Sai Englert
As
Israel wages genocide in Gaza with impunity, mass movements across the Arab
world are once again rising up - against both Zionism and the regimes that
enable it
The World Food
Programme has announced that it has officially run out of food supplies in the
Gaza Strip, as a result of Israel's total blockade, now entering its third
month.
At the same
time, Israeli officials are making their intentions plain: to maintain military
control over Gaza, cleanse it of genocide survivors and partition Syria.
Israel's
onslaught against Palestinian and Arab life, organisation and resistance over
the past 18 months has been devastating beyond words.
This period
will be remembered, alongside 1948 and 1967, as a moment of major Palestinian
and regional defeat at the hands of Israel and its western sponsors, marked by
rapid settler-colonial expansion and an aggressive redrawing of the status quo.
And yet, from
this defeat, new contradictions will emerge - from which the long struggle for
liberation will burst forth once more.
Unimaginable
depths
The situation
in Gaza has once again reached unimaginable depths. As of the end of April
2025, the official death toll had surpassed 52,400, and at least 90 percent of
the strip's population had been displaced. The actual number of dead is likely
far higher.
Already, by
September 2024, projections had exceeded 300,000. Since then, conditions have
only worsened.
Doctors Without
Borders has described the whole of Gaza as a mass grave. Even before the latest
announcement by the World Food Programme, all bakeries had shut down, baby
formula had run out, and children were receiving "less than one meal a day".
Access to water
has been weaponised, as Israel cuts off electricity and fuel. The genocide has
shifted from a military campaign of successive massacres to a slow, systematic
mass murder by starvation and daily bombing of displaced Palestinians. Words
fail to capture such a hell.
Israel's
"day after" vision is now unmistakable. As it once did in the West
Bank, it is carving out small bantustans in Gaza, segmented by
Israeli-controlled corridors named after former settlements: Netzarim,
Philadelphi and Morag.
This campaign
of mass expulsion and starvation is designed to "thin out" the
Palestinian population and force it into dramatically smaller zones, far from
most arable lands - especially between Rafah and Khan Younis.
Beyond Gaza
Israel's
assault extends well beyond Gaza. It has expanded military operations into
Lebanon and Syria, raining fire on civilians, indiscriminately destroying
infrastructure and seizing territory.
In doing so,
Israel has delivered a major victory for US imperialism, weakening Iran and its
allies while expanding its own settler-colonial control. Israeli officials now
openly state that they will remain "indefinitely" in these countries,
establishing military bases, carrying out routine air strikes and unilaterally
imposing demilitarised "zones of influence".
In the West
Bank, Israel intensified its campaign of terror long before 7 October 2023.
Since then, more than 1,850 settler attacks have been recorded, alongside at
least 860 Palestinian fatalities, including 177 children. In just one year,
20,000 new settlement units and 49 new outposts have been established.
Most
strikingly, Israel is moving to redraw the status quo on Palestinian refugees -
the seven million living reminders of past ethnic cleansing and the need for
redress.
It has outlawed
Unrwa, enabling a direct assault on Palestinian refugee services such as
schools and welfare support. At the same time, it is carrying out military
expulsions from key refugee camps across the West Bank.
At least 40,000
people have been displaced in a process that shows no sign of slowing.
What now?
In the face of
such overwhelming defeat, it is difficult not to be swallowed by despair. It
seems nothing will compel the US and its western allies to withdraw the vast
military, diplomatic and financial support they continue to provide Israel.
The genocide
against Palestinians, plainly visible to the world, is a price our rulers are
willing to pay to preserve their influence in a region crucial to the global
economy - particularly amid declining US hegemony. They lie openly, and the
horror continues.
Yet, it would
be a mistake to lose hope. Across the western world, people are fighting back
and standing with the Palestinian people against their governments.
The boycott,
divestment, and sanctions movement (BDS) has grown exponentially. Massive
protests have rocked the capitals of former colonial powers. Students are
refusing to accept their universities' complicity in apartheid and genocide.
Most
significantly, workers and trade unions have begun mobilising their collective
power to present the ruling class with a stark ultimatum: end your support for
Israel, or face economic disruption.
Crucially,
resistance is also building across the MENA region.
Most recently,
Moroccan dockworkers blocked a Maersk shipment of US fighter jets bound for
Israel - a vital development. The Moroccan monarchy has played a key role in
normalising ties with Israel, expanding military contracts and allowing the
Israeli arms firm Elbit Systems to open a factory on Moroccan soil.
These deals are
deeply unpopular, and the fact that this anger is now spilling into the streets
and workplaces - despite the real threat of violent repression - is
significant.
And Moroccans
are not alone. In Jordan and Egypt - two of Israel's neighbouring states that
have long spearheaded the normalisation process - popular resistance is also
mounting.
Both
governments have deepened trade and security ties with Israel even as the
genocide in Gaza unfolds. In Jordan, large and regular protests have erupted
throughout the war, demanding an end to the Wadi Araba peace treaty with
Israel, the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador, and the severing of all
economic and diplomatic relations.
In response,
the Hashemite monarchy has launched a crackdown, most recently banning the
Muslim Brotherhood under the laughable pretext of foiling a plot supposedly
sponsored by the group.
In Egypt, where
repression is even more brutal and sustained, people continue to seize rare
opportunities to voice their opposition to their government's complicity in
Israel's crimes.
Liberation
This growing
regional resistance, which targets not only Israel but also the Arab
reactionary regimes that sustain it, is essential for the liberation of
Palestine. The Palestinian left, since the 1960s, has understood that
Palestine's liberation is inseparable from that of the wider region.
This is partly
due to the regional nature of Zionism itself: a military outpost used to
suppress challenges to western power and influence. Israel's actions across the
Levant over the past 16 months provide a contemporary example of this.
It is also a
reflection of class relations inside Palestine. Israeli workers are deeply
invested in the settler-colonial project, including its genocidal present form.
They have often led efforts to escalate it. They are not a credible force for
Palestinian liberation.
Palestinians,
by contrast, are excluded from Israel's economic core, relegated to peripheral
sectors such as construction, agriculture, and low-wage services. The internal
balance of forces does not favour them. Unlike workers in South Africa, Kenya
or Algeria, they are not in a position to shut down the settler economy to
achieve their freedom.
Palestinians
must therefore struggle alongside the broader regional masses for liberation
from western imperialism, local ruling elites and Israeli settler colonialism.
Ghassan Kanafani, the Palestinian revolutionary, writer and theorist, described
these three forces as the "enemy trinity" facing Palestinians - the
principal threat to their liberation.
Similarly, the
Marxist thinker and revolutionary Jabra Nicola wrote that "the struggle
against imperialism - inseparable from all democratic struggles - can only be a
struggle against all the existing dominant classes and regimes in the
region".
Both men were
writing in the 1970s, after another regional defeat, but their insights remain
crucial today. In the words of Kanafani's comrade George Habash: "The road
to Jerusalem goes through the capitals of the Arab world."
We caught a
glimpse of this in 2011, when a revolutionary wave swept the region. From
Tunisia to Syria, from Bahrain to Egypt, people linked their freedom to that of
Palestinians and demanded an end to normalisation and Arab complicity.
Those uprisings
were rooted in solidarity with the Second Intifada. Now, a decade and a half
later, Israel's genocide in Gaza and the silence of Arab regimes are
re-energising once-defeated mass movements. Their revival remains the key to a
free Palestine.
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