Photo Above: On 4 February 2025 in Khan Younis, Gaza, fighters of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hold a reception to honour prisoners freed as part of the ceasefire deal with Israel. Despite massive support from the U.S., Australian and other imperialist powers and despite slaughtering nearly 50,000 people – mostly women and children – the Netanyahu regime failed to achieve its war aims in Gaza. This was due to the heroism of Palestinian resistance fighters – not only from Hamas but from Islamic Jihad and secular leftist groups like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Photo credit: r/MarxistCulture

AUSTRALIA’S RULERS BACK ISRAEL’S TERROR
AND VILIFY THOSE WHO OPPOSE IT

BUILD A WORKING CLASS INTIFADA
AGAINST THIS CAPITALIST RULING CLASS!

28 February 2025 – Despite massive support from the Western powers, the genocidal Israeli regime failed to achieve its Gaza war aims. This is due to the heroism of Palestinian resistance fighters and the extraordinary resilience of the Palestinian people in the face of unparalleled brutality. The continuing blows that the Gaza resistance and their Yemeni allies inflicted against the Israeli military and the dissension that this caused within Israeli society forced Netanyahu to agree to a ceasefire. However, other events have emboldened the Zionist regime. Through bombarding Lebanon – assisted by parts of Taiwan’s Western-puppet rulers who supplied Israel with the pagers used in the exploding devices attack against Hezbollah – the Israeli regime has weakened Hezbollah for the present, forcing the group to pull back from the northern front against the regime. Furthermore, right-wing ISIS-linked fanatics, massively armed by the U.S. and its Turkish, Israeli, Saudi and Qatari allies and assisted in their final offensive by direct U.S. military action, have taken over a Syria that had been ground into submission by years of U.S. and Australian sanctions. Although the ousted Syrian government’s support for Palestine was partial, it nevertheless enabled the flow of arms to Hezbollah and Hamas, provided bases for Palestinian resistance groups and shunned Israel. By contrast, the new regime has vowed not “to meddle in anything that will threaten Israel’s security” and ordered Palestinian resistance groups in Syria to close their bases and disband their military forces. No wonder Netanyahu hailed the regime change in Syria as “a historic day”. Thirdly, the new far-right U.S. regime is even more intent on backing Israel’s genocidal terror than its predecessors. The previous government headed by “Genocide Joe” Biden also supported Israel to the hilt. But it tried to limit the battering of its own image that this was causing. As a result, last May it paused shipping Israel the 2,000-pound bombs that inflicted such carnage in Gaza. Now, the Trump regime has resumed shipping these weapons. Moreover, regardless of whether Trump can actually drive out Palestinians from Gaza as he plans to, or is using the threat of this to weaken Palestine in negotiations, his Gaza plan imperils the Palestinian people.

Palestinian people are still in great danger. This is the case whether the Zionist regime unleashes a new assault on Gaza’s people, or instead focuses on intensifying its terror in the West Bank, while maintaining the caged, pre-October 2023 “status quo” in a now devastated Gaza. Since the Gaza ceasefire began, Israel has greatly escalated its attacks against West Bank Palestinians. Over the last two months, Zionist forces have killed at least 13 children there. Among those that the regime murdered was two year-old Leila al Khatib, who soldiers shot while she was in her own home in Jenin. Those who survive, the Israeli military forces to flee by bulldozing their homes and smashing connecting sewerage and water pipes. More than 40,000 people have been forcibly displaced from their homes in the West Bank since the ceasefire came into force – the highest number since Israel occupied the Palestinian Territory in 1967. The Left and workers movements must escalate struggles worldwide in support of the Palestinian people. Let us mobilise mass actions to demand: No new Israeli attack on Gaza! Down with Israel’s terror in the West Bank! Israeli troops and fascist settlers get out of the West Bank, all of Gaza and Syria’s Golan Heights! Israel out of Lebanon!

We have a special responsibility here. Next to the U.S., German and British regimes, no other regime gives as much support to Israel as the Australian one. It jointly operates with the U.S. the Pine Gap spy base near Alice Springs that transmits to Israel the location of targets to bomb. Australian troops in the Middle East directly participate in attacks on Yemeni supporters of Palestine. Australian bases are facilitating air-to-air refuelling of the U.S. bombers that attack the Houthis. We need powerful actions to demand: Close Pine Gap! No refuelling or hosting of U.S. warplanes from Australian bases! Australian troops get out of the Middle East! No military sales to Israel by Australian companies!

As part of this struggle, we must resist the ruling class’s attempts to silence pro-Palestinian voices by cynically branding them as “antisemitic”. On Monday, university bosses announced a new “definition” that will label as “antisemitic” any calls for eliminating Israel as an ethnic supremacist state. The next day, police hit nurse Sarah Abu Lebdeh with severe charges for merely reacting angrily to being contacted on social media by extreme Zionist provocateur, Max Veifer. Rightly furious at Israel’s genocidal terror and justly incensed at Veifer’s blatant justification of Israel’s killing of Palestinian civilians – on the basis that the majority of Gaza’s people had voted for Hamas (!) – Abu Lebdeh and Blacktown Hospital co-worker Ahmad Rashad Nadir responded to Veifier’s baiting by making unfortunate, obviously false claims to him that they had refused to treat Israeli patients. Ruling class politicians and media seized on their retorts to hype them up and witch-hunt the nurses, causing their jobs to be suspended. Hospital and university administrations here – if they were actually controlled by the people and the workers at these institutions – would be speaking out against the killing and jailing of Palestinian doctors and nurses, and the destruction of hospitals and the entire university sector in Gaza by the genocidal Israeli state. We demand: Drop all charges against Sarah Abu Lebdeh! Reinstate her and her colleague! Junk the universities’ “antisemitic” definition that aims to silence pro-Palestine voices!

WHO IS THE MASTER? WHO IS THE DOG?

Some argue that Western powers support Israel because they are controlled by the Zionist lobby. However, this has it the wrong way around. In fact it is U.S. imperialism and its allies that are the masters – albeit ones that hold their nasty Zionist attack dogs on a long leash. Thus, Trump’s plan for the U.S. to annex Gaza in order to turn it into a resort run by American firms is a scheme to boost U.S. capitalist profits, with Zionist expansionist plans relegated to second place. U.S. rulers use Israel as an enforcer of their predatory goals in the Middle East. We saw his in Israel’s role in the West’s regime-change triumph in Syria, which Netanyahu proudly declared “is a direct result of the blows we have inflicted….” The U.S. imperialists are desperate to ensure that the Middle East is firmly in their grip. This is both to grab the region’s oil wealth and because of the region’s crucial location at the crossroads of the world. To do so, they must ensure that no government in the region pries out too much independence for itself, including through establishing strong mutually beneficial relations with socialistic China. With their Syria problem now “solved”, the U.S. is counting on their Zionist attack dogs to help maul the last remaining regime in the region not under their thumb – the Iranian one. As you can see, U.S. support for Israel has little to do with loyalty to Zionism, let alone concern for Jewish people. Indeed, the biggest player within the current U.S. administration and the world’s richest capitalist, Elon Musk, is at one and the same time a strong Israel supporter – who bans people from X if they call for “Palestine to be free from the river to the sea” – and a rabid antisemite. Musk promotes racist conspiracy theories against Jewish people nearly as much as he cheers white supremacist attacks on blacks, Muslims and other people of colour. Musk, Trump and Co. are not only prepared to facilitate the genocide of Palestinian people if it helps them enforce their class tyranny over the Middle East but to fight to the last drop of Jewish Israeli blood too.

Similarly, Australia’s ruling class only backs Israel because Israel helps enforce the power of the Zionists’ U.S. masters. Australia’s capitalist exploiting class needs this because it is the might of its U.S. godfather that protects its own mafia style plunder and tyranny over the resources and peoples of the Southwest Pacific and Southeast Asia. That is why the Australian rulers’ support for Israel is so intractable, because the interests of the Zionist lobby coincide with the predatory interests of Australia’s capitalist rulers. To force a change, we need to weaken the ruling class so decisively that they are unable to hold up their Israeli allies. But how do we do this? If we only appeal to the masses’ sense of conscience to stand with Palestine, this will never be enough, given the overwhelming pro-Israel propaganda that the masses are subjected to. However, just like in the U.S., working class people here have compelling reasons to struggle against their ruling class. Capitalist rule is driving millions of people in Australia into poverty through grossly unaffordable rents, prices that have risen faster than wages and the lack of secure, permanent jobs for young workers. The ruling class here subjects Aboriginal people to violent cop attacks and racist smear campaigns. Arab and Muslim communities are furious at the racist violence and abuse they face on the streets, attacks that are being incited by the ruling class and its media’s vilification of people with a pro-Palestine sentiment; and then further inflamed by their broader racist scapegoating of migrants and refugees. Ruling class narratives are also fuelling attacks against people of East Asian, South Asian, African and other people of colour heritage. We must build struggles that unite opposition to the Australian regime’s backing for Israeli terror with the fight against racist attacks on migrants and people of Muslim, Arab, Asian and African backgrounds, with solidarity with the Aboriginal people’s struggle for liberation, with standing shoulder to shoulder with the embattled CFMEU construction workers union and supporting union strikes to win real wage rises and permanency for casuals, and with mass action to win a massive increase in low-rent public housing.

The biggest obstacle to building these struggles are the masses’ illusions that change can be achieved through merely voting at elections to shuffle which party administers the capitalist order. Of course, no genuine Palestine supporter will vote for the Liberals or for the far-right parties. But some may vote Labor on the grounds that it is “a lesser evil”. To do so is to accept defeat and to support the continuing genocide of the Palestinian people! Many will refuse to. However, it would be a tragedy if that leads to Palestine supporters voting for the Greens. Yes, the Greens do verbally oppose the most extreme aspects of Israeli terror. But the Greens back the other agendas of the Western imperialist rulers that prop up Zionist rule. The Greens rabidly supported imperialism’s proxy-war to overthrow the previous Syrian government, enlist in the Cold War big lie campaigns against socialistic China and inflame the U.S.-led war drive against Iran – often demanding that the Western powers enact tougher sanctions against Iran. Furthermore, because the Greens embrace capitalist bigwigs and their system, when they have been part of governments, the Greens inevitably yield to pressure from the capitalists. During Israel’s November 2012 war on Gaza, when the Australian regime was, as now, giving military support to Israeli terror, the Greens remained in a de facto coalition government with Labor. For their part, the Greens German counterparts hold the ministry of foreign affairs in the German coalition government that has been Israel’s most fervent supporter in Europe. That is why we urge all Palestine supporters to convince their friends not to vote at the upcoming elections for any of the parties currently in parliament – whether directly or through preferences. The more people are convinced that nothing good can come from supporting these parties, the more willing people will be to join the strikes, occupations and other militant mass actions needed to oppose the genocide-supporting Australian ruling class. And the more open they will be to building the new workers party that is ultimately needed to organise mass resistance to capitalism and imperialism.

Let’s tirelessly oppose the Australian capitalist class that is a key prop for Zionist terror! Let’s stand against the Australian imperialists and their U.S. godfather in every battle they face around the world. Let’s support the resistance that is building in Syria against the new pro-imperialist regime there! Let’s stifle the U.S.-led war drive against Iran! Most importantly, let us resist the capitalist powers’ anti-communist Cold War and defend the greatest state threat to imperialism – socialistic rule in China. When we topple U.S. and Australian imperialism, the Zionist regime that relies on it will also collapse. Then Palestinians and Jews will live happily together in a secular, socialist Palestine – from the river to the sea!