Gaza
The official number of Gazans killed by the Zionist entity since October 7, 2023 is over 50,000, many thousands of which were children and the elderly. The real number is very likely much higher. The respected British medical journal, Lancet, estimated in July of 2024 that Israel has killed around 190,000 Gazans, with a significant number of them being children. By September, projections based on the Lancet study suggested that Israel would have killed more than 330,000 Palestinians by the end of the year. This genocide has also been an urbicide of one of the most densely urbanized geographies in the world; an ecocide, with the destruction of Gaza’s agricultural lands and severe damage to its ecology and seashore; and a scholasticide, the annihilation of its schools and universities and the deliberate mass murder of intellectuals, teachers, students, and journalists. The death toll of journalists in Gaza has amounted to the deadliest war for journalists in the history of warfare.
Lebanon
By Sept. 2024 the Zionist colonizers had spread their aggression to Lebanon. Their plan was to degrade Hezbollah’s military capabilities and to assassinate its leadership.
Hezbollah has historically been the most effective military force in Lebanon and perhaps in the entire MENA outside Iran, so there is a basis for the Israeli strategy here, but the attacks on Lebanon, like those on Palestine, were carried out for purposes beyond their pretexts. The larger Israeli goal, to drag the US into a direct confrontation with Iran, has not so far materialized, although with Trump now coming to power, developments on this front are uncertain. The Iranians have thus far remained restrained.
The ceasefire of January 2025 comes with exactly zero of Israel’s military aims achieved.
While Hezbollah remains formidable, especially as a fighting force on the ground, it is undeniable that the attacks in Fall of 2024 have been a significant setback for them. There seem to be serious intelligence vulnerabilities in the organization. Hezbollah’s relative lack of response to the invasion, aside from local militias’ direct confrontation with the IOF in the south, suggests that its firepower has been degraded.
At the time of this writing, the Assad regime has been toppled in Syria, with the result that Israel has increased its aggression in the Golan Heights and its bombing campaigns inside Syria.
Crisis in Israeli society
Events since October 7 indicate a deep crisis within Israeli society, arguably an organic crisis, which, to paraphrase Gramsci, encompasses all spheres of society, economic, political, social, and ideological.
Military defeat
The Israeli military is based on conscription. They specialize in murdering civilians, especially children and elders, in destroying undefended buildings, and carpet bombing from the air. Whenever they have to fight on the ground against, for example, Hamas or Hezbollah militants, they get trounced. Their morale seems to be eroding.
The frequent live-streaming of war crimes by IOF soldiers—making this the first genocide that’s being seen across the globe in real time—is a reflection of an army in political if not military defeat. War crimes bespeak a bankruptcy of political ideology. They are fighting to humiliate their enemy, while Palestinian and Lebanese fighters are fighting for liberation and defense of homeland. To adapt a phrase from Ho Chi Minh, speaking on the military power but political bankruptcy of French colonialism: the national liberation movement is like a tiger attacking an elephant. It attacks repeatedly but unpredictably and disappears back into the forest. Eventually the elephant will bleed to death. We have seen something like this with Hamas and allied fighters in Gaza and in Southern Lebanon.
Many are no longer asking if the Zionist settler state will collapse but when. This is unprecedented.
The Israeli military aims have been to annihilate Hamas and expel all Palestinians from Northern Gaza, thus extending settlement over one third of Gaza. As noted by Middle East Eye, the ceasefire of January 2025 comes with exactly zero of Israel’s military aims achieved.
Economic crisis
Economically, the genocide has also provoked a crisis in Israel. “Prices are high. Standard of living is going down. There is inflation. There is a decline in the value of the Israeli currency,” according to comments made by the Berlin-Based Israeli economist Shir Hever late last summer. The budget deficit ballooned to 8 percent since October 7, 2024, double the figure before that date. Approximately 85,000 people had dropped out of the workforce by then, a quarter-million had been internally displaced, 46,000 businesses had gone under, and foreign investment had dried up. The much-touted Israeli high-tech sector, which accounts for approximately 20 percent of Israel’s economic output, is looking to relocate en masse. Hever added that “the full story is what is the perspective of the population regarding the future. People who don’t believe that there is a future. People who don’t believe that the state of Israel will ever be able to recover from this crisis.” A report published in August 2024 by the Institute for National Security Studies, a Tel Aviv think tank, lamented that the economic damage to Israel could last long after the end of the current “war.” This echoed the sentiments of the former head of the Bank of Israel.
Social crisis
Israel is experiencing a huge brain drain. Moreover, it is increasingly no longer seen by Jews as a safe haven; it is the most dangerous place for Jews in the world. The more secular, educated, professional strata—the proponents of liberal Zionism—are on the decline, politically and demographically. The fascist (or “revisionist”) current of ultra rightwing settlers experiences astronomical birth rates (ca. 7 babies per mother) and is in the political ascendancy. The trend in Israeli society is toward their side. They are the more dynamic element; liberal Zionism is the walking dead.
This is not to say that liberal Zionism doesn’t have power. In the West, especially the US and Germany, it is hegemonic across the bourgeois parties and nominally left electoral parties. It is the default setting in Western liberal institutions such as the media, the universities, etc. There is, however, a twist in the US, where revisionist Zionism is dominant among the base of the Republican Party, especially among Christian Zionists who numerically outnumber Jewish Zionists.
Many informed observers (e.g., Pappe, Shir Hever, C. Mokhiber) see the imminent collapse of the Zionist project. This collapse is predicted not in the long term but in the lifetime of the middle-aged Gen X comrade-writer of this document, if not sooner. For the first time since the Nakba, Israel may be in a terminal crisis. Many are no longer asking if the Zionist settler state will collapse but “when.” This is unprecedented.
Impact on the United States
There has been a dramatic rise in mass mobilizations worldwide in support of Palestine. The Palestine solidarity movement has grown to unprecedented scale. BDS has secured important victories as well, although there have also been examples of capitulation, as when the International Longshoremen’s Association strike last year made an exception for weapons deliveries to Israel.
Overall, what we see is a dramatic shift in consciousness in the United States, especially among the youth, and an unsurprisingly vicious reaction by the ruling class.
A large majority of the US population is against what Israel has been doing. Recent polls indicate a dramatically increased sympathy for Palestinians, particularly among youth. As Firebrand comrades have argued elsewhere, Palestine is where the gulf between the US bourgeoisie and the working class is clearest and most acute.
On the one hand the liberation of the Syrian people and that of Palestine depends on liberation from reactionary regimes such as that of Assad. On the other hand, it is undeniable that the current power in Syria resides with a reactionary Islamist movement that seems eager to align with the West.
An increasing number of US people are noting the glaring contradiction of the US regime continuously funding Israel to the tune of billions while defunding domestic services. While whole cities and communities in the Southeast were being devastated by hurricanes last fall, Israel continued to receive a flood of US money and weapons. It was particularly galling that the release of $8.7 billion to Israel in September happened right as Hurricane Helene was smashing the Southeast. Earlier in the year, the director of FEMA stated that the department would run out of funds for the 2024 hurricane season.
Meanwhile, since 10/7/23, it has become clear to millions that the liberal and official institutions of the US bourgeoisie (not only the state, but NGOs, the media, and especially the universities) are aligned with US imperialism and Zionism. Most don’t theorize this in a Marxist way, of course, but they do recognize that the seemingly sacrosanct freedoms of US liberal democracy, such as free speech, freedom of assembly, and the right to critical thought in our educational institutions are under threat.
The arena in which the US-based anti-Zionist struggle has been most acute has been on college campuses. In spring and summer of 2024, we saw an inspiring nationwide emergence of student-led protests and encampments across US (and international) colleges. These challenged Zionism and US involvement in the genocide, clarifying for a mass audience a generally correct analysis. The student movement also highlighted the complicity of leading US liberal institutions, especially in the higher education sector, exposing the myth that these are in any way left wing and the emptiness of the supposed liberal values they put on their PR materials. The response of university administrations was also educational: violent repression, calling in riot cops, suspending or expelling or bringing charges against students, collaborating with Zionist street thugs and other right wing “human dust.”
Over the summer break and into the Fall 2024 semester, universities began devising more draconian rules to repress free speech and assembly, directly and specifically targeting Palestine solidarity. We’ve seen a consequent steep decline in the student mobilizations in Fall 2024 and the current Spring 2025 semesters. However, while this is a tactical victory for pro-Zionist bourgeois institutions, it is potentially strategically self-defeating and should be used by the movement to highlight the total hypocrisy and utter moral bankruptcy of academic institutions.
The question of US imperialism
Some observers have argued that the Biden administration sacrificed all its other interests for the sake of Israel. It isolated itself, discredited the “West” and its “values,” and gave rivals such as China and Russia the political upper hand. There is truth to this. We communists say, the more discrediting of US liberal democracy, US imperialism, and Western claims to represent universal human rights, the better! Communists should clarify and educate on the class and imperialist nature of these ideological claims.
It is undeniable that US imperialism is in decline and the ongoing desperate attempts by its regime to protect Israel at all costs reflects this. The US is still in a protracted “long depression.” It seems unable to slow the emergence of China as an alternative imperialist pole. Its legislature and supreme court are the most backward and reactionary in all the developed world, at best totally dysfunctional from the perspective of the working class.
Overall, what we see is a dramatic shift in consciousness in the United States, especially among the youth, and an unsurprisingly vicious reaction by the ruling class.
The United States’ only recourse is the violent smashing of any progressive impulses that augur a future beyond US imperialism, such as Palestinian liberation. The attachment of its ruling class and bourgeois politicians to Israel is deep. This is the result of direct material interests: Israel is one of the main purchasers of military materiel, one of the few remaining profitable sectors of US capitalism. Israel also provides intelligence in the MENA (and historically, intelligence and military training far beyond, such for the Central American death squads in the 1980s). This deep US-bourgeois attachment to Zionism is also due to the deep-seated racism, Islamophobia, and settler colonial mentalities that one must either come equipped with or, as in the case of AOC, be willing to adapt to to get a snort at the pig’s trough of US bourgeois institutions.
Situation in Syria
The causes and aftermath of the toppling of the Assad regime in Syria in winter 2024 require more space and time than is available here. Some brief observations are offered in this document, with the hope that Firebrand will continue to develop our analysis.
First, the fall of Assad was clearly in large part the result of a popular uprising from below. Most Syrians rightly hated the cruelty of this essentially reactionary bourgeois regime. We reject campist attempts to portray the anti-Assad movement as a puppet of western powers. We should also highlight that Assad was no friend of Palestinians. The Baathists not only did nothing to resist the Israeli occupation of Golan, they also did not hesitate to imprison and murder Palestinian liberation forces.
Second, the movement against Assad has not been led by the working class. Its leadership, and thus the current leadership of the country, is reactionary and Islamist. Moreover, it seems even more conciliatory to the West and to Israel than its predecessor. It has not meaningfully resisted the increasing Israeli aggression on Syrian territory since the fall of Assad.
Syria presents a conundrum to revolutionaries and communists. On the one hand the liberation of the Syrian people and that of Palestine depends on liberation from reactionary regimes such as that of Assad. As many principled revolutionaries have said, you cannot free Palestinians and crush Syrians at the same time. On the other hand, it is undeniable that the current power in Syria resides with a reactionary Islamist movement that seems eager to align with the West. Geopolitically, the US and Israel are content with this outcome.
Firebrand should carefully research the concrete conditions and balance of class forces in Syria and solidarize only with progressive proletarian forces.
Organizing conclusions
Working within the Palestine solidarity movement, communists must maintain that the genocide did not begin on October 7, 2023. The Zionist project has been a genocidal colonial war since at least the Nakba of 1948. All talk framing the situation in Palestine in terms of “terrorism” and “peace processes” obscures this reality; since the early Zionist settlement, the goal has been the colonial theft of land and the genocide of the Palestinian people, supported by Europe and the United States. What has changed since October 7 is the shift from the “incremental” genocide of 1967-2023 into a full-blown exterminationist military assault, with a death toll constantly underreported in the capitalist media.
We therefore affirm the right of Palestinians, Lebanese, Iranians, and others in the region to fight by whatever means necessary to defend and liberate themselves from Zionist colonialism. This does not mean that we support the politics of every group involved, or that we see the organizations at the front of the resistance as potential agents of socialist revolution, but only that the politics of the leading groups are not a basis for condemning resistance as it occurs. We support all resistance to Zionism, regardless of the politics of the groups currently leading it.
The ceasefire that wasn’t
Israel’s essential character as a client for US imperialism means that militarist aggression and colonial violence are inherent to it. The comrades at Puntorojo argued at the beginning of the January ceasefire that “imperial control across the region is key to maintaining US primacy over a globally strategic region as economic crises deepen internationally, and as we are driven closer and into impending global inter-imperialist war and further manifestations of crisis capitalism that will be defining features of the next epoch. For this reason, if implemented in its current form, a ceasefire will likely not hold for very long.” More recent developments have proven this assessment absolutely correct.
The Israeli lobby question
The commonly adopted belief of some people turning against the US’s support of the genocide that pro-Israeli lobbying is primarily responsible for US policy must be dealt with by any communists involved in the movement. Often, this belief reveals an antisemitic perspective of a similar type to other conspiracy theories blaming a secret cabal of Jews for the ills of capitalism, and in these instances must be criticized in the harshest possible terms and driven out of the movement. There is no room for antisemitism in the Palestine solidarity movement, and certainly not in our organizations and branches.
However, some activists we meet may have adopted this position as the “common sense” position for opposing the genocide, especially if they have developed their politics to the point of opposing the genocide but not as far as recognizing that the US is not a benevolent actor that has been misled by outside forces, but is in fact completely committed to the killing.
We affirm the right of Palestinians, Lebanese, Iranians, and others in the region to fight by whatever means necessary to defend and liberate themselves from Zionist colonialism.
This perspective is obviously wrong. It is, however, undeniable that a highly organized, well-funded, and politically committed network of institutions and actors exist who have a near monopoly over US policy in Palestine, from US bourgeois politicians to Christian Zionists organized in right-wing and fascist churches to groups like AIPAC, the ADL, and JCRC; there is a massive gulf between the social power of these groups and those committed to Palestinian liberation.
Principled revolutionaries and communists must commit to education around these key points. While the Israeli power lobby does indeed work in a similar manner to other lobbies seeking to ensure politics and policies in favor of their interests, the primary mover behind the violence in Palestine is US capital and imperialism. The lobby is allowed to function the way it does because its interests generally align with and promote those of US imperialism to expand markets in the weapons, surveillance, and data sectors as well as consumer goods, and because it provides a political bulwark against progressive and popular movements in the Arab world. In this sense, Israel has been an extremely effective tool of US imperialism, smashing the Arab left and defanging any anticolonial movements in the region.
Israel is therefore a key part of a regional axis of reaction that the US is attempting to assemble and maintain. This includes Israel, the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan. The US client states in Egypt and Jordan have normalized relations with Israel for decades. The “Abrahamic accords” alliance is a part of US attempts to secure hegemony over the MENA in the context of intensifying capitalist competition with China, Russia, and Iran.
The dog wags its tail, not the other way around. It is in the interest of the US capitalist class to support the Zionist state; its actions in directly facilitating genocide are not because an otherwise benevolent and enlightened US has been misled by a pro-Israel lobby, but rather the calculated decision by an imperialist state to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of lives at the altar of its regional ambitions.
Agent of liberation
As primarily US-based communists, we see our role as intervening and helping to build the movements that challenge Zionism and US imperialism, such as BDS and the youth Palestine solidarity movement, as well as conducting education and propaganda in support of self-defense and self-liberation from Zionism by any means necessary. It is clear that the MENA working class will be the primary force for its own liberation; it cannot rely on MENA bourgeois states and least of all on the US, even its “progressive” politicians. However, since the US is Israel’s primary imperial sponsor, it is crucial to intervene on a united-front basis in the struggles against Zionism; that is, we fight together with all forces in those movements but do not capitulate to politics against our principles, such as support for the Democrats or third-worldism, and, as Lenin said, “patiently explain” our approach to those fighting alongside us.
Concluding points
We end with two points. First, any actual, lasting end to the violence in Palestine will require the defeat of Israel. The Zionist project is genocidal to its core in the service of US and European interests in the region; it has and will use every pause in its own terror to continue the killing and displacement by “normal” means.
Therefore, the Palestinian solidarity movement must raise the demand for full liberation of Palestinians, especially in the heart of the empire. This includes, at minimum, the right of return for all those expelled by the ongoing Nakba and their descendants, full and equal rights for Palestinians, and the end of the Zionist project. The occupation is directly inflicted funding the US provides through Democratic and Republican administrations. We cannot afford to believe crocodile tears from politicians in either party. Liberation doesn’t stop there, however; we need a movement to eliminate imperialism and the capitalist system it is based on. Palestinians won’t be safe until the imperialist beast is slain.
