PV staff
October 7 marks one year since Israel launched its genocidal siege of Gaza.
It is an aggression which has seen Israel drop more than 70,000 tons of bombs – more than the total dropped on Dresden, Hamburg and London combined, during World War 2. Well over 40,000 Gazans have been killed, nearly 100,000 injured, and over 2 million displaced. More than 60 percent of all buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, including 80 percent of those in the north alone. Refugee camps, schools, hospitals, places of worship, safe areas, housing and infrastructure have all been ruined.
The Israeli government, its allies in the West including Canada, and the mainstream corporate media all refer to the assault as something it is not – a war against Hamas. It is a war against Gaza. It is a war against Palestine. It is a genocide.
And now, by Israel’s design, it has escalated into a regional war involving Lebanon – where Israel has killed over 2000 people, wounded 10,000, and displaced over 1.2 million.
Israel has propagated all of this under the protection and with the support of Western countries including Canada. This protection and support from the US-led imperialist bloc have continued despite condemnation from the vast majority of the world, including the International Criminal Court.
The past year provides proof that the conflict between Palestine and Israel – and the conflict between Israel and most states in the region – is not fundamentally an ethnic or religious battle. This is a conflict that is rooted in the drive by the world’s most powerful capitalist economies, especially the United States, to divide up and control energy resources, transport routes and “spheres of influence” throughout the Middle East and North Africa region.
Israel is imperialism’s beachhead in the region, and it is dependent upon overwhelming military, trade and financial assistance from countries like the US and Canada to play that role. It also receives ongoing, unconditional and utterly unjustifiable political protection from the West, to ensure its impunity as it continues its brutal and illegal occupation of Palestine and oppression of Palestinians living within apartheid Israel.
The Palestinian people’s struggle is an anti-imperialist one that concerns all workers, supporters of peace, progressives and democrats throughout the world. This struggle began long before October 7.
Even one minute of genocide is criminal, let alone an entire year. For governments like Canada’s to ignore it is equally criminal.
The most important way to mark one year of genocide is to renew and strengthen solidarity with the Palestinian people and their just struggle. This includes activating the labour movement in Canada, which has had ample opportunity to mobilize itself against the genocide but has, in the main, avoided doing so. Shamefully, when union activists have been targeted for their Palestine solidarity, the labour leadership has generally sat silent or, worse, attacked those members.
Strengthening solidarity means pressuring the Canadian government for a real embargo, to immediately stop the flow of weapons and military equipment and technology to Israel, and to call for its allies in the US and NATO to do likewise.
It also means building the Boycott, Divest, Sanction (BDS) movement, to put real economic pressure on Israel to stop its genocidal siege, withdraw from the occupied territories, and end its systemic oppression of Palestinians. Tens of billions of dollars from Canadian banks and pension funds are invested in Israel – we need to stop the profiteering off genocide, occupation and apartheid.
The past year has seen incredible acts of solidarity, from the many mass demonstrations which brought tens of thousands of people into the streets, to the eruption of neighbourhood groups across Canada calling for a ceasefire and embargo, to the endless stream of petitions calling on Ottawa to act, to the workplace actions preventing the delivery of arms to Israel.
For the first time in decades, questions of peace, international solidarity and anti-imperialism are resurfacing. This is the path forward.
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