After seven weeks of a ceasefire, Israel suddenly resumed its genocidal bombing campaign on March 18. In surprise air attacks in the middle of the night, it killed at least 400 Palestinians.
In the ensuing days, the official Palestinian death toll since October 2023 reached 50,000, with the real figure likely much higher. Hostage releases by Hamas and reciprocal ones of Palestinian prisoners by Israel were thereupon halted, likely sealing the fate of the several dozen remaining living Israeli hostages, and dooming tens of thousands more in Gaza.
All this is happening in the context of the fascist Donald Trump’s declaration that the people of Gaza should be ethnically cleansed and removed to other countries. Not only did Israel’s reactionary Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu endorse what he called Trump’s “bold vision”, but as recounted by the noted Israeli writer Dror Mishani, “the vast majority [of Israelis] think that the displacement from Gaza of the Palestinian population is a good idea”, this at a time when it has become “a society obsessed by vengeance”.
Trump’s plan is no mere verbal excess. The Israeli regime has begun to plan for it and Trump officials have recently approached Sudan, Somalia and Somaliland as destinations for the people of Gaza, with Sudan at least rejecting it, as had Egypt and Jordan earlier.
Amid all this, the escalating carnage on the West Bank should not be forgotten. Even during the ceasefire, Israel sharply increased its repression and ethnic cleansing there, not only killing more than 800 people since October 7, 2023, but also driving tens of thousands off their land.
Whole communities have been subjected to terror, not sparing even Hamdan Ballal, one of the winners of an Oscar for the documentary No Other Land, who was brutally beaten by Jewish settler fanatics and then briefly imprisoned by the Israeli occupation army.
Despite the near collapse of Iran’s so-called Axis of Resistance last year, an “axis” that was always mostly about Iran’s sub-imperialist aims, and despite the Trumpist fascists’ assault on free speech and academic freedom in the United States, pro-Palestine demonstrations have continued.
Beleaguered students and faculty have protested Israel’s renewal of its genocidal war and Trump’s illegal deportation actions against student activists, as well as the capitulation of their universities, if not their outright complicity, in the repression.
Particularly in the US, largely spurious charges of antisemitism have been weaponised for repression, a process escalated by the Trump administration against universities but often with the passive support, if not worse, of the centrist liberals.
Here, Columbia University stands out as a monument of shame, with its trustees having thrown to the Trumpist wolves its students and the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies.
Around the world, actions in support of Palestine have been larger and stronger. In Britain, more than 100,000 gathered in February to protest Trump’s call for the ethnic cleansing of the people of Gaza.
Smaller countries like Ireland and South Africa have not wavered in their support for the prosecution of Israel for genocide at the International Criminal Court, while Mexico has just welcomed a Palestinian ambassador for the first time.
Above all, the ascendancy of Trumpist fascism in what remains the world’s largest military and economic power and its dirty deals with Russia for redivision of the world have put struggles for human liberation on the defensive everywhere.
A new generation of radicals and revolutionaries around the world, born of the struggle against US-supported Israeli genocide, and shaped by other struggles like the Movement for Black Lives, the Second Arab Spring and the labour upsurges in many countries, is being tested as never before.
[First published in New Politics. Kevin B Anderson is Professor of Sociology, Political Science and Feminist Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism: A Critical Study (1995) and Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies (2010) and the co-editor of the Rosa Luxemburg Reader (2004).]