The horrifying scenes of starvation from Gaza being broadcast around the world recall the darkest periods in human history. Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians, backed by the European and North American imperialist powers, is a crime against humanity comparable with the Nazis’ “final solution” of European Jewry—the Holocaust.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a wanted war criminal—who only remains free to oversee the annihilation of the Palestinians due to the refusal of all the major powers to execute an arrest warrant against him— rivals Nazi propaganda chief Josef Goebbels when it comes to the lies used to justify his barbarism. This week, with every day bringing news of multiple deaths from hunger and malnutrition across the Gaza Strip, Netanyahu declared that there is “no starvation” in Gaza. Although the Zionist regime has ruthlessly enforced a blockade on aid flowing into Gaza for five months, government officials state with a straight face that food shortages are due to Hamas “stealing” supplies or the UN’s failure to deliver them. The latest figures from Gaza’s Health ministry indicate that over 150 people have died of starvation, including 83 children.

The Zionist regime’s genocidal intent has been evident since the very beginning of its onslaught on Gaza, which has officially claimed over 60,000 lives, with the true death toll likely being many times more. On the second day of Israel’s bombardment in October 2023, then Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, another war criminal whose arrest warrant, like Netanyahu’s, has been outstanding for more than a year, asserted,

I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed… We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.

For almost two years, the Zionist mass murderers have enjoyed an uninterrupted supply of the highest-powered weaponry to slaughter Palestinians indiscriminately, principally from Washington and Berlin, but also from the other imperialist powers. Governments in the US, Germany, Britain, France, Canada and elsewhere have viciously witch-hunted opponents of the genocide, denouncing them as “antisemites,” criminalising their activities, and deploying police violence to intimidate them.

Faced with the revulsion of billions of people around the world over the extermination of the Palestinians, some of the imperialist powers have felt compelled recently to attempt to distance themselves from the crime scene. Trying desperately to wash blood from their hands, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, and French President Emmanuel Macron have indicated their intention to recognise a Palestinian state in September.

Nobody should be taken in by these despicable hypocrites, all of whom continue to ship weapons to Israel while shedding crocodile tears over the innocent civilians they help slaughter. The thorough insincerity of their pronouncements is summed up by the statement signed last week by 28 countries calling for the immediate and unhindered supply of aid to Gaza, which also included a passage praising the fascist-minded US President Donald Trump for his tireless efforts to secure “peace” in the region. Earlier this year, Trump blurted out what the policy of American imperialism and its Israeli client is for Gaza: the forcible expulsion or extermination of the Palestinians to create a “riviera of the Middle East” in the enclave. Starmer, Carney and Macron will therefore be “recognising” a Palestinian state without the Palestinians.

A New York Times article by Stephen Erlanger pointed to the real concern motivating the imperialists: Israel’s very viability as a client of the imperialist powers amid widespread hostility towards the Zionist state around the world. Israel “risks becoming an international outcast” and is “increasingly isolated,” he wrote.

The problem facing the imperialists and their media lackeys is that Israel’s genocide in Gaza is not the product of misguided policies that can be corrected, but flows from the very nature of the Zionist project and its close reliance on imperialism to realise it. Since its emergence in the late 19th century as a reaction within the Jewish bourgeoisie and better-off layers to the growing appeal of socialism among Jewish workers, Zionism has shown no scruples about aligning with the most reactionary imperialist forces. From the Tsarist autocracy in Russia, to British imperialism in the early decades of the 20th century, and even Nazi Germany during the 1930s, the Zionist movement sought to secure the backing of the most violent and ruthless regimes for its reactionary project of an exclusively Jewish nation-state within the framework of decaying world capitalism. It was only after the Holocaust left hundreds of thousands of desperate Jews stateless that the Zionist project could be implemented, with the backing of the imperialists and the Stalinist Soviet Union, and on the basis of the forcible expulsion of the Arab population in the Nakba.

In the nearly eight decades since these tragic events—for the Palestinian and Jewish peoples alike—imperialism has used Israel as a bridgehead for its interests throughout the Middle East. The Zionists promise of a “safe haven” for the Jewish people has been transformed into a nightmare of one bloody war after another, culminating in the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians.

The imperialist war criminals in Washington, Berlin, London and Paris—who belong on the defendant’s bench on charges of war crimes alongside Netanyahu and his fascist entourage—have facilitated and continue to support the genocide for their own great power ambitions. As David North explained in his lecture Genocide in Gaza: imperialism descends into the abyss,

There are, of course, pragmatic geopolitical interests that determine the support of the United States and its NATO allies for Israel’s war against the Palestinian people.

But underlying this united front against the Palestinians is the recognition that their democratic aspirations, which require the dissolution of the existing Israeli state and the creation of a new bi-national federation, threaten not only the interests of imperialism in the Middle East, but the entire historically obsolete state structure of imperialist geopolitics and capitalist rule.

The only social force capable of stopping the “united front” of the Zionists and imperialists aimed at exterminating the Palestinian people is the international working class. Mobilised in struggle, workers internationally must fight for immediate measures to halt the genocide as part of a broader struggle to put an end to the rotten social system that has produced it. As the World Socialist Web Site explained in a statement earlier this month, these measures should include:

•    An immediate halt to shipment of all weapons to Israel.

•    The boycott of all trade and other economic activity with Israel.

•    US, European and other corporations assisting Israel in carrying out the genocide must be indicted and prosecuted.

•    The arrest of Israeli officials for war crimes.

•    The end of repression of the opposition to the Gaza genocide.

To these can be added the immediate admission of all aid blocked on Gaza’s borders by the criminal Zionist regime. Since our last statement, UN Palestinian Refugee Agency head Philippe Lazzarini has confirmed that over 6,000 truckloads of urgently needed supplies are waiting in Egypt and Jordan.

Enforcing these demands is possible only as part of a struggle by the working class against barbaric capitalism, of which the Gaza genocide is the most horrendous contemporary manifestation. The mass anger expressed by millions of people in global protests against Israel’s imperialist-backed genocide, including the growing opposition inside Israel itself, must be turned towards a fight to mobilise the industrial and political power of the international working class. Workers’ struggles against the savage attacks by the ruling classes throughout Europe and North America on jobs and social programmes, to fund arms supplies to Israel and their own mad rearmament plans, must be fused with the opposition to the persecution of opponents of genocide and war in a mass socialist movement to stop the imperialist war machine and the Gaza genocide.