By Sam Casey
Despite a so-called “ceasefire”, the genocide and enforced starvation of the Palestinian people of Gaza continues unabated. Over two years, around 77,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been confirmed killed or missing. This number is set to rise drastically as more and more bodies are found under the rubble and in mass graves, with some estimates suggesting it may be as high as 680,000. 39,000 families have suffered horrific massacres, with thousands completely exterminated or left with a single survivor. Entire worlds have been extinguished. Gaza, which stood for thousands of years before the creation of the Israeli State, has been decimated – with 90% of civilian infrastructure systematically destroyed by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF).
The initial hopes that the ceasefire deal would bring a cessation of this nightmare, allowing the people of Gaza even the chance to begin to properly grieve and process the trauma they now live with, have been dashed. In the weeks since it was agreed, the vicious IOF have broken the ceasefire every single day; killing hundreds of people through gunfire, shelling, and airstrikes, continuing its blockade of the Rafah crossing, and its bombardment of Lebanon.
But the horrors of this genocide, and the steadfastness of the Palestinian people in their resistance to the occupation, has brought about a global awakening amongst the youth, working class, and oppressed people of the world. Millions have engaged in protest against the genocidal Israeli state, as well as its imperialist allies and the multi-national corporations that are complicit. Capitalist states around the world turn to brutal state repression as a cudgel against the movement, attempting to provide political cover for the Israeli State. But the emergence of a new generation of anti-Zionist youth is a crucial development, one that is generating a renewed interest in anti-imperialist and revolutionary ideas.
The genocide in Gaza continues a decades-long project of the Israeli State displacing, fragmenting, and erasing Palestinian life. This project began with the ‘Nakba’ in 1948, when Zionist militias violently expelled 750,000-950,000 Palestinians from their homeland, expropriating 78% of the land of historic Palestine. More than 12,000 Palestinians were slaughtered in this period, with tens of thousands more injured. This was the bloody foundation of the Israeli State, which has ruled for decades in the same way it was born – through military violence and ethnic cleansing.
Settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing
As is widely recognised today, Israel is a settler-colonial state formed through the colonisation of Palestine and the dispossession of its Indigenous people. This analysis emerged from figures in the Palestinian resistance movement itself, like Fayez A. Sayegh in the 1960s and George Jabbour in the ‘70s, who wrote extensively about the nature of Zionism, aiming to arm the revolutionary movement against the Israeli State. They noted that colonialism was a historical manifestation of capitalism’s ceaseless drive for expansion, which meant going beyond borders in search of raw materials, energy, and labour-power.
The direct form of colonialism saw colonial powers ruthlessly extract wealth from the resources of the colonies and Indigenous People’s labour to enrich the capitalist “metropoles”, collaborating with local elites who functioned as intermediaries for foreign rule and ensured imperial dominance. But in settler-colonial societies, such as the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Israel, a different logic took hold. Here, European settlers did not just seek to govern and extract wealth from an existing population, but to establish permanent settlements by dispossessing and replacing them, completely upending property relations and entering into permanent conflict with the Indigenous population.
The “founding father” of Israel, David Ben Gurion, summed up the strategy behind the ‘Nakba’, when he wrote “we must expel the Arabs and take their places”. The Zionists sought to create an ethnically exclusive Jewish economy, from which Palestinians would be forcibly excluded. In this way, Israeli settler colonialism differs from some other forms of settler colonialism; notably the French colonial “Pied-noir” regime in Algeria or the Apartheid state that emerged in South Africa. In these states, a small class of European landowners and capitalists ruthlessly exploited dispossessed Indigenous labourers. Zionism, on the other hand, has at its core the exclusion and elimination of the Indigenous population of historic Palestine. Sayegh wrote that while “racial discrimination” was the linchpin of settler colonialism in southern Africa, “racial elimination” was that of the “race-supremacist Zionist settler-regime in Palestine”. In this way, it has more in common with settler-colonial capitalist states in North America and Australia, which manifested in outright attempts to eradicate Indigenous Peoples.
As soon as the Palestinian population was expelled in 1948, Israeli bulldozers flattened entire villages to make way for Jewish settlements and parks. Today there are roughly 6 million Palestinian refugees from this act of mass ethnic cleansing, living in 58 refugee camps across the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, in conditions of total destitution. Many more live in the Palestinian diaspora outside of the region. Palestinians are denied the right to return to their homeland by the Zionist State, which is intent on maintaining its Jewish-majority demographics. At the same time, any Jewish person in the world has the right to immigrate to Israel at any time and receive Israeli citizenship, along with their children, grandchildren, and spouse. The exclusion of Palestinian labour meant that for Israeli capitalism to develop, the Zionist regime needed to encourage the migration of Jews from around the world to bolster the working class on which, along with Palestinian land, the economic foundations of Israel were built.
Imperialism and militarism
Israeli settler colonialism is an outgrowth of imperialist domination in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). It was only with the support of British imperialism, which had established its colonial rule over Palestine after the fall of the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, that the Zionists were able to get a foothold in Palestine. The region was critical in the oil routes of the British empire, which ran from what is today Northern Iraq to Haifa, and from there oil was transported to European markets. With rising nationalism amongst the Palestinian people, British imperialism sought to install a “friendly” western population, armed and willing to suppress the Indigenous population, as a bulwark for its strategic interests in the region. The first British Military Governor of Palestine, Sir Ronald Storrs, described the Zionist presence in Palestine as “a little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism”.
Following the Second World War, the US emerged as the dominant imperialist power in the world. Israeli capitalism was able to consolidate itself largely thanks to the support of US imperialism, which uses Israel as its “watch dog” in a region that is central to the global supply of fossil fuels, and thus, to global commodity production and trade. This relationship was sealed with Israel’s victory over the Arab states in the ‘67 war, dealing a crushing blow to Arab nationalism which posed a threat to US-dominance over the region’s oil resources. Between 1966 and 1973, US military aid to Israel soared from $90 million to $2.2 billion. US Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig, summed up the Israeli State’s role for US imperialism when he described it as “the largest American aircraft carrier in the world…located in a critical region for American national security”. Arms and military technology are a central pillar of the Israeli economy today.
Israel is well placed to play this role precisely because of its settler-colonial structure and the prevalence of Jewish-supremacist ideas in Israeli society. Israeli national consciousness was shaped by militarism and the threat of invasion. Zionist propaganda weaponises the intergenerational trauma of the Holocaust to relentlessly push the idea that Arabs, and Palestinians in particular, are an existential threat to Jewish people. The army plays a central role in all aspects of life, while militaristic ideas are inculcated in Israeli Jews from a young age through the media and the education system, preparing them for mandatory service in the IOF maintaining the occupation. This acts as a powerful block on the unity of the Israeli-Jewish working class with oppressed Palestinians, as well as with the Arab workers across the region, making Israel a stable ally for the US’ strategic interests.
The occupation regime
The Israeli State was not able to displace the entire Palestinian population in 1948, and the enduring resistance of the Palestinian masses has presented a problem for Zionism ever since. Those Palestinians who remained within the borders of what became Israel were granted Israeli citizenship, though they lived under military rule for decades. They became an exploited minority (about 20% of the population today), subject to a system of racism and segregation that discriminates against Palestinians in housing, education, employment, land rights and living standards.
The tension between the drive to eradicate the entire Palestinian population, and to subordinate them under a system of racist domination, intensified with the occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip in 1967. In order to manage the occupation, the Israeli State developed a system of racist apartheid and Jewish supremacy over the Palestinian people. The Palestinians in the Occupied Territories – the vast majority of them Nakba refugees and their descendents – were not granted citizenship, which would have threatened the Jewish-majority demographic of the Israeli State. Instead, they were placed under a vicious regime of military occupation, with prison-like conditions enforced by the ruthless IOF.
For decades, the Occupied Territories supplied Israeli capitalism with thousands of Palestinian labourers who gathered at checkpoints to be hyper-exploited as day labourers in what were openly called “slave markets” in Israel. This contributed to a massive expansion of the Israeli economy. But the Israeli State soon came to recognise this as a threat. In 1987, after decades of living under military occupation, a revolutionary struggle of Palestinian masses in Gaza and the West Bank broke out. In this First Intifada (meaning “shaking off”) democratic workers’ organisations coordinated demonstrations, mass assemblies, and a paralysing general strike, which seriously shook the Israeli State. The uprising showed the creativity and revolutionary spirit of the Palestinian masses, particularly the youth and women who played the leading roles.
For the Zionist regime, this posed an existential threat. It responded with vicious repression. But it took the betrayal of the Intifada by the PLO leadership, dominated by Fatah, to stabilise the situation for Israel. With the signing of the Oslo Accords, Israel sought to create a facade of Palestinian political administration in the West Bank – one that is fundamentally controlled by the occupation. The Palestinian Authority was established as a collaborationist regime, dominated undemocratically by the PLO’s largest faction, Fatah, and in particular the hated Mahmoud Abbas and his cronies. In reality, it is akin to the “bantustans” of apartheid South Africa which acted as vehicles for ethnic cleansing that were dominated by the apartheid regime. The PA acts as nothing more than Israel’s subcontracted enforcers of the occupation, presiding over a corrupt police-state that clamps down on Palestinian resistance on behalf of Israel.
In the period since, the Israeli State has sought to re-establish its regime of exclusion – fearing the power of the Palestinian working class. The exploitation of migrant workers from Asia, similar to the Gulf states, and the migration of impoverished Russian Jews following the collapse of the Soviet Union means Israeli capitalism is less reliant on Palestinian workers. Today, mass unemployment in the Palestinian Territories is the third highest in the world.
While some sections of Israeli capitalism profit from the occupation through the extraction of resources and the huge expenditure on arms and surveillance technology, the costs of the occupation are immense. Its role is not primarily to profit from the colonisation of the Occupied Territories, but rather to enforce a system of national oppression and to advance the central pillar of the occupation regime – the settlement and ethnic cleansing project. The right-wing of Zionism has dominated Israeli politics since the late 1970s. With its rise, an ideological drive to create a “Greater Israel”, a Jewish-supremacist state stretching across all of historic Palestine (and even including parts of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt), became the overarching goal of the Israeli State.
Israeli settlements are established in militarised towns and neighbourhoods, located on confiscated land in strategic areas between Palestinian cities and villages. The Israeli state provides financial incentives to encourage settlement in the West Bank, including tax breaks, cheap loans, business grants, and subsidised housing, in an attempt to further the settler-colonial project. The settlement project was enshrined through the “Basic Law” in 2018 which states that “the State considers the development of Jewish settlements a national value and will take action to encourage and promote the establishment and reinforcement of such settlements”.
Today, over 750,000 Israeli settlers live in illegal settlements in the Occupied West Bank, a population which is growing at almost twice the rate of the Israeli population inside the Green Line. A labyrinth of fortified settlements cuts through Palestinian territory, secured by a vast system of military checkpoints, walls, and surveillance technology, weaponised by the Israeli state against Palestinian residents. Every aspect of Palestinian life is controlled under a suffocating military regime. Travel is tightly constricted, and every morning Palestinians must crowd into cage-like checkpoints on their way to work or school. Land confiscations and demolition orders are a daily occurrence. The settlements have a far-right extremist core who see themselves as on the frontline of a war of conquest against the Palestinians. Palestinians face constant violence from far-right settlers who work hand-in-hand with the IOF to terrorise the Indigenous population.
The rise of genocidal Zionist extremism
The old values of Zionism have become increasingly more extreme, more openly racist, more supremacist and more violent. The incremental ethnic cleansing that was pursued by past Israeli governments has been abandoned; now, the state engages in genocide to empty Gaza of Palestinians, and escalates its war on the West Bank. The Israeli State has openly stated its goal in Gaza is to ethnically cleanse the Strip by terror-bombing civilians, decimating infrastructure, slaughtering people indiscriminately, and forcing the population out. An Israeli cabinet source stated Netanyahu saw “thinning the population to a minimum” as a “strategic goal” of the IOF. A proposal from the Intelligence Ministry also detailed the plan to forcibly transfer Gaza’s residents to Egypt, with far-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich explaining how this would be achieved by first “concentrating” the 2.3 million population of Gaza into a narrow strip of land between the Egyptian border and the Morag Corridor in the south of Gaza. While there is opposition to Netanyahu’s government, there is no political force in the Israeli establishment that opposes the occupation, the settlements, or the genocidal violence in Gaza; and a growing section of the Israeli ruling class now seeks to annex the West Bank entirely.
There has always been a genocidal tendency within Israeli society which demands that the Zionist state “finish the job” of the Nakba, expelling the remaining Palestinians from historic Palestine through a campaign of mass murder and displacement. Though once on the fringe of Israeli society, the massive expansion of the settlements by successive Israeli governments has allowed the far-right to swell into a significant force within Israeli politics, one that has increasing power within the state.
The current Israeli government, led by Netanyahu, is the most far-right in the country’s history. Brought to power in 2022, it is a coalition of right-wing parties with the far-right National Religious Zionist movement. Smotrich, the leader of the National Religious Party–Religious Zionism, acts as the governor of the West Bank and is actively seeking to annex the territory. Security minister Itamar Ben Gvir, leader of Otzma Yehudit (“Jewish Power”), oversees the torture of Palestinian captives in the regime’s dungeons, and is pushing for expanded powers to execute Palestinians in prison. His party emerged from “Kahanism”, the fascistic Zionist ideology that seeks to establish a Jewish theocracy in Israel, and holds that all Arabs in historic Palestine are enemies of the state of Israel and must be removed or eradicated.
But the influence of the far-right goes far beyond the current government. Elements of the far-right settler movement now occupy the upper echelons of the military and security services within Israel. In 2024 it was revealed that 40% of those graduating from the IOF’s infantry officer schools now come from the far-right settler section of the population. These sadistic thugs have openly shared their genocidal acts on social media. One soldier described the slogan of the IOF in Gaza as “there are no uninvolved”.
The general direction of the Israeli State is towards a more openly fascistic and extremist regime. It is telling that far-right parties and figures such as Ben-Gvir get significant support from the Israeli youth, whose votes helped to propel the far-right Netanyahu government into power, with 73% of Israelis aged 18-24 identifying as politically right-wing. What is most striking is the genocidal fervour which has taken over much of Israeli society. A poll of Israeli Jews earlier this year showed that 82% support expelling all Palestinians from Gaza, while 56% support expelling all Palestinians within the Israeli State’s borders. A shocking 47% said that the IOF should “conquer” Gaza as the Biblical Israelites did in Jericho, “killing all inhabitants”.
For now, the small number of Israeli Jews who stand against the genocide are extremely isolated and face growing repression at the hands of the state. But even a small anti-Zionist movement that unifies Palestinians and Jews in and beyond the ‘48 borders can play an important role in destabilising the genocidal Israeli State from within.
So-called “ceasefire” is a plan for colonial domination
Despite the catastrophic violence wrought upon Gaza, the Israeli State has been unable to achieve its goals. Thousands of young Palestinians have joined the resistance to the genocide, fighting a heroic guerilla struggle with homemade weaponry and unexploded Israeli ordinance which has inflicted a real cost on the IOF.
The instability wrought by the genocide in Gaza – which has led to an eruption of pro-Palestinian struggle across the region and the world – has become increasingly untenable for US imperialism, which has now forced the ceasefire deal upon Netanyahu. In particular, Netanyahu’s terrorist bombing of the Hamas negotiation delegation in Qatar – a key US ally in the region – inflamed tensions; showing how Israel’s rabid militarism has become a block to US imperialism’s long-term goal of normalising relations between the Gulf states and Israel, the key pillars of US dominance in the region, in order to maintain its control of the supply of oil to the world market.
The “ceasefire” deal was forced upon the Netanyahu government by the US, and it has tried at every stage to undermine it. Ben-Gvir has threatened to collapse the government if the full-scale genocide in Gaza does not continue, and the likelihood that Hamas will refuse to disarm will be used by sections of the Israeli State to demand the abandonment of the deal. But the US is adamant it will hold, installing its own military command to oversee it.
The Trump plan is in essence the continued colonial domination of Gaza by the Israeli State and its imperialist allies. Israel is using the cover of the ceasefire to continue its mass killings and destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure. The agreement leaves Israel in control of 58% of Gaza’s territory – including the vast majority of its now devastated agricultural land, setting the stage for making the US-Israeli occupation of Gaza permanent – further entrenching the Zionist regime’s ability to starve its population. Already, the IOF has expanded this territory by erecting a militarised “buffer zone”; the same mechanism it uses to ethnically cleanse the West Bank. The deal tramples on the national rights of Palestinians, placing Gaza’s fate under the control of an imperialist “Board of Peace” ruled by Trump with arch war criminal Tony Blair as a modern colonial viceroy. An article in the Wall Street Journal outlines the Trump regime’s plan to carve out “safe zones” under US-Israeli occupation, with reconstruction funding flowing only into those areas.
The real plan motivating the ceasefire was revealed by Vance on his visit to Israel. “There are considerations happening now in the area that the IDF controls”, he said, “to start the construction of a new Gaza.” For US imperialism, this so-called “peace” agreement is just the first step towards the construction of Trump’s “Gaza Riviera”, with billionaire tech oligarchs who are close to the Trump regime, Peter Thiel and Larry Ellison, along with the Saudi and UAE regimes, reportedly planning to turn Gaza into “a city of tax-free startups, with scattered server farms for cloud processing and artificial intelligence, and at its center a Tesla factory where cheap local labor will work.” The proposal, the basis for which has been laid by the IOF’s total destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure and civilian life, would transform what remains of it into an occupied, militarized colony serving the interests of Israeli and US imperialism. This must be resisted, both in and outside of historic Palestine.
Resistance and revolution
The unprecedented global movement for Palestinian liberation is one of the most vital developments in the global situation. It has exposed the whole rotten capitalist order, driving millions of people into conflict with governments, media, courts, and corporations that are complicit in genocide. A vast faultline is opening up in society, as the Israeli socialist author Ilan Pappé has noted, with the the forces of imperialism, state repression, the arms industry, and the billionaire-tech oligarchs aligning with the camp of “Global Israel”; while the young people and working-class masses of the world, especially in the Global South, increasingly make up a “Global Palestine” camp which is willing to struggle against the horrors of capitalist-imperialism. The massive general strike for Gaza in Italy shows the blueprint for how the global solidarity movement can proceed, by harnessing the collective power of working-class people and bringing it to bear against the Israeli war machine.
The willingness of a new generation of Palestinians to resist the genocide and occupation can be the crucial factor in the fight against the Israeli State. Discussions taking place today within historic Palestine about the formation of new democratic organisations that are capable of fighting the political struggle for a free Palestine can point the way forward. The exclusion of Palestinian labour by the Israeli settler-colonial state has important implications for Palestinian resistance. As such Palestinian revolutionaries throughout history, organising in the refugee camps throughout the region that became hotbeds of socialist and anti-imperialist ideas, have linked the liberation of Palestine to a broader revolution that would sweep across the MENA region.
The working class and oppressed masses of the region have shown a willingness to engage in revolutionary struggles through the movements in 2011 and 2019. Today, they are incensed by the reactionary Arab regimes’ complicity with imperialism and genocide, as well as the conditions of crushing poverty and state repression that capitalism breeds. The conditions are being prepared for a revolutionary struggle that can sweep across the region, one with the power to smash the genocidal Zionist State. Such a struggle is inherently bound up with the necessity to rid humanity of the rule of capitalism and imperialism. It means fighting for a socialist society based on genuine political and economic freedom for all, with the right to self-determination for all peoples on a genuinely equal basis.
Notes
1 Various, 10 Oct 2025, ‘Full-Scale Genocide’: 77,000 Palestinians Killed or Missing, Gaza in Ruins’, palestinechronicle.com • 2 Fayez A. Sayegh, 1965, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PLO Research Center • 3 George Jabbour, 1970, Settler Colonialism in Southern Africa and the Middle East, PLO Research Center • 4 Sai Englert, 2022, Settler Colonialism: An Introduction, Pluto Press • 5 Adam Hanieh, Robert Knox, and Rafeef Ziadah, Resisting Erasure: Capitalism, Imperialism, and Race in Palestine, Verso Books • 6 Various, 2011, The Histadrut: Its History and Role in Occupation, Colonisation and Apartheid, Trade Union Friends of Palestine • 7 Dr. Assaf Oron, 28 Oct 2023, ‘What’s behind Israel’s biggest economic boom? The occupation’, 972mag.com • 8 Shir Hever, 2010, The Political Economy of Israel’s Occupation: Repression Beyond Exploitation, Pluto Press • 9 The National and Scotland for Palestine, ‘How Gaza genocide happened: Damning words of Israel’s politicians’, thenational.scot • 10 Ilan Pappe, 2025, Israel on the Brink: The Eight Revolutions that Could Lead to Decolonization and Coexistence, Oneworld Publications • 11 Peter Beaumont and Quique Kierszenbaum, 19 July 2024, ‘National religious recruits challenge values of IDF once dominated by secular elite’, theguardian.com • 12 Dahlia Scheindlin, 3 June 2025, ‘Poll Shows Majority of Israelis Support Expelling Gazans; genocidewatch.com • 13 Dov Lieber, 22 Oct 2025, ‘A U.S. Plan Splits Gaza in Two—One Zone Controlled by Israel, One by Hamas’, wsj.com
