No to U.S./U.N. Colonial Rule – For an Arab/Hebrew Palestinian Workers Republic in a Socialist Federation of the Middle East

Gaza “Ceasefire”: There Is No Peace

Transport Workers: Stop All War Cargo to Israel!

On October 9, representatives of Israel and Hamas (the Islamic Resistance Movement) signed an agreement for a ceasefire in the monstrous two-year Zionist genocidal war on the Palestinian population of Gaza. The agreement was announced the day before by Donald Trump on his social media platform. Having received their instructions from on high, the negotiators, overseen by the president’s personal envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, then put their signatures on the brief (one-page) document. When bombs stopped falling the next day, crowds of Palestinians in Gaza City, who had lived through 24 months of hell on earth, were jubilant. And when 25 Israeli hostages were returned alive, there was rejoicing in Tel Aviv. But this was only a pause in the unending Zionist war on the Palestinian people. There is no peace.

The ceasefire plan included immediately turning over all hostages held in Gaza and freeing 2,000 Palestinians being held in Israeli jails and prison camps, including 250 prisoners sentenced to life imprisonment; also withdrawal of Israeli forces to an agreed-upon line; and the entry and distribution without interference of relief and rehabilitation supplies through the United Nations and other international bodies. The release of hostages, detainees and prisoners was carried out, but Israel refused to free several Palestinian leaders, and over 9,000 Palestinians are still being held as hostages. The “yellow line” to which Israeli troops pulled back still leaves them in control of 53% of Gaza. And while aid has begun to flow, from October 10 to 31 Israel let in on average only 152 trucks a day, barely a quarter of the agreed minimum of 600+.

In short, Gaza is still “the largest open-air prison in the world,” but its over 2 million people are now crammed into half the space they occupied before. Moreover, more than three-quarters of those residents are living in tents, makeshift shelters and overcrowded public buildings used as emergency refuges. Over 80% of all buildings in the Gaza Strip have been badly damaged or destroyed, including 89% of all schools and 92% of all housing units. Vast areas in the north and south have been completely leveled, with no structures left standing. This is the most massive destruction anywhere on the planet since World War II. And as we have previously reported, over 100,000 people have been killed in this slaughter. This is the barbaric toll of what is in fact a U.S./Israel genocide in Gaza, a war of annihilation against the Palestinian people.¹

That genocide has not stopped. At most, in response to the massive international outcry – particularly the powerful mass strikes for Gaza and millions-strong protests that shut down Italian ports, railroads and highways on September 22 and October 3 – the “ceasefire” paused some of its most notorious aspects, such as Israel’s daily bombing of apartment buildings and total blockade of food and supplies for months at a time.² But already Israeli authorities have closed the Rafah border crossing, sharply cut back the amount of aid permitted to enter Gaza and are restricting suppliers. Then on October 19, Israeli airstrikes killed at least 45 people, and on October 28, Israeli forces killed at least 104, 66 of them women and children, after which spokesmen for the Zionist military cynically announced they were “renewing” the ceasefire.

The truce is only the first step in Trump’s 20-point plan for a “Comprehensive End of Gaza War.” Under the proposal unveiled on September 29, the next stage would be forming a “technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee” of “qualified Palestinian and international experts” to govern the Strip under the supervision of an international “Board of Peace” headed by Donald Trump and including former British prime minister Tony Blair. An “International Stabilization Force” would be created by the U.S. working with “Arab and international partners” that would secure borders with Israel and Egypt and would train “vetted Palestinian police forces” in Gaza with the aid of Jordan and Egypt. All tunnels and weapons production facilities would be destroyed and weapons “decommissioned” (made unusable).

What of this elaborate plan (and the fabled “Trump economic development plan”) for a “New Gaza” would ever be carried out is open to question. Israel’s ultra-Zionist government led by Benjamin Netanyahu depends on the votes of outright fascist parties which are determined to annex Gaza and the West Bank and would not agree to any Palestinian governing body. Hamas, on the other hand, would have no interest in, nor agree to, total disarming or destroying the tunnels: their very reason for existence is as an armed resistance to Israeli occupation. And Arab countries are not eager to send their soldiers into Gaza where they would be targets for ambushes by battle-hardened fighters, and objects of mass protests when Israel predictably clamps down on vitally needed supplies or renews bombing. The whole construct is a Trumpian fantasy.

The United States is seeking a United Nations Security Council resolution giving its fake Stabilization Force “robust powers” to enforce security in Gaza. It would not be an official UN “peacekeeping force,” but would have a “U.N. mandate” to act “with the kind of powers given to international troops operating in Haiti to combat armed gangs” (Guardian, 18 October). The job of the Gang Suppression Force in Haiti is to back up the police and army, which killed nearly 1,000 people during April-June 2025, almost three times as many as killed by gangs. So the U.S. is asking for a blank check to give Trump’s plan the imprimatur of international law (itself a fiction) to act as border guards for Israel with a license to carry out massacres. This is a formula for colonial rule, with Trump as overlord and his toady Tony Blair as governor general of Gaza.

Palestinians already had the bitter experience of such an international “mandate,” under the League of Nations, which led to the Nakba (catastrophe) in 1948 when Israel seized most of Palestine, then grabbed the rest in the 1967 war. Defenders of the Palestinians and opponents of imperialism should oppose any U.N. resolution mandating the Trump plan and oppose any international force imposing a vassal Gaza “government.” Class-conscious workers should step up the fight for workers action to stop all military goods to Israel. The mythical “two-state solution” was always a formula for Israeli domination and is by now impossible: there already is one state between the (Jordan) River and the (Mediterranean) Sea. In opposition to the inherently antidemocratic Zionist state of Israel, the League for the Fourth International calls (and has called throughout) to defend Gaza and defeat the U.S./Israel genocidal war, and stand for an Arab/Hebrew Palestinian workers state in a socialist federation of the Middle East.

The Zionist/Imperialist War on the Palestinian People Goes On

In the joint press conference announcing the Trump “peace plan,” Netanyahu declared that it “achieves our war aims,” including the “dismantling of Hamas’s military infrastructure.” False. Under orders from the prime minister, the IDF (Israeli army) was engaged in an operation to obliterate Gaza City and force out the entire population of 800,000. Yet on October 10, the hundreds of thousands walking to the south turned around, and half a million returned to live in the rubble. As for the Hamas military infrastructure, hardline IDF general (retired) Giora Eiland, an architect of the Zionist genocide campaign to make Gaza unliveable, told NBC News (20 October) that Hamas still has up to 25,000 fighters, and that 70-80% of its vast tunnel network is intact, with much of its exact location unknown to the Israeli military.

Disarming Hamas – or more broadly the armed resistance groups³ – and inducing fighters to go into exile with promises of “safe passage” is a non-starter. To begin with, they and many others recall what happened after the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) evacuated from Lebanon after Israel’s 1982 siege of Beirut: thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese Shiite Muslims were murdered in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps by a fascistic Lebanese militia in a massacre engineered by Israel. Hamas may make a show of giving up some heavier weapons which are of little use to it now, but no fighter would be without their AK, if only for self-protection. The only purpose to the demand for disarmament of Gaza resistance fighters is as a pretext to resume full-scale war (which also wouldn’t disarm them).

While Trump is posturing as a man of peace, and desperately wants to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize,⁴ one of his immediate aims was to defend the Zionist state from being an international pariah. “Bibi [Netanyahu’s nickname] took it very far and Israel lost a lot of support in the world. Now I am gonna get all that support back,” Trump said in an interview (Axios, 4 October). Trump basically told Netanyahu to declare victory and move on, which the Israeli prime minister did. Not without some squirming, as when the U.S. president handed the mass-murdering Israeli leader a White House phone and had him read a scripted apology to the Qatari prime minister for having attempted to assassinate the Hamas negotiators in an Israeli airstrike on Qatar, site of a major U.S. air base.

But Israel will never be able to wash off the stigma of carrying out a Nazi-like genocide in Gaza. It is the ultimate logic of Zionism, to “cleanse” the “promised” Land of Israel of its Palestinian inhabitants to erect a Jewish supremacist state. From 1948 to today is a straight line. The Israeli attackers of Gaza indiscriminately terror-bombed apartment buildings in 2014 and 2021, only this time it was on a vast scale, with AI-assisted targeting. At the onset of the present war, the head of the Israeli military’s COGAT (Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories), told the people of Gaza, “This is your Nakba.” And even after the “ceasefire,” Israel’s severe restriction of food aid shows that the Zionist rulers haven’t abandoned their policy of deliberate mass starvation.  

Even when the industrial-scale slaughter was paused with the Trump “ceasefire,” the Zionist genocidal attitude comes through. Israeli propagandists complain of eight bodies of hostages that have not yet been returned which are likely buried under the rubble from Israeli bombing, as are thousands of Palestinians. Meanwhile, out of 150 bodies of Palestinians returned by Israel, 135 were mutilated (Guardian, 20 October). Many bore signs of torture, several had hands tied behind their backs, and a number were killed by “direct gunfire at point-blank range.” The bodies all came from the military base Sde Teiman in the Negev desert. But when videos of Israeli soldiers at that notorious torture center abusing a Palestinian were leaked by the top IDF law officer, Maj. Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, she was arrested while the torturers are free.

Then on October 22, during the visit to Israel by U.S. vice president JD Vance, the Knesset (parliament) passed by 71 to 13 (with both the right-wing government majority and much of the opposition in favor) a resolution proclaiming Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank and claiming a “legal right to all of the territories of the Land of Israel” – i.e., including Gaza as well. Trump said in an interview that the West Bank annexation “won’t happen” because he wouldn’t permit it. But he has never renounced his plan from earlier this year, under which “the U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip…. We’ll own it” and turn it into “the Riviera of the Middle East,” while pushing out the entire Palestinian population. As recently as May, the Trump administration was working on a plan to settle 1 million Gaza Palestinians in Libya (NBC News, 16 May).

Fight Illusions in the Phony Trump “Peace Plan”

The heroic endurance of the people of Gaza has at least temporarily stymied many of those plans. While Israeli leaders call Palestinians “human animals” (war minister Yoav Gallant at the outset of the war) and the like, the steadfastness of the Gaza population while being forced to trek from one end of the enclave to the other and then back again has been legendary. The Zionist militarists’ effort to terrorize Palestinians into abject submission failed. Even on the brink of starvation the population did not turn against resistance fighters. For Trump, Gaza is a “site” and Israel’s 2005 pullout was “one of the worst real estate deals ever made,” giving up prime “oceanfront property.” But while totally penned in, Gazans would not be stampeded into flight – enduring unbelievable suffering, they would not have another Nakba. They were staying put.

The Trump administration asserts that at a secret meeting, with Qatari officials acting as intermediaries, Hamas negotiators indicated to Witkoff and Kushner their agreement to disarm. Trump said that “If they don’t disarm, we will disarm them … quickly and perhaps violently.” He did not explain how he would accomplish that when Israel didn’t come close over two years, even with hundreds of thousands of soldiers on the ground and devastating bombing. In any case, Hamas fighters reappeared at the handover of the hostages, and within a day 7,000 were deployed, directing traffic and overpowering militias that collaborated with and were armed by Israel (a fact confirmed by IDF commanders). Those militias, which are aligned with the Islamic State, were notorious for stealing relief aid from U.N.-organized convoys.

So contrary to Netanyahu’s declared war aim to “completely defeat” and “finish” Hamas (which even top IDF officers say is impossible), the Gaza armed resistance is still there and not going away. To give up the tunnels would be suicidal. Hamas agreed last March to play no role in civil government (who would want to administer this total devastation?), so this ceasefire could have been settled months ago – except that Trump gave the Israeli prime minister the green light to go ahead with his latest offensive. In fact, it could have been negotiated two years ago and 100,000+ lives saved had Israel agreed to the insurgents’ demand to free the thousands of Palestinian prisoners being held hostage in Israeli jails, many for decades. But the rabid Zionists were hell-bent on exacting revenge on the population of Gaza, and Democratic U.S. president “Genocide Joe” Biden backed them to the hilt, supplying the means to carry out the genocide.

While Netanyahu tries to portray the ceasefire as an Israeli victory, which neither his fascist ministers nor the liberal Zionist opposition agree with, the Hamas leadership greeted the truce as a significant achievement. An October 9 statement portrayed it as “an agreement to end the war on Gaza, withdraw the occupation, allow humanitarian aid, and exchange prisoners,” which is quite an overstatement. It added, “we value the efforts of U.S. President Donald Trump aimed at definitively stopping the war.” The next day Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem declared, “This ceasefire is a milestone in the struggle of our people.” The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) called it “the possible option under the current circumstances,” based on “clear American guarantees that prevent procrastination.” Don’t count on that.

Echoing this, many in the Palestinian solidarity movement have hailed the ceasefire as a victory. This has, after all, been the main demand of protests around the world for the last two years. In the U.S., the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), which works closely with the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), put out an October 9 statement saluting the celebration of “the end of the war” in the streets of Gaza. Certainly, a halt to the Israeli bombing and ground attacks, is positive, even if it is temporary. But, Donald Trump’s boasting to the contrary, the ceasefire does not represent an end to the war on Gaza, nor is it necessarily a “step toward peace.” The war of annihilation against the Palestinian people goes on, and the struggle to defeat that Zionist and imperialist war must step up, most crucially through internationalist class struggle by workers both in the region and internationally.

The PSL writes that “global public opinion has shifted irreversibly to the side of the Palestinian people,” and that “the ceasefire was won by the resilience of the Palestinian people and the global movement for Palestine, which forced a historic turning point in public opinion in support of the Palestinian cause.” It adds that in “the coming months and years, there will be an ever-stronger movement” to demand that the U.S. end all support for Israel. It is certainly true that the reality of the Zionist genocide, which millions around the world watched in horror in real time, has left an indelible imprint on the consciousness of an entire generation, which nothing that Israel and its imperialist backers do can erase. The Zionists definitely lost the battle of public opinion, but that does not determine the course of the war.

The very fact that Hamas and the other armed Palestinian groups have not been wiped out despite the horrendous death and destruction means that Israel did not win the war. Guerrilla groups seldom win wars against powerful regular armies. None of the groups in Gaza ever thought this round of fighting could bring down the Israeli behemoth. Hamas’ “Operation Al Aqsa Flood” aimed at stopping the slide toward an accommodation between Israel and Arab states (such as the 2020 “Abraham Accords” with Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Morocco) and the inexorable expansion of settlements of fascistic Zionist settlers on the West Bank. The war in Gaza did put the Palestine question in the center of world attention, but the settlements continue to grow and the ceasefire may increase Arab states’ cooperation with Israel.

The fact is that neither the Zionist Israeli military machine nor the Gaza armed resistance forces groups won, and neither definitively lost: amid exhaustion on both sides, the war on the Palestinian people goes on to the next round. The coming battle may be fought out increasingly on the global scale. Calls for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) have failed to budge Israel one centimeter, precisely because they are ultimately an appeal to the imperialists, for whom the Zionist state is a pillar of their domination of the Middle East. On the other hand, the campaign for workers action to stop delivery of military material to (and from) Israel, which the League for the Fourth International has called for from the outset, has escalated in the last several months, and has sent shivers down the spines of the Zionist militarists.⁵

Only Proletarian Revolutionary Struggle Can Bring Peace to the Middle East

In the imperialist countries, the rulers have sought to smear any support to the Palestinians and opposition to the Zionist slaughter as “antisemitism,” weaponizing this slander with vicious repression. The real antisemites, fascists and white supremacists who would destroy the Jewish people support Israel, while tens of thousands of Jews in the U.S., and more elsewhere, have protested in in solidarity with Palestinians. The stunning breakout on 7 October 2023 by fighters overwhelmed the military apparatus and 30-foot-high wall that have kept over 2 million Gazans locked in for over half a century, stirred supporters of the Palestinian cause worldwide. Yet this was undercut by the indefensible indiscriminate attacks on the population of nearby areas that killed 815 civilians.⁶ This was used by the Zionist butchers as the pretext to murder over 100,000 Palestinians and destroy Gaza.

The establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 was a historic crime, the result of the monstrous historic crime of the Nazi genocide that annihilated 6 million European Jews in World War II, and of the large-scale refusal of the “democratic” imperialist countries to accept Jewish refugees and Holocaust survivors. Even after the mass expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the 1948 Nakba, today the state of Israel is inhabited by 7.2 million Hebrew-speakers and rules over 7.7 million Arabs (both Muslim and Christian), 2 million as second-class citizens and the rest with no rights at all. There are two nations, Hebrew (including both religious Jews and a secular near-majority)⁷ and Palestinian Arab – the first the oppressor, the second the oppressed – living intermixed⁸ on the same sliver of land on the eastern Mediterranean shore.

As Israel is vastly stronger economically and militarily, any “two-state solution” under capitalism will inevitably be one of Israeli domination over a Palestinian pseudo-state. From the standpoint of proletarian internationalism, and of the survival of both peoples, the only equitable solution is a binational state, which will only be realized by an Arab/Hebrew workers revolution. That requires that sizeable numbers of Hebrew speakers break with Zionism. When Netanyahu spoke in September of Israel becoming a “super-Sparta,” referring to the militaristic state of ancient Greece, many Israelis piped up that they didn’t want to live in a garrison state forever. But that is the future they face, and while a tiny country of 7 million Hebrew speakers may be militarily dominant today, in the long run it cannot dominate a region of over 300 million Arabs.

As proletarian internationalists, the LFI stands firmly on the side of those fighting against the U.S./Israel genocidal war on Gaza, stating from the outset that “Any real blow against the Zionist state by Palestinian forces, even by reactionary Islamists, is in the interests of the workers and oppressed of the world.”⁹ At the same time, we politically oppose those seeking to impose Islamic rule, as well as bourgeois nationalists and the various monarchist and militarist regimes of the region. The Zionists and imperialists, in contrast, often use reactionary Islamist forces to combat leftists and secular nationalists. Thus since 2018, Israel (which spawned Hamas to counter the PLO)¹⁰ and the U.S. approved $30 million monthly payments to Gaza from Qatar,¹¹ which has longstanding relations with the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is an offshoot.

Should Trump’s fantasy begin to take form as a Gaza ruled by a puppet committee under his thumb, with the wretched Tony Blair as his viceroy and policed by an international mercenary force, defenders of Palestinian rights must support struggles against this colonial monstrosity engendered by the October 2025 ceasefire. The Internationalist Group in the U.S. along with the other national sections of the LFI never called for a ceasefire, precisely because, as we explained, this would leave Israeli troops in Gaza and the Palestinian people under occupation. We call instead to mobilize the power of the working class worldwide to drive the Zionist occupiers out of Gaza and the West Bank, and to defeat the U.S./Israel genocide in Gaza and the imperialist/Zionist war on the Palestinian people.

The likelihood is that Gaza will return to something akin to the situation before October 2023 with periodic deadly Israel airstrikes and ground incursions, only under far worse conditions, with the vast majority of the population living in ruins. The chances that someone comes up with the $70 billion (UN/European Union/World Bank estimate) or much more that it will take to rebuild the enclave are not great, and in any case it would take years. Nor will there be peace in the region. For the Zionist militarists, a ceasefire in Gaza could be the trigger for a new attack on Iran, which both the IDF and Pentagon are preparing. And globally, a major reason the Trump administration (as well as the Biden administration before it) wants to end full-scale war in Gaza is in order to concentrate on building up U.S. forces for imperialist war for counterrevolution in China and dismembering Russia – in other words, a thermonuclear World War III.

Today, with everyone from the Israeli Hostage Forum to Benjamin Netanyahu to Hamas looking to Donald Trump to conjure up a new era, or just to provide a stepping stone to an imaginary permanent settlement in the Middle East, it is necessary to combat illusions in the ceasefire and phony “peace” plan imposed by U.S. imperialism. Israel, having faced severe shortages of the 2,000-lb. bombs it used to destroy just about every home in Gaza, will rebuild its stocks. The German government is preparing to resume war cargo shipments to Israel (which never really stopped). The League for the Fourth International calls to intensify efforts for transport workers (air and sea) to “hot-cargo” (refuse to handle) military goods of all sorts to Israel, and to shut down Israeli exports of weaponry and police surveillance technology.

To achieve a just peace in historic Palestine, the war criminals responsible for the genocide must be brought to justice administered by a workers state resulting from joint Arab/Hebrew socialist revolution. The presence of interpenetrated peoples, both oppressors and oppressed, is not unique to Palestine but is also the case in neighboring Lebanon, Syria, Turkey and elsewhere in the Middle East. Breaking with the dead-end of nationalism, in order to lead a common struggle by the workers of the myriad peoples of the region against national oppression and capitalist exploitation, it is necessary to mobilize the proletarian powerhouses of Egypt, Turkey and Iran and to do so requires above all building genuine communist parties on the internationalist program of Lenin and Trotsky.

In their heroic refusal to bow down to oppression and even outright genocide, the Palestinian people of Gaza have inspired millions of workers and youth around the world – and together we will win. ■

To contact the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International, send e-mail to: internationalistgroup@msn.com

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