Netanyahu’s Final Solution
Smoke billows during Israeli bombardment over Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on February 12, 2024. Said Khatib/AFP/Getty Images
Gaza, one of the oldest cities in the world, was once a vibrant, thriving city. It was home to 2.3 million people, all of whom have names, families, friends, and lives just like the ones we live right now. Today, it is covered in dust, rubble, and dead bodies that have been accumulating for over 75 years. More than a million people are now packed into Rafah, the southernmost point of the Gaza Strip, bordering Egypt, normally home to less than 300,000 people.
The Rafah Border Crossing is the only way in or out of the Gaza Strip at the southern border where Palestine meets Egypt. Since October 7, Egypt has built up its border security with a concrete wall topped with barbed wire and increased military personnel. The Palestinian people—surviving off contaminated drinking water, animal feed and grass, with no anesthetics and almost no basic medical supplies—are left with quite literally nowhere to go.
Israel went as far as to label Rafah a “safe zone,” but Netanyahu and co. laid all their cards on the table on Saturday, February 10 as they announced their plans for the Final Solution to the Palestinian question. Since then, the Israeli military advanced into Rafah to “assist with the evacuation” of hundreds of thousands of people with no timeline or details of when or how this will be done. “Evacuation” by gunpoint is not humanitarian; a more accurate word would be expulsion or forced displacement, especially since Israel is targeting Gaza’s infrastructure. Hours before Netanyahu announced his goal, at least 44 Palestinians in Rafah were killed in an airstrike, over a dozen of them children. They are still being bombed and murdered at this very moment.
We do not use the term “Final Solution” lightly. As Hitler and the Nazis did with the Jewish people, Netanyahu and the IDF have forced Palestinians into open-air concentration camps where they are living in overcrowded, unsanitary areas with little to no basic resources. They are bombing civilians in their homes, schools, churches, mosques and hospitals every day. The Israeli military even dressed up as medical staff while raiding a hospital in the West Bank to murder civilians.
After rejecting Hamas’ proposed ceasefire terms, Netanyahu said in an interview on February 7, “We are on our way to absolute victory…It’s not just a matter of years or tens of years. It’s a matter of months.” In short, the Prime Minister of Israel openly announced that the extermination of Palestinians will be achieved, not in a decade, not in a year, but in a matter of months. Hamas and Gaza, he claims, will no longer be threats to Israel. What will Israel do after they succeed? Hand the rubble back over to the handful of Gazan refugees left standing?
Hamas has long been the pretext for Netanyahu’s genocidal campaign, which escalated tenfold after Palestinian resistance groups broke down the walls of their prison on October 7. However, as V.I. Lenin pointed out in the Third All-Russia Congress of Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies, “Not a single problem of the class struggle has ever been solved in history except by violence. When violence is exercised by the working people, by the mass of exploited against the exploiters—then we are for it!” Accordingly, we stand with all peoples, groups and organizations who resist their oppressors by any means necessary. Decolonization and the overthrowing of colonial rule is the only path toward Palestinian liberation.
But the Israeli government knows this was never really about Hamas. Israel is and always has been a settler-colonial apartheid state with a quest for complete control of the land of Palestine, and they will not stop until they achieve it. This ongoing genocide runs much deeper than one Prime Minister and his cabinet. Zionist colonization is not compatible with the continued existence of the indigenous population. If they cannot force Palestinians out of the land, the Zionists will bomb, maim and murder them until there are no longer any Palestinians at all. Since Zionism’s inception, which happened more than fifty years before the creation of Israel, this has always been the end goal.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Netanyahu and his officials recently where he raised concerns about Israel’s next steps for Rafah, saying the toll of Israeli military operations on civilian lives remains too high, but that hasn’t stopped our government from flooding tens of billions of dollars in military aid to Israel.
The U.S. has no objection to funding the Israeli terrorist state, but only when its strings of power are not being pulled taut. Our national government’s facade has not only cracked, but has fallen under the insurmountable pressure of support for Palestine. The general public knows this is a Holocaust of the Palestinian people. Genocide Joe isn’t the only one who’s got to go. The bourgeois American régime as a whole, as the prime example of an imperial settler-colonial empire, must be overthrown. There is only one solution: Intifada revolution.