In late March Israel resumed its war on the Palestinians of the Gaza strip, killing and wounding thousands more Palestinians. Since the war began in October 2023, more than 51,000 Gazans have been killed along with another 115,000 wounded. And now, for the first time since this war began, Israeli political and military leaders are openly declaring that it is Israeli policy to annex portions of the strip.
Only days after the Israeli assault resumed, on March 21, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said that “the more Hamas persists in its refusal to release the hostages, the more territory it will lose, which will be annexed to Israel.” He continued: “Israel will continue to take more and more territory in the strip for permanent control.” He called these new areas, now occupied and totally controlled by the Israeli Defense Forces, “security zones” in which the IDF will remain “as a buffer between the enemy and the communities in any temporary or permanent situation in Gaza.” These so-called security zones are in fact anything but safe. For Palestinians, they are kill zones where all buildings and agriculture have been destroyed and flattened, and where any living thing is a target for IDF perimeter guards.
At the same time as the IDF kills by the thousands and annexes more land, the Israeli government has pledged to create an agency to help Palestinians who wish to “voluntarily” depart from Gaza. The message is clear.
While it was obvious to anyone paying attention that a desire to kill and remove as many Palestinians as possible and to seize as much land as possible was always part of the Israeli rationale and war plan, Israeli leaders had tried to downplay these ideas in public. For more than one year, they needed to balance their racist, genocidal destruction with a fake concern for restraint and international law in order to make it easier for Joe Biden to continue U.S. military aid. But once Trump came to power, Netanyahu and the Israeli military establishment have gotten the message that they have an unlimited green light to continue destroying and taking. Even though Trump has rarely mentioned his idea of the United States taking over and owning the Gaza Strip since he first pronounced it in early February, Israeli leadership is using it as a justification for their actions. “We are working by all means to implement the vision of the U.S. president, and we will allow any Gaza resident who wishes to voluntarily move to a third country to do so,” said Katz. Taken together, these military actions are a qualitative escalation in Israeli military plans, designed not just to kill and destroy, but to now directly occupy the land and force out as many Palestinians as possible.
This jump in Israeli strategic planning is a sign of just how significant U.S. approval is for nearly everything Israel does. Although Biden completely supported Zionism’s war, he felt obligated to at least discuss peace, or a two-state solution. Although these considerations did nothing to make him draw down the enormous military support for Israel – at least $22 billion in just one year of fighting – they made Israeli policymakers at least think twice before attempting to actually incorporate Gaza as their territory. Now, with Trump as President and willing to openly muse about taking all of Gaza, Israeli leaders are taking the message that they can do whatever they want. They are now 100% sure that their chief economic and military backer will support them no matter how many international laws they trample, how many they kill, or what it looks like to rest of the world.
We in the United States live in the belly of the beast. We live in the nation that does the most to finance and support the Zionist project that has caused and continues to cause so much human suffering.
For this reason, if we in the United States are able to organize and build our forces to challenge the people who rule us here, our actions can reverberate throughout the world. So much is up to us and our own initiative. We must recognize this basic fact and begin to take action. Never again is now!
