Above: bodies being delivered to a mass grave in Khan Younis in November 2023 (AA Photo)
Between the summer of 2024 and February 2025, the reality of the Palestinian Holocaust has been severely absent from our discourse. When last spring’s campus Gaza uprisings ended, the universities had the time to impose major new speech rules, and the media got an opportunity to redirect the discourse away from Gaza. By the time both presidential nominees were chosen, Gaza was no longer a regular part of the news cycle, and had been replaced by a constant stream of distraction stories. Therefore, the Zionist entity became able to commit even more massacres than it already was. Add half a year’s time to this, and you get the outcome we have today. An outcome where at the very least, the entity has murdered 200 thousand Gazans.
This number comes from how Trump has said that Gaza’s population is now 1.7 to 1.8 million. Prior to October 7, the number was between 2.1 and 2.3 million; which means that in the last year-and-a-half, the entity has murdered 200 thousand at the minimum, in addition to the hundred thousand or so who’ve left the Gaza strip. This is consistent with how in July, The Lancet found that the deaths may have by that point exceeded 186,000. That estimate’s accuracy is supported by Trump’s admission; it makes total sense that almost 200 thousand had died nine months into the extermination effort, and that tens of thousands more died in the following six months. It all matches with the timeline of how this genocide got started, and then got accelerated with the discourse shift away from Gaza. Given all of these factors, the 200 thousand number is extremely conservative; so much that it’s almost implausible for the number to realistically be this low.
The irony is that many of the political actors who were supposed to fight against the genocide have come to hold a crucial role in getting things to this point. When Palestine was de-centered in the discourse, the organized left failed to sufficiently push against this trend; that’s because their foremost priority came to be anti-Trumpism. PSL, DSA, and the other major left orgs have tried to build a protest movement that’s specifically anti-Trump, rather than focused on Palestine as the central issue. And this has put the Palestinians in an even more vulnerable place. The Zionist entity has momentarily retreated from Gaza not because of the U.S. pro-Palestine movement—which has become highly weakened—but because of the strength of the Palestinian resistance. The Palestinians have been left to carry forth this fight on their own, and though they’ve gained a strategic victory, many more of them will be murdered unless we re-center Palestine.
The great danger which appeared after last month’s ceasefire agreement was that the empire’s narrative management machine would succeed at burying the genocide. That the prevailing narrative on Gaza would be one about Trump having brought “peace,” and ended what the media calls the “Israel-Hamas war.” This is the false story that the Zionists desperately want people to believe about those fifteen months after October 7. Their narrative is that this was all just a “war” between the Jewish people and the modern-day Nazis; and that many died in this “war,” but this was the fault of Hamas. The IDF soldiers didn’t want to kill all those defenseless people, say the Zionists; Hamas forced them to do this by using “human shields.”
There was no way this lie could succeed. Far too many have been able to understand that this was not a war, but a systematic, deliberate slaughter of a people as punishment for existing. Many also see that this wasn’t about defending the Jewish people. It was about trying to eliminate a population that stands in the way of U.S. imperialism’s quest for world domination, with the empire using Jewish fascists as its proxy for doing so.
By the time the ceasefire came, the bulk of our society had either gained this level of knowledge about the situation, or at least come to recognize that the bombing wasn’t justified. Under cover of the illusion about “peace” having been reached, the Zionist carried out more bombings of Gaza, acting like these were only exceptional actions meant to fight “terrorists infrastructure.” The aggressors were trying to see how much they could still get away with. Now, in these last few days, the entity has partnered with Trump to launch the next phase in the extermination effort. The president has promised to have the U.S. occupy Gaza, using American troops if necessary. Even if that military action doesn’t happen, Trump most certainly wants to facilitate an ethnic cleansing, and this Gaza statement is meant to pressure Egypt and Jordan into helping with that project. The evil nature of this plan is so brazen, it will create a new and far more effective pro-Palestine revolt; that is, if the new pro-Palestine struggle can learn from the errors of the old one.
We must avoid the trap of an “anti-Trump” movement. We must avoid adventurist tactics, like blocking roads. We must not seek to appease the NGOs, like the established left orgs do. Conversely, we shouldn’t support Trump, or act like he’s a genuine threat to the imperial project. In regards to MAGA, the correct posture to take is one of calling out Trump for his betrayals of MAGA’s goals.
We must be open to welcoming all parts of the masses who have revolutionary potential, whether they’re MAGA supporters, libertarians, former Democrat voters who’ve been disillusioned over Gaza, or independents. And when it comes to tactics, we need to do more than protests, which are essentially all that the organized left is doing; we must carry out worker organizing and community organizing, of the kinds that let us reach the broad masses. One of the organized left’s problems is that it only focuses on connecting with the students; the students must be merely one among the many elements we reach.
These are the steps required for rescuing the pro-Palestine movement—and all other aspects of popular struggle—from petty-bourgeois radicalism. Gus Hall explained the reasoning behind petty-bourgeois radicalism; it’s the same inwardly focused mentality that’s led to actions like the PSL’s road blockages:
The very premise of petty-bourgeois radicalism is that it is impossible to win the working class in the struggle against capitalism. From this it follows that mass concepts of struggle are not possible, necessary or realistic. This leads to actions based on small elite groups––or to individual action. Because this concept is not concerned with winning over masses, it promotes and condones actions that alienate masses. There is an inner logic to this path. Specific actions are taken because there is a lack of confidence in mass–in class–actions. These ill-considered actions result in widening the gap between the petty-bourgeois radical movements and the masses. This widening gap then becomes “proof” that you cannot win masses and therefore the line of conduct of these movements is justified. Each step leads to a further isolation. This is the inner logic of petty-bourgeois radicalism.
Because the nature of petty-bourgeois radicalism is to undermine itself, during this last year all the orgs which represent this problem have destroyed their own relevance. At least since November 2024, the left hasn’t held the influence which it had during the bulk of the Biden era. The pro-Palestine mass upsurge gave the left an opportunity to fail on a massive scale; these orgs took on the task of leading this vast movement, and then they squandered its immense strength. Just because the anti-Zionist cause was set back, though, doesn’t mean the mass support for it is gone; there’s more support for it than ever. Amid the self-defeat of the actors which harmed the movement, we have an opening to rebuild it in a new form.
These petty-bourgeois radical forces still have the ability to guide protests, but protests aren’t everything; the anti-imperialists who seek to rectify the movement’s errors can also guide the struggle. We’re in place to make Palestine an issue that transcends the traditional ideological divides. That unifies the bulk of our society, in the way opposition towards slavery came to do. The supporters of the genocide remain vocal, and they’ll keep getting more aggressive; but the side of justice is the side that’s headed for victory.
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