Socialist campaign holds broad discussion to mark one year of Gaza genocide

Register to attend our next online campaign event, “The class struggle, capitalist crisis and the US elections,” which is taking place on Wednesday, October 16, at 8:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time.

On October 9, the Socialist Equality Party election campaign held a substantial discussion on the social, political and historical causes of the ongoing Israeli genocide of the Palestinian population.

The discussion, titled “The Gaza genocide, world war and imperialist geopolitics,” featured SEP presidential candidate Joseph Kishore and vice presidential candidate Jerry White, as well as World Socialist Web Site International Editorial Board Chairman David North. The event was moderated by WSWS reporter Andre Damon.

In comments opening the discussion, North emphasized the historical and social conditions which have produced the horrific brutality witnessed over the past year. Referring to the unrestrained violence unleashed by the Israeli government and its imperialist allies against the Palestinian population, he explained that “all of these events are deeply rooted in history,” noting specifically “the last 30 or so years in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the culmination of the betrayal of the October Revolution” by the Stalinist Soviet bureaucracy.

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North commented, “[t]he United States, the principal imperialist power, saw that the time had arrived to reestablish as it would have been had there not been an October Revolution, ... to reestablish colonialism to restore the unfettered domination of the imperialist system all over the world.”

Kishore called the Gaza genocide, which has officially claimed the lives of over 41,000 Palestinians and has been calculated to have an even higher death toll by The Lancet medical journal, a “crossing of a Rubicon” and the “normalization of barbarism” by the world’s leading military powers.

He cited recent statements in the media by Gaza medical workers showing evidence of the Israeli Defense Force’s “deliberate campaign of targeting children” in Gaza. “It’s a component of a global war,” he explained. “The long process of escalating war over the course of the last 30 years is now developing into a World War connected to the US-NATO war against Russia [in Ukraine]” and the “threats of war against Iran, the bombing of Lebanon which is taking place and the threats against China.”

Kishore said this process, along with “the normalization of mass death from the COVID pandemic and the normalization of fascism” in the US political system is “an expression of a society that has reached a historical dead end: capitalism.”

SEP vice presidential candidate Jerry White spoke at length about the party’s effort to mobilize workers against war. “I would say there’s a deep revulsion among workers [toward the war and the Gaza genocide],” he said. White recalled discussions with Michigan auto assembly workers, “who are discussing these issues all the time. I know a Warren Truck [Stellantis] worker who during the lunchroom breaks explains to other workers, ‘Where do you think your tax dollars are going? They’re going to buy missiles to murder the Palestinians.’”

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White emphasized that the SEP campaign is “conducting a fight to help workers draw the connection between their daily struggles, against inflation, against plant closings and layoffs and their fight to defend a decent living standard, to restore pensions like at Boeing, to understand that that is intimately connected with the fight against capitalism and against war because after all it’s the very same corporations who are waging a war on workers.”

North responded to a question from a viewer, who asked if one of the US’s foreign rivals could be induced to intervene on behalf of the Palestinians. “We don’t have a program for world war,” explained the WSWS chairman, referring to the threats governments such as China, Russia and Iran have faced from the US. “We are not supporters of Russia against the United States or China against the United States. A nuclear conflagration is not the answer to the problems of our time; we don’t ally ourselves with another faction of capitalists.”

Explaining that “the basic question which comes up in one way or another is can’t you offer a somewhat simpler path, isn’t there some simpler solution?,” North posed another question in response. “Can you think of any serious solution to any of the problems which we confront without a vast transfer of wealth from the heights of capitalist society to the broad mass of people?”

He continued:

Can you conceive of a set of circumstances where the rich—the hyper-rich, the malignantly rich—are going to accept any restriction on the accumulation of their wealth? … No, they won’t. Classes don’t make those sorts of decisions, and in any case, it’s not even a question of their individual desires. It’s a question of the functioning of an economic system. Capitalism strives for domination.

In summing up the experiences of the past year, where mass protests in every country have failed to stop the imperialist onslaught against the Palestinian people, Joseph Kishore stated “the big question I think which arises is: Is there a social force capable of opposing imperialism? There is, and that is the international working class.

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“The same global processes of production which are producing this conflict and lie at the base of war: the conflict between global economy and the nation-state system” have also created a world working class, “which is integrated as an international force like never before through the process of production” and technology.

The task, Kishore concluded, was to mobilize this immense force “through organization, the fight to unify the working class and through above all political perspective and understanding” of these root objective causes of genocide and war.

The SEP campaign’s next online event, “The class struggle, capitalist crisis and the US elections,” is taking place on Wednesday, October 16, at 8:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. Register to attend today!