Palestine Liberation

By Eddie McCabe & Donal Devlin, Socialist Party Ireland. 9 June 2025 Palestinian socialist and writer Ghassan Kanafani described the Palestinian struggle as “a cause of the exploited and oppressed masses in our era.” These are apt words. The unrelenting horror in Gaza has laid bare the depravity of capitalism today. That a veritable holocaust could happen in the 21st century, with live-streamed massacres almost daily, has exposed all of the hypocrisy, shamelessness and inhumanity of the system and its leading representatives, particularly among the Western imperialist ruling class. The world will never be the same again after this genocide. People across the world have been awakened to political action. Tens of millions have mobilised in solidarity with Palestine. The savagery being inflicted on a defenceless population crammed into a small, blockaded strip of land has been met with a global protest movement not seen since the Vietnam War. The occupation of Palestine is one of global capitalism’s fault lines, serving to radicalise and educate many as to who is ultimately on the side of freedom and justice in our world and who is not. Repression of a movement Throughout it all there has been an uninterrupted flow of arms to the Israeli State from the United States and Europe. Multinational corporations, the giant household name monopolies, are directly complicit in the genocide. Google and Amazon have competed to provide the Israeli military with AI and cloud tools, which it has used with lethal effect against Gaza’s civilian population, including children. In the occupied West Bank, where Palestinians face a new wave of mass displacement, the largest of its kind since the occupation began in 1967, companies like Hewlett Packard and Microsoft have provided the occupiers with the technology to engage in mass surveillance of its populace. Facebook has platformed more than 100 advertise-ments promoting settlements and far-right settler activity.1 The capitalist media – from the BBC, RTÉ, The Irish Times, The New York Times, CNN, and many more – largely act to either under-report, justify, minimise or contextualise the actions of the Israeli State. They sanitise the dynamics of the genocide by refusing to even use the word to describe this appalling campaign of state terror, nor even words like ‘massacres’, ‘atrocities’ or ‘war crimes’. They promote a narrative that two equal sides exist in this ‘conflict’. This wilfully ignores the blatant asymmetry that characterises the relationship between the high-tech, highly militarised, nuclear-armed Israeli State and a dispossessed, impoverished, traumatised people: the Palestinians. Imperialist support for Israel’s agenda has meant a clamping down on basic democratic rights in many so-called democracies in the West. In the US, the recent cruel kidnapping by ICE agents of Mahmoud Khalil, a Syrian-born Palestinian refugee whose wife is expecting a baby in April, is one blatant example of this. Khalil was one of the main organisers of the solidarity encampment at Columbia University in New York City in 2024. His arrest, which Donald Trump publicly boasted about, is designed to create a chilling effect on the broader Palestine solidarity movement. Further arrests and threats of deportation, such as those of Georgetown scholar Badar Khan Suri and Cornell student Momodou Taal, have followed. All of this comes in the wake of the brutal repression of the encampments last year, with thousands of students expelled or suspended from their courses. The scale of pro-Zionist censorship in the US was illustrated by the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land failing to receive a distributor in the US. A Florida mayor went so far as to threaten to close down a cinema in Miami Beach for showing it.2 In Germany, the second-largest exporter of weapons to Israel, the state has engaged in an unprecedented level of suppression of Palestine solidarity protests, targeted in particular against migrants, Muslims and people of colour – arresting activists, banning protests, raiding and forcibly breaking up meetings. This is what happened during a public meeting featuring Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur for the Palestinian Occupied Territories, an outspoken critic of the genocide. Two Irish citizens are among four foreign nationals facing deportation at the time of writing because of their Palestine solidarity activity. Demonstrators have even been arrested for chanting and speaking in Arabic at a protest in Berlin. Germany’s citizenship law was amended to require new citizens to affirm Israel’s ‘right to exist’. Meanwhile, there is a rush by governments to adopt the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) definition of anti-Semitism, which, in essence, equates this vile prejudice with any criticism of the Zionist State. This includes the Irish State, as the government in the South scrambles to prove its pro-Zionist credentials to the Trump administration. Likewise, the government has ditched its commitment to support the Occupied Territories Bill, a basic measure that would ban goods and services from the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. The arrest of women from the group Mothers Against Genocide (some of whom were outrageously strip-searched) who were peacefully protesting outside the Dáil at the end of March is a warning that the Irish State is willing to follow the example of other repressive states if it can get away with it. Settler colonialism Western imperialist support for the existence of a client Zionist state in the Middle East has a long history. As far back as 1839, senior Tory politician Lord Shaftesbury, in an article in The Times, wrote of the need for a homeland for Jews in Palestine, speaking of an “Earth without people – people without land”. This was the perpetuation of a myth that Palestine was a desolate land and, therefore, could be easily populated by Jewish migration. A variant of this phrase – “a land without a people for a people without a land” – became the Zionist movement’s rallying cry, notably in Theodor Hertzl’s 1896 pamphlet The Jewish State. This notion consciously ignored the existence of the Palestinian Arab population. It became the justification for ethnically cleansing Palestinians from their land to build a Jewish majority state, a