Two Jewish groups comment on the current catastrophe in Israel-Palestine

JVL Introduction

The Jewish Socialists’ Group in Britain and Jewish Voice for Peace in the United States have issued statements about the current catastrophe in Israel-Palestine which broadly echo our own immediate response.

Deploring the loss of life and the targeting of civilians, all agree on the necessity to place the recent events in their wider context – brutal occupation, never-ending ethnic cleaning, suffocation of Palestinian life and hope – in order to understand the roots of the conflict and to move beyond it.

While JSG stresses the fascist aspects of the current Israeli regime and support for those who oppose occupation and apartheid, JVL is particularly concerned to stress US complicity in the oppression and horror caused by Israel’s military occupation.

Coexistence or No Existence. End Occupation. End Apartheid

Statement from the Jewish Socialists’ Group, 8 October 2023

The Jewish Socialists’ Group stands for a future of peace and coexistence for the people in Israel and Palestine that can only be based on equality, justice, freedom and an end to occupation, colonisation and apartheid practices that reflect racist and fascist values of supremacy.

That future of co-existence was pushed much further away on Saturday 7th October, when, in a single day, more than 500 people’s lives were taken, Palestinian and Israeli, the vast majority of them civilians. We stand fully behind the right to resist occupation and oppression and the siege of Gaza. We stand also against the targeting of civilians, and our opposition to acts of terror against civilians applies equally whether they are carried out by individuals, resistance movements or state armies.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu declared a state of war in response to the action of resistance fighters from Gaza on Saturday morning. That state of war against Palestinian aspirations for equality and freedom from occupation has existed for decades. When Israel passed its Nation State law in 2018, it wrote longstanding discriminatory practices into its “Basic Laws”.

When openly declared racists and fascists were welcomed into Israel’s cabinet after the last elections in November 2022, the oppression of the Palestinians increased in intensity. Settlers in the occupied West Bank have carried out pogroms with impunity. Hundreds of Palestinian civilians have been killed, many more wounded, arrested and imprisoned, and homes demolished in 2023 before last Saturday’s events. As Jewish Socialists we are against fascism everywhere.

Palestinian and Israeli human rights bodies have come under attack. Attempts to support Palestinians internationally through peaceful boycott activities have come under attack. Those Israelis who have joined Palestinians in protests together against occupation and apartheid have experienced increasingly violent oppression from the Israeli authorities.

We stand with those young Israelis who are refusing army service on political grounds in unprecedented numbers. They are part of a future that can build coexistence based on justice, equality and freedom.

The Root of Violence Is Oppression.

Jewish Voice for Peace statement, 8th October 2023

Right now, Palestinians, Israelis and all of us with family on the ground are terrified for loved ones. We grieve the lives of those already lost and remain committed to a future where every life is precious, and all people live in freedom and safety.

Following 16 years of Israeli military blockade, Palestinian fighters from Gaza launched an unprecedented assault, in which hundreds of Israelis were killed and wounded, and civilians kidnapped. The Israeli government declared war, launching airstrikes, killing hundreds of Palestinians and wounding thousands, bombing residential buildings and threatening to commit war crimes against besieged Palestinians in Gaza.

The Israeli government may have just declared war, but its war on Palestinians started over 75 years ago. Israeli apartheid and occupation — and United States complicity in that oppression — are the source of all this violence. Reality is shaped by when you start the clock.

For the past year, the most racist, fundamentalist, far-right government in Israeli history has ruthlessly escalated its military occupation over Palestinians in the name of Jewish supremacy with violent expulsions and home demolitions, mass killings, military raids on refugee camps, unrelenting siege and daily humiliation. In recent weeks, Israeli forces repeatedly stormed the holiest Muslim sites in Jerusalem.

For 16 years, the Israeli government has suffocated Palestinians in Gaza under a draconian air, sea and land military blockade, imprisoning and starving two million people and denying them medical aid. The Israeli government routinely massacres Palestinians in Gaza; ten-year-olds who live in Gaza have already been traumatized by seven major bombing campaigns in their short lives.

For 75 years, the Israeli government has maintained a military occupation over Palestinians, operating an apartheid regime. Palestinian children are dragged from their beds in pre-dawn raids by Israeli soldiers and held without charge in Israeli military prisons. Palestinians homes are torched by mobs of Israeli settlers, or destroyed by the Israeli army. Entire Palestinian villages are forced to flee, abandoning the homes and orchards and land that were in their family for generations.

The bloodshed of today and the past 75 years traces back directly to U.S. complicity in the oppression and horror caused by Israel’s military occupation. The U.S. government consistently enables Israeli violence and bears blame for this moment. The unchecked military funding, diplomatic cover, and billions of dollars of private money flowing from the U.S. enables and empowers Israel’s apartheid regime. Those who continue calling for “ironclad” U.S. support for the Israeli military are only paving the path to more violence.

From the U.S., there are no sidelines.  We will uproot complicity where we are: we demand that the U.S. government immediately take steps to withdraw military funding to Israel and to hold the Israeli government accountable for its gross violations of human rights and war crimes against Palestinians. We commit to escalating our campaigns for boycott, divestment and sanctions to end the billions pouring into the Israeli war machine from corporations and private foundations.

Inevitably, oppressed people everywhere will seek — and gain — their freedom. We all deserve liberation, safety, and equality. The only way to get there is by uprooting the sources of the violence, beginning with our own government’s complicity.