“This present conflict also proves that the establishment of the Palestinian Authority after the Oslo Accords of 1993 was a complete travesty designed to turn the former Palestinian resistance, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), into a force that guaranteed Israel’s ‘peace’ by policing their own people.”

(https://www.marxist.com/israel-palestine-no-to-the-invasion-of-gaza.htm)

The former “Palestinian resistance,” the PLO, had failed the Palestinian struggle from the beginning by promising a leadership in favor of national independence outside of the Fourth International. While Marx and Lenin argued in favor of national liberation before socialist reconstruction, they never argued that leaders of national liberation movements must organize outside of the Marxist international. A conscious Marxist movement is better equipped to overthrow the national bourgeoisie when it becomes an obstacle to national liberation, when the national ruling class sees its class interests as aligned with the defense of private property by multi-national corporations or reactionary ruling class ideology by world religion or with a struggle within a struggle to prevent a regional or world-wide revolution from upsetting their regional and imperialist allies. Only the Fourth International, which arose in a struggle against the bureaucratization and internalized policing of the world revolution, can produce a leadership that can effectively turn the workers of the imperialist powers against their own governments in partnership with the oppressed nations also organized within the Fourth International. Any revolution based on opposition to Marxism and the Fourth International will only disarm the workers or lead them into self-defeat.

“The Israelis respond to the death of one of their citizens by the slaughter of hundreds of Palestinians.”

This exaggerates the power of Israel, which must face threats from neighbors and allies. As Israel kills more Palestinians, so do more Israelis die as a result. Nazi Germany did not manage to escape the fate either as 1/3 of German men died in WWII and Hitler died one month after killing Anne Frank. As Palestinians and Israeli speed up the rate of death, they will increasingly kill each other and die together.

“Israel’s measured retaliation was designed not to escalate the situation further, and Hezbollah doesn’t seem to be prepared to go beyond symbolic gestures of defiance. Hezbollah may be forced to change its attitude if the Israeli army invades Gaza with boots on the ground.”

This completely contradicts the statement right above, and furthermore, it reveals the writer’s sympathy for the imperialist strategy. Israel will not escalate. Hamas merely creates “symbolic gestures of defiance.” In other words: let the bloodbath begin. Let us hope that an Israeli ground invasion convinces Hezbollah to escalate the conflict further. To this, the #Democratic_Power_Faction responds: Both the Israeli military and Hezbollah seek to gain the favor of different imperialist powers by maintaining the status quo of a Netanyahu-Abbas dictatorship. Only a revolutionary commitment to the establishment of new governments and elections can reverse the mutual destruction of Palestine and Israel and unite them for a struggle against imperialist invasion, whether from the EU and the US or Russia and China.

“The decision of Ariel Sharon to withdraw from Gaza, carried out in 2005, and Israel’s disastrous invasion of Gaza in 2014, proved the impossibility of suppressing and subduing more than two million people for long with purely military means.”

This exaggerates the effect of capitalist propaganda, and that is certainly not how Marx saw it. Capitalism uses purely military means to operate nakedly oppressive regimes. The state is a group of armed men. The occupation of Gaza and the West Bank justifies the permanent occupation of the political capital of not only Israel, but all of its imperialist backers. Not only capitalist servants of the imperialist powers but also socialists with the interests of the people in mind want to establish control and occupy permanently the Knesset in Jerusalem, the PA Parliament in Ramalah, as well as the capitals in Washington DC, Brussels, and others who finance both sides of the conflict so as to drain them of both resources and people. The Bolsheviks used purely military means to force out the Tsarist government and even attempted to use purely military means to settle their conflict with the German empire. To the same extent that Bolshevism failed to hold on to power independently of a signature from the German empire or from US corporations, they also failed to defend the decisions of their own people in opposition to the demands of the imperialist powers.