The situation that has been determined in the Gaza Strip as a result of the Israeli bombardment that has been going on for weeks, using the Hamas terrorist attack of last October 7 as a pretext, cannot but shake consciences. We are facing not only an occupation, but a real genocide.
The increasingly dramatic death toll, essentially civilians, has well exceeded 10,000, most of them children and young people.
The risk of a widening of the conflict, at least on a regional scale, is real. The disregard for international law and the systematic perpetration of war crimes are facts of life.
Violence (which the Palestinian people have suffered since 1948) calls for violence and will mark the relationship between the Israeli and Palestinian populations for years to come.
There is a need to end the apartheid suffered by the Palestinian people in their own land and implement the UN resolutions, which provide for an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza.
The immediate imperative is ceasefire, de-escalation. Enough must be said of the spiral that moves ever further away from the necessary and possible solution to the underlying problem, which is and remains that of the unresolved Palestinian question.
We are faced with precise political responsibilities, which the most alert Israeli side acknowledges to its state, namely to the Netanyahu governments and the conservative and reactionary forces that have supported and sustain it, to the U.S., which such policies have over time covered up. This is in the knowledge that this situation has objectively constituted the “breeding ground” in which the most extremist forces, terrorism, Hamas, those who have an interest in maintaining, for multiple reasons, including and especially geostrategic ones, the status quo.
The PCI supports the right to self-determination of all oppressed peoples and stands for their struggle. We also support workers who refuse to send arms to the Israeli and Ukrainian regimes.
The ongoing conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine are key pieces of a single world conflict that has as its stakes the perpetuation of a U.S.-led unipolar world or the emergence of a new multipolar equilibrium that prefigures democratic and mutually beneficial international relations.
The much-ballyhooed Ukrainian offensive immediately bogged down, and on both sides there are so many casualties. Despite massive arms shipments to Kiev by NATO countries, the Russian Federation has far greater human and industrial potential on its side than Ukraine. This war will have to end with an agreement between the parties.
We continue to believe that the watchword must be an immediate ceasefire and an international negotiation leading to respect for the rights of the Russian-speaking peoples, including the right to choose whether to be part of the Russian Federation or the Republic of Ukraine.
Ukraine must become a democratic country, cleansed of the nostalgic elements of Nazism that are currently in power; it must become a neutral state that does not pose a nuclear threat to the Russian Federation as NATO membership would entail.
NATO’s war in Ukraine first and the invasion of Gaza later have generated in EU countries a systematic campaign aimed at criminalizing dissent and imposing the legitimacy of a single point of view: that of U.S. and NATO imperialism. Russian artists and athletes prevented from performing; Russian media and dissidents blacked out; demonstrations against aggression in Gaza banned; media propaganda unleashed in support of Kiev and Tel Aviv.
The war campaign is accompanied by a narrowing of democratic freedoms aimed at drastically shrinking the permitted spaces of not only political but also ideological agility.
In the face of all this, we communists and anti-imperialists must support the international efforts of the forces and countries opposed to U.S. unipolarity and primarily the People’s Republic of China and its Communist Party and support the strengthening and enlargement of the BRICS. China’s foreign policy is based on respect for the independence of nations and works to establish a system of economic exchange based on mutual benefit and the replacement of the dollar as the international reference currency.
These are the prerequisites of the multipolar world that can restore breath and perspective to workers’ and peoples’ struggles and the international perspective of socialism.
