Death in Gaza

Sometimes you can try to explain an atrocity with statistics. But the death of Wael Abu Warda says it all.

Abu Warda, a 27-year-old Palestinian man, died on Aug. 6 in besieged Gaza because the Israelis refused his entry at the Erez crossing point between Gaza and Israel. He suffered from kidney failure, which is fatal unless treated. His transit for medical care had already been approved—a difficult task to have achieved. Yet the Israelis still kept him waiting for days.

The Israelis, who have imposed a murderous siege on Gaza since June 15, refused his entrance due to bureaucratic technicalities. Under the conditions of the siege, bureaucracy amounted to racist murder.

The U.S. and Israel are punishing the Palestinian people. The imperialists have declared the Hamas government of the Palestinians to be “terrorist.” It is a label of convenience. They used it also for the Palestinian Liberation Organization when it was led by Yasser Arafat. They use it these days for anyone who stands up to U.S. imperialism or to its Israeli client state—from the Philippines to Latin America to Africa to anywhere in West Asia. This label alone is supposed to allow Washington and Tel Aviv to commit any crime to get their way.

But the usual meaning of “terrorist”—a small organization isolated from the masses that substitutes small-group violent actions for mass mobilization—has nothing to do with Hamas.

Hamas has the mass active support of the Palestinian people, more than any other single organization. Hamas won the last national election in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories—the West Bank and Gaza—an election Washington first pushed and then immediately disowned.

Like any liberation organization, Hamas conducts armed defense of the interests of the Palestinian people when they are attacked. The Israeli state attacks Palestinians constantly. Hamas fights back.

If Hamas’ resistance is terror, then the Yugoslav and Ukrainian and Jewish partisans who fought heroically against the World War II German imperialist occupations of Yugoslavia, the Ukraine and Warsaw would be “terrorists” instead of heroes.

In order to avoid being smashed by an internal coup backed by Israel and the U.S., Hamas—which was already the leading party in the government—seized power in Gaza this spring. The U.S.-Israeli response has been to attempt to starve the Palestinian population inside Gaza, a narrow strip of land surrounded by the sea, the desert and the Israeli armed forces. This siege has created a humanitarian crisis of near starvation for the 1.5 million Palestinians living in the territory. It is compounded when each week the Israeli military rolls its tanks into Gaza and fires its missiles. Israel’s siege of Gaza is a prototype example of state terrorism.

This criminal siege results in the deaths of Palestinians, like Wael Abu Warda.

End the Israeli siege of Gaza. No U.S. arms or aid to Israel. U.S. out of the Middle East. Long live Palestine.