By Miguel Angel Hernandez, a leader of the SFP of Venezuela and the IWU-FI.
25 October 2023. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres stressed the importance of recognizing that the Hamas attack was not spontaneous. The Palestinian people have been under a suffocating occupation for 56 years. They observed their land steadily filled with settlements. They subjected them to violence, and they stifled their economies, displacing Palestinians, and demolishing their homes. Their aspiration for a political solution to their plight is fading.” His address came at the start of the UN Security Council meeting in the Middle East, 78 years after its creation in 1945.
Guterres placed Hamas’s action within the framework of Israel’s decades-long oppression of the Palestinian people, the consequence of a “56-year suffocating occupation” that displaced Palestinians through the theft of their land and the demolition of their homes using violence. In his speech, he had to acknowledge that there is an army occupying stolen land and sustaining the occupation through violence.
However, this is traditional in the UN. On the one hand, its Secretary General makes this denunciation but, as usual, does not put forward anything concrete, assuming the hypocritical role of the good cop, dividing tasks with imperialism, and in particular with the United States, which denies the possibility of a ceasefire, and even the most elementary, a “humanitarian pause”, the euphemism they cynically use in the UN, to get some resources in so that the Gazans do not starve to death.
The words of Guterres, representative of a multilateral body of world imperialism, are undoubtedly symptomatic. They are, therefore, not a minor or anecdotal fact. They reflect the tremendous crisis within world capitalist imperialism, which is deepening with the ever more mobilisations of the peoples all over the world, not only in the Arab or Islamic countries but also in Europe, the United States, Latin America, and the entire world. Even in Jerusalem, orthodox Jews who oppose Zionism have mobilised in recent days.
The crisis is also expressed in the reaction of Zionist representatives at the United Nations. Guterres’ intervention aroused the ire of Israeli foreign minister Eli Cohen and UN ambassador Gilad Erdan, who called for the secretary general’s resignation.
Guterres even questioned whether Israel had ordered more than a million civilians to evacuate northern Gaza without resources, and then bombed the areas in the south where it told them to move. He acknowledged something already reported on the networks and denied by Israel.
In his speech, Guterres warned that Israel’s war on Gaza was creating “divisions that fracture societies and tensions that threaten to spill over”. This is a direct allusion to the possibility that these “fractures and tensions” in countries are expressed in large mobilisations that could eventually put governments and regimes in different countries in check, as well as the possibility that the military conflict to spread to the entire Middle East region.
From the International Workers’ Unity – Fourth International, we insist it is necessary to redouble the mobilisation of the peoples of the world to stop the genocide carried out by the Zionist Israeli entity.
In many cities, on all continents, the people are rising against the Zionist aggression and holding up the heroic Palestinian resistance. The IWU-FI gives its unconditional support to the Palestinian resistance, and we call upon the people to demand the breaking of relations of their governments with Israel, as well as all economic, political, military and cultural agreements; to stop the bombing and the sending of arms and financial aid from the USA to the Zionist entity; the withdrawal of the US fleet from the Middle East, while we continue to struggle strategically to end the apartheid state of Israel, and to replace it with a single Palestinian state, secular, non-racist and democratic, in the historic territory of Palestine, where Arabs, Jews, Christians, and other religions can fully coexist.
