Two years of genocide: Fight the Republican and Democratic Parties to END U.S. military aid, END the genocide in Gaza!

“We need a global intifada — a mass uprising against this violent capitalist system — on a working-class basis.”

Today marks two years since the genocide in Gaza began. More than half a million Palestinians have been slaughtered by Israeli state terrorism yet both parties of U.S. imperialism continue to back this modern-day holocaust.

Democratic and Republican politicians in the U.S. Congress have provided over $21 billion to Israel to carry out these horrors, first under President Biden, who presided over the genocide for 15 months, and now under President Trump.

The brutal mistreatment of courageous activists on the Global Sumud Flotilla, including Greta Thunberg and Amazon union leader Chris Smalls, detained and assaulted by Israeli forces, has been met with deafening silence by Democrats, including progressives like AOC and Bernie Sanders. My opponent, Democratic Congressmember Adam Smith, has also remained silent, not surprisingly. Smith has called antiwar activists “left-wing fascists” and demanded they be arrested. He has voted again and again to fund the genocide and to repeatedly block United Nations food aid to Gaza, despite overwhelming evidence of catastrophic mass starvation in Gaza.

The Democratic Party has not a shred of credibility left. Instead of “never again,” the Democrats have voted again and again to fund the Gaza holocaust. As recently as July, 207 Democrats, including Adam Smith and AOC, voted to fund Iron Dome, which is part of the weapons apparatus that has allowed the Israeli state to act with impunity with its onslaught against Gaza as well as other nations in the region, including Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran.

We need a new party for working and oppressed people in the United States. A party that will base itself on militant mass movements, on mass strike action, and mass civil disobedience to end this genocide and to fight unambiguously for working people and the oppressed against the billionaires and their rotten system.

My independent socialist campaign for Congress is calling for an immediate end to all U.S. funding to the Israeli state, an end to the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, an end to the apartheid system in Israel, and an end to both genocidal parties of the U.S. billionaire class.

We need a global intifada — a mass uprising against this violent capitalist system — on a working-class basis. The Palestinian intifadas began in 1987 as a series of uprisings against the barbaric Israeli occupation that has been ongoing now for 77 years. During these intifadas, Palestinians fought back with mass protests, civil disobedience, and strike action in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank. This resistance has been met with brutality by the Israeli state backed to the hilt by American imperialism.

We need an intifada of the millions which follows the historical example set by the Palestinian masses, and the example being set now by the Italian working class. These are examples of broad unity and militant working-class action against the genocide and occupation. We need general strikes that will shut down the economy, the ports, and the capitalist system as a whole until our demands are met.

Some hope that Trump’s latest “peace plan” could end the massacre. But history tells us that the Israeli state plans to carry through its plan of mass murder and ethnic cleansing to the end, unless they are stopped by a mass international antiwar movement. The Israeli state itself was created as a bulwark for Western imperialism. It acts as a force against regional working-class movements and on behalf of the capitalist class, which also includes the uber-wealthy individuals in nations such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt.

The only way out of this cycle of genocide, war, poverty, and climate catastrophe is to end capitalism itself. That’s why I’m a revolutionary socialist. We need a fundamentally different kind of society, run by and for working people, not the billionaires. Only a socialist world, built on international working-class solidarity, where the economy is under democratic control by workers and planned rationally and sustainably, can ensure a real future for humanity.

Solidarity,

Kshama Sawant