Billionaires, imperialists, and antisemites: The forces behind the assault on opposition to Gaza genocide

More than 80 days into Israel’s genocidal war against the people of Gaza, the ruling class is bitterly attacking democratic rights in the major capitalist countries in order to suppress and isolate mass protest against the genocide. 

by Gabriel Black

Part 1

The marches that have, globally, involved tens of millions of people are being relentlessly and cynically labeled “antisemitic” by the bourgeois press. In Germany, protests against the massacre are outright banned and criminalized. On college campuses in the United States, films by young Jewish directors critical of the state of Israel are being barred and those showing them threatened with expulsion. Student groups opposed to the massacre unfolding in Gaza are being outright banned, including Jewish Voice for Peace.

The United States Congress has begun a witch-hunt which targets university administrators whose words and actions do not sufficiently target students’ right to protest. The congressional grilling of university presidents Liz Magill (Penn), Claudine Gay (Harvard), and Sally Kornbluth (MIT)  earlier this month was a McCarthyite event aimed at intimidating other institutional heads to march in lock-step with this assault on democratic rights. Those who are not adequately revoking or curtailing the basic rights of students and employees to protest face expulsion from their post. The media is entirely complicit, with the New York Times pushing out reporters and staff who become too “political” by characterizing Israel’s assault as genocide in their non-work-related writing, including social media posts.

Twenty-two Democratic members of the House of Representatives and virtually all the Republicans voted to  censure US House Representative Rashida Tlaib (Democrat-Michigan) for calling for a ceasefire. Meanwhile, figures like Republican Senator Lindsey Graham are cheered when they call for a “total war” against what he calls “the most extremist population on Earth,” that is, the residents of Gaza.

The Biden administration has played a leading role in the campaign to censor opposition to Israel on college campuses. In October the White House began a campaign to combat the surge of pro-Palestinian sentiment on campus, sending teams from the Department of Education to go to major universities and colleges throughout the country.

White House spokesperson Andrew Bates, reporting on the student protests against Israel, stated, “these grotesque sentiments and actions shock the conscience and turn the stomach. They also recall our commitment that can’t be forgotten: ‘never again.’” Yet, cynically, it is the White House which has provided nearly every bomb that has been dropped in Gaza, killing well over 20,000 civilians, primarily women and children, the worst ethnic cleansing of the 21st century.

The Biden administration’s support of Israel has nothing to do with protecting the world or the Jewish people from the horror of genocide. It is about geopolitical control over the Middle East by US imperialism and its regional allies.

As Biden explained in 1986, speaking about US support for Israel on the Senate floor, “There is no apology to be made, none. It is the best $3 billion investment we make. If there were not an Israel the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect our interests in the region. The United States would have to go out and invent an Israel.”

Source, links:

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/12/28/xxni-d28.html

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