Women declare: ‘Let Gaza live!’

The International Working Women’s Coalition, which for the past 10 years has commemorated International Working Women’s Day in New York City, stands with the world’s working and oppressed peoples in solidarity with the heroic people of Gaza who are resisting the heinous atrocities by the fascistic, Zionist regime, especially the Israeli Defense Forces.

What is happening in Gaza, known as the world’s largest open-air prison, is nothing short of a genocidal holocaust by a racist, apartheid settler state. The U.S. government provided $3.4 billion in military aid to Israel last year. That amounts to over $9.3 million a day. Israel could not exist for one day without this military aid and other economic assistance.

In the U.S., while schools, hospitals, women’s clinics and day care centers are being closed; while homes are being foreclosed; while people’s water and utilities are being shut off in Detroit and elsewhere; while wages and pensions are being slashed to the bone, causing deepening poverty, U.S. taxpayers’ money is being diverted to bomb and destroy the entire infrastructure in Gaza, including hospitals, schools, homes, sanitation, sewage and electricity. Just imagine how the $3.4 billion — that goes to Israel’s defense budget alone — could be spent to help meet the human needs of people suffering in U.S. urban and rural areas.

Since Israel’s ground invasion began on July 17, following its missile attacks, over 1,000 people, close to 100 percent of them Palestinians, have been slaughtered, many of them women and children, from the very young to elders. What is happening in Gaza is a 66-year-old continuation of one of the greatest crimes against humanity in the 20th century: the brutal theft of Palestinian lands that led to the creation of Israel in 1948, reminiscent of the theft of Native peoples’ land after Christopher Columbus first landed in the Americas in 1492. Just as the U.S. Cavalry was used as a terrorist occupying force to exterminate Native peoples to expand U.S. capitalism into the West, Israel was propped up as a military garrison state to protect and expand the lucrative profits of Big Oil corporations.

Our coalition also condemns the disgusting, biased coverage by the pro-Zionist big business media of what is in reality the lynching of Gaza in the form of collective punishment by Israel. The media like to portray Israel as the victim, while demonizing Hamas as the aggressor, ad nauseam.

Israel is a terrorist state rooted in anti-Arab, pro-white supremacy. Anti-Zionism is not the same as anti-Semitism, which triggered the Holocaust in the 1930s and 1940s and the forced mass exodus of Jewish people from Eastern Europe. Zionism is racism.

The International Working Women’s Coalition demands include: Stop the genocidal bombing of Gaza, which especially targets Palestinian women and children; end all U.S. aid to Israel — military, economic and cultural; unconditional release of all Palestinian prisoners of war detained in Israeli jails and prisons; tear down the apartheid wall and stop building settlements; support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Campaign against Israel; rebuild Gaza’s infrastructure; support Palestinians’ right to self-determination and self-defense, including their right to elect their leaders; and support the Palestinians’ right to return to their homeland.

Let Gaza live! From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free! U.S. out of the Middle East!