Every day, images and news reports emerge from the Gaza Strip of crowds of hungry, thirsty, sick, and exhausted people being machine-gunned as they queue in the sun for a plate of food or a bottle of water, with hospitals and schools bombed. Thousands of Palestinians, including very young children, are being held without trial in Israel, while the entire population of Gaza is locked up in an open-air prison that is being reduced and bombed every day.

Gaza is not the only region in the world where people are massacred for no apparent reason, where they die of hunger or thirst. But this calculated genocide is the responsibility of a democratically elected government and parliament, the “only democracy in the region,” carried out by a regular army of a state, not by criminal mercenary gangs, with weapons freely sold, if not donated, by equally democratic countries.

Not only the State of Israel but all states are involved in the massacre: even those Arab states that claim to be friends of the Palestinians, Turkey, which claims to defend Muslims, and Iran, which, together with Israel, has financed and armed Hamas.

Because the life of a people counts for nothing to the servants of global capital. For the monstrous concentrations of wealth around the world, the only law and morality is the pursuit of profit. Let humanity die, as long as the insane accumulation of capital survives.

In every country, big capital, through its men, its parties, its state apparatus, holds entire peoples hostage. Their lives are nothing but a commodity to be traded. They are defended if they are useful, otherwise they die. In the natural selection of capital, the most unscrupulous and bloodthirsty survive.

The systematic destruction of the Strip and its inhabitants has been going on for almost two years now, in full view of the whole world. Only in the last few days do governments seem to have noticed. But the chorus of condemnation and disapproval, entirely verbal, from numerous chancelleries, and the shamefully symbolic parachuting of a few crates of aid for a population of two million, should not give rise to any hope of relief.

The international organizations created at the end of World War II in the face of obvious crimes confirm their total impotence and cosmetic role in hiding the monstrous face of capitalism. The UN and the International Criminal Court issue condemnations that remain only on paper.

The facts therefore demonstrate that the only right that counts is that of force; there is no right without a force that can exercise it. The bourgeois Israeli state, a vile mercenary of the US, exploiting a power vacuum in the region, has been given the task of bombing the capitals of Lebanon, Syria, Iran, and Yemen with impunity. But the whole West rejoiced that, in Iran, “Israel is doing the dirty work for us too,” as the German chancellor said contemptuously.

This is the value of the so-called “international law” in defense of “peaceful coexistence between states.”

Force can only be opposed by force. Individual disgust or indignation is therefore worthless in stopping or mitigating the massacre. In a class society, power lies with the classes. So far, we have seen confused spontaneous demonstrations, but the working-class organizations, the parties, which do not exist, and the unions, which follow the bosses, have remained silent. Thus consenting to the slaughter of their working-class brothers in Palestine.

In a situation that sees the approach of a more general military clash between imperialisms, the genocide in Gaza will be repeated many times, both on the people who have the misfortune to find themselves on the lines of friction between the blocs and in the rear.

This is the scenario facing the international proletariat if it allows itself to be regimented for the approaching war.

The proletarian class, organized in its reborn economic defense organizations and led by the revolutionary communist party, is the only force that can oppose that of rotten capital: to the discipline of the states, its class discipline; to bourgeois war, proletarian war.