The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) in Australia is holding a public meeting calling for an end to the genocide in Gaza being perpetrated by the Israeli regime, with the full backing of all the imperialist powers.
The meeting will be on Wednesday, December 20 at 7 p.m. (AEDT) at the Lakemba Senior Citizens Centre, 23 Croydon St, Lakemba, New South Wales (NSW). For those unable to attend in person, the event will also be live-streamed via Zoom. Reserve your seat now!
The meeting will be devoted to a discussion, not only of what is occurring but why and, therefore, how the genocide can be fought. Despite mass anger and opposition, the Israeli regime and its imperialist backers are only intensifying their criminal onslaught. This underscores the need for a new perspective based on the mobilisation of the working class and a revolutionary socialist perspective against the source of war, the capitalist system.
For more than eight weeks, the Netanyahu regime has been subjecting the 2.2 million people of Gaza to starvation and deprivation of water. Over 80 percent have been displaced from their homes. The unrelenting bombing of civilian targets, including hospitals and refugee camps, has levelled half of all housing.
Over 20,000 Gazans have been murdered, 10,000 of them children and more than 5,000 women. One out of every 115 people in Gaza has been killed. At the present rate, one out of every 20 Gazans will be dead within a year. The aim of the Israeli regime is to kill as many Palestinians as possible and drive the rest into the desert or the sea.
What is being carried out recalls nothing less than the industrial slaughter carried out by the Nazis during the Second World War.
The relentless mass media propaganda campaign portrays the atrocities as purportedly justified acts of self-defence in response to the October 7 military offensive by Hamas. In recent weeks, documents have revealed that the Israeli regime had detailed knowledge on where and how Hamas would strike and gave the order to stand down, in order to facilitate the attack.
This criminal conspiracy reveals that the Hamas attack was used as a pretext to unleash long-held plans. There is no doubt that the United States was informed of these plans. It points to a plot that involves not only Israel, but the US and likely British and European intelligence agencies.
What is being carried out is a crime of capitalism. The world is seeing imperialism in its most naked form. It is not only a question of the Israeli regime, but of all the world’s major governments, including the Labor administration in this country, which have adopted mass murder as their program.
This is the response of the ruling elite to the historic crisis of the capitalist system. As in the 1930s, they are turning to genocide, war, an onslaught on social conditions and to authoritarian forms of rule. The governments backing Israel’s onslaught are also trying to ban protests and are implementing sweeping cuts to workers’ living standards on behalf of a tiny corporate oligarchy.
That demonstrates the bankruptcy of any perspective of halting the genocide by appealing to or placing pressure on the governments. That has been tried and it has failed.
Protests are important, but on their own they are incapable of halting the slaughter. What is required is a political struggle against the governments and the profit system itself. That means the mobilisation of the working class, to block supplies to Israel and starve its war machine.
But above all, it means taking up the fight for a socialist and internationalist perspective. Imperialism is powerful, but the international working class is more powerful. It must be united globally in a movement to put an end to the capitalist system, to reorganise society to meet social need, not profit, and to create the foundations for a world based on peace and equality.
At the meeting, leading members of the SEP will discuss this perspective and present the party’s socialist and internationalist program. Ample time will be provided for questions and discussion. Register today!