The one-year anniversary of the beginning of the genocide in Gaza was marked in the United States by brief, hypocritical and completely false statements by President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

Both made reference to what have been standard anti-Palestinian tropes from the State Department, echoed faithfully in the US corporate media. Biden declared the attack by Hamas fighters was “the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust.” Harris referred to the completely unproven claims of mass rape, adding, “What Hamas did that day was pure evil—it was brutal and sickening.”

If a comparison is to be made to the Holocaust, it is in the actions of Israel over the past year, first in Gaza, then extended to the West Bank, and now targeting pro-Palestinian forces like Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen.

The cumulative death toll in Gaza from bombs, blockade, starvation and disease was estimated in July by the British medical publication The Lancet as 186,000. The total must now be well over 200,000. That would mean the Israel Defense Force (IDF) has killed at least 167 Palestinians for each of the 1,200 Israelis who died on October 7 (of whom a large but unknown number were the responsibility of the IDF itself, under its “Hannibal Doctrine,” which calls for shooting and killing Israelis rather than allowing them to be taken captive). 

Despite the constant efforts to hijack the remembrance of the Holocaust to justify the modern-day crimes of the state of Israel, it is Israel that is openly copying the savage methods of the Nazis. In one of the most notorious acts of mass murder by Hitler’s regime, after Gestapo chief Reinhard Heydrich was killed by Czech resistance fighters in 1942, German forces targeted the village of Lidice, seizing and summarily executing 173 Czech men. In effect, the IDF has carried out three Lidices in Gaza every day for the past year, targeting babies, children and women, as well as men.

No such comparisons will appear in US official circles or in the media, which is devoted to downplaying the colossal and horrific scale of the mass murder in Gaza. 

And as always, the premise of all such statements and analysis is that the world began on October 7, 2023. The uprising of the Gazan Palestinians is presented as an “unprovoked” slaughter of peaceful Israeli civilians, without any reference to the preceding 70 years of dispossession, Zionist terror, mass expulsion, and the creation in Gaza of the largest prison enclave in the world, with 2.3 million inmates.

The whole presentation is a lie from beginning to end. Harris’s statement declared, “The long, extraordinary arc of Jewish history is full of pogroms and prejudice, slaughter and separation.” True enough. But what of the “long arc of history” for the Palestinians, including oppression by British imperialism, Zionist colonization and decades of subsistence as stateless refugees?

The brief and perfunctory character of the official observances—Biden and his wife lit candles and listened to three minutes of Hebrew prayer; Harris and her husband planted a tree outside her official residence, then scuttled back inside—was effectively an admission that the world’s population has seen through the official lies and cannot be swayed by such gestures.

As Ruth Marcus, a pro-Zionist columnist and deputy editor of the Washington Post, admitted Monday, “Israel ... has become—and, to be blunt, has helped itself become—less sympathetic victim than international pariah.”

Indeed, world public opinion is overwhelmingly on the side of the Palestinians. This includes growing numbers of Jewish workers and youth, hostile to the Israeli fascists who use the Holocaust to justify crimes on a monumental scale.

And not just Israel. The Zionist regime is the spearhead of imperialism in the Middle East. The United States too is an international pariah, seen as responsible by the vast majority of the world’s population for the ongoing slaughter of almost unfathomable dimensions. The American government, along with its allies in NATO, are openly associating themselves with and defending mass murder.

And this is only the beginning of what could become far worse. Israel is bombing Lebanon at a pace that rivals the destruction of Gaza. It is preparing to attack Iran. And both Israeli and American military forces struck Yemen last week, where the Houthi-led regime has publicly declared its solidarity with the people of Gaza. The stage is being set for all-out war across the Middle East.

According to a study by Brown University’s Costs of War project, released October 7, the United States has spent at least $22.8 billion on Israel’s wars and US military operations in the Middle East over the past year. Nearly $18 billion is in the form of military aid, including bunker-buster bombs, precision-guided weapons, artillery shells, and endless cash to purchase other weapons and fuel. This brings the total US military aid to Israel to $251.2 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars since 1959, the report said.

Another $4.86 billion has been spent on US military operations in the region, where US troop deployments have ranged from 34,000 to 51,000 over the past year, depending on the size of the naval forces stationed in the Mediterranean, Red Sea and Arabian Sea.

Zionism has become the spearhead of imperialist reaction at home as well, as the crackdown on opposition to genocide in Gaza has intensified to the point where a virtual police-state atmosphere exists on many US college campuses. On October 7, police pepper-sprayed and arrested anti-genocide protesters on the Diag, the central square of the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor.

President Biden’s statement declared his administration’s determination to crack down on “antisemitism,” by which is meant, not the actual anti-Jewish sentiments of the fascist right, which dominates the Republican Party, but rather left-wing opposition to imperialist war and the crimes of its Zionist proxies. In the hands of the ruling class, the term “antisemitism” has been deprived of any real content, used as a cudgel against anyone, including Jews, opposed to mass slaughter.

With the official spectrum of American politics, opponents of war and genocide have no choice. On one side is the calculated, ruthless warmongering of Biden, Harris and the Democrats, focused for now on the war with Russia in Ukraine and the build-up to war against Iran. On the other is the fascist warmongering of Trump, Vance and the Republicans, who attack the war policies of Biden from the standpoint of an equally bloody militarism, focused more on China, while pledging even more ferocious assaults on the democratic right of the American people to oppose imperialist war.

There is only one practical method to halt the drive towards World War III, which emanates from the global crisis of capitalism and the turn by the ruling classes of every major capitalist country towards dictatorial methods of rule. That is the independent political organization of the working class, and the full mobilization of the vast social power of workers against the warmongers and their system.

The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) has insistently warned that those who claim that popular pressure can stay the hands of Biden, Trump and other imperialist rulers are leading working people into a blind alley, with devastating consequences.

Only the building of a mass revolutionary movement of the international working class, committed to the overthrow of world capitalism and the establishment of a socialist system, offers a road forward.