Gaza ceasefire: End siege & occupation, fight for socialist change
Judy Beishon, International Secretariat of the Committee for a Workers’ International
Emotions ran high across the world at the news of a ceasefire deal for Gaza. But alongside that wave of relief have been two big questions: Why did it take 15 terrible months before a deal? And will it really lead to an end to the war?
A report in the Lancet medical journal estimated that over 64,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war. Over 100,000 have been injured and most of the Gaza Strip is rubble. Even after outgoing US president Joe Biden had announced the ceasefire deal, the Israeli military slaughtered a further 100 Palestinians in Gaza before it came into effect a few days later.
The ceasefire will bring Gaza’s highly traumatised population a desperately needed chance to gain some medical help and basic necessities. But the right-wing Israeli government led by prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has threatened to end it after its first phase, and remains determined to maintain a military stranglehold on the strip, keeping the Palestinians there confined in conditions that will be much worse than before the massive devastation caused by the war.
Pressure for deal
The negotiations brokered by world and regional powers that led to the deal were shrouded in secrecy. Biden clearly wanted to claim it as a final success for his presidency in its final days. But Israel’s leaders had no need to succumb to the demands of a US administration that was about to leave office, and that had stood by for 15 months while Gaza was pummelled to ruins, including with many US-supplied weapons. Biden had put forward a similar ceasefire proposal in May 2024 but without willingness to exert the necessary pressure to force Netanyahu to agree to it.
The planned timing of the present deal – for the day before Donald Trump became president – was among the obvious indications that it had a link with his inauguration. Trump declared last year that the war had to be over before he takes office and his Middle East envoy, Steven Witkoff, met Netanyahu on 10 January to demand support for a deal.
None of this means that any support should be given to Trump, who has no genuine concern for the Palestinians. In his first term as US president he declared Jewish settlements in the Palestinian West Bank to be legal and didn’t intervene against the siege of Gaza that trapped and impoverished the 2.3 million Palestinians there.
Rather, he wants to promote the interests of US imperialism by trying to lessen the instability caused by the war, including the threat to marine trade routes, and not forgetting the impact of anti-war protests in the US and worldwide. Also, he wants to aid US trade and strategic links with the Gulf states and encourage links between those states and the US’s strong ally Israel, as he did in his first term of office through the Abraham Accords.
For Arab regimes like Egypt, and across the Gulf, the war on Gaza was a great obstacle to such links, because of the outrage of the Arab masses towards the Israeli regime and US imperialism’s support for it. As the Saudi regime is demanding a “clear and credible pathway to a Palestinian state”, which is utterly opposed by Netanyahu and co, it is possible that Trump will make Netanyahu offers that it would be difficult for him to refuse, as part of preserving US influence over the region. However, the form of Palestinian state that the Saudi regime and the imperialist powers would propose would not be one in the real interests of the Palestinian masses.
Volatility in Israel
As well as the Palestinians in Gaza reacting to the ceasefire with enormous relief, the families of Israeli hostages held in Gaza have been consumed with hope and expectation, desperate for their release, although not knowing which of them are no longer alive. The first day of the ceasefire brought the release of three Israeli captives, and from Israeli prisons 90 Palestinians.
Throughout the war on Gaza, Netanyahu strongly resisted a ceasefire, partly due to threats from the far-right parties in his coalition that they would withdraw and collapse the government if a ceasefire was agreed. One of those parties, Jewish Power led by Itamar Ben-Gvir, has indeed resigned from the governing coalition following the ceasefire. Another, the Religious Zionism party led by Bezalel Smotrich, has threatened to resign in ‘phase two’ of the deal, when a lasting end to the war is scheduled for negotiation. That second resignation of a group of coalition members would tip the government into having no majority. However, even in that scenario, Netanyahu could continue by heading a minority government, because opposition parties have said they would keep it afloat in order to maintain the ceasefire agreement.
In the Israeli population there is majority support for the deal. For instance, an Israel Channel 13 TV poll showed 61% supporting it, 24% opposing it and 15% not knowing. When asked: “Should we continue to phase 2 of the deal and end the war?”, it was 60% in favour, 28% for restarting the war and 12% unsure.
A significant factor in the Israeli government’s agreement to the deal is that Netanyahu is in his most confident state since the start of the war, because of his veneer of success following the major blows struck against Hezbollah militias in Israel’s recent war on Lebanon, the attacks that degraded military facilities in Iran and Yemen, and the fall of Assad’s regime in Syria that had hosted Iranian forces. He also points to the fact that many Hamas fighters in Gaza have been killed, including leaders such as Yahya Sinwar, and he tries to portray the terrible devastation in Gaza as successful, justified retribution for the Hamas-led attack on Israel in October 2023.
However, none of those wars, assassinations and attacks have brought greater security for Israelis and they do not amount to a strategic victory for the Israeli state. Even Hamas, while severely weakened, can rebuild its forces, and according to Biden’s secretary of state Antony Blinken it has already recruited new fighters to replace nearly all of those killed. It is a humiliation for Netanyahu’s government that it has had to negotiate with Hamas, the organisation it swore to wipe out.
It is also a climbdown, because the deal abandons a number of obstacles that Netanyahu deliberately placed in the way of previous attempts at a deal, such as keeping the Netzarim and Philadelphi corridors in Gaza under Israeli military control. Journalist Ben Caspit wrote in Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv: “I ask myself where did all the obstacles go? All the conditions? All the ridiculous spins that were thrown out by the leader and were echoed by his mouthpieces?”
No trust can be placed by either the Palestinians or by Israeli Jews in Netanyahu’s government abiding by the planned terms and phases of the ceasefire. As well its repeated blocking of a ceasefire, it is a government that consistently prevented basic humanitarian aid from being delivered to the strip and it derecognised the United Nations relief organisation, UNRWA, the main provider of aid and services to Palestinian refugees.
However, while it is uncertain, it seems that Netanyahu is more likely to carry on with the ceasefire phases in some form than not to, because the wars he has waged have now distanced him from the legacy of security failure on 7 October 2023, and his government’s relations with Trump’s administration are no doubt high in his priorities. This view was taken by a Jerusalem-based research group, Israel Democracy Institute, whose president Yohanan Plesner said: “I think his mind is already in the next big move. If he has to choose between an intimate relationship with the Trump administration and Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, he’ll opt for Trump.”
The deal
As well as a “full and complete ceasefire” the deal stipulated a withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, that Palestinians can return to their destroyed neighbourhoods, the release of the 94 hostages held in Gaza and thousands of Palestinians held in Israeli jails, and an increase in humanitarian aid.
In ‘phase one’, to last six weeks, a third of the hostages are to be released, along with 1,900 Palestinian prisoners. Phase two is designated to bring the release of the remaining hostages, more Palestinian prisoners, withdrawal of the Israeli military from Gaza and an actual end to the war. The third phase would start reconstruction work in the strip.
Even if it all happens, as well as being too uncertain, it is all much too slow for the Palestinians in Gaza, as they are suffering crisis conditions. They need a complete end to the war now, the withdrawal of all the Israeli forces now, and an immediate, massive influx of humanitarian aid and construction materials.
Preventing further war
Pressure from working people internationally – including against the governments supplying arms used for repression by Israel – shouldn’t end in the face of the ceasefire news. We must demand not just a ceasefire but an immediate stop to the war and the siege, and the complete withdrawal of the Israeli military from the occupied territories.
Backed by workers’ solidarity internationally, Palestinian workers and the poor in the occupied territories need to build their own democratically run organisations, unaligned with any of the Palestinian pro-capitalist parties, including Hamas and Fatah, for resistance and mass struggle against the occupation and to fight for national liberation. There must be opposition to any form of imposed rule on Gaza’s people by the regional or world powers – the Palestinians have the right to democratically determine their own future.
So too across the entire region, including in Israel, the building of mass workers’ organisations is the way forward to counter and challenge capitalist parties and interests.
In Israel, a general strike took place on 2 September 2024 demanding that the government implement a ceasefire in Gaza to obtain the release of Israeli hostages. There was also a nine-month-long mass movement against Netanyahu’s government before the Gaza war, which also included a general strike.
It is only a matter of time before anger erupts again in Israel, whether against austerity measures being inflicted, a breaking of the ceasefire, or over many other possible issues. Also, following the two previous mass uprisings of the Palestinians – the first intifada in 1987-93 and second intifada in 2000-05 – as repression and occupation remain, their anger will inevitably erupt again.
For future movements to be able to bring peace and security for people on both sides of the national divide, adopting socialist ideas will be crucial, as only those ideas offer an alternative to the capitalist system that is the underlying cause of oppression, conflict and war.
The building of workers’ mass political parties armed with socialist programmes – to take wealth and control out of the hands of the ruling elites and to develop socialist economic planning to raise living standards for all – is the route towards achieving workers’ collaboration across the region and an end to the cycles of conflict and suffering.
This article is an updated version of an article posted on socialistworld.net on 17 January 2025
- End the siege of Gaza and the occupation of all the Palestinian territories. For the permanent withdrawal of the Israeli military from those areas
- For a mass struggle of the Palestinians, under their own democratic control, to fight for liberation
- For the building of independent workers’ parties in Palestine and Israel and links between them
- For an independent, socialist Palestinian state, alongside a socialist Israel, with guaranteed democratic rights for all minorities, as part of the struggle for a socialist Middle East
- No trust in capitalist politicians internationally. Fight to build workers’ parties that stand for socialism and internationalism
