To Commemorate A Pogrom

UTRGV's DSA chapter to hold "week of rage" in commemoration of Hamas slaughter in Israel. The "rage," however, will be directed at the victims, as opposed to the perpetrators.

Supernova Music Festival-goers fleeing Hamas gunfire, 7 October 2023.

A year ago, next Monday, will mark the first anniversary of Islamist death squads storming southern Israel, in order to commit genocide and mass kidnappings for ransom. They killed hundreds of concert-goers at the Supernova Festival in a cruel and sadistic fashion, maiming and dismembering hundreds, taking the occasional hostage here and there. In residential areas, they shot people at random, assassinating those entering their neighborhood while opening the gate, as they hid in the bushes to await an entering vehicle. They set houses on fire with people inside and then shot them as they ran out. They looted and stole valuable items. Surviving holocaust resisters were not spared, either.

It took several hours for Israeli security forces to repel the invasion, as it truly was a surprise attack, and thus their units were not in position to respond at the capacity needed. It was chaos and mayhem on ice.

The following day, complimentary Islamist death squads in southern Lebanon began shooting rockets into northern Israel, immediately causing an exodus of about 100,000 Israelis into “safer” parts of the country, or overseas. What’s strikingly different about this war in the middle east, as compared with those since 1947, is that this one is the first since their first war of independence that involves the military mobilization of the entire population. The wars of the sixties and seventies against the old bourgeois Arabist and Stalinist regimes mostly involved military-on-military combat, often dealing with air fields and other “conventional targets”, although many civilians were killed, to be sure.

Solidarized groups in the western bank of the Jordan river, along eastern Israel, began conducting more insurgent-style operations, picking precise “soft targets” at sporadic moments where again chaos is likely to ensue and flourish. They, too, started not long after the seventh. A few months later in April, the clerical government that currently rules Iran launched a barrage of missile strikes into the whole of the country, as Israel conducted military attacks against Hamas positions strategically placed in residential areas, schools and hospitals, in order to maximize carnage during what would surely be guaranteed retaliation from Israeli forces that could then be cynically weaponized to blame the victim country with “committing a genocide,” particularly the country for whom the term ‘genocide’ was first coined by a Jewish attorney who’d escaped the horror.

Given this reality, one would think one’s solidarity would go to the victims of the massacre and support their right to not just repel the immediate invasion that they faced on the morning of October seventh, but also to dismantle and destroy the ability of these groups to ever conduct another such attack. However, there are many who admit—but only after several minutes of recalling them to the question, as they dance around it in all kinds of ways—that they believe the massacre was justified. While the more courageous of them just come out and say it, every now and again, all of them effectively argue that because of the war in 1947, won by Israel, Palestinians today have the right to commit rape, genocide, and displace Israeli civilians of any national origin or religion, but especially and most preferably Jews. They refer to the Islamist death squads as “the resistance,” defiling the honorable memory of militant resistors against fascism and Nazism.

Democratic Socialist of America (DSA) groups, nationwide, will be hosting a “week of rage,” some beginning Sunday, against what they call “genocide” being committed by Israel. This includes the local University of Texas Rio Grande Valley chapter of the Young DSA (YDSA). They are the youth affiliate of the local DSA group, which is led by UTRGV employee, Erik Carlos Toren, with whom YDSA cooperates. At their recent meeting, according to three people who attended the online Zoom call, John Cuvillier, a restaurant union bureaucrat for UNITE Here, who supports the DSA, and whose partner organizes the UTRGV YDSA, congratulated Toren’s staff union for recently passing a resolution calling for an arms embargo against Israel as it struggles against Islamist death squads.

Genocide is the aim to eradicate a people, entirely, as Adolf Hitler and the Nazis so clearly wished. Rendered in Latin, genocide literally means race murder. In the last two years of the second imperialist war, which lasted between 1939 to 1945, the Nazis amped up their efficiency of exterminating Jews as they could begin to sense, and accept, that they were going to lose the war. A significant portion of the 6 million Jews—at that time 40 percent of the global Jewish population—were exterminated in the last months and weeks of the war. There isn’t a single Jew in the world today whose family wasn’t affected by the Shoa.

If the Israelis are committing genocide against Arab Palestinians, where are the gas chambers in Gaza? Where are the concentration camps? Where are the boxcars full of Palestinians being escorted to death marches by force and deceit? Where are the industrial furnaces burning people alive? Where are the rounding ups of women and children, in order to shoot them in a ravine? Is it that the Israelis don’t have the capability? Where’s the Israeli “Mein Kampf” outlining the warrants for genocide against Arab Palestinians? And most pressingly, if the Israelis want to exterminate every last Arab Palestinian, why didn’t they start with their own internal Arab population? There are millions living in Israel.

The demand of these groups is that Israel cease its “unjust” struggle against Hezbollah in Lebanon, under the false banner of “hands off Lebanon.” If they were honest and politically clear, they would say “Hands off Hezbollah.” They make no demand of Hezbollah to cease its attacks on Israelis, which they describe as acts of solidarity with the ‘resistance’ in Gaza. Some of them, like Rania Khalek, thuggishly argue that if Israel doesn’t want rocket attacks waged against them, then they should cease their struggle to destroy and dismantle Hamas, a group whose origins are linked in continuity with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who was a close friend and ally of Adolf Hitler and organized pogroms in old Palestine. These announcements came on the day the Iranian regime launched another broadscale aerial assault into Israeli cities. Of course, the groups mention nothing about this either, as they’d surely describe them as mere acts of solidarity.

This upcoming Monday, 7 October 2024, many worldwide will commemorate by paying their respects to the victims massacred and tortured that day, last year. Working people should join and build these actions. Others, like the UTRGV YDSA—outside the lovely, humble, and gorgeous university chapel, I say as a hardened atheist—will be in solidarity with the murderers, rapists, and genocidaires who planned, prepped, and then finally executed a pogrom.

jonathansalinas@substack.com

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