From 1914 to the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza: an unbroken chain of massacres

For over a year and a half, we have been witnessing daily operations by the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip. In the name of ‘Israel's right to defend itself,’ Netanyahu claims to be hunting down the murderous Hamas commandos in their tunnels and wherever the terrorist group may have found refuge, whether in hospitals, schools or refugee camps, in order, as he claims, to free the hostages from 7 October who are still alive.

But the Israeli government couldn't care less about the hostages, who are merely a pretext for its sordid imperialist objectives: Netanyahu and his clique have announced their intention to occupy the entire Gaza Strip forever... completely cleansed of its Arab population! To achieve this, the Israeli bourgeoisie is sparing no expense. The army is showing boundless cruelty in this open-air prison: amid piles of corpses, the population, tossed from zone to zone, north one day, south the next, plunged into despair and lacking everything, lives in constant fear of the abject crimes of the soldiers, of bombs, hunger and disease. At the same time, attacks and expulsion policies have intensified in the West Bank, where thousands of Palestinians are being terrorised and forced to flee.

For Netanyahu and the religious fanatics around him, eliminating the Palestinians from the face of the Earth is now an avowed goal: when the army is not deliberately firing on frightened crowds, it is constantly obstructing the supply of food and basic necessities, shamelessly starving adults, the elderly and children. For more than three months, the government has even completely blocked supplies under pretexts so extravagant that they were in themselves yet another provocation, a barely concealed admission of ethnic cleansing. And all this with the active complicity of Egypt and Jordan, who officially express concern for the fate of the Palestinians while effectively strangling them by preventing them from leaving this hell.

All over the world, we are witnessing immense outrage and protests against the crimes taking place before our very eyes. Demonstrations are taking place in many cities calling for an end to the fighting, with cries of ‘Free Palestine!’ [1]Even the leaders of several European countries, after months of dithering, now feel compelled to condemn the IDF's abuses in Gaza, and even to denounce the reality of an ongoing genocide, such as Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who recently spoke out against “a catastrophic situation of genocide”[2].

But behind these statements there is nothing but hypocrisy and lies. The policy of systematic destruction in Gaza is no exception. Quite the contrary! Far from a ‘world at peace’, the entire history of decadent capitalism shows that society is sinking inexorably into barbarism and that no section of the bourgeoisie is capable of putting an end to it.

An unbroken chain of violence

In the 19th century, Karl Marx had already shown that capitalism came into the world through violence, massacres, destruction and pillage, “sweating blood and mud from every pore”: "The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation."[3] The primitive capital necessary for the industrial revolution did not miraculously fall from the sky; its initial accumulation could only exist through plunder, banditry and slavery. In fact, the history of the first capitalist powers is a succession of ignominies, far removed from the ideals of its Enlightenment philosophy: from the large-scale genocide of the Native American peoples (between 80 and 100 million victims!), the development of capitalism has been bloody everywhere. Whether in Great Britain (genocide of the Australian Aborigines, among many other examples), France (extermination of a third of the Algerian population from 1830 onwards), Germany (genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples in Namibia between 1904 and 1908), Russia (1 to 2 million victims during the ethnic cleansing of the Circassians between 1864 and 1867), the United States (during the conquest of the West, for example) and even the ‘small country’ that was Belgium (with 10 million deaths in the Congo!), all bourgeoisies have been involved in the worst atrocities. This violence was also directed against the peasantry of traditional society, as evidenced by the cruelty inflicted by Great Britain on the Irish peasants.

Capitalism is synonymous with structural and institutionalised violence, but the process took a new, qualitative turn after the First World War. At its founding congress in 1919, the Communist International clearly identified the entry of capitalism into its period of decline: “A new epoch has dawned: the epoch of the disintegration of capitalism, of its internal collapse. The epoch of the communist revolution of the proletariat”. Whereas the conquests of the ascendant period had enabled the capitalist powers to develop and universalise new relations of production, the First World War meant that, in the absence of sufficient space and markets, conquest would henceforth take place not primarily on ‘virgin soil’ but through a deadly confrontation with other capitalist powers.

Thus, while the violence of capitalism's period of ascendancy had at least allowed for the development of the productive forces, the violence of its decadence represented a formidable chain of destruction that continued to expand and deepen: "Violated, dishonoured, wading in blood, dripping filth – there stands bourgeois society. This is it in reality. Not all spic and span and moral, with pretence to culture, philosophy, ethics, order, peace, and the rule of law – but the ravening beast, the witches’ sabbath of anarchy, a plague to culture and humanity. Thus it reveals itself in its true, its naked form… One thing is certain. The world war is a turning point. It is foolish and mad to imagine that we need only survive the war, like a rabbit waiting out the storm under a bush, in order to fall happily back into the old routine once it is over. The world war has altered the conditions of our struggle and, most of all, it has changed us"[4].

During the First World War, scientifically planned mass murders (such as gas attacks) and organised atrocities on a very large scale began to appear, as in the genocides of the Pontic Greeks and Armenians, in which millions of people were killed and displaced. This is why in its 1919 Platform the Communist International clearly identified that, faced with capitalism that had become obsolete, the alternative now facing humanity was either socialism or barbarism: “Human culture has been destroyed and humanity is threatened with complete annihilation. There is only one force able to save humanity and that is the proletariat… The final outcome of the capitalist mode of production is chaos. This chaos can only be overcome by the productive and most numerous class – the working class”. Since then, capitalism has continued to spread death and sow barbarism: expulsions, genocides, ethnic cleansing and policies of starvation have become ordinary weapons of war used continuously by all belligerents on a scale unprecedented in human history. After the First World War, even before the horrors of the Second began, this chain of violence continued. Atrocities were perpetrated, for example, this time not against a ‘foreign enemy’, but against Ukrainian peasants (Holodomor) during a famine organised by Stalin (between 2.6 and 5 million dead), or against the Russian population, who died by the millions while working in the gulags.

World War II: the relentless logic of decadent capitalism

The chain of violence finally reached a new level of barbarism during World War II, with 60 to 80 million dead in just six years, not counting the countless victims of hunger, disease and repression after the fighting ended. This conflict followed the same logic as that of 1914-1918, but on an even more murderous scale, reflecting the deepening historical crisis of the system.

The mass atrocities of the Nazi regime and its allies are well documented, but it is undoubtedly the industrialised killing of 3 million people[5], the vast majority of whom were Jews, in the extermination camps that most clearly expresses the height of barbarism that this conflict represented. But while the Nazis were appalling barbarians, it should not be forgotten that they expressed the barbarism of a decadent system, reduced to its most despicable extremes in the deadly competition between all states and all bourgeois factions.

What is much less publicised, however, are the crimes committed by the Allies during the war, including against the Jews. It is now established that the Allies were fully aware of the existence of the extermination camps from the moment they were set up in 1942, as well as the details of the methods of extermination and the number of victims already killed and those yet to be killed[6]. Yet neither the British, US nor Soviet governments took any action to stop or even slow down the massacre. Not even a railway line was bombed! Instead, they repeatedly bombed (with terrifying phosphorus incendiary bombs) numerous German cities with only civilian populations, particularly working-class suburbs, such as Leipzig, Hamburg (at least 45,000 civilian victims) and, above all, Dresden. The latter bombing caused countless casualties. Estimates vary considerably, ranging from 25,000 to 200,000 dead. We are unable to determine the number of victims, but the bombing of Dresden has certain significant characteristics of the barbarity unleashed by the Allies, both in terms of the mobilisation of exceptional resources (1,300 bombers in one night and two days) and the use of ‘banned’ phosphorus bombs, which turned the city into a veritable furnace. All these measures only really make sense when one considers that Dresden was not a major industrial city, nor did it have any real strategic interest. On the other hand, it had a huge population of refugees who had fled the Eastern Front, believing that Dresden would not be bombed. The aim of this exemplary destruction was to terrorise the population and the working class in particular, in order to deprive them of any desire to mobilise on their own class terrain, as had already happened in 1943 in several German and Italian cities. In a memorandum dated 28 March 1945 addressed to the British General Staff, Winston Churchill wrote about these bombings: “It seems to me that the time has come to question the bombing of German cities carried out with the aim of increasing terror, while invoking other pretexts. Otherwise, we would be taking over a country that is completely ruined. For example, we would not be able to obtain building materials from Germany for our own needs [...]. The destruction of Dresden cast serious doubt on the conduct of the Allied bombing." Astonishing cynicism!

But these crimes were ultimately only a prelude to the immense tragedy of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (approximately 200,000 victims), which were completely unnecessary from a military point of view and intended to intimidate the ‘Soviet’ rival. And it was with the same cynicism, with the same indifference towards the victims, that Russian troops stopped fighting at the gates of Warsaw in order to leave it to the Nazis to crush the ongoing uprising (160,000 to 250,000 civilians killed). For the Stalinist bourgeoisie, haunted by the spectre of the revolutionary wave of 1917 and in the midst of a world war, it was a question of crushing any possibility of proletarian reaction and having a completely free hand to install a government under its thumb. In Italy, Churchill also held back the fighting to allow the fascists to suppress the growing strikes, letting them, in his own words, “stew in their own juice”.

Capitalism is sinking into widespread barbarism

Since 1945, the massacres have never stopped: our planet has not known a single day without military conflict. No sooner had the war ended than the confrontation between the two new rival blocs led to the horrors of the Cold War: the Korean War (3 to 5 million dead), the Vietnam War (around 2 million dead), the first war in Afghanistan (2 million dead according to estimates) and countless extremely deadly proxy wars, such as the Iran-Iraq War in the late 1980s, which left at least 1.2 million dead.

After the Cold War, the massacres resumed with a vengeance, and the world took a turn for the worse, becoming even more chaotic and anarchic as the logic of blocs no longer imposed any discipline on the various states or factions. A new dynamic of decay emerged in this final phase of decadence, the phase of decomposition. Conflicts became increasingly destructive, characterised by short-sighted power grabs with no rational strategic objectives other than to sow chaos among rivals.

Here too, the major democracies have blood on their hands, as evidenced by the wars in Yugoslavia (at least 130,000 dead), fuelled by arms supplied by the United States, France and Germany. The attitude of UN troops during this conflict, when they allowed Milosevic's death squads to massacre the population of Srebrenica in July 1995 (around 8,000 killed), is also characteristic of the permanent cynicism of the bourgeoisie. Another example is the attitude of French troops, under UN mandate, during the Rwandan war in the 1990s, who were complicit in the genocide of the Hutus (1 million dead). The major powers have also been directly involved in large-scale massacres, sowing chaos wherever they have intervened, particularly in Afghanistan (165,000 dead, officially, but undoubtedly more), Iraq (1.2 million killed) and today in the Middle East and Ukraine, where the conflict has already claimed more than a million lives. The list is endless.

Gaza, an illustration of the future of capitalism

The chain of violence that has marked the 20th century is now leading, through the threat of widespread war, nuclear risks and environmental destruction, to the possible disappearance of civilisation, or even of humanity itself. While the scenes of horror in Gaza are particularly shocking, the Ukrainian population and certain regions of Russia have also been living for more than three years under bombs and a policy of terror, with the open support of those who are now outraged by the fate of the Palestinians. At the same time, the millions of people suffering from war in Sudan, Congo, Yemen and so many other parts of the world are barely noticed by the media. In Sudan alone, 12 million people have tried in vain to flee the war, and millions more are threatened with starvation under the indifferent gaze of all the ‘democracies’. The Sahara is ablaze, and the Middle East is sinking deeper than ever into chaos. Asia is under severe strain and on the brink of war. In South America, regions ravaged by clashes between rival gangs resemble war zones, as evidenced by the catastrophic situation in Haiti. Even in the United States, the seeds of a potential civil war are visible. Capitalism today presents an apocalyptic image, and it is striking to note that the fields of ruins typical of the end of the Second World War have appeared in a matter of weeks in Ukraine and Gaza.

The wars in the Middle East are part of this deadly process. Symbolising the impasse into which capitalism is sinking, Israel launched a new offensive in the Gaza Strip in May, just as Trump was touring Arab countries, celebrating a series of trade agreements and investment projects, many of which, of course, involved arms sales (142 billion dollars with Saudi Arabia alone!).

The European bourgeoisie is not to be outdone in cynicism. While expressing belated indignation at the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and threatening (without much insistence) Israel with sanctions, it was meeting at the same time in Albania at the summit of the European Political Community to rally support for Ukraine. Its main concern is not so much to help refugees, nor the victims of Israel's genocidal policy, nor the millions of refugees who have fled and are desperately trying to reach Europe. Their only concern has been to mobilise more weapons and soldiers for the war against Russia, while strengthening brutal measures against ‘illegal immigrants’.

While despicable propaganda from the Israeli government seeks to portray any outrage at the crimes in Gaza as anti-Semitism[7] by exploiting the Holocaust in a despicable manner, the Zionist state, which presents itself as the protector of Jews, the descendants of the Nazi genocide, has itself become an exterminator[8]. This is hardly surprising: the nation-state is not a transcendent category above history; it is the ultimate form of capitalist exploitation and competition. In a world dominated by the relentless logic of imperialism and rivalries between all against all, every state, weak or powerful, democratic or not, is a link in the chain of violence that capitalism inflicts on humanity. To fight for the creation of a new state, Israel yesterday, Palestine today, is to fight to institutionalise the arming of new belligerents and fuel a new graveyard. This is why all extreme left groups that call for support for the ‘Palestinian cause’ are de facto choosing an armed camp and are in fact contributing to the perpetuation of massacres rather than to the liberation of humanity.

EG, 13 July 2025