Yesterday, after more than 460 days of US-sponsored genocidal war, Israel and the Palestinian resistance reached a ceasefire agreement. While Palestinians celebrated by filling the streets of Gaza and the refugee camps, Israel marked the occasion by continuing to drop bombs on Palestinians in Gaza and on Jenin in the West Bank. The agreement, set to take effect on Sunday, January 19th, calls for the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza, the release of Palestinian hostages, the entry of food aid to Gaza, and a temporary pause in Israeli bombings. The end of US-Israeli aggression against the people of Gaza, even if temporary, is a concrete victory for the people of Palestine and reflects their steadfast commitment to defeating aggression, liberating their homeland, and returning to their homes.

Palestinians have endured unspeakable suffering—a modern-day holocaust during this genocide. Entire lineages have been annihilated, and whole families have been destroyed while sleeping or seeking shelter. Israel has committed massacre after massacre, incinerating refugees who had already been driven from their homes. They have bombed schools, churches, mosques, apartments, and homes, inventing new levels of depravity with their war on Gaza’s medical system: bombing hospitals, kidnapping doctors, and sending snipers into hospitals. At Al-Shifa hospital, they rounded up patients and executed them in the courtyard. During the Nuseirat massacre, they bombed a refugee camp and disguised soldiers as aid workers to invade the camp, resulting in hundreds of deaths.

Israel has targeted and bombed wells and water treatment facilities, allowing diseases like polio to return to Gaza, and has systematically used starvation as a weapon in their genocide by denying food aid and assassinating aid workers. The occupation has continued its decades-long regime of kidnapping and torturing Palestinian captives, opening the notorious Sde Teiman concentration camp, where kidnapped individuals face legalized torture, brutality, and sexual assault. Survivors of the prison camp report being beaten, having dogs sicced on them, being handcuffed for 24 hours at a time, regularly denied food, and subjected to torture so severe it led to amputations. The death toll from the genocide is well over 100,000, including Palestinian martyrs from all walks of life—from 6-year-old Hind Rajab to internationally renowned poet and teacher Refaat Alareer, to thousands of resistance fighters and leaders, including Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. Israel and the US did everything in their power to expand the war, unleashing bombings, assassinations, terror attacks, and land grabs on Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Iran, and Lebanon, which suffered from ground invasions, indiscriminate bombings, terrorist attacks, and the assassination of key resistance leaders, including Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.

Every act of genocide—the bombs dropped, the homes destroyed, the families shattered—was co-signed by the United States of America. While Israel (even after the genocide) does business with countries ranging from Turkey to China, its primary function in the world today is as an extension of US imperialism. Genocide Joe Biden said back in the 1980s, “Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region.” Israel, as a partner and extension of the US empire, is crucial to propping up other reactionary US allies in the region, extracting key resources, and ensuring the smooth flow of commodities to the US and other wealthy nations. The US directly arms Israel and provides the funds and diplomatic cover for the oppression and slaughter of the Palestinian people, whose very existence as a people who will never give up on their liberation is a thorn in the side of the imperialists. For their participation in the modern-day holocaust, Genocide Joe and his whole cabal, chief among them Killer Kamala Harris, Anthony Blinken, and Linda Thomas-Greenfield, deserve a Nuremberg-style trial, preferably held by the people of Palestine or Yemen.

The Palestinian people have been joined in their steadfast resistance by others in the region, who sided with justice: the people of Lebanon and especially the heroic people of Yemen, who have endured more than a decade of US-Saudi aggression, only to defiantly stand up to the Israeli war machine in support of ending the genocide. Across the world, mass protests helped expose and isolate Israel before the global public. Activists of Palestine Action in the United Kingdom managed to shut down munitions factories, and workers in Greece halted the transport of war materials through their ports.

Before self-immolating in February 2024, Aaron Bushnell said, “I am an active-duty member of the United States Air Force. And I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers—it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.” Across the US, there have been people who refused to be complicit in genocide: Jewish organizations staged mass civil disobedience, the Merrimack 4 engaged in direct actions against an Israeli munitions facility, and some protesters clashed with police and defied business as usual, including attempting to shut down the Democratic National Convention. Last spring’s student encampment movement, particularly its militant edge, made it clear that thousands of young people in the heart of global imperialism refused complicity.

By and large, though, people in the US failed the assignment. Many in the student movement couldn’t respond to the wave of repression that came down on them, nor move beyond stifling obsessions with safety. Many protesters lacked the creativity and determination to move beyond individual acts (boycotting certain corporations or posting on social media) and actually put themselves on the line. Much of the self-appointed leadership of the protest movement, especially the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) and the United States Palestinian Community Network (USPCN), has more in common with the collaborationist Palestinian Authority than with the resistance, working to keep protests within the bounds acceptable to the rulers, either to line their own pockets or maintain favor with local elected officials.

The other political force that should be permanently discredited are those who insisted that anything other than voting for Killer Kamala in the last presidential election would harm the people of Palestine. While we have no illusions that Donald Trump is a friend to the people of the world, it’s clear that even before his inauguration, he was pushing for this ceasefire deal for his own political reasons. The Genocide Joe government did not want the genocide to end. Notably, this deal is almost identical to one that Israel rejected last May, meaning that Genocide Joe and Killer Kamala could have applied Trump-style pressure (or threatened the flow of weapons) to get Israel to stop the slaughter, potentially saving thousands of lives. Instead, Democrats, their NGO hacks, and pundit-class cheerleaders straight-up lied to people, even sending Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to the DNC to claim that Killer Kamala was, “working tirelessly for a ceasefire.”

The people who stuck with the Democrats through the genocide and waved pom-poms for their candidate—from AOC to Bernie Sanders to Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson—should be ignored and ruthlessly mocked going forward. The professional managers of the protest movement, who prioritize their careers and social standing over a principled stand, should be treated with absolute disdain. The US handmaidens of this holocaust should never know a minute of peace in public—people owe that, at the very least, to the people of Palestine. As the people of Palestine have shown, against impossible odds, defiance and commitment are the way forward.

It’s unclear whether this ceasefire will last beyond the next few weeks. However, no matter the result, Palestine remains a compass for anti-imperialist struggles and will continue to be a critical fulcrum for world events. On one side, the necessity for the US to outpace its rivals and remain the top global power means it must maintain a strategic foothold in the region. On the other, the determination and courage of the Palestinian people, against all odds, to raise their children in a Palestine free of imperialist domination and occupation. Amid the devastation and suffering, the ceasefire announcement is a victory for the Palestinian people, who have sacrificed everything in the past months. It’s long overdue for people in this country to take our place alongside them in the fight to bring down the greatest threat to human life on the planet: US imperialism.

The empire is the enemy. From the belly of the beast, we choose to resist it!
Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea!