After two years of US-Israel genocide against the Palestinian people of Gaza, a ceasefire has come into effect. Just as they did before the last ceasefire, while Palestinians celebrated a potential end to the slaughter and made plans to return to their homes, Israel’s occupation forces made sure to pummel Gaza, one more time, bombing the Ghabboun family home in the Sabra neighborhood of Gaza City. The previous ceasefire, agreed to in January, was broken in March, when Israel killed more than 400 Palestinians in one night. The agreement comes as Israel has been laying waste to Gaza City, and supposedly was imposed by the Trump government after Israel added Qatar to the long list of countries it has bombed since the genocide began: Palestine, Yemen, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and Tunisia. 

While Trump is taking credit for the agreement, the basic outline of exchanging Israeli captives for the thousands of Palestinians kidnapped and tortured inside Israeli dungeons has been available since October 8th, 2023. The basic concept of an all-for-all exchange was offered by the Palestinian resistance after the al-Aqsa flood of October 7th. The Israeli captives killed, the destruction of Gaza, the deaths around the world, and the hundreds of thousands of slaughtered Gazans: all of the deaths are the sole responsibility of the US-Israel war machine. The leaders of the genocide, Netanyahu and Trump, Yoav Gallant, and Joe Biden, are holocaust-level criminals and deserve nothing less than a Nuremberg-style trial.  

We don’t know whether this ceasefire will give the Gazan people some measure of peace to rebuild their lives, or will quickly be broken by the murderous betrayers in the US and Israel. But it is an appropriate moment to take stock of how the world responded to two years of genocide. Millions of people took to the streets to stand with Palestine and oppose the genocide. The Palestinian people were joined in their refusal of annihilation by the Lebanese resistance and by the heroic Yemeni naval blockade and other actions to materially disrupt the genocide. A few others from the region put it all on the line to stand with Gaza, take their aims at US imperialism and its attack dog. In the West as well, a wave of defiance threatened, for a moment, to bring the war home. In the UK, Palestine Action activists risked years in prison to actively impede the shipment and construction of weapons (not in only is Palestine Action UK banned, it’s illegal in the UK to even say “I support Palestine Action”). A few brave individuals in the US, from Aaron Bushnell to Casey Goonan, put it all on the line. 

The campus uprising of Spring 2024 offered one possible vision of a US population choosing to side with the people of Palestine against our own empire and its rulers. Those protests, however, were unable to come back from the wave of repression directed against them, and were dragged down by the postmodernist politics that rule academia and the bizarre fiction with safety. Since that time, in the US, nearly every attempt to bring forward a new wave of militant, mass action against the genocide has been ignored or actively sabotaged by the class of protest mis-leaders who used the last two years to cement their social and political positions at the head of the main Palestine-protest organizations. These opportunists have profited from the blood of the Gazan people, while perfecting an opportunist two-step: militant-sounding rhetoric (“Support Palestinian resistance” or “Shut it down for Gaza”), and the repeated instance of strategy and tactics that don’t threaten business as usual (same old boring marches). 

Across the world, even as public opinion stood firmly in favor of the people of Palestine, governments failed to act. The governments supposedly most opposed to US imperialism in Russia and China (two of Israel’s largest trading partners) extended nothing materially in support of the Palestinian people. The European attempt to exorcise the ghost of the two-state solution was dead on arrival, and the governments in Jordan and Egypt maintained their firm status as US quislings, despite the demands of their population. In short, the world failed Gaza. 

As people who live in the heart of the US empire, as people whose government opened up the spigot of bombs, of funds, and of political support to the genocide, we have a special responsibility to take stock of this situation, and to soberly assess our failings and shortcomings, alongside assessing the failure of the entire movement. The tasks ahead are monumental: to continue to stand with the people of Palestine against the attempts at ethnic cleansing and exterminating their existence that have not stopped, and to stop the next monstrous crime of US imperialism before it starts. 

After two years of genocide, the continued survival of Gaza, and of the heroic Palestinian resistance is a profound defeat for the US-Israel war machine and a testament to the fact that steadfast resistance makes the impossible possible. The people of Palestine deserve nothing less than us committing our whole lives to bringing down this beast, US Imperialism, once and for all.