Image from the PFLP.
The extermination campaign against Gaza’s people is the fulfillment of every anxiety about engineered depopulations, apocalypses, or environmental catastrophes that we’ve seen in recent times. It’s also proof that when a people have been put into this kind of seemingly hopeless scenario, they will find ways to fight back, and to ensure the demise of the powers behind their suffering. This is what we must always keep in mind, whatever news comes out of Gaza: the Palestinians are not beaten, and the example of their resistance can aid resistances all across the globe.
When many heard this last week that Gaza’s deaths have potentially reached around 680,000 (an estimate that was recently reported by Middle East Monitor), one reaction was to wonder how the survivors could come back from this. The scale of the crime is becoming clearer, and the world is unsure of how to process this. Those who side with the genocide’s perpetrators will of course say there’s no way this number could be real, yet when we think of the deaths from past imperialist wars, it seems quite plausible that the deaths are this high. This July, doctors Richard Hil and Gidein Polya wrote about how 680,000 is the number that’s consistent with Gaza’s population, and with what proportions of people tend to die in catastrophes comparable to this one:
The figure of 680,000 is derived from calculations based on other conflicts around the world. The UNHCR, Reword Global Law and Policy Database has found that the ratio of indirect deaths (non-violent deaths from imposed deprivation) to direct deaths (violent deaths) ranges from about two to 16 in a variety of wars in recent decades. Indeed, estimates of violent deaths and non-violent deaths from deprivation drawn from UN Population Division data, reveal direct deaths in the Iraq War (2003-2011) of 1.5 million and indirect deaths of 1.2 million, yielding a total of around 2.7 million deaths, a ratio of 1.5:1.2. The ratio of direct deaths/indirect deaths in the Afghan War (2001–2021) is estimated to be 0.4 million/6.4 million, that is deaths from deprivation 16 times the death toll of violent deaths…
Assuming that 33 per cent of the violent Gaza deaths were children, 21 per cent women and 46 per cent, men (according to the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor), and that the same proportions obtain for the deprivation-based deaths of non-infant children, women and men, then the 680,000 Gazans killed by violence and imposed deprivation by 25 April 2025 included about 380,000 under-five-year-old infants, 479,000 children in total, 63,000 women and 138,000 men.
Another fact they point to is how multiple times, President Trump has referenced Gaza’s population as being “1.7 million,” a number that he logically would have gotten by being briefed on. This is more than half a million less than what Gaza’s population was two years ago, and only around a hundred thousand were able to leave Gaza in the early months after October 7. Whatever arguments the Zionists make for why Hil and Polya’s estimate is supposedly absurd, if anything it’s absurd to believe that Gaza is the exception to all these other instances of die-offs during humanitarian horrors.
When the real extent of Zionism’s crimes is allowed to come out, this debate will be settled, but by then it will be too late. Which is why we need to use this time to assist the Palestinian people in their struggle against annihilation. One crucial part of how we do this is by continuing to keep Palestine in the center of the discourse. This is so important to emphasize because even within antiwar or dissident spaces, not everyone has been willing to agree that centering Palestine is necessary.
The established left-wing organizations have been trying to build an “anti-Trump” protest movement, effectively tailing after the Democratic Party at the expense of the Palestinian cause. The parts of “alt” media that have been willing to give Trump the benefit of the doubt are also guilty of this; to make the argument that Trump is any kind of authentic anti-establishment actor, they’ve needed to omit the Trump White House’s efforts to accelerate Palestine’s extermination. In the political game, even the “dissident” parts of it, doing the principled thing is not what’s incentivized.
This is part of why the pro-Palestine movement has so far failed to stop the holocaust that’s happening. We must combat this attitude of ambivalence towards focusing on Palestine, and we must do so through more methods than simply speaking truth to power. I advocate for centering Palestine as a means to an end, that end being the organization of the masses around materially weakening our imperial war machine.
Palestinians have been working to provide us with this kind of practical, organizational direction. In July, the Palestine General Confederation of Trade Unions put out a call for the world’s workers—particularly the workers in seafaring and in the ports—to have their unions obstruct the economic flow towards “Israel.” It’s this mission, where the producers and transporters of goods cut off the Zionist entity’s lifelines, that all our other pro-Palestine work must aid in. Bringing the pro-Palestine struggle into organized labor is absolutely essential to our cause’s success; it’s the step that can take the Boycott Divestment Sanctions movement to a new level, and give the globe’s workers key leverage. Leverage that the Palestinian people will share in, as the rebuilding of the world’s workers movement is intertwined with the gains of Palestine’s resistance.
In the countries which are leading the genocidal effort, the bulk of the masses already see that what’s being done to Gaza is a crime, and many more are now finding out about this crime’s full scope. The next phase is where they become familiar with the nature of the existential fight that Palestinians are waging, and what a fight like this entails. Which is where we within the movement must intervene in the discourse, and publicize the resistance actions that are being carried out.
We must direct attention towards the ongoing successes in smoking the armed forces of the genocidal entity; towards the refusal by Gaza City’s people to be ethnically cleansed; towards the region’s broader armed resistance, which remains strong in both Yemen and Lebanon despite the recent efforts to terrorize these countries Gaza-style. If this struggle’s participants are kept connected to the fight that’s being waged by those who are at the center of the battles, no news is going to convince them that the fight is over. On all fronts, the struggle will keep finding members who are willing to do what’s necessary for this cause, as they’ll have a clearer picture of what needs to be done and how close we are to victory.
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