01/10/2025
Gaza, Beneath the Blood and Dust.
What in the name of all that’s human are we watching? Gaza, once a living city, now ground into powder. Children crawling out from under the rubble, their cries drowned by the whirr of drones bought and paid for by Western gold. The sky a constant roar, the earth a graveyard.
They call it a “conflict.” The BBC dresses it in “complexity.” The White House calls it “self-defence.” But we, the working class, the ones who know what oppression feels like in our bones, we know what it is: genocide. Cold, calculated, and cheered on by a chorus of hypocrites who sell bombs by the tonne and empathy by the tweet.
Israel’s slaughter machine doesn’t run on divine providence; it runs on imports. Every bullet, every Hellfire missile, every F-35 slicing through Gaza’s sky is paid for, supplied, or sanctioned by the empire and its satellites.
The United States, bloated on imperial arrogance, forked over $3.8 billion a year so Netanyahu could paint Gaza red. Joe Biden, whispering about “red lines” with one hand, signing arms deals with the other. Germany, still carrying its historical guilt like a cursed relic, thinks atonement means shipping submarines to a colonial regime and calling it justice. Britain, the mother of imperial sin, midwife to the Nakba, still exporting components and excuses. Italy, Canada, Australia, all nodding along, their factories humming, their bank accounts swelling.
And the arms industry, that festering hydra, Lockheed Martin, BAE, Elbit Systems, they profit off carnage, counting their blood money in quarterly reports. These are not neutral merchants. They are butchers in suits, and they belong in the dock with Netanyahu, Bibi the Butcher, who sits in his bunker like some delusional Caesar, issuing orders that erase whole families.
And what of the law? What of the so-called International Criminal Court, with its stern faces and empty gavels? They finally stirred from their slumber, November 2024, arrest warrants fluttered from The Hague like confetti in a funeral. Netanyahu, Gallant, Hamas leaders, a spectacle of “balance,” as if the murderers and the murdered were equals.
Then there’s the ICJ, wringing its soft hands. January 2024, it dared to say the quiet part aloud, that genocide was plausible. Plausible! As if a million displaced souls and hospitals bombed to dust were a crossword clue. It ordered “provisional measures”, polite reminders to stop doing war crimes. Meanwhile, the bombs kept falling, the children kept dying, and The Hague kept issuing statements no one obeyed. The courts of empire, feckless to the core, issuing paper decrees while Gaza drowns.
And when ordinary people tried to act, tried to do what the governments would not, they were met with the true face of Zionism. The Sumud Freedom Flotilla, carrying food, medicine, and hope, intercepted by Israeli forces in international waters, hijacked like smugglers. Civilians kidnapped, their ships seized, their mission smeared as subversion. This is piracy, state-sanctioned and U.S.-funded. And the so-called “rules-based international order”, silent as a grave. Where’s the outrage? Where’s the Royal Navy now? Too busy guarding oil routes and polishing medals, I suppose.
To understand Gaza, you must remember 1948, the Nakba, the great catastrophe. Over 750,000 Palestinians driven from their homes, villages torched, families scattered. Britain handed the keys to Zionism and walked away whistling. Before that, the Balfour Declaration a letter written by an empire to a movement, gifting away someone else’s homeland. The same empire that starved our own people, that filled our prisons, that murdered Connolly and tried to s***f out our republic.
Zionism, born from the same colonial womb, took its cues from the masters of divide and rule. Settler colonialism in new clothes, flags and fences instead of redcoats. And for seventy-five years, the Palestinian people have resisted, with nothing but stones, songs, and stubborn hope. From Deir Yassin to Jenin, from Sabra and Shatila to Rafah, the story repeats: ethnic cleansing in instalments, wrapped in the language of security.
We, the Irish, know the taste of occupation. We know the sound of boots in the streets, the curfews, the checkpoints, the hunger strikes. We know what it means to be told your life is less than human, your resistance is terrorism, your history an inconvenience. From Derry to Dublin, we were starved, shot, and silenced, yet we endured. And so our solidarity with Palestine isn’t charity; it’s kinship. It’s a bond forged in blood and struggle. The same empire that stole our land and crushed our uprisings built the foundations of Israel’s apartheid. The same logic that called us savages now brands them terrorists.
To stand with Palestine is to stand with every colonised soul. To remain silent is to side with the empire.
Every nation still shipping arms to Israel, the U.S., Germany, Britain, Italy, Canada, Australia is complicit in genocide. Their leaders should be hauled before the courts. Their companies nationalised and dismantled. Their war profiteers made to answer to the mothers who bury their children in plastic bags. No “dual-use” excuses. No “existing contracts.” If a weapon kills, it condemns. If a government trades with murderers, it’s a partner in crime.
And Ireland to must look itself in the mirror. Platitudes won’t wash the blood from our hands. Recognition of Palestine is hollow if our ports still welcome Zionist goods and our diplomats still shake hands with war criminals.
The institutions are rotten. The courts are cowards. The governments are gutless. But the people, the people, they are stirring. Dockworkers in Barcelona refusing to load weapons. Students in New York and Dublin pitching tents of conscience. Nurses, teachers, labourers raising the flag of solidarity.
It won’t be The Hague that saves Gaza; it’ll be the global working class, uniting across borders, shutting down the war machine from the inside. The same spirit that lifted the pike at Vinegar Hill, that marched through the streets of Belfast, that filled the jails of Long Kesh, it beats now in the hearts of every soul who says no more.
Empires fall. Walls crumble. Genocides end, not because the powerful grow a conscience, but because the people refuse to kneel.
The Gaza genocide is the logical endpoint of empire, a system that devours the poor to feed the powerful. It will not end through diplomacy, nor through decrees, but through class solidarity and revolutionary will.
So raise your voice, comrades. Boycott, blockade, protest, resist. Tear down the lies and lift up the truth. For every child in Gaza, for every worker in the shadows, for every life crushed by greed and steel, the struggle continues.
And from the bogs of Ireland to the ruins of Gaza, we roar as one: From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free; and so will we.
