By JAMES MARKIN
Ever since the beginning of the Israeli assault on the people of Gaza, each new day, week, and month have brought with them fresh barbarity and horrors as Israel seeks to wipe out a significant percentage of the population of Gaza. Israel rang in the new year with yet another massacre in Gaza. As a rain storm flooded shelters across the besieged strip, Israeli bombs killed 26 in the early hours of 2025. The Gaza Health Ministry reported that the dead included at least four children. The situation in Gaza has deteriorated to a status quo without any of the features of civilization as Israel has continually made infrastructure, especially medical infrastructure, a target.
This has especially been the case in northern Gaza as Israeli politicians have called on the government to implement the so-called “Generals’ Plan,” which seeks to completely depopulate that region of Palestinians by declaring any Palestinian in the region as a legitimate military target. While this is not yet the official military policy of Israel, it is close enough to the status quo. This was symbolized by the Dec. 30 Israeli attack on the Kamal Adwan hospital, followed by further attacks on the remaining two medical facilities in northern Gaza. During the attack on Kamal Adwan, doctors were forced to strip off their clothes and were arrested while soldiers set the facility ablaze, potentially burning patients alive. One of the kidnapped doctors, the hospital’s director, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, has become a cause célèbre as Israel has gone back and forth between denying that they have the doctor in custody and justifying his kidnapping by pretending that he is a ranking leader of the military wing of Hamas.
Israel’s goals with these attacks are clear: they want nothing less than the complete depopulation of northern Gaza, potentially as a precursor of annexation. This is genocide and ethnic cleansing of the most brutal kind as part of what Netanyahu hopes will be the beginning of the end of the war on his terms.
Has the “Axis of Resistance” collapsed?
Since the beginning of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, a political framework became increasingly popular among those fighting for the liberation of Palestinians—the so-called Axis of Resistance. This framework refers to the constellation of several political forces: Hamas itself fighting in Gaza, the Shia theocratic government of Iran, Hezbollah and its allies in Lebanon, the Zaydi-Shia Ansar Allah government in western Yemen (popularly known as the Houthis), and the more minor Shia Islamist militias in Iraq and Syria.
Since the beginning of the war, the forces that group themselves under this label have contrasted themselves with the Arab regimes such as Egypt and Jordan, which have refused to take any concrete steps to oppose the Israeli genocide. At the same time, some of the forces within the “Axis of Resistance” were doing a lot more resisting than others. Of course, Hamas fighters in Gaza, who every day fought to defend the rubble of what was their homes, were doing all they could in the face of a war machine that was backed to the hilt with American weaponry.
The same might be said of the Houthis in Yemen, who launched a series of daring attacks, mustering what they could of their meager weaponry in order to weaken Israel and its imperial allies. This military support for Gaza has resulted in crushing retaliation from the U.S. and Britain, with Israel itself launching a series of attacks on the Houthi capital of Sanaa in late December. Nevertheless, the Houthis have hung on and continued their dogged attacks on Israel, with drone strikes hitting targets in the Zionist state as recently as Jan. 2.
While Hezbollah’s cross-border strikes into Israel put pressure on the Israeli economy and were used as a justification for a full-scale Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2024, they fell short of what some thought Hezbollah was capable of. Nevertheless, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon has seemingly seriously damaged Hezbollah and resulted in the killing of its charismatic leader, Hassan Nasrallah.
Iran also has held back, only launching a series of missile and drone attacks following particularly severe Israeli provocations. No doubt Tehran was cowed by the potential of all-out war with Israel, with the specter of U.S. involvement looming before them. The low impact of the two strongest pieces of the Axis demonstrate the limitations of relying on nationalist forces tied to Middle Eastern capital for defense of Palestinian self-determination. It shows the serious problems with the whole model of the Axis of Resistance.
Israel tries to strangle revolutionary Syria in the crib
Indeed, of all of those grouped within the supposed Axis of Resistance, the efforts taken by the former Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad, to oppose Israel were by far the lamest. He clung to the mantle of a friend of Palestinian resistance merely by playing host to offices of Palestinian factions and by allowing Iranian weapon shipments to pass through his country. This somehow merited him the label of a member of the Axis of Resistance even as Hamas fighters gave their lives in brutal urban warfare in Gaza.
When the Syrian people rose up against Bashar al-Assad’s government during the Arab Spring in 2011, some Palestinian factions hosted and backed by al-Assad supported the regime and even fought for him during the civil war. This was despite the fact that al-Assad and his Russian allies indiscriminately bombed Palestinian refugee camps within Syria during the war. Hamas seemingly stood alone as the only Palestinian party to have given some support to the Syrian rebels. Now in 2025 with the collapse of the al-Assad regime, this alignment has been revealed for the catastrophe that it was. While the average Syrian, of course, sympathizes with and supports the Palestinian people, the Palestinian political parties now have to reckon with a future where they need the support of Syria, despite Syrians having seen some of these groups as standing on the wrong side of their bloody civil war.
On the other hand, Israel has reacted to the fall of al-Assad with horror and moved quickly to attempt to shape the situation on the ground. While Bashar al-Assad was no friend to Israel, he also did not represent much of a threat. Israel’s fear of a potentially anti-Israel democratic government in Syria has been demonstrated by their actions since the fall of al-Assad. The IDF immediately moved to seize land in the country, and the Israeli air force carried out the single largest series of air strikes in Israeli history, systematically destroying weapons depots and Syrian military capacity. As the new year dawned, Israel claimed that IDF commandos blew up weapons factories deep within Syria. The still-forming post-revolutionary government of Syria seems unable or unwilling to oppose these very severe Israeli attacks.
The West Bank and the Palestinian Authority
As all this has unfolded, there has been a new resurgence in the crisis of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which dates back to the early months of 2022. At that time, a series of new armed groups emerged in the northern West Bank cities of Jenin and Nablus, which were not afraid to directly attack Israeli troops. When the PA moved to crack down on these groups, which they deemed as “outlaws,” Palestinians rose up in support of the militias, angry at the PA’s collaboration with the state of Israel. While the PA was seemingly able to regain control over the old city of Nablus before the start of the current war, the northern West Bank has continued to be a center of resistance to the Israeli occupation. In particular in the northern city of Jenin, the coalition of armed groups known as the Jenin Brigades continued to politically dominate the refugee camp.
In the waning days of 2024, both Israel and the PA have increased violent crackdowns in this region. In early December, the PA launched an assault on the Nablus refugee camp, killing a Jenin Brigades commander, the journalist Shatha Sabbagh, and others. Facing severe criticism for these fratricidal attacks, the PA moved to broaden its crackdown on dissent by following in the footsteps of its paymaster Israel and banning al Jazeera. Israel has also begun the year with its own attacks in the northern West Bank, killing and injuring teenagers in the balata refugee camp, in the city of Nablus.
What can socialists do in the face of Israeli genocide?
As the new year dawns, opposing the increasingly unhindered Israeli attacks on the people of the whole Middle East becomes more and more critical for those across the world. For workers in the imperialist core, the fight of the Palestinian people is our fight too.
Without the weapons that the U.S. gives Israel (including 100% of its combat aircraft), the Zionist state would be unable to prosecute this war. Not only does the U.S. support Israel with funds that could be spent on education, infrastructure and health care at home, but also the collaboration with Israel trains and develops the repressive apparatus that can and will be used against workers here. We have already seen the Palestine issue be weaponized to crack down on political speech in the United States. It is therefore the duty of the working class in the United States to oppose this war and to work to end U.S. support for it.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons