San Francisco in Solidarity with the People of Gaza!

Youngbloods, Elders and Friends:

All of us living in the United States need to speak out against the genocide unfolding in Gaza.

The casualty toll of at least 280 Gazans killed and over 700 injured includes many civilians, including children who were hit when Israel struck as their school day was ending.

Israel has once again proven that the Zionist regime is based on a form of racism that rests on a belief that Jews are the "chosen people" and that Jewish lives are more valuable than Palestinians. Israel's barbaric persecution of the indigenous Palestinian population since 1948 has proven that Zionism is a pernicious form of racism that should be eradicated, not accommodated.

Israel's lame justification for the latest genocidal attack is that it is a response to the resistance by Hamas. However, Hamas scrupulously adhered to the cease fire declared six months ago until it became clear that Israel was continuing the blockade of Gaza that has resulted in malnutrition, lack of medical supplies, power outages and the destruction of the Gazan economy. Hamas struck back in desperation, firing rockets into the Negrev. By any measure, Israel's inhuman response is out of any proportion to the level of resistance by Hamas. Israel's blockade of Gaza as well as its current exercise of mass murder are against international law which has condemned Israel's occupation and aggression against Gaza and the West Bank and which recognizes the right of an occupied people to resist.

Israel's current attack against one of the most densely populated territories in the world was not perpetrated by right wing Likudniks or even the so-called "moderate" Kadima adherents. The architect of the attack was Ehud Barak, the likely candidate of Israel's so-called leftist Labor Party, proving that there is no major political force within the Israeli government that can be trusted to make peace.

For six months Barak and his fellow conspirators prepared for this weekend's attack while Israel told the Egyptians to assure Hamas that Israel wanted to resume negotiations over renewing the ceasefire and would not launch a major strike on Gaza at the present time. Under the last ceasefire brokered by Egypt several months ago Israel agreed to end its blockade of Gaza in return for a cease fire that Hamas adhered to. Israel continued the blockade, provoking Hamas to resume resistance by firing rockets into the Negrev. The Palestinian rockets did little damage and Israel's murderous rampage in Gaza is a disproportionate and unjustified response.

Since the Second Intifada several years ago it has become apparent that there is no effective opposition by Jews in Israel or the United States to the plunge of the Zionist movement into genocide. A genocidal mentality is sweeping the Jews of Israel and there is a real potential for a Palestinian holocaust in the coming few years as Israelis and their supporters rationalize inhuman acts from torture to extrajudicial murders of Palestinian political, religious and cultural leaders on the ground that they are "terrorists." Settlers are conducting pogroms and lynching Palestinians while the IDF has turned into an army of occupation. The West Bank is a racist, violent, apartheid state and Israel has turned Gaza into the largest concentration camp in human history.

Israel's murderous and treacherous attack on densely populated civilian areas in Gaza guarantees that future generations will remember the Zionist regime alongside other purveyors of racism and genocide such as the Nazis, the apartheid regime of South Africa and the post-bellum Jim Crow regimes of the southern states in the United States.

The current attack on Gaza underscores the point that the attempt to build a Jewish state in Palestine has failed. The only solution that will guarantee human rights to the indigenous Palestinian Arabs will be a single state with an Arab majority.

Today, the Gazan people are heroically resisting a ruthless and seemingly omnipotent oppressor, similar to the resistance of the heroic Jews of the Warsaw ghetto in 1943.

The Gazan massacres are being carried out with U.S. supplied weapons and with the tacit approval of the United States government. As citizens and residents of the United States we have a special responsibility to speak up NOW! to oppose Israel's atrocities.

Please don't remain silent at this critical time. We cannot be good Germans when the Gazan people are facing genocide. Go to demonstrations, post to blogs, even write to elected leaders or newspapers, but please do something!

Ronald B. McGuire
December 28, 2008