By John Catalinotto
July 23, 2025
Doctors Without Borders is one of the many organizations protesting the Israeli pariah state’s crimes in Gaza. Geneva, Switzerland, June 5, 2025.
In the more than 650 days since the Al-Aqsa Flood (October 7, 2023), a remarkable change has taken place in the consciousness of the most politically active sectors of the population in the United States.
Workers World’s readers are fully aware of the horrors of the genocide in Gaza. These horrors are reported graphically in videos even where they are ignored or distorted in the corporate media. They are unbearable and cry out for action to stop them.
In the Global South, consciousness of the reactionary nature of Zionist goals was already strong. What has changed is the consciousness within the imperialist countries in Europe, including in Britain, and in the United States. These changes must be important for Palestine and can be for all humanity.
The U.S. imperialist ruling class has always considered the Israeli settler state its most reliable weapon to impose U.S. domination of the energy resources of West Asia and North Africa.
During the June 1967 and 1973 wars against Syria and Egypt, and continuously after the demise of the monarchy in Iran, the U.S. has offered complete military, economic, diplomatic and propaganda support to the Israeli war machine. The U.S. government also allowed pro-Zionist organizations like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to operate without hindrance within the United States.
As a result, the U.S. rulers succeeded in manufacturing popular support for the State of Israel — until October 7, 2023, and the subsequent genocide. With each day of Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, the Zionist state loses more popular support in the United States.
Among young people, more and more started becoming activists against the genocide soon after October 7. Starting with youths with ties to West Asia, this movement expanded to include many others. Those who began being horrified by the genocide started to support the Palestinian people’s heroic struggle for liberation.
(Readers should be aware that the social democratic leadership of the early movement against the Vietnam War in June 1967 refused to oppose the Israeli six-day war. In 1982, similar leaders of a massive anti-nuclear war rally in Central Park in New York refused to even mention the ongoing Israeli atrocities then occurring in Lebanon. The first and only national mass demonstration that invited a Palestinian speaker was at the March on the Pentagon on May 3, 1981, where Workers World Party played a leading role.)
Today’s youth refuse to be complicit
Today’s youth soon realized that the U.S. government — and that includes the Democratic and Republican establishment along with the Trump MAGA movement — is also guilty of the genocide in Gaza. The youth refuse to be complicit.
A large section of Jewish students and youths started in 2023 to protest the mass killing of civilians in Gaza. By 2025, many of them were calling for the liberation of Palestine.
The government, the police and university administrators repressed the activists who sympathized with Palestine, falsely accusing them of “antisemitism.” In response, those same activists began to turn against the leaders of these institutions.
Like South Africa before the legal end of apartheid in the 1990s, Israel is now considered a settler-colonial state, a state of genocide, a pariah state. In the U.S., people demonstrate every day against the Zionist state.
In Britain, the rulers are so frightened they have outlawed the group Palestine Action, which has held mass, dramatic, direct actions and are arresting its supporters. Palestine Action continues the fight. Stadiums cheer for athletes and musical performers wearing and waving the Palestinian flag. Greek workers have refused to load weapons for Israel at ports.
Organizations that identify with the struggle for socialism must continue to find ways to stop the repression and expand the struggle to aid the people of Gaza and aid the liberation of Palestine. Achieve this, and we will have delivered a telling blow to Israel’s war of aggression and genocide.
As we engage in acts of solidarity, we should realize the following: Many people have changed their lives to stop the genocide in Gaza. It is a moment when their activism can turn into an understanding of the need to rid the world of imperialism and capitalism and to commit to a fight for a world of equality, to open a path to socialism and peace.
First let us build a world movement to assist the liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea!