By Sara Flounders 
October 9, 2025

Sara Flounders, International Action Center director and a Workers World contributing editor, gave the following talk at the October 5, 2025, webinar organized by International Manifesto Group entitled: “After two years of Gaza genocide, finding a path to peace and liberation.” View the entire program at youtube.com/watch

The world has profoundly changed in two years. Resistance in Gaza has caused a global shift in political consciousness. There is a deeper understanding of imperialism and colonialism. Zionism, a tool of the West, and Israel, a colonial outpost, are finally seen for what they are.

Something else has shifted in the two years since the heroic, daring October 7.

The creative, simplest ability of a surrounded, besieged, locked-down people to organize a resistance to an announced complete expulsion is a shock to those who are so used to holding all the cards and all the weapons to threaten the world into obedience.

Here is another shift. Two years ago, all appeals were to the great imperialist powers to break with Israel. There were endless appeals to the U.S. and European Union countries to rein in Israel, stop the bombings and allow in food or supplies.

Now, there are millions of people in actions, large and small; from a flotilla of small boats to those cheering Yemeni missiles; they have a new level of understanding. There is a determination to mobilize “people power” globally.

It is clear that there will be no mercy from the imperialists. Any gain for Palestine solidarity will be based on collective determination, the strength of the demands and mobilization from below.

The duplicity of the ruling class of each country has been exposed. For example Italy and Spain, feeling the heat of mass pressure, sent navy ships, but not for protection of a flotilla of small boats. It was just to encourage people to back down or to pick up the pieces of damaged boats and rescue people in danger.

There is raw determination to break through the corporate media distortions and lies. Palestine has overwhelmed every other topic or campaign.

In the U.S., every threat was used in an effort to shut down the solidarity, including suspending and expelling students, administrators, staff and teachers. Thousands of workers were fired for social media posts, even from protected tenured jobs. There were mass arrests.

This has not silenced growing solidarity with Palestine.

Now there are no appeals to the authority figures. There is a growing awareness of people power. It is a real shift for millions of people in the West, in the imperialist countries, who are not just defending Palestine, but increasingly actually aligning with the Global South.

Both U.S. imperialism and the Zionist movement are seething in frustration at their failure to defeat the Palestinian struggle and sensing their isolation with the hatred directed against them. Now they are lashing out wildly and violently.

Imperialism’s message to the world is: There is no crime we won’t commit. Trump threatened Palestine, then Yemen, then Iran, then Venezuela. Every possible destabilization effort, every coup that can be fomented, is being tried. Now Trump is sending troops into U.S. cities.

This is part of the drive to cut every social program and create misery and occupation of communities right here. But the response is not the population cowering or hiding.

The ‘Peace Plan’

Trump’s “Peace Plan” is the latest exposure of the imperialists’ weakness and desperation.

Israel is isolated on a global scale. It has failed, utterly failed — despite every form of mass terror, every crime of starvation, assassinations, random shooting and bombing of schools and hospitals — to defeat the Palestinian Resistance.

It is clear that the Israel Occupation Forces can’t continue on their usual course. They lack capacity and internal cohesion, not weapons.

It is also clear to all the imperialist powers, who rely on Zionist forces to be their storm troopers in West Asia, that Israel is no longer capable of fulfilling that role, despite endless shipments of equipment and weapons.

It is clear that the apartheid state can’t administer Gaza. In two years it hasn’t secured Gaza.

The “Peace Plan” states that all the imperialist powers and all their collaborators — the countries occupied by U.S. bases and U.S. troops — together will collectively do what the Zionist state could not do. Now, all of these predators boldly claim in unison they will bail out the Zionists.

This “Peace Plan” excluded every Palestinian organization, even the forces which were willing to be collaborators in the past, because they were no longer relevant. So now they are just cast aside.

Hamas and the whole Palestinian Resistance were given 72 hours to totally surrender, or Palestinians would face collective annihilation as a people.

Hamas responded. They had to insert themselves into the negotiations that had intentionally excluded them.

We don’t know what is ahead. But the world movement needs to first and foremost support any agreement that the Palestinian Resistance groups make.

Our solidarity is an obligation.

There can be no lecturing to a resistance where every leader — political, military and diplomatic — has been hunted and assassinated, using every high-tech form of weaponry.

The global movement

We take note of the general strike in Italy. This was something new, not seen in decades. It was a workers’ strike, not on bread-and-butter issues, not against the austerity and cutbacks, although that underlies the growing anger throughout Europe and here — anger at the endless money for war.

This was a political strike. It was a qualitative change, with the collective actions in Rome, Milan, Naples and especially Genoa. Genoa has one of the largest ports in Europe, a multicommodity port. It is a vital link in the Trans-European Transport Network.

The latest flotilla, the Global Sumud Flotilla, rode with the aspirations of millions of people, hoping to find a way to break through the siege of Gaza and give concrete aid.

The Israeli Navy stopped the 50 small boats, and immediately another group of boats set sail for Türkiye, including a large medical boat of doctors and health workers armed with medical supplies. More flotillas are following.

The Zionists can stop small boats, but not a sea of people. This is the wave they fear.

There were breakthroughs in Germany, where solidarity with Palestine, even mention of the word “Palestine,” is criminalized. In France, a huge solidarity movement has ignored the ban on even displaying the Palestinian flag. In Britain, despite the harshest “terrorism” laws ever passed, thousands have stood up to the effort to criminalize Palestine Action.

War on the workers

In the U.S., the Trump administration gathered every one of more than 800 generals, admirals and all the top brass at Quantico military base. What was the message? U.S. troops will be deployed on the streets of our cities in an escalating racist war against immigrant workers.

Here there is a war on workers and labor unions. There are 200,000 government workers being fired and hundreds of thousands more being robbed of their right to a union. Millions of people are losing access to health care, food assistance and housing and can no longer afford basic necessities.

All federal government services are shut down over a budget impasse.

But through all of this it is the inspiration of Palestine that has led millions of youth to risk arrests, expulsions and suspensions from school and firing from jobs, despite websites and social media being censored and shut down.

The streets of New York City during U.N. Week were an upheaval of nonstop demonstrations; people were infuriated that Netanyahu was welcomed, while all Palestinian visas were canceled. This confirms the collapse of this eight-decade-old international body.

There is an all-out effort by the ruling class to silence resistance and normalize a vicious level of violence. Now they ignore and seek to destroy the international laws and United Nations bodies they created over generations.

Trump aided Israel in the bombing of Palestinian negotiators in Qatar by ordering negotiators to gather to study his peace plan; then Israel bombed the gathering. Qatar is a U.S. proxy. It hosts and pays for the largest U.S. military base in West Asia. Qatar has paid billions of dollars to meet U.S. protection demands.

The Trump administration helped orchestrate the assassinations by bombings of top government officials in Iran, Yemen and Lebanon and overturned the whole government in Syria based on years of the harshest U.S. sanctions.

The ruling class is seeking to expand the war in Ukraine while attacking Venezuela, demanding a complete regime change, and threatening Mexico, Panama and Colombia, demanding every government surrender.

But the surrender is not happening!

Tariffs are imposed globally. This unravels the U.S. economy, and it breeds resistance. There are new connections among peoples, who identify with each other’s struggles.

The Palestinian Resistance has continued generation after generation. They made it clear that they can’t be dismissed or wiped out or their demands for sovereignty ignored.

Now the youth of the West chant not only, “Free, Free Palestine!” They embrace the chant, “Death! Death to the IDF!”

These two years have changed everything. Let’s embrace this change, take risks and refuse to back down.

A new day is painfully emerging.