By Benny Schaft
August 28, 2026

The State of Israel admitted Aug. 19 that the Israeli military was involved in the murder of five-year-old Palestinian Hind Rajab and her family in Gaza. The car she was in was riddled with bullets fired from a tank while she was on the phone trying to reach emergency services.

After leaving the scene with Hind still alive, the tank returned and fired into the car again, killing her. Tank fire also killed the paramedics who had responded to her call. Over 335 rounds were fired into the vehicle.

Until Aug. 19, the Israeli regime had denied its or any other state’s involvement in the murder of Hind and the paramedics who tried to save her. Israeli officials had even denied that its troops were in the area when the killing took place.

That the U.S. government is the Israeli state’s biggest cheerleader and teacher should be no surprise. The U.S. has committed and continues these same kinds of actions against its own population, particularly the Black community. Black youth are lynched and brutalized almost daily at the hands of the police, who are the armed wing of the ruling class which occupies Black communities in every city.

Starting in 2025, the Trump administration used the pretext of its “concerns about crime” to deploy the National Guard into cities with large Black populations.  These included Washington, D.C., Memphis, Tennessee, Chicago and New Orleans.

The administration’s action had nothing to do with crime. It was simply an extension of the ruling class’s occupation of Black, working-class neighborhoods.

State-sponsored terror connects Palestinian and Black comrades. Both nations of people are subjected to relentless state violence, a pattern with deep similarities of oppression despite historical differences.

Long histories of racist violence

Before the settler-colonial State of Israel was even established, Zionist violence during the Nakba was preceded by decades of dispossession. In the 1920s and 1930s, Zionist reactionaries, often backed by British authorities, waged campaigns to evict, brutalize and displace Palestinians who had lived on their land for centuries. In the mid-1920s, evictions in the Marj Ibn Amer/Jezreel Valley led to hundreds of Palestinian deaths at the hands of both British and Zionist forces. In 1929, over 20 Palestinians were killed by Zionist attacks.

The violence escalated through the 1930s. In 1937, members of the Irgun and Lehi Zionist paramilitary groups bombed a marketplace in Haifa, killing 18 Palestinians and injuring 38. Seven months later, the same groups detonated a car bomb that killed 35 people and wounded 70 more. In June 1939, Zionists attacked the village of Balad al-Sheikh, kidnapping and murdering several residents.

Murder of Palestinians was the de facto policy of the Zionist movement, the British Empire, the United States and the whole capitalist ruling class worldwide. Its aim was the exploitation and subjugation of the Palestinian people. This policy culminated in the 1940s with the Nakba, made possible by imperialist money and weapons funneled into the founding of the Zionist state.

While the British and Zionists carried out these atrocities in West Asia, the ruling class was inflicting comparable terror on the Black community here in the belly of the empire, particularly in the South. The same year as the Haifa bombing, Roosevelt Towns and Robert McDaniel were lynched in Duck Hill, Missisppi, after being falsely accused of murdering a white shopkeeper. The following year, Tom Green was lynched by a white mob for defending himself against a white man’s attack. Two months later, a white mob attacked a Black neighborhood in Atlanta, killing several residents and burning down homes.

Mutual assistance in fostering racist killings

The connection runs deeper still: the U.S. and Israel have long assisted each other in suppressing revolutionary movements for liberation in both the Black and Palestinian communities. After Israel’s Six Day War in 1967 against Arab nations, the United States gifted Israel weapons and equipment it had used in its attempted genocide of the Vietnamese people.

The same weapons, including M-16 and M-14 rifles, were also used domestically to crush rebellions in Detroit, Newark, New Jersey and Washington, D.C. and to repress the Black Panther Party. Much of the same weaponry and equipment used to crush the rebellions, including Patton tanks, were then gifted to Israel, which it used for its own terrorist campaigns, from the 1973 Yom Kippur War to the ongoing genocide against the Palestinians and Lebanese people.

This is where Hind Rajab’s murder fits into the larger picture. The exchange of weapons between these two states has always been bound to a shared strategy: the murder of youth who can lead liberation movements. Both governments understand that working-class youth, especially working-class youth of color, are essential to organizing and mobilizing people toward a revolutionary, self-governing future, and that terrifies them. So they target children. Hind Rajab was five years old when she was murdered. One-year-old Kohen Wiley was murdered in front of his mother by Mississippi police.

Seventeen-year-old Dalaneo Martin was racially profiled and shot five times in his car in Washington, D.C., in 2023 by U.S. Park Police. Malak Sharaf, age 11, her 10-year-old brother Malik and their sisters Yasmin, age 6, and baby Nour were killed on October 25, 2023, by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City. That same year Omar Bilal al-Banna, only four years old, was also killed by an Israeli airstrike. This year, Cyrus Carmack-Belton was chased down and lynched in South Carolina.

These cases tie everything together. Both states are willing to kill children: five-year-old Hind Rajab, four-year-old Omar Bilal al-Banna, 14-year-old Cyrus Carmack-Belton and so many others. U.S. and Israeli collaboration is on full display through the direct training partnerships between U.S. police departments and the Israel Occupation Forces. Cop City in Atlanta is one example, openly advertising its ties to state killers while soliciting donations to keep operating.

All of this is further proof that racist, imperialist, settler-colonialist capitalists murder the youth to repress the Black liberation and Palestinian liberation movements alike, revealing the shared material reality between the Black proletariat and the Palestinian proletariat.

So the question becomes: How do we stop the killing, both in the Black community and in Palestine? How do we stop the armed occupations of an entire country like Palestine and of predominately urban Black communities?

The answers start with centering the voices of the people in these communities, because they understand best how capitalism functions and what must be done: the ruling class and capitalist system must be done. The ruling class and capitalist system must be replaced by a dictatorship of the proletariat.

That can only happen by putting Black, Palestinian and other oppressed comrades in leadership, building toward genuine workers’ states in North America and West Asia. Only then can we end the genocide and mass murder of Palestinians and Black people alike.