How is it that so many people are talking about Gaza, a tiny coastal enclave in the Mediterranean about twice the size of Washington DC, but with three times the population of the U.S. capital? There reside a little over two million Palestinians of the approximately fourteen million there are in the world, and they are the descendants of the Palestinians who remained as refugees after Zionist gangs terrorized and expelled some 750,000 Palestinians in the months leading up to Israeli independence in 1948. That effort has culminated seventy-seven years later in the Jewish state's ongoing effort to exterminate the population of Gaza, as part of its presumed mandate from God. This genocidal act is the natural outgrowth of Zionism, a nationalist ideology that has backed the creation and support of an independent Jewish state in its supposed ancestral homeland, the Biblical "land of Israel."
It is Zionism that explains, if anything truly can, the stubbornly lawless, extreme, and contemptuous attitude of Netanyahu and Israel, which recently kidnapped and jailed five hundred humanitarian activists from forty countries attempting to break the siege of Gaza by bringing in food, water, and medicine via the Global Sumud Flotilla. The Flotilla and its members, composed of more than forty boats from Latin America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and the United States, left Barcelona on October 1 determined to open a humanitarian maritime corridor to Palestine that would deliver desperately needed aid to the besieged Gazans. Israel's kidnapping and abduction of these humanitarian activists was yet one more repressive act in violation of international treaties, one that involved both their physical and psychological torture, a well documented Israeli specialty.
Unprecedented international solidarity with the Flotilla activists quickly emerged from Britain, Spain, France, Ireland, Italy, and Portugal, while European governments remained silent, demonstrating their complicity with Israel.
Popular mobilization was particularly impressive in Italy. In the first three days of October, huge Palestine solidarity demonstrations rocked the nation, featuring two million participants in one hundred cities, including Turin, Naples, Palermo, Milan, Cagliari, and Bari, with one million turning out in Rome alone. Organized labor successfully carried out a general strike.
Italy's popular outpouring overshadowed Donald Trump's 20-point peace plan, which Israel promptly ignored while carrying out ninety-three air and artillery attacks the night of October 4, adding seventy more dead to the likely hundreds of thousands of Palestinians killed previously.
As usual, President Trump said nothing about Israel's latest atrocities, and no country in Europe or elsewhere issued a condemnation or took any restraining action, except Colombia, which broke off diplomatic and commercial relations with Israel in a superb act of dignity and courage.
How many governments are prepared to follow suit?
Time will tell.
Meanwhile, the mass extermination in Gaza continues.
Source:
Victor M. Toledo, "Stop The Genocide, Support Palestine," La Jornada (Spanish), October 7, 2025
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