These protests are delivering a popular verdict against the war crimes being carried out by Israel, with the full backing and participation of the major imperialist powers. A vast chasm has opened up between the capitalist governments, which unanimously support the state of Israel, and the masses of working people.
The world’s population are seeing atrocities of staggering dimensions: buildings pulverized by bombs and missiles; hospitals and apartment blocks leveled; children covered in blood, pulled screaming from the rubble; bodies everywhere. These images of genocidal war have a profound effect on consciousness, which cannot be undone by media lies or government propaganda.
This weekend, half a million people took part in a protest in London. Tens of thousands demonstrated in other cities in Europe, with hundreds of thousands in the Arab and other majority-Muslim countries. In the United States, tens of thousands have marched in New York City, Washington, Detroit, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles, with significant turnouts in hundreds of other cities, both large and small.
One of the most significant aspects of these protests has been the participation of thousands of Jews, particularly Jewish youth. This was seen most dramatically in the takeover of Grand Central Station in Manhattan Friday night, in a sit-in by several thousand called by Jewish Voice for Peace, under the slogan “Not in Our Name.”
The outpouring of popular anger in response to the war crimes in Gaza has shaken both the ruling classes and their media servants. They are so frightened that they’ve decided that the only way to respond is to ignore it and create a counter-reality, manufactured by the media, in which the public supports Israel and its genocidal war on Gaza, and the expressions of mass horror and revulsion simply are not taking place.
The news outlets that set the pace for the American media have imposed a virtual blackout on the protests, limiting their reporting to a handful of online references that are drowned out by the deluge of pro-war coverage, which occupies pages and pages of newsprint and endless hours of television time. There is no reference to the millions who have declared their opposition to the war on Gaza, while there has been non-stop coverage of the October 7 Hamas raid on Israel, the Israeli preparations for war, the bombing campaign, and the visits by top Western leaders—Biden, Sunak, Scholz, Macron and others—to Jerusalem to declare their unbreakable solidarity with Netanyahu and Israel.
This weekend, for example, the New York Times did not even report on the worldwide anti-war protests in its print editions, limiting its coverage to a small article in its online edition about a pro-Palestinian march across the Brooklyn Bridge. This was relegated to the “New York” section of the online edition, which contains news items of only local interest.
The Washington Post adopted a similar policy. It published one roundup of the global protests, in an online opinion column that did not appear in the print edition. CNN published a single item of less than 600 words on its website, compared to endless hours of broadcast time devoted to the Israeli military operations and the Hamas raid.
Twenty years ago, millions around the world marched in protest against the impending US invasion of Iraq, which was widely—and correctly—seen as a brazen war crime. The Bush administration used the 9/11 terror attacks to provide a bogus justification for long-prepared plans to seize Baghdad and loot the country’s vast oil resources.
At that time, the New York Times noted, with considerable astonishment: “The fracturing of the Western alliance over Iraq and the huge antiwar demonstrations around the world this weekend are reminders that there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.” Translated into class terms, this was a recognition that American imperialism faced a more powerful opponent than any state: the masses of working people all over the world who hate war and oppression in all its forms.
Today, however, the Times and its media followers dare not even refer to the burgeoning opposition to the war plans of American imperialism and its Zionist accomplices. This is not because the position of Washington is stronger, but just the opposite: it is a demonstration of weakness and extreme crisis.
This weakness and crisis are also manifested in the outright criminalization of protests against the Gaza war. It is not enough to suppress the news of protests: the protests themselves must be suppressed. In Western Europe, there have already been widespread efforts to restrict the voicing of pro-Palestinian slogans, or to ban displays of the Palestinian flag, or even to outlaw protests altogether.
Similar measures are under way in the United States. This was prefigured in a resolution adopted by the US Senate, drafted and introduced by the fascist Republican Josh Hawley, condemning the student protests at Harvard and several other schools, claiming they were pro-Hamas and pro-terrorist. It was passed by unanimous consent on Thursday, as no Democrat, nor even the self-styled “socialist” Senator Bernie Sanders, made any objection.
The resolution itself is only a statement of opinion without legal force. But Hawley accompanied it with a letter to the Department of Justice demanding an FBI investigation of the groups and individuals involved in such protests. “Given the potential scale of this threat, I urge you to immediately deploy DOJ resources to investigate these organizations’ funding sources,” he wrote. “The First Amendment protects the right to protest. But it does not protect the provision of material support to terrorist organizations.”
Despite media censorship and government lies, however, the mass deaths in Gaza are real, and so is the popular revulsion against them. The imperialist media doesn’t create reality, it can only distort it and cover it up.
Photo: Some of the protesters at the 20,000 strong protest in Manchester, against Israel's war on Gaza, October 28, 2023.
Source: World Socialist Web Site.
