On Saturday, Israeli forces carried out one of the most horrific acts of mass murder of the entire genocide. At least 274 people were killed in the assault on the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza. The death toll includes at least 64 children, 57 women and 37 elderly people. Another 680 people were wounded. 

Israeli troops, disguised as aid workers, opened fire and carried out a series of raids throughout the camp. The massacre was carried out ostensibly as a “hostage rescue” operation. For every hostage rescued, however, 68 people were horrifically slaughtered, including, notably, three Israeli hostages and one US citizen.

The massacre took place just days after the leaders of both houses of Congress set a date, July 24, for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress in Washington D.C. It is akin to inviting Hitler to speak during World War II, at the height of the Holocaust. 

The World Socialist Web Site calls on workers and youth to respond with a mass demonstration in Washington D.C., timed to coincide with Netanyahu’s appearance. The purpose of this demonstration, however, is not simply to protest Netanyahu but the role of American imperialism and the entire political establishment in directing, financing, arming and politically justifying the genocide. 

The invitation of Netanyahu, signed by the “bipartisan leadership of the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate,” is a political provocation against mass opposition to the genocide in Gaza, in the US and throughout the world. It is a declaration of political and moral solidarity with a murderer who has been accused by the top prosecutor of the International Criminal Court of war crimes. 

At the same time, the invitation exposes the real relationship between the American government and the Israeli regime. Netanyahu is asked to give what amounts to a progress report. “We invite you to share the Israeli government’s vision for defending democracy, combating terror, and establishing a just and lasting peace in the region,” it states. 

The Israeli regime is not “combatting terror.” It is massacring an entire people, and it is doing so as an instrument of US and European imperialism. 

Indeed, Saturday’s massacre took place with the direct involvement of US forces. The New York Times confirmed that US military personnel deployed on the ground in Israel provided “intelligence and other support” for the assault, while Palestinian sources claimed that the aid vehicle in which Israeli forces were hiding was unloaded from the US-made “humanitarian” pier that had been put in place the day before.

When asked, “Does the U.S. support Israel doing more operations like this in the very same way, even if this number of civilians were killed?” National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan declared, “We will continue to work with Israel to do that.” 

In inviting Netanyahu, the American political establishment is making clear that there are no “red lines” to the number of Palestinians the Israeli regime is allowed to murder. The death toll is now approaching 50,000. Hundreds of thousands could be killed, including through mass starvation, and it will not impact the support of the United States. 

The WSWS calls on workers in all factories and other workplaces to organize delegations to participate in  the demonstration. We also call on students and youth to travel to D.C. to protest on July 24

The purpose of this demonstration is not to persuade the war criminals to change their minds. They will not. It is to set in motion a powerful anti-war movement on the basis of a genuine strategy against imperialist war.

This strategy must be based on the following principles: 

First, the Gaza genocide is inseparably linked to the global eruption of US-led world imperialism, a critical part of an escalating US war against Russia and China. 

The invitation to Netanyahu takes place amid a major escalation of the war in Ukraine, in which the NATO powers are entering into the war as direct participants. Last week, Biden announced that he had authorized Ukraine to carry out strikes inside Russia using NATO weapons, and French President Emmanuel Macron has announced that he is working to form a coalition of countries that would send troops to Ukraine.

The same governments backing the genocide in Gaza are arming the proxy regime in Ukraine. And as the US and its allies have overseen the arrest of thousands of people protesting the genocide, the Ukraininan government, staffed with outright fascists, have arrested Bogdan Syrotiuk, a socialist opponent of the war and the capitalist regimes in both Ukraine and Russia. 

Second, a movement against war must be based in the working class. 

It is the working class that will fight and die in war, and it is the working class that will be forced to pay for it. The same capitalist crisis that produces war also produces the basis for ending war, in the form of growing struggles against inequality, poverty and the attack on wages, jobs, healthcare, education and all the social rights of the working class.

Third, the movement against war must be completely independent of and hostile to all political parties and organizations of the capitalist class. 

The Biden administration and the Democrats have been directly involved from the beginning. Last week, Biden’s Republican opponent in the 2024 elections, Donald Trump, declared, “Israel has to finish the job.” The Democrats and the Republicans have joined hands in arming the genocide and slandering opposition to it as “antisemitic.”

As they escalate war abroad, the ruling elites are turning ever more openly to fascistic and dictatorial forms of rule at home. This is directed at all opposition in the working class to the policies of the corporate and financial oligarchy. 

Fourth, a movement against the genocide and against war must be international, uniting workers in every country and on every continent on the basis of their common class interests. 

The escalating global war, like World War I and World War II, arises out of the contradictions of the world capitalist system. A new global conflagration can only be averted through the mobilization of the global working class, which produces all of society’s wealth and therefore has the social and economic power to oppose the conspiracies of the capitalist ruling elites.

Fifth, the fight against war must be anti-capitalist and socialist, since there can be no serious struggle against war except in the fight to end the dictatorship of finance capital and the economic system that is the fundamental cause of war.

In defense of their interests and the capitalist profit system, the corporate and financial oligarchy is driving mankind toward an abyss. The permanent war of the ruling class must be answered with the perspective of permanent revolution by the working class, the strategic goal of which is the abolition of the nation-state system and the establishment of a world socialist federation.