La Marx International

The Ceasefire Agreement expresses the remarkable triumph of the 3rd Intifada. The agreements signed on paper illustrate the reality of the defeat that the Palestinian people imposed on the battlefield, based on the firm determination to liberate their land occupied by Zionism.

The defeat of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is a historic event, never before suffered by the Zionist state provoked by the struggle of urban 

guerrilla warfare, the decisive factor that explains why the Palestinian people won this first round of the war of national liberation.

The images clearly show the reality: After the announcement of the ceasefire, celebrations began in Gaza, and pro-Palestinian activists from all over the world who held massive mobilizations of celebration. For example, in New York, Within Our Lifetime, the most prominent activist group led by Nerdeen Kiswani stated at a rally in Times Square: "Gaza has won, Palestine has won, the resistance has won. Imperialism and Zionism have lost, the Democratic Party has lost, the future of the Zionist state continues to erode... The price has been devastatingly high, but so it has been in all revolutions... long live the Intifada" in an article you can read here.

The images of the celebration in Palestine remind us of the Syrian people's recent celebrations for the triumph of the revolution that overthrew Al Assad, without a doubt, as an expression that revolutions are intimately intertwined: The 3rd Intifada linked to the Second Arab Spring; the Syrian revolution linked to the Ukrainian revolution, and at the same time, the Palestinian revolution to the Syrian revolution, linked to the Rojava revolution, to the Houthi revolution in Yemen, linked to Lebanon, and the world mobilisation in favour of Palestine.

Meanwhile in Israel, the ceasefire agreement has sparked a political crisis. Despite the remarkable technical superiority, the infinitely superior resources due to the support of US imperialism, and NATO, Israel's military must withdraw from Gaza with heavy losses, without having achieved any of its political objectives. Which has led the Times of Israel political analyst David K Rees to headline "For the first time Israel has lost a war" and states that Netanyahu: "... will go down in history as the first Prime Minister of Israel to lose a war" in an article that you can read by clicking here.

The ceasefire agreement aggravated the political crisis of Netanyahu's cabinet with the resignations of members of the Zionist Otzma Yehudit party, led by National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir accompanied by ministers Yitzhak Wasserlauf and Amichay Eliyahu, as well as committee chairmen Zvika Fogel and Limor Son Har-Melech and MK Yitzhak Kroizer. The disastrous situation that Israel is going through makes it clear that the ceasefire agreement, although in its terms expresses Israel's defeat, is at the same time an open betrayal of the Islamic leaderships Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other groups as Hezbollah has already done in Lebanon.

These agreements sponsored by U.S. imperialism, the NATO, and the sinister Arab bourgeoisies only seek to stop the mobilization and revolution that the 3rd Intifada means in defense of the interests of the ruling classes of the Middle East. As we have been explaining in the various articles that you can read here, imperialism and the Arab bourgeoisies need to defend the entire support device of capitalism in the Middle East and for this they must stop the 3rd Intifada, a revolution that involves several fronts of struggle simultaneously that threaten to destroy the pillars of capitalism in the region.

The 3rd Intifada defeated Israel's army

The triumph of the Palestinian militias is clearly expressed in the fact that they imply a complete withdrawal of Israel from Gaza. It begins in a first phase of 42 days in which the Zionist troops begin to withdraw and while the Palestinian militias free 33 hostages, Israel releases 1904 Palestinian prisoners of which 296 of them have life sentences. Some are prisoners with more than 40 years in jail, and in this way, the 3rd Intifada achieves another great triumph with the release of thousands of Palestinian political prisoners. This whole process began with the release of 90 women on January 20, 2025, who were detained in the horrific Zionist prison of Neve Tirza, known for its overcrowded conditions.

Released prisoners, such as prominent Palestinian activist and member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Khalida Jarrar, were greeted by large crowds of family, friends, and jubilant militants. As the 42 days are completed, the second phase of the agreement will be entered whereby the Palestinian militias will release all hostages alive and dead, in exchange for which Israel will release the remaining Palestinian prisoners.

Israel withdrew the remaining troops from Gaza in the north and south of Gaza on January 19, remaining in the Philadelphia corridor from which they are due to withdraw in 42 days. Meanwhile, the people continued to occupy the neighborhoods, to which was added the arrival of dozens of trucks with food and supplies deployed in conjunction with the Palestinian militias that established thousands of fighters in the neighborhoods of Gaza and have formed a local police force to establish order and reorganization of the cities. as the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) explains in a report that you can read here.

The leaders of the Palestinian political currents, and the representatives of the Arab capitalist ruling classes met on January 18 in Doha, Qatar, to agree on the establishment of a new Palestinian government. Completely behind the backs of the people, Hamas leaders, Islamic Jihad leaders such as Ziad al-Nakhalah, or the deputy secretary general of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Jamil Mazhar, and representatives of various sectors agreed to march towards a "transitional national unity government" of Gaza and the West Bank. Left out of the meeting were the traitorous representatives of Fatah and the Palestinian Authority, which the people reject as a pro-Zionist entity. However, all these leaderships want to hasten to put an end to the 3rd Intifada that has caused a process of enormous erosion and destruction in the occupying Nazi-Zionist state.

The IDF has killed 46,000 Palestinians and injured another 100,000 Palestinians, a veritable genocide perpetrated on the innocent population, children, the elderly and vulnerable families. As Palestinian activist organizations such as Within Our Lifetime put it, in every national liberation revolution, the peoples who seek to liberate themselves do so at an enormous cost of human lives, as has been the case in Iraq, Vietnam, or today in Syria or Ukraine. But imperialism, Zionists, capitalist leaders and the bourgeois and reformist left put the accent on the deaths of Palestinians to hide what Israel and the Netanyahu government do not want to show are the numbers of dead, wounded in the Israeli army, in addition to the displaced, and exiled.

Everyone hides these figures to cover up the result of the revolution. But in reality, these data, locked up by imperialism, the occupying state and the Netanyahu government, are the most relevant to understanding the current situation of the 3rd Intifada. According to data provided by Al Jazeera military analyst Brigadier General Fayez Al Duwairi of the Jordanian army, which he has extracted from reliable sources in the government and senior commanders of the IDF, as well as the Pentagon and the United States government, the numbers are staggering: 15,000 dead, and 45,000 wounded by the Israeli army. in a total of 60,000 soldiers who have been killed, mutilated, or disabled forever, to which must be added the thousands who have been psychologically wounded.

There is a massive flight of people and capital as a result of the impact of missiles and drones falling on cities, because the "Steel Shield" that protected Israel no longer works. Education and health are collapsed by fear, lack of investment and the end of collaboration with universities around the world that is suspended by the blockades of student occupations in the United States and Europe.

In other words, the myth of Israel's "invincibility," its wealth and technological superiority has collapsed. All that no longer exists, the 3rd Intifada has wiped it off the map. This puts within reach the democratic task of destroying the state of Israel that we have historically been supporting since Marxism, a task that is expressed in the slogan of "Free Palestine from the river to the sea" that activists around the world maintain. But it is not only a democratic task, it is also anti-capitalist because the destruction of Israel puts on the order of the day the destruction of the entire imperialist apparatus that sustains capitalism in the Middle East. This is something that the Arab ruling classes are perfectly clear about, they know that the advance of the 3rd Intifada can end with Israel, and with themselves as the ruling class, and it is the reason why they are rushing to press for an end to the 3rd Intifada by negotiating the government of a small territory, to save Arab capitalism.

The 3rd Intifada Achieves Triumphs Despite Its Leaderships

We do not criticize Islamic fundamentalist leaderships solely because of their religious ideology. We do not criticize them for the methods of terrorism that we know are typical of peoples suffering from long oppression, as Karl Marx put it in "The Indian Revolt" of 1857. While we do not agree with the religious ideology of the Islamic fundamentalist leaderships, we highlight the courage and bravery of the Palestinian militias, partisans and guerrillas in the fight against an infinitely superior enemy, which they must defeat "by all means necessary", in the words of Malcolm X. We support, without hesitation, their heroic struggle in defense of their families, but while we support the militants, we criticize the Islamic fundamentalist leaders for their program of defending capitalism, and their 'policy of alliances with the capitalist ruling classes of the Middle East.

This program and this policy in defense of capitalism turns them in an inconsistent direction in the struggle for national liberation. It is the same criticism that we make, for example, of Zelensky in the national revolution in Ukraine, or of Al Golani and the HTS leadership in the Syrian revolution. Being a democratic and anti-capitalist revolution, the 3rd Intifada ends up going against the interests of the Arab bourgeoisies and the Islamic fundamentalist leaderships, which are defenders of capitalism, which is why at a certain point these leaderships end up betraying the revolution by putting a stop to it, so that it does not exceed the limits of questioning the system they defend.

But the 3rd Intifada is not only a democratic and anti-capitalist revolution, it is also a political revolution. It is part of the Second Arab Spring that confronts Islamic fundamentalist leaderships based on the development and emergence of a new young activism that fights for secularism, fed up with the oppressive politics of the religious oligarchy of the Ayatollahs. Thecrisis of Islamic fundamentalism explains the triumph of the Syrian revolution and the fall of Al Assad, which would not have been possible had there not been a fracture between the leadership of HTS and the religious oligarchy of the Iranian Ayatollahs. 

As you can read here, Al Golani and the HTS leadership broke with the leaders of Islamic fundamentalism in self-defense because the Revolutionary Guards and Hezbollah were assassinating them daily in defense of the Al Assad dictatorship. The Second Arab Spring explains the rise of secular militias in the West Bank that kicked off the 3rd Intifada in 2021 through the emergence of groups such as The Lion's Den. TheNetahayu government promoted a Judicial Reform with the aim of being able to perpetrate massacres with total impunity, but it collided head-on with the uprising of the Israeli people against the reform, which opened a political crisis that was taken advantage of by the Palestinian militias in Gaza to launch a successful attack on October 7, 2023, when they invaded and defeated the IDF.

From there, the 3rd Intifada entered the phase of open and declared civil war that was articulated as a complex of revolutions linked to each other with 7 fronts: 1) The Battle of Gaza, 2) The Battle of the West Bank, 3) The Battle of Lebanon 4) The Battle of Syria and the Golan Heights, 5) The Battle of the Red Sea, 6) The Battle of Iraq, and 7) The World Mobilization in Support of Palestine. The Israeli government's response to the October 7 defeat in Gaza was the invasion of Gaza on October 28, 2024. This invasion lasted for 3 weeks until November 23, 2023, when a 6-day ceasefire was agreed. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) faced a group of Palestinian militias, including Al-Qassam answering to Hamas, Al-Quds Brigades of Islamic Jihad, Al-Nasse Salah Brigades of the Popular Resistance Committees, Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades of Fatah, Ali Mustafa Brigades of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Brigades of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Brigades of the Palestinian Mujahideen Movement.

These militias presented an urban guerrilla war to the IDF, following the method of Iraqi militias against NATO in the Iraq War, as well as Kurdish militias in Rojava, Syrian rebel militias against Assad's dictatorship, Houthi militias against Saudi Arabia, or Ukrainian militias against Putin's army. The ambushes and permanent assaults are causing enormous numbers of casualties in soldiers and officers, as well as enormous material losses, while the weapons seized from the occupier in the ambushes serve to feed more and better weapons to the Palestinian militias.

The imperialist-linked media speak only of Hamas, to hide the fact that there is a much larger and more widespread coalition of Palestinian guerrilla and partisan groups of which Hamas is the largest group. Hezbollah, the militia that controls southern Lebanon, began to attack northern Israel with mortar fire in solidarity with Palestinian militiamen andthe Palestinian militias won a resounding victory in the battle for northern Gaza in early January 2024 that forced IDF forces to withdraw from northern Gaza, which you can read by clicking here

Israel sent troops to central Gaza who again clashed with Palestinian forces who caused a new defeat for Israel that could not appropriate any neighborhood or city in central Gaza. During this moment of the fighting, attacks on Israel by the Yemeni Houthis who won the war with Saudi Arabia began, which opened a new front in the 3rd Intifada. The Houthis began attacking NATO ships in defense of Palestine, which allowed them to begin controlling the Red Sea's maritime traffic. Desperation over defeats and failures led Israeli authorities to carry out an April 1 bombing in Damascus that killed seven officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

For a free Palestine from the river to the sea!

The IDF's defeats forced Netanyahu on April 7, 2024 to withdraw thousands of soldiers, all troops from Gaza, leaving only the Nahal Brigade in custody of the Netzarim corridor. To read more about Israel's defeat in April click here. A month later, Israel launched an attack on the southern area of Rafah, the most populous area of Gaza in Gaza on the border with Egypt, on May 7, 2024, where the IDF continued to perpetrate massacres against civilians. Israel built the Philadelphia corridor, mimicking the structure of the Netzarim corridor, but it is the only thing it could control, as heavy fighting between the IDF and Palestinian militias prevented the IDF from taking control of any towns or cities in southern Gaza, leading to Israeli troops withdrawing from Rafah on July 12, 2024. From then on, Israel no longer had ground advances in Gaza.

The failure of the invasion of Rafah, as well as the defeats in northern and central Gaza, led to the dismissal of Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and the Netanyahu government's desperate turn to the "Generals' Plan" strategy, a plan that combined targeted terrorist assassinations of leaders of Palestinian militias and movements with bombings Newspapers have been remotely targeting schools, hospitals, critical infrastructure, including UN aid posts, doctors, journalists, and non-Palestinian officials.

Ultimately, this strategy also failed because no army wins a battle by murdering innocent women and children. It must inflict a defeat on the resistance troops, something that the IDF never achieved: On the contrary, between November 7, 2023 and July 12, 2024, they only knew how to string together defeat after defeat, and open a crisis that led the Netanyahu government to accept the ceasefire agreement.

Today the 3rd Intifada is undoubtedly the vanguard of the Second Arab Spring. The First Arab Spring, which began in 2011, was a revolutionary process that encompassed more than 30 nations and forever changed the political situation in the region with the fall of dictatorships that had been in place for decades, such as that of Hosni Mubarak or Muhammar Gaddafi. But the Second Arab Spring that began in 2019 incorporated into the revolutions the struggle against Islamic fundamentalist governments, the dictatorship of the Ayatollahs in Iran, the capitalist governments in Iraq, against the Hezbollah government in Lebanon, against ISIS or against dictatorships such as that of Bashar Al Assad. That is, it began to incorporate the global process of political revolution by assigning a whole series of new Palestinian activists.

Ceasefire agreements in both Palestine and Lebanon will not be able to end the 3rd Intifada. A people's will to liberate is unstoppable when it explodes, and even more so when it obtains revolutionary victories. Our policy is unconditional support for the Palestinian militias, but at the same time and simultaneously, support for the process of political revolution in Palestinian activism by supporting the development and emergence of a new secular activism linked to Marxism, stimulating the break with the Islamic fundamentalist leaderships that have a reactionary policy and ideology of support for the Arab bourgeoisies. and a retrograde theocratic program in favor of oppressive dictatorships. From La Marx International we continue to give full support to the 3rd Palestinian Intifada, which on all fronts is repeating the epic of the Vietnamese people when they managed to defeat US imperialism. The triumph of the Battle of Gaza must serve to advance the worldwide regroupment of activists and leaders who support the 3rd Intifada, and promote the struggle for a Free Palestine "from the river to the sea", secular, democratic and non-racist, as part of the struggle for global socialism.

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