From the Editorial Letter: “As this issue of Catalyst goes to press, Israel has resumed its attack on the people of Gaza. In upcoming issues, we intend to offer an…

From the Editorial Letter: “As this issue of Catalyst goes to press, Israel has resumed its attack on the people of Gaza. In upcoming issues, we intend to offer an analysis and diagnosis of this latest stage in the decades-long ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. For now, a few things are already clear. Perhaps the most significant is that, despite President Joe Biden’s grotesquely fulsome support, despite European elites’ backing, and despite the predictable labeling of any criticism of Israel’s brutality as antisemitic, Israel is, in the eyes of the world, a pariah state. No doubt the general support for the Palestinian cause has always been deep in the Global South and among wide swaths of the Western public. But in this conflagration, the baseline sympathy has congealed into a wave of political mobilizations at a scale we have not seen since the lead-up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. What is truly remarkable is that the protests and marches for Palestine have extended beyond major metropolitan areas to smaller cities and suburbs across the United States, Europe, and the South.

The outpouring of support for Palestinians and the revulsion at the sheer scale of Israel’s destructive campaign have caught everyone by surprise — even those who have been active in the cause for decades. Now that it is out, there is simply no chance of putting this genie back in the bottle. There is every reason to believe that this might be a turning point in the struggle for Palestinian statehood, in that, as Noam Chomsky predicted in the summer 2021 issue of Catalyst, the “era of impunity” might very well be at an end. While Israel is still too important to the United States for it to be abandoned, it seems very likely that it will no longer have the unquestioned backing and the blank check from the United States that has hitherto been the norm. How this unfolds, and what the outcome is for the Palestinians, will depend on a host of downstream political factors. Just what kind of opening is available is not yet clear. But the shift in the political landscape seems to be inescapable.

Of course, such near-term developments are cold comfort to the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have been uprooted in a second Nakba, who are desperate for the bare necessities of life and once again have to rely on ramshackle convoys for their survival. The immediate goal must be to secure their essentials — food, shelter, medical treatment — to the best of our ability. But when the smoke clears, it will be the Left’s responsibility to press forward, building on the organizing efforts of the past weeks and creating the conditions for Palestinian autonomy. For projects like Catalyst, our contribution will be to analyze and propagandize to the best of our ability.”