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It is counter-intuitive that any country winning a military struggle would initiate a call for an immediate ceasefire. But that is precisely what Israel needs to do to achieve their primary objective, preserving the nation-state of Israel. By pursuing its current war with Hamas, Israel is working against that goal.

Hamas may be prepared to have all its combatants killed in this Holy War against Israel because their ultimate victory is the elimination of Israel. That will only occur if the Muslim, Arab, and Persian world is united in that goal. The humanitarian tragedy resulting from Israel bombarding and invading Gaza invites and reinforces that unity.  

The war with Israel meets Hamas’s goal of derailing the budding positive relationship developing between Israel and Palestine’s largest Arab donors.

Weeks before Hamas attacked Israel, President Joe Biden was meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, publicly observing that a “historic peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia” seemed within reach. That would devastate Hamas’s plans for driving Jews out of the Middle East. 

Under President Trump, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco all signed on to normalization agreements with Israel. The top Arab donor from 1994 to 2020 was Saudi Arabia at $4 billion, followed by the UAE ($2.1 billion). But in 2020, Saudi Arabia cut its aid to Palestine by 81.4%. Other Arab countries had also begun cutting back their financial aid at the urging of President Donald Trump to push Palestine to be less critical of Arabs reaching agreements with Israel. 

Hamas could see that its role as the liberator of Palestine from Israel’s domination was slipping away. Within the past two years, Arab funding for Palestine has dramatically shrunk. They had to do something dramatic and quick to stop Saudi Arabia from signing an agreement with Israel — they brutally attacked Israel. 

The 6,000-plus missiles slamming into Israel was a horrific experience for Israel. However, having terrorists get past Israel’s “iron wall,” breaking into your home and killing your family members is a personal traumatic defilement of one’s life. It was sure to arouse Israel’s new far-right government to launch a counterattack against Gaza, Hama’s base of operations. 

Did Hamas intend to provoke Israel to invade Gaza?  The first rule for winning a fight is to choose the battleground. Hamas was prepared to fight the war on its ground. Israel was surprised by the brutality of the Hamas attack, but Hamas was not surprised by Israel’s response. 

If so, as in past conflicts, Israel’s military intervention was expected to awaken furious support for the Palestinians within the Arab countries. Those countries’ leaders were forced to stall establishing better relations with Israel.

It may seem inconceivable that Hamas is winning the war, with its top leaders being picked off, their central city falling into rubble, and hundreds of their children dying. But consider this. Hamas built an infrastructure just for an Israeli attack. According to military analysts, Hamas’s costly, extensive, sophisticated network of tunnels would have required at least two years of planning and construction. Tunnels are not needed for diplomacy. But they are necessary for an all-out war with Israel. But how could a poor country afford to build such an extensive underground fort?

There is little verifiable accounting of the billions of aid Palestine has received from the West and Arab countries. Israel monitors that aid to ensure it bypasses Hamas’s manipulation. However, the autocratic Hamas-run Gaza government benefits from foreign countries footing the bill for schools, hospitals, and infrastructure. That aid frees Hamas to use taxes collected from their impoverished citizens to do other things – like building tunnels and purchasing weapons.

As of 2020, less than half of Palestinian households were food secure. Meanwhile, unemployment in the West Bank is at 14 percent, and it is nearly 50 percent in Gaza. These are conditions that brew discontentment toward Israel since it controls Gaza’s contact with the outside world, restricting its ability to be economically independent. This allows Hamas to point to Israel as the cause of their sorrows. The current war ignites that anger and supports Hamas’s attacks on Israel. 

Hamas can tolerate the destruction that is leveling their country because Israel’s massive military response is reinforcing their more significant objective. It is difficult to imagine that Hamas was unaware that thousands of Palestinian civilians would die once Israel started firing missiles back at the dug-in missile launchers located under Gaza’s densely populated country.  

It is possible that some Palestinians approved of Hamas’s attack on Israel in retaliation for what they see as occupiers of their homeland. But there is no way to know what most of the Palestinians in Gaza freely think. That’s because Hamas controls Gaza’s internal communications to the extent that they do not tolerate any open opposition to their rule. 

Hamas has snuffed out elections, public polling, and open forums in Gaza. They are a classic theocratic government, like Iran, in determining internal and foreign affairs within a religious prism, dividing the world into good and evil. 

Israel is a functioning democracy, albeit some rights groups argue that dozens of laws indirectly or directly discriminate against Arabs. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ultra-conservative government is deeply committed to following scriptures from the Hebrew Bible. The Prime Minister said in an October 30 speech that Israelites should remember from their Bible what happened to the ‘Amalek,’ a nation. They destroyed it as an act of revenge. 

In line with that position, Netanyahu rejected calls for a cease-fire in the war and would continue to destroy Hamas’ underground network of tunnels. But it’s unclear if he cares to discriminate killing Hamas from the many civilian Gaza residents who may consider Hamas combatants as their freedom fighters.

Consequently, Israel’s air and ground assault on Gaza is creating a humanitarian crisis, with estimates that hundreds of children are dying each day that it continues. The demands for a ceasefire are often being made by non-partisan agencies who witness the plight of Palestinians who have had 30% of their housing demolished and their hospital and care facilities severely damaged or operate with minuscule medical supplies. 

Israel’s government believes that accepting a complete ceasefire will happen after it eliminates Hamas. As articulated by Netanyahu, Israel’s main objective is to destroy Hamas. 

However, journalist Jay Michaelson sees another long-term objective that Netanyahu and his right-wing Likud party have pursued. They believe that an independent Palestine is the greatest threat facing Israel. Their effort has been to tolerate Hamas to keep them as a counterbalance to the other Palestine party, the Palestinian Authority, which controls the West Bank.

Celebrating when some Hamas leader who was responsible for organizing the attack on Israel is killed is not going to eliminate Hamas. More importantly, the larger story is often the large numbers of civilian deaths and injuries that are explained away as unintended collateral damage. 

Israel is stubbornly blind to how their massive military incursion into Gaza’s air and ground space is affecting a new generation of Palestinians. For every Hamas combatant killed, a future fundamentalist combatant will arise from the thousands of homeless or orphaned children in Gaza grieving for their killed parents. Why wouldn’t their traumatic experience create a future army of children nourishing hatred, not love, towards Israel and Jews? 

Journalist Fareed Zakaria wrote that Israel’s experience when it invaded Lebanon in 1982 should encourage restrain its current invasion of Gaza. Their objective then was to drive the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) out of parts of Lebanon bordering Israel. For years, the PLO fought skirmishes with Israel’s army and killed Israeli civilians. Israel used 80,000 troops and 1,200 tanks to drive the PLO out of power. In that victory, more than 17,000 people in Lebanon were killed and more than 30,000 injured.

Forty years later, another, more powerful and dangerous advisory, Hezbollah, has emerged with an estimated 60,000 fighters and 150,000 rockets and missiles. In comparison, Hamas is estimated to have about half the number of fighters and less than a quarter of the missiles. 

Israel must now address this deadlier threat to its existence, along with trying to eliminate Hamas.  This should make Netanyahu and his government acknowledge that it is a dead-end solution to continue killing more Palestinians, Muslim, or Arab civilians in search of the terrorists. There are 8 million Jews in Israel, and there are over 360 million Muslims in the Middle East. The Hamas party and its government may be destroyed, but the Arab movement that wishes to destroy Israel will now have more recruits. 

Rightly or wrongly, Israel, not Hamas, is blamed for creating a humanitarian tragedy. Many, if not the majority, of media outlets outside the U.S. and Western European countries repeat that theme. Meanwhile, except for retrieving hostage Israelis, Hamas’s initial terrorist acts are becoming old news.

Israel must grapple with its image as a ruthless aggressor that has gone way beyond defending its territory. It must act decisively and boldly in a manner that will alter the conditions that will lead to a more dangerous, not safer, future for it to survive. 

Israel can do something that Hamas is unprepared for and cannot stop. Israel can declare a unilateral ceasefire. Hamas could not tolerate that move. It wrecks their narrative. It allows the Arab nations to withdraw support from Hamas. 

Yes, Hamas, for a limited time, may well continue to fire missiles into Israel, and some Israelis may die.  But with each missile fired, Gaza, as the continuous victim of Israeli aggression, will crumble. The world will be reminded that Hamas started this war. And they will lose their standing as a legitimate government.

Israel has amply demonstrated that it could inflict much greater pain upon the people of Gaza, but it could also prefer to withdraw as an honorable nation. If it did, the Arab nations would be stunned into acting to free Gaza citizens from Hamas authority. With their assistance, a new non-Hamas government could emerge. 

A unilateral ceasefire is a bold strategy that aligns with the winning tactic of dividing your enemies. Not only will the more moderate Arab nations withdraw support from Hamas, but Palestinians may follow along if Israel can change its current overall approach to Palestinians living in both Gaza and the West Bank.

Only Israel can stop the war. Even if the U.S. ceased all aid to Israel, Netanyahu’s government would continue the war. The movement for a peaceful settlement and a stabilized Israeli–Arab Middle East relationship must come from within Israel. 

This moment in history requires an Israeli political leader to be fiercely pragmatic in hammering out a new relationship with the surrounding Arab states. Netanyahu’s recent speech framing this conflict and future conflicts with Palestinians as a Holy War does not allow for that approach. 

From Netanyahu’s past words and actions, he never endorsed an independent Palestine state alongside Israel as a two-state solution. It is a position that Iran’s leader, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, wholly supports since he considers Israel an occupier regime that does not deserve to exist in Palestine. Both leaders’ attitudes can lead to eradicating Palestine or Israel as nation-states.

If Israel can abandon the hard-right fundamentalism that grips Netanyahu’s party, a pragmatic Arab leader would be able to emerge to work for a peaceful, long-term solution. By continuing Netanyahu’s uncompromising warfare strategy, Israel is sowing the seeds of never-ending wars, no matter how many Hamas leaders are eliminated.  

The two Republican front runners for their party’s Presidential Candidate fear that communists could take over America if the Republicans don’t win in 2024. 

In a speech after his indictment for mishandling classified documents, Donald Trump said, “At the end of the day, either the Communists destroy America, or we destroy the Communists.” Adding that “we will cast out the communists.” Meanwhile, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law designating November 7 as “Victims of Communism Day.” DeSantis said this was “to ensure that history does not repeat itself.”

Democratic campaign strategists recommend ignoring these statements; do “not take the bait.” Don’t get into a dialogue about communism. If you dignify them with a response – their message will only resonate with the MAGA base. However, even if true, it will likely be repeated as election campaigns roll out. Ignorance is not bliss.  We cannot have a vibrant democracy if one side concedes the debate floor to the other side. 

To ignore confronting this doomsday prophecy is, in effect, elitist. It betrays an attitude that only uneducated people would follow this thinking. By remaining silent, the perceived threat, but not the reality, of a communist takeover will increase. It shows that the Democrats lack the stamina to refute the Republican’s narrative logically. 

Jon Schwarz of The Intercept wrote of the revival of this red-scare tactic. The author concluded that people, since 1945, have been the same, so beware. People are the same in many ways, but that recognition does not provide a pathway for countering disinformation. Going forward demands a rational response to counter the fantasy that our nation is under a communist attack from within our boundaries.

Let’s begin by identifying what action would bring about communists ruling America. It could result from a violent revolution, an election victory, or a secret cabal within the federal bureaucracy.  

Communists Controlling America Through Revolution

The world’s first communist party was formed when V. I. Lenin created the Bolsheviks. It was previously a faction of a revolutionary Marxist-oriented Russian social democratic party. Lenin, and Leon Trotsky, became the lead spokesmen demanding that a true communist state could only exist after a bourgeois democratic government was eliminated. 

Their resulting new ruling government would eradicate capitalism and establish a dictatorship of the workers. In time the state could also be eliminated. Lenin refined Marx’s evolutionary theory of economic and political change to enable Russia to survive as a lone communist state within a capitalist world. Later revolutionary Marxist-Leninist parties were formed worldwide to achieve a communist future in their countries. 

America has had and continues to allow Marxist-Leninist communist parties to exist. They began shortly after the Russian Revolution. The main party, the Communist Party USA, has gone from espousing a rigid Marxist-Leninist philosophy to adopting a tamer version. The party had never sanctioned violent activities. 

During the sixties, when revolutionary rhetoric was at its apex on college campuses, the Communist Party was shunted aside as ineffective and irrelevant. More radical and youth-dominated parties emerged with revolutionary rhetoric. By the end of the seventies, small groups like the Weathermen had either disbanded or remained as endless talking circles defining Marxist theory. 

The reality of a Marxist communist revolution in America is a delusion. After a hundred years of organizing, communists accomplished less than President Donald Trump almost accomplished in only four years: toppling the Federal Government. The January 6 insurrection (described by some Republicans as a harmless unguided tour of Congressional offices) came the closest of any past action from any leftist party to stop the orderly transition of presidential power.  If you expect a revolution to overthrow the government, look to the diehard MAGA adherents. Meanwhile, orthodox Marxists are in the libraries reading incomprehensible tomes on why a revolution to eliminate the bourgeois democracy is inevitable sometime in the future.

Communists Controlling America Through Elections

So, let’s turn to the election route for a communist takeover of America. It’s difficult to believe people voting for candidates who don’t think our democracy has legitimate elections. Then again, since Donald Trump lost the 2020 Presidential election, forty percent of Republicans believe our democratic presidential election was corrupt.  Those thinking that democracy doesn’t work for them are often attracted to parties and political leaders who promise a new political order that will deliver what they want, which is seen as achieving true democracy. 

Since America’s Communist Party was created in 1919, its political perspective and subsequent policies have drifted from strictly adhering to ML’s revolutionary dogma to actively supporting liberal reformist policies. In the tradition of Marxist movements fragmenting, America’s communist party began as two competing factions. Nevertheless, they shared a common objection. While one proclaimed that it had “only one demand: the establishment of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” the other announced that it did “not propose to ‘capture’ the bourgeoisie parliamentary state, but to conquer and destroy it.”

Communist Party candidates reached their high-water mark while the capitalist economy was failing during the Great Depression. They received about 100,000 votes in several elections during the 1930s. William Foster, the communist presidential candidate in 1932, promised that when they came to power, “all the capitalist parties—Republican, Democratic, Progressive, Socialist, etc.—will be liquidated.…”

Not waiting for that to happen, most of those suffering during the Great Depression favored FDR’s tangible reforms over the vision of a future communist society. Foster received less than 1 percent of the vote, and the communists subsequently denounced Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal as “social fascist.”

Over time, America’s communist party dropped its revolutionary rhetoric and began promoting progressive policy legislation. It supported the civil rights and anti-war movements, organized against police abuse and mass incarceration. It resisted climate change by most recently endorsing the Green New Deal legislation by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

In other words, the communists in the US started to participate as just another political party in the democratic legislative arena. This is a similar practice to what communist parties were doing in seven other functioning democratic countries (including Spain and Brazil), where they have been or are part of the ruling party. Most had about 2 percent communist representatives in their parliaments, where the ruling party needed small parties to cobble together a majority to govern. 

Support for communism occasionally peaks in some opinion polls. According to a 2019 poll conducted by YouGov, communism received a 36 percent approval rating compared to 50 percent for capitalism. Professor of political theory at San Jose University, Lawrence Quill, said that these theories are so broad they lend themselves to endorsement by very different sorts of people looking for very different things. 

The poll measured attitudes, not election preferences. Just two decades ago, membership in the Communist Party was below 2,000. The chance of any communist party’s path to controlling our government through elections is zero.

Communists Controlling America through the Federal Bureaucracy 

Republicans know that the communists will not initiate a revolution or win elections. But they do fear the federal government intruding on their lives, such as using public money to provide social security to everyone, forbidding their children from working in factories, or providing public health care to women who seek abortions. 

These can be big-budget public policies they do not need or want. On the cultural front, the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation reported that “cultural Marxism today presents a far more serious and existential threat to the United States than did Soviet communism.” What are they referring to?  Is big government, like communism, attacking their Christian beliefs? Is it doing that by eliminating the freedom to discriminate with whom where one wishes to work, live with, and serve? 

Government employment has expanded to provide both services and regulation of the marketplace. The upside is that more acceptable conditions exist for safe working, sustainable environments, healthy living, and affordable housing. However, more government workers translate into a bigger, more distant, and deeper bureaucracy, which can breed alienation. Unfortunately, that condition afflicts every type of sizeable secular organization serving multiple purposes. And it provides a feeding ground for sprouting conspiracies when government policies do not align with a sector of the population. 

In 1950, it generated McCarthyism, named after Senator Joseph McCarthy, who claimed to have a list of members of the Communist Party USA  working in the State Department. The late fifties saw the explosive growth of the John Birch Society, founded by Robert Welch, who believed that American liberals acted as “secret Communist traitors.” Fear of an internal communist takeover had Congress publicly questioning citizens if they were communists in this grand scheme. 

Today, that search has morphed into Republicans trying to find those in the “deep state” who unfairly helped impeach and indict Donald Trump. Republican candidates, like Trump and DeSantis, need a boogeyman to scare voters. Communists had been ideal because of their revolutionary fervor and association with the Soviet Union. Being a member of the Communist Party has been dropped as a meaningful charge, mainly because the party is no longer linked to a foreign county.

But what does the gradual growth of a state’s bureaucracy have to do with fearing communism? Nothing. The five proclaimed communist countries that exist (ironically, Russia is not one) resulted from internal revolutions, not elections or the gradual growth of bureaucracy. 

The real threat to our democracy is the acquiescence to authoritarian actions. Democrats must show that authoritarian regimes have emerged from socialistic, theocratic, or democratic governments. That happens when the executive, legislative, and judicial government branches are under absolute control by one person or political party. 

The first step in protecting our democracy is to have a public campaign to advocate retaining laws that uphold election procedures that have ensured fair elections for all political parties. Democratic governing is not achieved by storming the Capital to overturn an election after it was certified by all fifty states and confirmed by over 50 court cases. 

When Republicans claim that socialists, Democrats, and federal employees belong to some manipulative communist-like cabal hidden within government, they undermine our democracy. They should look in the mirror and see that it’s not communists tearing apart the democratic norms that keep our institutions functional; it is them. 

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials.

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