Barely three weeks into the Gaza conflict, Brazil’s president Lula declared “It’s not a war, it’s a genocide.” “End the genocide. It’s not a war,” Francesca Albanese told a UN committee in November 2024. “There is no war. It’s a misnomer to call it a war,” said the genocide historian Omer Bartov in April 2025. More than two years into the destruction of Gaza, the refrain has become a formula. It is repeated by generals and presidents, by jurists and historians, by aid workers standing over the bodies of their colleagues, by columnists and street marchers. This refrain is meant to register the scale of the slaughter and the asymmetry of force, and to refuse the sanitizing language of self-defense and military necessity. But the refrain is wrong. Gaza is a war. Seeing that clearly is part of seeing the world that produces it, and only from there can any real struggle against that world begin.
The “not a war” formula is an appeal to courts, sanctions, humanitarian intervention — to the international order, as if somewhere in it there were states willing and able to stop this. But the states with the power to act are the states facilitating the war: their diplomats publicly urge restraint in Gaza while their defense ministries renew Israel’s weapons contracts. The order was designed not to prevent violence but to regulate which states may exercise it. Two and a half years in and more than a hundred thousand dead[1], the order has produced a few symbolic restrictions, a few ministerial condemnations, and no willingness to cross Washington. The order to which the formula appeals was never going to stop this war.
What kept the major powers from fighting each other after 1945 was not the international order but nuclear deterrence: the certainty that direct war between them would be annihilation. The institutions built in the shadow of that threat took credit for a peace they did not produce. The wars continued anyway, displaced onto proxies and client states across three continents, but the great powers themselves did not fight. The USSR’s collapse ended the deadlock. For a few decades the United States ran the system alone, waging its wars under the old humanitarian vocabulary. That unipolar era is now over. The US no longer bothers to dress its dominance in the language of international law; it competes openly for hegemony, and so do its rivals. What were once suppressed rivalries are now open contests, and Gaza is one of them.
When the pretense of a rules-based international order falls away, what remains is war. The “not a war” formula does not escape this war but takes one side in it. It strips the conflict of its political content in a particular way: Israel is reduced to a killing machine, Gaza to its victims. Hamas dissolves into the mass of Gazan suffering. Armed factions, class divisions, foreign patrons all vanish, and what remains is babies, mothers, families, the People as such. This image depends on a mystification: that the ruled and their rulers are united in a single national interest and political will. But Hamas is the government and army that rules Gaza, with its own war aims, its own backers, and its own willingness to sacrifice those under its rule.
The militant form of this mystification elevates Hamas rather than dissolving it; its violence becomes the authentic self-assertion of a subjugated people. The mirror image of Israel’s doctrine of self-defense is the ready-made line that an oppressed nation has the right to achieve statehood by any means, and that the killing of a thousand Israelis[2] was therefore a revolutionary act. “It’s not a war,” said IDF general Itai Veruv within days of the October 7th attack. “It’s not a battlefield. It’s a massacre.” Both sides identify Hamas with Gaza as a whole: one to justify armed resistance, the other to justify collective punishment. It is the same nationalist ideology wearing a different uniform. One side fights for national security, the other for national liberation; both require the exploited to die for their rulers’ aims and to desire the enemy’s destruction as the very object of victory. The working class — of Gaza, of Israel, of Lebanon, of Iran — has nothing to gain from any side of this war.
A war, then. Not because its violence is legitimate, symmetrical, or bound by the rules international humanitarian law claims to enforce. War is no duel between gentlemen. Overwhelming asymmetry does not make it something other than war, nor does the fact that most of the dead never held a rifle. War is organized armed conflict pursued for political ends by states and the armed organizations that serve or challenge them. Gaza meets that description on every count. Naming it a war does Israel no favors. It is a refusal of the pretense that this systematic mass murder belongs to some other, incomprehensible disaster, some catastrophic break with the normal functioning of this world.
And this is the normal functioning of the world. To call Gaza “not a war” is to treat it as exceptional, as if the killing there were fundamentally different from the killing this world treats as normal. Sanctions starve hundreds of thousands of children in Iraq and Syria under the label of diplomacy.[3] The drone strikes of the “war on terror” — legally reclassified as counterterrorism to facilitate the frictionless administration of death — killed people in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Afghanistan for two decades. Border policy kills migrants by the thousands every year, turning deserts and seas into graveyards by design. People are crushed in warehouses and killed in the fields they pick, poisoned by the air they breathe and the water they drink, and consigned to die from the routine diseases of deprivation — and none of it counts as violence because no one fired a gun. None of this is an aberration. It is capitalism’s peace.
Nor is Gaza an isolated war. It is one front among many. Israel is simultaneously destroying Gaza, tightening its hold on the West Bank, invading Lebanon, and bombing Iran. The October 7th attack helped scuttle the normalization deals between Israel and the Gulf states; Iran’s chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz threatens the world economy; the US drive to maintain hegemony in the Middle East is tested in Ukraine at the same time; Russia and China probe every crack in the same unstable field. This war is driven from elsewhere: in capitals, markets, and treaty rooms far beyond the strip. That elsewhere is not the backdrop; it is where the killing is decided. This is what it means to say modern war is interimperialist. The states competing within the system of global capital throw their weight onto every local conflict and convert it into a node in a planetary struggle for control. They move through arms contracts, basing agreements, currency flows, and the calculations of staff officers in distant capitals, and end in a particular apartment block in Khan Younis.
None of this requires denying that what is happening in Gaza is genocidal. But the legal machinery that distinguishes genocide from war does not exist to protect the people being killed. That definition exists to sort atrocity — to determine which mass killings will be prosecuted and which will be tolerated as the routine cost of doing business. The political aims driving the destruction of Gaza, the states and blocs backing it, the war economy sustaining it — none of these change depending on whether a court classifies the killing as war or genocide. It is the same conflict, driven the same way, producing the same dead. The reasons are not legal but historical.
In the twentieth century, war and genocide became intertwined through the development of capitalism’s accelerating capacity for destruction. The infrastructure of industrial war had been growing since the 1860s.[4] What the First World War added was not the technology but the scale. For the first time, the productive capacity of an entire economy determined whether a country could keep fighting. The front consumed ammunition faster than peacetime industry could produce it[5], and every warring country was forced to turn its civilian economy into a munitions operation, conscripting labor and directing production at unprecedented scale.[6] The military conclusion followed directly: if the war effort begins in the factory and the bakery, then the machinist and the baker are both targets.
The Second World War put this conclusion into practice. Cities and their populations were deliberately destroyed as a means of breaking the productive base that sustained the enemy — a line that runs from Guernica through Hamburg and Tokyo to Hiroshima. By 1945 the distinction between combatant and noncombatant no longer constrained how wars were fought. Strategic doctrine could designate a whole society as a target, but producing the social will to carry out that destruction required something more. Here the logic of nationalism reached its extreme: entire societies were cast through racial categories as existential enemies whose destruction became not just a strategic but a moral necessity. The same process binds the attacking population together: shared hatred of the racial enemy is one of the most effective mechanisms for producing the national unity that total war demands. Genocidal racism and extermination were not wartime deviations from capitalism’s normal functioning. The concentration camps are the hell of a world whose heaven is the supermarket.[7]
That hell has not closed. Gaza is not alone. The camps multiply. In Sudan, rival military factions have turned a war for control of the state into ethnic extermination in Darfur, with starvation deployed as a weapon and entire communities burned out. In Tigray, the Ethiopian government besieged an entire region and waged a war of annihilation against Tigrayans. In Myanmar, the military has been displacing and destroying the Rohingya for years. None of these wars has been stopped by the institutions that claim jurisdiction over genocide and war crimes. All of them have long been called what they are: war, genocide, mass atrocity. The naming has not produced intervention, prosecution, or an end to the killing. Taken together with Gaza, they show that the twentieth century’s convergence of war and exterminatory violence has only deepened. The world’s powers are competing harder, over shrinking margins, with more weapons, and the wars they produce are growing more destructive.
The war with Iran makes this unmistakable. The excuse of Gaza’s density collapses in Iran, a country of eighty million with distributed cities and a standing army, where the same methods are producing the same destruction. In Minab, an American bomb hit an elementary school on the first day of the war and killed at least 175 people, most of them children.[8] Russia has made Ukrainian civilian infrastructure a primary military target. Israel leveled Gaza’s hospitals and schools over two years. Now the United States is doing the same in Iran, and its defense secretary is dismantling the institutional restraints that were supposed to prevent this: firing the military’s top legal advisors, closing the offices designed to respond to civilian harm, boasting about eliminating “stupid rules of engagement.” These restraints are being taken apart deliberately, because they are obstacles to the kind of wars these states intend to fight.
The great powers are arming themselves at scale. The war in Ukraine has ground into an industrial attrition contest decided by shell production, and Russia has built a war economy it cannot demobilize without triggering an economic and political crisis of its own. China has been preparing for years, massively expanding its navy, doubling its nuclear arsenal, and engineering its civilian industry to be a war economy on demand. Current wars have drained US munitions stockpiles, and the Pentagon is scrambling to rebuild mass-production capacity hollowed out by decades of preference for high-tech, low-volume systems. The shortfall is so great that the US is cutting back security commitments and pressuring its allies to rearm at a pace unseen since the Cold War.[9] The great powers are not yet at war with each other, but they are arming and preparing as if they expect to be, and the wars they are already fighting show what that preparation is for. The world is producing more Gazas, faster, with fewer restraints, and with larger wars on the horizon.
We say it is a war. We say so not to domesticate the horror or file it away as one more conflict among others. We do it to reject every position that treats this war as separable from the system that produces it. The campist identification with the resistance champions the local face of an imperialist bloc. The institutional appeal petitions a collective authority that has no means of enforcement independent of the states that arm the war. Calls for intervention, sanctions, or correct legal recognition are addressed to the UN; the great powers simply ignore them.
Every camp represents its campaign of destruction as necessity, defense, revenge, civilization, or even peace. Opposing the war by choosing a side in it is not opposition. It is recruitment. The internationalist position is a refusal of all these camps. No camp in this war, or in any of the wars now multiplying, represents the interests of the people fighting and dying in it. No army liberates the population in whose name it kills. Nationalist ideology — whether it calls itself patriotism, resistance, solidarity, or security — is how rulers get their subjects to willingly fight and die for them.
The forces producing these wars are enormous, and the present capacity to interrupt them is almost nonexistent. In a period of low working-class activity there is little use for strategic proposals. We are pro-revolutionaries; what we can say is what any struggle that would actually threaten these wars could not be. It could not be a campaign for a better international order, a coalition of “progressive” states against the dominant imperial bloc, nor even a “workers’ semi-state” that marshals the proletariat[10] under a red flag. Each of these leaves intact the conditions that produce these wars. Only the working class can end what produces them: the state, capital, and the class relation that sustains both.
So long as capitalism persists, there is more of this to come. There will be more Gazas, more wars dressed as police actions or security operations or humanitarian interventions, more destruction of civilian life as the routine method of conflict between states whose rivalries intensify and whose restraints are being stripped away. The enemy is not this or that state, not this or that army, but capitalism itself, which destroys life in both war and peace. Every war depends on the willingness of the exploited to fight it. Every collective refusal — every mutiny, every strike against the war, every crack in the nationalist ideology that binds the working class to its rulers’ wars — is a crack in the machinery of war itself. The struggle against these wars requires the clarity to insist, against every camp and every flag, that what must be fought is not this or that war but the system that produces them: capitalism.
HK
The official death toll records only identified or otherwise registered deaths and necessarily excludes many bodies still buried under rubble, deaths not reported to health authorities, and indirect deaths from hunger, disease, lack of clean water, exposure, and the destruction of medical infrastructure. By October 2025, Gaza’s Ministry of Health reported more than 67,000 killed and 169,000 injured; public-health researchers have repeatedly argued that this substantially undercounts both violent deaths and indirect deaths. A 2026 Lancet Global Health study estimated more than 75,000 violent deaths in the first sixteen months alone, with additional indirect deaths from malnutrition and untreated illness. On any accounting that includes siege-related mortality, the toll is plausibly well above 100,000. ↑
Approximately 1,200 people were killed in the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attacks on Israel, the large majority civilians. Initial figures of 1,400 were later revised downward as Israeli authorities corrected for victims of the Israeli military’s “Hannibal Directive,” a protocol allowing the use of lethal force to prevent soldiers from being taken captive, which resulted in significant Israeli casualties from friendly fire. ↑
UNICEF estimated in 1999 that the UN sanctions on Iraq (1990–2003) had caused roughly 500,000 excess deaths of children under five. Sanctions regimes on Syria and elsewhere have been credibly linked to mass humanitarian crisis and substantial excess mortality, though causal attribution is complicated by the simultaneous effects of war, government policy, and infrastructural collapse. ↑
The industrial logistics of modern war were visible decades before 1914. The Crimean War (1853–56) combined rifled artillery, the railway, and the telegraph, allowing supplies and information to move at speeds that reshaped operations. The US Civil War (1861–65) was fought between two industrializing economies of unequal development (the North’s greater industrial capacity was decisive in its victory) and ended with Sherman’s March to the Sea, a campaign designed to destroy the South’s productive base and the population’s willingness to sustain the war. The Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) showcased Prussian railway mobilization at unprecedented scale and speed. What the First World War added was not these capacities but their systematic integration under state direction. ↑
Britain’s 1915 “shell crisis” is a useful shorthand for the moment when industrial capacity became visibly inseparable from military success. The crisis followed severe shortages of artillery shells on the Western Front and helped bring down the Liberal government, produce a coalition government, and create the Ministry of Munitions under Lloyd George. The lesson drawn by the state was that modern war could not be supplied by ordinary market coordination or peacetime procurement: labor, raw materials, factory output, and civilian consumption had to be subordinated to the needs of the front. Contemporary parliamentary debate already framed munitions as a national production problem, not merely a military supply problem. ↑
The state’s wartime command of production did not disappear with the armistice. The Ministry of Munitions in Britain, the War Industries Board in the United States, Germany’s Kriegsrohstoffabteilung, and similar apparatuses in every major belligerent pioneered techniques of labor direction, price control, and industrial planning that became permanent features of twentieth-century statecraft. After 1918 these apparatuses were partially dismantled but never fully dissolved; they were reactivated during the interwar depression and fully remobilized for the Second World War, after which state-directed capital allocation became the permanent condition of capitalist economies — whether under Soviet central planning, fascist corporatist direction, New Deal liberal-democratic management, or postwar social-democratic developmentalism. Tendencies toward concentration, monopoly, and state involvement in production predated 1914, but the First World War forced their consolidation into the institutional forms that have structured capitalism ever since. ↑
La Banquise, #1, 1983 ↑
“U.S. and Israeli Strikes Have Damaged Hundreds of Schools and Health Facilities in Iran,” The New York Times, April 22, 2026. ↑
NATO standards require member arsenals to conform to specifications that in practice mean buying American weapons, so the more Europe rearms, the larger the market for the US military-industrial complex. Trump’s various threats against NATO have been instrumental in extracting a European commitment to a 150% increase in military spending over the next decade, at the expense of the social wage. See Sanderr, “Is He Just Mad or is There a Strategy?”, Internationalist Perspective, February 2026 https://internationalistperspective.org/venezuela-greenland-minneapolis/ . ↑
The class that can be conscripted to the factory can be conscripted to the front. Any revolution that preserves labor as the condition of access to the social product preserves the dispossession that makes both forms of conscription possible. ↑