ISRAEL is not only committing genocide in Gaza, says suspended Israeli MP Ofer Cassif — it is “well on the way to becoming a clear, full-blooded fascist land.”

Cassif is a brave man. His current six-month suspension from the Knesset is for supporting the South African case accusing Israel of genocide at the International Court of Justice and for calling Palestinians resisting Israeli troops in Jenin in the occupied West Bank “freedom fighters.” But he’s no stranger to being punished for taking a stand against the occupation, having been imprisoned four times during the First Intifada for refusing to serve in the occupied territories.

Currently touring Europe to raise awareness of Israel’s worsening violence against Palestinians — in the West Bank as well as in Gaza — and deepening repression of dissenting voices at home, his reports to Saturday’s Communist Party executive committee and public meeting at the Marx Memorial Library that night made grim listening.

“Israel was never a democracy — it was an ethnocracy because it defined itself as belonging only to the Jewish people, not only those who live in Israel by the way, but even those who live outside it. But now, it is already a fascist regime, and it is getting worse.

“The situation now in Israel is of a terrible, violent political persecution of anyone who raises an alternative voice.

“The main victims among the citizenry are the Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up about 20 per cent of the population; but also democratic and radical Jews.” Cassif himself is Jewish: the Communist Party of Israel has long been the only party in the state with both Jewish and Arab members.

One young teacher, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, whose case he relates had made a dance video on TikTok. A year later, TikTok automatically reloaded the video with the date — October 7, a pure accident — but she was arrested for supposedly celebrating the Hamas attack of a year earlier. 

This single mother was bound hand and foot, blindfolded and taken away. The police mocked and humiliated her, taunting her to dance for them. When she had to be taken in front of a judge, she was released: it was clear she hadn’t done anything wrong, but there is no redress for her abduction and abuse by a police force Cassif says increasingly resembles an extremist private militia answering to the racist National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir.

Another case involved a Jewish secondary school teacher, of 40 years’ experience. He posted photographs online of children killed in Gaza, with their names and ages.

But in Israel it is not permissible for murdered Palestinian children to have names and faces. He was fired immediately; the mayor of the city he taught in ruled that he could not teach in any school in the city; the education minister revoked his teaching qualification. He was held for four days, confined to his cell for 23 hours a day as a supposed security risk. Again, a judge dismissed the case and, after he sued, a court ruled the school should give his job back: which it did, but far-right students refused to allow him to enter when he came back.

“These are two examples of thousands,” Cassif says. Over 100 separate Bills are now proceeding through the Knesset restricting democratic rights; several are aimed at disenfranchising Palestinian citizens. Hadash, the coalition including the Communist Party that Cassif represents in the Knesset, is among those which will be barred from standing if the laws pass.

These cases may seem tame compared to the genocide in Gaza, but they are all part of the same project: silencing protest and suppressing the peace movement in Israel facilitates its continued massacre of Palestinians.

The war in Gaza “has nothing to do with the security of Israel,” he charges. “Definitely nothing to do with the release of the Israeli hostages.”

Besides an official death toll approaching 50,000, almost certainly a significant underestimate, he draws attention to the hundreds of thousands who have been maimed or crippled for life, the psychological scars inflicted on a whole people.

“The Israeli government, members of its coalition, of the opposition, not to mention people among the public, say ‘there are no innocents in Gaza,’” he says. “That reminds me of another era in another place, in which the attitude was the same with regard to my people, the Jewish people.”

Given the evidence of wiped out villages, the deliberate targeting of hospitals, the systematic starvation of people in the north, Cassif says he had no choice but to call it out as genocide. “How can you refer to it as anything else? You must be such a villain to try to justify this.”

The war in Gaza is about creating a greater Israel. Cassif notes Israel’s interests in natural gas fields off the coast of Gaza, and a project the US and Saudi Arabia are involved in to build a pipeline to extract those resources. The material motivation is definitely part of Israel’s agenda, he agrees with an audience question, but is far from the whole picture, given the driving seat occupied by racist bigots determined to wipe out the Palestinians as a people.

And “under the smokescreen of the genocide, there is ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.” Over 20 small communities have been entirely destroyed by settler violence in the last year, their residents forced to flee. 

Violent settlers routinely invade Palestinian homes. Some smash them up or burn them. Others just show up, take food from the fridge, and sit around smoking and drinking as a calculated humiliation of the occupants. 

Palestinians who try to stop them risk attack, not just by the settlers but by the occupying army. And lethal attacks are common enough. 

The armed settlers, whose violence is routine, become “even more vicious” at the olive harvest, when they torch olive groves, attack and even shoot dead Palestinians harvesting them. One of the solidarity actions undertaken by Israel’s Communist Youth League is to send volunteers to help Palestinians with the harvest, and Cassif was on one such mission last month, an attempt to deter or at least document settler violence.

The missions to help with the harvest are among multiple acts of defiance and resistance to Israel’s dispossession of the Palestinian people that Cassif relates.

Cassif dismisses the idea that there is much of a parliamentary opposition: besides Hadash, the Knesset is united in favour of occupation and the ongoing slaughter in Gaza. When I ask about the fractiousness of Israeli politics, the shaky coalitions and the sacking of defence minister Yoav Gallant, he answers that however divided they may be on secondary questions the coalition and opposition agree in supporting the genocide.

But he stresses the significance of the opposition on the streets, the scale of marches for a ceasefire and the safe return of the hostages, many of which Hadash has been involved in mobilising. These have met savage police violence, with even family members of hostages held by Hamas being beaten.

The government’s narrative is that opposition to genocide or the occupation amounts to support for terrorism. 

Yet Cassif is unequivocal in condemning the Hamas attack of October 7. He knew some of those killed that day; one, a close friend, texted him minutes before she and her husband were murdered.

He has no political sympathy with Hamas, which he regards as a reactionary religious organisation committed to sharia law; and he quotes Israeli fascist Bezalel Smotrich’s observation that “the Palestinian Authority is a burden, Hamas is an asset,” noting the long history of assistance to Hamas to divide the Palestinian movement by Israeli right-wingers including Benjamin Netanyahu. 

At the same time, he notes that Hamas is a major player in Palestinian society and it is not for Israelis to decide who represents them. The key point is Palestinian self-determination, which he argues is essential both as the right of every people and for the long-term future of Israel.

The Communist Party of Israel, like the Palestinian People’s Party, remains committed to a two-state solution: though down the line, Cassif says other arrangements might be voluntarily entered into by two independent states, such as a federation or even a state of defined “communities and regions” like Belgium. 

But he sees an independent Palestine alongside an independent Israel as a more realistic immediate goal, as well as the key demand of the Palestinian Authority which has been recognised as a state by over three-quarters of countries. 

Asked about the hundreds of thousands of illegal settlers in the West Bank and how these might disrupt the creation of a Palestinian state, he counters with the successful repatriation of even larger numbers of French “pied-noir” settlers in Algeria, and notes that aside from a racist hard core, the majority of Israeli settlers are motivated by Israeli government policies making it cheaper to buy property in the West Bank, and with suitable financial inducements could be convinced to leave.

Currently, there is huge mutual fear between the two nations, among Palestinians because of their daily experience of occupier violence and theft, and among Israelis because of fear the oppressed will strike back, whipped up by relentless propaganda about terrorists.

But Cassif stresses the importance of hope that things can change, seeds of which we see in the courage of a peace movement in Israel that is still protesting despite the regime’s increasingly violent intolerance.

Pointing to a huge shift in attitudes among Palestinians when Israel withdrew from Gaza in the early 2000s, with some even giving flowers and sweets to departing Israeli soldiers, he argues that once the communities have real hope of an end to the violence, all sorts of currently rejected compromises will be on the table.

Such hope must be kept alive: but it should not blind us to the darkening reality of today, with Palestine being ethnically cleansed and Israel’s government forging a more monolithic, more violent and more unashamedly racist state with each passing day. 

The world has to act, he insists — continuing to march for peace, strengthening the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against the Israeli occupation, and putting pressure on Israel — both its government and its labour movement — to stop the genocide and end the occupation.