The barbaric attack in Iran led by Netanyahu and Trump is bringing disasters upon the masses in Iran and across the region. In Iran, more than 1,300 people have perished — including more than 150 victims in a massacre at a girls’ school. In Lebanon, over 550 were killed in Israeli bombings, including more than 80 children, and hundreds of thousands were displaced from their homes. The Israeli government has also re-imposed a total siege upon the surviving population in Gaza.
As a result of the war launched by Netanyahu and Trump, working-class communities under the Israeli state are also impacted, not least Arab Palestinian residents of Israel with a far lower rate of shelter facilities, but also among Jewish working-class communities. One of the missiles in the Iranian regime’s counter-offensive hit in Beit Shemesh on 1 March a neighborhood, not far from where I live, and nine residents perished, including young teenagers. Dozens were injured.
For the communities in Beit Shemesh, who even before the onset of this bloody crisis were contending with economic and social hardships, this is a horrific tragedy. Grief is sweeping through the city’s residents. Daily life is filled with anxiety and the nights are sleepless. In my home in Beit Shemesh, similar to most of the city’s residents, there is no reinforced security room (MAMAD), and the public bomb shelters are inaccessible, being more than a walking distance away. There is no real access to protection in this situation, especially when it comes to the elderly or people with disabilities. Every siren becomes a gamble for life. Will the missile fall near our home? Will family members or friends in the neighborhood survive after this siren?
On Sunday afternoon, contrary to the statements of the Home Front Command, I — like many other residents — did not hear the siren. If it was activated, it likely happened less than half a minute before the impact. The explosion occurred in a neighborhood in the “Old Beit Shemesh” area, a nickname for several neglected poverty-stricken neighborhoods. I have many childhood memories from the street that was hit, which is now almost completely destroyed, and from the park next to it where I used to run, which is a place of recreation for many other residents.
The missile directly hit a dilapidated, long-neglected shelter beneath a synagogue. Even inside my building, located a 10-minute walk from the impact site, windows were shattered. More than 30 people entered the small shelter that was hit by the missile. Two of the fatalities were inside the shelter. Despite the fatal result, the Home Front Command claimed the shelter “met all standards”. However, it appears it was built more than 40 years ago and was not intended to withstand a strike from a ballistic missile weighing more than 400 kilograms.
What is certain is that the Israeli government of death chose to launch an attack on Iran knowing that entire communities lack shelters, and many of the existing shelters would not provide full protection against a ballistic missile.
Bruria Cohen (76) and her son Yossi Cohen (41) were inside the shelter and were killed in the direct hit. Oren Katz (46) stood in the stairwell outside the shelter and also perished. The six other residents killed were waiting outside the shelter after receiving the upcoming missile alert, but not yet hearing the siren indicating need to immediately enter the shelter: Sarah Elimelech and her daughter Ronit Elimelech, Gabriel Revaḥ (16), and the siblings Yaʿakov (16), Abigail (15), and Sarah Bitton (13). Yaʿakov was supposed to celebrate his 17th birthday that night.
Sarah Fanny Omer, a resident who managed to get inside the shelter and was saved, recounted in an interview with Haaretz that she met Sarah and Ronit Elimelech on the way. They told her they would go down to the shelter when the siren was activated, which is supposed to give a warning of at least a minute and a half. But as mentioned, the siren was not heard in my neighborhood, and residents report hearing it only moments prior to the impact.
Beit Shemesh is the third poorest city in Israel among the Jewish population. The lack of community shelters is an expression of the housing crisis and the neglect of public infrastructure — all part of a policy of austerity and the drying up of social budgets, the enforcement of poverty, and also institutionalized racist discrimination and national oppression. Among the Arab-Palestinian population, sheltering in many localities is nearly zero due to systemic discrimination. In the Negev, for example, more than 200,000 residents in unrecognized Bedouin villages have no shelters — and what is the Israeli government doing? Promoting further budget cuts for the Arab population.
Beit Shemesh is not an isolated case, and many communities in Jewish-majority localities are abandoned without sheltering. Since the beginning of the current offensive on Iran, hundreds of families in Tel Aviv have been sleeping in underground light rail stations. The enormous inequality creates a situation where more well-off households can usually afford apartments with reinforced security rooms (MAMADs), and billionaires protect themselves in “luxury shelters”, while in working-class neighborhoods and poorer communities not only are there no MAMADs, but often there aren’t any public shelters. The TAMA 38 plan (the national outline plan for renovation of aging buildings), which includes on paper the reinforcing of neglected buildings and the building of MAMADs in them, is promoted at a snail’s pace, and only subject to the profit interests of real-estate capitalists. It is not profitable for them to build in the periphery and in poorer communities. Meanwhile, at the beginning of the year, the government passed a budget of 500 million NIS for sheltering in Israeli Jewish colonial settlements in the West Bank!
The Government of Death Exploits the Blood of Victims
Netanyahu, Foreign Minister Gideon Saʿar, and the Israeli military spokesperson arrived at the scene of the impact in Beit Shemesh to exploit the blood of the victims and the poor communities and to cynically use the disaster to justify the continued aggression against Iran and across the region. “The terror regime fires at civilians and we fire at the terror regime to protect civilians”, Netanyahu said during that visit.
Netanyahu and the generals embarked on this further round of aggression in Iran while sitting in an atomic bunker, with the clear knowledge that working-class communities here would also be exposed to missile fire. The central responsibility for the disaster lies with the Israeli government of death. While socialists oppose the indiscriminate firing of missiles at population centers, the one who poses an existential threat to the masses in the region is the right-wing government of Netanyahu–Ben Gvir and its partners in the Trump administration, who are fueling the regional bloody crisis.
For the government of death, the MKs of the establishment parties in the ‘opposition’, and the elite representatives as a whole, the disaster in Beit Shemesh is merely another ‘propaganda tool’. Netanyahu said in Beit Shemesh: “We went out on this campaign to push further away from us this attempt to renew existential threats, and we also went out to create the conditions for the brave Iranian people to cast off the yoke of tyranny… If this regime of horrors has a nuclear weapon, it will threaten all of humanity”. This is how he tries to cynically exploit the disaster in Beit Shemesh. The aspiration of the government of death is not a Middle East with security, freedom, and life of dignity. And certainly not a Middle East free of nuclear weapons: the government of death itself, like its predecessors, possesses nuclear weapons with no oversight.
Only eight months ago, Netanyahu declared that “Israel has removed a double immediate existential threat — both in the nuclear field and in the field of ballistic missiles”. The government of death and senior officials in the Israeli military lied then and are lying now. They truly want to topple the Iranian regime, only not to bring democracy to the masses in Iran, but rather to replace it with a pro-Western regime, which Trump has already clarified does not have to be democratic. For this purpose, they launched the current campaign, while sacrificing the security not only of the Iranian masses, and Palestinian and Lebanese masses, but of millions of ordinary Israelis as well.
The chairman of The Democrats opposition party Yair Golan and MK Naama Lazimi from The Democrats also came to visit Beit Shemesh. Lazimi, who serves as the chair of the lobby for civil protection, supports the offensive initiated by the Netanyahu government and has limited herself, since it began, to social‑media posts focused on thanking the rescue services and local authorities. These posts contain no criticism whatsoever of the budgetary strangulation of those same local authorities, nor of the lack of protective infrastructure in their areas. Most importantly, together with the rest of the capitalist ‘opposition’ in the Knesset, Lazimi expresses zero opposition to imperialist aggression against Iran, to the full siege on Gaza imposed by the government since the start of the war on Iran, or to the bombings in Lebanon. As in many junctures over the past two years, the Israeli establishment ‘opposition’ once again reveals its true face: defending the existing social order of occupation and the rule of capital, and eternal war — despite certain differences with Netanyahu over how to manage it.
Building a Struggle Against the Government of Death and Its Regional Aggression
The disaster in Beit Shemesh highlights once again the need to build a broad struggle against the government and its entire agenda — a struggle that should also raise a demand for an emergency deployment of portable shelters based on need and without discrimination, in all localities and neighborhoods lacking protection, at the expense of the capitalists. To ensure that no more die on the altar of eternal war, we must struggle for a fundamental solution. Such a solution must include building struggle parties on both sides of the fence, against the “Super Sparta” agenda, against regional aggression, the genocidal war on Gaza and the occupation in the West Bank, against the rule of capital and for socialist change.
We demand:
- Immediately stop the imperialist aggression in Iran and the region. Demand the withdrawal of the Israeli army from Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria.
- Organize an emergency deployment of portable shelters based on need and without discrimination in all localities and neighborhoods that lack protection. Immediate emergency servicing of unfit public shelters and opening them to the public.
- No to abandoning human lives to the mercy of the market within the framework of the failed TAMA 38 plan, which is promoted at a snail’s pace and subject to the profit interests of real-estate capitalists. The state must build new public shelters and promote broad protection plans in all regions, including the periphery, neglected neighborhoods, and the discriminated Arab municipalities. Funding should be facilitated through expropriating the massive profits of the banks and corporations that robbed the public during the war.
- Yes to a cross-community and cross-border struggle to stop the war, and for reconstruction and compensation for everyone without discrimination. Yes to the expropriation of vital resources from the control of capitalists and transferring them to public ownership and democratic control, for the benefit of social investment.
- Yes to the struggle for equality, welfare, and personal security, against the rule of capital, the occupation, and imperialism, and for socialist change.
