Deliberate shooting of civilians
The American State always supported the Zionist colonial State, as it always staked on the clericalist, anti-Semitic, absolute monarchy of Saudi Arabia. With the strengthening of Iran and Russian imperialism in Syria, with some aloofness of Turkey, Trump, flanked by generals and torturer chiefs of the CIA, modified the policies of American imperialism. He reconsiders the negotiated agreement on the Iranian nuclear program, to the detriment of the peoples of Iran who believed escaping at last from the blockade; he grants the Islamist Turkish government the right to intervene in Syria and in Iraq, allowing it to slaughter with Syrian Islamists the Kurds of the PKK-PYD-KCK; he encourages the next monarch of Saudi Arabia, who imposes a blockade on Qatar and destroys Yemen; he supports the racist and militarist prime minister of Israel who strangles the Gaza strip, continues the colonisation of Jerusalem and of the West Bank, redoubles his policy of terror against Palestinians.
In to what did run, in practice, the transfer announced by Trump on December 6, 2017, of the embassy in Israel?
- On December 15, the Israeli army killed 4 Palestinians who protested and wounded 160.
- In the night from January 8 to 9, the Israeli army bombed a military base of Syria. On April 9, it repeated.
- On January 16, the American State froze more than half its payments provided for to the UNO agency for Palestinian refugees, aggravating the dramatic situation of Gaza, put under the blockade of Israel and Egypt.
- On March 30, the Israeli army fired with real bullets in Gaza on peaceful demonstrators of the March of Return: at least 17 Palestinians killed, 758 wounded. On April 6, the army fired again with real bullets: at least 9 Palestinians were killed (among whom a journalist), several hundreds wounded. On April 13, a Palestinian was killed and 120 wounded by bullets. Soldiers coldly shoot demonstrators who stand several hundred meters away from the border.
For the workers’ united front against Israeli State terrorism
France invited Israel to “restraint”. Saudi Arabia has taken up the position of two States. Jordan and Egypt have condemned the slaughter. Turkey protested more vigorously.
But Palestinians may not trust bourgeois States of the region. The monarchy of Jordan crushed the Palestinian resistance in 1970-1971. The Christian-fascists of Lebanon liquidated in 1982 thousands of Palestinian refugees, with the help of the Israeli army. The Syrian Baas regime militarily hit the Palestinian resistance in 1983. The Egyptian and Syrian governments repressed the revolutionary movement of 2011, whose victory could open a perspective for Palestinians. On April 4, the future king of Arabia declared that Israel had the right to exist.
I believe the Palestinians and the Israelis have the right to have their own land. (Mohammed bin Salman, The Atlantic, 2 April 2018)
Most neighbouring States overexploit Palestinian refugees or migrant workers, and discriminate against them. Iran and Turkey oppress their national minorities, among which Kurds. Turkey is still member of the NATO led by the United States. Turkey and the Gulf monarchies helped Islamist-fascists who oppressed women in Syria and in Iraq, who exterminated worker activists, religious minorities, and national minorities. Egypt gets weapons and money from the United States, it blocks the Gaza strip.
The best aid to Palestinians is the struggle to overthrow the governments that support the Zionist State. In the whole world, foremost in the United States and in Israel, all organisations calling upon workers must demand:
- End the ongoing colonisation in East Jerusalem and in the West Bank!
- Lift the blockade of Gaza by Israel and Egypt!
- Destroy the apartheid wall!
- Free all Palestinian prisoners!
- Right to return for refugees and their descendants!
- No weapon, no military aid for Israel!
- No military threat against Syria or Iran!
Zionism feeds anti-Semitism
The world working class is, on this question as others, paralysed by the policies of its leaderships. The labour or social-democratic parties, the parties arising from Stalinism, support the “two-State” solution of the UNO, as do several centrist organisations: SPEW, SAlt, AWL, LO, NPA … This amounts to put on the same footing a colonial State supported by all imperialisms and an oppressed nation. This amounts to ratify the violent colonisation of a large part of Palestine and the creation of Bantustans under the boot of Israel in the rest of the territory.
That is why, in this case, the fundamental interest of proletarian class struggle, requires that we never adopt a formal attitude to the national question, but always take into account the specific attitude of the proletarian of the oppressed (or small) nation towards the oppressor (or great) nation. (Lenin, December 31, 1922)
The Israeli State and the Zionist movement, the American imperialism and its deputies try to liken anti-Zionists to anti-Jewish racists. For instance, in France, Mélenchon, the leader of Unsubdued France, was expelled on March 28 from a protest demonstration against a sordid crime tainted with anti-Semitism. His crime? To support the campaign of boycott of Israel (BDS)! Another example, the British bourgeois press accused, once more, Corbyn, the elected leader of the Labour Party, of anti-Semitism. His crime? To have spent the evening of April 2 with Jewdas, a group of non-Zionist Jews of his constituency!
Certainly, one finds anti-Zionists who are anti-Semites, but there are also many pro-Zionists who are anti-Semites, following Lord Arthur Balfour or Lord Winston Churchill. The pro-Zionist governments of the United States and of the European Union maintain narrow links with Islamist absolute monarchies that spread in the whole world the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic forgery fabricated in 1901 by the Czarist police and abundantly cited by Hitler.
Internationalist communists, who since 170 years fight racism and colonialism, have no lesson to receive from the likes of Trump and Netanyahu. The Zionist movement itself often accommodated with anti-Semitism at the beginning of the XXth century, since these two reactionary currents shared the idea that Jews were inassimilable in the countries where they lived. Facing the worst anti-Semitism in history, Jewish bourgeois nationalism barely opposed the “3rd Reich” and some of its leaders even collaborated with the Nazis. It is after the 2nd World War that the Holocaust served as pretext for the Zionist bourgeoisie to colonise Palestine.
The Israeli State is built upon racism and violence against Arabs of Palestine. The Zionist project is to refuse the integration of Jews in countries where they live and to settle them all in Palestine, which has been the ground of multiple ethnic mixings and of violent religious competitions. The Israeli State was established in 1947 with the support of the United States, France, Great Britain and the USSR. In 1948, during the Nakba, 700 000 Palestinians fled the Israeli army and its abuses. The Israeli Labour Party and the Zionist labour union Histadrut demanded to exclude Arabs from employment.
Thus, Jewish bourgeois nationalism transformed a minority of the world’s Jews into oppressors. The consequence has been the persecution and forced emigration of Jews settled since two thousand years in North Africa and in the Middle East, who were not colonists but who served as scapegoats to Arab bourgeois nationalist regimes. Zionism also facilitated the nauseating anti-Semitism of Islamists everywhere in the world.
For a Palestine unified through socialist revolution
To obtain from the UNO and the United States a State beside Israel, pan-Arabic bourgeois nationalism (Fatah, FDLP) signed the Oslo agreements in 1993 (only the FPLP opposed it, while remaining in the PLO led by Arafat). The result has been the continuation of the colonisation of Jerusalem and of the West Bank, the construction of the apartheid wall, the repeated destruction of the Gaza strip in 2008, 2012 and 2014, the systematic repression, the assassinations and imprisonments of Palestinians. Another consequence has been, for want of a proletarian perspective, the rise of Islamism formerly a small minority (Hamas, Jihad…) among Palestinians. This allowed the Hamas to take control of the Gaza strip.
But the Hamas and the Fatah have in common to be led by bourgeois, to oppose the struggle of the Palestinian proletariat, to depend on neighbouring bourgeois States and to be unable to speak to workers in Israel (Arabs or Jews). Besides, they got closer during these last months under the pressure of general Al-Sissi, the president of Egypt who represses any political opposition and participates to the blockade of Gaza.
The end of national oppression against Palestinian Arabs requires the destruction of the State of Israel, racist, warmonger and colonialist, tool of Western imperialism in Western Asia. Against all bourgeoisies (American, Hebrew, Arab, Turkish, Persian …), the mobilisation of workers in Jerusalem, in the West Bank, in Gaza, in Israel, in Jordan, in Turkey, in Egypt, in Tunisia … will allow to establish a secular and multi-ethnic Palestine over the whole territory of Palestine, in which Arabs and Jews, Muslims, Israelites, Christians and atheists will be able to live together. Jerusalem, with its multicultural traditions would probably be the capital of this workers’ State. Such a Palestine would be viable only by the extension of revolution, the abolition of frontiers inherited from colonisation and the establishment of the socialist federation of the Levant. Only a workers’ international (and revolutionary workers’ parties in each country) can lead such a fight.
The working class, rallying farmers and students, is the social force that is able to liquidate Zionist colonisation in Palestine and imperialist domination on Western Asia, to emancipate youth and women, to give land to farmers, education to youth, jobs for all and to ensure economic development.
April 14, 2018
Permanent Revolution Collective
Internaciema Kolektivista Cirklo / Spanish State
Patronsuz Dünya / Turkey
Tendência Marxista-Leninista / Brazil