New barbaric acts towards Palestinians
After eight days of intense bombings, the Zionist tanks and troops just invaded the Gaza Strip, a small and very dense territory in which more than one million people are locked up. Under the pretext of some rocket fire, an over-equipped army intervened out of its own territory, after having destroyed an important part of the infrastructures: all the administrative premises but also a university, schools, roads, a hospital… It would have killed 500 Palestinians and injured more than 2 000 of them. Hospitals are not able to treat people. In order to prevent accounts on its barbarism, the Israeli army prohibited the journalists and the diplomats from entering Gaza.
The government led by Olmert, who was convicted of corruption, acts under an explicit support by the Bush administration and an implicit support by Obama, according to an interview given by its adviser, whereas the president-to be was playing golf in Hawaii.
Well, certainly, the president-elect recognizes the special relationship between United States and Israel. It’s an important bond, an important relationship. He’s going to honor it … And obviously, this situation has become even more complicated in the last couple of days and weeks. As Hamas began its shelling, Israel responded. (David Axelrod, CBS, December 28, 2008)
In order to prepare its new slaughter, Israel increased the blockade, in collusion with the Moubarak government in Egypt, which closed its boarder with Rafah. Because of the Israeli blockade, 50% of the working class would be unemployed, the Gaza Strip depends on the international aid (insofar as Israel accepts it). People are suffering from power cuts more than 10 hours a day, get water only once a week. Gaza lacks medicine whereas starvation increases.
Israel rests on colonization and inevitably leads to war
After the Second World War, under the pretext of the extermination of the Jews by Nazism, the Zionists, who had searched agreements with Hitler, resorted to terrorism in Palestine and colonized it, with the support of the great powers, beginning with the United States and USSR, who had done nothing against the criminal anti-Semitism of the German State and of its stooges, including the French State.
The State which was founded in 1948 transformed a small part of the Jews of the world into oppressors. It turned the former inhabitants of Palestine and their descendants into disadvantaged Israeli citizens, into inhabitants of the two important ghettos separated by Israel (the Gaza Strip and the West Bank) which are permanently under its military threat, into oppressed refugees in camps which are ill-tolerated by the neighbor Arab bourgeois States in which they have been slaughtered everywhere by the Arab reaction at some moment (Lebanon, Syria, Jordan).
Israel is a capitalist society which economy is on a drip, with strong inequalities, with militaristic, clerical and racist trends. Israel, which is in possession of “weapons of massive destruction’, builds in the “Territories of the Palestinian National Authority” a wall which deprives more lands and suffocates the economy of the territories. Colonization is going on in Jerusalem and in the West Bank. Hundreds of Palestinians are killed every year by the occupying forces, thousands are arrested, hundreds of thousands are humiliated.
The whole experience demonstrates that the coexistence between the two States which would be equal (United Nations resolution 1397) is a mystification, since in practice, one (Israel) is stifling the economy of the other (the Territories of the Palestinian National Authority), steals its territory, kidnaps and confines its nationals, regularly wages it undeclared wars: in 2001, 2002, 2006 and 2009. Israel also invaded Lebanon from 1996 to 2000, and again in 2006.
The impasse of Arab nationalism and of Islamism
So far the Palestinians have been deceived by organizations that are controlled by the Palestinian bourgeoisie, which is submitted to the neighbour States (Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Syria…). Due to the betrayals of the USSR bureaucracy and to the subordination of the local bourgeoisie to the “communist” parties of Palestine and to other Stalinist parties of Middle-East, the Palestinians never had a workers’ revolutionary and internationalist party which could lead the national struggle in relying on the working class and on the poor peasantry of the whole region.
When Palestine became a revolutionary hotbed in the late sixties, all the components of the PLO (Fatah, PFLP, DFLP…) strayed into petty-bourgeois terrorism (hijackings, assassinations of sportsmen…), together with a refusal of fighting for a revolutionary overthrow of the neighbor Arab regimes, of all defenders of capitalism and enemies of the working class. As a result, the troops of the Jordanian monarchy, the Lebanese fascist groups and the rabble of soldiers of the Ba’athist regime have, in turn, crushed the Palestinian fighters and slaughtered the refugees from the camps. When the Palestinian people, including the women and the youth, spontaneously rose up in December 1987 (intifada), the PLO started negotiating with the United States, under Gorbatchev pressure.
During a two-hour interview with Yasser Arafat on the 9th of April 1988, the Kremin leader took an unprecedented initiative: he requests the PLO and the Arabs to recognize the existence of Israel… (Xavier Baron, Les Palestiniens, Seuil, p. 528)
On the basis of successive defeats by the Palestinians, of the restoration of capitalism in Russia and in China, the United States, the other imperialist powers and Moubarabak’s Egyptian regime have demanded the recognition of Israel, in the name of the United Nations. In 1993, in return for a rump State, Arafat and Fatah capitulated to imperialism, and in 1996 they revoked the “Palestinian Charter”. After this historical betrayal, PFLP and DFLP remained members of the PLO together with Fatah.
Since that time, the bourgeois party Muslim Brothers-Hamas started to grow. This clerical and racist party denies any Jewish presence in Palestine (there has always been one), and has proved to be more efficient in punishing the workers and young people in the Gaza Strip than in fighting against the Zionist army. Indeed, the clerical party too admits the colonization of the most important part of Palestine, provided that it is limited to the 1967 boarders.
“We admit a Palestinian State within the boarders of the 4th of June 1967…”, Mechaal claimed in Damas. He so answered to Jimmy Carter’s proposals. Last week the former American president undertook a tour in Middle-East in order to convince Hamas to support the Israel-Palestinian peace negotiations. (Le Figaro, 24th April 2008)
In the imperialist countries, the corrupt union leaderships, the parties from a Stalinist background, the Social Democrat parties supported the United Nations. Their pseudo-Trotskyist protections capitulated to Islamism (Cliffists, Pabloists, Lambertists…) or confirmed the Zionist colonization (Grantists, Hardyists, Pabloists, Altamirists, Robertsonists…).
Both Abbas’ Fatah and Mechaal’s Hamas are unable to call Jewish workers and Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Kurdish workers in that region, because they both defend the private property of capitalists and of big landowners.
The Muslim Brothers have been supported by Israel for years in order to counter PLO. Hamas, which stems from it, is funded by the capitalist and reactionary regime of Saudi Arabia, an ally of the United States, a women oppressor, a vile exploiter of immigrant workers (including Palestinians) and by the capitalist and clerical regime of Iran which supported the imperialist intervention in Iraq and oppresses its national minorities (including the Kurds), which puts down the workers’ strikes and spreads anti-Semitism.
The rockets that are shot by Hamas from Gaza are aimed to the civilian population in Israel. In the last few years Hamas, Fatah, PFLP and DFLP militias have resorted to suicide attacks against the Jewish civilian population, instead of arming the people of Palestine and of mobilizing the Egyptian, Lebanese, Jordanian, Syrian… workers against the Zionist army and the accomplice Arab regimes.
For the united front in defense of the Palestinians
There is no equality between a State which is colonizing, blocking, bombing and invading and an oppressed people which is trying to defend itself. No trust can be given to the United Nations who recognized colonization as soon as 1948, to the United States which fund and arm Israel, to the European Union which the main members fund and arm Israel, Egypt, Qatar, Turkey…
In order to defend the Palestinians, the workers must demand the urgent and effective solidarity from all the workers’ organizations of all the countries for demonstrating in Israel itself and in front of Israel embassies all over the world, for an immediate halt to the military intervention, for preventing the delivery of weapons to Israel, for supplying food, medicine and facilities to the people, for helping the Palestinian soldiers by all means:
- Immediate retreat of Israeli tanks and troops! Immediate halt of bombings on Gaza! Lifting of the blockade on Gaza and the West Bank!
- Destruction of the apartheid wall! Freedom for all Palestinian prisoners!
- No weapon, no military aid to Israel! Withdrawal of troops from Lebanon and from Iraq! Halt imperialist threats on Iran and Syria!
The best way to help the Palestinians is the fight for overthrowing Israel warmongering government and the governments which, in United States, in Europe, in the Middle-East, support the Zionist State.
For a united, secular, multiethnic Palestine, through the socialist revolution in Middle-East
The end of national oppression and of racism against the Arabs, the right of return for all the refugees, the equality of rights for all those who want to live in Palestine, Jews and Arabs, men and women, Christians, Israelites, Muslims and atheists, request the overthrow of the Zionist State and the establishment of secular, multiethnic Palestine on the whole territory of Palestine. Such a Palestine could only be a State of the workers and the peasants, since the only class which can achieve this historical task is the proletariat, since the only method is the socialist revolution and the only perspective for such a Palestine is the establishment of the socialist Federation of the Middle-East.
In order to achieve that, the workers and the young Arabs of occupied Palestine and of the “Territories” must break with Fatah and Hamas, which betrayed them and will betray them again, with a view to building a workers’ revolutionary party which will attract the Hebrew workers who reject Zionism, which will create relations with workers of Egypt, Turkey, Iraq, Iran… and also of France, Britain, the United States, Spain… with a revolutionary workers’ international.
Workers of all Middle-East, unite!
Permanent Revolution Collective
(CRP Peru, GB France, PRK Austria)