Israel wages a permanent war against the Palestinian Arabs because it is a colonial state from its design by Jewish nationalism (very much a minority before the extermination of the Jews by the racist bourgeois German state). Israel as a state has been based from its birth on the eviction of the non-Jewish inhabitants and on large scale terrorism against them; it will never ensure the Jew’s security as a state.
Such a situation of violence and oppression is lived every day through the exile of millions people, through the Arabs’ discrimination in Israel, through the continuing settlement in Jerusalem and in the West Bank, through the construction of a 700 kilometers ethnic cleansing wall, through the stocking of 1.7 million persons in the Gaza 360 km² ghetto, through the imprisonment of millions people…
Zionist colonialism periodically strikes even more openly and violently, through targeted assassinations, through raids of an over-armed state (including the nuclear weapon, in disregard for the international treaties): in June 2006 (7 Israeli deaths/200 Palestinian deaths), in December 2008-January 2009 (13 Israeli deaths/1300 Palestinian deaths), in November 2012 (6 Israeli deaths/163 Palestinian deaths), in June-July 2014 (30 Israeli deaths/627 Palestinian deaths as for now).
The inequality in defensive and offensive weapons and the imbalance in the victims show who is dominating, oppressing and assaulting, whatever incident is used as a pretext. So Sderot is presented as a martyred city by the Israeli propaganda. Actually there has been no Israeli victim in Sderot in 2014: however, some of the local residents set up on the hills with armchairs and tables for enjoying the show of the bombardment of Gaza. Nationalism and militarism stifle the struggle between classes while the capitalists exploit the waged workers and while inequalities increase.
In its barbaric manoeuvres, the Israeli government is supported by the capitalist powers, United States, Britain, France, Russia… They only see it as “the right of Israel to defend itself” (Hollande, 9th July; Obama, 10th July; Poutine, 10th July; Cameron, 12th July…). In practice, these are the Palestinians who, for 70 years, have been trying to defend themselves with minimum means against colonisation. All these leaders discuss with Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel; none of them discusses with Haniyeh, the Prime Minister of bombarded Gaza.
However, the imperialist states, even if they are rival and if they indirectly fight each other in Syria, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, are concerned with the destabilization of the local bourgeois regimes and with an outburst of the social revolution that barely started in Tunisia in 2010 and in Egypt in 2011. This explains the calls for “restraint” from the Western leaders.
Similarly, by way of precaution, the Egyptian military junta, which is, like Israel, an ally of the US imperialism, had to slightly open its border to the victims of Israel. And the Islamist Turkish government, another ally of the US imperialism, was obliged to suspend its alignment with Israel.
The Fatah is now so dependent on imperialism that the Abbas government in the West Bank collaborated with Netanyahu after the murder of three young settlers while the Israeli army was intervening on its territory in June (12 Palestinians deaths).
Only the resumption of the offensive against the Hamas, in the West Bank and in Gaza, led it to end the truce that he had followed through since 2012.
The workers and the young Palestinians cannot rely on a so-called Arab or Muslim community since all the neighbouring bourgeoisies did betray them or will do it.
The monarchy in Jordan and the Syrian nationalist Baath regime crushed the Palestinian resistance, respectively in 1970 and in 1976, at a time when Israel was favouring the Islamists.
In all the monarchies of the Gulf, the Palestinian workers are overexploited, like the other immigrants.
In Lebanon, in Syria, in Jordan, the Palestinians are kept in camps.
The Khamenei and Rohani Islamist Iranian regime physically liquidated the revolutionaries, it oppresses its own national minorities and it has started to tighten its links with US imperialism since 2013, in its own interests and without considering the plight of the Palestinians as a barrier.
The Bahraini monarchy broke the general strike and slandered the protestors in March 2011.
The Erdogan’s Turkish Islamist government suppresses May Day, imprisons thousands of revolutionary activists and suppresses the Kurdish people.
The Islamist president Morsi had recognized Israel, the Marshall Sissi participates in the sealing-off of Gaza, he suppresses its own people and he detains some 1000 or 2000 people in his prisons.
The Salafist monarchies in the Arabian Gulf, the Ayatollahs in Iran and the leaders of Palestine’s Hamas have in common the fact that they are more efficient in growing richer, in suppressing the women and young people, in banning the unions and the strikes, in defending the private ownership… than in fighting against Zionism and against the imperialist powers.
The Palestinians can only rely on the world working class for their defence. All the organizations that claim to defend the workers and socialism must demand:
- Immediate halt to the Gaza bombings and to the military incursions in Gaza and the West Bank! Lifting of the blockade of Gaza and of the West Bank! Free movement for the Palestinians all over the world!
- Destruction of the apartheid wall! Liberation of all the Palestinian prisoners! Right to return for the refugees and their descendants!
- No weapon, no military support to Israel! Withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, from Lebanon and from Iraq, departure of the US fleet from the Mediterranean sea and from the Indian ocean, closure of the imperialist military bases all over Western Asia!
Helping the Palestinians requires fighting for overthrowing all governments which, in the US, in Europe, in the Middle-East support the Zionist state.
The Palestinian bourgeoisie, whether it is Pan-Arabic (Fatah) or Islamist (Hamas), cannot liberate Palestine because it always preferred the collaboration with the bourgeois states to the mobilization of urban and countryside workers of the region, which would have led to the challenge of private ownership. The Palestinian bourgeoisie, in preaching the misleading unity of all the Arabs, or of all the Muslims, has proved unable to reach out the working class of the region and of the imperialist countries. Therefore the Palestinian workers must break with their bourgeois and petit-bourgeois leaders in order to set the mass movement and to build their revolutionary party.
Only the working class can free the Palestinian Arabs. For fulfilling this role, the workers must unite on an international scale whatever their nationality, their ethnic group, their religion are.
If workers’ revolutionary parties achieve this goal, the anticapitalist social revolution in the entire region will establish a secular, multiethnic Palestine, in which Arabs and Jews, Muslims, Israelites, Christians and atheists will be able to live together.
The workers’ and peasant government of unified Palestine only can arise from the ruins of the colonizing, racist, warmongering and colonialist state, which is the instrument of imperialism in the Middle-East. As the expression of the power of the workers’ councils, the workers’ and peasant government will abolish the borders inherited from the colonization and it will open up the perspective of the socialist federation of the Middle-East.
Workers of the world, unite!
Internationalist Marxist Collective (Columbia)
Permanent Revolution Collective (Austria, France, Peru)
Movement to Socialism (Russia)