Stop the Zionist slaughter in Gaza!

Israel’s invasion of the Gaza strip is the latest in a long line of military assaults aimed at crushing the Palestinian people’s heroic resistance to Zionism and its determination to prevent them having their own state.

Even before the tanks rolled into Gaza, the relentless aerial bombardment, with an attack every 20 minutes, has killed more than 400 Palestinians, a majority of them non-combatants, many of them children. Since the land invasion deaths have doubled and the tally of Palestinian injured has reached 3,500.

More than 2,000 have been badly injured, only to find themselves in crowded hospitals with little electricity and few medical supplies to ease their suffering. Now Gaza City is surrounded and the territory cut in two, while civilian houses and market buildings are indiscriminately blown up to batter the Palestinians into submission.

In contrast, Israel has suffered a handful of casualties as a result of the renewed rocket attacks on Israel’s southern towns, and only one civilian death. Indeed, in the last eight years Israel has suffered 20 deaths from Hamas rocket attacks while, since Israel evacuated Gaza in 2005, 1,700 Palestinians have been slaughtered in Zionist attacks, 1,300 of them since Israel left Gaza. Even during the six-month ceasefire Israel killed 22 people in Gaza, including children.

To suggest that Israel’s attack is a “proportionate” response to hit-and-miss primitive rocket attacks is to play with words. Israel’s lies Israel’s well-drilled media machine justifies the invasion with a barrage of lies. They claim they attacked Gaza because Hamas broke the six-month ceasefire in December and resumed their rocket attacks on Israeli settlements.

But the ceasefire Hamas agreed to in June was never honoured by Israel; it was understood that the Zionist’s strangulating blockade of Gaza would be substantially eased or lifted. This slow choking to death of Gaza’s population has ensured 80% of its people scrape by on $2 a day. The ceasefire agreed to open up the border crossing in the south with Egypt, but this was never down either.

Hamas’s “breaking” of the ceasefire was merely recognising reality on the ground. Israel had never stopped its attacks inside Gaza during the ceasefire, targeting Hamas leaders and killing civilians during this time. Tel Aviv’s leaders have cynically sought an excuse for an assault and invasion in time to influence the outcome of the forthcoming February general election.

The ruling Livni/Barak government was trailing badly in the polls and was poised to lose badly to the far-right Likud party, which promises to destroy Hamas completely. The present coalition hopes to steal Likud’s clothes by engineering a bloody defeat for Hamas.

Zionists to blame

The blame for the current conflict lies squarely with Israel. Since they dismantled settlements in Gaza and left in 2005 they have done everything possible to prevent Gaza being a stable viable entity, by restricting access to it by land, and by controlling its airspace and coastal waters.

Hamas was elected fairly in January 2006 by the people of Gaza. Instead of recognizing this mandate and transferring real control over Gaza to its government, Israel has colluded with Fatah inside the West Bank to ensure western governments do not recognize Hamas’s democratic victory and to do all in their power to unseat Hamas.

International reaction

The response of the US and EU governments has been predictable; they have refused to condemn the Israeli slaughter, echoing instead the Zionist lies about Hamas’s culpability in ending the ceasefire and organising rocket attacks.

President Bush sides openly with Israel, as did the new Czech EU president, who claimed the Zionists’ military onslaught was “defensive” in character. Gordon Brown was silent for a week after the attacks began, while Foreign Secretary David Miliband demanded Hamas stop its rocket attacks as a condition for Israel ending its bloody slaughter. And the US president-elect Barak Obama? He was silent for two weeks and then issued anodine words. So much for “change” and a new start in US politics: when it comes to backing Israel it is business as usual.

The United Nations continues to show how useless it is. Its humanitarian representatives on the ground in Gaza can do little other than insist – against Israeli claims – that there is a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, while they are powerless to do anything about the lack of medicines, water, energy and food. Meanwhile in New York the US for the umpteenth time vetoes a security council resolution demanding an end to Israel’s aggression.

The fact is that the US and EU remain solid backers of Israel, as they have been since 1948, because the Zionist state acts as an armed-with–nuclear-weapons gendarme in the Middle East, disrupting Arab unity and thwarting attacks on the west’s assets in the region.

No less despicable is the reaction, or lack of it, from the Arab leaders of the surrounding states and of Fatah inside Palestine Egypt’s leaders were mute until ground forces moved in – no surprise since they adamantly refused to open up the southern border crossing into Gaza, something they signed up to in the ceasefire. Even with thousands fleeing the air bombardment in December Cairo refused to open the border to Palestinians to allow them to escape the suffering.

It is in fact an open secret that Egypt, along with the arch-reactionary Gulf petromonarchies, would dearly love Israel to deal a decisive blow to Hamas, which opposes their craven co-operation with imperialism and Zionism.

Hamas resistance

In the face of this Palestinian suffering, thousands of Hamas militias, hopelessly outgunned by the high-tech US-armed Israeli airforce and army, courageously harass and delay the Israel’s advance, hoping to repeat Hezbollah’s success in 2006 in the Lebanon by exacting a high price in terms of casualties for every inch of territory they take. In this unequal contest all democrats, socialists and anti-imperialists should support Palestinian fighters using whatever weaponry they can get hold of to repel the Israeli invasion. Egypt should immediately supply anti-tank and ground-to-air missiles to the Gaza authorities.

Hamas’ fight demands solidarity but there can be no political support for Hamas inside Gaza. While its government has been welcomed by many for imposing a degree of social stability and for uprooting endemic corruption that was associated with Fatah’s rule, this has come at a high price. In the judicial and legal system Hamas has railroaded through a system of reactionary Islamic codes and penalties, while banning and persecuting non-Hamas Islamic and non-Islamic parties and media. It has enforced measures which restrict the free association, employment, education and movement of women.

Its brand of anti-democratic and religious anti-imperialism is a trap for the Palestinian people and can never hope to unify the diverse Arab and Middle Eastern people except through force and constant repression. It can certainly never win allies inside Israel for the overthrow of the Zionist state, which is a precondition for stability and justice in the region.

For a secular, bi-national socialist republic of Palestine

The present war underscores why the dream of a stable “two-state” solution to Palestine and Israel conflict is a fantasy. As long as an Israeli state exists in the region which is founded upon privileges for Jewish people and their religion, it can be no other than a reactionary, anti-democratic state.

In the first place this must be so for the 20% of the Palestinian Arab citizens trapped inside such a state, in which they are doomed to be second-class citizens, mistrusted by their government, and doomed to the worse jobs and discrimination in education. In the second place it will be anti-democratic for a growing number of Israeli Jewish citizens who see their civil rights curbed and withdrawn in the name of defending the state against external threats and “Arab terrorism”.

Any Zionist state must continue to depend on the expansion of its citizen numbers by drawing in the Jewish diaspora. And, as has been the case since 1989 in central Europe and Russia, it will only succeed in drawing in those with so little that they are glad to take possession of Palestinian land in the West Bank and East Jerusalem; or attract the legions of Jewish fundamentalists from the USA who act as frontline Zionist settlers, fuelled with hatred for those Palestinian who dare to trespass on “the land that God gave them”.

Nor is the prospect of a Palestinian ministate one to relish, deprived of real sovereignty over its borders and harassed and spied upon Tel Aviv. The end goal of the Palestinians fight must be for a unitary secular workers’ state of Palestine. This slogan affirms all that is positive in Palestinian thought on the issue to date whilst extending it, crucially,  to embrace the question of social revolution. Among other reasons this is the only means of breaking Israeli Jewish workers, or at least key sections of them, from the Zionist state.

Against the maintenance of the racist Zionist state in any form we advance a programme for a revolution based on armed councils of Palestinian workers, fighters, camp-dwellers and peasants, seeking support from those sections of the Israeli Jewish working class that can be won away from identification with imperialist interests, and from the workers of the surrounding Arab nations.

Unless the working class leads this revolution and maintains its independence then it will be super-exploited even more intensely than before and this vicious exploitation will be justified by demagogic claims about the need to make sacrifices to build the new nation.

The Palestinian workers and peasants would also need urgently to extend the revolution into the surrounding Arab states, with their stronger working classes and more industrially based and diversified economies.

The existence of huge Palestinian refugee communities in these countries makes this struggle all the more possible. For a Socialist United States of the Middle East!

*  Support the self-defence of Palestinians against Israel

* For global mass demonstrations in solidarity with Gaza’s people surround Israel’s embassies!

* For a secular, bi-national socialist workers’ republic of Palestine

Thu 08, January 2009 @ 15:30