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FRONT PAGE ARTICLES
Palestinian people resist Israeli brutality
Washington sends warships with 2,100 Marines to Yemen
 
Harris condemns Israeli aggression, calls for self-determination for Palestinians
 
Workers in Yugoslavia press fight for rights
 
Miners in Illinois defend health care
 
80,000 march for women's equality in Canada  
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The Palestinian struggle for self-determination
 
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A socialist newsweekly published in the interests of working people
Vol. 64/No. 41October 30, 2000

 
Harris condemns Israeli aggression, calls for self-determination for Palestinians
(front page)
 
The following statement was issued October 18 by James Harris, Socialist Workers candidate for U.S. president.

I urge working people and all who oppose national oppression to join protests, rallies, and forums to demand self-determination for the Palestinian people! For Washington to break all ties with the Israeli regime! For an end to the brutal violence against the Palestinian and Arab peoples! Our campaign gives unconditional support to the struggle of the Palestinian people against the Israeli state, which owes its existence to imperialism, chiefly Washington.

Our campaign also demands that Washington, instead of deepening its massive military presence in the Mideast, withdraw its warplanes, battle ships, and troops now. The U.S. government must cease its harassment of Palestinian rights activists and others of Middle Eastern descent under the guise of its "antiterrorist" campaign.

There will be no peace until the Palestinian people achieve self-determination and national liberation. Testimony to this fact is the tenacious resistance of the Palestinian people, their refusal to be cowered into submission, and their determination to maintain their national consciousness even though uprooted from their land, dispersed throughout the Mideast, and turned into a stateless people. Every person around the world fighting for dignity, against exploitation, and for democratic rights can salute and draw inspiration from the courage of Palestinian workers, farmers, and youth who are standing up against tremendous odds against a state with overwhelming firepower.

It is with the utmost hypocrisy that U.S. president William Clinton poses as a peacemaker in this conflict. The Clinton administration has supported the Zionist regime as have all its predecessors dating back to Harry Truman, who in 1948 backed the creation of the state of Israel at the expense of the Palestinian people. Despite some partisan bickering heading into the elections, both George W. Bush and Albert Gore stand behind Washington's course. It is Washington that has armed the Israeli colonial-settler regime to the teeth and has used it as a military garrison to strike against the Arab peoples. The one and only contribution U.S. imperialism can make to peace in the region is to end all military, economic, and political ties with Israel now.

Washington is seeking to enlist the support and backing of as many capitalist Arab governments as possible to pressure the Palestinian people to stop their struggle, but the violence and the daily realities of oppression by the Israeli government cannot be so easily ignored by hundreds of thousand of Palestinians.

Israel was established through the dispossession of the Palestinian people and the denial of the most basic rights of those living within it's self-defined borders. Israeli capitalists have benefited from the superexploitation of Palestinian labor, as well as the exploitation of workers who are Jewish. The Zionist state has been since its founding not only a violent bulwark denying national self-determination for the Palestinians but also the greatest threat to Israeli Jews, who have been turned into an oppressor nationality. It poses a giant obstacle to the alliance of the Arab peoples and Jewish workers and farmers against a common enemy: the capitalist state of Israel and its imperialist backers.

Washington is also using the bombing of the U.S. warship Cole, a guided missile destroyer docked in the Yemeni port of Aden, to criminalize working people. It has prodded the government of Yemen to interrogate nearly every port worker. U.S. officials are telling the media that "a significant number of people were involved," including the harbor pilot, people on the piers, and others. It has assigned the New York bureau of the FBI to the case, one with a long record of sweeps of whole neighborhoods, detentions, arrests, and other actions against Arabs and Arab-Americans in that city. Washington's assaults abroad are always combined with attempts to restrict rights of working people at home.

This brutality, exploitation, and national oppression is what capitalism and the imperialists have to offer working people around the world. Joining with and defending the Palestinian people will help deepen the struggle to win national liberation and fight to overturn capitalism itself. It will help take a step in forging an uncompromising working-class leadership. That road, not emergency summits called by the imperialists to bring "peace," is what is urgently needed today.
 
 
Related articles:
Palestinian people resist Israeli brutality
The Palestinian struggle for self-determination
Harris addresses Palestinian activists

 
 
 
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