Vol. 73/No. 2      January 19, 2009

We must also demand that Washington end its massive aid to Israel. The U.S. government played a major role in establishing the state of Israel in 1948 on land that belonged to Palestinians. The goal was to have a firm ally in the Middle East for the imperialist powers that would keep the Arab masses in line.

In 2005 Israel withdrew its occupation troops and settlers from Gaza and the West Bank and permitted the Palestinian Authority to take over local government. But Tel Aviv rejects any moves toward genuine self-determination for the Palestinians, be it the right to return to their land or the right to be treated as equals in employment, land use, and religious and cultural freedom.

The fact that more than 60 years after its founding, the state of Israel has to once again go to war to maintain its forcible expulsion of the Palestinian majority is one more confirmation of its failure as the “promised land” for Jews. Israel can only survive by continuing to fight the Palestinian people.

The regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan have been complicit with Israel in its Gaza attack, blaming Hamas for the Israeli assault. Fatah, the Palestinian group Hamas ousted from power in Gaza in 2006, has broken up demonstrations in solidarity with Gaza by Palestinians on the West Bank.

The challenge facing working people in Palestine—Arab and Jew—is how to organize an effective fight against the Israeli rulers. That course, the fight for a democratic, secular Palestine, would represent a mortal threat to the Arab bourgeois regimes in the region as well—a course once embraced by the Fatah-led Palestine Liberation Organization.

Neither Fatah nor Hamas are leading a fight along these lines today and block the capacity of Palestinian workers and farmers to mobilize in an effective fight to win back their land and their rights.

A road forward can come only out of the response of new generations of working people and youth in the fight for land, jobs, unions, the release of political prisoners, an end to discriminatory laws, for the rights of women, and ultimately against capitalist rule itself. Such a course could unite and mobilize both Palestinian and Jewish workers and farmers. A democratic, secular Palestine offers the only realistic solution to the permanent conflict world imperialism imposed back in 1948 on the working people of the Middle East. Fighting today to get the Israeli troops out of Gaza and to end the economic blockade are key steps toward opening political space for the workers and youth in the occupied territories and in Israel itself to a new generation of fighters.
 
 
Related articles:
Hundreds in Gaza killed in assault
Gaza invasion sparks international protests  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home