The death toll alone speaks volumes about the character of Tel Aviv's occupation. Israeli rifle and machine gun fire, tank shells, and helicopter-launched missiles have taken the lives of more than 300 Palestinians since the crackdown began at the end of September. Some 10,000 others have been wounded, many of them seriously and permanently.

Reports from Gaza describe another all-to-familiar side to this occupation. The Israeli government uses its domination over the occupied territories to target Palestinian workers and farmers. Government "security measures" and settlement expansion plans mean Palestinian farms and houses are often destroyed by armored cars and bulldozers, frequently destroying the livelihoods and life savings of thousands. In Gaza alone, hundreds of acres of farmland have been devastated in this way over the past several months.

These methods pursued by Tel Aviv are simply aimed at terrorizing working people who are Palestinian and reasserting by force the oppression of the Palestinian people. They are a continuation of the very means by which Israel was formed and expanded as a heavily armed garrison state--through the eviction of much of the Palestinian population, through wars of conquest against its neighbors, and through nonstop brutality against Palestinians inside Israel and in the region. This is the source of, and guarantees, further conflicts, wars, and bloodshed.

The great majority of Jewish people who live in Israel have no objective stake in this setup. The garrison state is a death-trap for Jews. The actions of the Israeli government and military, carried out falsely in the name of the Jewish people, divide Jewish and Palestinian working people from each other, in the absence of a leadership that speaks clearly of the need for unity in the fight against the capitalist regime. A Palestinian farmer who recently lost his land to the Israeli military's bulldozers summed up the problem: the government's actions "teaches [children] hatred of the Jews," he said. Adding, "That's not what we taught them."

The political questions tied up in the history and modern reality of the state of Israel, and the national struggle by the Palestinian people merit the closest study by vanguard workers and working farmers. The structure and character of an oppressed people on a world scale, and the concrete nature of the state of Israel as an oppressor nation, are important questions addressed in a number of titles published by Pathfinder. The books place both the fight against anti-Semitism and the Palestinian liberation fight in their true place, as part of the fight of workers and farmers to overthrow imperialist exploitation and capitalist brutality.

Several of those books and pamphlets are being offered at special rates to Readers Club members by the working-class publisher during the holiday period. We urge readers of the Militant to take advantage of these specials and to join together with others to discuss these books.

Doing so is part of the fight to win tens of millions around the world to the revolutionary struggle for a democratic, secular Palestine.
 
 
Related article:
Israel's Barak resigns, rulers' divisions deepen  
 
 
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