Vol. 73/No. 4      February 2, 2009

Working people should demand an immediate end to the military and economic blockade of Gaza. Open all border crossings.

The Israeli assault killed more than 1,300 Palestinians, wounded 5,000, left tens of thousands homeless, damaged 1,500 factories and workshops, and caused nearly $2 billion of destruction.

Tel Aviv insists it has the right to review every item entering Gaza and requires its approval for every person traveling there to help with rebuilding.

The protests by hundreds of thousands around the world against the Israeli aggression took place in the context of the deepening capitalist economic crisis driven by a worldwide contraction in production. These actions became an avenue to protest the assault on fellow working people in Gaza and to give expression to the growing anger at rising unemployment, cuts in health care and education, and other attacks on our living standards. For many demonstrators, including the 12,000 in Washington, D.C., and others at several protests in New York and other cities, these were their first political actions.

The resistance to the spreading capitalist disorder and wars, of which these actions are a part, registers the growing openness of workers and youth to the need to take power out of the hands of the capitalist rulers around the world as the only way to end imperialist wars and assaults—whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Palestine—and to build a society based on human needs not profits.

The actions of Hamas confirm that far from being a liberation movement it is a bourgeois party that is an obstacle to the fight against the Israeli assaults, the economic blockade, for land and water rights, freedom of political prisoners, and the right to travel. Its course over several years left the vast majority of Palestinians unprepared for the Israeli assault and all but ensured the Israeli victory. Fatah is no better. While the Israeli assault was going on, it broke up Palestinian demonstrations in the West Bank.

Tel Aviv has abandoned its dreams of a “Greater Israel.” Instead it fenced off Gaza, including a one-third-mile-wide “buffer” zone that affects a large part of the area’s farmland. And it is still building a wall through the West Bank to separate Palestinians and Israelis and set up a smaller, more defensible Israeli state.

Israeli Arabs, a growing part of the Israeli population, are becoming more assertive in demanding their democratic rights, as well as opposing Tel Aviv’s economic and military assaults on Gaza.

Tel Aviv’s victory in Gaza will not halt these fights by Israel’s Palestinian citizens or the people of Gaza and the West Bank.

Their struggles can open the road towards the fight for a democratic secular Palestine where all who live there—Jews, Arabs, Muslims, Christians, and nonbelievers—have the same rights and protections.
 
 
Related articles:
End Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip!
Over 1,300 dead as Israeli troops withdraw
Socialist candidates say ‘End U.S. aid to Israel!’
Australia to Minnesota: No to Israeli assault!
Tel Aviv asked for U.S. help to bomb nuclear site in Iran  
 
 
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