Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine

A memorandum addressed to friendly parties about the war of annihilation practised by the Israeli occupation in the Gaza Strip and the Palestinian territories

Dear comrades, militant greetings,

 Since 2007, the Gaza Strip has witnessed a severe and illegal siege in which the occupation imposes complete control over land, sea and air crossings, causing a severe humanitarian crisis. The occupied Palestinian territories are witnessing an unprecedented escalation of the occupation’s crimes, which included repeated incursions into Jerusalem, the Palestinian West Bank, and Palestinian Islamic and Christian holy sites, which led to cold-blooded killings of civilians, arbitrary arrests of children and women, home demolitions and confiscation of land, in addition to increasing the pace of settlement and continuing the siege of the Gaza Strip.
Now the residents of the Gaza Strip, inhabited by more than two million Palestinians who suffer from deteriorating living conditions, are being exposed, as a result of an ongoing Israeli siege, to a horrific crime that amounts to war crimes of genocide and crimes against humanity, in which entire residential neighbourhoods containing thousands of homes and residential towers were demolished, and massacres of murder were committed.
Hundreds of Palestinian families, and about half of Gaza's population was displaced from their homes.
While the Israeli occupation forces had killed thousands of citizens in Gaza during five multiple and successive wars on the Strip (2008-2014-2018-2021-2022).
So far, they have killed more than 3,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including about 500 children and nine thousand wounded.
It continues to bomb civilians, public and private property, and infrastructure, as well as cutting off supplies of water, electricity, food, and other basic facilities to the Strip. 
The Israeli occupation in the West Bank killed more than 54 Palestinians in one week and wounded more than 1,100.
Today, the Israeli entity has revealed an old-new plan aimed at displacing our people in the Gaza Strip towards Egypt in a transfer process and a major crime that brings to mind the Nakba of 1948, but our people will remain committed to their land and resist the occupation by all means and forms, and if anyone is to leave the land of Palestine, it is the Zionist occupation.
The Israeli occupation and some Western countries, led by the United States of America, are carrying out a systematic and widespread media campaign to deceive world public opinion and falsify the facts about what “Israel” is carrying out in terms of a war of genocide against Palestinian civilians. 
They portray the Israeli entity as a victim and being subjected to killing at a time when their deceptive methods have been exposed by publishing pictures of wounded children from Gaza as Israeli children, to make it clear that they do not have any evidence that the Palestinian resistance killed Israeli children.
The Al-Aqsa Flood operation came in response and in defense of the rights and dignity of our people, who are suffering from the longest occupation in history, and who are exposed every day to terrorism, murder, and arrest at the hands of war criminals in the Israeli enemy entity. 
The Al-Aqsa Flood battle confirmed the fragility of the occupation forces, which have lost their prestige before the entire world.
Our people demand that all free and honorable people in the world intervene immediately and seriously to stop the Zionist crimes against the civilian population in the Gaza Strip and the occupied Palestinian territories. 
We also call for exerting maximum pressure on the occupying entity to lift the siege on the Gaza Strip, release prisoners, stop settlement activity, and stop the war of extermination and mass massacres that occupation forces are practising.
We demand that full protection be guaranteed to the Palestinian people in accordance with international law and the Geneva Conventions. 
We also call on international courts, especially the International Criminal Court, to open an investigation into the crimes committed by the occupation authorities.
We call for exposing the Israeli propaganda that receives support in Western media circles, and we call for the refutation of the deceptive narratives of the Zionist media and some journalists and media professionals in many Western countries who promote the false Zionist narrative of the truth.
Our steadfast people on the land of Palestine today face a war of extermination carried out by the Israeli occupation forces, supported by the United States of America, which has become a partner and party leading this aggression, which is also blatantly supported by some Western countries that seek to protect the Zionist entity and its continued occupation of our land and our country.
Our heroic people, the people of the free and the martyrs, will not kneel or retreat, and will continue the struggle and resistance until their full inalienable national rights are restored and their independent state is built on the land of Palestine.
Stopping the Zionist aggression, the war of extermination and population displacement is the duty of all honourable and free people in the world. We are confident that you will support our people and our just cause.

with our deepest regards

Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
15th October 2023

Justice for the Palestinians!

Rage on the Arab street. Protests throughout the Global South and huge demonstrations in Britain and the rest of the Western world. The world has reacted with horror, shock and anger at Israel’s relentless bombardment of the Palestinian Arabs in the beleaguered Gaza Strip.
Tower blocks razed to the ground.Whole streets smashed to bits. Even hospitals are, as we have seen, not immune from the onslaught. 
Israel has cut-off basic supplies like electricity, water, food and fuel. Over 3,000 Palestinians have been killed in under nine days, over a thousand of them children. That's one child in every 15 minutes of Israel's assault. Gaza is experiencing massacre after massacre.  
The Palestinians are calling on the world to stand by them to halt the slaughter and end the brutal Zionist occupation and colonisation of the West Bank. They are calling on the world to uphold the promises made to the Palestinian Arabs in 1948.They want the Great Powers to honour the resolutions upholding the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people –he end to the occupation, the right to return and  the right to self-determination that are repeatedly passed by the world forum to end the fighting but routinely ignored by Israel and its imperialist masters when the price of Arab oil falls on the world market. 
Zionism is based on four myths. The first is that all Jews are descendants in one way or another of the ancient Israelite tribes. The second is that therefore all Jews have a “divine” right to Palestine based on a legendary covenant that the Israelite tribes made with their god during the Bronze Age. The third is that Jews need a state of their own as a safe-haven from pogroms and persecution. And the final one is that Israel is an independent country whose policies are determined by their elected leaders.
While the meaning of the Covenant is best left to religious scholars it is certainly not a divine title deed to land that was inhabited by others long before Abraham and Isaac and long after most of the Jewish population was dispersed by the Romans following an abortive revolt against Roman rule in 70 AD.
We can also see that the modern state of Israel is far from being a sanctuary for Jews. It is, in fact, one of the most dangerous places for Jews to live and this is entirely because Israel’s Zionist leaders consistently refuse to recognise the rights of the Palestinian Arabs. And they themselves are just pawns of imperialism.
Israel supported a futile Anglo-French move to overthrow the Egyptian government and regain control of the Suez Canal in 1956. They then turned to the Americans when  US imperialism became the dominant force in the Middle East. 
Israel is an American protectorate in all but name. It would and could not survive in the Arab world without the billions of dollars that keep its war-machine going and its economy afloat. And ultimately it relies on American military know-how and American military might to key the Arabs at bay. That’s why American aircraft carriers, backed by the Royal Navy and other NATO warships, are now patrolling the Israeli coastline.
The imperialists think rockets and drones can crush the Palestinians. But that’s what they thought in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan too...

A slap in the face for the Israeli security system

by Fouad Baker
Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) 

No one expected that this would be the response of the Palestinian resistance to the plan of the fascist and racist Israeli occupation government based on Judaisation, displacement, expansion of settlements, annexation of lands, storming the courtyards of Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Palestinian camps in the West Bank, administrative arrests, and the liquidation of the Palestinian cause and the national rights of the Palestinian people.
  Although Israel possesses the latest technologies, its security system failed to protect the settlers living on stolen Palestinian land. A number of Palestinian resistance fighters were able to cross the border fence separating the Gaza Strip and the settlements killing dozens of settlers and taking others prisoner back to the Haza Strip.
  Some  5,000 missiles  were fired from the Gaza Strip towards these illegal settlements, which paralysed the Israeli ‘Iron Dome’ and the Israeli security system. The joint Palestinian operations room, which includes all the Palestinian factions, took part in this military operation. The most prominent of which were Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine...
The news was greeted with astonishment in the West Bank. Astonishment at the success of  the military operation carried out by the Palestinian resistance in the Gaza Strip. Celebratory marches in Palestinian cities in the occupied territories soon led to clashes with Israeli troops.
  Israeli troops opened fire on Palestinian demonstrators in towns throughout the West Bank and an Israeli police station was torched in Jerusalem
The Palestinian resistance called the attack on the Israeli settlements located on the border of the Gaza Strip ‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’.
The offensive was designed to regain the initiative and block Saudi-Israeli normalisation, which aims to liquidate the Palestinian cause and deprive them of their national rights. Rights which include the right of the refugees to return to their land, ending the Israeli occupation, establishing an independent Palestinian state.
The Israelis called the “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation a terrorist operation, ignoring the fact that they are the occupiers of lands belonging to the Palestinian people. If they want real peace in the Middle East they must end the occupation.
The Palestinian operation exposed the weakness of Israeli intelligence that failed to discover the resistance plan despite all the support from the USA, and the failure of Israel’s surveillance and espionage programmes such as their Pegasus spyware which they’ve also sold to some Arab regimes.
The operation’s success was down to the full coordination between the Palestinian resistance factions working in complete secrecy. 
The Palestinian bet on using parachutists to penetrate the border fence in the Gaza Strip to destroy Israeli tanks and open the way to the advance towards the illegal settlements worked.
     The emergence of a qualitative development in the work of the Palestinian resistance, which transformed primitive rockets and simple shells into semi-precise missiles that reach deep into Israel enabled it to capture Israeli soldiers to use in negotiations for the release of the Palestinian prisoners languishing in Israeli prisons for decades.
The Al-Aqsa Flood operation was launched only after all diplomatic means had been exhausted. It was a specific confrontation due to the racist policy implemented by the Israeli occupation government headed by Benjamin Netanyahu. It was a move to prevent the Arab regimes from signing peace agreements with Israel and derail American attempts to build economic blocs in the region to besiege China, Iran, and Russia – the most recent of which is the India-Middle East-Europe ‘corridor’.
The Israeli response to the Palestinian offensive has been to bomb the Gaza Strip including residential tower blocks and other civilian targets resulting in over 250 Palestinian martyrs and hundreds more wounded.
But the fascist Israeli government wants to avoid a long and multi-fronted conflict as it knows that any military operation that crosses the red line will ignite the Middle East in defence of the Palestinian people, as happened in the October War of 1973.
In the occupied territories, the refugee camps in Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan and the Palestinian communities in Europe the people are rallying behind the defence of the Gaza Strip. Support is coming from Iraq, Yemen and Syria and the Lebanese resistance has already intervened...
Around the world social networking sites are ablaze with congratulations to the Palestinians for this qualitative military operation while the Arabs took to the streets with fireworks and sweets to celebrate a Palestinian victory that has been seen since the birth of Israel in 1948.
Those who think that the Palestinian people can be fobbed of with email messages of support or agree to becoming political pawns of the Great Powers are only fooling themselves. The deluded are those who think that the Palestinian people will accept political settlements that do not meet demands that recognise their legitimate national rights. And the most delusional are those who think that peace in the Middle East can be achieved without real justice and an end to the Israeli occupation of the occupied Palestinian territories.
Just as the Battle of Saif al-Quds in Gaza in 2021 ended a stage in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Al-Aqsa Flood operation opened a new page in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

As ye sow…

...so shall ye reap was what Paul told the followers of Jesus of Nazareth two thousand years ago. Sadly this lesson is still not understood by many of those who now live in the land that the Apostle knew so well.
The deadly Hamas raid into Israel last weekend that killed over a thousand Israelis and wounded thousands more reflected the pent-up fury of the Palestinian masses in the Gaza Strip who have endured a brutal and often bloody Israeli siege for years. Ignored by the West which has armed Israel to the teeth and betrayed by the feudal Arab oil princes who crawl to the imperialists whose guns prop up their thrones the Palestinians in Gaza have closed ranks behind the Hamas leadership and the other resistance movements that believe that confrontation is the only way forward.
While the Israelis pound the densely populated settlements in the Gaza Strip they are amassing their forces for a new onslaught. Many thousands of Palestinians will die in the carnage that will inevitably follow.
Assured of blanket Western support the Israelis are clearly out to crush all Palestinian resistance to their occupation. But they never learn.
This seemingly endless cycle of violence started when the first Arab-Israeli war began in 1948. The Palestinians were driven from their homes and robbed of their land. But wherever there is oppression, there is resistance.
The refugees have the right to return or receive compensation, if they so want it, for their stolen land. The Palestinians have the right to self-determination; to establish their own independent state as was envisaged by the same United Nations that created the State of Israel in the first place. 
The Palestinians remained determined to fight. They still are and they still will be no matter what the Israelis throw at them.
Russian and Chinese calls at the United Nations for a cease-fire and genuine peace talks to end the conflict were, of course, routinely ignored by the Americans and their lackeys. They still think that victory comes through air-superiority and hi-tech weapons. Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan proved them wrong. And they’ve been taught no end of a lesson in Palestine...  

a sham democracy

Delegates overwhelmingly re-affirmed their commitment to the renationalisation of the railways and the energy industry at their annual conference in Liverpool last week. But any hopes for a restored public sector under a future Labour government were soon dashed when
the Starmer leadership made it clear that this simply wasn’t going to happen. Shadow business secretary Jonathan Reynolds told the BBC "we're not going to nationalise the energy system". Asked if they would follow the vote, he said "No".
One wonders why Labour bothers to have a conference in the first place when decisions the leadership doesn’t like are simply ignored.
The social-democrats closed ranks with the bourgeois parties to trumpet their so-called “democratic” values during the Cold War. They called imperialist hegemony the “free world and said  the Soviet Union and the people’s democracies were dictatorships no better than those the Allies defeated in the Second World War.
They say we have free speech and live in a democracy but its democracy and freedom only for them. In fact bourgeois democracy is democracy only for the exploiters. It’s dictatorship in all but the formal sense for the exploited. Bourgeois elections are used so that the smallest number of people can manipulate the maximum number of votes. It is, in fact, a sham – much like Labour conference last week.

Only one choice...

Some of the childish elements on the left would have us believe that nothing could be worse than a Labour government led by Sir Keir Starmer. But last week’s Tory conference showed that no matter how bad the current Labour leadership is, the Tories are much, much worse.
There, in Manchester,  nonsensical talk about raising the retirement age to 75 was taken seriously while the former UKIP leader, Nigel Farage, who was covering conference for GB News, virtually outshone everyone on Rishi Sunak’s front bench.
Though Rishi Sunak had hinted that the former Brexit campaigner would be welcomed back by the party he left in 1992 no one seriously thinks it will ever happen, least of all Farage who says he’s not even interested in returning to Sunak’s “broad church”,.
But working till you drop could happen if former Brexit negotiator Lord Frost has his way. The Tory grandee told delegates that “the honest truth is that the pension age is going to have to go up quite a long way to solve this problem [of reducing public expenditure],That seems to me the best way of getting out of it in the medium term”.
“The big blocks of spending are health, pension, and benefits,” says the noble lord. “If you don’t tackle those you’re not really tackling anything. People are much healthier than they used to be and I think [the pension age] does need to go up,” he said. Asked whether it should be raised to 70, he replied “75, it’s quite a lot higher”.
Needless to say this is too much for even the Blairites to swallow. And as we’re in the run-up to the next general election there will, thankfully, be few takers in the Sunak camp for Frost’s draconian plan.  But this is what we’re up against.
Crawling to the Americans isn’t just about preserving British imperialism’s interests around the world or upholding the “special relationship” with what some Tory politicians still regard as our “trans-Atlantic cousins”. It’s about admiring the unfettered capitalist system that operates in the United States – a billionaires’ playground that’s hell on earth for the poor,  and the sick and the elderly who cannot afford to pay for treatment in the “land of the free”. This is what they want here. Liz Truss leads the pack but there’s plenty more that agree with her free-for-all neo-con economics that nearly brought Britain to its knees during her brief spell in office last year. 
The social-democrats may not be much better. The slavish support of their leaders for what they think is the dominant section of the ruling class has led to betrayal after betrayal.   
 But the possibility of change remains as long as Labour retains its links with the trade unions and the co‑operative movement.
We need to defeat the right‑wing within the movement and strengthen the left within the Labour Party and the unions to create a democratic Labour Party that will carry out the demands of organised labour when in office.
Bourgeois democracy is a fraud. It is democracy for the exploiters and dictatorship in all but a formal sense of the exploited. Bourgeois elections, when they are held, are used so that the smallest number of people can manipulate the maximum number of votes.
Standing left candidates without mass support against Labour only divides the movement and ignores the obvious fact that, at the moment, the only realistic alternative to a Tory government is one led by Labour.

All smoke and mirrors

Quite why the Foreign Office has chosen to leak details of secret talks with the Russians at this time remains a mystery to the bourgeois media that unquestioningly published the story earlier in the week.
These sort of clandestine talks were, of course, the norm during the Cold War.  Hot lines and secret diplomatic exchanges via go-betweens in neutral countries remained open during the height of the imperialist confrontation with the Soviet Union. Vital links for spy deals, prisoner swaps and back-door channels to avoid misunderstandings that could rapidly escalate into a nuclear war that neither side could win. But if we are to believe the Foreign Office the only matters raised with the Russians at a number of covert meetings around the world were on routine issues of grain supplies and nuclear safety. These are issues that could usually be dealt with at ambassador level. They certainly would not normally justify covert liaisons in all sorts of places like New York and Vienna.
The Foreign Office is at pains to stress that at no point has the UK sought to enter peace talks around finding a diplomatic end to the conflict. If so what was the point of all these cloak-and-dagger meetings?
We can only guess at what was on the agenda but one thing’s for sure, and that is that the British envoys were acting as errand boys for the Americans. Though the Americans have been quite open about their own talks with the Russians they like to use trusted allies, like Britain and Japan, to raise issues without compromising their own position  in advance of any future direct negotiations.
Though Boris Johnson liked to pose as the man who persuaded  the Ukrainians to go for total war and break off peace negotiations with the Russians last year everybody knows that Johnson was only doing the bidding of Joe Biden and the American war-lobby which has used the conflict to tighten their grip over all their European allies.
Ukraine is essentially a protectorate of US imperialism. A vassal state that fights with NATO’s guns and lives on imperialist aid only keeps up the fight because the war is still in the American interest. 
No-one, beyond the chosen few in America’s ruling circles, knows what Biden’s war aims are but he’s clearly has got most of what he wanted when the war US imperialism provoked broke out in February 2022. NATO has taken over the once neutral states of Scandinavia. Russian gas and oil exports to Europe have been cut and US imperialism is now supreme in the UK and the European Union. It has come at a price that has largely been paid in blood by the hapless Ukrainians. But it has also cost the American tax-payers plenty in billions of dollars-worth of military supplies that can never be repaid. Now that bill is coming under scrutiny in the run-up to the next US presidential election.
Donald Trump is on the come-back trail claiming he could stop the Ukraine war in a day by talking directly to Putin. On the other hand the Democrats, still unsure on whether Biden is capable of fighting the next election, want to concentrate on their domestic reform platform which they believe will secure them a second term in office. They need a cease-fire to stop this becoming a campaign issue. But only time will tell whether the Biden administration is now ready to seriously talk about ending the war.