Keep up the fight for Palestinian rights!

Though the prisoner exchange between Hamas and the Israelis may bring about a temporary halt in the fighting there can be no let up in the campaign for a permanent cease-fire and an end to the siege of the Gaza Strip. 
The Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) quite  rightly says that “while a temporary truce is welcome it is not a solution. We won’t stray from our demands. We demand a permanent ceasefire and an end to the siege of Gaza and to Israeli apartheid”.
. Next week’s national demonstrations in London, Cardiff and Glasgow must go ahead and the campaign must continue to mobilise mass pressure throughout the labour and peace movement not only to end the fighting but to restore the legitimate rights of the Palestinian Arabs.
Truces and armistices may have brought about temporary pauses in the Arab-Israeli war that began with the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. But they never led to a permanent end to the conflict let alone the “comprehensive, just and lasting peace” that the imperialist leaders pretend to support while ensuring that it can never be achieved.
The first war led to the expulsion of around a million Palestinian Arabs from their homes by the Zionist regime. Those refugees and their descendants have never given up their right to return to their land. And this is the heart of the crisis in the Middle East that has led to five full‑scale wars and continuing simmering conflicts.
The Zionists still dream of dominating the Middle East and colonising Palestine. But their petty ambitions are not the driving force of American imperialism.
Israel is an American protectorate – economically and politically entirely dependent on US imperialism. Israeli governments exist simply to serve the needs of American imperialism in the region. And those needs are to weaken and divide the Arabs to ensure that the big oil corporations can continue their exploitation and plunder of Arab oil until it eventually runs out.
We are, once again hearing the Americans talk about a “two-state” solution. This was, indeed, the basis for the partition of the British colony in 1948 which gave the Palestinian Arabs 44 per cent of their land with Jerusalem under an international administration. It is also the basis of the current UN proposals that simply call for Israel to withdraw from the Palestinian territories they seized in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war to allow the Palestinian Arabs to establish their own independent state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with Arab East Jerusalem as its capital.
But what the Americans are talking about doesn’t even go that far. Their “two-state” solution would see the Israelis retaining all their West Bank settlements in exchange for  worthless desert in Israel that would be attached to the Gaza Strip and what’s left of the Arab West Bank for the establishment of a powerless “state” whose independence would barely stretch beyond that of an Indian “reservation” in the United States. It’s all there in Donald Trump’s worthless “Abraham Accords” that were supposed to bring peace to the Middle East but in the end were only accepted by Israel and the craven oil-princes of Bahrain and the Emirates. 
American imperialism believed it called all the shots. They thought  all resistance can be crushed by brute force. They hoped to find enough willing Arab tools to do their bidding and sign a surrender peace. The Palestinians have, once again, proved them wrong.

DFLP: Israeli war-crimes in the Gaza Strip

by Fouad Baker

Commander Abu Khaled of the DFLP

The barbaric Israeli aggression supported by the West, especially the United States, which has been continuing since the 8th October, was not the first. Rather, it was preceded by many wars on the Gaza Strip, resulting in thousands of martyrs in addition to the systematic destruction of homes and infrastructure.

Aggression, massacres and war-crimes are an inherent feature of the Zionist entity. The Gaza Strip is an area with the highest population density – 2.2 million people live in the 365 km enclave. Over the last 17 years, from the start of the brutal siege that began in 2006, on Israel has launched 12 incursions into the Strip, including six destructive invasions. Over 4,300 Palestinians were martyred in these wars and over 19,500 wounded while the number of Israeli deaths did not exceed 136 dead and about 4,000 wounded.

2006: 277 Palestinians were killed and 1,167 wounded in Israeli raids that continued for three months.

2008:125 Palestinians were killed and large numbers of wounded over the course

of five days of bombing.

2008 – 2009: 1,430 Palestinians were martyred, including about 400 children and 240 women, 5,400 wounded, in addition to the complete or partial destruction of more than 10,000 homes. In the Battle of the Shale Stones about 180 Palestinians were martyred, including 42 children and 11 women, and about 1,300 others were injured. In the battle of the Eastern Storm 2,322 Palestinians were killed and 11,000 wounded. In the Battle of the Cry of Dawn 34 Palestinians were killed, and more than 100 others were injured and some 250 Palestinians were killed and over 5,000 wounded in the Battle of Saif al Quds (the Sword of Jerusalem).

The Gaza Strip is an integral part of the occupied Palestinian territories and it is not possible to create any kind of geographical or political separation between them. These territories are a single and unified territorial unit. Any dealing with them in a partial manner is an attempt to divide the Palestinian land  and divide the Palestinian people. We will fight to defend the unity of the land, the people, and the cause.

What must be emphasised repeatedly is that what happened on 7th October is an extension of what was happening before that date in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and the city of Jerusalem in terms of criminal practices against the Palestinian people. Therefore, the battle of Al-Aqsa Flood must be seen in the context of responding to the massacres and crimes committed against our people in the West Bank, Jerusalem, and in the Gaza Strip. 

It was a response to the daily killings, arrests, theft of land for the purposes of

settlement, demolition of homes, the burning of entire towns and the storming and destruction of cities and refugee camps by the Israeli aggressors. 

  Therefore, we say that there is no solution to our national issue without recognising that the basic issue is the occupation and settlement of our land.

Israeli aggression is not against any Palestinian faction or party, but rather against all the Palestinian people and all their parties and political and social components.

It is a systematic aggression, a genocide, against an entire people – women and children, the sick and the elderly –  everything that lives and moves in the Gaza Strip.

It’s not just in Gaza. It’s all over Palestine. This year over 500 Palestinians have been killed on the West Bank –   200 martyrs since 7th October. This, the bloodiest year for the Palestinian people in the West Bank and Jerusalem, confirms that the main problem is the physical presence of the Israeli occupation army and the Israeli settlers.

The United Nations and its resolutions consider the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem to be Palestinian lands occupied by Israel. International law allows persecuted peoples to resist invaders. The Palestinian people have the right and even the duty to resist the Zionist occupier, and the legal, political, moral and humanitarian duty of the international community is to support the people’s resistance.

The Palestinians struggles to liberate their land and enable them to freely exercise

their national rights free from occupation, subjugation and colonialism.

The Israeli occupation and the Israeli settlements are the main root of the problem, and any solution that does not take into account the national rights of the Palestinian people will perpetuate the conflicts in Palestine and the region.

The Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) calls on all parties of the world and its political and popular institutions to condemn the war of extermination pursued by the Israeli enemy against the Palestinian people, to take punitive and deterrent measures against Israeli war criminals, and to exert pressure on Western governments that support the aggression to stop their partnership in killing and crimes against civilians of the Palestinian people and to work from In order to stop the series of crimes against humanity.

USA: Brave voices speak out for peace

 

Solidarity action in Chicago

by Chris Mahin

“It feels like the new McCarthyism”. That’s how Genevieve Lakier described the mood in the United States since the Gaza crisis began in early October. Genevieve is a professor of law at the University of Chicago whose work focuses on freedom of speech. In an interview with Politico in early November, she compared attacks on those who oppose Israel’s brutal attacks in Gaza to the anti-communist Red Scare campaign spearheaded by US Senator Joe McCarthy during the 1950s.
Dima Khalidi, the director of Palestine Legal, an organisation that seeks to preserve the civil rights of supporters of Palestinian rights in the United States, told The Intercept: “We are seeing people being fired from their jobs, being investigated by HR over their social media posts or conversations with colleagues, and having job offers rescinded.”
The attacks on freedom of speech started almost as soon as the crisis erupted on 7th October. Some examples:

On 7th October at Harvard University, 34 student groups co-signed a statement calling on Harvard to “take action to stop the ongoing annihilation of Palestinians.” Within days, personal information about the signers was being posted online and their family members were being threatened. Numerous CEOs from billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman to Sweetgreen CEO Jonathan Newman called for the list of signers to be made public so that companies could blacklist them. A truck with a digital billboard – paid for by a right-wing group – circled Harvard Square in Cambridge Massachusetts, flashing the names and photos of the student signers under the headline “Harvard’s Leading Antisemites”.

On 10th October New York University Law School student body president Ryna Workman sent an intra-community message to classmates expressing “unwavering and absolute solidarity with Palestinians”. As a result, Workman was ousted as student body president, had a job offer from a prestigious law firm withdrawn, and received many death threats online.

On 19th October the prestigious arts magazine Artforum published an open letter on its website calling for a ceasefire and suggesting that Israel is responsible for a genocide. The letter condemned all violence against civilians. It criticised the silence of cultural institutions about the Israeli bombing of residents in Gaza. The statement was signed by thousands of artists, academics, and cultural workers, including the magazine’s top editor, David Velasco. On October 26, Velasco was fired by his publisher Penske Media. Velasco had been at Artforum or 18 years. After Velasco was fired, multiple top editors at Artforum quit, and some contributors announced that they would boycott the magazine.

On 20th October Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen was scheduled to appear at the 92NY in New York, a prominent cultural hub, to promote his new memoire A Man of Two Faces. Earlier in the week, Nguyen had joined more than 700 other writers in signing an open letter published in the London Review of Books calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. A few hours before the event was supposed to take place, a spokesperson for the ‘Y’ said that the event had been “postponed”.

On 23rd October Michael Eisen, a geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) that he was being replaced as the editor- in-chief of eLife, a prominent open-access science journal, for retweeting a satirical article from The Onion critical of Israel. 

 On 24th October Florida Governor Ron DeSantis ordered the state’s colleges to shut down chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). Florida was the first state to outlaw the group on its campuses.
On 25th October the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) wrote to the presidents of almost 200 colleges and universities urgently requesting them to investigate the chapters of the Students for Justice in Palestine on their campuses. The ADL claimed that these students should be investigated for “materially supporting a foreign terrorist organization.”

On 27th October the US Senate passed a unanimous resolution condemning what it called “anti-Israel, pro-Hamas student groups” across the country.

On 7th November, perhaps the most high-level attempt to silence dissent about Gaza took place. That evening, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 234-188 to censure Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, the only Palestinian-American in the US Congress. (The tally included 22 Democrats voting in favour of the censure.) The censure resolution viciously distorted comments that Tlaib had made about the Gaza crisis.

In addition to the cases which have garnered widespread publicity, there have also been many others involving less prominent people. Just weeks after the crisis began, the Palestine Legal organization had received more than 200 reports of retribution against people speaking out on the Gaza crisis. A concerted effort is underway to use the Gaza crisis to further limit what people are allowed to say at work or on their workplace social media and to punish those who challenge the status quo. This is extremely dangerous and is setting a terrible precedent which will curtail discussion and debate on many issues other than American policy in the Middle East.
However, at the same time that censorship is growing, so is the resistance to it. The crisis has spurred many people of good will to speak up and loudly defend freedom of speech for those advocating a ceasefire in Gaza and an end to Israeli apartheid. In many of the cases where speaking engagements were cancelled or editors fired, tremendous outrage and protest has followed. More of this is needed. We cannot allow a new McCarthyism to take root in this country!

Stop the Israeli war on Gaza

 

Hospitals stormed. Innocent women and children are being slaughtered. Thousands upon thousands of Palestinian Arabs have been made homeless. This is Gaza today as Israeli missiles rain down on the beleaguered Palestinian enclave and Zionist troops pour into Gaza spreading death and destruction in their wake.
    On the streets of London and in the capitals of all the other imperialist heartlands millions upon millions are joining in the world-wide demand for an immediate and unconditional end to the fighting. But in Washington Joe Biden turns his back on demands to end the war being waged by America’s most loyal puppet in the Middle East. In London the craven Sunak government does the same and sadly so does Sir Keir Starmer, who is determined to outdo the Tories in crawling to imperialism.
    But more and more Labour members are refusing to toe the imperialist line. It began with breakaway councillors in mainly Muslim areas. It rapidly spread to Scottish Labour and the regional leaders of London, Manchester. Now 56 Labour MPs have taken the principled stand to defy the Starmer clique in Parliament this week.
    They rejected Starmer’s meaningless call for “humanitarian pauses” in the fighting which Biden and Netanyahu support simply to buy time for the Israeli army to finish the slaughter. They supported a Scottish nationalist call for an immediate cease-fire. And ten Labour front-benchers, including eight shadow minsters, left their jobs to vote with the SNP.
    The SNP motion called for an end to the "collective punishment of the Palestinian people" and urged "all parties to agree to an immediate ceasefire". It was defeated by 125 votes to 294, with the 56 Labour rebels joining the other opposition parties to demand a ceasefire, against the Conservatives who opposed it.
    Outside protesters gathered to call for a ceasefire and justice for the Palestinians. Every week the protests get bigger. Last weekend around a million people marched through London to demand and end to Israeli aggression. Let make it even bigger next Saturday...

Sunak shuffles his pack

The Prime Minister reshuffled his pack on Monday. Suella Braverman is out. David Cameron is in while Sunak played musical chairs with the Cabinet to create a new ministerial team which he clearly hopes will reverse the Tories flagging fortunes in time for the general election next year. Sacking Suella Braverman was the easy part. Bringing Cameron back from the political wilderness is more problematic.
    Braverman may have been an icon for the Neanderthal wing of Tory party but amongst the public at large few will miss her. But even fewer missed Cameron when he resigned after losing the Brexit referendum.
    Some, however will be pleased. The Remainers were delighted at the news that one of their own is now in charge of the Foreign Office. They clearly hope that Sunak will encourage more of the pro-European old guard to return to the fold. Whether it will have the same effect on the electorate remains to be seen.
    Labour is still streets ahead of the Tories in the opinion polls with a 27 point lead over the Conservatives that would give them a victory of landslide proportions if repeated at a general election.
    Still, as Harold Wilson famously said a week is a long time in politics. The veteran Labour leader won four elections in the 1960s and 70s. Wilson was the master of come-backs. Sunak is not. But neither is Sir Keir Starmer…

A call to all free people in the world

communist & workers' parties joint statement

Amidst the continuous and severe Zionist airstrikes on the Gaza Strip, targeting residential, civil, and healthcare facilities, particularly escalating attacks on hospitals and their surroundings, notably the Al-Shifa Medical Complex, one of Gaza's largest hospitals, which has ceased operations due to the lack of fuel, supplies, and necessary medical drugs for treating the injured and ill. According to the director of Al-Shifa Medical Complex, there have been over 100 corpses for days in the hospital's yard, starting to decompose, unable to be buried due to continuous gunfire targeting anyone moving inside or outside the hospital. Continuous fatalities of infants and critical cases persist due to the halt of medical equipment, including incubators, ventilators, and other vital devices, with similar conditions prevailing in other hospitals across the Gaza Strip. 

Given these dire and dangerous circumstances and due to the stubborn refusal of the fascist occupation to heed international appeals from organizations like the Red Cross, the United Nations, and others to allow the necessary medical supplies into hospitals, the Palestinian Communist Party calls upon all freedom-loving individuals worldwide and all Communist and Workers' Parties globally to rally and demonstrate outside the embassies of the fascist occupying state, and the embassies of the United States of America. This is to pressure their governments to sever ties with this fascist occupation and form a global alliance to halt aggression, lift the siege on Gaza, and allow all humanitarian and medical aid without conditions.
 
We call upon all parties to sign this appeal
 

• Communist Party of Albania  
• New Communist Party of Britain
• Colombian Communist Party
• Communist Party of Chile
• Socialist Workers' Party of Croatia
• Communist Party of Denmark
• Communist Party of Greece
• Communist Party of Kenya
• Kuwaiti Progressive Movement
• Lebanese Communist Party
• Communist Party of Pakistan
• Palestinian Communist Party
• Philippines Communist Party [PKP 1930]
• Romanian Socialist Party
• Communist Party of the Russian Federation
• Communists of Serbia
• New Communist Party of Yugoslavia
• Communist Party of Sri Lanka
• Communist Party of Swaziland
• Syrian Communist Party [Unified]
• Communist Party of Turkey

End the siege of Gaza now!

 

Week after week millions upon millions around the world have taken to the streets to stand with Palestinians and demand a ceasefire. These marches are so powerful because when we come together we create a force that cannot be ignored. In Britain its encouraged the long-standing Palestinian solidarity campaigners to stand firm and emboldened others to take the principled stand and support the demands of the Palestinian Arabs.
    Within Labour ranks the call for a cease-fire has gone far beyond the Corbynistas and the Muslim community. Some of the Labour prominenti have stood up to challenge their leader’s mealy-mouthed apologies for Israeli aggression. More are joining them and more will join them as the marches and protests get bigger and bigger and more and more stand up to those who serve imperialism inside the labour movement.
    In Gaza the genocidal slaughter that has taken countless lives, including thousands of children, has horrified and outraged humanity. Yet the prospect of the hated apartheid apparatus of the Zionist regime crumbling has given hope to workers and oppressed people all over the world. All communists must close ranks around the demand for a cease-fire now and a just and lasting peace in the Middle East that can only be based on the restoration of the legitimate rights of the Palestinian Arabs.

One up for the unions!

The Government decision to axe plans to scrap all ticket offices on the railways was a significant victory for the transport unions and the passenger lobbies that defended the crucial role booking clerks played in sorting out the best deals for the pensioners, students and the disabled that are sidelined by the ticket machines the companies thought could simply replace the human touch.
    Over 750,000 responses were received by the transport watchdogs during the public consultation, with 99 per cent of them opposing the proposals. RMT, the main rail union played a major role in the campaign. Its Save Ticket Offices campaign inspired local protests outside stations; mobilised public opinion and generated a large number of responses to the surveys. This is what unions are for – defending jobs and defending the services they provide to passengers.
    The railways were once a truly national service during the days of publicly-owned British Rail. You could buy a ticket to any station in the United Kingdom at any station on the network. In those days fares were set at a national standard. These days passengers have to go through a confusing maze of offers and deals from the companies that now run the rail network – not to provide a service to the travelling public but simply to make a profit for their shareholders.
    These days it’s fashionable in the corridors of power to talk about air pollution and “green” agendas. Electric cars are all the rage amongst the well-to-so. But if the Government is serious about discouraging excessive use of the internal combustion engine both by individuals and haulage companies, much more must be invested in the railways to make them pleasant and reliable for the travelling public and to restore the freight rail network which could remove so many heavy lorries from our roads.
    The current situation on the privatised railways is a sick joke that will not pass until they are brought back into public ownership.

We are all Palestinians!

By New Worker correspondent

NCP leader Andy Brooks and other London comrades joined the huge crowd at Trafalgar Square on Saturday 4th November demanding an immediate end to the Israeli offensive on Gaza. And all over the world millions of other protesters were also taking to the street to stand by the Palestinians defiantly resisting the merciless onslaught of the Zionist aggressors.
Chanting “ceasefire now” and “in our thousands, in our millions, we are all Palestinians” demonstrators held sit-down protests in Oxford Street and Piccadilly Circus before moving on for a rally that overflowed into the many side-streets around Trafalgar Square. Hundreds more took over the concourse of Charing Cross station in the afternoon shutting down the nearby mainline railway station for several hours.
The Palestine Solidarity Campaign is now calling for a million-strong march through London on Armistice Day, Saturday 11th November Though the solemn ceremony at the Cenotaph will be held, as usual, on the following Sunday the Tories are still trying to stop the Palestinian demonstration in a drive to stifle the solidarity movement that is sweeping the county.
Rishi Sunak says the solidarity march would be “provocative and disrespectful” and warned that the Cenotaph could be “desecrated”. His Home Secretary, “Cruella” Braverman,  has gone even further  calling the demonstration a “hate march” that poised “an obvious risk of serious public disorder, violence and damage”. Both the march organisers and the police have said the protest will avoid Whitehall, where the war memorial is located.
Ben Jamal from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign told the media that “the attempts to frame the planned national demonstration on Saturday, November 11th , part of a cycle of weekly marches calling for a ceasefire, as disrespectful to Remembrance Day commemorations is at best misinformed and at worse an incitement to public disorder. This is a march calling for a ceasefire in order to stop the current slaughter in Gaza. To highlight this democratic action taking place on November 11th , well away from Whitehall, as disrespectful is dangerous and disingenuous politicking that defames many hundreds of thousands of people who want the current violence to stop.”
The Labour mayor of London Sadiq Khan says the Government is playing politics over the “terrible tragedy” unfolding in Gaza, and the solidarity campaigns say they have no plans to disrupt Remembrance weekend events. Now Gary Lineker has joined in the fray. The outspoken sports commentator and former England footballer weighed into the row to defending the planned protests saying “marching and calling for a ceasefire and peace so that more innocent children don’t get killed is not really the definition of a hate march”.

Problems of Peace and Socialism

by Robin MacGregor

Revolutionary Democracy :Volume Two, No. 2 (New Series) October 2023 
£5 plus £2.50 P&P from NCP Lit. PO Box 73, London SW11 2PQ

 Another issue of the Indian Marxist journal has arrived on these shores. It maintains now familiar format of articles on Indian affairs past and present, article from parties belonging to the International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organisations (ICMLPO, plus materials from Soviet archives. This time there are slightly fewer, but longer articles than hitherto. 
With regard to contemporary Indian the issue opens with two short articles on violent attacks on tribal peoples in Manipur state and the increasing number of anti-Muslim pogroms which increasingly common features of Indian life under the BJP government. 
There follows two longer articles on India. The first offers a detailed critique of the latest national budget for India. The author found that beneath the predictable fine words, there are ill thought out programmes and discrimination against ethnic and religious minorities. An interesting study of India: Broken Legacies of the Land and Forest Rights Movement provides an account of the subject from pre-colonial times through the British Raj to the present day, noting that things did not improve very much after independence. 
  The centre-piece of this issue, occupying almost a quarter of the space is the Asiatic Mode of Production in South Asia: An Empirical Study by Tripta Wahi. The concept of the “Asiatic Mode of Production” is a much debated one in Marxist thought. It was invented by Marx, but was not developed by him to any great extant. It refers to societies where government power and prosperity depends on large scale irrigation systems which had to be maintained by peasants. Some critics (both Marxist and non-Marxist) say the concept is unnecessary and what it describes is simply a variant of feudalism common in Europe. The present article covers what was British Punjab in pre and colonial times. 
  An Interview of Qemal Cicollari, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Albania with a Brazilian journalist defends the reputation of Enver Hoxha and blames the fall of socialism in Albania on his successor Ramiz Alaia. Unfortunately parts of his comments about other present day “communist” parties in Albania tends to resemble Private Eye’s Dave Spart.  
A transcript of an August 1946 "Record of the Meeting Between the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, I.V. Stalin, and Members of the Delegation of the Labour Party of Great Britain” reports a two hour meeting in Moscow. The exchange of views was a polite one, so we should not read too much into Stalin’s comments including one to the effect: “That the Soviet Union advances towards socialism via its own, Russian way, which is the shorter one, while the British advance towards socialism by a longer roundabout, way, both of these ways being appropriate”. Interestingly Stalin had a more realistic view about the possibility of a return to power by Churchill than his visitors. This reviewer is happy to identify the delegates as party chairman Harold Laski, General Secretary Morgan Walter Phillips, Harold Clay, Assistant General Secretary of the Transport & General Workers Union, and Alice Bacon, the new MP for Leeds North-East. Hopes for better relations between the two wartime allies were destroyed by Labour Prime Minister Attlee who secretly authorised the production of British atomic weapons less than six months after the meeting.
  The issue concludes with two sets of historical documents. The first is Materials for the Draft Programme of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks drawn up in 1947 with comments by Stalin. This is given a helpful introduction by the journal’s editor Vijay Singh. While it has been published in Russian, this is the first English publication. Finally we have a reprint of a 1951 Communist Party of India pamphlet containing comments from various party branches  making Suggestions and Criticisms on the Draft Programme and Policy Statement of the CPI, 1951. This is followed by an internal Soviet Party document about it which was sent to Stalin’s for information before publication in Pravda. 
All in all another worthwhile issue. Occasionally a few concessions to non-Indian readers would be helpful, particularly for those of us who tend to forget that a lakh is 100,000 and a crore is 10 million.

Stop the war in Gaza!

Millions upon millions of people have taken to the streets all over the world to call for justice for the Palestinians and an end to the fighting in the Gaza Strip. Not least in London which saw over half-a-million march  for Palestine through the heart of the capital last weekend and other flash demonstrations that included the take-over of the concourse at Liverpool Street station and a sit-down protest at Waterloo station. 
This huge protests and similar demonstrations in towns and cities throughout the country are sending a clear message to Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer to break with US imperialism and join the demand for an immediate cease-fire that’s echoing throughout the imperialist heartlands and the Global South.
Its clearly been heard in the Labour Party. Some Labour councillors have resigned the whip in protest at Starmer’s refusal to call for an immediate cease-fire and his pathetic defence of the brutal Israeli siege of the Gaza Strip. Tens of thousands more have joined the protests ignoring the threats of disciplinary action from Starmer’s henchmen to stand with the Palestinian resistance in their struggle against Zionist terror.
Now some of Labour’s big guns, like the Scottish Labour leader and the mayors of London and Greater Manchester are, at last, taking the principled stand – breaking ranks with Starmer & Co to call for a truce to save the beleaguered people of the Gaza Strip. Anas Sarwar, Sadiq Khan and Andy Burnham are all calling for an immediate cessation of the violence and a just resolution of the Palestinian issue while the militant RMT transport union leader, Mick Lynch, spoke in support of Palestinian rights at the mammoth London march on Saturday.
We can’t expect much from the Tories. Crawling to the Americans comes naturally to  the Conservatives. They’ve been doing it since the Second World War. But even they are not immune to public pressure.
This week Paul Bristow, the Conservative MP for Peterborough, was dismissed as a ministerial aide at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology on Monday after writing to the Prime Minister to call for an end to hostilities between Israel and Hamas to save lives.
Millions of people have seen through the lies of the bourgeois media. They want to see justice done for the Palestinian Arabs. Mass demonstrations and protests play a crucial part in mobilising public opinion in a just cause. They bring people together and by their actions they encourage others to take the principled stand. This is why some Tory politicians call  Palestinian slogans  “hate speech” and say that even waving a Palestinian flag could be an arrestable offence. 
We saw this in the run-up to the Gulf War when millions took to the streets to try to stop the imperialist invasion of Iraq. The protests peaked with a two million strong march through London that shook the Establishment.  But it was never followed up. The momentum was lost and the war was not stopped.We must make sure that never happens again.
The protests are getting bigger and bigger and more and more frequent – and that’s what’s got to happen to help end the suffering of the Palestinian people. End the fighting. Lift the siege! Let them hear it in Tel Aviv – let them hear it in Washington!
 

Reflections of a Great Silk Road

by John Maryon

East—west trade routes were first established between Europe and China during the Han Dynasty in the second century BC. Columns of camels, ideally suited to the formidable terrain, carried silk, spices, tea, silver, gold, salt and sugar along the 4,350 mile road.  Trading posts and markets were established which enabled trade between diverse cultures.  The Silk Road remained in existence for over 1,500 years linking the civilisations of Europe and China. 
The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) was proposed by China's President Xi Jinping in the autumn of 2013.  Within 10 years it has grown into the largest infrastructure and Investment project ever undertaken.  A total of 172 countries and international organisations have signed over 200 co-operation agreements with China.  Sour grapes claims by Western leaders that it is running out of steam, is a debt trap and allows China to dominate others have been debunked as over 2,500 delegates including presidents, prime ministers, bankers, technical experts and government officials arrived in Beijing for the Third Forum of BRI.  It was a dramatic demonstration of the building of a new multipolar world order based upon mutual cooperation. It will enable smaller and weaker nations to resist US hegemony while forming a platform for green, sustainable development. 
December 2021 saw completion of the China - Laos 1,035 km. High Speed Railway (HSR) connecting Kunming in south west China with the Laotian capital city of Vientiane. The flagship project was fully in line with the policy of Laos to develop from a land locked country to a land linked one.  Since it opened it has carried some 3, 270, 000 passengers and each day moves 8230 tonnes of freight.  The previous 4 day journey has been cut from 4 days to just 10 hours. Increased employment and entrepreneurial opportunities have been created for residents along the line.  Tourism has increased rapidly and many opportunities created for people to people contact.  Such projects are essentially long term  investment ventures and the route is expected to make a profit in 20 years. 
BRI for land locked central Asian republics is creating important opportunities through infrastructure projects. Roads, rail links, pipelines and power grids act a catalyst for further developments that boost trade and economic development.  China has been able to use the expertise gained, from lifting 800,000 of its own people out of severe poverty, to enable others also to enjoy increased prosperity.  As poverty is eliminated the attraction of violent extremism becomes reduced. The regions’ new long distance railways facilitate trade between Europe and Asia - a new Silk Road is being created for today.
BRI extends into South East Asia.  Indonesian President Joko Widodo's arrival at the Forum coincided with the first passenger services on the Chinese built Jakarta - Banding HSR.  The 147 km line links the capital with the country's financial centre. 
BRI dovetails with Mongolia's Steppe Road programme.  One objective being to upgrade the Trans-Mongolian rail corridor in association with its neighbours.  Proposals have been made for pipelines that would not only transfer Russian gas to China but enable Mongolia to develop it's own oil and gas resources.  New highways are being built and facilities created to speed up custom clearance. New opportunities are being created to boost exports of minerals, cashmere, meat, wool and coal. As with all BRI it's partners China abides with local laws and customs. 
Speaking in 2022 Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi encouraged Afghanistan and Pakistan to jointly build the BRI.  He said China and those two countries should advance cooperation on economic and political development, counter terrorism and security issues. An  important project in Pakistan is the Karot Hydropower Station that will play an important role in ensuring the country's energy security.  A new road is being built between China and Pakistan that will form part of the China - Pakistan Corridor.  
The spread of BRI far exceeds the limits of the original Silk Road as it spreads worldwide.  Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, attended the Bejing Forum and had talks with his Chinese counterpart.  He was the only EU leader to attend the milestone event.  Hungary was the first European country to sign a BRI cooperation agreement with China. Current projects in Hungary include the construction of the 350 km railway linking the cities of Budapest and the Serbian capital Belgrade.  China is to build a huge car plant that will produce electric vehicles in Hungary.  The country's positive approach is in sharp contrast to the collapsing and dysfunctional EU whose weak leaders have been led into a dependence trap by the US. 
Many world leaders attended the BRI Forum in Beijing.  President Putin of Russia was the guest of honour at the celebration event.  In his speech he spoke of forming closer links with the Eurasian  countries and outlined railway developments linking his vast country with the world.  He said that the world today is experiencing revolutionary changes as more countries seek to build a new architecture of international relations that is fairer and based upon mutual respect and mutual benefit. 
Smiles all round as Putin was warmly greeted by Xi Jinping when the two leaders met at the Forum.  Cooperation between the two great nations has never been better.  Cross border infrastructure projects such as the Tongjiang river bridge will help boost trade further. Work is underway to connect China's Northeastern rail network with Russia's Siberian railways. Emphasis was placed on work to link BRI with the Eurasian Economic Union. 
The involvement of BRI in Africa and the Middle East has seen remarkable progress.  A total of 62 States in the region have joined the initiative , most of which have low income and are eager to escape the poverty trap.  A number of key construction projects are starting to have a positive impact.  Five years ago only 40 per cent of Africans had access to electricity and only 33 per cent paved roads. BRI is starting to change all that. The main focus of Chinese investment has been  transport and energy. It is estimated that 10,000 Chinese firms operate  in the region. A typical project is the Addis Ababa - Djibouti Railway linking landlocked Ethiopia to the sea. To the north, in the Middle East, Syria is joining to participate in creating a corridor linking it to Iran via Iraq.  The opportunity exists to bring prosperity and hope to a whole region destroyed by US imperialism. 
In 2015  NATO member, Turkey, signed a Memorandum of Understanding.  Trade with China is expanding and work is underway to construct rail links to Central Asia and beyond. 
To Washington’s dismay, 21other states in the Americas have joined BRI.  In Argentina the 1310 MW Santa Cruz River Hydroelectric Station is being built with 70 per cent finance from China.  Construction will allow local workers to acquire new skills.  On completion 5,000 direct jobs with a further 15,000 in associated industries will be created.  Brazil, the largest economy in Latin America, is not a member but cooperation grows stronger each passing day.  China and Cuba have vowed to deepen practical cooperation.  Joint trade and development initiatives are being pursued in the telecommunications, mining and energy sectors. The successful growth of BRI takes place as US influence declines. 

One law for them…

The imperialists like to talk about the “international community” and “international law” – but only when it suits them. But they’re only talking about their law and their community when they drivel on about justice and human rights. They have an “international criminal court” in The Hague to deal with war-criminals – but only ones they don’t like.They have an “international community” – but it only consists of the United States; its NATO partners, and a handful of puppet states whose leaders are guaranteed to do its bidding.   
Rishi Sunak tells parliament that "first and most important principle is that Israel has the right to defend itself under law" and Grant Shapps, the defence minister, tells us that asking Israel to agree a cease-fire with Hamas is “untenable” and that Israel has "a right" to "go after" Hamas after the devastating Palestinian guerrilla raid into Israel earlier in the month. But whose laws and whose rights are they talking about?
It’s certainly not the rights laid down at the United Nations – the world forum which has repeatedly called for an end to the Israel occupation and upheld the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination. Nor is it the international law that the imperialists routinely ignored when they overthrew the governments of Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya or fermented civil war with their “colour revolutions”,“Arab Springs” and “Maidan Squares” to bring about “regime change” in Ukraine and Syria and create an American-run “Greater Middle East” for the benefit of the big oil corporations. 
The imperialists claim they stand for freedom. Biden talks about it all the time. But it is the freedom of the straitjacket and the dungeon. They preach this “freedom” with their Stealth bombers, their special forces and their economic blockades against all those who dare to stand up for themselves. We saw what the imperialists mean by freedom in Iraq. Libya  and the hills of Afghanistan. We see it today in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
They call their empire the “free world”. They say we have free speech, and live in a democracy. But it’s democracy and freedom only for them. In fact bourgeois democracy is democracy only for the exploiters.
Ken Livingstone, the former Mayor of London, once said that if voting changed anything, they'd abolish it. And bourgeois elections, as we well know, are used so that the smallest number of people can manipulate the maximum number of votes.
It’s dictatorship in all but the formal sense for the exploited. It is brutal and oppressive because that is the only way it can ensure that the rich can continue to live the lives of Roman emperors off the backs of the working people. While millions of people scrabble to earn a living just to keep a roof over their heads a tiny elite live lives beyond the reach and often beyond the imagination of most workers.
But wherever there is oppression, there is resistance. We saw it in the Don Basin when the anti-fascist resistance drove out the fascists from eastern Ukraine to set up their own people’s democracies that have now joined the Russian Federation. And now we see it on the streets of Gaza and the towns and villages of the West Bank...