Saturday, November 25, 2023

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.


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