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The Gaza ceasefire agreed this week has brought relief to the long-suffering Palestinian Arabs in the beleaguered Palestinian enclave and hope at last to the relatives of the prisoners held on both sides whose fate hinged on the success of the talks in the capital of the Arab state of Qatar. It remains to be seen if the Israelis honour the agreement they signed up to in Doha. But it’s difficult to see how they go back on their word over the truce that was pushed through on the insistence of an emissary of President-elect Donald Trump who returns to the White House on 20th January.
The deal – a total Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in return for a prisoner exchange – is essentially the one Hamas agreed to last May to end the fighting. Endorsed at the United Nations the Biden administration and the Netanyahu government both supported it – indeed they said the plan had orginated in Israel in the first place. But it was just a ruse to stall for time and divert world public opinion while the Israelis assassinated Hamas leaders and pushed on with their plan to re-occupy the Strip and drive out most, if not all, of the Palestinians Arabs to make room for Zionist settlers.
UN resolutions provide the basis for a just and lasting peace in the Middle East. First of all Israel must totally withdraw from all the occupied territories seized in 1967, including Arab East Jerusalem and Syria’s Golan Heights. The Palestinians must be allowed to establish a state of their own on the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The Palestinian refugees whose homes are now in Israel must be allowed to return or, if they so wish, be paid appropriate compensation in exchange. And all states in the region, including Israel, should have internationally agreed and recognised frontiers guaranteed by all the Great Powers.
Joe Biden fully approved of Israeli aggression. When he met Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his visit to Israel last year he said "I don't believe you have to be a Jew to be a Zionist, and I am a Zionist". But American support for Israel began long before Biden. When the Zionist state was proclaimed in 1948. When the first Arab-Israeli war began and around a million Palestinians were driven out of their homes to make way for Zionist settlement.
Israel is nothing without the United States. It is a pawn of the United States.The Zionist leaders strut the world posing as independent politicians. But US imperialism provides the military and economic support that keeps Israel going. The country is an American protectorate and their leaders will ultimately do whatever America wants.
Trump, in turn, loudly proclaims his own support for the Zionist entity. He also wants to keep the oil princes sweet. The section of the US ruling class that he leads wants to maintain the American presence in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf to build a new military bloc to threaten Iran and pave the way for US imperialism’s total control of the global energy market. Trump and his cohorts may well believe that an end to the fighting is enough to keep the feudal Arabs on side. But the Palestinians, and indeed, virtually the entire world outside the United States want to see a final end to the crisis.
As for Netanyahu – he wants to end his days covered in glory as the man who built “Greater Israel” and brought the Palestinians to their knees. But he’s failed on all counts. Whatever happens next this is their victory – not his.
The Middle East is now on the brink of all-out war following this week’s targetted killings of Palestinian and Lebanese resistance leaders in back-to-back Israeli air strikes in Beirut and Tehran. Some say this is what the Israeli leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, wants to stave off the Gaza cease-fire he fears would split his coalition and force him to call fresh elections he almost certainly lose. Bowing out while facing bribery, fraud and breach of trust charges is not how Netanyahu wants to be remembered. He wants to end his days covered in Zionist glory as the man who built “Greater Israel” and brought the Palestinians to their knees. But he’s failed, so far, on all counts.
Israel has failed to drive the Palestinians into Egypt to clear the decks for the Zionist settlement of the Gaza Strip. Israel has failed to stop the confrontation with the Lebanese resistance on its northern border. The Yemenis are maintaining their naval blockade that has closed down Eilat, Israel’s port on the Red Sea. The Palestinians still hold scores of Israeli prisoners and Hamas and the other Palestinian resistance movements fight on using tunnel networks under the Strip that the Israelis have failed to uncover.
It hasn’t been for the want of trying. The genocidal Israeli campaign in Gaza has brought death and destruction to the Palestinian enclave on an industrial scale. Some 39,000 Palestinian Arabs have been killed and over 90,000 more wounded in the round of fighting that began in October 2023. Most of them were defenceless civilians.
But behind Israel stands American imperialism. Despite all the talk of “Zionist lobbies” or the “Jewish vote” only the Americans count in Tel Aviv. The Israelis are American puppets that, until recently, enabled the Americans to pose as friends of the feudal Arab kings who allow the Big Oil corporations to plunder their oil in return for a juicy cut and American protection.
Likewise the Zionist leaders who strut the world posing as independent politicians are just alibis for American aggression in the Middle East. US imperialism provides the military and economic support that keeps Israel going. The country is a virtual American protectorate and their leaders will ultimately do whatever America wants.
The war goes on in Gaza because that’s what American imperialism wants. They want the fighting to continue until Hamas is crushed – because Hamas stands in their way, because the Palestinian resistance sabotaged the American plan for NATO expansion in the Middle East when it launched its raid into Israel last October.
But what the Americans want and what they get is another matter altogether. They failed in Iraq. They failed in Afghanistan. They failed in Syria and they will fail in the Middle East.
The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 led to the expulsion of nearly a million Palestinians from their homes. The war that began in 1948 continues to this day. The Palestinians fight on and they will continue the struggle until their legitimate rights are restored.
UN resolutions have provided the basis for a just and lasting peace in the Middle East. First of all Israel must totally withdraw from all the occupied territories seized in 1967, including Arab East Jerusalem and Syria’s Golan Heights. The Palestinians must be allowed to establish a state of their own on the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The Palestinian refugees whose homes are now in Israel must be allowed to return or, if they so wish, be paid appropriate compensation in exchange. And all states in the region, including Israel, should have internationally agreed and recognised frontiers guaranteed by all the Great Powers.
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.
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...
