After the guns fall silent…

...real negotiations must begin – and not just on the thorny issue of Iran’s nuclear energy industry. The American-inspired truce that some say was brokered at Israel’s request may have put the Israeli-Iranian conflict on hold but it hasn’t stopped the fighting in Palestine. In occupied Palestine Zionist gangs spread terror in the West Bank while the Palestinian resistance fights on against a brutal foe who kills scores of civilians every day in what is clearly an attempt to drive the Palestinian Arabs out of their Mediterranean enclave to make room for more Zionist settlement.
Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian leader who signed the Camp David surrender treaty, with Israel once said that the United States held “99 per cent of the cards” in the Middle East and that he relied on the Americans to advance the peace process in the region by “bringing Israel to reason”. The Arab traitor, who was assassinated by Islamic militants in October 1981, was wrong.
Sure – recent events have shown that the United States can bring “Israel to reason” any time they like as the Zionist entity is a total dependency of the United States. But the Americans, who certainly hold 99 per cent of the cards in Tel Aviv, have little or no sway in the corridors of power in Tehran let alone the Palestinian resistance. 
Despite all the talk of “Zionist lobbies” and 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 an American protectorate and their leaders will ultimately do whatever America wants.
Iran is perfectly entitled to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. While Trump and his Israeli and European followers bleat on about Iran’s supposed nuclear bomb project the International Atomic Energy Agency has confirmed that the claim by Israel and the USA that the Islamic Republic is secretly building a nuclear weapon is false. Likewise the continuous monitoring of Iranian nuclear activities by the agency has not unearthed any evidence of departure from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) that Iran has signed. 
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 in October 2023.
But what the Americans want and what they get is another matter altogether. They failed in Iraq. They failed in Afghanistan. They will fail in Syria and they will fail in the rest of 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 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 the 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 the Great Powers.

Syria’s downfall

Baath power began with the Syrian revolution in 1963. It ended this month. For most of that time the Party that led the Syrian Arab Republic was led by members of the Assad family.
Now Bashar al Assad is in Moscow. The Syrian Arab Republic is no more. The Baath Party has been dissolved. The old pan-Arab flag has gone and a new one flies over Damascus – the flag of the bogus “Syrian republic” during French colonial rule. 
Though a pan-Arab movement Syria was always at the heart of the Baath (Renaissance) Party. Born is the 1940s in the struggle to break the chains of colonialism it evolved into a mass movement when it merged with the Arab Socialist Party in 1952 to become the Arab Socialist Renaissance Party under its famous slogan “Unity, Freedom, Socialism – One Arab Nation! One Glorious Destiny!” that would soon be adopted by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Arab Socialist Union in Egypt. 
Baathist Syria took the road of socialist advance sweeping away the old guard and the feudal order in the countryside to build a better life for the Syrian people with national health and education services funded by a public sector that also had to support the armed forces needed to confront the Zionist enemy. 
From the start Baathist Syria supported the just struggle of the Palestinian Arabs in confronting Israel as well as fighting side by side with Egypt, which was then the United Arab Republic, in two major wars with the Zionist entity. In the 1970s Syria intervened in the Lebanese civil war under an Arab League mandate through a peace-keeping force that remained in the Lebanon until 2005.
Communists and Nasserists had long worked with the Baath as “independents” in the Syrian parliament but in 1972 this was formalised with the establishment of a popular front, the National Progressive Front, that brought communists, Nasserists and social-democrats into government as junior partners of the Baath.
Baathist Syria was always to the fore in the struggle against imperialism. A pillar of the non-aligned movement the Syrian Arab Republic stood with the militant Palestinian resistance movements and other progressive Arab republics in the Rejection Front to oppose any surrender peace with Israel. It joined the Steadfastness and Confrontation Front that included the PLO, Algeria, Libya and People’s Yemen to oppose Egypt’s acceptance of the American and Zionist demands that led to the Camp David surrender peace with Israel.
Baathist Syria was a friend of the Soviet Union and the DPR Korea. Syrian trade with People’s China had soared in recent years and only a few months ago Syria applied to join BRICS, the independent economic bloc of the Global South.
This is why the imperialists, working hand in glove with Turkey, Israel and the feudal Arab oil princes worked to bring down the Assad government. They imposed sanctions and blockades on Syria to force it to end its alliance with the Russian Federation and the Islamic Republic of Iran. They fomented the sectarian strife that triggered the civil war that began in 2011 and ended in the collapse of the Syrian government last week.   
The imperialists and their Zionist and feudal Arab lackeys cannot bring peace to the Middle East. Nor is that their intention. They believe that the best way to maintain imperialist hegemony and preserve the super-profits of the big oil corporations is by keeping the Arab masses weak and divided. It’s worked so far. But this is by no means the end of the story.  

Stop arming Israel!

The student occupations and tent cities that began in America have now spread like wild-fire throughout the centres of learning in the West while all over the world people are taking to the streets to demand justice for the Palestinian Arabs and an end to the carnage in Gaza. The American bourgeois media call them  “commie campus” protests. The students are branded as “anti-semitic” while in Britain the Sunak government is trying to brow-beat the college authorities into shutting down the Palestinian solidarity protests.
In the “land of the free” and the other parts of Western Europe under the American thumb the police have already been unleashed in a drive to crush the student protests. But who believes the lies of the bourgeoisie and the Zionists?
Not the youth of today who don’t even bother with the propaganda spewed out by the mainstream media these days. They’ve seen the mass graves of the victims of Zionist terror in Gaza. They know about the killing of aid workers and tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians – mainly women and children – by the Israelis who want to drive them out to make way for more Zionist settlement on stolen Arab land. They want this to stop and they want Britain to immediately cease all arms exports to Israel.
Israeli warplanes are being used in the ongoing genocide taking place in Gaza. Israel uses British weaponry, surveillance technology and military equipment to kill and enforce a system of apartheid on Palestinians. 15 per cent of components used by Israel’s American Lockheed-Martin F-35 aircraft to bomb Gaza are provided by the United Kingdom.
Any British company wanting to export military or dual use goods (that could have military or civilian use) to other countries must have a UK government licence to do so. To abide with international law, the UK’s export criteria state that arms shipments must be stopped when there is a ‘clear risk of violating international humanitarian law’.
The UK government’s own lawyers’ advice is reported to have stated that Israel has breached international humanitarian law in Gaza. But the Sunak government has failed to make this public or take any action. This stark report comes against the backdrop of mounting global concern over Israel’s breaches of international law. The UK is further shamefully providing diplomatic cover to Israel and is, therefore, complicit in the genocide.
Since 7th October over 30,000 Palestinians have been killed. 70 per cent of those have been women and children. 2.2 million people are at imminent risk of starvation, with 9 out of 10 people living on less than one meal a day.
The Palestinian solidarity movement is under attack from the Zionists and those who serve the interests of American imperialism. The Sunak government is trying to smear the anti-war movement and the student upsurge to justify curbing or even banning all public support for the Palestinian Arabs. We must send a clear message to this government that we are determined not to allow our right to protest to be taken away. We must tell them we want a halt to British arms exports to Israel and an end to the war in Gaza!

No arms for Israel!

Lord Cameron has come back from Israel empty-handed. The Foreign Minister went there to urge restraint on the Netanyahu government following the Iranian missile and drone attacks that were, themselves, a reprisal for the Zionist bombing of the Iranian consulate in Damascus that killed eleven military advisors including two of their top generals. Though the RAF, together with the French and American air force, did most of the work in fending off the Iranian drones, Cameron got nothing in return from Netanyahu apart from demands for more Western sanctions against the Islamic Republic and unconditional NATO support for whatever revenge the rabid Zionist leader is seeking.
Though not surprising in itself – the only people Netanyahu needs to heed are the Americans – it might, nevertheless, be a step too far for the Israeli leader because Cameron was clearly speaking for Joe Biden himself when he landed in Tel Aviv this week.
Biden, or rather the shadowy cabal that pull the strings behind him, must have sanctioned the Damascus attack that started this new round of fighting. Despite subsequent White House denials it’s difficult to see why Netanyahu would have opted for such a dangerous escalation without getting the green light from his masters in Washington. Some believe the Israeli leader wants to prolong the war in Gaza to scupper American plans for a new NATO bloc in the region that would include the oil-rich Saudis – and thus considerably reduce the role of the Zionist state in the region. Others that he simply wants the war to continue to remain in office and stave off the corruption charges he will face once his immunity from prosecution is lifted. Maybe he simply miscalculated the response in Tehran and Washington.
The Zionists don’t care what the Iranians think but they are certainly concerned at what is going on in Washington. Biden, who barely knows what day it is, is just a pawn of the “deep state” – that cabal of the most venal and aggressive elements within the American ruling class is clearly divided about what to do next.
We see this openly discussed in their media. Some still believe in backing Israel to the hilt to creat the “Greater Middle East” that would break up the existing Arab states into smaller, sectarian puppet governments whose rulers would depend on American and Israeli guns for protection. Others say this is simply beyond the reach of imperialism these days and that the only way forward is to cut a deal with the feudal Arab oil princes to buy off opposition on the Arab street and impose a sophisticated surrender peace that would give the semblance of a two-state solution while reinforcing American hegemony over the entire region.
The alternative is an escalating conflict that has already drastically reduced Western traffic through the Suez Canal amid fears of another all-out Middle East war that could disrupt or even cut the oil supplies from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf that the Western world depends on.
British workers have no say in what goes on in the United States but they do have a voice in the unions and on the street. Tell the Labour and union leaders that claim to represent us that British arms to Israel must be halted. We want an end to the war in Gaza and want justice for the Palestinian Arabs. And we want it now!

Another brick in the wall

Moves to curb democratic protests and solidarity movements were announced this week under new government definitions of “extremism” that will be used to blacklist groups the ruling class deem to be seeking to undermine what they call Britain’s “liberal democracy”. 
The new rules will, of course, not affect the Zionists or the racists who see the Tory party as their natural home following the collapse of the BNP and the National Front. What they will do is  prevent public bodies from providing platforms for those spreading “hateful anti-British” ideas that “poison community life”. Though the definition will have no effect on the existing criminal law  as it only applies to the operations of government itself, its intention is clearly to isolate and marginalise the massive Palestinian solidarity movement and climate change campaigns that have swept the streets and challenged the bourgeois consensus in recent years.
The Sunak government would dearly like to ban the demonstrations outright but it simply doesn’t have the public support to do so. So now it is stepping up the harassment of demonstrators and smearing the organisers as merchants of hate. But who believes their lies these days?
London hasn’t become a “no-go” area for Jews. In fact many members of the Jewish community have joined the massive Palestinian solidarity marches that have rocked London over the past five months and have all ended peacefully – despite the dire predictions of “mob rule” in the Tory media. 
Hundreds of thousands of people have supported the recent cycle of demonstrations calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Millions more support the demand for justice for the Palestinian Arabs and an end to fighting in the Gaza Strip. This is an attack on democracy, not a defence of it. The right to protest must be defended.

Keep up the fight

International efforts to stop the fighting in Gaza have come to nothing in recent weeks. The Palestinian resistance have rejected the Americans’ worthless Ramadan cease-fire “pause” that would clearly not have led to a lasting truce given Israel’s declared aim to re-occupy the Strip and wipe Hamas off the face of the earth. The Palestinians want a permanent cease-fire, the total withdrawal of all Israeli troops from the Gaza Strip and internationally guaranteed pledges to speedily work towards the establishment of the independent Palestinian state that the imperialists accept when they talk about a “two-state” solution.
Air-drops and floating piers aren’t going stave off starvation in Gaza. If the Americans really want to help they should just tell the Israelis to allow food and medical convoys cross their border into the enclave. If the Americans really want to see the release of the Israelis in Palestinian captivity they should accept the Palestinian offer of a prisoner exchange. If the Americans really want to see an end to the fighting they should stop vetoing truce proposals at the United Nations that have the support of all the members of the Security Council as well as virtually all the countries in the entire world.

Justice for Palestine – cease-fire now!

 Gaza faces a full-scale humanitarian catastrophe as Israel mercilessly maintains indiscriminate attacks on the civilians in the beleaguered Palestinian enclave that is bitterly resisting the Israeli onslaught. But world public opinion made its voice heard at the United Nations this week when 153 member-states voted for an immediate end to the fighting. Only eight lackeys of US imperialism joined Israel and the Americans in voting against the call for peace. Some of America’s NATO allies took the principled stand and supported the demand for peace. Others like Britain shamefully abstained – though some say this modest departure from the American script is a step forward for the Sunak government.
    If that’s so, and we can only hope it is, it is largely down to the wave of support that we have seen for the Palestinians in Britain and throughout the rest of the world. Grovelling to the Americans and turning a blind-eye to Israeli war crimes may be second nature for the Tory government and the leaders of the Labour Party but even they cannot blind-eye the mass protests of millions of people that rock the streets of Britain week after week. Nor can they ignore the view of their Saudi friends, who have shelved a planned summit with Sunak in London over the crisis, or those of the other Arab princes who’ve invested their oil riches in the UK and made this country their second home.
    These protests have encouraged those in the Jewish community that the Zionists claim to exclusively represent to also take the principled stand of supporting the demand for justice for the Palestinian Arabs. These protests are now rippling through the broader labour movement and now we’re seeing Palestinian demands taken up by unions at a local and regional level. We’re even seeing support for a ceasefire growing within the Parliamentary Labour Party with even some of Labour’s biggies now going beyond his meaningless calls for “humanitarian pauses”.
    This week Labour’s Shadow foreign secretary David Lammy slammed Israel over its attacks on Palestinians. He described the death and destruction in Gaza over the past two months as “intolerable” and attacked two Israeli cabinet ministers for “totally unacceptable” support of illegal Zionist settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
    A permanent ceasefire must be the starting point to address the underlying causes of the crisis, including decades of Israeli military occupation and a system of oppression against the Palestinian Arabs that is considered internationally to meet the legal definition of apartheid.
    Nearly 18,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, with over 40 per cent of those being children. Now is the time to really put the pressure on labour and trade union leaders and all the other powers that be in the UK to end the slaughter. They need to hear the call for a cease-fire from as many as possible and that Britain must end its complicity in Israeli war crimes now. Make sure they hear it by supporting the protests until the fighting stops.

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...

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

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.

No to Zionist terror!

People are demonstrating on the Arab street and across the rest of the world this week in solidarity with the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip who were again battered by the Israeli air force last weekend. Over three days Israel's renewed bombing killed 46 Palestinians. Over 360 others, including 151 children were injured in the terror bombings which the Zionists claimed was a pre-emptive move against the Islamic Jihad resistance movement.
    Bourgeois politicians on both sides of the Atlantic rushed to defend Zionist aggression claiming, as usual, that it was Israel’s “right to defend itself” – a right they never recognise when it comes to the Palestinians or indeed anyone else who dares to stand in the way of imperialism.
    We know the truth that every act of violence used to sustain a system of occupation, apartheid, and settler colonialism is by definition illegitimate. It is Palestinians who have the right to resist and defend themselves.
    In the occupied West Bank Israel violates international law and pursues unabatedly its expansionist policies. The Zionists continued the building of settlements and the colonising of Arab East Jerusalem and the rest of the occupied territories. The Israelis routinely ignore the protests of the powerless “autonomous” Palestinian Authority they pretend to recognise to evict Palestinians, demolish their homes, steal their land and water and all the other resources that belong to the Palestinian people. A policy reminiscent of ethnic cleansing.
    Israel still clings to the dream of dominating the Middle East and colonising Palestine. But its petty ambitions and dreams are not the driving force of Anglo‑American imperialism.
    The tail does not wag the dog and Israel and the American “Zionist lobby” do not dictate American foreign policy. They serve it.
    In the past they provide Anglo‑American imperialism with a convenient alibi to play the role of “honest broker” in the Middle East. They enabled the feudal Arab oil princes, whose thrones are propped up by imperialist bayonets, to claim that the Arabs’ enemy is not imperialism as such but Israel and this supposedly all‑powerful “Zionist lobby”, which pulls the strings in the United States.
    The Zionists get away with it because their interests serve those of Anglo-American imperialism. Israel is in all but name part of the NATO pact, an American protectorate that helps to guard the interests of the big oil corporations that have sucked the life out of the Arab world for the past hundred years.
    We reaffirm our support for and solidarity with the Palestinian people in their struggle to regain their legitimate and inalienable national rights, including the right to self-determination and the establishment of an independent and sovereign Palestinian state.
    We call for the immediate and unconditional end to the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip and for a comprehensive peace treaty to end the conflict in the Middle East based on past United Nations resolutions.
    The 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. All states in the region, including Israel, should have internationally agreed and recognised frontiers guaranteed by all the Great Powers.
    American imperialism believes it can call all the shots in the Middle East today. The imperialists, and the Arab collaborators who do their bidding, believe that all resistance can be crushed by brute force. But In the Middle East imperialist violence always leads to an equally violent resistance. Imperialism’s refusal to recognise this has led to the spiral of violence and terror that began in 1948 as a regional war, to a conflict that now spans the whole world.