Long live Palestine!
As the Palestinian people enter the latest phase of their 75-year struggle for freedom from genocidal zionist occupation, the World Anti-imperialist Platform affirms its full and unconditional support for Palestine’s just war of self-defence and national liberation.
Today, this war has broken out into open, armed conflict once more. At other times it has been waged through peaceful means – including media campaigns, boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) activities, international diplomacy, mass protest and civil disobedience.
Peaceful means have brought the Palestinians victory after victory in the court of public opinion and international law. Hundreds of resolutions passed overwhelmingly by the United Nations general assembly have asserted their rights and drawn attention to the crimes being committed against them. Companies and charities all over the world have refused to invest in illegal settlement activities and in companies that profit from the illegal occupation.
The United Nations has repeatedly called on the world to act to stop the illegal occupation and to facilitate the return of Palestinian refugees to their homes. It has repeatedly and explicitly recognised the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to resist by whatever means necessary, including by armed struggle, the occupation of their lands, the racist regime implemented by the occupiers, and the state of siege under which they are forced to live.
But in a world dominated by imperialism, zionist Israel has been shown in practice to be a case apart. Its special status as a US protectorate has given it de facto immunity from international law, which has proved itself impotent and irrelevant in the face of imperialist power. Ignoring the will of the vast majority of humanity, Israel has been surrounded by a cushion of western public relations spin, persistently described by corporate media as ‘the only democracy in the middle east’ even as it breaks every norm of democracy, international law and human decency.
Given immunity by the protection of Anglo-American imperialism, the zionists, instead of being prevented have been actively helped in carrying out their vicious colonial project of ethnic cleansing – in removing the local population from their lands at the point of a gun and offering them three alternatives: leave, accept the status of a third-class non-person (slave), or die.
But the zionist colonial project came too late for any possible long-term success. Founded in the era of national liberation – the era that was opened by the first salvos of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia – the colonisers may have begun with overwhelming firepower on their side, but they have never been close to persuading the local population to submit.
While many Palestinians have indeed been dispersed around the world, the majority have remained, neither accepting their enslaved status nor meekly disappearing from the scene. Indeed, the new generation of resistance fighters, like their fathers and grandfathers before them, have made it clear they would rather die on their feet than live on their knees.
With such a spirit, no matter what the vicissitudes of history, no matter what difficulties they have to overcome, the final victory of the liberation struggle is assured.
The establishment of a European colonial settler outpost in the middle east was no accident. Plans began to be formed after the British navy switched its fuel to oil in the early years of the 20th century – just as vast lakes of oil were found to be lying underneath the Arabian peninsula. Zionist immigration, overseen by the British colonisers, began immediately after World War 1.
The formal partition of Palestine and the creation of the ‘jewish state’ of Israel in 1948 was ‘justified’ by the crimes of the Nazis against European jews and carried through on a wave of international sympathy, but the zionists immediately launched their own genocide to cleanse the land they had been granted of Palestinian residents and to take over all the land that had not been allocated to them in the original partition of the country.
What needs to be fundamentally understood about Israel is that it is an artificial creation by imperialism. In essence, it is not a ‘country’ or a ‘nation’; it is an army base serving the interests of the British and American oil monopolies, arms manufacturers and financiers. The Europeans who settled there made a Faustian pact: they would train their children to be the armed attack-dogs of imperialism in the middle east – keeping down the peoples of the entire region and helping to maintain control over their resources – in return for a privileged status over and a better standard of life than that of their Arab neighbours.
Every inequality, every obscenity, every barbarity stems from this agreement. The imperialists get a cheap and highly motivated fighting force, while the media and politicians of the west can express ‘solidarity’ while never admitting to involvement in or culpability for Israel’s crimes.
After the mockery that was made of the Palestinians’ supreme act of sacrifice during the Oslo peace process in 1993, when the combined forces of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) signed away their right to 78 percent of historic Palestine in return for recognition and sovereignty over the remaining 22 percent, it must be clear to all that only one solution now remains. By trying to take all of Palestine for themselves, the zionists have instead ensured the end of Israel.
There will be no peace in the middle east until a single, secular state of Palestine is established. One in which all are equal before the law, in which the rights of refugees to return to their homes is not merely ‘recognised’ but actually implemented, and in which all racist, apartheid structures and mechanisms are completely destroyed, so that christians, muslims, jews and those professing no faith are able to live together on terms of fraternity and equality.
The first step towards this will be the breaking of US and British imperialist support for the fascist, supremacist, apartheid state of Israel. There must be an end to the impunity that has been granted by US imperialist protection at the United Nations and in the imperialist media.
Without this imperialist protection and the bottomless pit of imperialist funding, it is clear that Israeli society would fall apart from its own inherent contradictions.
We in the Platform support every move in the middle east that is tending towards the isolation and destruction of the zionist settler-colonial project. The resistance to imperialist domination waged not only in Palestine but also by the people of Iran, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen have tremendously weakened the position of Israel in the region, as has the Chinese-mediated rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
The more the imperialist-sewn divisions between middle-eastern peoples can be overcome, the more vulnerable and isolated Israel will be and the stronger will be the support for the Palestinian resistance, which is being waged not only for their own liberation but on behalf of the entire region, whose progress and development has been held back for decades by imperialist war and domination.
The struggle of the Palestinian people against imperialist-backed genocide is a central part of the global struggle against imperialist domination. All progressive humanity must support it fully and unconditionally.
Today we hear news of the total siege being enforced against the millions of Palestinian occupants of the open-air prison that is the Gaza strip. These people, displaced from their lands and homes and herded into the most populous few miles on the planet, are now being held without food, water, medical supplies or electricity while bombs rain down on high-rise apartment buildings full of families who have nowhere else to go.
Just to underline this point, even as the United Nations was calling for humanitarian corridors to enable the exit of non-combatants, the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt – the only possible exit from the strip – was bombed. Once again, internationally banned chemical weapons, including white phosphorus, have been dropped on the people. Once again, the United Nations has declared such means to be illegal and called for an end to the siege.
But despite all this, politicians and media in the west are falling over themselves to excuse and hide the crimes of the occupiers instead of holding them to account. Once again, they are filling the pages of their newspapers with fabricated horror stories in order to try to equate the resistance of the occupiers with the oppression of the occupation.
This is the true face of the regime that sheds crocodile tears over the fate of ‘civilians’, even as their supporters call for the ‘wiping out’ of Gaza’s two million imprisoned people.
And this is the true tragedy of those who serve imperialism as its fascist proxies around the world: in order to dehumanise others, they must first dehumanise themselves. It is they, even more than those they target, who are finding themselves trapped inside an iron cage. It is they who have poisoned the minds of their children by bringing them up to hate and to kill; to believe in the twisted fantasy of dominant and subjugated races; of Uber and Untermensch.
They are doomed to a painful awakening. Their efforts will be in vain. The fascistic means of repression used to try to control Palestinian resistance will ultimately prove as futile as they have in Ukraine, south Korea, Chile, South Africa and so many other countries around the world.
Meanwhile, it is our task as anti-imperialists to help workers everywhere understand the true nature of this conflict, and to take a stand with the oppressed, whose fight is an integral part of the fight of all humanity to end the barbaric system of capitalist-imperialism for good.
We confirm that we will not be deterred from this duty by the push to criminalise every manifestation of support for Palestine that is now ongoing across the collective west.
Death to imperialism and its fascist proxies everywhere!
Victory to the resistance!
