Socialist Viewpoint

Israel’s brutal invasion of Palestinian refugee camps, villages, and cities in the West Bank and Gaza is part and parcel of the United States “War on Terrorism.” This is not because it is in any sense a response to terrorism, but because this invasion is paid for by the United States, politically supported by the United States, justified publicly by Israel’s leaders with the rhetoric of the United States (Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon even quotes President Bush’s speeches on the subject), and, shares an underlying purpose with the so-called “War on Terrorism.”

That purpose is to assure U.S. corporate control over the world’s resources, especially its oil resources, and to control and dominate the toiling workers and farmers of the countries of the world who try to take control of their own resources, lands, and political entities by any means at their disposal such as the Palestinian intifada, mass demonstrations (as in Rome and Barcelona), uprisings, and revolutions.

Massive demonstrations are taking place the world over opposed to Israel’s invasion and in support of the Palestinian people. Like the Vietnamese revolution against foreign domination and the South African resistance to apartheid, the Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation and domination has won the solidarity of millions of the world’s people of many nationalities and many religions. The David and Goliath nature of the current struggle, in which one of the world’s most heavily armed states—Israel—in alliance with the world’s only super-power—the United States—lays siege to a civilian population who have been pushed out of their ancestral homes and lands. Suicide bombing is understood for what it is—a desperate means of struggle for a people suffering bloody repression by the combined military and economic power of the United States and its client state.

The Zionist rationale for a Jewish state at the expense of the indigenous peoples of the region is losing ground, even in its strongest base outside of Israel—the United States. Many Jews have come to realize that the Israeli state is no more justified in its crimes against the Palestinian people than were the Nazis in their crimes against the Jews.

Many have come to realize that the setting up of a theocratic state with rights for Jews, but not for the land’s non-Jewish indigenous population has led to the current explosion of anger and resistance by the Palestinian people.

In fact, even many Jews in Israel, as well as elsewhere in the world, now reject the Zionist rationalization—that the Nazi Holocaust justifies the current victimization of the Palestinian people—for their genocidal assault on Palestine.

Oslo helped create the explosion

Socialist Viewpoint is printing an article by Nadine Picadou, which was published in the French newspaper, Le Monde, one year ago. This article explains the background to the current intifada. It explains how the Oslo accords of 1993 created the conditions for the current drastic situation for the Palestinians, a situation in which the Palestinian struggle for national self-determination was actually set back by the creation of an “autonomous” Palestinian Authority which would be dependent on Israel in myriad ways, “preserving Israel’s overall sovereignty over territory, by controlling borders, air space and underground reserves (notably water).” And of course the expanding Jewish settlements into the West Bank and Gaza made the terrible Zionist crime against Palestine clearer than words ever could.

Of course much about the intifada has changed since the article first appeared, but Picadou’s insightful analysis of the Oslo accords sheds much light on the past year’s events.

The “autonomous” Palestinian Authority, trying to co-exist with the highly armed, U.S.-supported Israel, is a foretaste of what a “two state” solution might look like. In other words, any Palestinian state that U.S.-dominated Israel would agree to recognize would automatically have to exist in the framework of a dependent and weakened relationship with the Israeli state. This has already proved to be intolerable for Palestinians. That is why the solution of a secular, democratic, socialist Palestine, with equal rights for Palestinians and Jews, and ultimately workers’ ownership and control of the country’s resources, is the only practical means for ending the conflict and bringing peace to the Middle East.

American imperialism’s basic economic interests in the region have already led it to a war on Iraq which began in 1991 but whose bombing raids have continued since then, and whose outcome has been the devastation of the country, its social and physical infrastructure, and the deaths of over a million of its civilian population, mostly children!

The Palestinians also face U.S. weapons. F-16 fighter jets and Apache helicopters are flying over refugee camps and bombing Palestinian homes as this is being written. U.S.-supplied bulldozers and pile drivers have destroyed hundreds of Palestinian homes and uprooted thousands of precious olive trees that are the historic base of Palestinian agriculture.

Americans who have opposed the U.S. government’s open and secret wars on the poor peoples of the world can and must be mobilized to oppose this U.S.-financed war on the Palestinians.

Hundreds of thousands of the American people can and must be mobilized to join in solidarity with the world’s working people instead of solidarity with the capitalist ruling class—the tiny minority of super-rich who exist by robbing workers and farmers of the fruits of their labor and the resources of the earth.

The April 20 National Demonstration Against War, Racism, and Poverty is the next opportunity for Americans to join working people around the world in opposition to the U.S. war on the peoples of the world. In light of the U.S. supported Israeli war against the Palestinians, the April 20 demonstration will be the opportunity to demand:

• No U.S. Aid to Israel!

• Don’t use our tax dollars to fund the war against the Palestinian people!

• All Out for April 20!

Carole Seligman,

For the editors of Socialist Viewpoint.