The New Worker
The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
Week commencing 15th August 2014
NO ONE can ignore the plight of the Palestinian Arabs these days. Massive demonstrations against the Israeli onslaught on Gaza throughout the world and similar solidarity actions across the country and the world have rocked the bourgeois consensus on Palestine.
Baroness Warsi, the token Muslim in the Con-Dem government, resigned from the Cabinet and the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, has condemned David Cameron’s “silence” on the genocidal anti-Arab rampage by Israel in the Gaza Strip.
The huge march in London last weekend and the demonstrations that are continuing across the country reflect the growing support for the Palestinian cause amongst all strata of society. More and more now see Israel for what it is despite the best efforts of the BBC and the rest of the bourgeois media to portray Israel as the victim rather than the aggressor and side-line or completely ignore the fundamental cause of the conflict.
Meanwhile the Israelis are continue to build illegal Zionist settlements in the occupied West Bank and grow produce and set up industrial zones on stolen Palestinian land. That’s why it is so important to broaden the Palestine solidarity effort in the labour movement and adopt the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel.
Israel is a Zionist colonial-settler state based on stolen Arab land and the expulsion of a million Palestinian Arabs driven out during the war that began in 1948. Five major Arab-Israeli wars have followed leading to the total Zionist occupation of Palestine and continuing instability in the Middle East. But the Palestinians have never accepted defeat.
Some put Israel’s strength down to superior technology and the power of the Zionist lobby in the United States and western Europe. But there is no all-powerful Zionist lobby pulling the strings in Washington.
Zionism has always been the servant of imperialism. As the philosophy developed by 19th century Jewish capitalists it mirrored the other racist and chauvinist theories uses by the European powers to justify their seizure of large areas of the world.
Zionism, like the racist theories that were used to dragoon the British working class into support for “their” Empire, continues to seek to divide Jewish workers from the rest of the working class and tries to justify a colonialist programme based on religious mysticism and the needs of world imperialism.
Lenin, a ceaseless enemy of anti-semitism, maintained that “this Zionist idea is absolutely false and essentially reactionary”. It was, therefore, no surprise to the Russian Bolsheviks in 1917 to find that the Zionists had thrown their lot in with the counter-revolutionaries.
Israel is the willing tool of US-led imperialism. Israel is economically dependent on the United States. All Israel’s weapons come from the Nato powers and its power is based entirely on the massive support it gets from Anglo-American and Franco-German imperialism.
In the past Israel served imperialist interests in post-colonial Africa while providing a conduit for covert trade with the old racist regime in South Africa. In the past the Israeli army was used as a strike force to destabilise or topple progressive Arab governments that had broken with imperialism and were taking the non-capitalist road to development.
Though the Americans like to pose as honest brokers Washington’s peace proposals, such as they are, fail to meet even the minimum demands of the Palestinian Arabs.
The central issue is the Palestinian problem. Peace can never be achieved in the Middle East until the legitimate rights of the Palestinian Arabs are restored. The Palestinians are entitled to establish their own independent state on Palestinian soil. The Palestinian refugees must be allowed to return to their homes in Israel or, if they so wish, be paid appropriate agreed compensation for the loss of their land and property. Israel must withdraw from all the territories it seized in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war including the parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip it still controls, Arab East Jerusalem and Syria’s Golan Heights