Detroit/Seattle
Workers' Voice mailing list
November 9, 2023
The following article is from Seattle Workers’ Voice, November 6, 2023, vol. 7, #3, which called on people to take part in the weekly demonstrations every Saturday at 3:00 pm at the Westlake Center (4th & Pine).
In the Gaza Strip, population 1.9 million, the high-tech Israeli armed forces have now murdered over 10,000 men, women and children. Refugee camps, residential neighborhoods, schools, hospitals, ambulances and more have all been bombed, and no place is safe for the people. They're also hungry and thirsty due to the Israeli blockade (the UN says the average Palestinian resident is living on two pieces of Arabic bread a day, yet the main refrain from the street is “water, water”), and hospitals often must run without electricity. But amidst the rubble and horror, the Gazans are showing great mass heroism as they struggle to save their comrades. They're also crying out to the people of the world for assistance.
In the West Bank,--Palestinian population 2.5 million--prior to
October 7, Israeli settler land-grabbing was already increasing, with
the settler population reaching 1/2 million. But after October 7, this
is dramatically being dramatically stepped up. Palestinians have woken
up to find notes on their doors saying “get out or be killed,” and in a
little more than three weeks 155 Palestinians have been killed, 2,000
injured and nearly 1,000 others forcibly displaced. The Israeli Defense
Forces (IDF) give the settlers automatic rifles with which to
accomplish this, as well as directly participating.
Behind this is the Zionist vision of creating a Jewish state from
the sea to the Jordan River, or even beyond. (1) But to accomplish this the
majority Arab population had to be driven out. Thus, in 1938 Zionist
David Ben Gurion, who would later become Israel's first prime minister,
was saying,“I am for compulsory transfer; I do not see anything immoral
in it.” Thus, there was nothing immoral about the Zionist military
forces expelling at least 750,000 Palestinians, destroying over 530 of
their villages and massacring 15,000 of them in order to set up a
Jewish state in 1948. And in 1948, Ben Gurion also said: "We must do
everything to insure they [the Palestinians] never do return. The old
will die and the young will forget." Today, Netanyahu's Likud Party
program says that “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be
Israeli sovereignty,” while a number of Israeli right-wing politicians
publicly call for driving the Gazans into Egypt.
The Zionists charge anyone opposing their state and its policies with ANTISEMITISM, and they ridiculously lay this charge against the Palestine solidarity movement even though large numbers of Jews are involved in it. But with swastikas now being painted on synagogues and assaults on Jews, it's clear that real antisemitism remains an issue in society. Moreover, tiny groups of neo-nazis and white nationalists have begun to infiltrate pro-Palestinian demonstrations in the east, where they were denounced.
ISLAMOPHOBIA. Seeing so many
Arabs and Muslims marching in the streets is stirring the islamophobes
to violence. In Illinois, an Islamophobic landlord murdered a
6-year-old Palestinian-American boy with a knife, and seriously wounded
his Palestinian mother. Assaults on Muslim women have increased. At
Stanford University, a driver accelerated his vehicle in order to run
over a Muslim student, and then drove away while shouting, “f++k you
people.”
HAMAS is led by
fundamentalist-reactionaries who won the 2006 election with 44% of the
vote, but have never held another. They're now corrupt, they send the
police to crush protests, and they try to force their morality onto the
Gazan women, LGBTQ people and youth. And their resistance strategy has
been to indiscriminately lob missiles into Israel that usually killed
civilians. The October 7 Al-Aqsa Flood raid continued this strategy,
but this time Hamas murdered hundreds of innocent Jewish-Israelis,
dozens of Arab-Israelis, and at least 50 migrant workers, most of whom
were from Thailand. And also this time it took at least 242 people
hostage.
So this was a crime, and pointing out that the Zionist's crimes are
much larger than it doesn't hide the fact that it was. What's more, it
acted to push Israeli Jews into the arms of Netanyahu and the worst
ultra-Zionists, who conflate the entire Palestinian national struggle
with Hamas, and who use this to to justify their present slaughter in
Gaza. Meanwhile, a small part of the solidarity movement actually
supports the Al-Aqsa Flood raid, while a larger part remains silent
about it. This will not do. Many people outside the movement rightly
sympathize with the innocent victims of the Hamas attack and they
rightly sympathize with the Palestinians, but they're going to question
joining a movement that won't speak against Hamas and October 7. After
all, such actions as Al-Aqsa Flood drive a wedge between the
Palestinian cause and the mass of working people around the world, when
the unity of working people everywhere for the Palestinian cause is
needed.
The Zionist press pundits are stepping up propaganda against the
slogan, “FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA,
PALESTINE WILL BE FREE!” They say it means the Muslims (and not
all Palestinians are Muslim) want to oppress the Jews in a new state,
drive them out, etc. But they know this is a lie. The historic demand
of the Palestinian national movement has been for one secular and
democratic state from the river to the sea: one person, one vote. And
after the 1948 Nakba, the demand for the right of return of the
refugees was added. In the early 90s, however, under pressure from
Washington, the dominant Fatah party, plus some other parties in the
PLO abandoned this solution in favor of a two-state solution. (This
threw the Palestinian movement into a crisis that has yet to resolved.)
But while the Zionist leaders agreed to talk, they were never going to
agree to letting the refugees return to Israeli soil, nor were they
going to agree to having a viable Palestinian state next door. Thus,
while the talking went on and on, the Zionists built their apartheid
separation wall and segregated road system, they steadily increased the
settlements in the West Bank, and they committed atrocity after
atrocity against the Palestinians. Biden, who knows this history, is
now giving speeches advocating the two-state non-solution. In this way
he's pretending to be a man of peace while arming Israel as it
slaughters the Gazans.
And Biden is rightfully being targeted by the movement. He has increased military aid to Israel; he's sent aircraft carrier groups to back up the IDF; he refuses to call for a ceasefire, thus giving Israel the go-ahead; the U.S. was one of a very few nations in the UN to vote against a call for a ceasefire.
Identification with the Palestinian cause, as encapsulated in the chant “we are millions, we are billions, we are all Palestinians,” is at the root of this global movement. The mass media is already saying that the demonstrations are the largest in 20 years. In numerous Western cities more than 100,000 people have marched in a day, and in the Arab and Muslim world, many hundreds of thousands or over a million people have marched. More protests are to come. And besides demonstrations, other mass actions are taking place, such as the attempts to block an Israeli military vessel in the ports of Oakland and Tacoma. Also notable is that this great outpouring of support for the Palestinians has come in conditions where the demonstrators have had to defy national and local government bans on pro-Palestinian protests in France, Germany, Austria and Hungary, and suffer police beatings and hundreds of arrests. Meanwhile, the situation in Israel is fascist. Arab Israelis are liable to be hauled off in the middle of the night just for mentioning the word “Gaza” on social media. And the small Jewish demonstrations are attacked by the cops and Zionist thugs. But despite all this, the Jewish Israelis recently had a protest in front of Netanyahu's house, and they persist. We should too.
Not a penny, not
a dime, for Israeli war crimes!
No to Israeli apartheid!
Stand with the Palestinian people!
(1) For more on the history of the Zionist project, see
[https://www.communistvoice.org/31cZionism.html](https://www.communistvoice.org/31cZionism.html).
Demonstrate every Saturday at 3:00 pm
at the Westlake Center (4th & Pine)!
Look for other pro-Palestinian events at
https://www.facebook.com/people/Falastiniyat/100081689528945/ [Falastiniyat, a grassroots collective of diasporic Palestinian feminists
in Seattle] and
https://www.facebook.com/SuperUw/ [Students United for Palestinian Equality and Return (SUPER) is a student organization at the University of Washington]
Spread the word!
Seattle Workers’ Voice,
11/6/2023.
seattle.com.sg@gmail.com<>
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