Detroit/Seattle Workers' Voice mailing list
November 9, 2023
Help build the movement in solidarity with the Palestinian people!
Denounce Israel's U.S.-supported slaughter in Gaza!
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).
- The slaughter in Gaza
- Some movement issues
- Join and build the Palestine solidarity movement
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.
Some movement issues
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.
Join and build the Palestine solidarity movement!
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/Falasti ... 89528945/ and
https://www.facebook.com/SuperUw/
Spread the word!
Seattle Workers’ Voice, 11/6/2023.
seattle.com.sg@gmail.com<>
