Leninist Trotskyist Fraction Statement
From the 28 of June, the Zionist-Fascist state of Israel, has begun a new military offensive against the Palestinian workers and people. With the pretext of “freeing” an Israeli soldier who was captured by one of the Palestinian militias, it has surrounded and invaded the Gaza Strip –a territory of 400 square kilometers with a population of one-and-a-half million people –with tanks, ships, artillery and troops. It has launched a massive artillery bombardment against the Palestinian people, already killing 54 of them – including 9 children – by the end of June. With this offensive, imperialism and its Zionist policeman aims a new counter-revolutionary blow at the Palestinian and Middle Eastern masses, and in particular at the heroic resistance of the Iraqi masses who are fighting a war of resistance against the US army and who every day send back to the US more dead soldiers in body bags. We reproduce in a slightly abridged version a statement of the FLT.
The situation of the oppressed people of is already a catastrophe and getting worse: the electrical power stations and the bridges were destroyed and all access roads closed. With a temperatures above 40°, the people do not have water, light, food, medicines, fuel, etc. One out of three new-born children dies for lack of basic medicines. Without power the hospitals cannot perform operations or maintain blood supplies or medicines, etc.
The vast majority of Palestinian workers are unemployed. The Zionist State in the last months cut from 88,000 to 11,000 the ‘work permits’ that allow Palestinian workers to be exploited in Israeli and imperialist factories in occupied Palestine. Thousands of workers risk their life every day leaving Gaza and the Transjordan without permits to work for food to feed their children. But today no worker can leave to work.
The Zionist army also entered Ramallah, in the Transjordan, bombing dependencies and detaining almost 100 civil employees of the “Palestinian government” –the so-called ‘Palestinian National Authority’ –accusing them of being ‘criminals’, ‘terrorists’, etc.
This is the true face of the Zionist-Fascist state of Israel, artificially created in 1948 by means of the military occupation of the territory of the nation of Palestine, the expulsion of its inhabitants, their systematic extermination and displacement on the assumption of an historic ‘Biblical right’ , and maintained since then by Anglo-Yankee imperialism as its police force to keep the Palestinian and Middle Eastern Masses subservient to the imperialistic powers and their demand for oil!
The new fascist offensive aims to smash all resistance and impose an apartheid state of Palestine
The Palestinian masses, with its nation under occupation, condemned to live as prisoners in their own land, are prisoners in “ghettos” and concentration camps that are no better than the Warsaw ghetto of the Nazis. This new military offensive is the continuation of the defeat of the huge revolution that the Palestinian people began in September 2000. It aims to complete that defeat, with the reimposition of a fascist barbarism by the Zionist invaders of the nation they have occupied for more than half a century.
At the same time, it is the response of US and British imperialism to the refusal of the Palestinian resistance to accept defeat of their revolution. Not one day has passed since 2002 when there has not been demonstrations against the apartheid wall in Transjordan, against the confinement of the people in ‘Bantustans’ and concentration camps surrounded by the Zionist army and the fascist colonies, against the recurrent massacres and murders of the Zionist army, struggles to liberate more than 10,000 Palestinian political prisoners in the Zionist jails, including over 500 women and children.
If the military offensive of the army of Olmert and Bush is victorious, then immediately we will see the imposition of the ‘Road Map’ to complete the formation of a “Palestinian state”, separated from an Israeli state, and consisting of small strips of barren, over-populated territory, without infrastructure and water, isolated from one another, behind walls like Transjordan, and surrounded by the Israeli army and the fascist colonies.
If they succeed in this offensive, imperialism and its Zionist agent will be more confident of being able to finally smash the heroic resistance of the Iraqi masses, of advancing its plans to attack Iran, and also to intensify its attacks against the workers of the United States and the European imperialist powers.
There is no middle road when facing the life and death struggle of the Palestinian people who have been fighting to throw out the Zionist occupants of their land more than half a century: one is unconditionally with the Palestinian people, or one is in the trench of the Zionist-Fascist state of Israel, and the imperialists Bush, Chirac, the UN and the other bandits.
Cynically, the world bourgeois media worries about the fate of the Israeli soldier taken prisoner, while it couldn’t care less about the deaths and the suffering inflicted on the millions of oppressed Palestinians that try to defend their land from the occupyers. As revolutionary Trotskyists we defend the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to defend themselves and to fight against the Israeli occupying troops with any means at their disposal. The right to fight to defeat the Zionist invader and to destroy the Zionist state, is an inalienable democratic-revolutionary right of the Palestinian people.
The Palestine bourgeoisie of Al Fatah and Hamas: prison guards of the enslaved Palestinian people
At the same time, we say very clearly that the long suffering of the Palestinian people will only end with the destruction from the Zionist-Fascist state of Israel. This will not be won under the leadership of the Palestinian bourgeoisie. No, on the contrary, it will be necessary for the working class and the exploited people to break all ties to the national bourgeoisie.
The Palestine bourgeoisie betrayed the historic struggle of thePalestinian people for its national liberation and it have become the prison guards of its own people, first by making the Oslo agreement and today by supporting the ‘Road Map’ that implements the Oslo Agreement.
In 1993, by signing the Oslo agreements the PLO and Al Fatah, headed then by Yasser Arafat, openly renounced the struggle for the destruction of the State of Israel, recognizing its ‘right to exist’, and accepting the plan to create the fiction of a ‘Palestinian state’ coexisting by its side. Those agreements introduced the farce of the “Palestinian territories” under the so-called government of the Palastinian National Authority and its police, as prison guards of their own people as slaves confined to ghettos and concentrations camps.
It was against that new system of control that the masses revolted in September of 2000, starting the heroic Palestine revolution. The oppressed workers rose up, took the police stations from the ‘Palestinian National Authority’, disarmed it and forming their own workers and peasants militias in the towns and camps. Breaking from their own bourgeois police guard and arming themselves, the Palestinian workers and peasants immediate raised to a higher level, the struggle for national liberation, and opened the road to the the destruction of the Zionist-Fascist state of Israel.
To smash that revolutionary upsurge, the the Zionist state sent in the army to disarm masses while at the same time protecting the bourgeois leadership of Palestine by locking up Yasser Arafat and his cabinet in Ramallah. By ensuring that Arafat survied the revolution, the Zionist state rearmed the Palestine bourgeoisie (channelling Billions of “international aid” through international companies such as the one that supplies the cement for the wall around Transjordan) to control its own people behind the apartheid Wall. The brigades of Al Aqsa and Al Fatah, and then the brigades of Ezzedine Al Kassam of Hamas, at once began to repress the workers and peasants militias proving that they were in fact the new “Palestine” police whose task was to suppress the revolutionary masses.
Hamas succeeds Al Fatah as the jailhouse guards
Because it openly attacked the Palelstinian people the bourgeois leadership of Al Fatah was widely discredited in the eyes of the masses. This is why another bourgeois fraction, represented by Hamas (the fraction of the commercial bourgeoisie, related to the bourgeoisie of the Bazaar of Iran) replaced Al Fatah as the leadership of the “Palestinian Territories’. It was this fraction represented by Hamas, that won the legislative elections last February, and formed the new government chosing the Prime Minister and cabinet, while Al Fatah is now represented only by the Presdident Abu Mazen.
Hamas demagogically won the elections with its policy of the destruction of the State of Israel, manipulating therefore the feeling and the aspirations of the vast majority of the Palestinian people. But as soon as it became the Government, Hamas made a ‘truce’ with the Israeli state for 10 years. That is, it guaranteed the existence and survival of Isael by undertaking the task of policing its own people. This proves yet again, that the liberation of the Palestinian people can only be won by the working class leading the poor peasantry, and destroying the Zionist-Facist state of Israel.
Hamas has already renounced the historical fight for the destruction of the State of Israel. But it has tried to convince the Israeli state that the best way to control the Palestinian people that the it still fights for the destruction of the State of Israel. With those arguments, Hamas tried to get the Zionist state to release the “international aid” and withheld taxes to the Palestinian government.
But the Zionist bourgeoisie – backed by US imperialism – rejected this deal with Hamas. They want to see all the fractions of the Palestine bourgeoisie on their knees before Israel. So while the prison guards fight among themselves, the Zionist state sends in its military forces to make clear who commands the jail.
Only the workers of the whole Middle East can destroy the state of Israel and imperialism
The undefeated Palestinian people have suffererd more than half a century of massacres and betrayals, because the leaders of the national liberation struggle are the national bourgeoisie. The Palestine bourgeoisie, like all national bourgeoisies, are the junior partners of imperialism. They would prefer to go to prison like the Hamas leadership today, and that its people got killed, than arm the masses.. It knows that if the Palestinian people were armed not only would they destroy the state of Israel, but as already happened in 2000, they would destroy the national bourgeoisies power and private property. Therefore, it hides the weapons so that the masses cannot get them, and forces them to face the murderous attacks of the fifth biggest army in the world, armed to the teeth by imperialism, with empty hands.
The only then way then, that the Palestinian masses can face the Zionist military offensive, is to break all political subordination to its own bourgeoisie, and take the leadership of the national liberation struggle into its own handes. It must form workers and peasants militias and arm the Palestinian people and fight for the destruction of the Zionist-Fascist state of Israel. Otherwise the blood of its martyrs will again be used by the Palestinian bourgeoisie as a currency in its negotiations with imperialism and the Zionist state.
In that way, the masses of occupied Palestine can be united in struggle with the millions of Palestinians expelled from their land by Zionism and who now live Lebanon and Jordan. The heroic masses that resist in Gaza and Transjordan, have a powerful rearguard in the millions of Palestinian workers and who live in the south of where their militia forced the Israeli army to retreat in June 2000 in first engagement of the coming Palestinian revolution! There are many battalions able to confront the Israeli army on the East Bank of the Jordán River, in Jordan, where almost half the population is Palestinian.
Break with the bourgeoisie of Al Fatah, Hamas, Hizbollah, etc., so that the Palestinian masses can be armed to defeat the Zionist offensive and open the road to the destruction of the State of Israel. Break with Hizbollah so that the Palestinian masses in Lebanon can engage the Zionist state with their armed forces. Break with the Jordanian bourgeoisie - whose monarchy is responsible for terrible massacres against the Palestinian people, to allow the Palestinian masses of Jordan to split the Jordanian army and unite with its brothers and sisters in occupied Palestine. Build workers and peasants militias to take the leadership of the national liberation struggle, and retake the road of the revolution of 2000 that leads to the victory over imperialism. For a workers and peasants revolution capable of destroying the state of Israel, and creating a secular, democratic and nonracist Palestinian State where the workers and of all religions can coexist peacefully!
Re-entering the road to revolution, the Palestinian working class can lead a united struggle in the Middle East to defeat the imperialist troops in Iraq, stop any attack on Iran, and win a new Vietnam war that buries in the sands of the desert both imperialism and its Zionist policeman.
Stop the ‘oil wars’ of the imperialists and their national bourgeois junior partners!
The national bourgeoisies of the Middle East states, “condemn” the new Zionist offensive, but do not move a finger to support the Palestinian people. This is because these bourgeoisies are the junior partners of imperialism in plundering the oil of the region and the superexploitation and oppression of their own workers. Such is the case with the Iranian bourgeoisie and French imperialism; the Iraqian bourgeoisie –Sunni and Shiite – and US and British imperialism. Those national bourgeois regimes –from North Africa, to Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran, are exploiting and repressing hundreds of millions of poor workers and peasants who live in the most extreme poverty and misery, while under their feet are the greatest oil reserves in the world. They also get their share of the profits from the million of workers who move from country to country to work in oil wells living in squalid camps and guarded by the mercenaries of the oil companies.
The bloody occupation of Iraq, the warlike threats against Iran, and the Zionist offensive against the Palestinian people, are all part of the “oil wars” of the imperialist powers and the national bourgeoisies of the region. For that reason, the Egyptian bourgeoisie sent 2500 police to the border with Gaza to guarantee that no Palestinians can escape to Egyptian territory. The Syrian bourgeoisie, although equipped with artillery, allowed Israeli helicopters to fly over Damascus in a clear military threat, but did not more than verbally “repudiate” that action. The Iranian bourgeoisie, that constantly threatens a “mother of all battles” against the state of Israel and the imperialism, does nothing but request that the UN Security Council meets…that same den of imperialistic thieves that imposes sanctions against Iran for its nuclear development!
Only the working class can stop these “oil wars”, because it has no class interest that ties it to imperialism, only chains to break. The most urgent task is to unite the ranks of the working class of the whole Middle East, so it can use the most powerful “missile” of all against imperialism and the bourgeoisies agents: to attack its private property and its super profits with a generalised struggle to expropriate the imperialistic oil monopolies, and the nationalization without compensation and under working control of the oil and gas wealth in all the Arab nations, and the whole Middle East.
One world working class, one fight!
In order to be able to go in aid of its Palestinian brothers and sisters the workers of the Middle East must break all the chains to their own native bourgeoisies. The heroic Iraqian resistance must break with the Shiite and Suni bourgeosies to unite with the Palestinian masses in one fight against imperialism and the state of Israel. The Egyptian workers and exploited must break with their oppressive bourgeoisie to demolish the border that separates them from their Palestine brothers and sisters, and provide arms, food and medicines so that they can oppose the Israeli army. The workers and exploited people of Iran must break with their nation bourgeoisie and send arms, missiles etc to the Palestinian people. Defeat imperialism and expropriate its monopolies, destroy the State of Israel, overthrow the lackey bourgeois regimes, and create worker-peasant governments within a Federation of Workers and Peasant governments of the Middle East.
The fight to destroy Zionist-Fascist state of Israel is also task of working class of the imperialist powers that created Israel, finance it and supply it with arms. The proletariat of the US, Britain, France and other imperialist powers have the key to stop the Zionist offensive and to defeat imperialism in Iraq. Paralyse the imperialist war machine and the Zionist war machine by workers boycotts strikes, mobilizations and pickets. Stop all shipments of arms, equipment and provisions to the Zionist State and the occupying armies of Iraq. Provide the Palestinian masses and the Iraqi resistance with arms, food and medicines, so they can defeat the imperialists and the Zionists!
But to defeat imperialistic powers we have to defeat the labor bureaucracy, the labor aristocracy and the leaders of the World Social Forum that chains the workers and peasants to the popular front with the imperialists.The working class and the exploded ones of Latin America must take the lead in the defense of the Palestinian people. It’s long struggle for national liberation is the same fight as that of the workers and poor peasants of Latin America to remove the imperialist yoke.
But the World Social Forum leaders like Fidel Castro are demanding that the UN intervene to stop the Zionist offensive in Gaza and return to the ‘Road Map’! Kirchner, Lula, Chávez, Morales and Co., “condemn” the attack of the Zionist army, and plead for “peace”. At the same time they are preparing to sign at the Mercosur meeting on 20 and 21 July, a Free Trade Agreement with the Zionist-Fascist state of Israel, while the working class and the Palestinian people are killed and injured. Down with the FTA with Israel!
Therefore the first condition, for the workers and peasants of Latin America to support the struggle of our class brothers and sisters of Palestine, is to break with the bourgeoisies, their regimes and their governments, and the union bureaucracies, Castrioists, and fake Trotskyists, who are today part of the World Social Forum.
Emergency Call to the world working class
The Leninist Trotskyist Fraction (FLT) calls on the world working class to take up the revolutionary program of struggle for the liberation of the Palestinian people that we have advanced. Take to the streets to fight for the destruction of the Zionist-Fascist state of Israel, and for the defeat of imperialism and the victory of the heroic Iraqi resistance. Surround the US and Israeli embassies everywhere in the world; use stoppages, boycotts, pickets and general strikes to stop the shipment of arms to the Zionist state and the imperialist army in Iraq. Supply arms, equipment, food and medicines to the heroic peoples of towns Palestine and Iraqi that are fighting for their national liberation. The world working class, the only one that can defeat imperialism and its Zionist policeman, must fight side by side with its class brothers and sisters of Palestine, Iraq and the whole Middle East!
· Stop the genocidal attack of the the Israeli state and its army against the Palestinian workers people!
· Immediate and unconditional freedom for the more than 10,000 Palestinian fighters held in Israeli jails!
· Down with the “Road Map” of the imperialistic butchers, the Zionist state and the Arab bourgeoisies, that wants to create an apartheid Palestinian state!
· Paralyze the imperialist war machine and the Zionist war machine by workers boycotts strikes, mbilizations and pickets.
· Stop all shipments of arms, equipment and provisions to the Zionist State and the occupying armies of Iraq!
· Provide the Palestinian masses and the Iraqian resistance with arms, food and medicines, so they can defeat the imperialilsts and the Zionists!
· Workers and peasants militias and arms for all Palestinian people to take the leadership of the national war of liberation gainst the Zionist occupier!
· For the destruction of the Zionist-Fascist state of Israel!
· Only a workers government of the self organised and armed Palestinian masses can guarantee a secular, democratic and nonracist Palestinian State!
· For a Federation of Workers and Peasants Republics of the Middle East!
· For the military defeat of all the invading troops, and for the victory of the heroic resistance of the Iraqi masses!
· Out with all the imperialist troops from Afghanistan and the Middle East!
· UN and imperialist hands off Iran!
From Class Struggle 67 June/July 2006
