Issued by the Office of the Chairperson
By Prof. Jose Maria Sison
International Coordinating Committee
International League of Peoples’ Struggle
28 November 2012
On 29 November, the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, the International League of Peoples’ Struggle proudly proclaims our solidarity with the people of Palestine in their 64-year struggle to reclaim their occupied homeland. In this we stand together with the majority of humanity.
This day, now acknowledged by the United Nations, was originally proclaimed by the Organization of Solidarity of the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America. It marks the day in 1947 when Palestine was partitioned by imperialist edict against the will of its people. The US Truman administration forced partition through the United Nations at a time when most of Africa and Asia were under colonial rule and had no vote in the UN.
We especially salute the people of Gaza who have lived under six years of blockade and repeated terrorist attacks by the massive US-armed and -funded Israeli war machine. We salute their heroic resistance, which stopped the murderous Zionist military in its tracks.
We also salute the people of the West Bank who have taken to the streets again and again in the face of Israeli guns and mass imprisonment. We salute the Palestinians living under discrimination inside the Israeli apartheid state who have never given up their identity. We salute the 6 million Palestinians in exile who for 64 years have never given up their basic human right to return to their homes and land. This comes less than four years after Operation Cast Lead, in which 1,400 Palestinians, including 300 children were murdered by the Israeli war machine.
For eight days this month the racist Israeli state of Israel rained US-made bombs and missiles from US-made aircraft flown by US-trained pilots on the crowded cities and refugee camps of Gaza. They took the lives of 170 people, including at least 36 children. Entire families were massacred. Many more lost arms and legs, saw their homes destroyed or are left without power, water or medicine.
Gaza is a giant concentration camp, the world’s largest prison. There 1.8 million people, children, the elderly, entire families, live behind iron walls, unable to leave, on a restricted diet, denied medicine, building materials, the right to trade or to fish their own waters and subject to arbitrary, summary execution by their Zionist jailers. They have been imprisoned there, in one form or another, for 64 years.
They are imprisoned for the crime of being born in the land of Palestine, for being native to that land. The crime of being born or having parents or grandparents who were born where now stand the settler enclaves of Tel Aviv and Herzliya and Rishon le Zion, where the beaches are lined with luxury Hilton and Sheraton hotels and second homes for people from the United States.
The workers of Gaza, the dispossessed in camps like Jabalya, were forced to build those hotels and condos under four decades of direct Israeli occupation, when they were allowed to return to the towns of their birth only as day laborers who could be imprisoned if they were found there after sundown. Jabalya camp is the most densely populated place on earth.
But the people of Gaza never relinquished their right to return. In 2006 they democratically elected a leadership that defended that right. Now they are not allowed to leave at all. They are bombed and murdered and their elected representatives are targeted for assassination by the US-funded Zionist Reich that now rules their land.
In the eyes of Israel’s benefactors in Washington and on Wall Street, the Palestinian people have also committed a crime: They were born in a strategic land at the crossroads of Africa and Asia, at the heart of a region of the world that holds 52 percent of the world’s oil and 42 percent of the world’s natural gas. It is a region that yields incredible superprofits to US oil monopolies and banks and war contractors. It is a region they are driven to keep weak and torn apart and divided.
How else can they assure that its vast resources will not be used to develop Africa and Asia independently of US monopoly capital. How else to assure that Arabian petrodollars will continue to fill the vaults of Morgan Chase and Citibank. The heroic uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia and Bahrain and now in Jordan, like the Iranian Revolution of 32 years ago, showed the US imperialist ruling class that there is no regime in the region they can trust and rely upon without the loaded gun of Israel pointed at its head. But the resistance in Gaza, as in Lebanon in 2006, has shown that loaded gun can be defeated by people’s resistance.
It is the Palestinian people’s resistance that has forced the United Nations to concede today that Palestine has the right to statehood, albeit without the right to vote in the General Assembly and on a fraction of its stolen national territory. The vitriolic opposition of not only the Zionist entity but of US and British imperialism to even this mild concession exposes them as implacable enemies of freedom and justice for Palestine and the Arab people.
Time and again in its 64 years of existence, the racist Israeli regime has unleashed its US-supplied arsenal on the people of Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria and Jordan. It recently bombed Sudan and it is threatening to attack Iran. That is its role in the region, a role it will continue to play until it is replaced by one democratic state for all the people of Palestine.
Palestine, the fight to free Palestine, is at the very heart of the global battle between oppressed and oppressor, between imperialist monopoly capital and the people of the world. The ILPS supports unconditionally the struggle of the Palestinian people to free their homeland. We support their right to return and live in peace and freedom in every corner of their land. We condemn and demand an end to the arming and funding of the Israeli settler state by the United States and other imperialist powers. We support the global movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions on the racist Israeli state and urge all our member organizations to support that movement in their respective countries.
