Palestine supporters “block the boat” blockade of Israeli ship at Oakland 2014Israel is a Zionist settler state colonised by military conquest. It is not a Jewish state. Most Jews around the world do not recognise it as their state. Jews as a minority oppressed people have the right to a nation, but not at the expense of an existing nation, Palestine. The right to a nation’s self-determination cannot be realised by destroying another nation’s self-determination. Moreover, this right should be the expressed will of the majority, not the project of a small section of ultranationalist Zionists who want a national territory to advance their financial interests.
It was this bourgeois nationalist Zionist faction that negotiated with the ruling classes in Germany, Britain, the US, and the bureaucratic Stalinist USSR, to facilitate the migration of Jews to Palestine before and after WW2. That ruling class solidarity between the Zionists and their powerful allies allowed the Zionists to occupy Palestine without facing any serious opposition to decades of expansionary wars against the displaced and oppressed Palestinians.
The solution can only be the national liberation of Palestine from Zionist colonial rule. This will not result from the intervention of any of the great powers. The US/EU powers and their Russia/ China rivals do not want a fight over Palestine. The US/EU already backs Israel as its gendarme in the Middle East. US allies like Saudi Arabia and Egypt are concerned to keep their own working masses under control. Russia and China and their allies Iran and Turkey fear popular support for Palestine and the risk of a wider regional revolutionary uprising. And of course, the UN is no more than a fake democratic façade for the imperialist gang.
The question is: how can the Arab and other masses in the region rise up in support of the Palestinian cause of freedom? Some signs that the Arab masses are capable of winning are the new generations of youths who do not respect the narrow bourgeois politics of their national elites including Hamas and Fatah; Arab Israeli youth behind the 1948 Green Line who as second class citizens are standing up for the cause; the Palestinian diaspora in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon are also rising in solidarity. These uprisings expose the fragility of the weak and divided ruling classes of these anti-democratic regimes.
While the Arab Spring has faded and the Syrian revolution left a divided and destroyed nation, the masses are like a smoldering fuse. Serious working-class supporters of Palestine in the big powers should follow the lead of unionists in Livorno, Italy and black the export of munitions to Israel. The dockers in Durban, South Africa (SATAWU) and Oakland, US (ILWU), who both have a history of banning Israeli cargo, plan another ban this weekend refusing to work Zim Line ships. A strong international blockade of Israel would raise the costs of Israel’s Zionist project and further divide the country internally to the point where their international backers withdrew their support and the regime is isolated and weakened.
The Palestinian masses and their Israeli supporters backed by an international workers movement, should join forces to remove their bourgeois nationalist regimes, liberating Palestine and building a workers’ and farmers’ government. A socialist Palestine, as part of a wider union of socialist republics in the region, would see all the old oppressive historic feudal and imperialist borders replaced by a multi-ethnic federation of socialist republics.
Communist Workers Group (Aotearoa/New Zealand)
Leaflet 20th May 2021
https://labourheartlands.com/italian-dockers-refuse-to-load-weap
http://www.labournet.net/docks2/1007/blockade1.html
https://www.facebook.com/anna.majavu.5/posts/10165130065040055
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