By Yossi Schwartz of the ISL the section of the RCIT in Israel (Occupied Palestine), 15.9.2021
The Slander of the Freedom Fighters
Gideon Levi, a journalist of Haaretz wrote that the six Political prisoners who escaped the Gilboa jail are freedom fighters. This of course led to his condemnation by the Zionists. In reply, the mainstream Zionist by the name of Emanuel Gross wrote in Haaretz: “How can you call them freedom fighters? Freedom fighters fight an oppressive occupation and kill only soldiers.”
Thus for the Zionists, the resistance to their oppression is labeled criminal terrorism, while the Zionist terrorists are considered freedom fighters. The Zionists of course are not unique in using this type of propaganda. This has been the line of all the imperialists facing the resistance of the oppressed. This is the line of French imperialism in Mali and was the line of the American imperialists before they were defeated in Afghanistan.
The difficulty in defining “terrorism” is in agreeing on a basis for determining when the use of violence (directed at whom, by whom, for what ends) is legitimate; therefore, the definition of terrorism is inherently controversial. The use of violence for the achievement of political ends is common to state and non-state groups. The majority of definitions in use have been written by agencies directly associated with the government and are systematically biased to exclude governments from the definition.
In the writer’s definition, terrorists are those who kill uninvolved and innocent civilians.
The Zionist occupation of Palestine in “1947-8 and in 1967 is an oppressive cruel bloody occupation. Even the existing bourgeois international law recognizes that the oppressed have the right to use armed struggle. “Long ago, it was settled that resistance and even armed struggle against a colonial occupation force are not just recognized under international law but specifically endorsed. By international humanitarian law, wars of national liberation have been expressly embraced, through the adoption of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva conventions of 1949 as a protected and essential right of occupied people everywhere“.[1]
Some of the Israelis who were killed by the Palestinian guerrillas were not in uniforms. Yet in Israel men and women are called to serve in the Zionist army as reservists. Are they innocent civilians? We can agree that Israeli children, old people, and the ultra-orthodox who do not serve in the Zionist army and are not settlers are civilians, but not those who serve in the Zionist army as reservists. They are soldiers on vacation. In addition, the settlers in the West Bank are armed even when they do not serve in the army and they cannot be considered innocent civilians. The only Israeli adults who can be considered innocent are those who do not serve in the army, do not act to serve the occupation and in particular, those who refuse to serve in the army and they are few.
From the perspective of the international working class, there are two major kinds of terror, White terror, and red terror. The French revolution used red terror against the counter-revolution. The Bolsheviks used red terror against the terror of the pro monarchists backed by the imperialists. In the case of the French revolution and the Bolshevik revolution, the red terror was justified.
Trotsky wrote on terror: “In the seventeenth century England carried out two revolutions. The first, which brought forth great social upheavals and wars, brought amongst other things the execution of King Charles I, while the second ended happily with the accession of a new dynasty. The British bourgeoisie and its historians maintain quite different attitudes to these two revolutions: the first is for them a rising of the mob – the “Great Rebellion”; the second has been handed down under the title of the “Glorious Revolution.” The reason for this difference in estimates was explained by the French historian, Augustin Thierry. In the first English revolution, in the “Great Rebellion,” the active force was the people; while in the second it was almost “silent.” Hence, it follows that, in surroundings of class slavery, it is difficult to teach the oppressed masses good manners. When provoked to fury they use clubs, stones, fire, and rope. The court historians of the exploiters are offended at this. But the great event in modern “bourgeois” history is, nonetheless, not the “Glorious Revolution,” but the “Great Rebellion.”…”The iron dictatorship of the Jacobins was evoked by the monstrously difficult position of revolutionary France. Here is what the bourgeois historian says of this period: “Foreign troops had entered French territory from four sides. In the north, the British and the Austrians, in Alsace, the Prussians, in Dauphine and up to Lyons, the Piedmontese, in Roussillon the Spaniards. And this at a time when the civil war was raging at four different points: in Normandy, in the Vendêe, at Lyons, and at Toulon.” (Page 176) To this, we must add internal enemies in the form of numerous secret supporters of the old regime, ready by all methods to assist the enemy”…”. The severity of the proletarian dictatorship in Russia, let us point out here, was conditioned by no less difficult circumstances. There was one continuous front, on the north and south, in the east and west. Besides the Russian White Guard armies of Kolchak, Denikin and others, there are attacking Soviet Russia, simultaneously or in turn: Germans, Austrians, Czecho-Slovaks, Serbs, Poles, Ukrainians, Roumanians, French, British, Americans, Japanese, Finns, Estonians, Lithuanians … In a country throttled by a blockade and strangled by hunger, there are conspiracies, risings, terrorist acts, and destruction of roads and bridges.“The government which had taken on itself the struggle with countless external and internal enemies had neither money, nor sufficient troops, nor anything except boundless energy, enthusiastic support on the part of the revolutionary elements of the country, and the gigantic courage to take all measures necessary for the safety of the country, however arbitrary and severe they were.”[2]
In the struggle of the oppressed people, white colonialist settlers are killed. In the imperialist propaganda, these are innocent civilians attacked by savages. Native Americans killed European settlers who came to steal their lands and massacred whole villages. Revolting black slaves killed white masters. The Vietminh forces responded to the French occupation with an assault on Cite Herault on July 24, 1945, and killed “scores” of French and Eurasian civilians. The French imperialists’ use of torture, napalm, and attacks often killed civilians[3]. The Algerian FLN killed colons while the French imperialists targeted Algerians arrested and tortured, and executed many Muslims. [4]
In the case of Palestine, the Zionists have used large-scale state white terror, and most actions of the Palestinians, the oppressed nation, are red terror.
The Zionists portray Zakaria Muhammad Abd Al-Rahman Zubeidi as a dangerous criminal with blood on his hands.
The Story of Zakaria Muhammad Abd Al-Rahman Zubeidi
Zubeidi’s father, Muhammad was an English teacher but was prevented from teaching by the Zionists after he was convicted of Fatah membership in the late 1960s.
During the First Intifada Arna Mer-Khamis, a member of the Stalinist party in Israel opened a children’s theater in Jenin, to encourage friendship between Israeli oppressors and Palestinians. Dozens of Israeli volunteers joined the theatre. Zubeidi, then aged 12, his older brother Daoud, and four other boys around the same age formed the core of the theatre.
In 1989, at age 13, he was shot in the leg when he threw stones at Israeli soldiers. He was left permanently affected, with one leg shorter than the other. Following the 1993 Oslo Accords, he joined the Palestinian Authority’s Security Forces. He became a sergeant, but left, disillusioned, after a year, when he realized that the Palestinian Authority serves the occupation. His mother was killed during an Israeli raid into Jenin. She had taken refuge in a neighbor’s home and was shot by an IDF sniper who targeted her as she stood near a window. She subsequently bled to death. Zubeidi’s brother Taha was also killed by soldiers shortly afterward. None of the left Zionists called him to comfort him for the murder of his mother and brother. A month later Hamas used a bomb that exploded in hotel Park in Netanya killing 30 Jewish civilians. Zubeidi was not a member of Hamas and Israel was not able to charge him. In Jenin, he became a leading figure of Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades – a militant Fatah faction. In 2004 Zubeidi took responsibility for the bombing in Tel Aviv that killed one teenage woman and injured 30. The Zionist army tried to assassinate him four times. In one such attempt in 2004, an Israeli police unit killed five Palestinians, including a 14-year-old boy. On November 15, following Arafat’s death, the Zionist army raided Jenin to kill him, but he evaded them; in the raid, nine Palestinians were killed, including four civilians. On July 15, 2007, the Prime Minister of Israel announced that Israel would include Zubeidi in an amnesty offered to militants of Fatah’s al-Aqsa-Brigades. On 29 December 2011, Israel rescinded Zubeidi’s pardon for unstated reasons. Zubeidi told Ma’an News Agency that he had not violated any of the conditions of his amnesty[5]. Zubeidi was then kept in detention without charge by the Palestinian Authority from May to October 2012. On 27 February 2019, he was arrested by Israel on suspicion of having engaged in terrorist activities, and in May he was charged before an Israeli military kangaroo court with carrying out at least two shooting attacks on civilian buses carrying armed settlers in the West Bank. He admitted that he shot at a police car. Just compare him with the Zionist heroes.
The Zionist Heroes
The Zionist heroes prior to 1948 were Zionist terrorist groups:
“The Irgun (Etzel): Known as the National Military Organization and the Military sector of the Revisionist movement that their white terrorist actions included:
Al-Quds massacre, December 1937: Member of the Irgun hurled a hand grenade at the marketplace near al-Quds mosque, killing and injuring dozens.
Haifa massacre, March 1938: Members of the Irgun and Lehi gang throw grenades at Haifa market, killing 18, and injuring 38.
Haifa massacre, July 1938: The Irgun explodes booby-trapped vehicles in Haifa market, killing 21and injuring 52.
Balad El-Sheik Village Attack, June 1939: This Palestinian village was attacked by members of
the Haganah, the Main Zionist force was a partner to King David Hotel Bombing in July 1946: Led by Menachem Begin. The attack killed 28 Britons, 17 Jews, 41 Palestinians, and 5 others for a total of 91 victims.
The Stern Gang: Founded by Avraham Stern in 1939 were responsible for
Cairo-Haifa Train Bombings, Early 1948: A few months before 1948
An attack in March killed 40 civilians and wounded 60 more.
Deir Yassin Massacre, April 1948: Commandos of Lehi and Irgun headed by Menachim Begin attacked Deir Yassin, a village of 700 Palestinians, ultimately killing between 100 and 120. The Master Mind behind the Deir Yassin massacre, Begin justified the attack in his book The Revolt:
The assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte, September 1948: Count Bernadotte, a UN Peace mediator who had come to the Middle East in 1948 to modify the Palestine partition plan, was also assassinated by the group.
Lehi was known for using assassinations as a terror mechanism, even using them against Jews they accused of being traitors. Lehi carried out 42 assassinations, more than twice as many as the Irgun and the Haganah combined. Of its politically motivated assassinations, over half of them were carried out against other Jews [6] during 1947-8 the Zionists committed at least 30 massacres. The most known was Dir Yasin. 24 massacres in the north (Galilee), 5 massacres in the central area of Palestine, and another 5 in the south.” [7]
Ariel Sharon became known for his command of unit 101 that raided Arab villages in Jordan where this unit butchered civilians: Qibya massacre in the fall of 1953. that killed 65 to 70 Palestinian civilians, half of them women and children when Sharon’s troops dynamited 45 houses and a school. In 1982 as Defense Minister he launched an invasion of Lebanon and the Zionist army assisted in the massacre of the refugee camps Sabra and Shatila massacre In a three-day massacre between 16 and 18 September, possibly 3,500 civilians, mostly Palestinians and Lebanese Shiites, were killed by the Phalanges the allies of Israel.
Ben Gurion, Begin Shamir and Sharon the leaders of these Zionist white terrorist organizations became Prime Ministers of Israel.
The Zionists dare to speak about the Palestinian fighters as those with blood on their hands. No amount of water will wash the blood on the Zionist’s hands. The Palestinian fighters are freedom fighters against the criminal Zionist apartheid that face now the possible beginning of a new heroic intifada. The enemies of the Palestinians are not only the Zionist state including the left Zionists who joined the government of Bennett, and their imperialist friends but the quisling Palestinian Authority that agreed to help the Zionists to catch the freedom fighters.
“Senior members of the Fatah movement’s steering committee and high-ranking Palestinian Authority security officials agreed in a meeting late Thursday to help Israel apprehend the fugitive prisoners who broke out of Gilboa Prison this week, a PA official told the Lebanese paper Al-Akhbar“.[8[
While most articles in the Hebrew newspapers criticize the inefficiency of the prison system, there are some Zionists who begin to see the connection between the victory of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the situation in the West-Bank:
“The return of the Taliban to power in Afghanistan raises concerns in Israel that a similar process might happen in the West Bank.The Palestinian Authority controls part of the West Bank. There have been problematic relations between Israel and the PA since 1993, when it was established. The connection between the two has vacillated between hostility and cooperation over the years.In the last decade, Israel and the PA managed to avoid a showdown and even built a very effective security detente against their common enemy, Hamas. Without Israeli assistance, the PA would collapse. This could resemble what happened in Afghanistan, where the local government crumbled after the US exit.”
What they do not see is that it is not the question of only the West-Bank but of the Zionist state that stand where its twin sister the SA apartheid was in the early 1980s.
While the useless centrists like the ISA, IMT LFI, Socialist Action are quiet and do not dare to cheer the escape of the Palestinian political prisoners, and thus they follow the imperialist’s mass media that ignores the heroic escape in order not to upset Israel we in the RCIT stand unconditionally with the freedom struggle of the Palestinians.
Down with the Zionist apartheid state!
Down with the traitors PA!
Release all political prisoners!
For Palestine red and free from the river to the sea!
References:
[1]https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2017/7/20/palestinians-have-a-legal-right-to-armed-struggle
[2] Leon Trotsky Terrorism and Communism
[3]https://sites.tufts.edu/atrocityendings/2015/08/07/indochina-1st-indochina-war/
[4] Algerian Independence, 1954–1962: Case Outcome: COIN Loss pp. 75-93
[5] Issacharoff, Avi. Palestinian pardoned by Israel put back on wanted list. Haaretz. 2011-12-29. Accessed on 2011-12-29.
[6]https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/cjpme/pages/2211/attachments/original/1471975203/23-En-Jewish-Terrorism-under-British-Mandate.pdf?1471975203
[7] Salman Abu Sitta, The Palestinian Nakba 1948. London Palestinian Return Centre, 1998.
[8]https://www.israelhayom.com/2021/09/10/report-pa-agrees-to-help-israel-apprehend-fugitive-terrorists