The Zionist Murderers and the Palestinian Struggle for Freedom

Statement by the Internationalist Socialist League (Israel / Occupied Palestine), 07.04.2018, www.the-isleague.com

The Friday Demonstrations

For the second consecutive Friday, tens of thousands of Palestinians demonstrated in Gaza, demanding the right of return of the Palestinians refugees to their lands. And once again, the Israeli army met this demand with shooting, killing and maiming.

On March 30, the Zionist army killed 16 Palestinians and injured 14,000. This Friday, they killed 8 and injured 1000 Palestinians. Was it not for the heavy black smoke caused by burning tires, the number of dead and maimed would have been higher. The Palestinian brave, unarmed, young men and women faced tanks, sharpshooters and regular army.

These soldiers were ordered to shoot anyone who approached the Israel’s declared 500-meter buffer zone inside the fence – that has made Gaza the largest Ghetto in the history. Palestinian officials identified some of the people who were murdered as Osama Qdeih, 38, Majdi Ramadan Shbat, Hussein Madi, 16, Ibrahim Al-Ourr, 20, Sidqi Abu Outewi, Mohammed Hajj Saleh, 33, and Alaa al-Zamali, 17. The Gazan health ministry said 1,070 people were wounded, including 293 by live fire, and 25 of those were in a serious condition. Among those hurt were 12 women and 48 children, the ministry added.

Resorting to the regular smokescreen of big lies, or at least exaggerated pipe dreams, Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus accused Hamas of controlling the events around the border fence, sending people to riot as a cover to attempt to carry out terrorist attacks in Israel and plant improvised explosive devices. He argued that Israel was attempting to defend its land and soldiers from such Hamas incursions.[1] [2]

They Cannot Break the Fight for Freedom

Conricus’ apologetics are nothing but a reflection of the way typical Zionists think. The political and military leaders of Israel assumed, first of all, that it was Hamas that coerced the Gazans into protest and fail to realize that this a movement which for a long time has been applying pressure on it from below. Secondly, they think that the killing of the unarmed youth will break the willpower of the Palestinians to fight for their freedom. On the other hand, self contradictory myths form the backbone of Zionist ideology. For example, just a week ago, Israelis commemorated the unsubstantiated folktale of Hebrew slaves being oppressed by the Egyptian monarchy, only to become stronger: “But the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and grew. And they were grieved because of the children of Israel.” (Exodus 1:12)

The Zionists are wrong as reactionaries are rarely able to perceive reality. The heroic struggle of the Palestinians will end only with the liberation from the Zionist oppression. While Israel’s propaganda contends that the unarmed Palestinians who were murdered and maimed were terrorists, [3] it fails to mention the fact that its so called sovereign territory is actually lands robbed in 1947-8 from the Palestinians. The motto of Israel is “whatever lands we steal are ours as part of God’s promise to the people of Israel.” Such is the case, not only regarding the lands Israel stole in 1947-1948, but the lands Israel occupied during the 1967 war.

In 1947 the Zionists held less than 6% of the lands:

	Population		Land Ownership (acres)
	Arabs	Jewish	Arabs	Jewish
1917	738,000	59,00	6,512,060	162,500
	92%	8%	97.6%	2.4%
1947	1,200,000	500,000	6,296,112	378,448
	70%	30%	94.33%	5.67%

Source: Palestine remembered [4]

From its very inception the Zionist movement adopted two main myths. The first one, is that the European colonists who settled in Palestine are direct descendants of the ancient Israelites. Similar myths were held by South African Boers who claimed that they are the real children of Israel, coming to the promised land, escaping Pharaoh’s army. Furthermore, when Hertzel tried to promote the Uganda Scheme (it was actually Kenya) for Zionist colonization; he referred to it as “new Israel”. No doubt, if this plan was materialized, the Zionists would have suddenly discovered the remains of a Jewish temple and would have called the Mau Mau rebels terrorists.

The second myth is that Palestine was an empty land waiting for the Israelites to return. According to the pro-Zionist Joan Peters, in her book “From Time Immemorial,” most of the growth of the Arab’s population was in fact a result of illegal Arab immigration. Her figures are not accepted by most demographers and historians, including Zionist ones.

However, “Palestine was not an empty land when Zionist immigration began. The lowest estimates claim there were about 410,000 Arab Muslims and Christians in Palestine in 1893. A Zionist estimate claimed there were over 600,000 Arabs in Palestine in the 1890s. At this time, the number of Jewish immigrants to Palestine was still negligible by all accounts. It is unlikely that Palestinian immigration prior to this period was due to Zionist development. Though uncertainty exists concerning the precise numbers of Arabs living in the areas that later became Israel, it is very unlikely that the claims of Joan Peters that there were less than 100,000 Arabs living there are valid” [5]

If Palestine was not an empty land and its people were mostly Palestinian-Arab before 1947, the Zionists materialized their dreams of an empty land by emptying the country from its native Palestinians population. In 1948 Zionist forces took more than 78 percent of historic Palestine, ethnically cleansed and destroyed about 530 villages and cities, and killed about 15,000 Palestinians in a series of mass atrocities, including more than 70 massacres.

“The origins of the Palestinian refugee problem have been the subject of much argument since 1948. Most pro-Israelis claim that the Palestinian became refugees because their leaders ordered them to flee. This version of events was always denied by the Palestinians, who say that they fled in fear from the Zionist militia. No conclusive proof has been produced showing that Arab leaders did order Palestinians to flee. Historical archival research has found evidence of attacks on civilians, and looting.” [6]

What is beyond the Zionist understanding is that these 70% of the people, who live in Gaza as refugees, coming from families who were expelled from their lands and their land was stolen through armed robbery, are saying “enough is enough”. These people and especially the youth have had enough with the inhuman conditions forced upon them. They want a future and they reached the conclusion that dying in protest is better than living as if you’re already dead. They have nothing to lose but their chains. The Israelis are rightly terrified of them because the young Palestinians are marching on the road to revolution. The Israeli army is killing them for the same reason the Romans crucified rebellious slaves led by Spartacus, or the Mexican counterrevolutionaries murdered Emiliano Zapata.

The Cynical Responses of the Imperialists and their Servants

Israel is able to carry out its criminal policy only because it is backed by the other imperialists while the Palestinians are not supported by the local rulers serving either the American imperialists, like Al-Sisi and Saudi Arabia, or Russian ones, like Assad.

“Firearms should only be used as a last resort, and unjustified recourse to their use may amount to willful killing of civilians, a breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention,” U.N. Human rights spokeswoman Elizabeth Throssell said.

Lofty words indeed, but these are empty as a shell when not followed by any attempt to bring to trial the Zionist criminals. Even verbal condemnations in the UN Security Council are blocked by the U.S. The right of return of the Palestinian refugees was recognized in resolution 194 already in 1948 but has the UN done anything to implement this resolution?

The corrupt PA authority is condemning the killing of the Gazans, yet these are empty words as it does not break with the so called security coordination with Israel against the Palestinians.

The Zionist Liberals and Stalinists, who support the two state illusion, are baffled as to why the Jewish Israeli masses support Netanyahu. The answer is very simple. Many Israelis support the idea of a new ethnic cleansing because they want to loot the Palestinian properties.

The plunder and looting of Palestinian homes, farms, plantations, banks, cars, ports, railroads, schools, hospitals, trucks, tractors, during 1948 war, were a crime committed not only by the state; but by common Israelis. For example, “From Lydda alone, the army took out 1,800 truck-loads of property.” Ben-Gurion himself was surprised by the large “mass robbery” of Palestinian properties by the citizens of the “Jewish state”. He said in a Cabinet meeting: “The only thing that surprised me, and surprised me bitterly, was the discovery of such moral failings among us [Jews], which I had never suspected. I mean the mass robbery in which all parts of [the Jewish] population participated.” [7]

Thus, what the liberals, whose roots are in the privileged classes of Israel, are actually saying is: “we robbed enough, let us not put those gains at risk,” while the less privileged supporters of the Zionist right wing say: “Wait, but what about us?”

Not only land and properties were taken. A lesser known aspect of the looting were books, manuscripts, personal papers, photographs and works of art. A short film The Great Book Robbery, made by Benny Brunner and Arjan El Fassed tells the story of the systematic looting in 1948 of tens of thousands of Palestinian books in a joint operation by the paramilitary Haganah – that later became the Israeli army – and the Israeli national library.

One Democratic State

The young Palestinian demonstrators want one democratic state as the Guardian observed:

“Israel has described the recent demonstrations on the Gaza frontier as “riots” and a ploy to “camouflage terror attacks” led by Hamas, a militant group founded on the idea that Israel has no right to exist. Yet Ahmad Abu Artema, who claims no Hamas affiliation, holds an ideology more often attributed to that of Israel’s president: he says he wants to see Palestinians and Israelis living in one country as equal citizens. “If you want my personal opinion, I don’t believe in liberation [of land in Israel]. I believe in ending the apartheid system in Israel like the end of the apartheid system in South Africa, and we live all in one democratic state,” Artema said in an interview in Gaza City. “I want to live with Israelis.” [8]

The struggle for one democratic state is indeed the way forward. However, the question is how do we get it? We have to look at South Africa and ask ourselves: Is it what we want? The black majority who struggled heroically against the apartheid system were betrayed by the ANC and the Communist Party. While the black majority are suffering from exploitation; leaders like Jacob Zuma who serve the capitalist class of mostly whites, has accumulated wealth and is facing trial for his corruption, The leadership of the ANC, like the Palestinian PA cannot be but corrupt while they serve the real masters of the land.

Moreover, the Zionist apartheid state will not accept the Palestinians as equal citizens. This one democratic state can be achieved only through a social revolution led by the working and Falaheen classes. This revolution must be part of a victorious Arab revolution. It will begin with simple democratic demands, but soon enough the revolutionary classes will find out that the privileged classes keep standing in the way, sabotaging any and all progress towards anything that would resemble a democracy.

Thus, in order to win, the democratic revolution would have no choice but to transform into a socialist revolution. Such lessons were, once again, taught and demonstrated to us by the great Egyptian and Syrian struggles that ended so far in defeat, in our view, only because they were not led by a working class revolutionary leadership, but by the privileged bourgeois classes and their middle class servants.

Mahmoud Darwish in his poem ID Card wrote:

Write down:

I am an Arab

Robbed of my ancestors’ vineyards

And of the land cultivated

By me and all my children.

Nothing is left for us and my grandchildren

Except these rocks…

Will your government take them too, as reported?

Therefore,

Write at the top of page one:

I do not hate people,