Release Palestinian Government Leaders!

Zionist Rampage in Gaza

JULY 4—As we go to press, Israel’s rulers, with the approval of their paymasters in Washington, continue to unleash hell on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Israeli forces have invaded parts of Gaza while warplanes and helicopter gunships have destroyed Palestinian government buildings, including the prime minister’s office, bridges and Gaza’s only power plant. In the West Bank, Israeli troops have rounded up at least 64 members of Hamas, including eight members of the Palestinian cabinet and 23 legislators. The pretext for Israel’s wave of “collective punishment” was the June 25 attack on an Israeli military outpost, in which two soldiers were killed and a third seized. On June 28, four Israeli F-16 fighter jets provocatively buzzed the residence of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad near the city of Latakia, claiming that Hamas leader Khaled Meshal, who resides in Syria, was responsible for the June 24 attack.

Gaza is little more than a concentration camp, an impoverished and devastated strip of land where 1.4 million Palestinians are trapped, surrounded by the sea, an electrified fence and a wall sealing its southern border with Egypt. With Gaza’s sole power plant destroyed, the only electricity available is the small amount allowed in by Israel, leaving most residents with only a few hours of power each day. Many hospitals and clinics are without power. Many of the water pumps and treatment plants can no longer function. With the borders largely sealed, supplies of water, fuel and food are running dangerously low. A massive public health crisis, including the spectre of cholera, looms. Now, Israel’s interior minister threatens the Palestinians that if the seized soldier is killed, “The sky will fall on them.”

Unlike the criminal attacks against civilians in Israel carried out by Hamas and other Palestinian groups, the June 25 raid was directed against a genuine military target. At the same time, the brutal onslaught by Israel’s coalition government following the successful raid underlines the massive disproportion of military forces between Israel and the Palestinians. We defend the Palestinians in their just struggle against Zionist occupation. However, as long as the conflict remains one of nation against nation, the Palestinians can only lose out to the heavily armed (including with nukes) and more technologically advanced Zionist state.

The much-vaunted August 2005 “disengagement” of Zionist settlers and troops from Gaza has in fact allowed Israel to even more effectively strangle the population economically while giving the army a freer hand to unleash military terror. On June 9, Israeli artillery rained down on a Gaza beach, killing eight Palestinians, nearly wiping out a family having a picnic. This was followed by a series of massacres in Gaza in which at least 16 Palestinians were slaughtered and dozens more injured.

Relentless state terror and devastation by Israel have been visited upon the Palestinians. These, combined with the political bankruptcy of Palestinian nationalism—exemplified by the ignominious 1993 Oslo deal between the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel—have driven much of the once cosmopolitan Palestinian people into the arms of the reactionary, anti-woman and anti-Semitic outfit Hamas. The electoral victory of Hamas in January has been met with a starvation embargo by the U.S. and European Union imperialists and Israel. With the rounding up of a third of the Palestinian cabinet, the Zionist rulers, like their U.S. imperialist patrons, are asserting their “right” to carry out “regime change” against any Palestinian government not to their liking. Down with the starvation embargo! Defend the Palestinian people! Release the Hamas ministers, legislators and other victims of Zionist repression! Israel out of Gaza, the West Bank and all the Occupied Territories!

At bottom, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is one of interpenetrated peoples, two populations laying claim to the same small piece of land. There can be no equitable resolution to the conflicting national claims of the Palestinians and Hebrew-speaking people under capitalism. It is necessary to break the Hebrew-speaking proletariat from Zionist chauvinism and the Palestinians from Arab nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism. This requires the construction of Leninist-Trotskyist parties committed to the overthrow of capitalist rule in Israel and throughout the region, and the forging of a socialist federation of the Near East.

We have no illusions that winning the Hebrew proletariat to defense of the Palestinians will be an easy task; it will likely require some historic event, such as the victory of social revolution in another country in the Near East extending a hand of proletarian internationalism to the Israeli working class. As we wrote in “Zionist Butchers Strike Gaza” (WV No. 834, 15 October 2004): “So long as the national axis is emphasized, the situation will always be bleak and hopeless. But if the class axis is emphasized, there is at least a realistic chance at an equitable resolution.”