Israeli Butchers Detain International Activists

Down With Blockade of Gaza!

Defend the Palestinians!

Darlene Wallach, Vittorio Arrigoni and Andrew Muncie, pro-Palestinian activists working with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), were arrested by the Israeli government on November 18 while accompanying Palestinian fishermen off the coast of Gaza. The Israeli Navy seized the fishing boats at gunpoint, detaining everyone on board, including fifteen Palestinian fishermen who were held overnight. Wallach, Arrigoni and Muncie engaged in a hunger strike to protest their detention and were subsequently deported. These arrests are part of an ongoing campaign of terror in which the Israeli Navy fires at Palestinian fishing boats with automatic weapons and water cannons, confiscating the boats and detaining the fishermen, fifteen of whom have been killed since 2000. Hands off Palestinian fishermen!

These attacks come in the context of the ongoing, genocidal blockade of Gaza, which was imposed with the support of the U.S. after Hamas militarily took control of Gaza in 2007. The blockade was the culmination of ever-tighter restrictions imposed following Hamas’s 2006 victory in the parliamentary elections. The 1.4 million residents of Gaza are imprisoned in conditions reminiscent of the Warsaw Ghetto. Trapped between the electric fence that surrounds the Gaza Strip, the closed Egyptian border and the Mediterranean Sea, Palestinians are routinely denied shipments of food, fuel and medicine. On November 4, the Israeli government further tightened the blockade, stopping food distribution to 750,000 people dependent on food aid and ominously preventing journalists from entering Gaza. Meanwhile, in the West Bank, the Palestinian population has been sealed off by an apartheid wall that cuts through Palestinian territories and a Kafkaesque series of military checkpoints and “Jewish only” roads that make travel within the West Bank virtually impossible. In both cases, Israeli forces terrorize the Palestinians with mass arrests and shootings. Down with the blockade! All Israeli troops and settlers out of the occupied territories!

Darlene Wallach, Vittorio Arrigoni and Andrew Muncie sailed into Gaza in defiance of the Zionist blockade in August along with more than 40 activists from the Free Gaza Movement. This trip, which included the delivery of 200 hearing aids for children whose hearing was damaged by Zionist military operations in Gaza, was grotesquely described by the Israeli government as “supporting the regime of a terrorist organization in Gaza.” This statement is nothing but a justification for repression against Free Gaza activists, who have reported receiving death threats and the sabotage of their equipment by Israeli agents.

The Israeli state’s campaign of terror against defenders of the Palestinians is well known. In 2003, two ISM activists were killed at the hands of Israeli forces. Twenty-three-year-old American Rachel Corrie was deliberately crushed by an Israeli bulldozer as she tried to stop the demolition of a Palestinian home. Tom Hurndall, a 21-year-old British photojournalist, was shot in the head by Israeli troops as he tried to protect Palestinian children in Gaza’s Rafah refugee camp. The deaths of these courageous activists must be added to the huge toll of Palestinians who have perished at the hands of the bloody Zionist state.

We stand in defense of the Palestinian people against Zionist terror, which is backed to the hilt by the Democratic and Republican parties of U.S. imperialism, the biggest enemy of working people and the oppressed around the globe. We recognize that there can be no solution to the conflicting national claims of the Palestinians and the Hebrew-speaking people within the framework of capitalism. Both peoples lay claim to the same small sliver of land; under capitalism, the exercise of national self-determination by one will necessarily be at the expense of the other. What is necessary is the forging of Marxist workers parties in the Near East to fight for workers revolutions throughout the region, including the shattering of the Zionist state from within through Arab/Hebrew workers revolution, laying the basis for a socialist federation of the Near East. Only then will the liberation of the region from imperialist subjugation, national oppression and religious reaction begin—a liberation that will be completed only by the world socialist revolution, especially in the U.S. and other imperialist centers.