For international working-class solidarity, for a new mass Palestinian intifada
Joint Statement by WASP and SYM
Over 140 Palestinians, including at least 27 children, have been killed by Israeli airstrikes in besieged Gaza in recent days.
These new atrocities come as we commemorate, on the 15th of May, the Nakba of 1948 – when over 800,000 Palestinians were violently displaced to birth the modern state of Israel. 73 years later, this process of ethnic cleansing continues with impunity and worsening by every measure.
Now, Palestinian families in the occupied East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah are under ongoing threat of eviction from homes they had lived in for generations, by far-right settlers and the Israeli state.
In the background to the current escalation, Palestinians were further harassed when Israeli police attacked the al-Aqsa mosque compound during Ramadan prayers. Hundreds have been injured in this cowardly and racist attack on muslim congregants. This wave of ruthless violence has now spread.
Prior to that, we’ve seen the refusal to extend vaccines to territories under Israeli occupation in the context of the current pandemic. This occurs along with escalation of mass evictions, land dispossesions and indiscrimate bombings of civilian populations under the pretext of war with Hamas. In no uncertain terms, WASP and SYM condemn the Israeli regime’s colonial occupation and its brutal violence against Palestinians. In South Africa we are far too familiar with the violence of dispossession, Apartheid, and colonialism to ignore its reflection in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. We are too well acquainted with the barbarity of imperialism to neglect our duty of solidarity with the oppressed and working class people of the world. The suffering and oppression of the working class people in this country cry for the remedy – an end to the brutal system of imperialist capitalism by a united revolutionary movement of the working class and oppressed people of the world.
Recent weeks have seen an important eruption of popular Palestinian protests, led by youth, albeit under merciless repression by the Israeli military and police. These protests point the way forward for the national liberation of the Palestinians. If further broadened and developed, with democratic committees to advance action and self-defense, it would pose a real threat against the occupation.
In the meantime, the intervention by the right-wing Hamas with indiscriminate firing of rockets into civilian population, which killed at least 8 civilians, including children, Jewish, Palestinian and immigrant workers, was seized upon by the Israeli state to further escalate brutal military offensive against the Palestinians. The Israeli military represents one of the most well-armed and ruthless contingent of imperalism’s global military-industrial complex.
Under increased repression, some protests among Palestinians within Israel have escalated into riots. Jewish far-right street gangs are also rioting and have attacked Palestinians with Israeli citizenship in horrific lynch attempts in several cities. However in many cities and workplaces, Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews have defended each other and protested together to end the right-wing provocation and stop the war.
Members of Socialist Struggle Movement (ISA in Israel-Palestine), a sister organisation of WASP, are swimming against the stream of reaction in Israeli society to raise the banner of working class solidarity with the oppressed people of Palestine. SSM continues to actively organise protests along with other progressive sections of Israeli society against Zionists and Israeli imperialism.
No analysis of Israel’s right-wing regime is complete without an understanding of the material forces of global imperialism that enable it. Israel receives an annual average of $3.8 billion in military aid from the USA. Just like the US enables pharmaceutical monopolies to solidify corporate profits at expense of human health in the current pandemics devastating millions of lives across the world, it also subsidises the killing of Palestinians to secure hegemony in the Middle East. The US routinely vetoes any UN resolution that calls Israel to account for its proven crimes against humanity. Recent normalisation agreements between Israel and other states in the Middle East pathetically display how symbolic solidarity will crumble at the whims of capital.
The ANC government of South Africa is no different in its shambolic condemnation of Israel. DIRCO issued a weak statement describing the 7 May attacks on Al-Aqsa mosque as a clash between Israelis and Palestinians. In reality, this was an attack by an Apartheid state against working class civilians. Those injured were thereafter denied emergency healthcare services as vehicles were prevented from entering the compound and stun grenades were thrown inside its clinic. Just as the ANC has been spewing hypocritical rhetoric to pacify the oppressed in South Africa, it has been similarly disingenuous in its calls for peace in Israel and Palestine. No call for peace can be taken seriously while South Africa maintains uncritical diplomatic and trade relations with the state of Israel. No call for peace can be taken seriously while this is viewed as a conflict between competing forces rather than the systematic and discriminatory rule of one state over an oppressed population.
As opposed to ideas promoting ‘normalisation’ of the occupation and oppression of the Palestinians — including the economic and military relations between the Palestinian Authority and the Netanyahu government — the left must advance a struggle against national oppression, as well as dialogue and joint struggles, especially of workers, on both sides of the national divide, which will help clarify the joint broad interests in a struggle against Israeli capitalism and for a new, socialist, society, without any national discrimination.
We echo our comrades in Socialist Struggle, the Israel-Palestine section of the International Socialist Alternative:
- Stop the war! End the missile strikes and military attacks on Gaza. End the siege! Stop the police and military repression of protest. Stop the arbitrary arrests. Mobilize for demonstrations against the military attacks and against the occupation.
- Solidarity with the struggle of Shiekh Jarah residents against the barbaric takeover of their homes by messianic settlers and the right-wing regime, who are trying to displace Palestinians living under the occupation of Israeli colonial rule in East Jerusalem
- End the entrance of Israeli armed forces to the Al Aqsa compound — stop the nationalist provocations and the attacks on worshipers’ rights that promote religious war. End the criminalization of Palestinian house construction in East Jerusalem, enough with house demolitions, with the occupation and the settlements.
- There’s no peace without struggle against occupation, poverty, inequality, against corrupt elites and for healthcare, livelihoods and welfare for all. For a mass Palestinian intifada for national liberation. For independent democratic committees for defence and the organization of the struggle.
- For international working class solidarity to resist the settlements, arbitrary arrests and military crackdowns.
- Only peace and equality will bring personal security for all — end the siege, all attacks and collective punishment on 2 million residents of Gaza. Solidarity with residents from both national communities in Israel that cope with indiscriminate rocket fire
- End the occupation, no more denying the right for self-determination and national oppression of the Palestinians. For the right of return of all Palestinian refugees. For the withdrawal of the Israeli military from the occupied territories. For an independent socialist Palestine, with its capital in East Jerusalem, for a socialist change in Israel and in the whole region
We call on organised labour, community orgs, working class formations, and members of the working class to join the march to the Israeli Embassy on Saturday 15 May:
