Trump’s Provocation: The Palestinian People Are in Danger!

Declaration by the Organising Committee for the Reconstitution of the Fourth International (OCRFI)

The provocative announcement by U.S. President Trump to recognise Jerusalem as capital of the State of Israel and to transfer the U.S. Embassy there has provoked the legitimate anger of the Palestinian people, and of all those around the world who support the unconditional right of the Palestinian people to determine their own future. The Palestinian people are in danger once again!

Following Trump’s provocation, some heads of state and political leaders “regretted” the announcement, with some of them describing it as an “irresponsible” statement that does not reflect the reality of the U.S. administration’s policy.

Of course, there is a crisis at the highest level of the government of the world’s most powerful bourgeoisie. But Trump’s provocation forms part of the widespread war against the peoples being driven by U.S. imperialism and its allies. It comes after his threat to wipe North Korea off the world map, after the U.S.’s involvement in the genocidal war being waged by Saudi Arabia in Yemen, after the strengthened occupation of Afghanistan, after the U.S.’s direct interference in destabilising Venezuela, and after the U.S.-Israeli-Saudi threats against Lebanon and Iran. This policy is a continuation and escalation of the policy pursued by Trump’s predecessors in the White House, both Republican and Democrat. Trump’s provocation, which is preparing the ground for new slaughter in the Middle East, is an expression of the dead-end reached by the system of private ownership of the means of production, which is only surviving at the cost of massive destruction of the productive forces, notably through the growth of the arms economy and war economy.

Trump’s provocation is the end-result of months of negotiations by White House emissaries in the Middle East, as revealed by the international press: “Since January, the U.S. President’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has been shuttling non-stop between Jerusalem and Riyad (…). He was in fact working on an old Israeli dream: bringing the Arabs – at least the Gulf monarchies – closer to Israel.” These negotiations led to openly proclaimed collaboration between the reactionary Arab regimes and the State of Israel, leading the Israeli Chief of General Staff to tell one Saudi newspaper that: “Israel and Saudi Arabia are in complete agreement about Iran’s intentions”. Just like those negotiations, the U.S. President’s statements – claiming to call the shots in the Middle East – once again demonstrate that the Palestinian question has nothing to do with supposed religious conflict, with “Jews” opposing “Muslims”. And for good reason: Under the aegis of U.S. imperialism, Saudi representatives of Wahhabi Islam and representatives of the Zionist State, which claims to speak “on behalf of the Jews,” have worked hand-in-hand to prepare this new coup d’état against the Palestinian people — a coup d’état of which all of the region’s peoples, including the Jewish population, will suffer the consequences.

Trump’s provocation is part of the logic that began 70 years ago, with the plan for the partition of Palestine imposed in November 1947 by a high-level agreement reached at the UN between the U.S,. British and French imperialist leaderships and the Stalinist bureaucracy of the USSR. The carving up of Palestine resulted in the creation of a theocratic Zionist State whose goal is to expel more and more of the Palestinian people from their lands and to subject them to incessant slaughter, while at the same time, the Jewish population is trapped in and locked into a logic of colonial rule. Every one of the agreements, especially the Oslo Accords (1993), based on an acceptance of the partition of Palestine and recognition of the State of Israel, have only intensified the oppression of the Palestinian people and their expulsion from their lands, and have strengthened the impossibility for the millions of Palestinian refugees to enjoy the basic democratic right of return to the towns and villages from which they were driven away, 70 years ago.

The Organising Committee for the Reconstitution of the Fourth International (OCRFI) strongly condemns the provocation by the head of the U.S. administration, and affirms its unconditional solidarity with the Palestinian people in their struggle for the right to land, peace and freedom, in other words for their right to a nation and for the right of all refugees to return.

The OCRFI calls for unity of the labour and democratic organisations for the defence of the Palestinian people and against the policy of U.S. imperialism and its servants in the Middle East: the State of Israel and the reactionary Arab states. The OCRFI’s organisations will participate – under their own banners – in any mobilisation on the slogan of defending the Palestinian people.

The OCRFI is part of the continuity of the fight by the Fourth International, the only current of the labour movement to oppose the UN’s plan for partition in 1947, rightly describing it at the time as “the most effective way to divert, at one and the same time, the struggle of the Arab masses and the discontent of the Jewish working population from an anti-imperialist explosion in the direction of a fratricidal struggle (Quatrième Internationale, December 1947).

It is within this continuity that the OCRFI declares itself in favour of the Palestinian people’s right to freely determine its own future, of a Palestinian Constituent Assembly that will open up the path to a democratic secular Palestinian Republic covering the whole of the historic territory of Palestine, and guaranteeing equal rights to all of its citizens irrespective of their religion or ethnic origin, with Al Quds/Jerusalem as its capital.

8 December 2017

The OCRFI International Committee