OCRFI Statement on the Gaza Land Day Massacre

Sixteen Palestinians were killed and more than 1,400 were wounded, many of them struck in the back, as they peacefully demonstrated within the framework of the “March of Return” convened on the occasion of Land Day. Such was the bloodshed on March 30, 2018. The Organizing Committee for the Reconstitution of the Fourth International (OCRFI) and its organizations share the indignation of the workers and people of the whole world in the face of this massacre perpetrated by the Israeli army and applauded by its sponsor: Benjamin Netanyahu. The OCRFI and its organizations will participate in all the rallies and initiatives demanding the immediate halt to the massacre of the Palestinian people, and they salute the Arab and Jewish activists who, inside the Zionist State, jointly denounced the massacre.

The OCRFI and its organizations condemn the active complicity of the “great powers,” starting with the Trump administration, whose special envoy in the region, Jason D. Greenblatt, gave Netanyahu the green light only a few hours before the massacre. The OCRFI and its organizations condemn the complicity of all those who, from the UN to the European Union, through Macron, Merkel, May and many others, dare to call upon the butcher Netanyahu to show “restraint”, or who ask for an “independent inquiry” — as if an “investigation” was needed to establish who is the murderer and who is the victim!

This complicity is shared by all reactionary Arab regimes. Yesterday they fraudulently paraded as “friends of the Palestinians,” today they don’t even bother to put on this mask. One of them, Mohammed bin Salman, Crown Prince of the Saudi monarchy, has just dared to declare that, “Israelis have the right to have their own land. … Israel is a big economy … and of course there are many interests we share” (April 2, The Atlantic). He went on to call for joint action against Iran, under Trump’s leadership.

All those who invoke “international law” in the aftermath of the massacres know perfectly well that in the age of imperialism, “international law” is the right of the strongest, and that the Palestinian people over the past 70 years have always been its victim. In November 1947, it was within the framework of the United Nations that the counterrevolutionary agreement between imperialism and the the bureaucracy of the Soviet Union was sealed for the partition of Palestine (Resolution No. 181). This partition has been at the origin of the uninterrupted oppression of the Palestinian people, driven from their lands and left to endure massacres and discrimination. The partition is just as much a trap for the Jewish populations who emigrated to Palestine, enclosing them in a subsidiary oppressive miniature State subordinated to U.S. imperialism and existing only thanks to its subsidies.

The tens of thousands of Gazans who have been participating in the “March of Return” since March 30 — despite the atrocious massacre that has just been perpetrated — say that the 750,000 refugees and their millions of descendants, who are still crammed into UNRWA camps that Trump has decided to starve, have never given up their right to return, a democratic right recognized to all peoples of the earth, except the Palestinian people. For more than 70 years, despite the Nakba of 1948 and the expulsions, despite the massacres and so-called “peace agreements,” which, from Camp David to Oslo, have only dislocated Palestine, despite the murderous blockade of Gaza since 2007, the Palestinian people have never renounced their right to self-determination.

The OCRFI and its organizations reaffirm the continuity of the positions of the Fourth International since 1947: It is up to the Palestinian people, and to them alone, to finally be able to decide freely on their fate, by electing a Constituent Assembly. In this way, the Palestinian people will be free to rid themselves of partition and oppression, and to move towards the establishment of a Palestinian nation with its Arab and Jewish components with equal rights, in a single secular and democratic State – from the sea to Jordan.

— April 3, 2018

OCRFI – corqi.ocrfi@gmail.com