T.O. 101 BIS: Correct URL to Register for S.O. Palestine Forum; Excerpts on Gaza from Final Declaration of OCRFI International Conference *

Posted on November 27, 2023

(1) Dear readers,

We inadvertently sent out the incorrect URL to register for the December 3 forum on Palestine hosted by Socialist Organizer. Instead of clicking the forum registration, you received an endorsement coupon to support the statement for a Democratic and Secular Palestine promoted by the ODSI coalition — a statement that we hope you will endorse.

The correct registration URL for the December 3 forum is: https://tinyurl.com/2k3zdmwf.

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(2) Following are excerpts on the situation in Gaza from the Declaration adopted by the 3-5 November International Conference for the Reconstitution of the Fourth International (OCRFI), For the World Party of Socialist Revolution.

To the workers and young people on every continent fighting against war and exploitation, for the emancipation of the workers and peoples

1. On 3-5 November, an International Conference for the Reconstitution of the Fourth International, For the World Party of Socialist Revolution was held in France. The participants included delegations from 32 countries representing groups and organisations affiliated to the Organising Committee for the Reconstitution of the Fourth International (OCRFI), also groups and activists who, while not belonging to the OCRFI, are engaged in the struggle against capitalism, against imperialism and against war, and who participated freely in our discussions. (Delegations from seven other countries were prevented from taking part in our discussions because the French government refused to issue entry visas to them.)

2. We met in conference at a time when the Palestinian people are being crushed under a blanket of bombs in Gaza. Every day there are hundreds of new victims. The State of Israel, which is supported militarily, politically, diplomatically and economically by US imperialism and the other capitalist powers, is making no secret of the objective it would like to achieve: to organise a second Nakba, in other words, over and above the current massacre, to expel the 2.3 million Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.

3. Just after 7 October, the OCRFI adopted a public position: “It is with emotion that the workers, youth and peoples worldwide deplore the thousands of civilian victims, especially the young people and children whose lives have been brutally snatched away in Israel and the Gaza Strip. “We are at war!”, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has declared. In reality, war has been devastating the region for 75 years, it did not begin on 7 October 2023. For 75 years, the Palestinian people have been expelled from their land, driven from their villages and had their homes destroyed. For 75 years, they have been denied the Right to Return and have faced a settler colonisation that is devouring more and more Palestinian land. Subjected to a veritable apartheid regime of discrimination, oppression and humiliation, they have nevertheless continued to resist and fight back.”

4. After calling for “war”, Netanyahu stated that he intends to extend the war of 1947 and announced that “it’s only the beginning”. Every worker, every young person, every activist, every supporter of freedom and democracy has an overriding duty to stand alongside the Palestinian people and stop the massacre immediately. The mobilisation that has begun on every continent and in every country must continue and expand in order to impose without delay a halt to the Israeli bombardments and the lifting of the blockade, which have already caused around 10,000 victims and threaten to cause tens of thousands more by depriving them of water, food and medicines. Nothing can justify Gaza being turned into “an open mass grave”, in the words of the Vice President of Médecins du Monde [Doctors of the World]. Stopping the bombing, stopping the airborne and ground intervention and lifting the siege are the common cause of all supporters of democracy and all defenders of humankind.

5. Beyond that: every activist, every worker, every young person who loves freedom, justice and democracy has a duty to support the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and to return to their land, the right to freedom, the right to life. Nothing can justify a people not having the right to life. The horrors produced by the capitalist system with the atrocities committed against the Jews by the Nazis during the Second World War cannot justify the horror being perpetrated by the State of Israel against the Palestinian people. One genocide cannot justify another genocide; the extermination of the Warsaw Ghetto in atrocious conditions cannot justify the liquidation of the Gaza ghetto today. The Jewish child raising his arms in front of Nazi soldiers in April 1943, in the final days of the heroic Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, cannot serve as justification for the Palestinian child crushed under Israeli bombs in 2023.

6. For 75 years, the partition of Palestine imposed by the UN over the heads the Palestinian people has brought suffering to the Palestinian people, who have been condemned to endless wandering and unrestrained repression. But this suffering also falls on the Jewish population, who are paying the consequences of the situation in which the Zionist project has placed them. Fighting back against barbarity in no way feeds anti-Semitism – which must be fought – but on the contrary means outlining a positive solution for the Jewish and Arab peoples living in the land of Palestine. More and more voices – even if they are still in the minority – are being raised today, among the Palestinian Arab populations as well as among the Jewish populations living within the 1947 borders, to champion another perspective: that Jews, Arabs, Christians, Muslims and atheists should be able to live with equal rights and obligations in a State founded on the principles of democracy, in a secular, democratic and independent Palestine covering the whole of the historic territory of Palestine. One way or another, this is the only solution that will bring a lasting end to the situation that began 75 years ago.

7. All the governments of the Western powers, including the US government, are calling for the UN Resolutions to be applied. Need we remind you that the dramatic situation in Palestine stems from the vote in favour of UN Resolution 181, which on 29 November 1947 established partition? Need we remind you that this Resolution established an exclusive Jewish state and denied the Palestinian people the right to be part of the state on their own land? It was the UN which, on the basis of an agreement between the capitalist powers and the Soviet Union then led by Stalin, made possible the 1948 Nakba, the permanent expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians from their lands, their fields, their homes. Everything that has happened since then stems from that vote in 1947.

8. The UN means the partition of Palestine. The UN cannot be the solution. Of course, everyone claims to support it: Israel, the USA, but also all the leaders of the left-wing parties and various organisations that claim to be “friends of the Palestinian people”. We say to the workers and young people: “Beware of those who call on you to support the UN Resolutions”. The only one of the 81 Resolutions adopted by the UN on the Middle East since 1947, the only one that has been applied, is the one that allowed the Zionists to create a state reserved exclusively for Jews. All the other Resolutions, including those calling for the return of occupied territories or the moderation of settler colonisation, have never been applied. The UN, to use Lenin’s phrase about its ancestor, the League of Nations, is nothing more than a “den of thieves”, because its function is to enable capitalist “thieves” of all kinds (in agreement previously with the Stalinist counter-revolutionary bureaucrat-thieves who have now become the Kremlin’s oligarch-thieves) to come to an agreement with each other. The UN is not an international organisation for guaranteeing peace, it is an international organisation for guaranteeing that the various capitalist states have the freedom to act according to their interests.

9. The positive solution to the tragedy which Palestine has been living through for three quarters of a century can only come from the implementation of the perspective formulated as early as 1947 by the Fourth International and its Palestinian section: a Palestinian Constituent Assembly bringing together its Jewish and Arab components with equal rights covering the whole of the historic territory of Palestine. The truth is that the perspective of a secular and democratic Palestine – enshrined in the Palestinian National Charter of 1968 – was originally shared by all the components of the Palestinian national movement, but was later abandoned under pressure from imperialism and the reactionary Arab regimes. Just as, since the collapse of the USSR, all the official leaderships of the labour movement have abandoned – not only in practice but also in words – the perspective of socialism, and therefore of the abolition of the system of private ownership of the means of production. To win, the workers will have to (re)constitute parties and an International which fully take up in words and in practice the positions which were the founding positions of the labour movement at its origin: a complete break with the bourgeoisie, the collective appropriation of the means of production. This is the perspective that needs to be developed in the class struggles. Because the class struggle is alive and kicking.

10. The barbarity that is being unleashed against the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank is happening also because for 75 years, despite the defeats, despite the massacres, despite the blows suffered, the Palestinian Revolution has not given up. Generation after generation, the Palestinian people have never stopped fighting for their rights, the Right to Return, the right to see redressed the terrible injustice done to them at the time of partition and the first Nakba. The Palestinian Revolution and its continuity over the last 75 years are a component part of the revolutionary processes that have seen peoples on every continent, and workers in particular, rise up for their demands. In the recent period, as the delegates to our conference pointed out, we have seen massive strikes in the automobile and entertainment industries in the United States; we have seen massive strikes in enterprises in China despite the ban on trade union organisations; we have seen the more limited but highly significant strikes by workers in Russia in the midst of war and despite the war; we have seen the uprising of the peoples of Egypt and Algeria; we have seen the mobilisation by the peoples of West Africa against the French colonial presence and the demand for an end to it; we have seen the tens of thousands of textile workers on strike in Bangladesh. Capitalist barbarism is being opposed by the legitimate mobilisation of workers and peoples for their rights. This sometimes wins demands. Sometimes workers’ mobilisations are unsuccessful. However, all these struggles express the reality of the class struggle. On an international scale, this class struggle is seeing the oppressed and exploited repeatedly taking up the fight against their exploiters and their governments.

11. The working class holds the future of humankind in its hands. Decayed imperialism is everywhere calling into question democratic rights, including the right to demonstrate and the right to organise. Everywhere, the wheel of history is turning backwards with regard to the rights won by working women, or the right to education for the younger generation. Everywhere, the independence won by peoples is under attack, just like the formal equality won by Black people in the United States. In recent years, the former colonial powers and imperialism have even declared a total blockade of Mali and then Niger. By fighting for their right to organise, for democratic rights, for the rights of working women, for the sovereignty of nations, and against social regression, the working class and the labour movement, allied with all the oppressed layers of society, are coming up against the capitalist system, the system of private ownership of the means of production. This working-class resistance is opposed to the course on which the capitalist powers are now embarked, that of war which is becoming more widespread, of the march towards the Third World War, which can only be prevented by broadening the mobilisation of the international working class.

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