T.O. 123 – Special Issue on Gaza: “The Palestinian Struggle for Self-Determination”

IN THIS SPECIAL ISSUE ON GAZA:

• Opening Presentation to the Dec. 3 Forum titled, “The Palestinian Struggle for Self-determination: Our Solidarity Today and Tomorrow” — by Mya Shone

• Recommended Reading: The Hidden History of Zionism by Ralph Schoenman

• Suggested Viewing:  Video of The Palestinian Struggle for Self-Determination: Today and Tomorrow, a Socialist Organizer forum held December 3, 2023.

• “An Even More Hellish Scenario,” States the UN — by Dominique Ferré 

• ¨Weapons Distribution and Use of White Phosphorus  — by D. F. 

• Israeli Intervention in Gaza: “A Mass Murder Factory” –  by Jean Allain 

• Gaza: Surviving on Two to Three Liters of Water a Day — by D. F.

• “Netanyahu Knew. Netanyahu Ignored It. Netanyahu Is Responsible.

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Opening Presentation to “The Palestinian Struggle for Self-Determination: Our Solidarity Today and Tomorrow“

Presentation by Mya Shone to the December 3 Socialist Organizer Forum titled, “The Palestinian Struggle for Self-determination: Our Solidarity Today and Tomorrow.” Eighty-eight people were in attendance.

Comrades and friends,

The genocidal assault of the Israeli state against the Palestinian people in Gaza has resumed in force. “It’s a new layer of destruction” stated Robert Mardini, head of the International Red Cross. Over 15,400 killed to date, 70% of whom are women and children, an untold number buried under rubble; 1.8 million people, nearly 80% of Gaza’s population, forced to flee their homes; over 100,000 buildings destroyed, including entire neighborhoods, hospitals, schools, mosques, vital infrastructure for electricity, water, fuel and transportation; a siege that has created a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions such that the number of deaths is expected to double.

Yet, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refers to this genocidal attack in Gaza as the second war of independence for the Jewish people. Netanyahu harkens back to Joshua and the Biblical description of the battle for Jericho 3,000 years ago.

What is revealing about Netanyahu’s reference is that the Old Testament both extols the extermination of the indigenous Canaanites and mandates that the Israelites eliminate all peoples in the territory they conquer. This is throughout the region in which, according to Genesis 15:15:21, “the Lord made a covenant with Abram:

“To your descendants I give this land, from the Wadi of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates — the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kamonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaites, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites, and Jebusites.”

The conquest that created the Kingdom of Israel took place over the course of the Bronze Age. The Kingdom of Israel divided into the Kingdoms of Judea and Samaria after the death of King Solomon before it was swept away by the Babylonians in 586 BCE.

But we are not here today to discuss ancient history, theology, or whether God, if one so believes in deity, is a real estate agent as Netanyahu and other Zionists contend. We are here to discuss social and political liberation in modern times and how to effectively advance the struggle for Palestinian self-determination and the vision of a society in all of Palestine — from the River to the Sea — where the rights of people do not depend upon ethnic or religious identity. This is the struggle for a democratic and secular society such as we demand for ourselves.

We must first understand that Zionism and the quest for greater Israel, accompanied by the removal of the Palestinian people — is foundational to the ideology of the Zionist movement, Revisionist and Labor Zionist alike.

In 1936, David Ben Gurion, revered as the father of the Israeli state and its first prime minister, wrote to his son: “A partial Jewish state is not the end, but only the beginning.” “The boundaries of Zionist aspiration,” he explained in a speech in 1938 to the World Council of Poale Zion, “include southern Lebanon, southern Syria, today’s Jordan, all of Cis- Jordan (the West Bank) and the Sinai.”

In 1940, Joseph Weitz, the head of the Jewish Agency’s Colonization Department, described what that would entail: “Between ourselves it must be clear that there is no room for both peoples in this country. … there is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to neighboring countries — all of them not one village, not one tribe should be left.”

The quest for power and the struggle for Zionist control of a wide swath of the Middle East has been unrelenting: the Nakba, the Zionist massacres that led to the expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians, the subsequent war in June 1967 in which the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan Heights were seized, the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 followed by an 18-year occupation of the south, 500,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank, 220,000 in East Jerusalem and the land surrounding it, 118 outposts laying the groundwork for new West Bank settlements, most of the Jordan Valley, 30% of the West Bank, off limits to Palestinians.

 Add to this the brutality of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, including 1 million Palestinians imprisoned and tortured since 1967, the 16-year boycott and siege of Gaza, along with periodic massive bombardment. Let us note that none of this could occur were it not for U.S. sponsorship and funding since the partition of Palestine on November 29, 1947.

 The F-15 and F-35 fighter jets, missiles, the 2,000-pound bunker buster bombs, the J-DAM guidance kits as well as the millions of rounds of ammunition that are killing and maiming the Palestinian people and rendering their communities uninhabitable are, for the most part, manufactured in the U.S. and paid for with our U.S. tax dollars.

That is why first and foremost we demand End All Aid to Israel. Our demand puts us in conflict with the imperialist interests of the U.S. ruling class and the Democratic and Republican parties that serve it. As we press our cause and meet opposition, the inevitable issue of who wields power is raised and, thus, it becomes essential for us to create the basis for a mass working-class party rooted in labor and oppressed communities which can serve our interests.

The Zionist state, with the assistance of the U.S. government, has built the 4th largest military in the world. It serves to protect U.S. ruling class interests in the Middle East, foremost suppressing the Palestinian and other Arab revolutions which would threaten imperialist control of oil and other resources.

A state, however, is not coextensive with its people. We have been organizing and participating in the burgeoning solidarity and anti-war movements on campuses and in our communities to Stop the Bombardment, End the Siege and End All Aid to Apartheid Israel. That, too, is why this is a critical moment for the Jews of Israel and Jews throughout the world, as well as other people, to assess whether they want to bear the consequences of the reactionary ideology of the Zionist movement and Israel, a state founded on dispossession and exclusivity.

That is why the effort of the One Democratic State Initiative with its “Open Letter to Our Jewish Allies” is so significant.

Let there be no illusion that a two-state solution was ever and is ever possible. That it is mentioned today is a sign of desperation by the imperialist powers and the country-selling regimes of the Arab world.

Aaron David Miller, who served as an adviser on Middle East issues to Democratic and Republican administrations, concluded that President Biden’s recent emphasis on a two-state solution was an “aspirational talking point.” “The odds are very, very low,” Miller said. “It’s essentially mission impossible.” (as reported in the Associated Press, October 29, 2023) Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, trying to stave off Zionist plans to drive the Palestinians in Gaza into the Sinai, has called for the establishment of a de-militarized Palestinian state with international intervention that would serve to achieve security for the State of Israel.

As noted by a veteran Palestinian militant in DeHeishe camp: “Those who hold out expectations for a two-state solution are blind to what is happening on the ground. The Zionists will not leave a centimeter for a two-state solution.”

Furthermore, he stated, “Israel and the Palestinian Authority are afraid of another Intifada in the West Bank. They know it can happen in the streets again. That is why Israeli troops enter the camps and towns every day and every night. Over 3,000 youth have been arrested in one month, most as administrative detainees, held without charge. They know we will fight until the end. We will make a new kind of history. This is not the history of the Arab leaders. This is the people themselves.”

It was during the First Intifada, beginning in December 1987, when stone-throwing youth combatted heavily-armed Israeli soldiers and their massive tanks, that Palestinians, throughout the West Bank and Gaza, refused to pay Israeli taxes, boycotted Israeli goods, withheld their labor, and most significantly organized themselves into local committees that along with representatives from social service organizations, labor unions, and the militants of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Fatah, and the Palestine Communist Party formed the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising. It was a national leadership independent of Chairman Yasir Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization leadership in Tunis. In essence, a constituent assembly.

The national bourgeoisie under the leadership of Yasir Arafat sought to demobilize the Intifada. The popular organization with the UNLU was undermining its authority and threatened the PLO discussions with U.S. imperialism. Arafat pushed a policy of capitulation at the Palestine National Council meeting in Algiers in mid-November 1988 wherein the P.L.O. would abandon its historic position of a democratic secular Palestine and would recognize Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish state. The unrealistic expectation was that the United States would ensure a Palestinian state on a fragment of historic Palestine. We know what ensued.

To conclude: The Palestinian people have been in constant struggle for self-determination for more than 100 years — since the imperialist division of the Ottoman Empire at the close of World War I and the creation of the draconian British Mandate control of Palestine.

The Palestinian struggle has its roots in the uprisings in Jerusalem in 1920, Jaffa in 1921, Hebron in 1929, the three-year struggle from 1936 through 1939 which flowed from an unprecedented six-month Palestinian general strike. The Palestinian people have never relinquished their struggle no matter the brutality and genocide unleashed against them.

Today, just as in March 1988, during the first Intifada, when notable figures in the U.S. and internationally, such as Nobel Peace Laureate Linus Pauling, authors Gore Vidal and Kurt Vonnegut, labor leaders, leaders in the Black liberation movement, professors, and religious figures both Christian and Jews, came together to demand End All Aid to Apartheid Israel, we see that the response to decades of outrageous tyranny still exists among the Palestinian people and is echoed in those Israeli Jews who resist the oppression of others.

“Theirs is the passion for a life without oppression.

“Theirs is the vision of a country shorn of racist dominion.

“Palestinians and Jews, free at last from discrimination and injustice, will forge lasting peace only in a democratic and secular society where elementary rights are accorded to all.

“Extend your hand to the heroic people of Palestine. Support the campaign to end all aid to apartheid Israel. Join the worldwide call for a democratic and secular Palestine.”

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“The Migration of Jews to Palestine Will Transform Palestine Into a Bloody Trap for Jews” — Leon Trotsky

Leon Trotsky in July 1940, on the eve of World War II, wrote in response to a question.

“The attempt to solve the Jewish question through the migration of Jews to Palestine can now be seen for what it is, a tragic mockery of the Jewish people. … The future development of military events may well transform Palestine into a bloody trap for several hundred thousand Jews. Never was it so clear as it is today that the salvation of the Jewish people is bound up inseparably with the overthrow of the capitalist system.”

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Recommended Reading:

The Hidden History of Zionism by Ralph Schoenman available in print with your $25 contribution to Socialist Organizer. Please send your street mailing address to takingaim@pacbell.net once you have made the contribution.

The Hidden History of Zionism is available free online at https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/mideast/hidden/index.htm

Suggested Viewing:

The Palestinian Struggle for Self-Determination: Today and Tomorrow, a Socialist Organizer forum, Sunday, December 3, 2023. Contact us to view this important two-hour forum (first hour presentations and second hour discussion. Please consider contributing to Socialist Organizer via donate online at www.socialistorganizer.org. Your contributions make these forums possible.

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“An Even More Hellish Scenario,” States the UN

On December 1, the Netanyahu government put an end to the temporary truce, triggering a new offensive against Gaza, particularly in the south, where more than a million inhabitants of the wiped-out Gaza City have taken refuge. By December 4, the offensive had already claimed 15,207 lives, including 6,150 children.

The UN warns of an “even more hellish scenario.” Israel’s Chief of Staff has promised that “just as we did it with force and thoroughness in the north of the Gaza Strip, we will also do it in the south.” (The Times of Israel)

A “thoroughness” in the unleashing of barbarism is more like it. Unicef has denounced “devastating losses among children” in the southern bombardments (December 2), while the International Committee of the Red Cross asserts: “We are creating a generation of amputees.” (December 4)

Plans for the “post-war period” are being discussed. Sectors of the Netanyahu government have not given up on expelling Palestinians from Gaza to Egypt … while a U.S.-Israeli plan, revealed by the Wall Street Journal, aims to evacuate thousands of Hamas fighters from Gaza “just as the PLO fedayeen evacuated Lebanon in 1982,” notes Courrier international (December 1), which points out, however, that “the affair seems quite complicated.”

Whatever “solution” Israel envisions, it can only be based on devastation and expulsions. The Biden administration is not happy about this. Not that it has the slightest sympathy for the Palestinian people, but for the first time in history, the majority of the U.S. population does not support the Israeli offensive.

CNN (November 30) explained:

“Mr. Biden’s support for Mr. Netanyahu has cost him dearly politically, both at home and abroad . … Domestically, the thousands of Palestinian deaths … raise fears that the youngest and most progressive voters, already turned off by Mr. Biden, will not vote for him in November 2024 … . The risk of growing differences between the two governments over the future conduct of the war could introduce new tensions. The vital national interests of the United States and Israel are not irrevocably aligned.”

Secretary of Defense Austin warned Israel that “by driving [the Palestinians – ed. Note] into the arms of the enemy, you will turn a tactical victory into a strategic defeat” (December 3). On this occasion, Austin and Biden pulled out of their hats the so-called “two-state solution” as “the only way out of the tragic confrontation,” according to Austin.

But the U.S. administration knows perfectly well that this so-called “solution” is no more than an empty slogan that has been raised routinely over the past 75 years. It was present in UN Resolution 181 which, on November 29, 1947, imposed the partition of Palestine, i.e., its artificial division into a “Jewish state” and an “Arab state” … which never came into being.

Its invocation has never prevented massacres and “tragic confrontations.” As always, this “solution” comes up against a reality: no leader of the State of Israel intends to tolerate any “Palestinian state.” – Dominique Ferré 

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Weapons Distribution and Use of White Phosphorus 

The Netanyahu government has distributed 150,000 arms licenses to Israelis since October 7. This compares with 42 licenses distributed over the same period last year! In disagreement with these civil war measures, the director of the Licensing Department has resigned, while the daily Haaretz denounces the weapons’ distribution:

“Weapons are being distributed like candy” (December 4). The main beneficiaries are the extremist settlers of the West Bank who, together with the army, have murdered 256 Palestinians since October 7.”

In southern Lebanon, it has now been established that the Israeli army uses white phosphorus bombs, as Amnesty International has pointed out in relation to this incendiary substance: “People exposed to white phosphorus can suffer respiratory damage, organ failure and other very serious and life-altering injuries, including burns that are extremely difficult to treat and cannot be extinguished with water.”

Burns affecting only 10% of the body are often fatal.” – D. F. 

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Israeli Intervention in Gaza: “A Mass Murder Factory”

Following are the findings of an investigation by the Israeli magazine +972 

John Kirby, Biden’s spokesperson, dared to declare on December 3 that Israel was “making efforts” to minimize civilian casualties in the Gaza Strip. This cover-up of the crimes committed by the Israeli government is contrary to facts just revealed by +972 magazine, which reports the existence of a “mass murder factory” (November 30).

This Israeli publication, following a survey of current and former members of the Israeli intelligence services, reports the existence of a system of “authorized air strikes on non-military targets and the use of an artificial intelligence system,” which “enabled the Israeli army to wage its deadliest war … against the Palestinians since the 1948 Nakba,” according to the media outlet.

Compared with previous interventions in Gaza, the current war has seen the Israeli army “significantly expand its bombardment of targets that are not clearly military in nature. These include private residences as well as public buildings, infrastructure and high-rise apartment blocks, which, according to some sources, are prime targets for the Israeli armed forces … which the army defines as ‘powerful targets’ (‘matarot otzem’).

Members of the intelligence services consulted, writes +972, “confirmed that the Israeli army has files on the vast majority of potential targets in Gaza – including homes – which stipulate the number of civilians likely to be killed in an attack on a particular target.

This number is calculated and known in advance by the army’s intelligence units, who also know, shortly before launching an attack, how many civilians are certain to be killed. …

“The figures have gone from dozens of civilian deaths [allowed] as collateral damage in an attack on a senior official in previous operations, to hundreds of civilian deaths as collateral damage,” said one of the sources.

“Nothing happens by chance,” said another source. “When a three-year-old girl is killed in a house in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it didn’t matter that she was killed – that it was a price worth paying to hit [another] target …. It’s all intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in each house.”

“According to the survey, ‘another reason for the large number of targets and considerable damage to the civilian population in Gaza is the widespread use of a system called “Habsora” (“The Gospel”), which relies heavily on artificial intelligence and can “generate” targets almost automatically at a rate that far exceeds what was previously possible. This artificial intelligence system, as one former intelligence officer described it, essentially makes a “mass assassination factory” possible. – J.A. 

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Gaza: Surviving on Two to Three Liters of Water a Day

 Drinking, preparing food, going to the toilet, washing… These basic necessities of life have been rendered almost impossible in the Gaza Strip, explains an article in the British daily The Guardian (November 23).

“Due to Israeli bombardments, Palestinians in Gaza only have access to two or three liters of water a day …. The aquifer that runs along the Mediterranean coast from Israel through Gaza to Egypt is the only natural source of water for the Palestinians in Gaza.

But this water is seriously polluted: by 2022, an estimated 90,000 cubic meters of wastewater were flowing into the Mediterranean every day, making 96.2% of the water unsafe for consumption. The Palestinians resort to desalination and water treatment, but the bombardments and blockade have led to the total collapse of the sanitation system ….

2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza currently survive on two to three liters of water a day. For comparison, a toilet flush consumes around 6 liters and a shower nearly 10 liters per minute.” By way of further comparison, The Guardian reports that a Palestinian in the West Bank receives an average of 80 liters of water a day, “less than the 100 liters recommended by the World Health Organization.

Israelis “have access to an average of 300 liters of drinking water a day” including “those living in illegal West Bank settlements, who can thus water their vineyards, olive groves, farms and date fields.”

The Guardian continues:

“The number of people fleeing the north of the Gaza Strip continues to grow. Some towns in the south can only provide one toilet for every 600 people. Infectious diseases are spreading. Even before the conflict, one in four children in Gaza suffered from diarrheal disease, which kills more children under the age of five … . The inhabitants of Gaza have had to resort to drinking seawater, contaminated by wastewater. And the consequences are catastrophic. Now that the health system has been destroyed, there are few means of treating those who fall ill.” – D. F.

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Nakba 1947

“Netanyahu Knew. Netanyahu Ignored It. Netanyahu Is Responsible.

Every week brings new revelations about Netanyahu’s responsibility for the conditions in which the Hamas attack of October 7 took place, causing 1,200 deaths on the Israeli side.

The editorial in the Israeli daily Haaretz (November 22) is blunt: “Netanyahu knew. Netanyahu ignored it. Netanyahu is responsible.” [1]

The daily adds that “the head of the research branch of (Israeli) military intelligence had personally sent a warning to Benyamin Netanyahu.” The New York Times has since asserted that Israel was aware of Hamas’s preparations for the military operation at least a year before the October 7 attack.

As for the Israeli government’s decision to end the truce, it is causing new rifts in Israeli society. An opinion poll conducted for the Israeli daily Maariv on the eve of the resumption of bombing revealed that 54% of Israelis support the continuation of the temporary truce in the Gaza Strip and the exchange of prisoners between Israel and Hamas.

Endnote:

[1] Israeli intelligence had a detailed document on the Hamas operation that they code-named “Jericho Wall”)