Editorial
Stop Sharon's war crimes
Victory to the Intifada!
Nearly two weeks after the invasion started on April 3, the media finally managed to break through the Israeli cordon surrounding Jenin refugee camp. But it is almost impossible for even the best journalists or the most talented photographers to convey the real horror of what has happened inside what The Times describes as the "camp of the dead" and The Independent calls " a human tomb", with "grisly evidence of a war crime".
Janine di Giovanni comments in The Times: "Rarely, in more than a decade of war reporting from Bosnia, Chechnya, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, have I seen such deliberate destruction, such disrespect for human life".
Jenin camp was home to 15,000 refugees, driven off their land by the Zionists in 1948. The much-feted Oslo accord and the establishment of the Bantustan Palestinian authority did not create the possibility for these people to move out of the camps in which they have lived for the last 50 years. No wonder Jenin camp and the other camps across the territories have been the site of some of the fiercest resistance to the latest murderous onslaught by the Israeli state – and the strongest support for the Intifada.
And now hundreds of homes have been bulldozed, many with people still inside them. Not content with slaughtering hundreds – men, women and children – the Israeli army has blocked ambulances removing the bodies. Corpses have either been left to rot – or have themselves been bulldozed into mass graves.
Many people whose injuries from Israeli ammunition were not in themselves life-threatening have bled to death because medical teams have been barred from access to the camp.
Jenin is a particularly vile example of what the Israeli war machine has done – and the one in which so far the greatest number of Palestinians have been slaughtered. It is also tragically typical of what has been meted out to the Palestinian people by their Zionist occupiers in town after town, camp after camp across the West Bank.
The 1200 people that packed into a London rally to hear the report back from Ramallah by Sussex University students and entertainer Jeremy Hardy got a glimpse both of the horror of what the Palestinian people face day after day – and of their courage in the face of this indescribable nightmare.
This Intifada has a huge echo across the world – and those who are going to the Occupied Terrorities to act as human shields are playing a vital role as part of building solidarity with the struggle.
Yet again Tony Blair has demonstrated with brutal clarity where he stands in all of this. At huge public expense, he recalled Parliament – to conduct an utterly pointless debate on the death of a 101-year-old racist, snob and scrounger. Of course even Blair’s enormous power could not prevent the death of Mrs Windsor – though he sought to exploit it.
But there has been no such measure to discuss the avoidable slaughter of hundreds of Palestinians by an army supplied with British arms, bankrolled by the USA, and given a bank cheque for slaughter by Blair’s good friend George W. Bush.
The British government does have the power to stop selling arms to Israel, and to stop giving political support to the war criminal Sharon.
But these questions, along with the continuing war in Afghanistan and the threats to Iraq were not even up for debate at the "mother of Parliaments", despite calls from the back benches.
Outrage at Blair’s criminal stance, together with opposition to the Zionist war machine have brought increasing numbers of people out onto the streets across Britain in these last weeks.
This political radicalisation has been strongest, not surprisingly in the Arab and Muslim communities, many of whom have seen more accurate pictures of the reality of the Zionist massacres through Al-Jazeera than on British TV.
But other activists from the anti-war and anti-globalisation movement, from colleges and schools have increasingly participated alongside them. Significantly, sections of the Jewish community have also marched to show their disgust with what Sharon is doing in their name.
The Palestinian people will not, cannot give up their fight for freedom. It is the duty of every socialist to build the broadest possible solidarity with their struggle