Palestine
Sharon murders on - with Bush and Blair's support
The horrific events in the West Bank are causing revulsion around the world. But while the right wing media focus has been almost solely on the suicide bombings by desperate Palestinians, the sheer scale of the Israeli state terror is beginning to be revealed.
Details are emerging of the bloodbath which has taken place in the Jenin refugee camp, with hundreds killed and hundreds more wounded – many of them dying though the denial of medical treatment as Israeli troops fire on ambulances and drive away journalists and aid workers.
The Palestinians are being subjected endless murder and humiliation inflicted by a state-of-the-art military juggernaut armed with F16s, Apache helicopter gun ships and up-to-date battle tanks.
Hundreds have been killed in the past few days as Ariel Sharon has launched all-out war on the Palestinian people, the Palestinian Authority, and Yasser Arafat.
Pictures of these events have prompted mass demonstration from Egypt to Indonesia. Over a million demonstrated in the Yemen, up to three million in Morocco, 100,000 in Tripoli, 50,000 in Egypt, 100,000 in Baghdad, 30,000 in Jordan. In towns and cities across Britain there has been pickets and protests and demonstration.
Even before the Jenin massacre, the Israeli military had killed over 1500 Palestinians since the second Intifada began 18 months ago. And since September 11 the so-called ‘war on terrorism’ launched by Bush has given Sharon every excuse he needed to step up the offensive and to move to destroy the Palestinian Authority.
In the middle of this Bush, after prolonged vacillation, made his cynical call for the withdraw of Israeli troops from the West Bank, no doubt prompted by the need to placate the Arab bourgeoisies in the build-up to a US attack on Iraq.
At the same time any action to enforce Bush’s call was firmly ruled out. Calls for sanctions by the EU were brushed aside.
Colin Powell, sent by Bush to enforce the call has travelled by the scenic route going first to Morocco, Egypt, and then Spain – making sure that Sharon and his generals had the opportunity to kill hundreds more Palestinians before he got there. No wonder Sharon took not a blind bit of notice.
Powell arrived in Israel only to be seen joking with Sharon, and claiming that he has an assurance that the Israeli army will complete their operations "as soon as possible". Presumably they always intended to complete them as soon as possible.
It is ridiculous to suggest that the Israeli government could resist the demands of the US government if Bush meant what he said. Israel is bank-rolled by the USA to the tune of billions of dollars a year, and is totally dependent on the USA. A serious demand by Bush behind the scenes, spelling out real consequences of Israeli defiance, would produce the results.
Instead the US has again shifted its fire towards the Palestinians, demanding Arafat make a humiliating condemnation of the suicide bombings before Powell would attempt to secure a meeting with him.
Now Powell is in Israel he has nothing to say about the Jenin massacre, and nothing to propose.
The flawed Oslo agreement and the so-called "peace process" is dead in the water: and the PLO is (rightly) no closer to accepting the Bantustan option offered at Camp David (repeatedly and cynically cited by the Israelis as an offer to give the West Bank and Gaza back).
In reality there was little if anything on offer: there was to be no independent Palestinian state, no withdrawal to the borders of 1967, no return of the Palestinian refugees, and no compromise over Jerusalem.
Now the objective effect of Powell’s visit is to legitimise what Sharon is doing – since the US appears to have abandoned Bush’s call on April 4 for an Israeli withdrawal.
Sharon is operating on the basis that the only solution is a military solution – i.e. kill a lot more Palestinians. The next steps in this hardly bear thinking about: it could even mean the ethnic cleansing of part of Israel itself of its Arab population as Israeli Arabs protest against the war.
There can be no way out of the situation in Palestine without addressing the real issues that have created the situation – the expulsion of the Palestinians and the partition of Palestine in 1948, the establishment of a state which gave privileges to Jewish people to the detriment of Palestinians, and the cynical role of British and US imperialism in dividing the Middle East in their own interests.
Since Oslo, thousands more Palestinians have lost their homes and land, while the relentless, illegal expansion of the Zionist settlements has continued.
Bush and Blair, busily preparing to invade Iraq, demanding Saddam implement UN resolutions have consciously ignored Sharon’s flagrant and long-standing defiance of repeated UN resolutions.
If the reaction of Bush to the events of September 11th has let loose the full force of Israeli brutality, it is the Palestinians (as George Monbiot rightly argues) who have emerged as the vanguard of the resistance to Bush’s war drive – as well as in defence of their own national rights and liberties.
A small people with no army, navy or air force have mounted a remarkable resistance against overwhelming odds.
They are a part of a growing resistance world-wide to a super-power on the rampage and those who act in its shadow to consolidate their own regional domination or crush those fighting for their democratic rights.
They fight alongside those fighting for national self-determination in Chechnya against the Russian army and those resisting military repression in Colombia, the Philippines, and elsewhere. They fight alongside those mobilised in the anti-war movement around the world and those resisting the onslaught of global capitalism. Anti-globalisation activists have been to Palestine to protest against the repression.
Socialists must support the struggle of the Palestinians for national liberation and justice – for the victory of the intifada and the rejection of Oslo and other dead-end solutions like the Saudi peace plan.
This means supporting those forces on the ground who are attempting to build a real alternative – the draft resisters, the civil rights groups in both communities, and others.
It means campaigning for a boycott of Israeli goods, for the end of arms supplies to Israel and for the indictment of Ariel Sharon as a war criminal.
For a democratic secular Palestine, with full rights for all minorities
For the mobilisation of the Arab masses in defence of the Palestinians