By Lal Khan
Seventy-two countries are due to attend the conference on Sunday 15th January in Paris presumably to lay an international framework for a two-state solution between the Palestinians and Israel. However the Israeli and Palestinian will not attend the gathering. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu described the conference as, “a relic of the past, it’s a last gasp of the past before the future sets in.” Such is the relevance and authority of the so-called international community and the imperialist arbiters on the Zionist regime in Israel.
The pernicious corporate media has virtually obscured the Zionist occupation and the brutalities being relentlessly inflicted upon the generations of oppressed Palestinians by Israel’s state terrorism. Their living conditions of a perpetual hell and fight back against this despotic tyranny are since long being ignored. The rise of Islamic fundamentalist forces with active encouragement from the Zionists has further isolated the Palestinian issue by restricting it to sectarian narrowness and allowed the Zionist state to provoke Jewish reaction within Israeli. Hatreds and sectarianism were orchestrated between the Jews and Palestinians living in the same communities, villages and towns. Former president of Israel’s Supreme Court Aharon Barak once said: “Israel is different from other countries. It is not only a democratic state but also a Jewish state.”
During the past two decades, approximately 5,000 Palestinian homes in Israel have been demolished. More than 1.7 million Palestinians that reside within the official Jewish state have jurisdiction over only 2.3 percent of the entire state’s land. They face systematic discrimination merely because of their race, ethnicity, and national origin, depriving them of electricity, water, schools, and access to roads, while nearby Jewish settlers enjoy all of these state-provided benefits.
Since the creation of the Israeli state in 1948, no new Palestinian towns or cities were built, in contrast to the 600 Jewish municipalities have mushroomed. Since 1948 the newly formed Zionist state imposed a bigoted law whereby any Jew in the world can move to Israel, while expelled Palestinian refugees were stripped of citizenship and are barred from returning forever.
There are 4.5 million Palestinians that live under a de facto Israeli military regime in the West Bank and Gaza Strip under the so–called administrations of Fatah and Hamas. To enforce this neo-colonial subjugation the Israeli military conducts nightly raids, detains Palestinians without trial or charge, tortures detainees, and represses any kind of resistance – including unarmed protests – with lethal violence.
However, in the last seventy years, Zionist subjugation has failed to suppress the Palestinian defiance. There have been many mass movements or Intifada. The last wave of protests that have swept Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank with tens of thousands of Palestinians taking to the streets was in October 2015 in which 42 Palestinians were killed and hundreds wounded at the hands of Israeli forces. Men and women of all ages joined in the movement. Palestinian citizens of Israel simultaneously took to the streets in a general strike, closing businesses and schools across the country. However the mainstream Palestinian parties – Fatah, Hamas and the PFLP – have remained relatively quiet for a long time, while the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has only been urging protesters to remain peaceful after one uprising to another.
However, the Palestinian’s struggle for generations has failed to achieve neither national nor class liberation. From the armed struggles of the 1960’s and 70’s to many rounds of negotiations – all proved to be futile. The most effective fight was the Intifada. But these also could not achieve victory mainly due to the lack of a clear programme; strategy and a Marxist leadership for a revolutionary overthrow these states and the system.
The acts of individual violence in the armed struggle did give temporary publicity but in the last analysis, it proved to be counter productive as the Zionist state used these acts to inculcate fear amongst the Jewish population to enforce their vicious rulership. For Zionist generals, these acts were an alibi for ferocious state terrorism against innocent Palestinians exacerbating their repression and brutalities upon Palestinians. Every act of violence led to a new brutal aggression of the Israeli military against innocent masses.
The Camp David, Oslo and other accords under the auspices of the US and European imperialists were a facade. The UN Security Council resolutions and General Assembly’s condemnations of Israeli occupation were not even worth the pieces of Paper these were written on. The imperialists had originally carved out the Israeli state on a religious basis to advance their interests and exercise a greater control of the region by instilling a continuous instability. Their bias for Israel and false neutrality stand exposed. The impotency of international institutions subservient to imperialist interests has been revealed in many conflicts from Palestine to that of Kashmir.
The most significant movement based on the class struggle that ever erupted within Israel in its history was during August 2011. Its inspiration was the wave of a mass revolt that swept across North Africa and the Arab world in those stormy times. The ebbing of that tide has brought in bloodshed, terror, mayhem and elements of barbarism in the Middle East. In Israel religious-nationalistic chauvinism has become dominant with the vicious Benjamin Netanyahu regime’s boosted power. But this is a temporary phenomenon. Its now been graphically demonstrated that the ebbs and flows; social patterns of reaction and progression incline to be in a similar vein and have analogous timings in the Arab countries, Palestine and Israel.
A two state solution was a dud case from its inception. How could a debilitated and dependent Palestinian state economically and politically be independent and sovereign dominated by a mighty Zionist state? Arab regimes were never interested in Palestine’s freedom. They always exploited the issue to divert internal dissent against their dictatorial rulership. Fresh mass upheavals impend. In such mass rebellion the way out lies in class unity and revolutionary struggle of the region’s oppressed workers and youth to overthrow the Zionist colonial state and the reactionary Arab regimes that plunder and coerce the oppressed classes. Ultimately the road to the liberation of Palestine leads through the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
