World condemns Israeli massacre in Gaza

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F over 2200 Gaza Palestinians murdered by the rac­ ive hundred and sixteen children are among the ist, Zionist, apartheid settler state of Israel. An esti­ mated 75-80 percent of the Palestinians slaughtered were civilians.

Some 1.8 million Palestinians “live” in perhaps the world’s largest prison, Gaza, virtually unable to enter or leave, starved and bereft of clean water, electricity, and basic medical care. Their residences—15,000 to date—have been obliterated, bombed to smithereens by Israeli jets, artillery, and mortars.

These horrors have been justified in grotesque and racist terms. An Aug. 22 Hollywood Reporter ad, signed by a score of Jewish executives, featured a 1950s state­ ment from former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir (1969-73) about “the Arabs.” The ad, however, leaves out Meir’s words “the Arabs,” who were expelled en masse from their homelands and are today’s Palestin­ ian Gazans and their descendants. Meir’s “haunting words” (the Hollywood executives’ choice of language to indicate their agreement) were paraphrased in the ad as follows: “We can forgive [the Arabs] for killing our children. We cannot forgive them from forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with [the Arabs] when they love their children more than they hate us.”

“Us” and “them!” These terms are used to describe one of the most powerful military states on earth, versus a virtually defenseless people. “Their chil­ dren!”—516 Palestinian children murdered, versus one Israeli child! “They hate us” more than they “love their children!”—a demented statement by the leader 6 SOCIALIST ACTION AUGUST 2014 Tony Savino / Socialist Action of a racist state. Does this not reflect a colonial mind­ set akin to that of the Belgian King Leopold, who in the 19th century murdered 12 million Congolese, in the world’s most monstrous case of genocide? Leo­ pold, Hitler’s predecessor in atrocities, also did not concern himself with the annihilation of innocent peoples, instructing his soldiers to cut off the hands of the “rebels” of his day.

Need we remind today’s Zionist colonizers that in 1943, walled-in, starved, and persecuted Warsaw Ghetto Jews courageously fought back with primi­ tive weapons against the Nazi butchers’ army, then the strongest in the world? Did Warsaw’s Jews pro­ voke the Nazi retaliation that bombed and burned the Ghetto—and a year later, most of the rest of War­ saw—to the ground, killing Jewish children and all others? Hitler called them terrorists and proceeded to try to annihilate an entire people. The world called Warsaw’s resisting Jews freedom fighters.

Today’s Israeli Zionist murderers are the descen­ dants of what was, until after the Holocaust, a con­ servative minority current in Jewish history and politics—a current whose mentor, Vladimir Jabotin­ sky, thought that Jewish freedom could be obtainable through the agency of British imperialism.

Said Jabotinsky in his 1923 Zionist exposition, “The Iron Wall”: “Every native population in the world re­ sists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colo­ nized. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of ‘Palestine’ into the ‘Land of Israel.’”

Tony Savino / Socialist Action And again: “Except for those who were born blind, they realized long ago that it is utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine Arabs for converting ‘Palestine’ from an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority. … “We cannot offer any adequate compensation to the Palestinian Arabs in return for Palestine. And there­ fore, there is no likelihood of any voluntary agreement being reached. … Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population—behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.

“That is our Arab policy; not what we should be, but what it actually is, whether we admit it or not. What need, otherwise, of the Balfour Declaration? Or of the [British] Mandate? Their value to us is that outside Power has undertaken to create in the country such conditions of administration and security that if the native population should desire to hinder our work, they will find it impossible.”

In Europe of the early 20th century, the majority of po­ litically active Jews opposed the Zionists and instead worked to bring about fundamental social change in their own countries. Revolutionaries of Jewish origin constituted a large portion of the central leadership of Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Party, which in 1917 not only led the first socialist revolution in world his­ tory but virtually instantly abolished all Tsarist laws that persecuted Jews.

That revolution ushered in a society with the great­ est diversity and fidelity to human freedom, dignity and liberation ever. It’s central leader, Lenin, partly Jewish himself by virtue of his grandfather, railed against the Great White Russian chauvinism that pre­ vailed to a significant extent in his times. He similarly condemned the ingrained anti-Semitism and persecu­ tion of Jews under the Tsar.

Recently, 40 survivors of the Nazi genocide and 287 descendants of survivors and victims published a half-page ad in The New York Times condemning Israel’s Gaza massacre. The Aug. 23 ad denounced a previous ad published in the British Guardian and in two mainline Israeli papers that featured a statement by Israeli’s misbegotten Nobel “Peace” Laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, who, like the present Zionist colonial warrior and Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, charges Palestinians with “child sacrifice.” Wiesel called on President Obama to con­ demn Hamas’ “use of children as human shields.”

“In my own lifetime,” Weisel wrote, “I have seen Jew­ ish children thrown into the fire. And now I have seen Muslim children used as human shields, in both cases, by worshippers of death cults indistinguishable from (continued on page 7)

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that of the Molochites.” (This was an ancient cult, re­ ferred to in the Old Testament and said to have sacri­ ficed children to their god.)

Weisel continued: “What we are suffering through today is not a battle of Jew versus Arab or Israeli ver­ sus Palestinian. Rather, it is a battle between those who celebrate life and those who champion death. It is a battle of civilization versus barbarism.”

The Holocaust survivors of the Nazi genocide and their descendants responded in The Times with a truth that is today echoed around the world as Zion­ ism’s atrocities and the Zionist state itself stand ex­ posed and illegitimate as never before. They wrote, “As Jewish survivors and descendants of survivors and victims of the Nazi genocide, we unequivocally condemn the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza and the ongoing occupation and colonization of historic Pal­ estine.

“We further condemn the United States for provid­ ing Israel with the funding to carry out the attack, and Western states more generally for using their diplo­ matic muscle to protect Israel from condemnation. Genocide begins with the silence of the world.

“We are alarmed by the extreme, racist dehuman­ ization of Palestinians in Israeli society, which has reached a fever-pitch. In Israel, politicians and pun­ dits in the Times of Israel and The Jerusalem Post have called openly for genocide of Palestinians, and rightwing Israelis are adopting Neo-Nazi insignia.

“Furthermore, we are disgusted and outraged by Elie Wiesel’s abuse of our history in these pages to justify the unjustifiable: Israel’s wholesale effort to destroy Gaza and the murder of more than 2,000 Pal­ estinians, including many hundreds of children. Noth­ ing can justify bombing UN shelters, homes, hospitals and universities. Nothing can justify depriving people of electricity and water.”

The liberal Israeli newspaper, Ha’aretz, writes, “This article, “Holocaust survivors condemn Israel for ‘Gaza Massacre,’ call for boycott,” has been recommended on Facebook more than 50,000 times and tweeted more than 10,000 times.”

Raphael Cohen, a signatory of the letter and a mem­ ber of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network [IJAN], which published the ad, commented: “We wanted to make it clear that he [Weisel] does not speak for all survivors of the Nazi genocide and that he doesn’t speak for all Jews. And we wanted to make clear that there is a huge number of survivors who are outraged by what Israel is doing in the Gaza Strip.”

IJAN’s website reports unprecedented coverage of the ad and solidarity statements reported in major media around the world.

Similarly, an Aug. 14 statement by Archbishop Emer­ itus Desmond Tutu, published by Ha’aretz, calls for a global boycott of Israel. Tutu stated: “The past weeks have witnessed unprecedented action by members of civil society across the world against the injustice of Israel’s disproportionately brutal response to the fir­ ing of missiles from Palestine.

“If you add together all the people who gathered over the past weekend to demand justice in Israel and Palestine—in Cape Town, Washington, D.C., New York, New Delhi, London, Dublin and Sydney, and all the other cities—this was arguably the largest active outcry by citizens around a single cause ever in the history of the world.”

Tutu was not exaggerating. Opinion polls around the ed in the abuse and repression of Palestinians to pull out. The campaign specifically targets Dutch pension fund ABP; Barclays Bank; security systems supplier G4S; French transport company Veolia; computer company Hewlett-Packard; and bulldozer supplier Caterpillar.”

Tutu noted that, “Last month, 17 EU governments urged their citizens to avoid doing business in or in­ vesting in illegal Israeli settlements. … We have also recently witnessed the withdrawal by Dutch pension fund PGGM of tens of millions of euros from Israeli banks; the divestment from G4S by the Bill and Me­ linda Gates Foundation; and the U.S. Presbyterian Church divested an estimated $21 million from HP, Motorola Solutions and Caterpillar. It is a movement that is gathering pace.”

Younger Americans are far likelier than older ones to say that Israel is more responsible than Hamas for the fighting in Gaza. A recent Gallup poll found that a majority of those under 30 thought that Israel’s ac­ tions in Gaza were unjustified. The same poll indi­ cated that among people of all ages, around 42 per­ cent thought that Israel was justified in its attack on Gaza, and about 39 percent thought that Israel was unjustified.

In the U.S., unprecedented protests have been or­ ganized across the country. In San Francisco, 6000 mobilized to protest Israeli atrocities, and rallies of a similar size or larger were held in New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.

The San Francisco protest included people who rep­ resented Gazan family members that were murdered by the Zionist bombardment. “End all aid to Zionist Israel,” read one prominent banner, which signifi­ cantly added, “Abolish Zionist Israel!” This is perhaps the clearest expression of a growing phenomenon in the U.S.—the recognition that the state of Israel is ille­ gitimate. The longstanding distinction between broad U.S. popular opposition to all colonialism and impe­ Tony Savino / Socialist Action (Above) Thousands join Aug. 9 New York march against Israel’s attack on Gaza. Unprecedented numbers have protested around the world.

rialist occupation except the Zionist variety, is begin­ ning to crumble.

The idea that the solution to the “Palestinian prob­ lem” would be the establishment of a tiny, economi­ cally unviable, isolated, and physically discontiguous Palestinian state on a tiny fraction of the original Pal­ estine is seen as akin to the South African system of apartheid that the racist white government, backed to the hilt by U.S. arms, insisted on before 1992.

The courageous Palestinian people’s standing up to the Israeli military behemoth and enduring hor­ rific punishment for doing so, has won the hearts and minds of the world’s people. The Zionist murderers have won the “war” but lost much more.

The door is open wider than ever to the fight for a democratic secular Palestine based on historic Pal­ estine as it existed before the imperialist 1948 parti­ tion. This prospect, however distant given the present relationship of forces, can only be achieved when the Palestinian masses bring forth revolutionary and so­ cialist leadership prepared to unite all the Palestinian people and build alliances with the oppressed work­ ing masses across the Middle East.

In this regard, the Arab Spring demonstrated in bold relief that the oppressed working masses are more than willing to fight for their freedom and liberation. What is painfully and tragically lacking is a deeply rooted mass revolutionary socialist leadership—the prerequisite to bringing forth a democratic and secu­ lar Palestine, where Jews, Palestinian Arabs, and all others can live in peace and harmony.

Unless this new state is socialist in its very founda­ tions—abolishing capitalist-created oppression, rac­ ism, exploitation and war—it cannot resolve the pres­ ent “Palestinian problem.” n