July/August 2006

http://alawda.newjerseysolidarity.org

STOP THE SIEGE!

The War on Gaza - The US/"Israeli" Assault on Palestine

On June 27, 2006, a new phase of the war against Palestine, and specifically against the people of Gaza, began, when Zionist forces invaded, striking from ground and air, destroying homes, ravaging infrastructure, demolishing bridges, and killing Gaza Palestinians. This invasion followed weeks of assaults upon Gaza that saw a family massacred as they visited the beach, homes and lives shattered by missiles, and repeated assassinations of Palestinian political leaders and resistance activists. Scores of Palestinians have been killed and many more injured, and 64 Palestinian legislators, democratically-elected members of the Palestinian Legislative Council, city mayors, and cabinet members, seized and held prisoner, joining over 9,400 of their fellow Palestinians as political prisoners held in Zionist jails. This brutal assault of missiles, bombs, tanks and bullets upon the people of Gaza is, however, only the latest step in a long line of genocidal Zionist attacks upon the Palestinian people, and the most recent intensification of the siege of Palestine by the Zionist state, its ally and patron, the US, and their international cohorts.

Palestinians in Ramallah protest the military assault on Gaza and the imprisonment of elected legislators, June 28, 2006.

Since 1948, in one form or another, Palestine has been under siege.In the West Bank and Gaza, in the refugee camps, in Palestine ‘48 - Palestinians have been targeted for violent assaults and attempts to isolate them as a people. In Gaza itself, nearly 80% of the population in the small, crowded territory are refugees of 1948 and their descendants, continuing to demand their right to return to their homes, lands and properties from which they were expelled. It has been a long continuation of al-Nakba, inside and outside Palestine. Nevertheless, Palestinians have continued to survive, to struggle and to resist. Against overwhelming military force and a campaign to destroy Palestinian existence, Palestinians have organized, built political institutions, maintained their culture and identity, and refused to relinquish their rights and their identity. In recent years, the assault on Palestine has only escalated, in various guises - through the mass imprisonment of the false “peace” of Oslo, to the rending of Palestinian land in the West Bank through the construction of the massive apartheid wall, to the criminalization of Palestinian organizing and Palestinian resistance by Western governments. Since the Palestinian Legislative Council elections on January 25 and the Hamas victory, the Zionist regime and the US have strikingly intensified their war on the Palestinian people.

International aid - a lifeline in the economically isolated West Bank and Gaza - has been conditioned upon Palestinian acceptance of the unacceptable - the so-called legitimacy of an occupier state built on the dispossession of Palestinian land and the expulsion of the Palestinian people; the relinquishment of the right to resist occupation and oppression, and the one-sided acquiescence to previous “agreements” that have meant nothing but danger and destruction for the Palestinian people. Hamas’ victory itself was, in large part, a reflection of the mass rejection of such defeatism among the Palestinian public in the West Bank and Gaza. The overwhelmingly democratic elections have been followed by an onslaught of demands that Palestinians relinquish their rights to resist, to exist, and to reject their dispossession. In addition to the freezing of aid, “Israel” has refused to turn over taxes collected from Palestinians and belonging to the Palestinian authority; meanwhile, banks, under orders from US and EU governments, have refused to do business with agencies or individuals interacting with the Palestinian Authority, ensuring a cash and financial crisis within the West Bank and Gaza.

As the Zionist military drops its bombs and shoots its missiles into Gaza, the US and its junior partners internationally have joined hand in hand with the Zionist state in an attempt to starve Palestinians into submission through economic isolation and attempts to destroy Palestinian political structures. Those armaments are, by and large, produced in the US and sold by the US to the Zionist military; this military support is part of the $15 million daily in aid provided to “Israel” by the US. The US has used its international economic and political power to implement the economic siege upon Palestine. Without US economic, military and political support, the siege would, at this level, be impossible. It is the role of the US that renders the situation for Palestinians on the ground so severe and dangerous. Palestinians holding foreign passports are now routinely denied access to the West Bank and Gaza, including those who have lived there for decades; Palestinian Authority officials are forced to bring cash on their persons from Egypt in order to pay the most basic of salaries. All of these attempts at starvation and at international economic and political isolation have continued as the Zionist state attempts to create a civil war among Palestinians, providing political support to any and all forces who would relinquish Palestinian national rights while claiming to represent Palestinians, and encouraging armed conflict between Palestinian political forces while seeking to bolster right-wing Palestinian political forces, like those within the Fatah party under President Mahmoud Abbas who were willing to accede to Zionist demands. Thus, the siege of Palestine has been multifaceted - political, economic, and military - to devastating effect on the ground.

Despite the assault, Palestinians have continued to resist and to struggle for survival. Palestinians have held fast to their national rights - to return, to resistance, to liberate their land. Yet the effects of the siege are severe; the dead in Gaza and the West Bank, the ongoing assassinations and imprisonment of political activists and leaders, the rising levels of malnutrition and the numerous Palestinians living in poverty, their economic ties to Palestinian communities and families in exile abroad threatened by policies of isolation. As this war on Palestine has continued to rage, international agencies have, by and large, stood aside and allowed the siege to continue, despite the massive humanitarian crisis threatened as a result of economic strangulation and military assaults. United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has cautioned “Israel” to “exercise restraint,” yet rarely has an international agency questioned the legitimacy of the war on the Palestinian people.

On the contrary, it has been the Palestinian resistance - an indigenous resistance of a nation held under a brutal occupation, of millions forced from their homes and lands, of a people subject to colonial aggression and imperialist war - who have come in for attack. In fact, the state of siege only highlights the heroism of all forms of Palestinian resistance, from the mothers who brave starvation to raise Palestinian children in Palestine, to the demonstrators who march against the apartheid wall tearing through their land, to the freedom fighters who take up arms in defense of their land and their people. On June 25, 2006, in retaliation for the repeated attacks on Gaza that killed 21 Palestinians, Palestinian resistance forces raided a Zionist military outpost, killing two soldiers and capturing a third, whom they took prisoner. This attack was unquestionably legitimate by all standards: a military raid, by the grassroots resistance forces of a people under occupation, against the military base of the occupier, taking prisoner a military combatant. Palestinian resistance forces demanded the release of Palestinian political prisoners as the condition for the release of this soldier. Despite facing an overwhelming military force - the Zionist army is often described as the world’s fourth most powerful, a nuclear-armed military supplied with the most advanced US military technology and backed by the political, economic and military support of the most powerful military in the world - that of the US - Palestinians have continued to defend their land and their people, and fight for their freedom. While the resistance’s capture of this prisoner has been subject to condemnation from the US government and international agencies - even some claiming to be otherwise neutral - that label the Zionist assault on Gaza as understandable, cautioning only “restraint,” over 9.400 Palestinian political prisoners currently are held in Zionist jails, while these same agencies are silent. 20% of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have spent time as political prisoners in Zionist jails, a category including numerous women and children. Palestinian children are regularly subject to political imprisonment - since September 2000, 4000 Palestinian children have been detained. Palestinian political activists and leaders have been subject for generations to assassination and imprisonment; on March 14, 2006, Zionist forces attacked Jericho prison, where Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Secretary Ahmad Sa’adat and four of his comrades had been illegally held by the Palestinian Authority since 2002, raiding the prison and seizing Sa’adat and his comrades, kidnapping them and forcing them into a Zionist jail.

The hypocrisy of the US government and its allies and proxies is only more apparent when the Zionist raid on Jericho and the abduction of an illegally-held Palestinian political leader and elected Palestinian Legislative Council member with overwhelming military force by a colonial occupier seeking to maintain its domination and control is condoned, while a military action, holding a soldier of occupation as a prisoner of war , by the resistance forces of an oppressed people seeking their freedom, and the liberation of their land, is condemned.

The war on Gaza and the siege of Palestine are part of the ongoing drive to destroy Palestine and smash Palestinian existence. Despite the devastation of 1948 and then 1967, the ongoing military assaults, and the fact that the Palestinian refugee population today numbers 6 million - the world’s largest refugee population - at home and in exile, Palestinians have upheld their identity, their existence and their struggle for liberation and return. Palestinian existence and Palestinian resistance has been a living disproof to imperialist control over Arab lands, and belies claims to Zionist colonial legitimacy on Palestinian land. From the earliest days of the Zionist presence in Palestine, Zionism and its imperialist backers have sought to force Palestinians from their homes. Nevertheless, Palestinians remain, and Palestine remains, highlighting the illegitimacy of the Zionist occupation of all of Palestine and refusing to allow their homeland to become merely a piece of land subject to imperialist control and colonial authority. It is clear that this current attack is meant to drive Palestinians from their land; Zeev Boim, a close aide to Zionist prime minister Ehud Olmert and former deputy defense minister, urged hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in northern Gaza to leave their homes and lands, in a threat reminiscent of the 1948 Nakba - "As far as I am concerned," he said, "the inhabitants of Beit Lahya and Beit Hanun should start packing right away."

This assault comes as Palestinians have rejected defeatism; the January elections were a clear rebuff to the so-called “peace process,” which has, over the past fourteen years, brought nothing but further mechanisms of oppression to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, while ignoring entirely the fundamental right of millions of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and lands and never addressing the national rights of Palestinians in Palestine ‘48. The mechanisms of control, and of setting up a Palestinian force, in the Palestinian Authority, to carry out “Israeli” dictates and “security control” against the Palestinian population, failed in the face of Palestinian determination and commitment to national rights. As Palestinian resistance has been an inspiration to the world, and to their Arab brothers and sisters, so has imperialist control and domination faltered in Iraq. Despite the massive military presence arrayed against the Iraqi people, Iraqis have refused to accept US colonial domination of their nation. Attempting to crush Palestine is a necessary part of ensuring imperialist domination of the Arab world; the assault on Palestine goes hand in hand with the ongoing war on and occupation of Iraq. In addition, the Palestinian people of the West Bank and Gaza have been battered over nearly six years of intifada - six years of military invasions, an apartheid wall, the assassination and imprisonment of their political leadership, the impoverishment of their population, and the attempted destruction of internal Palestinian economic infrastructure and Palestinian political forces.

Nevertheless, despite the assault on Palestine - the military attacks from the Zionist occupier and the siege from the outside - Palestinians have continued to resist. However, it is imperative that people of conscience around the world act to support the Palestinian struggle. Palestinians, resisting occupation and oppression, have been on the front lines against colonial control and imperialist domination for over half a century. It is now critical that all stand alongside the Palestinian people, hand in hand with the Palestinian movement, to support Palestine, and demand an end to the war and an end to the siege. Grassroots direct aid to Palestine has perhaps never been more urgent. Medical facilities, such as Al-Awda Hospital in Gaza, face dangerously low stocks of medicine; food supplies are alarmingly short; and military attacks have concentrated on destroying infrastructure, from bridges, to electricity plants that also ensure the provision of clean water. Direct international provision of aid, and resources, on a grassroots, humanitarian and community level, utilizing principles of solidarity, is critical. Fundraising internationally can ensure the continued operation of hospitals, community centers, and critically important humanitarian institutions in Palestine; such fundraising is, in fact, a way to make solidarity materially manifest. In addition, while Palestine is targeted for international isolation, the call for international boycott, divestment and sanctions from “Israel” is now urgent. It is the responsibility of those active outside Palestine to demand that the US and other international governments and agencies cease their support to “Israeli” terror. There is a terrorist regime in Palestine that must be internationally isolated - the Zionist state - and it is incumbent upon people of conscience that we seek to break the siege through direct aid and through political advocacy. Solidarity is critical now for Palestine - as the US seeks to internationally isolate Palestine, it is to us to ensure that grassroots activism ensures that plan’s failure, and that Palestine and Palestinians can never be cut away from the struggling peoples of the world, nor from movements for social justice.

The real end to the siege will not come until all six million Palestinian refugees’ right to return to their homes, lands and properties in all of Palestine is recognized and implemented, and until all of Palestine is liberated. The Palestinian struggle for national liberation is a clarion call for justice, and the siege of Palestine is a desperate attempt to starve and isolate the Palestinian national movement. Nevertheless, Palestinian communities in exile around the world are organizing. It is the responsibility of all people concerned for social justice to stand hand in hand with the Palestinian movement, in Palestine and in exile, in full solidarity with the return of Palestinian refugees and the liberation of Palestine. Palestinian resistance has been showing for years that the most powerful of military threats is not invulnerable in the face of popular resistance In the face of the siege of Palestine, it is more than ever necessary to globalize that resistance and to defend Palestine - to break the siege, stop the war on Gaza, and support the Palestinian people.