The Palestinian cause advances (web only)

According to a recent CIA study, as reported by Iranian Press TV, Israel is likely to fall within 20 years. The study also comes to the conclusion that the future will be one inclusive state that has a majority Palestinian population following a swift collapse of the racist zionist state. (See Lalkar, November 2009)

Meanwhile, a few steps closer to this happy future have been taken this month with the news that Mahmood Abbas appears to have finally recognised the futility of his conciliatory policies towards Israel and is refusing to stand in any future election for the government of the Palestinian Authority. This refusal has been brought on by the total intransigence of zionism and its US backers, who are refusing to throw a single crumb in his direction that he could use to persuade the Palestinian people to forego their just struggle for the restoration to them of their homeland.

Israeli intransigence has probably already made it too late for the Palestinian people to be willing to accept a two-state solution, especially one that confines them to just 22 percent of the land that was, until 62 years ago, indisputably and entirely theirs. But Abbas struggled blindly on, offering unprincipled concession after unprincipled concession, while Israel carried on expanding its jews-only settlements on occupied Palestinian territory and remorselessly driving more and more Palestinians out of their homes in, for example, East Jerusalem.

The predictable result is that Abbas has lost nearly all credibility among the Palestinian people. Not only has his faction been driven from office and suppressed in Gaza, but his hold on the West Bank is tenuous in the extreme.

As Nader Said, a sociologist who runs Arab World for Research and Development, in Ramallah, has pointed out,“[Abbas] is at a point where he can no longer pretend that this role of presidency will lead him to helping the Palestinians overcome occupation,” precisely because “It doesn’t seem that there is any seriousness on the Israeli side to establish a Palestinian state and no desire on the part of the Americans to deliver the goods.” (Quoted in ‘Mideast peace talks hang in balance over Abbas’ by Ethan Bronner, New York Times, 19 November 2009)

There are no obvious successors to Abbas, with the result that both the Israelis and the US imperialists are now panicking at the signs that in the West Bank, too, the Palestinian people are redoubling their militancy. They are wondering if there are any concessions that they can make that could reverse this process.

One problem for Anglo-American imperialism is that concessions from the Israelis are nearly as hard to extract as blood from the proverbial stone. And without concessions, it is definite that Palestinian militancy can only continue its exponential increase.

This brings to mind the words of Lenin: “The law of mechanics is that an action is equal to its counteraction. In history also the destructive force of the revolution is to a considerable extent dependent on how strong and protracted was the suppression of the striving for liberty …” (The Two Tactics in the Social Democratic Revolution, 1905)

And it is precisely the suppression of the Palestinians, the vindictive and callous attempts to humiliate and cow a people by the racist zionist state, that make the collapse of that state inevitable. The whole history of Israel is one of trying to dehumanise and degrade the Palestinian people to justify taking their land in the first place and expelling so many of them from their homeland.

From the initial landgrabs and clearances of the original owners, the Palestinian people have suffered and fought back against so many calumnies, including the massacres at the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, when the zionist military not only conspired with the Christian Phalangist militias, allowing them to enter the camps to slaughter the inhabitants but also guarded the perimeters so that no-one could escape by that route.

Palestinians have endured the indignities of having to cross through countless road blocks and armed checkpoints just to go about the daily business of living, ie, shopping, going to work, visiting relatives, seeking medical help and the hundred and one other reasons for leaving the house that we take for granted.

They have seen their children shot in the streets, had their homes bulldozed (to teach them a lesson) been bombed until cities look like deserts, occupied by troops who shoot without any provocation, imprisoned by the thousand, seen their political representatives assassinated, had borders closed on them denying food and medical imports, as well as crushing any export industries that might help the Palestinian economy.

Through all of this, the Palestinians have maintained their dignity and their resistance. Even the monstrous apartheid wall that is being constructed was recently breached at Qalandia, near Ramallah in the West Bank, and Palestinians surged through to protest, burning tyres and waving Palestinian flags before being beaten back (quite literally) by the zionist armed forces.

In trying to dehumanise the Palestinians, the Israelis have only succeeded in losing their own humanity. This can be seen clearly by their refusal to allow the necessary building materials across the borders around Gaza, so that Palestinians might repair the badly damaged water treatment and sewerage systems. This is creating a state of affairs where drinking water is becoming extremely limited, water to wash in is part sea water and part sewerage, and what water there is for drinking often has high levels of nitrates, leading to all manner of health problems for the young, old and sick.

This is, in short, a policy designed to kill or otherwise drive out Palestinians without the bother of using bombs and bullets; it is genocide and ethnic cleansing by biological means.

Currently, the fact that the Israelis have been depriving Palestinians of their minimum water needs (the daily quota of water for each person in Gaza being 80 litres, half of the World Health Organisation’s recommended minimum), while Israeli settlers, even in settlements that the zionist authorities themselves admit are illegal. are free to use as much as they like to keep their homes surrounded in lush vegetation, has been receiving a great deal of publicity, as imperialism, with the rise of militant resistance among not only the Palestinians but all middle-eastern peoples, is beginning to worry that its interests may be more threatened than they are advanced by its continued uncritical support and unlimited bankrolling of Israel.

We can now read in such an impeccable bourgeois organ as the Financial Times the following:

“For Palestinian leaders, the water crisis has become an increasingly pertinent political issue. Officials and analysts here agree that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians – for decades a struggle best known for control of the land – is becoming ever more a conflict over water.

“The sensitivity surrounding the issue was starkly exposed this week when Amnesty International, the human rights organisation, published a report accusing Israel of depriving Palestinians of their fair share of the region’s scarce water. Palestinians, said Amnesty, consumed only 70 litres of water a day – including for agriculture – while Israelis used four times that amount.

“Access to the only sizeable source of fresh water in the occupied West Bank, the mountain aquifer, is split unevenly. Israel – which can also tap other aquifers as well as the freshwater Sea of Galilee – takes 80 percent of its water, leaving only 20 percent to the 2.5m Palestinians living in the territory.” (‘Thirst fuels conflict in West Bank’ by Tobias Buck, 30 October 2009)

The implied criticism of Israel is clear, even if muted.

The CIA report mentioned above predicts the exodus of 2 million jews from Israel as the righteous furies that zionism continues to unleash against themselves make life in Israel intolerable to them.

The Israelis have long been claiming that all Palestinians who seek to re-establish a secular state on the whole of historic Palestine, dismantling the racist jewish state, want to drive all jews into the sea. What is becoming clearer by the minute is that the zionists are, by their racist cruelty and intransigence, doing their utmost to drive themselves into the sea!

Just as apartheid South Africa, which seemed outwardly firmly entrenched and immovable, nevertheless disappeared in a short period of time, Israel, too, as another fundamentally unjust society, is being steadily undermined, and is destined to disappear forever.

That day cannot come fast enough, but whenever it does finally arrive, in the pages of this paper there will be only joy and support for the risen Palestinian people.