Why Palestinian freedom is a central issue

Joyce Chediac WW photo: Lal Roohk

Excerpted from a speech by Joyce Chediac to the May 13-14 Workers World Party conference on socialism.

A fundamental vulnerability of imperialism is its underestimation of the workers and oppressed. For example, this weekend marks the 58th anniversary of al Nakbar or the great catastrophe, when approximately 1 million Palestinians were forced out of their country, many at the point of guns supplied by Washington.

Palestine was erased from the map. Israel took its place, built on the bones of the Palestinian people. Palestinians were made refugees around the world.

The imperialists and Zionists thought this extermination of a nation would be easy. Everyone would soon forget. Were they wrong! For 58 years, no matter where they have been—refugee camps in the Middle East, in the U.S. and Europe, in the West Bank and Gaza and within Israel itself—the Palestinian people have fought back. And today around the world, people know who the Palestinians are, get inspiration from their struggle, and recognize that they are entitled to their national rights.

The last eight years of constant struggle on the West Bank and Gaza have been possible because they are based in the growing Palestinian working class, especially in the great proletarian centers of Gaza, Nablus and Ramallah.

If we want to understand the people of the Middle East, we need to understand that the Palestinian struggle is the central cause of the Arab people. This is because Israel is an extension of the Pentagon in the Middle East and its guns are aimed at the entire Middle East. Israel stopped a revolutionary upsurge, it stopped oppressed countries in the region from seizing their own gas and oil resources and using them for development. This has stifled, stunted and warped any independent bourgeois development and left workers in the Middle East locked in poverty.

As a Lebanese-American, I know that Lebanon can never be free until Palestine is free. The same can be said of all the countries and nationalities in the region. So the Palestinian struggle is held important not only by Arabs, but by other Middle Eastern peoples as well. Witness recent demonstrations in Iran of tens of thousands in support of Palestine.

And because the U.S. supplies all the money that keeps Israel afloat, every Israeli attack on the people of the Middle East is really a U.S.-Israeli attack.

The Palestinian struggle is one of the most difficult to get support for in the U.S. Why? U.S. corporations and banks have garnered huge profits from Israel’s assaults on revolutionary, progressive and nationalist Arab movements and countries. While there are splits in U.S. ruling circles on what the Pentagon should do in Iraq, the bourgeoisie here has no disagreements on the role Israel plays for the U.S. This is true of the Democratic as well as the Republican Party.

In the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, the U.S. claims it is an impartial mediator. This is an attempt to obscure the real relationship of forces: the U.S. and Israel are the oppressors, and the Palestinians and all the peoples of the Middle East are the oppressed.

The Bush administration’s most recent smokescreen was its campaign to bring “U.S.-style democratic elections” to the Palestinian people. Washington’s spin was really aimed at using elections to stop struggle. The Bush administration, however, underestimated the Palestinian people. Washington was flabbergasted when Hamas received most of the votes.

Hamas was voted in because it is the major Palestinian group that is most intransigent to imperialism and Zionism. Instead of dampening the struggle, as the Bush forces wanted, the Palestinian people used the electoral arena to affirm the struggle. And now they are being punished for their vote. Israel, the U.S. and the European bourgeois governments are denying the Palestinian Authority funds, inflicting great hardship on the Palestinian people.

In the U.S. media, Hamas is called a “terrorist organization, which refuses to recognize the right of Israel to exist, or to renounce violence.” But the same media would never think of describing Israel as “a state built on the bones of the Palestinian people, which refuses to recognize their right to exist.” Yet this is the truth.

Why should Hamas recognize the “right of Israel to exist” when Israel has never to this day recognized the right of Palestinian people to an independent and sovereign state, or admitted what it did to the Palestinian state and people?

Why should Hamas respect previous agreements when, five years ago, Ariel Sharon became Prime Minister and said his government would not recognize any agreements entered into by past Israeli governments with the PLO?

Israel is a settler state, built on the oppression of another people. It has no right to tell the Palestinians what to do. The Palestinian people have every right to aspire to regain every square inch of historic Palestine, to return to their original towns and villages. They have every right to choose who will represent them in their government.

While talking peace, for more than five years Israel has waged an unprecedented war on the Palestinian people of the West Bank and Gaza. All this was before the Hamas electoral victory, which Israel and the U.S. now blame for everything.

While Israel would prefer Fatah and Mahmoud Abbas over Hamas, Israeli officials just a short while ago refused to speak with Mahmoud Abbas, blaming him for not taking action against Islamic Jihad.

The U.S. and Israel want in Palestine what the U.S. wants in Iraq—puppets, rent-a-cops that do imperialism and Zionism’s bidding. The different Palestinian groups, though they may have disagreements, are all trying to build a sovereign governing body for a nascent Palestinian state. Knowing the strategic importance of the Palestinian struggle to the entire Middle East, the U.S. and Israel will not tolerate an independent Palestinian state. The Palestinians, however, will never stop fighting for one.