Palestine and the global class struggle

The following excerpts are from a talk by Bill Cecil at the WWP National Conference, Nov. 14.

Perhaps no international struggle is more intertwined with our Party’s history than that of the people of Palestine. In the 1960s and 1970s, we and the most militant Black liberation forces stood almost alone in the U.S. in defending the Palestinian and Arab people against the U.S.-armed and -funded Israeli war machine.

We went to giant anti-war demonstrations, whose leaders refused to criticize Israel, with banners and flyers condemning the war against Palestine. We fought off Zionist gangs that attacked our events with lead pipes and gas bombs and, in the face of media-fanned anti-Arab hysteria, we distributed hundreds of thousands of flyers explaining the Palestinian people’s struggle on the streets of New York and other major cities.

Why did we take this question so seriously? Because no people on earth have been more attacked and vilified by the U.S. ruling class and its media than the people of Palestine and the Arab and Islamic world in general.

In the 61 years since they were driven from their homes by European settlers who called themselves “Israelis,” the Palestinian people have been occupied, massacred, bombed, imprisoned and called “terrorists and fanatics” for simply wanting to go home, for wanting to live in peace and freedom in their own land.

For 61 years, the racist, apartheid settler state called “Israel,” erected on the ruins of their towns and villages, has been supplied with an endless stream of dollars and sophisticated weapons of mass destruction by both Republican and Democratic administrations.

Look at Gaza, where we traveled in July with the Viva Palestina medical aid convoy: this small island of freedom that is at the same time the biggest prison on earth. A small sliver of land where 1.6 million Palestinian women, children and men are denied food, medicine and the right to travel by an international conspiracy between the U.S., Israel, Western Europe and U.S.-allied Arab regimes; an array of forces not unlike that faced by revolutionary Haiti in 1804 or the workers of Paris in 1871.

Look at the rain of U.S.-made bombs and missiles unleashed on Gaza in December and January, a slaughter that even the U.N.’s Goldstone Commission was forced to condemn as a war crime, and look how the U.S. Congress and administration rushed to condemn and block any action on that report.

Look how former U.S. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney was kidnapped at sea by Israeli commandos for trying to bring aid to the people of Gaza, and both the White House and the U.S. media were completely silent about this brazen act of international piracy. All because the Palestinians of Gaza dared to practice democracy, to cast their votes for Hamas, a party that refuses to relinquish the Palestinian people’s Right to Return.

What crime have Palestinians committed? Like the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, of Somalia and Iran, they were born in a region that holds three-fifths of the known reserves of oil, the world’s most profitable commodity, a region that corporate America must keep oppressed and divided.

Arab and Iranian oil once provided 60 percent of the overseas profits of the Fortune 500; it made ExxonMobil, BP and ChevronTexaco the richest companies on earth. Today the same Wall Street bankers that plunder the U.S. Treasury while throwing workers out of their homes suck trillions of dollars in tribute from the corrupt feudal regimes of the Arabian Peninsula. The big arms contractors depend on sales to that part of the world.

But any Arab regime could be swept away by the people as suddenly as the Shah of Iran was in 1979. Instead of enriching Wall Street bankers, their oil wealth could build schools and hospitals, as it did in Iraq before the U.S. invasion, as it has done in Iran since 1979 or is doing in Venezuela today. It could provide the material basis not only for an independent, unified Arab nation but also for an ALBA-type alliance of the entire African-Asian region.

To maintain its obsolescent position at the center of the global capitalist economy, the U.S. capitalist class can only rely on force and destruction. Israel is nothing but a giant U.S. military base dividing Asia from Africa, a loaded gun pointed at the Arab people, an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” in the words of Alexander Haig, Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state.

In the words of Hugo Chávez, “Why was the state of Israel created? ... To divide. To impede the unity of the Arab world. To assure the presence of the North American empire in all these lands.”

When the Palestinian people demand their right to return home, they not only challenge U.S. control over the entire region. They raise an issue that shakes the very foundations of monopoly capitalist power: the fundamental right of a dispossessed people to take back what was stolen from them. This is the right the people of Zimbabwe and South Africa are also fighting for. It is the right of Native and Black and Mexicano people in this country, of workers whose homes and jobs have been stolen by the banks.

The cause of Palestine is the cause of the workers and oppressed everywhere!