Solidarity with Palestinian people

By Professor Jose Maria Sison
Chairperson, International League of the Peoples’ Struggle

Aug. 7 — We, the International League of People’s Struggle (ILPS), renew our call to all our member organizations, our allied organizations and the broad masses of the people of the world to sustain the mass actions in solidarity with and support for the Palestinian people in the just struggle for national liberation and self-determination against the U.S.-supported Israeli Zionist occupation of Palestine and the current genocidal attacks on the people in the Gaza Strip.

Since July 8, the fascist Netanyahu regime has used the police case of three Israeli youth killed in the West Bank as pretext to unleash a war of aggression against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip and has perpetrated horrendous war crimes and crimes against humanity. As of the Aug. 5 count, Zionist Israel has massacred nearly 2,000 Palestinians (mostly children, women, the elderly and sick) and wounded more than 8,000 others. It has destroyed entire neighborhoods and the social infrastructure (including schools, United Nations shelters, mosques, hospitals, and water and energy facilities).

The Israeli aggressors have used against the Palestinian people artillery fire, attack planes, tanks and bombs, including white phosphorous bombs, and other types of weapons. These have been supplied by the U.S. and the European Union to kill the people and destroy their homes and social facilities. They have systematically pulverized entire neighborhoods in a vicious scheme to make a so-called three-kilometer buffer zone around Gaza City and thus to deprive the people in Gaza Strip of 44 percent of their land.

We must launch and develop a movement to demand the end of the conditions in which Israel can at will attack Gaza and massacre the Palestinian people. In six years, Israel has unleashed three massacres without being held to account by an international criminal court. It has turned Gaza into a concentration camp since 2006. It has subjected the Palestinians to various forms of collective punishment. Fishermen are shot to death whether they go beyond a 3-kilometer limit imposed unilaterally by Israel. Farmers are also killed when they harvest their crops beyond a borderline arbitrarily set by Israel.

We heed and endorse the call of the people of Gaza for the people of the world to carry out a movement for realizing boycotts, divestment and sanctions. As in the global campaign against the apartheid regime in South Africa in recent history, the people of the world and their institutions and organizations can and must pressure governments to sanction Israel and implement a comprehensive arms embargo. Israel has been able to occupy Palestine, operate a terrorist and apartheid regime and commit its murderous atrocities because of the support of imperialist governments, especially the U.S. and the European Union.

We join the all-out Day of Rage of Aug. 9 which the people of Gaza and entire Palestine have called for. We enjoin all the ILPS member organizations and all justice-loving people in various countries to initiate and hold mass actions to the best of their ability on August 9 and thereafter. We also endorse and join the mass actions initiated by other organizations, alliances and actions in the imperialist countries and elsewhere. The ILPS member organizations in the U.S. are joining in full force the International March to the U.N. on August 9.

The people of the world must stand in solidarity with Palestinian people and sustain a mass movement to pressure the U.S. and other imperialist powers to back down from propping up Zionist Israel. We must demand the end of Israeli colonialism and terrorism, its occupation of Palestine and all the barbarities of Israel. We must resolutely and militantly support the Palestinian people in their just struggle for national liberation, full recovery of their homeland and the return of the millions of Palestinian refugees to their homeland.