Gaza Stripped Bare

The siege of the Gaza Strip was imposed in 2007 to induce the Gazans to overthrow the Hamas administration they have elected. Keeping Gaza and the West Bank isolated from direct contact with the outside world is crucial to Israel’s claim to continued sovereignty over the occupied territories and preventing the emergence of a sovereign Palestinian state. Some sections of the Israeli ruling class are prepared to accept a peace settlement based on the “two-state solution”. Peace would give Israeli business unrestricted access to Arab export markets and cheap labour. The present government, however, is tied to the occupation – above all, the military-industrial complex and the settlers’ lobby. Netanyahu’s Likud is loathe to contemplate a genuine Palestinian state. For these people, peace is a danger to be warded off at all costs. This explains Israel’s cold reception to the re-amalgamation of Abbas West Bank Palestinian Authority and Gaza’s Hamas.

The Israeli state oppresses the Palestinians, driving them into the hands of the fanatics of Hamas out of despair at the failure of the secular Palestinian left. In turn the pitiful rocket and mortar attacks provide for the Israeli state 'proof' of the murderous nature of the Palestinians and drives the Israeli public to support harsher and harsher measures against the against the Palestinian people who are all now viewed as complicit in terrorism. This is a self destructive spiral and must be broken. The Israeli state is not shaken by the ineffectual rockets of Hamas. Neither the Israeli army nor Hamas really care about 'their' civilians, except as bloody images for the cameras of the world's press in order to justify their own next atrocity.

Perhaps one of the saddest and longest lasting examples of a working class divided against itself is the continuing factional struggle between Israeli and Palestinian workers. Our appeal is to both Jewish and Palestine workers to shun the political intentions and racial rhetoric of both the rulers of Israel and Hamas. Not every Jewish citizen of Israel is a Zionist at heart -- they are merely workers. Indeed Jews and Arabs can live side by side as 20% of Israeli-Arabs demonstrate, albeit they suffer the discrimination of the Jewish religious lobby and Zionist expansionists. Zealots expounded Jewishness as a separate race while Islamic fundamentalists find fertile ground among the oppressed Moslem population.

Israel/Palestine is today de facto one state. But it is an apartheid state which discriminates against non-Jews in favour of Jews. Currently, the West Bank and East Jerusalem house some 500,000 Jewish settlers living in more than 130 settlements dispersed throughout these areas.

Dr Ghada Karmi, author of ‘Married to Another Man: Israel's Dilemma in Palestine’, writes:
“The Palestinian task now is to fight against this apartheid and mount a struggle, not for an impossible Palestinian state, but for equal rights under Israeli rule. They would need to dismantle the Palestinian Authority, which is now a liability that only camouflages the true situation, and then confront Israel, their actual ruler, directly. As stateless people under military occupation, they must demand equal civil and political rights with Israeli citizens, and apply for Israeli citizenship if necessary. That puts the onus on Israel to respond: either to ignore the five million Palestinians it rules, or vacate their land, or grant them equal rights.”

 Peace will create better conditions for democracy. No longer obsessed with ethnic conflict, Jewish Israelis and Palestinians will be able to refocus on the social, economic and ecological problems spawned by the “normal” peacetime functioning of capitalism. A space for socialist ideas will open up in this corner of the world. We ask that workers set aside the reaction of nationalism, religious bigotry, ethnic hatred, racism and join together to root out the real problem itself — capitalism.