The brutal Zionist war against the Gaza Strip has entered its fourth week. To date, it has left more than nine thousand five hundred martyrs and tens of thousands injured and missing, not to mention the unprecedented destruction of buildings, including hospitals, schools and places of worship. Aerial photographs, particularly of Gaza City, reveal the almost complete disappearance of neighbourhoods and areas that include thousands of buildings and towers, recalling the terrifying disasters experienced by major European and Asian cities during the Second World War. This goes hand in hand with the strengthening of the blockade imposed by the Zionist entity on the population of Gaza since 2007, which prevents food, water, fuel and medicine from reaching them, with the consequences of exposing them to the risk of dying of hunger and thirst, and of not being able to treat their wounded, condemning most of them to an almost inevitable death, especially since the few hospitals which are not targeted by the bombings have started to close, due to the lack of fuel, medicines and medical equipment.
This war was preceded by a lightning attack launched by Hamas fighters on the Gaza Strip on 7 October during which more than 1,400 people were killed and thousands more injured, in addition to approximately 250 hostages, including a significant number of officers and soldiers, who have been dispersed by Hamas to various places in the Gaza Strip, in the hope of dissuading the enemy army from striking the targets it had chosen. The Zionist authorities, led by current Prime Minister Netanyahu, claimed that this attack particularly targeted civilians, and was accompanied by murders of children and women, perpetrated by Hamas fighters. This the latter denied but Western governments have repeated this statement, hastening, without verifying its veracity, to support and justify the crimes of the Zionist state against the people of Gaza, the overwhelming majority of whom are unarmed civilians – who are brutally persecuted by this the Zionist colonial state, in the same way it brutalized their forebears – under the extremely ugly and despicable pretext that Israel has the right to defend itself!!
These governments agree with the Zionist occupier on the classification as terrorists of those who resist this occupation, including the organizations participating in the “Al Aqsa Flood ” operation, led by Hamas! This is an erroneous description, with which successive Zionist governments and their allies in imperialist countries have characterised all Palestinian resistance organizations since their emergence. This is the case whatever their ideologies, and whatever our position on them. Any member of the Palestinian people who has carried out resistance operations against the Zionist enemy has been described thus. However, international law and the Charter of the United Nations give full legitimacy to resistance.
Unfortunately, if the invasion of Lebanon during the summer of 1982 by Likud – the Zionist right-wing party then led by Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon – was not the object of popular consensus, and large demonstrations bringing together hundreds of thousands of Israelis protested against it, the current war against Gaza, led by the extremist Zionist leader Benjamin Netanyahu, threatened with prosecution for corruption and other crimes, benefits from an unprecedented political consensus, ranging from the Zionist left to the right and the racist, quasi-Nazi far right, which has a dominant position within the Netanyahu war government. Worse still, this war is the subject of a popular quasi-consensus, with the exception of the families of Hamas prisoners and those in close solidarity with them, because the brutal bombardment could take away their loved ones.
But, faced with this shameful consensus, there have been on the contrary courageous voices which rose and broke, with honour and vigour, this chorus of hatred and brutality, and defended, in one way or another, Gaza and its right to resistance and freedom, such as the Israeli journalist and writer, Gideon Lévy, who wrote:
“We shoot innocent people, gouge out their eyes and smash their faces, deport them, confiscate their lands, rob them, kidnap them from their beds, and carry out ethnic cleansing. We also continue the unreasonable siege. We build a huge barrier around the Gaza Strip; its underground structure cost 3 billion shekels ($766 million) and we will be safe.” He also said that “A few hundred people proved that it’s impossible to imprison 2 million people forever without paying a cruel price.” He added that the Palestinians in Gaza have decided “they are willing to pay anything for a glimpse of freedom.”
He concluded: “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bears very great responsibility for what happened, and he must pay the price, but it didn’t start with him and it won’t end after he goes. We now have to cry bitterly for the Israeli victims, but we should also cry for Gaza. Gaza, most of whose residents are refugees created by Israel. Gaza, which has never known a single day of freedom.” 1
Support of the USA
Gaza, which has never known a single day of freedom, is currently subject to one of the most heinous massacres in human history. Gaza is targeted not only by the Zionist state, but also the entire imperialist West, led by the United States of America, which has brought part of its war machine to our region: aircraft carriers, battleships and the latest bombs of destruction and extermination.
The US president himself came to a country whose leaders declared that they had entered a state of war, to declare his full solidarity with them, and his absolute support for their combat, and to parrot their assertions – including their base and false allegation that the rocket which killed hundreds of children and women, not to mention men, and injured thousands more, in and around the Baptist Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, was launched by the Islamic Jihad movement, and not by Zionist military aviation.
He participated in the meetings of their inner cabinet, responsible for planning and carefully monitoring the course of this war, as he asked Congress to agree to the granting of fourteen billion dollars to cover their genocidal military expenses, in which the Americans have no qualms about being involved.
In the framework of the same process and the same goal, the US government exercises its veto in the Security Council to prevent a ceasefire resolution, so how can it condemn Israel? All this, knowing that the current brutal war against Gaza aims, in addition to inflicting the heaviest human losses on the population of Gaza and its resistants, to repeat the process of displacement, of transfer, which took place during the war of 1948. This time against the Palestinians of Gaza, with a view to its subsequent implementation in the West Bank. Then it will be the turn of the Arabs beyond the Green Line, that is to say, the Palestinians who have remained up to now in the occupied territories.(The Green Line, (pre-)1967 border, or 1949 Armistice border is the demarcation line set out in the 1949 Armistice Agreements between the armies of Israel and those of its neighbors (Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria) after the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. It served as the de facto borders of the State of Israel from 1949 until the Six-Day War in 1967, and continues to represent Israel’s internationally recognized borders with the two Palestinian territories: the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.) All to bring into being the historical dream of the Jewish state, which was first expressed in the famous book by Theodore Herzl, “The State of the Jews”!
At the same time broad popular masses are mobilizing in the West, with an honour which is lacking in their governments, as has been demonstrated by the massive demonstrations that have filled the squares of major American, British, German, French, etc. cities, in solidarity with the Palestinian people and in condemnation of the atrocities committed by the Zionist army in Gaza. But unhappily in most of the capitals and big cities in the Arab world there is not yet the same mobilization. An equivalent which would bring back to life the popular movements and revolutionary processes which for many months, from 2011 until not so long ago, albeit intermittently, heard millions of people chanting “The people want the overthrow of the regime” with unparalleled bravery. This time in support of the Palestinian people and the fighters who defend Gaza.
The Arab countries have a responsibility
The most the Arab governments have done is to push for a meagre recommendation from the UN General Assembly calling for " an immediate, durable and sustained humanitarian truce leading to a cessation of hostilities […], meeting the basic needs of civilians in Gaza, and in sufficient quantity.”2 They should have demanded that the General Assembly issue a binding recommendation – under the “Uniting for Peace” procedure,3 – to condemn the Zionist aggressor, to call for an immediate ceasefire and a complete and definitive end to the siege of Gaza by Israel, as well payment by Israel of significant compensation to the population of Gaza for the human and material losses it has caused them, under penalty of severe sanctions in the case of non-respect of the resolution. This has happened several times, when the Security Council was unable to adopt a resolution because of the veto power possessed by the "big five" - during the Korean War in 1950, or even during the tripartite aggression against Egypt in 1956, and on many other occasions.
Although the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia found itself forced to stop the treacherous normalization negotiations with the Zionist entity – and felt it had done enough – the other countries having initiated normalization did nothing. All the governments of the Arab regimes have refrained from taking a strong stance against any Western government supporting the aggression, especially against the American government which is closely participating in it. Indeed, many of these governments are complicit in aggression in one way or another, including the Egyptian government led by Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.
Our demands
Faced with this reality, and to confront the ongoing massacre and its extremely dangerous final objectives, the undersigned revolutionary organizations call on the Arab governments, on the one hand, and the popular masses of the countries of the region, on the other hand, as well as the countries of the world, to:
First:
a) Ask for the above-mentioned resolution, in accordance with the procedure "uniting for peace", within the framework of a global mobilization campaign against the war crimes committed by the Zionist state. The Palestinian people have been suffering ethnic cleansing and extermination for more than a hundred years while the plots of the great colonial powers, (first and foremost Great Britain and the United States of America), aim to deprive them of their most basic national rights. These machinations have facilitated the establishment of an artificial state on the territory of this people, who continue to be displaced, killed and uprooted from their historic land, and allowed this state to practice the most odious forms of oppression.
b) Sever all relations with the usurping state and with the United States of America, and threaten the other Western countries that support the Zionist state with the same measure if they continue to provide such support.
c) Cut off oil and gas from countries that cooperate with and support the aforementioned country, in a global move similar to what happened in the October War of 1973. The main difference, this time, is that this measure, and other measures against the principal aggressor and the countries which support it, should go hand in hand with the maximum mass mobilization against the aggression, as against any of the Arab governments which do not implement the above measures.
Second:
a) Call on the Iranian state, which claims to provide absolute support to the Palestinian people, to implement the same measures as those mentioned above and to close, until further notice, the Strait of Hormuz to tankers transporting these vital materials for Western companies. Taking such a step is the minimum required to absolve it of the accusation of trading on the pain of our people. This is a justified and accurate accusation, based on a long history of hypocritical exploitation of the Palestinian cause.
b) We call on all peoples who love justice and peace to oblige their governments to provide the greatest support to the Palestinian people, faced with their historical enemies, who are necessarily also objective enemies of all humanity. This includes severing relations, in all their forms, with the Zionist state and, if necessary, with the United States and other Western colonial countries.
• Immediate stop to the war on Gaza.
• Opening the borders to meet the needs for food, medicine and fuel, as well as to transport the wounded and sick.
• Immediate lifting of the incessant siege of Gaza.
• Withdrawal of the imperialist military forces, which participate in the aggression, ready to intervene to intimidate the region and create an atmosphere of prior defeat among the defenders of the Palestinian people, as well as among all peoples of the region hostile to Israel and its imperialist protectors.
Finally, the organizations signing this declaration believe that to prevent the outbreak of destructive wars, threatening in the not-so-distant future to evolve into a world war, there must be an agreement on the return to their original lands of all Palestinians wishing to implement this historic demand, provided for in dozens of international resolutions since the war of 1948. We also call for the replacement of the current racist apartheid state, called the State of Israel, by the creation throughout the territory of historic Palestine of a democratic and secular state governed, on a basis of absolute equality, by all its inhabitants, Arabs and Jews,.
What is currently happening in our region, and in particular in Palestine, can, depending on the way in which this conflict is resolved, constitute a historic turning point, either in the direction of a change in the world, as part of a process which guarantees justice and freedom for all inhabitants of the planet, or, on the contrary, in the direction of producing conditions conducive to the outbreak of terrible wars that could completely destroy the future of human life in this region.
5 November 2023
Signatory organizations:
1- The Al Mounadil-a current , Morocco
2- The Organization of Revolutionary Socialists, Egypt
3- Mahmoud Rechidi , general secretary of the Socialist Workers' Party (PST), in Algeria, whose activities have been banned and therefore cannot sign as an organization
4- The Revolutionary Communist Group – Lebanon
Translated from the French translation of Inprecor
- 1Haaretz 9 October 2023 “Israel Can’t Imprison Two Million Gazans Without Paying a Cruel Price” https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2023-10-09/ty-article-opinion/.premium/israel-cant-imprison-2-million-gazans-without-paying-a-cruel-price/0000018b-1476-d465-abbb-14f6262a0000?v=1701268924295<s=1701268967269
- 2UN General Assembly, 10th emergency special session Illegal Israeli actions in Occupied East Jerusalem and the rest of the Occupied Palestinian Territory ”Protection of civilians and upholding legal and humanitarian obligations” https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/LTD/N23/319/20/PDF/N2331920.pdf?OpenElement
- 3Explained by the UN as follows: Once convened, under a landmark 1950 resolution widely known as ‘Uniting for peace’, the UN’s entire membership would consider the matter immediately with a view to making appropriate recommendations for collective measures. In the case of a breach of the peace or act of aggression, that includes the use of armed force, when necessary, to maintain or restore international peace and security. UN News 20 October 2023 “Explainer: What now, as Security Council deadlocks on Gaza?” https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/10/1142587