Text of the Socialist Party leaflet for tomorrow’s Palestinian solidarity protest
The genocidal slaughter continues.
43,000 murdered in seven months.
Many more are wounded and famine looms over the Strip.
All hospitals have been destroyed.
Hundreds of thousands have been expelled from Rafah as its populace awaits invasion by the Israeli occupation forces.
The relentless bombardment has created 37 million tonnes of rubble that will take ten years to clear, with countless homes and lives forever destroyed.
There can be no business as usual while the Gaza genocide continues.
Inspiring solidarity
This is the firm and inspiring message of the students who have risen up on campuses globally to demand divestments from companies connected with the Israeli apartheid regime.
In Ireland, we witnessed the amazing victories won by the Trinity and UCC encampments.
Workers in Belgium’s national TV station actively protested Eurovision’s showing, while over 20,000 protested outside the event in Malmo, Sweden. This week, thousands welcomed the Palestinian women’s football team in a beautiful act of solidarity.
This spirit of defiance and solidarity needs to be brought into our workplaces. We must heed the call of Palestinian trade unions for action. Workers, backed by the trade union movement, need to come together and organise to ensure that all companies that profit from the occupation of Palestine are targeted with strikes.
This should be combined with the ongoing solidarity protest movement’s battle to kick out the Israeli Ambassador—the mouthpiece for genocide. The Occupied Territories Bill must be enacted. We must end the complicity with genocide by kicking US imperialism out of Shannon Airport.
The Nakba continues
This week marked Nakba Day—it is 76 years since Palestinians were expelled and exiled from their historic homeland. The Nakba was not one act—but an ongoing process of dispossession, occupation and now genocide by the racist, colonial Israeli State.
The decades long crimes of this state, and indeed those that pioneered the Zionist project in historic Palestine before its creation, were and are being done with the full backing of Western Imperialism.
The ruthless logic of their capitalist system meant domination and economic exploitation of the peoples of the Middle East for power and profit. For the imperialist powers, the racist Israeli regime, heavily armed with high-tech military equipment and nuclear weapons, has been a crucial instrument in maintaining its rule over the region.
Freedom for Palestine
We have all come on this protest today because we want to see an end to the genocide and for freedom for Palestine. This includes the right of the victims of the Nakba and their descendants to return to their homeland.
Clearly, this will never be happen if the Israeli regime and its genocidal ruling class remain in existence. Both must be overthrown and smashed. The Palestinian masses, allied with the working class and poor in the Middle East and globally, are crucial to achieving this.
But we can’t stop there.
The whole system must go
The crimes of the Israeli apartheid state cannot be seen in isolation. It is part of the global capitalist order that is destroying our planet, fuelling racism and the far-right and resulting in growing militarisation.
Alongside imperialism, it, alongside the other rotten capitalist states in the Middle East and North Africa, has created a prison house of exploitation and oppression for its people. This whole system must be got rid of.
A revolutionary struggle such as this could involve reaching out to the working class in the Israeli State that could appeal to them to join in a struggle against a common enemy. Understandably, given the very real impact of a chauvinistic and Zionist ideology, many will understandably be sceptical as to whether this is a real possibility.
However, in the last number of weeks, protests involving thousands of Jews and Palestinians have taken place in the Israeli State to demand an immediate ceasefire. This is a glimpse of what is possible.
Socialist change
A democratic socialist Middle East and North Africa would mean a society in which wealth and resources are seized from the exploitative multinationals, banks, and the super-rich and ensure they are publicly owned and democratically controlled by governments of the working class and poor.
A society based on the rule of the masses would mean freedom and justice for all. It could allow both Palestinians and Israeli Jews the equal and democratic right to self-determination and full equality for all national and religious minorities.
The nightmare rule of the genocidal system must end. The struggle for revolutionary socialist change must begin today.
