Once again the aggressive and expansionist Zionist state has launched bloody attacks on the besieged Palestinian population of Gaza. On March 3 Al Jazeera reported that Israeli incursions and air-launched missiles over the preceding five days left ‘at least 116 Palestinians dead, including 22 children and 12 women’.
Israel’s deputy defence minister, Matan Vilnai, speaking on Israel Army Radio on Friday 29 February, declared that the Palestinians: ” are bringing upon themselves a greater shoah (holocaust) because we will use all our strength in every way we deem appropriate, whether in air strikes or on the ground.”
At the beginning of the attacks, on Wednesday 27 February, an Israeli air strike destroyed the head office of the Palestinian Medical Relief Society (PMRS), killing a six -month-old baby. The PMRS head office housed the main PMRS clinic and pharmacy in the Gaza Strip, it was a centre for persons with disabilities. All the medicinal supplies and most of the equipment were destroyed.
Already subject to an economic blockade which has brought mass unemployment, acute food and clean water shortages, power cuts, restriction of medical supplies, the destruction of hospitals and regular terror attacks on civilian houses by Israeli planes, Israel now threatens a full- scale invasion as punishment for the limited response of a few missiles hitting Sderot and Askelon.
In fact the random and untargeted rocket fire has killed only three Israelis in a year
Whereas the Israeli Occupation Forces have killed 182 Palestinians in Gaza since the start of 2008. This incredible “asymmetrical conflict” has nevertheless occasioned a remarkable racist outburst from the Zionists.
The Israeli use of the term Holocaust has shocked many in the Western media but it simply reveals the truth – the genocidal intentions of the Zionist regime and the total fraud of the Annapolis Peace Process.
Ehud Barak, the Israeli defence minister, revealed the political intentions of the Israeli attacks when he threatened ” – we need to prepare for escalation, because a broad ground operation is real and tangible.” He claimed the objective was to “weaken the Hamas rule … in the right circumstances even bring it down.” In fact, this has been the central objective of the Zionist regime since Hamas won the Palestinian elections in 2006 – to reverse the democratic decision of the people.
The picture of Hamas as the aggressor is a plain lie. In fact, Hamas has repeatedly indicated that it would agree to a ceasefire if the IDF stopped targeting its institutions and militants with rocket and air attacks and entered into negotiations with it as the elected authority in Gaza, something the Israeli regime – backed by George Bush – absolutely refuses to do.
Yossi Beilin, former government minister and ex-leader of Meretz, a centre-left Israeli party, said that Hamas had at least twice made requests “via a third party” to agree a truce. A Haaretz-Dialog poll in the week of the Gaza onslaught showed that 64 per cent of Israelis were in favour of such an agreement to end the rocket fire, and secure the release of the Israeli corporal, Gilad Shalit, who was captured by Gaza militants in June 2006. Yet every move in this direction has been rejected out of hand.
Instead, the Zionist regime insists that their “precondition” is that Hamas must first “recognise the State of Israel, renounce all armed struggle against it and disarm its militants.” That is to say, the precondition for ceasefire talks is total surrender in the struggle for Palestinian rights. This cynical call is of course supported both by George Bush and Condoleeza Rice and byTony Blair, the special envoy of the so-called Contact Group – the forces supposed to be “mediating” between Israel and the Palestinians.
It does not take any act of imagination to foresee what the Palestinians would be offered by Israel under such total surrender conditions. Even less than the nothing Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was offered at Annapolis.
In reality, Israeli is not offering a negotiated peace but the national annihilation of the Palestinian People. Vilnai’s threat of a Holocaust exposes the genocidal intentions of Zionism. They quite simply want to make any sort of viable Palestinian state impossible. They want to create simply a series of open-air concentration camps behind their steel and concrete walls – for a disarmed and displaced remnant of the Palestinians. The monstrosity fully compares with the horrors of Apartheid South Africa
Yet the Palestinians have shown that they are not ready to surrender. They did so in January when they pulled down the border fence with Egypt and for eleven days were able to get food and other vital supplies. They showed this willingness again in the north of the Gaza Strip when they formed a human chain in a peaceful protest against the Israeli blockade. Israel immediately threatened to open fire if protesters tried to cross the border.
In fact, these mass actions as well as the heroic resistance to the Israeli incursion of all the resistance fighters show the way forward. They could be the start of a Third Intifada, this time a mass Intifada, an Intifada without borders, aimed at throwing back the Israelis in defeat from Gaza and the occupied West Bank – just as they were thrown back from South Lebanon.
The people of Gaza will need support from their Arab brothers and sisters in Lebanon, Jordon and, above all, in Egypt. The mass demonstrations, which greeted the pulling down of the Gaza-Egypt border shows this, can be achieved. Indeed, across the Arab and Muslim world, across the entire world that groans under the oppression of US and EU imperialism, mass forces should be mobilised on the streets against the governments which back Israel and the USA and their allies. The demand must go up to break all military and economic ties with the racist state attempting to inflict a Holocaust on the Palestinians
In the Imperialist Countries – in the belly of the beast that arms and finances the Zionist war machine antiwar, labour movement and anti-imperialist militants must create a mass movement such as they built in 2003 when faced with the invasion of Iraq.
Around the world, in all countries, we can use the global day of action already planned for March 15 under the slogans Troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan! Don’t attack Iran!
and End the Siege of Gaza! We need to place special emphasis on the latter slogan this year. We need to win the forces mobilised to take action to blockade the blockaders, to sever all economic and military ties with Israel, to impose workers’ sanctions at the ports and airports, to provide aid in all forms, medical, food, to the Palestinian people, including arms to the Resistance.
Down with the Zionist Holocaust!
Break the Siege of Gaza!
Down with the Apartheid Wall and the colonisation of the West Bank!
Victory to the Palestinian Resistance !
For an International Intifada to help free Palestine!