Bulletin No 52 novembre 2024 For over a year, every week, the Revolutionary Communist Party has been giving its opinion on the situation in Palestine. Tirelessly, for over a year, we have recalled that the war began in 1948, it is a war of national liberation that the Palestinian Resistance is waging, we have denounced the genocide and shed light on the real goals of the Zionists.
In Gaza, the dead follow the dead, and among them an incalculable number of children. Homes, universities, schools, public buildings, mosques, churches, an entire historical heritage is destroyed. In the north of the Strip, the last hospital (the others have been destroyed) is targeted by tank cannon fire. And in Lebanon, the invaders use the same methods: destruction of buildings, bombing causing many victims, deportation of the population.
What more could we say? Horror continues to follow horror in the deafening silence of most of the media and the Western imperialist states dominated by the United States, which through their political and military support allow Israel to carry out this genocide. Only the peoples of the world, and especially the workers, display and affirm their solidarity with Palestine, with Lebanon.
But it is not a question of keeping quiet. We therefore propose to recall, in a few lines, the essentials of what one needs to know concerning the conflict in the Middle East and the reactions it provokes, as well as the essentials of our position. [1]
1. It is a colonial conflict.
The Zionist project is a settler or substitute colony project; it is not about exploiting the natives, but about driving them out and replacing them. European immigrants landed in Palestine from the 1900s onwards, settled without mixing with the Palestinian population, created armed militias, fought the “ Great Arab Revolt ” between 1936 and 1939 and then drove out or killed a good part of the Palestinians who took refuge in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the Gaza Strip, which was then Egyptian. These armed militias became the Zionist army, the main means of the unilateral proclamation of the State of Israel in 1948. In 1967, it was the turn of the West Bank and Gaza to be invaded and occupied by the Zionist army, as well as the Syrian Golan, which still is, and the Egyptian Sinai, surrendered in exchange for a normalization of relations, that is to say the recognition of the apartheid state, the colonial state of Israel.
2. Israel is a creation and tool of the Western imperialists.
If the massacres and expulsions were able to take place in 1948, it was because the League of Nations, the forerunner of the UN, had given the United Kingdom a mandate over Palestine. The British therefore occupied it and ruled it from 1918 to 1948. As early as 1907, they had considered building a buffer state in the Middle East on the future ruins of the Ottoman Empire, which they knew was moribund and whose territories they had their eye on. But this state was also to control the wealth present in the soil and was part of a larger plan to divide the Arab world that the fall of the Ottomans would inevitably make free, a plan that gave rise to a sharing of the Near and Middle East between the future colonial powers, France and Great Britain in 1916. The following year, the project took shape with the famous " Balfour Declaration ", which remained secret until the victory against the Turks, allies of the Germans during the First World War. This declaration by the British Foreign Secretary sent to the leaders of the Zionist movement, proposed to them to create in Palestine a " Jewish National Home ". This is what accelerated the immigration of European Jews in the 20s and 30s to Palestine. The Second World War was a time of passing the baton. The USA replaced the United Kingdom as the dominant imperialist power and then took charge of the buffer state issue, and for the first time at a conference in 1942 [2] , raised the idea not of a national home, but of a Jewish state.
The UN, which was then formed and had few states, decolonization not having taken place, decided without consulting the Palestinians who had lived on this soil for thousands of years, to divide Mandatory Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. All the imperialist powers supported this project. Unfortunately, the USSR was mistaken in approving it as well. When the Zionists proclaimed the State of Israel, they conquered by war a part of what was intended to be included in the Arab State, driving out nearly 800,000 Palestinians who became refugees. And since then Israel has invariably been supported in its warlike, murderous, colonial oppression activities by the dominant US imperialism and its vassals, notably Germany and Great Britain and more recently France. This is still the case for the ongoing genocide. As Georges Abdallah says, " The Zionist entity is the organic extension of Western imperialism ."
3. A mythical and false story.
The justification for the presence of emigrants from Europe is based on a summary explanation: there was supposedly a " Jewish " people who had been dispersed throughout the ancient world following the capture of the second temple in 79 AD by the Romans. However, the only sources are religious. For example, for the episode of 79 we recently learned that, while the mythical legend led us to believe that the Hebrew defenders of Massada had supported a siege against the Romans that lasted more than a year, in reality, archaeology shows that it could not have lasted more than, or even reached, three weeks. The myth of dominant Hebrew kingdoms is also strongly undermined. All we know, in truth, is that Pharaonic Egypt dominated this region for a long time, and ancient archaeology shows us that we come into contact with sedentary people (pig bones have been found) and nomads (none have been found).
But what matters most is the story. Zionist historians in the 19th century secularized the Bible to make it a historical document. For history it can only be considered a vague reference, less than the oldest Semitic text, the Epic of Gilgamesh or the oldest Greek story, the Iliad, because it is not an epic but a text with a unique religious vocation. And the authors of this secularization and their successors were not fooled. Ben Gurion, the first principal leader of the Zionist state, a notorious atheist, was able to declare: " God does not exist, but he gave us a land. "
What remains of the Bible has been brought up to date and drummed up by Zionist propaganda, it is the notion of "Jewish people". In reality, there are several Jewish peoples. We know of at least four, the Ashkenazim, or Yiddish people, who live or lived in Central and Eastern Europe, the Sephardim, Berbers originally from the Maghreb, some of whom went to Spain, chased out by the Catholic kings after the capture of Granada, the Jews of Ethiopia, who are called the Falashas, are mistreated and exploited in Israel and those of Yemen who, according to legend, are descended from Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Apart from the latter, none are Semites, they are descendants of converts. This brings down the whole story.
What is different today compared to Ben-Gurion's time is that most Zionists, especially those in the political movements currently governing, believe in the biblical story and, consequently, that the Zionist state is becoming more and more theocratic. Netanyahu had the Knesset vote in 2018 that "Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people." And we could hear the genocidal Meyer Habib say that the Jews settled in Judea and Samaria (the name given by the Zionists to the West Bank, in order to be able to annex it better) are not settlers like the French in Algeria, because they are descended from the Hebrews.
In reality, the only descendants of the Hebrews must be among the Palestinian people, descendants of converts to Islam.
4. Propaganda: inversion through terrorism and anti-Semitism.
We see it clearly, as soon as it comes to defending the Palestinian cause, the Zionist organizations, their friends and their relays throw at us the apology of terrorism and anti-Semitism. Their goal is simple, to make the colonizing people and the occupying army appear as victims. Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy said in November 2023: " There have been many occupiers in history, there have been occupiers more terrible than Israel, but Israel is the only occupier that pretends to be a victim. " This rhetoric is based first of all on Israel's pseudo right to defend itself; no one can believe that this is what it is doing in Gaza, nor by transforming Tyre and Balbek into ruins. And on Israel's right to exist, to exist eternally, we will come back to this.
Let us first take the concept of terrorist. The recent anniversary of the Algerian uprising on November 1 , 1954 has refreshed some memories about the use of this concept; it was used throughout the decolonization period to designate armed opponents of the colonial powers, national liberation fighters. Houari Boumediene, Yasser Arafat, Nelson Mandela and Eloi Machoro were thus described. Previously, the Nazi occupiers had used this word to designate armed Resistance fighters, particularly Communists. Pierre Stamboul, the main leader of the UJFP, son of a Resistance fighter of the FTP-MOI, an organization to which Missak Manouchian belonged, said during a speech, " I am the son of a terrorist, and I am proud of it. "
But the dominant US imperialism has changed the meaning of the word after September 11, 2001. Forgotten the struggles for national liberation, the concept of terrorist is now attached to the armed mafia gangs that the USA armed and supported and which turned against them. These armed gangs, like Al-Qaeda, the first to benefit from the new meaning of the term terrorist, have in common that they are ideologically fascist Islamists. Let us note that this is still variable geometry. During the attempt by the Western imperialists to bring down the Baathist regime in Syria, if DAESH was presented as evil (with many ambiguities all the same on the origin of its weapons), other organizations, with the same ideological profile, were officially supported; The French Minister of Foreign Affairs at the time, Laurent Fabius, was able to declare in a newspaper that the fascist militias of the Al-Nusra Front (a continuation of Al-Qaeda) were doing " good work "; not to mention that these people and the Turkmen militias serving Erdogan were described by the left-wing petty bourgeois Olivier Besancenot as " Syrian revolutionaries ". The use of this new meaning of the concept aims to demonize the Palestinian Resistance and make them " terrorists " whose fight would not be linked to the resistance of a colonized people. It is a question of assimilating Hamas to DAESH and prohibiting it from being considered and even more so from being designated as an anti-colonial resistance organization, and therefore erasing the colonial situation.
We wrote an article about the nature of Hamas and its relations with the Muslim Brotherhood, which are fascists. If some political leaders of Hamas had an attitude similar to that of Qatar during the war in Syria, an attitude of total support for the Western imperialists, this has never been the case for the branches in Gaza, since Sinwar was their leader. For the Revolutionary Communist Party things are clear, we have important philosophical differences with the Hamas fighters in Gaza, but they are part of the Palestinian Resistance because they are recognized as such by the Palestinians and by the other resistance movements; moreover, once again it must be repeated that Hamas was not alone on October 7, four other organizations of the Palestinian Resistance, including two Marxists, were at their side. We have said it from the beginning: the only ones who can decide who is a movement of the Palestinian Resistance are the Palestinians . To better demonize and make us forget the colonization, the official media in France, always in battle for the title of best supporter of Israel, inundate us with the concept of human shield, while the only ones who use it are the Zionist military or suggest that the story of the occupation, such as hospitals, schools, UNRWA premises would house Hamas "command centers". When we know that they found Yahya Sinwar by chance, before killing him, there is frankly reason to doubt especially since the occupying army has never been able to prove these accusations. Similarly, all the people who lived in Gaza during the blockade, notably those of the UJFP have denied the idea of a Hamas dictatorship over the Palestinians of Gaza.
The other argument used is that of anti-Semitism, by equating anti-Zionism or criticism of the colonial state with racism, the latest to benefit from this insult is the UN Special Rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, who has tirelessly denounced colonization since 1948 and presented a damning report on Zionist atrocities in Gaza. We know well that this is manipulation, it is enough to mention the number of anti-Zionist Jews to prove it. The goal is to equate Israel with all the Jews in the world, to prevent any criticism and any questioning of its existence as a colonial state. However, if a nation has an inalienable right to a state, a state cannot claim to exist forever in the form it takes, especially if it is a colonial state. To say this is not to want to " throw the Jews into the sea ", it is to demand the end of colonization and equality for all the inhabitants of Palestine. For the Revolutionary Communist Party, it is the colonial fact, that is to say the existence of the Zionist State which is the cause of all the conflicts in the Middle East, it must therefore disappear as a colonial and theocratic State, and give way to another form of State .
5. All Zionists must be fought.
It is fashionable, especially among left-wingers in France, to attack only the " far-right government of Netanyahu ". This allows us not to attack the foundations of the affair, the Zionist project and the existence of the State of Israel, since we barely hear them talk about colonization. This must be compared to their political struggle: the left against the right and the far right and not revolutionaries against capitalism. They are in favor of the development of capitalism, do not question its existence, so there is no objective reason for them to question Zionism, having proven itself as an effective tool of imperialism.
There are no right-wing Zionists and left-wing Zionists, there are only Zionists, and they all agree; they all voted for the expulsion of UNRWA, if they differ on the issue of captives, they are fundamentally in agreement (even if some say it louder than others) for the recolonization of Gaza, the eradication of the Palestinians and to " finish the work that Ben Gurion left unfinished in 1948. "
6. What this war tells us is that it doesn't work.
These are the words of Elias Sambar, a Palestinian activist, a former close associate of Yasser Arafat, a university professor. They reveal the intellectual's admiration for the workers, the people, who, despite all the horrors, resist oppression.
The Zionists have several goals: to terrorize the Palestinians in Gaza to make them leave; to commit genocide to kill as many as possible; to raze all of Gaza's past; and to defeat the Palestinian armed resistance. While the second and third are well on the way to success, neither the first nor the last have been achieved. Despite all the horror of the Zionist army's military campaign to eradicate northern Gaza, the armed resistance still holds a good part of the Jabalya camp. The occupation army is once again resorting to bombing because its ground advance has been halted. It is the same in southern Lebanon. The Lebanese armed resistance organized around Hezbollah is preventing any ground advance by the Zionists. The Israeli army has only one superiority, that of the air, it also has it when it machine-guns civilians, blows up buildings, but faced with fighters trained in urban guerrilla warfare or guerrilla warfare in general, the so-called IDF can clearly do nothing.
History has shown us in Vietnam, Algeria, Cuba and elsewhere that resistance to colonialism may suffer defeats but it always ends up winning. The Revolutionary Communist Party pays tribute to the resistance of the people of Gaza, to their struggle, in all its forms, against the Zionist colonial state. Palestine has a crucial importance in our current imperialist world, it is the symbol of resistance to colonialism, of resistance to capitalist oppression.
7. The fight of the Revolutionary Communist Party.
The deployment of its military force in Lebanon, the plans to destroy all Palestinian life in northern Gaza, the growing control over the lands of the Palestinians of the West Bank do not change anything, the Zionist State shows its muscles to hide that it cannot achieve its goals. The Palestinians, with or without weapons, resist and the occupation army is in difficulty, the Zionist State itself is on the verge of collapse. The Lebanese Resistance despite the blows it has dealt is organizing and keeping watch. This is enough to warm the hearts of those who fight in their own way for the liberation of Palestine. If the goals of the Zionists are now clear, there is a long way to go!
Like all those supporters of the liberation of Palestine around the world, we continue and will continue tirelessly to demand an immediate and permanent ceasefire, as well as free access for humanitarians throughout the Gaza Strip and the complete withdrawal of the occupying forces from the enclave. But this will not be enough.
A just peace means the dismantling of the colonies, the return of the refugees and an independent Palestinian state. What prevents such a peace is the existence of a colonial state. The workers of Israel cannot be free if they do not break with Zionism, if they continue to find themselves objectively in the camp of the colonizers. Solidarity with Palestine cannot be satisfied with general phrases about peace. We need a state where all inhabitants enjoy the same rights and can live together regardless of their origin, in this case, a democratic Palestinian state. Similarly, the national liberation struggle of the Palestinian people does not need compassion but real political support and actions of internationalist solidarity. And for France, where the Revolutionaries, as elsewhere, must first fight their capitalists, this begins with the political struggle against the support of French imperialism for the Zionist colonial state.
This is why the Revolutionary Communist Party intends to continue to bring together all those who want an immediate ceasefire to end the massacre of Palestinians and who speak out for peace. For us, this means supporting the fundamental demands of the Palestinian national liberation movement, especially after the assassination of one of its leaders: an immediate end to Zionist military aggression, the right of return for refugees and the formation of a Palestinian state on the territory of Mandatory Palestine.
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[1] We recall, in passing, the 3 publications of our party on the subject of the History of Palestine: Palestine 1st Part Israel/Hamas War? NO!! (2023)
https://www.sitecommunistes.org/index.php/publications/ocuments/2538-palestine-ier-partie-guerre-israel-hamas-non
Part 2: The illegitimate partition of Palestine by the UN in 1948. (2023)
https://www.sitecommunistes.org/index.php/publications/documents
Part Three: From the 1948 War to the 1967 War Emergence and Affirmation of the Palestinian National Liberation Movement. (2024)
https://www.sitecommunistes.org/index.php/publications/documents/3044-une-histoire-de-la-palestine-troisieme-partie-de-la-guerre-de-1948-a-la-guerre- from-1967-emergence-and-affirmation-of-the-Palestinian-national-liberation-movement
[2] . The Biltmore Conference was convened by the Extraordinary Zionist Conference and was held from May 6 to May 11, 1942 in New York City in the presence of a large number of Zionist organizations. The original purpose of the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate which recognized the historic connection between the Jewish people and Palestine was to give them the opportunity, as President Wilson stated , to establish a Jewish state .