Israel
A state that survives by blood and fire
08/07/2006 La Verdad Obrera N° 194
The brutal military deployment on the Gaza Strip illustrates a
recurrent practice of the State of Israel over Palestine during more
than 50 years of colonial occupation. The Palestinian people have the
legitimate right to exercise self-defense against aggression by the
State of Israel, in pursuit of their liberation.
Moshe Dayan, the Israeli general who commanded the Six-Day War in
1967, and one of the prominent figures of the Labor Party, used to
point out that Israel as a Jewish state was destined to permanent war
for 1,000 years. Dayan fully knew that the State of Israel was built
at gunpoint, by expelling millions of Palestinian peasants from their
ancestral lands, made to leave on a forced exile. If the Zionists
remember 1948 as the year of national independence, the Palestinian
people remember that date as the Nakba, the mourning preceding the
massacres, the refugee camps, more than 10,000 prisoners in the
Israeli prisons and a diaspora that exceeds 4 million Palestinians,
wandering in different areas of the planet.
While the Jews of Eastern Europe were fleeing from the Nazis, the US
and Britain were closing their borders, denying them refuge, while
promoting the colonization of Palestine, a key geostrategic zone as a
battering ram for access to the main oil routes. But that region of
the East was not "a land without people," predestined for "a people
without land," as the Zionists were pleased to declare. The
Palestinian people historically dwelled there, living together as
brothers with people of the Jewish and Orthodox Christian faiths.
Thus, after the Ottoman Empire ceased to control the zone, with
millions of dollars England and the US financed the construction of
an artificial state, functional by its nearness to the main oil
reserves. In 1956 when the Nasser government decided to nationalize
the Suez Canal, hindering the transport by the big multinationals,
the State of Israel mobilized its troops rapidly through the Sinai
desert and, without hesitating, invaded the streets of Egypt. The
history of the State of Israel is the history of a permanent war
against the oppressed Arab peoples of the Middle East.
The movement of Orthodox settlers that advocates a Greater Israel,
based on the Old Testament, expresses the real face of the Jewish
state as a racist state that discriminates against everyone who does
not profess Judaism, such as the so-called "Israeli Arabs,"
considered to be second-class citizens.
Expropriated from their lands, the Palestinian people were forced to
gather on the eastern border of Jerusalem and the small islands of
Gaza and the West Bank. The Zionists continue to employ their
classical colonial policy on this sector, by building that gigantic
wall with the purpose of isolating and fragmenting the small
Palestinian villages, to snatch the most fertile lands and the
strongholds of potable water concentrated in the Jordan River.
The proposal to install two separate states not only legitimizes
Zionist colonization, but also represents a reactionary utopia that
could in no way effectively solve the Palestinian national movement’s
aspirations for self-determination. What kind of sovereignty could be
exercised by a Palestinian state reduced to two miniscule islands
that are not even contiguous, while the Zionist state controls the
highways between them, the border roads, patrolling the
Mediterranean, energy production and the monopoly over distribution
of water, the scarcest resource in the entire Middle East? How could
the 4 milion Palestinians who remain in the diaspora fit on those two
tiny portions of land, or develop a relatively normal life? Only the
destruction of the State of Israel in its organic matrix (the fusion
of state and religion as an indissoluble whole) will be able to
create the conditions for a just and democratic peace between
Palestinians and Jews, starting from fraternal relations, not
segregationist criteria based on race. Only a single Palestine,
situated on the whole of its historic territory, will be able to
respond to the expectations of millions of Palestinians, who hope to
return to their lands and recover their property, expropriated by the
Zionist state. Only a workers’ and socialist Palestine will be able
to provide the social bases for the workers and peasants of the
region to expel imperialism, and advance in an independent direction
as a step toward a Federation of Socialist Republics of the Middle
East, that can overcome the chronic backwardness to which the
capitalist system condemns them.
