To: Detroit/Seattle
Workers' Voice mailing list
June 1, 2021
by Joseph Green, Detroit Workers' Voice
For 11 days Israeli warplanes, tanks, and artillery ravaged the
Gaza Strip. Over 200 civilians, including more than 65 children, were
killed, and many tall apartment building, hospitals, schools, and vital
infrastructure were destroyed. No place, however innocent, was safe
from the danger of attack; even the Associated Press building in Gaza
was destroyed. There has been shock throughout the world as the full
power of modern weapons were deployed against a crowded,
densely-populated, essentially undefended area where people had no
place to take shelter. The Israeli government boasts about how many
activists it has killed in Gaza but says it spares civilians, but the
facts show otherwise.
The bloody carnage from the bombing of Gaza added fuel to ongoing
protests against the mistreatment of Palestinians. There was a one-day
strike on May 18 of hundreds of thousands of Arab Israelis, along with
other Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. There have been protests
across the Middle East, but also in Europe, Australia, Brazil, and
elsewhere. In the US, there have been protests in Chicago,
New York City, Buffalo, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle,
Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Dearborn (Michigan), and other cities; in
some places, like Dearborn, there have been repeated demonstrations. It
seems that sympathy for the Palestinian people is greater than it has
been for some time. This is seen not only in the protests, but in
cracks appearing in the Democratic Party, which historically is a
major backer of whatever Israel does. This is one facet of the
imperialist foreign policy which both the Democratic and Republican
parties uphold, and Israel pounds Gaza with the help of almost $4
billion of military aid from the US government in 2020 alone. But
when President Biden came to Detroit on May 18, he faced not only two
demonstrations by Palestinians and their supporters, but
criticism of his pro-Israeli policy from some other Democratic
politicians, such as Michigan Representative Rashida Tlaib.
There is presently a ceasefire in Gaza between Israel and Hamas; it
is not clear whether it will last. But there is no agreement between
the Israelis and the Palestinian movement; there is no let-up in
discrimination against Israeli Arabs; and there is no agreement to end
Israeli strangulation of the West Bank and Gaza. So nothing has been
resolved.
And that's the crucial issue, as the basic cause for the current crisis is the apartheid system in Israel which makes Palestinians living in Israel into second-class citizens, and which treats those living in the Palestinian Territories even worse. There may be elections in Israel proper, but there is no equality between Jews and non-Jews; the Palestinians in the West Bank are gradually losing their land as extremist Jewish settlers take it over; and Gaza has been blockaded by land, sea, and air since 2007. Ethnic cleansing continues, bit by bit, day by day, in Israel and the West Bank, while Gaza is simply strangled. The immediate events that led to the current crisis are the Israeli government push to remove more Palestinians from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem, as well as brutal police actions against worshippers at Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa Mosque, which is a major Islamic holy site. These events are not an accident; such things to continue so long as apartheid does.
A New York Times article of May 15 was headlined "After Years of Quiet, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Exploded. Why Now?" (1) But were these quiet years? Let's look in a bit more detail at what has been going on:
These are some of the conditions that have led to the present situation. No matter how many bombs fall, no matter how many deaths on both sides, no matter who wins Palestinians elections, so as long as ethnic cleansing and apartheid continues, there will be continual flareups, again and again. The Palestinians will not give up the struggle for their rights.
Meanwhile it's become a commonplace in Israel to discuss whether
Israel can be both a Jewish state and a democratic state, given the
large Palestinian population in Israel and the Occupied
Territories. A democratic state would have to grant equality to
all its residents, and protect the security and interests of all its
people, and not simply be the state of one religious group. But
Israel, as a zionist state, can't do this; it has used ethnic cleansing
and enforced apartheid since its formation in 1948.
Over the years, the Palestinians have sought different ways to fight for their national rights and to oppose ethnic cleansing and apartheid. The last decade had see a number of mass actions by Israeli Arabs in Israel, but the current wave seems to be larger and to reflect a new generation coming into struggle. Protests have taken place in a number of cities throughout Israel. It appears that the protesters have lost faith in the old organizations, and are searching for other methods of protest.
Also, in a number of neighborhoods with both Jews and Palestinians,
communal rioting broke out. The Israeli police backed Jewish extremists
attacking Palestinians, while some Palestinians attacked Jewish
residents. This reflected the zionist extremist hopes to throw
the rest of the Arabs out of Israel, and the despair among many
Arabs as one method of organized protest after another had been closed
off to them over the years. But this ugly manifestation was was not the
main feature of what was going on, which was the extension of
discontent throughout the Arab population in Israel. This underlined
that the issue isn't simply Israel versus the occupied territories, but
the nature of the Israeli government itself.
On May 10 Hamas began shooting small-scale missiles into Israel in retaliation for Israeli actions at the Al-Aqsa mosque. This dead-end tactic had no chance of defeating the Israeli government; it instead turned the struggle into Hamas negotiating with Israel. The missiles were welcomed by many Palestinians who thought that it at least did some damage to oppressors, which is understandable, but the missiles did nothing to answer the issue of where the Palestinian struggle should go. Indeed, missile warfare tends to replace the prospect of a mass anti-apartheid struggle with backing Hamas' struggle to ensure its own sectarian rule.
Israel justifies its actions by ranting about Hamas over and over,
but nothing done by Hamas justifies the extension of Israeli apartheid.
Moreover, Israel's reacted to the missiles from Hamas by a full-scale
devastation of Gaza. No area was safe in Gaza, and even Dr. Ayman Abu
al-Ouf, the head of internal medicine at Gaza's main hospital and an
important figure in fighting the COVID epidemic, was killed. Israel not
only killed ten or twenty civilians for every death from Hamas'
missiles, but it destroyed the already inadequate living conditions in
Gaza. Pictures of this devastation have helped create revulsion at the
way the Israeli extremists maintain the apartheid state.
In the US, there has been an increase in solidarity with the Palestinian people over the last few years from organizations like Students for Justice for Palestine and the BDS movement, as well as from some entirely Jewish organizations, like Jewish Voice for Peace. With the bombing of Gaza, there have been demonstrations around the country, and even several union locals have expressed support for the Palestinians, although of course the AFL-CIO leaders have not. The growth of the Black Lives Matter movement has also encouraged opposition to other oppression, and more and more people are declaring that Palestinian lives matter too!
No to Israeli apartheid and ethnic cleansing!
No to anti-semitism!
Support the Palestinian movement!
Palestinian lives matter!
(1) Patrick Kingsley, "After Years of Quiet, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Exploded. Why Now?", May 15, updated May 21, 2021, New York Times.<>
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