January 3 - The Israeli military is committing the most horrific massacres in Gaza. People the world over are being spurred into action to protest against these crimes. Tens of millions of decent people. Let us make sure our outrage is not diverted by imperialist politicians that speak deviously of putting an end to “violence on all sides.” We must be clear: we must take a side - the side of the downtrodden Palestinian people against the Israeli state. Palestinian people are a subjugated people. Palestinian resistance struggles against the Zionist military are fully justified.

The whole Zionist project – the idea of building a religious state through colonial settlement and ethnic cleansing – has been a catastrophe. An absolute catastrophe for the Palestinian people. Zionism also offers no future for Jewish working class people that hope to bring up their children in a sane environment. Only the privileged classes in Israel sponsored by Washington are truly benefiting from the pursuit of this racial-supremacist agenda.

Israel’s terror has always served the world’s imperialist rulers. Tel Aviv was a key ally of the capitalist powers in their Cold War to destroy the Soviet workers state. Today, Israel continues to be a stronghold for U.S. imperialism as Washington seeks to assert control over the oil-rich Middle East. In this, the Zionist rulers do a parallel service alongside the other U.S. allies in the region like the CIA-backed “secret rendition” government in Cairo and the ultrareligious, woman-hating monarchies that rule Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Kuwait.

Everyone knows that Israel is able to get away with slaughtering the people of Gaza only because it is backed by the U.S. and by U.S. allies. Washington gave the green light to this latest assault. And Canberra couldn’t wait to fall into line. It joined the U.S. rulers in both blaming Hamas for the “violence” and in excusing Israel’s butchery as a “response.” Acting Prime Minister Julia Gillard stated on December 28: “We are calling on Hamas and other militants to cease shelling Southern Israel. Obviously, they have broken the ceasefire and engaged in an act of aggression against Israel. Israel has responded.” (Sydney Morning Herald, 29 December, 2008)

Here, the Rudd/Gillard team is not only acting like John Howard did but is also acting in true ALP tradition. It is acting in both the longstanding ALP tradition of support for Israeli violence and the even older ALP tradition of constantly betraying the true interests of its own working class supporters.

It is no surprise that the rulers of the U.S., Germany, France, Britain and Australia should provide an alibi for Israel’s terror. After all, this is what these imperialists do themselves! Look at the way the U.S. and Australian militaries are slaughtering the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. Do not forget the 23 February, 2007 massacre in East Timor when occupying Australian troops opened fire on internally displaced people who were protesting against the relocation of a refugee camp at Dili airport. And in this country, racist cops continue to get away with murdering Aboriginal people in custody.

The capitalist powers’ excuse of Israel’s massacres shows once again how insincere they are when they attack other countries over “human rights.” Washington and Canberra only brandish “human rights” when that serves as a cover for attacking “disobedient” small nations or when they are looking to sponsor forces trying to undermine socialistic states like Cuba and the Peoples Republic of China.

The U.S. and Australian imperialist rulers are clearly enemies of the Palestinian national liberation struggle. Yet, out of desperation, many political tendencies in the West still push the idea that their governments can be made into a force for peace and justice in the Middle East. Since such hopes are unrealisable they will eventually cause Palestinian rights supporters to become demoralised. The false hopes will eventually result in the dissipation of the pro-Palestinian movement and thus allow Israel to quietly continue its terror. That is why we must be absolutely clear that the destroyers of Falluja, the torturers of Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, the administrators of the detention camps in Christmas Island and Villawood, the imposers of racist stigmas against Muslim migrants ... that these people are not going to become defenders of the Palestinian, or for that matter any other oppressed, people.

When the major capitalist governments intervene on international issues their only motive is to secure a strategic “order” that allows the rich corporate bosses whom they serve the greatest opportunity to control resources, labour and markets abroad. These governments long ago calculated that for the Middle East their best-case strategic “order” includes having a massively armed Israel as their deputy sheriff and that it does not include having a truly independent Palestinian state in the historic Palestinian homelands. Thus “peacemaker” interventions into the Israel-Palestine issue by imperialist governments have only ever served to impose unjust “agreements” at the expense of the Palestinian people. These include the U.S.-dictated 1993 Oslo Accords that simply coopted a section of the Palestinian leadership to police bits of the Occupied Territories for the Israelis while clearing the way for the further expansion of Israeli settlements and fortifications in the Occupied West Bank. All these imperialist-sponsored “solutions” from Oslo to the various “accords” in Lebanon have inevitably led only to new slaughters. Let us not forget Sabra and Shatila in 1982! It was French troops and U.S. marines in a “Multinational Force” that opened the way for that horrific massacre of over 3,000 Palestinian civilians living in the West Beirut refugee camps. The Multinational Force “peace monitors” shepherded away out of Beirut the Palestinian fighters protecting the refugees and then withdrew from the camps themselves thus allowing Israel to get its Christian-fascist Phalangist allies to go in and unleash a genocidal slaughter.


To strike a serious blow against Israel’s aggression, we in the international Palestine solidarity movement must target the interests of those powers that sponsor Israel. When we are able to punish the ruling classes in the U.S., Britain, Australia etc for their support for Israel then this will deter these imperialists from giving Israel the military, diplomatic and economic backing that the Zionist rulers so rely on.

The way to get at these U.S. and Australian imperialist rulers is by hitting them where it hurts these greedy capitalists the most – in their hip pockets. Threaten their flow of profits! Let us build trade union industrial action from San Francisco to Sydney to protest against the Israeli slaughter in Gaza!

It is possible for proud workers to organise themselves to carry out such struggle in defence of oppressed peoples. For example, in Sydney, members of the Maritime Union of Australia recently undertook an important action in support of anti-racist political prisoner Lex Wotton. Wotton has been jailed for his participation in a heroic resistance struggle by the Palm Island Aboriginal community that had responded to the racist police killing of a fellow community member. But when Wotton was facing a sentencing hearing in Townsville on November 7, waterfront workers across all of Sydney’s wharves stopped their cranes in a show of solidarity that was timed to coincide with the start of a Sydney “Free Lex Wotton” rally.

Today, we need such protest industrial action, and on a bigger scale, in support of the people of Gaza. We need to shake the imperialist branches that the Israeli nest is built upon! Already around the world, workers unions representing millions have expressed their outrage at Israel’s massacres. This needs to be turned into powerful political strike action now. But for such a campaign to be built, active workers in the West must become clear that effective solidarity with the Palestinian people will be achieved not through appealing to the U.S., British and Australian rulers but rather by opposing them.

Through opposing the violent imperialist agenda in the Middle East, working class people around the world will ultimately be protecting their own children’s future. For in the end, the profit driven and crisis-ridden imperialist economic system promises to lead all of humanity into a bloody war. Let us stop the descent into such a world war. Let us start to shake things up now so that our children will neither have to themselves face the horror that the people of Gaza are facing nor are enlisted to commit the crimes that the Israeli troops are committing. Build union strikes in the West to stop imperialist support for Israel! Stand with the people of Gaza against the Israeli killing machine! Demand an end to the starvation blockade of Gaza! Demand the withdrawal of all Zionist forces and fortifications from all of the Occupied Territories! Support the right of return of all Palestinian refugees to their homelands! Demand that all U.S., British, and Australian troops get out of Afghanistan and Iraq now!