Photo above: Palestinian people survey the rubble of a house in Beit Lahia, in the northern Gaza Strip. The house was destroyed on 12 May 2023 by yet another deadly Israeli airstrike on the people of Gaza.
Photo credit: Fatima Shbair/AP

SUPPORT THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE’S RESISTANCE!

OPPOSE THE U.S. AND AUSTRALIAN RULERS’
VIOLENT IMPERIALIST “RULES-BASED GLOBAL
ORDER” PROPPING UP ISRAEL’S TERROR!

SUPPORT SOCIALISTIC CHINA AGAINST THE
AUKUS REGIMES’ POLITICAL AND MILITARY PRESSURE!
DOWN WITH WESTERN IMPERIALISM’S PROXY WAR AGAINST RUSSIA!

7 May 2023: Today, Israel demolished a Palestinian school at the Jabbet al-Dhib village in the West Bank. With ministers in its new extreme, right wing government openly vilifying Palestinian people, Israel’s authorities are emboldened to intensify what they have long been doing: destroying Palestinian people’s homes, schools, fruit gardens and water sources. The Israeli state aims to violently create “facts on the ground” so that Palestinians never regain their national rights over the West Bank and its key city of Jerusalem. It has moved half a million Jewish settlers into the West Bank.

Already, in this year alone, Israeli forces have killed 111 Palestinian people, including at least 20 children. They have done this through the terror bombing of Gaza, murderous raids on Palestinian activists in the West Bank and attacks on Palestinian protesters. All this racist state violence has in turn encouraged increasingly powerful, fascist gangs amongst Israeli settlers and others within the country, thereby adding to the terror that Palestinian people must face.

This oppression is outrageous to most of the world. In a UN session last December, a resolution standing against Israel’s actions in the West Bank was supported by a majority of the world’s most populous countries, including socialistic China, Pakistan, Russia, Nigeria and Mexico. The only countries that opposed the resolution were most of the Western powers and their most hopelessly dependent neocolonies. Also refusing to stand by the Palestinian people were several Western-allied regimes that either abstained or did not vote on the resolution including Ukraine, Japan, India, South Korea, the Philippines and Fiji. It is only because of the support of the Western imperialist powers that dominate the world that Israel is able to get away with its murderous occupation. In particular, the U.S. superpower and its AUKUS allies, Australia and Britain, are ardent supporters of Israel’s terror. Canberra’s opposition to the December UN resolution shows that the new Labor government is as committed to upholding Israel’s tyranny as was its conservative predecessors.

That Australia’s rulers strongly back Israel is little surprise. Capitalist rule was established here through the dispossession of Aboriginal people in a manner that had all the brutality of Israel’s later 1948 Nakba ethnic cleansing of Palestinians … and then some! The Australian ruling class continues to subjugate Aboriginal people. Anti-colonial activists must, therefore, both support Aboriginal people’s struggle for liberation and back the Palestinian resistance. Let us: Oppose the state murder of Aboriginal people in custody! Welcome any flow of arms to Palestinian people carrying out armed resistance against Israeli forces and fascist settler gangs! Let us demand: Israel and far right settlers, get out of the West Bank and Gaza! For the right of return of Palestinian refugees to all parts of Palestine!

BRING DOWN ETHNIC/RELIGIOUS ULTRA-CHAUVINIST, ZIONIST RULE
THROUGHOUT ALL OF PALESTINE!

The Israeli occupation is hell for Palestinian people. But life in Israel is not that great for the Jewish masses either. Zionist rulers promised that Israel would create a sanctuary for Jews to escape discrimination and racist oppression in Europe – an idea that only gained wide appeal following the Holocaust. However, the idea of building a nation in a land by expelling its existing inhabitants will necessarily breed resistance by the dispossessed people of that land. And so while Palestinians are overwhelmingly the victims of violence in their homeland, the Zionist project incites attacks on Jewish inhabitants too. Moreover, a state where Jewish youth must endure a compulsory military service of up to three years and where residents are frequently running into bomb shelters is hardly a “peaceful sanctuary”. Far from protecting Jewish people, the Zionist project, based as it is on ethnic cleansing, has made Israel’s Jews the objects of hatred on the part of their neighbours.

That Israel is now administered by a chaotic, extremist government – and, moreover, one that is grabbing dictatorial powers for itself while being hated by much of its own population – is a symptom of just how crisis-ridden the Zionist “order” is. The Zionist regime is squeezed between the resistance it faces from the Palestinian people and the fact that its “order” does not serve the Jewish working class either but only truly serves a small class of capitalist Jews. The economic system that this capitalist class runs is based on the theft of Palestinian agricultural land and crops. These capitalists make huge profits, too, by super-exploiting Palestinian labourers who enjoy few rights. Although relatively privileged compared to their Palestinian counterparts, Jewish workers are also exploited by Israel’s bosses just like in any other capitalist state. Israel’s capitalist rulers infect their masses with virulent ethnic supremacist notions to keep the Jewish working class subservient to their capitalist interests. However, when the neighbouring Arab toiling classes rise up against their imperialist-dependent rulers and fight to take over power, this will inevitably inspire a portion of the Israeli Jewish working class to break from Zionism. There is plenty of social tinder for such an explosion. Arab toilers are seething under Western neolonialism and ground down by poverty and unemployment. Women workers face women’s oppression on top of all that. Meanwhile, Israel has one of the highest poverty rates in the OECD. In real terms, Israel’s minimum wage has dived by around 5% over the last five years. A section of the Jewish working class must be won to the understanding that the only way that they can put an end to their own exploitation and create a truly peaceful home is by linking up with neighbouring Arab workers and with the Palestinian people’s resistance in a joint struggle to smash the racist Israeli capitalist regime and create a secular, socialist Palestine where Palestinians and Jews can live together in equality.

RESIST THE U.S. AND AUSTRALIAN REGIMES THAT UPHOLD
THE SUBJUGATION OF PALESTINIAN PEOPLE!

Why do U.S. rulers and their allies support Israel’s conquest of Palestine? The imperialist rulers of the U.S. and those of Germany, Japan, Australia, Britain and France make profits not only from exploiting their own workers but from even more ruthlessly exploiting the workers of the ex-colonial countries of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the Pacific and Latin America and through plundering natural resources and seizing markets there. To enforce this tyranny, the strongest imperial power, the U.S., enlists deputy sheriffs to police particular regions. Israel is its deputy sheriff in the oil-rich and strategically-located Middle East. As Israel’s attacks on anti-Western forces in Lebanon, its threats against Iran and its air strikes against Syria prove, Israel acts to undermine forces that refuse to fully accept the U.S.-led West’s violent despotism over the world – what Western powers cynically refer to as the “rules-based global order”. Israel also serves in the West’s Cold War against socialistic China by intimidating regional countries that dare to become close to the Peoples Republic of China.

Yet, precisely because it is in the interest of America’s capitalists and their allies ruling Australia and Britain to back Israel, it is in the interests of the exploited masses of these countries to take the very opposite stance. For any weakening of Australia’s capitalist rulers through blows against their local or global interests can only be a good thing for the downtrodden masses of Australia. It would strengthen the struggles of workers facing plunging real wages, insecure jobs and skyrocketing rents and of Aboriginal people being hit with racist state oppression and ever more intense vilification in the capitalist media. That is why it is not only a matter of moral imperative but also in the clear interests of the working class of the U.S. and Australia to oppose Israel’s tyranny. The Australian workers movement must take industrial action to demand: End all U.S. and Australian military and economic support for Israel!

Right now there is a major battle in Ukraine whose outcome will affect the strength of the imperialist powers that prop up Israel’s occupation. Although the conflict started as mostly an inter-capitalist battle for territory, the Western powers intervened so aggressively that it quickly became a proxy war of the U.S.-led imperialist powers against Russia. Although Russia is also ruled by capitalist rulers, Russia’s ruling class lacks the capital to lord it over the “Third World.” It is not Russia that destroyed Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya and it is not Russia that props up Israel’s occupation. That is why it is in the interests of all those suffering directly and indirectly from the tyranny of Western imperialism – including the Palestinian people – and the workers of the world to stand for the defeat of the U.S., British and Australian regimes’ proxy war against Russia. However, the Socialist Alternative and Socialist Alliance groups which proclaim their solidarity with Palestine are on the side of the U.S.-backed imperialist powers in their Ukraine proxy war. They even support Western arms supplies to Ukraine. In doing so, they are taking the side which, if victorious, will reinforce Western imperialist tyranny over the world and with it the strengthening of their brutal Israeli deputy sheriff.

There is a far more serious threat to Western global domination (the so-called rules-based order) than Russia. And that is the rise of a giant socialistic power in China. China’s cooperation with developing countries is slowly enabling the latter to achieve greater independence from the imperial powers. Today’s decision by the Arab League to rebuff Western pressure and readmit Syria into the League and China’s successful efforts to bring Iran and Saudi Arabia towards rapprochement in defiance of the USA’s divisive schemes are early signs of this. If China’s strength were to continue to grow and she was able to further offer developing countries access to technology, capital and markets in her mutually beneficial way, Palestine’s neighbours would be less dependent on the imperialists and more willing to resist Washington’s demands that they acquiesce to Israel’s occupation. Most importantly, should China’s rapid development continue until her per capita income approaches that of the richest countries, her poverty alleviation successes will encourage workers all over the world to also demand socialism. The Western capitalist rulers would face being overthrown at home. The Zionist occupation will topple with them. That is why every true supporter of Palestine must stand for the defence of socialistic rule in China from not only imperialist military threats but also from Western-backed anti-communist forces within China. We must also oppose the lying anti-China propaganda attacks that are launched by Western imperialist politicians, NGOs and pro-Western media – the very same people that vilify the Palestinian struggle.

Let’s weaken the Western imperialist props that uphold Israel’s tyranny! Let’s combine opposition to Washington and Canberra’s military, political and economic aid to Israel with resistance to the brutal oppression of Aboriginal people and class struggle action against the exploitation of workers and all the poor in this country!