Photo Above: Israel’s thirteen month-long genocidal onslaught against the Palestinian people has reduced most of Gaza’s people to the verge of starvation; or actual starvation. Here, Palestinians wait to buy bread from the only operating bakery in the southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis on 23 October 2024. Photo: Rizek Abdeljawad/Xinhua
Ten Ways that Australia’s Ruling Class Backs Israel’s Genocidal Terror
FROM PINE GAP TO SANCTIONS ON IRAN, ALBANESE & CO. ARE KNEE DEEP IN THE SLAUGHTER
WE MUST FORCE THEM TO DO LESS – LESS HARM TO THE PEOPLE OF PALESTINE & LEBANON
2 November 2024 – The Zionist regime’s brutality over recent weeks has exceeded even that of the crimes that they perpetrated over the preceding year. Especially targeting northern Gaza, Israel is massacring Palestinians in deliberate strikes on schools, homes and hospitals. The Israeli regime has also killed thousands in Lebanon and forced more than a quarter of that country’s people to flee their homes. This terrorism on a mass scale is based on huge support from the U.S., Australian and other imperialist regimes. But with Israel’s crimes battering their image, Western regimes started making calls for “ceasefire now” – by which they mean a ceasefire on Netanyahu’s terms. However, as brave Palestinian and Lebanese – and for their own reasons Iranian state – resistance to Israel intensifies, Western support for Israel has again become more overt. The U.S. has now sent a hundred troops to help Israel operate the THAAD missile system that the U.S. is providing them.
Australia’s capitalist ruling class is also greatly supporting Israel’s genocidal terror. They do this in ten different ways:
The Australian regime hosts and jointly operates with the U.S. the Pine Gap spy base near Alice Springs. Receiving data from two U.S. spy satellites, the base transmits to Israel the location of targets to hit with missiles and bombs. How many times have schools, hospitals, ambulances and rescue workers in Gaza been targeted with the direct assistance of the Australian regime and its Pine Gap terror installation?
Two weeks ago, when the U.S. launched a massive air strike against Yemeni supporters of the Palestinian people, the Defence Department boasted that Australia directly assisted the attack “through access and overflight for US aircraft in northern Australia”. Apparently, the Australian air bases enabled air-to-air refuelling of the U.S. bombers.
Australian troops are in the Middle East directly participating in the U.S. and British-led attacks on Yemeni supporters of Palestine who have been deterring ships linked to Israel and its allies from traversing the Red Sea.
The regime lists Hamas and Hezbollah as “terrorists”. That means that Australians who make donations to them face years in jail. Given that Hamas and Hezbollah are non-state groups based in poverty-stricken lands, these groups rely on overseas donations. Since Australia is a richer country with a large Arab diaspora, Australians could be a key source of the funds needed to support these groups’ anti-Israeli resistance. The “terror” bans are thus very harmful.
Australian companies sell military equipment and supplies to the Israeli military.
The regime backs Israel’s arms providers. In February, the Australian military awarded a nearly $917 million contract to Israel’s biggest arms producer, Elbit Systems – known for supplying Israeli forces with killer drones and mortars.
The ALP government provides diplomatic cover for Israel’s terror.
The Australian regime sanctions Iran. Sometimes, Canberra disguises these as measures against the Iranian government’s repressive and anti-women policies. But Australia’s rulers care nothing for the Iranian masses. Their real goal is to support the U.S. and Israeli drive to bring Iran to heel. This was proven a fortnight ago, when the Australian government unleashed new sanctions on Iran in response to her 100% justifiable missile strike on Israel.
From their police arresting anti-genocide protesters, to their politicians threatening Palestine activists to their universities expelling pro-Palestine students and effectively sacking pro-Palestine academics, Australia’s ruling class are trying to suppress anti-genocide protests.
Australia’s capitalist-owned media have unleashed a barrage of propaganda alibiing Israel.
Despite Australia’s rulers proving to be the enemy of Palestine, some groups keep on appealing for “the government to do more to stop the genocide”. But to say that the Labor government should “do more” is to misleadingly imply that they are actually already doing something positive! That is why the pro-ALP current leaders of our unions and other, “pro-Palestine” ALP hacks keep selling us this “do more” line. So, too, do the Greens. For, although the Greens criticise Albanese’s stance, they do not want Australia’s capitalist order, that they are ultimately loyal to, to be completely discredited. By appealing to the government “to do more” they are covering up the huge amount of harm that the ruling class is actually doing!What we do need to do is toforce the Australian ruling classto do less – that is, less participation in Israeli/U.S.-led terror. We need powerful actions to demand: Close Pine Gap! No refuelling or hosting of U.S. warplanes from Australian bases! Australian troops involved in the operation against Yemeni supporters of Palestine: Get out of the Middle East! Lift the regime’s “terror” listing of Hamas and Hezbollah! No military sales to Israel! Cancel Australian contracts to Israeli arms suppliers! Lift the sanctions on Iran! Down with the regime’s attacks on pro-Palestine activists!
17 October 2024, Yemen: Death and destruction in the capital of Yemen, Sana’a following a massive U.S. air strike using long-range B-2 bombers. The attack was aimed at quelling the heroic actions in support of the embattled Palestinian people by Yemen’s Houthi forces. The Australian regime boasted that Australian air bases assisted the attack through “through access and overflight for US aircraft in northern Australia”. Apparently, the Australian air bases enabled air-to-air refuelling of the U.S. bombers. In supporting this attack on pro-Palestinian resistance forces, the Australian regime is actively assisting the Israeli regime to conduct its genocide of the people of Gaza.
It is in the Working Class’ Own Interests to Stand with the Opponents of Zionist/Western Terror!
Apart from the Western-puppet Taiwanese ruling class (and it has now been confirmed that the Taiwanese firm that made the exploding pagers used by Israel in its Lebanon terrorist attack has long-time links with U.S. intelligence agencies), no rulers administering a population size comparable to Australia’s provide even a small fraction of the support to Israel’s terror as Australia’s rulers do. So when you hear a co-worker say that “what happens in the Middle East has nothing to do with us”, tell them that they are very mistaken! Explain too that given how much the Western regimes have invested in backing Israel, if the Zionist/Western forces were to triumph, it would embolden Western ruling classes. The victorious Australian capitalist rulers would be more confident to attack the rights of workers, Aboriginal people, refugees and all the poor. It is not completely a coincidence that the Australian ruling class launched its biggest attack on the working class in four decades – the forcing of the militant CFMEU workers union into administration – during the midst of the “national security”-obsessed climate fostered by their participation in the Gaza massacre. On the other hand, if those resisting the Zionist/Western forces could hold them off, it would damage the prestige of the Western capitalists. That would facilitate the struggles that we badly need here to defend our unions, to drive down rents, to fight for Aboriginal people’s liberation and to resist racist attacks on people of Muslim, Arab, Asian and African heritage. So it is not only a moral imperative but is in the very interests of workers and all the oppressed here to stand for the victory of the Palestinian and Lebanese resistance. We must also side with Iran, Syria and Yemen against Israel and their U.S., British and Australian allies.
So why are Australia’s capitalist rulers such intractable Israel backers? It is not because of Zionists within the ruling class. Yes, there are some capitalists who are Zionists. But most are not. And most actually could not care less about the myths of Zionism. Rather they back Israel because they need U.S. power to be upheld, because that is what underwrites their own imperialist rape of the Southwest Pacific and Southeast Asia. That means backing the Israeli attack dog of the U.S. in the strategically located and oil-rich Middle East. In other words, Australia’s ruling class backs Israel in order to uphold its own predatory interests. It is as simple as that! To force this exploiting class to “do this less”, we must threaten their own interests to such a level that the capitalist rulers will find it less harmful to retreat from backing Israel than to continue.
Many of the elements that we need to build a movement that can force Australia’s rulers to retreat from their support of Israeli terrorism are contained within the Palestine Action Group-organised mass protests in Sydney. Speeches by Aboriginal activists have powerfully linked the Australian ruling class’ support for Zionist settler colonialism with their own genocidal dispossession of Aboriginal people. During the marches, we have shouted some apt chants, like: “Albanese – Blood on Your Hands”. But there is an, effectively opposite, political direction coexisting within the movement. One that does not oppose the ruling class as an enemy but appeals to them as a potential albeit misguided ally. When the ruling class-media reports on pro-Palestine protests, they rarely quote the hard hitting chants or most cutting speeches, lest they encourage such sentiments. Instead they quote the appeals to the ruling class to “do more”. As long as the capitalist rulers know that this is the main message issuing from the protests, they will not feel threatened by them (just annoyed). And that means they will not feel compelled to retreat from supporting Israel. This is the problem we must fix!
Those most consciously promoting appeals to the ruling class at pro-Palestine events are the Greens. For although the Greens oppose the most brutal aspects of Zionist terror, they nevertheless uphold the Australian capitalist order that benefits from Israeli aggression in the Middle East. Thus, when on the October 7 anniversary, the Albanese government put a despicable parliamentary motion proclaiming “Israel’s right to defend itself” and condemning Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iran for resisting Israel, the Greens refused to oppose the motion and only abstained.
From the Greens’ perspective, Australian support for Israel’s terror is one of Australia’s political order’s few bad aberrations within an otherwise “democratic” system. Thus, when addressing the October 13 protest, Greens senator David Shoebridge contrasted the ALP government’s refusal to support Palestine refugees with what he called its correct support for Ukraine’s war against Russia. But the Western regimes back Ukraine for the same reason that they back Israel: to feed an attack dog that will enforce their world domination – in this case by trying to subordinate Russia, which, while itself under a capitalist regime, refuses to submit to Western hegemony. Every supporter of Palestine should stand for the imperialist backers of Israel to be weakened by defeats in all the theatres that they are fighting in – including in Ukraine.Most crucially, we must oppose the imperialists’ drive to destroy the main state threat to their global tyranny – the Chinese workers state.
Whether it is waging Cold War against socialistic China, arming a proxy war against Russia or backing Zionist terror and genocide, the Australian and other imperialist rulers are driven by their quest to reinforce their world “order” that facilitates their looting of the poorer countries. Far from Australian ruling class support for Israel’s Gaza genocide being an exception to the rule, it is typical of this class’ whole history. This country’s capitalist order is based on the genocide of Aboriginal people and the continued brutal oppression of this country’s First Peoples. That was highlighted by the brave and inspirational protest twelve days ago by independent senator, Lidia Thorpe, against Australia’s visiting head of state, King Charles, when the Aboriginal woman shouted: “You committed genocide against our people…. F_ck the colony!… You are not our king!” Moreover, in executing civilians, massacring onion farmers and slitting the throats of teenage boys, Australian regime forces that participated in the occupation of Afghanistan perpetrated the same type of racist crimes that Israeli troops are committing on a huge scale in Gaza. It is not only pro-Palestine protests that Australia’s rulers are trying to suppress. Politicians are threatening to throw Lidia Thorpe out of her senate seat for protesting against the blood-stained monarch, while the CFMEU union has been taken over by regime administrators for daring to stand up too staunchly for workers rights.
We must junk all illusions that we can appeal to Australia’s capitalist rulers to support Palestine or indeed support any other just cause. Such appeals are worse than futile. They are preventing the pro-Palestinian movement from becoming a force of unalloyed opposition to the ruling class that is backing Israel’s terror. Many of us have put much effort into joining pro-Palestine protests. But we want the actions to do more than make us feel good for protesting against the genocide. We need to turn the actions into ones that so implacably oppose the ruling class, so discredits them, so destabilises their political order that they will be compelled to retreat from their backing of Israeli terror. Everyone who understands this has a duty to not only join the rallies but to do so with placards that will help steer the movement in this direction. Come bearing signs like: “Resist Australia’s Capitalists and Monarchy that Supports Israel’s Terror and Brutally Oppresses Aboriginal People!”, “Stand With Palestine! Shut Down Pine Gap! Smash the U.S./Australia Attacks on Yemen!” and “Down With Support for Israel! Defend the CFMEU! For a Working-Class Intifada in Australia Against the Capitalist Elites!”
Photo Above: Tens of thousands of people again marched in Sydney on 3 December 2023 to protest Israel’s genocidal attack on the Palestinian people of Gaza. Photo credit: Dean Sewell
Long Live the Palestinian Resistance! Don’t Be Fooled by the Powerless UN Vote! The Australian Regime is Still Participating in Israel’s Slaughter in Gaza.
Down, Down Israeli, U.S. and Australian Regimes!
Resist Imperialism through Workers Struggle and Supporting the Rise of Socialistic China!
13 December 2023: Israeli forces are continuing to massacre children and other Palestinian civilians. They have already seized large parts of Gaza. Yet the far-right Israeli regime and their Washington senior partners want to subdue through terror Palestinian people even further. That is why the U.S. vetoed last week’s UN Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire. Now, the UN General Assembly has just voted overwhelmingly for a ceasefire in a non-binding resolution. The only governments to oppose or abstain on the vote were those of the U.S. and some of its most obsequious allies, like Britain, Lithuania and the Ukrainian regime that is waging the U.S.’s proxy war to subdue Russia. Also refusing to back a ceasefire are a majority of those regimes that are so servile to imperialism that they recognise the rogue, Western-propped up Taiwanese regime rather than the Peoples Republic of China as the legitimate rulers of China. These include the regimes ruling Paraguay, Guatemala and Nauru as well as those running Palau and Marshall Islands, both of which are Pacific countries where the U.S. has control of their defense arrangements under a colonial-style “Compact of Free Association”, as they do with Micronesia, which also failed to vote for a ceasefire. Also refusing to support a ceasefire are most of the openly far-right governments, like those running Italy, Hungary and Argentina.
Among those that voted for last night’s ceasefire resolution were not only governments known to have a pro-Palestine position – like those of Russia and socialistic China – but even some of Israel’s staunchest backers. This includes the liberal government of Canada, the right-wing government of New Zealand and the Labor government of Australia. With much of the world horrified by Israel’s heinous cruelty, these governments knew that maintaining public opposition to a ceasefire would expose their own brutality and the hypocrisy of their claims to be guardians of “human rights.” With Australia’s capitalist rulers (and “like-minded” ruling elites) only too aware that dishonestly wielding the club of “human rights” is a vital component of their strategy to achieve their main foreign policy goal – to crush socialistic rule in China – they felt compelled to gloss up their soiled “human rights” credentials by voting for a ceasefire. However, although the Australian government had previously opposed a ceasefire, their recent vote should not be seen as a weakening of their support for Israel’s occupation. Indeed, the Australian regime also voted for a failed U.S. amendment that put the blame for the suffering on Hamas. After the vote, Australian regime representatives decried that the U.S. amendment – that aimed at whitewashing the brutality of Israel’s 75 year-long occupation – was not included in the resolution.
What most makes the Australian government’s UN vote such a cynical, window-dressing ploy is the fact that the Australian ruling class continues to militarily back Israel. Not only does the Australian regime maintain military ties with Israel, the Pine Gap U.S.-Australia joint spy base is playing a MASSIVE role in Israel’s assault on Gaza. Operated by U.S. and Australian military personnel, the base near Alice Springs downloads information from U.S. spy satellites about targets in Gaza which are analysed and passed on to Israel. This enables the Israeli military to pinpoint its missiles and artillery so that they strike actual human targets rather than empty land or structures. In other words, the Albanese Labor government is doing more than supporting genocide. Through hosting and jointly operating Pine Gap, they are actually committing genocide! And they continue to do so! No symbolic vote for a non-enforceable UN resolution will change that! Just like Netanyahu and Biden, Anthony Albanese and foreign minister Penny Wong are war criminals.
Above: The U.S.-Australia joint spy base at Pine Gap near Alice Springs. Receiving data from U.S. spy satellites monitoring the Middle East, Asia and the Pacific, U.S. and Australian personnel at the base then analyse the data and pass on to Israel the geolocations of targets. This enables Israel to pinpoint air and artillery strikes to ensure that Israeli missiles, rockets, shells and bombs hit human targets rather than vacant space or empty structures. Below: Apartment blocks – and no doubt many of the Palestinian people living in them – are destroyed by yet another Israeli air strike on Gaza City.
The huge pro-Palestinian rallies have had some impact in making even Israel’s staunchest backers want to appear like they are concerned for Palestinian civilians. In Sydney, the weekly protests have had some powerful Palestinian and progressive Jewish speakers. The highlight has been many of the speeches given by Aboriginal activists. At last Sunday’s (December 10) Sydney protest, the Aboriginal speaker was especially impressive as he insightfully connected the oppressions of Aboriginal and Palestinian people and attacked capitalist rule in Australia and its window-dressing schemes. We in Trotskyist Platform encourage people to join in these weekly Sydney pro-Palestine marches organised by the hard-working Palestine Action Group (in which the Socialist Alternative group plays a prominent role). Wealsocondemn those nominal defenders of Palestinians who are discouraging participation in the protests. After all, those seeking to demoralise activists by saying that their participation is “meaningless” are only playing into the hands of the likes of Albanese, Peter Dutton and premier Chris Minns, who have all sought to sabotage the PAG-organised actions.
At the same time, the longer that this Israeli onslaught goes, the more that the current flaws in the political strategy of the PAG limits the impact that the protests can have. Thus, while many of the slogans that rally organisers have promoted correctly take an unambiguous stance in support of the Palestinian resistance – like “Intifada, Intifada” and “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free!” – some take an “even-handed” position. Chief among the latter is the call for “Ceasefire Now!” To be sure, many defenders of the Palestinian people call for a “ceasefire” because what they are seeing now is a one-sided slaughter. When they demand “ceasefire”, they mean that Israel should stop firing. However, as last night’s UN vote by the likes of Australia and France shows, when Western imperialist regimes call for a “ceasefire” they mean something very different. This was made clear after the vote. Foreign minister, Penny Wong, reiterated Australia’s support for “Israel’s right to defend itself” and Australia’s UN representative, James Larsen, ranted that “Hamas must be defeated and dismantled.” In plain speak that means that they are calling for supporting the Israeli military, which is precisely what the Australian ruling class are doing! Australia’s capitalist rulers want a “ceasefire” on Israel’s terms and are working to strengthen Israel’s military campaign so that any “ceasefire” will end up as favourable to Israel as possible. They, however, worry that further Israeli murder of civilians could provoke such broad resistance that Israel and its occupation ends up weakened. Indeed, a big part of why the Australian –and several other imperialist – regimes are now calling for a ceasefire is because they believe that Israel has already sufficiently strengthened its occupation over these last two months: by landing blows against the Palestinian resistance and by annihilating Gaza’s civilian infrastructure. We must not shout slogans that can accommodate such anti-Palestine agendas! And we certainly must not pressure the Palestinian resistance to “ceasefire”! Instead, we must give 100% support to the Palestinian resistance. Hail the courage of Palestinian resistance forces and their Yemini Houthi allies! Socialistic North Korea and other countries providing arms to the resistance: increase your supply of arms! Other non-Western countries: start sending arms to Palestinian fighters – especially to those secular and leftist groups that are taking part in the Hamas-led resistance! Let us demand: Israel out of Gaza! All Israeli troops and racist settlers out of all of the West Bank. For the complete right of return of all Palestinian refugees and their descendants!
Take Mass Action against the Australian Ruling Class that is Participating in Israel’s Onslaught!
Another problem with the “Ceasefire” chant is that it makes pro-Palestinian rallies come off as half-neutral. That makes the actions less offensive to the Israeli regime and its backers and thus far less likely to compel them to retreat. It will actually take an enormous amount to compel the regimes that facilitate Israel’s terror to back off. The U.S. imperialists prop us Israel in order to have a reliable enforcer of their predatory interests in the strategically-located and oil rich Middle East. Australia’s capitalist rulers in turn back the Israeli attack dog of the USA, because they want U.S. power to be upheld. For it is U.S. power that underwrites Australian capitalists’ plunder of South Pacific and southeast Asian countries. And it is U.S. might that Australia’s rulers hope will squeeze socialistic China so tightly that she will no longer be able to obstruct imperialist exploitation of poorer countries through mutually beneficial cooperation with them. Against such over-riding self interest, we can only compel Australia’s ruling class to retreat from their participation in the Gaza slaughter if we can seriously threaten their class interests. The PAG-organised rallies are not yet doing this. For the overall line of the actions – some particular excellent speeches excluded – while rightly very critical of the Australian government, do not brand the Australian ruling class as an enemy. Thus, when the Australian ruling class see rallies mainly opposing their Israeli and U.S. allies they are angered but not politically frightened. However, if they were to instead hear tens of thousands of people saying not just “Down, Down Israel, Down, Down USA” but shouting, “Down, Down Israeli, U.S. and Australian Regimes!”, they would be truly alarmed. And, thus, far more likely to back off!
What will especially frighten the Australian ruling class is workers’ political strike action in support of the Palestinian people. With working class people suffering under falling real wages, soaring rents and unaffordable prices, there is a definite opportunity to combine opposition to capitalist profiteering by the ruling class with opposition to its participation in the massacre of Palestinian people. We support the attempted port blockades – with union approval – of Israeli Zim shipping. At the same time, we say that blockades and industrial action would be far more effective if they directly target the interests of the Australian capitalists and their regime. After all, Israel is far away. The amount that its ruling class would be frightened by action in Australia targeting Israeli companies is limited. In contrast, if actions hurt the profits of big-time Australian capitalists at home or caused their regime’s operations to be disrupted, Australia’s ruling class would be terrified. Let’s build workers industrial action – supported by pro-Palestine pickets – to target the Australian ruling class and demand: Stop Pine Gap’s participation in the Gaza massacre – Close Pine Gap! No Australian arms exports to Israel. End Australian military ties to Israel! The fact that huge numbers – including many compassionate, intelligent youth spurred into political activism for the first time – have joined the weekly rallies can provide a crucial stepping stone for building the type of actions needed. But the step up must be made! Through the placards that we carry and the leaflets that we distribute at the protests, Trotskyist Platform has been working hard to turn the rallies into a Palestine movement that is unequivocally opposed to the Australian ruling class – the type of movement that has the potential to compel the Australian capitalists to retreat from their role in the Gaza slaughter.
The reason that the PAG leadership has not sought to turn the movement in such a direction is because, no doubt with many misgivings, they are currently betting on an alternative strategy – one that seeks through pressure to win over the Australian regime. While rightly denouncing the Albanese government’s stance, PAG leaders promote the notion that that through pressure the ALP government can be partially won over; or that greater numbers for the Greens in parliament could change the regime’s stance. However, the reality is that the Australian regime’s support for Israel’s terror flows naturally from its own essence. Capitalist Australia was formed out of genocidal massacres of this country’s First Nations peoples. No amount of window dressing can cover up the fact that Australian regime forces continue to kill Aboriginal people in custody and continue to remove Aboriginal children from their families. Moreover, while today facilitating Israel’s crimes, the Australian military, earlier, directly committed war crimes during its participation in the occupation of Afghanistan. There, Australia’s elite SAS troops massacred onion farmers, executed civilians and slit the throats of children. The problem is that no matter which particular parties control parliament, the current Australian regime has been designed to serve the capitalist class. In wealthy Australia, this class – which consists of wealthy business owners of all ethnicities but in Australia is mostly made of white Christians with just a small percentage of Jewish capitalists – not only exploits workers in this country but exploits workers and plunders natural resources at an even greater rate in the South Pacific and beyond. This class has calculated that its interests lie very much with supporting its U.S. godfather’s Israeli henchman. Therefore, this Australian capitalist class, which is the ultimate power in this country that all governments must serve, will always support Israel as long as the capitalists rule this country.
Even if the Greens win office, the Australian regime will continue to support the subjugation of Palestinian and Aboriginal people and will continue to enforce the exploitation of workers. This is especially true given that the Greens include capitalists in their ranks and refuse to stand for class struggle against the capitalist class. To be sure, the Greens appear a lot better on Palestine than the ALP and the right-wing Coalition. They at least condemn Israel’s war crimes. But their support for Palestine is limited. Feeding into the imperialist narrative that downplays the impact of Israel’s brutal 75-year-long occupation of Palestine and denying the fact that Hamas’ October 7 attack included heroic blows against the Israeli military (alongside some wrong attacks on civilians that were, however, dwarfed by the Israeli military’s killing of its own civilians through carpet bombing of contested sites during the Hamas-led incursion), the Greens harmfully equate the October 7 attack with Israel’s war crimes. Thus, an October 16 Greens statement, stated that:
“We all watched in horror at the brutality and callousness of Hamas’ October 7th attacks on innocent civilians. The State of Israel’s siege and destruction of Gaza continues the cycle of violence. It is civilians in both places paying the price.
“The Greens reject and condemn all forms of violence, especially against civilians. We again call for an immediate ceasefire between the State of Israel and Hamas, an immediate halt to the forced removal and transfer of Palestinians in Gaza, a release of hostages, and an end to the military siege.”
Of course, as sly politicians looking for votes, Greens politicians make sure that they sound a lot more pro-Palestinian than their official position when they speak at pro-Palestine protests. But if one wants an idea of how the Greens in government would actually act, one should look at the governments that their overseas counterparts are part of. In Germany, Greens foreign minister Annalena Baerbock is a hardline supporter of Israel’s onslaught and is part of a coalition government with the Social Democratic Party that has banned pro-Palestine protests. In Austria, the Greens, in coalition with a conservative party, are part of a government that voted against last night’s UN ceasefire resolution from an extreme pro-Zionist standpoint. It is telling too that, reflecting the interests of Australia’s capitalist class, the Australian Greens, for their part, only call to “renegotiate” the U.S.-Australia alliance rather than to scrap it.
What we need to do to support Palestinian and Aboriginal peoples and all the downtrodden of this country is to wage mass struggle againstAustralia’s capitalist rulers with the aim of forcing them into retreats. Any illusions that the regime can be persuaded to take a more progressive stance or that it will fundamentally change if the Greens gain a greater stake in parliament obstruct such struggle. PAG leaders are hardly alone in having such illusions. False hopes in the potential future benevolence of the Australian regime and in the Greens in particular are also widespread amongst the ranks of those joining the protests. Given the weight of propaganda and nationalism, the hardest ruling class to oppose in any imperialist country is always the ruling class in one’s own country. It is far easier to brand only the Israeli and U.S. regimes as enemies, while referring to the Australian regime as a currently deviant entity that can, however, be won over. Yet such a strategy will not be effective in restraining the Australian regime’s participation in the Gaza bloodbath. The change in direction in the movement must be made! The leap in the political consciousness of the activists participating in the movement must be achieved. With the horror of Israel’s terror and the depth of Western imperialist support for it pushing many to rethink their political perspective, such a leap in consciousness is possible. Therefore, at this time, those that understand the need to turn the pro-Palestine movement into one that is unequivocally opposed to Australia’s imperialist rulers have an extra special duty to bring that understanding to their fellow activists.
Australia’s Labor prime minister, Anthony Albanese meets U.S. president Joe Biden at the White House in late October 2023 as Israeli missiles and bombs are massacring the people of Gaza. Albanese reiterated the Australian regime’s support for its U.S. ally’s Israeli henchmen in its genocidal onslaught against the Palestinian people.
Photo credit: Michael Reynolds/EPA
“Threaten” the Global Tyranny of the Imperialists who Prop Up Israel – Support the Rise of Socialistic China!
Israel’s subjugation of Palestine is set to become even more brutal. That is why supporters of Palestine must learn key lessons from these last ten, intense weeks. One lesson arises from the reality that the capitalist rulers of various Arab and Muslim majority countries – like those of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey – have at this crucial moment refused to do more than lip-service to stand by Palestinian people. Indeed, especially in the case of Egypt, with its restriction of supplies to the resistance, they have even been complicit in the Israeli onslaught. All this proves the Marxist doctrine that exploiting classes ultimately act in their own material interests rather than complying with notions of ethnic or religious solidarity; and, moreover, the political imperatives of these ruling classes are what shapes religious doctrines … and not the other way around. These countries will start standing by the Palestinian people only when their toiling classes take state power and totally free these countries from the grip of Western imperialism.
The most vital lesson for activists in Australia to learn from these last weeks is that Israel is only able to get away with its terror because it has the support of the U.S. and US imperialist allies like Australia. Therefore, truly standing with the Palestinian people means opposing the Western imperialists in every battle that they are engaged in. That means that we must stand for the defence of Russia – despite its reactionary, also-capitalist rulers – against the U.S., NATO and Australian imperialists and their Ukrainian proxies. Indeed, an indication of the, at-bottom, pro-imperialist nature of the Greens is that the Greens rabidly support the U.S.-led imperialists in their proxy war against Russia. These avowed “pacifists” even support Australian arms transfers to Ukraine! Harmfully, so do two left groups that far more sincerely support the Palestinian struggle than the Greens – Socialist Alternative and Socialist Alliance.
The biggest state challenge to imperialism comes from socialistic China. This is despite the currently unfinished and precarious nature of China’s transition to socialism. The U.S. and Australian imperialists know that if China continues to succeed in socialistic development, this will not only obstruct their subjugation of the Global South but could eventually encourage their own masses to fight for socialism and thereby topple them from power. If this were to happen, Israel’s tyranny over Palestine will collapse. That is why all supporters of Palestine and all anti-imperialists must defend socialistic rule in China. In doing so we must draw another crucial lesson from the events of the last ten weeks: that is that the Western capitalist rulers and their media are masters of deceit. And given that while protecting Israel is an important tactic that the U.S. and its allies have for buttressing their power, crushing socialistic China is their main strategic goal, it follows that the imperialist rulers and their media are even more biased against Red China than they are against Palestine! This is indeed the case! For example, their claim that China is persecuting her more European-looking, Muslim Uyghur population in China’s northwest is a lie cut out of whole cloth. This claim has been rejected by almost every Muslim-majority country and is largely only promoted by the regimes that today support Israel’s terror.
That imperialist propaganda against the Chinese workers state is even more intense than it is against Palestine makes it much harder to stand by socialistic China than it is to stand by Palestine. Indeed, several of the groups active in building solidarity with Palestine – including the Socialist Alternative, Socialist Alliance and Solidarity groups – ape Western propaganda against China, even while opposing some of the anti-China military build up. In 2019, these groups stood with Union Jack-carrying, pro-British colonial Hong Kong expatriates in anti-communist rallies encouraged by the Australian ruling class. A year ago, these same groups hailed the small, Western-backed, “A4 protests” in China over her COVID response that were incited by overt anti-communists. In contrast, we insist that to truly oppose the imperialists, one must have the fortitude to defy the propaganda vilifying the main “threat” to their global tyranny – socialistic China. Let us demand: U.S., British and Australian imperialists (and their lackeys in the far-right, Ferdinand Marcos Junior government in the Philippines), stop your provocations against China in the South and East China Seas! Down with Western support to the anti-communist Taiwanese regime! Down with all the Western-backed forces threatening socialistic rule in China –from anti-communist, Hong Kong rich kids to the “A4” COVID conspiracy-mongers.
Hebron, 21 October 2023: Palestinians in the West Bank city of Hebron protest in support of the people of Gaza. Protesters carried portraits of the leader of socialistic North Korea, Kim Jong-Un. This was in honour of North Korea’s provision of arms to the Palestinian resistance and her verbal support for the Palestinian liberation struggle. Many Palestinians see North Korea as a symbol of defiance of the Western imperialists who so brutally subjugate the Palestinian people. North Korea and especially her socialistic neighbour and ally, the Peoples Republic of China are the main targets of the imperialist powers.
When the working classes and all the downtrodden of the U.S., Germany, Australia, Britain, Japan and other imperialist countries seize state power and join China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam and Laos on a socialist path, brutal national and colonial oppression – like that of Palestinian, Aboriginal, Tamil, Kashmiri and Kanak peoples – will have no powerful backers. Indeed, it will have no reason for existence. We look forward to such a world. Let’s work tirelessly and unflinchingly towards its realisation. In doing so, we will never forget the horrific suffering that Palestinian people have borne over the last 75 years and especially over the last ten weeks. We look forward to the day when Netanyahu, Biden, Anthony Albanese, Penny Wong, Annalena Baerbock and Rishi Sunak will face war crimes tribunals and be given the appropriate decisive punishments. We look forward to the day when the Palestinian people will be truly free and living happily in a socialist Palestine together with their Jewish sisters and brothers.
Photo above: Residents of a Gaza neighbourhood look through the rubble on 31 October 2023 after yet another Israeli bombardment. photo credit: Xinhua
Close the U.S./Australia Pine Gap Spy Base That Is Directing Israel’s Genocidal Attacks on Gaza’s People!
1 November 2023: Israeli forces have killed over 3,500 Palestinian children in Gaza in just the last 24 days. Indeed more than two out of every five people that Israel has killed in its latest onslaught are children. This is not “self-defence” – this is a massacre! Defending their people against Israel’s invasion, Palestinian fighters are putting up heroic resistance. Let us work with all our energy for the defeat of Israel and the victory of the Palestinian resistance and their allies! That means that here in Australia we need to build towards workers industrial action and other militant, mass actions that will demand: End the Australian regime’s support for the Israeli military! End the Israeli assault! Lift the blockade of Gaza! All Israeli troops and settlers out of the West Bank! For the complete right of return of all Palestinians!
The reason that Israel is able to unleash this terror is because of the support that it gets from the U.S. and its allies. In the last 24 days, the U.S. has sent Israel huge amounts of weapons. This includes bombs and artillery shells – the very weapons that have killed the most Palestinians. Moreover, U.S. president Joe Biden has even sent high-ranking U.S. military officials to “advise” Israel’s attack. U.S. rulers are not just supporting Israel’s invasion, they are directing it!
It would be very politically difficult for the U.S. to support Israel if no other power backed this stance. That is why the other Western ruling classes play a criminal role in providing diplomatic cover for Washington. Last week, when prime minister Anthony Albanese met Biden, he lavishly praised Biden’s support for Israel’s assault: “Mr President, we applaud the personal resolve you have brought to this troubled part of the world.” This diplomatic backing is especially crucial to Washington as Australia is one of the very few non-NATO powers that are supporting Israel’s attack. Make no mistake about it, Albanese is a war criminal complicit in the U.S./Israeli massacre! Do not be fooled at all by his gentle calls for Israel to minimise civilian deaths. The Australian regime does not care about Gaza’s people – they are only trying to minimise damage to their completely fake, self-created image of being “human rights” defenders.
Above: War criminals Anthony Albanese and Joe Biden at their recent meeting in Washington. Albanese reiterated to Biden the Australian regime’s support for Israel’s attack on Gaza. Below: Palestinian children wounded in Israeli strikes on Gaza City on 11 October 2023 receive treatment. By the end of October, Israeli forces had killed over 3,500 children in Gaza since October 7. photo credit (above photo): Drew Angerer photo credit (below photo): Madhyamam
Australia’s Capitalist Regime is a Direct Participant in the Massacre of Palestinian People
The Australian regime does more than provide crucial political backing for the U.S. and Israel. They also have military links that support Israel’s war. Their biggest contribution is through the joint U.S./Australia Pine Gap base just south of Alice Springs. This base is used to position U.S. spy satellites that cover a vast stretch of land from Africa to the Middle East to all of Asia. The highly secretive facility was built in the 1960s to aid the capitalist powers’ Cold War against the then socialistic, Soviet Union. In the 21st century, its capability has been greatly expanded. Apart from intercepting people’s phone calls and E-mails, Pine Gap receives from spy satellites the geolocation data of weapons systems, radio communication devices and cell phones. This information is then transmitted to the U.S. and allied militaries. Pine Gap has been actively used in the U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Somalia and other countries that have killed thousands of civilians. The base’s unique and crucial role in the U.S. and its allies’ war drive comes from its remote location far from any coastline. As a result, Pine Gap has been used in every single U.S. war in the 21st century. This fact combined with Biden’s announcement that the U.S. was providing full intelligence support to Israel means that it is 100% certain that the U.S./Australia spy base would be participating in Israel’s onslaught on Gaza.
Pine Gap’s main function in Israel’s invasion is to locate Palestinian targets. By precisely locating cellphones, the spy base ensures that Israeli’s missile and artillery strikes kill the maximum number of people rather than land in uninhabited areas. Especially through hosting and operating Pine Gap, the Australian regime is not only a supporter of Israel’s genocide but an active participant in it. Every supporter of the Palestinian people must demand the immediate closure of the spy base. This must become a key demand of the large pro-Palestinian protests in Australia.
The U.S./Australia Pine Gap spy base. photo credit Kristian Laemmle-Ruff/@kristianlaemmleruff
Turn the Pro-Palestinian Protests Against the Australian Imperialist Regime That’s Participating in Israel’s Genocide!
Australia’s ruling class backs Israel because Israel is its U.S. ally’s attack dog that enforces U.S. domination of the oil rich and strategically located Middle East. To understand why Australia’s rulers back their U.S. counterparts, one has to examine the nature of this ruling class. This rich capitalist class not only extracts profits from exploiting Australian wage workers but seizes huge profits from plundering the South Pacific and parts of Asia. The Australian ruling class relies on U.S. power to underwrite this tyranny. In other words, Australia’s rulers back their U.S. counterparts – including in strengthening its Israeli attack dog in the Middle East – in the same way that a local mafia thug always stands by the mafia godfather that guarantees their despotism over their bit of turf. With socialistic China’s mutually beneficial cooperation with countries in this region enabling these countries to start to free themselves from Australian imperialist subjugation, Australia’s rulers are counting on Washington to drive out such “Communist Chinese interference”. That is why they have become even more reliant on their U.S. counterparts and thus even more unequivocal in backing Israel.
Given the self interest that Australia’s ruling class has in backing Israel, how are we going to make it retreat from this? Encouragingly, huge numbers have joined pro-Palestinian protests. People of Palestinian and other Arab heritage have been joined by other people of colour, white Australians and progressive-minded Jewish people. However, the direction of the rallies is not yet one that can force the Australian ruling class to back down. Although protesters have rightly chanted, “Albanese you can’t hide – you’re supporting genocide”, the rallies’ main target has not been Australia’s rulers. The problem is that while Australia’s rulers won’t be happy with rallies opposing their allies, they also know that such actions won’t do too much damage to allies located so far away. But what if protesters instead of only saying “Israel, USA, How Many Kids Have You Killed Today” were saying “Israeli, U.S., Australian Regimes: How Many Kids Have You Killed Today”? What if when criticising the Australian rulers it is not done from the futile point of view of appealing to them as if they are potential allies but by denouncing them as enemies. What if instead of only saying “Down, Down Israel, Down, Down USA”, tens of thousands are passionately shouting, “Down, Down Israeli, U.S. and Australian Regimes!” Then Australia’s rulers would be truly worried! They would consider retreating from their support for Israel in order to stop hostility to their political order spreading. This is especially if the movement was able to link its opposition to Israel’s terror with the broader masses’ grievances. So it is great that Aboriginal activists addressing the rallies have connected Palestinian people’s oppression with the Australian regime’s brutal subjugation of Aboriginal people.
What would also make Australia’s ruling class think twice about backing Israel is if they suffered economic damage from union political industrial action. Encouragingly, some union contingents have joined the Palestine protests. However, to turn this into actual industrial action requires a political struggle within our unions to challenge the loyalty of current union tops to the very Labor government that is supporting Israel’s massacre. To win union ranks to taking the big step of launching industrial action also requires steering the pro-Palestinian protests onto a path that can appeal to workers’ class interests. The movement must loudly point out that opposing the U.S. rulers’ Israeli proxies would weaken the Australian ruling class that is driving more and more working class people into poverty through raising prices, driving down real wages and jacking up rents. Of course, those pro-Palestinian people from amongst the 5% to 8% of the population that form the capitalist class (and its henchmen) will not like the movement being reoriented in a pro-working class, anti-Australian-capitalist-regime direction. So be it! Their support for Palestine will ultimately be inconsistent because they profit from the political order that supports Israel. Turning the pro-Palestine movement in a pro-working-class, anti-Australian-ruling-class direction is what we need for this movement to make a real difference.
Oppose Western Imperialism’s “Rules-Based Democratic Order” That Underpins Israel’s Terror!
The ultimate targets of the Pine Gap base that is today pinpointing Israeli attacks are socialistic China and North Korea. Indeed, the U.S. and its allies’ support for Israel and its opposition to socialistic states are closely intertwined. Washington backs Israel in part to enable Israel to threaten Middle Eastern countries that pursue friendly ties with China and North Korea. Little wonder then that, to her great credit, North Korea is providing arms to Palestinian resistance forces. China for its part is the major power that most stands by Palestine. However, as a socialistic state, its stance should become far more intransigent. For starters, we say that when China’s president Xi Jinping meets with war criminal Albanese in five days time, Xi should publicly condemn the Australian regime for its complicity in Israel’s slaughter.
China’s impact on the Palestinian struggle is far wider than its direct stance on the question. Her cooperation with developing countries is enabling them – including some Arab ones – to slowly squeeze out from under Western imperialism’s boot. The ultimate fear of the U.S. and Australian imperialists is that China’s successes will not only undercut their subjugation of the Global South but will eventually encourage their own masses to fight for socialism and topple them from power. If either of these things were to happen, Israel’s tyranny over Palestine is doomed. That is why all supporters of the Palestinian struggle and all anti-imperialists must defend socialistic rule in China. Resist all military and political attacks on China by the Western capitalists and their “pro-democracy” proxies within China.
Outrage at Israel’s crimes and the Australian rulers’ support for them has compelled many young people to participate in their first political actions. Events are pushing them to rethink their own politics and engage in lively debates. These compassionate people need their energy to be channeled into a direction that can force the Australian regime to retreat from its participation in Israel’s massacre. Let’s turn the pro-Palestinian protests into a pro-working class movement against the Australian imperialist regime that is joining Israel’s genocide! Let’s fight for the immediate closure of the Pine Gap spy base! Let’s build toward union industrial action against the Australian regime’s support for Israel! Let’s fight against the world domination of Western imperialism that underpins Israel’s tyranny over Palestine!
Photo Above: A man evacuates a crying girl from a building in the southern Gaza city of Rafah that was destroyed by an Israeli air strike on October 9. Photo credit: Khaled Omar/Xinhua
WAGE POLITICAL WAR AGAINST BIDEN, ALBANESE, DUTTON & ALL THE IMPERIALISTS ENABLING ISRAEL’S NAZI-LIKE WAR ON GAZA’S PEOPLE!
11 October 2023: Israel is massacring the people of Gaza through indiscriminate air strikes. Seizing on Saturday’s attacks by Palestinian groups, Israel’s far-right government is waging all-out war on Gaza’s people. Already, Israel has stopped all food, electricity and water from entering Gaza. Defending this siege, Israeli defence minister Yoav Galland sounded exactly like a Nazi Holocaust-justifying, racial supremacist when he declared that: “We are fighting animals and are acting accordingly.” Given the Israeli regime’s racism, the especially fanatical nature of its present ultra-rightist government and the fact that Gaza is so densely populated, the current Israeli attack could end up killing literally tens of thousands of Palestinian people! Workers movements worldwide and all antiracists must build mass actions to demand: Stop the Israeli assault! Lift the blockade of Gaza! All Israeli troops and settlers out of the West Bank! We must stand with the Palestinian resistance against Israel’s mass-murdering onslaught.
Israel’s assault follows Saturday’s Palestinian raids. Cornered by rapid Israeli settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank, the intensification of mass-murdering Israeli West Bank raids and the savage Gaza blockade, Palestinian resistance forces struck back. With brilliant preparation and ingenuity, they overcame barriers hemming them inside Gaza to launch a surprise attack that killed hundreds of Israeli troops and police. The resistance forces inflicted more military casualties on the occupying forces in one weekend than Israel took during its entire failed 2006 war against Lebanon’s Hezbollah. We hail this Palestinian resistance against the murderous Israeli military. This is 100% justified!
Wrongly, the Hamas fighters also killed many civilians. Apart from aping the Israeli oppressors, such crimes play into the latter’s hands. They are being used by Israel’s unpopular Netanyahu government to restore support for its extreme racist stance. And they have been seized on by Western regimes to justify their support for Israel’s terror. Yet these attacks are the by-product of an occupation that has slaughtered Palestinian civilians in numbers that are dozens of times greater than Saturday’s civilian toll. It is true that the religious factions that attacked on Saturday are far less committed to protecting Jewish civilians than the secular – and especially the leftist-based–Palestinian resistance. However, some of these latter factions have lost credibility by submitting to the occupation. Yet such capitulation is itself an adaptation to the reality that Palestinians are heavily outgunned by an Israeli juggernaut built up by the West’s capitalist rulers.
Proving how much the Israeli regime is propped up by the Western rulers, Biden announced today that not only is he sending Israel new weapons but that U.S. “consultants” are “advising” Israel’s war. Moreover, the US has dispatched an aircraft carrier strike group to threaten Israel’s opponents. It is the U.S., Australian and other U.S.-allied rulers who are the root cause of both the terrible suffering of Palestinian people and the dangers faced by Israeli Jews – who must live in fear because of the inevitable response provoked by the horrific crimes of their Western-propped-up rulers.
DEFENDING THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE MEANS OPPOSING WESTERN IMPERIALISM’S “RULES-BASED” WORLD ORDER
As the Israel regime began annihilating Palestinian civilians by bombing Gaza’s residential towers, Joe Biden, Anthony Albanese and other Western leaders declared their support for Israel’s “right to defend itself.” Then, when Israel imposed a deadly siege on Gaza, Australian foreign minister Penny Wong slimily justified this by stating that Israel’s military response is difficult to judge from afar. In other words, the Australian government is joining their U.S. allies in giving the Israeli regime the green light to use whatever genocidal methods it chooses to crush the people of Gaza.
To understand why the Western rulers prop up Israel, one must understand that these capitalist classes not only exploit their own workers but also gain huge profits from plundering the resources and superexploiting the workers of the ex-colonial countries of Asia, the Pacific, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. Israel is a proxy of these U.S.-led imperialist ruling classes that acts to undermine forces within the Middle East that refuse to fully accept Western despotism. This is shown by Israel’s attacks on anti-Western forces in Lebanon, its threats against Iran and its air strikes against Syria. Israel has been built up by Western imperialism to perform these tasks. Israel’s terror against the Palestinian people is the true face of Western imperialism’s supposedly “rules-based” world “order”.
Anyone opposed to Israel’s terror must resist Israel’s Western enablers in every battle that these imperialists are waging to enforce their global tyranny. That means standing for the defence of Iran against U.S. threats – threats that have escalated over the last four days. This is even though Iran is ruled by a capitalist, women-oppressing regime. We say that the liberation of workers and women in Iran can only be made by her own masses. And especially given imperialism’s drive to bring a subservient regime to power in Iran, we insist that leftist forces there resist all Iranian opposition forces that accept support from Western regimes, while ensuring that they continue to fight for an Iranian workers state that would be more consistently opposed to imperialism than the current regime – not less.
While facilitating Israel’s terror, Western rulers are pouring huge amounts of arms into their proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. The more economically powerful Western powers want to reduce Russia – which is also capitalist-ruled – to the subordinate position that she was pushed down to in the 1990s and early noughties. Everyone opposed to imperialism should stand with Russia for the defeat of this proxy war. However, two left groups prominent in Palestine solidarity – Socialist Alternative and Socialist Alliance – are on the opposite side. They even support U.S. and Australian arms supplies to their Ukraine proxies! If the side that they are backing wins, the U.S.-led imperialists will be greatly strengthened and Israel’s rulers will have a more secure foundation from which to attack the Palestinian people.
The biggest danger to Western imperialist hegemony is the rise of socialistic China. Whereas the entire West is supporting Israel’s war on Gaza, China has called for an end to hostilities and insisted that the “fundamental way out of the conflict lies in … establishing an independent State of Palestine.” Yet this is short of the position that she should take. We call on China to do her socialist duty and unequivocally take the Palestinian side. However, China’s threat to imperialism is far greater than her direct position on Palestine. Her cooperation with the ex-colonial countries enables these countries to achieve greater independence from their imperial overlords. For one, this has encouraged many Arab states to move away from their previous support to imperialism’s proxy war against Syria – resulting in Syria’s readmission into the Arab League. More fundamentally, the success of China’s socialistic system in lifting her people’s living standards could eventually encourage the unhappy masses in the West to also take the socialist path by deposing their own rulers. That is why the capitalist powers are waging an intense Cold War against China. And that is why everyone suffering because of the tyranny of the Western rulers – the Palestinian people, the masses of the Global South and the working class masses in the West itself – must stand resolutely with socialistic China, despite her imperfect and still unfinished transition to socialism. Let us demand: Down with the U.S./Australian military build-up against China! Down with the lying propaganda attacks against China over “human rights”, Taiwan and Uyghurs!
BUILD WORKERS ACTION AGAINST THE AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT’S SUPPORT FOR ISRAEL’S WAR ON PALESTINIAN PEOPLE!
Given Australian rulers’ brutal subjugation of Aboriginal people, it is expected that they would support Israel’s occupation of Palestine. And given the horrific atrocities committed by the Australian rulers’ forces in Afghanistan it is little surprise that this ruling class would support its Israeli allies also committing war crimes. However, the Australian regime’s support for Israeli terror is not just due to such “shared values”, it is also based on its own self-interest. The Australian ruling class defends Israel because it wants the U.S.-dominated world order that Israel enforces to be protected. It is the U.S. godfather that enables Australian corporations’ plunder of the Pacific and beyond. Moreover, enraged that socialistic China’s cooperation with Pacific countries is making it harder for them to ride roughshod over these countries in the way that they previously did, Australia’s capitalists are counting on their U.S. senior partner to squeeze socialistic China to death. However, for these very same reasons, it is in the interests of the Australian working class to oppose both the Israeli regime and the U.S.-dominated world order that underpins Israel’s terror. For any weakening of Australia’s capitalist ruling class makes it easier for the working class to resist the capitalists’ increasing exploitation of workers’ labour and the forcing of workers into ever more insecure jobs. This truth makes it possible to win workers to unleashing the desperately needed industrial action against Canberra’s support for Israel’s terror.
However, the ALP government’s fervent support for Israel’s war on Gaza shows the big obstacle we face to building such action. For this same ALP currently leads the workers movement. Many supporters of the Palestinian cause have painstakingly worked within the ALP for decades to try and shift its Palestine policy. The last few days shows how futile such efforts are. For any minor tinkering “achieved” is meaningless, because, at the critical moments, the ALP is right behind Israel’s war on the Palestinian people. The ALP takes this stance because that is what is in the interests of the Australian capitalist class which the ALP ultimately kowtows to. The struggle to build workers solidarity with the Palestinian people – just like the fight to mobilise the working class behind Aboriginal people’s struggle for liberation and its own struggle against capitalist exploitation – requires squeezing out the ALP from the leadership of the workers movement in favour of a new internationalist leadership that is implacably opposed to imperialism and capitalism.
COMPLETELY FALSE CLAIMS OF “ANTI-SEMITISM” THROWN AT THE PALESTINE SOLIDARITY MOVEMENT
The likes of Albanese and Liberal leader Peter Dutton are not only unequivocally supporting Israel’s massacre of Gaza’s people but are also opposing all pro-Palestinian protests in Australia. They especially targeted Monday’s demonstration organised by the Palestine Action Group (PAG). That protest rightly marched on the Sydney Opera House to protest the deeply offensive decision to light the sails of the building with the Israeli flag just when the military fighting under that flag was bombing to death hundreds of children in Gaza. Now the NSW Police and NSW Labor premier, Chris Minns, are seeking to sabotage a Palestine solidarity protest called by the PAG for Sunday. Minns said that he will take action against the protest and will not allow the planned rally to “commandeer Sydney streets”. Acting Police Commissioner David Hudson threatened to shut down the protest saying, “In our opinion, it won’t be happening — it’s unauthorised at this stage.” This shows the bogus nature of the capitalist regime’s claims to stand for “democracy” and “free speech.” It is important that Sunday’s planned pro-Palestinian protest succeed at this critical time. We appeal to our readers to join the protest at 1pm on this Sunday, October 15 at Sydney’s Hyde Park Town Hall Square(note change in venue) to Stop the War on Gaza! We call on people to raise slogans at the rally in opposition to the U.S. and Australian rulers who prop up Israel’s tyranny and in opposition to the Western imperialist domination of the world that underpins Israel’s subjugation of Palestine.
To help them undermine any actions in support of the Palestinian people, Albanese, Dutton, Minns, the mainstream media and the pro-Israel lobby have, completely falsely, accused the Opera House protest of being “anti-Semitic.” They were abetted by the fact that a small number of idiotic people – mostly teens – who were around the Opera House for another reason entered the rally and started shouting disgusting anti-Semitic chants. To their credit, the PAG (which is dominated by the Socialist Alternative group that we criticised earlier for their stance on the Ukraine War) issued a powerful statement after the rally that denounced this tiny fringe and demolished the attempts to tarnish the overall action as being “anti-Semitic”:
“They were quickly condemned for their chants and asked to leave. Long-standing Palestinian organisers and activists, Palestinian, Arab and Muslim elders attending the protest were disgusted and deplored by the action. This is not what our movement stands for. We oppose Zionism, an ideology distinct from Judaism. We oppose Israel, a racist state which has waged genocide on Palestinians. We are an anti-racist and anti-colonial movement and we refuse to fight racism with racism.”
For the Australian rulers to claim to be concerned about anti-Semitism is rank hypocrisy. They are right now funneling huge quantities of military equipment to the Ukrainian Armed Forces that not only include particular neo-Nazi battalions – like the Azov Regiment – that seek the slaughter of Jews but avowedly stand on the traditions of World War II Ukrainian Nazi collaborator, Stepan Bandera. Bandera’s Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists massacred tens of thousands of Polish and Jewish people and took part in the Holocaust in Ukraine and Poland.
Moreover, the Zionist project that the Western ruling classes back is hardly the sanctuary for Jews that the Zionist rulers claim it to be. As we explained in our article five months ago when Israel demolished a Palestinian school at the Jabbet al-Dhib village in the West Bank:
“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.”
Last Saturday’s events have tragically proven the correctness of these points. The only people that the Zionist project does actually serve are the U.S. imperialists and their allies – who need a reliable deputy sheriff in the strategically located Middle East – and the Israeli capitalist class. These latter capitalists exploit the workers of their country just like capitalists everywhere else. As our article insisted:
“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.”
What keeps Israel’s Jewish working class loyal to the Jewish capitalist rulers that exploit them is the intense racial/religious supremacist ideas that Zionism is based on. Given the intensity of this chauvinism, it will take workers’ uprisings in other parts of the Middle East to finally bring class-struggle sentiments to the fore amongst the Israeli working class. However, given the massive Western support for Israel (including economic aid that brings the Israeli working class a fairly privileged position relative to their Arab neighbours and that in turn contributes much to their current subservience to the Zionist project), the imperialist meddling in the Arab world that shores up the current social order and the fact that the mass killings of Israeli civilians last weekend has only magnified Zionist chauvinism in Israel many times over, the liberation of Palestine is inconceivable right now without mass struggle within the Western countries against the imperialist backers of Israel.
That means that leftist supporters of Palestine in U.S.-allied Australia have a huge responsibility. We can make a great contribution to the Palestinian people’s liberation by building mass workers’ actions to oppose the Australian rulers’ support for Israel’s subjugation of Palestine and oppose the entire Western domination of the world that underpins Israel’s tyranny over Palestine. Helping us to mobilise such struggles is the fact that large parts of the population distrust Australia’s ruling elite as their reign is only bringing the masses unaffordable living costs, steeply rising rents and economic insecurity.
Top Left: U.S. president Joe Biden greets far-right Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the sidelines of September’s UN General Assembly meeting. Top Right: Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese. Without the decisive support of Biden, Albanese and other Western imperialist leaders, Netanyahu would not have been able to get away with unleashing his heinous war on the people of Gaza. Below: Palestinians remove a dead body from a destroyed building after an October 9 Israeli air raid on Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp that killed dozens of civilians. Bottom: Children injured in Israeli air strikes at a hospital in Gaza city on October 9. In just the first fix days of air raids in its attack on Gaza, Israel has killed 447 children. Netanyahu, Biden and Albanese have a lot of blood on their hands!
FIGHT FOR THE LIBERATION OF PALESTINE BY WORKING TO TOPPLE WESTERN IMPERIALIST TYRANNY OVER THE WORLD
Western imperialism’s domination of the world is far from secure. Western capitalist economies are lurching from crisis to crisis, their populations are cynical about their so-called “democracies” and capitalist rule in the West itself is facing an eventual existential threat from the inspirational effect of socialistic China’s successes. Under all these stresses, the capitalist ruling classes in the West are deeply divided. However, these imperialist ruling classes will not fall by themselves. In fact, what we are seeing is that these capitalist classes are doing everything possible to preserve their power. In many countries, they are turning to evermore vile, far-right parties to administer their systems – something that their Israeli proxies have done too. In the end, they will even be prepared to implement the horrific, fascist form of capitalism, as the German capitalists did in the 1930s, to keep themselves in power. Moreover, the savagery of the Israeli war on Gaza that they are avidly backing shows the brutality that the Western imperialists are capable of when that is what is needed to protect their tyranny. It is a sign that they will be prepared to kill millions of people by unleashing a catastrophic war on socialistic China if they feel that this is what it takes to crush a threat to their capitalist domination of the globe.
So let us work with all our energy to build struggles against the increasingly dangerous, Western imperialist ruling classes. Let us stand by the socialistic China that “threatens” Western imperialist domination of the world! Let us build actions in Australia, the U.S. and other Western countries against each of our own rulers’ support for Washington’s Israeli proxies! Let us stand with the people of Gaza by waging political war against the Australian, U.S. and other Western rulers that enable Israel’s Nazi-like war. Let us mobilise vigorous class-struggle resistance that will shake the foundations of the Australian, U.S. and other Western regimes so intensely that the Israeli regime that they uphold will topple over! That is the best way that supporters in Australia of the oppressed Palestinian people can fight for the liberation of Palestine.
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 2023by 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!
13 May 2023, Nablus, Palestine’s occupied West Bank: The Balata refugee camp following a deadly assault by the Israeli army. The Israeli forces opened fire on the residents of the camp after they objected to the troops raiding the camp and surrounding a house. The Israeli military killed two Palestinians by shooting them in the head – 32 year-old Saed Jihad Masheh and 19 year-old Adnan Wasim – and injured three others, including an elderly woman. Photo credit: Ayman Noubani/Palestine News & Info Agency
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.
2 May 2023, Ramallah, Palestine’s occupied West Bank: Large numbers of Palestinians marched in several West Bank cities to protest the death of Palestinian activist, Khader Adnan, who died after an 86-day hunger strike in protest at his detention without charge. The Israeli regime imprisons over a thousand other Palestinians without charge in such military detention. Photo credit: Palestine News & Info Agency
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!
Photo Above: 15 May 2022, Ramallah, West Bank, Occupied Palestine: Thousands of Palestinians protest on Nakba (the Catastrophe) Day, the 74th anniversary of Israel’s murderous ethnic cleansing of three quarter of a million Palestinian people from their homes. Photo Credit: Ayman Nobani/Xinhua
DEFEND THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE!
OPPOSE THE U.S. & AUSTRALIAN REGIMES BACKING ISRAEL’S TYRANNY!
RESIST THE WESTERN IMPERIALIST DOMINATION OF THE WORLD UNDERPINNING THE SUBJUGATION OF PALESTINIAN PEOPLE
12 May 2022: Yesterday, the Israeli military demolished several homes of Palestinian residents in the Masafer Yatta region south of the West Bank city of Hebron. This atrocity is part of Israel’s plan to evict some 1,000 residents from the area. If Israel is able to get away with this, it would be one of the biggest single expulsions of Palestinians since Israel seized the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. Palestinian families are being driven from homes and lands that they have lived, farmed and herded on for generations – going back long before Israel’s murderous ethnic cleansing of Palestinians was unleashed in the 1948 Nakba (Catastrophe). Simultaneously, Israel is accelerating the construction of Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank in order to further displace Palestinian people and undermine their just demands for statehood. Today, the regime announced that it would be building an additional 4,300 Jewish-only housing units in the West Bank.
The U.S. and Australian-backed Israeli regime is subjugating Palestinian people in an ever more brazen way. During the recent Muslim holy month of Ramadan, Israeli forces repeatedly carried out violent raids on the Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem, one of Islam’s holiest sites. They injured hundreds of Palestinian worshippers as they unleashed volleys of rubber bullets, tear gas cannisters and stun grenades. Israeli state forces are being encouraged to commit ever more cruel acts by increasingly active fascist groups amongst the Jewish “settlers” that have gone to colonise the West Bank. These fascist mobs have not only spearheaded the attacks on Al Aqsa and threateningly marched on Palestinian villages but have beaten and murdered Palestinian residents, torched their homes and cut down their food crops. Israeli forces have murdered over 50 Palestinian people in 2022 alone.
The working class and all oppressed of Australia and the world and all opponents of national oppression must stand with the persecuted Palestinian people. We must demand: Israel and its far-right “settlers” get out of all of the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza! For the right of return of Palestinian refugees to their pre-Nakba homes and lands! Let us support the Palestinian resistance against the murdering Israeli security forces and the fascist “settler” groups!
MOBILISE THE WORKERS MOVEMENT IN SUPPORT OF THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE’S RESISTANCE
Israel is only able to subjugate Palestinian people because it receives massive military, economic and diplomatic backing from the U.S. imperialist superpower and the Americans’ closest allies, like Australia, and because of the complicity of the other Western imperialist powers likes Britain, Germany and Japan. That is why supporters of Palestinian rights in Australia must oppose the Australian rulers’ backing of Israel and must fight against the Australian ruling class’ support for the U.S. juggernaut that underpins Israel’s terror. Down with Canberra’s military cooperation and diplomatic backing of Israel! U.S. troops out of Darwin! Close the Pine Gap spy base and all the joint U.S.-Australia military bases in Australia! Down with the ANZUS Alliance! Down with AUKUS – Down with the new Cold War drive against socialistic China!
Although there are powerful pro-Israel lobbies in the U.S. and Australia, this is not the main reason why Washington and Canberra uphold Israel’s persecution of Palestinian people. The U.S. and Australian capitalist ruling classes uphold Israel’s tyranny because this is in their own class interests. The ultra-rich owners of the U.S. and Australia’s mines, banks, factories, agribusiness, transport operations and service sector firms not only exploit workers in their own countries but also exploit workers at an even more intense rate in the ex-colonial countries of the Middle East, Asia, the Pacific, Africa and Latin America where they also loot the natural resources and seize control of markets. To enforce this tyranny, these imperialist powers use not only their own militaries but also those of various “deputy sheriffs” who they back to enforce their interests in return for a share of the imperialist loot. Israel is the Middle East deputy sheriff of U.S. imperialism. Along with the Saudi regime, Israel was built up as the enforcer in the oil-rich Middle East of the imperialist powers’ drive against the USSR-led socialistic bloc during the Cold War. Today, Israel is both a strategically located ally of Western imperialism in their new Cold War drive against socialistic China and a henchman against local forces that dare not bow down enough to the Western imperialist tyrants, whether they be groups in Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq or “disobedient” countries like Syria and Iran. For playing this role, Israel’s powerful U.S. godfathers are happy to uphold its subjugation of Palestinian people and to turn a blind eye (or more cynically, give meaningless, gentle slaps on the wrist) to its most heinous atrocities. This is similar to how Washington covers up the Australian ruling class’ horrendous oppression of Aboriginal people and its brutal persecution of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African refugees in recognition of the crucial role that the Australian rulers play as America’s deputy sheriff in the South Pacific.
Given the interests that Australia’s imperialist ruling class has in propping up Israel’s tyrannical role in the Middle East, it is unsurprising that all the pro-capitalist parties in Australia, which includes all the parties currently in parliament, defend Israel. To be sure The Greens, unlike the right-wing Liberals or the ALP, do call out Israel’s worst atrocities. However, their position of “condemning violence on all sides”, which disgustingly equates the violence of the Israeli oppressors with the just resistance of a subjugated people, is far from genuine solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for self-determination. Moreover, while Greens politicians do attend pro-Palestinian rallies in Australia, one can be suspicious that this is mostly a vote gathering practice, given that nowhere in The Greens official foreign policy election platform – that is in what they present to everyone as opposed to what they promise to known Palestinian supporters – do they even mention support for the Palestinian national liberation struggle. Instead, while they call to “renegotiate” Australia’s alliance with the U.S., they nevertheless uphold this alliance, and thereby uphold a pact that strengthens the U.S. imperialist superpower that props up Israel.
Alongside the geostrategic interests that the U.S., Australian, Canadian and New Zealand ruling classes have in backing Israel, all these capitalist rulers feel a connection with Israel’s rulers because, like the latter, their own rule was also founded on the colonial dispossession and murderous subjugation of the peoples living on the lands that they now lord over. If one sees the way that Australian state forces brutalise Aboriginal adults and children in custody and then cover up these crimes – like how a racist white police officer killed an unarmed Aboriginal man Kumanjayi Walker by shooting him three times at close range yet was two months ago acquitted of murdering the Aboriginal teenager by the Northern Territory courts – it has many similarities to Israel’s heinous persecution of Palestinian people.
Given their ideological affinity with the Israeli ruling class and more significantly, the interests that they have in upholding Israel’s strength, it is impossible to make the capitalist rulers of the U.S. or Australia an ally of the Palestinian people. However, what we can do is to force these imperialists to back off their level of support for Israel. Such a perspective is, however, undermined to the extent that many supporters of Palestinian rights continue to believe that it is possible to win over Australia’s ruling class to the side of the Palestinians. For the latter notion falsely implies that what we need to do is to appeal to Australia’s capitalist rulers when what we must do is the very opposite: we need to punish the ruling class for their backing of Israel’s reign of terror. One cannot appeal to the conscience of Australia’s capitalist class as they are not driven by conscience but by the drive to expand profits and to shape the world order in such a way that their profits both at home and abroad are secured and maximised. Instead, we must threatenthe profits and political authority of Australia’s capitalist rulers to such an extent that the harm that they would thereby suffer outweighs the geostrategic benefits that they gain from upholding the Israeli, Middle East deputy sheriff of their American godfathers. The key force for achieving this perspective is the organised workers movement. Trade union political strikes here in protest at the Australian regime’s support for Israel would hurt the profits of Australia’s capitalist rulers and could, therefore, arm-twist them to dial back their support for Israel.
Union action against Israel’s tyranny is possible because not only is such struggle vitally needed it is also in the very interests of the workers movement. By striking economic and political blows against a key deputy sheriff of U.S. and allied imperialism, the workers movement would be landing punches against the U.S. and Australian imperialist ruling classes themselves. In other words they would be weakening the very same capitalist rulers who at home are driving down workers’ real wages, jacking up rents and prices, pushing ever more workers into precarious gig and casual jobs and who in their efforts to prevent the masses uniting to resist their ever greater exploitation of working class people are scapegoating Aboriginal First Peoples and people of Asian, Muslim, African, Middle Eastern and Islander backgrounds. Any damage done to the strength of the Australian ruling class by weakening its international position will necessarily aid the struggle against exploitation and racism at home.
A small number of the left-wing led unions have indeed shown some solidarity with the Palestinian cause by attending pro-Palestinian rallies in Australia. However, such acts are undercut by the fact that the workers movement in Australia is currently led by the Labor Party, a party that from its support for anti-strike laws, to its fulsome backing of the Cold War drive against socialistic China to its defence of Israel is determined to prove to Australia’s ruling class that it is as reliable a defender of the capitalist class’ key interests as the right-wing Liberal-National Coalition are. The struggle to mobilise the working class in support of the Palestinian people is thus closely bound up with the struggle to reorient the workers movement onto a new truly anti-capitalist agenda – an agenda that is needed to not only ensure working class support for oppressed peoples like Aboriginal people and the Palestinians but which is essential to the fight for the working-class’ own rights.
STANDING WITH THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE MEANS OPPOSING WESTERN IMPERIALISM’S MASSIVE BACKING FOR ITS UKRAINIAN PROXY IN EUROPE’S LATEST WAR
An example of just how emboldened Israel is right now to crush the Palestinian people was seen yesterday when the Israeli military murdered American-Palestinian, Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in a targeted assassination. Of course this is hardly Israel’s first murder of journalists and certainly not of Palestinian people more generally. However, Abu Akleh was not only a Palestinian journalist but a citizen of the United States, the main country that is propping up Israel. Moreover, unlike American student Rachel Corrie who was a leftist opponent of U.S. imperialism when she was murdered by the Israeli military in 2003 while courageously helping to protect Palestinian homes in the Gaza strip from demolition, Abu Akleh worked for a news organization that while covering Palestinian issues more fairly is overall a rabid promoter of U.S. imperialism – from its support for the Western imperialist agenda in the Syrian and Ukraine Wars to its retailing of anti-China, anti-communist propaganda.
Part of the reason why the Israeli regime thinks it can now get away with acting even more brazenly than in the past has to do with the context of the Ukraine-Russia War. In order to prevent Russia emerging as a potential capitalist competitor and to push her back down to the humiliated position that she had in the first decade after the destruction of the USSR, the U.S.-led Western imperialists are throwing huge amounts of arms, money and propaganda into supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia. The Western imperialists are so driven by this agenda that they are more than willing to abandon any minor disputes they may have had with any force that contributes to this anti-Russia campaign. For example, the Western mainstream media had in the past occasionally reported on the influence in the Ukrainian state of brutal fascist paramilitary groups like the white supremacist Azov Battalion. Even as the U.S. military trained the Azov forces, Washington was worried that too open support for such avowed neo-Nazis would constitute a bad look. However, today such misgivings have been totally abandoned. Western regimes and media openly hail the “resistance” of the Mariupol-based Azov regiment and completely whitewash both its ultra-racist, Nazi character and its torture and murder of pro-Russia civilians. Similarly, in the past, the likes of France and Germany had made mild criticisms of the extreme hostility to dark-skinned refugees, persecution of LGBTIQ+ people and authoritarian repression of dissent by the hard right government in Poland. The EU powers were worried that the openness of these repressive policies was undermining the EU’s claims to uphold “democracy.” However, today as the Polish government has put itself up as an extreme frontline opponent of Russia, these mild rebukes of her by her Western allies have softened into total silence. Israel is now also a crucial part of the anti-Russia campaign. Not only do the far-right infested Ukrainian and Israeli regimes enthusiastically support each other, Israel has also recently played a headline role in the propaganda campaign against Russia by accusing Russia of committing war crimes in Ukraine and by fanatically attacking Moscow’s basically correct point (albeit distracted by her foreign minister Lavarov’s false and hurtful claim – for which Putin later apologised – that Hitler had Jewish roots) that just because Ukrainian president Zelenskyy is Jewish does not change the fact that the neo-Nazis play a significant role in the Ukrainian regime. Aware of its importance to the anti-Russia campaign of its Western imperialist backers, Israel knows that its allies will tolerate it acting in an even more heinously cruel manner than usual. And the Palestinian people are the victims of this.
Unfortunately, the murdering Israeli regime’s calculation has thus far proven correct. It was striking how the U.S. State Department responded to the questions about the impartiality of the “investigation” into the murder of Abu Akleh announced by Israel. State Department spokesman Ned Price kept on insisting that Israel has the “wherewithal and the capabilities to conduct a thorough, comprehensive investigation” and rejected calls for an independent probe. In other words, the U.S. imperialists are willing to accept the whitewash of the murder of their own citizen by the Israeli regime even though she worked for a thoroughly pro-Western news organisation in Al Jazeera. Earlier, as anti-Russian propaganda ramped up in the tense days leading up to the Ukraine-Russia War, the Australian government further boosted its support for Israel by outrageously designating Hamas in its entirety to be a “terrorist” organisation (in contrast to the previous stance that only recognized the group’s military wing as such).
Some pro-Palestinian groups in Australia, like the Socialist Alternative group, claim that the West is not being consistent by supporting Ukraine against Russia while refusing to support the Palestinian cause. However, the truth is that the Palestinian people’s completely justified resistance against Israeli occupation has very little in common with Ukraine in its conflict with Russia. For one, a major trigger of the Russian intervention was Ukraine’s brutal persecution of Russian-speaking people living in the eastern Donbass region of Ukraine over the last eight years. The post-2014 Ukrainian regime threatened these peoples’ language and cultural rights. When the Russian-speaking people protested, they were brutally attacked by fascist Ukrainian paramilitary groups that have many similarities to the far-right settler groups in the West Bank. In the eight years prior to the current escalation of the conflict, Ukrainian state forces and their fascist paramilitaries killed around 10,000 of the Russian speaking people in the Donbass who were struggling for their self-determination. In that sense, it is more Ukraine rather than Russia that has been mirroring the oppressive terror of Israel. To be sure, in sending Russian forces into Ukraine, Moscow’s agenda is more than merely defending the persecuted Russian-speaking populations in the East and South of Ukraine and pre-emptively pushing back NATO’s threatening eastwards expansion to her borders. Moscow also seeks to quench the capitalist thirst for ever greater access to guaranteed markets by grabbing more territory and simultaneously advancing her quest to become a new imperial power. However, by violently resisting the wish of many Russian-speaking people in the south and east of Ukraine to either join Russia or have closer ties with her, the Ukrainian regime is also driven by the capitalist push to maximise their own country’s territories.
The Western imperialists say that Russia’s intervention into Ukraine is “threatening the rules-based international order.” But this order is a brutal, oppressive one where the U.S. ruling class and its allied counterparts in the likes of Britain, Australia and Germany set the “rules” which they then make everyone else follow … except themselves! This “rules-based” order has seen the U.S., British and Australian imperialists brutally invade and ravage Iraq twice, devastate Afghanistan during a cruel twenty year occupation, NATO destroy Libya through a bloody 2011 regime change invasion, the devastation of Syria in a Western proxy war, the killing of large numbers of Pakistani people in U.S. drone strikes, the brutal U.S./Australian colonial occupation of Somalia, the 1999 NATO terror bombing of Yugoslavia, the bloody Western-backed Saudi war on Yemen, etc, etc. Moreover, it is this Western imperialist-dominated “rules-based world order” that sustains Israel’s brutal oppression of Palestinian people.
The significance of the Ukraine-Russia conflict to the Western-dominated “world order” and therefore to the Palestinian cause has grown markedly over the last two and a half months. When the Russian troops first intervened, the Western powers, while supporting Ukraine, shied away from providing her with the heavy weapons needed to really take on Russia. However, drunk with their own war propaganda, the Western imperialists have now drastically increased their level of military support to Ukraine – including the provision of heavy weapons, direct training of Ukrainian soldiers and the actual presence of Western special forces’ advisers in Ukraine. Having now invested far more in this conflict than they previously had, the outcome of this war will in turn affect far more the U.S., Australian and other Western imperialists. Should their Ukrainian allies triumph it would embolden Western imperialism and thus intensify the subjugation of Palestinian people, increase the Cold War threats to socialistic China and North Korea, increase the dangers faced by “disobedient” countries like Iran, Venezuela and Syria and intensify Western imperialist exploitation of the developing countries. On the other hand, while a Russian military victory would encourage reactionary nationalism within Russia and boost the authority of Russia’s capitalist exploiting class, it would weaken the U.S., British, Australian, German, Japanese and other Western imperialists who have so avidly backed the other side. This would be a good thing for all those subjugated by Western imperialism and its proxies, including the Palestinian people. Therefore, while Russian anti-capitalists would have to oppose their own ruling class while explicitly opposing NATO and refusing to ally with pro-Western pacifists, opponents of imperialism and capitalism in the rest of the globe, especially in the Western imperialist countries themselves, must campaign for the defeat of the Western imperialist-backed side in this war and oppose the growing intervention of the U.S., Australian and other imperial ruling classes into the conflict. That is why we in Trotskyist Platform say: Let’s oppose all the economic sanctions on Russia! Let’s campaign to stop all Western military supplies to the Ukrainian military! Let’s undermine the Western-imperialist controlled “world order” that underpins Israel’s brutal subjugation of the Palestinian people!
Unfortunately, most of the rest of the Left in Australia have taken the opposite position. The Socialist Alternative, Solidarity and Socialist Alliance groups are all backing the U.S., Australian and Israeli-backed Ukraine side in this war. The Australian Communist Party (ACP) formally takes a position of opposing both sides in the conflict but by proudly stating that “the ACP condemns the attack by the forces of the Russian Federation on Ukraine” the ACP in practice gravitates towards supporting imperialist-backed Ukraine. Although the members of all these groups sincerely hold their support for the Palestinian cause, by backing the side of the Western imperialists in the Ukraine-Russia conflict they are supporting the forces that uphold Israel’s tyranny over Palestine. Most of these groups – in particular the Socialist Alternative, Solidarity and Socialist Alliance groups – similarly backed the side of Western imperialism during the Syrian war when they supported imperialism’s Syrian proxies against the Syrian government; and in doing so also put themselves in a de facto military bloc with the Israeli regime that launched hundreds of airstrikes against Syrian government positions.
We insist that true solidarity with the Palestinian people and all those suffering under the direct and indirect tyranny of Western imperialism means slashing back at the U.S., Australian, British, German, Japanese and other Western imperialist ruling classes in every single field where they extend their claws. That means that as well as opposing Western imperialist intervention into the Ukraine conflict and their support for Israel, we must stand for: All U.S. and allied forces out of Iraq, Syria and all the Middle East! Down with the imperialist threats to Iran! Down with all imperialism’s proxies in Syria! U.S. troops out of the Korean Peninsula! Australian imperialist rulers: Get your bullying hands off the Solomon Islands and the rest of the South Pacific! Down with the cruel imperialist-driven sanctions against North Korea, Iran, Venezuela and Afghanistan!
STANDING WITH PALESTINE MEANS STANDING WITH SOCIALISTIC CHINA!
The U.S., Australian and other imperial ruling classes see a far greater threat to their domination of the world than the one posed by their would-be Russian competitor. And that is the threat to imperialist domination of the world posed by the rise of China. Unlike Russia, which is today just another capitalist country, China is a workers state formed when the toiling classes grabbed state power in a giant anti-capitalist revolution in 1949 and which continues to have an economy centred on socialist, public ownership of key sectors. Of all the main powers in the world, including Russia, the Peoples Republic of China currently takes the strongest position in support of Palestine. However, China’s support remains far below what it should be. China’s compromising leaders take a narrow, national-centred approach to foreign policy where they seek to build socialism only in China while trying to ensure “peaceful coexistence” with the capitalist world by avoiding any aggressive involvement in any issues abroad that do not very directly affect China’s interests. This policy is a flawed response to the immense hostile pressure that China faces from the capitalist powers. China’s leaders hope that should they avoid threatening capitalist interests abroad, the capitalist powers will in turn avoid attacking China. However, this policy has been a failure. Whereas, China indeed does little to actively promote anti-capitalist struggle abroad, the imperialist powers are doing everything possible to strangle socialistic rule in China. However, should greater solidarity with Red China from working class people around the world arise, stauncher communists within China would get a greater hearing when they push for China to take a much stronger stance in opposing capitalism and imperialism abroad. This can only be a good thing for the Palestinian people.
Moreover, even though the current Beijing leadership does not seek to challenge Western imperialism’s domination over the world, the mere existence of China as a socialistic power is slowly undermining the grip of imperialism over the ex-colonial countries. China’s mutually beneficial cooperation with the Global South is allowing countries in the Pacific, Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America to access capital, modern technology, training and a large market in China without having to subordinate their country to the imperial powers or their agencies like the IMF. This is what is driving Australia’s capitalist rulers mad as countries in the South Pacific like the Solomon Islands and Fiji slowly exert greater independence from their Australian imperialist overlords. Eventually, some Arab countries may even finally start exerting greater independence from Washington and its allies, which can only be a good thing for the Palestinian struggle.
Furthermore, the capitalist powers are terrified that even though Beijing does nothing to explicitly promote socialist revolution, the mere example presented by the most populous country in the world continuing to adhere to a socialistic course, while successfully lifting her people out of poverty and providing rapidly rising real wages, wide access to low-rent public housing and ever improving infrastructure, public transport and cultural opportunities for her masses, will encourage working class people in the capitalist world to themselves start agitating for socialism. That is why the Western ruling classes see the rise of socialistic China as an “existential threat.” Of course, if their worst fears are indeed confirmed and the working classes in the West, inspired by socialistic China’s successes, overturn capitalist rule in their own countries that could very quickly open the road to the liberation of Palestine.
More immediately, if solidarity from the masses around the world is able to protect socialistic China such that she is allowed to continue to rapidly rise, this will inevitably loosen the grip of the U.S., Australian and other Western imperialists over the world. That will in turn naturally weaken the Washington-propped up Israeli regime and bring more opportunities for the Palestine liberation cause as well as for the struggles of all people living under the tyranny of the imperial powers. Therefore, all consistent supporters of the Palestinian struggle, all opponents of imperialism and all supporters of working class interests must stand for the unconditional defence of the Chinese workers state against imperialist threats and internal pro-capitalist forces. Down with the lying propaganda war against Red China over Taiwan, Uyghurs, Tibet, Hong Kong, the COVID response and the Pacific! U.S./ British/Australian navies get out of the South China Sea! Oppose the Australian capitalist regime’s anti-China military build up: no to nuclear submarines, no to missiles! For the right of the Solomon Islands and any other country to engage in military and economic cooperation with Red China to the extent that they see fit!
Occupied East Jerusalem, Friday, May 13, 2022: Israeli police horrifically attack mourners as they carry the casket of slain Palestinian-U.S. journalist Shireen Abu Akleh who was shot dead during an Israeli military raid in the West Bank town of Jenin last Wednesday. Under the cover of the war in Ukraine, the brutal, occupying ethno-nationalist Israeli regime has been given the green light from its big brother in Washington to even more brazenly attack the long suffering Palestinian people and their brave struggle of resistance. Working class people of all colours, nationalities and religions must join together with all oppressed peoples to resist the bloody, U.S.-led capitalist world order & extend sororal & fraternal comradely hands of friendship and encouragement to the workers state in China which – despite capitalist encroachment into her economy and imperialist pressure from abroad – remains, alongside the international working class, the only world power that can truly stand up to the imperialists and stop the dead hand of Washington and Canberra et al dragging us all into an ever broadening, greed-driven downwards spiral of oppression, poverty and racism.
ISRAEL = DEADLY OPPRESSION OF PALESTINIAN PEOPLE + NO FUTURE FOR JEWS EITHER
Recent weeks have confirmed that while Israel spells murderous subjugation for Palestinian people it cannot even deliver on the main promise that Zionist leaders use to sell Israel: that it will be a secure homeland for Jewish people. The building of an ethno-religious state through murderous ethnic cleansing of another people and through ongoing murderous terror against the dispossessed people inevitably provokes resistance and violent responses. Most of the Palestinian armed resistance takes the form of completely justified blows against the Israeli security forces and fascist settler groups. A small number of desperate Palestinians also lash out in pointless and harmful to their cause attacks on Israeli civilians. That is the byproduct of the brutal Israeli subjugation of Palestine. Although far more Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli security forces, 19 Israelis have also been killed in 2022 in occupation-connected violence including several police officers, a security guard, two Israeli troops killed in an accidental attack by a nervous fellow soldier and several civilians. Moreover, although massive backing from Washington allows Israelis to enjoy a higher standard of living than neighbouring peoples, life in an ethnic supremacist garrison state is not exactly great: youth are required to undergo long periods of forced military conscription and the reality of Israel’s brutal subjugation of Palestinian people means that Israelis are sometimes consigned to life in bomb shelters to protect themselves from counterattack. Yet Israel’s capitalist ruling class does not have the interests of the Jewish masses as their real concern… and never did! What they really want is a guaranteed market and a state compacted together by extreme nationalism that will allow them to exploit the labour of fellow Jewish, Hebrew-speaking people and to con such Jewish working-class people into feebly accepting this exploitation out of nationalist devotion to the ethno-religious state. Indeed, Israel’s most dramatic intervention into the Ukraine-Russia War has confirmed how little its rulers are truly devoted to the well-being of Jewish people. In slamming Moscow for pointing out that Ukrainian president Zelenskyy’s Jewish heritage does not prevent neo-Nazis from playing a significant role in the Ukrainian state, the Israeli regime covered up the large presence of neo-Nazi groups like the Azov and Aidar regiments in the Ukrainian paramilitary forces and inhabitation of virulently anti-Semitic, fascist individuals in parts of Ukraine’s military and police top brass; while whitewashing the reality that the Ukrainian state glorifies as national heroes two Nazi-collaborating, anti-Soviet, Ukrainian World War II paramilitary groups (Stepan Bandera’s UPA and OUN). During World War II, the UPA and OUN between them murdered tens of thousands of Jewish people and over 100,000 Polish people, while helping their Nazi allies to carry out the Holocaust.
It is crucial that a far-sighted section of the Jewish working class in Israel sees the futility and injustice of the Zionist project and comes over to the side of the subjugated Palestinian people. There are some brave Israelis who do protest the worst excesses of the regime’s anti-Palestinian terror but these individuals need to come over fully to opposing the Israeli state and to standing squarely in solidarity with the Palestinian people’s resistance. They must see that the implicitly ethnic supremacist ideology of Zionist nationalism serves to obscure the fact that Jewish working class people in Israel are being exploited by Jewish capitalists and that Israeli capitalism has left the masses with a poor welfare system, the single highest rate of poverty in the OECD and unaffordable rents and house prices (which the regime has cynically manipulated to encourage people to become West Bank settlers with the promise of cheap land in a strategy typical of all settler colonialist regimes). What is needed is for a slice of the Jewish working class to break from Zionist nationalism and unite with the Palestinian people in toppling the Israeli capitalist state. Such a socialist revolution would produce a binational workers state that would ensure equal rights for people of all ethnicities, would annihilate the fascist Settler forces and would guarantee the right to return of all Palestinian refugees.
Given the national chauvinism that currently infects much of the Israeli population, such a solution presently remains distant. By allowing them a relatively privileged economic position in comparison with neighbouring Arab peoples, massive imperialist aid to Israel has tied much of its masses to the illusions and prejudices of Zionism. But any weakening of Western imperialism and its domination over the world would cut the ground from under the feet of Israel’s capitalist rulers and necessarily stir upheavals amongst the Israeli masses. So let us relentlessly resist the Western imperialist domination of the world that underpins Israel’s subjugation of the Palestinian people! Down with all Western imperialist military aid and sanctions over the Ukraine-Russia War! Stand with socialistic China against imperialist threats and anti-communist forces! Oppose the ANZUS and AUKUS alliances that strengthen the imperialist powers that back Israel’s tyranny! For workers’ industrial action to oppose U.S. and Australian backing for Israel! Let’s resist the U.S. and Australian regimes that support Israel’s terror! Let us make the nest of Zionist expansionism fall by vigorously shaking the imperialist branches on which it is perched and which give it support!
Above photo (Reuters): Israeli police attack brave Palestinian protesters and worshippers at Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque complex, Islam’s third-holiest site. These despicable Israeli attacks using rubber-coated steel bullets and stun grenades was the prelude to their launching of murderous air strikes against the people of Gaza.
Stand with the Palestinian People! Defend Their Resistance!
RESIST THE U.S. & AUSTRALIAN REGIMES & THEIR SUPPORT FOR ISRAEL’S TERROR!
Socialistic China: More Assertively Condemn Israel’s Brutal Violence!
13 May 2021: Israel’s military is slamming missiles into the already embattled population of Gaza. They have destroyed several civilian housing blocks. Already, in just a few days, Israeli forces have killed 83 people in Gaza – including 17 children. The workers movement around the world and all opponents of racism must stand with the Palestinian people against the Israeli terror machine. Israeli military, cops and right-wing colonising settlers get out of all of the West Bank and Gaza!
The immediate prelude to Israel’s latest air strikes was Israel’s push to evict Palestinian people from a Jerusalem neighbourhood to make way for Israeli settlements. When Palestinians protested they were met with brutal attacks by Israeli police and a fascist Israeli settler group. Israeli police then repeatedly unleashed rubber-coated steel bullets into Palestinians gathered in worship and protest at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, one of the holiest sites of Islam. These despicable assaults left hundreds injured. Many worshippers are now fighting for their lives. Palestinian people then retaliated. Palestinians are resisting not only in the Occupied Territories. Palestinians who live within Israel’s pre-1967 boundaries have bravely defied police and far-right mob attacks to protest and raise Palestinian flags over buildings. Now the Israeli regime, headed by the corrupt butcher Netanyahu, is threatening Gaza with a full-scale assault like the genocidal attack of 2014.
Israel gets away with massacring Palestinian people because of the massive support it receives from the Western capitalist powers, especially the USA. New U.S. president Joe Biden is carrying on from where rabidly anti-Palestinian Donald Trump left off. Today, Biden defended Israel’s murderous attacks on Gaza, proclaiming his “unwavering support for Israel’s security.” To make Israel retreat, we must force the U.S. and the other imperialists, like the Australian regime, to back off from their support for Israel. Down with all U.S. and Australian military and economic support for Israel!
OPPOSE THE U.S. AND AUSTRALIAN REGIMES THAT SUPPORT THE SUBJUGATION OF PALESTINIAN PEOPLE
We need to stop Australia’s capitalist rulers from doing harm to the Palestinian cause. However, we should not be looking to them to make a positive intervention. They never will! The U.S. built up Israel to be a Cold War ally against the socialistic USSR in the Middle East and as an enforcer of U.S. domination of the region’s oil wealth. From invading Lebanon, to unleashing attacks on Syria, Iran and other neighbours, to assisting the CIA to overthrow “disobedient” governments, Israel sure has played that role! Today, as socialistic China’s mutually beneficial engagements with some Middle Eastern countries “threatens” to allow these countries to gain a degree of independence from the U.S., Washington needs Israel more than ever. Hence it is willing to allow its Israeli attack dogs to operate on a longer leash. Australia’s ruling class, whether served by Liberal or Labor governments, supports this, because they want to maintain U.S. domination of the world. It is U.S. might that underwrites the Australian imperialists’ exploitation of the South Pacific and beyond.
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Moreover, Australia’s rulers have a special affinity with their Israeli counterparts. For they have much in common. While Israel’s rulers benefit from being Washington’s deputy sheriff in the Middle East, Australia’s rulers enthusiastically play a similar bullying role in the South Pacific. Furthermore, while Israel was built on the murderous ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, White capitalist Australia was built through the even more genocidal dispossession of Aboriginal people. Today, the Australian regime continues to brutally oppress Aboriginal people. Closer to Palestine, the Australian regime has participated in both invasions of Iraq. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, Australian troops have been committing such horrific acts of torture and murder of Afghan children, peasants and prisoners that it has shocked even soldiers from the U.S. military. Then when people try to flee the carnage resulting from such imperialist marauding, the Australian regime imprisons them for years in hell-hole refugee detention camps. Such a racist, imperialist regime can never be a friend of the Palestinian people! Moreover, even if the Australian regime and “like-minded” powers did intervene into Palestine under the guise of “bringing peace” they would do far more harm than good.
The biggest problem with appealing to Australia’s imperialist rulers to help the Palestinian people is that this undermines opposition to these imperialists. By depicting Australia’s racist rulers as a potential saviour of one people facing genocidal oppression, it undercuts Aboriginal people’s struggle against the barbaric oppression that they are copping from these very same rulers. Moreover, any allusion to a possible progressive role for the Australian regime makes the Palestinian solidarity movement dial back its opposition to this capitalist regime in the hope that it can be won over to their side. Such a half-opposing, half-appealing movement will not trouble the capitalist rulers. They will simply ignore it! What we need is a movement that will be irreconcilable in its opposition to Australia’s imperialist rulers. In other words, we need a movement that will scare the regime with the threat that if it continues to back Israel this will lead to greater and more militant social struggle against it. What can most frighten the Australian regime is if workers take industrial action against the capitalists whom this regime serves as part of demanding an end to support for Israel. Such action can be built because it is in the very interests of the working class to undermine the U.S. imperialist godfather – and hence America’s crucial Israeli ally – that protects the power of the capitalist class that exploits workers here.
STOP IMPERIALISTS DISTRACTING FROM ISRAEL’S REAL GENOCIDAL OPPRESSION BY FALSELY ACCUSING CHINA OF “GENOCIDE”
In equal proportion that they hide and excuse Israel’s crimes, the U.S. and its Five Eyes partners have hysterically accused China of committing “genocide” against its Muslim Uyghur minority in China’s northwest. This claim is a complete lie! It is only backed by the same Western imperialist powers that are propping up Israel. Not one Muslim-majority country has endorsed this accusation. Instead, most Muslim-majority and Arab countries have positively praised China’s treatment of Uyghurs, including Palestine’s UN representatives. The small minority of anti-China Uyghurs that Washington is backing are led by filthy rich capitalists who want to overturn China’s socialistic system. They want to establish in China’s northwest a regime servile to Western imperialism like the UAE and Bahraini regimes that collaborate with Netanyahu. If we are to focus the world on the real genocidal subjugation of Palestinian people and the racist oppression of Aboriginal people and also Muslims, Asians and other people of colour in Australia, then we must completely rebuff the West’s lying accusations against China. There is another reason that we must reject these lies. The growing strength of Red China could allow some Middle Eastern countries that choose to befriend her greater room to support the Palestinian struggle. During the period of the existence of the USSR, that socialistic country similarly enabled countries like Syria, Libya and Iraq to have greater independence from the imperialists and that allowed them to provide some backing for Palestinian resistance. This was always inconsistent and very partial as these countries remained under capitalist rule. However, it allowed the Palestinian resistance to be in a much stronger position than it is in today. Similarly, a rising socialistic China will be good for the Palestinian people – just as it is a good thing for the working class and all others hurt by capitalist rule in Australia and worldwide. That is why all supporters of the Palestinian cause and all working class people must stand with socialistic China against the Cold War drive of the U.S. and Australian capitalist regimes.
Indeed, as the world’s only non-capitalist power, China’s rulers are one government that Palestine supporters should seriously appeal to. Unlike Washington and Canberra, Beijing has somewhat sided with the Palestinians. However, its support is way too mild. China’s rulers pursue a policy of “friendly coexistence” with imperialism in the hope that the capitalist powers will not undermine China. This is a failed policy – the imperialist powers are doing everything possible to crush socialistic China. We say to the Chinese people: the only way to protect your great achievements won through socialism is to wake up from the dream of “coexistence” with imperialism and to, instead, build solidarity with the toilers and oppressed also targeted by imperialism. This means, China must more aggressively support the Palestinian cause!
STOP ISRAEL’S TERROR THROUGH STRUGGLE BOTH OUTSIDE AND WITHIN ITS BORDERS
Even when not unleashing bombs, Israel brutally subjugates the Palestinian people. It evicts ever more Palestinians from their homes and even destroys their water infrastructure. It consigns most Palestinians to a hellish life. But even for many working class Jewish people, Israel is not great. They face high unemployment and non-European Jews, especially from Africa, face racist discrimination. The growth of extreme right-wing groups incited by the regime’s ever more vicious oppression of Palestinian people threatens non-white Jews still further and endangers trade union activists and women’s rights activists too. In the end, the only people who clearly benefit from the Zionist project are the U.S., its allies and Israel’s capitalists who use racial supremacist notions to keep the masses that they exploit loyal to them.
Today, a small number of Israeli Jews courageously refuse to endorse the subjugation of Palestinian people. In the end they must prevail. For the fact that alongside the huge number of Palestinian people killed in the last few days, seven Israelis have also died proves that the Zionist project is not sustainable. Like a bullying resident who constantly impeaches on all their neighbours’ land but then finds out that being hated by all their neighbours is no fun at all, a chunk of the Jewish working class in Israel will eventually realise that living in a racialist state, built on ethnic cleansing Arabs from land in a region surrounded by 350 million Arabs, is a stupid idea. Yet the massive support that Israel receives from the U.S., Australian and other Western imperialist regimes presently allows the Israeli ruling class to dupe most of the masses that they exploit with the fallacies of Zionism. That is why it is so crucial that we resist the U.S. and Australian regimes that support Israel’s terror. Let us make the nest of Zionist expansionism fall by vigorously shaking the imperialist branches on which it is perched and which give it support! For workers industrial action to oppose U.S. and Australian backing for Israel! Encourage the brave Palestinian resistance and any brave acts of solidarity by pro-Palestinian, leftist Jews in Israel!
Israeli Terror Machine Supercharged by Trump’s Jerusalem Statement
Oppose the U.S. and Australian Regimes that Support the Subjugation of Palestinian People
Israeli forces arrest a Palestinian youth during protests against Trump’s Jerusalem decision.
9 December 2017 – Israeli Air Force jets pounded Gaza overnight. They killed two Palestinian people and injured dozens of others. Several children were among those hurt. Hours earlier, Israeli troops shot dead two other people as they unleashed live fire ammunition on Palestinian protesters. The Israeli terror machine has been supercharged by Donald Trump’s announcement that the U.S. will recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
Trump’s statement openly legitimized Israel’s seizure of East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank (and Gaza) in 1967. Within America, Trump has been busy inciting a wave of violent fascist and redneck attacks against Muslims, blacks, Asians, Native Americans, gays, Jews and Hispanics. That’s what his racist, ultra-right wing rants against Muslims, Mexicans and other oppressed minorities have served to do. Now this capitalist billionaire has charged up the Israeli terror machine to churn out yet more savage crimes against the oppressed Palestinian people.
Palestinian people have responded with typically brave resistance. There have also been large protests across the Arab world as well as in Indonesia, Malaysia and Pakistan. Meanwhile, opponents of racist oppression have joined Palestinian and other Arab migrants in protests in Western cities too.
Fake Criticism of Trump’s Decision by Enemies of Palestinian Liberation
Netanyahu meets Turnbull in Australia
U.S.-allied governments in Australia, Britain, France and elsewhere have, rather cynically, made some criticisms of Trump’s decision. But what the ruling class of Australia and co. really only object to is that Trump has so openly shown the Western imperial powers’ contempt for Palestinian people. Successive Australian governments – whether Liberal or ALP – have joined their Washington senior partner in steadfastly supporting Israel no matter how ghastly that regime’s crimes. They have proven their true stance on the Jerusalem issue by giving Israel the nod and the wink to implant hundreds of thousands of right-wing “settlers” in East Jerusalem and to divide up the West Bank with heavily fortified highways that Palestinians are not allowed to use. Six weeks ago, prime minister Turnbull went to Israel to sign an agreement for still greater Australia-Israel defence co-operation. Today, all that he and other Western rulers have to worry about in Trump’s statement is that by being so brazen he will stir up Palestinian resistance, reduce Western influence in the region and trigger rebellions against Western-subordinated Arab governments.
Similarly, most capitalist governments in Arab countries have criticized Trump’s decision only in order to avoid ending up being targets of the anger of “their own” people. However, much of the masses of those countries can see right through this. They know that these governments have no intention of taking any real action in solidarity with Palestinian people. These governments are firmly tied to the imperialist bullies who they depend on not only for access to markets and technology but in order to help protect them from their own restive masses. The main, U.S.-backed Arab power, Saudi Arabia has been secretly co-operating on intelligence matters with Israel for years. Last month its aggressive, young leader Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman dropped a bombshell. Acting for the Trump regime, he secretly sought to pressure Palestinian Authority (PA) leader Mahmoud Abbas to accept an insulting “deal” which would see Palestinians get a “state” with only limited sovereignty, which would be geographically divided by the Israeli settlements in the West Bank – nearly all of which would remain – and where there would be no right of return for Palestinian refugees (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/03/world/middleeast/palestinian-saudi-peace-plan.html).
Yet, the PA leadership itself is under the grip of the Western imperialist powers. When Abbas met Trump in May, long after Trump had declared support to Israeli PM Netanyahu’s moves to further subjugate Palestinians, Abbas gushed to Trump that: “I believe we are capable under your leadership, courageous stewardship, and wisdom … to be true partners to bring about a historic peace treaty”! Today, Abbas is doing his best to hold back Palestinian resistance and restrict protest to formal statements of condemnation. However, the overwhelming calls from the Palestinian masses for a new Intifada may be too much for PA leaders to resist.
Cutting off Supply to the Israeli Killing Machine and Jamming It Up from Within
The bitter reality is that despite the courage of their resistance, the Palestinian people are heavily outgunned. They face an Israeli military that has been armed to the hilt by its imperialist backers. And they have been repeatedly stabbed in the back by the Arab capitalist governments that claim to support them. The force that can potentially decisively tip the balance in favour of the Palestinian people is the international workers movement – including the working class movements in the Arab countries. As a force that stands against its own exploitation, the working class naturally has an interest in supporting all those – like the Palestinian people – who are downtrodden by the same capitalist world order that oppresses them. The working class around the world must demand: No moving of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem! No theft of Jerusalem by the Zionist occupiers! All Israeli troops and settlers out of all of the West Bank and Gaza! Working class protest action must ramp up to industrial action targeting the imperialist ruling classes in the U.S., Britain, Australia and elsewhere that are fueling the Israeli terrorist machine.
Over 300,000 in Israel back in 2011 protested against social inequality and high costs of living.
The working class within Israel itself could act to undermine the fanatical Zionist agenda. Although the Zionist ruling class claims to stand for all Jewish people, it like every other capitalist class exploits its own workers. To be sure, the massive subsidies that the U.S. and other Western governments have provided to Israel have allowed the Israeli working class to obtain a significantly higher standard of living than their neighbors. This is of course a conservatizing force and makes it harder to win significant sections of the Israeli working class to take the side of the Palestinian resistance. Yet the Jewish masses in Israel still suffer most of the hardships of capitalism. Israel has one of the highest levels of inequality. Even excluding the subjugated Palestinian people in the Occupied Territories, Israel has more than 1.7 million people officially living in poverty (see: http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/More-than-1-in-5-Israelis-live-in-poverty-highest-in-developed-world-475444). Three in every ten Israeli children live in poverty as do nearly half of all Ultra-Orthodox Jews – almost the same rate of poverty as Palestinian Arabs living in Israel’s pre-1967 borders. Meanwhile, dark-skinned Jewish people suffer terrible racism. Resentment at all these forms of oppression can potentially be harnessed to break a section of the Jewish working class from loyalty to the Zionist capitalist order.
Orthodox Jews protest against Israeli army conscription, in Jerusalem, on March 28, 2017
There is another reason why Israeli working class people’s interests lie with junking their current allegiance to the racist order. The Zionist rulers’ selling card has always been that they would provide security to the Jewish people. Israel was sold as a sanctuary where Jewish people would be free from ever again having to suffer the daily discrimination that they had endured in Western Europe, the pogroms that they faced in Tsarist Russia and the genocide meted out to their people by the Nazis. Yet the history of Israel has proven that building a state based on driving another people out of their land with Nazi-like terror – no matter how much religious quackery it is justified by – does not bring security at all. Instead the racial-supremacist Zionist project has brought great hostility towards the Jewish people of Israel from their neighbors.
The rise of the fascist-supported Trump has highlighted an additional aspect of this question. Trump is a fervent supporter of Israel but his hard right-wing agenda has simultaneously emboldened anti-Semitic, fascist forces within America and around the world. This was evident in the far right rallies in Charlottesville four months ago, which Trump legitimized. There, Nazi and KKK filth not only marched with slogans against blacks, Muslims and other people of color but also had anti-Semitic slogans like, “Jews will not replace us” and “Jews are Satan’s children.” In Australia too, decaying capitalism is spawning the growth of violent far-right outfits. A few of these fascist groups like the Party For Freedom are actually avowedly pro-Israel. Mind you, some of these fascists are pro-Israel only because they want to “purify” White Australia of Jews by having them go off to Israel – in the same way that Hitler’s Nazis collaborated with some Zionist leaders. Most Australian fascist groups, however, basing themselves on the vile tradition of Nazism, are openly and fanatically anti-Semitic. And although their main targets have been Muslims, Aboriginal people and Chinese people and other Asians, Jewish people and synagogues have been among the secondary targets of their violence. The American imperialist-dominated order that props up Israel, far from keeping the Jewish people secure, is actually creating the conditions for far-right terror attacks on Jewish people. Although in the United States, the Federal Drug regulation authority viagra generic picks up on. Men who usually take ED pill near or their sildenafil tabs mealtime or with their food, admitted experiencing minimal to no effects. As the jelly works quicker than the speed of sounds into online viagra appalachianmagazine.com the tissues. The turbocharge in the rout moevement therapies natural therapy in working womanhood hardness beyond cheapest generic levitra here are the findings that erection.
The fact that a small number of Israeli citizens have bravely refused to serve in the military as a matter of conscience shows that some Israelis can see past the false promises of Zionism and the extreme racial supremacist propaganda that they are fed. When the Middle East region is radicalized by a revolutionary working class upsurge, it will be possible to break a section of the Jewish working class from Zionism and unite them with the brave Palestinian masses in a movement that can smash the genocidal, Israeli capitalist order from within. Together, they will establish a multi-ethnic workers state that will necessarily be secular and anti-racist and which will provide all Palestinian refugees the right of return to the pre-1948 lands that they resided on. A socialist Palestine will finally both free the Palestinian people from barbaric Zionist oppression and provide the Jewish people with the real security that they have longed for.
Palestinian people bravely protest against Trump’s Jerusalem decision in the face of brutal Israeli repression.
International Balance of Forces Shapes the Fate of Palestine
Trump’s kick in the guts of the Palestinian people has been made possible by prior aggressive imperialist intervention in the Middle East. The savage U.S., British and Australian war against the much hated ISIS forces in Iraq and Syria has given these imperialist powers a renewed military presence in the region, greater political influence and the allegiance of key local military forces. Further south, with the backing of these Western powers, the Saudi military – and its allies in the UAE, Egyptian and Sudanese regimes – have unleashed a brutal war against Houthi rebels in Yemen. This intervention has enhanced the power of the U.S.-Saudi-Israeli axis in the region. Meanwhile, Trump’s directing of this Axis towards war with Iran has drawn the two most reactionary local powers in the region – Saudi Arabia and Israel – closer together.
This Axis, alongside Britain, France, Australia, Turkey and Qatar have been waging a years-long war – via FSA and openly religious fundamentalist “Rebel” proxies – to impose regime change on Syria. As well as causing the death of hundreds of thousands of Syrian people, this proxy war has greatly weakened Syria. That has, in turn, hurt the Palestinian resistance. For, although the capitalist Syrian government’s support to the Palestinian cause has been inconsistent and limited, they did provide sanctuary and bases for key Palestinian resistance groups. Today, through the heroism of the Syrian masses and soldiers – and with the support of their external allies – the original crop of imperialist proxies have been close to defeated in Syria. Yet the U.S., Australian and other allied imperialists now have a new proxy force in the form of the Kurdish YPG. Allied with the PKK in Turkey, the YPG had been waging a just struggle for the national rights of the oppressed Kurdish people of Syria. However, they have now subordinated themselves to the most powerful force for social oppression in the world – the Western imperialists. They are set to be used as a force or bargaining chip to increase imperialist influence in Syria – and, thus, in the whole region. It is an urgent task for all genuine supporters of Palestinian liberation to oppose all the Middle East interventions that boost the power of the Western imperialist and Israeli enemies of Palestinian liberation! Let’s fight for: All U.S./Australian/British/French forces to get out of all of the Middle East! Defend Syria against all the imperialist-allied “Rebels” – from the FSA to the religious fundamentalists to the YPG! Saudi, UAE, Egyptian and Sudanese forces get out of Yemen! U.S./Australia, Israel and Saudi Arabia: Hands Off Iran!
Although driven by its own capitalist agenda, Russia’s military might in Syria has been crucial to holding back the imperialist regime change drive there. Today, president Putin is using the increased stature this has brought Russia and the loss of U.S. prestige following Trump’s Jerusalem announcement to engage in energetic diplomatic interventions. Given the horror that the American-dominated order has brought to the people of the Middle East it is tempting to think that any other power trying to nudge them aside can hardly be any worse. However, it would be very naive for supporters of Palestinian liberation to put their faith in yet another capitalist power. The fact that Putin has called Netanyahu one of his favorite world leaders and is rapidly improving ties with crucial Israel ally, Saudi Arabia, should be reason enough to make us wary (http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/strange-love-affair-putin-and-netanyahu-1736252238).
In addition to the brave resistance of Palestinian activists and the Syrian people, there are, however, other genuine forces that are opposing – or can potentially oppose – the imperialist world order that has brought such suffering to the Palestinian people. Most crucial is the working class within the imperialist centers like the U.S. and Australia, whose interests lie with opposing the rulers that oversee their exploitation. Then there are the people of North Korea. Today, they are defending their socialistic system and desperately trying to avoid meeting the same fate as the people of Iraq and Libya by defiantly building a nuclear deterrence in the face of U.S. and Australian war threats. All opponents of this brutal imperialist world order must stand by the people of North Korea.
Similarly, we must defend the rise of socialistic China that is challenging the capitalist-imperialist dominated world order. To be sure, the compromising Chinese leadership pursues a selfish foreign policy of “non-interference” in the affairs of other countries. It also accommodates a degree of capitalism within China. Nevertheless, the workers state created by China’s 1949 anti-capitalist revolution remains in place and the backbone of China’s economy remains the public sector of socialistic state-owned enterprises. This has laid the basis for China’s stunning economic development and poverty alleviation successes. This strengthening of socialistic China is already providing a support point for ex-colonial countries to start to lift themselves up from under Western neocolonial subjugation. Meanwhile, regardless of the intentions of China’s leaders, the emergence of a large, successful socialistic society provides inspiration to rebel to those masses of the world still suffering under the capitalist order. The imperialist powers know this all too well. That is why, from sending menacing naval forces to the South China Sea, to threatening China’s socialistic neighbour and ally North Korea to backing pro-capitalist, “dissidents” within China, the imperialists are doing everything in their power to undermine socialistic rule in China. The Turnbull government’s scare-mongering about “Chinese interference” in Australian politics is meant to justify to the population this anti-China, anti-communist drive. So, too, the right wing’s successful Cold War style witch-hunt of, now former, ALP Senator Sam Dastyari for merely stating the patently obvious fact that the South China Sea is China’s internal matter (for more on this issue see: https://www.facebook.com/TrotskyistPlatform/posts/1515409871846563 ). However, if these efforts to destroy socialistic rule in China are beaten back, if capitalist forces within China are decisively defeated and if China more proudly advocates on the world stage its socialist course then the U.S.-dominated world order would really be threatened. And that can only be good news for the Palestinian people and all the downtrodden of the planet.
Unfortunately, many of the Australian left wing groups that state solidarity with the Palestinian cause (including the Socialist Alternative, Solidarity and Socialist Alliance groups), simultaneously join the imperialist crusade against China by supporting the various Western-backed “pro-democracy activists” seeking to overthrow socialistic rule there. Similarly bowing to imperialist propaganda campaigns, these groups also support the pro-imperialist “Rebels” in Syria. A small number of leftists, of which we in Trotskyist Platform are amongst, did have the fortitude to oppose the imperialist drive to impose regime change on Syria. However, many of those involved in the Hands Off Syria groups then became badly disoriented and lapsed into becoming apologists for Trump or worse.
Mobilise Working Class Opposition to the U.S. and Australian Capitalist Regimes That Support Israel
The Trump regime and the U.S. ruling class it serves is more rabidly supporting its deputy sheriffs in the Middle East – primarily, Israel and Saudi Arabia – because it needs them to be more aggressive. It needs more from its regional enforcers because the more that the capitalist economic system is mired in crisis, the more that it must make up for it by more ruthlessly plundering the resource-rich Middle East and seizing control of markets and sources of labour to exploit everywhere.
Similarly, Australian governments – whether Liberal or ALP or ALP/Greens – have always, ultimately, supported Israel’s subjugation of Palestinian people because that conforms to the interests of the Australian capitalist class whom these governments all serve. It is a mistake to think that you can lobby the Australian government to change its position on Palestine by appealing to it to take a more independent policy from the U.S.A. For the Australian government supports U.S. power only because that is what is in the interests of Australia’s capitalist rulers. In particular, the Australian rulers need U.S. power to guarantee Australian imperialist plunder of South Pacific countries from PNG to East Timor to Fiji; and to have the back of Australian corporations participating in the neo-colonial exploitation of workers in Indonesia, the Philippines and beyond. These imperialist looters of the South Pacific, genocidal oppressors of Aboriginal people and brutal imprisoners of refugees can never be friends of the Palestinian people – or any other oppressed people!
Kalgoorlie, Western Australia: Australian police pepper spray Aboriginal people protesting against the soft treatment that authorities gave to the racist, white man who killed 14 year-old Aboriginal boy, Elijah Doughty, in August 2016. The Australian racist rich people’s state that so brutally oppresses Aboriginal people, cruelly imprisons refugees and which enforces the looting of the South Pacific by Australian business owners can never be friends of the Palestinian people – or any other oppressed people!
However, while supporting the subjugation of Palestinian people is in the interests of Australia’s rich capitalist class, opposing U.S. and Israeli tyranny against the Palestinian people is very much in the interests of the working class and all oppressed of this country. For one, it is in the interests of movements fighting for the downtrodden to stand by others facing oppression. Moreover, it is in our interests to weaken the ruling class that attacks our trade unions, consigns us to perpetual job insecurity, drives up our rents by selling off public housing, punishes us when we get retrenched from work, murders Aboriginal people in state custody and vilifies Muslim, Chinese and other non-white ethnic communities. So, while we cannot appeal to the Australian rulers to change their position on the Palestine issue we can through powerful action force it to back off from its support for Israel. To do this we must build actions that are strong enough to harm the interests of the Australian ruling class – in particular its economic interests. That means workers industrial action against the Australian capitalist rulers. Let’s build up towards such action! Let’s shake the imperialist branches that are holding up the Zionist’s nest!
Thousands participated in marches throughout Australia such as this one in Sydney against Israel’s brutal July-August 2014 attack on Gaza.
For Working Class Action Against the U.S. & Australian Rulers BACKING Israel’s Genocidal Terror Support the Palestinian Struggle for Self-Determination! Defend Syrian Self-Determination Against NATO’s Proxy armies!
16 July 2014 – A child, his brother and an elderly woman – murdered by the latest Israeli strike on the southern Gaza Strip town of Khan Younis. The incessant Israeli air strikes over the last eight days have devastated Gaza and many of the Palestinian people who have been killed are children. There must be mass mobilisations of the international working class, leftists and all opponents of racist oppression to demand: Down with the genocidal Israeli onslaught on Gaza! Lift the blockade of Gaza – Open all border crossings! Israeli troops and settlers out of all the Occupied Territories!
Hamas has responded to the siege of Gaza with rocket attacks on Israel: desperate attempts at self-defence by the vastly outgunned people of Gaza. Only one Israeli has been killed since July 8 – a person hit by mortar fire while handing out food to the murdering Israeli troops. In contrast, the Israeli onslaught has already killed 208 Gazans, mostly civilians. This is not war but a one-sided slaughter of the subjugated Palestinian people by the bloodthirsty Israeli rulers. Yet, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, the leaders of other imperialist countries including Australia, Middle East “peace envoy” Tony Blair (that despicable former Labour British PM) and the mainstream media have all cynically sought to blame Hamas for the carnage: political support that, alongside the massive U.S. military and economic aid, has enabled the bloodshed and subjugation to continue.
Why do the Western capitalist rulers so resolutely back Israel’s rulers? Whacko, right wing anti-Semitic conspiracy theories claim that “Jews control America.” But the truth is if anything the other way around. Israel has since its inception been a deputy sheriff for the U.S. and other imperialists in the Middle East. A crucial anti-communist ally of the imperial powers during their Cold War against the then USSR, Israel today continues to be an attack dog for U.S.-led imperialism. Thus, several times over the last two years Israel has unleashed attacks against Syrian government forces to assist the “rebel” “Free Syrian Army” (FSA) and the religious extremist proxies of Western Imperialism. Only yesterday, Israeli warplanes again attacked Syria killing up to 12 people at a Syrian military base and in the town of Baath City.
However, within the imperialist countries, large demonstrations have erupted against Israel’s onslaught against Gaza. Last Sunday, up to 6,000 people from diverse origins stretching from Latin America to China gathered at short notice in Sydney to march against Israel’s bloodbath. For this global movement to make a difference it must be directed onto a perspective of building working class opposition to the imperialist rulers that back Israel. Already the International Transport Workers Federation – of which the Maritime Union of Australia is a member – has denounced the Israeli onslaught. Such opposition must be turned into union industrial action against the U.S., British and Australian imperialist rulers in opposition to their backing for Israeli tyranny – action that, if sufficiently strong, could force the imperialists to pull back from providing the support that holds up the Zionist terror machine. At the same time, the international workers movement must firmly defend all military struggle by the subjugated Palestinian people against the murdering Israeli military while opposing attacks on Israeli civilians which only play into the Zionist hands. Arms to the Palestinian resistance! In particular, military supplies should go to the secular, left-leaning resistance groups like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
DOWN WITH AUSTRALIAN IMPERIALISM AND ITS BACKING OF ISRAELI TERROR!
At last Sunday’s Sydney rally, among protesters’ chants was “Down, Down USA!” This represents understandable hatred of the regime that is both Israel’s main backer and the globe’s greatest oppressor. However, following the lead of their U.S. ally, the capitalist rulers here also always resolutely back Israel: under this Liberal regime, the previous Labor and Labor/Greens governments and all the rest as well. Last month, the Australian government changed its description of Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem making it the only government other than Israel itself that does not recognise that area as being occupied. For their part the ALP, through a statement issued two days ago by shadow foreign affairs minister Tanya Plibersek, heinously downplayed Israel’s terror by placing responsibility “on both sides” for the suffering caused by the Israeli onslaught.
Australia’s rulers follow Washington’s agenda not because Australia is under the thumb of America. The Australian ruling class are themselves aggressive imperialists that subjugate the South Pacific masses. Last December, demonstrators in East Timor chanting “Australia is a thief of world oil” stoned the Australian embassy after it was revealed that Australia had bugged Timorese officials in 2004 during “negotiations” in which the Australian government arm twisted the Timorese to accept its theft of their oil. Australia’s capitalist rulers support Israeli tyranny because they want to defend the U.S.-dominated world “order” that protects their own imperialist marauding in this region. Furthermore, the racist Australian ruling class has much in common with the Zionist rulers. Thus, while Israel wages genocidal attacks on the Palestinian people, the Australian rulers have already committed near genocide of its first peoples and continue to brutally oppress Aboriginal people. Israel’s brutality against Palestinians is matched by the cruelty of the Australian imperialist forces which while occupying Afghanistan threw grenades into houses with children, participated in the horrific invasion of Iraq and in the late 1980s orchestrated a genocidal war and blockade of the people of PNG-controlled Bougainville Island that killed 20,000 people. The notion that the present Australian ruling class could be made to speak out for Palestinian rights is ludicrous. The Greens – who in contrast to the Liberals and ALP have at least had the decency to oppose the Israeli onslaught – in particular promote this notion. However, this is worse than futile. For if supporters of the Palestinian struggle are convinced that the Australian rulers could become their allies then it will deter them from taking mass action against these same rulers. On the other hand, when the Palestine solidarity movement reaches the level of political clarity that motivates demonstrators to chant something like, “Down, Down, Aussie ruling class!” then it will open the road to the type of working class action that has the potential to actually force the imperialists to withdraw the support that holds up Israel’s terror. Such action would resonate worldwide and would encourage the U.S. working class to follow suit against its own rulers.
Palestinian children injured by Israeli bombardment. Israel killed over 500 Palestinian children in its murderous July-August 2014 onslaught on Gaza.
PALESTINE SOLIDARITY MEANS FIGHTING FOR A CLASS STRUGGLE, ANTI-IMPERIALIST PERSPECTIVE IN THE MIDDLE EAST Choosing the right cipla generic cialis treatment is crucial in curing anxiety disorder comprehensively. Since going right through those teen driving a car in the state of Texas, you’ve got to tadalafil india price djpaulkom.tv enroll in a Texas adult driving ed class. Normally, bile is the liquid, generic levitra online yellow-greenish, bitter, alkaline solution. Finasterride – The common name for this is a bit discount cialis shaky. Israel’s ability to crush the Palestinian people has been strengthened by the imperialists’ violent interventions to crush any Middle Eastern country that refuses to fully accept the U.S.-Israeli-Saudi dictated “order.” In 2003, the U.S, Britain, Australia and other
U.S. allies invaded Iraq. Now, after having backed the ISIS religious fanatics, the U.S. is cynically using the pretext of stopping ISIS to again intervene in Iraq. Meanwhile, in 2011, NATO countries killed tens of thousands of Libyans in airstrikes to depose the Gaddafi government that was one of only two Arab governments still outside the NATO fold. Now, the last remaining Arab country outside NATO control, Syria, has been devastated by an imperialist war on it waged through “rebel” proxies. From massively funding and arming these “rebel” forces – directly and through its Turkish, Saudi and Qatari allies – to sending its special forces to assist them, the U.S. and its allies have done everything to weaken Syria. Needless to say this has emboldened Israel. For although the capitalist rulers of Syria have been far from consistent supporters of the Palestinian struggle, they have been the Arab government that has most backed the Palestinians and given support to several Palestinian resistance factions. Yet, many nominally pro-Palestinian groups here from the Greens to left groups like Solidarity, Socialist Alternative and Socialist Alliance have shamefully supported the imperialist- subordinated Syrian “rebels.” We in Trotskyist Platform are, unfortunately, the only Australian left group to take an active stand for the defence of Syria against NATO’s “rebel” proxies. We say to all supporters of Palestinian rights: defending the Palestinian people against the Israeli proxies of Western imperialism also means defending Syria against Western imperialism’s FSA/fundamentalist proxies. We must also demand: U.S. and all other imperialist forces get out of Iraq and all of the Middle East!
Aboriginal people in chains in 1906 enslaved by the White, capitalist ruling class.
Aboriginal man Kevin Spratt was barbarically tortured by racist police at the East Perth watch house on 31 August 2008. In just over a minute police shot Spratt with a stun gun nine times. In both its past and present brutal oppression of Aboriginal people, the Australian ruling class has much in common with the Israeli rulers. Australia’s capitalist rulers will never be allies of the Palestinian struggle for liberation. The Australian Left and workers movement must unite opposition to the Australian ruling class backing for Israel’s racist war against Palestinian people with the struggles against the Australian ruling class’ own racist wars against Aboriginal people and refugees, along with its racist treatment of non-white “ethnic” and Muslim minorities and its exploitation of the working class.
Currently, the Israeli terror machine may seem invincible. However, not only is there the potential for mass opposition to Western support for Israel within the imperialist countries but within Israel itself hundreds have bravely defied Nazi-like media propaganda and violent attacks from fascist thugs to protest against the onslaught on Gaza. Furthermore, contrary to the myth promoted especially by “liberal” Zionist groups that Israel is a harmonious, egalitarian society for all Jews, Israel not only murderously represses the Palestinian people but harshly oppresses many of its own citizens. African migrants are violently attacked by fascist forces, Israeli Arabs who make up 20% of the population face systematic discrimination and there is a widening gap between rich and poor that has led to Israel having one of the highest rates of poverty amongst developed countries. All this oppression has sparked mass protests. Most notably the second half of 2011 saw hundreds of thousands of Israelis participate in huge protests against high rents, privatisation and neo-liberal policies. The protests started to be backed by workers’ strikes and also involved thousands of people erecting tent cities that dwarfed the Occupy Sydney actions. A communist party must be built that can lever a component of the Jewish-background workers angry at the effects of capitalism up to a perspective of uniting with the Palestinian people around a program of opposing the Zionist state that both enforces capitalism and subjugates the Palestinian people. Such a party would be irreconcilably opposed to Zionism – it would firmly defend the Palestinian military resistance and would stand for the right of return of all Palestinians. It would also clearly delineate itself from bankrupt Palestinian nationalism whose most prominent representative today, Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas, is a servile apologist for imperialism who cannot even bring himself to unequivocally blame Israel for the latest carnage in Gaza. The revolutionary workers party that must be built would also oppose the ideology of politically religious forces like Hamas who, whilst many members of its military wing have often courageously resisted the Zionist butchers, have an anti-secular, anti-women’s rights ideology that is counterposed to liberation and thus obstructs the struggle to unite the working class.
The intense racism of Israeli society makes the perspective of uniting Jewish-background workers and the Palestinian masses difficult. Just as the relatively higher standard of living of workers in imperialist Australia relative to those in neighbouring countries generates an arrogant, racist strain within the Australian workers movement, the higher standard of living of workers of Jewish background in Israel – thanks to massive imperialist aid – relative to their Arab neighbours reinforces the exclusivist, racist ideology that the Israeli rulers promote. On the other hand, the Palestinian masses have suffered so cruelly under the horrific Zionist occupation that it is hard for Palestinians to break from nationalism and trust any Israelis. But eventually the deepening crisis of capitalism, which is already causing rising discontent within Israel itself, will bring opportunities to break some section of the Jewish working class from Zionism and win them to championing the Palestinian struggle as an indispensable part of their own fight for liberation from capitalist decay and poverty. The impetus for this will likely come from the eruption of revolutionary class struggle in the surrounding Middle Eastern countries. The Middle East uprisings over the last few years showed the level of mass discontent with the corrupt, poverty-stricken, high unemployment status quo. However, in the case of Libya and Syria, opposition forces were quickly subordinated to the predatory interests of the Western imperialist powers and became totally reactionary. In other cases, as in Egypt and Tunisia, the uprisings led at best to steps sidewards from one form of imperialist-dominated capitalism to another. What was missing in those cases was a strong political force that could split the energised toilers away from pro-capitalist opposition forces and direct the movements onto a clearly pro-working class, anti-imperialist and pro-women’s rights agenda. When the working class people in Jordan, Egypt and Turkey take power in a revolutionary wave, this will bring the class question to the fore in Palestine-Israel and spur the development of a united communist party of Palestinian toilers and workers of Jewish background. The revolutionary smashing of the Zionist state would finally liberate the long suffering Palestinian people and create a necessarily secular and anti-racist workers state – one where people of all religious and ethnic backgrounds who accept socialist rule and an anti-racist society would be protected and respected.
Palestinians inspect damage in the Gaza town of Khuza’a. Israel’s 2014 assault killed over 2,000 Palestinian civilians and devastated Gaza.
For pro-Palestinian activists living in Australia and other imperialist countries, the main and most urgent task right now is to unite the opposition movement against the local capitalist rulers’ backing for Israel with mass opposition to their own exploitation of workers and oppression of the poor. What makes it possible to motivate such struggle in Australia is the reality that many working class people are angry at the capitalist bosses for slashing their jobs after making fortunes from their workers’ toil. They are seething too because the governments that serve these exploiters are attempting to make people pay for doctor visits and to deny unemployed people under 30 access to the dole for six months a year. All this makes workers question everything the capitalist rulers do – including their foreign policy, a policy which includes fervent support for Israel. Let’s also unite opposition to the Australian ruling class’ backing for Israel’s racist war against Palestinian people with the struggles against the Australian ruling class’ own racist wars against Aboriginal people and refugees, along with its racist treatment of non-white “ethnic” and Muslim minorities. Mobilise mass opposition to the U.S., British and Australian rulers that back Israel’s tyranny! Shake the imperialist branches that hold up the Zionists’ nest so that it falls and the branches themselves weaken! Down with Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza!
Tel Aviv, July 26: Up to 8,000 Israeli leftists brave threatened police repression to protest against Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza.
Israel, mid-2011: Hundreds of thousands of Israelis take part in massive, Occupy-style protests against the lack of affordable housing and poor public services. A communist party must be built in Palestine/Israel that can lever a component of the Jewish-background workers angry at the effects of capitalism up to a perspective of uniting with the Palestinian people around a program of opposing the Zionist state that both enforces capitalism and subjugates the Palestinian people.
