After more than a week of Palestinian youth mobilizations, the Israeli government launched a deadly aggression in East Jerusalem and Gaza with the support of the far-right. A massacre orchestrated in complicity with Macron and Biden and their support for the colonial state.
Israel represses struggling Palestinian youth
Less than 3 days before the anniversary of the birth of the State of Israel, the Israeli police and army have just led a historic offensive in East Jerusalem and Gaza against the Palestinian people. A bloody offensive comes in response to the mobilizations of Palestinian youth from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem. Several events explain this mobilization, in particular the prohibition of access to the Damascus Gate by the Israeli police in the middle of the month of Ramadan and, subsequently, the announcement by the Supreme Court of the desire to expel several families from the neighborhood to relocate Israeli settlers. The crowning achievement of this offensive was the attempt to deny access to the iconic Al-Aqsa Mosque.
These attacks blew up the anger of Palestinian youth in the east of the capital. A wave of spontaneous anger came in response to a liberticidal offensive by the government and which awakened the stigma of the oppression and colonization of Palestine by Israel, which has existed for more than seventy years. After more than a week of mobilizations, the escalation of the repression resulted in a veritable massacre by the Israeli authorities during a bombing of the Gaza Strip, officially killing 26 including 9 children and more than 305 injured. From the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem, Israeli police entered the Al-Aqsa Mosque and suppressed hundreds of Palestinians who sought to defend the mosque as well as the neighborhood.
Following these attacks, mobilizations in solidarity with the Palestinians of Jerusalem took place in almost all the cities of the West Bank but also in several Israeli cities such as the cities of Jaffa, Haifa, Acre but also Tel Aviv mainly made up of Israelis. Jews despite their high proportion of Arab inhabitants.
This repression is none other than the continuity of the policy of Benjamin Netanyahu who seeks to make the complete Judaization of the capital a central political issue of his mandate. For the Zionists, this has been a historic struggle since 1967, knowing that East Jerusalem remains today a symbol of resistance and struggles for self-determination of the Palestinian people.
To this, we must add that Israeli ultra-right groups have been harassing since the end of April the inhabitants of several houses in the neighborhood threatened by the Supreme Court with eviction in order to allow the installation of new settlers.
These clashes gave rise to the authorization of “Jerusalem Day” by the Israeli authorities, a kind of demonstration organized every year to celebrate the annexation of Jerusalem by the Israeli State in 1967 and which takes place in the public square. from the Western Wall, a few hundred meters from the Al Aqsa Mosque. A great mobilization of the sectors of the ultra-right took place thereafter in this public square to celebrate the day of violent repression of the Palestinians of the capital but also of those who, in Gaza, died of the reprisals and the Israeli bombardments on Palestinian civilians.
However, the combativeness of the Palestinians struggling in Jerusalem and in other cities of the territory testifies to a youth who has suffered heavily from the consequences of colonization and apartheid. On the social, health, and economic front, Netanyahu’s government has worked to deepen the inequalities and oppression of Palestinians in recent years in an attempt to find a way out of the political crisis that is sweeping the country through colonial oppression.
A worsening political crisis for Netanyahu
It has now been more than two years since the Israeli state has experienced a major political crisis. Following several attempts to form a government and already four parliamentary elections in two and a half years, Netanyahu tried to play the card of a political coalition. He notably gave the responsibility to Yair Lapid (center left) to organize a coalition with a significant part of the Israeli political caste, via Likud, but also the extreme right of Naftali Bennett as well as the United Arab List.
Faced with the difficulties in setting up this coalition and the internal discontent within the Likud governing party with the emergence of figures such as Guideon Saar, Netanyahu sees his brutal colonization policy as one of the best arguments for building a sense of security around its face and rely on the most far-right sectors of the population. This is also due to the fact that Netanyahu only has 21 days left to build a coalition, otherwise, new elections could take place.
However, the United Arab List has found nothing better than to “put on hold” the negotiations following the bombing of Gaza, by offering itself to a fully conciliatory policy with the assassin state of Israel. Contrary to what certain sectors of the so-called “progressive” opposition claim, such as the Israeli Labor Party or the French press, there are no “equivalent clashes” or “two belligerents” in this situation, but indeed a policy of apartheid, displacement, and murder of Palestinians orchestrated by the State of Israel.
Imperialism primarily responsible for the massacre of Palestinians
Although some editorial writers, like those of the newspaper Marianne, would like to believe in a progressive Biden ready to slap his fist on the Israeli table, the new US president, just like the majority of the governments of the European Union including that of Emmanuel Macron are responsible and accomplices in the massacres of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and in Sheikh Jarrah.
Biden himself has found no better way to start his tenure than to appoint Thomas Nides as head of the US embassy in Israel. As reported by RadioJ, he played a key role in the Obama administration extending multi-billion dollar loan guarantees for Israel. Despite his image of a “pacifist” who would seek to break with the image of Donald Trump, unconditional support of Netanyahu, Biden’s policy has above all an essential strategic interest in maintaining the State of Israel as a pro-imperialist enclave. in the region, as evidenced in particular by the maintenance of the United States Embassy in Jerusalem by Biden.
For its part, the Élysée did not go further than a call for “moderate” use of force. A call for “the restraint of the two actors” abject in the situation of colonization and apartheid which the Palestinians live today, even though France and the United States appear among the first partner States of Israel, on the military, economic and political plan. A central interest in the imperialism of these states in the region. For their part, Arab states like the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain feigned a “denunciation” that looked more like a formal reprimand than real opposition to the massacre of Palestinians by bombardment.
Down with bloody repression, imperialism, and the colonial state of Israel!
In such a situation, the Arab and Israeli working class must mobilize to forcefully reject Netanyahu’s repressive turn in trying to unblock his government crisis by killing Palestinians determined to struggle as in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. In addition, the working class and the oppressed, especially those living in major imperialist countries allied with Israel such as France and the United States must show solidarity with the struggle of the Palestinian people for their right to self-determination. of Palestine and for the end of all occupation of the Palestinian territories.
There is no real political alternative to the oppression of the Palestinians among the old Arab political class or among Hamas. The latter are organizations with a very often reactionary program and do not represent an alternative for the self-determination of the Palestinian people as Joseph Daher recalled in an interview for Permanent Revolution.
The coexistence defended by certain organizations such as France Insubordinate of two “equal” States by the simple recognition by international organizations of a Palestinian State is a utopia. It is impossible that two states can coexist, while the State of Israel maintains an essential monopoly on water and industrial resources and enjoys the support of the imperialist powers, economically and militarily. To build a true anti-imperialist perspective, no half-measures are possible. We must fight for the dissolution of the State of Israel and the establishment of a socialist and revolutionary Palestinian State which would refuse any religious or racial oppression and where Jews and Arabs coexist. For life in peace among these peoples, it is necessary to dismantle the foundations of the racist and pro-imperialist Israeli state by putting an end to imperialism in the region. As a revolutionary, we consider that this great historical task can only be solved by the strategy and the methods of the class struggle so that working-class and socialist Palestine is the first point of support towards the construction of a Federation. of the Socialist Republics of the Middle East.
To support the struggle of the Palestinian people in the face of Israeli colonial aggression, let us demonstrate on Saturday, May 15 everywhere in France!
