Defeat Trump’s imperialist provocation Defend the rights of the Palestinian people!
For a Free Socialist Palestine
in a Socialist Federation of the Middle East
By his provocation to declare on December 6, 2017 “Jerusalem as the capital of Israel” US President Donald Trump, escalated the already spreading wars, political crisis and popular revolts in the Middle East. This brutal repudiation of all the rights of the Palestinian people, is a new aggression to the entire Arab and Muslim peoples and a threat against all humanity through the expansion of imperialist war.
We call the international workers movement, all the freedom fighters and oppressed of the world to mobilize immediately in solidarity with the Palestinian people joining and supporting its heroic struggle in its usurped land occupied by the Israeli Zionist regime, its military troops and settlers.
Trump himself demonstrated unequivocally that there is no room for compromise with imperialism, and its Zionist bastion in the region. The EU imperialists, the reactionary Arab regimes in the region led by the Saudi monarchy, as well as the collaborationist Mahmood Abbas, leader of the so called “Palestinian Authority” pretended to be surprised by the Trump provocation, “protesting” that the US put in jeopardy the “peace negotiation process” and the “two states solution”. Long ago the “negotiations” under US supervision are dead and the “two states solution” is a zombie. What kind of a Palestinian “state” could be an unarmed, fragmented Bantustan in the 15 per cent of the historic territory of Palestine, without control on water and other vital resources, under the asphyxiating military control of Israel?
The hypocrisy of the protests of the EU imperialists and of the reactionary rulers in the Arab and Muslim countries is shown by the emptiness of their “condemnation” and the lack of any real practical action against the provocations of Trump and Netanyahu. The “Islamic Summit” in Istanbul, apart from empty words, did not took any real step towards a break with imperialism and Zionism.
In line with his general posturing, Turkey’s Erdoğan has been heaping criticism on both Trump and Israel. This is simply for domestic consumption and for persuading the Arab masses that he is the only leader in the Sunni world that can challenge the US in the name of the rights of the Palestinians. His past record regarding the Mavi Marmara incident, where he finally capitulated and normalized relations with Israel –shamefully the normalization contract was officially signed as Ankara and Jerusalem!- should tell the Arab world of the emptiness of his posturing now. The real task is to end all diplomatic, economic and military links to Israel, to break with NATO and to shut down the Incirlik military base in southeast Turkey, from where the US Air Force strikes all forces in the Middle East it considers to be against US imperialism and Zionism.
In Greece, Tsipras and his so called “left” government, have established a close strategic alliance with Netanyahu’s far right Zionist regime and the military dictatorship in Egypt. The Greek government is committed to its partnership with the Zionist state to exploit in the future the gas reserves of the Mediterranean. On the eve of Trump’s declaration, Tsipras had praised the US President and agreed to expand the strategically crucial network of US military bases in Greece.
France and the EU, after the US imperialist decision, received the visit of a triumphant Netanyahu and combined mild verbal criticisms with the declared acceptance of “the leading role of the US in the peace process”. What separates Macron from Trump is the opposition of the latter to French petroleum company Total´s business in Iran.
Putin’s Russia also combined some mild criticism with a tour by the Russian president in Turkey, Syria, and Egypt. The announcing of a partial departure of Russian troops form Syria, the new economic contracts with the pro-US, pro-Saudi Egyptian dictator al Sisi, and the existing relations with Netanyahu, underlines Kremlin’s will to act as a global power seeking a negotiated compromise with the US -not only on the Middle East, but above all on Ukraine and the former Soviet space.
The leading force of Arab reaction remains Saudi Arabia. Trump could not jeopardize the American strategy to build an axis of Israel and Saudi Arabia at the head of other Sunni states against Iran and its allies in the region. The Saudi monarchy of Mohammed bin Salman is in a deep crisis both economically, accumulating for the first time deficits, as the world slump affects the oil price, and politically, with nearly half of the royal family in prison, and important Saudi reverses in Yemen and in the standoff with Qatar. Trump had, undoubtedly, the Saudis’ tacit consent before taking his public decision. But this fact will deepen the Saudi crisis and exacerbate the political instability both in Riyadh and among all its allies.
The crisis of credibility and legitimacy of all regional regimes, including the Palestinian leaderships in Ramallah and Gaza is deepening. It is not an accident that 70 per cent of the Palestinian population is rejecting Abbas and asking for his departure from his power position. A majority is calling for a protracted popular revolt to defeat Trump’s provocation. Hamas and Hezbollah have called for a Third Intifada. Independently of the number of those already engaged in battle in the streets of occupied Palestine, popular anger is growing rapidly like a volcano ready for eruption.
A sizeable part of the Palestinian movement see that 2017/18 is neither 1987, the time of the first Intifada that the treacherous Oslo negotiations later stopped, nor 2000, when the second Intifada erupted after Sharon’s provocation and the collapse of the Oslo process. The impact of the unresolved a decade long world capitalist crisis in the Middle East and internationally has no precedent. Trump’s decision itself is not a sign of his strength but of the huge economic and political crisis in the United States itself, of the rapid fall of his popularity and his dependence on the Evangelicals lunatics, of the political civil war within the deeply divided US ruling class itself. This infighting was demonstrated with the Flynn case just before the decision on Jerusalem, and the electoral defeat of Trump in Alabama’s senatorial election immediately after it.
New dangers and new revolutionary possibilities arise to be faced neither on a national nor a regional level only but on a world scale.
Sections of the Palestinian vanguard understand that just another rebellion, would not be enough, but this time the Intifada should develop into a real Thawra -a Revolution until victory. And such a victory to be achieved it needs an international revolutionary mobilization of forces against imperialism and capitalism.
More and more Palestinians are convinced that the only solution is the establishment of one state where all citizens have equal rights. But this one state solution with equal civil rights, including the right of return of the Palestinian refugees, guaranteed for all, Arabs and Jews, cannot be implemented without a confrontation, the defeat, and dismantlement of the Zionist state structures. It can be achieved only on a socialist basis of unity of all oppressed and exploited, emancipated from imperialism, Zionism, and local reactionary regimes, in the framework of a Socialist Federation of free peoples- Arabs, Turks, Jews, Kurds, Iranians, etc.- of the Middle East.
To advance and realize this perspective it is needed a stubborn fight in two levels:
to work without delay to establish an international and regional United Front in action of all revolutionary left and popular anti-imperialist forces in solidarity to the Palestinian people’s struggle and against imperialist war, as it was outlined in the Resolution of the Fourth Euro-Mediterranean Conference held in Athens, Greece in May 2017.
To overcome the crisis of leadership in the social and national liberation struggles by building strong revolutionary parties and a revolutionary International.
Hands off Al Quds/Jerusalem!
Down with imperialism, Zionism and their stooges!
From the River to the sea, Palestine shall be free!
For a united, free, socialist Palestine within a Socialist Federation of the Middle East!
December 15, 2017
DIP (Turkey)
EEK (Greece)
Marxist Workers League/MTL (Finland)
Partido Obrero (Argentina)
Partido de los Trabajadores (Uruguay)