March 2002 

The Israeli government has launched a genocidal war against the Palestinians. Its purpose is to “decapitate” the Palestinian Authority, to kill thousands of those who oppose Israel’s brutal rule, and to “ethnically cleanse” key areas of the West Bank and Gaza by driving out tens of thousands of Palestinians who are already refugees in their own country. The Zionist leadership under war criminals Ariel Sharon, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer and Shimon Peres has received a green light from the United States government to carry out this terrorist war. The U.S. and its NATO allies meanwhile are keeping Afghanistan under the iron heel of occupation as they prepare a new war against Iraq. 

The League for the Fourth International issues an urgent call to defend the Palestinian people against the Zionist “final solution”! Drive the Zionist occupiers (army and settlers) out of the West Bank and Gaza – Bring down the Zionist state through Arab/Hebrew workers revolution, in a socialist federation of the Near East! We call on the world working class to mobilize to defeat the terrorist “war on terrorism” launched by the bloodiest state terrorists of all, U.S. imperialism, which has wantonly slaughtered millions of Vietnamese, Koreans, Iraqis and Serbs as it seeks to rule the world. Defend Afghanistan and Iraq against imperialist occupation and attack! U.S./NATO out of the Near East and Central Asia! Defeat imperialism through international socialist revolution! 

The nuclear-armed Zionist madmen have cornered Yasir Arafat in his offices, declaring him an “enemy” and “terrorist” as they prepare to assassinate or seize the chairman of the PA, the sham “government” set up to enforce the Oslo “peace” accords. The League for the Fourth International warned last July that the Israeli rulers were preparing total war on the Palestinian people. Now they have launched a war of extermination. Sharon & Co. seized upon the hideous Islamic fundamentalist indiscriminate ter-ror attack that killed two dozen Israelis during a Passover ceremony in Netanya in order to carry out the attack they have been planning for weeks. Israeli troops and secret police have already murdered more than 1,000 Palestinians and carried out targeted assassinations of more than 100 on their hit list. But the Zionist garrison state has already begun to crack under pressures. Already more than 350 Israeli army officers and soldiers have refused duty in the Occupied Territories, and a number have been jailed. We demand that Israel release all Palestinian prisoners of war and Israeli “refuseniks”!

March 30 is Land Day, the annual commemoration of the 1976 massacre of Israeli Arabs fighting against the seizure of their lands by the Zionists. Today a far greater slaughter of Palestinians is being carried out under the jackboot of the Israeli rulers, who openly imitate the Nazis as they seek to drive out and annihilate Palestinian fighters. As they seized refugee camps earlier this month, Israeli occupation forces called out all adult Palestinian men, blindfolded them and wrote numbers on the wrists and foreheads of many, as Hitler’s SS earlier did to the Jews in Auschwitz and other extermination camps. Today the Zionists are turning the West Bank and Gaza Palestinian ghettos into a giant concentration camp. And they are readying their arsenal of hundreds of nuclear bombs and biological weapons for a full-scale Near East war, to carry out the “transfer” (mass expulsion) of tens or hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their lands when the U.S. launches its attack on Iraq.

Shades of the Warsaw ghetto: Israeli troops stop Palestinians trying 
to leave Ramallah, 28 March 2002

The answer to the Zionist and imperialist slaughter is not the dead end of nationalism, but international proletarian revolution. The Hebrew and Palestinian Arab peoples are thrown together in a narrow corner of the Near East, both having the right to national existence, democratic rights which cannot be equitably realized under capitalism. A Palestinian “mini-state” in barely a fifth of historical Palestine will be at best a glorified bantustan, a low-wage labor reserve for the Israeli capitalists. Just as the Oslo “peace process” led to the expansion of Zionist settlements in Palestinian territory, the new Saudi “peace” plan is really a war plan to help pave the way for a U.S. assault on Iraq. Israeli rulers imagine they can force the Palestinian Arabs to surrender if they only use enough brutality. Yet the Zionists have only succeeded in making the Occupied Territories into a slaughterhouse for Palestinians and Israel into one of the most dangerous places for Jews on the entire planet, as their occupation generates new suicide bombers every day. 

The only road to genuine peace in the Near East is to unite Hebrew and Arab working people in a common struggle against the genocidal Zionists and the reactionary kings, sheiks, emirs, generals and nationalist rulers–all of whom are or have been the lackeys of Washington–and sweep away imperialism through international socialist revolution. This requires building Leninist-Trotskyist workers parties in the fight to reforge the Fourth International. n