LONG LIVE THE UPRISING OF THE OPPRESSED PALESTINIAN MASSES

Over the last few weeks, the exploited Palestinians (men, women and children of all ages) have offered a stupendous example of their indomitable will to fight against the oppression of their people by confronting with a magnificent spirit of sacrifice the highly equipped army of the State of Israel – a State that the democratic West planted and continues to support in the heart of the Middle East as a means of guaranteeing its neo-colonialist dominion over the oilfelds in the area. The Western media trumpet the warning that "Peace is threatened": but the "peace" they refer to is the one that the governments of the USA and Europe (including the Italian government) want to use in order to force Palestinians to live in misery in "autonomous" cramped bantustan-type ghettoes, or to make them become defenceless refugees housed in Lebanese compounds or wandering in limbo.

This is a poisoned "peace" of the type offered to the people of Iraq by means of the murderous UN embargo established after the war ended ten years ago: a "peace" that is exclusively designed to guarantee the "rights" of the masters of the West to pillage the oil and exploit the labour of all of the Arab masses. This is the only objective of Western imperialist powers (well served by "progressive" governments and the cowardice of "left-wing" parties), despite the fact that they sometimes cry some crocodile tears over their Palestinian victims.

By means of its latest slaughters, the State of Israel (with the full support of the USA and the apparently wavering but in reality no less determined support of the hypocritical European powers) is transmitting an open warning to the Palestinian masses: accept this "peace" or you will be faced by a war of extermination involving the most powerful weapons of mass destruction, including the atomic weapons with which the imperialist frontier posts in the Middle East have already been adequately supplied.

The rebellion of the exploited Palestinians and Arabs is a sign of their unbowed opposition against this "order sanctioned by the international community". We internationalist communists unconditionlly support their struggle and call upon the more conscious workers in Italy and the West to sustain it in the only effective manner possible by opposing their "own" imperialism which, albeit in a different way, oppresses the working classes wherever they may be.

At the same time, we say to our Arab and Islamic class brothers that they must continue the struggle to the end and not place it in the hands of the Arabian bourgeoisie and their governments, which have so many times betrayed it in exchange for miserable compromises or a deceptive "peace" (such as that sought by Arafat) with imperialist masters and the State of Israel.

The solution of the drama facing the Palestinian peoples does not lie in the formula: "two peoples, two States". This would only serve to keep the conflict continuously alight and make it seem a war between peoples or religions, and it is no accident that the bellows are already provided by the State of Israel and its imperialist protectors (not to mention the Arab governments which, in an attempt to protect and conserve their own power, are willing to make compromises with imperialism at the expense of the working masses). The solution is to transform the war between peoples into a social war that foresees a united front between the exploited Arab and Jewish masses against imperialism. The former are the victims of the rape and pillage; the latter are the cannon fodder that imperialism uses in order to preserve its dominance and defend its business activities. In exchange for this role, imperialism grants the Jewish proletariat some miserly privileges, but there is no privilege that can compensate it for participating in the oppression of another people in favour of those responsible for its own exploitation.

It is only together that Arab and Jewish proletarians can drive imperialism out of the Middle East, sweep away the corrupt Arab governments, and free it from the State of Israel (the local stronghold of imperialism) and the Arab States that are already nothing more than imperialist pawns.

Arab and Palestinian proletarians: organise yourselves and unite your forces on the basis of a social liberation programme that includes all of the oppressed in the area – including the exploited part of the Jewish population – in order to defeat imperialist domination in the Middle East, give power to Soviets of Arab and Jewish workers, and join socialist battle against this putrid world system of oppression and exploitation!