In the last weeks the Palestinian people of Gaza have returned to tell the whole world that they do not intend to resign themselves to suffer the Israeli policy of extermination.
On 30 March 2018 the Palestinian resistance organizations in Gaza started the “Great Return March”. Since that day there are five permanent garrisons in five different locations next to the security fence built by Israel between itself and Gaza. From these garrisons, combative and participated demonstrations began on Friday 30 March, Friday 6 April and Friday 13 April.
Against the "Great Return March", Israeli government has launched its snipers, drones, bombers, guns cannons and electronic systems. Since March 30th, 44 Palestinians have been murdered and more than 5000 have been injured.
The organizations of the Palestinian resistance do not intend to give up. They absolutely want to continue the “Great Return March” until May 15th, that is the day of the 70h anniversary of the birth of the State of Israel. They want to fight the "Big Lie" spread by the Western and Israeli media, according to which Israeli state would have been created in an uninhabited land, for giving shelter to a persecuted people and making it live in peace with the other peoples in the region.
This "Big Lie" hides two truths.
1) The land Israel has been built on was originally inhabited by the Palestinian people, and so is now. A people of farmers, artisans, fishermen, farmhands and factory workers. This population was driven out by terroristic wars started 70 years ago. Only in the small Gaza region, there are seven-hundred thousand historical residents and 1.2 million of Palestinian refugees coming from the stolen territory that Israel annexed in 1948 and in the following decades. Many millions more have fled to Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and others Arab countries.
2) Israeli state did not - and does not - have the task of permitting Jewish people to peacefully live with the other peoples of the region. It was born by the will of Western countries and Jewish bourgeoisie, which needed a gendarme to dominate the Middle East and to rob its oil and manpower, with the complicity of the corrupted Arab aristocracies. To carry out this operation, Israel has managed to exploit the desperation of many Jewish workers, eager to save themselves from the persecutions, both in the Nazi-fascist countries and in the democratic ones. The policy pursued by Israel against the Palestinian population of Gaza is the living proof of the historical role of Israel.
After dominating Gaza from 1967 to 2005 with a ruthless occupying regime to (unsuccessfully) attempt to stifle the resistance struggle of the Palestinians, Israel was forced to retire in 2005 and in 2008 it has tightened a ferocious embargo around Gaza. Moreover, since 2008 Israeli military forces have repeatedly invaded the Gaza Strip and massively bombed it.
In recent years, also as result of the collaboration between Al-Sisi’s Egypt and Israel, life in Gaza has become a living hell: power plant barely works, drinking water and medicines are in short supply, fishing in the Mediterranean Sea is reduced to a bare minimum, the building sector is almost paralyzed by the embargo on building materials ...
The goal of this terrifying “leaden shroud” is to silence the fate of the Palestinian people and to lead to a slow death this heroic people, whose resistance combines the resistance of all the other exploited peoples in the Middle East against the domination’s system established in the area by the democratic West after World War I.
The “Great Return March” begun on March 30th wants to reject the "invitation" to silently die launched on the Palestinians by Israel and its democratic godfathers.
"We are determined to break the siege of Gaza, we will not leave, even if they kill us all."
"I want to live, but death is better than a life as a prisoner without future, like the one we are forced to suffer now."
These words, pronounced by two Palestinian fighters in an interview with the newspaper "Il Manifesto" dated 5th of April 2018, relate us the historical and political truth of current events.
This new chapter in the struggle of the Palestinian people
cannot find any help in the European countries and in the European Union.
Do not be misled by European Union’s protests about the "exaggerations" of Israeli repression and about Trump’s full support to Israel, also by moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. No help will come from Italy and other European countries since they, together with the USA, have been and are the godparents of the birth of the State of Israel. No help will come from Italy and other European countries because they have been - and so are now - promoters of the "two States for two Peoples" policy, imposed to Palestinians by mean of the catastrophic Oslo agreement. The same policy that is leading to a slow extermination the Palestinian people forced to live in Bantustan-like areas controlled by Israel’s army.
The “Great Return March” can only find its allies among the exploited people of Middle East, in the first place among the workers and the oppressed people of Lebanon, Syria and Iran which, in these same weeks, are fighting against the claws that Israeli and Western war machine have put on their countries. Among the exploited people in the Middle East objectively interested in fighting alongside Palestinians there are also the Jews proletarians of Israel, in fact they have a great importance in the (for now) tiny cracks that Palestinians’ determination and Israeli’s restrictive social policies have caused to open in the traditional and unnatural compaction that exists between the Israeli ruling class and the exploited one.
The main obstacle in strengthening the fight of the Palestinians and in developing the class fraternization in the Middle East is the attitude of Italian, European and Western workers: it is their silence in the face of Israeli policy and Western and Israeli aggression to Syria; it is Western workers’ complicit illusion to be able to derive some advantage from Western and Israeli domination on the Palestinians and on the Middle East exploited masses; it is the difficulty to root even into a small minority of Western proletarians the intuition that the opposition to the policies promoted by the EU and the Italian government against the workers of "here" cannot be separated from the unconditional support to the untamed resistance of the disinherited proletarian masses of the Middle East!
16th February 2018
Internationalist Communist Organization