Daily Times

Last Monday, as Palestinians’ were being slaughtered by the Zionist sate, Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner were celebrating the inauguration of the American Embassy in Jerusalem. Israeli leaders and diplomats from imperialism’s subservient states were eagerly chatting over festive march music pretending to be oblivious of the carnage and the blood of innocents, children and elderly being spilled on the sands of Gaza.

May 14 was the deadliest day in the occupied lands since 2014.On Tuesday, funerals for 63killed Palestinians were being held on the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, or catastrophe, the day on which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled from their homes and the villages where their ancestors had lived for millennia and the state of Israel established on May 15,1948. Seventy years after its establishment, Israel stands as a racist, apartheid state, whose structural oppression of the Palestinians has become a disgrace for humanity.

For the last seven weeks Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have been protesting for the right of their return to the areas from which they were forcibly expelled in 1948.Since March 30, Israeli forces have killed at least 114 and wounded 12000.Week after week the ordinary people of the Gaza strip marched to the border and protested, the Zionist snipers killed them remorselessly. Yet their marches to the border have persevered — as if they conquered the fear of death. The Israeli Human rights organisation B’Tselem reported, “Soldiers — including snipers — fired for hours on end at protestors… we’ve never seen such massive destruction ever before.” The barbarous character of the Zionist regime was laid bare when the Israeli Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman commented; “There are no innocents in Gaza.”

This horrendous tyranny was ‘condemned’ as usual by western and world governments the OIC and others while the US imperialists and their closest toadies condoned it. Most Arab regimes including the most sacrosanct monarchy, Saudi Arabia, opted to adopt a criminal silence. Arab-Israeli conflict has lost its relevance. Arab regimes are overtly and covertly entering into strategic relations with Israel. While there is still a risk for an Israeli war with Iran, it looks likely that these Arab states will be on the side of the Zionists.

May 14 was the deadliest day in the occupied lands since 2014. On Tuesday, funerals for 63 killed Palestinians were being held on the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, or catastrophe

For very long, the PLO pursued a strategy of armed struggle — mainly individual attacks on Israelis. Even wars between the Zionist state and progressive Arab regimes in Syria, Iraq, Egypt and others took place during the 1960’ and 70’s. These failed to get the Palestinians their liberation. By the 1980’s, as armed struggle had proved futile. The exhausted PLO leadership under Yasir Arafat switched onto a policy of a negotiated solution. Peace talks under the auspices of the very same imperialists who had propped-up their Zionist outpost in the Middle East eroded the Palestinian struggle.

The PLO’s leadership made enormous concessions and backtracked from the original positions in the extraordinary compromise of 1988. They recognised the imposed Israeli state of 1948, and accepted a Palestinian ‘state’ in the rest of the occupied territories, less than a quarter of their original homeland. Despite the famous handshake on the White House lawns between Yasir Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin, the Oslo accords and other diplomatic agreements, peace has remained elusive. The Zionists continued to demolish Palestinian homes and build illegal settlements in the occupied lands. These settlements were connected with roads that Palestinians are prohibited from using. Thus cleaving the occupied territories into pieces and making Palestinian statehood impossible. In effect, the Nakba process continued under the pretence of a ‘peace process’

No US president ever applied any meaningful pressure on Israel. Obama Administration’s cosmetic peace gestures on its way out were no respite for the Palestinians. Donald Trump has unashamedly defended the Israeli leaders, staffing his administration with ‘hawks’ shunning Palestinian rights, taking Jerusalem ‘off the table’, ending use of the word ‘occupation’ to describe Israel’s annexation of Palestinian lands and slashing assistance to Palestinian refugees.

Seventy years after the Nakba, expelled Palestinians are no closer to regain their homes than they were in 1948. The so-called international community has retreated to tepid comments on the atrocities of the Zionist state, as Israel bars Palestinians from every avenue towards freedom and basic rights of human existence. Live sniper fire awaits those who dare to mount an effective protest. However human aspiration for freedom are mightier than any force of repression. Vicious coercion in the past seven decades has not broken the Palestinians’ will and determination to struggle.

Nouran Abbasi, a 20year old girl from Galilee told Aljazeera, “A liberation struggle begins with awareness, learning from past experiences, such as the two Intifadas (popular Palestinian uprisings) and the 1936 revolt, and reading history correctly, not from the perspective of the victim but from the perspective of the freedom fighter…The Palestinian struggle for justice, which envisions the kind of equality and prosperity that protects the future of all Israelis and Palestinians, will continue until we bring this decades-long Nakba to an end, once and for all.”

These sentiments of Palestine’s new generation reflect high levels of political consciousness and show the way forward. The support of Muslim and Arab states has proved to be a deception. Hypocrite Western European regimes have double standards on ‘democracy, human rights and freedom’. Their armaments industry continues to bleed the Middle East for its obscene profits. The UN and the so-called international community always protect the interests of the rich and powerful. The negotiated solutions, wars and armed struggles have proved futile. The Palestinian ‘governments’ in the West Bank and the Gaza strip have their own privileges and power to protect. Ultimately, the oppressed Palestinian masses have been left to fight on their own. But this movement can only be successful if linked to the struggles of the oppressed classes in Israel, the Middle East and across the planet. That is the only genuine support Palestinians can trust and depend upon. Such unity in struggle on a class basis, rejecting the religious, nationalistic and other prejudices of the past can lead to liberation. This victory of the class struggle shall ensure national and class emancipation.

The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and International Secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at ptudc@hotmail.com

Published in Daily Times, May 21^st 2018.