What Can Communists Do to Free Palestine?

This is the text a leaflet distributed by comrades of Socialist Revolution at Palestine solidarity demonstrations across the country. Download the PDF of the two-page leaflet here.

Living in the US, it’s easy to feel powerless about the occupation of Gaza and the daily terror inflicted on Palestinians. But we have enormous potential power—as long as we can get organized.

US imperialism and its political representatives explicitly support the Israeli state’s atrocities against Palestinians. The Democratic and Republican parties have virtually the same position on this.

The US government does billion-dollar arms deals with the reactionary Israeli regime, providing weapons and resources that are used to murder Palestinians. Investment by US banks, multinationals, and universities all aids this destruction.

The establishment media in the US spreads all manner of lies and distortions when it comes to the siege of Gaza and the oppression of Palestinians by the Israeli state.

We can do something about all of this, if we organize, agitate, and mobilize. In every school and university, mass meetings and rallies in solidarity with Palestine should be called and organized. In every workplace, we should start up discussions about these issues, including the complicity of the bosses.

We should focus around these demands:

• Both the Democrats and Republicans must be held responsible for supporting the Israeli regime’s oppression of the Palestinian people.
• If we want the US government to cut all ties with and support to the Israeli state, we must fight for a workers’ government, which alone can make this a reality.
• US universities should refuse investment in and collaboration with the arms industry.
• High schools, colleges, and universities should teach the truth about the history of the Israeli state and US imperialism, and their many crimes against the Palestinians.
• The capitalist media should be condemned for its lies about the Israeli oppression of Palestinians.

None of this will happen just because we ask nicely. The Biden administration, Trump and the Republican right wing, the bosses, the capitalist media, university administrators, and high school principals and school boards will all try to ignore us. So we have to make them listen.

Trade unionists should present motions in solidarity with Palestinian workers and youth—calling on the union federations to do the same—and oppose the continued support of the unions for the Democrats. Unions can also help organize and attend local solidarity rallies, calling on their members to attend as a block.

Workers can also mobilize and take militant action. Dockworkers can block arms shipments. Machinists can prevent the manufacture of weapons. Truckers can stop weapons being transported. Media workers can prevent the publication of the capitalists’ lies. Students should pass resolutions through student unions, and join forces with academic, administrative, and other staff on campus or in high schools. Coordinated action—such as walkouts, occupations, and strikes—should be organized to shut down universities and schools completely.

Accompanying this mass direct action should be teach-ins that cover the real history of Israel’s occupation of Palestine, and the role of US imperialism.

Each of us can discuss the situation with coworkers, classmates, friends, and family. We should collect quotes and interviews with those who are angry and enraged by the Israeli state’s violence against the Palestinian  people. We can publish these in our own media. Send reports, pictures, and videos to us at [email protected]

All of this will have a direct impact on the fight to end imperialism and free Palestine. Above all, we need to oppose “our own” imperialist government in the US, and overthrow the capitalist system it represents.

Bringing about a socialist revolution in the US—putting a workers’ government in power, with a foreign policy based on socialist internationalism—is the best way we can offer real solidarity to Palestinian workers and youth.

For that, you need to help us build a genuine communist movement in the US, by joining the International Marxist Tendency, and getting organized as a communist.

No to the Invasion of Gaza! End the Occupation!

The latest horrific conflict in the Middle East is the direct consequence of the escalating violent suppression of the Palestinians, promoted by Netanyahu, who leads the most reactionary government in Israel’s history. Now that war has been declared, the brutality of the Israeli state’s response to Hamas’s attack will only intensify. Retaliatory bombings have already killed hundreds of Palestinians and injured thousands, leveling schools, hospitals, mosques, and apartment buildings.

Imperialist hypocrisy

The leaders of Western imperialist governments are now talking about the “right of Israel to defend itself.” Biden, Macron, and reformist leaders like Starmer in Britain, in a hypocritical chorus, have condemned the attack on Israel. Conveniently, however, they have remained silent for decades in the face of Israeli brutality.

They all ignore the fact that, under Netanyahu’s cynical watch, violence by far-right Jewish settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem against Palestinian neighborhoods has increased exponentially.

Attempts by Palestinian youth to resist the occupation have been met with disproportionate and systematic deadly violence by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF). This culminated in the deadly onslaught against the Jenin refugee camp this past July. All this, while armed settlers menace the Palestinian population.

For the sake of his own political survival, Netanyahu has leaned on the most extreme right-wing Zionists. Their program is to provoke a “new Nakba”—emulating the massive ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population that led to the proclamation of Israel in 1948. This means annexing the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and Gaza, and driving out all Palestinians.

It is Netanyahu, his reactionary Zionist supporters, and the imperialists who are to blame for the present escalation. You cannot continue to deny a people its basic democratic rights, humiliate and oppress them, take more and more of their land and houses, shoot them, arrest them, torture them, and grind them into the dust, without sooner or later provoking an almighty backlash.

This repressive reality is intentionally obscured by the international capitalist media in an attempt to focus the blame on “crazy Palestinian violence.” The same people who talk today about “terrorism” remained silent during “Operation Cast Lead” in 2008–2009, and again during “Operation Protective Edge” in 2014. On both occasions, Israel killed thousands of Palestinians, and left tens of thousands without shelter. This is just to mention two recent examples.

They present the situation as if it were a struggle between two equivalent forces. This is entirely false. This is a struggle between a powerful and aggressive imperialist state, and a weak and oppressed people, fighting to defend itself and assert its right to exist as a nation.

Netanyahu has threatened a “mighty revenge.” But while it is certainly possible for Israel to bomb, strangle, invade, and reduce Gaza to rubble, as they have done many times in the past, it will prove impossible for them to hold it under occupation. Two million people cannot be suppressed indefinitely by purely military means.

President Biden has come out firmly in support of Israel, with no mention of the Palestinians’ right to oppose Israeli oppression. US imperialism is just as responsible as the Zionists and Netanyahu for the present situation, with their persistent defense of Israel as a bastion of “democracy”—meaning an important asset for US imperialism in the Middle East.

The prospect of an Israeli invasion of Gaza, and of the full occupation of the West Bank, which could set the whole of the Middle East on fire, must worry the most serious imperialist strategists in Washington. This situation is a harbinger for revolutionary convulsions and social instability around the world.

Intifada until victory!

The current crisis was long in the making. Over the past two years, a new generation of Palestinian resistance has emerged against the occupation in the West Bank. A defiant mood has developed among the Palestinian youth. They want action. Mere words of condemnation are not enough.

Only the revolutionary initiative of the Palestinian masses themselves—in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, as well as in Gaza and within Israel itself—can lead to a successful struggle against the occupation. Furthermore, the Arab masses in the neighboring countries must also play a key role. This means overthrowing the reactionary regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, etc.

International solidarity of the youth and working-class movement is crucial, provided that it is not based on abstract appeals for “peace” or “de-escalation of tensions.” Decades of UN resolutions and international agreements have not advanced the cause of the national liberation of the Palestinian a single inch.

We must be clear and demand the following:

• No to the invasion and bombing of  Gaza!
• No to imperialist meddling. Imperialist “peace” and the Oslo accords have failed the Palestinians!
• For a mass intifada uprising against the occupation, on both sides of the Green Line! 
• End the occupation! Release all political prisoners! End and reverse the Zionist settlement land grab. 
• No to oppression, and for equal rights for all peoples, regardless of ethnicity or religion!
• For a socialist federation of the whole of Palestine, as part of a socialist federation of the Middle East!
• Intifada until victory!