Israel/Palestine

At midnight on Thursday 28/Friday 29 February, Israeli F16 jets fired three heavy rockets which demolished completely the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Union's "Folk House" in Gaza City. As well as destroying the building, which is - sorry, was - used for the provision of union-administered health care as well as organising, the missiles killed one Palestinian and injured 37, including many children, some of whom are now in hospital in critical condition. It badly damaged numerous homes, and destroyed the area's electricity and water supply. The PGFTU is calling for an end to the...

That Israel should want to stop the clerical-fascist Hamas regime in Gaza lobbing rockets into Israel is understandable and unobjectionable. That is has a right to defend itself will be denied only by those who share Hamas's belief that Israel itself has no right to exist, and the Jewish Israelis no right to be where they are, except as a vulnerable, stateless, disarmed religious minority within an Arab state. In principle, Israel has a right to attack those in Gaza who make feeble and intermittent war from the sky on its citizens. Despite all that, when you look at what is happening in Gaza...

"The Palestinians and Israelis should go out to the streets under the slogan of ceasefire now. They must force the leaderships to stop the war now. The bloodshed must be ended immediately..." "The Israeli occupation is responsible for the contemporary situation... decades of brutal oppression and expropriation of Palestinian lands, along with dozens of barriers within the West Bank and the miserable life in refugee camps... However, the Palestinians will not win their liberation by allying with the coarsest reactionaries..." *** After a long period of bloody warfare between Israel and the...

[Drafted to be within the union's 150-word limit] 1. The Israeli state must be condemned for its continued occupation of Palestinian-Arab land since 1967 and its brutal oppression of the Palestinian-Arab people. 2. Any future resolution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict can only be democratically achieved by a "two nations, two states" framework. 3. As UCU members: a. we offer solidarity to Palestinian-Arab and Israeli-Jewish workers who oppose any impediments put down by their ruling elites to a democratic "two nations, two states" solution; b. we recognise the importance of links between...

A month ago, the founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Dr. George Habash, died in Jordan. Dr. Habash died of a heart attack. He was 82 years old. Under the leadership of Dr. Habash, the PFLP constituted the radical wing within the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). The Front has been standing for a socialist, secular and democratic republic of Palestine, was influenced by the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union and advanced pan-Arabic politics which was aiming at uniting the Arab masses along nationalist-secular lines. However, Habash was not only a...

The serious and long-lasting strike of the teachers, which was ended up in a compromise with the Education Ministry, and the long strike of the lecturers in that was also finished in a compromise, were a serious factor in the militancy of many workers and youth, mainly within academia. In addition, young workers in were building their own union in a famous cooperative of coffee shops (the Coffee Bean, like Starbucks) and made a serious impression. The class struggle in becomes sharp from one day to another and people who were not involved in politics are becoming politically active. In Jaffa...

I'll start with one needed clarification: Zionism should be considered not only as theory but also as practice. Lenin and Trotsky were against Zionism as a program of building an exclusive national state on the land of Palestine, a program that denies the existence of an Arab people and wishes to get national independence by relying upon imperialism, e.g., world capitalism. Thus, Zionism is a reactionary theory in the sense of carrying forward nationalistic agenda; however, like any other national liberation movement, Zionism should be supported in the sense that it stands for liberation of...

The left devotes much of its efforts to campaigning against imperialism, which is no surprise given the present foreign policy of the American and British governments. However, in order to effectively combat imperialism and war, it is necessary that we understand what ‘anti-imperialism’ means, who is anti-imperialist, and what relationship that has with working-class politics. Unfortunately, the dominant conception of ‘anti-imperialism’ on the British left today, as schooled to thousands of young new activists by organisations such as the Socialist Workers’ Party, is wholly inadequate. As I...

Seven people were killed on 27 January as the Lebanese army clashed with rioters in southern Beirut in the wake of a Shia demonstration. The incident has drawn the army into Lebanon’s political crisis, which has seen three months of impasse as parties close to PM Fouad Siniora squabble with Syrian-backed parties such as Amal and Hezbollah over the election of a new president. The 27 January demonstration in Mar Makhaeil was called to protest about the chronic power cuts which take place in predominantly Shia districts of the Lebanese capital. The army attempted to break up the demonstration...

A footnote to Pat Longman’s review of The Shock Doctrine (Solidarity 3-126). Capitalism has always been full of “hard-faced men who did well out of the war” — or out of whatever recent disaster may have thrown society off balance. It may well be that since the early 1990s the governing circles of capital have been become more triumphalist, less concerned for stability, more confident about plunging into crises with the belief that the gains in terms of subsequent “restructuring” will outweigh the losses. George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq — a project plainly deemed a crazy excess by the top...