By LEANDRO GALASTRI*
The colonialist and racist state of Israel will never be able to eliminate the resistance and struggle of the Palestinian people for their sovereignty and the defense of their lands.
1.
On October 7, 2023, the Islamic resistance group Hamas led the most impressive Palestinian reaction to the occupation of their lands by Israel since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. It was a response to decades of periodic massacres and daily humiliations. Hamas' historic military action shook the comfort and security of Zionism, which now, under the pretext of fighting the Islamic military group, promotes one of the most brutal genocidal actions in history, aiming at the physical elimination of an entire people.
Palestinian lands began to be systematically invaded at the beginning of the 20th century under the sponsorship of the global Zionist movement, an elite of fundamentalist Jews who, with the support of British imperialism at the beginning of the 20th century, decided to found a State in that region, summarily ignoring the historical presence of millions of Palestinians.
The support of British imperialism went down in history with the infamous Balfour Declaration, a letter from the British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour in 1917, addressed to the richest Zionist of the time, Baron Rothschild, in which he granted European Jewish settlers the right to steal Palestinian lands, a theft sanctioned and protected by the British crown. Since then, there has been a history of periodic massacres of the Palestinian population, first by fundamentalist Zionist settlers, armed and trained by British imperialism itself, and from 1948 onwards by the so-called “State of Israel”.
In November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly approved the partition of Palestine. It was decided that the region would be divided between a Jewish state with 53% of the territory and a Palestinian state with 47% of the territory previously controlled by the British mandate. The Arabs did not accept this decision, as it meant losing half of the territory that had belonged to them for centuries.
Then the first Arab-Israeli war occurred, with a military victory for Israel and the final annexation of 79% of all the territory planned for division by the UN. After the victory, Israel expelled more than 700 Palestinians from the area that was stolen from them, giving rise to what became known as nakba, or tragedy, in Arabic. In addition to the thousands of people killed and injured by this massacre, this Palestinian population lost their property, their savings and their nation, to which they were never able to return.
2.
In the history of the recurring massacres that the Israeli Army carries out against the Palestinian population, the current one has been going on for more than a year and has as its declared objective the complete extermination of the Palestinian people. The act has already been officially considered genocide by South Africa and around 50 countries in a case that is being processed at the UN's International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague – with no signs of slowing down or resolution.
According to internationally recognized figures, Israel has already killed around 50 people, almost half of them children. The pro-Israel media itself estimates the death toll at around 186, including indirect deaths and those who disappeared under the rubble. Israel has dropped 70 tons of bombs on Gaza so far, surpassing the bombings of Dresden, Hamburg and London combined during World War II. Virtually the entire structure of the Gaza Strip has been destroyed.
The cowardly accusation of anti-Semitism against those who rise up in protests and struggle against the genocidal State of Israel – many of them anti-Zionist Jews, as is widely known and shown on social media – seeks to surreptitiously exploit the painful memory of the crimes of Hitlerite Germany, so that Zionism can embody, without embarrassment, its own deplorable Nazi ideal of ethnic cleansing, of extermination of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, of which more than half are women, children and the elderly.
The Israeli state, in turn, seeks to unify public opinion and common sense in its country through an ideological campaign of racism against the Palestinians and the colonial project of ethnic cleansing.
3.
The proposal for the formation of two states has never been taken seriously by Israel, nor by England – the first sponsor of the theft of Palestinian lands – nor by the United States. Zionist leaders have always worked to make it unfeasible, and have never accepted it and will never accept it. The most realistic and democratic solution possible is the construction of a single, secular Palestinian state, where Arabs, Jews, Christians and anyone else can live freely and equally. The segregationist state of Israel has no international legal support to exist in the occupied territories!
Zionism, however, like all racist fundamentalism, is cowardly… It pays and will continue to pay the price of having to keep the usurpers of Palestinian lands on permanent alert and in constant fear of the Palestinian popular struggle… Let them be afraid, because the Palestinian fighters will never give up their territory, their people, the memory of the sacrifice of their children, their culture.
That is why we stand in solidarity and stand together with all those who are on the side of the Palestinian people’s struggle, denouncing and fighting the lies and sordid manipulations of the imperialist media and its national lackeys; we speak out in defense of the students of the University of São Paulo who are being prosecuted for anti-Semitism by their cowardly rector, who prefers to give subservient priority to maintaining relations with the Zionist academy; we stand alongside the professionals of the independent press who denounce the Palestinian Holocaust and, together with the international anti-Zionist and anti-fascist community, we demand a ceasefire and the immediate withdrawal of the colonial occupation army from legitimately Palestinian territory!
The colonialist and racist State of Israel will never be able to eliminate the resistance and struggle of the Palestinian people for their sovereignty and the defense of their lands. That is why we will continue to declare: down with Zionism and its direct promoter, US imperialism! Down with the colonialist and racist State of Israel! Long live Palestine and its valiant fighters! We will not forget! Palestine will indeed be free, from the river to the sea!
* Leandro Galastri he is professor of political science at Unesp-Marília. Author of Gramsci, Marxism and Revisionism (Associated Authors)). [https://amzn.to/3LJq2VU]
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