IT IS AN indisputable fact that Alan Johnston, the BBC journalist, was freed by the Hamas movement just two weeks after Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip from the political friends of the US and British governments, who are grouped around President Abbas and were unable to free Johnston.
Fatah could not achieve his release, and neither could the US, UK or Israeli governments – witness that the Israeli Corporal, Shalit, is still being held in the Gaza Strip and no number of Israeli raids or attacks could or can free him.
Yet the British government is still a party to the barbaric plan to starve the citizens of the Gaza Strip because they helped vote in a democratic Hamas government, supporting its refusal to recognise the state of Israel, which exists on part of the historic territory of Palestine.
At the same time as the Brown government is engaging in this barbarous action, it is supporting President Abbas, who overthrew the Hamas-led national unity government and now rules the West Bank by decree.
The TUC and all of the British trade unions which campaigned for the freeing of Johnston must now thank Hamas for doing the job.
They must also demand of the British government that it recognises Haniya, the Hamas leader, as the democratically-elected prime minister of Palestine, and recognises the national unity government as the legitimate government, adding that Abbas must be told to step back from his coup.
The Brown government will not do this. The ex-British prime minister, Blair, is even now planning to go to Palestine as the representative of the Quartet, to help Abbas to hang onto control of the West Bank.
Blair must be withdrawn.
The trade unions must not only demand these things from the Brown government, they must fight for them by calling a national demonstration to demand the resumption of the Hamas-led national unity government.
One cannot talk about Palestine without dealing with Iraq.
Palestine is occupied by Israel and Iraq is occupied by the US and the UK.
The times of Saddam are now looked on as an idyll, after the massive slaughter and the privations of the years since March 2003, with an estimated 650,000 Iraqis killed and up to two million exiled and another two million in internal exile.
It is almost beyond belief that even British state security officials should be amazed at the discovery that a small group of young Arabs, connected to the NHS, with a few of them being doctors, should be prepared to hit back at the homeland of their enemy, which is destroying their homeland and very large numbers of its people.
The profiled expectation put forward is that the ‘terrorist’ will be an uneducated worker or peasant villager bemused and disorientated by a handful of crazy clerics.
This policeman’s profile is drawn up by people whose understanding is less than that of the most ill-educated Arab peasant or villager.
What is taking place in the Middle East is that an alliance of modern vandals is seeking to grab the region’s oil and gas resources by destroying a civilisation that invented writing, the potter’s wheel, cities with paved streets, legal systems, and magnificent buildings with hanging gardens, without which you could not have modern humanity.
This is all being destroyed, and the lives of millions are being destroyed with it.
The ruling classes expect to meet counter-attacks from those seeking revenge for the barbarism that they have seen and the slaughter.
Yet the same ruling classes persist in their looting. They are now licking their lips at the thought of privatising Iraq’s oil and its whole state-owned economy.
The way out of this crisis in the Middle East is not through terrorist attacks on the US or UK.
The way forward is through an alliance between the workers of the West and the peoples of the East to overthrow capitalism and imperialism with socialist revolutions in the western capitalist states.
These will expropriate the bosses and bankers and create the basis for an advance to world socialism.
