THE Israeli armed forces, under orders from the Israeli government, are continuing to attack defenceless Palestinian women, children and men in the Gaza Strip, using bombs, shells and missiles delivered from the air.
Fourteen Palestinian civilians, five of them children, have been killed in Israeli air strikes on the starving Gaza Strip in the last 10 days. This is after a family of eight were killed, including children, on the Gaza beach by an Israeli gunboat.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has declared there will be no let-up, announcing that the government will continue raids against the ‘terrorists’.
Olmert is acting in this way because he knows that he has the absolute support of Bush and Blair.
The UK, US and EU governments continue to boycott the democratically elected Hamas government, in favour of seeking to starve and bully the Palestinians into accepting what Israel is prepared to offer them.
This is a number of Palestinian entities, one in the Gaza Strip and a number of others in the West Bank.
In return for this, the Palestinians must accept that Jerusalem is the eternal capital of Israel, that Palestinian refugees cannot have the right to return to their homes, and that the Jordan Valley and the massively Israeli settled areas in the West Bank are to be annexed to Israel.
This is allegedly the solution to the Palestinian question. The occupiers are to be rewarded for their crimes, and the Palestinians are to get the Gaza Strip and a series of disconnected refugee camps and towns in the West Bank as their state.
To help the Israelis get the agreement of the Palestinian leadership to these aims, the governments of the US, UK and the EU states have imposed sanctions on the occupied people, including financial sanctions, to starve them into an agreement.
The Israeli Prime Minister Olmert has in the last fortnight appeared at a press conference with the British Prime Minister Blair, who publicly proclaimed that Britain and Israel were the best of friends, while not saying a word about the slaughter of Palestinian children.
Blair said that he was for a negotiated settlement and that it was important that a Palestinian leadership came forward to agree to Israel’s terms. If the Palestinian government would not recognise the state of Israel and would not negotiate the kind of settlement that Israel required, preferring to follow the example of Yasser Arafat, Blair considers that Olmert will be entitled to unilaterally impose his borders with Palestine, and annexe a big area of the West Bank and the Jordan Valley to Israel.
The kind of negotiations that Bush and Blair envisage are where Palestinian leaders come forward to give Israel everything that it wants. This would allow the Arab leaders to recognise Israel.
A Palestinian leadership that will not recognise Israel leaves the Israelis seizing the land, meaning that the struggle will continue and the Arab states will not be able to recognise Israel.
Blair, Bush and Olmert favour the first course of development, but if the Palestinian people will not allow their leaders to settle on Israel’s terms, Bush and Blair favour unilateral action by Olmert.
Olmert has made it clear that the attacks to wipe out ‘terrorists’ in Gaza will continue, meaning that more Palestinian children will die.
He would not be doing this if Bush and Blair had told him that this policy was out of the question.
This is imperialist – Zionist diplomacy at work, making demands supported by sanctions on Gaza and the West Bank, and missiles and massacres in Gaza.
The British trade unions must react immediately and come to the aid of the Palestinian people and their children.
They must declare a total trade and cultural boycott of Israel and spread it worldwide through the international trade union movement.
They must also demand that Palestinian democracy is supported and not punished and that the Hamas government must be immediately recognised by the British government.
