THERE is an obvious contradiction in the fact that while the US and the UK are considering fighting their way into Burma to ‘bring aid’ to the victims of Cyclone Nargis, the same states, and the same ruling classes are quite happily standing by and watching 1.5 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip starve, and go not just without food, but without oil, heating, electricity, education, healthcare and jobs.
Indeed such is the brazenness of the imperialist powers that Tony Blair and Rice have both visited Palestine, and did not lift a finger to bring food and fuel to the besieged and starving Palestinians.
In fact Bush, the US president is due in Palestine in just days to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the state of Israel, which is at the same time the 60th anniversary of the source of all of the horrors that have befallen millions of Palestinians to this day.
In their celebrations of 60 years of the Zionist entity Bush, Rice and Blair are in fact dancing on the graves of countless Palestinian men, women and children who have fallen in the last 60 years and who are continuing to fall.
However there is something that unites the imperialist powers over Palestine and Burma, and this is their politics, their aims.
They are starving and killing the masses of Gaza as a punishment for democratically electing a Hamas government and seeking to crush Palestinian resistance by all means possible, so that they can establish a Greater Israel by incorporating the West Bank settlements into the Zionist entity, as well as East Jerusalem.
For this strategic aim over a million Gazans are being starved.
In the case of Burma, they are desperate to intervene so as to be able to use food aid as a weapon in order to overthrow the Burmese military government, which they see as an obstacle for their political aims in the region.
The tactics are different in the two cases, but the strategic aim is the same.
The Burmese generals are loth to let them in, since they know that the aim of Bush and Brown is regime change.
What will happen after the regime change, they are not too worried about. This is proven by the experience of Iraq where five years after the overthrow of the ‘tyrant Saddam’, Iraqi people are being killed, maimed, turned into refugees and starved in record numbers.
This is Imperialism at work. In all cases bloody from head to toe.
It is in this situation that the trade unions in Britain must take action to support the hungry masses of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
They must separate themselves from the Brown government and its policy of 100% support for the state of Israel and US imperialism.
They must at all of their conferences this summer, climaxing at the TUC Congress, carry emergency resolutions imposing a trade and cultural boycott on Israel.
The trade unions must see to it that all trade and all forms of cooperation between the UK and Israel are severed.
Not only that, they must take this struggle to all of the world’s trade unions and seek to impose a worldwide trade union boycott of all Israeli goods and services.
This boycott must be imposed and kept on until the Palestinians are allowed to establish their own state with East Jerusalem as its capital, and with all Palestinians having the right to return, and with all settlements withdrawn from the West bank and East Jerusalem, with the latter becoming the capital of the Palestinian state.
This is what the the trade unions must do.
In the year of the 60th anniversary of the catastrophe that struck millions of Palestinians and saw them robbed of their land and exiled, the British trade unions must take a decisive stand and take action that will reverberate all round the world, play its part in the ending of the current siege, and be a milestone in the struggle for the establishment of the Palestinian state.
