ISRAEL, on Saturday evening, committed over 200 tanks and 20,000 troops to an invasion of Gaza, covered by artillery fire and fire from warships off the Gaza coast, in a desperate effort to destroy the Hamas movement.
The Israeli government sees Hamas in the same way that it saw Yasser Arafat.
Yasser Arafat was put under virtual house arrest in Ramallah, and was then poisoned because he was an enemy who prevented Zionism achieving its dream of establishing a greater Israel that would be recognised by the rulers of the Arab world, and would be able to dominate a Palestinian bantustan.
Now Hamas, and the Palestinian masses in Gaza, who played a key part in electing Hamas to be the legitimate Palestinian government in a democratic election, are getting the same treatment.
Israel is seeking to physically eliminate Hamas and to teach the Palestinian masses a bloody lesson, that they must learn to bend the knee to Israel or they will die.
The death toll has now reached over 500, with 2,000 wounded, after up to 100 Palestinians have been killed so far in the last two days, either by tank, artillery or mortar fire, while a number of Palestinians have been shot dead by Israeli troops in the West Bank during protest demonstrations.
The Israeli ruling class is now showing that it is willing to kill tens of thousands of Palestinians to achieve its objective of destroying Hamas.
In this, it has the open support of the US and the UK for a very big massacre.
Its purpose is to clear the way for the incoming US president Obama to intervene and dictate Israel’s terms for the settling of the Palestinian question to the Palestinians.
The working class in Britain supports the Palestinian cause, and has shown this support once again in Saturday’s demonstrations throughout the country.
Now it must force its powerful trade unions to take action to halt this massacre. This action has not been forthcoming because the trade union bureaucracy supports the Brown government.
The trade unions must be made to demand that the Brown government publicly tells Israel to cease fire, and if it will not, close the Israeli embassy and break off all relations with the Zionist regime.
The trade unions must demand that the British government sends aid to the embattled masses of Gaza and Palestine, and that it follows the example of the boats that have already broken the Israeli blockade.
If the government will not carry out this policy, the trade unions must launch a campaign of industrial and political action to force through this policy.
The trade unions must also convene an emergency meeting of the TUC general council, and impose a trade boycott of Israel and spread it worldwide so that the Zionist entity is completely isolated.
This boycott will only be lifted when the siege of Gaza is lifted, and the Palestinian state has been established, with Jerusalem as its capital with the settlements ended and with all Palestinians enjoying the right to return.
Trade unions must advance from verbal support to very clear moral, financial, physical and political support for the Palestinian masses of Gaza and the West Bank.
This is the only way to establish peace in the Middle East by defeating Zionism and imperialism and creating the conditions for the establishment of a socialist secular state of Palestine in which Christians, Jews and Arabs will live side by side as part of a federation of Middle Eastern Socialist States.
