IT IS 40 years since Israeli warplanes destroyed the Egyptian airforce on the ground and Israeli troops occupied the Sinai peninsula, occupied Syria’s Golan Heights and occupied more of Palestine, including East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
The ‘Six-Day War’ led to Israeli maps being published which showed the Sinai peninsula as part of Israel. The illusion of Israeli invincibility was rife, as was the idea that there would be a Greater Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates.
An Israeli premier of the period, Golda Meir, was emboldened enough to declare that there was no such thing as the Palestinian people and that the Zionists had returned to an ‘empty’ land.
However, even before the Six-Day War, the Palestinians were mobilising and forming the PLO.
‘Israeli invincibility’ did not last for long. In 1973 Egyptian troops crossed the Suez Canal on Yom Kippur Day and caught the Zionists either praying or on holiday. The Israelis were driven away from the banks of the Nile, and the Israeli government was forced to return the Sinai peninsula to Egypt, destroying all of the Jewish settlements that had been built there.
In 1982 Israel attacked the Lebanon to try and destroy the growing strength of the PLO. Instead their action created the Hezbollah, which ended the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon in 2000, with Israeli troops scurrying out of the country with their armour in the middle of the night.
The Palestinians were not idle during this period. In 1987 the First Intifada began, the sticks and stones revolution of the Palestinian masses – children, youths, men and women. This achieved the return of the PLO to Palestine when Yasser Arafat arrived in Gaza on July 1, 1994, to negotiate a two-state solution.
The Israelis, however, were only interested in delays and more delays, and the building of settlements.
Palestinian frustration with this erupted into the Second Intifada on September 28, 2000, the day that the butcher Sharon forced his way into the Al Aqsa mosque surrounded by hundreds of soldiers and bodyguards. This was an armed Intifada, an open revolutionary development.
On November 11, 2004, Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader who refused to sell out the Palestinian people, and who was under siege in Ramallah, died – probably from Israeli poisoning. The Zionists rejoiced, but the response of the Palestinian masses was revolutionary defiance, electing a Hamas government that refused to recognise Israel.
The masses then got the same treatment as Yasser Arafat: starvation, blockade and murderous attacks, imposed and encouraged by the US and UK imperialists. But, as did Arafat, they stood fast and would not give way.
This stand against the Zionists took place at the same time as the Arab revolution was rising in Iraq with the growth of the Iraqi insurgency against the US-UK occupiers.
And then came the defeat of the Zionist forces in the Lebanon, who invaded that country in July 2006 and were driven out in an absolutely humiliating defeat by the Hezbollah movement, creating consternation and crisis in the Zionist government and military leadership, that is still continuing.
With the US defeated in Iraq, and the Israelis being run out of the Lebanon, the struggle to liberate Palestine is now going to be driven forward.
Internationally in the trade unions there is a movement to boycott Israel, which the Zionists are already screaming about, since it has the potential to greatly weaken the Israeli state economically and politically.
The defeat of the imperialists in Iraq and the Lebanon, and the boycott Israel movement in the West, is creating the conditions for the emergence and triumph of the Third Intifada. This will end the occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, see the ending of the massive Jewish settlements, win the right to return of all Palestinian refugees and see the Palestinian parliament sitting in its capital in East Jerusalem.