YESTERDAY the European Union followed the example of the US and suspended its aid to the Palestine National Authority. The EU has given $400 million to the PNA , since its foundation in 1994, while the US has given $600 million.
The US and the EU are bringing retribution, in the form of starvation, to the Palestinian masses for having the audacity to vote for the party of their choice, Hamas, in the recent Palestinian elections, and not the party that the US, the EU and Israel favoured, Fatah.
While the imperialist powers are cutting off their aid to the PNA, the Israelis are attacking and shelling the Gaza Strip from the land, the sea and the air. Times have never been so tough for the people of Gaza, most of them unemployed, most of them in refugee camps, with bread almost unobtainable and people being killed and wounded every day.
The Israelis have also launched attacks on Palestinian towns in the West Bank – Jericho, Nablus and Ramallah to mention a few.
Still filled with rage at the shock of their defeat in the recent Palestinian elections, the US, EU and Israeli message to Hamas is that the movement had better break its election pledges to the masses and recognise the State of Israel, the Oslo Accords, all the agreements that the PNA made with Israel and renounce all violence, or else the ‘democratic imperialists’ will starve them out, while the Zionist gangsters bomb, shell and murder them on a daily basis.
The content of Western democracy is vote as we say, or else we’ll butcher you.
Meanwhile, the Israelis are getting the agreement of Bush to forcibly expand Israel by annexing East Jerusalem, and Bethlehem to Israel, by moving their international frontier to the outskirts of Ramallah, to the Qalandia checkpoint, while completing the building of the Separation Wall so that the Zionists can attempt to annex all of the main settlements in the West Bank, as well as the Jordan valley.
This will leave Gaza and a number of disconnected Palestinian towns on the West Bank as the Palestinian entity. This latest projected bout of Zionist ethnic cleansing already has the implicit support of the Bush administration and of the Blair government.
Faced with the massive attack on Hamas and the Palestinian people, the Fatah movement should at once join a government of national unity with Hamas.
Such a government would then form a common front with the Lebanese masses, the anti-occupation Iraqi insurgents, the Syrian people and the embattled people of Iran, who are now being threatened with bombing raids and war by both Israel and the United States.
It is now obvious from its defeat in Iraq that US imperialism, for all of its vast military strength, has feet of clay and cannot take on the revolutionary masses and defeat them. In Iraq, the US administration has even fallen out with a section of its puppet government, led by Jaafari, and is encouraging sectarian conflicts to try and cover up its defeat at the hands of the Iraqi masses.
In the Lebanon, Hezbollah and its allied movements are standing tall against the Zionists and those would serve them within the Lebanon itself.
The Syrian masses have not given way to US threats, while in Iran the masses are sure that they can match the deeds of the Iraqi insurgency as far as any US intervention is concerned.
In fact, the Zionists have their own considerable crisis to contend with.
They are little more than an armed encampment kept going by transfusions of billions of US dollars annually.
All thought of a Greater Israel had to be abandoned when they had to hand back the Sinai peninsula to Egypt, and then southern Lebanon.
Such is their crisis, their political parties are exploding in their own contradictions. Likud, the last government party has more or less disappeared while the new ruling party Kadima is so insecure it has to be buttressed by Sharon’s corpse, still technically alive.
The turn-out at the last, most important, Israeli election ever was 39 per cent, hardly a vote of confidence in Zionism.
The road to the Palestinian state is not through the meetings of the Quartet, or through winning the good will of Zionists.
The road to Palestine is a revolutionary one. It lies through forcing the occupation armies out of Iraq and carrying the fight from there into occupied Palestine.
The only way that peace can come to the Middle East is through the establishment of a Palestinian state over its entire historic territory, with Jerusalem as its capital. It will be a land in which Jews, Arabs and Christians will live in side by side, part of a Middle East Federation of Socialist States.
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