YESTERDAY, not content with killing over 300 Palestinian men, women and children in Gaza, and seriously wounding 900, Israel was massing tanks on the Gaza border and calling up 6,000 reservists in order to step up their mass murder campaign in Gaza with an armoured invasion.
Such an attack will cost the lives of thousands of Palestinians, if this armoured invasion is allowed to take place.
The events of the last few days could not have happened without the go-ahead of the Bush administration – in its dying days – and without the incoming Obama administration being informed.
The British government may also have been officially informed, since it is well known that where the US goes, Brown will follow.
This he has done in a very similar way to that of the Blair government in 2006, when Israel attacked the Lebanon. The refusal of the Blair government to condemn this attack, and to demand that it be halted, let loose the dogs of war for three weeks, in the course of which much of the Lebanon was destroyed and thousands were killed.
This time Brown has also issued a statement about Israel’s right to defend itself, putting the onus for the mass slaughter of Palestinians onto Hamas!
He called on Palestinian militants to halt all rocket attacks on Israel and said Israel must ‘do everything in its power to avoid civilian casualties’.
The Israelis are being terrorised by the Palestinians in Brown’s upside-down world!
In fact, the Palestinians are being hit with a massive air assault, without the slightest means to defend themselves, making for a regular US-style ‘Turkey shoot’ of the kind we saw in Iraq.
In fact, ever since Hamas was elected as its government by the Palestinian people, the US, the UK and Israel have responded with blockades, the use of starvation as a weapon and with Israeli military attacks.
Hamas has responded with pinpricks, a few, small, obsolete and antiquated rockets.
The US aim has been, since that general election, to get the Palestinian people to dump Hamas and embrace those willing to run a Palestinian bantustan for Israel and the US.
Bush’s target was to resolve the ‘Palestinian problem’ in this way by the end of his term.
The US and the imperialist powers blame Hamas, its refusal to give up the right to return, its insistence that Jerusalem must be the capital of a Palestinian state in all of the pre-1967 Palestinian territories, with all of the settlements disbanded, for not being able to meet this timetable.
This is why Gaza is now coming under the heaviest attack ever.
This attack is an attempt at a regime change in Gaza, to get rid of the government that won the first Palestinian general election and replace it with those who are willing to collaborate with Israel.
It is an attempt to prepare the way for the incoming US president Obama to intervene in the Middle East as he is pledged to do, with either Hamas out of the way or greatly weakened.
This attempt at regime change is not going to succeed.
Workers all over the world must rally to the defence of the Palestinian masses in Gaza.
They must make the trade unions call strike action now to demand the end of the attack on Gaza and that the siege is broken.
The trade unions must organise a worldwide boycott of Israel to last until a Palestinian state is established with Jerusalem as its capital, with the settlements cleared and with all Palestinians having the right to return.
They must also give full financial and material support to the Third Intifada when it is called.
