PALESTINIANS are demanding that the US-sponsored ‘peace talks’ with Israel are called off after Israeli troops murdered three Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu pledged to build more Israeli settlements in the occupied territories.
Palestinian negotiator Mohammad Shtayyeh said yesterday the ‘so-called bilateral Palestinian-Israeli negotiations are not going to take us anywhere’.
He added: ‘There is a strong party and there is a weak party, and the Israelis want to dictate rather than negotiate.
‘The Israelis want to replace occupation by force with occupation by an invitation, with our signature, and it will never happen.’
The plan that is being pushed by US secretary of State John Kerry is a security plan to defend and strengthen Israel.
It would see Israeli troops stationed along the Jordanian border, as well as allowing Israel to annexe the already settled areas, make Jerusalem its capital, and end any Palestinian right to return.
President Abbas’ media spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina accused Israel of deliberately carrying out the shootings in Jenin and Qalqilya in order to sink the talks.
He said ‘This dangerous Israeli escalation aims to thwart American and international efforts to move forward with the peace process, and leads the negotiations to a dead end.’
The West Bank killings were carried out by plainclothes assassins disguised as employees of the PalTel phone company.
Several hours later, a Palestinian security officer was shot dead just before dawn during an exchange of fire in Qalqilya, the Israeli army said, describing him as a ‘known gunman’ responsible for firing at troops.
The latest deaths raised to 28 the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli troops this year.
Netanyahu’s settlement speech added fuel to the fire with his declaration: ‘We will not stop, even for a moment, building our country and becoming stronger, and developing…the settlement enterprise.’
He said the obstacle to peace was ‘the ongoing opposition to the existence of a national Jewish homeland within any borders’.
The Palestinian territories are now very close to a new uprising, a ‘Third Intifada’ to establish their state by revolutionary means.
The call by Hamas that it is ready to form a national unity government with Fatah is a move to unite the Palestinian people for action.
In fact, Palestine is not the only area in the Middle East where revolution is erupting.
In next-door Syria, the Syrian masses, their army and their government are fighting off the Islamist hordes that have been armed and supplied by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the US and the UK to force through the same kind of regime change that has destroyed Iraq.
Not only are the Syrian masses fighting but they are also winning.
This development has seen President Assad declare that he will stand as President once again in the next election in 2014.
This courageous stand has shaken not only the imperialist powers, it has also stirred the Stalinist bureaucracy in Russia, which issued a statement saying that Assad should not make these declarations as it made convening the Geneva-2 talks more difficult.
However, the state of affairs in Syria will shadow the state of affairs on the battlefield as it did before in Vietnam in the 1970s, when the imperialist plans for peace talks came to nothing as they had to concede Vietnam to the NLF.
In fact, the Syrian government has replied to the suggestion of the Moscow Stalinists.
The Syrian government said on Thursday that nobody can prevent the country’s President, Bashar al Assad, from running for re-election next year.
It insisted: ‘Nobody has the right to interfere and say he must run or he should not run,’ Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Muqdad said, shortly after Russia criticised statements that Assad wanted to seek another term.
Bravo! Forward with the Palestinian and Syrian revolutions to drive imperialism and Zionism out of the Middle East, to fully restore Palestine, Syria and Iraq, and prepare the way to end the rule of the Gulf feudal rulers!
