AT the same time as the Fatah leader, President Abbas is meeting the Israeli Premier Olmert for the continuing ‘peace talks’, that were launched by President Bush with ex-Premier Blair as their chief ‘fixer’, the Israeli military has been slaughtering Palestinians with a terrible determination to kill the innocent.
Israeli air-raids in the 48 hours up to last Thursday morning killed 17 Palestinians including three children and a 5-month-old baby. Dozens of people were also seriously injured.
On Wednesday evening, three Palestinian children were killed and six others injured in an Israeli air strike on the Al Taw’am area close to the Khazandar gas station, north of Gaza City.
One of the dead was 5-month-old Muhammad Nasser Al-Borey, who was in his family home when a missile struck the building.
Earlier on Wednesday, two Palestinians were killed and two others injured when Israeli artillery targeted an orange grove in the Ash-Shuja’iyya neighbourhood in eastern Gaza City.
On Wednesday morning, five Al-Qassam Brigades activists were killed, and several bystanders were injured, after Israeli helicopters launched two missiles at a car in western Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip.
However, Israeli violence was not just reserved for the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip.
Two Palestinian activists affiliated to Fatah’s Al-Aqsa Brigades were killed on Thursday morning as fierce clashes erupted between Palestinian resistance fighters and Israeli forces in Balata refugee camp, east of Nablus in the northern West Bank.
Eyewitnesses said that a large Israeli force invaded Balata camp early in the morning after an undercover force infiltrated the camp and initiated the clashes.
Fierce fighting erupted between the invading forces and Palestinian resistance fighters.
It is clear that the Israelis realise that the Palestinian masses will never agree to their peace programme, and that as far as the Palestinian masses are concerned the Israelis desire the peace of the grave.
The kind of peace that they are after can only be achieved over the corpses of thousands and thousands of Palestinians.
The major concern of the Israeli ruling class is a racist one, that the nature of the ‘Jewish’ state is consolidated.
They are opposed on principle to one Palestinian state where Jews and Palestinians can live side by side.
As is well known they are violently opposed to granting the right of those Palestinian people who were evicted in 1948 and 1967 to return to their homes.
In fact they have the opposite in mind – the eviction of a huge number of Palestinian Arab Israelis who they say are out breeding the Jewish population and could be the majority in 10 years.
The Zionists are, in fact, looking for a deal with Egypt that it should agree to accept as part of a major US financed package, for Palestinians from Israel to be resettled in the Sinai peninsula.
Along with this transfer of population, the Zionists want a land swop.
They are willing to hand over a big chunk of the Negev desert to the Palestinians, provided they get the Israeli settled areas of the West Bank, as part of Israel.
The Palestinian masses will never agree to this type of peace settlement. This is why the US-Israeli peace programme can only be implemented as part of a major, murderous military campaign against the Palestinian masses, to try and beat them into submission.
No wonder that from all over the land of Palestine the call is going up for Abbas to break off from these obscene ‘peace talks’ and reunite the Palestinian masses to complete their historic struggle for their state.
The UK trade unions cannot just stand and watch the Israeli onslaught against the Palestinian masses.
They must immediately impose a boycott of all trade with Israel and spread it worldwide through the international trade union movement. They must show that they stand with the Palestinian masses and that they will not lift such a boycott until the independent and viable Palestinian state is established.