ISRAEL has made it brutally plain that it is not in the slightest interested in negotiating any ‘peace of the brave’ with the Palestinian people.
It is obsessed with establishing a ‘greater Israel’ that absorbs the Jordan valley and part of the West Bank into the state of Israel, along with the city of Jerusalem, and gives to the Palestinians a chunk of the Negev Desert and a section of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the latter to be policed by Egypt while the West Bank is to be dominated and be part of a federation with Jordan.
Israeli politicians have also urged the US to accept that there will be no two-state solution and to get on with the job of smashing Syria, Hezbollah and then Iran, which Israel sees as the key tasks to be accomplished to guarantee the racist state of Israel.
That is not to say that Israel does not have any allies in the Middle East. The Saudi feudalists have also made it very plain that they will tolerate endless atrocities against the Palestinians, provided the US gets on with the job of smashing Syria and Iran. Currently it is on strike and will not join the UN Security Council because the US has begun to talk to Iran. There is a common front between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
As a result of the ‘peace talks’ being made into a farce, Palestinian negotiators Saeb Erekat and Mohammed Shtayyeh have presented their resignation to Palestinian Authority President Mahmud Abbas.
This decision comes shortly after Israel revealed plans to demolish the homes of over 15,000 Palestinians in East Jerusalem in addition to announcing the construction of over 5,000 illegal settler homes in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Municipality officers, escorted by Israeli soldiers, issued demolition warrants for thousands of Palestinian homes in the East Jerusalem neighbourhoods of Ras Khamis and Ras Shahada on Friday, a local Palestinian official said yesterday.
This plan by itself is more than enough to bring on another massive eruption of Palestinian anger in a ‘Third Intifada’.
As well, three members of Hamas’ al-Qassam Brigades military wing died on Friday after an Israeli airstrike targeted a village in the southern Gaza Strip. Their body parts were found after the air strike.
On Thursday, a young man was killed and another wounded in separate Israeli artillery shelling east of Khan Younis refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip.
Medics said a 22-year-old man died and another was injured after the two were targeted by Israeli forces in the Absan area east of Khan Younis.
Then, on Thursday morning, Israeli planes fired missiles in an unprovoked and arrogant attack on a Syrian air base in Latakia.
The cover story for this unprovoked act of aggression is that Israel was forced to take this action because Russian missiles had just been delivered that were to be sent on to Hezbollah in the Lebanon.
The real story is that Israel is destroying Syria’s missile defences, after its chemical warfare capacity has been negotiated away, to prepare the next stage of the war to overthrow Assad, after the Syrian opposition sabotages any Geneva peace talks with its non-attendance.
Israel is banking on the Geneva peace talks collapsing because of the non-attendance of the Islamists on the orders of Saudi Arabia, and is preparing the way for an invasion of Syria.
This is why it is already being mooted that Thursday’s Israeli bombing raid is just the first of a series to disable Syria’s air defences and clear the way for an invasion by the imperialists and their allies.
In the face of these war preparations, workers in the West must give their full support to the Palestinians. The trade unions must impose a worldwide boycott of all Israeli goods and services to be kept clamped on till the Palestinians have their independent state with Jerusalem as its capital, and with the right of return.
Workers must give their full support to Syria and warn the imperialist leaders that any renewed attempt to overthrow Assad through an imperialist invasion will be met with general strikes to bring down the imperialist governments, on the basis that the enemy of the working people is at home and not in Damascus or Tehran or Moscow!
