THE Israeli Netanyahu regime is now working hard at its programme for the ‘final solution’ to the question of Palestine and the Palestinians.
The Palestinian Ministry of Education and Higher Education has just turned down a request by Tel Aviv to teach the Israeli syllabus in schools across occupied East Jerusalem in exchange for special funding of over $5.2m.
Most schools in East al-Quds teach the Palestinian curriculum, with graduates taking the Palestinian Authority’s matriculation exam. Meanwhile, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) says Israel is organising to steal the entire occupied Palestinian territories from the Palestinians, through confiscating more and more private land in the occupied West Bank.
The PLO’s National Bureau to Defend Land has just warned of the ‘dangerous’ consequences of a plan by the Netanyahu regime to resettle evacuees from the illegal Zionist Amona settlement outpost in the central West Bank to a nearby privately-owned piece of Palestinian land.
The PLO said the ‘unprecedented’ measure is aimed at ‘swallowing’ more Palestinian land with the leasing of the privately-held Palestinian properties. Meanwhile, some 140 new illegal housing units are expected to be built on the Palestinian land. The Israeli human rights watchdog Peace Now has slammed the Israeli plan to steal more Palestinian land, saying it would ‘create an opening for the takeover of tens of thousands of dunams in the West Bank.
‘The scope of absentees’ property is estimated at around 100,000 dunams (double the size of Tel Aviv and similar to the land taken up by all of the settlements today),’ it added, warning that the move would constitute ‘the crossing of a red line’ and pave the way for the construction of even more unauthorised and illegal settlements across the West Bank.
The Israeli group added that Israel ‘will crush the basic rights of Palestinians under its rule in the occupied territories, while violating international law – all out of the will to comply to the demands of a group of settlers that established an illegal outpost on stolen Palestinian land with the backing of the government’.
Already, over half a million Israelis live in more than 230 illegal settlements built since the 1967 Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank, including East al-Quds. All these Israeli settlements are illegal. Palestinian leaders gathered at a solidarity sit-in for the thousands of current hunger-striking Palestinian prisoners on Saturday, in the southern occupied West Bank city of Bethlehem. They declared that Israeli prisons have turned into a ‘battlefield’ and were in a state of ‘Intifada against injustice, humiliation, and racist arbitrary laws’.
Issa Qaraqe cited the mass hunger strike underway throughout Israel’s prisons as a mass protest against administrative detention – Israel’s policy of detention without charge or trial, as well as solitary confinement, humiliating raids, and other severe measures imposed on Palestinian prisoners.
Qaraqe said that Israeli forces recently raided Israel’s Nafha, Ramon, Ofer, Galbou, Negev, and Eshel prisons, assaulting Palestinian prisoners, leading them to declare an open hunger strike. Qaraqe also called hunger striker Bilal Kayid’s health condition a ‘time bomb’ and reiterated warnings that the hunger striker could die at any moment after 56 days of his strike, leading to an insurrection.
He added that Palestinian prisoners were in need of international protection.
The workers of the world must answer his appeal for ‘protection’ by imposing a full trade union blockade of Israel, as a pariah statelet established solely for the purpose of making war on the Palestinian and all Arab peoples, on behalf of the US and the UK.
Workers in the UK must demand that the TUC Congress in September decides to impose a permanent blockade on Israel, and also to organise mass protest actions, and mass strikes in the UK to force the government to recognise the state of Palestine, and force it to stop arming Israel. If it won’t then the government must be brought down by a general strike and a workers government brought in! Revolution is the way forward for both the Palestinian and UK workers!
