ISRAEL’S PM is ecstatic. ‘Our time has come’ Naftali Bennett declared to the world after US President Biden gave the Golan Heights to Israel, and the go-ahead for Israel to build hundreds of settlements on the Heights, and to double the number of Israeli settlers.
‘This is our moment. This is the moment of the Golan Heights,’ Bennett told ministers. ‘After long and static years in terms of the scope of settlement, our goal today is to double settlement in the Golan Heights.’
The Golan is Israeli-occupied Syria, which the United Nations General Assembly has voted must be returned to Syria, a decision that President Biden has told Bennett that he can ignore.
The Syrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates, in a statement released on Monday, said the occupied Golan is an integral part of Syrian territories under international law, and that Damascus is determined to recover the area ‘through all available means’.
It added: ‘The Syrian government reaffirms its complete and strong support for the entire Syrian nation, including local residents of the occupied Golan Heights who are steadfast in their resistance against the Israeli occupation and resoundingly reject the annexation of the Syrian territory as well as Israeli authorities’ land grab policies.’
The Israeli government, with the USA standing behind it, will now step up its colonisation of the Golan, where it will meet massive resistance. It will also step up its war to evict hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes in the occupied Palestinian territories, knocking down their houses and killing their youth as an ‘incentive’ to go.
Backing this move are President Biden and the British government. The latter has just nodded through a motion in its parliament, that was not debated never mind voted on, to make membership and support of Hamas, the Palestinian national liberation movement, illegal. While Israel kills scores of Palestinians on a daily basis, in the UK, if you show support for the Hamas resistance movement, you will be jailed.
As the Israeli murder machine goes into operation on the Golan and in occupied Palestine, anyone who supports the resistance of Hamas to the Israeli occupiers is a criminal, according to MPs.
In fact, US ex-president Trump – who negotiated with the UAE and other Arab states to ally with Israel, while it murders Palestinians and agreed that Jerusalem should be declared the capital of Israel, and all Palestinians driven out of it – is at one with his successor Biden. They both agree that Israel must run the Golan, and be able to cleanse the occupied territories of Palestinian men, women and children.
Trump also negotiated an agreement with the UAE and Bahrain to normalise their relations with Israel – as it murders Palestinian men, women and children.
In this period of massive economic crisis the major imperialist power, the USA, is desperate to secure the Middle East and place as much of it as possible under the heavy hand of Israel, taking in tow the anti-revolutionary anti-Iranian Gulf states. In return, Israel is being schooled to attack Iran at some date in the near future.
However, there is no doubt from the massive demonstrations that have taken place throughout the UK and the USA in support of the Palestinian people that the working class supports the Palestinians and their right to live in their own state under their own government.
Last May, when the Israelis waged an 11 day war against Gaza, there were two huge 150,000-strong demonstrations in London, headed by TUC leaders who, in the person of NEU teachers’ union leader Kevin Courtney, called for a general strike in support of the Palestinians. However, they went no further than a call!
As the Israeli army tools up to kill thousands in the Golan Heights, in the occupied West Bank and in the Gaza Strip, the British trade unions must take action.
They must tell the Johnson government that the working class does not recognise the unvoted motion to ban Hamas and to make support for the Palestinian revolution illegal. Further, with a massive economic catastrophe on the way, the unions are in the same trench as the Palestinian masses in the occupied territories and the Golan Heights.
The trade unions must call a general strike in support of the Palestinians to bring down the Johnson government and bring in a workers’ government that will put itself at the disposal of the Palestinian people in the struggle to establish a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, where all its citizens live in harmony, peace and prosperity.
