IN 1967, Israel, in the infamous ‘Six-Day War’, used its air power, and its backing from the Western powers, to defeat Arab armies and occupy the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza in Palestine, the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt, and the Golan Heights in Syria.
This was the apex of Israel’s power when its dream, and the nightmare of the Arab peoples, a Greater Israel, stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates flowing through Iraq, looked to be within its grasp.
Almost immediately maps appeared showing Sinai detached from Egypt, the Golan Heights detached from Syria, and the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as part of a Greater Israel.
Zionist leaders such as Golda Meir were emboldened enough to question whether there had ever been a Palestinian people.
These victories, despite appearances, actually extended the Zionist-controlled territories beyond the capacity of the Israeli state to defend them, while at the same time rousing the entire Arab people against them.
The Zionist self-created bubble of superiority was burst in 1973, when Egyptian troops crossed the Nile and drove the Israeli army out of the Sinai Peninsula, causing them very heavy losses and heralding the beginning of the end of the Zionist dream. The Zionists were forced to end their settlements in Sinai and evacuate that vast area.
They, however, clung onto the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights, and seemed to be well dug in, outlasting the First and Second Intifadas, while involving the PLO in bogus peace talks for over a decade. These were a cynical exercise in time-wasting, while they established what they called ‘facts on the ground’, massive settlements in the West Bank which rapidly became ‘Red Lines’ never to be crossed, and finally surrounded by an ‘Apartheid Wall’.
With Arafat’s death, at the hands of Zionist agents, the end game was in sight as far as the Zionists were concerned.
Their final solution was to allow the establishment of a Palestinian Bantustan, while they annexed Jerusalem, the West Bank settlements and the Jordan Valley as a part of Israel, and then allowed the Palestinians to have a chunk of the Negev Desert in return, for which the Palestinians were expected to concede that they would abandon the right to return and give up on East Jerusalem being their capital.
However, yesterday, on the 44th anniversary of the Six-Day War, the masses of Palestine rose up and crossed the ‘border’ on the Golan Heights to reclaim their territory and demanded their right to march to Jerusalem at the Qalandia Crossing on the outskirts of Ramallah.
These mass actions followed on from the mass action on Naqba Day. These risings were a declaration by the Palestinian masses that they are determined to declare their state this year, 2011, at the UN in September, and to call for all UN states to support it.
Then the battle will be waged to establish the state on the ground through a huge development of the Palestinian and Arab revolutions.
The two revolutions are in fact one.
It is the huge eruptions, that are taking place throughout North Africa, the Middle East and the Gulf, with millions of young people in the lead, that have inspired the Palestinian people to rise up, and will continue to drive on the Palestinian revolution into its third and victorious Intifada.
This is the road of the Palestinian revolution – as part of the Arab and world socialist revolutions.
This year, the workers of Palestine, supported by the working class of the Middle East and the Gulf, and the workers of the world, will see to it that the Palestinian state is established, and the situation is created where a single Palestinian state will emerge, with Jerusalem as its capital with all refugees having the right to return. It will be a socialist state where Arabs, Christians and Jews can live side by side, with the Zionist leadership and the imperialist powers driven out of the area.
