THE Palestinian masses and their organisations must unite to fight their enemy which is the Zionist state of Israel, backed up and supported by the ruling classes of the US and the UK.
Any party that fights to bring down the Hamas government of Palestine, the government elected by a vast majority of the Palestinian people – a government which the Israeli government, and the US and UK refuses to recognise and wants to see removed – is in fact doing Israel’s dirty work for it.
The Palestinian people elected a government that refused to recognise the state of Israel, although it is willing to agree to a 10 year truce with the Jewish state.
All Palestinian organisations must support the democratic right of the Palestinian people to elect the government of their choice.
The response of Israel, the US and the UK to the election of Hamas was to launch massive military attacks on the Gaza Strip, and to impose an international blockade on Palestine, seeking to bludgeon and starve the Palestinian people into surrender. It is also a matter of fact and a matter of shame that the rulers of the Arab states are respecting this blockade.
The Israelis followed this attack on Palestine with an attack on the Lebanon, again supported by the US and the UK. This was defeated after Israel had killed over 1,500 Lebanese and turned over a million people into homeless refugees.
Palestinians must support their elected government, and break the siege of the Israeli regime.
The Fatah movement has called for early elections explaining that ‘the serious dialogue, which it proposes, should deal with one topic, the topic of holding early elections that will take us out of the crisis and reinforce the principle of partnership and national unity.’
But all that early elections will do is either return another Hamas government, driving the Zionists and imperialists into a greater fury, or return the Fatah movement to power, giving Israel what it wants, a government that recognises Israel.
Fatah continues: ‘The people are the arbiter and that their verdict and choice of an acceptable, practical programme will extricate us from the crisis.’
The people however made their choice just a few months ago. The only ‘acceptable practical programme’ that Israel, the US and the UK will accept is recognition of Israel and an agreement to accept a bantustan and forget about a state of Palestine.
Last Sunday Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas was asked on al Jazeera satellite TV: ‘Mr President, recently there have been reports about progress in talks on forming a Palestinian national unity government based on the Prisoners’ Document. Suddenly, as some people have noticed, this changed during your visit to Washington and shortly after your visit to Jordan. What were the reasons for this change?’
Abbas replied: ‘The change took place before, and not after, we went to New York. . . Before I went to Washington I felt that the agreement was at an end, and subsequently we thought that we should repeat our efforts. That is why I said in an interview that we had returned back to square one.’
He added: ‘When I felt that the agreement would be cancelled, I said we should present something that is acceptable to the world. The world accepts the Quartet committee’s conditions. What are the Quartet committee’s conditions? . . . The signed agreements are: mutual recognition between us and Israel . . .’
The Palestinian factions must form a national unity government to fight for a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital and with its refugees having the right to return and with all of the settlements in the occupied territories abandoned.
The Arab masses must demand that the rulers of the Arab states break the inhuman imperialist blockade of Palestine and supply the Palestinian government with the promised aid to feed its people.
The British workers must demand that their trade unions take action against the Blair government to force it to end the blockade of Palestine and if it will not, to bring it down.
