SATURDAY saw the concrete proof of just how much support the brave Palestinian people have won in their battle to undo the dirty work of British imperialism, whose Balfour Declaration handed over Palestine to the Zionist Federation and sent hundreds of thousands of Palestinians into exile, into refugee camps and to early deaths as they resisted British imperialism and its Zionist colonisers.
The Palestinian ambassador to the UK was able to declare to a massive crowd of 150,000 workers and youth: ‘I bring a message of defiance from Jerusalem, the eternal capital of the state of Palestine, and from besieged and heroic Gaza, and from the refugee camps – we will not be denied any more.’
Husam Zomlot told the mass rally outside the Israeli embassy in Kensington on Saturday: ‘I bring a message – this time it’s different. This time we will not be denied. United we stand. We have had enormous oppression, apartheid, ethnic cleansing. Enough of war crimes.
‘In Gaza an entire family has been wiped out – eight children. Only eight-month-old baby Omar survived in that family. Omar is Palestine. Only through dignity of freedom will we go on. There are not two sides. We will never waiver. We will remain steadfast.’
He addressed a massive demonstration of 150,000. However, it is not just the UK working class and the UK youth that have taken up the cause of Palestine – there were mass marches all over the world, even throughout the USA, for justice for the Palestinian people.
However, Zionism remains Zionism, as they showed when their military blew up the media HQ for the Associated Press and Al Jazeera in Gaza, declaring that these bourgeois institutions were harbouring Hamas ‘terrorists’.
You can understand the mad logic behind their desperate and murderous actions, since Al Jazeera and the capitalist media have shown the Zionist gangsters at work, slaughtering men and women and children in Gaza.
They consider that they can murder with impunity and can do what they like following Trump’s decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and then forge alliances with some of the Arab states and encourage the continuing eviction of Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem. President Biden has continued from where Trump left off, but the masses have refused to kowtow.
The mass rally in London signals that the time has come to rip up the Balfour Declaration and establish a secular state of Palestine with East Jerusalem as its capital, where Arabs and Jews can live and flourish side by side.
Glyn Secker, speaking at the London rally for ‘Jews for Justice for Palestinians’, said: ‘We have to put an end to over half a century of occupation, midnight raids, children snatched from their beds, the 1982 massacres of Sabra and Shatila, 73 years of racism.
‘This rotten fruit that is Israel is split open. I’m a Jew. I know what a pogrom looks like. We are the Jews who stand shoulder to shoulder with Palestinians. Israel’s internal stability is fractured. Now is the time for justice. Now is the time for Palestine.’
However, what was lacking at the rally were any of the current TUC leadership who in the past have carried all kinds if resolutions opposing the Zionist pogroms in Palestine.
Next Saturday, there is to be another mass march and rally and there will be more people there than there was last Saturday. Trade unionists up and down the country must now tell their leaders that senior TUC officials must be present and must address next Saturday’s rally.
The murderous aftermath of the Balfour Declaration must be negated by the TUC officially supporting the Palestinian people’s struggle with deeds, beginning with their recognition of the state of Palestine, with East Jerusalem as its capital, and with all Palestinians having the right to return.
The TUC General Council must meet this week and decide on a complete boycott of all Israeli goods, and to serve notice on the Tories that the TUC will call a general strike to bring down the Johnson government if it does not recognise the Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, and pack the present Israel political and military leadership off t The Hague to face a war crimes tribunal trial. This is the way forward!
