IN A dramatic move the United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres has invoked Article 99 of the UN Charter to urge the UN Security Council to act on the genocidal war being waged by Israel in Gaza.
Calling for the Security Council to convene an emergency meeting Guterres said he believed the situation in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories ‘may aggravate existing threats to the maintenance of international peace and security’.
Guterres wrote: ‘Facing the severe risk of the humanitarian system in Gaza, I urge the Council to help avert a humanitarian catastrophe and appeal for a humanitarian ceasefire to be declared.’
The call by Guterres for the Security Council to call for an immediate ceasefire was welcomed by the Palestinian Foreign Ministry who called it a ‘very necessary step’ and strongly condemned the Zionist regime’s attack on the secretary general who it accused of ‘political terrorism’ for demanding a cessation of the genocidal attacks that have killed over 17,000 Palestinian men women and children.
The UN Security Council has the power to order a worldwide sanction of Israel – a move that would crush Israel which relies for its existence solely through the support of its imperialist backers.
However, with the US and UK holding the powers of veto the chances of any motion demanding an immediate ceasefire being passed and acted on are non-existent.
The only force on the planet with the strength and will to end the genocide and ethnic cleansing being carried out on behalf of imperialism by the Zionists, is the working class and masses of the world. The working class across the world is rising up against its own capitalist governments and in support of the Palestinians.
In Greece on Wednesday, over 15,000 youth, students and workers took to the streets of Athens in an anti-police and anti-government march commemorating the killing of a school student, Alexis Grigoropoulos, by police in 2008. The hatred of police state ‘terrorism’ in Greece against workers and young people and the demands to bring down the government were accompanied by calls for ‘Freedom to Palestine’.
The identity of the struggle against the capitalist state with the struggle of the Palestinian people, not to be strangled by the Zionist regime, is clear across the world.
In Britain, the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) Director for England, Patricia Marquis, warned that the NHS is ‘under incredible pressure’, even before the worst of winter hits, with ‘services struggling to cope’ with the increasing number of patients arriving at hospitals and with nurses struggling to cope ‘leaving them burnt out, demoralised and pushing many out of the profession’.
The NHS has been brought to the point of collapse by over a decade of Tory austerity cuts that has cost the health and lives of workers and their children. Lives that the Tories and capitalist class regard as being worthless compared to the profits of the bosses and bankers.
While the Zionists are bombing hospitals in Gaza, the Tories are destroying hospitals at home with austerity, and threatening to destroy the trade unions with rapacious anti-union laws.
There is an identity between the class war at home by a Tory government armed with anti-strike laws to shackle the working class, and an imperialist shooting war in Gaza to impose imperialist domination over the oil rich region.
The working class and youth have already shown with mass demonstrations that they are prepared to fight the Tories and give full support to the Palestinians.
On Saturday, there is a historic opportunity to put this mass working class force into decisive action. On Saturday morning, the TUC Special Congress has been convened in London to decide on action to oppose the Tory anti-strike laws.
At midday, a mass march demanding a complete ceasefire, and an end to the Israeli occupation and for a Palestinian state from ‘the river to the sea’ will be taking place in London.
The TUC Special Congress must call a general strike to smash the anti-union laws by kicking out the Tories and by bringing in a workers government and socialism that will give its full support to Palestine.
The TUC must put itself at the head of Saturday’s march for Palestine. This will win the TUC the overwhelming support of millions of workers and youth in Britain and the enthusiastic support of workers and masses across the world, to go forward to socialism.
