FIERCE clashes are continuing between Israeli forces and Palestinian youth organised in Popular Committees across all of the West Bank districts.
The Palestinian Red Crescent (PRC) said 272 Palestinians were injured during Wednesday’s clashes across the West Bank districts, including nine with live ammunition, 84 with rubber-coated bullets, and 179 suffocation cases by tear gas inhalation.
The PRC said it was unable to secure an accurate count of the overall injuries, since a number of wounded Palestinians were arrested and beaten by Israeli undercover forces. Tension has mounted across the West Bank districts and Jerusalem with Israel’s repeated assault on the Al-Aqsa Mosque Compound, Islam’s third holiest site, particularly its growing attempts to enforce a temporal division on the site between Muslims and Jews.
It is clear that the Third Intifada has begun and the masses of Palestinian youth, along with the masses of workers and farmers, are organised in their own Popular Committees to fight off the Israeli soldiers, police and settlers to establish their state. Already, the Chair of the European Parliament Delegation for Relations with Palestine, Martina Anderson, has called for occupied East Jerusalem to be placed under immediate international protection after murderous Zionist soldier and settler attacks on the Palestinian masses.
However, the bosses of the planet and their governments are not interested in protecting the Palestinian masses. The PLO Secretary General, Saeb Erekat, said on Wednesday that the Palestinian leadership will not remain silent in the face of the persisting Israeli escalation in the occupied territories, and will continue to report all Israeli ‘crimes’ committed against Palestinians to the International Criminal Court.
Erekat is part of a Palestinian leadership that has had to admit that the Oslo Accords, that it negotiated, and the attempt to organise a two-state solution have completely failed, with Israel determined to have a one-state solution, and to kill as many Palestinians as necessary to try to drown the would-be Palestinian state in blood.
The crisis of the PLO leadership means that the Palestinian masses are now facing the Zionist army, police and settlers with only sticks and stones in their hands while the PA armed police forces remain on the sidelines, watching and observing their agreement with the Zionist state and their understandings with the USA.
Reporting Israel to the International Criminal Court holds no fears for the Zionist leadership since they are sure that they have the support of the imperialist powers. The UK government continues to arm Israel, while the 100,000 petition demanding the arrest of Netanyahu during his visit to the UK was ignored by the British government.
To rub salt into the wounds of the Palestinians, the USA, with the UK abstaining, voted against the raising of the Palestinian flag at the UN, while Obama did not even mention Palestine in his address to the General Assembly. Meanwhile, a battle is being waged all over the Middle East against imperialism, with Syria, supported by Hezbollah, Iran, Iraq and Russia, fighting for its life against an imperialist-organised drive to strengthen Israel by smashing the Assad government and dismembering Syria itself, to be divided up between Turkey and the Gulf Caliphates.
Palestinians must give their support to Syria and Hezbollah against imperialism and follow the example of Hezbollah that built a movement that was capable of driving Israel out of the Lebanon and defeating it when it tried to return. In fact, victory for Syria and Hezbollah over the imperialist powers will change the Middle East forever and create the conditions for driving out imperialism and its Zionist agency.
The working people of the world support Palestine. They must see to it that their trade unions clamp a boycott worldwide onto Israel to weaken it, and also take action to prevent their governments arming it, to prepare the way for the Zionist entity to be overthrown and replaced by one state Palestine, with Jerusalem as its capital, where Jews, Muslims, Arabs and Christians will be able to live in harmony side by side.
