Palestinian resistance

"It never happened..."            (John Pilger, 26 July 2007)

Imprisoning a Whole Nation (John Pilger, 22 May 2007)

Palestinian Resistance Cuts the Gordian Knot (Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) June 14-15, 2007)

It never happened..."

John Pilger: New Statesman, 26 July 2007

Concealed during the Alan Johnston kidnap crisis was the fate of a Palestinian cameraman shot by the Israelis. The BBC, desperate to deny charges of "bias", refused to follow the story.

One of the leaders of demonstrations in Gaza calling for the release of the BBC reporter Alan Johnston was a Palestinian news cameraman, Imad Ghanem. On 5 July, he was shot by Israeli soldiers as he filmed them invading Gaza. A Reuters video shows bullets hitting his body as he lay on the ground. An ambulance trying to reach him was also attacked. The Israelis described him as a "legitimate target". The International Federation of Journalists called the shooting "a vicious and brutal example of deliberate targeting of a journalist". At the age of 21, he has had both legs amputated.

Dr David Halpin, a British trauma surgeon who works with Palestinian children, emailed the BBC's Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen. "The BBC should report the alleged details about the shooting," he wrote. "It should honour Alan [Johnston] as a journalist by reporting the facts, uncomfortable as they might be to Israel."

He received no reply.

The atrocity was reported in two sentences on the BBC online. Along with 11 Palestinian civilians killed by the Israelis on the same day, Alan Johnston's now legless champion slipped into what George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four called the memory hole. (It was Winston Smith's job at the Ministry of Truth to make disappear all facts embarrassing to Big Brother.) While Alan Johnston was being held, I was asked by the BBC World Service if I would say a few words of support for him. I readily agreed, and suggested I also mention the thousands of Palestinians abducted and held hostage. The answer was a polite no; and all the other hostages remained in the memory hole. Or, as Harold Pinter wrote of such unmentionables: "It never happened. Nothing ever happened . . . It didn't matter. It was of no interest."

The media wailing over the BBC's royal photo-shoot fiasco and assorted misdemeanours provide the perfect straw man. They complement a self-serving BBC internal inquiry into news bias, which dutifully supplied the Daily Mail with hoary grist that the corporation is a left-wing plot. Such shenanigans would be funny were it not for the true story behind the facade of elite propaganda that presents humanity as useful or expendable, worthy or unworthy, and the Middle East as the Anglo-American crime that never happened, didn't matter, was of no interest.

The other day, I turned on Radio 4 and heard a cut-glass voice announce a programme about Iraqi interpreters working for "the British coalition forces" and warning that "listeners might find certain descriptions of violence disturbing". Not a word referred to those of "us" directly and ultimately responsible for the violence. The programme was called Face the Facts. Is satire that dead? Not yet. The warmonger David Aaronovitch is to interview Blair in the BBC's "major retrospective" of the sociopath's rule.

Bringing democracy

Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four lexicon of opposites pervades almost everything we see, hear and read now. The invaders and destroyers are "the British coalition forces", surely as benign as the St John Ambulance, who are "bringing democracy" to Iraq. Newsnight describes Israel as having "two hostile Palestinian entities on its borders", neatly inverting the truth that Israel is actually inside Palestinian borders. A study by Glasgow University says that young British viewers of TV news believe Israelis illegally colonising Palestinian land are Palestinians: the victims are the invaders.

"The great crimes against most of humanity", wrote the American cultural critic James Petras, "are justified by a corrosive debasement of language and thought . . . [that] have fabricated a linguistic world of terror, of demons and saviours, of axes of good and evil, of euphemisms" designed to disguise a state terror that is "a gross perversion" of democracy, liberation, reform, justice. In his re-inauguration speech, George Bush mentioned all these words, whose meaning, for him, is the dictionary opposite.

It is 80 years since Edward Bernays, the father of public relations, predicted a pervasive "invisible government" of corporate spin, suppression and silence as the true ruling power in the United States. That is true today on both sides of the Atlantic. How else could America and Brit ain go on such a spree of death and mayhem on the basis of stupendous lies about non-existent weapons of mass destruction, even a "mushroom cloud over New York"? When the BBC radio reporter Andrew Gilligan reported the truth, he was pilloried and sacked along with the director general, while Blair, the proven liar, was protected by the liberal wing of the media and given a standing ovation in parliament.

The same is happening again over Iran, distracted, it is hoped, by spin that David Miliband is a "sceptic" about the crime in Iraq when, in fact, he has been an accomplice, and by unctuous Kennedy-quoting Foreign Office propaganda about the Foreign Secretary's "new world order".

"What do you think of Iran's complicity in attacks on British soldiers in Basra?" Miliband was asked by the Financial Times.

Miliband: "Well, I think that any evidence of Iranian engagement there is to be deplored. I think that we need regional players to be supporting stability, not fomenting discord, never mind death . . ."

FT: "Just to be clear, there is evidence?"

Miliband: "Well no, I chose my words carefully . . ."

The coming war on Iran, including the possibility of a nuclear attack, has already begun as a war by journalism. Count the number of times "nuclear weapons programme" and "nuclear threat" are spoken and written, yet neither exists, says the International Atomic Energy Agency. On 21 June, the New York Times went further and advertised an "urgent" poll, headed: "Should we bomb Iran?" The questions beneath referred to Iran being "a greater threat than Saddam Hussein" and asked: "Who should undertake military action against Iran first . . . ?" The choice was "US. Israel. Neither country".

So tick your favourite bombers.

The last British war to be fought without censorship and "embedded" journalists was the Crimea a century and a half ago. The bloodbath of the First World War and the Cold War might never have happened without their unpaid (and paid) propagandists. Today's invisible government is no less served, especially by those who censor by omission. The craven liberal campaign against the first real hope for the poor of Venezuela is a striking example.

However, there are major differences. Official disinformation now is often aimed at a critical public intelligence, a growing awareness in spite of the media. This "threat" from a public often held in contempt has been met by the insidious transfer of much of journalism to public relations. Some years ago, PR Week estimated that the amount of "PR-generated material" in the media is "50 per cent in a broadsheet newspaper in every section apart from sport. In the local press and the mid-market and tabloid nationals, the figure would undoubtedly be higher. Music and fashion journalists and PRs work hand in hand in the editorial process . . . PRs provide fodder, but the clever high-powered ones do a lot of the journalists' thinking for them."

This is known today as "perception management". The most powerful are not the Max Cliffords but huge corporations such as Hill & Knowlton, which "sold" the slaughter known as the first Gulf war, and the Sawyer Miller Group, which sold hated, pro-Washington regimes in Colombia and Bolivia and whose operatives included Mark Malloch Brown, the new Foreign Office minister, currently being spun as anti-Washington. Hundreds of millions of dollars go to corporations spinning the carnage in Iraq as a sectarian war and covering up the truth: that an atrocious invasion is pinned down by a successful resistance while the oil is looted.

The other major difference today is the abdication of cultural forces that once provided dissent outside journalism. Their silence has been devastating. "For almost the first time in two centuries," wrote the literary and cultural critic Terry Eagleton, "there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life." The lone, honourable exception is Harold Pinter. Eagleton listed writers and playwrights who once promised dissent and satire and instead became rich celebrities, ending the legacy of Shelley and Blake, Carlyle and Ruskin, Morris and Wilde, Wells and Shaw. He singled out Martin Amis, a writer given tombstones of column inches in which to air his pretensions, along with his attacks on Muslims. The following is from a recent article by Amis:

Tony strolled over [to me] and said, "What have you been up to today?"

"I've been feeling protective of my prime minister, since you ask."

For some reason our acquaintanceship, at least on my part, is becoming mildly but deplorably flirtatious.

What these elite, embedded voices share is their participation in an essentially class war, the long war of the rich against the poor. That they play their part in a broadcasting studio or in the clubbable pages of the review sections and that they think of themselves as liberals or conservatives is neither here nor there. They belong to the same crusade, waging the same battle for their enduring privilege.

In The Serpent, Marc Karlin's dreamlike film about Rupert Murdoch, the narrator describes how easily Murdochism came to dominate the media and coerce the industry's liberal elite. There are clips from a keynote address that Murdoch gave at the Edinburgh Television Festival. The camera pans across the audience of TV executives, who listen in respectful silence as Murdoch flagellates them for suppressing the true voice of the people. They then applaud him. "This is the silence of the democrats," says the voice-over, "and the Dark Prince could bath in their silence."

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Imprisoning a Whole Nation

John Pilger, New Statesman, 22 May 2007

Israel is destroying any notion of a state of Palestine and is being allowed to imprison an entire nation. That is clear from the latest attacks on Gaza, whose suffering has become a metaphor for the tragedy imposed on the peoples of the Middle East and beyond. These attacks, reported on Britain's Channel 4 News, were "targeting key militants of Hamas" and the "Hamas infrastructure". The BBC described a "clash" between the same militants and Israeli F-16 aircraft.

Consider one such clash. The militants’ car was blown to pieces by a missile from a fighter-bomber. Who were these militants? In my experience, all the people of Gaza are militant in their resistance to their jailer and tormentor. As for the "Hamas infrastructure", this was the headquarters of the party that won last year’s democratic elections in Palestine. To report that would give the wrong impression. It would suggest that the people in the car and all the others over the years, the babies and the elderly who have also "clashed" with fighter-bombers, were victims of a monstrous injustice. It would suggest the truth.

"Some say," said the Channel 4 reporter, that "Hamas has courted this [attack]..." Perhaps he was referring to the rockets fired at Israel from within the prison of Gaza which killed no one. Under international law an occupied people has the right to use arms against the occupier’s forces. This right is never reported. The Channel 4 reporter referred to an "endless war", suggesting equivalents. There is no war. There is resistance among the poorest, most vulnerable people on earth to an enduring, illegal occupation imposed by the world’s fourth largest military power, whose weapons of mass destruction range from cluster bombs to thermonuclear devices, bankrolled by the superpower. In the past six years alone, wrote the historian Ilan Pappé, "Israeli forces have killed more than 4,000 Palestinians, half of them children".

Consider how this power works. According to documents obtained by United Press International, the Israelis once secretly funded Hamas as "a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO [Palestine Liberation Organisation] by using a competing religious alternative", in the words of a former CIA official.

Today, Israel and the US have reversed this ploy and openly back Hamas’s rival, Fatah, with bribes of millions of dollars. Israel recently secretly allowed 500 Fatah fighters to cross into Gaza from Egypt, where they had been trained by another American client, the Cairo dictatorship. The Israelis’ aim is to undermine the elected Palestinian government and ignite a civil war. They have not quite succeeded. In response, the Palestinians forged a government of national unity, of both Hamas and Fatah. The latest attacks are aimed at destroying this.

With Gaza secured in chaos and the West Bank walled in, the Israeli plan, wrote the Palestinian academic Karma Nabulsi, is "a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless, destroyed, cowed, ruled by disparate militias, gangs, religious ideologues and extremists, broken up into ethnic and religious tribalism and co-opted collaborationists. Look to the Iraq of today..."

On 19 May, the Guardian received this letter from Omar Jabary al-Sarafeh, a Ramallah resident: "Land, water and air are under constant sight of a sophisticated military surveillance system that makes Gaza like The Truman Show," he wrote. "In this film every Gazan actor has a predefined role and the [Israeli] army behaves as a director... The Gaza strip needs to be shown as what it is... an Israeli laboratory backed by the international community where human beings are used as rabbits to test the most dramatic and perverse practices of economic suffocation and starvation."

The remarkable Israeli journalist Gideon Levy has described the starvation sweeping Gaza’s more than a million and a quarter inhabitants and the "thousands of wounded, disabled and shell-shocked people unable to receive any treatment... The shadows of human beings roam the ruins... They only know the [Israeli army] will return and they know what this will mean for them: more imprisonment in their homes for weeks, more death and destruction in monstrous proportions".

Whenever I have been in Gaza, I have been consumed by this melancholia, as if I were a trespasser in a secret place of mourning. Skeins of smoke from wood fires hang over the same Mediterranean Sea that free peoples know, but not here. Along beaches that tourists would regard as picturesque trudge the incarcerated of Gaza; lines of sepia figures become silhouettes, marching at the water’s edge, through lapping sewage. The water and power are cut off, yet again, when the generators are bombed, yet again. Iconic murals on walls pockmarked by bullets commemorate the dead, such as the family of 18 men, women and children who "clashed" with a 500lb American/Israeli bomb, dropped on their block of flats as they slept. Presumably, they were militants.

More than 40 per cent of the population of Gaza are children under the age of 15. Reporting on a four-year field study in occupied Palestine for the British Medical Journal, Dr Derek Summerfield wrote that "two-thirds of the 621 children killed at checkpoints, in the street, on the way to school, in their homes, died from small arms fire, directed in over half of cases to the head, neck and chest – the sniper’s wound". A friend of mine with the United Nations calls them "children of the dust". Their wonderful childishness, their rowdiness and giggles and charm, belie their nightmare.

I met Dr Khalid Dahlan, a psychiatrist who heads one of several children’s community health projects in Gaza. He told me about his latest survey. "The statistic I personally find unbearable," he said, "is that 99.4 per cent of the children we studied suffer trauma. Once you look at the rates of exposure to trauma, you see why: 99.2 per cent of the study group’s homes were bombarded; 97.5 per cent were exposed to tear gas; 96.6 per cent witnessed shootings; 95.8 per cent witnessed bombardment and funerals; almost a quarter saw family members injured or killed."

He said children as young as three faced the dichotomy caused by having to cope with these conditions. They dreamt about becoming doctors and nurses, then this was overtaken by an apocalyptic vision of themselves as the next generation of suicide bombers. They experienced this invariably after an attack by the Israelis. For some boys, their heroes were no longer football players, but a confusion of Palestinian "martyrs" and even the enemy, "because Israeli soldiers are the strongest and have Apache gunships".

Shortly before he died, Edward Said bitterly reproached foreign journalists for what he called their destructive role in "stripping the context of Palestinian violence, the response of a desperate and horribly oppressed people, and the terrible suffering from which it arises". Just as the invasion of Iraq was a "war by media", so the same can be said of the grotesquely one-sided "conflict" in Palestine. As the pioneering work of the Glasgow University Media Group shows, television viewers are rarely told that the Palestinians are victims of an illegal military occupation; the term "occupied territories" is seldom explained. Only 9 per cent of young people interviewed in the UK know that the Israelis are the occupying force and the illegal settlers are Jewish; many believe them to be Palestinian. The selective use of language by broadcasters is crucial in maintaining this confusion and ignorance. Words such as "terrorism", "murder" and "savage, cold-blooded killing" describe the deaths of Israelis, almost never Palestinians.

There are honourable exceptions. The kidnapped BBC reporter Alan Johnston is one of them. Yet, amidst the avalanche of coverage of his abduction, no mention is made of the thousands of Palestinians abducted by Israel, many of whom will not see their families for years. There are no appeals for them. In Jerusalem, the Foreign Press Association documents the shooting and intimidation of its members by Israeli soldiers. In one eight-month period, as many journalists, including the CNN bureau chief in Jerusalem, were wounded by the Israelis, some of them seriously. In each case, the FPA complained. In each case, there was no satisfactory reply.

A censorship by omission runs deep in western journalism on Israel, especially in the US. Hamas is dismissed as a "terrorist group sworn to Israel’s destruction" and one that "refuses to recognise Israel and wants to fight not talk". This theme suppresses the truth: that Israel is bent on Palestine’s destruction. Moreover, Hamas’s long-standing proposals for a ten-year ceasefire are ignored, along with a recent, hopeful ideological shift within Hamas itself that amounts to a historic acceptance of the sovereignty of Israel. "The [Hamas] charter is not the Quran," said a senior Hamas official, Mohammed Ghazal. "Historically, we believe all Palestine belongs to Palestinians, but we’re talking now about reality, about political solutions... If Israel reached a stage where it was able to talk to Hamas, I don’t think there would be a problem of negotiating with the Israelis [for a solution]."

When I last saw Gaza, driving towards the Israeli checkpoint and the razor wire, I was rewarded with a spectacle of Palestinian flags fluttering from inside the walled compounds. Children were responsible for this, I was told. They make flagpoles out of sticks tied together and one or two will climb on to a wall and hold the flag between them, silently. They do it when there are foreigners around and they believe they can tell the world.

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Palestinian Resistance Cuts the Gordian Knot

Statement of the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) on the Expulsion of US/Israeli-Backed Gangster Elements from the Gaza Strip, June 14-15, 2007

These moments in Occupied Palestine and on the world scale are bringing out the very best and the very worst which human civilisation has given rise to: either solutions to the problems faced by the people based on fundamental principles of international law, or anarchy raised to the level of authority.

On June 14-15, the military arm of Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement (the Qassam Brigades) seized the headquarters, training facilities and arms caches of US-financed, Israeli-backed gangs in the Gaza Strip. It dissolved their organisation, the so-called Preventive Security Force, and put its head Mohammed Dahlan and his hired staff and allies to flight. Hamas reiterated that the Palestinians are one people but that resisting the Zionist occupation requires stopping the hands of those who act as its tools – even if some of these are Palestinian. It did this through al Aqsa TV, broadcasting messages to Gaza's 1.5 million people to reassure them, as the fighting turned from clashes to an all out assault on Dahlan held positions.

It was not an attack on Fatah, on Gaza's people or a coup d'etat the broadcasts insisted. Those under attack were the Dahlan gangs that had arrested and tortured thousands of partisans and were "collaborators with Israel and the US and traitors". The London Observer reported from Gaza on June 17: "As Hamas consolidated its grip on the narrow coastal strip last week, it produced a former senior member of Fatah Khaled Abu Helal on its TV station to say that he welcomed Hamas' cleansing of Fatah of its collaborators and traitors. He announced too that he would be forming a new Fatah committee to oversee the organisation." The London Observer further reports: "The collaboration of Fatah members with Hamas was also suggested strongly by other witnesses. One told The Observer that some officers in the Presidential Guard had sent their men home as the fighting began. Another Hamas official, the spokesman for its Qassam Brigades, Abu Obaida, insisted there was co-ordination between the two sides as the purge went on: 'Today is a day of mercy and unity,' he said on Friday. 'Hamas has issued a full pardon to all the security leaders and personnel who participated in the fight against Hamas. Our fight is not against Fatah, the one with the long history in the struggle, but against just one group of Fatah agents who were following the Zionist agenda. The decent people of Fatah were co-ordinating with us and are happy we have got rid of the corrupt people of Fatah. Now we have to enforce law and order.'"

The dramatic assertions widely spread by the Western media and different governments that the events in Gaza represented the unleashing of a fratricidal civil war and a coup d'etat by Hamas do not correspond with the facts. Such disinformation is perfidy, the stock in trade of those who accuse the Palestinians of the very crime of inciting a reactionary civil war and the decapitation of the Palestine National Authority that they themselves were planning to commit. It is the US-organised force which is striving to exploit the just resistance in Gaza to their advantage by proclaiming an "emergency government" (which Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh immediately denounced as "unconstitutional"), seizing the funds of the National Unity Government, carrying through a coup d'etat, and implementing the US-Zionist programme to dismember Occupied Palestine through subversion and blunt force. There can therefore be no doubt as to what is the real purpose of the disinformation surrounding the events in Palestine.

While untrue reports of the "peaceful and humanitarian" response of Israel and the Fatah faction are stressed, the US, Israel and their abettors camouflage the dangerous agenda they are poised to implement: the invasion of Gaza and the annexation of the West Bank.

The aim running as a black thread through all these developments is to conceal the real role of the forces in play, criminalise and demonise on the basis of fabrication those who refuse to submit to the US-Israeli dictate and to prepare a fresh basis for new repression and widening of the conflict in the Middle East.

Behind the Curtain of Disinformation

Various international media have already begun to admit that this decisive act has put an end for the time being to much of the civil disorder that had become endemic throughout the Gaza Strip. This Mediterranean coastal enclave, home to more than 1.5 million people subject to an Israeli military occupation since June 1967, is sandwiched between the State of Israel and the Egyptian border in a landmass whose area would fit several times inside that of Greater Toronto. It has come to be described as "the world's largest open air prison".

The real facts are as follows. These events marked the culmination of a months long struggle that developed out of the January 25, 2006 electoral victory of the Change and Reform slate sponsored by Hamas in the national elections for the Palestine Legislative Council. The candidates of the national slate came from diverse backgrounds, including a Christian Palestinian candidate. Fourteen of the elected lawmakers were political prisoners held in Israeli jails. Far from being a religious vote as portrayed by the media, this was a vote against occupation and for resistance, a vote for the sovereign rights of the Palestinian people and democratic governance. Within hours of the result, George W. Bush, president of the United States, which had carried out direct and indirect interference in the election including the expenditure of several millions of "aid" dollars on behalf of individual Fatah candidates to dictate a favourable outcome to it, arrogantly declared: "I've made it very clear that the United States does not support political parties that want to destroy our ally Israel and that people must renounce that part of their platform." He further stated: "I don't see how you can be a partner in peace if you advocate the destruction of a country as part of your platform. And I know you can't be a partner in peace if you have, if your party has got an armed wing." This treacherous behaviour is in conformity with the attitude toward foreign policy typical of the ruling circles of the Anglo-American countries: instead of a policy based on international law, of respect for the legitimate rights of all peoples based on the UN Charter including non-interference in their internal affairs, a policy is pursued of using every means, down to and including calumny, for the purpose of weakening an entire people, exploiting them for narrow selfish interests and striving to strengthen the position of the foreign occupying power at their expense. According to Bush, only those political platforms and political parties sanctioned by the US are permissible.

Instigating a Coup against the Palestinian National Authority

The leader of the Fatah faction, Mahmoud Abbas, retained the presidency of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) as the president is elected separately. However, the result of the election meant he otherwise lost control of the administration and cabinet of the PNA. The United States and Israel mobilised the European Union and others to inflict a massive financial embargo and other sanctions designed to "put the Palestinians on a diet", i.e., starve them into submission, as the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert infamously boasted. The sanctions, including the arrogation by Israel of Palestinian tax revenues estimated at more than 700 million US dollars, as well as US bullying of Arab and Palestinian banks to refrain from transferring Arab aid money to the cash strapped Palestinian government, further crippled the Palestinian economy, impoverished Palestinians perhaps as never before and pushed tens of thousands of Palestinian families to the brink of starvation.

Ahead of virtually the entire international community, one of the first acts of Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay of the newly installed Harper Conservative government in Ottawa was to withdraw Canada's financial support for the Palestinian Authority, citing Hamas as a "terrorist organisation". The previous Liberal government, utilising the hysteria created after the 9-11 terrorist attack in New York City, had through executive decree proscribed Hamas (as it did Hizbullah, the Lebanese resistance organisation) in such terms – falsely portraying them as "jihadists" as if they too were poised to launch attacks within Canada, as a means of isolating popular support and sympathy for the Palestine resistance amongst the Canadian people. However, the Palestinians – or, more accurately, the majority – refused to be duped by the conspiratorial Americans and their collaborators and agents into revolting against Hamas and cutting each other's throats.

The Bush Administration promised $42 million, then $50 million, then $80 million, then $60 million and (most recently) finally authorised $40 million to finance the outfitting and maintenance of a US-directed and -trained "Palestinian National Guard" under Abbas' Presidential office. It is known that this is led by his right hand man Muhammad Dahlan, operating entirely independently of the civilian control of the PNA Ministry of the Interior. The Presidential Guard at Anzar in Gaza City also received a significant amount of light weaponry such as assault rifles and ammunition, all in coordination with Israel. Washington's plan was widely reported to have been devised by Elliot Abrams, co-responsible for the Venezuelan coup attempt in 2002. The CIA plan also involved "strategic advice" to politicians and some liberal secular parties as well as mercenary journalists that agreed to work against Hamas.

By the spring of last year, the plans of various elements from this informal imperial coalition to instigate a coup against the Palestinian National Authority were openly discussed over the Internet and in other media to be followed by a blood purge of Hamas for daring to struggle and daring to win. The deafening propaganda from the US and Israel was that the Palestinians were submitting to "Islamic terrorism" by even tolerating, let alone voting for Hamas. The "civilised world" would not be long in fixing this malady, they said. On April 30, 2007 the Jordanian newspaper Al-Majd further published an important, 16-page secret document, an "Action Plan for the Palestinian Presidency", based on a Jordanian government translation of a reputed US intelligence document, that called for undermining and replacing the Palestinian national unity government. The Hashemite Jordanian government, which is suggesting that it could re-annex the West Bank as its own "peace" plan, immediately shut this newspaper down. In May, the undersecretary general of the United Nations and its envoy to the Middle East, Alvaro de Soto submitted to the UN Secretary General a detailed document, frankly accusing "the United States of a plot to depose the Palestinian government from power at any price, even the price of a bloody civil war".

Now it is these same forces of "civilisation" that are in quite a fix. In 1947-48, they were puffed up with the greatest arrogance over the success of the first partition of Palestine. They were supremely confident of the permanence of the humiliation and Nakba that their creation of the State of Israel would inflict on Arab peoples in general and the Palestinians in particular. In 1967, the Zionist praetorian guard of this "civilisation" instigated the June Israeli Arab war to divide the Arab world. It redivided the Palestinians at the same time by placing under a brutal military occupation those in the West Bank and Gaza Strip who were outside the immediate jurisdiction of Israel.

These last four decades of denial by the Zionists of any of the just claims of the Palestinian resistance and people on these occupied territories served to blind these same "forces of civilisation" from recognising the authority that this resistance has always enjoyed among the Palestinian people. That resistance enjoys such authority as the guarantor of the unquenchable national aspirations of the Palestinian people that the Fatah slate was voted out of office in January 2006 for betraying that trust.

Notwithstanding the self-serving discourse of the "forces of civilisation" that the Palestinians are thus "hopelessly divided", progressive forces everywhere defending the right of peoples to self-determination grasp and recognise that Palestine in its own right is "a land, a people, a history, a future". As such, it is not reducible to some obstacle to be demolished by imperialism and its Zionist tools. The Palestinian resistance continues to develop stepwise within definite conditions. Various forms of organisation have been developed and followed to the extent that they serve the advancement of the struggle for self-determination within those conditions.

The Resistance Prevails

The broad principle of the entire Palestine people as a liberation organisation has remained well entrenched since 1948. Based on the general principle that the liberation of the Palestinian homeland is first and foremost a deed of the Palestinian people themselves, however dispersed, since 1964 many forms of resistance were developed. These forms were under the umbrella of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) led by Yasser Arafat as head of its Fatah faction. Many of these forms and arrangements had to be shed as developments internally and outside Palestine placed new demands on their struggle, such as the first Palestinian Intifadah (uprising) in the West Bank and Gaza in December 1987 which lasted until 1992. Some of these arrangements, like the Oslo Accords of 1993, were desperate gambles that could never be turned to the account of a Palestinian nation-building project. After the Soviet Union collapsed, the US wanted to block re-entry into the region of any other foreign imperial power. Israel would use the Oslo Accords to institute a stranglehold of military checkpoints (and later, the apartheid annexation wall throughout the West Bank) in order to steal more Palestinian land for Zionist colonisation. Some Palestinians, desperately seeking accommodation with the occupier, began to feel the second Al Aqsa Intifadah unleashed by Palestinian youth and civil society in September 2001 was burning their feet. Yet throughout, the Palestinians' steadfast resistance to occupation and national humiliation never ceased even for a single moment. To date, this resistance has never given the progressive forces any grounds to doubt where final victory will lie. Furthermore, Palestinians have been impelled by a growing conviction that the opposition of many of the Arab regimes to Israel was not based on principle but on rivalry for favour with the imperial court, in which they aimed to use the Palestinian question as their bargaining chip. However, time and time again the facts show that nothing will stop the Palestinians! Last week's events proved this truth once again.

A year ago, in response to many events – the intensified military shelling of the Gazan population, the forcible kidnapping by Israel of different Hamas elected members, cabinet members and officials of the PNA (including the Speaker of the Palestinian legislative council, Aziz Duweik, his deputy Mahmoud Ramahi, and the deputy Prime Minister Nasserdin al Shae'er from their homes in the West Bank), and the various internal coups being plotted against its leadership of the Palestine Legislative Council – the Palestinian resistance unfolded a new level of struggle against the military forces of Israeli occupation when they staged a successful action to push the occupier's armed forces further back behind Gaza's perimeter and captured Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier. Every funeral of a Palestinian martyr slain by Israeli targeted assassination became the occasion for massive popular rallies.

The response from Israeli forces and their media was frantic. The calls in the Knesset and media escalated to "transfer Palestinians!" not only from the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, but also from Israel proper (those Palestinian lands occupied since 1948). The open fascists publicly declared Israel's Arab citizens a fifth column (nearly 25 per cent of the population). The Israeli Zionist armed forces, under the pretext of freeing a captured soldier, bombed or destroyed the bulk of Gaza's civilian infrastructure, including schools, colleges, streets, bridges, charities as well as thousands of homes and the only power station, forcing 1.5 million Gazans to live in total or partial darkness. It exposed once again the enormous vulnerability of the Zionist hierarchs. Whenever organised Palestinian resistance emerges right under their nose they are submerged within the reactionary public opinion of their supporting ghetto of people of mostly Jewish origins from Europe, the former Soviet Union and the US. The most remarkable feature at that particular moment however, was the evident paralysis of the Olmert government in Tel Aviv.

A few weeks later, Hizbullah forces inside Lebanon responded with a militarily organised resistance action against violation of the border by Israeli forces, capturing two more Israeli soldiers. In this moment, the Zionists retaliated full bore, unleashing a 34-day orgy of bloodletting, bombing Beirut and other major urban population centres throughout Lebanon, dropping more than 1.5 million cluster bombs throughout southern Lebanon, slaughtering more than a thousand innocent civilians and displacing tens of thousands more, while attempting to assassinate the leaders of Hizbullah.

The governments of other US allies could not find foxholes fast enough in which to dive out of the way of inquisitive reporters. However, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper waded in to declare that the Israeli military assault was a "measured response". Michael Ignatieff, running at that time for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada, refused to condemn as a war crime the deliberate slaughter by Israelis of more than 50 civilians in Qana near a UN observer post. The Canadian corporate media openly questioned why the government should pay one cent of the cost of evacuating from the war zone Canadian citizens let alone residents mostly of Lebanese origin.

When the internal organisation and morale of the Israeli government's own forces, especially those confronting the Lebanese resistance at the border, seemed to reach breaking point and to the consternation of the Western powers mass demonstrations began to develop throughout the world against the Israeli aggression, such as the more than 100,000 people in London, the 75,000 in Montreal, etc., the US rushed to the rescue of their Zionist proxy with the face saving ceasefire Resolution 1701 in the UN Security Council.

The determined stand of the Lebanese national resistance to the ferocious US-backed Zionist assault led by Hizbullah and based amongst the people and villages of southern Lebanon, marked a major watershed and turning point for the oppressed peoples of all the Arab countries in general and for the Lebanese and Palestinian resistance struggle in particular. No longer did the people flee their villages in the face of the customary Israeli terror as in 1948; their presence is vital to the resistance. Hizbullah was seen as having won. The ascendant peoples of Palestine and Lebanon buried the myth of Zionist invincibility. The great terror, the Israeli army, the Shin Beit and Mossad and all the rest, that state within a state, however numerous and well-armed with sophisticated weapons and divide and rule policy had been unable to quell the movement of the Palestinian and Lebanese peoples for their rights, national liberation, and sovereignty. This continuous resistance movement in different forms and intensities for 170 years had now reached a new quality. The Olmert government slouched towards collapse. Thousands of Israelis in northern Israel abandoned their homes. This had never happened before.

The Palestinian resistance in Gaza, meanwhile, girded itself against murderous reprisal actions by Dahlan's gangs co-ordinated with Israeli artillery and air strikes. The international media intentionally misrepresented armed self-defence against these provocations as a "Palestinian mini civil war". Matters came to a head last November in the Gaza Strip village of Beit Hanoun. US-directed forces from the Israeli army encircled Palestinian resistance fighters in the local mosque. Enabling the resistance forces' escape to safety, some 2,000 women of the village, acquitting themselves as simple people who chose principles over fear, courageously offered themselves as human shields between the forces of reaction confronting them and the hopes for their future represented by the fighters trapped in the mosque. In another instance, masses of civilians occupied the rooftop of a building to successfully prevent an Israeli targeted assassination of a Palestinian leader and his family. On November 7, an opinion poll released by the Palestinian Centre for Public Opinion in Beit Sahur showed that over 75 per cent of Palestinians blamed the US, Israel, EU and Fatah for the financial economic crisis in the Occupied Territories.

Re-Establishing the Primacy of Resistance

By last December, the Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh could enter the corridors of the Arab League with dignity as the leader of a heroic people who had once again stood up. In this phase, even with more than 30 of their elected legislators arrested or detained by Israel or prevented from travelling between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank (the Palestinian parliament is in Ramallah), the Hamas executive would begin at last to thaw the deep freeze in which US pressure had placed the PLC's access to financial resources needed to run the PNA administration. Although the Arab bloc remained split at the top – the Mubarak dynasty controlling the government of Egypt, the most populous Arab state, remains firmly on the side of the US and Israel for the moment – the leading forces of the Arab world supported Hamas' bid to prevail on President Abbas and all the Palestinian political factions to renew the governing system in the PLC as a "national unity government". In a related development contributing to breaking the US-Anglo cordon sanitaire, the government of South Africa publicly invited Prime Minister Haniyeh for a state visit. The invitation came immediately after South African Minister of Intelligence Ronnie Kasrils visited Gaza and condemned Israel for its state apartheid policies.

The most striking and creative feature of the design of this Palestinian government was its basic agenda. It would not include any kind of language or recognition for a so-called "right" of the State of Israel to exist in its current form as a Jewish-only Zionist junta. It would not exclude any of the previous calls by Palestinian and other Arab leaders for the State of Israel to lift its illegal occupation of, and remove its armed forces from, the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights and Sheba'a Farms. It was more than clear that while maintaining a full Israeli military withdrawal behind its borders of June 4, 1967 would represent one step, this would not constitute the final step in righting the historic wrong inflicted on the Palestinian people by all the forces of imperialism both Zionist and non-Zionist.

Earlier this spring, a major obstacle to overcoming the financial blockade and embargo was eliminated by arranging the Mecca Accords between the Hamas and Fatah wings of the PLC. The Saudi royal family brokered the Accords. This was followed by the inauguration of the Palestinian Unity government to which Russia gave its support and Norway recognised. While the US and European Union stewed and their Zionist proxy sank into ever deepening political incoherence, Dahlan's gangs stepped up their reign of terror in Gaza. The new game plan was to take back by force at ground level what had been finally so grudgingly conceded at the diplomatic level. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told the international media this past weekend that "nobody expected" Hamas' action or its outcome. She sounded exactly like every reactionary potentate in human history imbued with a morbid preoccupation with defeat. This must be taken as emblematic of the utter obtuseness of the Bush Administration's attitude towards the resistance of the peoples to oppression. It is certainly the declaration of bankruptcy of the entire line of its policy of "democratisation" of the Middle East over the last six years – the so-called Greater Middle East Initiative. The fact of the matter is that the reactionary provocations of its Dahlan criminal gangs were continuing as accompaniment to a situation that had become neither fish nor fowl. The US-EU-Israel bloc wanted "accommodation" and "compromise" as a waystation to crushing and exterminating Palestinian resistance. The pretext would not matter. It could be effected in the name of saving civilisation from barbarians at the gate who would not recognise the right of Israel to exist, or it could be carried out in the name of saving civilisation from what The Wall Street Journal, the entire Israeli media and Palestinian accommodationists contemptuously label "Hamastan". Hamas acted last week to cut this Gordian knot.

This development re-establishes the primacy of resistance in the Palestinian narrative over the politics of neo-colonial accommodation. As always in such moments, there is no lack of elements to which anyone could point and conclude that the resistance has acted in undue haste. How hasty, and how undue? People have an expression about "not seeing the forest for the trees". In August 2005, the Zionists were compelled by the level of resistance in Gaza, and the corresponding response within Israeli public opinion, to dismantle their internal Gaza City colony – a "settlement" whose presence had provided the justification since 1967 for permanently implanting a large Israeli military force within Gaza City and throughout the Strip. The troops were thereafter redeployed outside the perimeter of the Gaza Strip.

The Sharon government took the credit. Nine hundred journalists were deployed to Gaza from abroad to ensure this credit. Some circles took credit for fulfilling the reactionary dream of an Israeli army general that the Palestinians in Gaza needed to be "bottled up like cockroaches" and left thereafter "to kill one another". Other circles took credit for "restoring some semblance of honour to the Israeli military and people". In yet other circles, they took credit for "taking the first steps towards a 'two state' solution". But the Palestinians were very clear that the Zionist exit from within Gaza was a victory. The rest of fighting humanity is beginning to see more of the true dimension of this victory. Unlike the West Bank, there is no apartheid wall inside Gaza. The interior of the Gaza Strip is a no-go zone for the Israeli military. Last week's actions have now rendered it a no-go zone as well for collaborators and tools of that occupier.

According to the international media, the actions of the Palestinian resistance in Gaza are "undue" because it did what none of the other partners in the Unity government "expected". Such a conclusion is unwarranted on its face. In the January 2006 election result, the forces of resistance threw down the gauntlet to the forces of accommodation who in the name of high ideals seek to compromise the fundamental principles of the Palestinian right to self-determination. It is these attempts to eliminate the principles on which the Palestinian struggle is based that are responsible for the present situation, not the just resistance to these attempts. The present situation has been brought about by those who live outside the rule of law, and place themselves beyond its reach and above the principles on which it is based including the opposition to the use of force to settle conflicts within nations and between nations.

Further Developments

The new Emergency Government proclaimed by President Mahmoud Abbas in response to the Gaza events suspended the laws under the Palestinian Constitution. This move will solve no problem whatsoever. Under Palestinian Basic Law an emergency government can be constituted only for 30 days after which the matter must be brought before the Palestine Legislative Council (PLC). This body, in which Hamas has a majority, must agree by a two thirds majority vote to extend it, one time only, for another 30 days. However, this is the very body that all the forces pitted against the Palestinians' right to self-determination are determined shall not meet. According to independent Palestinian legislators, this is the only section of the Constitution that cannot be abrogated by the President. Thus, the very measures originally designed by foreign powers against Chairman Yasser Arafat return to haunt his successor. The foreign powers including Canada, instead of practicing enlightened statecraft and defending the elected Palestinian Authority including its elected Prime Minister as the embodiment of the will of its people, and proceeding from the premise of the equality and sovereignty of all nations and opposition to the use of force to resolve conflicts, have submitted to the US dictate and are once again caught in their own veneer of high ideals.

The US, Europe and Canada rushed to recognise Abbas' so-called new government and restore funding to the Abbas rump in Ramallah yet such a PNA that excludes Hamas runs against the reality of the resistance. Far from the statecraft of the middle ground proclaimed by these capitals of maintaining the illusory two state solution, this recognition constitutes a step into the abyss.

Canada's Role

How Canada has participated in this policy of accommodation is most enlightening.

In early 2006, withdrawing its financial aid to the PNA, the Harper government joined the US and Israel in taking up the blood politics of revenge, dismissing Hamas as a "terrorist" cancer soon to be excised from the body politic of the Palestinian people. To this end, personnel of the Canadian Forces covertly provided military training to Dahlan's terrorist gangs under US and CIA tutelage while just nine months earlier US and Canadian Forces had been training pilots of the Israeli Air Force in aerial bombing (Exercise Maple Leaf, Cold Lake, Alberta, May June 2005). Canada also gave free rein to Israeli state agencies to recruit Canadian nationals to fight in the Israeli armed forces through Sar El Canada, which is a criminal offence in brazen violation of the Foreign Enlistment Act, 1937. These same Israeli forces killed eight Canadian civilians in Lebanon and a Canadian UN observer in Qana. At the same time, Canada prides itself on its "balanced" humanitarian role as chair of the UN Committee on Refugees and funding this and that refugee camp, the very refugees and humanitarian disaster created by aerial bombing and other weapons of mass destruction utilised to enforce the Occupation.

Who Will Come Forward to Defend Palestine and the Rule of Law?

There is no middle ground here; there is either anarchy proclaimed above the rule of law or a just solution to the Occupation based on the principles of international law and the sovereign rights of the Palestinian people. The middle ground has caved and its undoing comes from the very Constitution designed by the West based on the model of the European state. The big powers are deluding themselves as they attempt to dictate arrangements to a world which refuses to submit to the negation of their right to be. 

Within the conditions, nothing was more timely than the actions of the Palestinian resistance in Gaza on June 14-15. The cup had been filled to overflowing and the resistance demonstrated that it means business. By its actions, the Palestinian resistance showed the world once again that it is determined to continue dismantling the Zionist occupation of their land piece by piece.

The time for Canadians to take a stand is now. Canada must take concrete steps to defend the legitimate authority of the Palestinian people. This defence must proceed from principle, the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination consistent with international law, and the cause of peace and justice. Only on this basis can solutions be arrived at. Those who put the responsibility for "civil war" on the Palestinian partisans are without shame. They do not represent Canadian conscience. Demand an immediate end to the Occupation! Isolate the Olmert and US war criminals and their Canadian sycophants who are committing crimes against humanity. Isolate those who have found accommodation with such war criminals under the high ideals of peace and the two state solution. Nor can the State of Israel be permitted indefinitely to retain the exemption it has enjoyed from the standards of international humanitarian law when it comes to the crimes it is committing against the people of Palestine. Israel must be held to account!

The Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) calls on the Canadian working class and people to come forward. Support the Palestinian people in their historic task of national independence. Demand the Canadian government normalise its relations with the Palestinian National Authority which was elected according to the Palestinian Constitution. Canada must cease providing military assistance to the Israeli armed forces and stop its political, diplomatic and economic support of the Israeli Occupation. Furthermore, it must not use the fraudulent "terrorism" issue concocted by the US to justify "regime change" of the PNA and for broader aggression and war in the Middle East.

By concretely supporting the Palestinian people, Canadians will make a contribution to peace and justice.