Adopted by the MRCI conference, April 1988
The heroic uprising of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip since December 1987 is a magnificent response to the Zionists’ plans for the 40th anniversary celebrations of the foundation of the state of Israel. It registers in the most dramatic way possible the unbroken resistance of the Palestinian people to attempts by Zionism to destroy their national identity and struggle.
The current uprising is centred in the refugee camps. It is within them that the most brutalising effects of 21 years of Israeli military occupation are felt. The deliberately engineered poverty of the camps, the abolition of all Arab civilian local administration and the exhausting effect of enforced labouring across the Green Line have all led to a spontaneous revolt whose aim is to expel the Zionist military administration from the ‘occupied territories’ of 1967.
Socialists and trade unionists across the whole world must rally to the support of the Palestinians. In 1948 world Zionism colluded with US imperialism to push aside the decaying rule of the British Mandate and by force of arms establish an exclusively Jewish state in the midst of another nation—that of the Palestinian Arabs. Neither then nor now can any legitimacy be accorded to the state of Israel nor any recognition given of its right to exist.
Israel was founded by the conversion of a settler minority into a national majority, achieved through the forcible exclusion of hundreds of thousands of Arabs from its borders, mass expropriations of Arab land and systematic discrimination in employment. A Jewish state in Palestine is by its very nature antagonistic to the right of Palestinian Arabs to national self-determination.
It created a widespread diaspora of the Palestinians themselves. The state of Israel, massively buttressed by the funds of US imperialism, the Zionist diaspora and German reparations, is a force for political reaction and a gendarme for US, Japanese and European imperialism in the Middle East. It serves to constrain or divide any possible national revolutionary threat to the economic and political interests of imperialism in that region. It must be destroyed and replaced by a single, secular workers’ state of Arabs and Israeli Jews in Palestine.
The PLO project of an international conference is designed to impose an imperialist peace on the Palestinians, with the creation of ‘bantustan’ states in Gaza and the West Bank, policed by Israel, Jordan and the UN. The strategy of a separate West Bank/Gaza Palestinian state, either as a form of co-existence with Israel, or as a ‘stage’ towards Israel’s destruction, is a dead end for Palestinian and Israel workers alike.
The international labour movement must answer the call to aid the Palestinians. Break all links with the Histadrut and the Israeli Labour Party, which, far from being organs of proletarian struggle, are instruments of Zionist rule. For firm ties of solidarity action with the Palestinians. Material aid must be organised to sustain the resistance.
Workers must demand of the leadership of the social democratic and Stalinist parties and unions that they organise mass national demonstrations, fact-finding trade union delegations to the occupied territories to report back to rank and file meetings. In organising these the labour movement must provide itself with the means to refute the Zionist claim that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are the same. The labour movement must be won to an internationalist campaign of working class solidarity aimed clearly against imperialism and not to a humanitarian pacifist movement of protest which condemns the violence on both sides.
We must fight for these demands:
- For arms, food and medical aid to the camps under the control of the Palestinian resistance and international working class organisations. We reject the call for UN peacekeeping forces for the camps.
- End the beatings, the murders and the jailings.
- For the right to return of all Palestinians.
- Down with the internal borders and all restrictions on movement between ‘Israel’, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Jerusalem.
- For free elections for all municipal authorities and the legalisation of all political parties including the PLO and its constituent organisations.
- Repeal all repressive and emergency regulations and release all political prisoners.
- Israeli troops out of the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, Golan Heights and Southern Lebanon.
- Defend the right of the Palestinians to armed resistance inside and outside the occupied territories.
- For free trade unions in the occupied territories. No bans on political parties and their propaganda. No censorship.
- For full recognition by imperialism and Zionism to the chosen representatives of the Palestinian people. For the right of the Palestinian people to self determination.
- Demand the Arab bourgeoisie of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan break with US imperialism and Zionism. Demand they renounce Camp David. For full material aid to all the chosen representatives of the Palestinian people, including the PLO. Reopen all PLO offices.
- Against the closure of the PLO UN offices by US imperialism.
- For arms, food and medical aid to the camps under the control of the Palestinian resistance and international working class organisations. We reject the call for UN peacekeeping forces for the camps.
