Adopted from our nearly-finished book, and in memory of Comrade George Habash, who passed away on January 26, 2008
For the uninitiated, Palestine is a region in the Middle East, and Israel is the current state that controls most of this region. Now, Israel claims to be a homeland for all Jews of the world. What it really is is a settler-colonial state that takes the homeland of both Arabs and the native Jews (Mizrahim) who had already lived in the region before the Zionist takeover. (The Mizrahim do enjoy the privileges that other Jews enjoy, such as being automatic citizens of Israel as soon as they live there. Muslims and Christians lack these privileges.) Israel has used deportations of Arabs to make space for Jews to live there. Now, Jews moving to Palestine is not necessarily bad; it is the forceful removal of the Palestinian people from the land in which they were born that is not good.
Israel does not control the world, contrary to Nazi propaganda. Israel was actually formed with the help of American and British imperialism, making Israel a puppet of America in the Middle East. There are some lobbyists who back Israel’s interests in Congress, but it is mostly the US government that supports Israel (which is why it receives billions of dollars from the US). Jews are also not the problem of Israel; settler-colonialism is. Israel’s role as an expansionist semi-colony of the US and other Western imperialists is why we oppose it.
On the flipside, anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, contrary to Zionists’ lies and slanders. There are Jews that oppose Israel’s actions in Palestine. There are Jews who oppose the settler-colonialism and ethnic cleansing that Israel does. There are Jews who oppose Israel as a political concept. And Israel is not really for the Jews of the world; if it was, then it would not provide medical assistance to anti-Semitic and overall reactionary Sunni Islamists in Syria. Israel would also not persecute Mizrahi Jews if it was so friendly to Jewish people of all races. In Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine justifies the call for Palestinian self-determination and debunks the myth that Palestinian liberation must be anti-Semitic:
That Israel constitutes an aggressive presence against our people from the outset is an indisputable fact. For our people, the rise of Israel has meant the expulsion of this people from its home and lands, the usurpation of all that our people had built through its labor and effort, the dispersal of our people throughout the Arab world and the world at large, and the concentration of the greater portion of it in the camps of misery and poverty scattered in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon without hope and without a future.
That Israel constitutes a colonialist expansionist presence at the expense of Arab land and its owners is not a matter for discussion. For us it is the tangible experience before which all spurious claims and allegations fade away. The “National Home” for the Jews in Palestine became the “State of Israel” within the boundaries of the Partition resolutions adopted by the United Nations in 1947. It then expanded to include Israel with its pre-June boundaries, which are far more extensive than those established by the United Nations’ resolutions of 1947, and finally expanded once again to include the whole of Palestine as well as Sinai and the Golan Heights. …
The Palestinian liberation movement is not a racial movement with aggressive intentions against the Jews. It is not directed against the Jews. Its object is to destroy the state of Israel as a military, political and economic establishment that rests on aggression, expansion and organic connection with imperialist interests in our homeland. It is against Zionism as an aggressive racial movement connected with imperialism, which has exploited the sufferings of the Jews as a stepping stone for the promotion of its interests and the interests of imperialism in this part of the world that possesses rich resources and provides a bridgehead into the countries of Africa and Asia. The aim of the Palestinian liberation movement is to establish a democratic national state in Palestine in which both Arabs and Jews will live as citizens with equal rights and obligations and that will constitute an integral part of the progressive democratic Arab national presence living peacefully with all forces of progress in the world.
Israel has insisted on portraying our war against it as a racial war aiming at eliminating every Jewish citizen and throwing him into the sea. The purpose behind this is to mobilize all Jews for a life-or-death struggle. Consequently, a basic strategic line in our war with Israel must aim at unveiling this misrepresentation, addressing the exploited and misled Jewish masses and revealing the conflict between these masses’ interest in living peacefully and the interests of the Zionist movement and the forces controlling the state of Israel. It is this strategic line that will ensure for us the isolation of the fascist clique in Israel from all the forces of progress in the world. It will also ensure for us, with the growth of the armed struggle for liberation and clarification of its identity, the widening of the conflict existing objectively between Israel and the Zionist movement on the one hand and the millions of misled and exploited Jews on the other. [Source]
The Palestinian masses deserve full self-determination and a socialist state of their own. They need to get the land that they lived in (alongside Mizrahim Jews) for thousands of years. To do this requires supporting the ongoing armed struggle, and decolonization. We must support any move for protracted people’s war and a New-Democratic revolution in the region, as well as all struggles for a proletarian dictatorship in Palestine. Until then, we must oppose the US’s backing of Israel, and the end of US imperialism will mean the end of Israel’s biggest supporter.
Great post