Stop Gaza Attacks
Posted on January 2, 2009
The Israeli-Palestininan Workers’ Advice Centre (WAC-MAAN) has called for workers to pressure their governments to demand that Israel cease its assault on Hamas in Gaza.
Israel claims that it is defending its citizens in the South. But these people are working-class, and the government has shown by its policies that the lives and security of workers mean nothing to it: its priorities are with the rich.
[...] The government encourages the formation of a “precarious work force” in order to help employers and investors.
The same government that started the present war has sent tens of thousands into unemployment, while destroying the social security net in accordance with its neoliberal agenda.
WAC-MAAN opposes the war on Gaza and calls for an immediate cease fire. After the war ends, we know, hundreds of thousands on both sides of the border will remain poor and unemployed. Palestinian workers are shut jobless behind the separation wall, while their families languish in poverty and hunger. Israeli workers, for their part, are starting to feel the pinch of the global financial crisis, with higher levels of unemployment and further attacks on earlier social gains.
As WAC-MAAN reminds us, Hamas rockets do not just affect Israeli Jews, but also Arab Israelis and Palestinian workers — on 29 December, Hani al Mahdi was killed and nine others were injured by a Grad rocket fired from Gaza.
The Hamas strategy of indiscriminate rocket attacks and suicide-murder of civilians in Israel is equally as deplorable as the similarly unselective and haphazard attacks on Palestinian cities which constitute Israel’s current ‘defensive’ strategy.
The violence in Gaza suits the agendas of both the eliminationist, antisemitic, Hamas and the Israeli rejectionist, racist right. On the Hamas side, Jews are behind the French and the Communist Revolutions and there is no war that broke out anywhere without [Jews'] fingerprints on it, and on the other, Hamas’ response to Israeli bombardment is ‘proof’ that Palestians are ‘terrorists’ and ‘justifies’ the ongoing occupation of Palestinian land and denial of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination.
Hamas spews violent antisemitic hatred, and despite a cloak of anti-imperialist rhetoric, is an implacable enemy of socialism and independent workers’ organisations. Hamas intimidates and threatens workers and attacks trade union leaders, tortures and murders political opponents and those it designates as ‘collaborators’ and enforces the ‘veiling’ of women in areas under it’s control. While Hamas was considered less corrupt than the opportunistic and institutionally corrupt Fatah (themselves never turning down a ride on the antisemitic bandwagon when it suits them), Hamas ministers have been found travelling with suitcases full of millions of dollars for which they are unable to offer any explanation. Hamas is another bourgeois elite parasitic on the Palestinian workers whom they use as cannon fodder in their reactionary nationalistic war with both secular Palestinian society and the Israeli State.
The Israeli blockade and isolation of Gaza for the two years since Hamas were elected, has had the unintended — or intended — consequence of ensuring that Hamas has not been given enough room to ‘fail’, as the people of Gaza are concerned with the day to day struggle for survival. Fatah has provided no way forward and Hamas promises a social and political disaster for Palestinians, while Israel’s divide and rule strategy and continuing brutal occupation and isolation of Palestinian lands will bring nothing but further chaos to Jews, Israeli Arabs and Palestinian Arabs alike. The Palestinian and Israeli ruling classes have failed to provide peace and security for their respective peoples, despite majority support for peace on both ’sides’ of the conflict. It is time for ordinary Israelis and Palestinians to join together to realise the aspirations of peace and self-determination for both peoples.
