Say No To U.S.-Israeli Occupation
• Salute Palestinian Resistance and Defend Palestine’s Right to Be!
• Developments in Gaza
• Palestinian Resistance Prevails
• What Hamas Wants
• Barghouthi: “Israel Wants to Weaken All Palestinian Factions”
• Fatah-Affiliated Al Aqsa Brigades Reject Decree of President Abbas to Disband
• Hamas Uncovers PA, CIA Intelligence Trove -
• Engage with Hamas: We Earned Our Support
• Palestinians Will Not Accept a Vichy Government
Salute Palestinian Resistance and Defend Palestine’s Right to Be!
The Palestinian resistance has again emerged successful against U.S.-Israeli efforts to bomb, starve and exterminate the Palestinian people and Palestine’s right to be. Recent events in Gaza again made clear make that it is the state terrorism of U.S.-style democracy, and its “partner in democracy” Israel that are the source of problems and it is resistance to the occupation that is the way forward. The resistance in Gaza also made clear that U.S.-Israeli efforts to infiltrate the resistance with U.S. paid and organized collaborators will not succeed. Indeed, these U.S.-backed gangs were routed. This is a positive development, opening the way for more advances by the resistance.
In leading the resistance, Hamas made clear that this is not a fight between Hamas and Fatah. The Palestinians are one people fighting against the U.S.-Zionist occupation and for their self-determination. Resisting the occupation also requires stopping the hands of those who act as U.S. tools — even if some are -Palestinian. Before, during and since the June 14-15 events, the resistance has reiterated: Palestine is not for sale, to the U.S., Israel or anyone else. The resistance to occupation and national humiliation is steadfast and has never stopped even for a single moment. Voice of Revolution salutes the Palestinian resistance and calls on everyone to do the same. It is the broad impunity of U.S.-Israeli state terrorism that is the crime, resistance the solution.
The U.S., faced with its own failure, is attempting to sow doubt in the resistance. It is trying, again, to use its usual claim that those who stand against the U.S. are “terrorists” and “extremists.” It is trying, again, to blame the Palestinians for problems the U.S.-Israeli occupation has created. Just as in Iraq, where the U.S. blames the Iraqis for U.S. crimes, so too the U.S. tries to blame the Palestinians. Defending and supporting the resistance by defending the rights of the Palestinians and Iraqis, including their right to determine their own affairs without foreign interference, is vital at this time.
The U.S. and Israel are also attempting to use the rout of their gangs in Gaza to proclaim that the Palestinians are “hopelessly divided” and “unable to provide security.” Again, the echo of justifying the war in Iraq is heard. And again, the U.S. must come to the rescue by installing a new government and demanding, as it does in Iraq, that this government “fight terrorism,” meaning, fight the resistance. The policy has failed in Iraq and Palestine and inside the U.S. as well, where the Bush government and U.S.-style democracy has lost all legitimacy.
The broad majority of Palestinians have rejected occupation, just as the Iraqis have. Let no one fall for the trap that the situation in Palestine is now “tragic” and the Palestinians are to blame. There is no doubt that it is the resistance that prevailed and it is the resistance that will win final victory. It is U.S. imperialism and its U.S.-style democracy that will end up on the garbage heap. Nothing will stop the Palestinians. Nothing will stop the Iraqis. This is what reality shows.
Americans can make their contribution to peace and democracy by stepping up their own resistance to U.S. imperialism and continuing to reject U.S.-style democracy and all its crimes at home and abroad. Defending Palestine means defending their resistance and rejecting occupation and any and all interference in their internal affairs. Palestine has the right to resist and the right to be. Defend these rights!
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Say No to U.S.-Israeli Occupation
Developments in Gaza
The U.S. and Israel continue to try and deny the rights of the Palestinians to decide their own government and secure their national liberation. The U.S. refuses to accept the defeat of its policy of dictate and occupation in Palestine and worldwide, and instead is pursuing the lawless path of installing governments of its own choosing. The new Emergency Government proclaimed by President Mahmoud Abbas in response to the Gaza events in mid-June, was done by decree and served to suspend 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. According to independent Palestinian legislators, this is the only section of the Constitution that cannot be abrogated by the President. However, the PLC is the very body that all the forces pitted against the Palestinians’ right to self-determination are determined shall not meet. Israel has jailed dozens of elected Hamas representatives and refuses to release them. The U.S. is continuing efforts to block a meeting by dictating that Abbas and Fatah boycott any PLC meetings.
Thus it can be seen that the U.S.-Israeli forces are being haunted by the very measures they put in place to block the powers of then President Yasser Arafat. Instead of submitting to the Constitution and engaging the elected Palestinian Authority including its elected Prime Minister as the embodiment of the will of the Palestinian people, the U.S. claims that the Constitution does not stand and the President can rule by decree. Bush is trying to impose the very same unitary “King George” medieval arrangements on the Palestinians that he is attempting to impose on Americans. The attempt is a failure in both places, leaving nothing but ruthless force of an imperial power with no legitimacy.
The Palestinians, and peoples worldwide are demanding that the U.S. and Israel end the occupation and recognize the principle that all nations proceed from the premise of the equality and sovereignty of all nations and opposition to the use of force to resolve conflicts.
The U.S. rush to recognize Abbas’ so-called new government and restore funding to Abbas in Ramallah is yet another form of interference in internal affairs with the aim of strengthening the occupation. A PNA that excludes Hamas runs against the reality of the resistance. Far from the statecraft of the middle ground proclaimed by Bush, recognition of the Abbas government constitutes a step into the abyss for the imperialists.
Maneuvers to use the United Nations to bring in foreign troops are also being rejected. Hamas has rightly said these troops will be part of the occupation and treated as such. At the same time Hamas continues to emphasize that the Palestinian people are one and to call on all elected forces to work together to resolve the current problems.
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Palestinian Resistance Prevails
The U.S. is making every effort to again paint resistance in Palestine as that of terrorists and to present the current situation as one of a defeated people reduced to a “tragic civil war.” In fact it is the failure of U.S. policy and U.S.-style democracy that is being completely revealed, and the Palestinian resistance has again prevailed. It is a situation where the primacy of resistance has been confirmed and served to block the U.S.-Israeli efforts to bring the Palestinians to their knees. These moments in Occupied Palestine and on the world scale are bringing out the very best and the very worst that human civilization 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 U.S.-financed, Israeli-backed gangs in the Gaza Strip. It dissolved their organization, 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 U.S. 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 organization.” The 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, June 15. ‘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-coordinating 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 U.S. and repeated in the Western media that the events in Gaza represent a “tragic civil war” and a coup d’etat by Hamas do not correspond with the facts. Nor do the claims that the fight is one between religion and secularism, or between “moderates” and “extremists and radicals.” Such disinformation is 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 U.S.-organized forces, Israel first and foremost, that are 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 their own coup d’etat, and implementing the U.S.-Zionist program 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 the U.S. and Israel are stressed, the U.S., Israel and their abettors camouflage the dangerous agenda they are poised to implement: the invasion of Gaza and the annexation of the West Bank. In his meetings June 19 with Israeli Prime Minister Olmert, President George W. Bush emphasized the two had “a long and serious discussion about what we can do to keep the peace.” This was followed by Israel bombing Gaza and sending troops and tanks in, which were met by Hamas resistance fighters. They also more recently invaded Nablus in the West bank, killing civilians and kidnapping at least 30 Palestinians.
Previous meetings between Bush and the Israelis have been followed by massive aggression, as occurred last year against Gaza and Lebanon. There can be no doubt that yet more U.S.-Israeli bombing and violence is planned. It is precisely to hide this aggression that the U.S. keeps talking about “peace,” “defeating terrorism,” and defending its “partner in democracy,” Israel.
The aim running as a black thread through all these developments is to conceal the real role of the forces in play, criminalize and demonize on the basis of fabrication those who refuse to submit to the U.S.-Israeli dictate and to prepare a fresh basis for new repression and widening of the conflict in the Middle East.
It is the U.S. that rejected the legitimate Palestinian elections of January 2006 where the Hamas slate won a majority. It is the U.S. and Israel that imposed the collective punishment of starvation and blocked funds to Palestine in an effort to bring the Palestinians to their knees. It is the U.S. that is illegally interfering by attempting to install a government and write the laws of Palestine, as it is attempting in Iraq and Lebanon. Yet Bush claimed, “It is interesting that extremists attack democracies around the Middle East, whether it be the Iraq democracy, the Lebanese democracy, or a potential Palestine democracy…And those of us that believe in liberty and human rights and human decency need to be bound together in common cause to fight off these extremists and to defeat them.”
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 a U.S.-Israeli military occupation since June 1967, is sandwiched between the State of Israel and the Egyptian border in a landmass whose area is only about twice the size of Washington, D.C. 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 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, President Bush, 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 again reiterated that because of the resistance by Hamas, they could not be a “partner in peace.” The U.S. pumped millions of dollars into the elections and interfered in other ways to try and secure an outcome favorable to it — and failed. Bush then summarily rejected the elected government again showing that U.S. policy is not 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. The U.S. pursues a policy of using every means to try to weaken an entire people, exploit them for narrow selfish interests and striving to strengthen the U.S.-Israeli positions as foreign occupying powers at the expense of the Palestinians. According to Bush, only those political platforms and political parties sanctioned by the U.S. are permissible, whether in Palestine, Iraq, Iran, Korea or elsewhere. All others are to be defeated through force, starvation, and genocide.
Instigating a Coup Against the Palestinian National Authority
In the 2006 elections, 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 mobilized to inflict a massive financial embargo and other sanctions designed to starve the Palestinians into submission, including mobilizing the European Union and others to refuse to send funds. The sanctions, including Israel’s illegal refusal to turn over Palestinian tax revenues, estimated at more than $700 million, as well as U.S. bullying of Arab and Palestinian banks to refrain from transferring Arab aid money to the cash strapped Palestinian government, further crippled the Palestinian economy. This criminal collective punishment against the Palestinians impoverished them perhaps as never before and pushed tens of thousands of Palestinian families to the brink of starvation. However, the Palestinians — or, more accurately, the majority — refused to be duped by the U.S.-Israeli moves and those of their collaborators, 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 authorized $40 million to finance the outfitting and maintenance of a U.S. 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.
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. The coup was to be followed by a blood purge of Hamas for daring to struggle and daring to win. The deafening propaganda from the U.S. and Israel was that the Palestinians were submitting to “Islamic terrorism” by even tolerating, let alone voting for Hamas. The “civilized 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 U.S. intelligence document, that called for undermining and replacing the Palestinian national unity government. 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 “civilization” 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 U.S-backed Zionist guards of this “civilization” instigated the June Israeli-Arab war to divide the Arab world. It re-divided 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 U.S-Zionist forces of any of the just claims of the Palestinian resistance and people on these occupied territories served to blind these same “forces of civilization” from recognizing 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 civilization” that the Palestinians are thus “hopelessly divided,” progressive forces everywhere defending the right of peoples to self-determination grasp and recognize that Palestine in its own right is “a land, a people, a history, a future.” As such, it cannot be reduced to some obstacle to be demolished by U.S. imperialism and its Zionist tools. The Palestinian resistance continues to develop stepwise within definite conditions. Various forms of organization have been developed and followed to the extent that they serve the advancement of the struggle for self-determination within those conditions. The recent developments in Gaza are yet another example of the resistance prevailing against the forces of U.S.-Israeli reaction.
The Resistance Prevails
The broad principle of the entire Palestine people as a liberation organization 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 Organization (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 Intifada (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 benefit of a Palestinian nation-building project.
After the Soviet Union collapsed, the U.S. wanted to block re-entry into the region of any other foreign imperial power. The U.S. had Israel use the Oslo Accords to institute a stranglehold of military checkpoints and later, the apartheid annexation wall throughout the West Bank. This served to steal more Palestinian land for Zionist colonization. Some Palestinians, desperately seeking accommodation with the occupier, began to feel the heat of the second Al Aqsa Intifada unleashed by Palestinian youth and civil society in September 2001. 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. 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 the Hamas leadership of the Palestine Legislative Council — the Palestinian resistance unfolded a new level of struggle against the military forces of U.S.-Israeli occupation. They staged a successful action to push the Israeli 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 resistance showed it would not be vanquished and would carry forward under all conditions and circumstances.
The response from the U.S.-Israeli forces and their media was frantic. The calls in the Israeli Knesset 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 in the U.S. and Israel publicly declared Israel’s Arab citizens a fifth column (nearly 25 per cent of the population). The U.S. repeatedly branded the resistance as “terrorists” and “extremists” and emphasized that “its democratic friend” Israel could commit any crime to “defend” itself. The U.S.-backed, armed and funded 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. These actions forced 1.5 million Gazans to live in total or partial darkness and often go without water. The resistance continued and the most remarkable feature to emerge at that time was the evident paralysis of the Olmert government in Tel Aviv.
A few weeks later, Hizbullah forces inside Lebanon responded with a militarily organized resistance action against violation of the border by Israeli forces, capturing two more Israeli soldiers. The Zionists retaliated, unleashing a 34-day orgy of bloodletting, bombing Beirut and other major urban population centers 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.
When the internal organization and mo rale 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 U.S. and other western power, mass demonstrations began to develop throughout the world against the U.S.-Israeli aggression — such as the tens of thousands that demonstrated in Washington D.C., Los Angeles and San Francisco and elsewhere in the U.S., the more than 100,000 people in London, the 75,000 in Montreal — the U.S. rushed to rescue their Zionist proxy. The U.S. provided the face saving ceasefire Resolution 1701 in the UN Security Council.
The determined stand of the Lebanese national resistance, led by Hizbullah, to the ferocious U.S.-backed Zionist assault 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 in particular. No longer did the people flee their villages in the face of the Israeli state terrorism as in 1948 — their presence is vital to the resistance. Resistance was based amongst the people and villages of southern Lebanon. Hizbullah was seen as having won. The ascendant peoples of Palestine and Lebanon buried the myth of Zionist invincibility. The great terror, the U.S.-backed 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 coordinated with Israeli artillery and air strikes. The international media intentionally misrepresented armed self-defense against these provocations as a “Palestinian mini civil war.” Matters came to a head last November in the Gaza Strip village of Beit Hanoun. U.S.-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 Center for Public Opinion in Beit Sahur showed that over 75 per cent of Palestinians blamed the U.S., Israel, EU and Fatah for the financial economic crisis in the Occupied Territories.
Re-Establishing the Primacy of Resistance
By last December, 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 traveling between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank (where the Palestinian parliament is located, in Ramallah), the Hamas executive would begin at last to thaw the deep freeze in which U.S. pressure had placed the PLC’s access to financial resources needed to run the PNA administration. Leading forces of the Arab world supported Hamas’ effort to have President Abbas and all the Palestinian political factions renew the governing system in the PLC as a “national unity government.” In a related development contributing to breaking the U.S. 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 the U.S. and all the forces of imperialism.
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 recognized. While the U.S. 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.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told the international media 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 stand toward the resistance of the peoples to oppression. Without fail the U.S. expects a quick victory and to be welcomed and without fail it faces resistance and refusal to be occupied. Certainly, Rice’s claim shows the bankruptcy of the entire line of U.S. policy of “democratization” 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 U.S.-EU-Israel bloc wanted “accommodation” and “compromise” as a waystation to crushing and exterminating Palestinian resistance. The pretext would not matter. It could be affected in the name of saving civilization from barbarians at the gate who would not recognize the right of Israel to exist, or it could be carried out in the name of saving civilization from what the Wall Street Journal and the entire Israeli media and Palestinian accommodationists contemptuously label “Hamastan.” Hamas acted last week to cut this Gordian knot. The primacy of resistance over the politics of neo-colonial accommodation was established.
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 level of resistance in Gaza, and the corresponding response within Israeli public opinion compelled the Zionists, 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 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.
In the January 2006 election result, the forces of resistance threw down the gauntlet to the forces of accommodation that 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.
Defend Palestine and the Rule of Law
Events in Gaza and elsewhere are revealing that there is no middle ground. There is either the U.S. path of 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 U.S. The U.S. rulers are once again deluding themselves as they attempt to dictate arrangements to a world that refuses to submit to the negation of their right to be — in Palestine, Iraq, or in New Orleans and across the U.S.
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 U.S-Zionist occupation of their land piece by piece.
Now is the time to defend the resistance and to do so without doubt or hesitation, as the Palestinians themselves have done. Now is the time to step up demands for the U.S. to get out of the Middle East and to end all support for Israel. End the occupation now and hold the U.S. and Israel responsible for their crimes of genocide!
(Source: Statement of the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist), TML updates June 22 and 23, www.cpcml.ca)
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The events in Gaza over the last few days have been described in the West as a coup. In essence, they have been the opposite. Eighteen months ago, our Hamas Party won the Palestinian parliamentary elections and entered office under Prime Minister Ismail Haniya but never received the handover of real power from Fatah, the losing party. The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, has now tried to replace the winning Hamas government with one of his own, returning Fatah to power while many of our elected members of Parliament languish in Israeli jails. That is the real coup.
From the day Hamas won the general elections in 2006 it offered Fatah the chance of joining forces and forming a unity government. It tried to engage the international community to explain its platform for peace. It has consistently offered a 10-year cease-fire with the Israelis to try to create an atmosphere of calm in which we resolve our differences. Hamas even adhered to a unilateral cease-fire for 18 months in an effort to normalize the situation on the ground. None of these points appear to have been recognized in the press coverage of the last few days.
Nor has it been evident to many people in the West that the civil unrest in Gaza and the West Bank has been precipitated by the American and Israeli policy of arming elements of the Fatah opposition who want to attack Hamas and force us from office. For 18 months we have tried to find ways to coexist with Fatah, entering into a unity government, even conceding key positions in the cabinet to their and international demands, negotiating up until the last moment to try to provide security for all of our people on the streets of Gaza.
Sadly, it became apparent that not all officials from Fatah were negotiating in good faith. There were attempts on Mr. Haniya’s life last week, and eventually we were forced into trying to take control of a very dangerous situation in order to provide political stability and establish law and order.
The streets of Gaza are now calm for the first time in a very long time. We have begun disarming some of the drug dealers and the armed gangs and we hope to restore a sense of security and safety to the citizens of Gaza. We want to get children back to school, get basic services functioning again, and provide long-term economic gains for our people.
Our stated aim when we won the election was to effect reform, end corruption and bring economic prosperity to our people. Our sole focus is Palestinian rights and good governance. We now hope to create a climate of peace and tranquillity within our community that will pave the way for an end to internal strife and bring about the release of the British journalist Alan Johnston, whose kidnapping in March by non-Hamas members is a stain on the reputation of the Palestinian people.
We reject attempts to divide Palestine into two parts and to pass Hamas off as an extreme and dangerous force. We continue to believe that there is still a chance to establish a long-term truce. But this will not happen unless the international community fully engages with Hamas.
Any further attempts to marginalize us, starve our people into submission or attack us militarily will prove that the United States and Israeli governments are not genuinely interested in seeing an end to the violence. Dispassionate observers over the next few weeks will be able to make up their own minds as to each side’s true intentions.
Ahmed Yousef is the political adviser to Ismail Haniya, who became the Palestinian prime minister last year and is currently contesting his dismissal.
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Barghouthi: “Israel Wants to Weaken All
Palestinian Factions”
Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi, Hamas spokesperson, said on June 26 that Israel is not trying to make one Palestinian faction stronger than the other, but seeks to weaken all Palestinian forces. During a press conference in Ramallah, in the West Bank, Dr. Barghouthi said Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert wants to create two isolated Palestinian ghettoes, one in the Gaza Strip and one in the West Bank. Dr. Barghouthi added that statements of Olmert, during the recent Sharm Al Sheikh summit in Egypt, did not address fundamental issues, such as the issue of Jerusalem, the right of return for refugees, Israeli settlements, borders and other important issues, and instead focused on a absent “political horizon.”
Dr. Barghouthi said Olmert does not have the right to tie the release of Palestinian tax revenue with the absence of any Hamas members in the government, and added that Israel does not have the right to withhold the Palestinian tax revenue.
Dr. Barghouthi also slammed the statements of Olmert regarding the possibility of releasing 250 detainees, members of Fatah, and said that there are at least 11,000 detainees imprisoned by Israel, many of them women and children, that must be released. [Israel has since decided not to release the 250 prisoners.][TOP]
Fatah-Affiliated Al Aqsa Brigades Reject Decree of President Abbas to Disband
The Fatah-affiliated Al Aqsa Brigades have announced that they have rejected the presidential decree regarding the disbanding of militia in the occupied Palestinian territories. The spokesman of the brigades, Abu Oday, told Ma’an that, following consultations with the brigades’ leaders in the West Bank, they have issued the following declaration:
First: the rejection of the dissolution of the brigades, “because they are a resistance group, and are defending the country and the dignity of the people.”
Second: the refusal to disarm the group, “because it is a legitimate arm of resistance, and is a weapon to defend the Intifada.”
Third: the rejection of the description of the brigades as ‘militias,’ “which defame the Palestinians, and it is nonsense to describe the only remaining armed wing [of Fatah] as a militia.”
Fourth: the brigades support the presidents’ decision to withdraw illegal arms used in the lawlessness, and announce that they stand with the security forces to stop the state of disorder.
Fifth: the brigades will “do their best” to aid the security forces, “and will be honored to stand beside the security forces to defend the country.”
Sixth: the brigades will not be complacent before the crimes of the occupation,” and will retaliate for the crimes committed [by the occupying U.S.-Israeli military], especially in the recent days in the Gaza Strip, Nablus and Jenin.
Seventh: the brigades reject the connection established between themselves and the current state of lawlessness, and confirm that they “were created to confront the occupation and its aggression against the Palestinian people”.
Eighth: the brigades will not be committed to a truce with the Israelis as long as the occupation continues the crimes and incursions against Palestinians and their cities.[TOP]
Hamas Uncovers PA, CIA Intelligence Trove
Hamas has uncovered a trove of thousands of documents, including classified correspondence with Israeli forces. After seizing the Palestinian Authority’s Security headquarters in Gaza City on Thursday afternoon, Hamas fighters report they have seized tens of thousands of sensitive intelligence documents, including correspondence between the PA, the American CIA, and the Zionists regarding security issues. Hamas officials said the newly found information would help them battle the Israeli regime’s surveillance tactics.
A Hamas member said he and his men rem oved thousands of documents, video tapes and equipment from the compound. “I saw my name appeared at least four times in the intelligence documents -- related to attempts to take me out. I saw details of surveillance against me and joint Fatah-Israeli plans to thwart our operations.”
“If we release these documents, the entire world will be shocked, not just the Palestinians. The dozens of armored vehicles, RPG launchers and rockets, the hundreds of thousands of bullets we have, they are all nothing compared to the documents and data discs we uncovered.”
“There are video tapes of surveillance against our fighters and their homes, wiretaps on our calls, the PA’s entire method of operation has been exposed,” he said. According to the Hamas source the papers also document the PA’s cooperation with the CIA against Palestinian organizations, especially Hamas.
Releasing the documents would entail the approval of the Hamas leadership, said the Hamas source, noting that the documents would be used to prove the justness of Hamas’ fight against the Palestinian “security” forces.
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Engage with Hamas: We Earned Our Support
The Palestinian National Authority apparently joins the list of elected governments targeted or toppled over the past century by interventionism: nations that had the courage to take American rhetoric at face value and elect whomever they would. No doubt some in Washington persist in the fiction that the United States is following a “road map” to democracy for Palestinians, just as others believe the Iraq war has been a sincere exercise in nation-building.
Neoconservative strategists have miscalculated, however, and Hamas is stronger than ever. For the first time in months, Gaza is secure. This may be a momentary peace as Israel prepares an attempt to retake parts of Gaza. Yet neither blunt force nor U.S. subterfuge will extinguish Palestinian aspirations for self-governance, free from outside interference.
Hamas’s actions to secure Gaza from the horrific recent violence of the [U.S.-organized] Palestinian contras have been out of self-defense. The assassinations of Hamas officials and supporters, attempts on the life of the elected prime minister, and kidnappings and bombings by some in President Mahmoud Abbas’s paramilitary groups had to stop. The PA has a clear legal right, indeed an obligation, to prevent this violence, by force if necessary, and to protect the Palestinian people.
It is not Hamas that has “outlawed” the government. (When has an elected party with a voting majority ever resorted to banning the government to get its way?) The success of the Reform and Change Party is neither a chimera nor a momentary lapse in reason on the part of the electorate. Rather, it is the result of four decades of hard work in Palestinian society. It reflects the trust of the people. Those who collaborate with the occupiers to void the electoral process will not succeed. Abbas’s “state of emergency” and his U.S. and Israeli arms will not prevail in Gaza or quench the thirst for political freedom in the West Bank.
Some critics raise the red flag of “al-Qaeda” and say that Hamas and parliament are a stalking horse for Salafi jihadists. I defy them to demonstrate one instance in which Hamas’s military structure has struck against any force outside the theater of the occupation. The struggle has always been against the Israeli agenda of ethnic cleansing and conquest. Hamas is a movement of Palestinian liberation and nationalism — Islamist, yes, but in the sea of contending faiths that is the homeland, where is the sin in loving one’s creed?
Likewise, those who demean resistance to the occupation as little more than a proxy for Iran, Syria or Hizbollah are ignorant of history. The long-suffering Palestinians have gratefully accepted assistance from neighbors both near and far, Arab and Western, Muslim or otherwise. Slighting the generosity of those who sympathize with the Palestinians is hypocritical given America’s billions of annual aid dollars for Israel, money that has only purchased tragedy.
Palestinians want, on their terms, the same thing Western societies want: self-determination, modernity, access to markets and their own economic power, and freedom for civil society to evolve. Those who warn of “failed states” and “Hamastan” as a breeding ground for terrorism forget where blame for failure belongs — at the feet of the American administration, which has chosen to isolate, rather than deal with, the elected government.
The Bush administration never intended to honor the outcome of fair and transparent elections in the occupied territories. The embargo, designed to punish the electorate for its choice, was the first step toward crushing new democratic institutions. The second has been to find collaborators for the American agenda and to supply them with advisers, funds and weapons for their campaign of destabilization. The final step will be to truncate Gaza from any proposed Palestinian state and make it a de facto prison for all “undesirable” aspects of Palestinian nationalism. This will culminate in provocations designed to trigger a military response from Israel, which will “justify” a war on Gazans. This would be tragic for all concerned, and the international community, especially the Arab League, must not allow such an outcome.
What can be salvaged from the wreckage of the multiparty system? Those who have dissolved the government and joined with the occupiers are embraced by the Bush and Olmert administrations, which have released Palestinian tax revenue and taken other steps to shore up the Abbas government’s legitimacy and proclaim it the future of a Palestine shorn of troublesome Gaza.
Yet it remains that Hamas has a world in common with Fatah and other parties, and they all share the same goals — the end of occupation; the release of political prisoners; the right of return for all Palestinians; and freedom to be a nation equal among nations, secure in its own borders and at peace. For more than 60 years, Palestinians have resisted walls and checkpoints intended to divide them. Now they must resist the poisonous inducements to fight one another and resume a unified front against the occupation.
We urge the Bush administration not to repeat the mistakes that have become hallmarks of its actions in the Middle East. Allow the Palestinian people to chart their own course, free from the influence of those who seek little more than to perpetuate the status quo. The alternative is unacceptable.
Ahmed Yousef is a senior political adviser to Ismail Haniyeh, who is contesting his dismissal as prime minister by Mahmoud Abbas.[TOP]
Palestinians Will Not Accept a Vichy Government
The vast bulk of Palestinians, at home and in the Diaspora, will not accept a quisling government in Ramallah that might be at Israel’s beck and call. This is precisely what the Bush administration and Israel expect the new government, headed by Salam Fayyad, to be. Of course, it is entirely up to Fayyad and his cabinet to prove the falseness of Israeli bedding and American expectations.
Unfortunately, the new government seems to offer little promise for a better tomorrow for the thoroughly starved, exhausted and tormented Palestinians. Indeed, the deafening silence by Abbas and Fayyad, et al, in the face of widespread thuggish behavior by well-known armed hooligans who have been vandalizing and burning down buildings, institutions and businesses throughout the West Bank, is very telling.
True, the government is still a few hours’ old. However, the absence of even a verbal condemnation of the orgy of terror and vandalism against suspected Hamas supporters and their families and businesses doesn’t augur well for the future.
Predictably, the U.S. and Israel have been heaping wholesome praise on the Fayyad government. Moreover, the U.S. and Israel have already signaled their enthusiastic willingness to lift all financial sanctions against the occupied West Bank, apparently to strengthen the Dahlan-Abbas camp against other Palestinians who refuse to be bribed or intimidated into giving in to Israeli insolence and arrogance of power.
The Fayyad Government may be temporarily pleased by the American and Israeli support. However, it should understand that American and Israeli backing is like a poisoned chalice. Experience has proven that in the Middle East any government or faction or organization backed by the U.S. will be reviled by the masses. This is especially true in the occupied Palestinian territories where collaboration with Israel, is seen as ultimate treason.
The Palestinian masses know very well what the U.S. symbolizes for them, their children and their enduring cause. It symbolizes oppression in its ugliest forms. It symbolizes mass murder, land theft, dispossession, deprivation and ultimate mendacity and hypocrisy. America is the enabler, sustainer and justifier of 40 years of Israeli Nazism whose ultimate goal is the obliteration of Palestinians as a nation, by arrogating their homeland for them and making their future as precarious as possible.
In short, America to the Palestinians is very much like what Nazi Germany was to the Jews. Hence, any government agreeing to throw itself into the American lap will lose its legitimacy if not its very existence. This is probably the reason why Palestinians in the Gaza Strip did not fight for Muhammed Dahlan and his men.
During the past 18 months, the U.S., through people like Lieutenant General Keith W. Dayton, gave us a lot of money and weapons to kill each other in the service of Israel, which does not really distinguish between this or that Palestinian group that rejects the occupation and insists on freedom. That happened while the U.S. and Israel (and also the hypocritical EU governments) made sure to starve and impoverish ordinary Palestinians in the hope that they would revolt against Hamas and abandon Palestinian aspirations, in return for bread and American money. Yes, America gave us weapons to kill each other, while making sure to starve and torment us, as if the Nazis of our time wanted us to kill and be killed hungry.
These are not allegations or unsubstantiated claims but well-known facts. U.S. officials and media have been openly speaking about igniting civil war in Gaza and the West Bank. Elliot Abrams, who is answerable to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, boasted about his success in setting Palestinians against each other.
Unfortunately, President Abbas never bothered to tell the Palestinian people why and for what purpose he was amassing all these American-supplied weapons? Was it because he wanted to fight the Israeli occupation? Or was it to decapitate Hamas in one fell swoop when the opportunity arose? And if the latter was the reason, then can we say that Hamas was justified in its preemptive action in Gaza?
Honest Palestinians knew from the very inception what was going on. The writing was on the wall for a long time, and the national apostasy on the part of certain Palestinian leaders was getting starker and starker. There is no doubt that any close identification of the new government with the Israeli occupier will invite its demise, and that could happen sooner rather than later. More to the point, it is wrong and misleading to assume that the Fatah movement in its entirety would back a government that says “yes” to Israel and the U.S. A government as such would be a treacherous government, a quisling entity.
Therefore, the new government should watch its steps very carefully and refrain from reaching any agreement with the Zionist regime that could compromise our national rights.
This is not a matter of Fatah vs. Hamas. This is a matter of Palestine and Palestine is not for sale.
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