Category: Marxism

Below we publish the text of a talk given by Mike Walker at a recent Workers Party public forum in Christchurch.

If we are to believe the hype true liberation and self determination for the Palestinian people will be forthcoming with what is commonly referred to as the “two state solution”. This supposed “solution” would leave the racist structures of the Israeli state in place and therefore the fundamental cause of the ‘conflict’ also in place. This proposal would confine Palestinians to less than twenty per cent of the land mandated by the British in 1947 and would leave the situation of Palestinians driven from their homes in what is now Israel unresolved. It would render invisible the alienated enclaves divided by checkpoints, barriers, the annexation wall and a brutal military occupation in the West Bank; combined with the Gaza strip, which has been called the largest concentration camp in the world. This represents the Palestinian Bantustan.

It is crucial as we look at the current situation in Palestine to keep in mind the “two state solution” and to contextualise the history with an emphasis on the history of Zionism and the conduct of Zionist leaders since the creation of the state of Israel.

Continue reading ““Two States” – a Zionist solution”

– Tim Bowron

Israel and most of the Western media would have us believe that the recent bloody assault on Gaza is a regrettable but unfortunate necessity forced upon the Israelis by the breaking of the June 2008 ceasefire by Hamas. This is a lie.

Between June 16 and November 4 when the Israeli army broke the ceasefire by carrying out an armed raid killing 6 Palestinians in Gaza, no Hamas rockets were fired into Israel. However, during this time Israel maintained a complete sea and air blockade of Gaza, restricting the movement of people as well as of goods and vital humanitarian supplies.

Israel has maintained this blockade since January 2006, when Hamas won power in the Palestinian Legislative Elections. Israel regards Hamas as a “terrorist organisation” because unlike the PLO it has not accepted the apartheid solution of partitoning Palestine into a homogenous Jewish state (Israel) and a small collection of impoverished Palestinian Bantustans in the West Bank and Gaza. The PLO’s acceptance of Israeli apartheid and the Oslo “Peace Process” is the main reason why it lost power in the 2006 elections.

In 1948 when the United Nations in concert with the Western imperialist powers created the state of Israel they gave it 55% of the land in Palestine, despite the fact that Jewish people only comprised one third of the total population. Today the Palestinians are left with only 22% of the land (and much of this is also taken up with illegal Israeli settlements). Over half the Palestinian population (4.2 million) are refugees.

Israel must keep fighting to ensure that it maintains its character as a homogenous Jewish state (the dream of the Zionists) – it knows that if the millions of Palestinian refugees were to exercise their right of return to the homes from which they were forced in 1948 and 1967 then the Jews would be a minority within their own country, so it must do all it can to “disappear” them from history.

The Zionists insist that Jews and Arabs cannot coexist within the same state. Yet this ignores the fact that until the arrival of the Zionist movement in the early 20th century Jews and Arabs had lived together peacefully in Palestine for centuries.

The only solution to the current conflict is the creation of a single democratic, secular and unified state in Palestine with equal rights for all peoples and religions. Until this is realised there will be no peace and no justice.