Communication from the ILC coordination on May 16, 2018

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A massacre. It was a true massacre that was carried out by the Israeli army by firing real bullets at a crowd that was peacefully demonstrating, causing 60 deaths and thousands of wounded, of whom 60 are between life and death at the time we are writing.

Trump and his representatives simultaneously congratulated themselves on the transfer of the American embassy to Jerusalem. Trump and his representative to the UN congratulated the Netanyahu government on “showing restraint”! The European Union, while seeking to distance itself from Trump’s brutality, condemned the violence and called for the self-restraint of the two parties, as if there was an equality between those who fired on the crowd and those who peacefully demonstrated. No one is fooled by the “arguments” put forward for repressing the Palestinians, under pretext of fighting against terrorism, of security or even of self-defence. Who can believe for a single moment these countertruths that aim at masking the fact that these demonstrations call the edifice created under the aegis of imperialism into question.

These are the same governments that, in the interests of the multinationals, provoke wars and conflicts across the planet.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians from Gaza were demonstrating against the Gaza blockade and for the right to return. Gaza, in effect, is the largest prison in the world, open-air, a true ghetto in which, on 360 square kilometres, 2 million people “live”, 5,400 per square kilometre, one of the highest densities in the world.

This band, where there is no electricity but for a few hours a day, where everything is lacking, notably medicine, where there is no work, is under a blockade organised by the Israeli state, which controls the walls and barbed-wire fences enclosing the band of Gaza. It was against this blockade that tens of thousands of Gazans, for the most part descendants of the 800,000 Palestinians forcefully displaced from their villages and homes in 1948 with the creation of the Israeli state, were demonstrating.

On all the territories where Palestinians live, in the West Bank, In Galilee, and within the 1948 borders (the Israeli state), the emotion is at its peak, and the demonstrations that are taking place take this into account, since it’s an entire people that is hit, and it’s a single people that is standing up against the repression and oppression. And the Palestinian youth, which rejects all that is sought to be imposed on it, which does not recognise itself in the various “solutions” that are pretended to be provided, is massively mobilising, since it has no other solution.

The March of Return, in effect, raises the question of the right of Palestinians to return to their villages and their homes, for the Palestinians of Gaza, of the West Bank, of Lebanon, of Jordan, of Syria… The right to return concerns 6 million Palestinians, exiled, enclosed in camps, submitted to oppression and repression.

This demand runs up against all the accords that were put into place under the aegis of American imperialism. The numerous Palestinian militants who participated in the Open World Conference against war and exploitation in December 2017 in Algiers clearly affirmed: the Oslo Accords in 1993, the carving-up and division into shreds of the Palestinian territories under the control of the Palestinian Authority, stand against the Palestinian’s sovereignty and right to a nation. The whole of this system, in reality, aims at protecting the Israeli occupier and repressing the Palestinian people.

Since the Oslo Accords, supposed to find a “solution”, twenty-five years have passed; the Palestinian people has not ceased to be repressed, beaten and massacred. There is only one way to establish peace in this region: to end the apartheid against the Palestinian people. Therefore, we unconditionally support the right to return of all the Palestinian refugees to their villages and homes of origin, the right to land, the right to national sovereignty.

Unconditional support for the Palestinian people!

We call to all the militants and organisations that participate in the activities of the International Liaison Committee of workers and peoples to be in the foreground of the fight in defence of the Palestinian people against the massacre perpetrated by the Israeli army with the support of Trump.

Luisa Hanoune, general secretary of the Workers Party (Algeria)
and Dominique Canut, member of the national bureau of the Independent Workers Party (France),
coordinators of the ILC