BRAZIL

Revolutionary Communist Party (PCR)

Why does Israel massacre the Palestinian people?

Luiz Falcao

The terrorist offensive of the Israeli government has no limits: this July and August, hundreds of sea, land and air attacks with phosphorous and fragmentation bombs were carried out in the Gaza Strip, killing more than 2,000 Palestinians, the vast majority of them civilians. The Palestinians have no army, unlike the State of Israel, which has one of the 10 most powerful armies in the world, with 160,000 soldiers, as well as submarines, modern tanks, bombs of all kinds and about 400 nuclear weapons.

The result of these cowardly Israeli bombings are hundreds of children killed and thousands with legs or arms amputated. One of these attacks was on the Abu Hussein School of the United Nations, in the early morning of July 30, killing 21 children while they were asleep. The school was bombed despite the fact that the UN reported to Israel 17 times that its 83 schools in Gaza accepted only civilians. Pierre Krahenbuhl, Commissioner General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) stated after these deaths: “Last night, children were killed while they were sleeping next to their parents on the floor of a classroom in a UN refuge in Gaza. The children were killed as they slept; that is an affront to all of us, a source of shame.” That same day, more Israeli missiles attacked another UN school and a public market in Sejaiya.

Just a few hours after the massacre, the US confirmed the delivery of heavy artillery such as grenade launchers and 120-mm mortars to Israel.

Up to the beginning of August, more than 400 Palestinian children had been killed and 9,000 seriously wounded. Every day, more bodies are found in the rubble of buildings and houses, schools and hospitals destroyed by Israel.

But why does Israel carry out this bloodbath in the narrow Gaza Strip, where 1.6 million Palestinians live?

There is no doubt that Israel hates Arabs peoples, particularly the Palestinians. It knows that it has a military power infinitely superior to that of the Palestinians and has the support of the imperialist countries, particularly the US, which provides weapons and billions of dollars to promote the killing of Palestinians in the Middle East. From 2009 to 2018, the US gave $30 billion dollars in military aid to Israel.

Israel is strictly following the Nazi ideology that a lie repeated a thousand times becomes the “truth”. It counts on the complicity of the mass media of the world bourgeoisie, which repeats ad nauseam the Israeli lies as if they were facts.

Who are the terrorists?

Who does not remember Israel saying that as long as Yasser Arafat was alive there would be no peace between Israelis and Palestinians, since Arafat was a terrorist? However, when Arafat’s body was exhumed in 2012, it was proved that he had died of poison. In January 2013, Shimon Peres, then president of Israel, confirmed that Zionist agents had killed the Palestinian leader.

Today, Israel says that as long as Hamas exists and continues governing the Gaza Strip there will be no peace, because Hamas is terrorist. But who bombs schools and markets and kills sleeping children in the UN school?

Israel is also attacking the Palestinian people in the West Bank, where the government is led by the moderate Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian National Authority, and it is building more settlements there. As the Israeli government statistics show, the building of Israeli settlements on the West Bank increased by 120% in 2013.

Israel never fulfilled any of the peace agreements that it signed. On the contrary, they were all violated and thrown into the garbage by the successive Zionist governments. In 1993, it signed the Oslo Accords, pledging to withdraw its armed forces from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and to respect the sovereign rights of the Palestinian people. But instead of withdrawing from the Palestinian territories, it built more and more settlements on Palestinian land and continues to ignore international law and the pleas of tens of thousands of peoples for a permanent peace in the region.

Israel’s hypocrisy is so great that it proposes putting an end to the bombings and demilitarizing the Gaza Strip, but what it wants is to build up its army and to continue manufacturing and importing weapons. If Israel does what it does now when the Palestinians have only a few rockets and stones, one can imagine what it would do in the Gaza Strip if that were demilitarized.

For decades, Israel, besides carrying out cowardly bombings and constant military actions, has been imposing an inhuman blockade on the Palestinians, forcing them to live with rationing of drinking water, energy, food and medicine. Its objective is to expel the Palestinian people from Gaza and its lands and to show the Palestinians that either they leave the Gaza Strip or they will be decimated by their bombs and tanks, as was made clear in the words of Nazi leader Benjamin Netanyahu: “The Jewish state must be prepared for a long campaign in the Gaza Strip until the mission is completed.”

And what is that mission? To expel the Palestinian people from Gaza or to make them into slaves of the Zionists. The replacement of Shimon Peres with Reuven Rivlin as President of Israel on July 24 is further evidence in this regard. Mr. Rivlin is part of the more radical wing of Likud, he rejects the creation of a Palestinian state and supports the policy of settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, “Rivlin won’t be the State of Israel’s president, but Greater Israel’s president. He will exploit the presidential institution to advance the West Bank settlement project. “

Israel tortures children

In 2008 and 2009, Israel carried out “Operation Cast Lead,” in which it murdered more than 1,300 Palestinians and took over more land in the West Bank and Gaza. During this massacre, the US sent 325 containers of 6 cubic meters each, with arms to supply Israel. The cargo left from the Greek port of Astakos for the Israeli port of Ashdod, 8 kilometers from the Gaza Strip.

In May of 2010, Israel attacked the ships of the Freedom Flotilla that was trying to bring humanitarian aid to the Palestinian people, killing nine people on the ships. So, while the US arms to Israel freely sail the oceans, ships with food and medicine for the Gaza Strip are attacked.

In June of last year, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child accused Israeli forces of abusing and torturing Palestinian children, in addition to using them as human shields. According to the UN agency, “Palestinian children detained by the military and police are routinely subjected to degrading treatment and often to acts of torture.” The agency further stated that over ten years, about 7,000 Palestinian children aged 9 to 17 years were arrested and interrogated and many of them were taken before Israeli military courts handcuffed and chained at the ankles. The majority of the children arrested were accused of throwing stones. According to Israeli law, Palestinian children who throw stones at Israeli soldiers can receive a sentence of up to 20 years in prison.

The aim is to rob Palestinian land and gas

But hatred for the Palestinian people alone does not justify such cruelty. The Zionist state of Israel is ruled by politicians and parties that, in addition to openly defending Zionism and preaching hatred for the Palestinian people, represent the big bourgeoisie of the country, that is, the big civil construction companies interested in building settlements on Palestinian land and the Israeli and U.S. war industries in close relation with international finance capital.

As Israel has few natural resources and 85% of its land is desert, robbing Palestinian land is essential in order to expand the building of settlements and to increase the profits of the construction and real estate industry in Israel.

Also the Israeli armament firms – Aerospace Industries, Elbit System and Elta – which produce satellite-launching vehicles, drones, fighters, advanced radars, etc., and the United States firms (Boeing, Lockheed, Northrop, General Dynamics, Raytheon), although they can sell their weapons to other countries (including Brazil), they have in the Israeli army one of their biggest buyers. The permanent war against the Palestinian people creates huge profits for the owners of the arms industry.

On the other hand, Israel boasts of having a modern and high-tech industry, but it depends on the import of grain, meat and oil. To overcome this they want to occupy Palestinian lands.

But Gaza does not have only Palestinian children. It also has significant reserves of natural gas. In the year 2000 extensive gas reserves were discovered in the region. These reserves were estimated by the multinational British Gas (BG Group) at 40 million cubic meters, but everything indicates that they are much greater. BG has negotiated with the Israeli government to explore these resources, and the Palestinian people, the real owners of that wealth, have been ignored. In addition to BG, other monopolies have already expressed their interest in exploring Palestinian gas. Whoever occupies the Gaza Strip will control the gas and could make millions of dollars. In 2007, the Israeli government admitted paying for the exploration for gas to the Palestinians, but changed its mind and now wants to take over the land and wealth that does not belong to them; that is why they are massacring the Palestinian people. For that crime they rely on the weapons and financing of the US, the European Union and the unconditional support of the mass media around the world.

In short, Israel does not want to live in peace with the Palestinian people, it wants to rob their lands and kill those who do not accept its rule, it wants to seize the gas and super-exploit Palestinian labor power.

As a wall

Indeed for the bourgeoisie that rules Israel today and for the major imperialist powers, what matters is to increase their wealth; the wars against the Palestinian people, against the Syrian people (more than 179,000 people killed), against Iraq (more than 1 million people killed), against Libya and Ukraine, among others, are one of the major means for the capitalist class to increase its profits, especially at a time when the capitalist system going through a deep economic crisis. It does not matter, for the lords of war, who are precisely the owners of the means of production and the banks, how many Palestinian children they kill in their sleep, nor how many wars they have to make.

The Zionist government of Israel and its accomplices, the imperialist countries, want to prevent the existence of a Palestinian state at all costs in order to rob their wealth and enslave the survivors of this genocide. These are the real reasons that Israel and the US are carrying out this bloodbath and not the tunnels and rockets of Hamas.

But the Palestinian people have already shown that they will not accept being slaves; they prefer death to living without freedom. A people that fights for its freedom may lose some battles, but it will win the war. And as the verses of the Palestinian Communist poet Tawfiq Az-Zayad say, the Palestinians will not disappear, they will fight:

“Here
We shall remain
like a wall
upon your chest
in your throats...
When we are thirsty
We will squeeze the stones
And we will eat land
when we are hungry
But we will not leave
Our future is here”

(Tawfiq Az-Zayyad)

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