For a United Socialist State of Jewish-Arabic working classes opposed to the dual state-ruse of the imperialists!
Statement of the Colombo Action Committee
We demand to immediately stop the Israel Emergency Unity Government’s genocide carried out by air and missile attacks over two million oppressed Palestinians, trapped inside Gaza, while preventing them from receiving their most essential needs such as water, electricity, fuel and medicines, and call all workers, youth and progressive sections of the masses to line up for the protection of the Palestinian people.
On the 13th, the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s regime forced over one million people to evacuate from the Gaza Strip brazenly violating international laws. By morning today (16), according to the BBC reports, half a million Palestinians have evacuated. Even those tens of thousands fleeing with their children and possessing only their wearing dresses are also being attacked. Even the refugee (IDP) camps have been attacked. Patients die in hospitals due to the lack of fuel to run the ventilators.
A monumental crime, comparable to those committed by the Nazis, is now unfolding before our eyes. A population of over two million, comprising majority women and children have been wilfully forced to starvation and dehydration. UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini remarked on the situation in the Gaza Strip as follows: “Gaza is running out of water, and Gaza is running out of life. Soon, I believe, with this there will be no food or medicine either. There is not one drop of water, not one grain of wheat, not a litre of fuel that has been allowed into the Gaza Strip for the last eight days.”
“The siege in Gaza, the way it is imposed, is nothing else than collective punishment. So, before it is too late, the siege must be lifted and aid agencies must be able to safely bring in essential supplies such as fuel, water, food and medicine. And we need this NOW,” Lazzarini stated.
Already by now, the number of deaths caused by Israel Army attacks on Gaza has exceeded 2600. The purpose of positioning the United States naval forces on the Mediterranean is to support these racist and barbaric attacks. The support of the imperialist forces and capitalist states like India is for Israel, the oppressor. Sri Lanka President Ranil Wickremasinghe, threatened by the deepening economic and political crisis in the country, joined imperialist masters in strengthening provocations against the Palestinians.
Principal dividing lines are getting clearer. Millions of people worldwide are rallying around the oppressed Palestinians’ cause. Protests carrying placards calling to end “Israel terrorism“ and “Free Palestine“ have spread from the United States to Japan. Protesters in England did not yield to the police threats to arrest those in support of the Hamas Organization. French imperialism has warned that such protesters would be subjected to up to 5 years of imprisonment. People in all countries cannot be contained by the threats of the ruling classes. The Gulf Region is getting enveloped by the mass protests. Under these conditions, the Saudi Arabian ruling class that has assured a bargain with Israel towards a steady transition to restructure the Middle East, has been unable to accept the request of the United States to denounce the Hamas Organization. For the first time, Mohamed Bin Salman has been forced to take a call to his adversary, Iranian President Ibraham Rasik.
For the Palestinians, who have been forced to live as prisoners on their own land, there lies no other alternative than fighting. At the 78th General Assembly of the United Nations, held between September 19-26, Palestinian President Mohammad Abbas stated,
“[O]ur people are defending their homeland and their legitimate rights through peaceful, popular resistance. This is our policy. It is a strategic option for self-defense and to liberate the land from a colonial occupation that does not believe in peace and has no regard for the principles of truth, justice and human values.”
Except by forcing an end to this brutal occupation, the Palastinians will have no freedom. All oppressed peoples in all countries headed by the international working class must fight to end this brutal occupation and to build a United Socialist State of Palestinian and Israeli working class.
Let all reactionaries be counting the pieces from the rubble of the attack on the 7th by the Hamas organization in Israel! Hamas fighters were able to intrude and attack quite unexpectedly on Israel, which is named as one of the most powerful Defense Forces in the world, only with the support of the larger Palestinian population. What would have been the situation, had it emanated as a genuinely organized revolutionary uprising by the United Jewish and Arab working class, employing their highest industrial force?
The State of Israel that exists today was a result of a strategy employed in 1914 during the First World War, by the British Imperialist War Cabinet to win over the support of the Jewish people towards them. Based on this Cabinet decision, in 1917, Sir Rothschild, a Zionist leader of the British-Jewish community, was assured by the British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour that his government would support the establishment of a “National home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, which was then under the Ottoman Empire, with a small minority of Jewish people. The strategy employed by the British to maintain their imperialist, bourgeois rule and to crush popular uprisings that emerged at the end of the Second World War was to divide and partition certain states on racial and religious lines.
No one should forget the fact that in the creation of the Zionist state in Palestine in 1948, it was British imperialism’s intention to retain the oil-rich Middle East under their domination.
Today, the entire imperialist system is being dragged towards a third world war, under an economic and political crisis, that judders in its very depths. That is the exact reason why the current developments in Israel represent a new stage of the long-rooted contradictions in the global capitalist system. While the working class needs freedom, imperialist capitalism wants it buried. Exactly because of this reason, defending the Palestinian people’s struggle for freedom is an unavoidable class obligation of the working class in every country, including that of the Israeli working class.
The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS.org) have taken the lead in this struggle by developing the necessary international perspectives of the working class and the programme necessitated by that struggle. The Colombo Action Committee for People’s Struggles stands with these perspectives and programme to defend Palestinian people and calls upon all progressive masses to rally round that struggle.
Workers, the oppressed and the progressive masses, and youth in Sri Lanka, South Asia and around the world, let us fight for the following demands:
Stop all military support provided to the Netanyahu regime by the United States and all European governments!
Lift the siege of the Gaza Strip now!
Provide the besieged people of Gaza with water, medicine, electricity, food and all essential supplies immediately!
End the occupation of Palestinian lands!
Withdraw invader Zionist armies immediately!
[This statement was originally published here in Sinhalese on October 16, 2023]
