The African People’s Socialist Party and the Uhuru Movement join with the peoples of the world in denouncing Israel’s brutal, barbaric mass murder of Palestinian Arabs in Sheikh Jarrah, the Gaza Strip and throughout Occupied Palestine.
We unite with the Palestinian people’s right to defend their land against the U.S.-backed Israeli occupation, and their struggle for national liberation from Zionist and U.S. imperialist domination.
The state of Israel is an illegitimate white nationalist colonial settler state resting on stolen Palestinian land. The current wave of brutality by Israeli settlers and the settler regime’s military forces is only the most recent in a history of colonial genocide, land theft and displacement spanning back over 70 years.
Today, May 15th, is commemorated by the Palestinian people as “Al Nakba Day,” marking the 73rd anniversary of May 15, 1948 when the colonial state of Israel was formally established. Nakba is the Arab word for “catastrophe.”
Between 1947 and 1949, at least 800,000 Palestinians – nearly half the population – were expelled from their homeland and forced into refugee status in neighboring Arab states. Backed by British and later U.S. imperialism, Zionist terrorists took control of more than 75 percent of Palestine and destroyed over 600 villages and cities. Jewish terrorist groups like the Irgun, Stern Gang and hagana murdered over 20,000 Palestinians with gruesome acts of violence.
Israel is part and parcel of a capitalist world order revolving around the colonial economy with its origin in the enslavement and colonization of African people. The Israeli military receives more funding from the U.S. than all other countries combined.
This parasitic colonial-capitalist world economy was born from the assault on African and the enslavement of African people and the genocide against the Indigenous people and theft of their land.
The wealth and power of the U.S. and Europe — and Israel, for that matter — would not exist without the colonization and theft of resources from African people.
An article published in The Burning Spear newspaper during the 2006 Israeli war on Gaza explained: “The tap root of the struggle in the Middle East began in that historical period made famous by Christopher Columbus when the Europeans unleashed upon the world’s peoples a more than 500-year period of rape, plunder, pillage and genocide.”
This was the initiation of the process where Europe, using colonial terror, created the current world of violence and instability being witnessed today.
The article goes on to explain, “Palestine, after having been under Ottoman control since 1517, came under British mandate in 1917. The British Balfour Declaration decided that Palestine would become a ‘national homeland for Jewish people.’
“In 1948, the British, the United Nations and the Zionist Movement decided to split Palestine. The Zionists with 30 percent of the population received 53 percent of the land. The Arabs with 70 percent of the population received 47 percent of the land.
“Then, as a result of the first Arab/Israeli War [Al-Nakba] in 1948-49, the Israelis occupied another 22 percent giving them a total of 75 percent of Palestine. They immediately began receiving financial support from the United States.”
Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah resist invasion by Israeli settlers
The current escalation of Israeli terror against the Palestinians in Gaza Strip and at the Al Aqsa Mosqieue in Jerusalem were preceded by an intensified encroachment of Palestinian territory by Jewish colonial settlers.
Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah have been demonstrating for weeks against the eviction of their families by Jewish settlers.
Sheikh Jarrah’s residents are themselves refugees who were forced from their homes in Haifa and Jaffa during the 1948 Nakba genocide. In the 1950s the government of Jordan, which controlled East Jerusalem at the time, relocated 28 refugee families to Sheikh Jarrah in coordination with the United Nations.
In 1967 during the so-called “Six Day War” the Israeli settler colonial regime expanded its territorial control of Arab land through the invasion and capture of East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and the Syrian Golan Heights. Not long after Israel extended its reach into East Jerusalem did Jewish settlers begin the process of pushing the Palestinians living there out of their homes.
In 2009 the settlers began taking over Paletsinian people’s homes in Sheikh Jarrah evicting 53 Arabs under Israeli court order.
The Palestinians have resisted, bravely fighting in defense of their land, sometimes with nothing but rocks in their hands against the tasers, gunfire, white phosphorus, tanks, grenades and other advanced weaponry deployed by the Israeli colonizers.
These events reached a tipping point in the mass uprisings of thousands of Palestinans at the Al Aqsa mosque where the Israeli government opened fire injuring over 300 people this past weekend.
In the days following, Israel intensified their bombardment of the Gaza Strip with artillery and air strikes. The Israeli Defense Forces announced on Thursday that “air and ground troops are currently attacking in the Gaza Strip.”
The Israeli prime minister, a colonial thug named Benjamin Netanyahu, blustered that the Israeli military will make the people of the Gaza Strip “pay a heavy price” for their resistance.
The Gaza Strip is a tiny section of territory nominally administered by the Palestinians. Nearly 2 million people live in Gaza Strip in a state of life the Palestinians have described as an “open air prison.” Gaza is only 25 miles long and five miles wide.
In 2006 the people of Gaza elected the Islamic resistance organization Hamas as their governmental leadership, an expression of Palestinian democratic will to which the Israeli and US governments responded by launching a full-scale war against Gaza.
Israel imposed a vicious blockade on Gaza, preventing food and medicine from being delivered there, creating dire conditions of starvation and poverty.
U.S. imperialist president Joseph Biden cheered on the Israeli killers, saying they had the “right to defend themselves.” Biden’s position was consistent with that of former U.S. president Donald Trump who named Jerusalem the capital of Israel.
The entire white global colonial-capitalist world applauds the Israelis as they kill the Palestinians, if only at times moderating their applause out of concern that the Israeli state’s behavior might contribute to a destabilization of the entire region.
In response to the imperialist talking point that “Israel has the right to defend itself,” we respond with our own slogan: “Palestinians have the right to take their land back, by any means necessary!”
Africans and Palestinians have a common enemy: colonialism
As the African People’s Socialist Party we believe that the peoples of the world must respond to the murder of Palestinans taking place in broad daylight as we speak.
We denounce not only the U.S. and Israel but also the reactionary and neocolonial Arab regimes in the so-called Middle East who have collaborated with imperialism to constrain the Palestinian restiance. They have funded ‘moderates’ or neocolonial Arab Palestinians and brokered their own settler peace with the illegitimate white nationalist state of Israel.
We salute the resistance of the Palestinians. We unite with their anti-colonial struggle for independence and freedom.
The Palestinians are disrupting this unholy alliance in the Middle East, undermining the success of colonial capitalism in maintaining hegemony and stability in that region of the world.
We have not forgotten the solidarity demonstrated by the Palestinians with our people when Africans rose up in Ferguson, Missouri after the August 9, 2014 police murder of Mike Brown. When the police were using tear gas and other weapons to attack us, we received words of encouragement, suggestions and unity from the colonized people in Palestine. As the Party we have always recognized that Africans and Palestinians share a common struggle against colonialism.
Our Party has a long history of unity with the Palestinian revolutionary movement.
Israel is an enemy of the African nation. As a military outpost of U.S. imperialism the Israeli regime is heavily involved on our African continent, working with neocolonial puppets in Sudan, Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda, and Burundi, bolstering those regimes’ ability to violently suppress the struggle of the African working class and maintain our division form each other and our resources.
Israel is a settler colony
Colonialism is when a foreign hostile alien state power oppresses a whole people for the benefit of the colonizer, oppressor nation population. Settler colonialism is when the colonizer invades and inhabits the land of the colonized, expelling the natives from their homeland and establishing a settler-colonial government to reign over the lives of those who remain.
Israel is the settler-colonizer, Palestine is the colonized. Israeli Jews are the settler-colonizers, Palestinian Arabs are the colonized. The main contradiction, therefore, is not Israeli “apartheid” or racism, but settler colonialism itself. The theft of the Palestinian land is the basis of the current explosion of colonial violence against the legitimate resistance of Palestinian people.
This settler-colonialism is no different from Zimbabwe , South Africa, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and indeed, the United States. The U.S. is in fact the largest illegimate white nationalist colonial settler regime on the planet earth, forged through the genocidal murder and displacement of the Indigenous people and their confinement into concentration camps euphemestically labeled “‘reservations.”
As Africans we are colonized everywhere on the planet earth including in the United States where we face police terror, colonial poverty, displacement, mass imprisonment and other conditions resembling in every way those of the Palestinians.
We call for Africans everywhere to join the African People’s Socialist Party and build the African Socialist International worldwide to advance the revolutionary movement for our liberation and unification as a people.
Our triumph over colonial-capitalism and recapturing of our independence will strike the final death blow to the parasitic colonial capitalist system that oppresses, murders, bombs and tortures the peoples of the world from Congo to Haiti, from Minneapolis to Gaza.
