In early November, Swiss scientists released a report in the British medical journal The Lancet exposing that Yasser Arafat, president of the Palestinian National Authority, had ingested radioactive polonium, leading to his death in 2004.
After traces of radioactive polonium-210 were found on many of Arafat’s personal items, including his clothes, combs and toothbrush, Arafat’s body was exhumed last year for further examination.
Patrice Mangin, director of the laboratory at Lausanne University Hospital’s Institute of Radiation Physics in Switzerland stated, “You don’t accidentally or voluntarily absorb a source of polonium—it’s not something that appears in the environment like that.”
In other words Arafat was deliberately poisoned in a political assassination.
When the Palestinian leader’s death was announced nearly 10 years ago, Chairman Omali Yeshitela, leader of the African People’s Socialist Party expressed his conviction that Arafat had been murdered.
The obvious culprits are the U.S. and Israel. Built on the enslavement of African people, the genocide of the Indigenous people and the colonization of the majority of the world, the U.S. is the lead capitalist-imperialist force in the world today.
As the main imperialist power in the world today, the U.S. is currently facing a terminal economic and political crisis.
As African People’s Socialist Party Chairman Omali Yeshitela has explained, imperialism’s crisis is the result of mass resistance of oppressed peoples around the world—including the militant, long-standing liberation struggle of the Palestinian people whose land was stolen by the U.S.-backed illegitimate, colonial state of Israel.
The murder of Arafat took place under the regime of Ariel Sharon, one of Israel’s most brutal war criminals who had publicly vowed to do away with Arafat.
It was Sharon who carried out the terror against the Palestinian people known as Al-Nakba in 1948 and who executed the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre, a mass slaughter of Palestinian people who had been forced into exile in Lebanon by Israel’s colonial occupation of Palestinian land.
According to reports, Sharon carried out the assassination with the permission of then-U.S. president George W. Bush. Since 2006 Sharon has been in a coma, kept alive on life support following an alleged stroke.
Chairman Omali pointed out that long before the assassination of Arafat, the U.S. wanted to get rid of Arafat and install the neocolonial Mahmoud Abbas as the leader of the Palestinian Authority.
The Chairman stated that the U.S. and Israel “had maneuvered Arafat to change the structure of the Palestinian government to make Abbas a prime minister who they incorrectly thought would be able to assume control.”
The failure of this plan escalated the efforts to neutralize Arafat, including his murder.
Although the people’s resistance continues unabated against the occupying Israeli state and oppressor nation today, the U.S./Israeli counterinsurgency has done much to crush the revolutionary trajectory of the Palestinian Liberation Struggle.
Last week the Hamas Movement, which declared from the beginning that Arafat was murdered by the Israeli occupation, called on the neocolonial Palestinian Authority (PA) to conduct an independent investigation into the death of Arafat and to provide full disclosure of all the details of the assassination to the Palestinian people.
Hamas also demanded that the PA immediately suspend negotiations with Israel, according to the website Middle East Monitor.
Although they made no accusations against Israel at the time of Arafat’s death, Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority have now tepidly called for an investigation into the case.
The murder of Arafat is evidence of Israel and the U.S. government's desperate, bloodthirsty, genocidal efforts to destroy any form of resistance to Israeli occupation, even if the resistance is moderate and not revolutionary in character, as was the case with Arafat. Arafat's organization, Fatah, was one of the least revolutionary organizations of the Palestinian Liberation Organization.
However, Arafat refused to surrender the national rights of the Palestinian people to Israel and the U.S. as required by the imperialists. This is why the U.S. deemed it necessary to reorganize the Palestinian Authority as an unsuccessful means of subordinating Arafat to Abbas.
The murder of Arafat has been a blow to the Arab side of the balance of power in the whole Middle East where all struggles revolve around the question of the right of the Palestinian people to their land and sovereignty.
The African People’s Socialist Party and the African Socialist International stands in unconditional solidarity with the Palestinian people in their just struggle for the total liberation of their land and people. The struggle of the Palestinian people is our struggle.
The exposure of the assassination of Yasser Arafat brings home once again to African people the deadly hand of the U.S. government and the system of parasitic capitalism built and maintained at the expense of the oppressed peoples of the world.
As Africans, we have seen all too often the savage U.S.-backed assassinations of our beloved revolutionary leaders, including Patrice Lumumba, Kwame Nkrumah, Thomas Sankara, Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, Walter Rodney and so many more.
We know that we will unite and liberate our Africa and African people everywhere only under the iron-clad discipline of the Party of the African working class guided by the theory of African Internationalism.
African workers and peasants of the world unite! African Internationalism leads the way!
Forward to the 6th Congress of the African People’s Socialist Party, Dec. 7-11, www.asiuhuru.org
Long live the Palestinian Revolution!
Uhuru!
