Free, free Palestine! Historic anti-colonial resistance launched against Israeli settler-colony marks world turning point
On October 7, 2023, the Palestinian resistance movement in the Gaza Strip, led by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, launched a historic counteroffensive against the Israeli settler-colonial occupation regime, reportedly firing over 5,000 rockets and fighting by ground, sea, and air using hand gliders with parachutes.
The Palestinian freedom fighters courageously broke through the Gaza Strip’s militarized borders, an open-air prison.
The Palestinians reclaimed control of every Israeli settlement along the Gaza border, seizing control of a police station, checkpoints, the southern Israeli military command headquarters, and attacking over 20 Israeli military bases, capturing at least 35 Israeli occupation soldiers. The Israeli army was entirely taken by surprise!
The Hamas military commander Mohammad Deif said, “We have decided to end all of the occupation’s crimes. The time is over for them to act without accountability. Today, the people reclaim their revolution, correct their path, and return to the march of return.”
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has declared war on Gaza. Reports are saying that so far, Israel has killed over 200 Palestinians with air strikes and gunfire. The Israeli government said Saturday evening that it was cutting off the electricity supply for Gaza. U.S. President Joseph Biden has extended the U.S. government’s ongoing support for Israel, stating that U.S. support for Israel is “rock solid.”
At least 100 Israeli occupiers have also been killed, and nearly another 1000 wounded.
Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are flooding the streets to celebrate and cheer in support of the freedom fighters.
Who are the real terrorists?
In the last year, Israel has escalated its brutal assaults on the Gaza Strip. On August 5, 2022, Israel killed 33 Palestinians over three days. Another attack began on May 9, 2023, with air strikes on three houses. Over five days, Israel killed 30 Palestinians. Over 500 Palestinians were injured in these attacks.
The UN has said 2023 has been the deadliest year for Palestinians since it started counting deaths in 2006. More than 200 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire since the start of this year, according to the health ministry.
These facts expose the truth behind the colonial bourgeois media’s slanderous designation of Hamas as a “terrorist organization” and their ridiculous claim that the Palestinians initiated an “unprovoked attack” on the Israelis. There can be no “unprovoked attack” by Palestinians against Israel. Every act of Palestinian resistance is provoked by 75 years of colonial occupation, land theft, dispossession, torture, brutality and slaughter.
The bourgeois media also state that the “Palestinians have infiltrated or invaded Israel.” But we are clear: “Israel” is Occupied Palestine, and it is impossible for a Palestinian to “invade” Palestine. It is their land.
In Palestine today, a war for national liberation is part and parcel of the global anti-colonial struggle exploding worldwide.
As Chairman Omali Yeshitela has clearly stated, the State of Israel is an illegitimate, white nationalist, colonial-settler state – no different from the United States, South Africa, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.
Israel is an illegitimate settler-colony
The State of Israel was founded in 1948 f due to a vicious, genocidal process in which Europeans, in this case Jews, slaughtered and expelled the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine and stole their land at gunpoint. All the land currently occupied by the State of Israel belongs to the Palestinian people.
The ideology created to justify the State of Israel is called Zionism. Zionism was developed by an Austro-Hungarian Jew named Theodore Herzl in the late 19th century. Herzl authored the book The Jewish State.
As Herzel saw it, the project of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine was the means by which European Jews could seek to advance their interests within the colonial mode of production. He was clear that it would require the elimination of the Palestinian people. The Zionist movement under Herzl worked to win support from the major European imperialist powers for the Zionist colonization of Palestine.
Zionism was, from its inception, an entry point into the colonial mode of production for a sector of the European population. As the Chairman has pointed out, the Zionist movement in Europe was consolidated less than a decade after the Berlin Conference, 1884-1885, where the imperialist governments gathered to carve up Africa among themselves. In fact, Palestine was not the only place considered by the Zionists as the location for the Jewish settler State. They also considered Uganda and Kenya.
The Israeli state was eventually established on occupied Palestinian land with the support of British and later U.S. imperialism. Israel was founded in May of 1948 after a brutal period of massacres and expulsions of Palestinians carried out by Jewish settler terrorist organizations. This period is referred to by the Palestinians as “Al-Nakba,” the Arabic word for “the Catastrophe.”
The Nakba was a barbaric genocide. Gangs of Jewish terrorists invaded hundreds of Palestinian villages. They used hideous form of violence to destroy and expel the Palestinians from their homes.
The Zionists expelled 80 percent of the indigenous Palestinians from their homeland. Over 600 Palestinian villages were destroyed. By May 1948, when Israel was formally “founded,” over 800,000 Palestinians had been driven into exile.
In 1967, Israel waged a war to steal even more Arab land. Known as the so-called “Six Day War,” Israel invaded and occupied the West Bank, Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, and the Syrian Golan Heights.
“The African People’s Socialist Party
(APSP) stands in unity with the righteous
struggle for national liberation of the
Palestinian and Arab people and the
destruction of the Israeli colonial-settler
State as well as all neocolonial, petty
bourgeois Arab regimes that do the bidding
of the U.S. and Europe…”
Africans must stand with Palestine!
The African People’s Socialist Party has always stood in profound unity with the anti-colonial struggle of the Palestinian people to reclaim control of all of their land, resources, and self-determination.
As Chairman Omali Yeshitela has stated, Israel functions as a military outpost for U.S. imperialism in the Middle East. Israel is used by the U.S. to secure access to resources in that region and to provide U.S. imperialism with a strategically significant minion to carry out its aims and objectives in the Arab world and Africa. The U.S. provides more military financing to Israel than all other countries combined. The U.S. shells out nearly $4 billion to Israel annually.
Every day, the Israeli state terrorizes the Palestinian people who live under siege. Palestinians are forced to live in conditions similiar to Africans, who are also colonized people within the U.S. and elsewhere: checkpoints, poverty, confinement in concentration camps called ghettos and prisons, constant police surveillance and brutalization, the torture in cold and dehumanizing detention cells, constant murders, demolition of homes as a form of “collective punishment.”
Who are Hamas?
The Palestinian resistance movement, Hamas, was founded in Gaza in 1987 during the massive popular uprising, the First Intafada.
In 2006, the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip rejected the opportunistic, sell-out leadership of the Palestinian Authority and Fatah.,They voted to elect Hamas as the leadership of Gaza. In response, Israel bombed the Gaza Strip, killing thousands of Palestinian men, women, children, and babies, and imposed a genocidal blockade by land, air, and sea, blocking food, medicine, and other essential supplies from reaching the people there. The blockade remains in effect today, 15 years later.
As the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Human Affairs noted, “The Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated places on Earth. It has a population of approximately 2.1 million people. Since 2007,it has been under a land, sea, and air blockade imposed by Israel.” There is no access to clean water. “Almost half of Gaza’s people do not have enough food, around 60 percent of children are anemic, and many suffer from stunted growth due to malnutrition… 70 percent of youth are now unemployed.”
Africa, Palestine will be free!
The APSP stands in unity with the righteous struggle for national liberation of the Palestinian and Arab people and the destruction of the Israeli colonial-settler State as well as all neocolonial, petty bourgeois Arab regimes that do the bidding of the U.S. and Europe to suppress the people and facilitate the theft of their resources.
When Africans were engaged in resistance to colonial police terror in Ferguson, MO, in 2014, the Palestinians sent messages to the young Africans via social media with encouragement and information on how to defend themselves against tear gas.
In August of 2014, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine issued a statement in support of the African resistance in Ferguson, stating that the “black struggle is leading the world” and also noting that “since the earliest days of the Black movement in the U.S., from slaves revolting for freedom to the civil rights movement and beyond, Black people, organizations and movements have faced severe state repression, targeting, incarceration and killings at the hands of the state.”
On July 29, 2022, the FBI violently and militarily raided seven homes and offices of the Uhuru Movement, including the home of our Chairman Omali Yeshitela and Deputy Chair Ona Zené Yeshitela in St. Louis, Missouri. Just a matter of weeks later, in August of 2022, the Israeli police raided six offices of Palestinian organizations in the West Bank. The security camera footage of the Israeli raids was strikingly similar to the footage of the FBI raids on the Uhuru Movement.
Africans unite with the Palestinian people in the struggle to overturn their colonial domination. The African Revolution, under the leadership of the African People’s Socialist Party, the Vanguard Party of the African working class, is leading the struggle to destroy the colonial mode of production, which is responsible for the exploitation and violence imposed on all colonized and oppressed peoples for the benefit of the white colonizer population.
Overturning colonialism as a mode of production is the road to the ultimate defeat of the Israeli regime, which is propped up by billions of dollars from the U.S., without which it would not survive for one day. Israel, the U.S.,and all colonial-settler states must go! The colonial mode of production must go!
Victory to Palestine!
Victory to the African Revolution!
Join the African People’s Socialist Party!
APSPUhuru.org
