Position of the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) on the expulsion of U.S./Israeli-backed gangster elements from the Gaza Strip, June 14-15, 2007
Demonstration in Hamilton, July 22, 2006
THESE MOMENTS in Occupied Palestine and on the world scale are bringing out the very best and the very worst which human civilization has given rise to: either solutions to the problems faced by the people based on fundamental principles of international law, or anarchy raised to the level of authority.
On June 14-15, the military arm of Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement (the Qassam Brigades) seized the headquarters, training facilities and arms caches of U.S.-financed, Israeli-backed gangs in the Gaza Strip. It dissolved their organization, the so-called Preventive Security Force, and put its head Mohammed Dahlan and his hired staff and allies to flight. Hamas reiterated that the Palestinians are one people but that resisting the Zionist occupation requires stopping the hands of those who act as its tools – even if some of these are Palestinian. It did this through al Aqsa TV, broadcasting messages to Gaza’s 1.5 million people to reassure them, as the fighting turned from clashes to an all out assault on Dahlan held positions.
It was not an attack on Fatah, on Gaza’s people or a coup d’etat the broadcasts insisted. Those under attack were the Dahlan gangs that had arrested and tortured thousands of partisans and were “collaborators with Israel and the U.S. and traitors.” The London Observer reported from Gaza on June 17: “As Hamas consolidated its grip on the narrow coastal strip last week, it produced a former senior member of Fatah Khaled Abu Helal on its TV station to say that he welcomed Hamas’ cleansing of Fatah of its collaborators and traitors. He announced too that he would be forming a new Fatah committee to oversee the organization.” The Observer further reported: “The collaboration of Fatah members with Hamas was also suggested strongly by other witnesses. One told The Observer that some officers in the Presidential Guard had sent their men home as the fighting began. Another Hamas official, the spokesman for its Qassam Brigades, Abu Obaida, insisted there was co-ordination between the two sides as the purge went on: ‘Today is a day of mercy and unity,’ he said on Friday. ‘Hamas has issued a full pardon to all the security leaders and personnel who participated in the fight against Hamas. Our fight is not against Fatah, the one with the long history in the struggle, but against just one group of Fatah agents who were following the Zionist agenda. The decent people of Fatah were co-ordinating with us and are happy we have got rid of the corrupt people of Fatah. Now we have to enforce law and order.’”
The dramatic assertions widely spread by the Western media and different governments that the events in Gaza represented the unleashing of a fratricidal civil war and a coup d’etat by Hamas do not correspond with the facts. Such disinformation is perfidy, the stock in trade of those who accuse the Palestinians of the very crime of inciting a reactionary civil war and the decapitation of the Palestine National Authority that they themselves were planning to commit. It is the U.S.-organized force which is striving to exploit the just resistance in Gaza to their advantage by proclaiming an “emergency government” (which Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh immediately denounced as “unconstitutional”), seizing the funds of the National Unity Government, carrying through a coup d’etat, and implementing the U.S.-Zionist program to dismember Occupied Palestine through subversion and blunt force. There can thus be no doubt as to what is the real purpose of the disinformation surrounding the events in Palestine.
While untrue reports of the “peaceful and humanitarian” response of Israel and the Fatah faction are stressed, the U.S., Israel and their abettors camouflage the dangerous agenda they are poised to implement: the invasion of Gaza and the annexation of the West Bank.
The aim running as a black thread through all these developments is to conceal the real role of the forces in play, criminalize and demonize on the basis of fabrication those who refuse to submit to the U.S.-Israeli dictate and to prepare a fresh basis for new repression and widening of the conflict in the Middle East.
Behind the curtain of disinformation
VARIOUS international media have already begun to admit that this decisive act has put an end for the time being much of the civil disorder that had become endemic throughout the Gaza Strip. This Mediterranean coastal enclave, home to more than 1.5 million people subject to an Israeli military occupation since June 1967, is sandwiched between the State of Israel and the Egyptian border in a landmass whose area would fit several times inside that of Greater Toronto. It has come to be described as “the world’s largest open air prison.”
Hamas supporters rally in Gaza, June 15, 2007
The real facts are as follows. These events marked the culmination of a months-long struggle that developed out of the January 25, 2006 electoral victory of the Change and Reform Slate sponsored by Hamas in the national elections for the Palestine Legislative Council. The political candidates of the national slate came from diverse backgrounds, including a Christian Palestinian candidate. Fourteen of the elected lawmakers were political prisoners held in Israeli jails. Far from being a religious vote as portrayed by the media, this was a vote against occupation and for resistance, a vote for the sovereign rights of the Palestinian people and democratic governance. 
Within hours of the result, George W. Bush, president of the United States, which had carried out direct and indirect interference in the election including the expenditure of several millions of “aid” dollars on behalf of individual Fatah candidates to dictate a favourable outcome to it, arrogantly declared: “I’ve made it very clear that the United States does not support political parties that want to destroy our ally Israel and that people must renounce that part of their platform.” He further stated: “I don’t see how you can be a partner in peace if you advocate the destruction of a country as part of your platform. And I know you can’t be a partner in peace if you have, if your party has got an armed wing.” This treacherous behaviour is in conformity with the attitude toward foreign policy typical of the ruling circles of the Anglo-American countries: instead of a policy based on international law, of respect for the legitimate rights of all peoples based on the UN Charter including non-interference in their internal affairs, a policy is pursued of using every means, down to and including calumny, for the purpose of weakening an entire people, exploiting them for narrow selfish interests and striving to strengthen the position of the foreign occupying power at their expense. According to Bush, only those political platforms and political parties sanctioned by the U.S. are permissible.
Instigating a coup against the Palestinian National Authority
THE LEADER of the Fatah faction, Mahmoud Abbas, retained the presidency of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) as the president is elected separately. However, the result of the election meant that he otherwise lost control of the administration and cabinet of the PNA. The United States and Israel mobilized the European Union and others to inflict a massive financial embargo and other sanctions designed to “put the Palestinians on a diet,” i.e., starve them into submission, as the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert infamously boasted. The sanctions, including the arrogation by Israel of Palestinian tax revenues estimated at more than 700 million U.S. dollars, as well as U.S. bullying of Arab and Palestinian banks to refrain from transferring Arab aid money to the cash strapped Palestinian government, further crippled the Palestinian economy, impoverished Palestinians perhaps as never before and pushed tens of thousands of Palestinian families to the brink of starvation.
Ahead of virtually the entire international community, one of the first acts of Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay of the newly installed Harper Conservative government in Ottawa was to withdraw Canada’s financial support for the Palestinian Authority, citing Hamas as a “terrorist organization.” The previous Liberal government, utilizing the hysteria created after the 9-11 terrorist attack in New York City, had through executive decree proscribed Hamas (as it did Hizbullah, the Lebanese resistance organization) in such terms – falsely portraying them as “jihadists” as if they too were poised to launch attacks within Canada, as a means of isolating popular support and sympathy for the Palestine resistance amongst the Canadian people. However, the Palestinians – or, more accurately, the majority – refused to be duped by the conspiratorial Americans and their collaborators and agents into revolting against Hamas and cutting each other’s throats.
The Bush Administration promised $42 million, then $50 million, then $80 million, then $60 million and (most recently) finally authorized $40 million to finance the outfitting and maintenance of a U.S.-directed and -trained “Palestinian National Guard” under Abbas’ Presidential office. It is known that this is led by his right hand man Muhammad Dahlan, operating entirely independently of the civilian control of the PNA Ministry of the Interior. The Presidential Guard at Anzar in Gaza City also received a significant amount of light weaponry such as assault rifles and ammunition, all in coordination with Israel. Washington’s plan was widely reported to have been devised by Elliot Abrams, co-responsible for the Venezuelan coup attempt in 2002. The CIA plan also involved “strategic advice” to politicians and some liberal secular parties as well as mercenary journalists that agreed to work against Hamas.
By the spring of last year, the plans of various elements from this informal imperial coalition to instigate a coup against the Palestinian National Authority were openly discussed over the Internet and in other media to be followed by a blood purge of Hamas for daring to struggle and daring to win. The deafening propaganda from the U.S. and Israel was that the Palestinians were submitting to “Islamic terrorism” by even tolerating, let alone voting for Hamas. The “civilized world” would not be long in fixing this malady, they said. On April 30, 2007 the Jordanian newspaper Al-Majd further published an important, 16-page secret document, an “Action Plan for the Palestinian Presidency,” based on a Jordanian government translation of a reputed U.S. intelligence document, that called for undermining and replacing the Palestinian national unity government. The Hashemite Jordanian government, which is suggesting that it could re-annex the West Bank as its own “peace” plan, immediately shut this newspaper down. In May, the undersecretary general of the United Nations and its envoy to the Middle East, Alvaro de Soto submitted to the UN Secretary General a detailed document, frankly accusing “the United States of a plot to depose the Palestinian government from power at any price, even the price of a bloody civil war.”
Now it is these same forces of “civilization” that are in quite a fix. In 1947-48, they were puffed up with the greatest arrogance over the success of the first partition of Palestine. They were supremely confident of the permanence of the humiliation and Nakba that their creation of the State of Israel would inflict on Arab peoples in general and the Palestinians in particular. In 1967, the Zionist praetorian guard of this “civilization” instigated the June Israeli Arab war to divide the Arab world. It redivided the Palestinians at the same time by placing under a brutal military occupation those in the West Bank and Gaza Strip who were outside the immediate jurisdiction of Israel.
These last four decades of denial by the Zionists of any of the just claims of the Palestinian resistance and people on these occupied territories served to blind these same “forces of civilization” from recognizing the authority that this resistance has always enjoyed among the Palestinian people. That resistance enjoys such authority as the guarantor of the unquenchable national aspirations of the Palestinian people that the Fatah slate was voted out of office in January 2006 for betraying that trust.
Notwithstanding the self-serving discourse of the “forces of civilization” that the Palestinians are thus “hopelessly divided,” progressive forces everywhere defending the right of peoples to self-determination grasp and recognize that Palestine in its own right is “a land, a people, a history, a future.” As such, it is not reducible to some obstacle to be demolished by imperialism and its Zionist tools. The Palestinian resistance continues to develop stepwise within definite conditions. Various forms of organization have been developed and followed to the extent that they serve the advancement of the struggle for self-determination within those conditions.
The Resistance Prevails
2nd Anniversary of the Untifada
THE BROAD PRINCIPLE of the entire Palestine people as a liberation organization has remained well entrenched since 1948. Based on the general principle that the liberation of the Palestinian homeland is first and foremost a deed of the Palestinian people themselves, however dispersed, since 1964 many forms of resistance were developed. These forms were under the umbrella of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) led by Yasser Arafat as head of its Fatah faction. Many of these forms and arrangements had to be shed as developments internally and outside Palestine placed new demands on their struggle, such as the first Palestinian Intifadah (uprising) in the West Bank and Gaza in December 1987 which lasted until 1992. Some of these arrangements, like the Oslo Accords of 1993, were desperate gambles that could never be turned to the account of a Palestinian nation-building project. After the Soviet Union collapsed, the U.S. wanted to block re-entry into the region of any other foreign imperial power. Israel would use the Oslo Accords to institute a stranglehold of military checkpoints (and later, the apartheid annexation wall throughout the West Bank) in order to steal more Palestinian land for Zionist colonization. Some Palestinians, desperately seeking accommodation with the occupier, began to feel the second Al Aqsa Intifadah unleashed by Palestinian youth and civil society in September 2001 was burning their feet. Yet throughout, the Palestinians’ steadfast resistance to occupation and national humiliation never ceased even for a single moment. To date, this resistance has never given the progressive forces any grounds to doubt where final victory will lie. Furthermore, Palestinians have been impelled by a growing conviction that the opposition of many of the Arab regimes to Israel was not based on principle but on rivalry for favour with the imperial court, in which they aimed to use the Palestinian question as their bargaining chip. However, time and time again the facts show that nothing will stop the Palestinians! Last week’s events proved this truth once again.
A year ago, in response to many events – the intensified military shelling of the Gazan population, the forcible kidnapping by Israel of different Hamas elected members, cabinet members and officials of the PNA (including the Speaker of the Palestinian legislative council, Aziz Duweik, his deputy Mahmoud Ramahi, and the deputy Prime Minister Nasserdin al Shae’er from their homes in the West Bank), and the various internal coups being plotted against its leadership of the Palestine Legislative Council – the Palestinian resistance unfolded a new level of struggle against the military forces of Israeli occupation when they staged a successful action to push the occupier’s armed forces further back behind Gaza’s perimeter and captured Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier. Every funeral of a Palestinian martyr slain by Israeli targeted assassination became the occasion for massive popular rallies.
Demonstration outside the Al Aqsa Mosque at the time of the First Intifada
The response from Israeli forces and their media was frantic. The calls in the Knesset and media escalated to “transfer Palestinians!” not only from the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, but also from Israel proper (those Palestinian lands occupied since 1948). The open fascists publicly declared Israel’s Arab citizens a fifth column (nearly 25 per cent of the population). The Israeli Zionist armed forces, under the pretext of freeing a captured soldier, bombed or destroyed the bulk of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure, including schools, colleges, streets, bridges, charities as well as thousands of homes and the only power station, forcing 1.5 million Gazans to live in total or partial darkness. It exposed once again the enormous vulnerability of the Zionist hierarchs. Whenever organized Palestinian resistance emerges right under their nose they are submerged within the reactionary public opinion of their supporting ghetto of people of mostly Jewish origins from Europe, the former Soviet Union and the U.S. The most remarkable feature at that particular moment however, was the evident paralysis of the Olmert government in Tel Aviv.
Canadians denounce Harper’s defence of aggression as “measured response”
A few weeks later, Hizbullah forces inside Lebanon responded with a militarily organized resistance action against violation of the border by Israeli forces, capturing two more Israeli soldiers. In this moment, the Zionists retaliated full bore, unleashing a 34-day orgy of bloodletting, bombing Beirut and other major urban population centres throughout Lebanon, dropping more than 1.5 million cluster bombs throughout southern Lebanon, slaughtering more than a thousand innocent civilians and displacing tens of thousands more, while attempting to assassinate the leaders of Hizbullah.
Demonstration in Ottawa, July 22, 2006.
The governments of other U.S. allies could not find foxholes fast enough in which to dive out of the way of inquisitive reporters. However, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper waded in to declare that the Israeli military assault was a “measured response.” Michael Ignatieff, running at that time for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada, refused to condemn as a war crime the deliberate slaughter by Israelis of more than 50 civilians in Qana near a UN observer post. The Canadian corporate media openly questioned why the government should pay one cent of the cost of evacuating from the war zone Canadian citizens, let alone residents mostly of Lebanese origin.
When the internal organization and morale of the Israeli government’s own forces, especially those confronting the Lebanese resistance at the border, seemed to reach breaking point and to the consternation of the Western powers mass demonstrations began to develop throughout the world against the Israeli aggression, such as the more than 100,000 people in London, the 75,000 in Montreal, etc., the U.S. rushed to the rescue of their Zionist proxy with the face saving ceasefire Resolution 1701 in the UN Security Council.
The determined stand of the Lebanese national resistance to the ferocious U.S.-backed Zionist assault led by Hizbullah and based amongst the people and villages of southern Lebanon, marked a major watershed and turning point for the oppressed peoples of all the Arab countries in general and for the Lebanese and Palestinian resistance struggle in particular. No longer did the people flee their villages in the face of the customary Israeli terror as in 1948; their presence is vital to the resistance. Hizbullah was seen as having won. The ascendant peoples of Palestine and Lebanon buried the myth of Zionist invincibility. The great terror, the Israeli army, the Shin Beit and Mossad and all the rest, that state within a state, however numerous and well-armed with sophisticated weapons and divide and rule policy had been unable to quell the movement of the Palestinian and Lebanese peoples for their rights, national liberation, and sovereignty. This continuous resistance movement in different forms and intensities for 170 years had now reached a new quality. The Olmert government slouched towards collapse. Thousands of Israelis in northern Israel abandoned their homes. This had never happened before.
The Palestinian resistance in Gaza, meanwhile, girded itself against murderous reprisal actions by Dahlan’s gangs co-ordinated with Israeli artillery and air strikes. The international media intentionally misrepresented armed self-defence against these provocations as a “Palestinian mini civil war.” Matters came to a head last November in the Gaza Strip village of Beit Hanoun. U.S.-directed forces from the Israeli army encircled Palestinian resistance fighters in the local mosque. Enabling the resistance forces’ escape to safety, some 2,000 women of the village, acquitting themselves as simple people who chose principles over fear, courageously offered themselves as human shields between the forces of reaction confronting them and the hopes for their future represented by the fighters trapped in the mosque. In another instance, masses of civilians occupied the rooftop of a building to successfully prevent an Israeli targeted assassination of a Palestinian leader and his family. On November 7, an opinion poll released by the Palestinian Centre for Public Opinion in Beit Sahur showed that over 75 per cent of Palestinians blamed the U.S., Israel, EU and Fatah for the financial economic crisis in the Occupied Territories.
November 11, 2006, the women of Beit Hanoun rally to defend resistance fighters from Israeli Occupation Forces, after an Israeli tank opened fire on a march.
Re-establishing the Primacy of Resistance
BY LAST DECEMBER, the Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh could enter the corridors of the Arab League with dignity as the leader of a heroic people who had once again stood up. In this phase, even with more than 30 of their elected legislators arrested or detained by Israel or prevented from travelling between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank (the Palestinian parliament is in Ramallah), the Hamas executive would begin at last to thaw the deep freeze in which U.S. pressure had placed the PLC’s access to financial resources needed to run the PNA administration. Although the Arab bloc remained split at the top – the Mubarak dynasty controlling the government of Egypt, the most populous Arab state, remains firmly on the side of the U.S. and Israel for the moment – the leading forces of the Arab world supported Hamas’ bid to prevail on President Abbas and all the Palestinian political factions to renew the governing system in the PLC as a “national unity government.” In a related development contributing to breaking the U.S.-Anglo cordon sanitaire, the government of South Africa publicly invited Prime Minister Haniyeh for a state visit. The invitation came immediately after South African Minister of Intelligence Ronnie Kasrils visited Gaza and condemned Israel for its state apartheid policies.
The most striking and creative feature of the design of this Palestinian government was its basic agenda. It would not include any kind of language or recognition for a so-called “right” of the State of Israel to exist in its current form as a Jewish-only Zionist junta. It would not exclude any of the previous calls by Palestinian and other Arab leaders for the State of Israel to lift its illegal occupation of, and remove its armed forces from, the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights and Sheba’a Farms. It was more than clear that while maintaining a full Israeli military withdrawal behind its borders of June 4, 1967 would represent one step, this would not constitute the final step in righting the historic wrong inflicted on the Palestinian people by all the forces of imperialism both Zionist and non-Zionist.
Earlier this spring, a major obstacle to overcoming the financial blockade and embargo was eliminated by arranging the Mecca Accords between the Hamas and Fatah wings of the PLC. The Saudi royal family brokered the Accords. This was followed by the inauguration of the Palestinian Unity government to which Russia gave its support and Norway recognized. While the U.S. and European Union stewed and their Zionist proxy sank into ever deepening political incoherence, Dahlan’s gangs stepped up their reign of terror in Gaza. The new game plan was to take back by force at ground level what had been finally so grudgingly conceded at the diplomatic level. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice told the international media this past weekend that “nobody expected” Hamas’ action or its outcome. She sounded exactly like every reactionary potentate in human history imbued with a morbid preoccupation with defeat. This must be taken as emblematic of the utter obtuseness of the Bush Administration’s attitude towards the resistance of the peoples to oppression. It is certainly the declaration of bankruptcy of the entire line of its policy of “democratization” of the Middle East over the last six years – the so-called Greater Middle East Initiative. The fact of the matter is that the reactionary provocations of its Dahlan criminal gangs were continuing as accompaniment to a situation that had become neither fish nor fowl. The U.S.-EU-Israel bloc wanted “accommodation” and “compromise” as a waystation to crushing and exterminating Palestinian resistance. The pretext would not matter. It could be affected in the name of saving civilization from barbarians at the gate who would not recognize the right of Israel to exist, or it could be carried out in the name of saving civilization from what The Wall Street Journal, the entire Israeli media and Palestinian accommodationists contemptuously label “Hamastan.” Hamas acted last week to cut this Gordian knot.
This development re-establishes the primacy of resistance in the Palestinian narrative over the politics of neo-colonial accommodation. As always in such moments, there is no lack of elements to which anyone could point and conclude that the resistance has acted in undue haste. How hasty, and how undue? People have an expression about “not seeing the forest for the trees.” In August 2005, the level of resistance in Gaza, and the corresponding response within Israeli public opinion compelled the Zionists to dismantle their internal Gaza City colony – a “settlement” whose presence had provided the justification since 1967 for permanently implanting a large Israeli military force within Gaza City and throughout the Strip. The troops were thereafter redeployed outside the perimeter of the Gaza Strip.
The Sharon government took the credit. Nine hundred journalists were deployed to Gaza from abroad to ensure the credit. Some circles took credit for fulfilling the reactionary dream of an Israeli army general that the Palestinians in Gaza needed to be “bottled up like cockroaches” and left thereafter “to kill one another.” Other circles took credit for “restoring some semblance of honour to the Israeli military and people.” In yet other circles, they took credit for “taking the first steps towards a ‘two state’ solution.” But the Palestinians were very clear that the Zionist exit from within Gaza was a victory. The rest of fighting humanity is beginning to see more of the true dimension of this victory. Unlike the West Bank, there is no apartheid wall inside Gaza. The interior of the Gaza Strip is a no-go zone for the Israeli military. Last week’s actions have now rendered it a no-go zone as well for collaborators and tools of that occupier.
According to the international media, the actions of the Palestinian resistance in Gaza are “undue” because it did what none of the other partners in the Unity government “expected.” Such a conclusion is unwarranted on its face. In the January 2006 election result, the forces of resistance threw down the gauntlet to the forces of accommodation who in the name of high ideals seek to compromise the fundamental principles of the Palestinian right to self-determination. It is these attempts to eliminate the principles on which the Palestinian struggle is based that are responsible for the present situation, not the just resistance to these attempts. The present situation has been brought about by those who live outside the rule of law, and place themselves beyond its reach and above the principles on which it is based including the opposition to the use of force to settle conflicts within nations and between nations.
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