Long live the Palestinian Insurrection, long live the Third Intifada! Down with the state of Israel!
La Marx International
On October 7, 2023, Palestinian fighters, armed youth and self-organized militias, began an offensive operation against Israel's occupation, penetrating the Beit Hanoun border crossing, the Zikim base and the headquarters in Reim . This action is part of the 3rd Palestinian Intifada that began on May 6, 2021, which now took a leap when militants from various Palestinian organizations and Hamas decided to begin recovering the territories occupied by Israel by adopting the strategy of urban guerrilla warfare.
Groups of fighters began tearing down the walls and barbed wire fences surrounding Gaza with bulldozers, cutting holes in the cables, and barbed wire. After overturning the walls, they began to recover territories occupied by Israel, taking control of several towns in which they expropriated barracks, prisons, assets, tanks, bases, equipment, ammunition and weapons depots. The militants entered the cities from the sea and by paraglider, expropriating, occupying and recovering the cities of Kfar Aza, Sderot, Sufa, Nahal Oz, Magen, Be'eri, Ashkelon, Ofakim, and the military base of Re'im. The Commander of the Israeli occupation army, General Nimrod Aloni, was capturedand more than 100 prisoners, including military and police officers, held.
The militiamen, partisans, and guerrillas face the military superiority and technological deployment of imperialism and Israel , who have recovered many of the cities taken by the Palestinians. In turn, the attack by the Palestinian militiamen is accompanied by massive mobilizations in the West Bank, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, and millions around the world who have come out to support the Palestinian people, while in the south of Lebanon, Hezbollah is launching rockets and mortars towards Mount Dov in solidarity with the Palestinian offensive, where there is a long-range radar station, designed for the detection and tracking of missiles. From La Marx International we support the 3rd Palestinian Intifada, at the same time we advocate for a secular, democratic, and non-racist Palestine , a democratic slogan that can open the way to the workers' revolution in Palestine, and throughout the Middle East.
The Palestinian people carry out a War of National Liberation
Since October 7, more than 1,000 Israelis and 700 Palestinians have been killed, while more than 2,100 Israelis and 3,700 Palestinians have been injured, figures that will surely be old by the time this article is published given the violence of the attacks and combats. The Israeli government has launched a brutal missile bombardment on the Gaza Strip, a veritable open-air concentration camp where 2.3 million Palestinians live in an area of 365 square kilometers. Israeli President Netanyahu said that " Israel is embarking on a "long and difficult" war , while leaving Gaza "without electricity, without food, without fuel . "
Netanyahu attacks the civilian population and bombs them, repeating Putin's same fascist methodology against the civilian population in Ukrainian cities. None of these measures by the Israeli government can surprise us, it is the same one that Israel has been carrying out for decades. The enclave of Israel is an artificial state created by imperialism in the Middle East in 1948 to subjugate and repress the Arab people, which was created on the lands that the Palestinians and the other peoples of the region had occupied in peace for centuries. From thecreation of Israel by the UN, the Palestinian people became a wandering, landless people, while Israel emerged as a Nazi state, a poortplanes on land financed by imperialism that murders, represses and persecutes everything that is Arab by attacking militarily, usurping territories from all the Arab peoples of the region for decades.
The president of the US imperialist government Joe Biden affirmed that he "is unconditionally on the side of Israel", ratifying the status of an imperialist enclave of the Zionist state. Meanwhile,
NATO and US imperialism began to intervene in support of Israel by
deploying the powerful Ford-class Gerald Air aircraft with nuclear
propulsion and EMALS electromagnetic catapult system to the
Mediterranean Sea. The class struggles will have the last word as to whether all this technological and military development that includes the redeployment of its troops in Jordan is useful to imperialism and Israel to defeat the Palestinian people. But now, this Nazi enclave is threatened by the revolution of the Palestinian people and the Arab people.
The 3rd Palestinian Intifada is part of the National Liberation War of this people that has entered a higher phase characterized by the emergence of Palestinian militiamen organized to defeat an army and a state whose superiority is absolute. Palestinian militiamen are acting following the example of Ukrainian militiamen and partisans who are defeating Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
An urban guerrilla war confronts the Zionist army
Palestinian militiamen, partisans, and guerrillas have undertaken the fight facing the military superiority and technological deployment of imperialism and Israel. But superiority is no guarantee of victory, just as it was not for Putin in Ukraine, or for the US in Iraq or Vietnam. When a people decides to undertake the revolution for National Liberation, and adopts the most modern revolutionary strategies such as urban guerrilla warfare, it will be very difficult for any army to defeat it, no matter how best and most modern equipment it has.
The coalition of resistance committees that launched the urban guerrilla war inside the State of Israel is made up of the Al Qassem Brigade who confronted the Israeli security forces in Sufa, Holeit, Ofakim, Sderot, Yad Mordechai, Kfar Azza, Kissufim, the military outpost of Be'eri and Ezre. Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) brigades also fought in several cities in southern Israel. Both the Al Qassem Brigade and the Islamic Jihad are Islamic fundamentalist currents.
The Palestinian militias of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade also acted with actions that confronted the Israeli forces in Bat Hefer, in the Hefer Valley Regional Council, Central District. This brigade is not fundamentalist and responds to the Fatah party, linked to the Palestinian Authority of the West Bank. Another group of Palestinian militiamen that acted is the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) that confronted Israeli forces in Darwish Salem, Haifa district, one of the checkpoints that connect Israel with Jenin, in the northern West Bank. as well as other militia groups attacked an Israeli military post on October 8 in Hebron, in the southern West Bank.
The coalition of resistance committees that launched the urban guerrilla war inside the State of Israel is made up of the Al Qassem Brigade who confronted the Israeli security forces in Sufa, Holeit, Ofakim, Sderot, Yad Mordechai, Kfar Azza, Kissufim, the military outpost of Be'eri and Ezre. Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) brigades also fought in several cities in southern Israel. Both the Al Qassem Brigade and the Islamic Jihad are Islamic fundamentalist currents. The Palestinian militias of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade also acted with actions that confronted the Israeli forces in Bat Hefer, in the Hefer Valley Regional Council, Central District. This brigade is not fundamentalist and responds to the Fatah party, linked to the Palestinian Authority of the West Bank. Another group of Palestinian militiamen that acted is the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) that confronted Israeli forces in Darwish Salem, Haifa district, one of the checkpoints that connect Israel with Jenin, in the northern West Bank. as well as other militia groups attacked an Israeli military post on October 8 in Hebron, in the southern West Bank.
Other fighters who have begun to act are those of Hezbollah (LH) who carried out an artillery and guided missile attack against Shebaa Farms stating that their attack on Shebaa Farms was on the way to "liberating what remains of occupied Lebanese land." The attacks hit a radar site and two unspecified positions at Zabdin and Ruwaisat in Shebaa Farms.
All of these organizations have been designated as " terrorists" by Israel and the United States, however those who have carried out terrorism have been the governments of Israel and the United States for decades against the Palestinian people. The organizations of militiamen and combatants that face Israel's occupation and seek to liberate their territory are carrying out a just War of National Liberation. We defend this just right to carry out this fight, despite the differences we have with Islamic leaderships such as Hamas, or Hezbollah, who have a far-right, fundamentalist and religious program that we do not share.
Nor do we share his proposal to build an "Islamic Palestine". The liberation of the Palestinian people will be done by confronting the Nazi program of the state of Israel, but also the far-right program of the extremist organizations, something that the people of the Middle East have already begun to do in the first place by rejecting the coming Palestinian Authority of Gaza. betraying the Palestinian people, many of whose collaborators have been disowned.
And
on the other hand, confronting these fundamentalist or fundamentalist
leaderships, as the Rojava guerrillas do against ISIS in Syria, the
people of Iran against the dictatorships of the Ayatollah, the people of
Syria against the fundamentalists who defend the dictatorship of Bashar
Al Assad, or the people of Egypt who faced and defeated the Muslim
Brotherhood government. In
Gaza the people have been repudiating and rejecting Hamas officials
with mobilizations over the disastrous administration and power cuts. The
3rd Intifada as well as the 2nd Arab Spring also implies a political
revolution against those treacherous leaderships of the movement and the
fight for a new consistent and revolutionary leadership, whose
beginning is the young fighters who confront the Israeli army for the
liberation of the Arabs and Palestinians. .
Israel's political-military crisis
Palestinian militia groups launched the offensive taking advantage of the enormous political crisis in which the Israeli armed forces are mired. The Israeli army is suffering numerous casualties, including that of Colonel Yehonatan Steinber, commander of the Nahal Brigade, part of the 162nd Armored Division.
The offensive by Palestinian fighters occurred just when Israel is going through a deep political and social crisis, starting with the uprising of the Israeli people just 7 months ago, in March 2023 when they carried out a powerful mobilization against the reforms of Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. These mass demonstrations reached more than 100,000 people in Habima Square and were concentrated in Jerusalem in front of the prime minister's residence.
Likewise, other large mobilizations also took place in cities in Haifa, Rosh Piná, and Tel Aviv against the anti-democratic attempt by Netanyahu, who returned to office in December 2022 at the head of a coalition made up of reactionary, racist, fascist, and Zionism fanatics. His government tried to advance a reform through Justice Minister Yariv Levin that gave the government the power to dictate laws, appoint magistrates, appoint judges, and prosecutors. The judicial reform allowed the Executive Branch to blatantly intervene in the Judicial Branch to control it, allowed Parliament to annul judicial rulings, eliminate the position of attorney general, and allow the reactionary ruling Coalition to appoint its own State Prosecutor.
In this way, the reform allowed Netanyahu to avoid prosecution on corruption charges, and at the same time advance an offensive of repression against Arab, Palestinian and Israeli citizens. In the massive mobilizations in rejection of the reform, very large sectors of the Israeli Armed Forces joined and folded , which led to an extreme crisis of the State of Israel, a crisis of the regime that revealed that the existence of a Nazi state, fascist, is incompatible with the exercise of social rights, democratic freedoms, and not to mention the existence of an insurrection or mass struggle such as the 3rd Intifada of the Palestinian people.
This was the state of affairs inside Israel when the Palestinian militants began the offensive. This
explains why it was easier for the Palestinian militiamen to carry out
the invasion, and violate the security services of one of the most
controlled borders on the planet. Now the Netayahu government seeks to stop the Palestinian offensive, and thereby close the crisis in the army by calling 300,000 reservists to defeat the Palestinians. Netanyahu himself has called for a " government of national unity" with the aim of closing Israel's political crisis.
The 3rd Intifada opened the crisis in the entire political superstructure of the region
But without a doubt, what put the entire political superstructure of the region in crisis, both the Netanyahu government, the Palestinian Authority government led by Mahmoud Abbas, the other Arab governments, the Israeli political parties, as well as to the Palestinian Islamic fundamentalist leaderships, was the beginning of the 3rd Intifada, the uprising of young people from the poorest neighborhoods of Jerusalem that began on May 6, 2021 with the mobilizations against the decision of the Supreme Court of Israel on the evictions affecting dozens of Palestinian families from the neighborhoods of East Jerusalem.
The clashes left more than 300 Palestinians injured, prompting Palestinian groups on the Temple Mount to stockpile flagstones, stones and fireworks to confront the police. Israeli police forces stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque, firing rubber-tipped bullets at stone-throwing Palestinians, leaving many injured. This 3rd Palestinian Intifada is urban, developed in the neighborhoods of Israel, based on youth, unlike the previous ones that occurred outside Israeli cities.
From there, Netanyahu's government tried to stop the Intifada with violent attacks against the Palestinians, while promoting undemocratic reform to legalize repression. Throughout 2022, Israeli forces killed 151 Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, almost double the number recorded in 2021 .
An entire year in which the Palestinian population suffered violent attacks such as the death of a 17-year-old Palestinian boy in the early hours of April 15, which brought to 7 the number of Palestinians killed in violent episodes in the West Bank, such as raids such as those that occurred in the town of Nablus with 11 Palestinians dead and a hundred injured. In June, Israel launched an ethnic cleansing operation in the West Bank city of Jenin in the refugee camp, an act that ended up being condemned by the UN where dozens of Palestinian militiamen were killed. The massacre had been preceded by a pogrom in Turmus Ayya, when 200 Israeli settlers entered the city to attack civilians, destroy houses and set vehicles on fire.
The entire increase in attacks on Palestinians is what led to the emergence of new Palestinian militia groups, such as the "Lions' Den" group in the Nablus area of the West Bank, born in August 2022 and made up mainly of young Palestinians. from Nablus who do not identify with any of the traditional leaderships, be it Fatah, Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. "The Lion's Den" was founded by a 25-year-old Palestinian named Mohammed al-Azizi, better known as "Abu Saleh" , and his 28-year-old friend Abdel Rahman Suboh, or "Abu Adam" and despite both being killed in combat in July 2022, the group experienced a surge in popularity among West Bank Palestinians.
Another new youth group that emerged is the "Jenin Brigades", or "Jenin Battalion",
a Palestinian militia group composed mainly of young people from the
Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank who reject the old Islamic
fundamentalist leaderships. The "Jenin Brigades" and the "Lions' Den" launched the "Unity Intifada" in May 2021 , the unified Palestinian general strike that shook the Palestinian territories. Both the emergence of the"Jenin Brigades" and the "Lions' Den" group
express the emergence of a new leadership of the Palestinian movement
that has been leading the 3rd Intifada and is not referenced in the old
fundamentalist Palestinian leaderships.
These movements of combatants are not focused, but rather rely on mass mobilization and sustenance. Both the process , the emergence of new leadership of the Palestinian movement, as well as the pressure and clamor of the Palestinian people to stop the barrage of attacks in the last two years, was what led to the traditional organizations of the Palestinian people such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and others, to plan the offensive of October 7, 2023, a whole new process that led to the explosion that caused a leap in the development of the 3rd Intifada.
The Arab Spring opened a new era in the Middle East
"Intifada" means "Uprising" in Arabic. In any case, Israel and NATO must defeat the 3rd Intifada, which is the successor and direct descendant of the First Intifada that occurred in 1987 after the Camp David agreements (1979) in which the bourgeoisie of Egypt and Jordan recognized the State of Israel, and signed a Peace agreement, a true betrayal of the struggle of the Palestinian people. This first Infifada remained in history as the "Intifada of stones" , when thousands of young people began to stone the tanks, and Israeli army soldiers passing through the occupied territories.
The
struggle lasted many years and achieved recognition of the need for the
Palestinians to obtain their territory in Gaza and the West Bank. But
at the same time, imperialism, the Arab leadership, and the leadership
of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) sought to stop the "Intifada"
through the Oslo Accords of 1993 in which imperialism led by the
president of United States Bill Clinton, together with the Israeli
president, and the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)
Yasser Arafat signed the agreement that provided the "Two State" solution
The "Two States" policy established
territory for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, under Israeli
administration, in exchange for the PLO recognizing the State of
Israel. The "Two States" solution is
a deception to the Palestinian people, because the nature of the State
of Israel is a permanent danger since it never stops repressing and
permanently murdering Arabs and Palestinians. The
PLO signed the agreement, which was an enormous betrayal by Arafat of
his own Palestinian people, since the Arab states, as well as the
Palestinian leaders, had refused for decades to recognize the State of
Israel, precisely because of its racist character, and fascist.
But since the Camp David agreements, the ruling classes of the Arab countries began to agree with Imperialism, and with the Israeli bourgeoisie, including the Palestinian bourgeoisie itself.
By signing the Oslo Accords, they abandoned the historic slogan of destroying the State of Israel, and fighting for a Palestinian State, and with this betrayal the Palestinian people were left abandoned to their fate, betrayed by the Arab bourgeois leaders, and by the PLO, organization that entered into crisis and began to be questioned as a traitor leadership by the Palestinian masses. Thousands of Palestinians began to sympathize with Islamic fundamentalist movements, promoted by the theocratic state of Iran such as Hamas, or Hezbollah, which refused to recognize the State of Israel.
The "Two States" policy failed when the 2nd Al-Aqsa Intifada broke out in 2000, an insurrection that left thousands dead, and became the third deadliest conflict in Israel's history, surpassing the Six Day War, the Suez War, or the First and Second Lebanon Wars. But under the leadership of Islamic fundamentalism influenced from Iran, the bourgeois, pro-capitalist, and inconsistent policy of Hamas, or Hezbollah, led to the defeat of the 2nd Intifada, when imperialism and NATO decided to invade the Middle East with the invasions of Iraq. and Afghanistan, after the attack that caused the fall of the Twin Towers in New York on September 11, 2001.
Long live the 3rd Intifada! For the triumph of the Palestinian people!
After the defeat of US imperialism in the Iraq war, and the withdrawal of NATO troops from the region starting in 2010, the "Arab Spring"
broke out in 2011, the revolution of the peoples of the Middle East
that It covered more than 30 countries, and shook all the dictatorships
and reactionary political regimes in the region. This gave a new impetus to the Palestinian people who carried out great struggles. In turn, the "Arab Spring"
had a second wave starting in 2019 with the fundamental feature, as we
already pointed out, that this second wave of the Arab Spring began to
confront the Islamic fundamentalist governments in Lebanon, Iran, and
Iraq.
In
this 2nd wave, a process of breaking with Islamic fundamentalism began
among vast sectors of the Arab masses, led by the youngest, and women,
fed up with the oppression of religious fundamentalists, such as the
Ayatollahs of Iran who, like all religious leaders , of the world , they preach poverty but they are very rich bourgeois in the midst of people who suffer brutal conditions of poverty.
This development
of confrontation against Islamic fundamentalism worsened after the
defeat of ISIS at the hands of the brave Kurdish guerrillas of Rojava,
when anti-fundamentalist sentiment invaded the entire region . The
religious leaders and Ayatollahs live in luxury, like the Vatican, or
other religious leaders, while they oppress millions under the strict
racist, anti-scientific, sexist, oppressive norms of religious
fundamentalism.
A movement for secularism began, and the liberation of religious rituals, and this is how within the framework of this "2nd Arab Spring"
the 3rd Intifada began, the urban uprising within Israel of the
youngest people who followed the most generals in the region, also began
to break with Hamas, and Hezbollah, the Islamic fundamentalist
leaderships that had influenced the Palestinian movements in recent
decades.
The 3rd Intifada is underway. It
is a revolution that moves the world, deeply related to the global
revolutionary process, and to the global crisis of capitalism. It
is a very tough fight, and very difficult for the Palestinian people,
which faces the most powerful armies in the world such as those of NATO
and Israel, and which can be defeated either by force and brutal
repression by the forces. imperialist armies, as well as as a product of
the inconsistency of the fundamentalist leaderships that largely lead
these processes. But the last word has not been said, the class struggle will give its verdict.
For Marxists there is only one way: Support the Palestinian revolution with all our strength. Its triumph can be the triumph of world revolution, putting an end not only to the Nazi state of Israel, but also a devastating blow to world imperialism that sustains the decadent capitalist-imperialist system. Our support is support for the National Liberation of the Palestinian people, who must tear off the chains that subjugate them, on the path of the fight for Global Socialism.