Palestine

December 15, 2023

Rise Up for Palestine

The Israeli military has now killed more than 18,000 Palestinians in Gaza, at least half of them women and children. The mass murder is relentless, with accounts of mass executions now emerging, and other types of barbarism. Over 1.9 million of the 2.2 million people of Gaza have been displaced. These terms of death and displacement surpass the 1947-1948 Nakba, when Zionist militias fighting for the creation of the state of Israel murdered thousands of Palestinians, and sent more than 750,000 permanently out of their historic homeland.

This second Palestinian Nakba, and ongoing genocide, continues to be bankrolled by the United States. Early in November both parties voted to send 14 billion dollars in military aid to Israel. Just days ago, 412 members of both parties voted yes to a right wing Republican resolution which equates antizionism—criticism of racist Israel settler-colonial ideology and state policy—with antisemitism.

November 15, 2023

by Kim Gasper-Rabuck

The Israeli Genocide of Palestinians: Made in the USA

For decades the fight for liberation of the US working class has been hamstrung by dependence on and support for the Democratic Party within the two-party capitalist system. The belief in the ability to slowly turn bourgeois democracy into democratic socialism is still considered “realistic” by many on the left. Unfortunately, that ignores the reality that working class people have some control over the capitalist political system or the capitalist parties.

October 27, 2023

by Puntorojo Editorial Collective

Why We Need Theory

Israel’s assault on Palestinians right now is the most extreme offensive Israel has launched in decades. Hundreds of thousands of people are taking to the streets around the world to protest Israel’s siege of Gaza. The widespread demonstrations across the Middle East have threatened instability and have played a role in Biden calling on Israel to slowdown the genocide.

October 19, 2023

by Zack Frailey Escobar

What does “peace” mean in occupied Palestine?

Since the events of October 7, when Operation Al-Aqsa Flood shattered the illusion of Zionist invincibility, the Western media has unleashed a deluge of bile against anyone who speaks out in defense of Palestinian or Arab lives. This has created an environment in which it is possible for Bernie Sanders, a Jewish man and a descendant of Holocaust victims, to be boycotted as an antisemite by the leader of the German (!) Social Democratic Party for having the audacity to condemn Israel and Hamas equally for targeting civilians.

The libels against Sanders and others serve a dual function. They attempt to define the parameters of the pro-Israel position as constituting only those who support the present invasion and indiscriminate killing of Palestinians. At the same time, they label as anti-Israel (or “pro-Hamas” or “antisemitic”) any view that calls for military restraint on the part of the Zionist occupiers.

October 14, 2023

by Amy Lerner

On the Question of Revolutionary Violence

“The violence which has ruled over the ordering of the colonial world, which has ceaselessly drummed the rhythm for the destruction of native social forms and broken up without reserve the systems of reference of the economy, the customs of dress and external life, that same violence will be claimed and taken over by the native at the moment when, deciding to embody history in his own person, he surges into the forbidden quarters.” – Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth

October 11, 2023

by Puntorojo Editorial Collective

Palestine Will Be Free!

Socialists have always viewed the creation of the state of Israel as a project of Western colonizing countries. The capitalist states of Europe and the United States that supported the creation of Israel did so for two reasons: to establish a political foothold in a region rich with oil they wanted access to build their capitalist machinery, and to create a homeland for Jews they did not really want in their own countries to begin with. Since the creation of Israel in 1948, it has served as a watchdog for the United States.

It was Palestinians who paid the price for this colonizing project and imperial arrangement. Their indigenous homeland was taken from them. They were denied a state. They were forced to live under a United Nations partition they did not support. Over 750,000 Palestinians were displaced during the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” of Israel’s creation; many thousands more were murdered.

October 9, 2023

by Bill V. Mullen

Overcoming Zionism with the Power of Culture

For three beautiful days in Philadelphia, Palestinians celebrated their writing, history and culture at the University of Pennsylvania campus at the second Palestine Writes Literature Festival. For three beautiful days in Philadelphia, Palestinians celebrated their writing, history and culture at the University of Pennsylvania campus at the second Palestine Writes Literature Festival

December 12, 2021

by Bill V. Mullen

Under Siege: why socialists must fight for Palestine and BDS

The struggle for Palestinian liberation from Israel’s U.S.-backed settler-colonial regime has become a cornerstone of most radical and progressive political platforms. Especially since Palestinian Civil Society launched the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions campaign (BDS) in 2004, modeled closely on the South African campaign to end Apartheid; the broad U.S. and global Left have made the struggle to end Israel’s occupation part of a wider critique of U.S. imperialism.

Yet recent events have challenged the unity and momentum of both the struggle for Palestinian liberation on the Left, and its primary global weapon, the BDS campaign. One of those challenges has come from the reformist wing of the Left, the Democratic Socialists of America. Another, even more potentially threatening to Palestinian liberation unity, has come from within the ranks of the U.S. Arab political class and its institutions.

July 1, 2021

by Zack Frailey Escobar

Zionists Weep Crocodile Tears

As Israel bombs Palestinian civilians in Gaza, ethnically cleanses Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem, and deliberately unleashes right wing mobs to terrorize Palestinians everywhere, the whole U.S. congressional establishment has united to condemn Israel’s critics.

The entire Democratic leadership joined with the most rabidly racist sections of the Republican Party to slander congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s statements comparing Israel’s and the United States’ crimes with those of Hamas and the Taliban as antisemitic. The statement they issued on June 11th reads, in part: “Drawing false equivalencies between democracies like the US and Israel and groups that engage in terrorism like Hamas and the Taliban foments prejudice and undermines progress toward a future of peace and security for all.”