the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Apr 25, 2022
This article is translated from the April 22nd issue, #2803 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
One year after the awful days of deadly violence in East Jerusalem and Israel’s bombing of Gaza, this Easter weekend new clashes took place outside the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. More than 170 people were injured, mostly Palestinians, after the Israeli air force destroyed an alleged arms factory in Gaza.
Since March 22, armed attacks against Israelis—attributed to Palestinians or to ISIS militants—have alternated with counterattacks by the Israeli army in the occupied West Bank. After an initial attack in Tel Aviv, Israel’s far right-wing Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, head of a fragile coalition government, ordered “total freedom of action” for the army and gave the intelligence services a blank check.
His strengthening of the apparatus of repression, his deployment of more soldiers and police to carry out more surveillance and arrests, has resulted in many more raids of Palestinian towns and neighborhoods as well as more administrative detentions of Palestinians without charges or trials. As of April 20, the death toll was 11 Israeli dead and 23 Palestinian dead, with many more Palestinians injured, and hundreds arrested by Israeli police.
Bennett’s administration was cobbled together after many negotiations almost a year ago. It was weakened on April 17 when conservative Islamic party LAU defected, its four deputies condemned the repression of the Islamic faithful outside the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Bennett also recently saw the resignation of one of his colleagues, a member of the far right Yamina party. His very small majority was threatened. His opponent, former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is waiting in the wings to overthrow Bennett, despite ongoing corruption trials against Netanyahu.
In fact, this latest episode in the latent and permanent war of Israeli armed force against the Palestinian population has no other cause than the policy of settling Jewish colonizers on Palestinian lands. Settlements continue to spread throughout East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank. Arbitrary arrests and raids by the army and by far-right settler militias are daily occurrences for Palestinians in the West Bank, who suffer more and more humiliation and restriction of their movement. Simply getting to work is often haphazard or dangerous.
The great powers, like France, consider the state of Israel to be imperialism’s outpost in the Middle East. It recently was reinforced by support from Arab countries like the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco. At the hands of racist rulers of the extreme right, Israel continues to thrust Jewish and Arab populations alike into endless war.