International Socialists

The young extremists know neither toleration nor compromise; they regard themselves as morally justified in violence directed against any individual or institution that impedes the complete fulfilment of their demands.

 

This does not, as you might think, refer to Palestinian suicide bombers. It was written by the Officer Administering the Government of Palestine to the British Colonial Secretary in 1945. He was describing Zionist groups - Irgun, Haganah, the Stern Gang - whose terrorist actions laid the basis for the state of Israel. Former Israeli Prime Ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzak Shamir started their political lives as members of such organisations.

 

From the 1948 massacre of hundreds of Palestinian villagers in Deir Yassin, through a series of expansionist wars, the 1982 invasion of South Lebanon and the slaughter of refugees in the Sabra and Shatila camps (overseen by current Prime Minister Ariel Sharon) and up to the horrific attacks we see today, Israel has waged a non-stop war of terror against the Palestinians.

 

In 1948, the UN established Israel as a Jewish state. But to create a Jewish majority required the forcible expulsion of Palestinians - most of them still in exile or crowded into refugee camps today - and the denial of their existence as a people with rights to self determination.

 

Nearly 500 Palestinian villages existed in the territory that came under Israeli occupation after the UN partition. In the next two years, nearly 400 of these were demolished. Israel's Law of Return allows any Jew to become an Israeli citizen. But the Palestinians who were driven out are not allowed to return.

 

Israel's founders bought the support of the Western powers - especially the US - with a promise to watch over their economic and strategic interests in the Middle East. The alliance between Zionism and imperialism has created a state which depends on systematic repression to survive.

 

But don't take our word for it. "The Intifada is the Palestinian people's war of national liberation," wrote former Israeli Attorney General Michael Ben-Yair recently in Israel's Ha'aretz newspaper:

 

We enthusiastically chose to become a colonialist society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the Occupied Territories, engaging in theft and finding justification for all these activities We established an apartheid regime.