Nakba protests: The Arab revolution reaches the Palestinian masses

Palestinian flags outside Israeli embassy in Cairo. Photo: Maggie OsamaThe
creation of the State of Israel was accompanied by violence, terror and
the forcible expulsion of one and a half million Palestinians from
their homes and lands, transforming those Palestinians who had fled
during the fighting into stateless refugees. The violence still
continues, as the 63rd anniversary of the Nakba has shown to the whole
world. At least nine people were reported killed and an unknown number
wounded when the Israeli army opened fire on the demonstrations.  

Across
the West Bank and Gaza, thousands took to the streets, holding old keys
to symbolise their dreams of reclaiming the property they lost when
Israel was created. The demonstrations were peaceful until they came
under attack as they approached checkpoints guarded by Israeli forces.
Palestinian protesters marched on three different frontier posts with
Lebanon, Syria and Gaza. Two people were killed and more than 100
wounded after Israeli troops opened fire when 200 protesters broke
through the border fence between Syria and the Israeli-occupied Golan
Heights and marched to the centre of the village of Majdal Shams, which
has been under Israeli control since the 1967 Six Day War.

The
protesters showed great courage in crossing a heavily armed border,
which is flanked by minefields and patrolled by the UN, Israeli and
Syrian forces. This was the first time anyone had breached the border
fence. The New York Times reports: “The biggest confrontation took place
on the Golan Heights when hundreds of Palestinians living in Syria
breached a border fence and crowded into the village of Majdal Shams,
waving Palestinian flags. Troops fired on the crowd, killing four of
them.”

The local residents greeted the infiltrators like heroes,
joining them as they marched towards the main square singing and waving
Palestinian flags. The mass breaching of the border with Syria left
Israeli security chiefs in a state of utter confusion. For weeks they
had been announcing that they were expecting trouble on Sunday and that
the Israel Defence Forces were ready. But eyewitnesses in Majdal Shams
said only a handful of Israeli soldiers were on duty on Sunday and were
taken by surprise when more than 1,000 buses appeared on the Syrian side
of the border.

They were clearly not expecting such a massive
response and were unprepared for it. The murderous response had all the
hallmarks of a panic response.  "I don’t think they were really prepared
for anything to happen on this side. It took more than an hour for the
back-up to come," said Majdal Shams, a resident Shefaa Abu Jabal. "They
crossed into the village and not even one landmine exploded, even though
we’ve learned all of our lives that this place is full of landmines."

There
were more killings in Gaza, where thousands of Palestinians marched
through a Hamas checkpoint towards the Erez border crossing with Israel.
The Independent states that Israeli border guards “opened fire with
tank shells and machine-guns”. The Israeli “warning shots” included at
least two tank shells and machine-gun fire at open fields close to the
protestors. Doctors in Gaza said one person was killed and more than 40
injured in this “incident”.

In the usual hypocritical style, The
Independent describes this as “violent clashes between Palestinian
demonstrators and Israeli security forces”, as if one could place on an
equal footing unarmed demonstrators and the Israeli army. At the
Kalandia refugee camp north of Jerusalem, hundreds of Palestinian youths
threw stones and Molotov cocktails at Israeli forces who fired tear-gas
and rubber bullets. There were clashes too in Hebron, Wallajeh and East
Jerusalem.

The New York Times writes:

“‘This is
war, we’re defending our country,’ asserted Amjad Abu Taha, a
16-year-old from Bethlehem as he took part along with thousands in the
West Bank city of Ramallah near the main military checkpoint to Israel.
He held a cigarette in one hand and a rock in the other. Hundreds of
Israeli troops using stun guns and tear gas roamed the area. 

“In
Gaza, a march toward Israel also resulted in Israeli troops shooting
into the crowd and wounding dozens. The Hamas police stopped buses
carrying protesters near the main crossing into Israel, but dozens of
demonstrators walked on foot and reached a point closer to the Israeli
border than they had reached in years. (…) Later, in a separate
incident, an 18-year-old Gazan near another part of the border fence was
shot and killed by Israeli troops when, the Israeli military says, he
was trying to plant an explosive.”

The picture is
quite clear: on the one side, Palestinian teenagers armed only with
rocks, on the other, Israeli soldiers engaged in violent repression with
stun guns, tear gas – and live bullets. In Gaza it is directly admitted
that they were “shooting into the crowd and wounding dozens.” Here
there is not the slightest pretence about “shooting into the air”. But
in order to make the deaths of young Palestinians a bit more acceptable,
they say that one of them was “near the border fence” (how near?) and
“was trying to plant an explosive” (what explosive?). It is also
interesting that Hamas tried (and failed) to stop the protesters from
reaching the border.  

Israeli rulers terrified

Benjamin
Netanyahu later claimed the Israeli army was acting in “self defence”:
“I instructed the Israel Defence Forces to act with maximum restraint
but to prevent any infiltration into our borders,” said the Israeli
Prime Minister. “Everyone should know that we are determined to protect
our borders and our sovereignty.”

In this way, the Israelis are
attempting to portray the latest events as an “invasion” and a threat to
Israel’s sovereignty. But what kind of an invasion is it when unarmed
people cross frontiers that were imposed by force and are defended by
violence? And what kind of threat can unarmed men and women pose to
heavily armed soldiers?

In some cases the demonstrators threw
stones. But the Israeli troops replied with shells from tanks. It is
said that they were only “firing in the air”. In that case, they should
be severely reprimanded for poor marksmanship, since bullets fired into
the air succeeded in killing at least eight people, who were not in the
air but definitely on the ground.

An Israeli military spokesman,
Captain Barak Raz, said that Israeli troops at the Syrian border “fired
only at those infiltrators trying to damage the security barrier and
equipment”. So the crime for which people were shot dead was not
threatening the lives of Israeli soldiers but only of trying to damage
razor wire and barriers erected to keep them out of their own country.
For this heinous crime they paid with their lives. On the other hand,
some 13 Israeli soldiers were said to have been “lightly wounded” from
thrown rocks. 

The Bible tells us David, the little shepherd boy
confronted the Philistine giant Goliath with stones flung from a sling.
He succeeded in killing the giant. But the present day Goliaths are
better armed than their Biblical equivalent, and respond to stones with
automatic gunfire. Acutely aware of the David and Goliath story and its
implications, the Israeli authorities are always trying to pose as the
innocent victims who are merely defending themselves against an evil
enemy who is bent on their destruction. That is why Israeli officials
have described these events as a "provocation” organized by Iran.

The
chief Israeli military spokesman, Brig. Gen. Yoav Mordechai, said on
Israel radio that he “saw Iran’s fingerprints” in the coordinated
confrontations although he offered no evidence. Other Israeli spokesmen
blamed Syria. Yoni Ben-Menachem, Israel Radio’s chief Arab affairs
analyst, said it seemed likely that President Bashar al-Assad of Syria
was seeking to divert attention from his troubles caused by popular
uprisings there in recent weeks by allowing confrontations on the Golan
Heights for the first time in decades. 

“This way Syria makes its
contribution to the Nakba day cause and Assad wins points by deflecting
the media’s attention from what is happening inside Syria,” he
added. This is a lie. Ahmed, a Palestinian refugee from the Yarmouk
camp, denied the Israeli army’s claims that the event was planned by
Iran. “We didn’t really plan,” he said. “We got a bit excited and we
decided come on, let’s do it. We didn’t plan to cross. The army said we
could stand near the border. The army didn’t know. I don’t think the
Syrian army would have let us in if they knew.”

These lies are a
blatant attempt to disguise the murder of unarmed Palestinian protesters
as “self defence” against “foreign enemies” (Iran and Syria). In
reality, this movement was a reflection of the impact among the
Palestinians of the Arab Revolution, which proved that the power of the
masses is able to shake the mightiest states and armies. The correct
parallel was drawn by The New York Times:

“[…] this is the first year that Palestinian refugees in Syria and Lebanon tried to breach the Israeli military border in marches inspired by recent popular protests around the Arab world. Here too, word about the rallies was spread on social media sites.” (my emphasis, AW)

In
order to counteract the image of heavily armed Israeli soldiers
shooting down unarmed demonstrators, the Israeli propaganda machine
issued reports of an Israeli Arab truck driver allegedly ramming his
truck into cars, a bus and pedestrians in Tel Aviv, killing one man and
injuring more than a dozen others. The police hastened to describe this
incident as “a terrorist attack”. 

We do not know what the cause
of the incident in Tel Aviv was. But we do know that the cold-blooded
murder of unarmed demonstrators is certainly terrorism, and we note that
the hired media never uses this word in relation to the Israeli army.
This is yet another example of the hypocrisy and double standards of the
so-called free press.

Impotence of leaders

Syria
condemned the shootings as "criminal acts" by Israel. But people in the
Middles East are now asking how it is that unarmed men and women were
able to do what the Syrian army has not been able to accomplish for
forty years.

Marches were held in the Jordanian capital and in the
Jordan Valley. Five hundred people, many of Palestinian origin, marched
in Amman demanding Palestinian sovereignty and the right of return for
Palestinian refugees and their descendants to territory that is now in
Israel.

Hundreds of Lebanese joined by Palestinians from more than
nine refugee camps in Lebanon headed toward the border, around the town
of Maroun al-Ras, Lebanon, scene of some of the worst fighting in the
2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah. They passed posters that had gone
up the past week on highways in Lebanon. “People want to return to
Palestine,” they read, in a play on the slogan made famous in Egypt and
Tunisia, “People want the fall of the regime.” 

At the Lebanese
border Israeli troops shot at hundreds of Palestinians trying to cross,
killing four protesters and wounding dozens more, according to Lebanese
officials. Though the Lebanese army tried to block them from arriving at
the border, some managed to reach it. They placed a Palestinian flag at
the fence, and some threw rocks, witnesses said. Israeli soldiers
opened fire and at least four were killed and 30 wounded. 

The Independent report states that:

“The
worst incident occurred when thousands of protesters, transported to
the southern Lebanese village of Maroun Al-Ras by bus, threatened to
break down the border fence after hanging flags on the barbed wire.
Israeli and Lebanese troops fired warning shots and five people were
reported killed.”

Two points must be made about this report. Firstly, the demonstration was opposed by both the Israeli and
Lebanese armies. Matthew Cassel, an eyewitness, reported on Twitter:
"Lebanese army started shooting in air non-stop. There was a stampede,
refugees running away." Secondly, how can “warning shots” kill five
people?

Palestinians demonstrated throughout the West Bank and
Gaza. The main rally was held in the West Bank city of Ramallah, seat of
the so-called Palestinian Authority government, the ramshackle regime
that presides over the pathetic Bantustan established by the Oslo
Agreement.

Mohammed Elayan, of the Higher National Committee for
Commemorating the Nakba, told thousands of people: "The Palestinian
people are today more solid in confronting occupation and the policy of
ethnic cleansing. The Zionist conspiracy against our people will be
destroyed in the face of our steadfastness."

And Ismail Haniyeh,
the outgoing Hamas prime minister, told thousands of worshippers at a
Gaza mosque that Palestinians would mark Nakba Day this year “with great
hope of bringing to an end the Zionist project in Palestine”.

But
these are just empty words to satisfy the crowds. The harsh fact is
that sixty three years later, the Zionist state remains firmly in
control. The leaders have no solution. Neither the rockets of Hamas nor
the “negotiations” of the PLO have yielded any positive results.

The
Palestinian masses are acutely aware of this and the recent “unity
movement”, inspired by the Arab revolution, was in fact a damning
criticism of the leadership of both Fatah and Hamas which have led the
Palestinian struggle into a blind alley.

Netanyahu responded to
the newly formed unity government by declaring that there was “no
place… for denying the existence of the State of Israel”. “I regret
that there are extremists among Israeli Arabs and in neighbouring
countries who have turned the day on which the State of Israel was
established, the day on which the Israeli democracy was established,
into a day of incitement, violence and rage,” he told cabinet ministers
in Jerusalem.

The people who are inciting the Palestinians to
violence and rage are Netanyahu and his government who have trampled on
the most elementary democratic and human rights of the Palestinians who
they treat in the same way that the colonial despots of the past treated
all conquered peoples. The Israeli ruling class has now even passed a
so-called “Nakba Law” making the commemoration illegal. If you drive
people to the point of desperation they will respond with desperate
measures.

The Israeli ruling circles are indifferent to suicide
bombers and Hammas’ rockets. Indeed, they welcome them. Every rocket
that falls on an Israeli village, every bus that is blown up in
Jerusalem, provides them with all the ammunition they need to galvanize
Israeli public opinion behind the government and the army. But this is
something different. The right wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu was
so terrified of the Egyptian Revolution that he issued an order to his
ministers not to comment on events in Egypt. By their actions last
weekend, the Palestinian masses have shown that there is another way
forward: the road of mass revolutionary action. These are also the only
methods which can divide Israeli society along class lines.

Egypt

Outside Israeli embassy, Cairo, May 15. Photo: Maggie Osama

In
Egypt, thousands rallied in Cairo in a Facebook-organized campaign
aimed at marching all the way to Gaza. In Egypt’s second city,
Alexandria, thousands marched to the Israeli consulate after dawn
prayers at one of the main mosques while chanting, “With our souls, with
our blood, we redeem you, Palestine.”

Hosni Mubarak, a US stooge,
was complicit in the crimes of the Israeli ruling class. In effect, he
participated in an Israeli blockade on Gaza by shutting the border. The
great majority of Egyptians regard this as a national shame. Following
the overthrow of Mubarak the Egyptian people are demanding that Egypt do
more to help the Palestinians. One sign read: “The people want the
opening of the Rafah crossing – fully and for good.”

“We are
demonstrating to show that the Palestinian cause is in the heart of all
Muslims,” said Sameh Abu Bakr, an agriculture engineer, in Cairo’s
Tahrir Square, which was decked with red, white, black and green
Palestinian flags. “We are here today to show our support for the
Palestinian cause,” said Muhammad Abdel-Salam, a 22-year-old activist.
“The victory of our revolution will not be complete without the
liberation of Palestine,” he told AP.

Thousands of Egyptians had
planned to march to the Egypt-Gaza border to stand in solidarity with
Palestinians, but Egyptian security forces prevented buses from carrying
them.  The army set up checkpoints along the main road leading to the
Rafah Border Crossing.  The Egyptian authorities banned the planned
march on Gaza, arguing that the timing was “inappropriate”. For these
gentlemen the time will never be appropriate. The government deployed
army and police forces to prevent demonstrators from crossing the Suez
Canal to Sinai, the route they would have to take to reach the Gaza
Strip.

Egyptians and Palestinians living in the Sinai staged a
protest in the neighbouring city of Al-Arish after Friday prayers,
chanting pro-Palestinian slogans and calling on the Egyptian army to
allow the demonstrators to continue their march. Mustafa Reda Amin, the
secretary-general of a youth alliance that helped oust Mubarak, saying
organizers contracted 20 buses to take demonstrators to Sinai. But an
Egyptian security source said the authorities had decided to restrict
entry to Sinai to commercial trucks and residents of the Sinai Peninsula
and stepped up security on all access points to Sinai. “We want to
prevent large numbers of people from entering Sinai for the day of the
Great March,” one source said.

After the army intervention at the Israeli embassy. Photo: Gigi IbrahimBut
the greatest brutality was seen in Cairo, where Egyptian riot police
fired tear gas and live ammunition to disperse thousands of
pro-Palestinian protesters outside the Israeli Embassy. The protesters
set fire to an Israeli flag, chanted anti-Israeli slogans and called for
the expulsion of Israel’s ambassador and the closure of the embassy.
According to an eyewitness account by Mostafa Sheshtawy,
the demonstration was “very peaceful with the usual chants” until the
army attacked it with tear gas and gunfire.  Up to that point there was
“no contact between the protesters and the army in any form all day. The
whole day session was just the same chants and debates everywhere.”

As night fell, the protests were still peaceful, but some protesters shook the fence and hit it to make a loud noise.

“Suddenly
the Army started to shoot in the air, people got scared and ran away
for a while then came back chanting even louder. After a while things
calmed down and protesters started to chant again in a very peaceful
way. An hour later, some individuals removed a small fence from above a
small security check right next to the Gate (main fence). People started
cheer and things got loud again.

“Those same individuals started
chanting, yet they raised their arms as they are trying to say they are
peaceful and mean no harm. Then other individuals started removing the
main fence – I thought they wanna get in – and started removing
everything between the army and them. After they did , They just stood
there! NO ONE attacked the army, and no one tried to force themselves
in.”

Less than 10 minutes later, the shooting
started. The streets were full of tear gas, which left people almost
blinded. The infamous CSF (riot police) fired on the crowd with
birdshot, the same tactic that was used on 28th January in Tahrir Square
and caused many protesters to lose their eyesight. According to the
Health Ministry at least 353 people were hurt outside the embassy,
mostly from smoke inhalation. A security official said that some
protesters sustained bullet wounds and that one protester was in
critical condition.

Egypt in 1979 became the first Arab country to
sign a peace treaty with Israel. The interim military council now
running the country has pledged to honour the peace treaty. Of course!
Foreign policy is the continuation of home policy. It was naive to
expect these reactionary generals to defend the interests of the
Palestinian people because they do not defend the interests of the
Egyptian people. 

A youth organization, which played a key role in
the uprising that toppled former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, said
on its Facebook page that the protest in front of the embassy was
“civilized,” and questioned the riot police’s use of force in dealing
with the demonstrators. The people of Egypt are getting a valuable
lesson on the real nature of the army and the “democratic” regime that
has seized the reins of power.

A security official said Monday
that at least 20 demonstrators were arrested. It was just like old
times! It shows that the Revolution that started on 25 January is still
far from attaining its most elementary goals. The same generals who
served Mubarak are now posing as “democrats” and “patriots”. But they
serve the same class interests as the man the people threw out and no
real progress can be made until they also are shown the door.

The hypocrisy of the UN

For
decades the UN has been passing resolutions demanding the withdrawal of
Israeli troops from the occupied territories, but has done absolutely
nothing to implement them. Now that ordinary Palestinians have taken
direct action to implement these resolutions, they are shot down without
mercy.  One might well ask the question: where are the calls for a
“no-fly zone” and the need to “protect the civilian population”?

The
United Nations continues its hypocritical role of passing resolutions
that it has no intention of ever implementing. If such events had
occurred in Libya, one can imagine the outcry in the media and the
resolutions in the Security Council. But this is not Libya but Israel,
which is the main ally of the United States in the Middle East. With the
fall of Mubarak, Washington is more firmly attached to Israel than
ever, and is prepared to justify all its atrocities against the
Palestinians, while cynically talking of peace

The murder of
civilians by Israel is met by the “international community” with a
deafening silence. Meanwhile, the head of NATO demands the stepping up
of the criminal bombardment of Libya with the targeting of the
infrastructure, because “otherwise Gaddafi might remain in power”. The
fact that the UN resolution neither empowers NATO to bomb non-military
targets nor to try to overthrow Gaddafi is irrelevant to these
gentlemen. They are hell-best on regime change – in Libya. But they are
not so keen on regime change in friendly states like Saudi Arabia or
Israel.

The UN peacekeeping force in the border region called for “maximum restraint on all sides
in order to prevent any further casualties” and “immediate concrete
security steps on the ground” to prevent any further bloodshed. It is
always the same story: the violence of an occupying power is put on the
same level as the violence utilised by the victims of the occupation;
the violence of stone throwing teenagers is equated with the violence of
heavily armed troops.

The Palestinian cause cannot be served by
futile appeals to the so-called United Nations. Nor can it be advanced
by false “peace deals” like the monstrous Oslo Agreement between Arafat
and US imperialism. And after six decades it should be clear to all that
the bourgeois Arab regimes will always put their own narrow national
interests before those of the Palestinians, and therefore will always
betray them.

Is there no force in the world that can come to the
aid of the Palestinians? Is there nobody they can call a true friend?
The Palestinians have many true friends in the world. They are the
workers and peasants, the revolutionary youth and women, first in the
Arab lands, and secondly throughout the world. The Arab revolution has
aroused the sympathy of the world working class. The Palestinian
Revolution will gain an even greater sympathy, which must be translated
into active support on a world scale.

The Arab Revolution has
begun, but it is not finished. And it can never be finished until it has
overthrown, not just individual dictators, but the economic and social
system upon which dictatorships rest: the capitalist system. The
struggle of the Palestinian people for their national liberation can
only succeed if it is likened to a consistent struggle of the Arab
masses for democracy and social emancipation. The Arab Revolution will
triumph as a socialist revolution or it will not triumph at all.

Thawra hatta’l nasr!

Revolution until victory!

London, 16 May, 2011.