NEW YORK CITY, November 15—Progressive Labor Party members took the lead in organizing a forum about Israel-Hamas and the genocide of workers in Palestinian at Make the Road New York, a community organization in Brooklyn. Fifty working-class sisters and brothers attended from disparate places, several Latin countries, Palestine, India, Japan, the Philippines and the United States, all living now in New York City.
‘Immediate connection’
A Palestinian woman spoke about the lives of her grandparents and family in Palestine before being forcibly displaced and her young life growing up in a refugee camp in Jordan. “We were simple villagers and communicated by passing stories from one village to another. We were tied to the land and our crops of olives which would become olive oil.”
Families were big, spread out and unprepared for the imperialist Zionist onslaught that burned homes
and crops, killing people on their land, causing people to disperse and flee. There was an immediate connection between her and her family and friends at the forum and immigrant workers, mainly from Mexico, Ecuador and the Dominican Republic in the room.
Workers don’t need to be told what is just or unjust. They know how capitalism, colonialism and imperialism have destroyed their lives and forced them to make long, perilous journeys to the very imperialist countries that have caused them to flee, these experiences crystallized in a combination of sadness and rage which the Palestinian woman expressed. Their common experience is a force whirling beneath the surface, sometimes exploding in class rage.
It’s about profit, not religion
The following speaker described how for thousands of years peasants and traders, Jews, Christians and Muslims, lived side by side in Palestine. After World
War I, British colonialists eyeballed the Middle East as a gold mine for them because of the oil. Then began the program of dividing, displacing and killing Palestinians. After World War II, the U.S. saw the Zionist state as their anchor in the area to counter the Soviet Union and to control the drilling, shipping and sale of the black gold-oil.
Racist, nazi-like attacks to kill and displace Palestinians sharpened, as we see in Gaza now.
The working class of the world has no countries. We must unite to destroy capitalism.
A comrade concluded the forum with a description of the massive protests against genocide in Gaza all over the world. We need revolution, workers’ power to break our chains. “Tis the final conflict, let each stand in their place, the international working class will be the human race!”
Workers clapped and agreed to mobilize for a march in Bushwick. Onward!
