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Winter Project Helps Build PLP in Palestine-Israel
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- 20 January 2012 284 hits
ISRAEL/PALESTINE, January — We have returned from the winter project to the Middle East, with our minds once more agog at the racism, oppression and absurdity of the actions of the Israeli government. Not only did we see the horrors of the 45-year-old military occupation of Palestine, but also the discrimination against Israeli Arabs and the marked class distinctions among Jews. Those who were new to the area were in a constant state of shock and disbelief at the situations we encountered. We were buoyed, however, by participating in struggles and meeting new friends who were digesting our ideas.
The Israelis are continuing their policy of driving out Palestinians by actually demolishing their houses by the thousands or otherwise making their lives so miserable that they will emigrate. In the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, the weekly demonstrations continued against Jewish takeover of homes Palestinians have lived in for 60 years, having been driven out of West Jerusalem in 1948.
Israeli Attack-Dogs
We sat with a family there, half of whose home has been occupied by young Israeli men and their dogs, who attack members of the family. In two other East Jerusalem areas, we visited villages whose land is being confiscated by Israeli expansion.
To the south, in the Negev (desert), Bedouins who agreed to become citizens in ’48, live in “unrecognized” villages that receive no services. One, El Araqib, has been razed and rebuilt 33 times since July 2010 because the government, with the financial backing of an U.S. fundamentalist Christian organization, wishes to build a forest. We saw how houses for 500 people and 4,500 olive tress had been bulldozed into a sandy wasteland. The remaining residents are living in trucks and trailers in their cemetery.
Every week they, their neighbors and Israeli activists stand nearby at a busy intersection with banners, drums and speeches. They welcomed a talk about fighting racism by one of our young visitors.
In Tel Aviv, the massive tent cities and summer demonstrations for more social services and housing are gone, for they mostly involved middle-class people and lacked any political analysis. However, in a working-class area of Tel Aviv, Hatikvah, and in other places around the country, small encampments remain of those who have lost their homes even though most work. We marched in a militant demonstration of hundreds of workers and activists at which 43 people were arrested. Our comrades participate regularly in all these actions and have a steady base of readers and friends.
Fascist Military Courts
In the West Bank, conditions continue to be appalling. The representatives of a prisoners’ support group described how Palestinians can be arrested for belonging to any political party, even the ruling Fatah, holding a flag, congregating in a group of more than 10, or making any political statements. They come before military courts and can be held without charge for “investigation” indefinitely, as long as a military officer renews it every three months.
Forty percent of all Palestinian men have been jailed in the last 50 years. Since over 400 prisoners were released in the widely publicized exchange for the sole Israeli prisoner Shalit, an equal number has been arrested. There is widespread use of torture, even on children. The corrupt Palestinian ruling parties, Fatah and Hamas, also arrest and abuse hundreds of Palestinian activists.
Life in the Occupied Territories continues to be constrained by the wall erected by Israeli rulers to fence in the Palestinians and the lack of work, mobility, goods, and health care. In one refugee camp we visited, unemployment is 40%, compared to about 32% in the rest of the West Bank. Activists we talked with were pessimistic about mass resistance erupting soon, since there is a lack of a uniform set of demands or goals.
Our ideas, the need for a secular, multiracial, communist society, were attractive to some, and we renewed this discussion with friends we had met on previous visits. Many Palestinians are held back by nationalism, the desire to build a Palestinian state free of Israeli oppression, and too ready to ally with the local ruling parties, Fatah and Hamas, even as they recognize their corruption and ties to imperialism, the U.S., and Israeli bosses.
Building an International Party
As we left we were excited by the friends and adherents we left behind and saw our chance to influence many Jews and Arabs with our struggle to build an international, anti-nationalist working-class Party. In the U.S., we will educate our friends about the conditions there and work with the many organizations here that oppose the U.S. governments’ massive support to Israel, $3 billion annually, that keeps it afloat. Israel, with its powerful army and nuclear weapons, serves as the U.S. policeman in the region, to protect oil interests and serve as an ally in potential military ventures, such as an invasion of Iran. A fight against imperialism here is an essential part of the fight against fascism in Israel.
MINNEAPOLIS, December 28 — Recently the AFL-CIO held its annual NEXT UP! Young Workers Conference. Despite the union hacks toeing the Obama/Democratic Party line, many young workers were not fooled and dozens eagerly took copies of CHALLENGE.
Many workshops provided opportunities to talk to young workers from throughout the U.S. about communism and PLP.
Those conducting the immigration workshop, while well-informed, refused to discuss the racist, fascist nature of deportations, E-verify or Secure Communities. They conveniently found no time for questions when a PLP’er fought to discuss this.
A session on starting a Labor Party led to heated debate over whether a new electoral party was needed or the Democrats were good enough. Several youth complained that any party operating within capitalist rules would be useless. Time to share another CHALLENGE!
A PLP’er took advantage of the “un-conference sessions,” where individuals could propose their own ideas before all 700 participants. He stressed the need for multiracial unity, making the anti-racist fight primary, and realizing that any capitalist “solution” would fail the workers. Obama, he said, had been a horrible option for workers, citing the legal lynching of Troy Davis in Georgia and the multiple bombing campaigns by U.S. imperialism abroad.
Initial groans were followed by feverish clapping at the bold comments. Twenty young workers joined this session that pushed for militant multiracial unity to fight capitalism. One student, frustrated with the unions and elections, said he saw no end in sight to the myriad of problems created by capitalism. He eagerly took CHALLENGE and listened carefully to PLP’s ideas.
The conference, which opened poorly with Obama’s Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, ended just as badly with AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka giving the usual reformist speech supporting both Obama and Occupy Wall Street (but only to lead them into the Democratic Party). These misleaders do not walk the walk. They just front for the bosses. But despite their efforts, this conference was a great opportunity to distribute CHALLENGE and meet workers from all over the U.S., many of whom are tired of electoral politics and of the lies and misguidance of the union misleaders.
Next year, more PLP’ers should attend this conference, where young unionists come with open minds for our kind of solutions to capitalist, racist oppression. At such conferences, we must continue to identify the contradictions that separate reform from revolution.
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U.S. Billionaire Funds NGO Evictions of Jerusalem Workers
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- 20 January 2012 266 hits
SHEIKH JARRAH, EAST JERUSALEM, January 6 — Palestinian and Jewish activists, including PL’ers from Israel-Palestine and the U.S., held a rally protesting the racist eviction of Palestinian families from their homes in this neighborhood, minutes away from the center of Jerusalem. The demonstrators demanded real justice, the return of the families to their houses and the removal of violent settlers and brutal cops from the neighborhood.
Since the 1990’s, settlers, paid for handsomely by the El’ad and Ateret Cohanim NGOs (non-government organizations), used the Israeli courts to seize houses here. Despite the fact that the Palestinian residents, all working class, were the legal owners of their homes and had all the documents necessary to prove this, the court ruled for the settlers — upper-middle-class Jews — who only had very dubious documents of ownership. Obviously the Israeli court of “justice” is openly racist and prefers the “rights” of wealthy Jewish settlers over those of Palestinian or Jewish workers.
NGOs Serve Ruling Class
Both settler NGOs operating in East Jerusalem, El’ad and Ateret Cohanim, are heavily funded by Irving Moskowitz, a U.S. capitalist and “philanthropist” based in Miami, who has made his fortune from constructing private hospitals and casinos. Moskowitz pays the settlers to take over Palestinian houses and land throughout East Jerusalem so he can build real-estate projects (for wealthy Jews only) a few minutes drive from the city center, and reaps super-profits in the process.
PL’ers from both Israel-Palestine and the U.S. have visited the home of the al-Kurd family here. The family had received its home and land from UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Work Agency) in 1956. A few years later the Jordanian government, which ruled the West Bank and East Jerusalem between 1948 and 1967, acknowledged the family as the owners of their house.
But apparently having full land title and living on the land for 56 years wasn’t enough for the Israeli court. In the 1990’s, the al-Kurd family built a small housing unit in their yard for one of their sons. The Israeli court ruled that this construction was “illegal” and repossessed the housing unit. From 1999 to 2009 it stood empty.
In 2009, however, teenage settlers were allowed to live in this unit, rent free, and were also paid to live there! These settlers are very violent towards the al-Kurd family; they order their dogs to attack the family members. However, if the al-Kurd family dares to report these attacks to the police, they themselves get arrested, not the aggressive settlers!
The court has decided that the entire al-Kurd house belongs to the settlers’ NGO. Now there’s a standing lawsuit against the family, demanding they pay a hefty rent to that NGO for the house which they own.
Free Housing for Racist Thugs; Evictions for Workers
This is the true face of capitalism: free housing for racist thugs and evictions for workers. Be it Columbia University’s expansion into Harlem (at the expense of black workers; see CHALLENGE, 01/04/12) or Moskowitz’s take-over of East Jerusalem, the bosses use courts, cops and racism to rob the working class and make huge profits along the way.
We, workers and unemployed from all nations and ethnic groups, must unite and fight these racist bosses and their fascist state machine, be it liberal Obama’s subtle fascism or openly fascist Israeli ruler Netanyahu’s overt apartheid state. As long as the bosses control the state, they will use it against our class. The only real answer to capitalism’s horrors is for us, the working’ class, to rally behind the flag of the communist PLP and smash the bosses’ state, replacing it with a communist state of, for and by our class.
The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins, Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston/New York, 2006,
God and His Demons, by Michael Parenti, Prometheus Books, Amherst/New York, 2010.
If you are reading this, you are probably eager to see the world move beyond exploitation of the many by the few, and away from continual inter-imperialist wars for control over the world’s resources. We are aware that many CHALLENGE readers rely, to some degree, on religion to produce such progress. But whatever you may think about religion and God, there is an inherent problem in religion that allows our profit-seeking exploiters and war-making executioners to get away with their daily theft and murder of our friends, our families, ourselves. The problem is that religion — whatever comfort it provides, or whatever unity it encourages among fellow worshippers — is used by our exploiters to bind us to their needs over our own.
Bibles Celebrate Murder and Mayhem
Religions of all sorts have been used for millennia to justify war and genocide in the name of god. They have always been used to lead us to regard other members of our exploited class as enemies rather than allies and fellow-sufferers. Over thousands of years of human history, new religions evolve out of older ones whenever a rising class needs a new weapon of mass control.
The God Delusion and God and His Demons are both worth reading despite their shortcomings. Richard Dawkins, a British evolutionary biologist, concentrates on the logical and factual inconsistencies in the Judeo-Christian Bible. He shows the disconnect between religion and morality, describes the murder and mayhem celebrated in the Old and New Testaments, and alludes to the frequent modern-day abuse of children by religionists. He also writes about the historical use of all religions, by clergy and other backers, to induce workers to kill other workers in endless wars for gain and profit. Dawkins’ stated goal is to give skeptical readers enough evidence to argue against the belief in a supreme being.
Manufactured Religious Precepts
Michael Parenti, a Marxist historian in the U.S., places a greater emphasis on the predatory nature of fundamentalist preachers and priests, and how they have enslaved women and children to do their bidding, sexually and otherwise. He offers his own long selection of quotes from the Old and New Testaments to illustrate the bloody roots of the Judeo-Christian tradition. And he exposes the horrendous hypocrisy of contemporary clergy and politicos in their use of made-up religious precepts, such as those espoused by the anti-abortion and anti-gay movements in the service of meaningless “family values.”
Dawkins’ non-Marxist outlook, not surprisingly, fails to relate religion-fostered blindness to workers’ willing submission to exploitation by the capitalist promoters of religion. Parenti, a Marxist, points out how leading capitalists use religion to induce the world’s workers to do their bidding, against the workers’ own interests.
But while he exposes the racism, nationalism, and wars fostered by several major religions (including Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, among others), Parenti treads lightly on Jewish fundamentalism. Describing Jews as the historic “whipping boys” of other religions, he fails to consider how the Israeli ruling class and the Zionist movement inflict the same oppression on the Palestinian working class within Israel-Palestine. Nor does he expose these rulers’ racist support of Apartheid South Africa, shipping arms to suppress black workers.
Perhaps the greatest failing of both Dawkins and Parenti is that neither relates the historical and present crimes of religionists to the need for the world’s working class to free ourselves from the bonds of faith. Neither advocates the mental liberation of a scientific approach to all things in life. And neither understands that only a communist-led revolution can free ourselves from capitalist exploitation and oppression.
PLP has long argued that science rather than religion offers the world’s working class a deliverance from the bondage of capitalism. One major article deals with the history of various religions and their uses — “Religion: Tool of Bosses, Enemy of Workers.” Another explores the nature of science and its incompatibility with religion, and how science investigates the real world rather than an imagined or hoped-for one — “Intelligent Design.” These articles can be found on the plp.org website under the “Literature” tab, section “leaftlets and pamphlets.” Both of these articles fill important gaps in these two useful, well-researched books.
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PLP Militance Rolls Over Police Plan: BLOCK THE LONG BEACH PORT
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- 05 January 2012 305 hits
LONG BEACH, CA, December 12 — Seven hundred workers shut down business at the Long Beach Port. This march revealed a split between the Occupy movement’s liberal organizers and the rank-and-file occupiers, including Progressive Labor Party comrades who gave key leadership at the protest.
The liberals’ plan, orchestrated with the Long Beach Police Department, was to funnel the march along a narrow sidewalk, with the ocean on one side and the cops on the other. But with PL leading a communist chant of “Shut it down, shut it tight, workers of the world unite!” the march quickly turned militant. PL’s friends in the movement were evident as we crossed the line of cones and took the streets leading to the port.
The kkkops responded by attempting to use their motorcycles as barricades, splitting the protest into two halves. It was a potentially dangerous situation, with one group facing a wall of cops in riot gear. But we quickly organized ourselves and led the march back and sandwiched the police! At first, the other half of the march was hesitant to walk through the police barrier, but our comrades again led the way and soon the whole march followed.
An hour later, as the Long Beach police tried to push the protesters back onto the sidewalk, they were met with heavy resistance. The protesters stood their ground in open defiance, linking arms, chanting and singing. The standoff lasted for nearly an hour. It ended only after rank-and-file occupiers discovered that some trucks were getting into the port through a back entrance. After a brief discussion, the protest was moved to a location where we could better block all entrances. Traffic at the port was shut down for five hours before the police could disperse the crowd. Port workers who walked to the gates to watch the protest told us that they didn’t believe any work would get done that day.
While our PL leadership was critical in organizing the Occupiers to defy the liberal leadership, we were weak in organizing our own base from the jobs, schools and campuses to participate. We also need to distribute more CHALLENGEs.
We do have a small but active base within the Occupy movement, however. After this action, more than 20 young people met with us over breakfast to debrief. While there is a lot of potential to deepen these relationships and build the Party, we must struggle harder to make the Occupy fight more prominent in our workplaces and classrooms. The struggle continues.