SOUTHERN ISRAEL, JULY 27 — Some 1,500 heavily-armed Israeli cops, backed by choppers and bulldozers, demolished the “unrecognized” Palestinian-Bedouin village of Al-Araqib in southern Israel (the Bedouin Arabs are former nomads who have established their villages in the desert), leaving 40 impoverished working-class families stranded in the desert without a roof over their heads. The villagers’ olive orchards, chicken coops and sheep pens, used to supplement their meager incomes, were also destroyed.

Even before its demolition, Al-Araqib’s residents — like the residents of numerous other “unrecognized” Palestinian-Bedouin villages in the Negev — were denied even the most basic infrastructure and services. They lived without modern sewage facilities, with no local medical care or schooling, and had to use expensive on-site generators and plastic tanks to provide their electricity and water. The Israeli government conquered the Negev in 1948 and made it a part of Israel, claiming that the Bedouin — who have lived there for centuries — established the village “illegally” on land now belonging to the state. At the same time the Israeli government easily grants land, infrastructure and services to small Jewish settlements in the area and even to single-family “individual settlement farms” owned by rich ranchers (generally ex-Israel Defense Force ranking officers). Recently, one of these racist ranchers shot and killed a Bedouin; needless to say , he was found not guilty by the bosses’ Zionist court, thus giving the green light for others to follow suit.

Demolition U.S.-Financed

The aim of this racist demolition was to pave the way for a planned ruling-class gated settlement, Hiran, A Religious–Jews Only enclave. It is financed by U.S. billionaires, including Ron Lauder, in conjunction with the racist JNF (the Zionist Jewish National Fund, which controls all the land grabbed in the 1948 and 1967 wars). In other words, the Israeli Zionist police force erased an entire village off the land as a service to real-estate tycoons .

The destruction of Al-Araqib is not an isolated incident. It is another step in the Israeli ruling class’ ongoing attack on workers’ housing in the service of real-estate capital, both local and foreign. This is a racist and colonialist policy — ethnic cleansing to serve the rich. The racist, ultra-nationalist Israeli regime also wants to guarantee a Jewish national supremacy in every part of the country.

Recently, thousands of Palestinian workers living in the ancient city of Jaffa (part of Tel Aviv today), and super-exploited Jewish workers in the Kfar Shalem neighborhood (established on the ruins of a Palestinian village demolished in 1948) in south Tel Aviv are threatened with eviction to make way for massive real-estate development projects in the areas. The Miami-based real-estate tycoon, Irving Moscowitz, is using the Israeli state-machine to evict many Palestinian families from the villages of Sheik Jarah and Ras al-Amud in order to clear the land for real-estate development.

The fascist Israeli state, as well as its racist ideology of Zionism, serve only the capitalists, is more than willing to act with extreme brutality and cruelty against workers when it is deemed necessary by the tycoons’ interests. This government uses racism as a tool to divide the workers and turn them one against the other, all while blatantly ignoring the most basic needs of entire populations of workers.

The interest of the Israeli and Palestinian workers is, therefore, to unite and smash this fascist state-machine and place the working class in power. Only workers’ communist rule would be able to provide for the needs of each and every worker in this part of the world, be that housing, education, healthcare or adequate infrastructure. Only the seizure of power by the working class will do away with all tycoons and their rotten system that breeds racism, poverty and war.

UPDATE - AUGUST 10, 2010 - Al-Araqib was demolished again by the fascist Israeli police force, for the third time in two weeks. Several Jewish and Arab activists who tried to resist the destruction were arrested. But the workers and peasants of Al-Araqib have not given up, and will continue fighting against the racist government and its capitalist masters.

In New York the city administration is planning a 10% cut in the already under-funded public hospital system. In Chicago they already laid off hundreds of doctors, nurses and other frontline providers from the Cook County Hospital system and closed half of the County’s public clinics, with further cuts planned. In Los Angeles they downsized, then closed Martin Luther King Hospital, leaving thousands without care.

All these facilities serve largely black and immigrant working-class patients, but their existence means that there is a safety net for all workers who get thrown out of work by the inevitable ups and downs of the capitalist economy. Now the politicians in the big cities are dismantling public health, just like they are destroying public schools, public housing and public transportation. They use racism of different kinds to blunt the fight-back against their attacks.

The capitalist TV and newspapers create the myth that anything with the word “public” in the name is for black people. That’s one of their tricks to confuse white workers. Then they try to get black workers to go along with Obama’s “health reform” with the lie that “only” immigrants will be left out in the cold when the public hospitals close. That’s to build anti-immigrant racism, especially among blacks. Racism is the cutting edge of fascism, and a black “liberal” is now swinging the axe.

But many workers already see through these tricks. Demonstrations involving thousands of people have opposed these racist attacks. Workers have denounced the cuts in public meetings as well as picketing and marching outside as the rich “civic leaders” solemnly try to “save our public institutions” by downsizing and privatizing them. In California nurses’ strikes have forced the politicians to make concessions by improving the ratio of nurses to patients. But like most reforms, the bosses then turned this victory into its opposite by simply reducing beds and kicking out the patients.

The unions can be a useful place to organize fight-back, but the reforms they fight for will never satisfy workers’ healthcare needs. There is lots of anger about these attacks and workers need a stronger and more far-reaching counter-attack.

  The public services under attack are the remnants of the “welfare state.” Public hospitals and other things workers need to survive were created when millions of workers in the U.S. and Western Europe started getting ideas of revolution  from Russian and Chinese workers in the early to mid-20th century. At that time the Soviet Union (now “Russia”), and later the People’s Republic of China, were the only countries that guaranteed jobs and healthcare to all.

The capitalists in the West were scared to death of revolution in their own countries. They fought the threat of communist revolution in the West in two ways. First, they allowed a few reforms so that revolution wouldn’t seem like the only alternative to the misery of capitalism. Reforms silence the workers and further bar the workers from uniting as one. Then they fired, blacklisted, arrested, beat up and killed communists who led the workers in fighting for reforms.

These measures defused and tamped down the revolutionary energy that had been building in the working class. Now, the capitalists are under more pressure to cut costs as they prepare for bigger and bigger wars. And with the return of Russia and China to capitalism, the pressure is off for making reforms, at least for the moment.

Workers need a two-pronged counterattack. We need to sharpen the contradictions of the reforms wherever we can, and we need to recruit more and more workers into the PLP. The working class needs to go all the way to communist revolution. We need to understand that anything short of destroying capitalism and replacing it with communism will not offer the future we and our children and grandchildren desperately need.

Reforms will ultimately lead back to fascism. Revolution, not reform, is the only solution to the horrors of capitalism. Fight for communism!

“We did our job and now we’re going home,” says a GI. This is the theme of “Restrepo,” a National Geographic documentary which describes the 15-month tour of duty of an Army platoon whose job was to secure a valley in a mountainous area of Afghanistan so that a road could be built there to “help” the people of the valley.

“Restrepo” follows in the footsteps of the Oscar-winning film, “The Hurt Locker” which tells the story of caring, capable men assigned to a U.S. Army bomb-disposal unit. It brings to life the U.S. ruling-class slogan to “support the troops even if you oppose the war.“ But the only way to support working-class troops is for PLP to organize in the military to turn the guns around on the warmakers. The only way the working class wins is when we build a Red Army to fight for a communist revolution.

In this film we are asked to feel the camaraderie of men at war,  the grief they feel at the death of one of their platoon members and their joy at the death of one of the insurgents. They all “have a job to do” and they do it without any questioning of the Afghan war or their role in it. It recalls the oft-repeated line in “The Godfather” movie that “it isn’t personal, it’s just business.” The ruling class needs soldiers to believe this so they will continue killing their working-class brothers and sisters, in the bosses’ widening wars for profit and control.

In the film, one of the Army’s strategies is to win over the people in the village near their camp. The Army must apologize for the mass destruction of the villagers and their resources. The Army replaces the officer held responsible for the atrocities. His replacement meets with village elders and tells them that he won’t make the same mistakes as the previous officer and that the elders should trust him.

This pushes the idea that the military as a whole is doing the right thing, and is for the villagers. By replacing the one “bad” officer, we are to believe the villagers will be protected.

After their 15-month tour of duty, the soldiers go home, but the village and its elders are still there with the insurgents and a new group of soldiers who they are supposed to trust. The U.S. troops eventually withdraw from the valley after 50 U.S. soldiers have been killed. The documentary neglects to document how many civilians and insurgents were killed or how much destruction the U.S. military caused.

“Restrepo,” like “The Hurt Locker,” is a description of U.S. military duty as “just another job.” The men are shown as accepting the necessity of fighting imperialist wars for control of oil, oil pipelines and new-found mineral wealth. Neither the men nor the documentary questions the politics or morality of the war. Couched as “objectivity,” this allows ruling-class justifications for the war to go unquestioned and therefore dominate the discussion.

We need to bring CHALLENGE’S understanding of U.S. imperialism to high school students who will be joining the military and we need to win soldiers to PLP so that these wars will not be “business as usual.” Then we can make new documentaries that will tell the story of working-class rebellions and communist victories. 

In July 1967, one of the most stirring struggles of multi-racial working-class unity occurred when 15,000 black and white workers struck the Newport News (Va.) Shipbuilding Co., the world’s largest shipbuilder. The walkout was initiated by mostly black workers in the transportation department and followed by virtually all the company’s black and white workers. It eventually turned into a full-scale rebellion — similar to the big-city black rebellions that were sweeping the U.S. — against the loan companies and pawn shops surrounding the shipyard, sleazy merchants who had been bleeding the workers dry for years.

The workers had never struck before and were striking “against the national interest,” given the huge Navy contracts in the middle of the Vietnam War. It occured in a state with a 350-year history of racism, going back to the first arrival of black slaves in 1609.

They faced a pro-company press, the mayor, local police, Governor, State troopers, a company union and a judge’s Taft-Hartley injunction. Yet the workers, depending on their own rank-and-file leadership, organized a wildcat strike that shut the state’s largest corporation tight.

Black Workers Lead a
Wildcat Walkout

It began when three workers in the transportation department, two black and one white, refused overtime as a protest to press demands over grievances and unequal pay and were suspended. After a meeting of 239 mostly black workers in that department, 75 on the night shift walked out and set up a virtually all-black picket line. Although the department represented only 1% of the entire work-force, they were the main artery that kept the yard running.

The black and white workers on the incoming day shifts respected the picket line and the yard ground to a halt. The engineers on the Chesapeake & Ohio R.R. refused to move trains into the yard and the teamsters refused to drive their trucks past the wildcat picket line.

Virtually the entire yard’s workers soon met and voted 4 to 1 to walk out. They defied the court injunction ordering them back. Mass picketing stopped any scabs from entering. When a cop’s police car rammed the pickets, injuring two workers, the strikers launched a hail of rocks, bottles and bricks and soon the cops were huddling against a fence.

Open Rebellion: ‘They attacked us like they were brothers…’

Then open rebellion ensued. Multi-racial groups of workers smashed the pawn shops and loan companies that had been bleeding then dry for years. Soon the city’s entire 150-man police force with police dogs arrived and were met with a barrage of rocks and bottles. Then 3,500 strikers squared off against the cops charging with guns drawn and drove them back. One police official said the rebellion was “thoroughly integrated. [They] attacked us like they were brothers.”

Nine cops were hospitalized and five police cars burnt or damaged. The state troopers were ordered out onto the battlefield and sent dozens of bloodied workers to the hospital, but the yard was still crippled.

Finally the Governor ordered out more troopers to escort scabs into the yard, wading into the pickets in brutal fashion. With no real organized leadership, increasingly violent threats from the Governor and intervention of federal mediators, the workers were forced back with only the “promise” that their grievances “would be dealt with.”

But it was a historic lesson in multi-racial working-class struggle. As one worker declared, “Workers have gotta learn that they have to stand up or they’re dead…”