Platform declaration: From the river, to the sea, Palestine will be free!

The following declaration was signed by 29 parties attending the recent international conference of the World Anti-imperialist Platform in Athens. View signatures here.

Contact the organisers to add your organisation’s signature: platform.21c@gmail.com.

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Understanding:

• That the partition of Palestine by the United Nations in 1948, which was pushed through the United Nations according to a plan set out by British imperialism and without any consultation with the local population, is a historic injustice that must be recognised and whose consequences must be addressed if a meaningful peace is to be achieved in the middle east.
• That zionism, the official ‘justification’ for the creation of the state of Israel, is a pernicious ideology, whose growth and development was fostered by British and later US imperialism, which works to confuse jewish people into thinking of themselves not as part of a religious group but (incorrectly) as a ‘nation’ – and one whose members, alone amongst the people of the earth, will never be able to live in peace in any place outside of a separate ‘jewish homeland’.
• That the zionist leaders of Israel have consistently made clear by their words and actions that they have never had any intention of settling for less than total control of the entire territory of historic Palestine and more (the Golan in Syria, southern Lebanon, etc).
• That zionism, by holding that the jews are God’s ‘chosen people’ is a racist, supremacist ideology that justifies every kind of barbarity against the Palestinian people on the basis that they are not full human beings ‘like us’. And we note that in this context that many religious jews are opposed to zionism and to the occupation of Palestine.
• That the horrific tragedy of the rise of zionism amongst jewish people in Europe was the transformation of those who had been the victims of fascist persecution in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s into the perpetrators of an equally fascistic and genocidal enterprise in the postwar middle east.
• That with its pass laws, ghettos, segregated infrastructure, checkpoints and prison complexes, its conversion of the small areas of land that remain ‘free’ for Palestinians to occupy into concentration camps surrounded by barbed wire and policed by tanks and fighter planes, and with its daily routine of violence and humiliation practiced against the native inhabitants, zionism is the inheritor and continuer of such barbaric and inhuman regimes as Nazi Germany, settler-colonial British Kenya and apartheid South Africa.
• That zionist Israel has been enabled to commit its terrible crimes unhindered because of the special function it performs for Anglo-American imperialism – that is, it acts as an armed outpost of imperialism whose fundamental role is not to ‘protect the jewish people’ but to keep control of middle-eastern oil for British and US oil monopolies.
• That Israel’s vital importance to modern imperialism stems from the central importance of oil to the modern economy – since oil remains the most important source of energy not only for industry but also for the imperialist war machine.
• That this importance is reflected in the insistence of the imperialist ruling classes that every career politician in Britain, the European Union and the USA must demonstrate their total loyalty towards zionism, which is simply another way of expressing total loyalty to British and US imperialist interests.
• That this importance is also the real reason why Israel is consistently granted immunity for its repeated crimes by the imperialist-dominated ‘international community’, and why imperialist media work so hard to drop and deny all the above context, instead presenting an apparently ‘unsolvable’ narrative of ‘two sides at war’, all the while emphasising unforgiveable nature of any violence by the resistance while bending over backwards to justify the far more extreme violence of the oppressors.
• That scores of UN resolutions over seven decades at the UN general assembly have asserted the international community’s desire to find a just solution to the Palestinian question, have objected to the numerous crimes (including apartheid and ethnic cleansing) of the zionists and have even explicitly underlined the right of the Palestinians to resist by whatever means necessary, including by force of arms.
• That the USA’s control of the UN security council has essentially neutered all options for seeking a meaningful resolution via that body.
• That the genocidal nature of the zionist state has been made clearer than ever by its recent response to the Al-Aqsa Flood battle launched by resistance forces. This response has included:
  1. The indiscriminate massacre of more than ten thousand civilians, half of them children, including refugee columns and those taking refuge in hospitals, schools and UN facilities;
  2. Open calls by Israeli leaders to “wipe Gaza off the map” and attempts to implement a plan to transfer all of Gaza’s 2.3 million people into the Egyptian desert;
  3. Fake atrocity propaganda claiming that the resistance has “beheaded babies” and “massacred civilians”, all of which have been debunked, but which continue to be referenced by Israeli and imperialist politicians and media;
  4. Israeli army killings of Israeli civilians in order to promote the narrative of resistance ‘barbarism’ and to avoid the chance of them being taken prisoner to Gaza.

We the undersigned parties and organisations declare:

• That the struggle of the Palestinian people against the imperialist-backed settler-colonial state of Israel, with its illegal occupations, its apartheid system, its supremacist zionist ideology and its stated policy of genocide, remains at the forefront of the world struggle against imperialism.
• That the Palestinian people made huge sacrifices in the quest for peace when they signed up to the Oslo accords in 1993, giving up 78 percent of their historic homeland in return the promise of a viable Palestinian state on the 22 percent that remained.
• That, just as the imperialist-backed Ukrainian junta repeatedly undermined the possibilities for a peaceful settlement of the war in Donbass (first by deliberately undermining the Minsk accords and then by tearing up the peace deal they had agreed to in Istanbul), it is imperialist-abetted Israeli intransigence and double-dealing that has essentially undermined all possibility of implementing the two-state solution plan that was agreed upon at Oslo.
• That given the total failure to hold Israel to account for its flagrant violations of the terms of Oslo and the repeated statements of its leaders that they have no intention of being bound by those terms, no one has any right to expect the Palestinians to continue to be bound by the terms of Oslo either.
• That the Palestinian people have both the moral and legal right, recognised in international law, to struggle for their freedom by any means necessary, including by the use of armed force.
• That we will accept no correlation between the force used by a brutal regime of occupation and the force used by those struggling for their liberation: the zionists are waging a fascistic, genocidal, unjust war of conquest and national oppression on behalf of US imperialism, while the Palestinians are fighting a just war for national liberation and self-defence.
• That given these facts, all progressive, anti-imperialist and socialist forces have a duty to side firmly and unconditionally with the Palestinian people and to do everything in their power to provide them with material solidarity.
• That we in the Platform note the growing desire of the masses to show material support to the brave struggle of the Palestinian people. We commit ourselves to promoting every existing example of concrete solidarity and expanding this campaign to every corner of the globe, helping workers to understand that this is the only way we can assist our Palestinian brothers and sisters on the front line to victory:
  1. We call on manufacturing workers not to make munitions or other supplies that are intended for use by Israel;
  2. We call on transport workers not to move munitions, troops or any other supplies that are bound for Israel;
  3. We call on all dock workers to block the shipment of arms and other supplies to Israel;
  4. We call on all journalists to refuse to write or broadcast information that justifies or whitewashes the zionists’ crimes or reinforces their fake narratives, remembering that journalism which justifies aggressive war crimes was classified at the Nuremburg tribunals as a war crime in itself;
  5. We call on all media and communications technicians to refuse to print or broadcast such lies;
  6. We call on all supermarket workers to refuse to put Israeli products or zionist-promoting newspapers and magazines on the shelves of their stores;
  7. We call on all workers to force their governments to break diplomatic ties with Israel – there must be no normalisation of genocide;
  8. And we call on workers everywhere to apply the same non-cooperation stance to every part of the Nato imperialist war machine, which backs and is coming to the aid of its proxies in the middle east.
• That, along with all progressive humanity, we demand:
  1. An end to western imperialist military, financial, diplomatic and media support for Israel;
  2. An immediate end to Israel’s genocidal bombing of and armed incursions into Gaza, including the zionists’ use of internationally banned white phosphorous and other undeclared chemical and uranium-tipped weapons;
  3. The immediate opening of the borders for free passage of Palestinians into and out of their homeland;
  4. The release of all political prisoners and internees from Israeli jails;
  5. The end of the occupation of 1967 Palestine, including the withdrawal of Israeli military forces, the tearing down of separation walls and military checkpoints, the dismantlement of illegal settlements and the abolition of segregated infrastructure across Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza Strip;
  6. Freedom for the Palestinian people across all of 1948 Palestine to choose their own representatives to represent them in talks towards a meaningful peace settlement;
  7. All US troops and bases out of the middle east.
• That a just peace in Palestine will only be achieved when the Palestinian people are free to decide their own future, a future in which we are sure the following conditions will need to have been met:
  1. An end to the existence of any racist, supremacist ethnostate on Palestinian territory, which means the dismantlement of every legal and physical structure of apartheid discrimination;
  2. The establishment of secular, democratic rule across all of Palestine, allowing all to live on terms of equality and fraternity, no matter what their ethnic or religious background;
  3. The guarantee and implementation of the universally-recognised right to return of all the Palestinian refugees who have been forcibly evicted from their land and their homes since 1948;
  4. An end to imperialist interference in the affairs of all countries of the middle east.

No cooperation with the criminal zionist war machine!
Death to imperialism and its fascist zionist stooge regime in the middle east!
From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!
Savra savra hatta nasr! (Revolution until victory!)