Why Labour should support Palestinians

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I AM pro-Palestinian, proJewish but anti-Zionist. Israel is a colonialist settler state established in part by force of arms, including terrorism, by a largely immigrant population which has forced the majority indigenous Palestinian people out of their own homeland.

Zionism is a racist ideology which discriminates against the Palestinian population. It has turned them into a minority and second class citizens in their own country. Zionism has forced millions of Palestinians into exile in neighbouring Arab states. The Palestinians are today's diaspora.

The Israeli invasion of Lebanon is holocaust 1982 - an act of indiscriminale terrorism and genocide against the Lebanese and Palestinian populations of Beirut. The Israeli bombardment of Beirut and the hunting down of Palestinians is a slightly less barbarous modern equivalent of what the Nazis did in the Warsaw ghetto.

I fully support the Palestinian struggle. It is an anti-imperialist and anti-colonial fight for independence and self-determination - a just struggle for national liberation.

Whilst I am opposed to the indiscriminate terrorism practised by some factions of the PLO, the Labour Party should recognise and support the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.

The Labour Party and

British government ought

to support full and equal status for the PLO with all other parties to negotiations for peace in the Middle East.

Constituency Labour Parties and trade unions should flood the NEC with resolutions to ensure that Labour Parties and trade unions should flood the NEC with resolutions to ensure that Labour is committed to a democratic and secular state of Palestine, incorporating within it the present state of Israel, where Jews and Palestinians can live together in peace and tranquility.

Peter Tatchell, nonendorsed Labour candidate for Bermondsey, speaking at the founding meeting of the Labour Committee on Palestine. Palestinian Arabs. Its establishment and continued existence have only been possible with imperialist support - a support given because Israel is the watchdog of imperialism in the Middle East, the servant of its interests, in particular the interests of the dominant imperialist - the United States.

Although this support gives rise on occasion to complications for imperialism in its attempts to relate to the Arab bourgeois and feudal-bourgeois regimes, Israel remains the primary military instrument for maintaining imperialist order and imperialist interests in the Middle East. Imperialism's reliance on Israel is qualitatively different from its reliance on other agencies.

Occupy

Having expelled he Palestinians, and br Liberation Organisation has called for a democratic and secular state in all of Palestine - that is, a unified state respecting the right of all those who presently live there to live side by side with the returning Palestinians as citizens.

This demand deserves support from socialists. But while the PLO leadership - because of its own class interests and because of pressure from Arab regimes and from the Soviet Union - struggles in reality for a bourgeois state and develops consequent strategic and tactical positions, socialists have to point out that the destruction of the Zionist state will necessarily be the task of the oppressed masses under the leadership of the working class, and is prac-