by Tom
Barrett
This article, written for the most part in late March and early April 2002, when the Israeli assault on the West Bank first began, has been updated to include coverage of events through mass demonstrations in solidarity with the Palestinian people in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and elsewhere on April 20.
At the end of March, the Israeli government launched all-out war against the Arab population of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Leading this action was Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who is known to Palestinians as the “butcher of Sabra and Shattila.” (In September 1982, Sharon supervised a massacre of a thousand or more Palestinian civilians at the refugee camps of Sabra and Shattila near Beirut. Although the killers were mainly right-wing “Christian” Lebanese militia, allies of Israel, it is common knowledge among Palestinians that Sharon guided and directed the killing).
This
same Sharon, in September 2000, provoked the current round of violence with
his high-profile intrusion at the al-Aqsa mosque on Temple Mount (al-Haram
ash-Sharif; one of the world’s most sacred sites for Muslims). The so-called
al-Aqsa Intifada, the current uprising of the Palestinian people, dates from
that time.
Now,
in 2002, Sharon has sent his troops in massive force into the cities of the
West Bank, even surrounding the Palestinian Authority (PA) compound in Ramallah
and imprisoning PA President Yassir Arafat inside. Using the pretext of the
suicide bombings carried out by Arab fighters, for the most part members of
militant Islamic groups, such as Hamas or Islamic Jihad, Sharon has attacked
the entire Palestinian Arab people and its elected leadership (of which Hamas
and Islamic Jihad are not a part).
The
Bush administration has in fact acquiesced to Sharon’s brutal aggression,
despite verbal demands that Israel withdraw “right now”—and despite the
much-publicized “peacemaking” trip of Secretary of State Colin Powell to North
Africa, Europe, and the Middle East in April.
The amount of U.S. military aid to Israel that is publicly acknowledged adds up to more than $3 billion annually. There are “legal” grounds for stopping that aid immediately, because U.S. helicopters, fighter planes, and other military equipment provided to Israel are illegally being used against innocent civilians. But there are powerful and influential forces within the U.S. ruling class who are committed to backing the Israeli government regardless of its crimes against humanity. Only a powerful worldwide mass movement can stop this heinous alliance between the military superpower of the world and the Israeli regime, which in the Jenin Palestinian refugee camp has behaved little differently from the Nazi forces that obliterated the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw during World War II.
Some members of the Bush administration,
including Secretary of State Powell and National
Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, apparently hold the view that the U.S. has a compelling material
interest in encouraging peace and stability in the Israel-Palestine region,
especially at a time when no country has the military power to seriously
challenge U.S. hegemony, whether in the Middle East or anywhere in the world. They
apparently believe that the potential for profits for U.S. big business would be
greater in a peaceful Arab world. In the years following the 1993 Oslo
agreement, investors from Europe, other Middle Eastern countries, and even the
United States were developing an economic infrastructure for a future
Palestinian state that would fit in with the “globalized” world economy
oriented toward the production of profits for multinational corporations and
financial institutions, the huge concentrations of finance capital that, behind
the scenes, dominate most major developments in today’s world.
Powell,
Rice, and the corporate decision-making forces they speak for, recognize that
the Arab allies of the U.S. government rest on a precarious social base. They are historically
vulnerable to broad social mobilizations like those that have arisen in
reaction to the current ferocious Israeli offensive against the Palestinians.
The possibility of an all-out Middle East war, into which most Arab states might
be drawn in spite of their dependence on Washington, is now something that
policy makers in Washington have to take seriously. In such a war Washington’s
Arab allies, such as Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, could become its enemies.
The flow of petroleum to the industrialized world could be disrupted. And the
use of horrific weapons — even nuclear weapons — can never be ruled out. Aside
from the United States there is only one country involved in this crisis which
is known to possess nuclear weapons. That country is Israel.
After
seeing the images of Israeli tanks storming into Ramallah, Bethlehem,
Qalqiliya, and the largest Palestinian city, Nablus; after reading the reports
of Israeli snipers firing on Red Crescent volunteers attempting to evacuate
wounded Arabs; after hearing the amazing lies from the lips of Sharon, his
foreign minister Shimon Peres, and his right-wing rival Benjamin “Bibi”
Netanyahu; after seeing the bulldozing of houses with living people inside and
the other genocidal crimes at Jenin, it is chillingly apparent that the state of Israel is capable of virtually any level of violence.
Powell
and Rice are reportedly opposed within the Bush administration by Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, both unreconstructed Cold
Warriors. Ariel Sharon is their type of leader, a military man with an
old-fashioned colonialist mentality. Since the September 11 attack on the World
Trade Center, Rumsfeld and Cheney’s views have tended to prevail within the
administration. Fareed Zakaria, writing in the April 29, 2002, issue of Newsweek,
reported that when Bush himself made a shift in policy, called on Israel to
withdraw from the West Bank, and sent Powell to the region to mediate, “the
Defense Department and the vice president’s office…declared war on the
president’s policy…They recommended that the president stop issuing statements
supporting the secretary. Congress jumped in, with Democrats and Republicans
falling all over themselves to side with Ariel Sharon rather than George W.
Bush. The Christian right and the neoconservatives lobbied the White House
nonstop, denouncing the Secretary of State while he was meeting foreign
leaders.”
A
New Level of Lies
The
things that Sharon and other Israeli leaders — most especially Netanyahu — have said to justify
this new military onslaught are so dishonest and so far removed from reality
that it provokes a deep sense of outrage from anyone who has even the slightest
knowledge of the situation And American government leaders are uncritically
echoing the lies coming out of Tel Aviv.
One
hears nothing from U.S. government officials or from the mass media in the
United States to remind us of how this latest round of violence started. The
spokespeople for the U.S. ruling class have attempted to make us forget how the
“peace process” was derailed in September 2000. In the months since the
destruction of the World Trade Center towers in New York the media have been
for the most part successful in promoting this amnesia about the events since
September 2000. It is truly ironic that they are getting away with putting the
blame on Arafat, when Arafat has offered significant concessions to Israel — at
great risk to himself and to his authority — to bring about a compromise which
can put an end to the bloodshed. The concessions he has offered have never been
completely acceptable to the Palestinian people as a whole, and thousands of
Palestinians have turned away from Arafat’s leadership to the more militant
Islamic nationalist groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. And yet the Israeli
leaders argue that Arafat is to blame for all the “terrorism” being carried out
against Israel.
Israeli Provocations
The
current wave of Palestinian protest and struggle was not caused by a decree
from Arafat or anything of the kind. It began when Sharon staged his deliberate
provocation by trespassing on al-Haram ash-Sharif (known to Israelis as the
Temple Mount), the third holiest Islamic site on earth (after Mecca and
Medina). At that time the Israeli “Labor” government and its prime minister,
Ehud Barak (himself an army general), were on the verge of reaching a
compromise with the Palestinian Authority. Whatever the details of that
compromise might have been, there is no question that had a peace agreement
come about, there would have been a renewed momentum toward the establishment
of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. During the years
since the Oslo accords of 1993 Arab and international businesspeople, as we
have said, have been building the economic infrastructure for such a state, and
Arafat, with the support of the U.S. government and of Arab governments of the
region, has been building the political infrastructure.
Sharon
was determined to put a complete stop to any and all progress toward an
independent Palestinian state, and he knew that he could provoke violence that
would discredit Barak’s attempts to come to a compromise with the Arab people.
It is an unfortunate reality that a majority of Israeli Jews — with the
exception of a courageous but small minority — have responded positively to
racist leaders like Sharon, who reject any compromise or any notion of equality
between Jew and Arab in the land of Palestine. Sharon, whose lust for power is
well known, saw an opportunity to defeat the Labor Party and become prime
minister. And of course that is exactly what happened when elections were held.
And today a power struggle is going on within Sharon’s Likud bloc, with Netanyahu attempting to
outflank him on the right, as difficult as that might seem.
For Zionism, Peace Is a Danger
The
truth is that the greatest threat to the state of Israel — that is, to the
exclusively Jewish state which denies equal rights to non-Jews, including the
right of non-Jewish refugees to return to their family homes — is peace with
the Arab and Islamic world. The establishment of a viable Palestinian state
could not be, and never has been, a direct military threat to Israel— as though
any small Third World country could threaten this garrison state whose armed
forces are among the world’s most powerful.
However,
a condition of peace would inexorably bring to the fore the internal
contradictions in the state of Israel. Israeli society would then have to
directly confront these underlying contradictions, without the permanent
diversion of an “external enemy.” Absent that, the inherent possibility of
pragmatic convergences between the Arab and Jewish working classes in struggle
against their common exploiters in the Zionist state will always be fermenting
somewhere in the background.
The Zionist leaders regard this potential class-based differentiation within Israeli society as a threat. And so they relentlessly pursue their expansionist drive toward the borders of “Eretz Israel” (a “Greater Israel” extending into Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, a long-term goal of the more extreme Zionists). The Zionist project has always, even before the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948, relied on the specter of Arab violence, both real and imaginary, to politically steel and discipline the Jewish masses in this colonial-settler state.
Significantly,
the proportion of the Arab population, both Muslim and Christian, within
Israel’s pre-1967 borders has risen to 20 percent. Palestinians within Israel,
and even Jews who have emigrated from Arabic and African countries, are second-class citizens
in every way. The clear parallel is to the apartheid system in South Africa
before 1994. If there were peace on Israel’s borders, it would be very
difficult to continue to justify the discrimination against this significant
minority within Israel, and even more difficult to suppress the inevitable
struggle for basic civil rights that Arabs have already begun within the “Green
Line” (the borders of Israel before its 1967 occupation of the West Bank, Gaza,
and the Golan heights). That internal struggle for equal rights and full
democracy would explode if there were external peace.
Those
Israelis who are unashamed of their racism say openly what they fear: the Arab
birth rate is significantly higher than the Israeli Jewish birth rate. And it
is true. Unless the Arabs are driven out of Israel, either by force or by
making it so unpleasant to stay that they voluntarily emigrate, it is only a
matter of time before Arabs outnumber Jews in the “Jewish state.” Again, one
needs only to consider pre-1994 South Africa to understand how unviable such a
society is. And it is important to remember that white South Africans have
lived in that country since the 1600s, while the Zionist project for colonizing
Palestine arose only in the late 1800s, before World War I, when the European
colonial empires were still at their height.
And
yet, Israeli society depends on its Arab minority to do work that for
the most part Israeli Jews are unwilling to do. In fact, there are not enough
Arabs within the pre-1967 borders to work at all the lower-paying jobs in
Israel. For the past three decades, Israel has depended on labor from within
the Occupied Territories as well as from the Arab minority within Israel. Each
day thousands of Arabs commute from the West Bank and Gaza to jobs in Tel Aviv,
Haifa, and other Israeli cities. When the borders are closed, it is a hardship
not only to the Arabs who are denied access to their jobs, but to Israel, which
is denied the services of the Arab workers. (Recently the Israeli state has
experimented with importing low-paid workers from China and other poor
countries, but the results of such programs have been negligible.)
The Lie about “Terrorism”
During
the Congressional hearings following the attacks on the World Trade Center, Benjamin Netanyahu began spreading
another ominous lie, which is being used as the justification for Israel’s
assault on the West Bank and Gaza. This is the lie linking the Palestinian
struggle with the Taliban and the al-Qaeda network, and linking the Palestinian
Authority and its president, Yassir Arafat, with terrorism. Netanyahu was quick
to seize on the opportunity to use the September 11 events as a pretext to
threaten the Palestinian people — of course, under the guise of attacking the
“terrorist” leader Yassir Arafat. Today Israel has gone from threats to actual
aggression, but the justification remains as false now as it was six months
ago.
In the
thirty-four years since Palestinian fedayeen (“resistance fighters”) held
off Israeli troops at the village of Karameh in the West Bank, a battle which
made the entire world take notice of the Palestinian Resistance, Yassir
Arafat’s views on individual terrorism have been clear: he has rejected it.
However, his power over the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and later
over the Palestinian Authority, has never been an absolute monarchy. The PLO
was a coalition of different resistance groups, and some, most notably the
General Command faction of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine,
carried out airline hijackings and other acts of individual terrorism. Arafat
and his al-Fateh organization rejected this strategy, focusing instead on
guerrilla warfare and even conventional warfare to bring about the goal of liberating
Palestine — and in those early years that meant all of Palestine.
However, he could not then, nor can he now, control the actions of all
resistance fighters.
For
many years now, the Arafat leadership has in fact not been leading but trying
to keep up with the Palestinian masses. The first Intifada, or popular
uprising, of 1987–90, with its militancy and the creativity of its methods of
struggle, caught the PLO leaders by surprise. The influence of the Islamic
groups, such as Hamas, was as strong on the ground as the PLO’s, even though
Arafat has remained the symbolic leader, much as Nelson Mandela was the
symbolic leader of the South African struggle, even though he was imprisoned
under harsh conditions at Robben Island.
Today,
the second Intifada, the spontaneous eruption of outrage following Sharon’s
provocation on al-Haram ash-Sharif, is in no way controlled by Arafat or any
other leader. It has been a genuine outpouring of the anger of the Palestinian
masses at an attempt by one of the most racist of Israel’s leaders to humiliate
them. And the Israeli — and American — leaders well know that Arafat or any
other leader can be easily swept aside if the people perceive his attempts at
compromise as a surrender. Bush and Sharon are aware that Arafat has already
come dangerously close to conceding more than the Palestinian Arab masses are
willing to tolerate. For them to accuse him of being the “obstacle to peace” is
as monstrous a lie as can be imagined in this situation. And people are dying
because of it.
The Suicide Bombers
In the waning months of 2001 a number of young Palestinians sacrificed their lives carrying their response to the Israeli violence to the civilian population of Israel. With high explosives strapped to their bodies, they have blown themselves up along with those in their immediate vicinity. Scores of Israelis, both civilians and police, have died as a result of these desperate actions. It is clear that as long as the occupation continues, no one will be safe. There is, in the state that was founded on the reactionary and pessimistic premise that Jews could not live in peace and security anywhere else in the world, no Zionist sanctuary. One can be at a pizza parlor, a video arcade, a supermarket, it doesn’t matter: one can die in a flash of flame and a blizzard of broken glass. The young Arab martyrs have carried the violence to the heart of Israeli society. It is a measure of how desperate the Palestinian Arab people have become that the best and brightest of their young men — and now young women as well — are willing to give up their lives for their nation. In spite of plans to marry, to attend university, they see no other way to fight back except this one. The people of Palestine, and of the Arab and Muslim world at large, regard them has heroes and heroines.
In
1939 the exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky wrote a passionate defense of a young Jewish
terrorist, Herschel Grynszpan, convicted of
assassinating a Nazi official: “We Marxists consider the tactic of individual
terror inexpedient in the tasks of the liberating struggle of the proletariat
as well as oppressed nationalities. A single isolated hero cannot replace the
masses. But we understand only too clearly the inevitability of such convulsive
acts of despair and vengeance. All our emotions, all our sympathies are with
the self-sacrificing avengers even though they have been unable to discover the
correct road…In the moral sense, although not for his mode of action, Grynszpan
may serve as an example for every young revolutionist. Our open moral
solidarity with Grynszpan gives us the added right to say to all the other
would-be Grynszpans, to all those capable of self-sacrifice in the struggle
against despotism and bestiality: Seek another road! Not the lone
avenger, but only a great revolutionary mass movement can free the oppressed, a
movement that will leave no remnant of the entire structure of class
exploitation, national oppression, and racial persecution.” (“For Grynszpan,”
February 1939)
Of course, the political situation in
Palestine today is not exactly parallel to that of Europe threatened by Nazi
expansion. To the Arabs of Palestine there is not a sharp counterposition
between the mass struggle in the streets and the individual acts of violence
carried out by the youth. It is understood that a people who do not have tanks
and jet fighter aircraft use whatever weapons are available to them. In the
complicated situation in occupied Palestine today the bombings are terrifying
and demoralizing to the Israeli population. It is clear to many Israelis, now
more than in the past, that they are facing an enemy who is not afraid of
death. And even more frightening: the massive military forces that Israel has
sent into the West Bank are not effective against the resistance fighters. For
every young Arab killed there are many others to take her or his place. The
Zionists are confronting the reality that in spite of military superiority, they
cannot win. The more houses they demolish, the more Arabs they kill, beat,
imprison, the deeper the Arabs’ anger becomes. The more force they unleash, the
more hatred they inspire, and the longer the violence will continue. The deaths
of these beautiful young Arab men and women are truly tragic, a great loss for
Palestine. Yet their courage and dedication are examples to the world.
A massive worldwide movement of
solidarity with the Palestinian people is urgently needed to stop the killing. And there has been great progress recently in that
direction. Not only have huge mass demonstrations filled the streets in the
Arab and Muslim world (a million people in Morocco, for example) but also in
Italy, in mid-April, 200,000 demonstrated in support of the Palestinians, and
reportedly 100,000 in Paris and 100,000 in London. On April 20 in Washington DC, 75,000 or
more came out in the largest pro-Palestinian demonstration ever in the
United States. Organizers of the demonstration
claimed 100,000. On the same day, in San Francisco, another huge crowd marched
in support of the Palestinians—reports on the size of that demonstration varied
from 20,000 to 50,000.
A
worldwide movement in solidarity with the Palestinian people continues to grow. The
so-called “anti-globalization movement” (which
should more rightly be called a “global
justice movement”) saw 70,000 people gather in
Porto Alegre, Brazil, this January to proclaim “another world is possible” —
that is, a world no longer dominated by capitalist injustice. Many people in
that movement, including such leading figures as the French farmer José Bove, have
helped form the International Solidarity Movement and have put their bodies on
the line, suffering arrest and brutalization by Israeli troops and police, in
an attempt to protect the Palestinian victims of Israeli aggression. Noam
Chomsky, speaking in Porto Alegre, observed that a new International is being
created. From Argentina (whose population today is in the vanguard of the
international fight against the rule of world capital through the IMF and World
Bank), a clear message of support was sent to the Palestinian people by a
leading force, the Partido Obrero. (See the statement from their newspaper on
the Labor Standard web site).
This
is the aim, the cause, and the method that young Palestinian fighters and
fighters for justice everywhere need to link up with and build into a mass
movement that can change the entire world.
Who Can Come to the Aid of the People of Palestine?
Possibly
the most tragic thing about the young martyrs is that many Palestinians see
their actions as the only remaining weapon that can be used against the
pitiless oppression of the state of Israel. The entire world should be outraged
at this situation and demand that immediate steps be taken to defend the people
of Palestine. There have been many calls for international intervention by
peace-loving and well-meaning people throughout the world; most, however, have
been misguided, for most of them have called on the United States or the United
Nations to step in and mediate between the two sides. The reaffirmation by
President George W. Bush of virtually uncritical support for Israel (he calls
Sharon a “man of peace”) shows that the U.S. government cannot be trusted in
any way to help ensure justice for the Palestinian Arabs. The United Nations
cannot be trusted either. In the face of Israeli objections the UN withdrew
from sending a commission merely to investigate the Israeli massacre in
Jenin.
In today’s conflict between Israel and
the Palestinians what is needed is clearly far more than just the
continuing, desperate,
and isolated Palestinian resistance. What is
needed is unity and action throughout the world
against Israeli aggression.
In
mass demonstrations throughout the Arab and Islamic world people are
proclaiming without equivocation that aggression against the Palestinian people
is aggression against all Arab people. In 1973, in response to similar
mass pressure, the Arab states, led by Egypt’s Anwar el-Sadat, launched a
surprise attack against Israel. They did not win a military victory, but the
result was markedly different from the abject defeat they suffered in 1967, and
it forced the United States to treat the Arab world with respect. Ultimately
the U.S. brought Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Sadat together at
Camp David, where Israel agreed to give the Sinai Peninsula back to Egypt.
Besides
the military strike against Israel, the Arab states effectively used the weapon
of an oil boycott against the United States. As American motorists waited hours
for gasoline that had more than doubled in price, some began to realize that
the injustice perpetrated against the Arab people has inevitable consequences
for all of us. The policy makers in Washington had no choice but to recognize
that unchecked Israeli aggression had negative consequences for the U.S., both
internationally and domestically.
In
early April this year, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak decided to sever nearly
all diplomatic ties with Israel. That should have been a wake-up call for the
Bush administration. The message is: it can happen again. The war in the West
Bank can engulf the entire region, threatening the flow of oil to the
industrialized countries, the United States first and foremost. For that
reason, the administration seemed to make a shift of policy in April. Bush has
repeatedly called on Israel to withdraw from the West Bank cities without delay
(though taking no action to enforce this call). He dispatched Secretary of
State Colin Powell to the Middle East to meet with Israeli and Palestinian
leaders, but the trip produced no results aside from giving the appearance that
the U.S. government wanted to promote peace.
The
State Department historically has drawn most of its senior personnel from the
oil industry and for many years has been the least pro-Israel of all the
executive departments in Washington. Colin Powell is widely reported to be the
least pro-Israel member of Bush’s cabinet. Bush’s decision to send him to
attempt a diplomatic solution is clear evidence that the U.S. government is
seriously concerned that the current war could widen to involve Egypt, Jordan,
and Syria, and maybe additional countries as well. That could prove to be a
disaster for U.S. foreign policy and for the world economy.
As we
have said, massive street demonstrations have erupted in all the major cities
of the Arab world. The Arab masses are demanding that their governments take
action in defense of Palestine. And they are right. They are saying, “The time
for denunciations is over. It is now time for all the states of the region to
say to the young Palestinians: you must live. Instead of your martyrs’ deaths,
we will meet the Israelis’ tanks with our tanks, their fighter jets with our
fighter jets, their missiles with our missiles. Israel will have to fight on
all its borders, and this time the world knows why we fight: we fight against
Israel because Israel occupies our land.”
The
Israeli military forces are formidable; of that there is no question. Even more
so, the ominous presence of the Israeli nuclear arsenal hovers over all events
in the Middle East. However, the seeds of its destruction are already
germinating within. Over a thousand young Israelis, for whom military service
is compulsory, are refusing to take up arms against the Palestinians in the
Occupied Territories. They are facing not only judicial repression from the
Israeli government but social ostracism by their own people, who in their
majority support the racist oppression of the Arabs. But right and reason are
on their side, and as courageous Israeli Jews stand up against the cruelty of
their own government and join together with the Arabs who live within Israel’s
pre-1967 borders (about twenty percent of the population), they can strike a
blow for peace far greater than one might expect, even though today their
numbers are small.
Mubarak,
Jordan’s King Abdullah, and other Arab League leaders have made it clear that
they share the desire of the U.S. government and U.S. corporations to stabilize
the Middle East in the interest of capitalist profits. Indeed, the oil barons
of the Western world would not have permitted them to remain in office if they
did not. The entire history of the Middle East since World War I is more than
sufficient testimony to that. Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah has made a proposal,
to which the Arab League has agreed, to make a generalized peace with Israel if
the Zionists are willing to withdraw to their pre-1967 borders. Powell has
responded positively to the Saudi initiative. There is virtually no possibility
that Israel will agree to it, but it shows the Arab states’ willingness to
compromise, and it could be a basis for negotiation. Even Sharon and Netanyahu
understand that Israel cannot ignore its patrons in Washington. Will the U.S.
government exercise its influence on the Israelis to make them pull back from
the brink?
Throughout
the world — in Europe, in Latin America, in Islamic countries, in the United
States, and even in Israel itself — people who believe in justice and aspire to
peace are taking to the streets demanding that Israel end its occupation of the
Palestinian territories taken by force in 1967. We need not give advice to
George W. Bush or Ariel Sharon, or even less to Yassir Arafat, how to make
peace. Only one demand is appropriate: End the Israeli occupation! Allow a
Palestinian state to come into being! This we must demand, without conditions.
Those of us in the United States must demand that our government cut off all
aid to Israel. No weapons, no money for occupation.
A
Palestinian state will not be the final victory. It will not bring about
lasting peace and justice. But it is an important step along the way. The
struggle will take many forms in the future, and it is likely that a nonviolent
mass civil rights movement may play a major role, as it did in South Africa.
The methods of struggle must be and can only be decided by those on the ground,
fighting day-to-day for their liberation.
Today
the future for the beleaguered Palestinians seems bleak. Death and suffering
are their daily companions, and the Israeli tanks and guns are everywhere. And
yet there is hope. Israel is today more internationally isolated than ever
before in its history. The Arab governments, under pressure from their own
populations, are threatening a wider conflict, raising serious concerns within
the American government and ruling class. It is our responsibility to take to
the streets to demand that the rulers of our country end their support to the
state of Israel.