Solidarity For Palestine

A media briefing on Palestine took place yesterday afternoon in COSATU House, Braamfontein. It was well attended. The French in Algeria used to call the kind of action the Israelis are engaged in “rattonade”. This is a term full of racism but is at least a lot more frank than the Israeli colonialists presently are about what they are doing. The Israelis have announced that their actions have no time limit. This much is true. The Israeli actions in Gaza and the West Bank are not “punishments”, collective or otherwise. Punishment in all cases has a limit. Even a death sentence is supposed to be a single and final act. The Israelis cannot stop. Even if they were to drive the all of the Palestinians completely away from their land in a second NAKBA, they would still be compelled to find further victims in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Iran and even further afield. The Israeli colonial state has no other basis than violent and continuous attack. While claiming eternal victimhood, it must victimise, and so it must have victims. It must always find more. The shining towers of Tel Aviv are soaked in blood. Blood is their nature, from which they cannot escape. Their only possible escape would be to peace, but the Zionist entity is incapable of peace. It is in a state of antagonistic contradiction. It must continue to defeat, or it will be defeated. There is nothing else in it. It is often said, and was said again yesterday, that the South African experience might help in Israel/Palestine. We know that colonialism is a relationship of violence that is only maintained by the conscious continuous application of otherwise arbitrary violence. Let there be no dilution of this understanding. The first condition of peace must be the utter defeat of colonialism. This is what we know. What we also know is that it is only a mass democratic movement, both inside the country and outside of it. It exists in Palestine. But if the international solidarity movement does not have a mass and democratic character it will fail to fulfill its part in the necessary anvil-and-hammer-of-peace combination. Yet there are no membership cards on offer, no constitution in view, nor any annual conference or AGM. This is not how it was with the Anti-Apartheid Movement. The AAM was democratic and open to all comers. Its badge was proudly worn by millions, and represented democratic membership and rights, and much more than identity or attitude. It was a token of personal agency. This, also, must not be forgotten. There has to be a mass, democratic movement of solidarity for Palestine, outside Palestine, if any political relief is to be given to the Palestinian people. Yet the illusion still persists that funded NGOs can somehow do the job, in a cheap-and-easy substitution for the difficulties of mass organisation and leadership. NGOs cannot do the job. For the sake of the Palestinian people the south Africans should be saying, from their own experience: you must make this solidarity movement democratic, comrades, or it won't work. Click on this link: Media Statement on Palestine (1643 words)