Middle East

A letter sent to the Israeli Finance Ministry, pleading for help for the poor and disabled who attend a help centre in Israel. It highlights the plight of an ever growing layer of poor in Israeli society.

Yesterday, March 29, we received this statement from the Abnaa elBalad movement in Israel. Their leaders are still in prison “awaiting trial” and have now started a hunger strike to protest at the terrible conditions they are having to suffer.

More than 20,000 people participated today in the central Land Day Demonstration - 'Yowm al Ard' in Arabic - (marching from the Palestinian village of Sakhnin to Arabeh), protesting against the land confiscations, house demolitions, the arrest of the leadership of the Islamic movement and of the Abnaa elBalad movement, the Occupation, the Apartheid wall and the assassinations of Palestinian leaders.

This morning's criminal killing of Shaikh Ahmad Yassin, leader of Hamas, in Gaza, on the partb of the Israeli military will only serve to provoke more terrorist attacks on Israel. It will make the hellish spiral of tit-for-tat suicide bombings followed by state repression even worse. The Palestinian and Israel workers will be the ones to suffer. Only the working class on boths sides can offer a way out of this nightmare.

Sharon’s proposal to “withdraw” from Gaza do not represent a step towards a solution to the conflict in the Middle East, but rather hide manoeuvres on the part of the Israeli government. It is a cynical game played out at the expense of both the Israeli and Arab masses.

The idea of a bi-national state solution has become fashionable among some circles in Israel/Palestine. Yossi Schwartz in Jerusalem explains that on the basis of capitalism, with unemployment, bad housing, low wages and discrimination, neither the two-state nor the single bi-national state proposals can work. The only solution can be found within an overall Socialist Federation of the Middle East.

Yesterday’s bomb attacks in Iraq have brought the plight of the Iraqi people back into the attention of the whole world. It reminds everyone of the terrible mess that the US-UK war against Saddam Hussein has provoked. Iraq was no threat to anyone. That has been abundantly demonstrated now. So what has been achieved?

Things are going from bad to worse for the occupying forces in Iraq. As the guerrilla insurgency intensified, US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld arrived in Baghdad to check things out “on the ground”.

Today the International Court of Justice in the Hague has opened its hearing on the legality of Israel's wall that has been built in the last few months in the occupied West Bank and would leave Palestinians isolated in enclaves in only part of the West Bank. Let us make no mistake about this wall, what the government of Israel is doing is basically building Ghettos for the Palestinians. These walls should come down.Yet the question is how and by whom? And this question is related to other questions: Can we get justice in the Hague?

We have received signatures to the petition against the harassment of Abnaa elBalad from four Members of Parliament in Pakistan, and also from Mexico and the USA.

We have received this letter from Mordachai Peargut in Israel, a working class pensioner, who reflects on the state of Israel, the Middle East and the manoeuvres of US imperialism.

We have just received information about the arrest in Israel of the General Secretary of the Abnaa elBalad movement, Comrade Muhammad Kana'ane, of the central committee member Comrade Husam Kana'ane and the editorial secretary of the elJeel elJadeed magazine Comrade Sahar 'Abdu. We are asking our readers to sign this statement demanding their release.