authorities will claim it is essential for 'security reasons'. The families' children can only get to school with the help of the Red Cross, and their parents will lose their livelihood when eventually they are forced to move.
Kfar Darom is in fact one of the most controversial settlements, with 15 IDF soldiers killed protecting the illegal settlement recently. Soldiers have now flattened 1.5 sq km around the settlement and are constructing an electric fence around newly confiscated land. Again, the Orwellian term 'security reasons' is used to defend this illegal action.
In 2003, over 3.2 sq km of Palestine was annexed by the Israeli military in the Gaza Strip, then fenced in order to protect and expand settlements. Settlers currently comprise 0.5 per cent of the population of Gaza yet control over 40 per cent of the land.
In the southern Gaza town of Rafah, the IDF has left 75 Palestinians homeless by conducting various attacks against civilians and property since January 16. They completely destroyed a mosque, nine houses, and agricultural land.
This is part of a Likud strategy to clear a Get the Viewpoint! A monthly review of news and analysis from the CAPE TAL large chunk of land along the Palestine/Egypt border in order to create a buffer zone for the IDF. They are also building a road behind the Apartheid Wall in order to facilitate easy access to settlements in the Gush Katif area.
Indiscriminate shelling of the Palestinian Fourth International * 10 issues by airmail for only £30 from International Viewpoint, PO Box 112, Manchester M12 5DW. THE NEXT issue will be a special, focusing on the European Social Forum in Paris in November: JULY'S - still available - was a special double issue with documents from 15th World Congress of the Fourth International (send £5 plus £1.00 p&p) community began at noon on the 16 January. 31 people were forced from their homes by the IDF, with 3 severely beaten. These people were displaced because their community stands in the way of a road that links various settlements to one another:
The next day, soldiers shelled a refugee camp close to the Egyptian border, followed by armoured bulldozers that destroyed the house of a family of 10, without allowing the family to gather any of their belongings. Other refugees in the area are being shelled and shot at as I write. A further 34 Palestinians were displaced on january 17 just south of Rafah. Military bulldozers spent three hours demolishing homes and land. This continues the ongoing Israeli policy of wantonly destroying Palestinian civilian property, a serious violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
General Sharon has intensified his programme of ethnic cleansing with impunity, despite his empty rhetoric about concessions. Though currently under fire at home over corruption scandals, if he does resign polls suggest he will be replaced by the ultraright Likudnite Benjamin Natanyahu, an ideological fascist with an even more extreme and unapologetic approach to Palestine than Sharon.
The stupidly repressive Palestinian Authority (PA) has nothing to offer ordinary Palestinians at a time like this, with Arafat's headquarters under siege and complete capitulation to all US/Israeli wishes. Meanwhile, Arafat has genuine Palestinian revolutionaries imprisoned.
While the PA nominates various right-wing nonentities for the phantom role of 'Prime Minister' of Palestine (there is currently no Palestine to be prime minister of), Colin Powell has stated that the political map of the Middle East and wider Arab world is being redrawn by the US.
Control of Middle East oil is, of course, essential to US hegemony. Empty rhetoric about 'democratizing' the region and protecting human rights disguises the imperialist motives, with the US preparing to control and re-shape the Middle East economically, politically, socially and culturally.
While the mainstream media focuses on Arafat as a figurehead, and Bush/Sharon seem to have decided that Hamas is to be the bogeyman they must destroy in their war on terror, there is also an organized Left in Palestine that advocates a socialist pro gramme - a secular, democratic Palestine that respects all religious beliefs.
Since 1967, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) has been the leading Marxist organisation in the region.
Responsible for the assassination of the arch Zionist tourism minister Rehavim Ze'evi in 2000, the PFLP enjoys the support of a large number of working-class Palestinians due to their rejection of the Oslo Accords and their emphasis on popular resistance
Rather than the extremely centralised and hierarchical form of government favoured by Arafat and Queria, the PFLP create popular structures - local committees to discuss and generally.
The invasion and occupation of Iraq has sharpened many people's awareness of imperialism, with Palestine now finding a new generation of supporters, and far greater media and public attention than ever before.
The old image of the keffiyah-clad terrorist has been replaced by a more sympathetic view, even extending to the support of centrist MPs Jenny Tonge and Oona King. In this climate, it is important that we do not fall into the trap of believing that Palestinians are Jew-hating Islamic extremists.
The Intifada is a broad-based national lib. eration movement that involved women as well as men, atheist and Christian as well as Muslim
It is in fact the secular Left - PFLP and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) - that has the most coherent agenda for a future Palestinian sate. They advocate the Right of Return for all refugees (as agreed by the Palestine National Council in the days when Arafat still had some credibility, and recognizes that any agreement that does not offer a just solution to the refugee question will be abortive.
The Right of Return will have to be the key seeing stone towards a
permanent agreement. With 1.3 million Palestinians living in Israel, a twostate solution is also impractical, not to say undesirable. Socialists in the west would de well to forge closer links with the Palestinian left, and not be seduced by the western media's obsession with various half-baked 'peace plans' from the Zionist "left' nor the blind alley of a UN-brokered two-state deal.
Ahmed Saadat's words from prison eloquently spell out the plight of Palestinians from a socialist perspective
"Our people's quest, like any other people, is a democratic and free society. This democratic state the only state that can produce social and economic development -cannot be led or dominated by the parasitic and comprador bourgeoisie, but by a unity of popular forces that share structural interests in national independence, return to the homeland, popular democracy and economic development.
"This is, simply, our view in the PFLP, and the view of the national, democratic liberation movement."
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Palestine