socialist www.socialistresistance.net The bloody conflict that has broken out between Hamas and Fatah in Gaza and the West Bank will be music to the ears of the Israelis, the US and the EU.
They have worked might and main to isolate, blockade and undermine the Hamas government elected in 2006, and to strengthen the hand of the discredited and corrupt Fatah wing of the Palestinian movement, and its President Mahmoud Abbas.
The fighting that culminated in the Hamas victory over Fatah in Gaza -followed swiftly by brutal Fatah reprisals A grey deputy for Brown: But Respect misses its chance pages 2-5
against Hamas support and facilities in the West Bank - has now opened the possibility for US and EU aid to flow solely to their chosen faction in the West Bank, while further tightening the noose around Hamas and the civilian population in Gaza. For the Israeli regime this split in the ranks of its main opponents gives an opportunity to weep crocodile tears for the innocents caught up in the situation while celebrating fresh opportunities to isolate "extreme" Palestinian forces -and even cultivate a new, pliable
Media Freedom in Discussion ROJA pages 16-17
into a hopeless ghetto. work, and the ending of the army.
No. 46 Summer 2007 "moderate" Palestinian leadership.
The confrontations between Palestinians in Gaza are the direct consequence of the Israeli occupation and the transformation of the Gaza Strip
The only way out of the crisis is the reestablishment of the basic rights of the Palestinians, the immediate release of all the prisoners, freedom to travel and bombardments and the assassinations perpetrated continuously by the Israeli
Ecological Laggard state pages 10-11
A viable perspective for the Palestinian people requires the total withdrawal of the Israeli occupation forces and the evacuation of all the Israeli settlements on Palestinian land.
Socialists must also demand that the European Union, and in particular the British government, intervenes to stop the Israeli aggression, and begins again an honest co-operation with those elected to government in Palestine.
This is the only way the EU could help in practice to unblock the present tragic situation in Gaza and the West Bank.
page 2 of the scan
CWU Member Delegates at the Communication Workers Union Conference stood and cheered when the results of the Royal Mail and Post Office pay ballots were announced.
The membership rejected management's below inflation 2.5% pay with strings offer by 3-1 majorities on a turnout of over 66%.
It is now likely that the first national strike action in Royal Mail and Post Office for 11 years will take place, unless the company backs down from its hard line stance.
There are few signs that management will back down because the dispute is fast becoming a trial of strength with a still strongly organised workforce in the context of the government sponsored programme of postal liberalisation, automation and privatisation - all of which directly threaten up to 40,000 jobs and pay and conditions.
As the CWU puts it in a letter to Royal Mail managers, as far as management is concerned the workforce is *25% overpaid and 40% under worked."
Management's proposals includes an end to Sunday and Bank holiday collections, and major reductions in nightshift and overtime working.
Cuts in overtime hit postal workers hard because basic hourly rates are so low - about 28 an hour, with many working sixty hours a week or more to make a living wage.
Additionally Post Office management is closing over 2000 LOCAL Post Offices and franchising 85 Crown Offices without an agreement with the CWU.
Strike action is looking likely despite the WU Postal Executive stated intention of avoiding industrial action if at all possible, but management is belligerent.
Industrial action tactics have not yet been decided but all out indefinite action has already been ruled out, which is premature in front of a management which has few inhibitions in the tactics it is likely to use.
Offers of support have been forthcoming including that of Mark Serwotka's PCS General Secretary to coordinate public sector action.
This should be accepted and built on.
Gordon Brown will publicly maintain a hands off approach, while privately supporting Allan Leighton and Adam Crozier to the hilt.
He will see any dispute as an opportunity to allay any remaining City and Blairite fears that he may be a soft touch for the unions.
However a determined campaign can win. While competition is eating into the most profitable parts of the business, Royal Mail still handles 99% of letter deliveries for example. The inauguration of Gordon Brown and his new deputy leader at the end of June will close a period of relatively heightened debate and slightly more openminded analysis of the state of working class politics in Britain.
But it also represents yet another boat missed by the routinist and blinkered leadership of Respect, who have continued sleep-walking through the process.
The organisation which once set itself the task of building a broad political alternative to the left of Blairism has failed to seize this one-off opportunity.
It has missed a vital chance to raise its profile and present itself as a credible way forward to those considerable sections of the Labour and trade union left who had staked their hopes on a campaign around John McDonnell to rekindle dreams of "reclaiming" the Labour Party.
True, McDonnell himself was brought on to Respect platforms, and formal support was proferred to his campaign, for what that was worth: but the fact that the Labour leadership process was not even on the agenda at Respect's National Council meeting on May 12, and the relish with which leading delegates at that meeting predicted McDonnell's campaign "dead in the water", and pronounced for the umpteenth time the demise of the Labour Left, betrayed their underlying indifference to the political task of winning the best of that left to Respect.
Suggestions from Socialist Resistance supporters at that meeting just weeks after its very successful interventions in a number of council seize this one-off opportunity. elections) that should produce new, targeted, campaign material, preferably a hard-hitting and political tabloid paper, designed to intervene in the Labour leadership and deputy leadership debates and hustings and in the trade unions, were ignored.
So were suggestions of meetings and other initiatives which could raise Respect's profile and credibility as an alternative. The National Council does not meet again until September.
This failure to respond is no accident. It reflects the exceedingly limited objectives set for it by the decisive political force inside Respect, the SWP.
Remarkably, Respect's officers have decided that
itself is "too narrow" an organisation to focus the intervention of the SWP at the National Stop the War march that has been called on June 24 outside The organisation which once set itself the task of building a broad political alternative to the left of Blairism has failed to the Brown inauguration in Manchester.
Worse, SWP members working in Respect Manchester, following this approach, have redoubled their efforts to ensure that the organisation does not even produce a local campaigning tabloid for distriGalloway: "aspirations" for left have been contemplating their navels since the local elections, other organisations have been taking initiatives to reach out to the disoriented Labour Left and raise some form of political debate - without the slightest flicker of response from Respect.
Compass, a leftish-centre conglomeration of Labourite academics, MPs, commentators and pundits, signed up over 1,000 people to national conference "shaping our global world" on June 9, a debate firmly within the "reclaim Labour" framework. It was allowed to pass without challenge by Respect, which has no equivalent level of political