Resolution in Support of the Palestinian Struggle for Self-Determination, Liberation, and Return
Fight Back News Service is circulating the following resolution adopted at the 9th Congress of Freedom Road Socialist Organization.
As anti-imperialists and proletarian internationalists, Freedom Road Socialist Organization supports the heroic national liberation struggle of the people of Palestine to liberate every inch of their land, to secure their rights to self-determination and Return, and to end Zionist Israel's colonization and occupation of all Arab territories. We especially support the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and its revolutionary struggle for a free, democratic, and socialist Palestine!
The people of Palestine have struggled against British and now Israeli colonization, and for justice and independence, for over 100 years, including 74 years since the founding of the apartheid state of “Israel” on May 14, 1948, when over 750,000 Palestinians were forced off their lands in what Palestinians call Al-Nakba (the Catastrophe). And so, we join the people in Palestine, Palestinian refugees in exile, and the entire Palestinian diaspora worldwide in honoring the Palestinians who have been killed and martyred in the decades of ethnic cleansing by Zionist Israel's military occupation, one of the most brutal in history.
As communists in the U.S., we call for the end of all U.S. imperialist aid to criminal, racist, white supremacist, apartheid Israel, including all financial, military, diplomatic, and political support. U.S. aid to the apartheid state amounts to nearly $4 billion per year, and this must end immediately.
We recognize the ongoing Palestinian resistance as critical, not only in liberating the people of Palestine from imperialist-backed occupation, apartheid, and brutality, but also as part of the ongoing effort for united forces in the MENA region — such as Iran, Syria, and the popular forces of Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen — to challenge imperialism more broadly.
As of May 2022, over 4,650 Palestinians — including 170 children — are detained in Israeli prisons. Six hundred of them are being held without charge for months at a time under the illegal policy of administrative detention. We demand the release of all Palestinian political prisoners, including Ahmad Saadat, the General Secretary of the PFLP.
We demand the cessation of Israel's racist war crimes against the Palestinian people, including its killing and injuring of Palestinian civilians; its continued 15- year-long-and-counting siege and blockade on Gaza; its collective punishment policies of home demolitions, mass arrests, the imprisonment of children, and restrictions on movement characterized by over 700 military checkpoints in the occupied Palestinian territories; its ethnic cleansing and seizures of homes in Sheikh Jarrah and other neighborhoods of Al-Quds (Jerusalem), Al-Khalil (Hebron), and elsewhere; and its raids on refugee camps like Jenin, Balata (near Nablus), Dheisheh (near Bethlehem), and others.
We condemn Israeli suppression of journalism that exposes the true nature of Israeli apartheid, including the recent assassination of world renowned Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. We call for an end to Israeli attacks against Palestinian sites of cultural and religious importance, including the now-yearly raids on Palestinian Muslim worshipers at Al-Aqsa mosque in Al-Quds, and the recent repression against Palestinian Christian worshipers at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. We also call for an end to Israel's criminalization of Palestinian civil society and resistance organizations, as well as its attacks upon, and assassinations of, the popular leadership of the Palestinian national liberation movement.
We support the National Program of the Palestinian people, originally developed by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO): the right to self-determination; the Right of Return for all Palestinian refugees and their descendants, to the homes and land from which they were exiled in 1947-48, and again in 1967; and an end to Israeli colonization and illegal military occupation of all of historical Palestine, including the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Jerusalem, the 1948 Palestinian territories currently called “Israel,” the Syrian Golan Heights, and the Lebanese Shebaa Farms.
We echo the call from progressive forces in Palestine and the Arab world for an end to official Arab government normalization with Zionist Israel; for an end to U.S. and Israeli attacks and threats against Syrians, Hezbollah and the Lebanese, Iranians, Yemenis, Somalis, Iraqis, and others; and for the establishment of a single, democratic, secular state in all of historical Palestine with Al-Quds as its capital.
From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!