Fight back News Service is circulating the following Sept. 3 statement from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)

PFLP mass march and military rally in Gaza upholds resistance, salutes Palestinian steadfastness

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in Gaza City organized a mass rally and military march with thousands of cadres, members and supporters of the Front and hundreds of fighters with the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades. The event came in celebration of the victory of the Palestinian people in Gaza in the recent aggression, and in commemoration of the 13th anniversary of the assassination of Abu Ali Mustafa, General Secretary of the PFLP, on August 27, 2001, by a US-made missile fired by the Zionist airforce into his Ramallah office.

Marchers carried Palestinian flags, PFLP banners and resistance images from the region and around the world, saluting the Lebanese resistance and Latin American nations and people who stood consistently with Palestine.

Comrade Jamil Mizher, member of the Political Bureau and leader of the PFLP’s branch in Gaza, saluted the masses of the Palestinian people who defined the meaning of resistance and struggle as they confronted the Zionist war machine, its genocidal massacres and systematic destruction, killing and displacement of thousands.

He saluted the Palestinian people on behalf of imprisoned General Secretary Comrade Ahmad Sa’adat, the Deputy General Secretary, Abu Ahmad Fouad, and Comrade Khalida Jarrar, the PFLP leader and member of Parliament resisting the unjust expulsion order against her in Ramallah.

Mizher said that the “legendary steadfastness of our people and their valiant resistance which continued for 51 days, has made a strategic change in the Arab-Zionist struggle and has raised our political and military approach to a new level, despite the siege and the destruction of the Zionist aggression by land, air and sea.”

He saluted the over 2143 martyrs whose blood was shed on the road to victory, led by the leaders Mohammed Abu Shamala, Raed al-Attar, Mohammed Barhoum, Daniel Mansour, Salah Abu Hassanein, Shaaban Dahdouh, Zakaria Abu Daqqa, and comrade fighters of the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, Mahmoud Osama Abbas Abu Omrein and Abdul Rahman Hadayed. “The arms of the resistance will remain directed at the occupation and any attempts to remove them will fail and will not succeed,” said Mizher.

He pointed to the important role of the prisoners in the Israeli jails, always on the front lines confronting the occupier, pledging to dedicate all efforts and resources to free them from the occupier’s prisons.

He noted that this achievement “after 51 days of pain and pride…comes alongside the memory of the 13th anniversary of the martyrdom of…Comrade Abu Ali Mustafa. Today, we emphasize that the Palestinian people remain committed to the principles and objectives to which he dedicated his life to achieve, and for which he paid dearly. He believed…in the inevitability of victory over the criminal Zionist enemy and that the path of resistance is the only way to sweep the occupier from every inch of our land.”

He saluted growing international solidarity with Palestine around the world, saluting those who “filled squares in Europe, North America, Latin America..and South Africa,” saluting the governments of Latin American nations, including Venezuela, Cuba, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia, who took official actions to break with the occupier.

Mizher noted that “This battle fought in the Gaza Strip was a battle of the Palestinian people everywhere under the slogan of the unity of the land, the people and the cause, in Gaza, Jerusalem, Ramallah, Haifa, al-Khalil, the Galilee, and every village and every camp, in the homeland and in diaspora, a struggle for freedom, independence and return…on the road to the strategic solution, the establishment of a democratic Palestine on the entire Palestinian national soil.”

Mizher emphasized, in conclusion, that this is a historic opportunity, created by the sacrifices, steadfastness and courageous resistance of our people, and the only option is to march forward, with national unity and resistance, to defeat the occupier.

Comrade Abu Jamal of the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades spoke, urging the importance of the unified resistance front in achieving “the victory in this battle as a milestone on the path to liberation.” The Brigades emphasized that the resistance is ready for any battle and that it will not be broken and will continue, so long as the enemy remains on Palestinian land.

Abu Jamal noted that the Brigades lack faith in the concept of truce or ceasefire, and will never cease resisting until the Zionist occupation is uprooted.

He saluted the fighters who showed such bravery and caused severe losses to the occupation special forces, in Rafah, Gaza, Beit Hanoun, Shujai’ya, Khan Younis and throughout the Strip. The Brigades saluted the brave Palestinian people for their steadfastness, and all the people of the world who stood with the just Palestinian cause.

#GazaPalestine #GazaCity #PopularFrontForTheLiberationOfPalestine #Palestine #PeoplesStruggles #PFLP #ElFrentePopularPorLaLiberaciónDePalestinaPFLP #MiddleEast

The statement relates the Israeli solider was captured “during the recent operation carried out by the Brigades east of At Tuffah neighborhood, east of Gaza City, which killed 14 soldiers and wounded more than 50, including the commander of the Golani Brigades.” The Golani Brigade is an Israeli infantry group that is well known for committing war crimes.

The statement from the Ezzedeen Al Qassam Brigades also noted, “This operation came as a response of killing more than 480 Palestinian civilians and wounded more than 3200 due to Israeli attacks on Gaza residential districts.”

On July 21 Ezzedeen Al Qassam Brigades told of a another successful battle. “The Israeli patrol was ambushed by Al Qassam members in Ash Shuja’iya neighborhood east of Gaza city, the Qassam members clashed with them from zero point, killing 10 soldiers and wounding 30 others.”

Another resistance group that has been battling the Israeli assault on Gaza is the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and its armed wing the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades. According to a statement from the PFLP, on July 20 members of the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades “infiltrated and engaged occupation forces at the Rafah airport area and confronted them with a variety of weapons including four ‘107’ type missiles,” and they targeted “enemy artillery east of Shuja’iya at 12:45 a.m.”

Also on July 20, Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah, of Lebanon, pledged to stand with the Palestinian and the people of Gaza. Al –Manar News reports, “In a phone call with Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal, Sayyed Nasrallah said Hezbollah and the Lebanese resistance will support the Palestinian Intifada and resistance, with all their hearts, willpower, hope and destiny.”

According to Al-Manar News, “Sayyed Nasrallah also contacted the leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad Movement, Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, where they discussed the developments on the battleground in Gaza, including field conditions and political advances.”

#GazaPalestine #AntiwarMovement #Palestine #Israel #Hamas #Hezbollah #SoldierEzzedeenAlQassamBrigades #ShaulAaron #GazaCity #AbuAliMustafaBrigades #MiddleEast

Fight Back News Service is circulating the following Dec. 7 statement from the Popular Front of the Liberation Palestine (PFLP)

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine marked the 46th anniversary of its founding with a mass rally in al-Katiba courtyard in Gaza City, with tens of thousands of participants, including leaders, cadres and members of the Front, women’s, student and youth organizations, with the participation of representatives of the national and Islamic forces.

Large images of the General Secretaries of the Front – the founder, George Habash (Al-Hakim), Abu Ali Mustafa, and imprisoned General Secretary Ahmad Sa’adat – adorned the banner at the front of the stage, as well as the image of national martyrs and leaders Yasser Arafat, Fathi Shikaki and Sheikh Ahmad Yassin.

Banners were draped on the walls, calling for Palestinian national unity, and resistance, and saluting the Front’s history over 46 years. Performers played national Palestinian and PFLP songs and danced dabkeh, traditional Palestinian dance.

Comrades Hani Thawabteh and Shireen Abu Oun chaired the rally, at which Comrade Jamil Majdalawi delivered the keynote address. He saluted the martyrs, the prisoners, and the masses of Palestinians at home and in exile, particularly those in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria facing continued repression and new displacement, and to our people in the Naqab who are confronting the Prawer plan, the new Zionist scheme to displace Palestinians.

Majdalawi said that over the years, the harvest of the Palestinian national movement has not reached the great sacrifices or the goals of our people, and all of our forms of resistance have been weaker than they should be and can be, which only exacerbates the imbalance of power in favor of the Zionist enemy.

He described internal Palestinian division and lack of national unity as devastating to the Palestinian movement. In addition, the Palestinian Authority’s return to the dangerous and futile negotiations with the Zionist enemy in open rejection of Palestinian national consensus is particularly damaging.

Instead of negotiations, what is needed is resistance in all forms and the implementation of our people’s rights to return, self-determination and national liberation, Majdalawi said.

He saluted the ongoing steadfastness of the Palestinian people, which will be what secures the victory of our people over the criminal enemy. He particularly saluted the steadfastness of our people in Jerusalem, the capital of Palestine, in all of its forms to confront the enemy and its continuous plans. Support for the struggle of our people is growing inside and outside Palestine; hundreds of international activists confront soldiers and illegal settlers beside the steadfast Palestinian people and various levels of political, cultural and economic struggle are taking place around the world.

Majdalawi highlighted the ongoing siege on Gaza which is denying access to the most basic necessities including food, medicine, building materials and fuel, causing an electricity crisis in the sector, and transforming the area into a massive prison due to the ongoing, prolonged and repeated closure of the Rafah crossing, the only exit for the Palestinians of Gaza to the outside world. This comes in addition to mass unemployment and the drinking water crisis, attacks on fishers at sea, and the retreat in services by the UNRWA, when refugees are over two-thirds of the population in Gaza.

Majdalawi said that there is a decline in the grip of the United States over international affairs, and this weakening of the leader of imperialism and injustice in the world will necessarily mean an increased weakness in the enemy camp that supports and sustains the Zionist aggression on our people, emphasizing that the US is still the primary economic and military power in the world and that there are long years of struggle to come by the people and exploited classes of the world to defeat imperialism and achieve justice and equality.

On the Arab level, Majdalawi expressed support for the democratic process in Tunisia and the importance of protecting pluralism in Tunisia, warned of the dangerous exclusivity taking place in Egypt that must be discarded in favor of pluralism and democracy for all, and expressed his standing with the Syrian people in the struggle for a united Syria, with democratic freedoms and equal rights for all Syrians and their political and social forces without discrimination, in addition to our stand against external interference which aims to destroy the potential of the country’s future and sink the country into the morass of obscurantism, as supported by the U.S. imperialists and their allies.

Majdalawi announced that the Front has just completed its seventh national conference. Several historic leaders of the Front have stepped down from their positions and did not put their names forward in the elections at the conference, in order to support renewal in the organization and to prevent ossification and bureaucracy, including comrades Abdel Rahim Mallouh, Younis al-Jalou, Abdelaziz Abu Al-Qaraya and himself, Jamil Majdalawi.

He concluded by calling for progressive and democratic Palestinian forces to come together to build resistance and unity and mobilize the people towards victory.

#Palestine #GazaCity #PopularFrontForTheLiberationOfPalestine #PeoplesStruggles #PFLP #MiddleEast

Israel’s propaganda machine could not disguise the fact that the assault was meant to crush the Palestinian resistance. Targeting the whole of the Palestinian people, approximately 1350 Palestinians, including over 300 children, were killed in the attacks, with over 5000 more injured. Over half of the injured were women and children.

Millions of people across the world rose in protest against Israel’s massacres and war crimes. The Israelis were left scrambling to defend their atrocities, but were not able to, even with the continued military, diplomatic and political support of the U.S.

The mass Arab and international popular movements united around the world, including hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Americans here, taking to the streets in passionate support for the Palestinian people. The governments of Bolivia and Venezuela cut diplomatic ties with Israel, expelling Israel’s ambassadors from their respective capitals.

The Palestinian Front and Resistance

As analyzed in Fight Back! News Service in February of 2006, Hamas won the majority of seats in the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) elections of January 2006. Soon after, Israel, the U.S. and the European Union refused to acknowledge the victory and imposed a political blockade on Hamas and its appointed Palestinian Prime Minister, who, according to Palestinian law, was empowered to form a unity government arrangement with elected Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas.

Later, in June 2007, after an internal battle between Hamas and Abbas’s Fatah movement supporters, Hamas took power in Gaza, prompting Israel to immediately impose a military siege on the Strip, closing the borders and restricting the entry of food, medicine, medical supplies, fuel, electricity and other essential items needed for the Gazans’ survival.

Both the blockade and Israel’s breaking the ceasefire with the Palestinians on Nov. 4, 2008 are acts of war. The Palestinian resistance to Israel’s offensive is a legitimate response to an illegal military occupation in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank that has continued unabated since 1967. Israel’s unilateral declaration of the current ‘ceasefire’ is a sham, as elements of its ground forces remain in Gaza and the siege has not ended; nor have the border crossings, particularly at the Rafah border with Egypt, been opened. Tons of humanitarian goods have been sent back by the Israelis and Egyptians, most notably a delivery from Iran and a ship from Lebanon that also carried former U.S. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney.

Israel’s unilateral ‘ceasefire’ also signifies that its military was not able to defeat the Palestinian resistance, which was strong and unified and included all the organizations that constitute the Palestinian national liberation movement – Hamas, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Islamic Jihad, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), Fatah and others. It also signifies that Israel’s political goals of fostering internal Palestinian division – to impose an acceptance of Israeli apartheid and occupation on the Palestinian people – was defeated as well.

This unity in resistance must translate into a political unity. So, although there are Egyptian-mediated talks between Hamas and Fatah planned, neither organization can lead the Palestinian people alone and their battle for control of the Palestinian polity can only weaken the Palestinian cause.

The Palestinian people insist that its representative should be a national unity formation, one that truly represents all of the Palestinian social sectors and resistance forces. led by a reformed and reconstituted Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

The Arab Front and ‘Normalization’

The summit of Sharm el-Sheikh (an Egyptian resort town) in late January, attended by Europeans and some Arab regimes, represents a threat to the entire Arab people and is a an attempt to revive colonialism in the Arab world. There, the discussion of European ‘monitoring’ of the Egyptian-Palestinian border proves that there is no sovereignty either in Egypt or in Gaza and that these European imperialist powers are trying to impose their hegemony on the Arab peoples.

Mouin Rabbani, a contributing editor to the Middle East Report magazine, dismissed the significance of the summit, according to Aljazeera English. He said the leaders talked about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza as if it had been caused by an earthquake, adding, “I’m speechless, that you can, in 2009, have a major international gathering to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and have a whole series of keynote addresses, in which the word ‘occupation’ isn’t mentioned even once.”

In addition, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is talking about a “new Middle East” – one, for all intents and purposes, that does not challenge his and the other reactionary Arab leaders’ attempts to ‘normalize’ relations with Israel. As Mubarak explained to the Egypt State Information Service, normalization “simply means that there will be no restrictions whatsoever on cooperation in any area.”

Over the past 15 years since the failed Oslo Peace Accords, this ‘cooperation’ has manifested itself in Egyptian, Jordanian and Saudi pressure on the Palestinian Authority to liquidate the armed Palestinian resistance by arresting resistance leaders in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and engaging in ‘security talks and coordination with the Mossad (Israel’s intelligence and special operations agency) and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

The Israeli Front

In Israel the ultra-right-wing is definitely on the rise. As this analysis goes to press, Israeli President Shimon Peres has asked Likud Party leader Benjamin Netanyahu to form the next Israeli unity government, after the recent Israeli elections saw the rightist Likud and the center-right Kadima Party neck in neck in Knesset (Parliament) seats won.

But since neither party was close to the 61 seats needed to secure the position of Israeli Prime Minister, both were falling all over themselves to unite with the virulently racist and anti-Arab Yisrael Beiteinu Party, which won 15 seats and is led by Avigdor Lieberman. Lieberman is a former member of the outlawed Kach Party, whose founder, Meir Kahane, advocated the forcible expulsion of all Palestinians from all of historical Palestine.

Now, Kadima’s leader, Tzipi Livni, claims that she is uninterested in joining any government that she does not lead, stating she “would not serve as a fig leaf for a government of paralysis.” But before Peres chose Netanyahu over her to form the new government, she “boasted of her close ties with Lieberman and their long acquaintanceship, presenting him as a legitimate politician and desirable partner in a future coalition led by her,” according to the editorial page of Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Haaretz also reports that Netanyahu has promised to initiate legislation to deprive Palestinians of their citizenship and other rights in the 1948 territories, in support of Lieberman’s stance that all Palestinians who live there must sign a loyalty oath to Israel.

Netanyahu must also bring Shas, the ultra-Orthodox Sephardic party, and several smaller religious parties (that all also have anti-Arab platforms), into his coalition government to secure the 65 seats that he guaranteed in his negotiations with Peres. These developments indict the oxymoronic ‘Jewish democratic’ state of Israel.

Palestinian-Israeli ‘Peace’ and the Lessons of Gaza

Finally, the recent elections in Israel and the Gaza War have proven the utter futility of the PA’s ‘peace negotiations’ with Israel, which have continued under the auspices of, and under pressure from reactionary Arab regimes and the ‘quartet’ (U.S., Russia, European Union and the United Nations). Most of the Palestinian resistance forces have rejected these negotiations, stating that peace is a mirage while Israel continues its military occupation of the Gaza Strip, Jerusalem and the West Bank, and while Israel detains over 11,000 Palestinian political prisoners and expands illegal Jewish-only settlements.

The Gaza War has established that Israel is not indomitable The Palestinian armed resistance is still alive and well. The vast majority of the Palestinian people support the resistance as a means to end the occupation, to secure the Right of Return for all Palestinian refugees and their descendants and to achieve freedom, independence and a lasting peace for all the people in the region.

#Palestine #GazaCity #Analysis #PopularFrontForTheLiberationOfPalestine #Resistance #PLO #MiddleEast