Zionist Regime

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'S ONLY R TREACHERS TEMPORARY. LOX RURGERI FINANCE YOUR PHANTOM The months of May and June have seen an important new stage for the two regimes in the Israeli state and the territories occupied since 1967.

There have been important developments in the scale of Palestinian resistance, in the political aims of the Begin government and in the efforts of the imperialist powers to defuse the conflicts in the area.

The recent train of events can be traced back to the Palestinian guerrilla attack on a group of loyalist settlers in the town of Hebron on the West Bank on 2 May.

This has been the most well publicised but by no means the only example of increasingly intense Palestinian resistance activity in the occupied areas.

Israeli army patrols were shot in East Jerusalem on 10 June and in Bethlehem on 22 June.

Bomb attacks

On 25 June an agent of the Israeli security police was killed by members of the Palestinian Popular Front in circumstances that remain unclear.

Daily bomb attacks occur throughout the occupied territories and other forms of resistance include the soning of military vehicles and erikas Ei shops and schools.

What brought about this net upsurge in resistance? In part at least it has come from the crisis in the Zionist regime itself which is going through its mos testing time 27m= : 3= state was set up m 1945.

Durine the 19:0: 13e BUT... in the fortunes of Israel's once invincible army and the subsequent election of the ultra-right Begin government brought new problems for the Zionist state.

The same level of support from abroad could not be relied upon to prop up the economy and keep the military supplied.

Amongst other manifestations of the economic crisis, inflation has crept up to the rate of 130% per annum in recent months.

Disillusionment with the ideals' oi Zionisa bas gran.

-2#W2:323 The regime to 08 r been 177:05 52: I=2 MAZI lishment of new Jewish settlements in the more recently occupied areas of the West Bank.

There are now said to be 92 settlements in this area with 20,000 inhabitants.

Many of the people in these settlements come directly from the US or Britain and have little in common with those, including Jews, who have lived in the area for generations. The Gush Emunin movement of settlers takes its ideolo= on elerat sigpens s: the BARE RAN WEST BANK CHIPS Euphrates and whose leaders are among the only Jews ever to be detained by the Israeli authorities.

Some of their leaders formerly ran the notorious Jewish Defence League in the United States and were almost certainly behind the large cache of explosives recently found in a theological college in Jerusalem and probably intended to blow up a Mosque.

The settlers have 330 sympathies i =2= 2. seems o: the army with the ai the Gush Emunin Set and probably with • What is clear is that Begin cannot escape blame for the terrorist attacks on the West Bank.

The attempted murder of 3 West Bank mayors on 2 June and the actual mutilation of two of them could not have been carried out without help from within the military establishment.

These attacks go hand in hand list measures of official repression ranging from the closure of newspapers to the blowing up of houses and blocking up doors and windows with concrete.

One particularly macabre action of the Israeli forces was to forcibly close a group of shops where the Palestinian flag had been seen and paint the word 'closed' in Hebrew on the outside.

Such measures can only be compared to what the Nazis did to the Jews themselves in earlier generations.

As Mayor Shaka of Nablus said after his legs were blown ott, this "will expose Israeli policy of racialism against us"

'CORRECTION

IN LAST week's Sariulist LE ICE 5203d Fi a TO DES ETE the Durban industrial area involving around 8,000 workers) while the mine strike (involving around 4,500 workers) took place near Johannesburg.

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