As Zionists blitz camps DEFEND PALESTINIAN REVOLUTIONARIES

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Palestinians protesting in Beirut against the Sadat talks The campaign to defend the nine Cowley militants against a McCarthyite witchhunt by TGWU officials is The savage racialism and the utterly reactionary nature of the predatory Zionist regime in Israel has been clearly revealed by its 14 March invasion of Southern Lebanon, which marks a sharp new turn in the Middle East situation.

The full-scale invasion is said by the capitalist and proZionist press to be in retaliation' for the Fatah commando raid on 11 March which killed 32 Israelis and 7 commandos.

The retaliation story however is obviously nothing but the flimsiest pretext for a huge military operation which has been planned long in advance.

Detonator

As the mission began, Israeli defence minister Weizman was quite open about its real motive.

"It is true that the carnage 11 March served as a detonator, but an object is to mop up for once and for all the concentrations of terrorists in the South Lebanon who had received important reinforcements in recent months"

The Zionists need to settle matters in Southern Lebanon because this is the only area now left from which the Palestinian liberation forces can operate next to their borders.

Fascist The Zionists' friends in the Arab world, like Hussein in Jordan and Sadat in Egypt have long since prevented Palestinians from using their territory as a base, after bloody battles and many protests.

The Lebanese government, aided by fascist forces and Syrian troops also tried to drive out the Palestinians last year in the most bloody civil war of all.

However, with the support of Lebanese socialists, the Palestinians have remained in South Lebanon, a thorn in the flesh of the Zionists.

Even before the commando raid tensions had been building up in South Lebanon, with fascist and right wing Lebanese militia men crossing the border into Israel, returning with artillery and bombarding Palestinian refugee camps.

Invasion

This set the scene for last Tuesday's full-scale invasion by 30,000 heavily armed troops, huge amounts of artillery and the most sophisticated fighter planes dropping cluster bombs on civilian targets.

Latest reports describe Zionist troops as far as the Litani river, north of Tyre.

The Zionist butchers have destroyed every village and settlement in the border area except those supporting the fascist Falange.

Refugees have been bombed and shelled from air, sea and land as they fled from the area in taxis, broken down lorries or any transport they could find.

There is no doubt that while "liberal' bourgeois throughout the world may blench at these "excesses" of Zionism as they have with each new grab of territory, in the end class interests dictate Mourning Stalin..

WRP on Cowley witch-hunt Deakinism, part two .. that they will always support the "legitimate" state power of the Zionist colonialists The capitalist class must accept all this because the extreme right wing Begin regime is central to their strategy for dividing and suppressing the working class and peasantry of the Middle East -not least the Israeli working class which even as war broke out was engaged in a massive strike wave spurred on by galloping inflation.

Spectre Begin offers nothing Jewish workers To resolve their problems those workers must turn their guns not on the Palestinians in South Lebanon but on Begin and the Zionist exploiters.

The spectre of the independent mobilisation of the Palestinian and Arab working masses also terrifies the Arab bourgeoisie. This is why they have remained deaf to the pleas of PLO leader Arafat for assistance.

As socialists and opponents of all racialism and colonial exploitation we unconditionally support the Palestinian liberation fighters in their justified struggle against Zionism and all its bourgeois allies in the Arab world and internationally.

Incapable

Every kind of moral, political and financial help must be given to them.

But we do not consider it principled to give uncritical support to the means used by the Palestinians to pursue this struggle or to the particular leaderships thrown up at this stage.

The PLO policy of calling on the bourgeois Arab leaders -including even Sadat-is not the way in which Zionism and its allies will be defeated.

These leaders are incapable of waging the Palestinian revolution. The central appeal must be to the Arab masses throughout the Middle East to overthrow these reactionary regimes and come to the aid of the Palestinians.

Nor can the PLO leadership be said to be the sole representative of the Palestinian people, since no Trotskyist believes that such a leadership-however much support it has-can carry out the tasks of the Palestinian national revolution.

Such tasks require the destruction of the racist state of Israel, and carry over into the struggle for social revolution throughout the Middle East, to create a secular Palestine in which religious and racial discrimination is ended.

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