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Recently the UN general secretary Kofi Anan said the Iraq war was illegal. This means that the US and British governments headed by Bush and Blair who have killed tens of thousands of Iraqi people are war criminals, they have to be arrested and put on trial. But now these war criminals are dictating their road map to the Palestinians and the London Conference is a part of their plan. Can these imperialists who have murdered and tortured tens of thousands of Iraqi people for plundering their oil and increasing their control over the Middle East really bring peace for the Palestinian people? Do these occupiers of Iraq, Afghanistan, North of Ireland … really want to end the 57 years of occupation of Palestine? Has the history shown even once that the imperialists can stop exploiting, killing and torturing people and plundering their country? The imperialist road map is not to bring peace and prosperity for the Palestinian people. It is another desperate attempt to derail and crush people’s resistance to strengthen the state of Israel, their military outpost in the region.

In 1969 Israel Prime Minster Golda Meir declared, “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people.” But the reality is that the fierce, courageous, and just struggle of the Palestinian people has made this nation of several million an inspiration for oppressed people worldwide. After the election under occupation the main forces among the Palestinian leadership are trying to diminish that struggle -; struggle that has been waged under very difficult conditions and against vicious enemies. The settler -; colonial state of Israel was established, with imperialist backing, on land stolen from the indigenous Palestinian people. The Palestinians had lived and farmed on the land of Palestine -; including the West Bank, Gaza and the whole state of Israel -; for centuries. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been murdered and millions of Palestinians have been driven from their homes and their country by the genocidal campaigns of the Zionist occupiers backed by the US and British imperialists. Since its establishment by terror Israel has continued to expand through further theft of Palestinian territory. Israel serves as a crucial agent for US Imperialism in the Middle East and other parts of the world, and it receives billions of dollars in US aid each year.

There are many valuable lessons in the story of Palestinian people resistance, qualities that run counter to the interests of vultures sitting in power from Washington to London to Tel Aviv to Cairo. Western commentators try to call this resistance an “obstacle to peace.” By “peace” they mean the total submission of the Palestinian people to Israeli rule and Imperialist domination. This attitude reveals an arrogant, colonialist, racist outlook that has marked the entire history of imperialism in the world and the Israeli state in relation to the Palestinian people. In 1987 the first intifada broke out and in 1993 the US brokered an agreement between the Israeli government and the PLO, an apparent change of direction that mislead and confused many people at that time who believed peace with the occupiers is possible.

During the “peace process” that lasted from 1993 -; 2000 Israeli bulldozers and troops murdered thousands of Palestinians and destroyed thousands of Palestinian housed and often whole villages to make room for armed Zionist colonies in the West Bank and Gaza. Israel then built a spider web of roads to connect these colonies that Palestinians were eventually forbidden to even drive on. The Palestinians were increasingly driven off the little land that remained to them. Even there, Zionists uprooted their hundred year old olive orchards and rub them of vital water. Instead of freezing the influx of settlers in the West Bank, as had been agreed, Israel doubled their numbers. Jerusalem increasingly became a Zionist city in deeds, even though this was suppose to be a subject of negotiations. Using US money Israel imported over a million immigrants from Russia and declared them Jewish. In 2000 the US and Israel in violation of the Oslo agreements asked Arafat to drop the right of Palestinian refugees forced abroad to return to their homes; claims to the lands seized by Zionist settlers; and regaining even a part of Jerusalem. Once again submission to the occupiers proved to be wrong.

When the second intifada erupted Rabin had been shot and Israeli leader Ariel Sharon had staged a provocative visit to a holy site to signal what he considered the final crushing of the Palestinians. Israeli troops moved back to Gaza and took over all of the West Bank, killing more than 3,000 Palestinians since then and jailing about 7,000 more. Also the Zionist state started to construct the Apartheid Wall to fortify its nationwide prison house of the Palestinian people. Long before Arafat died the US and Israel began trying to impose their own favourites as his successors at the head of the Palestinian Authority, the PLO and Fatah. What is particular to Palestine is the continuing importance of Israel to the US’s plans for dominating the Middle East as a strategic keystone to world domination and the unyielding resistance of the Palestinian people. The US with the help of other imperialists was able to dismantle the apartheid white -; Settler State in South Africa, offer a junior partnership in the peoples exploitation to new African rulers. But under today’s conditions, at least there seems to be little possibility that US would consider any restructuring of power relations that involved dismantling much at all of the Zionist settler state that serves as its armed outpost against the Arab people.

Today the Iraqi people are coming to rescue of the Palestinians by waging war against the US occupiers, the same power that stands behind Israel. The Iraqi resistance is currently the biggest obstacle to the US’s plans in the region and the world and to a great extent it is inspired by the Palestinian struggle and connected to it by many threads. In Palestine the elections under occupation and pressure from the US imperialists brought forward politicians who are seeking gains for the people through a partnership with their oppressors, however, a lot more is possible. For a long time Palestinian people have been fiercely struggling for liberation which requires kicking out the occupiers and their imperialist’s masters. An independent and democratic Palestinian state cannot be realised through submission.