Socialist Viewpoint

In less than a week, the 53 combat officers and soldiers of the “Israel Defense Forces” that first signed the petition stating their refusal to continue “dominating, expelling, starving and humiliating an entire people,” has more than doubled. (See the text of their statement elsewhere in this magazine.) “We all have limits,” said David Zonshein, 28, a software engineer, who with another lieutenant in his unit, Yaniv Itskovitch, 26, a university teaching assistant, drafted the petition. “You can be the best officer,” and “suddenly you’re required to do things that you can’t be asked to do: to shoot at people, stop ambulances, destroy houses when no one knows who lives in them.”

With the credibility and moral authority that combat veterans command in Israel, the signers of the petition, many of whom have served stints in the West Bank and Gaza, have endowed their act of resistance with more force than might otherwise apply.

It is not possible to over-estimate the significance of this call for the withdrawal of Israeli forces of suppression from the two regions still nominally Palestinian territory. And despite their undiminished commitment to defending continued Israeli Zionist occupation of the rest of Palestine, their action has a logic of its own. It is inherently inconsistent with their implied support of the expulsion of the majority of inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza. The potential consequences of this movement, that has only just begun, are revolutionary. This is why:

Those who have followed the Palestinian struggle against the Zionist assault on their right to live in the land of their birth will remember that in 1968, Yasir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization, (a united front in defense of the fundamental right to national self determination), adopted (and never formally retracted), the goal of a “Democratic Secular Palestine.” That means a Palestine with equal rights for all, Jews, Christians and Muslims, to live in peace and with the right to practice—or not—any religion or other philosophy. That goal opens wide the door for Palestinian freedom fighters to win over the workers of Jewish descent in Israel for a common struggle for social, economic and political justice for all.

That, after all, is what revolutionary socialism is all about.

In other words, the clerical and racially-biased character of the Israeli Zionist state relegates all those who are not of Jewish descent to second-class status or, when it suits the Zionist interlopers, their expulsion from their land, homes and means of livelihood. It’s the strategy of all oppressors and exploiters; i.e., divide and conquer!

But the advocacy of a democratic secular Palestine is its exact opposite; it does not forbid nor exclude from Palestine those of any religion, race, nationality or philosophy. Thus, the struggle for a democratic secular Palestinian tends to remove such artificial barriers to a common struggle by the working class and their natural allies—all victims of capitalist exploitation and oppression—in both the captive and captor nations of the world.

As readers of this magazine are aware, the editors and active supporters of Socialist Viewpoint have consistently supported the struggles of the oppressed against their oppressors at home and abroad. We think that this class struggle outlook is the only consistent and therefore, effective, road to the liberation of all victims of capitalist social, economic and political injustice.

The least that can be said about the Israeli dissident soldiers’ statement is that it is the beginning of a qualitatively new phase in the struggle against the theft of Palestine by the Zionist settler state of Israel. Sharon and his generals know that when their own troops openly declare their opposition to the criminal acts of their own government—especially in wartime—they are in big trouble.

However, the task of uniting the workers in all parts of Palestine for a common struggle for a democratic secular Palestine is primarily the job of our socialist co-thinkers there. The task of this magazine is to promote the active support of workers in the United States against our own capitalist government, without whose military and economic support the state of Israel could never have been imposed on the people of Palestine. And if American aid and support for Zionist Israel were indeed stopped, the Zionist settler state would collapse in short order.