On December 9, 2017 close to one thousand people rallied outside the United States of America Consulate in Toronto, and many more demonstrated in cities around the world, to protest the decision to move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. The following is a statement by Socialist Action Canada on the occasion.
“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
This has been a resounding slogan of the Palestine solidarity movement for decades. It is central to the campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against the Zionist apartheid state. The homeland of the Palestinian people is under occupation, but it is indivisible.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of the State of Israel is a crude provocation. But it is consistent with the strategy of U.S. imperialism and its allies in Ottawa, London, Paris and Berlin to bury Palestinian aspirations in the carnage of occupation and ethnic cleansing.
It will not succeed. Wave after wave, the Palestinian intifada demonstrates that the two-state solution is an illusion, that apartheid Israel is a death trap for the Jews, and that the Arab and Muslim regimes across the Middle East and beyond are complicit in genocide.
Around the world today protests are demanding “Hands Off Jerusalem” and call for an intensification of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel, the cat’s paw of imperialism in the Middle East.
“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
While we condemn Washington’s policy, its cultivation and funding of the Zionist economy and military, we should also target our own government in Ottawa and the Canadian ruling class. They have profited from the misery of the Palestinian people for generations, under the cloak of fraudulent ‘diplomacy’ and hypocritical posturing.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland condemned the progressive, democratically-elected government of Venezuela, but not the electoral fraud in Honduras last week, nor the coup in Honduras in 2009. They condemn Russia and Syria, but not the reactionary regime in Kiev, Ukraine. They participate in the NATO build-up across Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia, but do not openly criticize Trump’s policy on Israel, on North Korea, on Cuba, or anything else. They do not denounce the repression by Spain of the people of Catalonia who demand self-determination. And Canadian police continue to participate in the foreign occupation of Haiti.
Finally, it is necessary to insist that the stance of the labour-based New Democratic Party on all of these issues is unacceptable. NDP policy will be challenged at its federal convention in Ottawa, February 16-18, 2018. Socialists and labour activists demand that the NDP break with NATO, support BDS, and fire NDP Foreign Affairs Critic Helene Laverdiere immediately.
Most of all, remember that the fight is not exclusively in Parliament. It is primarily in the streets. Solidarity forever. “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
Barry Weisleder,
Co-editor, Socialist Action newspaper