International Communist League            

                                                                                                                                                                                                                

   Workers Vanguard No. 1114

  30 June 2017 The closing date for news in this issue is 27 June.

   Workers Vanguard skips alternate issues in June, July and August. Our next issue will be dated July 28.

      

      Fifty Years of Occupation

Palestinians Under Israeli Jackboot

For a Socialist Federation of the Near East!

Only months after the June 1967 Six-Day War and Israel’s seizure of the Palestinian Arab lands in the West Bank and Gaza (as well as the Syrian Golan Heights), the first Zionist settlement was up and running in the occupied West Bank. In the 50 years since, the number of settlers has soared to over 750,000. The so-called Green Line, Israel’s pre-1967 border, has been replaced by a concrete “separation barrier” built on confiscated Arab land. Between this monstrous ghetto wall and the Jordan River, more than two and a half million Palestinians struggle for survival. Almost all of them are crammed into 40 percent of the West Bank, where they are surrounded by military checkpoints and fortifications, divided by Jewish-only highways and subjected to unceasing brutality at the hands of soldiers and fascistic settlers. 

 Another two million Palestinians are confined to a living hell in the tiny Gaza Strip. After Israel removed its small settler population there in 2005, Gaza was turned into a free-fire zone for repeated massacres by the Israeli military. These have amounted to collective punishment against the people of Gaza for the 2006 electoral victory of the Islamist Hamas over Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction, which maintains control of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank. A draconian Israeli blockade, enforced with the assistance of Egypt, ensures that the population remains destitute, overwhelmingly reliant on international aid packages and denied any possibility of rebuilding bombed-out housing and infrastructure. 

 Emboldened by the Trump White House, what was already the most right-wing government in Israeli history is now further strangling the Palestinian populations of Gaza and the West Bank. In early June, the Israeli government sharply curtailed the supply of electricity to Gaza’s residents, who will now have only two to four hours of electricity a day. The electricity cut was reportedly requested by Abbas’s Palestinian Authority in order to undermine Hamas. This request is only the latest in a long line of betrayals of the Palestinian people by the PA, which is widely despised and rightly seen as little more than the Zionists’ overseers in the West Bank. The political bankruptcy of the PA has driven many Palestinians into the arms of Hamas, a reactionary, anti-woman and anti-Jewish outfit. 

 On the eve of a visit to Israel by Trump’s “peace envoy” (and son-in-law) Jared Kushner, the Netanyahu government brazenly announced that it was beginning construction of a new settlement outside Ramallah, the first one in 25 years. Previously, successive Israeli governments have euphemistically described the massive settlement construction as merely expansion of existing settlements. Now even that flimsy cover has been dropped. Hands off Gaza—Down with the starvation blockade! All Israeli troops and settlers out of the Occupied Territories! (read on)               Latest Postings

           · Workers Vanguard No. 1114

 · Ο Μπολσεβίκος Τεύχος 2, Απρίλιος 2017

 · Stop Deportation of Claudia Rueda!

 · Loi spéciale de Couillard : dictature des capitalistes

 · No vote to Labour! 

 · On Manchester bombing 

 · Victoire aux ouvriers et ouvrières de la construction!

 · Kahrolsun Türk politikacılarına konulan konuşma yasakları!   Türkiye: Troçkistler “Referandumda Hayır de!” dedi

 · Spartakist Nr. 216

 · Workers Hammer  No. 238

 · Spartacist Canada No. 191

 · ¡Por lucha de clases contra la prisión española de los pueblos!

 · Ireland: Victory to the bus workers strike! 

 · Spartacist South Africa No. 14

 · 중국과 북한을 방어하라!

 · Le Bolchévik nº 219

 · Spartacist South Africa Supplement    Revisionist Minority Splits from SSA   The Fight for a South African Section of the ICL 

 · Déclaration de la Ligue trotskyste sur l’attentat raciste de Québec

 · Trotskyist League Statement on the Racist Attack in Quebec City

 · ¡Abajo el gasolinazo! ¡Libertad inmediata a todos los detenidos!   ¡Romper con el PRD y el Morena burgueses!    ¡Por un partido obrero revolucionario! 

 · Australasian Spartacist No. 230

 · Brexit: Ήττα των Τραπεζιτών και των Αφεντικών της Ευρώπης!

 · Το Αποτυχημένο Πραξικόπημα της Τουρκίας:   Και οι Δύο Πλευρές Άσχημα Νέα για τους Εργάτες

 · Espartaco No. 46 

 · 레온 트로츠키의 영구혁명 이론의 발전과 확장

 · Australasian Spartacist No. 229

 · Os operários não têm lado no impeachment do Brasil

 · Precz z wyrokami sądowymi przeciw komunistom!

 · Spartaco n. 79

 · 『スパルタシスト』38号

 · Крым является русским   Бюллетень Спартаковцев, Приложение N°22

 · İlkeler Ve Bazı Program Öğeleri Bildirisi

 · !دافعوا عن ليبيا ضد الهجوم الأمبريالى

 · مصر: انتفاضة جماهيرية تتحدى الدكتاتورية

 · Militant Strike Wave in China (Chinese)

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        Latest Archival Postings 

         · Back Bound Volumes of Spartacist (English edition),  Workers Vanguard and publications of the   Prometheus Research Library now available in PDF and other formats  on archive.org

 · Spartacist South Africa No. 13

 · Spartacist South Africa No. 11, Winter 2014 

 · Spartacist South Africa No. 10, Spring 2013 

 · 중국 기형화된 노동자 국가에 대하여 무조건적인 군사적 방어를! (2008)

 · 우리는 러시아 혁명의 당이다 (2008)

 · 『スパルタシスト』33号—35号

 · Διακήρυξη Αρχών και Μερικά Στοιχεία Προγράμματος   Διεθνής Κομμουνιστική 'Ενωση (Τεταρτοδιεθνιστική) (2000)

 · Η ίδρυση της Τροτσκιστικής Ομάδας της Ελλάδας   Για ένα Λενινιστικό κόμμα στην Ελλάδα!   Για μία Σοσιαλιστική Ομοσπονδία των Βαλκανίων! (2004)

                                   About the ICL

                                           The International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) is a proletarian, revolutionary and internationalist tendency committed to the task of building Leninist parties as national sections of a democratic-centralist international. Our aim is the achievement of new October Revolutions—nothing else, nothing other, nothing less. The ICL bases itself on Marxist historical, dialectical materialism and seeks in particular to carry forward the international working-class perspectives of Marxism developed in the theory and practice of the Bolshevik leaders V. I. Lenin and L. D. Trotsky and embodied in the decisions of the first four Congresses of the Communist International as well as key documents of the Fourth International such as the Transitional Program (1938) and "War and the Fourth International" (1934). We also look to James P. Cannon, a leader of the early American Communist Party who was won to Trotskyism and went on to become a principal founder of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), working in close collaboration with Leon Trotsky. The origins of the ICL are in the Spartacist League/U.S., which began as the Revolutionary Tendency in the SWP and was bureaucratically expelled in 1963. Our ICL "Declaration of Principles and Some Elements of Program" was modeled on the Declaration of Principles adopted at the 1966 founding conference of the SL/U.S.

 Adopted at the Third International Conference of the ICL in early 1998, the declaration presently exists in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, German, Russian, Polish, Italian, Turkish, Indonesian, Greek, Korean and Tagalog. In this post-Soviet period, marked by a deep regression of proletarian consciousness, we continue to be guided by Trotsky's statement that "the task of the vanguard is above all not to let itself be carried along by the backward flow; it must swim against the current." Reforge the Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution!