Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) supports the Palestinian people and their resistance against Israel’s criminal theft of Palestinian lands, expulsion of the Palestinian people, undermining of Palestinian rights, and brutal assault and siege on Gaza. The steadfast people of Palestine have struggled for many decades for self-determination and independence, especially since the founding of the state of “Israel” on May 14, 1948, when over 750,000 Palestinians were forced off their lands in what the Palestinians call Al-Nakba (the Catastrophe).
First and foremost, as communists in the US, we call for the end of US imperialism’s military, diplomatic, political, and financial (over 4 billion tax dollars per year) support of the terrorist state of “Israel.” We demand that the borders of Gaza be opened immediately. Gazans are living in a virtual prison with almost no access to the outside world. Malnutrition is rampant, the unemployment rate is astronomical and health care and education operate under impossible conditions.
We rose in protest with millions of people around the world when the 1.5 million people of Gaza endured the full might and terror of the Israeli military machine for 27 days beginning on December 27, 2008. This brutal bombing resulted in 1325 Gazans killed, 5000 more injured, 4000 homes destroyed, and over 100,000 left homeless.
Yet despite this Israeli terrorism supported by the US, it was not able to defeat the Palestinian resistance, which remained strong and unified and included all the national liberation forces—the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Islamic Jihad, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), Fatah, Hamas, and others.
We call for the immediate dismantling of Israel’s hundreds of settler colonies, the 600 kilometer-long Apartheid Wall, and the thousands of military checkpoints; and an end to illegal collective punishment in the form of home demolitions, forced removal of Palestinians from their homes, the closure of entire Palestinian villages and cities, and military-imposed curfews.
We demand the release of all the heroic Palestinian political prisoners, especially administrative detainees, and including Ahmad Saadat, the General Secretary of the PFLP.
We support all of the Palestinian resistance forces and their armed struggle against the Israeli Occupation and colonialism. We support the Palestinian national liberation program —self-determination; Right of Return for all Palestinian refugees and their descendants, to the homes and land from which they were exiled in 1947-48 and again in 1967; full independence and equality; and an end to the illegal Israeli occupation of historical Palestine and other Arab lands, including the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Jerusalem, the 1948 territories (present-day “Israel”), the Lebanese Shebaa Farms, and the Syrian Golan Heights.
We support the establishment of one democratic, secular state in all of historical Palestine with Al-Quds (Jerusalem) as its capital. Finally, we especially salute the PFLP, our comrades in the International Communist Movement, and uphold its revolutionary leadership of the struggle for a free, democratic, and socialist Palestine!
FRSO condemns the outrageous Israeli attacks on the Free Gaza flotilla on Sunday May 30, 2010 killing at least 16 people, all Turkish nationals. We call for demonstrations at Israeli consulates in every city in the U.S. to demand the U.S. cut all ties to Israel.
