Palestinians vow to liberate West Bank

More than 10,000 armed members of Hamas marched in Gaza City on Sept 18. Carrying assault rifles, Qassam rockets and anti-tank missiles, the marchers were cheered by hundreds of thousands of supporters.

This action was a political challenge to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who has demanded that all militias be disarmed and says Israel will not allow elections to happen if Hamas takes part without disarming. Elections for the Pales tinian legislature are scheduled for Jan. 25, 2006.

The demonstration was the largest armed Palestinian protest ever held. It was also the first time that commanders of Hamas’s armed wing have made a public appearance. For years Israeli forces using high-tech surveillance, drones and helicopter gunships have hunted down and assassinated many hundreds of Pales tinian militants and leaders.

The demonstration came one week after Israel completed the evacuation of its forces from the Gaza Strip, ending 38 years of military rule in the impoverished territory. Twenty-one Israeli militarized settlements were evacuated. The Sept. 12 departure of Israeli forces was followed by a salvo of Palestinian rockets aimed at southern Israel.

The Israeli pullout from the Gaza Strip and its removal of the settlements is seen as a victory for the armed and steadfast resistance of the nearly five-year Intifada, or uprising. Consciously omitted from the U.S. corporate media’s celebration of Israel’s “disengagement,” however, is the reality that all of Gaza’s borders, the sea, and even the airspace above the Gaza Strip remain under Israeli occupation, leaving the Palestinian people still under daily siege.

The Gaza Strip is desperately poor and densely populated. Over 1.3 million Palestinian people were packed into a thin strip of land 5 miles wide by 25 miles long. More than half the population are refugees of past Israeli expropriations.

Under a policy initiated by Ariel Sharon and supported by every Israeli administration for the past 23 years, militarized settlements were placed on the most desirable land of Gaza. Industries, farms, food-processing facilities, schools and shops were built, along with elaborate homes and gardens. These settlements are fin anced by billions of dollars of U.S. aid and political support.

Although only 8,000 Zionist settlers actually resided in Gaza, more than 30 percent of this densely populated strip of land was seized to build specialized roads, checkpoints, security perimeters, military bases and guard towers. Over a million Palestinians lived in prison lock-down conditions to accommodate the few settlers. An ever-widening swath of land and homes was constantly bulldozed in efforts to break Palestinian resistance.

Nevertheless, the militarized enclaves could not be secured and Israel was finally forced to withdraw.

Since the Israelis’ departure the border between southern Gaza and Egypt, much of it a formidable wall, has finally been opened after being under Israeli control for decades. Palestinians celebrated by tearing down sections of the wall. Thou sands moved back and forth across the border visiting and shopping.

In the confusion, new arms were quickly smuggled in to aid in rearming and further developing the defense capabilities of the Palestinian militias that had organized years of resistance.

Israel demanded that Egypt secure the buffer zone. But the 750 Egyptian officers who were deployed there did not stop the many thousands of Palestinians and Egyptians from crossing through holes, some blasted by militants.

Resistance in West Bank

Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza is an effort to further intensify its hold on the West Bank, also seized in 1967. About 210,000 Israelis live in settlements on the West Bank; a quarter million live in areas of Jerusalem and environs annexed by Israel in 1967.

As in Gaza, these Palestinians can at any time face the bulldozing of their homes, destruction of olive groves and expropriation of precious water resources so Israel can expand its system of exclusive roads, settlements and security parameters that has already stolen 47 percent of the land in the West Bank. The settlements in the West Bank are designed to surround and isolate Palestinian towns and cities and deny any contiguous land area.

On Aug. 18, Hamas leader Mahmud al-Zahhar said, “The Palestinian people are well aware that the aim of the Zionist ‘disengagement’ is to weaken our resistance and to strengthen their grip over our land. The resistance must move to the West Bank.”

Similarly, Jamal Abu Samhadaneh, commander of a cluster of militias in Gaza known as the Popular Resistance Com mittees, declared, “We will transfer all our fighting methods and capabilities to the West Bank.”

As Ariel Sharon was speaking at the United Nations on Sept. 15, protests were held in front of the UN offices all over the West Bank. The protests were led by representatives of all national political parties.

The main demonstration took place in Ramallah. A delegation representing all Palestinian political parties, the grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign and civil society organizations headed to the UN head office there to hand in a statement of protest. Other protests were staged in Jerusalem, Jenin, Tulkarem, Hebron, Salfit, Jericho and Bethlehem.

In New York, a demonstration took place outside UN headquarters while Sharon was making his speech.

The coordinated protests targeted Sharon’s criminal record and the implementation of the Apartheid Wall that extends hundreds of miles through the West Bank and turns Palestinian villages and towns into walled ghettos. The actions also reminded the world that Sharon and the Israeli military had surrounded the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla in Lebanon in September 1982, allowing right-wing Lebanese forces to massacre over 2,000 civilians.

The Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, although carried out to reinforce the West Bank settlements, also shows the limits of the most highly armed and technically equipped military force in the world. Despite massive infusions of U.S. economic and military aid every year for 57 years, the determination of the whole Palestinian population proved to be a more formidable factor.

During this entire period the wholly justified demands of the Palestinian people to return to their homes and exercise the right to their own state, with Jerusalem as the capital, have motivated continuing waves of resistance. This heroic steadfastness has given inspiration to resistance movements around the world.

Solidarity with and support for the demands put forth by the Palestinian move ment provides a powerful political perspective for all activists in every struggle against imperialist war and occupation.