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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Oct. 26, 2000
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------S.F. meeting supports new Intifada
By Brenda Sandburg
San Francisco
The current Palestinian uprising is more powerful than the battles against Israeli occupation and repression that have occurred over the last 52 years, Elias Rashmawi told a public forum in San Francisco Oct. 8.
"It is qualitatively different because after so many years of Palestinian insistence on nationhood, on statehood, after decades of a peace process that was suppose to give us crumbs," the entire Arab population is protesting, he said.
Rashmawi represents the Palestinian Right to Return Task Force of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and the Committee for a Democratic Palestine.
"Today 1 million Moroccans, half a million Iraqis, half a million Yemenis are protesting," he said. "From the Jordanian River to the Mediterranean Sea, from 1948 borders to 1967 borders, Arabs are saying enough of all the schemes, all the agreements, the Oslos, the Madrids.
"We want a fully unconditional Palestinian state where we as a people rule ourselves as we see fit."
He noted that "Israeli Arabs"--Palestinians living within the 1948 borders of the Israeli state--have also joined in protests against the occupier of their land.
The meeting, sponsored by the International Action Center, drew a crowd of 75 people.
It was organized in support of the Palestinian resistance which began on Sept. 29, the day after Israeli fascist Ariel Sharon, escorted by 1,000 Israeli troops, visited the main Muslim holy site in Palestinian East Jerusalem.
'We salute the resistance'
"We salute the resistance and determination of the Palestinian people in their 52-year struggle to regain their homeland," said IAC member Saul Kanowitz, who chaired the meeting.
Rashmawi decried the U.S. government's reaction to the Israeli repression. "[U.S. Secretary of State] Madeline Albright says she feels bad because Israel is under siege," Rashmawi said. "They tell us we are inflicting psychological torment on Israeli soldiers because they are killing us."
He also noted the division between Arab leaders and the Arab people. "The Palestinian Authority is in a precarious position," he said. "It does not know how to please Israel and the U.S. while standing with its people on the front line."
Rashmawi said the whole region must be de-colonized. "When that happens the U.S. won't be attacking countries like Iraq and sending them back into the Middle Ages," he said.
He called on the progressive movement in the United States to take a stand in defense of the Palestinian people as it did in supporting the South African movement against apartheid.
"When a Palestinian youth throws a stone, he or she is throwing it on behalf of everyone who resists the empire," IAC West Coast Co-director Richard Becker said. "There is another way to say the 'struggle against globalization.' You could also call it the global class struggle.
"It is the struggle of those resisting imperialism all over the world, from Cuba to Iraq, from Mumia to the FARC and ELN in Columbia, from Palestine to the people who live on this street fighting for decent wages and a decent life."
Becker also addressed the role the U.S. government has played in bolstering Israel and using the country as a tool for its own ends. The U.S. cannot be an honest broker in peace negotiations, he said.
Becker noted that the U.S. has given Israel $10 million a day for the last 30 years, and turned it into the fifth-largest military power in the world.
"Israel plays a key role in the imperialist system," he said, "serving as a giant military base for the U.S. in a strategically and economically key region, the Middle East."
Workers World Party vice-presidential candidate Gloria La Riva compared the U.S. government's support of Israel with its role in helping to dismantle Yugoslavia.
"Clinton said a few days ago: 'I want to salute the masses that came into the streets to take back their country.' Was he talking about the Palestinians? Of course not."
She said the elections in Yugoslavia "are a new phase of NATO's war, another phase in the U.S.-led campaign to take over all of Yugoslavia." La Riva added that the U.S. government spent more than $70 million to fund the campaign of new Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica.
"There are only two sides of the struggle in this world and Clinton and Madeline Albright are on one side," she concluded.
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