REVOLUTION 5

Israel and Palestine: A terrible ironic twist of history

[Audio transcript]

BOB AVAKIAN—REVOLUTION

Number Five

This is Bob Avakian (BA), coming to you again with more about the big things going on in the world and how this shows the urgent need for a real revolution. Talking about what is happening with Palestine now.

What is happening with Palestine shines a powerful light on what this murderous system of capitalism-imperialism, and those who rule it, are all about, and why their whole system has to go.

The U.S. ruling class has for decades supported Israel’s apartheid oppression of the Palestinian people, and this U.S. ruling class is now supporting the genocidal slaughter of Palestinians by Israel.

What a terrible ironic twist of history: For centuries Jews were subjected to horrendous atrocity, and this reached its most terrible dimensions in the Holocaust, when millions of Jews were murdered by the Nazis during World War 2; but then Israel was founded and has been maintained as a Zionist (Jewish-supremacist) state on the basis of bloody oppression of the Palestinian people! This is why I have made the provocative but profoundly true statement: After the Holocaust, the worst thing that has happened to Jewish people is the state of Israel.

Genocide is the deliberate killing off of a people, in whole or in part—and that is exactly what Israel is doing to the Palestinians in front of the whole world now.

Apartheid is a system that openly treats a whole people as inferior and not deserving of the same rights as the dominant and supposedly “superior” people—a system that forcibly segregates and confines the subjugated people in conditions of poverty and deprivation, continually subjecting them to violent repression.

Apartheid is the white-supremacist system to which the native African people in South Africa were subjected for generations, until the early 1990s. Apartheid is the Jewish-supremacist system which Israel has imposed on the Palestinian people, from the founding of Israel in 1948 until the present time.

Apartheid is also very much the same as the system in the U.S. itself, for 100 years after the Civil War, especially (but not only) in the southern U.S.: the enforced racial oppression, written right into the law—with systematic segregation and discrimination against Black people, backed up by official terror and Ku Klux Klan lynching.

So, it is not surprising that the U.S. ruling class supported the apartheid regime in South Africa for almost the entire time it was the ruling system in South Africa, and now the U.S. is continuing to support the apartheid state of Israel.

It is also no accident that, during the time when apartheid was the ruling system in South Africa, Israel was a very close ally of South Africa. Israel provided military and other aid to the South African apartheid regime in its brutal suppression of the African people in that country. Israeli leaders openly praised the South African apartheid regime, celebrating it as a model for Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people. (If you don’t believe this, or you want to know more about it, go to the website revcom.us and look at the quiz about Israel, and in particular Part 2 of that quiz: “Israel and Comparisons to Apartheid South Africa.”)

Apartheid has been ended in South Africa, but Israel is continuing its apartheid oppression of the Palestinian people—and now it is carrying out the genocidal slaughter of Palestinians, with the full backing of the U.S. ruling class. (And now the government of South Africa—which is no longer based on apartheid—has brought a case before the World Court of the United Nations rightly accusing Israel of genocide against the Palestinian people.)

I know some of you may be thinking: “All these horrors will always go on, and there’s nothing anybody can do that will really change this.” But that’s just wrong, and I’m gonna get into why and how we can change this in a fundamental way—through an actual revolution. An important part of being able to make this revolution is understanding what is really happening, and why, especially with really big things going on in the world, what this shows about the nature of the system that we are up against, and how to go about defeating it. What is happening now with the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people is one of those big things that holds crucially important lessons. So I’m gonna stay on this a while longer—coming back soon with more important truth about this.