Palestine’s Struggle – FighT bAck (1975)

From the American soldiers’ do-it-yourself magazine, ‘FighT bAck‘, August 1975, Heidelberg, West Germany. The capitalized letters in the name ‘FighT bAck’ can stand for slogans such as ‘Fuck The Army’

It is now clearly apparent from the Israeli attacks last week on PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] retreats inside Lebanese borders, that the central confrontation in the Middle East is between the Zionists and the Palestinian refugees. There are over three million Palestinians. Currently, half of them live in Palestine under Israeli rule, while the rest live in exile. Over one million of them inhabit refugee camps in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. It is these Palestinians, driven from their homes in 1947-48 and 1967, who are fighting for their return to Palestine, a right recognized over the past twenty-five years by successive U.N. [United Nations] resolutions, but a right which has been effectively denied to them through political channels. Unless the powers who wish to arbitrate the Middle East situation recognize and deal directly with the real existence of the refugees, there will be no peace.

Most people in the U.S. military can think of no good reason they should want to fight in the Middle East, yet Ford and Kissinger keep talking of war. The fact that oil companies would like a lot of us to die if it means it would raise their profits comes as no surprise. But what about Israel? Don’t the Jewish people need to be protected from the Arabs? What follows is a very strong answer to that question:

The Zionists* say that they alone are the representatives of the Jewish people. They say the political state of Israel is the supreme expression of the Jewish people. It is the duty, they say, for every Jew to support the state of Israel. Any form of opposition to Israel, they say, is rooted in anti-semitism.

The Zionists are lying! The history of the Jewish people is a proud history of struggle against oppression and injustice. We have resisted 6,000 years of oppression. The Zionists would now turn us into oppressors, into colonialists, into occupiers of other peoples’ land, into pawns of the wretched foreign policy of Kissinger, Rockefeller and Ford.

We reject their dangerous game. We reject the notion that in the 20th Century there is room for a racialist and theocratic state such as is now Israel. We reject a society that gives rights and privileges on the basis of race of religion. Both Zionism and Anti-Semitism are fundamentally racist theories that deny the possibility that Jews and non-Jews can really live together as equals. Both would herd the Jewish people into Ghettos, a Warsaw Ghetto, or a Ghetto-state of Israel. We reject Ghettos!

Rather than struggle against social injustice and resurgent anti-semitism in the United States, the Zionists offer us American Jews a false “homeland” on the land of the Palestinian people. But our Jewish identity is within us, and our best traditions tell us to reject their offer, to reject their betrayal.

The history of the Jewish People is also a history of the struggle for the basic right to live as human beings. How ironic that now the best expression of that struggle is carried on by the Palestinians, the true “Jews” of our time! It is the Palestinians, not the Zionists that call for a multi-racial state in the Middle-East. It is the Palestinians who suffer in the refugee tents, and are now fighting and dying so that Arab and Jew might live an brothers and sisters in Jerusalem, Haifa, and Tel-Aviv.

We plead with our American Jewish brothers and sisters to think carefully about these things. The appeal of the Zionists is the appeal of paranoia. But our survival as a people depends on loyalty to the essence of our cultural traditions: brotherhood and reconciliation.

We see the reality that the Zionists refuse to recognize: the PLO has the overwhelming strong support of the Palestinian people. This is a fact, and facts are stubborn things. That the PLO uses controlled revolutionary violence is a painful reminder of our Warsaw Revolt and our Maccabees.

We support the call of the PLO for the establishment of a democratic, secular state in Palestine. We stand with our Palestinian brothers and sisters in our common struggle against oppression.

PALESTINE IS OUR CAUSE!

SHALOM!

*According to Webster, Zionism is a movement for the re-establishment of a Jewish national homeland and state in Palestine