Palestinian leaders have embraced the commission's findings, despite the fact that it calls on the victims to cease their legitimate acts of self-defence against the brutal Zionist army and vengeful, hateful settler-zealots.

This agreement is a US led attempt to defuse the intifada while failing to deal with the underlying causes that gave rise to the explosion last September. The freezing of settlements that have been illegally constructed would do nothing to remove them as organising centres for Zionist armed terror against Palestinian villagers nearby.

Israel has anyway snubbed the Commission and said it will not halt construction in settlements in the West Bank and Gaza areas. At present 20 per cent of Gaza has been given over to 6,500 Israeli settlers while more than 1 million Palestinians are crammed into the rest of the territory.

This is no surprise. Throughout the whole Oslo process since 1993, the numbers of settlers and settlements has continued to grow to more than 200,000 now compared to a little over 100,000 when the agreement was signed.

The settlers are an essential part of the Zionist plan to establish Israelâs borders throughout historic Palestine. They are the armed front line troops of Zionist expansion, utterly racist, fanatically driven.

Sharonâs coalition government has embarked on a war strategy against the intifada. Suicide bombings and firearm and mortar attacks from the Palestinians has been met with F-16 fighter planes, tank shells, bulldozing of communities and invasion (and occupation) of sovereign PNA territory.

Most Israelis rejected the sitting Prime Minister Barak in favour of Sharon at the last election because they believed that he could contain the intifada and halt the loss of Israeli lives. What an illusion!

Israel will continue to reap a whirlwind for their oppression of the Palestinians. The Palestinians have endured 50 years of land theft, blockades, sweatshop labour, bulldozers, deportations, bans on foreign travel, arbitrary arrest, torture, assassination.

Meanwhile their Israeli Jewish oppressors continue to enjoy or aspire to their privileged European lifestyles and close their eyes and ears to the sound of their Arab neighboursâ agony.

The intifada brings the war to Israel, across the Green Line and they do not like it. The intifada and the response of Sharon will polarise Israeli society. Most people in Israel want a halt to the expansion of the settlements. A minority are trying to bring food across the Green Line to Palestinian villages suffering hunger as a result of the blockades and the disruption of economic life. Some Jews try to monitor and defend Palestinan human rights.

Outside of Palestine millions watch with revulsion the daily slaughter of the Palestinians in an unequal struggle between PNA police AK47s and Israeli tanks, between teenage slings and IDF sniper fire.

They bring to mind the worst crimes of the Apartheid state in South Africa and ask why do EU and US governments stand by and let it happen? They ask how can a state that was seen (wrongly) as a refuge from the anti-semitic horrors of the 1930s, turn with such racist savagery upon another oppressed people?

The answer is simple and brutal. For the USA Israel is the lynchpin of its whole Middle East foreign policy. It has been the Zionist stateâs most fervent backer for decades and gives this small state more than $3bn a year in aid and access to its most advance arms. With these it keeps the Arab neighbours divided and cowed which in turn allows the US to guarantee the continued supply of precious oil to the USA.

The EU has a more independent rhetoric but will not do anything that the US deems is against its interest. The European Union has miserably failed for more than a decade to properly enforce its formal ban on food products being imported into the EU from Israel which in fact are sourced from the Occupied Territories.

The official leaders of the labour movements of Europe and the USA are little better, refusing to take an open, critical stand against Israelâs actions against the just claims of the Palestinians.

It is time for a mass working class campaign in solidarity with the Palestinians. They are heroic but beleaguered, exhausted but determined. We must help. We must mount pressure on the trade unions and the social democratic parties to break with the pro-Zionist positions of the EU and North American governments. 

We demand:
ð an end to Israeli aggression; IDF out of PNA territory and the Occupied Territories; end assassinations, raids and destruction of homes.
withdraw the Israeli settlements, settlers out of Occupied Territories.
ð break diplomatic and commercial ties with Israel; enforce existing agreements to block settler food from West Bank labelled as Israeli.
ð massive economic aid to the Palestinian authorities. For an end to Fatah cronyism and corruption, and brutality aimed at its critics. For mass town and camp committees to elect representatives to armed local councils of struggle and to a Palestine wide Constituent Assembly.
ð no return to Oslo, the cruel deception that peace and injustice were compatible! For the unconditional withdrawal of Israel to pre-1997 borders.
ð the right of all post-1947 refugees to return to their homeland
ð no to a "two state" solution. Zionism and Palestinian right to self-determination are incompatible. For a unitary, bi-national, secular socialist state of Palestine. 
ð no to anti-semitism!

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