January 12, 2024

The organizers of the Stop World War 3 Peace Initiative, which held a conference in Rome, Italy, from Oct. 27-28, 2023, that drew representatives from 40 organizations in 25 countries, issued the following statement Dec. 31 on the events in Palestine and their impact on the world. The International Action Center was among the organizations that endorsed this statement.

Israel is committing a casebook crime of genocide in Gaza. To be precise, it is continuing and hardening the colonial genocide it had been committing in Palestine for 75 years. In our era, this crime is comparable only with the systematic extermination of the Iraqi and Afghani people that the U.S. and its allies committed.

Genocide is never self-defense. And no legal right of self-defense exists for the imperialist conquerors. The concept is meaningless.

The “Stop WW3 Peace Initiative” supports the struggle of the Palestinians against the illegal, neocolonial Israeli entity.

Palestine has the right to exist, to be the home of all Palestinians. Palestinians have the right to live in their own country, to be free to move anywhere in it, and to choose their own leadership.

Palestinians have the right to resist, to fight against the conquerors of their land.

Among the conquerors, no distinction is possible between army personnel and settlers who “simply” confiscate Palestinian land, exploit its wealth, expel the legal inhabitants and constitute the military reserves of the army.

Palestine needs an independent sovereign state that welcomes all of its inhabitants, no matter their religious beliefs, as did Palestine before the Zionist conquest. The 1993 Oslo accords failed to address this need and ended up null and void. Jewish people who migrated to Palestine during British rule or were brought later during the Zionist rule should also have the right of citizenship, but only as equal citizens, not as rulers.

Zionist state is the root of the problem

The problem in Palestine is not the resistance of the occupied Palestinian people, but the Israeli state itself. In other words, the problem arises from the formation of a racist, colonial state entity on Palestinian soil, one which at the same time serves as an advanced political and military U.S. base in Western Asia and Eastern Mediterranean.

Due to their exceptional historic experiences and circumstances, the Palestinian people have gained an enormous fighting spirit and steadfastness and have pushed aside those leaders who collaborate with Israel. They have achieved a deep political and military unity on the basis of resistance to the occupation, to build a state in Palestine based on self-determination, regardless of different views they might hold regarding its character.

Today all Palestinian political parties and military structures work together. These developments have led to the astonishing blows against occupation forces, blows unexpected by the West, despite the most brutal Israeli aggression and the heinous crimes against humanity Israel commits.

It is a struggle of the ant against the elephant. The West offers Israel enormous direct and indirect military support and has undertaken huge diplomatic and propaganda campaigns on Israel’s behalf. Meanwhile, Palestinians are fighting with light arms, without any industrial supply chain, under complete blockade, yet they inflict serious losses upon the aggressor involving personnel and equipment.

After three months of war, it has become clear to the world that the Palestinian resistance cannot and will not be easily defeated. While there cannot be any doubt that Zionism is ready for total genocide to achieve its goals, its Western backers are facing serious challenges.

The imperialist system of dominance in the region is already strained and moving to the edge of collapse. Its most important pillar after Israel — the military regime in Egypt — did not dare to consent to Israel’s plan to drive Gazans into the Sinai, which would be a completion of the Nakba. The Egyptian people would refuse to accept that surrender. Normalization with Israel by Arab regimes, which the U.S. has prepared for decades, has at least been delayed, if not reversed.

Resistance front is growing

On the other side, resistance forces are gradually building a large front that supports Palestine. Lebanese Hezbollah has already opened a second front in the north of Israel, in a calculated manner. Ansarallah (Houthis) in Yemen pose a serious threat to maritime trade with Israel.

War-torn Syria, although it remains partially under U.S.-Turkey occupation, is still a geopolitical obstacle for the Western order in the Middle East. Iran remains the main state supporter of the Palestinian struggle. These forces initiated the alliance of the Global South to call for an immediate cease-fire, for the defeat of Israel as a racist, neocolonial promoter of Western interests and for the formation of a democratic state in historic Palestine.

Western elites have waged an aggressive propaganda campaign in order to justify the massacre of the Palestinian people and legalize the neocolonial Israeli entity. They cultivate Islamophobia. They try to wage hate against the Islamic world, because Islam has functioned as a unifying means against their global dominance in an important part of the world. Using an Orwellian rhetoric, these elites try to present any condemnation of Israeli crimes against humanity as antisemitism. Despite this campaign, hundreds of thousands of people have demonstrated in support of Palestine – even in the Western countries.

Facing this brutal enemy, Palestine needs even stronger support from all who fight for democratic rights, for self-determination against imperialism and colonialism and for a new international order. Preventing the extermination of Palestinians and overthrowing the Western neocolonial plan in Palestine with the perspective of forming a democratic state will have a serious positive impact on all the current and imminent anti-imperialist struggles in the world.