Solidarity with Heroic Gaza: Statement from the International Action Center -- Jan. 6, 2009
The International Action Center condemns the criminal
U.S.-backed Israeli bombing and invasion of Gaza, and the massacre of now
nearly 600 and serious wounding of thousands of Palestinians. We call upon the
progressive, anti-war and workers' movement in the United States to join the
angry, growing worldwide protests of these latest Israeli war crimes with U.S.
complicity and stop the genocide. We refuse impunity to the Israeli state and
its backers.
The rightist Zionist regime had the arrogance to announce in advance its intention to strike Gaza's embattled civilians. Like every serious
Israeli move, this latest assault was done with a U.S. green light using U.S.
weapons and spy services.Today, Jan. 6, after 10 days of unrelenting bombing
and three of a heavily armored ground invasion by the Israeli military, the
Bush government has publicly supported the Israeli massacre and no top U.S.
political leaders, either Republican or Democratic, have spoken against it.
Despite the images and reports spirited out of Gaza that
prove that most victims are civilians and many are children, the Israeli
leaders -- Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Foreign
Minister Tzipi Livni -- continue to arrogantly defend every step of their
genocidal plan. The Israeli attacks -- targeting civilian population centers,
housing, water and electrical infrastructure, food supplies, government
services, schools and universities, prisons and hospitals, destroying the
sewage treatment -- reveal a malicious intent to inflict as many casualties as
possible, including on children.
The International Action Center stands unequivocally with
the right of the Palestinian people to defend themselves by any means at their disposal and to resist this latest attempt by U.S./Israeli occupation forces to exterminate their very existence as a people and a nation. The Jan. 1 assassination of Nizar Rayyan, a leader of the democratically elected Hamas government of Gaza, and at least 13 members of his family, including many
children, by a 1,000 pound bunker-buster bomb paid for by U.S. taxpayers, was another grievous Israeli war crime against civilians.
Under Israeli siege for over a year, the people of Gaza had
been struggling to survive with insufficient food, power and a damaged and
depleted medical-care system. Humanitarian organizations have condemned this
siege as an Israeli crime against humanity, carried out without protest from
Israel's powerful allies in Western Europe and the United States. The Israeli
siege itself violated the cease-fire agreement. And the Palestinian people in
Gaza have faced down the siege over 18 months, providing once again an example
for the world's people that the criminal U.S.-Israeli alliance has grown
desperate to tear down.
Like the bombing and invasion, the siege itself is a
U.S.-Israeli war crime, with the billions in yearly U.S. aid used to cut off
their electricity, kick them out of their homes and now to massacre the 1.5
million Palestinians in Gaza. Meanwhile, back home, the same U.S. government
lets banks foreclose on workers' homes, landlords evict tenants, and bosses lay
off millions of workers, while tens of millions live in fear of an illness that
will wipe out their savings -- if the economic crisis hasn't already.
The interests of working people in the U.S. can only be
served by halting the genocidal attack. We stand in solidarity with the
Palestinian people against U.S. imperialism and Israel, Washington's outpost in
the Middle East.
We demand that U.S. aid to Israel be cut to zero, and that
this money be used instead for reparations for the Palestinian people, to
ensure their right to return, and for homes, jobs, health care and education
right here at home.
International Action Center,
55 W. 17th St., 5th Fl.,
NY, NY
10011
IACenter.org
212-633-6646
