Latest issue of The Militant

This week's issue leads off with an excellent editorial on Obama's authorization of the murder of a US citizen opposed to Washington's policies in the Middle East:

....President Obama openly declared last year that al-Awlaki was a U.S. target for assassination. The decision was upheld by the courts. In carrying through that unilateral executive judgment, assassinating two U.S. citizens—al-Awlaki and Khan—the U.S. rulers seek to set a dangerous precedent.

Over the last decade, under the pretext of fighting "terrorism," Washington has militarized U.S. borders; encroached on privacy rights; curtailed the presumption of innocence; increased the powers of cop agencies; and stepped up use of arbitrary searches and arrests, as well as secret trials and secret evidence.

With the deepening crisis of capitalism worldwide, the bosses and their governments are pressing to foist the burden on working people from Greece to the United States. They anticipate intensifying class struggle as should we. And we should also anticipate that the methods and weapons the exploiting class uses against so-called "terrorists" and "foreigners" abroad will one day be turned against working-class militants at home.

Major excerpts from the Socialist Workers Party's 2006 convention resolution, "The World Crisis of Imperialism and the Contradictory Dynamics of the Labor Vanguard,"are also quoted in the context of a discussion of the Palestinian Authority's attempts to get recognition for PA statehood at the UN:

What the Israeli rulers are seeking to impose in order to consolidate Israel within borders of their own choosing is not a "peace process," as it's dubbed by liberals in the big-business media. It's the consolidation of an Israel still based on the forcible expulsion of the Palestinian majority, together with the "right of return" of those of Jewish parentage—and only those of such parentage. Its newly imposed borders will roughly correspond to the 400-mile-long wall the Israeli rulers are building inside the occupied West Bank, which lops off up to 10 percent of that occupied territory for Israel. What's more, Tel Aviv intends to hold onto East Jerusalem and selected large suburban Jewish settlements in the West Bank, as well as strategic military locations along the Jordanian border.

There can and will be no long-term peace with the dispossessed Palestinian people on that basis. Or on any other basis that forcibly seeks to guarantee a permanent, large Jewish majority in Palestine. The Israeli rulers aren't pulling back from their "right" to demolish the family homes of Palestinians accused of bombings or other attacks, let alone their "obligation" to "execute" members and leaders of Palestinian organizations they hold responsible for "terrorism."

Nor will this be a smooth process within the Israeli ruling class itself. Factionalism is on the rise in bourgeois politics there, too… .

Whatever party or coalition of parties comes out on top, this overall direction in bourgeois politics in Israel is irreversible.

As all this unfolds, the stakes continue to mount for the Palestinian people in forging a leadership adequate to the tasks before them, which remains the fight for a democratic secular Palestine. The bourgeoisification and political retreat of the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization, described in "The Opening Guns of World War III" [in New International magazine No. 6] some fifteen years ago, has proceeded apace. The PLO long ago exhausted its capacity to lead forward the Palestinian toilers in fighting for national liberation.

The bourgeois-nationalist opposition, Hamas, with its origins in the Muslim Brotherhood, neither has any alternative program or strategy to advance the struggle, nor offers more space to the proletariat to organize and act in the interests of the toiling majority of the Palestinian people.  
 
A road forward
A road forward out of this political morass can only—and will—come out of the response of new generations of working people and youth as the struggle continues on many fronts: fights for land; for water rights; for freedom of movement, freedom to travel; for jobs, decent wages, and union protection; for the release of political prisoners; for women's equality; against the brutal operations of Tel Aviv's cops, troops, and commandos; against war threats and mounting prospects for devastating military blows against sections of Israel itself; and many others. Neither we nor anyone else has a script or a timetable of how the forging of such a leadership, a communist leadership, will unfold in Palestine, or anywhere else in the world.

As for Israel itself, a revolutionary leadership that is proletarian internationalist to its core must be built there too—a secular, multinational leadership, with a substantial Jewish component in its makeup. This is a difficult task under the social, political, and military conditions prevailing in Israel. It won't happen rapidly. And the Palestinian people will not wait, and cannot be asked to wait, for class divisions and conflicts to deepen enough inside Israel for such a process to take place.

Once again, no timetables. A communist leadership of Jewish and Arab workers and farmers—dedicated to the fight for a democratic secular Palestine, and for socialist revolution—can and will be built, however. It will be built as growing numbers of toilers come to understand that if this task is not achieved in time, there will be little left of that part of the world.