Palestine Follow

ANYONE WHO has campaigned for the Palestinian people will have come across some bizarre arguments explaining why the Israeli government should pursue its policies of repression against the Palestinians.

On a recent visit to Israel I learnt a lot about the movements of solidarity by many Israelis for the Palestinian struggle against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank.

It was confirmed recently that US military commanders travelled to Israel In January this year to learn about urban warfare from the Israeli Defence Force (IDF).

War comes to Rafah

THE HORROR of ethnic cleansing was shown on TV screens across the world last week. But there were no shrieks of outrage from George Bush and Tony Blair. That's because their ally, Israel's prime minister Ariel Sharon, was carrying out that policy in Palestine.

Sabby Sagall and Hilary Westlake were part of an international delegation which travelled to Israel to greet Mordechai Vanunu on his release from jail. Here they recount their experiences.

The liberal media were 'surprised', or 'astonished', when Bush recently endorsed Sharon's latest twist of the knife into the Palestinians.

'DOOMED TO failure.\" That was the conclusion of 52 ambassadors and top officials in a letter to Tony Blair slamming his relationship with Bush and his policies on Iraq and Palestine. These officials come from one of the most privileged and loyal layers of the British establishment.

THURSDAY, GEORGE Bush endorses Israel's land grab in the Occupied Territories. Friday, he and Tony Blair line up behind Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon. Saturday, another Palestinian leader is murdered. The fiction of a \"road map to peace\" in the Middle East is dead, murdered by an expansionist Israeli government that wants to humiliate the Palestinians and leave them with a tenth of the land they lived in only two generations ago.

The assassination of Sheikh Yassin highlights once again the ruthlessness of the Israeli state.

SHOCK AND anger swept most parts of the world last week after Israel's murder of Sheikh Yassin. Socialist Worker sellers were part of the response, agitating for Palestinian rights and against Bush and Blair's support for Israel. Simon reports from north west London, "After the assassination of Sheikh Yassin, a couple of us went round the Arab cafes of Bayswater and Edgware Road.

In 1987 an Israeli historian called Benny Morris published a book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem. It caused a sensation at the time. Using official Israeli military archives, it confirmed the Palestinian case that the foundation of the Israeli state in 1948 had depended upon armed terror-resulting in the forcible "transfer", or expulsion, of three quarters of a million Palestinian Arabs. This was something that the Zionists - the ideologues who advocate an exclusively Jewish state in Palestine - had always denied.