On Recent Guerrilla Attacks against Israeli Soldiers in the West Bank

Statement by the Internationalist Socialist League (RCIT Section in Israel / Occupied Palestine), 22.03.2018, http://www.the-isleague.com

If you listen or watch the Israeli news, you may get an impression that all of a sudden for no other reason other than hate for Jews, a Palestinian terrorist killed two innocent Israelis and wounded two others near Jenin.

The alleged terrorist action was a car-ramming attack by 26 years old Rattab-a-Latif Kabha who killed two Israeli soldiers. The last thing you can say about Israeli occupation soldiers is that they are but innocent victims of terror. The Israeli army is a brutal occupation force that provokes the Palestinians on a daily basis.

In strict technical legal terms, this was nothing short of a guerrilla action by an oppressed people against their armed oppressors – not corresponding with any of the myriad definitions of terrorism.

On Monday, March 12, Israeli troops used tear gas to disperse dozens of Palestinian villagers, including schoolchildren, in Burin village near the West Bank city of Nablus.

Yahia Kadous, head of Burin village's municipality, said that Israeli occupation forces entered the village, with the goal of informing the council of an Israeli decision to confiscate a parcel of land owned by a local secondary school. However, the council members refused to meet Israeli army personnel or receive any notifications.

"Afterwards, the soldiers started firing tear gas canisters at the school, terrifying students," he said, adding that the army sought to confiscate Palestinian land in the village on the pretext of "maintaining security". [1]

In recent years, Kadous asserted, the Israeli authorities had seized roughly 1,000 square meters of the school's property and now sought to confiscate more.

Israeli forces have also arrested 16 Palestinians in overnight raids across the Israeli-occupied West Bank, the army said in a Monday statement.

This week Hizmeh, a village of 7000 people, has had its entrances blocked for more than two months in a collective punitive action for alleged stone throwing at Israeli vehicles passing nearby.

In response to the killing of the two soldiers, the Israeli army has raided the Palestinian village of Bartaa, arresting the brother of a man who has killed the two Israeli soldiers.

“The Israeli colonialist army returned at 3am and raided other 30 homes in the village, leaving a series of threats to various members of our 8,000-member community," he said. Israeli forces have also suspended work permits of at least 100 members of the Kabha family as retaliation.

The killing of the soldiers was a part of the confrontations between Palestinians and Israeli occupation forces in several places in the West Bank and Gaza. The Israeli state calls these protest terrorism, while from the moral point of view of the international working class these are action in the struggle for the liberation of the oppressed.

This is not the strategy or the tactics of the revolutionary working class, that among its methods of struggle are general strikes and mass armed uprising, but only hypocrites will condemn the actions of the oppressed people against the brutal oppression.

The oppression of the Palestinians will continue as long as the Zionist state will exist as an ethnocentric race-state. For this reason we keep holding on to the vision of a democratic and socialist red Palestine, where Arabs and Jews will live as true equals and the Palestinians refugees will return to their lands stolen by the colonialist settlers.

[1] https://tinyurl.com/yclqj4lg