Beyond Protest: It is Time for Action - We Need a Coordinated Global Solidarity Campaign in Defence of People of Gaza.

Pandaemonium is the Palace of All the Devils. Its building began c.1660.

It wll never be finished - it has to be transformed into Jerusalem.

The building of Pandaemonium is the real history of Britain ...

Humphrey Jennings, 1942.

In view of the situation in Gaza, so dreadful that words cannot be found, exacerbated by the current blockade - even of UN relief – of any goods being allowed into Gaza, I am writing to you my reader as a brother and friend to consider that the current and persistent onslaught on the Palestinian people is surely unbearable and an unacceptable wound on the conscience of humankind. What I am proposing that those who want to do something but are not sure, to focus our energy on revitalising and channelling, if you will, the latent sympathy of the working class and oppressed people around the world, by undertaking a bold and unprecedented humanitarian international mission led by the friends of Palestine, workers and concerned people from all parts, to bring solidarity and aid directly and physically to Palestine, by whatever means possible.

Our hearts go out to our brothers and sisters in Gaza, to our children and the innocents in the throes of hell on earth in this evil hour. I am calling on the social movements of the world, environmentalists and the anti-war movements, all thinking people and activists everywhere that we connect up our support for the people on the ground. We must build a new kind of campaign by going much further than just protest, because as much as it is needed, the urgency of the moment requires that our response must surely go beyond critique of the evils being committed - we who love humanity, must move towards a practical effort and resolution based on the support of the masses worldwide, including above all what remains of the real working class’ organisations. In order to defend the Palestinian people against colonial occupation and to bring to a halt the genocidal policy of Israel we have not merely to protest as we did since 2003 against the attack on Iraq, because it proved ultimately fruitless in the face of such stubbornness on the part of the aggressors. To remain silent would be a crime. This is a call to Action!

We have to take positive and creative action on an international scale by weighing with organised support into the balance with the necessary and intelligent and coordinated international action in solidarity with the dispossessed and besieged Palestinians. Our renewed global campaign should be taken to a higher level of scope and intensity drawing in ever wider layers of people, so that it registers global debate and indeed should to some extent set the tone of the discussion by clarifying or opening up the principal concerns and festering sores underlying the current malady, such as the right to self-determination, to self-defence, the right of refugees to return and at the heart of it, we have to face up the destructive and potentially apocalyptic consequences of the continued rule of the global system of Capital itself.

What I am proposing is that we who are in solidarity with the children of Palestine who are suffering the brunt of military chauvinism, we must urgently find a way to initiate the humanitarian campaign and raise the resources and build the alliances to coordinate and untertake an international mission led by the workers and ordinary people of the world and in this way to build up broad support against the war on Gaza, for independence and self-destermination for Palestine. We can build support in the schools and universities, workplaces and residential areas and in cyberspace. Set up action and collection committees far and wide.

We need to listen to the pleas of people inside Palestine and Israel, students, with workers, with doctors and nurses, community activists who know the situation on the ground. We should listen to the case of the workers, students, academics and professionals in Palestine and Israel speaking out against the genocide and give them voice. In this way we are able establish some sense of the situation and assess what forms of humanitarian support are most urgent. There must be a programme of action developed throughout the UK and Europe with support from the workers organisations and community movements.

With a clear plan of action and a principled stance on the question of international working class solidarity we can win the support of serious trade unionists, journalists, academics, students, school-goers, artists and initiate thus a high profile UK wide petition campaign with mass based support. This support can be raised from and by the workers and students and pensioners. Many international volunteers will surely undertake to physically deliver the materials to the hospitals, schools, workers’ associations in the Palestinian territories. We can make it possible for the material to be delivered, despite the intensity of the conflict, by building up a series of internationally coordinated mass actions, to coincide with our arrival at the border, by heightening international attention.

Such a path as I have briefly outlined is fraught with danger and tension but also the possibility of moral and political victory that can act as a signal and beacon for future struggles. The alternative would be to anaesthetise ourselves against the cries and despair and do nothing. No thinking person can tolerate apartheid, dispossession and ruthless colonisation, nor should we accept its genocidal conclusions. As Einstein before his death, the threat of general annihilation looms ever nearer on the horizon.

So we will have to be brave, we the tiny little people who must inherit the earth. If we do not claim our inheritance, there may be nothing left of it. For too long we, the people of the world, have stood aside and allowed this desperate tragedy to unfold. We must therefore press on all fronts for the rights of the dispossessed and exiled and besieged people of Palestine and elsewhere and so establish a principled basis for truly human relations and conditions of life worthy of humans. Failing to act in the face of the obvious and self-evident mutilation and extermination of a people must make us all of us watching complicit in murder. To remain silent would be a crime against humanity. Only the most concerted effort to oppose this injustice can free us from that charge of complicity in the day to day murder of several generations of dispossessed people and from the burden of responsibility which weighs like a nightmare upon the conscience of all thinking people.

Through this bold action, for which there is an obvous precedent in the work of those Free Gaza Movement, which have led several humanitarian missions to Gaza, even amidst the onslaught. These people have to be saluted and their courage celebrated. These people must be supported. New possibilities for real solidarity and friendship open up, barriers can be smashed by the force of our growing collective will and organisation, if we are courageous enough to cross the barrier of our own fear and inhibition, we can overcome the inertia and numbness and despair, we have to get up and go the distance, yes all the way to the battlezone, even if it means marching through the desert again; but we can and will impact on the resolution of the present crisis by addressing it as a priority in our time, as we must, to bring the necessary pressure of mass action to bear where it must.

This will be the true test of our humanity..