ISSAWIYE,  ISRAEL, December 3 — About 500 demonstrators, including many local residents and youth as well as hundreds of Israeli workers and activists, marched in multi-national solidarity against the crimes of the Israeli apartheid regime against the Issawiye neighborhood. Stunned cops were too scared to enter the neighborhood while the rally lasted! The cowardly riot cops and “border guards” (paramilitary cops) dared to show their ugly faces in Issawiye and brutally assault the locals with clubs and tear gas only after most of the Jewish demonstrators had left the area.
The Israeli regime does anything in its power to grab lands and encircle — and, indeed, strangle — the local Arab-Palestinian residents. Soon after the Israeli conquest of Issawiye in 1967, the Haddasah Hospital and the Hebrew University expanded their buildings at the expense of the neighborhood, blocking most of its entrances with gates, fences and structures.
Many lands to the east of the neighborhood, which were once owned by local residents, were seized and given to settlements, such as Maale Edomim, as well as to a large police base observing the neighborhood.
This goes to show that workers have no stake in the bosses’ laws regarding private property or security. Such laws exist to serve the most powerful capitalists and they are happy to rewrite or break them whenever they like. This is life in the Issawiye ghetto: ever-tightening encirclement, less and less space and ever-increasing police brutality.
The residents of Issawiye, like the residents of other neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, have Israeli IDs, and they pay taxes to the Israeli regime and to the Jerusalem municipality, but they lack full civil rights (for example, they cannot vote for the Knesset). The state and the city rarely invest any money, resources or manpower in developing the neighborhood or providing it with necessary services.
The youth of Issawiye, lacking educational services or any decent form of recreation for the afternoon hours, roam the neighborhood and sink into violence and boredom. A number of bored youth threw stones at a passing Israeli car in October 2010, and since then the cops have attacked the residents of Issawiye again and again, arresting kids and spraying large quantities of tear gas into the neighborhood.
Faced with this racist repression, the workers in all of Palestine and Israel — Jews and Arabs alike — must follow the example of the December 3rd demonstration and fight back against Israeli capitalists. Only a united workers’ struggle can defeat the racist rulers, and only workers’ power — the dictatorship of the proletariat and a communist economy — will be able to create decent living conditions for the residents of East Jerusalem!