Al-ARAKIB, ISRAEL February 14 — A massive police force, armed to the teeth and dressed for battle, savagely attacked the residents of the unrecognized Bedouin-Arab village of Al-Arakib. The villagers’ homes have been brutally demolished no less than 16 (!) times since July 2010. They have once again been stranded without shelter in the middle of the desert as their improvised shanties were demolished.
Many of the village’s men were detained, but the women and children kept fighting and tried to block the bulldozers’ way. The barbaric cops then assaulted them with tear-gas, batons and rubber bullets, wounding at least two women and one child. The police refused to allow the wounded kid to be evacuated for hours.
The goal of this fascist police brutality is to force the villagers to surrender their land to the Israeli state, despite the fact that it is the villagers’ ancestral land and that they hold title over it. As a first stage, the Zionist JNF (Jewish National Fund) intends to plant trees over the village’s ruins in order to prevent the villagers’ return to them. As a second stage, however, they plan to build a new town — called Hiran — over Al-Arakib’s ruins. Residence in Hiran would be restricted to well-off religious Jews only.
But there is more than just the fascist Israeli government and the ultra-nationalist JNF behind this racist land-grab. Ronald Lauder, a NYC-based billionaire, the heir to the Estee Lauder financial empire, and a major donor to the JNF, is the real-estate tycoon who intends to reap a fortune out of Hiran’s construction.
This is not an isolated incident; big U.S. capital is behind some of the worst brutalities of the Israeli apartheid regime. For example, the Miami-based mogul Irving Moskowitz has used his influence to have Israeli cops sent to throw Palestinian-Arab families out of their homes so that he could build fancy apartment buildings on the ruins. This has occurred in Issawiye, Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan (all neighborhoods in East Jerusalem.) Local Israeli bosses profit greatly from Israeli fascism as well, reaping a fortune from landgrabs, colonial settlement construction and the “security” industry.
The only answer we, the international working class, must have is to unite and fight back. The Israeli cops might have guns, clubs, tear gas and rubber bullets; Irving Moscowitz and Ronald Lauder might have billions of dollars; but we have the masses.
The working class produces all value. If we fight back as a united force, we will be able to defeat the capitalists and their fascist servants in all countries. But as long as capitalism exists, racism and fascism will exist as well. Therefore, the only way to get rid of them is to overthrow the rotten capitalist system with a communist revolution. This will give power to the working class – in other words, establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat!
