Palestine: Five reasons to be an activist

1. The need for solidarity

Israel is committing genocide. If you’re shocked and angry, you are not alone. Tens of thousands have taken to the streets in Australia, and millions more around the world, to stop the war on Gaza.

And across the occupied territories, people are watching how the world responds. That’s reason enough to join the protests. They are public displays of solidarity that send a message to Palestinians under siege: “You are not alone; we are with you”.

2. Australians have a special responsibility

Those of us living in Western countries have a special responsibility to fight against Western imperialism.

Australian governments in particular, both Labor and Liberal, are among the most uncritical backers of Israel in the world. They provide diplomatic and moral support at every turn, for almost every crime and every act of brutality.

More than that, Australia is becoming more and more integrated into the US military industrial complex. The Australian establishment has backed and participated in every US-led war in the Middle East and is preparing for another potential US-led war in Asia.

Standing up to the Australian government—making it harder for the politicians to be part of these criminal international invasions—is a crucial part of showing solidarity not only to the Palestinians, but to people all over the world who are victims of Western or Western-backed aggression.

3. There are more atrocities to come

The Western powers work 24/7. They never stop thinking about and organising ways to dominate the world and to put down any resistance to their rule.

So this is not the first time and won’t be the last time that an atrocity like this occurs.

But as the war drags on, it may start to become background noise—normalised as something that just “goes on” in the Middle East. Or people might start to despair that our protests haven’t fundamentally changed anything. The media might eventually lose interest, and the demonstrations might dwindle in number.

Yet the suffering of Palestinians and so many others will not abate.

We need more people with a long-term commitment to building a movement that campaigns day-in, day-out, to change the world. Just as the butchers at the top work tirelessly to maintain their domination, so too must we work 24/7 to build an ongoing movement against them.

4. Capitalism is the root cause of oppression

The dispossession and genocide of Palestinians is a grotesque crime. But it isn’t an aberration: it is a crime of global capitalism.

It’s not just Israel. And it’s not just the USA and Australia. It’s the ruling elites in the Arab dictatorships, in Europe, Russia and China. If they are not all directly complicit, they carry out their own crimes, their own wars, their own acts of dispossession and genocide.

They are all part of the same club: the global ruling class, which gets rich off the suffering of the poor and oppressed all over the world. This is the “international community” that humanitarians are constantly appealing to: a cabal of criminals who act only to enhance their own positions of power.

“From our Nakba to your Invasion Day, we are one in struggle”, reads a mural in the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut, Lebanon.

That is exactly right. If we want a free Palestine, and a world free of oppression, we need to topple not just Israeli apartheid, but all criminal states the world over.

5. We need socialism

Only a world run by the working class and the oppressed can win liberation for Palestine: a world in which exploitation and oppression are abolished and people live as equals.

So we need to build not just a protest movement, but a socialist political alternative to the pro-capitalist parties that are complicit in the crimes against humanity.

All around the world, there are other socialists doing this, often taking enormous risks to do so. Those living under dictatorships—in Egypt, Myanmar, Russia, China, Iran and other places—risk imprisonment, torture and death.

In capitalist democracies such as Australia, we don’t face such risks. But the task is no less important. To challenge capitalism and imperialism and all their horrors, we need socialist parties in every country.

That’s why Socialist Alternative, the group that publishes Red Flag, never stops campaigning. We not only help to organise the demonstrations in solidarity with Palestine; we campaign against injustice wherever it rears its head.

So if you are angry and want to see an end to genocide and oppression, become a socialist activist—join Socialist Alternative.

Together, we have a world to win.