Comrev.co editors’ note: Last Saturday, October 7, the Palestinian religious fundamentalist group Hamas launched a surprise attack against the Zionist state of Israel, including an incursion into some areas of the territory occupied by the state of Israel. Israel launched a counterattack with bombardments on residential buildings and on Gaza City, declared the beginning of a “long and difficult” war, and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu threatened to exact a “mighty revenge.” Western imperialist powers such as the United States and the United Kingdom expressed their unreserved support.
Comrev.co will soon publish a more in-depth analysis of these unfolding events, but as a basic point of orientation: neither of the two contending sectors represents anything positive or liberating, or even some “lesser evil.” Though faced off against each other, both are reactionary poles. As Bob Avakian correctly points out, they are: “historically outmoded strata among colonized and oppressed humanity up against historically outmoded ruling strata of the imperialist system. These two reactionary poles reinforce each other, even while opposing each other. If you side with either of these ‘outmodeds,’ you end up strengthening both.”
The state of Israel is a state that has been built based on a real “ethnic cleansing” of the Palestinian people, on the historical and systematic dispossession of its territories. Since its foundation, its history has been countless massacres and opprobrious acts against the Palestinians, but also against the other peoples of the Middle East. Israel has also been a bulwark of the unjust wars and inhuman practices of imperialism in the Middle East.
The resistance of the Palestinian people and the peoples of the world against the Zionist occupation of Israel and for their liberation is righteous, but reactionary Islamist forces like Hamas will not only not lead to the liberation of the Palestinian people, but are a big obstacle on that road. The Palestinian people need a real revolution and nothing less than that, a road radically opposed to what these contending outmoded poles represent.
The following is a report on the participation of a group of revolutionary communists and sympathizers in a protest on Saturday, October 7, 2023, called by various political forces in the wake of the escalating confrontation between Hamas and Israel.
Bogotá, Colombia: Revolutionary communists and sympathizers protest in front of the Israeli embassy, October 7, 2023 Photo: AP
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The banner says: “End the Zionist-Imperialist Occupation! Free Palestine! What Palestine Needs Is a Revolution, Nothing Less!”
A collective of the mainstream left called for a “protest in solidarity with the Palestinian people and their legitimate defense,” in front of the Israeli embassy in Bogotá, on Saturday night.
People dribbled in to the place, with little organization and without much clarity about what to do. The organizers had a sound system and played a speech by Chávez [sic] in which he referred to “the double moral for not criticizing Israel’s aggression against Palestine.”
Somewhat more than a dozen sympathizers of revolutionary communism attended both because of the justness of demonstrating against the onslaught of the Zionists and imperialists in the Middle East and because of the need to draw a line with the positions which, in the name of the “left,” support (considering them anti-imperialist) the reactionary religious fundamentalist forces that are in conflict with the imperialists and Zionists. We carried a 2m x 5m banner with the message “End the Zionist-imperialist occupation! Free Palestine! What Palestine Needs Is a Revolution, Nothing Less!”
Bogota, Colombia: Protest in front of the Israeli embassy in Bogotá, October 7, 2023. Photo: @comrev.co
We revolutionaries made several interventions. We developed the following questions: 1) Israel is an invasion of Palestinian territory; 2) this invasion has been part of the consolidation of U.S. interests in the region; 3) the struggle of the Palestinian people for their liberation is also our struggle; 4) this is not just solidarity; we face problems with common causes and a common solution; 5) part of that shared bond with the peoples of the world is to learn from their experience, in particular the Palestinian people have been victim of the false way out of fundamentalism, and this should make us not to fall into the false dichotomy of choosing between imperialists or fundamentalists.
The speeches of the organizers were weak, with superficialities. One of them (the main organizer) said in a tone of complaint, that the United States had assassinated “a great Iranian military leader, who had helped to organize the (Islamic) revolution in Iran.” In a conversation with her, she affirmed that “we must come out in the streets to support the Palestinians because they made a political bet with this action, and we have to support this in any way we can.”
Protest in front of the Israeli embassy in Bogotá, October 7, 2023. Photo: comrev.co
Protest in front of the Israeli embassy in Bogotá, October 7, 2023. Photo: comrev.co
On several occasions, we intervened pointing out that fundamentalism is an outmoded force and does not represent a liberating option for the people who are facing the attacks by imperialists and reactionaries. We exposed what fundamentalism has meant for the people in Iran and in particular for women.
We read “From the four prisons” by Nazim Hikmet and two poems by Mahmud Darwish.
We did agitation with the following slogans, while burning the flags of Israel and the United States:
Yankees Out of Palestine, Iran, Colombia, and the Whole World!
Neither Fundamentalism nor Imperialism! Revolution is the solution!
What is the problem?... it’s the damn system! What’s the solution?... Revolution, revolution!
Revolution, nothing less!
The protest lasted an hour and a half and at the end, we decided to walk along 26th Avenue to the U.S. Embassy...