Communist Party of Israel
by Mohammed Nafa's

Israel hinders a just solution in the region

First of all I'd like to express my warmest thanks and
appreciation to the Communist Party of Greece for hosting
this important and necessary meeting. I also regard it as
my duty to congratulate the people and national resistance
of Lebanon for defeating the aggressive Israeli occupation.
This is the truth, whatever interpretations are given by
others. This is also how the Israeli occupation of
Palestinian and Syrian territories is sure to end.

Dear comrades, the first communist organisation in
Palestine was founded in 1919. Last year we celebrated the
eightieth anniversary of the foundation of our Party. We
were also celebrating the 56th anniversary of the
publication of our Party's Arabic newspaper which is called
El et had, i.e. Unity. Today, this newspaper is the oldest
Arabic-language newspaper in the entire Middle East.

We communists, Jews and Arabs, have had a common goal since
1924, the struggle against the reactionary racist movement
of zionism; our aim has been to make known its dangerous
role. It is a struggle that continues to this day.

Since 1948, the rulers of Israel have launched many
offensive, expansionist wars against the Arab Palestinian
people, against Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon; they have caused
much damage, many assassinations and arrests, created many
refugees, and brought about great devastation to the
Palestinian people.

They have plundered the water resources of Syria, Lebanon
and Palestine, and all with the full support of
imperialism, particularly US imperialism today, in
conjunction with pro-US Arab reaction. Anyone familiar with
this situation regards it as his duty to continue the
struggle in our region and throughout the world. This is
our correct class-oriented ideology.

Israel today is obstructing and hindering the achievement
of a just and permanent solution in the region.
Unfortunately we have to say that there are no substantial
differences between the right-wing party Likud and the
Labour Party.

The expansionist and colonial policies of the present
Israeli government continue, as does its refusal to
recognise the right of lelf-determination for the Arab
Palestinian people and their right to establish an
independent state with Jerusalem as its capital. Also,
Israel continues to ignore and not recognise the right of
Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland and not to
be settled in Jordan as has been provided in a number of
different plans.

Israel's acquisition of nuclear weapons and the strategic
alliance between Israel and US imperialism is being used to
exert pressure and intimidate the victim, i.e. the Arab
side, by the United States, which has imposed a criminal
embargo against Cuba, Iraq, and Libya, against which voices
of protest have not been raised loudly enough in the Middle
East.

The Israel budget is almost $50 billion annually. A large
part of this budget is spent on armaments and the
colonisation of Palestinian territories, while unemployment
is rising constantly and the allowances given to the
unemployed and pensioners are being reduced. In the
meantime, the terrible privatisations and the exploitation
of the workers continue, particularly of Palestinian and
foreign workers, who have flocked to Israel from Romania
and the Far East.

In Israel, policies continue to be implemented that, in the
confiscation of land, discriminate at the expense rather of
the ethnic minority, the ethnic Arab minority, the
Palestinian minority living in Israel. During recent years,
the protests in Israel itself against this policy have
intensified. We are operating within the context of the
broader front of democracy and equality which participates
in the Israeli Parliament; and we cooperate with this front
in the trade unions and mass organisations.

We also worked with the Black Panthers and other
organisations, although this alliance dissolved, for which
we were not responsible. Despite this, we learned an
important lesson which was the need to preserve our
particular communist identity on both the theoretical and
practical level.

Recently we allied ourselves with certain forces from the
ethnic Arab Palestinian minority living in Israel, but
unfortunately they were unable to distinguish between
progressive and reactionary forces. And they want in some
way to replace the Communist Party of Israel.

The Islamic fundamentalist movement found full support
from the Likud party, in order to stain the image of the
town of Nazareth and to create religious discord between
the children of the same people. The policy of
normalisation is exploited to ensure the dominance of
Israeli economic policy in our region, by exploiting the
workers in Jordan and Egypt, and by moving Israeli
factories to Jordan to take advantage of the cheap labour
there.

There is an immediate and urgent need to organise more
meetings like today's, so that we communist parties can get
together and exchange experiences. There is also an urgent
need to overcome significant hurdles and find a way to
achieve a closer cooperation between communist parties and
all progressive forces in the Arab world and in the Middle
East more generally .

The severing of ties between our Parties harms our common
struggle and makes it easier for the forces of reaction to
put their plans into action. We, as an internationalist
communist party, call for the consolidation of relations
with all the fraternal communist parties in our region and
throughout the world, so that we may fight for peace,
internationalism and socialism.
Thank you very much.