PFLP on the 40th Anniversary of the Naksah (Six Day War)

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Source: http://www.pflp.ps/index.php?action=Details&id=1031

On the 40th anniversary of the ‘Naksah’ defeat, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine calls for the renewal of the effort of national resistance.

On the 40th anniversary of the 1967 defeat known as the “naksah,” the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine called for the renewal of the Palestinian national resistance effort, an effort that was born and grew up as a reaction to the defeat of the Arab regimes, and as a militant choice of the Palestinian people and the peoples of the Arab Nation in confrontation with settler colonialism and conquest, occupation, aggression, hegemony, and dependence.

The PFLP stated that the path of resistance is the only path guaranteed and tested and able to recover rights and honor and to safeguard identity – a fact that has been proven by the historic resistance of the Arab masses, and is being proven today by the resistance of the Iraqi masses in the Land of the Two Rivers, in addition to the Palestinian and Lebanese resistance that have established, in spite of all the difficult regional and international conditions, the ability of the Arab fighter and soldier to defeat the occupation army and “undefeatable” Zionist terror. Resistance has shattered the Zionists’ traditional strength and deterrent power and undermined their faith in the Zionist leadership, its army, and security agencies. At the same time it has exposed the reality of the war efforts of the Arab regimes, which, despite the triumphs of the Arab soldier, left 99 percent of the cards in the hands of America after having freed the Arab homeland of foreign control and external factors of manipulation and pressure.

The PFLP believes that the degeneration and decline from the slogans proclaimed at the Khartoum Summit after the 1967 defeat – “No peace accord, no recognition, no negotiations!” – to the total reversal of that position as expressed by the Riyadh Summit in March 2007 is proof of how far the official Arab level has declined, and of how far it is willing to go to deny the resistance and to try to circumvent it and undermine it, pursuing instead the policy of compliance, servility, and dependency on the colonial powers and American globalism.

The PFLP regards it as supremely ironic that 40 years of Zionist American arrogance and Arab degradation are still not enough to convince the official Arab regimes of the efficacy of the course of resistance, when in fact resistance is the only real strategic peace option.

Today we see the Zionist state of occupation and terror after 40 years of occupation of the West Bank and Gaza territories and 14 years after the Oslo Declarations is still establishing settlements and deploying settlers all over the lands of Jerusalem and the West Bank. There are now nearly half a million settlers there who have gobbled up nearly half of the land of the West Bank, including Jerusalem, and who squander more than 80 percent of its water resources.

At the same time the Zionist state perpetrates the most atrocious violations, acts of piracy, abductions, war crimes, and blockades against the land and people with impunity and with absolute support from its strategic ally in Washington that controls the resources and markets of the Arabs, plants military bases on their soil, fills their waters with its naval fleets, carrying out open aggression while imposing its humiliating and repressive rule upon them.

The PFLP noted that in the 40 years that have passed, the Palestinian people have made legendary sacrifices, waged an armed revolution and successive intifadas, and carried on a continuous resistance, thereby reasserting their political identity and raising their national cause from an issue of refugees to the cause of a people struggling, under the banners of its militant vanguard and sole legal representative the Palestine Liberation Organization, for freedom, independence, the return, and self-determination, the same as the rest of the peoples of the Earth.

Today, after 40 years in the maws of a battle for national liberation and democracy, we see the struggle flaring up again between the course of steadfastness and resistance on the one hand and the course of Palestinian and Arab alienation and a vain chase after the mirage of empty American promises and peace plans on the other. Our people are threatened with the danger that their national cause will be eliminated by the replacement of the goal of establishing an independent Palestinian state with the aim of a self-rule regime for the inhabitants, set up within temporary limits under the guard and at the mercy of the security of Israel and its economy, abandoning the right of return and relegating our people abroad to the fate of exclusion or dissolution and denationalization in other countries as we spin in an orbit around a phantom solution, engaged in impotent bilateral negotiations under American-Israel supervision. The home front is under attack in various ways and through numerous means of interference from abroad, when it should be uniting and strengthening its national ranks, embarking on the course of democracy and pluralistic participatory national politics which would in word and deed lay down the clear political basis on which national, popular, official, regional, and international forces could rally around the goals of the Palestinian people and their just, legitimate struggle.

On this occasion the PFLP warns that any call for a critical review of our situation loses its real value if it is not linked with national self criticism and critique of the course traversed by the revolution and all the organizations and social forces of the PLO, and a critique of the outcome of the negotiations that have been held and of the Oslo Agreements – the Palestinian people’s verdict on which has already been pronounced by the daily reality of intifada and at the election polls as well.

At this critical time, in which a national disaster and great calamity are threatening, the Popular Front appealed to the Fateh and Hamas movements to finally put an absolute end to solving differences within the national ranks by anything other than dialogue and democratic means, using reason and supreme national interests as their methodology, carrying on a comprehensive national dialogue among all the political and social forces on the basis of the Prisoners’ Document – the “National Accord” – that laid the firm programmatic foundation for reasserting the spirit of resistance, security, and stability, comprehensive democratic reform, national unity, and the activation and reconstruction of the PLO and its popular bases – from the bottom to the top – on democratic foundations through elections in accordance with the principle of total proportional representation in the framework of a clear time table, inasmuch as the PLO is the leader, authority, and sole legal representative of the Palestinian people wherever they are to be found.

Posted at 10:05 a.m. Palestine time, on 4 June 2007.