Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, the Lebanese Arab Communist struggler for Palestine jailed for over 35 years in France, released a statement in support of the growing international protests against Israeli annexation, read out in the original French at the protest in Paris on 27 June 2020, which brought thousands to the streets in a mass protest of solidarity with the Palestinian people. The image and words of Georges Abdallah – and the Palestinian prisoners – were very visible throughout the Paris march.
The translated text is below. Read the statement in French, Arabic or Italian.
Dear friends and comrades,
The Palestinian popular masses and their revolutionary vanguards have been fighting relentlessly since the late 1960s, under particularly difficult conditions. The emergence and affirmation of the modern Palestinian revolution, following the defeat of the Arab bourgeoisie and its various regimes in 1967, aroused the enthusiasm of the popular masses and the living movements of the Arab world, especially in the Mashreq. However, reactionaries on all sides never wanted to – and cannot seek to – coexist with this revolutionary hotbed in the region and in any way endorse a real Resistance to the Zionist entity, which, by the way, is not just one instrument among many others in the service of imperialism for the plunder and domination of the region. It is, in fact, an organic extension of Western imperialism. This is why the struggle of the Palestinian people in the region involves a far more complex task than other national liberation struggles against traditional forms of colonialism.
Since the very early 1970s, the liquidation of the Palestinian revolution has been high on the agenda of the imperialist forces and their regional reactionary affiliates. Wars and massacres have followed one another since then, and the popular masses have confronted them with the means and capabilities available…although the revolution has been torn (it still is today) between two poles: one seeking at all costs negotiations and endless concessions and the other focusing on resistance by all means and especially armed struggle. Innumerable battles were fought, some were lost, some were won, but on the whole and despite all the losses and despite all the mistakes, the popular masses were able to consolidate certain achievements whose strategic significance no one today can dispute.
The Palestinian people are still there and the Palestinian cause is more alive than ever: a historic path whose contours are traced by the blood of the Palestinian revolutionaries, the dynamics perpetuated by the early engagement of the Flowers and the Lion Cubs of Palestine, and the ever more illuminating light of the torches of freedom, these indomitable Resistance heroes captive in Zionist jails…
All of them are these days affirming their rejection of the infamous Oslo Accords. Perhaps it would be useful to point out that initiatives for any negotiations, and at the cost of concessions that are far from negligible, have multiplied following the so-called “intermediate program” or the “ten-point program” around 1974, at the height of the Palestinian struggle, and then the acceptance of Resolutions 242 and 338 at the 1988 Palestinian National Council session, and finally Oslo, which served neither to stop the colonization and confiscation of Palestinian land nor to prevent the ever more accelerated Judaization of Al-Quds.
For more than 27 years “they” continued to nourish illusions about the establishment of a “truly sovereign state” over less than 22% of Palestine in the midst of an active colonization project, a settler colonial project: the illusions of two “states” next to each other like old neighbours who have fallen out over a piece of land, illusions about the ability of the Zionist entity to exist normally in peacetime and to establish other relationships with the region (and not only with the Palestinian people) that would not reflect the interests of this “organic extension of imperialism”.
Since 1993 the Palestinian popular masses have been forced to endure horrible massacres and a genocidal siege and the detention of children and entire families, not to mention the demolition of houses and other property, because a stratum of compradors has been able to glimpse its interests flourishing at the end of the fantasized tunnel!!
Certainly it is not such a small matter to get out of the swamps of Oslo, especially since the instruments of repression are essentially linked to the mechanisms of counter-revolution in the service of the Zionist occupier…
The Palestinian people and their vanguard fighters have accumulated, throughout their journey of existential struggle, what is necessary to take up the challenge and continue the struggle until victory. The forces of the Resistance in the region are so strong that one can say with confidence and without bluster: victory is more than ever on the agenda. Naturally, the masses of the people and their imprisoned vanguard fighters can count on your active solidarity.
May a thousand solidarity initiatives flourish in support of Palestine and its glorious Resistance!
Solidarity, all solidarity with the resistance fighters in Zionist jails and in the isolation cells in Morocco, Turkey, Greece and the Philippines and elsewhere in the world!
Solidarity, all the solidarity with the young proletarians of the working class neighbourhoods!
Solidarity, all solidarity with the Yemeni people!
Honour to the martyrs and the struggling masses of the people!
Down with imperialism and its Zionist and Arab reactionary watchdogs!
Capitalism is nothing but barbarism, honour to all those who oppose it in the diversity of their expressions!
Together Comrades, and only together will we win!
To all of you, Comrades and friends, my warmest revolutionary greetings.
Your Comrade Georges Abdallah
Lannemezan, 27 June 2020
