Our Reporter
On October 26, the Colombo Action Committee for People’s Struggles (CACPS) engaged in a successful picketing campaign in front of the Colombo Fort railway station, demanding an immediate end to the war of extermination carried out by the Israeli Zionist ruling class headed by Benjamin Netanyahu, with the full support of the imperialist camp led by Washington, against the oppressed Palestinian people of the Gaza Strip.
Young and old from different parts of the island participated in the campaign. Activists took part in the campaign by displaying placards bearing slogans that provided a clear perspective, leadership and political program for the vast working class all over the world. For several days before the campaign, the comrades of the committee engaged in campaigning among the public by distributing nearly two thousand leaflets containing the committee’s declaration “Defend the Palestinian people against Zionism!”
The statement reads:
“Today, the entire imperialist system is being dragged towards a third world war, under an economic and political crisis, that judders in its very depths. That is the exact reason why the current developments in Israel represent a new stage of the long-rooted contradictions in the global capitalist system. While the working class needs freedom, imperialist capitalism wants it buried. Exactly because of this reason, defending the Palestinian people’s struggle for freedom is an unavoidable class obligation of the working class in every country, including that of the Israeli working class.
The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS.org) have taken the lead in this struggle by developing the necessary international perspectives of the working class and the programme necessitated by that struggle. The Colombo Action Committee for People’s Struggles stands with these perspectives and programme to defend Palestinian people and calls upon all progressive masses to rally round that struggle.”
Protest placards were displayed in Sinhala, Tamil and English.
The placards displayed by the protestors included the following: Free the Gaza Strip! Stop the Imperialist-Zionist Genocide in Palestine! Down with imperialist-backed Zionism! Workers, boycott arms shipments to Israel! Food, Medicine, fuel to Gaza! Lift the Siege! Withdraw American warships from the Mediterranean Sea! Condemn Sri Lankan government’s support to genocide! No to capitalist two-state trap! Build Jew-Arab United Socialist State! Prosecute Israel, US, NATO war criminals! Stop funding War!
The campaigners chanted aloud the following slogans for over 45 minutes.
Stop the Israeli attack on the oppressed Palestinians
End the Siege of Palestinian Territories!
Disarm the Israeli forces!
Disburse food, water and medicine to Gaza, Immediately!
Pro-Imperialist Zionists are on a killing spree
Killing infants and mothers
Setting hospitals on fire
Capitalists all over the world are Counting the war profits savouring the taste of blood !
Workers of Israel and Palestine – Unite!
Workers in America – Europe – Line up!
Oppressed people in Asia and all over the world – Rise up!
To bury the Profiteering war mongering capitalism !
At the end of the campaign, CACPS President, Comrade Sanjay Jayasekara addressed the campaigners, many journalists reporting the event, and the public.
He declared that, the Netanyahu regime is carrying out a genocide comparable to Nazi crimes by starving and dehydrating the oppressed Palestinian people – most of them are women and children – in Gaza. Netanyahu as well as the imperialist leaders who support his regime are war criminals. He said that the “Nakba”, the ethnic cleansing that started against the Palestinians in 1948, did not end with the partition of Palestine under the United Nations organisation led by British imperialism in 1947 and continued against the Palestinians each and every day of the past 75 years. He explained that the October 7 Hamas attack was a revolt by the oppressed Palestinians who were subjected to constant violence.
Jayasekara insisted that the struggle for freedom of the oppressed Palestinian people and the democratic rights of the Israeli working class would not be safe-guarded on the basis of the imperialist two-state death trap, but only in a United Jewish-Arab Socialist State. He called upon the working class to rally, especially in Israel and Sri Lanka, and all over the world to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian working people to defend the oppressed Palestinian people and prevent war.
Then the secretary of the committee, journalist Shantha Wijesooriya, spoke and asked the workers to unite in the anti-war movement to stop the Palestinian genocide and to build CACPS.
CACPS Executive Committee member Nandana Nannetthi explained that 81% of the people in Palestine are poor, 63% suffer from food shortages, and unemployment is 41%.The forcibly Occupied Palestinian Territories serve as an open air Israeli prison camp, as the entire population is controlled by the oppressive Israeli government. The social inequality in Israel, home to a very large number of super rich capitalists in the world, is so great that it’s capitalists own 19 times more wealth than 50% of its poorer people. Therefore the defence of the democratic rights of the Israeli working class is necessarily linked to the opposition to war. No nationalist organisation, including Hamas, has any ability whatsoever to protect the rights of oppressed nations within a global imperialist system. Nannetthi insisted that any program abstracting the struggle against the war from a fight against the local capitalist ruling class in one’s own country is fraudulent.
After the picket campaign, several comrades were engaged in discussions with the members of the CACPS. They suggested organising similar campaigns in other parts of the country and requested that the CACPS participate in them. Explaining that the people’s movement for anti-war and democratic rights can only be built by forming independent Workers Action Committees and uniting them both locally and internationally, the CACPS members invited them to take the initiative in establishing those regional committees.
