The Peta Lindsay/Yari Osorio presidential campaign stands in solidarity with the Palestinian people. Both candidates have proudly marched for Palestine on numerous occasions, and will continue to do so through the campaign season and beyond.
The Palestinian people are the victims of one of the worst crimes in modern times. “Ethnically cleansed” from 80 percent of their homeland to make way for the state of Israel in 1948, the Palestinians did not fade quietly into the pages of history. They have waged a heroic struggle against overwhelming odds, facing not only the U.S.-backed Israeli state, but also U.S. imperialism and its client regimes in the Arab world.
Israel remains a racist, apartheid-style state with vastly different rights accorded to Jewish and Palestinian residents. The terrible anti-Semitic atrocities committed against the Jewish people by fascist-led capitalist governments in Europe during the mid-20th century have been cynically used since the end of World War II as a pretext by Western powers to establish a dependent colonial-type settler outpost in the strategic and oil-rich Middle East.
Every year, the U.S. government provides billions of dollars in military funding to the Israeli apartheid state. It provides it with F-16 fighter planes, Apache helicopters and tactical missiles. These are the same weapons that were used to murder over 1,400 Palestinians in the 2008-2009 bombing of the Gaza Strip.
Continuing the same basic policy as the Bush administration, the Democrats during the Obama adminstration stood by the Israeli regime as it attacked the Mavi Marmara humanitarian flotilla, expanded settlements in the West Bank, bulldozed Palestinian homes and incarcerated members of the Palestinian political leadership. While Israeli and U.S. policymakers disagree over some tactics, they share a strategy that has nothing to do with genuine peace in the Middle East.
When Obama spoke forcefully against the Palestinian statehood application at the United Nations in 2011, he revealed the essence of his “two-state solution”: a Palestine that is weak, divided, demilitarized and dependent, and not a real state at all. For both Democrats and Republicans, it is essential to retain Israel as a heavily armed fortress, ready and willing to strike out against its Arab neighbors or Iran when imperial strategy requires it.
In contrast to these parties, the Lindsay/Osorio presidential campaign demands self-determination for the Palestinian people, including the right of return for Palestinian refugees. We support the efforts of the boycott-divestment-sanction movement, and demand an end to U.S. aid to Israel.
