By Abayomi Azikiwe
Note: This statement was submitted at the request of the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (GC) for its African Liberation Day rally being held on Sunday May 19, 2024 in Malcolm X Park in Washington, D.C. The event was organized under the theme: “From Cape Town to Cairo, the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, Pan-Africanism and Palestine Liberation are Indivisible! Smash the Genocide of International Zionism and Apartheid!”
This commemoration of African Liberation Day comes at a critical conjunction in the overall struggle against imperialism and for the total liberation of our continent along with other oppressed and exploited peoples throughout the globe.
Since October 7, the people of Palestine have once again renewed their leading role in ending the yoke of Zionism and imperialism over their land and people.
Some 76 years ago on May 15, 1948, the Zionists regime was recognized by the United States under President Harry S. Truman as the purported “legitimate” entity over the land of Palestine. Even prior to 1948, the Zionist project had been advanced by the French and British imperialists.
From its inception in the 1890s, the World Zionist Movement was committed to an “ironclad” alliance with western imperialism. This is why today the U.S. national security capitalist state is the main supporter of the oppression and genocide against the Palestinians.
Our solidarity and close operational work with the Palestinian liberation movement is rooted in the actual history of the most revolutionary forces to emerge over the last seven decades. In many years past, ancestors such as Malcolm X (El Hajj Malik El Shabazz), Ethel Minor, Kwame Ture, John Watson and others representing organizations such as the Nation of Islam, Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Black Panther Party, League of Revolutionary Black Workers, All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (A-APRP), etc., spoke out strongly against the Zionist state and its imperialist backers. Within Africa itself, the work of Presidents Gamel Abdel Nassar, Kwame Nkrumah, Ahmed Sekou Toure, Nelson Mandela, Col. Muamar Gaddafi, etc., remains a living force in the overwhelming support for the Palestinians throughout the continent in this latest phase of the war to liberate Palestine and the entire West Asia and North Africa regions.
There must no cooperation with the genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza and throughout the Occupied Territories. Those elements posing as representatives of the African people in the U.S. who continue to side with Zionism in defiance of the mood of billions around the world, should be denounced. They are not in accord with the interests of their own people in the U.S., around the world and all other oppressed and exploited masses globally.
Students and Youth Expose the Links with Zionism and Imperialism
The movement for the liberation of Palestine has impacted the university and college campuses around the U.S. and in other centers of imperialism such as the UK, Western Europe and Australia. The conscious students and faculty members are demanding documents related to the investments by their educational institutions which perpetuate Zionism.
These students have constructed encampments and seized buildings in their call for the end of the genocide and the freedom of the Palestinians. The White House and majority of officials within both Houses of Congress decided recently to send additional weapons to the Israeli regime so they can displace, injure and kill more Palestinians. This same aid package for imperialist war also included funds to undermine the sovereignty of the People’s Republic of China, to harass and kill more people crossing the southern border as well as additional weapons to the neo-fascist government in Ukraine for a war in which they have no prospect of winning against the Russian Federation.
Over the last month, a coordinated effort engineered by President Joe Biden’s White House and the Justice Department to crush the campus protests against the genocide in Gaza and for the complete disinvestment from Israeli apartheid, has resulted in nearly 3,000 arrests. The ruling class propaganda against the students falsely accusing them of being “outside agitators”, has not hampered the capacity to mobilize thousands. These are the same slanderous accusations made decades ago against the organizers of the Civil Rights, Black Power and Pan-African Movements.
The mass arrests of students and faculty members has only fueled the anti-Zionist movement in the U.S. In the most recent period, many young and older Jewish people who previously bought into the myths of Zionism related to the fundamental rights of the Palestinians along with other Arabs, related ethnic groups and Africans in the region, have joined demonstrations and rallies not only demanding an immediate ceasefire, some are now calling for the creation of a unitary Palestinian state.
An independent Palestinian state would be a profound contribution to the anti-imperialist struggle worldwide. Consequently, Africans within the various sectors, whether it be education, labor or religion, will undoubtedly intensify their efforts aimed at ending the genocide and bringing about the liberation of Palestine.
Labor for Palestine committees have been established in many states. The African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) and African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ) Church issued a joint statement demanding a shift in the policy of the Biden administration on Palestine. These denominations represent 4.9 million Africans in the U.S. and other regions of the world.
There is a tremendous level of political ferment surrounding the anti-Zionist movement worldwide. The revolutionary organizations in the U.S. should provide maximum solidarity with the students and faculty opposing the genocide in Gaza.
Neo-Colonialism and the Struggle for Pan-Africanism
In order for the unification and liberation of Africa to occur the external elements which conspire to contain and dominate the continent will have to be defeated. We have witnessed over the last year the upsurge of anti-imperialist sentiment in the Sahel region of West Africa.
France and the U.S. have been ordered to leave Niger despite the presence of the Pentagon’s Africa Command (AFRICOM) which staffs drone stations and 1000 troops. A scheme to prompt an imperialist-backed military intervention in Niger was rejected by various political parties and mass organizations throughout the West Africa region. These developments led to the formation of an Alliance of Sahel States encompassing Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali. After this coalition was formed, the sanctions leveled by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) were lifted.
The failures of U.S. imperialism and NATO in various geopolitical regions of the world have emboldened working and oppressed peoples to fight against exploitation and hegemony. This political upsurge will play an important role in the struggle to achieve African unification, sovereignty and socialism.
As noted by Dr. Kwame Nkrumah in 1965 when he published “Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism” that:
“The ideal neo-colonialist State would be one which was wholly subservient to neo-colonialist interests, but the existence of the socialist nations makes it impossible to enforce the full rigor of the neo-colonialist system. The existence of an alternative system is itself a challenge to the neo-colonialist regime. Warnings about ‘the dangers of Communist subversion’ are likely to be two-edged since they bring to the notice of those living under a neo-colonialist system the possibility of a change of regime. In fact, neo-colonialism is the victim of its own contradictions. In order to make it attractive to those upon whom it is practiced it must be shown as capable of raising their living standards, but the economic object of neo-colonialism is to keep those standards depressed in the interest of the developed countries. It is only when this contradiction is understood that the failure of innumerable ‘aid’ programs, many of them well intentioned, can be explained.”
African people around the world who are politically educated and organized can overcome the legacies of enslavement, colonialism, neo-colonialism and imperialism. African unification will achieve its full realization through a socialist path of development.
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