No amount of desire for peace on Becky Johnson's part will change the fact that the Palestinian people are oppressed and the Zionist government is the oppressor. U.S. support for the oppressor is prolonging the war.

My criticisms of Arafat were always from the left. When Arafat negotiated for the current "two state solution" I pointed out that it would not work because Palestinians would only have control of the poorer areas of Palestine where there was/is no real basis for an independent economy. Instead of being a truly independent nation the Palestinians continued to be forced to work for racist Zionists for employment while the Palestinian Authority took on the role of capitalist government administrators of the new Israeli Bantustans/open air prisons.

I oppose all capitalist governments, including the PA and the Kingdom of Jordan. This, however, doesn’t mean that I’m neutral when it comes to Israel’s murderous invasions of Jenin and Gaza etc.

The current state of the situation has shown that Yasir Arafat's strategy of negotiations with the Israeli government has achieved nothing, that the Israeli government can not even keep their word on earlier agreements, and that there will not be peace for either the Palestinian or the Hebrew speaking population until the Israeli state is abolished and in its place a socialist and democratic secular nation is built with federated republics of Palestinian and Hebrew speaking nationalities that have a separation of church and state where the civil rights of all nationalities are guaranteed. Only a socialist movement that represents the rights of the entire working class and speaks uncompromisingly against the discrimination and violence meted out to the Palestinians by the Israeli State will be capable of making such a revolutionary transformation. Likewise such a movement cannot see the Hebrew speaking population as the enemy and must instead target the repressive apparatus of the Zionist state.

A first step toward ending the oppression of Palestinian people and the war that is being carried out by Israel is to end U.S. military aid.