Contribution of the Palestinian Communist Party at the 24th International Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties in the Cuban Capital, Havana
Comrades, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba, leaders and representatives of the Communist and Workers’ Parties, honorable attendees,
On behalf of the Palestinian Communist Party, the party of the Palestinian working class, we extend to you our highest militant greetings. We hope that this 24th International Meeting will be crowned with success in its struggle to unite the ranks of our communist movement in the face of the fierce imperialist assault on our peoples.
We also extend a special tribute of reverence and admiration to the revolutionary people of Cuba and their Communist Party. We meet today on the land of the steadfast Cuban Revolution, which faces the largest imperialist attacks and the unjust economic and financial blockade since the Bay of Pigs invasion. This meeting convenes in conjunction with the centenary of the birth of the father of the Cuban Revolution, the immortal Comrade Fidel Castro, and takes place in close proximity to the dens of colonialism, where the free Cuban people built socialism and proved to the world that peoples are capable of victory. We reaffirm our full solidarity with Cuba and demand its definitive removal from any unilateral lists of state sponsors of terrorism.
Comrades, Our meeting convenes under highly complex international circumstances witnessing a dangerous acceleration in global transformations. Global capitalism, in its imperialist stage, is experiencing a deep structural crisis—an intractable crisis of overproduction. Historically, capitalism has resolved its contradictions and crises by igniting wars, whether major ones like the First and Second World Wars, or smaller wars in Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, and finally in Iran. Today, this acute imperialist struggle over raw materials, markets, trade routes, and energy is escalating. The capitalist powers, led by US imperialism and its allies, are resorting to militarization and fueling chauvinistic tendencies, the far-right, racist regimes, and fascism when bourgeois democracy fails to contain these crises.
The principled Marxist-Leninist position asserts that inter-capitalist wars always aim to control sources of wealth. Hence, it is our party’s view that the Russian-Ukrainian war is an expression of the crisis and contradictions of the global capitalist system, and of the struggle among imperialist powers for influence, interests, and strategic positions. This war cannot be understood in isolation from NATO’s military expansionist policies and US hegemony following the coup against socialism in the Soviet Union. At the same time, Russia’s use of military force or the violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty cannot be justified; Russia today is a capitalist state governed by class and geopolitical interests, not a socialist alternative to Western hegemony.
The principled stance of the communist and workers’ forces is based on the rejection of imperialist wars in all their forms, and the refusal to turn peoples into fuel for the conflicts of major powers. The primary victims of this war are the workers, the toiling masses, and the peoples, while arms corporations and major monopolies reap the benefits. Therefore, the solution lies in stopping the war, resorting to a political solution that guarantees the rights and sovereignty of peoples, and struggling for a more just international order based on peace and cooperation among peoples, far from military hegemony and polarization.
Dear Comrades, The capitalist and imperialist assault on peoples has shown its most hideous fascist face in our region through the alliance of fascist Zionism and religious extremism. The war on the Gaza Strip has turned into one of the most horrific crimes of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and systematic starvation in the modern era, aimed at breaking the will of our people and uprooting them from their land. Simultaneously, the West Bank, including occupied Jerusalem, faces the fiercest forms of apartheid and rabid settlement expansion. The West Bank has been fragmented by more than 1,300 electronic gates and military checkpoints, transformed into isolated enclaves and cantons to end the historical national existence of our people.
This criminal Zionist assault has not been limited to the land of Palestine; it has extended to sisterly Lebanon and its resisting people through brutal aggression, targeting residential areas and civilians, and violating its national sovereignty in a blatant Zionist-imperialist attempt to expand the scope of the war and subjugate the resistance forces in the region. We declare from this podium our firm internationalist solidarity with the brotherly Lebanese people and their valiant resistance in confronting this brutal Zionist aggression.
In this same context, the repeated US-Zionist aggressions and threats against Iran and its sovereignty are seen as an integral part of the imperialist strategy to subjugate the entire region and dismantle any axis that disrupts the absolute hegemony of US imperialism and its Zionist ally over energy sources and strategic corridors. We view this aggression as an attempt to impose new colonial equations through armed force and suffocating economic sanctions. We reaffirm our principled position upholding the absolute right of peoples to protect their sovereignty and national independence in the face of imperialist plots that seek to ignite a comprehensive regional war serving only the interests of the military-industrial complex and monopoly capital networks.
Dear Comrades, “Our party, the Palestinian Communist Party, engages with all its capabilities and cadres on the front lines to confront this fascist Zionist assault. In the Gaza Strip, the party makes immense sacrifices, offering blood as a group of our comrades ascended as martyrs in the battle of confronting the occupation. In the West Bank, our comrades are subjected to continuous arrests and persecution. Under these complex conditions, our party continues its struggle in all forms to restore our legitimate national rights. It focuses its tireless efforts on the ground to form a broad national front that unites the living forces hostile to the occupation and to the liquidationist ‘Oslo’ approach—a front whose features are gradually taking shape today, despite all the restrictions and persecutions by the Palestinian Authority apparatuses that are complicit with the occupation, targeting our party and the struggling national forces.”
Comrades, The struggle of the Palestinian people is not merely a local political conflict; it is an inherent part and an advanced front of the internationalist struggle against imperialism, colonialism, and plunder. Therefore, we emphasize before this podium the utmost importance of the role of the global communist movement. Imperialism operates as an internationally interconnected bloc, and confronting it requires a unified internationalist response and struggle based on the unity of the working class and oppressed peoples. History has proven that the unity of the communist movement has always been the safety valve and the primary pillar for victory over fascism and colonialism, and that the decline of this coordination gives enemies the space to impose their projects. Thus, we call for developing more effective forms of coordination, organizing comprehensive solidarity and boycott campaigns against the occupation, collectively standing against blockades, sanctions, and imperialist military alliances, and rebuilding the global socialist project on revolutionary Marxist-Leninist foundations.
Hence, our party reaffirms before you, comrades, its proposition and unwavering historical position: The Palestinian Communist Party’s vision and just solution for the Palestinian cause does not lie within the 1967 borders. Rather, we reject this partition and emphasize our principled goal of completely ending the Zionist settler-colonial project, and establishing a single democratic state over the entire Palestinian territory—a state for all its sons and daughters, where all components live on the basis of full equality in rights and duties without any national, religious, or ethnic discrimination; a state that guarantees the sacred right of return for Palestinian refugees to their homes in accordance with UN Resolution 194, paving the way towards socialism and social justice.
In conclusion, we extend our deepest thanks and appreciation to the Communist Party of Cuba for their warm reception and for hosting this important meeting. We renew our faith that the banner of workers’ internationalism will remain flying high, and that free peoples are capable of defeating occupation, fascism, and imperialism, and building a new world dominated by peace and socialism.
Glory to the struggling peoples. Glory to internationalist solidarity. Freedom for all of Palestine, from the river to the sea. Long live the Communist International.
https://www.solidnet.org/article/24th-IMCWP-Contribution-by-the-Palestinian-CP/
