Anne Alexander on Palestinian liberation

Major article from the new Socialist Review online - which stresses the crucial role the wider Arab working class, particularly in Egypt, can (and indeed must) play in the cause of liberating Palestine from Zionist and imperialist oppression:

'[Egyptian] Workers can see the connection between the regime which starves their children and sends riot police to beat them off the streets, and the oppression of the Palestinians. Thus it has been in those sections of the workers' movement which have gone furthest in the economic struggle, such as the Mahalla textile workers and the tax collectors, where the call for solidarity with the Palestinians has found the strongest echo. One of the striking tax collectors interviewed by filmmaker Nora Younis in December 2007 put it like this: "We are going to hell, but our country is backing Israel and the US." Egyptian workers have long whispered such things in private, looking over their shoulders in fear of Mubarak's secret police. Spoken in public, in the midst of a strike by 55,000 tax collectors, during a ten-day occupation of a street in central Cairo round the corner from the cabinet offices, these words represent the potential for something not seen in Egypt since the 1940s: the coalescence of the anti-imperialist protest movement with the social power of the Egyptian working class.'