Palestine Screening October 2024
Opening Speech
Hello everyone, greetings from the Communist Workers’ Platform USA. I would like to thank you all for coming here today to show solidarity with Palestine, learn more about Israel’s influence on the politics in our country, and listen to our messages. I would like to introduce our organization: we are the Communist Workers’ Platform USA. We are an organization seeking to rebuild the fighting strength of the working class through the leadership of the communist party and thus carry forward the class struggle between workers and capitalists to its revolutionary end. Our publication, New Worker, is available at the sign-in table and inside - as we will explain throughout tonight’s event, we will see how essential the central organ of the party is as a weapon against the ruling class on the ideological front. We encourage you to subscribe to the paper, purchase a copy, donate to our efforts, and learn more about us.
Just this week, Israel bombed tents outside of the Al-Aqsa Hospital in Gaza, leaving dozens of Gazans burning alive. A young man named Sha’ban burned to death alongside members of his family, caught on camera by helpless bystanders for the world to watch in utter horror. The IDF has encircled northern Gaza entirely, starving the population trapped there. Israel has expanded its war and is now bombing the Lebanese capital of Beirut and beginning an invasion of Southern Lebanon. In just under a month, over 2,300 Lebanese have been killed. The risk of war with Iran heightens, threatening to balloon the suffering of the working class in the Middle East to ever tragic levels.
The grip that Israeli propaganda had held on the US population has crumbled in the past year. We are now only three weeks away from the US presidential elections. In opposition to the workers and people of the US, both candidates have vowed to continue the US’ support for Israel’s genocidal campaigns. We intend today to show you this documentary which examines the influence Israel has deliberately cultivated through their propaganda and then provide our solution in this struggle.
For tonight, we will continue by watching the film, then comrade Robin will facilitate a few discussion questions, then comrade Kat will share a poem and a speech. Finally, we invite you all to join us in singing a traditional Palestinian song of liberation. Thank you once again for coming tonight, much love to you all.
Austin, First Secretary of the Greater-Miami Local Committee
Closing Speech
Comrades, brothers, sisters—today we stand together not only for Palestine but for every corner of the world where humanity bleeds under the boot of oppression. Palestine is not just a land under siege; it is a symbol, a pulse of resistance that has beat for over seventy years. It tells us of homes lost, families torn apart, and dreams buried beneath rubble. It tells us of checkpoints, airstrikes, and the suffocation of an entire people who have been denied the most basic right—to exist in dignity and freedom.
What we see unfolding in Gaza, the West Bank, and beyond is more than military occupation—it is genocide. It is a slow, methodical dismantling of a people, stripping them of land, of voice, of breath. And this is not an isolated story; it echoes with the cries of all workers and oppressed in every nation subjected to capitalist-imperialist violence. From the Rohingya in Myanmar to Indigenous struggles in the Americas to the people of Yemen—the narrative is the same: Empire profits from suffering.
What we fight for is not just survival but revolution. Palestine is where the promise of liberation is not merely spoken—it is lived, fought for, and passed on. Every march, every chant, every barricade is a refusal to disappear, a declaration that we will not be erased from history.
The Communist Workers Platform USA stands with Palestine because we know that workers everywhere share the same enemy: capitalism-imperialism, a system built on exploitation, militarism, and the denial of human dignity. A system which lives off the misery of the working class around the world. Our solidarity is not charity—it is our duty. When Gaza rises, the global working class rises with it. This revolutionary struggle is an aspect of the overall fight for the end of capitalism and the establishment of socialism-communism. When Palestine is free, we are all one step closer to a world where borders are dismantled**, labor is respected, and peace is built by those whose hands have carried the weight of the world.
The road to this victory is long, winding, and multi-faceted. A crucial front of this class struggle is the ideological battle. We see in the film that the ruling class takes this front very seriously. Their attempts to shape and form public opinion, to pit the workers and people against the Palestinians and to see the Israelis as helpless victims—flipping the David and Goliath narrative fully on its head.
How then are we to fight back against bourgeois ideology? Every ideology has a material basis, that is every ideology originates from the outlook of one class or another. We must actively, consciously launch an offensive on this front, using the full force of working class ideology—Marxism-Leninism—against the capitalists.
A centerpiece in our ideological battle against the ruling class is our central organ: New Worker. With New Worker we seek to create ideological unity and consolidate the unified voice of the class-conscious working class organized in the communist party. Building out New Worker—physical media, online, radio, and other channels—the communist media, will provide the working class the means to launch our own ideological offensive. We will demolish the Zionist propaganda and raise our mighty voices as one as we call for a free Palestine from the river to the sea!
Let us not falter, for we are on the side of history that builds. We fight for a world where no nation can profit from destruction, no child must grow under drone-struck skies, and no people are forced to live in perpetual exile. Palestine will be free—not just because we believe it, but because we will work until it is. From the streets of Ferguson to the rubble of Gaza, we say it loud and clear: Oppression has no place in the future we are building.
And we the working class—so many millions of dreamers, fighters—will build that future. Together. Until every land is free.
Kat the Poet
Poem on Palestine and the Globe
We are made of bread and protest signs, hands stained with mortar and earth,
palm to stone, fist to sky—
our sweat is currency that’s never honored.
In the soil of Palestine, every olive tree grows like a witness, roots tangled with history
and graves they try to make us forget.
Borders bloom like walls, checkpoints like thorns. To walk this land is to fight gravity itself,
while tanks roar lullabies to our children.
We are the workers who carry liberation on our backs, whose calloused hands clutch dreams like tools, organizing against boots on our necks,
against bulldozers that flatten both homes and hope. The oppressor tells us: work hard enough,
stay silent long enough—
and maybe the sun will rise for you too. But we have learned:
freedom is not given, it’s built.
And the sunrise? It belongs to the people who demand it.
Palestine is seven decades of withheld tomorrows, but we labor knowing that walls crumble—
if not by hammer, then by heart.
They want us to forget how to dream,
but our dreams do not fit in cages.
We are the fields that bloom in defiance,
the wages of resistance paid forward in song.
If freedom must be wrenched from the jaws of empire, then let the workers rise, united as one breath.
For every tear in Gaza, for every life stolen—
we carry the banner, we lift the torch,
and with our hands, we rebuild the world.
Kat the Poet
**Editorial Note
The issue of borders must be approached with clarity. The military checkpoints and barriers that imprison the Palestinian people and restrict their movement must be eliminated, while the borders that affirm their right to an independent state based on the 1967 lines must be upheld.
Under capitalism, borders serve as militaristic instruments for the inhumane treatment of refugees and migrants. They help bourgeois governments regulate labor supply based on market demands, restricting it during times of capitalist crises. The exploitation of migrants and refugees is a lucrative scheme for monopolies, as seen under the Bush and Obama governments and subsequent administrations. The borders are now one focal point of debate ahead of the 2024 elections. Migrants and refugees become fodder for capitalist governments, providing cheap labor for the bourgeoisie while also being scapegoated for political gains.
However, the communist stance on borders and immigration under capitalism is one which does not fall to either extreme: supporting reactionary, racist and discriminatory immigration laws or free immigration. In either case, the conditions of the countries which await migrant workers and refugees must always be exposed and combatted in the building of the unity of workers, local and migrant, in the struggle for the overthrow of the existing order and in the demand for proletarian internationalism for the socialist revolution. This is the path forward for the solution of the migrant and refugee crisis; to end the capitalist barbarism which causes it.
The communists recognize the importance of workers' power. Under socialism, borders come under the control of central planning and are overseen within the framework of protecting the dictatorship of the proletariat.