“I AM 55 years old, and I have never encountered such devastating news as I am receiving now from Palestine,” Palestinian People’s Party guest speaker Dr Firas Sarhan told a fringe meeting at the Communist Party’s 57th Congress yesterday.

“My dad lived through the first Nakba [catastrophe, as the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes as Israel was established is widely known] and he shared it with us, told us the horrible stories from that time.

“And that makes me think deeply and carefully about whether we are now facing a second Nakba, especially in terms of what’s going on in Gaza.

“We are at a crossroads — will we get a long-lasting peace treaty, a process that will take us forward, or will we see more and more of us becoming refugees, driven into the Sinai desert, or the Negev desert, or possibly into Jordan?”

Pointing to the 17-year siege of Gaza and the ongoing occupation of the West Bank, “the arrests, the administrative detention,” he stressed: “The conflict did not start on October 7. It goes back 56 years, or 75 years, or 106 years” (references to Israel’s occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem — the territory promised for a Palestinian state — in 1967, the Nakba of 1948 and the Balfour Declaration of 1917, promising the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine).

The Communist Party of Lebanon’s Nader Awaad said he began demonstrating for a free Palestine aged 16 in Beirut.

“History has been at a standstill when it comes to Palestine. The Berlin Wall has fallen, the Soviet Union has collapsed, and still we have to say ‘Free Palestine.’

“Lebanon suffers, but not so much as Palestine, from Israeli occupation. Gaza has been suffering for the last 20 years. 

“Where do you think we stand as the Lebanese Communist Party? We stand with the resistance.

“It doesn’t matter whose resistance — a Muslim faction, a leftie — resistance is resistance.

“Hezbollah in Lebanon is a resistance. We stand with them. We have differences with them on other topics, we confront them, but when it comes to the resistance, we are behind them. Nothing to do with Islam.

“We don’t want, like them, a Muslim state — I’m a communist, I drink, I eat pork, you name it I do it — but when it comes to the confrontation with the imperialists and the zionists, we are behind the resistance – it doesn’t matter what colour.”

Palestinians would never give up their struggle, he warned: “The Palestinians for 75 years have been deported from their land. The old-school zionists, they thought ‘the old will die, the young will forget, no-one will come after us.’ They were mistaken. Palestinians are dotted around the world — in the Arab world, in Europe, America, Australia, you name it — but they haven’t forgotten Palestine.”

Navid Shomali of the Tudeh Party of Iran said the war on Palestine “started 75 years ago, and more importantly never stopped.

“In 1967 Israel occupied the whole of Gaza and the West Bank, the area that was declared by the world powers in 1948 to be the home of the independent Palestine.

“And anybody who wanted to take a measure to resolve this crisis, this injustice, has paid with their lives.

“Thirty years ago, in September 12, the Oslo agreement was signed, by Yitzhak Rabin, the brave prime minister of Israel, and Yasser Arafat.

“And 28 years ago, Rabin was assassinated. By who? By zionists. Who didn’t want to have a peaceful solution. And that process has continued up to now.”

Mr Shomali pointed to the long record of Western imperialist intervention against democracy in the Middle East, including the overthrow of the Mossadegh government in Iran, pointing out that the Palestine question is bound up with the suppression of democratic rights across the entire region.

“United States imperialism, British imperialism, European imperialist countries have been responsible for the tragedy that is happening today in Palestine, because of the coups d’etats that they have staged in the Middle East, stopping democracy from taking root.

“Demand change. The first change should be to declare an independent state of Palestine on the 1967 borders, with its capital in East Jerusalem, with the right of return for refugees. Free Palestine.”