RAMLA, PALESTINE, July 26 — After more than a month of struggle, the eviction warrant placed at the al-Aju family compound was finally revoked. This victory was met with celebration by family members, neighbors and activists — both Jewish and Arab, workers and students — who supported the struggle. This small victory and others like it are a signal, not that capitalism can serve the needs of workers, but that a united working class has tremendous power and that we are moving toward exerting that power in communist revolution.
This struggle has deep roots in the recent history of Palestine. In the 1948 war, the al-Aju family — originally Arabs from the nearby town of Lydda (Lod) — was deported from their homes by the Israeli military. However, unlike many other Palestinian refugees, the family managed to remain inside the so-called Green Line and has settled on the land of another Arab family that had been driven off its land by Israeli bosses. As its original owners were no longer present, the Israeli state took over the land, and managed it through the national housing company Amidar.
For over sixty years, the al-Aju family lived on the land as tenants, paying rent in full to the landlords, Amidar. The family’s men are municipal maintenance workers, working hard for a low wage; some, especially of the younger generation, couldn’t find a job at all. As apartments are rarely marketed to Arabs in Israel, the entire family had to build their homes on the same plot of land, with over 70 people, including dozens of children, living in that cramped space with minimal infrastructure.
However, this situation was not profitable for the Amidar bosses. Looking to sell this land off to a real-estate developer who would build upscale apartments, Amidar tried twice to evict the al-Aju family from its land, both in April and June-July of 2011. However, the family did not surrender to the racist court’s orders, and fought back.
Helping the al-Aju family was the Solidarity organization, a broad coalition of Jewish and Arab left-wing activists (mostly students and workers), ranging from liberals to anarchists to communists, who are fighting against the racism, apartheid and fascism of the Israeli regime. At the eviction date in April, Solidarity activists held a rally against Amidar and the cops, and managed to stop the eviction attempt.
In early July, the court issued a “flexible” warrant for a whole month, meaning that Amidar and the cops could evict the al-Aju family from its home, children included, with no notice. To defeat this, Solidarity — in which several PL’ers are active — organized shifts of volunteers to sit at the al-Aju compound, give support to the family, and quickly call in help from additional activists in case the Amidar thugs and the cops showed up.
On July 25th, a large rally was held near the al-Aju compound, where the family’s father said over the bullhorn that he will stay in his house no matter what, and that “the revolution starts from the al-Aju compound.” An activist leader said that the family would be evicted only over his dead body, and a PL’er made the point plainly: “a system that can’t provide everyone with a roof over their heads has to destroyed.”
On July 26th we achieved a victory when the District Court decided to revoke the eviction warrant until further notice. This action gives us a glimpse at the power of the working class, when we are united across boundaries. This was a great training session for what we will need to do to finally defeat the landlords, the cops and the racist courts.
We call it a training session because this victory, like all reform victories, has an expiration date. The bosses have the ultimate trump card, state power, that they use to undo the major and minor advances that the working class wins. The warrant was revoked “until further notice,” which means that this battle will have to be fought again. But all is not in vain: a family has a little more security in their home — no small thing! But perhaps more importantly, communist ideas have been injected into the struggle. The al-Aju family and Solidarity know that communism is not dead, that there is a Party focused on the day when we will graduate from fighting evictions to fighting against the system that throws working-class families out into the streets.