 Massacre in Gaza
Throughout Ramadan 2014 and beyond, while muslims fasted, the world’s people looked on in horror as Israel’s intensification of the genocide of Palestinians escalated into a hideous bloodbath.
While Israelis have justified these crimes to others with lies about ‘defending themselves from terrorism’, the discourse of zionists among themselves paints a far more telling picture.
Seven years of inhuman blockade have been openly described by Israeli officials as “putting Gaza on a diet” and keeping its economy “on the brink of collapse”.
After the killing of three teenage settlers (shipped in from New York and elsewhere to illegally colonise the West Bank, and killed by persons unknown), zionist leaders told Israelis: “There is no mercy for the murderers of children. This is the time for action, not words.”
Frenzied mobs whipped up by such incitements went out and burned 16-year-old Mohammed Abu Khdeir alive in ‘revenge’. Strangely, no such call followed the shooting in cold blood of two Palestinian boys by Israeli snipers some weeks earlier, even though the perpetrators of that particular child murder had been caught on video.
Meanwhile, the rampage through the West Bank by occupation forces on the excuse of ‘searching for the missing settlers’ (all along known to be dead already) – during which 600 Palestinians were kidnapped and 10 killed – has paled into insignificance beside the unfolding horror that followed in Gaza.
In an attempt to crush the newly-formed Palestinian unity government and to keep the resistance to occupation in check, all the firepower of one of the world’s biggest and most technologically-advanced armies has been directed at the 1.8 million Palestinians (overwhelmingly refugees from earlier ethnic cleansing operations) who are penned into the tiny Gaza Strip.
These 40km2 are the most densely-populated on earth, and have been transformed by siege and occupation into a vast open-air prison.
As Israeli politicians openly call for the killing of mothers to prevent their producing more “little snakes” to fuel the resistance, the occupation forces are obediently targeting all the infrastructure of life – water wells and pipelines; hospitals, clinics, ambulances and medics; electricity stations and fuel supplies; mosques, schools and supply centres.
From uncontested skies, the ‘brave’ bombers of the zionist airforce are flattening one civilian neighbourhood after another, in a killing-spree that has left 2,000 dead (so far), 10,000 injured, and hundreds of thousands homeless ... again.
Nearly half the victims of these attacks are women and children. The overwhelming majority are civilians. This genocidal ‘policy’ is referred to in Israel as “mowing the grass”.
Zionism and Palestine
Israel was originally set up by Britain to be a “loyal jewish Ulster” in the Middle East, and, although British masters were later pushed aside by American ones, that is what it has remained to this day.
The zionist stooges who destroy Palestinian homes, drop bombs on Palestinian schools, plough up Palestinian crops and poison Palestinian water are bribed by US and British governments and corporations to do imperialism’s dirty work.
In return for helping corporations like BP and Texaco to carry on looting the oil and dominating the people of the whole region, the zionists are given money, military technology, diplomatic immunity, and the backing of a campaign of lies and disinformation in the imperialist-controlled media.
Israel was established in an orgy of ethnic cleansing, and has been wiping out Palestinian families ever since. War crimes are a daily event in this, the most militarised state in the world.
In fact, rather than viewing Israel as a state with a huge military, it is more helpful to realise that Israel is in fact a massive army base that also happens to have some schools. Israeli children are brought up to be Nazi-like stormtroopers, their heads filled with supremacist hatred of all Arab peoples.
The imperialists made one serious miscalculation, though. It was assumed that in the face of Israel’s might, Palestinians would accept underclass status or leave, but the days when colonialists could evict a people from their land and get away with it were over.
In the era of socialist revolution and national liberation, the racist dismissal of local peoples as ‘uncivilised barbarians’ or merely ‘irrelevant’ was no longer possible.
Resistance and solidarity
Instead of politely disappearing, the Palestinians stood their ground – refusing to submit no matter how barbarous their oppressors became. Instead of passively joining the long list of imperialist victims, the Palestinians became a beacon of resistance and an inspiration to oppressed people globally.
It is this resistance that is the key to defeating zionism. The heroic 67-year resistance of the Palestinians to zionism by every means at their disposal has frustrated British and US plans for total domination of the Middle East, exposed the real nature of fascist Israel, and steadily destroyed Israel’s moral standing in the world.
Gradually, the wellspring of sympathy that Israel shamelessly exploited following the Nazis’ mass extermination of jews in WW2 has run dry. As every agreement and concession on the part of Palestinians is greeted with fresh Israeli crimes, it has become clear to all that it is the zionists, and not the Palestinians, who stand in the way of peace.
So brazen has its war machine become that, today, Israel is the number one creator of anti-jewish feeling in the world.
Meanwhile, we need to recognise the very real power we in Britain have over the Israeli war machine, which could not function without imperialist support.
Not only do our media need to be held to account for their lies, and those firms that profit from the war and occupation need to be singled out and boycotted, but all parts of the war machine need to be stopped from functioning.
We are not only consumers but workers. Our media unions have the power to organise their members to refuse to write, publish or broadcast war propaganda. We have a duty to remind the public of the Nuremberg ruling that the creation of such propaganda is itself a war crime.
Our manufacturing unions need to back us up so that those who are making munitions for Israel can refuse to carry out such work. Those of us who provide any goods or services to Israel and to the settlements should be empowered to withdraw our labour-power from such work and explain exactly why we are doing so to the British public.
Supermarket workers should be organised to refuse to put Israeli products on the shelves. Transport workers should refuse to carry anything to or from Israel.
The whole zionist enterprise would collapse pretty quickly if we put our money where our mouth is and used our collective power.
It’s the one thing that could terrify our own ruling class into dropping its support for the Israeli project.
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