Bandar Bush’s strategy, coordinated with jihadis, was to virtually beg for Hezbollah to fight inside Syria. When Hezbollah obliged, with only a few hundred fighters, the jihadis scurried away from the battlefield to implement plan B: blowing up innocent women and children in the streets of Lebanon.
The bottom line is that the Persian Gulf Arab monarchies have now clearly emerged as strategic partners with the Israeli regime. Despite superficial differences, all are lawless regimes that are guilty of crimes against humanity and crimes against Arab and Muslims in particular. They share criminal methodology and logistics.
History always comes up with mysterious ways of playing ‘if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em’. For Washington, there will be no real pivot to Asia before a pivot to Persia.
Israel has committed repeated acts of war against countries that opposed its Zionist policies of colonization and annexation of Palestinian territory in East Jerusalem and the West Bank . Israeli leaders have secured arms and diplomatic support for their attacks through their Zionist proxies in the United States Congress and the Executive Branch.
On Israeli television he asked why Israel was continuing to build settlements when doing so was giving the Palestinians good cause to believe that Israel was not serious about peace. (Writing in The Times of Israel Raphael Ahren said Kerry’s “rhetorical onslaught” amounted to “a forceful slap in the face for Netanyahu”, a slap “the prime minister cannot have expected and one he will not quickly forget.”)
Israel had access to polonium from its nuclear reactor in Dimona, and has a long record of carrying out political assassinations, some ostentatious and others covert, often using hard-to-trace chemical agents. There is also plenty of evidence that Israel wanted Arafat “removed”. In January 2002, Shaul Mofaz, Israel’s military chief of staff, was caught on a microphone whispering to Israel’s then prime minister, Ariel Sharon, about Arafat: “We have to get rid of him.”
The chance for a first preliminary agreement between Iran and the six powers (US, UK, France, Germany, Russia and China) to resolve the decade-long conflict over Iran’s nuclear program was lost during the weekend because of a deliberate French policy of preventing agreement at the behest of Israel and the Obama administration’s lack of commitment to reaching a comprehensive settlement of the issue.
Hollande is a joke. This week he’s on the cover of the Courrier International weekly (headline: “The Art of the Fall”), with pan-European media judging him “incoherent”, “paralyzed” and “incompetent” (and these are the merciful epithets). On the weekend edition of the establishment Le Figaro daily, he was being destroyed because of France’s (latest) credit rating downgrade by Standard & Poor’s.
About 60,000 African migrants have arrived in Israel since 2006, fleeing unrest in their home countries. But upon arrival in the ostensibly democratic country, the migrants have faced intense persecution and have been branded as “infiltrators” by right-wing politicians and activists.
There is oppression all around the world but what makes the Israel-Palestine conflict special is a number of things. First of all, Israel presents itself to the world as a democracy. A country just like every Western State. It presents itself in this way while it is in fact committing crimes against humanity. It has produced a State which is divided along racial lines, like apartheid South Africa. It is also supported militarily and financially by Europe and America. So there is a massive hypocrisy going on, we are supporting a country that claims to be a democracy, we’re supporting it in every
way, and yet, it is involved in these crimes against humanity.
If you came armed with a gun to my house and took it from me, and then forced me and my family to live in the shed at the end of the garden, you could hardly be surprised if I started making trouble for you. If I called the police and they said they couldn’t help, you could hardly be surprised if I eventually decided to get a gun myself to threaten you back. If, when you saw I had a gun too, you then built a wall around the shed to imprison me, you could hardly be surprised if I used the tools I had to make primitive grenades and started lobbing them towards the house. None of this would prove how unreasonable I was, or how inherently violent.
John Pilger made the film ‘Palestine Is Still The Issue’ in 1977. It told how almost a million Palestinians had been forced off their land in 1948, and again in 1967. Twenty five years later, John Pilger returns to the West Bank of Jordan and Gaza, and to Israel, to ask why the Palestinians, whose right of return was affirmed by the United Nations more than half a century ago, are still caught in a terrible limbo – refugees in their own land, controlled by Israel in the longest military occupation in modern times.
