The labelling of the Bedouin as “squatters” and “trespassers” reveals much about the intractability of the wider conflict – and why the Americans have no hope of ending it as long as they seek solutions that address only the injustices caused by the occupation that began in 1967.
In truth, both Israel and the Palestinians understand that the war of 1948 never really finished.
At a town hall meeting in Harlem televised nationally, the deputy president of the African National Congress praised Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat, Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi and Cuban leader Fidel Castro. He called them “comrades in arms” in black South Africa’s struggle against the white minority government.
If Congress does back away from doing Zionism’s bidding to wreck the prospects for a new-start American and European accommodation with Iran, what options if any will Netanyahu’s Israel have to distract the world’s media and political attention from Zionism’s on-going colonization – ethnic cleansing slowly and by stealth – of the occupied West Bank?
The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal (KLWCT) today found former Israeli army general Amos Yaron and the state of Israel guilty of crimes against humanity and genocide stemming from the massacre of Palestinians in Beirut’s Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in 1982.
The conflict in and over Palestine that became Israel is the cancer at the heart of international affairs, and I know from long personal experience how costly and even dangerous it can be to tell the truth about the making and sustaining of it when powerful vested interests do not want the truth to be told. As I think some of you know, I have been committed for the past 30 years to telling this truth.
Those who want revolution are looking to build it on the bodies of Syrians who have little hope of liberating themselves in a world where their tiny state is no more than a pawn being shuffled around a board controlled by other, much stronger states. If the revolutionaries really want to effect change, they would be wiser – and more ethical – concentrating on the revolution needed first in their back yards.
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.
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.”
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.
