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Israel's Chilling Warning - John Wight |
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Israel's chilling warning;
John Wight calls on the Brown government to stop giving Israel cover for its massacre in Gaza, originally published in The Morning Star, March 5th www.morningstaronline.co.uk
A recent increase in Israeli air strikes against Palestinians in Gaza in response to repeated rocket attacks against Israeli towns adjacent to this enclave of 1.5 million Palestinians was accompanied last week by a chilling warning from Israel's Deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilnai.
He said that a full-scale invasion of Gaza was now being considered and that the Palestinians were risking a "shoah," which is the Hebrew word for catastrophe and traditionally used to describe the nazi Holocaust within Israeli society.
His words - and with them the likelihood of a full-scale Israeli military assault on Gaza - must be taken seriously by anyone with a scintilla of understanding as to the brutal military machine that is the IDF.
The sealing off of the Gaza Palestinians, followed by a siege which is designed to starve and weaken them, is part of a process that will inevitably culminate in the kind of military invasion described by Mr Vilnai.
Indeed, the logic of a state which is committed to a greater Israel and, wider, to US strategic and economic prerogatives throughout the region, demands that any and all opposition and resistance must be destroyed, now more than ever in the wake of Israel's humiliating military defeat at the hands of Hezbollah in the summer of 2006.
For too long, Israel has attempted to beguile the world into the belief that, due to the Holocaust, it has an opt-out when it comes to international law, universal human rights and all norms of human decency.
The Holocaust never took place in Palestine, yet the Palestinians have been condemned to pay the price. No longer can the veneer of victimhood, divine purpose and exceptionalism be used to justify Israel's brutal treatment of a people whose only crime is that they exist.
Listening to the likes of Blair and Bush, along with assorted European Union and international bureaucrats, pontificate endlessly about the responsibility of the Arab people to stop terrorist attacks and to recognise Israel is like listening to a police officer instructing a man being strangled in broad daylight to stop struggling or be charged with causing a breach of the peace.
For daring to exercise their democratic right and voting to be governed by Hamas in 2006, the Palestinians are being subjected to the kind of collective punishment which is synonymous with the nazis in occupied Europe during the second world war. A coup led by the Western and Israeli-backed Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank was part of an attempt to split the Palestinians into good and bad, to isolate Hamas in Gaza and, using starvation as a weapon, to hopefully turn the anger of the people against their leaders.
But now even the leader of the PA Mahmoud Abbas has been forced to renounce Israel's actions against the Palestinians of Gaza and cut all formal ties.
As for Hamas, they recently demonstrated their political nous during the courageous breaking of the siege at Rafah, when the wall was breached and tens of thousands of Palestinians poured out of their open prison into Egypt in order to access food and other essential supplies.
News footage of the event depicted the joy and euphoria on their faces, bringing to mind Lenin's description of the Paris Commune as a "festival of the oppressed."
The event was a masterstroke and succeeded in embarrassing Israel, the US, compliant governments in the West and Arab collaborationist regimes. It served to emphasise the fact that, despite repeated attempts to break them, the Palestinians of Gaza remain defiant and an inspiration to the world with their dignity and courage.
As oppressors and occupiers have done throughout history, successive Israeli governments have sought to make a fetish of the symptoms of their crimes - helped in this process by their US sponsors and US client states in the West, the British government chief among them.
While focusing on the nature of the Palestinian resistance, specifically the desperate and horrible use of suicide bombs and indiscriminate home-made rocket attacks, they conveniently fail to point out that, perhaps, if they had access to the same F-16 fighter aircraft, Apache helicopters, bulldozers and tanks which are deployed against them, then the Palestinians might opt for different methods.
They do not. What they do have, sanctioned under international law, is the right to physically resist military occupation.
As for the movement in this country, it is no longer good enough to regard the issue of Palestine as a side issue, a US proxy war, within the anti-war movement. The issues of Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan are inextricably linked, each constituting a different front in the ongoing struggle against the barbarism of US imperialism.
US plutocrats and military hawks are committed to seizing control of the world's energy supplies in order to meet the threat of the emerging economies of China, India and the EU.
Israel plays a vital role in that process as a US gendarme in the region and, as such, Hezbollah's military victory over Israel in 2006 will not and cannot be left unanswered for long.
The announcement last week that US warships were heading closer to Lebanon is evidence that Israel's war against Hezbollah was and will be engaged in largely as a result of the aims and objectives of its US sponsors in the region.
Before revisiting Hezbollah, however, Israel must first take care of Hamas and those Palestinians who continue to refuse to accept a status quo of ethnic cleansing and apartheid.
On, this, the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq, we simply must begin to force our will on our own government to bring all British troops out and to cease its support for the apartheid state of Israel.
The Israeli deputy defence minister's chilling warning about the danger of a Palestinian holocaust is a warning to us all that there is little time left.
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