Middle East Monitor - December 2, 2013
Gaza death toll from Israeli attacks tops 15,200
The death toll from Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip has soared to 15,207 since the start of the conflict on Oct. 7, the government media office in the blockaded Palestinian enclave said Saturday, Anadolu Agency reports.
“70% of the victims are children and women, and more than 40,652 people have been injured,” the media office said.
“The occupation (forces) continues to expand its bombing of civilians after the end of the humanitarian pause,” it added.
Since the start of the conflict, the office said, the Israeli attacks have killed 280 medical staff, while 31 others, including Director of the Al-Shifa Hospital Mohammad Abu Salmiya, have been detained for “a fascist interrogation under torture, abuse and hunger.”
As many as 130 health centers have been targeted, while 20 hospitals and 46 medical centers have been put out of service.
The Israeli army resumed bombing the Gaza Strip early Friday after declaring an end to a week-long humanitarian pause.
At least 193 Palestinians have been killed and 652 injured since Friday in Israeli airstrikes, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
Israel launched relentless air and ground attacks on the Gaza Strip following a cross-border attack by Hamas on Oct. 7.
The official Israeli death toll stands at 1,200.
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20231202-gaza-death-toll-from-israeli-attacks-tops-15200/
Anadolu Agency – December 2, 2023
Over 100 Palestinians killed in Israeli missile strike on Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza
Dozens injured, and many others still missing and under rubble of collapsed residential building, reports Palestinian media
Ikrame Imane Kouachi
More than 100 Palestinians were killed and many more injured in an Israeli missile attack on the Jabalia refugee camp in the Gaza Strip on Saturday, with many still missing under the rubble of a collapsed residential building, Palestinian media reported.
"More than 100 Palestinians were killed Saturday in a new massacre committed by Israeli occupation forces in the Jabalia refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip," the official Palestinian news agency Wafa reported.
“A missile strike targeted a residential building belonging to the Obaid family in Jabalia camp,” the news agency said, adding that “dozens were injured, and many others are still missing under the rubble.”
The Israeli army resumed bombing the Gaza Strip early Friday after declaring an end to a week-long humanitarian pause with the Palestinian resistance group, Hamas.
Earlier on Saturday, the Gaza Health Ministry said at least 193 Palestinians had been killed and 652 injured since Israel's army resumed airstrikes after announcing the end of humanitarian pause on Friday morning.
The humanitarian pause began on Nov. 24 as part of an agreement between Israel and Hamas to temporarily halt fighting to allow hostage swaps and aid delivery.
More than 15,000 Palestinians, mostly children and women, have been killed in Israeli attacks since Oct. 7 following a cross-border attack by Hamas.
Around 1,200 Israelis have also been killed, according to official estimates.
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/over-100-palestinians-killed-in-israeli-missile-strike-on-jabalia-refugee-camp-in-gaza/3071233
Information Clearing House – December 2, 2013
Will the Israelis perpetrate a clandestine 9/11-style terrorist attack in the US?
Will the Israelis perpetrate a clandestine 9/11-style terrorist attack in the U.S. to cover up their genocide, regain the media narrative, and help Biden’s reelection?
By Jad Melki
The second intifada, which started in September 2000, prompted unprecedented awareness of the Palestine liberation cause, especially in the US and Europe. I was a student back then at Kent State University—a university historically known for its activism and powerful protests, particularly the anti-Vietnam war demonstration in the 1960s and 1970s. It just happened that the same year the university commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Kent State University massacre, where the US soldiers shot and killed four students and wounded nine others in an attempt to dispel a major anti-war demonstration.
The spirit of activism was so palpable that year. I could clearly feel the shift in solidarity and support in favor of the Palestinian cause on US campuses, thanks to the many Arab-American student groups that were established across American universities, but also due to the brutality of the Israeli occupation and its genocidal tendencies. A peak watershed moment that swung the pendulum in Palestine’s favor and exposed Zionist lies and brutality was the killing of Muhamad al Durra. The short video of 12-year-old Muhamad and his father crouching behind a small barrier, pleading for help, while Israeli snipers kept shooting at them, became the icon of the second intifada. The video “went viral” at a time when social media did not exist yet. It was the dawn of the internet and hard to predict that 23 years later, social media will show thousands of Muhamad Al-Durras being killed in cold-blood by the Israeli apartheid regime.
The Zionist movement in the West was so terrified from this sudden uptick in solidarity with Palestine on US campuses that the Israeli allocated millions of dollars in the past two decades to monitor University faculty, intimidate students, and target both with false “anti-Semitic” accusations and other fabrications. Dozens of groups, with direct ties to Israeli intelligence and its US lobbying arm AIPAC, were established for that particular purpose, including Camera on Campus, Canary Mission, and theﾠIsrael on Campus Coalition. These groups illegally spy on US citizens and target any pro-Palestine students and faculty, especially the pro-Palestine Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Their goal was to avoid another wave of solidarity similar to the one triggered by the second intifada.
And although the small pro-Palestine liberation wave in 2000 quickly subsided, it was not due to the pro-Israeli campus spy groups. It took a much bigger event.
Exactly one year after the second intifada, the September 11 terrorist attacks happened, and overnight much of the pro-Palestine sympathy and solidarity evaporated or was subordinated by the overwhelming news of the attacks by Al-Qaeda, an extremist group that was originally created, funded and supported by the CIA and the Saudi regime to fight the Russians in Afghanistan. It had nothing to do with Palestinians nor with Iraqis, but the US used it as a pretext to destroy Iraq—based on the weapons of mass destruction lie and other baseless fabrications. The Israelis too used 9/11 as a pretext to continue their ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, build more illegal settlements, steal more land, and imprison more Palestinians.
Today, again, the Israeli genocidal apartheid regime is losing the media narrative on an unprecedented global scale, and millions of Westerners are becoming aware of the 75-year-old injustice Palestinians have faced under the brutal Israeli occupation. All the Israeli lies and propaganda are not helping its case or hiding its crimes. People worldwide are becoming more educated about this historic injustice. The Israelis are running out of tricks, and all their millions of dollars invested in spying campus groups and lobbying pollical arms that fund thousands of US and European politicians’ election campaigns are falling flat on their faces. Even their attempt to fund a US politician with 20-million dollars to run against the outspoken Palestinian-American congresswoman Rashida Tlaib backfired, and the bribe was turned down by senate candidate Hill Harper, in a rare honorable stance in US politics, which is notoriously influenced by donations from lobbying and special interest groups.
Even the historically pro-Israeli mainstream Western media were not able to counter the deluge of images disseminated on social media that has exposed the Israeli war on hospitals, bakeries, schools, and children in Gaza. But I have no doubt the Israelis will do something about this. It will be big, evil and murderous, designed to attract massive media attention and counter the enormous wave of pro-Palestine solidarity in the US—the country that has spent over 130 billion dollars of its taxpayer money to sustain this racist apartheid regime, money that could have gone to maintaining the crumbling US infrastructure or to support the declining education and healthcare systems in that country.
I am concerned that the Israeli Mossad will secretly conjure up a terrorist attack in the US or another Western country, at the scale of the 9/11 attacks, or even worse, in order to distract from their genocidal crimes in Palestine and in an attempt to win back the media narrative.
I don’t believe in conspiracy theories, but there is indisputable evidence of the strong connections between the Israeli intelligence and multiple extremist groups in Syria and Iraq, many of whom have been funded, armed, and supported directly by the Israeli Mossad, and others by the CIA. These extremist “rebel” groups are mercenaries who are willing to butcher and kill anyone in return for money. It is not inconceivable that the Mossad will direct one of these extremist groups to launch a terrorist attack in the West—an expensive and complicated operation that will require deep involvement by the Israelis.
Many have been wondering where all these extremist groups disappeared in the past few weeks, and why they haven’t spoken out against Israeli crimes. In fact, some of their leaders came out and attacked the Palestinian resistance and tried to sow sectarian hatred and division between the different resistance groups, playing on the Sunni/Shia divisions, but their hateful calls fell on deaf ears.
In addition, the Israelis have been using propaganda that targets Europeans and Westerners with claims that the Israelis are fighting terrorism in Palestine so it does not reach Europe. A terrorist attack in the West right now would hand the Israelis a golden opportunity to tell Western audiences “I told you so” and conflate between Palestinian resistance and extremist terrorism. Of course, the Palestinian resistance will have nothing to do with that, but both the Israelis and Western governments will take advantage of it to silence any pro-Palestine voice, justify continued support of the Israeli genocide, and use the attacks as a pretext for their own political agendas, just like they did after the 9/11 attacks. Just imagine what this will do to the plummeting popularity of the Biden administration and the unpopular European leaders today—a godsend for their reelection campaign.
If it happens, western citizens should know that their governments will be complicit. It is inconceivable today after all the security precautions put in place since 9/11 that any terrorist operation could happen in the West without governments knowing in advance about it. A terrorist operation in the West will cost so much money and require so much intelligence and advanced weaponry, only major governments can afford and are capable of executing. It should also be clear to everybody that the main beneficiaries will be the genocidal Israeli apartheid regime and Western leaders who are losing elections, particularly US President Joe Biden.
Jad Melki, Director of the Institute of Media Research and Training, Lebanese American University. Via Al Mayadeen
Information Clearing House – December 2, 2013
The death rattle of American domination
Palestinians are agents of history in “Israel’s” war of attrition, and they are refusing to abide by their occupier’s terms.
By Roqayah Chams
At the height of the US-backed 2006 July War, the Bush administration was embroiled in its mendacious fable of democracy-building in Iraq and Afghanistan. The American military project had engulfed the region, and with it came a triad of parasitic influence: economic, political, and cultural.
As for Lebanon, the July War would further unmask the United States’ “Greater Middle East” project, with “Israel” acting as geostrategic enforcer and watchdog of the predatory American order. It is then, amidst the unimaginable ruin and desecration, that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice would declare that “What we’re seeing here is, in a sense, the growing—the birth pangs of a new Middle East, and whatever we do, we have to be certain that we’re pushing forward to the new Middle East.”
In collusion with the United States, “Israel” would sow death in Lebanon; invoking a policy of open impunity, then-Minister of Interior Eli Yishai demanded the South be “turned into a sandbox”—and that is where a 2,000 lb, US-made MK-84 guided munition would turn the southern village of Qana – where Jesus performed his first miracle by turning water into wine at the wedding feast of Qana (John 2:1-11) – into a scene of bombing and blood. Gaza is now the stage of a thousand Qanas, sanctified by American weaponry.
Dutifully urged on by the Biden administration, “Israel” tightened its noose around the Gazan “ghetto” after the events of October 7— depriving its inhabitants of food and water, even extending its violence into the West Bank where thousands of men, women, and children have been kidnapped and disappeared behind Israeli prison doors.
Maha Hussaini, the director of Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, described death as being “closer than water” in Gaza. Palestinians in besieged Gaza have endured their pain for over one month, where they sift through the rubble, bare-handed, in search of their children, their fathers, their mothers; those who are intact, those who are fragments, and those who cling on, miraculously, beneath cement blocks.
In Jabalia, Gaza’s largest, and most densely populated refugee camp, “Israel’s” bombing campaigns pursued every sign of life in order to inflict the most pain: “The emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy,” Israeli Occupation Forces official Daniel Hagari said. In the aftermath, children’s corpses were raised to the sky, the fruits of “Israel’s” cowardly barbarism and the Biden administration’s unwavering support. And so, Palestinians in Gaza now face the Israeli entity like Hussain in Karbala. “After 13 heavy days, God blessed us,” wrote Huda, “[we] found the bodies of my father, mother, sister-in-law, and nephew.” On one street, a father carries the remains of his children in separate bags, on another a mother cries out that her children died hungry, and among the ruins that surround their Merkava tanks, Israeli soldiers dance on their graves.
In Gaza, the propaganda that has long guarded the shared extermination, neocolonial doctrine of both “Israel” and the United States has come apart, thread by thread. Habituated to the contemptible Western mélange of credulity and media indulgence, “Israel” can no longer control the narrative over their initial blitzkrieg, nor the wider occupation—not even with the craven intervention of the Biden administration. In glaring contrast, as a feeble looking Biden delivered his rare address to the nation, declaring that the United States “holds the world together”, Palestinians wrapped their children in white shrouds and presented them to the world in fields of mud, debris, and blood with resolution in their eyes. Not even “Israel’s” campaign of targeted assassinations of Gaza’s journalists and their families could prevent the nakedness of its savagery from being made manifest. Here, before the world, the Israelis are abiding by ritual and “mowing the grass” in Gaza, but Palestinians will not kneel.
In spite of their confidence, the Biden administration and “Israel” have miscalculated the impenetrability of their public relations campaign, which clothes itself in doublespeak and chilling euphemisms for mass slaughter. The invocation of the meekness of “Israel” and its “right to self-defense” had all but stifled any reference to Palestinian self-determination—but now, Gaza has become a siren call for the global rank and file, who continue to disrupt and bring cities to a standstill. And on their lips is not just Gaza but “Palestine”. The administrative pomp and circumstance masking “Israel’s” obscene occupation is crumbling.
Palestinians are agents of history in “Israel’s” war of attrition, and they are refusing to abide by their occupier’s terms; instead, they are consciously aware that history will absolve them and their Resistance. The United States’ colonial outpost cannot hold, nor can it continue the slow genocide of the Palestinians without a price. Editorial sympathy for the Israeli worldview is being challenged by a new generation which will not abide by the Zionist adage that “the old will die and the young will forget”. For every Qana, there is a Bint Jbeil; for every Jabalia, there is a Beit Hanoun. For every death, new life will emerge, more resolute than the last. Despite what has unfolded, Gaza still stands. The “Middle East” of the American imagination—of domination, fealty, and Arab humiliation—has fallen, and a new, more defiant region has risen in its place. Long live the new world.
https://informationclearinghouse.blog/2023/12/02/the-death-rattle-of-american-domination/
Information Clearing House – December 2, 2013
‘The Horror! The Horror!’, Revisited in Palestine
The jungle is here – creeping inside all of us.
By Pepe Escobar
“Mistah Kurtz – he dead.”
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad once said that before he had been to the Congo he was a simple animal. It was in one of those lands partially mapped out by the cruelty and hypocrisy of the imperial ethos that Conrad discovered European colonialism in its undiluted, most terrible incarnation, duly depicted in Heart of Darkness – one of the great consciousness-raising epics in the history of literature.
It was in the Congo that Conrad, an ethnic Pole born in what is still known today as “Ukraine”, then controlled by Poland, and who only started to write in English when he was 23, forever lost any illusion over the civilizing mission of his race.
Other eminent Europeans of his time seamlessly experienced the same horror – participating in Conquest Atrocity Spectaculars; helping the Metropolis to hack and plunder Africa; using the continent as backdrop to their – murderous – juvenile adventures and rites of passage; or only testing their mettle while “saving” the souls of the natives.
They went through the savage heart of the world and made their fortune, their reputation or their penitence just to come back to the sweet comfort of unconsciousness – when they were not shipped back in a coffin, of course.
To dominate assorted “primitive” peoples, Britannia replaced the iron and the sword with trade. Like any monotheistic faith, they believed there was only one way to be; one way to drink your tea; one way to play the game – any game. Everything else was non-civilized, savage, brute, at best providing raw materials and acute headaches.
The jungle inside
For the European sensibility, the sub-equatorial world, actually the whole Global South, was where the White Man went for personal triumph or for dissolution, becoming somewhat “equal” to the natives. Literature, from the Victorian era onwards, is full of heroes traveling to “exotic” latitudes where passions – like tropical fruit – are bigger than in Europe, and perverted forms of self-knowledge can be experienced to oblivion.
Conrad himself placed his tortured heroes on Earth’s “obscure” places to expiate their shadows alongside the shadows of the world, far away from “civilization” and its conventional punishments.
And that brings to Kurtz in Heart of Darkness: he’s in a class by himself because he arrives at an extreme of self-knowledge virtually unheard of in European literature, facing the full revelation of the malignity of his mission and his species.
In the Congo, Conrad lost his innocence. And his main character lost reason.
When Kurtz migrated into the movies in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, and Cambodia replaced the Congo as the Heart of Darkness, he was denigrating the image of the Empire. So the Pentagon sent a warrior-intellectual to kill him, Captain Willard. Coppola depicted the passive spectator Willard as even more insane than Kurtz: and that’s how he pulled off the psychedelic unmasking of the whole farce of civilizing colonialism.
Today, we don’t need to set sail or embark on a caravan looking for the source of misty rivers to live the neo-imperial adventure.
We just need to turn on the smartphone to follow a genocide, live, 24/7, even in HD. Our meeting with the horror… the horror – as immortalized in Kurtz’s words in Heart of Darkness – can be experienced while shaving in the morning, doing Pilates or dining with friends.
And just as Coppola in Apocalypse Now, we are free to express a humanist moral stupor when facing a “war”, actually a massacre, that is already lost – impossible to be ethically sustained.
Today we are all Conradian characters, just glimpsing fragments, shadows, mixed with the stupor of living in a gruesomely memorable time. There is no possibility of grasping the totality of facts – especially when “facts” are fabricated and artificially reproduced or bolstered.
We are like ghosts, this time not facing the grandeur of nature, or traversing the thick, irreversible jungle; but plugged to a devastated urbanity as in a video game, co-authors of the non-stop suffering. The Heart of Darkness is being constructed by “the only democracy” in West Asia in the name of “our values”.
There are so many invisible horrors enacted behind the fog, in the heart of a jungle now replicated as an urban cage. Helplessly watching the wanton killing of women and children, the carpet bombing of hospitals, schools and mosques, it’s as if we are all passengers in a drunken ship plunging into a whirlpool, admiring the powerful majesty of the whole scenery.
And we are already dying even before we glimpse death.
We are the epigones of T.S. Eliot’s Hollow Men. The haunting cries from the jungle don’t come anymore from an “exotic” hemisphere. The jungle is here – creeping inside all of us.
Pepe Escobar is a Brazilian journalist and geopolitical analyst.
https://informationclearinghouse.blog/2023/12/02/the-horror-the-horror-revisited-in-palestine/
Anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism.
By Dr. Habib Siddiqui
Is Zionism anything but crass racism? Do the Indigenous people have any right to exist in their homeland? Apparently not, if they are Palestinians who are evicted and killed by the Apartheid Zionist state of Israel.
Are not the Palestinian Arabs Semites? Apparently not – in the dictionary of the Zionists.
On Nov. 28, 2023, all but two members of the US House of Representatives voted in favor of a resolution (H.Res.888) which reaffirmed Israel’s right to exist and recognized that “denying Israel’s right to exist is a form of antisemitism.”
Coming as it did in the midst of the latest genocidal campaign of Israel that witnessed the sheer barbarity of its settler-colonial occupation forces, the so-called Semites, against the unarmed Palestinian civilians once again showed the moral bankruptcy of the Capitol Hill. It has become a mouthpiece for the Knesset, justifying and funding colonization, violence, and its genocidal agenda against the “other” people who happen to be non-Jewish.
Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), the only Palestinian in the US Congress, voted “present,” effectively an abstention. One may recall that earlier last month, Tlaib was censured by her colleagues in the House for her defense of Palestine. To the ‘Amen Corner’ humans are unequal, Palestinians lives do not matter, and the life of a single Israeli Jew is more important than lives of hundreds of Palestinians.
Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) wrote on X that he voted against the resolution because “it equates anti-Zionism with antisemitism. Antisemitism is deplorable, but expanding it to include criticism of Israel is not helpful.”
Such resolutions passed in the ‘Amen Corner’ that is long mortgaged to the interest of the pro-Israel, Zionist power-lobby should not surprise anyone.
The 2024 election is only 11 months away. With Israel's latest brutality in Gaza — and the strong backlash from the American public that has come with it — we are told that AIPAC is expected to spend at least $100 million in the Democratic primaries to oust people like Tlaib and the rest of the “Squad” who support Palestinian human rights.
Democratic candidate Nasser Beydoun posted a video on social media last week revealing that AIPAC offered him $20 million to run against Tlaib. Previously, Politicoﾠreported that Hill Harper, another Democratic hopeful from Michigan, was offered $20 million in a phone call on October 15 from Michigan businessman Linden Nelson — who has long been involved with groups affiliated with AIPAC in efforts to unseat Tlaib — to drop out.
This corruption of U.S. politics with AIPAC’s dirty-money explains the reason why even the so-called most progressive representatives like Cori Bush, who introduced a ceasefire resolution, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman, and Ilhan Omar voted in favor of this House resolution.
The House resolution is criminally silent about the Palestinian people, as if they do not exist. It also omitted the mere fact that prior to the influx of European Zionists, 95 per cent of the population of Palestine comprised of Muslim and Christian Palestinians. More problematically, despite the fact that only 5 per cent of Jews were native and indigenous to Palestine, Tuesday’s resolution declared that Jewish people are “native to the land of Israel.”
What a mockery! Truly, this resolution once again shows what is wrong with Zionism and its corrupting influence on the ‘Amen Corner’ that is complicit in crimes against humanity.
Historical facts cannot be whitewashed by such irresponsible resolutions that try to sanctify Zionism and its horrendous crimes against humanity.
As I have long maintained, political Zionism remains a curse for humanity. It betrayed Judaism and perverted Christianity. The entire policy of the state of Israel, internal or external, has been a colonial enterprise, but it wears the "chador” (cloak) of pseudo-theological myth. Israel remains a racist, settler-colonial enterprise that denies equality of humankind.
To the father of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl, universal brotherhood “is not even a beautiful dream, antagonism is essential to man’s greatest efforts." [Jewish State, (1897)] In his Diary, Herzl writes about the establishment of a Jewish state: "We should form there a portion of rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism." Here, it clearly shows his colonial, racist mentality. He first disregards the rights of the Indigenous inhabitants of the Arab Palestinians, and then calls them barbarians. All the Israeli leaders since the establishment of the Zionist state in 1948 have ensured that Israel remains a “rampart” of the West. In so doing, Zionism has transformed Israel into an apartheid state.
As expected, the western leaders have seen the emergence and protection thereof the Zionist state as a necessary, small investment. Its unholy establishment in the Holy Land allowed them to get rid of the Untermensch from Christian Europe and plant them in the heart of an oil-rich region that had no prior history of antisemitism (in contrast to the false allegation in the H.Res. 888). Zionism sanctioned eviction, dispossession and slaughter of the native Palestinians who are denied the right to return to their ancestral home while allowing non-native Jews to settle in as bona fide citizens.
Thus, it was no surprise that on Nov. 10, 1975, General Assembly of the UN equated Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination. The Resolution 3379 was approved by a vote of 72 to 35 (opposition coming mostly from former colonial and racist regimes like the USA, UK, FRG, Australia, New Zealand, France, Canada, Belgium, Italy, Netherlands, Sweden and some client states and of course, Israel).
The text of Resolution 3379 (XXX), Elimination of all forms of racial discrimination, reads:
“The General Assembly, Recalling its resolution 1904 (XVIII) of 20 November 1963, proclaiming the United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, and in particular its affirmation that "any doctrine of racial differentiation or superiority is scientifically false, morally condemnable, socially unjust and dangerous" and its expression of alarm at "the manifestations of racial discrimination still in evidence in some areas in the world, some of which are imposed by certain Governments by means of legislative, administrative or other measures",
Recalling also that, in its resolution 3151 G (XXVIII) of 14 December 1973, the General Assembly condemned, inter alia, the unholy alliance between South African racism and Zionism…”
The resolution also stated that international co-operation and peace require the achievement of “national liberation and independence, the elimination of colonialism and neo-colonialism, foreign occupation, zionism, apartheid and racial discrimination in all its forms, as well as the recognition of the dignity of peoples and their right to self-determination”. Additionally, it recognized, “the racist regime in occupied Palestine and the racist regime in Zimbabwe and South Africa have a common imperialist origin, forming a whole and having the same racist structure and being organically linked in their policy aimed at repression of the dignity and integrity of the human being”.
It continued, “Taking note also of the Political Declaration and Strategy to Strengthen International Peace and Security and to Intensify Solidarity and Mutual Assistance among Non-Aligned Countries, adopted at the Conference of Ministers for Foreign Affairs of Non-Aligned Countries held at Lima from 25 to 30 August 1975, which most severely condemned zionism as a threat to world peace and security and called upon all countries to oppose this racist and imperialist ideology,
Determines that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.”
It took another 16 years when the UN General Assembly revoked the Resolution 3379. Why? Israel had made revocation of Resolution 3379 a condition of its participation in the Madrid Peace Conference, which was aimed at reviving the IsraeliﾖPalestinian peace process through negotiations in the last quarter of 1991.
George H. W. Bush personally introduced the motion to revoke 3379. He said: “To equate Zionism with racism is to reject Israel itself, a member of good standing of the United Nations. This body cannot claim to seek peace and at the same time challenge Israel's right to exist. By repealing this resolution unconditionally, the United Nations will enhance its credibility and serve the cause of peace.”
As the subsequent events proved, Bush Sr. was grossly wrong and so was the UN, which lost its credibility. Peace has been a mirage in the holy land. The UN-revocation simply emboldened Israel to disregard Palestinian rights altogether and commit its genocidal crimes with more vigor, thanks to its powerful backers within the UN Security Council.
International criminal law, including the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid and the 1998 Rome Statute to the International Criminal Court, define apartheid as a crime against humanity consisting of three primary elements: (1) an intent by one racial group to dominate another; (2) systematic oppression by the dominant group over the marginalized group; and (3) particularly grave abuses known as inhumane acts.
Under the Rome Statute and customary international law, persecution consists of severe deprivation of fundamental rights of a racial, ethnic, or other group with discriminatory intent.
Israel has remained an Apartheid state that epitomizes racism and bigotry. It is a slap on our collective intelligence and wisdom to say otherwise.
The charge that Israel is committing apartheid has long been made and supported by United Nationsﾠinvestigators, the African National Congress (ANC), several human rights groups, and many prominent Israeli and Jewish political and cultural figures.
“I’ve been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land,” wrote the Nobel Peace Prize-winning bishop Desmond Tutu in 2002. “It reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa.”
The testimonies of prominent South Africans who defeated apartheid have been harsher. “The current situation” is “worse than conditions were for blacks under the apartheid regime,” said the former South African president Kgalema Motlanthe; it is “far worse than apartheid,” said the speaker of the South African parliament Baleka Mbete; “the Israeli measures, the brutality, make apartheid look like a picnic,” said the former South African intelligence minister Ronnie Kasrils who served in the ANC’s armed wing from its inception in 1961.
After witnessing the genocide of July-August 2014 in Gaza, Kasrils said, “We have known apartheid. The freedom fighters among us visiting the occupied Palestinian territories have unanimously declared ‘we are reminded of apartheid but what we see is far worse’… no African (black) townships or Bantustan settlements were ever bombed from the sky or attacked by tanks and artillery.” He continued, “We cannot tolerate a critique that questions the Palestinian people’s right to resist by whatever means they deem necessary. We reject the attempts to equate the violence of the two sides as though there can be parity with Israel’s state terrorism and Palestinian resistance. We reject the nonsense of the “terrorism” of the Resistance having the sinister motive of “digging tunnels”. They have enough right to do so as we sometimes did during our armed struggle and as the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto did in their courageous action in their 1943 uprising against the Nazis. We easily understand that it was precisely those tunnels on the borders of Gaza that halted Israeli land forces from advancing to inflict greater carnage.”
To Nelson Mandela, justice for the Palestinians is ‘the greatest moral issue of our time’. “After we toppled the Apartheid regime in 1994,” he went further, saying “We, South Africans, cannot consider ourselves free until the Palestinian People are free”.
Sadly, the Palestinian people remain colonized by the Zionists thirty years after the fall of the Apartheid regime in South Africa.
The 2017 UN Report argued thatﾠIsrael is “guilty of policies and practices that constitute the crime of apartheid”, a “crime against humanity under customary international law and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court”. It urged governments to “support boycott, divestment and sanctions [BDS] activities and respond positively to calls for such initiatives”. It recommended that the UN and its member states should “revive the Special Committee against Apartheid, and the United Nations Centre Against Apartheid (1976-1991)”.
As we know too well, thanks to Israel’s supporters, the UN recommendation was never put to practice.
In a 2021 report, Human Rights Watch said, “Applying the facts to the laws, Human Rights Watch concluded that Israeli authorities are committing the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution. We found that the elements of the crimes come together in the occupied territory as part of a single Israeli government policy. That policy is to maintain the domination by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians across Israel and the occupied territory. It is coupled in the occupied territory with systematic oppression and inhumane acts against Palestinians living there.”
It further said, “Today, apartheid is not a hypothetical or future scenario. A 54-year-occupation is not temporary. The threshold has been crossed. Apartheid, and parallel persecution, is the reality for millions of Palestinians.”
It recommended, “Recognizing and correctly diagnosing a problem is the first step to solving it and ending apartheid is vital to the future of both Palestinians and Israelis and the cause of peace.”
The latest mass slaughter and wanton destruction in Gaza once again showed the evil of Zionism. Israel lives in an alternative reality in which genocide and apartheid have been normalized. It is high time that the UN General Assembly reinstates the Resolution 3379 and convict the mass murdering Israeli leaders, and their western backers in the Hague for crimes against humanity.
Zionism is hideous. Anti-Zionism is noble and humane. Zionism is oppression and colonization. Anti-Zionism is freedom. Humanity demands resistance against oppression and apartheid.
Desmond Tutu reminded us: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”
The choice is ours. Let us choose what is morally and humanely right.
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The Journal of America Team:
Editor in chief:
Abdus Sattar Ghazali
Senior Editor:
Prof. Arthur Scott
Special Correspondent
Maryam Turab
