10-10-2023B

Global Times editorial – October 9, 2023

US politicians' remarks adding fuel to Israeli-Palestinian conflict are very callous

The casualty data of this round of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is being updated every day, causing concern and distress for the civilians living in the area. According to Israeli media reports on October 9, the conflict has resulted in more than 1,300 deaths and over 5,000 injuries on both sides. Both Israel and Palestine have suffered a large number of civilian casualties. Additionally, humanitarian relief organizations of the United Nations have stated that over 120,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have been displaced. The conflict is still escalating, and there is a significant degree of uncertainty about how much it will escalate and in which direction it will develop in the future. However, one thing is certain: The damage and suffering caused by the conflict will largely be borne by the local civilians, and they are in great need of care and protection from the outside world.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has ordered a "complete siege" on Gaza, where over 2 million Palestinian residents live densely packed. They already endure severe material blockades and restrictions on movement year-round, and the outbreak of the conflict has added to their dangers and hardships. Electricity and water supplies have been cut off, and a new humanitarian disaster is brewing. This is a focal point that the international community cannot afford to ignore in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The urgent task facing the international community, especially the major powers, is how to quickly put the brakes on this tragedy and prevent a larger-scale humanitarian catastrophe. It is the responsibility of the international community to address this issue promptly.

It must be said that the long-term marginalization of the Palestinian issue by Western countries, particularly the US, is extremely cruel. Western elites often ignore the actual humanitarian disasters while enthusiastically discussing abstract human rights, which is very hypocritical. We have noticed that many voices in the West are trying to create pressure for "taking sides," listing which countries "have not condemned Hamas." US Secretary of State Antony Blinken even openly "advised" Saudi Arabia during a conversation with the Saudi Foreign Minister to "clearly condemn" the attack. To be honest, Washington is not in a position to educate anyone on this issue.

All acts of violence and attacks targeting civilians are unacceptable in any civilized society and must be strongly condemned by the international community, regardless of the perpetrators. When conflicts erupt, the most rational and responsible approach is to call on all parties to exercise maximum restraint and calm and to achieve a ceasefire as soon as possible. However, in this case, we still see that the words and actions of the US and many Western countries are, in fact, fanning the flames rather than cooling down the situation. This is a consistent pattern for Western countries in many conflict regions, where they often create substantial obstacles to crisis resolution.

Take a typical example: Nikki Haley, the former US ambassador to the United Nations, who has already announced her candidacy for the 2024 US presidential election, specifically mentioned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on X (formerly Twitter), saying, "This is not just an attack on Israel - this was an attack on America." "Finish them… They should have hell to pay for what they have just done."

The remarks are filled with hostility and strong incitement. These extreme words promote hatred and represent the true attitude of many American politicians toward the Palestinian issue and other international issues. In their eyes, the world is seen as a binary opposition of black and white, with them representing justice. They are accustomed to understanding and perceiving the complex reality of international politics with simplistic and crude linear thinking, and they handle international hot issues with intricate historical backgrounds in a simplistic and crude manner. As a result, this approach only adds fuel to the fire and leads to greater disasters.

As an unhealed wound in the international community, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict repeatedly reminds the world of the extreme importance of collective security. The crisis is recurring primarily because the Middle East peace process has deviated from the right track, and the foundation of the "two-state solution" has been continuously eroded, with relevant United Nations resolutions not being effectively implemented. While it is important for the international community to mediate and promote the immediate de-escalation of the situation, this is only a temporary solution for the Israeli-Palestinian issue. To truly achieve lasting peace and allow the residents of this land to live stable and dignified lives, it is necessary to return to the grand ideas and principles of collective security. The pursuit of "absolute security" will only result in absolute insecurity, and there have already been enough tragedies and lessons learned from this.

It is essential to quickly de-escalate the situation and stop innocent civilians from becoming victims, as this is a basic human right. Major powers, in particular, have a responsibility to play their role and should take necessary actions to promote dialogue, achieve a ceasefire, and restore peace. Any actions that add fuel to the fire or take sides will only further complicate and hinder the situation. Only by truly practicing the concept of common, comprehensive, cooperative, and sustainable security can the Israeli-Palestinian conflict achieve lasting peace.

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202310/1299541.shtml

World Socialist Web Site - October 10, 2023

Who is responsible for the violence in Israel and Gaza?

By Tom Carter

The governments and media of all the imperialist countries have been mobilized for a massive propaganda operation to poison public opinion about the ongoing popular uprising against the Israeli occupation in Gaza and to justify the retaliatory decimation of Palestinians being prepared by Israel’s far-right regime.

The tone was set by US President Joe Biden, who declared Saturday following a call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that his “support for Israel’s security is rock solid and unwavering,” condemning the “appalling assault against Israel by Hamas terrorists from Gaza.” This was followed by what amounted to a roll call of the entire cast of characters that constitute the American political establishment, who lined up over the weekend to make appearances and issue statements denouncing “terrorists” and the “attack on Israel,” while expressing their “horror” and “outrage” at reports of deaths among Israeli civilians.

Similar scenes played out in all the imperialist capitals, with Israel’s national flag being projected onto public monuments. Any equivocation or wavering from this line was swiftly labeled as “antisemitism” or tantamount to “supporting terrorism.”

There is no denying that, particularly in the opening hours of the breakout from Gaza, there have been significant casualties among Israeli civilians, many of whom doubtless bore no individual responsibility for the oppression of Palestinians. There is an element of tragedy in the fates of many such people, who simply found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. Fighters from Gaza, hardened by a lifetime of atrocities under Israeli occupation and accepting that they would not return to Gaza alive, exacted their revenge on the first Israelis they found, including those who had staged a dance party on the outskirts of what amounts to a concentration camp.

But the question must be posed: Who bears ultimate responsibility for their deaths? Blame for these tragedies must be assigned where it belongs: In the first instance to the criminal Israeli apartheid regime and its US backers, together with the whole reactionary Zionist project of establishing an exclusivist Jewish state by expelling Palestinians and confining them to a constantly shrinking set of open-air prisons and ghettos.

The unanimous denunciations of the “terrorism” and “violence” of the uprising by the imperialist powers are hypocritical in the extreme. No official expressions of “horror” and “outrage” on a remotely similar scale have ever been made on behalf of the far more numerous victims of violence and terror among the Palestinians.

While Biden’s speechwriters offered his “prayers” Saturday for “all of the families who have been hurt by this violence,” Biden is a war criminal himself and no stranger to violence. In 2003, he voted in the Senate for the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, which resulted in over a million deaths.

Contrary to the upside-down official picture of events, according to which the Palestinians are the aggressors and the state of Israel is the victim, the oppression of the Palestinian masses by imperialism is an entirely one-sided conflict, in which for three-quarters of a century the Israeli government—armed to the teeth by the imperialist powers—has brutally put down all resistance. In the three-week 2008–09 aerial bombardment of Gaza, for example, which killed hundreds of people, Palestinian casualties exceeded Israeli casualties by a ratio of 100 to 1.

Palestinians in the West Bank have been reduced to living in hundreds of separate ghettos surrounded by hundreds more Israeli military checkpoints, while Gaza itself has been transformed into one giant open-air prison: the Gaza Strip, only a handful of miles wide and 25 miles long. At the mercy of the Israeli government for every necessity, more than 2 million Palestinians are confined in this open-air prison in some of the most densely populated and desperate conditions on earth. In this context, the uprising in Gaza that broke out over the weekend is more akin to a prison break than an “attack” and only the latest chapter in a long saga.

As the imperialist capitals resound with hypocritical denunciations of “violence” and “terrorism,” a retaliatory onslaught to terrorize the population of Gaza is already unfolding.

Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has declared “a complete siege on Gaza,” using language that fully exposes the character of his regime and its underlying ideology. “There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, everything will be closed,” Gallant said. “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.”

Former US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, a candidate for the Republican presidential primary nomination, declared that the uprising was “not just an attack on Israel” but “an attack on America,” directly demanding that Netanyahu “finish them.” Netanyahu, for his part, declared ominously yesterday, “What we will do to our enemies in the next few days will echo for generations.”

Behind all this ferocious imperialist hypocrisy is the fundamental class attitude of the oppressors to any resistance by the oppressed, whether it is in Gaza or anywhere else. “We, the oppressors, are free to use force whenever we decide that it serves our interests,” they say. “We can bomb you indiscriminately, we can blockade and starve you, we can rob you and imprison you and kneel on your necks. But force is our monopoly and our sole prerogative. You, the oppressed, are not under any circumstances permitted to use force in response.” It is this class attitude that animates the repeated use of the word “terrorist” to describe anyone who takes up arms against the occupation.

Underscoring the degree of hypocrisy involved, it is worth pointing out that in a New York Times article in August of last year, “Behind Enemy Lines, Ukrainians Tell Russians ‘You Are Never Safe,’” correspondent Andrew Kramer celebrated the work of Ukrainian terror squads carrying out assassinations with car bombs behind Russian lines: “They sneak down darkened alleys to set explosives. They identify Russian targets for Ukrainian artillery and long-range rockets provided by the United States. They blow up rail lines and assassinate officials they consider collaborators with the Russians.” Such methods are permissible to proxies of American imperialism, just not to those resisting its proxies.

In 1831, a slave uprising led by Nat Turner took place in Southampton County, Virginia. The escaped slaves used knives, hatchets and clubs to massacre dozens of white men, women and children. The rebellion was put down with even more extreme savagery, with roving militias and mobs murdering black people on sight regardless of whether they were involved in the rebellion. Turner’s body was flayed and his skin was turned into souvenir purses.

Any objective historian, with the benefit of hindsight, would place the blame for the terrific violence of such uprisings, not on the slaves, but on the slave system itself, with all its colossal inhumanity. To denounce the Turner uprising on the grounds that it was “violent” would be hypocritical and ahistorical and would amount to an indirect apology for slavery.

“A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains,” Leon Trotsky wrote in 1938, are not “equals before a court of morality!”

For his part, in his second inaugural address in the midst of the Civil War, Lincoln expressed the idea that the tremendous violence with which the country was afflicted was the inevitable historical reckoning for the institution of slavery, which required that “every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.”

By the same token, the repression now being carried out by the Israeli government against the population of Gaza is not fundamentally different from that used by Britain against the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, by France in the Algerian War of Independence, against South Africans struggling against the apartheid regime, or for that matter by the US military against the popular resistance to its occupation of Iraq. As always the political elites among the oppressors denounce armed resistance as terrorism and then proceed to carry out merciless retribution a thousand times more destructive.

In one rare deviation from the propaganda deluge, Palestinian National Initiative leader Mustafa Barghouti was interviewed by Fareed Zakaria on CNN yesterday, in which he was permitted to make the point that armed resistance is the inevitable result of the refusal of the government of Israel to recognize any other form of opposition by Palestinians as legitimate: “If we struggle in a military form, we are terrorists. If we struggle in a non-violent way, we are described as violent. If we even resist with words, we are described as provocateurs.”

Indeed, in 2018–19, there were mass protests in Gaza under the banner of the Great March of Return, demanding the right to return to the homes from which Palestinians were driven during the 1948–49 and 1967 wars. The Israeli military responded to these protests by gunning down Palestinian protesters as they approached the walls and fences that enclose them within the Gaza Strip. At least 223 Palestinians were killed, over 9,200 were injured, and hardly any of those personalities now preaching morality to the Palestinians batted an eyelash.

There is, in fact, deep opposition in the working class within Israel itself to the criminal Netanyahu regime, which will be seen as the principal instigator of this new bloody eruption of violence. This opposition has already been expressed in mass protests and a general strike earlier this year in opposition to the regime’s efforts to grant itself unchallengeable and legally unreviewable powers.

But the violent form taken by the uprising in Gaza is not unrelated to the absence of a genuine and principled left-wing and socialist leadership within Israel itself. In the mass protests earlier this year, the self-proclaimed leaders remained defenders of the Zionist state and scrupulously avoided any turn towards the struggles of the Palestinian masses, who would have been natural allies.

The massive propaganda campaign now underway to browbeat the population into accepting the official line reflects a fear that hundreds of millions of people around the world will not be inclined to accept that line, including within the US and Israel itself. Spontaneous demonstrations in support of the Palestinian uprising have already taken place around the world.

However great may be the challenges and obstacles to implementing this strategy, the only path to a peaceful future and the only way to settle accounts with the Zionist regime is through the unity of Israeli and Palestinian workers, who together must oppose the bloody onslaught against Gaza, bring down Netanyahu’s regime and join together in the struggle for a unified socialist society.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/10/10/ytol-o10.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws

World Socialist Web Site - October 5, 2023

The Present: The brutality of Israeli checkpoints

By Joanne Laurier

The Present, a 2020 film directed by British-Palestinian filmmaker Farah Nabulsi, is now streaming on Netflix. It has played at various film festivals and been warmly received. The short film treats the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, focusing on the brutal checkpoint system.

The film, co-written by Nabulsi and poet Hind Shoufani, was shot over six days at or around the infamous Checkpoint 300 in Bethlehem, Palestine. At that entry point thousands of Palestinian workers queue up as early as 3 a.m. to cross into Israel for work.

The Present

Yusef (played by the world-renowned Palestinian actor Saleh Bakri—The Band’s Visit, The Time That Remains, Wajib) takes his young daughter Yasmine (Mariam Kanj) to buy a gift for his wife Noor (Mariam Basha) on the couple’s wedding anniversary. The simple excursion, which also involves buying groceries, requires going only a short distance. But nothing is simple when confronted with the enormous hurdle of passing through a checkpoint manned by Israeli soldiers who would rather abuse and demean Yusef than allow him to pass.

At the entry, Yusef is forced to remove the contents of his pockets and some of his clothing. He is then put in a cage with other men waiting for admittance. During the long wait, the traumatized Yasmine urinates in her pants.

The return trip home is made even more difficult because father and daughter are pushing a trolley with a new refrigerator—the anniversary present—that won’t fit through the gates of the checkpoint. More dehumanization: along with their groceries is a bag with Yasmine’s soiled pants. “You’re all disgusting,” sneers one of the Israeli soldiers.

Rifles are instantly pointed at Yusef when he loses his temper. Chafing at the injustice of not being allowed to navigate or bypass the checkpoint gates with his refrigerator, he nearly becomes another Palestinian casualty of war.

Beautifully shot by seasoned French cinematographer Benoit Chamaillard, the 25-minute movie dramatizes its points eloquently, forcefully and efficiently. In a world in which millions of refugees face insurmountable borders, Nabulsi, in an interview with eninarothe.com, speaks about a people whose freedom of movement is continually trampled upon.

In Palestine, she explains, there are more than “130 Israeli military checkpoints, another 100 or so ‘flying’ check points—that can appear anytime, anywhere—separate roads, curfews, the separation wall, a convoluted permit and ID system and of course the inhumane blockade of Gaza.”

These control mechanisms, Nabulsi says, “are all an assault on this basic human right, that in turn destroys so many other rights—like the right to get to work and earn a living and put food on the table for your children, like being able to visit friends and family, tend to your lands, get to a hospital or clinic, school, study at university—or in the case of my film, something as simple as being able to go and buy someone you love a gift!”

The director also speaks about the psychological ramifications and the “impact on the human spirit, and the harm it can cause an individual, families, children, and whole communities, caught in such an exhausting, stressful and deliberately humiliating infrastructure.”

In 2014, Nabulsi made her first trip to Palestine as an adult, where she saw up close the infamous wall “ploughing through villages, the refugee camps, the separate road system, the checkpoints, the settlements,” she explains in an interview with the National News.

“I have met with mothers whose 13-year-old boys were in military prison,” she notes in another interview, “I listened to their stories of how they were taken, what their experiences inside prison were. I have met families whose homes were demolished, and had tea with them on the rubble.”

Her filmography indicates her commitment: she wrote Oceans of Injustice in 2016 and Today They Took My Son in 2017 about a mother coping with her young son being taken away by the Israeli military.

Award-winning film director and journalist John Pilger commented about the latter that this “extraordinary film is a landmark work. It touched me deeply and made me angry all over again about the horror of Israel and its treatment of the Palestinian people. It points a finger straight at the rest of us, whose governments support Israel, and demand that we speak up now, and never stop until Palestinians are free.”

In 2018, Nabulsi wrote and directed Nightmare of Gaza.

“The arts play a crucial role in changing the world and I believe film precedes them all. It gives voice to the silenced, thereby helping build the empathy and understanding needed to effect change.” Farah Nabulsi

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/10/05/jtoe-o05.html

Al Jazeera – October 10, 2023

Harvard students blame apartheid Israeli regime for Israel-Gaza war

A coalition of 34 Harvard University student organizations has issued a pro-Palestinian statement in reaction to the continuing Israel-Gaza war.

The students of the most influential university in United States politics said in the statement published on Monday that they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence” between the Palestinians and Israelis following decades of occupation, adding that “the apartheid regime is the only one to blame”.

The organizations signing the letter included Muslim and Palestinian support groups as well as others named for a variety of backgrounds including the Harvard Jews for Liberation and the African American Resistance Organization.

Here is the text of joint-statement

We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.

Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum. For the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison. Israeli officials promise to “open the gates of hell,” and the massacres in Gaza have already commenced. Palestinians in Gaza have no shelters for refuge and nowhere to escape. In the coming days, Palestinians will be forced to bear the full brunt of Israel’s violence.

The apartheid regime is the only one to blame. Israeli violence has structured every aspect of Palestinian existence for 75 years. From systematized land seizures to routine airstrikes, arbitrary detentions to military checkpoints, and enforced family separations to targeted killings, Palestinians have been forced to live in a state of death, both slow and sudden.

Today, the Palestinian ordeal enters into uncharted territory. The coming days will require a firm stand against colonial retaliation. We call on the Harvard community to take action to stop the ongoing annihilation of Palestinians.

Here is the list of organizations signing the statement:

African American Resistance Organization

Bengali Association of Students at Harvard College

Harvard Act on a Dream

Harvard Arab Medical and Dental Student Association

Harvard Chan Muslim Student Association

Harvard Chan Students for Health Equity and Justice in Palestine

Harvard College Pakistan Student Association

Harvard Divinity School Muslim Association

Harvard Middle Eastern and North African Law Student Association

Harvard Graduate School of Education Islamic Society

Harvard Graduate Students for Palestine