Nakba continues amid Zionist newspeak

Nakba continues amid Zionist newspeak
By Ameen Izzadeen
Nakba is indisputably a living testimony to the brutality of the beast among humans. The fact that it has been committed against victimised Palestinians for the past 76 years, again and again, is a damning indictment of the United Nations system. It is not a mere accusation to say that the United States, the United Kingdom, and their partners are as directly responsible as Israel for letting Nakba happen in 1948 and continuing it for 76 years with massacre after massacre and displacement after displacement. It is a fact.
Nakba means “catastrophe” in Arabic. The horrendous event in the annals of Palestinians happened just three years after the end of World War II and the setting up of the United Nations to bring about a world order based on peace and justice. Soon it became clear that the UN system was a sham because the United States had little intention of surrendering its newly acquired superpower status to the world body. The UN was structured in such a way to preserve US hegemony and imperialistic interests. The existence of such a world body is the antithesis of peace and justice; dissolve it. The UN has little or no power to bring about peace and justice for the victimised Palestinians. The UN process is undermined by Washington’s villainous use of the veto, which brags about value-based policies in what is seen as a grand global deception.
Nakba is a process that began in 1948, ahead of Israel declaring itself an independent state following UN General Assembly Resolution 181 on November 27, 1947. In Rafah, where some 800,000 people have been re-displaced in the past seven days, equaling the number of Palestinians displaced in the first Nakba, a Palestinian mother told Al Jazeera that she had gone through Nakba countless times. From Rafah, she is moving into another area where water is scarce and the food crisis is more acute than what she experienced in Rafah, but Israeli bombs abound.
The word Nakba is itself an understatement. What Palestinians have been experiencing for the past 76 years is much worse than the word’s stated meaning—catastrophe. Nakba today means genocide aimed at not only the physical annihilation of Palestinians but also their cultural and civilisational annihilation. As explained by George Orwell in his highly acclaimed book ‘1984’, Israel and its vicious Western allies resort to newspeak, erasing the Palestinian identity, history, and Semitic roots.
The Palestinians have a longer history in their land than the European Jews who are occupying it now. With their newspeak and the Orwellian Truth Department, Israel and Zionism-worshipping Western nations erase the Semitic origins of Palestinians and Arabs.
As part of this exercise, Zionism invented and popularised the term ‘Islamic Terrorism’. The terror group ISIS is pro-Zionist, for it refuses to fight Israel. Islamophobia is a Zionist-run global industry that is strategically employed to dehumanise the Palestinians so that Nakba can continue until Palestine is totally de-Palestined.
Zionist newspeak rejects the claim that most of these European Jews who are now occupying Palestine are of questionable Semitic origin. Research that points to their origin in the Kingdom of Khazeria in Eastern Europe is suppressed. Historical documents that warn of harm in Zionism are often dismissed as forgeries. Historians and academics whose version of the Holocaust is different from that of the Zionists have been sent to jail. The truth is yet to emerge as to who masterminded the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy, for he opposed Israel’s nuclear weapons programme and wanted to cleanse US domestic politics of the undue and anti-democratic influence of the Zionist lobby, particularly the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
The human lexicon has yet to invent a word to describe the continuous Nakba horror, as seen in Israel’s live-streamed genocide in Gaza. Moreover, Israel’s genocidal campaign desecrates Holocaust memories. Several Holocaust survivors have condemned Israel’s war on Gaza and said, “Not in our name.”
It was then-Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat who, in 1998, set May 15—the day Israel celebrates its independence—as the official day for the commemoration of Nakba, which marks the massacre of hundreds of Palestinians and the expulsion at gunpoint of some 800,000 Palestinians from their homes in some 500 Palestinian villages. The culprits were Jewish terror gangs like the Irgun, Haganah, and Israeli troops.
The award-winning movie Farha, which was screened on Nakba Day in Colombo at a film festival organised by the Palestinian embassy, vividly captures Nakba through the horror a 14-year-old girl witnessed when Israeli forces ravaged her village. From the outside kitchen where her father locked her inside before he fled, only to be arrested and used as a hooded identifier, she sees a pregnant woman in labour pain, her husband, and two daughters finding shelter in her abandoned house in her deserted village. Minutes after the woman delivered a baby boy, Israeli troops raided the house, killed the family, and let the newborn die of hunger.
The film was based on a true story, which is no different from the ongoing horrors in Gaza, where families are killed in one go and children are starved to death. The Zionists try to dehumanise the Palestinians as human animals, but it is they who behave beastly, as has been seen in viral social media video clips that show hardline Zionists setting fire to trucks carrying aid and destroying food items meant for the besieged people of Gaza. At the Israeli-controlled Karem Abu Salem crossing on Rafah’s eastern border, too, Zionist extremists continue to block trucks carrying aid to Gaza, with Israeli authorities making no effort to arrest them.
The deception with which the West furthers Zionism’s cause made credulous people across the world accord those who have committed or are committing the Nakba terror the respect worthy of statesmen.
World-renowned Palestinian scholar Edward Said in his compelling book ‘The Question of Palestine’ says: “For years and years, {Menachem} Begin has been known as a terrorist and has made no effort to hide the fact. His book, The Revolt, is to be found in any university or medium-sized public library as part of the standard Middle East collection. In this book, Begin describes his terrorism, including the wholesale massacre of innocent women and children in righteous (and chilling) profusion.
“He admits to being responsible for the April I948 massacre of 250 women and children in the Arab village of Deir Yassin. Yet a few weeks after his election in May 1977, he emerged in the press with his terrorism forgotten, as a ‘statesman with implied comparison to Charles De Gaulle’…. Yet so strong is the consensus decreeing that Israel’s leaders are democratic, Western, incapable of evils normally associated with Arabs and Nazis…”
No wonder that the West stubbornly refuses to condemn the Gaza genocide, although it acknowledges that a large number of civilians and children have been killed. Perhaps these hardcore Zionist Western leaders, such as US, British, and German leaders, clear their conscience by believing that what Israel is doing in Gaza, even if it is seen as genocide by others, is in accordance with international law.
Perhaps, this is why US President Joe Biden, derided by critics as Genocide Joe, has resumed arms shipment to Israel after the suspension of the Israel-bound 2000-pound bomb package.
With leaders like these, justice is like a needle in the haystack for Nakba victims.
(This article first appeared in the Daily Mirror, Sri Lanka)

Netanyahu in Rafah trap after ceasefire breakthrough

By Ameen Izzadeen
With or without a ceasefire deal, Israel has vowed to launch its grand invasion into Rafah, the Gaza Strip’s southernmost 64-square-kilometre area, where more than 1.5 million repeatedly battered and displaced Palestinians are crammed. Israeli troops have moved into Rafah and are now controlling the eastern part of the Rafah border with Egypt.
Those who closely follow Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza know that Rafah has been under regular Israeli bombardments almost from the beginning of the war, even though the Benjamin Netanyahu government had declared southern Gaza, including Rafah, a safe zone and urged the people in northern Gaza to move there.
But the Israeli government’s Rafah war plan is caught in a whirlwind, with Hamas declaring that it has accepted the ceasefire deal jointly worked out by Qatar, Egypt, and the United States. The hardline Israeli prime minister was caught flat-footed. He rejected the deal. Only last week, Netanyahu came in for praise from US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken for being generous in offering concessions for a ceasefire and hostage deal.
Hamas initially refused to accept the deal, but in a last-minute drama at the Cairo airport, the Hamas delegation agreed to it just before their departure to Qatar. They made two minor changes to the Israeli-approved document that was rushed to them by Egyptian officials. Hamas’ nod put Netanyahu in a spin. He turned his focus on the Rafah invasion, ignoring friendly warnings from Israel’s closest and all-crime friend, the United States, against such a move.
He probably believes a victory in Rafah will offer him a straw to cling to in Israel’s crisis-ridden coalition politics.
Netanyahu’s popularity at home is at an all-time low. He is being criticised for giving priority to his political survival over the need to bring hostages home. Hamas’ willingness to accept the ceasefire deal will make him a loser. If the ceasefire deal comes through, Netanyahu will have little to prove that he has achieved the objectives he spelt out at the outset of the war on October 7. His main objectives are to eliminate Hamas, rescue the hostages and ensure Israel’s security.
Despite Israel’s increased war tempo in Rafah, Hamas remains a fighting force. Most Palestinians in the Gaza Strip see them as saviours, even though nearly 120,000 Gazans have been killed or injured in the seven-month-old war. Regardless of a ceasefire deal, analysts say Hamas is capable of continuing the resistance by military means for as long as it takes.
In contrast, Netanyahu is facing international isolation and defeat in war and politics. He is doomed whichever way he moves. If he continues the war, he will lose his international support. If he signs the ceasefire deal with Hamas, he will lose the support of hardliners. To navigate this dilemma, he needs a face-saving strategy.
The US and his other Western allies have warned him not to proceed with a grand invasion, which they say will bring about an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe. Ignoring their advice, the Israeli war cabinet decided Monday night to launch the military operation in Rafah. In a symbolic reaction, Washington halted a shipment of 2000-pound bombs to Israel.
Though some Western analysts see US President Joe Biden’s decision as politically significant, the suspension of the arms shipment hardly makes a dent in the superior firepower Israel has built over the years with US and Western armaments. Israel must surely have enough US-made 2000-pound bombs to continue its genocide in Gaza.
Supplies of such civilian-killing weapons make the Biden administration complicit in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Thousands of Palestinian children lost their lives, limbs, and parents due to Israel’s use of these US-supplied bombs. They are not precision bombs. When detonated, they can kill or cause severe injury to people within a radius of 800 metres from the point of impact in open areas.
In an interview with CNN on Wednesday, Biden admitted that these US weapons “have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities — that deal with that problem.”
It is wrong to continue supplying those weapons systems, he said. His remarks came as he was losing the Democratic Party’s progressive vote bank, the Muslim vote and the support of university students.
The genocide-causing capability of these US-supplied weapons apart, Biden’s announcement of suspension of weapons supplies also appeased Israel. He added the usual rider that the US is committed to Israel’s defence.
The US action and the progress in the ceasefire talks have pushed Netanyahu into a corner, prompting him to perform a balancing act. He is under continous US pressure to accept the ceasefire deal. The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief, William Burns, was in Israel yesterday, waiting for a positive response from Netanyahu to the ceasefire deal.
Netanyahu is going ahead with his Rafah move on a staggered basis. The first target was the eastern side of the Rafah border crossing. As the Israeli troops moved in, more than 100,000 displaced civilians fled the area. Doctors and patients abandoned the only hospital there. Several mass graves at Gaza’s other destroyed hospitals have added to their fear that the invading army would destroy their hospital and kill the doctors and patients in execution style.
Netanyahu is playing safe and buying time until his unhappy coalition partners, the US in particular, come to terms with his step-by-step Rafah invasion. Contrary to his much-hyped grand invasion of Rafah, the Israeli Defence Forces have only taken control of the border crossing.
This was not the final victory his hardline cabinet colleagues, such as National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gevir, hoped for. Ben-Gevir and the like are opposed to any ceasefire deal with Hamas. They have pooh-poohed the previous US efforts and interpreted any ceasefire deal as a victory for Hamas, Iran, and Hezbollah.
Yet control of the border is strategically important for Israel because Hamas has built tunnels connecting Gaza and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. Israel has claimed it has detected and destroyed the shafts of 14 such tunnels. Most of the tunnels are along Rafah’s western border, which Israel has yet to capture. Israeli troops cannot take full control of the entire Rafah border without escalating the war and causing heavy civilian casualties.
In another development that confirms Israeli policy of using starvation as a weapon of war, Israel is using the control of the Rafah border to choke off the entry of life-saving aid into Gaza.
The Egyptians fear the Rafah war could see hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fleeing into Sinai. Egypt is pushing for a ceasefire to avert such an eventuality and also to end the Red Sea Houthi attacks, which have deprived it of billions of dollars in Suez Canal revenue.
The US and regional players should double down on their diplomatic efforts in the coming days to make the ceasefire deal a reality and to avert a full-scale war in Rafah.
(This article first appeared in the Daily Mirror, Sri Lanka)

What Netanyahu is trying to achieve by provoking Iran

By Ameen Izzadeen
Israel’s hardline and war-thirsty Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is more than ever before well close to dragging the United States into a war with Iran. Ever since Iran launched its nuclear programme in the late 1980s, Israel has been jittery. It fears an Iranian nuke will undermine its nuclear monopoly in the region.
Since Netanyahu became Israel’s prime minister for the first time in 1996, his main foreign policy objective has been to get the United States to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities and prevent the Islamic Republic from achieving nuclear power parity vis-à-vis Israel.
However, US Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump have skillfully circumvented Netanyahu’s efforts to trap them into attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities. As Netanyahu kept adding pressure on Washington, these US presidents would say all options, including the military, were on the table. These US presidents had heeded warnings that an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would open the gates of hell in the Middle East.
But the present president, Joe Biden, fell into the trap. On April 14, when Iran attacked Israel in response to Israel’s April 1 attack on Iran’s consulate office in Damascus, several US aircraft were airborne to intercept the barrage of oncoming Iranian projectiles.
Iran’s attack, which was in tune with Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, should have been seen as an equaliser, and the dispute should have been put to rest in the greater interest of world peace. After all, Iran’s attack with advanced notice came more as a warning to Israel than with the intention to cause havoc. It was a game-changer and a powerful statement that the days of Israel dominating the Middle East or deciding the fate of the region were over.
Yet Netanyahu is using the crisis for his political survival. He is whipping up war hysteria to prop up his failing popularity. Israel’s war cabinet has decided to hit back at Iran at a time and place of Israel’s choosing. In their effort to win the world’s sympathy, Israeli government leaders and diplomats are postulating that Iran’s drones and hypersonic missiles could have killed thousands in Israel if they had not been intercepted. They try to hide the glaring fact that the missiles and bombs with which they unleash their collective punishment on Gaza were more lethal than Iran’s 350-odd projectiles that caused no harm to civilians or civilian infrastructure.
Despite the activation of the Iron Dome, other anti-missile systems, and interception by US, British, and Jordanian aircraft, Iran’s strategic missiles hit the Nevatim airbase from where Israeli jets took off to attack the Iranian consulate in Damascus on April 1, killing an Iranian Revolutionary Guard general among a dozen others. It cost Israel US$1.4 billion to ward off the Iranian attack. So whether Iranian missiles reached their targets or not during Operation True Promise, Israel was the loser.
Iran has warned that any further attacks by Israel will draw a harsher response than what Israel witnessed on April 14.
By triggering a conflict with Iran, Netanyahu is trying to achieve several key objectives, apart from propping up his sagging popularity: He is reversing the strained relations with the Biden administration over his reluctance to listen to Washington’s concerns over the worsening humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip. He is expecting the US to get involved in the war and destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities. Netanyahu is also diverting the world’s attention from the Gaza genocide. The death toll—without counting the thousands of bodies buried in the rubble—is now close to 34,000, with about 50 percent of the casualties being children.
The US and Israel’s genocide-backing allies, such as Britain and Germany, are urging Israel to exercise restraint. To placate Israel, their spoiled brat and war criminal, these nations are threatening to impose fresh sanctions on Iran, ignoring the fact that it was Israel which provoked Iran.
But Netanyahu keeps even Israel’s allies guessing what he will do. An Israeli attack on Iran’s military or nuclear facilities will signal the beginning of a wider regional conflict. Iran is backed by Hezbollah militias in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and several militia groups in Iraq. Iran can count on Syria and Russia as well.
On Wednesday, days after Iran carried out its retaliatory attacks on Israel, Hezbollah launched a daring drone attack on an Israeli military facility, inflicting casualties among Israeli soldiers. An all-out Israel-Iran war will result in disruptions to commercial vessel navigation in the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz. A day before Iran attacked Israel, Iranian naval forces seized an Israeli-linked vessel in the Strait of Hormuz.
The Houthis, who are the de facto rulers of Yemen, will intensify their military activities in the Red Sea and may even target US military facilities spread across the region.
Also joining the war will be the pro-Iranian Iraqi militia, Kata’ib Hezbollah, which counts substantial support among Iraq’s Shiite Muslim majority.
An all-out war could see the involvement of Arab countries. Iran’s April 14 military response exposed some Arab nations’ pro-Israeli stance. Jordan, in particular, shot down a few Iranian projectiles flying over its airspace.
Although Jordan justified its action by saying it needed to protect its airspace from hostile objects, social media users across the Arab and Islamic world see the Jordanian action as treachery. Their posts recalled how the present King Abdullah’s great-grandfather, Sherif Hussein, the Emir of Mecca, schemed with the British to betray and topple the Ottoman caliphate. As a reward for this treachery, the British made one of Hussein’s sons, Abdullah, the first king of Jordan, a new state Britain and France created in keeping with the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement.
Jordan’s interception of Iranian drones exposed years-long US efforts to cobble together a military alliance to counter an Iranian threat. Israeli media reports claim that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates shared intelligence with Israel, although they refused permission for US aircraft to fly over their territories to intercept Iranian drones and missiles.
Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries, already struggling to contain public anger at their lack of action to stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza, are calling for calm.
If Iran responds to the next Israeli attack, once again the US, Britain, and other Western powers are sure to rush to defend Israel, just as they did on April 14. Meanwhile, the US and British actions in defending Israel have prompted Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, to ask, “If the Western nations could intercept Iranian missiles and defend Israel, a non-Nato member, why can’t they intercept Russian missiles and defend Ukraine?”
A region-wide conflict will, no doubt, shoot up world energy and commodity prices to unprecedented levels, spelling disaster for developing countries like Sri Lanka, which is struggling to come out of economic bankruptcy. A wider war in the Middle East, which accounts for one-third of the global oil supply, will only expedite the world economy’s fall into a major recession. Several European countries are already perilously close to recession, largely due to the effects of the Russia-Ukraine war. To have one more war, especially in the world’s biggest oil-producing region, will only spell catastrophe for the entire world.
(This story first appeared in the Daily Mirror, Sri Lanka)

Attack on Iran: Amid lies and deception, Gaza war may escalate into a regional conflict

Attack on Iran: Amid lies and deception, Gaza war may escalate into a regional conflict
By Ameen Izzadeen
The April 1 attack by Israel on the Iranian consular office in the Syrian capital of Damascus, killing several people including a senior Revolutionary Guard general and diplomats, is a potential trigger for a regional war. Let the entire world suffer and let millions of people die in such a war, which will have a devastating effect on developing countries. Israel will not stop until it conquers the world.
This is not a dark prophecy. Israel is well on the path to achieving its ambitions. With the West, the Arab world, and one-time Non-Aligned Movement stars paying obeisance to Israel, the Zionist state believes it is special and above the law. It believes international human rights laws, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and myriad United Nations mechanisms for a rules-based world order are only for nations other than Israel.
Usually, it is terrorists who bomb embassies. No state has ever done that. Respecting the inviolability of diplomats is an age-old tradition. The 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations says the premises of a diplomatic mission are considered inviolable. By attacking the Iranian mission, Israel violated the Vienna Convention and international customs on protection for diplomats and diplomatic missions. But does it care? With the United States and its Western allies desisting from condemning the dastardly act, Israel is encouraged to carry out more such attacks in the future.
In another act that confirms that Israel is above the law, six foreign aid workers were killed by Israeli fire in Gaza the same day it bombed the Iranian consular office. The World Central Kitchen, the charity to which the slain aid workers were attached, insists the killing was deliberate, but Israel claims it was a mistake. Yet the condemnation from the US and its Western allies is either muted or perfunctory: More encouragement for Israel to kill more foreign workers. However, the world over, peace-and-justice-loving people, including UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, believe there was a much more sinister design behind what Israel calls a mistake. In two posts on X, Albanese said:
“On the day Israel bombed a foreign embassy in a third country, it also killed @WCKitchen humanitarian workers. Israel is crossing every possible red line, still with full impunity. Sanctions now. Indictments now.”
“Knowing how Israel operates, my assessment is that Israeli forces intentionally killed #WCK workers so that donors would pull out & civilians in Gaza could continue to be starved quietly. Israel knows Western countries & most Arab countries won’t move a finger for the Palestinians.”
Since the attack, several foreign charities have decided to withdraw from Gaza, dealing a further blow to the starving Palestinians. Israel, which is using starvation as a weapon of war, cannot be happier.
Israel was founded on lies and deception, and it survives on lies and deception. The claim of land without people for people without land is an out-and-out lie. That Palestine was God’s Promised Land to the Jews is a devilish distortion of the scripture. That Hamas slit babies’ throats and raped Israeli women was a blatant lie Israel floated, the United States’ Israeli-serving president, Joe Biden, parroted, and the Israel-friendly Western media propagated.
The lies Israel utters are not permitted to be investigated and exposed. Anti-Semitism is the cover Israel has cleverly placed on its lies. Academics such as Roger Garaudy and David Irwin dared to challenge the 6 million figure given as the number of Jews Hitler killed. They did not deny the fact that Hitler killed Jews, but they disputed the 6 million figure. Garaudy and Irwin spent years in prison for exercising academic freedom. Many have lost their jobs.
Also being hushed is Hungarian historian Samuel Kohn’s seminal work that asserted Magyars (Hungarians) and Khazar Jews shared a common origin. Hungarian researcher and writer Arthur Koestler, in his book ‘The Thirteenth Tribe,” establishes the Khazeri connection of the European Jews, who have very little to do with Palestine. Khazeria was a kingdom that existed in the southern Ukrainian and Russian regions. In the tenth century, or about that time, the king and the people embraced Judaism to overcome conversion pressure from the Byzantine Christians and the Muslims. Ashkenazi Jews, according to Koestler, are largely Khazeris. The European Jews, or Ashkenazi, form 40 percent of Israel’s population. But Israel and Israeli-funded academia have dismissed the Khazeri connection as lies.
Lies and deception apart, the attack on the Iranian mission has placed Teheran in a dilemma. Although Iran’s spiritual leader, Ali Khamenei, has vowed a fitting response, Iran appears to be exercising restraint to avert a region-wide war, which may even lead to a world war. An attack on the consular office, in effect, is an attack on Iranian soil. If Iran does not respond, it will encourage Israel to undertake more such attacks now that the Western nations have, by their silence, given the Zionist state a blank cheque to violate the Vienna Convention.
White House spokesman John Kirby insisted yesterday that they have not found Israel to have violated international humanitarian laws in the past six months. Kirby and his State Department counterpart, Mathew Miller, are the new avatars of Goebbels. Perhaps, they are of the view that the genocide Israel is committing in Gaza is a humane one.
The inhumane extent to which US politicians will go to defend Israel’s genocidal action came out in a statement this week by US Congressman Tim Walberg. He said Israel should drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza. During a town hall meeting, Walberg was asked about the Biden administration’s moves to build a port off the coast of Gaza to deliver more humanitarian aid. He said, “We shouldn’t be spending a dime on humanitarian aid. It should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima, get it over quick.”
Not to be outdone, the Biden administration is sending ammunition, heavy weapons, and aircraft to Israel, even as the Zionist regime is committing genocide. In the US, the Leahy law prohibits military aid to countries that violate human rights and humanitarian laws. But Israel is above the Leahy law.
Israel may think that it can continue its deception and genocide as long as it has Goebbels and genocide fans in world capitals to whitewash its lies and justify its crimes. But the world’s peace-and-justice-loving people are waking up to these lies and atrocities. Today’s educated younger generation knows how to sift the truth from the propaganda spewed out by the mainstream Western media.
Iran has been championing the Palestinian cause since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, much to the chagrin of most Arab nations, which have embraced Israel in what is seen as the biggest betrayal in Islamic history, which only rivals the Arab betrayal of the Ottoman Caliph during World War I.
Today, Iran marks Quds Day. In the Islamic lexicon, Quds refers to the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. It is Islam’s third-holiest mosque. On every Quds Day, Iran renews its vow to liberate Palestine from Israeli colonialism and uses its allies, such as Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthi militias, to hit back at Israel. As Iran prepares for a response to the April 1 attacks, Israel has commissioned 77,000 reservists as a sign of the Gaza war exploding into a regional conflict.
(This article first appeared in the Daily Mirror, Sri Lanka)

Gaza genocide, ISIS and the tailpiece of Moscow terror

By Ameen Izzadeen
The Moscow terror attack conveniently claimed by the so-called Islamic State, a.k.a. ISIS, and the diplomatic circus at the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday in passing a Gaza ceasefire resolution may appear disconnected at first glance. But there is enough interconnection between the two tragedies.
First, let’s discuss the ISIS connection. The Friday evening terror attack at the Crocus City Hall on the outskirts of Moscow has revealed the mercenary character of ISIS. Questions have always lingered about the Islamic credentials of ISIS since its birth from the ashes of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) in 2011.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is a past master of espionage. No world leader knows the ins and outs of how intelligence outfits operate and produce plans in their laboratories better than Putin, a former KGB super-agent. Although last Friday’s attack that took place despite Russia’s high alertness given the regular terror attacks by Ukraine-connected elements raises questions over Russia’s ability to avert terror attacks, the arrest of 11 suspects, all Tajik nationals with Russian residency, in quick time, highlights the competence of Russian forces.
While the US and its allies condemn and blame ISIS, Putin is not buying it. He knows with whom ISIS works. None of the four gunmen appeared to be ISIS material. However, ISIS’ new franchise, ISIS-K, or ISIS in Khorasan claimed they were its members. By the way, Khorasan is a region identified with parts of Afghanistan and Iran and has some religious significance. But the terrorists have confessed they carried out the attack for half a million rubles and uttered nothing about their Islamic zeal or wish to ascend to paradise to have intimacy with 72 virgins.
The ISIS story begins with the arrest of a man called Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim Ali al-Badri by the United States occupation forces in Iraq in 2004 for militant activities not connected with terrorism. He was sentenced to a jail term in the US-controlled Camp Bucca prison, meant not for petty militants like him but for hardcore al-Qaeda operatives. According to a Newsweek article, Camp Bucca’s US guards struggled with unruly inmates. But the new prisoner, who was later known by the nom de guerre Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was cooperative with the guards and was credited with bringing order into the prison. After ten months in prison, he was released. He revived the leaderless AQI and renamed it the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
In yet another too-good-to-be-true feat, he staged a daring jailbreak in 2013 at Iraq’s Taji prison, highly guarded by US forces, and freed more than 500 hardcore prisoners detained for ‘terrorism’. They were loaded into waiting pick-up trucks and sent to join ISIS members fighting the Syrian troops in the regions bordering Iraq.
ISIS was united in purpose with the West, some Arab Gulf states, and Israel. They all wanted Assad ousted. Often, Israel acted as the air force of ISIS, taking on Syrian troop positions and enabling ISIS to make speedy advances across Syria. Moreover, Israel facilitated wounded anti-Assad forces, including ISIS, to obtain medical treatment in Israel.
That ISIS is a product of a powerful and highly advanced intelligence outfit’s laboratory cannot be ruled out. It could be Mossad, or an intelligence unit of a Western country with input from some Arab Gulf states. But ISIS, with its lightning-fast military successes, decided to go against its creator, like Frankenstein’s monster. The US then decided to take on the unruly ISIS in 2014, with the embedded Western media building up the casus belli by highlighting ISIS atrocities. Al-Baghdadi was eventually killed in a 2019 US operation. But Washington’s war against ISIS gave it an excuse to have a military presence in Syria.
In claiming responsibility for last Friday’s Moscow terror attack, ISIS stated that it targeted Russia because it believes Russia has Muslim blood on its hands. If Muslim blood is the criterion for ISIS attacks, then the group should be fighting not Russia but Israel, which is carrying out genocide in Gaza.
ISIS does not fight Israel. During the peak of ISIS terror, the group, in a March 15, 2016 article in its weekly newspaper al-Naba, said the Palestine issue should not be the priority of the Muslim world. The ISIS position only strengthens the argument that it serves Israel’s interests and, by extension, the interests of Western imperialism.
So it does not come as a shock when renowned British sociologist David Miller, who has done extensive research on Islamophobia, says it was Zionist elements, especially Benjamin Netanyahu, who introduced the word “Islamic terror” as far back as 1984, and from there onwards, the Zionist campaigners and the Zionist-friendly media popularised the term, stigmatising Islam and Muslims to dehumanise the Palestinians and to deprive them of the world’s sympathy.
But the Palestinians are winning the world’s sympathy despite the Zionists’ attempts to demonise them with the Islamic-terror label. Was the Moscow terror attack by the mercenary ISIS an attempt to whip up Islamophobia and thereby turn the world’s sympathy away from Palestinians?
The success of the Zionists’ Islamophobic propaganda is evident in the United States’ tolerance of or complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. However, the magnitude of the Israeli horror in Gaza has reached a point where Israel’s Western supporters had no choice but to call for an immediate ceasefire at least during the rest of the Ramadan. This was evident in the recent United Nations Security Council vote on Tuesday.
However, due to Israel’s influence, the entire UN procedure that adopted Resolution 2278, with 14 member states voting for it and the US abstaining, appears to be a big circus, with the biggest clown being Washington’s UN envoy Linda Thomas-Greenfield. After the vote, she made a speech underscoring the Joe Biden administration’s obeisance to the Zionist cause. Making an outlandish claim, she said the resolution was non-binding, although the overwhelming international legal opinion is that it is binding and part of international law. Therefore, if Israel fails to comply with it, sanctions could be imposed.
Unbowed, Israel stepped up its bombings on Gaza, taking the death toll to nearly 33,000 in 168 days of its military response to the October 7 attacks by Hamas. Israel is also going ahead with plans to annex northern Gaza. It has also rejected UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s report titled “An Anatomy of Genocide”.
Albanese said Israel has violated three of the five acts listed under the UN Genocide Convention in its war on Gaza. She also revealed that she faced threats after she came out with her report. The threats UN officials face for daring to call out Israel need to be taken seriously. After all, who can forget Count Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish diplomat and UN mediator? He was gunned down in September 1948 by members of the Israeli terror group Lehi. He was carrying a peace proposal that would have set up a Palestinian state in 1948. The gunmen were arrested by Israel, but as usual, they were pardoned and released after a short jail term. Therein lies terrorism.
(This article first appeared in the Daily Mirror, Sri Lanka)

Rachel Corrie and USS Liberty: The Hannibal Doctrine in US diplomacy

Rachel Corrie and USS Liberty: The Hannibal Doctrine in US diplomacy
By Ameen Izzadeen
On Saturday, Palestinians and peace activists campaigning for a free Palestine commemorated the 21st anniversary of the death of Rachel Corrie, an American citizen. She was crushed to death in Gaza on March 16, 2003, by a 26,287-kg heavy bulldozer driven by an Israeli soldier. Commemorative events were held in Palestinian territories despite the melancholy over the unending destruction with which genocide-committing Israel is visiting the Palestinians day in and day out and the ever-increasing death toll, which now stands at 32,000—nearly half of the children.
A volunteer attached to an international peace team, Rachel was in Gaza to protect Palestinian homes that were being regularly bulldozed for Israeli settlers to take over the Palestinian land. She was one month short of her 24th birthday when her life was brutally taken away.
The US magazine, Mother Jones, gave an account of her final hours:
“At two o’clock on the afternoon of Sunday, March 16, Rachel Corrie received a cell-phone call from a comrade in the International Solidarity Movement. ‘The Israelis are back,’ she told Corrie. ‘Get over here right away. I think they’re heading for Dr. Samir’s house.’ The news alarmed Corrie. Samir Nasrallah was a Palestinian pharmacist who lived with his wife and three children a few hundred yards from the battle-scarred Egyptian border in the Gaza Strip town of Rafah. Corrie and other pro-Palestinian activists based in Rafah had frequently spent the night in Nasrallah’s house, acting as human shields against the Israeli tanks and bulldozers, clearing a security zone around the border. Almost every other structure in the area had been knocked down in recent months; Nasrallah’s abode now stood alone in a sea of sand and debris.
“Certain that the pharmacist’s house was about to be razed, Corrie caught a taxi to the Hai as-Salam neighbourhood. The paved roads of downtown Rafah gave way to sandy tracks lined with scrabbly olive groves, mosques, modest houses, and dirt pitches where Corrie often played football—badly but enthusiastically—with local youths. At 2:30 p.m., a neighbour of Nasrallah’s named Abu Ahmed caught sight of the activist hurrying past his house. Slight, hazel-eyed, with high cheekbones and dirty blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, she carried a megaphone in one hand and an orange fluorescent jacket in the other. “Come inside and have some tea,” he urged her. But Corrie told him she did not have time, and he watched as she disappeared around the corner of his house, heading towards the roar of machinery.
“This much has never been contested: placing herself in the path of an Israeli bulldozer that she believed was about to flatten Nasrallah’s house, Rachel Corrie was crushed to death—her skull fractured, her ribs shattered, her lungs punctured.”
Witnesses said that Corrie’s death was no accident; the bulldozer’s operator had deliberately run over her, then put the vehicle in reverse. For Palestinians, she was a martyr—one of them.
But was justice done to her? As often happens in probes involving Israeli soldiers, no charges were brought against the bulldozer driver. An Israeli investigation concluded that the driver “had not seen Corrie” and therefore no charges would be brought against him.
To date, the investigation findings have not been published or shared with the US government or the Corrie family. As often happens in incidents where Israel is the wrongdoer, the US government did not let the Corrie tragedy become a diplomatic issue. The then-president, George W. Bush, who was known for his gung-ho statements about the 9/11 attacks, meekly expressed regret over the tragedy but rejected calls by the Corrie family and peace activists to conduct a probe by a US team.
For the current president, Joe Biden, a hardcore Israel worshipper and Zionist, Rachel Corrie is a non-entity.
With the Corrie family denied justice in the Land of the Free, in desperation, they filed a civil case in Israel. The case went all the way to the Israeli Supreme Court. As often happens in cases against Israeli soldiers, the Supreme Court on February 13, 2015, rejected the appeal on the basis of the “combat activities exception,” according to which the Israeli military cannot be held responsible for damages in a war zone.
The US government’s desertion or betrayal of an American citizen is the diplomatic equivalent of a top-secret Israeli military doctrine called the Hannibal Protocol. The doctrine is employed to prevent the kidnapping of soldiers by any means necessary, even if it means striking and harming Israeli forces. The doctrine, named after the Carthaginian general who chose to poison himself instead of falling captive to the Romans in 181 BC, implies that an Israeli soldier is ‘better dead than abducted’. Although it is not discussed widely in pro-Israeli Western media, evidence has now surfaced that many of the Israeli civilians being held captive by Hamas militants during the October 7 attacks were killed by Israeli troops in keeping with the Hannibal directive.
The Hannibal doctrine is what successive US administrations have been adopting concerning Rachel Corrie’s murder but with a significant variation. The military version, which Israel adopts, is all about promoting Israel’s national interest, even if it means killing its own citizens, but the doctrine’s diplomatic version, which the US has adopted, is not about promoting US interests. It is about promoting Israel’s interests, even if it means sacrificing American lives.
Nothing explains the Hannibal doctrine of the United States’ pro-Israeli diplomacy in greater detail than the USS Liberty incident in the Mediterranean Sea in 1967. Forget Corrie; forget Aaron Bushnell, the US airman who, in February, set himself ablaze, declaring “Free Palestine” in a heroic act to free his country from its blind slavery to Israel. The USS Liberty incident was about Israel killing 34 US sailors and wounding 174, followed by a cover-up.
Successive US Presidents, under Israeli pressure, have refused to take the lid of secrecy off the attack carried out by Israeli Air Force aircraft and Israeli Navy torpedo boats.
Subsequent investigations and interviews given by Israeli pilots confirmed that it was not an accident or due to miscommunication. The survivors said the attack was deliberate and took place after they identified the vessel as a US warship. They charged that the US government colluded with Israel to cover up the case. Retired Capt. Ward Boston, a former Navy attorney who helped lead the military investigation of the incident in a signed affidavit released at a news conference, insisted that then-President Lyndon B. Johnson and his Defence Secretary Robert McNamara ordered that the inquiry conclude that the incident was an accident. Since then, the US Congress has rejected calls for an investigation.
Many a theory has been floated about the attack, with Soviet research claiming that Israel attacked the US spy ship, fearing that its communications would be intercepted by a Soviet destroyer and passed on to the Egyptians, especially the information about the lack of Israeli fortification on the Egyptian front.
Though the causes of the attack remain shrouded in secrecy due to the diehard US servility towards Israel, the USS Liberty attack and the Rachel Corrie tragedy confirm the existence of the Hannibal Protocol in US diplomacy. Citizens of America, beware!
(This article first appeared in the Daily Mirror, Sri Lanka)

Gaza famine: Food aid before the slaughter

By Ameen Izzadeen
Just as the people sentenced to death are fed their best meal before they are executed, the Gaza Strip’s people, in the midst of a deadly famine, are being fed meals sent by the United States before they are slaughtered by Israel. Whatever is sent is not the best. But taste is not an option when survival is at stake.
The United States is completing a pier in the seas off the Gaza coast to send much-denied food aid. Its genocide-committing ally, Israel, also says it is trying to “flood” Gaza with aid, unable to withstand mounting international pressure, including some harsh criticism from its hardcore allies. Among them is the European Union, which stands by Israel and stomachs its war crimes with a high tolerance bar that is not seen in its human rights witch hunt against countries like Sri Lanka.
The EU has justified the human rights excesses of the Zionist state, insisting that it has the right to defend itself. The EU fully backed Israel’s disproportionate response to the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks. When it became no longer an option to turn a blind eye to Israel’s blatant violation of international law and international humanitarian law in its response to the October 7 attacks, the EU issued only token condemnations, while several EU members continued to send lethal weapons to Israel to be used in the Gaza genocide. Notable among them is Germany, a country that killed millions of Jews during World War II and is being accused of committing genocide in Namibia during its colonial expedition. Germany accounts for 28 percent of Israel’s military imports. In contrast, EU members Spain and Belgium took the morally correct action and ceased all military cooperation with Israel.
On Tuesday, the EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, hit out at Israel, saying that it was using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza.
“Starvation is being used [by Israel] as a war arm [sic], and when we condemn this happening in Ukraine, we have to use the same words for what is happening in Gaza,” Borrell said in a speech at the UN Security Council.
Without calling for a total ban on military exports to Israel, whatever concerns the EU and the United States express is empty talk, and whatever food aid they send to Gaza is similar to feeding a goat before its slaughter. In the US Congress, moves are underway to send US$14 billion worth of military aid to Israel to eliminate Hamas, a rag-tag resistance group that has no military tanks, no fighter jets, and no military bases.
As the military-industrial complex or the arms lobby salivates over multi-billion-dollar profits from the Gaza war, the Palestinians are dying in their hundreds at food collection points.
So far, some 400 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks while collecting food. Scores of children have died of severe malnutrition. Mothers watch their wasting children die without food or life-saving medication in hospital corridors. Yet, there is no let-up in the Israeli attacks on civilian targets. In a viral social media video, Israel’s chief military Rabbi was seen issuing a Jewish fatwa justifying the killing of women and children.
Dismissing warnings of catastrophic outcomes, Israel’s hardline Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, vows to unleash his country’s full military might on a million and a half Palestinians crammed up in the southern Gaza town of Rafah, which like all areas of Gaza, has no proper functioning hospital.
With neither Israel nor Hamas agreeing to compromise on their conflicting demands for a ceasefire, there is no respite for Palestinians, even in this holy month of Ramadan. A lull in military activities is expected, but not guaranteed, during the upcoming US food aid distribution through the makeshift seaport the Americans are now building.
But the US and most of Israel’s European backers are simply bluffing. In President Joe Biden’s case, it is all about politics and not about humanitarianism. It is not a change of heart—from a stone heart to a heart of kindness. He is worried about the growing progressive voice in the Democratic Party in support of a free Palestine. Though they are a minority, their protest vote can make or break Biden in the November presidential election. Biden is a hard-core Zionist, and his administration is complicit in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. After all, Biden, when he was a senator, shocked then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin by saying that he would sanction the killing of civilians, including women and children, in defence of Israel.
In the recent Democratic Party primaries, some 400,000 protest voters across several states voted ‘uncommitted’, sending shivers down Biden’s spine. There began a badly organised food aid airdrop, only to be stalled when a failed parachute fell on a house and killed five people.
If Biden really cares about the worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza, what he should be doing is calling Netanyahu to give him a stern warning that if land borders are not opened for aid convoys to move in, expect a US military and economic aid cut or face a US volte-face in the UN Security Council when the next ceasefire resolution is brought up.
But Netanyahu, knowing well that Biden is beholden to the Israeli lobby for campaign funds, would have none of it. The Israeli Prime Minister even pooh-poohed the ‘yes-and-no’ redline Biden warned of during a recent interview with MSNBC.
When asked about whether the Israeli military push into Rafah was a redline, Biden, whose poor memory is an election issue, in an oxymoron remark told MSNBC, “It is a red line, but I’m never going to leave Israel… The defence of Israel is still critical. So there’s no red line [in which] I’m going to cut off all weapons so they don’t have the Iron Dome to protect them.”
In an interview with Axel Springer, the parent company of Politico, Netanyahu said the Israeli military would go into Rafah. “We’ll go there. We’re not going to leave them. You know, I have a red line. You know what the red line is? That October 7 doesn’t happen again. Never happens again.”
Without naming them, Netanyahu claimed he had the tacit support of several Arab leaders for driving ahead with the onslaught against Hamas.
“They understand that, and even agree with it quietly,” he said. “They understand Hamas is part of the Iranian terror axis.”
When Netanyahu roared, the Biden administration began to underplay the redline warning. This week, Israeli lawmakers approved an amended budget that adds tens of billions of shekels to fund its military operation in the Gaza Strip, underscoring that the intended Rafah ground operation is very much on the table.
So all this food aid for the Palestinians is fodder for the lamb before the knife falls on its neck.
(This article first appeared in the Daily Mirror, Sri Lanka)

Famine looms in Gaza as Biden and Trump play politics

By Ameen Izzadeen
With a dangerous Donald Trump just one hurdle away from breasting the 2024 presidential tape after his sweeping victory at the Super Tuesday poll to pick the Republican Party candidate, the Palestinian people, if they are fortunate enough to survive Israel’s genocide, are likely to see a worse catastrophe than they are being inflicted now under his presidency.
Hours after his Super Tuesday feat, in an interview with Fox News, Trump voiced explicit backing for Israel’s war on Gaza until “total victory”. When asked whether he was on board with the way Israel was “taking the fight to Gaza”, Trump responded, “You’ve got to finish the problem”. He expressed no concern over the civilian deaths. “You had a horrible invasion that took place that would have never happened if I was president,” he boasted.
During his presidency from 2016 to 2020, Trump was outrageously pro-Israel, acting contrary to his campaign promise to follow an equidistant policy on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. In complete disregard for international law, he moved the US embassy to Jerusalem and acknowledged the city as the undivided capital of Israel, even though the international consensus is that East Jerusalem should be the capital of a future Palestinian state. He turned a blind eye to the Israeli government’s illegal settlement-building activities in the West Bank. Making a mockery of the peace process, he entrusted the task of making peace between Israel and Palestine to his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, an avowed Zionist.
This week, Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said, “President Trump did more for Israel than any American president in history, and he took historic action in the Middle East that created unprecedented peace. When President Trump is back in the Oval Office, Israel will once again be protected, Iran will go back to being broke, terrorists will be hunted down, and the bloodshed will end.”
Many opinion polls indicate a tight Biden-Trump contest or a narrow victory for Trump. If Biden loses the November election, he alone is to be blamed. Biden mishandled Israel, giving it unlimited freedom to take on Hamas, regardless of the number of civilians killed. This has turned out to be a costly blunder and earned him the displeasure of the progressives, especially the social-media-savvy youth who know to discern the truth from the crap in the Zionist-controlled mainstream media. Biden’s campaign has also been hit by voter concerns over his age and declining memory.
His administration has sent weapons and money to Israel to kill more than 30,000 Palestinian civilians, almost half of them children, and inhumanely blocked UN Security Council efforts to bring about a ceasefire.
Although foreign policy is the last of the priorities on the wish list of US voters, it cannot be dismissed altogether. While the economy and immigration are the two main issues on which both candidates are trying to prove their competency, the Gaza war is also likely to pop up in presidential debates if the conflict festers without a ceasefire.
If his Democratic Party strategists are serious about defeating Trump at the polls, they should not have waited until the Super Tuesday wake-up call. Ahead of Super Tuesday, a tensed Biden team distanced itself from Israel’s hardline Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and invited to Washington Israel’s war cabinet member and Netanyahu’s political nemesis Benny Grantz for meetings with Vice President Kamala Harris and other policymakers. An angry Netanyahu declared that the Grantz visit was not sanctioned by the government and that he would not accept its outcome.
Last week, Biden spoke of a weekend agreement for a ceasefire, and this week he said the Palestinian resistance group Hamas should agree to a ceasefire and the hostage deal. Hamas, however, is rejecting the ceasefire formula, saying it wants a permanent ceasefire, not a short-term one.
In Biden’s Super Tuesday victory, there is a message for him. In Minnesota and six other states, the sizeable protest vote was a signal that Biden’s rock-solid support for Israel may cost him reelection. In Minnesota, the protest vote was as high as 20 percent. A week ago, the Michigan primary also sent a similar warning that unless Biden changes his Gaza policy, he is unlikely to beat Trump.
A section of the Biden campaign team believes, that despite the dissatisfaction with the president’s Israeli policy, the protest voters will choose Biden because they fear the bigger danger that will befall the country under the Trump presidency. Besides, Trump is a suspect in four criminal cases and his mental soundness has been questioned by well-known US psychologists.
But the Biden camp is taking a big risk.
Angry youth disrupt Democratic Party’s town hall meetings, urging the politician to back the call for an immediate ceasefire and help facilitate food aid to the Gaza Strip, where people are more likely to die from starvation than from Israeli bombs.
With Israel using food as a weapon of war, scores of children have already died due to starvation. A BBC report quoted a senior UN aid official as warning that at least 576,000 people across the Gaza Strip—one-quarter of the population—faced catastrophic levels of food insecurity, and one in six children under the age of two in the north was suffering from acute malnutrition.
The warning indicates that if not enough food is sent to the besieged territory immediately, thousands of emaciated children will die. Wounded and severely malnourished children are brought to hospitals that have hardly any medicine, saline, morphine, or equipment. They are left on the hospital floor to join the chorus of whimpers, groans, and screams, until death silences them.
Biden is not acting decisively enough to prevent the 21st century’s worst humanitarian crisis that is unfolding before his own eyes. The Gaza humanitarian crisis is far worse than the two-year Ethiopian famine of 1983-1985. Up to 1.2 million people died, during the Ethiopian famine due to prolonged droughts amid a civil war in the northern parts, especially Tigray. The United Nations and the United States sent food aid but had to suspend the programme due to stealing by Ethiopian officials and the government policy of using food as a weapon of war. Yet, about 400,000 people could escape to neighbouring countries.
But for the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, there is no escape. Israel is not only indiscriminately bombing civilian areas but also using food aid as a war weapon, just as the Ethiopian government did in the 1980s. Even the United Nations food convoys are blocked by Israeli extremists with the connivance of Israeli Defence Forces personnel.
It is a huge embarrassment for the Biden administration when it is unable to get its staunchest ally, Israel, to permit US agencies to send food aid to Gaza through land routes. After all, it was for Israel’s sake that the US let its image be tarnished and be accused of being complicit in genocide. Instead, the US is airdropping packs of meals, which are hardly enough to feed the starving people caught up in a US-Israeli-made famine.
There is more politics than humanitarianism in Biden’s crumbs from the sky, as he grapples with the delicate balance between the Zionist pressure and the pro-Palestinian progressive revolt in the Democratic Party.
This article first appeared in the Daily Mirror, Sri Lanka)

Palestinian question: The context highlights the illegality of Israel

By Ameen Izzadeen
The October 7, 2023, attacks the Palestinian resistance group Hamas launched on Israel did not happen in a vacuum. In October last year, weeks after the Hamas attack, the United Nations Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, told the UN Security Council that “it is important to recognise the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum.”
Intellectuals avoid jumping to conclusions. They investigate all sides of an issue, including its history, context, and surrounding narratives, to form an opinion grounded in justice. The Secretary-General was not taking sides in the Israel-Palestinian question. His speech conformed to what was expected of an intellectual and a UN official committed to standing up for justice.
Yet, the Secretary-General’s intellectually sound remarks calling for an understanding of the context irked Israel, which accused him of supporting terrorism. The UN chief indeed condemned the Hamas attack as an act of terrorism. He said the “grievances of the Palestinian people cannot justify the appalling attacks by Hamas.”
In deference to the feelings of the Israeli people recovering from the October 7 incident in which 1,130 Israelis were killed, the Secretary-General was sensitive enough not to stress the international law principle that people under occupation have the right to bear arms against the occupation force. He was indeed more generous towards Israel, as he chose not to elaborate on more than 75 years of ethnic cleansing, dispossession, and war crimes suffered by Palestinians at the hands of Israel.
Yet, the Zionist state slammed him and cancelled meetings with him.
Since the Secretary-General’s audacious remarks on October 24, 2023, much blood has flown across the Gaza Strip. Israel has killed more than 30,000 Palestinians, including more than 13,000 children.
A catastrophic famine is gripping the territory. Whatever is sent as international aid is barely enough to feed the population. With no infant milk to feed their babies, some barely a couple of months old, mothers soak dates in not-so-clean water, wrap them in a cloth, and squeeze the juice into their babies’ mouths. In one hospital in northern Gaza, doctors could give formula milk to motherless babies in incubators only twice a day, instead of the minimum requirement of four times a day. People are forced to eat leaves and animal food, while animals eat human flesh scattered across bombarded sites.
Against the backdrop of this worsening humanitarian crisis that has eluded a ceasefire due to Washington’s shameless descent into moral turpitude to protect genocide-committing Israel, the context the UN Secretary-General emphasised was extensively highlighted at the International Court of Justice from February 19 to 26. Forty-nine countries and three international organisations presented oral submissions before the 15 judges in a case the United Nations General Assembly filed to obtain an advisory opinion on the legality of Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
The submissions presented by learned international lawyers, mostly outlining the illegality of the occupation, provided a clear picture of the context of the conflict. Three nations—the US, Fiji, and Zambia—gave priority to Israel’s security over the Palestinians’ right to self-determination.
These submissions were useful not only to international law and international relations experts and students but also to government leaders and people trying to understand why Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, and why Israel is committing war crimes in occupied Palestine.
These submissions, available on the ICJ’s website, assume the utmost significance, given the Western media’s attempts in their news coverage to warp or suppress the historical aspects of the Palestinian freedom struggle.
Noteworthy is the submission of the Arab League, although the grouping is being criticised by the Arab people for its diplomatic impotency in bringing about a ceasefire to protect the Palestinian people from Israel’s genocidal actions.
Dr. Ralph Wilde, Senior Counsel retained by the Arab League, addressed the legal questions before the court by explaining “the more than century-long denial of self-determination of, and war against, the Palestinian people, on the basis of racism”. He pointed out the illegality of the manipulation of the League of Nations process by Britain and others to set up a Jewish state in Mandatory Palestine. Here are excerpts:
“When this began after the First World War, the Jewish population of that land was 11 percent. Forcibly implementing Zionism in this demographic context has necessarily involved the extermination, or forced displacement of, some of the non-Jewish Palestinian population; the exercise of domination over, and subjugation, dispossession and immiseration of, remaining non-Jewish Palestinians; the emigration to that land of Jewish people, regardless of any direct personal link; and the denial of Palestinian refugees the right to return. All operating through a racist distinction privileging Jewish people over non-Jewish Palestinian people.
“This has necessitated serious violations of all the fundamental, jus cogens and erga omnes norms of international law—the right of self-determination, the prohibitions on aggression, genocide, crimes against humanity, racial discrimination, apartheid and torture—and the core protections of international humanitarian law.
“The legal right of self-determination of the Palestinian people originates in the “sacred trust” obligations of Article 22 of the League Covenant, part of the Versailles Treaty. Palestine—an “A” class Mandate under British colonial rule—was, after the First World War, supposed to have its existence as an independent State “provisionally recognised”: a sui generis right of self-determination. The United Kingdom and other members of the League Council attempted to bypass this, incorporating the 1917 Balfour Declaration commitment to establishing a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine into the instrument stipulating how the Mandate would operate.
“However, the Council had no legal power to bypass the Covenant in this way. It acted ultra vires, and the relevant provisions were legally void. There was and is no legal basis in that Mandate instrument for either a specifically Jewish State in Palestine, or the United Kingdom’s failure to discharge the “sacred trust” obligation to implement Palestinian self-determination.
“After the Second World War, a self-determination right applicable to colonial peoples generally crystallised in international law. For the Palestinian people, this essentially corresponded to, and supplemented, the pre-existing Covenant right, regarding the same, single territory. The 1947 proposal to partition Palestine was contrary to this; the Arab rejection was an affirmation of the legal status quo.
“In 1948, then, Palestine was, legally, a single territory with a single population enjoying a right of self-determination on a unitary basis.
“Despite this, a State of Israel, specifically for Jewish people, was proclaimed in 1948 by those controlling 78 percent—more than three quarters—of Palestine, accompanied by the forced displacement of a significant number of the non-Jewish Palestinian population—the Nakba, catastrophe. This illegal secession was an egregious violation of Palestinian self-determination.
“Israel’s statehood was recognised, and Israel was admitted as a United Nations member, despite this illegality. Israel is not the legal continuation or successor of the Mandate.”
If, as the UN chief says, the context is important to understand the Palestinian question, that context is the illegal existence of Israel in Palestine, as has been argued before the ICJ. Sadly, due to Western media colonialism and the continuous diplomatic manipulations by the US, Britain, and like-minded Western nations, the Palestinians are vilified and punished as though they are the ‘illegal’ occupiers of Israel.
(This article first appeared in the Daily Mirror, Sri Lanka)

Palestine question: US blamed for veto; Brazil, Guyana hailed, Lanka nowhere

By Ameen Izzadeen
Burying the values the United States presidents often speak highly of during their policy speeches, Washington once again inhumanely used its veto power at the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday to kill Algeria’s resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in the Gaza Strip.
It is revolting to see Washington’s UN envoy Linda Thomas-Greenfield, a political science lecturer, diplomat, and private sector executive not known for human rights or humanitarian activism, raise her hand at the UNSC to veto the resolution. This was the third time her hand went up in support of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and Israel’s war crimes in the Gaza Strip. As a paid servant of the US administration, she does whatever she is commanded to do by President Joe Biden, who is being flayed on social media as Genocide Joe.
Thick-skinned and stone-hearted, she will not resign her post in frustration at her government’s continuous refusal to back a ceasefire in Gaza, though resignation is what is expected of an official with conscience and compassion in the heart if the command of the government is to do the wrong thing.
It is only in horror movies that we see agents of vampires work to fulfil their masters’ insatiable hunger for human blood—not in the key policymaking body of the august international organisation set up to save successive generations from the scourge of war.
On Tuesday, in justification of the US vote against the ceasefire call, Thomas-Greenfield said it was an inopportune time to demand that Israel end its massacre of Palestinians. This raises the question of when the auspicious time will dawn for the US to support a ceasefire call. Is the Biden administration, arguably the most Zionist-servile US administration, waiting till the total annihilation of the Gaza population to support a ceasefire call?
The longer a ceasefire is delayed due to coldhearted US action, the more Palestinian children, women, and civilians are killed, not only in Israeli bombardment but also due to Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war and non-availability of medicine.
Linda Thomas-Greenfield said the ceasefire resolution, proposed by Algeria, would “negatively impact” ongoing negotiations for a truce. Such inane excuses make little sense. Instead, they add credence to claims that the so-called American values that US presidents and diplomats boast about are only a deception to cover foreign policy immorality.
The immorality of Washington’s diehard support for Israel, no matter how serious the Israeli war crimes are, was also highlighted at the ongoing submissions at the International Court of Justice, where its 15 judges are hearing a petition referred by the United Nations General Assembly seeking the court’s advisory opinion on Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
On Monday, appearing for Palestine at the World Court, the well-known US international lawyer Paul Reichler singled out the US for much of his critique, saying that whatever violations of international law Israel commits, “the US always seeks to shield it from accountability.” Quoting from Barack Obama’s 2020 memoirs, he said US diplomats found themselves in the awkward position of having to defend Israel for actions “we ourselves opposed.”
Obama may not be a paragon of human rights virtues. To call him so would be like plunging a long knife into the chests of thousands of innocent civilians killed by US drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan during his presidency. But this is not our topic today.
Linda Thomas Greenfield did not seem to be in an awkward position when she raised her hand that killed Algeria’s resolution, while the rest of the Security Council voted for it, with the sole abstention being the United Kingdom. A host of countries and human rights groups slammed the US for the use of the bloodlust veto. But does it care?
In response, Algeria’s UN ambassador, Amar Bendjama, said the U.S. ambassador’s lone vote against the resolution “implies an endorsement of the brutal violence and collective punishment inflicted upon” Palestinians in Gaza.
“We should ask ourselves: How many innocent lives must be sacrificed before the council deems it necessary to call for a ceasefire?” She told the Security Council, while the death toll soars over the 30,000 mark. This includes 13,000 Gazan children.
The US proposed a rival draft calling for a temporary ceasefire and to add icing to the badly baked cake, it included a clause opposing Israel’s impending strike on Rafah, the southernmost Gaza city, from where there is no escape for Palestinians from Israeli attacks except death.
The US diplomatic overdrive in defence of Israel’s genocide in Gaza was also evident in its opposition to the ICJ case on the question of the legality of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territory.
The World Court is hearing the case in consequence of the United Nations General Assembly passing a resolution on December 31, 2022.
Sri Lanka voted for the resolution, which was passed with 87 countries supporting it, 26 opposing it, and 56 abstaining.
In its submission, the US told the ICJ that it should not order the unconditional withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Palestinian territories without security guarantees. Citing the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, Richard Visek, the acting legal adviser for the US State Department, justified Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territory on grounds of Israel’s security. Absent in his submission is any mention of Israel’s numerous attacks since 1948 on Palestinians, beginning with the Nakba.
The US is not naïve not to know that security cannot be exclusively one state’s concern. Yet, as though the US is under the Zionist state’s satanic spell, it refuses to recognise that Palestinians are also entitled to live in security.
The World Court may take months to deliver its non-binding advisory opinion. Israel will be sure to ignore the ruling if it is not in favour of it. It will be a matter of serious interest to know how the US and Israel’s Western allies would react to such a ruling.
Meanwhile, the world’s peace constituency is hailing Brazil’s President Lula da Silva after he called out Israel for emulating Hitler’s holocaust. The remark set off a diplomatic spat, resulting in the tit-for-tat expulsions of ambassadors.
Apart from Brazil, also coming for praise are the countries that are making submissions to the ICJ in support of the Palestinian people’s right to statehood. Among them was the South American nation of Guyana, whose submission to the ICJ was outstanding, for it was packed with solid facts, irrefutable evidence, and logically structured arguments.
Why Sri Lanka was not among the 50-odd nations presenting submissions at the ICJ may raise a question about Sri Lanka’s commitment to the Palestinian cause. The Sri Lankan government could trot out an excuse that it was more preoccupied with the economic crisis during that period than international political issues.
However, the visit of Israel’s transport minister to Sri Lanka this week was ill-timed and could be interpreted as an endorsement of Israel’s war crimes in Gaza. Also, the government cannot guarantee that the Sri Lankan labour being exported to Israel won’t be used in Israel’s illegal settlement-building activities in occupied Palestinian land.
(This article first appeared in the Daily Mirror, Sri Lanka)