- by Marcus Browning
- The Guardian
- Issue #2079
Photo: Jarrod Moore
The state of Israel has been built up by the Western powers – principally Britain – as a colonising entity, and the military arm of US imperialism in the region. Israel has an arsenal of nuclear weapons, garnered without the slightest protest from these same Western powers, and has conducted a number of wars against its Arab neighbours. It continues to occupy part of the territories it seized in the 1967 war of aggression including the Golan Heights which belongs to Syria.
It has attempted to expel the Palestinian people by terror, repeatedly using its military forces, by thieving Palestinian land, and by building a huge concrete wall to surround the Palestinian people in the West Bank. It invaded Lebanon and occupied part of that country for many years before being forced out, mainly by the Hezbollah forces so frequently condemned in the Western media.
In fact, the emergence and growth of organisations such as Hezbollah are the direct result of Israel’s acts of aggression. Israel holds in its prisons thousands of Palestinians whose only crime is their struggle for the rights of their people – rights recognised by successive UN resolutions. Israel has now launched one of the most savage air bombardments imposed on any country against the Palestinians.
It compares with the Nazi bombardment Guernica in Spain at the time of the Spanish Civil War. Then too, leaders of the Western powers stood by and watched and did absolutely nothing to stop the Nazi barbarism just as they are now standing by, saying and doing nothing to protest against Israeli aggression and barbarity.
It is the same political forces centred in the US, Britain, and other European countries (and including the war mongering sell-out Albanese government) who will not act against Israel because Israel is the very willing tool to achieve the objectives of the imperialist states. Today’s objective is the re-imposition of their unchallenged economic and political domination of the Middle East.
As in the 1940s, the scene is replete with compliant governments, these now doing the bidding of the United States and Israel.
Israel, the US, Britain and their allies pretend to be in favour of a ‘road map to peace,’ but for several decades the Israeli government has refused to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority or any other Palestinian organisation. They refused to negotiate with PLO leader Yasser Arafat, and confined him to house arrest in Ramallah before he suffered a sudden illness and died in a French hospital. There is every reason to believe that he was murdered by the Israeli authorities.
Successive Israeli governments have regularly killed Palestinian leaders by ‘targeted assassinations’ and used their armed forces to invade Palestinian land and terrorise the people. They have invaded Lebanon, Syria and Egypt. These are the actions of a terrorist with nuclear weapons but the Western governments have no hesitation in backing Israel all the way.
The creation of the state of Israel was at the heart of this cataclysmic historical event for the Palestinians – the mass, forced expulsion of a people, the more than 50 massacres carried out over the summer of 1948 by various armed terrorist forces as a means to drive out those who were determined to stay. The physical demolition of the villages after the expulsions was aimed at ensuring the refugees could not return. All this is summed up in a single word for Palestinians – ‘Nakba,’ catastrophe.
“We must do everything to ensure they [the Palestinians] never do return … . The old will die and the young will forget,” said David Ben Gurion, the founder of Israel, in 1949.
The specific project against the Palestinians had a dual purpose: first to deny the very concept of Palestine and destroy its political and social institutions, and second the attempted annihilation of the spirit of the Palestinians as a people, so that they would forget their collective identity once scattered far from Palestine.
The Israeli government is the only nuclear power in the region. It ostentatiously ignores UN Security Council resolutions, undermines the agreements by the Palestinian organisations on the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, and rejects cease-fire proposals.
It is also in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, an international law that prohibits collective punishment, “targeted” assassinations, and destruction of the infrastructure of an occupied territory.
