En Passant

Those raising false “anti-imperialist” flags to justify their support for a capitalist regime involved in horrifying repression of its people are ignoring reality. Israel, the key imperialist asset in the region, very clearly sees the Syrian rebellion as a far worse alternative to the Assad regime. Assad’s Western defenders either don’t mention Israel at all when they list the countries they think are waging “war on Syria” (and hope no-one notices the omission); or, even worse, they add Israel to their list despite the evidence (and hope no-one notices).

Three key features characterize Israeli apartheid:

•Four million Palestinians in the Occupied Territories lack the right to vote for the government that controls their lives through a military occupation. In addition to controlling the borders, air space, water, tax revenues, and other vital matters pertaining to the Occupied Territories, Israel alone issues the identity cards that determine the ability of Palestinians to work and their freedom of movement.

•About 1.2 million Palestinian Israelis, who make up 20 percent, or one-fifth, of Israel’s population, have second-class citizenship within Israel, which defines itself as a Jewish state rather than a state for all its citizens. More than 20 provisions of Israel’s principal laws discriminate, either directly or indirectly, against non-Jews, according to Adalah: The Legal Center for Minority Rights in Israel.

•Millions of Palestinians remain refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and elsewhere, unable to return to their former homes and land in present-day Israel, even though the right of return for refugees is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Ever since I came back from Gaza, I haven’t felt the same, writes Gigi Ibrahim at her Angry Egyptian website. I have been through other traumatic experiences through the revolution, of course nothing like Gaza, but I am even surprised how heart-felt Gaza has hit me. It is like it shattered all my core into little pieces of sadness, not because ‘poor them, people are dying’ feeling, but because I wish we could do more as Egyptians. We are one of the most crucial countries in solving this whole “complicated issue” also known as, the deadly Zionist occupation. After all the path to Jerusalem passes through Cairo, not just symbolically or physically, but politically.

As Israeli missiles and artillery shells pounded the densely packed Gaza Strip, Australians from all walks of life will protest the massacre, which to date claimed over 100 lives, at noon on Saturday 24 November outside the Israeli Embassy in Turrana St Yarralumla.

Palestinians living under the brutality of occupation – and now an all-out war in Gaza -have not asked for global ideological approval. Instead, they have asked that we do whatever is in our power to help end their misery and stop the bombings, years-long siege and occupation.

To heed their call for solidarity means defending Palestinians’ right to resist Israel’s terror.

A single Palestine on the basis of secularism, democracy, and socialism would be transformed from a cornerstone of the capitalist-imperialist world order into a cornerstone of an emancipatory one. The prerequisite for this possibility is the defeat of Israel as a Zionist entity, the defeat of its inherent settler logic (and Zionism is historically just one example of settlerist ideology), and thereby the dissolution of its current social formation into one that is not irredeemably anti-emancipatory. There can be no ‘Zionist left’, no ‘liberal Zionism’, and so forth, for such propositions are incompatible with the practical logic of the settler state. The concept of Israel must die so that a Palestine may live for Jews and Arabs, Druze and Bedouin alike.

In the case of Israel, as long as the Zionists attempt to maintain a predominantly Jewish state they are pushed to be genocidal – witness the repeated wars, the continuing destruction of Palestinian society in the West Bank, the relentless stealing of land, the continuing military incursions and massacres, the destruction of the Palestinian economy and the blockade and now bombing and imminent invasion of Gaza.

We wish to express our outrage at the reprehensible media coverage of these acts [in Gaza] in the mainstream (corporate) media. We call on journalists around the world working for corporate media outlets to refuse to be instruments of this systematic policy of disguise. We call on citizens to inform themselves through independent media, and to voice their conscience by whichever means is accessible to them.

Despite the current devastation being rained on Gaza by Israel, Dr Amer in Gaza remains defiant:

“The Palestinian people will never back down and raise white flags because they are fighting for their freedom and dignity…the Palestinian people look to their brothers and sisters in humanity for support to continue and stand hand in hand in the struggle for freedom, dignity and human rights which Israel deprived them.”