Tony Greenstein | 07 October 2023 | Post Views:

The Hypocrisy of Biden & Cleverly is  nauseating – they Support Ukrainian Resistance but Condemn the Palestinian Resistance

Like most people it was with shock and surprise that I woke to learn that the Palestinians in Gaza led by Hamas had launched a counter-offensive against Israel’s occupation.

My first reaction though was the opposite of the political hypocrites and presstitutes who wondered how it could be that Palestinians were once again attacking those poor, defenceless and long suffering Israelis. My mood in contrast was elation not despair.

Gaza city fighters drive captured Israeli jeep

My first thoughts were that finally the inhabitants of the Gaza Ghetto had struck back at those who had maintained a 15 year, suffocating siege on the Strip. A siege that meant 95% of Gaza’s water was polluted, that thousands of its inhabitants were living on the brink of starvation, that nothing could move in or out without the agreement of the Israeli state. All with the agreement of Egypt’s police state under its President and US puppet, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi

SS General Jurgen Stroop, who led the attack against the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance and who was executed after the war

Of course the retribution of Israel will be bloody and savage. So was the revenge of General Stroop, the Commander of the Nazi forces that retook the Warsaw Ghetto after the Ghetto Uprising in April 1943. The savagery of the colonialist is always far greater than the violence of the oppressed.

rocket fire towards Israel

We see that with the call from Al-Qassam leader, Mohammed Deif who called on Resistance fighters not to target old people or children. Israel is now bombing Gaza mercilessly, it has topped 5 tower blocks already. Israel makes no distinction between men, women and children but the only thing we shall hear from Biden, Not So Cleverly and the other hypocritical western leaders is about how Israeli suffering not that of the Palestinians.

Israeli-anti-tank-missile

To those who object to the comparison with the Warsaw Ghetto all I have to say is that it was the last Commander of the Warsaw ghetto resistance, Marek Edelman, who compared their resistance with that of the Palestinian resistance. Which is why the Zionists wrote Edelman out of history.

Two hundred Israelis have so far been killed and many captured. The bias of BBC and Sky News were on full display as they interviewed at length Jotam Confino, the Foreign Editor of the right-wing Zionist Jewish News who constantly referred to ‘terrorists’ rather than guerillas or resistance fighters.

The Palestinian Resistance has undoubtedly killed many Israeli civilians but we have to remember that most Israelis are not only reserve soldiers but they have given overwhelming support to the slaughter of Palestinians.

Damaged Israeli apartment block

The massive demonstrations against Netanyahu’s judicial reforms went out of their way not to include in their demands any call for democracy in the Occupied Territories. The murder of over 240 Palestinians including 45 children in the West Bank was not part of their agenda. Their demands were wholly within the settler community.

Residential building hit in Tel Aviv

It is ordinary Israelis who have elected Israel’s neo-Nazi Police Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. Rabbi Dov Lior, the Chief Rabbi of the settlers’ rabbis issued a statement at the time of the last attack on Gaza that

“There is no such thing as enemy civilians in war time. The law of our Torah is to have mercy on our soldiers and to save them … A thousand non-Jewish lives are not worth a Jew’s fingernail.”

This is the voice of a genuine Jewish Nazi yet Israelis are quite happy with having this genocidal maniac controlling its Police and Security forces. So let no one tell us that Israeli civilians are innocent. It was they who elected the present ethnic cleansing far-right coalition government.

Operation Protective Edge in 2014 killed 2,200 civilians including 551 children. This war was supported by 95% of Israel’s Jewish population (rising at one stage to 97%). In Tel Aviv mobs took to the streets chanting ‘There’s no school tomorrow,there’s no children left in Gaza! Oleh!’

Rockets from Gaza

In 2014 there were Israelis who set up armchairs and coffee machines on a hilltop in order that they could get a better view and cheer on the ongoing destruction taking place in Gaza.

As Harriet Sharwood wrote in The Guardian of 20.7.14

Israelis gather on hillsides to watch and cheer as military drops bombs on Gaza, People drink, snack and pose for selfies against a background of explosions as Palestinian death toll mounts in ongoing offensive.’

This attack by Hamas and other groups was also aimed at the normalisation with Israel by the corrupt and treacherous Arab regimes led by the chief snake of all, Mohammed Bin Salman, the mass murderer who presides over Saudi Arabia.

The Arab regimes believe that they can make their peace with the Zionist settler colonial regime in Tel Aviv but they are very mistaken. As the football fans made clear in the World Cup last year in Qatar the Arab street is firmly behind the Palestinians.

The task of the moment is for the Arab masses to rise up and overthrow MBS and Sisi in Egypt and all the other corrupt Arab regimes who, with Israel have been responsible for maintaining the siege of Gaza. The Palestinians in the West Bank also have the task of overthrowing the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah which acts as Israel’s military subcontractor.

Hassan Nasrallah of Lebanon’s Hezbollah – A Paper Tiger? 

But it is not only the Arab regimes who are normalising the Israeli state who should be criticised. So too should Hassan Nasrallah of Lebanon’s Hezbollah. In response to a call by Hamas for them to join the resistance, Hasrallah’s response was that

“The leadership of the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon is closely following the significant developments on the Palestinian scene, monitoring the field conditions with utmost interest.’

That sounds very much like Hezbollah are not going to do anything except sit it out and allow Israel, at a time of its choosing, to attack Lebanon again. The time to fight is now.

Whatever criticisms one can make of Hamas, we should congratulate them on this well planned and audacious attack on the Zionist enemy.

Israeli Weapons Industry’s Bottom Line: Ethnic Cleansing

Haaretz Editorial, 1st Oct 2023

Nearly all the Armenian residents of Nagorno-Karabakh have become refugees overnight, following a blitzkrieg by the Azerbaijani army which put an end to the district’s independence.

More than 100,000 victims of ethnic cleansing have had to abandon the towns and villages their families have lived in for generations, fleeing to Armenia across the border. More than 100 years after the Armenian holocaust under the Ottoman Empire, members of this small nation are again running for their lives in fear of occupation and oppression.

However, Azerbaijan was not alone in this campaign. Israel supplied Azerbaijan’s army with the best and most advanced weapons that enabled the cleansing operation. This included surface-to-surface missiles, offensive drones, guided rockets, air defense systems, artillery, mortars, tank upgrading equipment, assault rifles, naval vessels, anti-tank missiles, and, obviously, cyber and espionage tools.

As reported in Haaretz (March 6), Israel allowed an airlift from the Uvda airbase to Azerbaijan to carry huge amounts of armaments and ammunition, on their way to the Nagorno-Karabakh front. Unlike other customers of Israel’s defense industry, who wish to keep their relations with Israel under wraps, Azerbaijan’s ruler Ilham Aliyev actually enjoyed boasting about his blue-and-white weapons systems.

Now that the results of the fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh are evident to everyone, it’s appropriate to ask the heads of Israel’s defense industries and all the people who supported, aided and enabled the billion-dollar deals with Aliyev: How do you feel when you see Armenian families running for their lives, the terror in the eyes of children, the new refugee camps in Armenia?

Do Michael Federman (Elbit Systems), Yuval Steinitz (Rafael Advanced Defense Systems) and Amir Peretz (Israel Aerospace Industries) see the ethnic cleansing and the horrific war crimes, or just the bottom line of the companies they head? Do they feel any empathy toward the victims or are they engaged only in calculating the dividends their investors will receive, the royalties paid to the government and the bonuses they’ll be paid? What passes through the head of Rachel Klein, the director of the Defense Exports Control Agency, who spearheaded a “reform” that loosened the regulation of such exports? Is she happy that all the forms were correctly filled, or does she feel a twinge in her heart?

Aliyev is not the first tyrant whose army relies on weapons from Israel. He was preceded by the heads of the apartheid regime in South Africa, the generals in Argentina, Pinochet in Chile, the regime in China and the Shah of Iran. Azerbaijan supplies oil to Israel and helps it in its confrontation with Iran.

And yet, despite these precedents and the strategic justifications, Israel’s partnership in the ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh requires a change in Israel’s export policies, and the curbing of sales to aggressive dictatorships. Israel must also provide aid to Armenia to help the country absorb the refugees.

Hostages: Learning From Israel

Norman Finkelstein

The crocodile tears have begun over Israeli hostages taken by Gaza militants.  But Israel has held the 2.1 million people of Gaza, including one million children, hostage in one of the most densely populated areas on the planet for nearly 20 years.  In fact, Israel was the only country in the world to have legalized hostage taking.  Revered President of the Israeli High Court Aharon Barak held in 1997 that “a detention is legal if it is designed to promote State security, even if the danger to State Security does not emanate from the detainees themselves,” and that “detention … for the purpose of release of … captured and missing soldiers is a vital interest to the State.”  (The decision wasn’t reversed until 2000.) If the past is any guide, Gaza’s leadership will swap the Israelis for some of the 4,500 Palestinians being held in Israeli prisons on alleged “security grounds.”  Gaza is only playing by the book written by Israel.

“All the chorus of calumny, which the Party of Order never fail, in their orgies of blood, to raise against their victims, only proves that the bourgeois of our days considers himself the legitimate successor to the baron of old, who thought every weapon in his own hand fair against the plebeian, while in the hands of the plebeian a weapon of any kind constituted in itself a crime.” Karl Marx, The Civil War in France

John Brown’s Body – in Gaza 

Norman Finkelstein 

https://youtube.com/watch?v=jso1YRQnpCI

Pete Seeger – John Brown’s Body

Dolores Ibarruri, La Passionaria, famously exhorted during the Spanish Civil War, “Better to die on your feet than live forever on your knees.”  

For the past 20 years the people of Gaza, half of whom are children, have been immured in a concentration camp.  Today they breached the camp’s walls.  If we honor John Brown’s armed resistance to slavery; if we honor the Jews who revolted in the Warsaw Ghetto—then moral consistency commands that we honor the heroic resistance in Gaza.

I, for one, will never begrudge—on the contrary, it warms every fiber of my soul—the scenes of Gaza’s smiling children as their arrogant Jewish supremacist oppressors have, finally, been humbled. 

The stars above in heaven are looking kindly down.  Glory, glory, hallelujah.  The souls of Gaza go marching on!

Posted in

Tony Greenstein

Leave a Comment





This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.