We look around our world that is sinking in a spiral of violence and wonder why we humans cannot learn the way of peace, harmony, and coexistence. What are the main factors that lead to such a situation? In the Gaza strip we see a microcosm and a more blatant and severe forms of oppression. Israel forced mass starvation and is every day committing over a dozen massacres causing hundreds of civilians casualties (vast majority of them women and children). It was all so predictable. I wrote a book about this earlier.
Children are now living in streets and tents in the bitter cold. Their frail bodies, with ribs showing, reminds one of other concentration camps and starvations like those of Ireland, Eastern Europe, Manchuria, Korea…etc. More than 700,000 have diseases related to starvation, lack of clean water, and lack of sanitation. Though there are other hungry and oppressed people elsewhere (Iraq, Yemen, Sudan, Western Sahara etc), there is a uniqueness about our situation. Eating grass and drinking water from polluted street puddles, the images are harrowing. We have an active, deliberate, and premeditated genocide by a colonial power supported by governments of several colonial powers (US, UK, France, Germany, Australia). Genocide is broadcast live and is not hidden. Over the past four months I shared with you >120 links with evidence including from independent sources like the all agencies of UN, governments, and non-governmental human rights organizations. No one can claim they did not know. Just about every human being on this earth knows (including the perpetrators and the partners in crime), but my subject here is not knowledge; it is the corruption that leads to these things.
Yesterday, I and a group of researchers risked our lives to visit and study an area of Palestine that is off-limits to Palestinians. We noted how there is great potential if we end the Zionist nightmare– potential for all to live in harmony again. Tourism in our country alone (religious tourism, eco-tourism, cultural tourism) would provide enough income to millions (Palestinians and even the colonial Jewish settlers). The Gaza strip would be a very prosperous province of Palestine like it was before 1948. It had a beautiful beach, natural resources like Gas (now being stolen by the Israeli occupation), and rich cultural history that goes back thousands of years. There are certainly enough resources to feed, to cloth, and to shelter everyone on this planet. 3% of what the US spends on the military is enough to end world hunger. Sudan alone could feed the Arab world but is now plunged into conflict driven by elitist powers from Israel, Ethiopia, United Arab emirates. Syria was also such a prosperous country. Palestine was a heaven on earth, a land of milk and honey as we heard even in the Jewish Torah (which is a collection of stories of deities from other cultures like Greek, Egyptian, Persian).
Everyone knows the reasons for the global carnage that affects mostly the global south. The global north with its controlled corporate media seems to care only if white Europeans are killed and cheers when indigenous people are killed en masse to support a corporate and political Western elite. In the past 100 years, at least 200 million were killed or starved to death in the global south mainly related to the benefit of elites getting the resources of those countries. From the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the armed forces of states the machinations to do this control and to cause the killings and endless wars are now well understood by masses around the world. The carnage in Palestine over the past 76 years bears witness but also lights the knowledge. Palestine is a geographic wedge between the two areas of significant geopolitical interests in the West: North Africa and Western Asia (both largely Arab and Muslim). Both areas had a large population of natives who are Muslim, Jewish, Christian and followers of other religions living in relative harmony. Then came Zionism and its side agreements: Balfour and Cambon declarations. Sykes-Pico, San Rimo Conference, Paris “peace” conference. This was supposed to create mini states at odds with each other and a “Jewish state” dividing wedge in this world and exerting overall hegemony. The Zionist project became key in Western destruction of the Arab and Islamic world beginning with its epicenter Palestine but branching to wars on Libya, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Somalia etc.. “Israel” should be understood as Prof Ilan Pappe said as a Zionist project, a project of global Zionism and imperialism and both of those existed before Israel and will likely exist (though weakened) after Israel as a project collapses. Jews and Israelis will prosper better without this nefarious project. The US and Western governments that prop it and give cover to it will finally give up on it and move to other projects.
Divide and conquer was and still is the policy. Finding any small differences among some people (religion, sects, geographic) and pitting them against each other. But to do that there was a need for creating “leaders” willing to comply and fighting any not willing to comply. Hence after the British and the French created “states” they installed their puppets in those states. Of the 22 states that are largely Arab, more than two thirds are run by Western puppets (kleptocracies like the rulers of “Saudi” Arabia , UAE, and Egypt among many others). These rulers help execute projects that prolong wars and genocide. Egyptian dictator Sisi helping besiege 2.3 million people in Gaza. The land trade corridor passing from UAE through Saudi Arabi through Jordan that saved Israeli economy when Yemen complied with International law to stop Israeli bound ships to stop the ongoing genocide.
Palestinian “leaders” were not immune from becoming puppets. There were accords signed in Washington DC. To distract us they call them the “Oslo accords” but they should be called the Washington accords. That ended the PLOs role in attempting liberation of Palestine to transform Palestinian leadership into the “Palestinian authority” which is mainly responsible for providing security for the Israeli occupiers (settlers and soldiers) and alleviating the financial burden of occupation by using foreign aid to support governance/service bodies for the occupied people. A pauper economy developed for the Palestinians while giving the Israeli government the most profitable occupation in history. Settler population went from 150,000 to 930,000 in 30 years of a “peace process” that was structured to entrench colonization and apartheid. That is what the Washington (aka Oslo) process achieved. It gutted the Palestine Liberation organization, destroyed its mandate and even claimed to have changed its charter.
While the Mahmoud Abbas government and the Arab and Western government claim to be helpless to stop the genocide, the facts on the ground show they are lying. Blockaded and impoverished Gaza could defeat the Israeli army on 7 October and withstand its genocidal bombardment for a fifth month while inflicting killing over 800 (some estimates 4000) Israeli soldiers and costing the Israeli economy $33 billion. Blockaded and impoverished Lebanon is inflicting heavy casualties on apartheid Israel and forced 100,000 settlers living on stolen lands in Galilee to leave! Blockaded and impoverished Yemen was able to essentially close down shipping from and to the apartheid genocidal state of Israel. So we now know that the 1948 war and the 1967 “6 day war” were no wars! That those corrupt and collusionist Arab leaders never seriously thought about war, let alone plan for a war. And the Palestinian authority which claims to support “non-violent resistance” actually collaborated with Israel to destroy all forms of resistance (see my book Popular Resistance in Palestine http://qumsiyeh.org/popularresistanceinpalestine/). And today they help prop the colonial regime. But despite all the Arab and Muslim collusion, Palestine lives and the Palestinians provide a shield against the expansion that Zionism had hoped for to create an empire stretching at least from the Nile to the Euphrates. Actually religious Zionists claim openly that all non-Jews (Goyim/Gentiles) will be willing slaves to them. That we are in the end of time. Perhaps the heroism and sumud (persistence/resilience) of millions of our people (here and in forced exile) over the past 76 years (despite 140,000 martyrs, 95% of them civilian) is the main reason for the meanness, callousness, and wanton and deliberate murder of some 13,000 children (average age 5 years) and a second Nakba of ethnic cleansing of 1.9 million (all just since 7 October).
The UN Security counsel will try to pass a resolution calling for a ceasefire (really should be called a resolution to end the genocide) but the US is expected to veto it thus violating its own laws again as well as the genocide convention… Stay tuned..watch the show
What is happening in Palestine now? I see some 300 videos every week that break my heart. Here is a list of less graphic items I saw last two days
https://israelpalestinenews.org/rafahs-displaced-we-read-last-prayers-every-night-day-131/
https://twitter.com/SaulStaniforth/status/1757716300921450747
https://www.btselem.org/video/2023_gaza_videos_of_life_under_war
https://twitter.com/MiddleEastEye/status/1759216698648047912?s=20
https://twitter.com/angeloinchina/status/1759194763960672522
https://twitter.com/mohammedakunjee/status/1759047553998278672
https://www.facebook.com/reel/3669937966559693
https://twitter.com/ajplus/status/1758990206169125343
https://twitter.com/angeloinchina/status/1759117117960704340
American doctor reports on what he saw in Gaza: not a war, it is annihilation
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-02-16/rafah-gaza-hospitals-surgery-israel-bombing-ground-offensive-children
Funny how western governments forget that Jewish leaders of Israel were Jewish terrorists
https://twitter.com/Bsonja5/status/1759170447655031109?s=20
Palestinians in Gaza Do Have Somewhere to Go: Their Homes in What is Now Israel
https://husseini.substack.com/p/palestinians-in-gaza-do-have-somewhere
Gaza Nasser hopital has catastrophic situation
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/2/15/catastrophic-situation-at-gazas-nasser-hospital-amid-israeli-raid
75% of Journalists killed in 2023 were killed in Gaza
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/2/15/nearly-75-of-journalists-killed-in-2023-died-in-israels-war-on-gaza-cpj
While Israel killed 1.2% of the civilian population of Gaza it killed >15% of the Gaza journalists (silencing the truth)
U.S. citizens detained by Israel in West Bank, Gaza, families say
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/02/08/israel-arrest-american-west-bank
[ofcourse the US will not start a war liberate those kidnapped American hostages or even care about them]
Likely regional conflict? https://www.aljazeera.com/program/inside-story/2024/2/16/how-likely-is-a-regional-conflict-in-the-middle-east
Prof. Ilan Pappe: It is dark before the dawn, but Israeli settler colonialism is at an end
https://www.ihrc.org.uk/it-is-dark-before-the-dawn-but-israeli-settler-colonialism-is-at-an-end/
Petition: Airdrop aid to Gaza https://chng.it/b5RPF4YnLd
Israeli army gassed my son like Auschwitz , mother of slain Israeli soldier says
https://thegrayzone.com/2024/01/18/israeli-army-gassed-auschwitz-soldier/
Having ethnically cleansed the Rafah people from the Sinai (the Egyptian Rafav). Egypt building a new concentration camp in Sinai for the Palestinians to be ethnically cleansed by Israel
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/16/egypt-building-walled-enclosure-in-sinai-for-rafah-refugees-videos-suggest
UAE, Jordan and Saudi Arabia quietly help Israel with supplies and allow Gaza people to starve to death
https://www.timesofisrael.com/houthi-bypass-quietly-goods-forge-overland-path-to-israel-via-saudi-arabia-jordan/
[Egypt also]
Edward Said seems like a prophet: 20 years on, ‘there’s hunger for his narrative’
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/15/edward-said-palestine-israel-gaza
Lift your spirit: Jerusalema Dance Challenge from Palestine by Popular Art Centre https://youtu.be/kbuJ61WBdpo
Egypt building wall to create a ,mini concentration camp for people of Gaza in Sinai
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/16/egypt-building-walled-enclosure-in-sinai-for-rafah-refugees-videos-suggest
The last American war: The U.S. supports Israel unconditionally because it sees the entire Western project in the Middle East at risk today in Gaza. While it may seem these our darkest days, it is also clear that the U.S. and Israel are bound to fail. https://mondoweiss.net/2024/02/the-last-american-war/
Merchants of death tribunal
https://www.politics.ox.ac.uk/person/neta-crawford
https://www.elgaronline.com/view/journals/cilj/11/1/article-p75.xml
& revisiting the genocide convention
https://original.antiwar.com/john-mearsheimer/2024/01/07/the-case-for-genocide-in-gaza/