September 16,
2024
Israeli forces
have killed at least 88 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip over the past three
days, according to numbers released by Gaza’s Health Ministry.
Palestinians inspect their destroyed homes after the Israeli aircraft
targeted an entire residential block in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood
in Gaza City (Mahmoud Issa / SOPA Images via Reuters Connect)
The ministry
said on Sunday that 24 Palestinians were killed and 57 were wounded in the
previous 24-hour period, bringing its death toll since October 7, 2023, to
41,206 and the number of wounded to 95,337.
On Saturday, the
ministry said that Israel’s assault killed 64 Palestinians and wounded 155 in
the previous 48-hour period. “Many people are still trapped under the rubble
and on the roads as rescuers are unable to reach them,” the ministry said.
The numbers from
Gaza’s Health Ministry are considered a low estimate since they don’t include
Palestinians who are missing and presumed dead under the rubble, which was
previously estimated to be 10,000. It’s also unclear how many indirect deaths
have been caused by the Israeli siege.
Israel’s strikes
on Gaza over the weekend included a Saturday attack that targeted a home in the
al-Tuffah neighborhood in eastern Gaza City, which killed 11, including women
and children.
“We have
recovered the bodies of 11 martyrs, including four children and three women
after an Israeli warplane hit a three-story house of the Bustan family,” said
Mahmud Bassal, spokesman for Gaza’s Civil Defense. “Several families had taken
refuge in the house targeted with a single missile without any prior warning.”
The Biden
administration continues to support the genocidal slaughter in Gaza by
providing weapons to the Israeli military. A senior Israeli Air Force official
recently acknowledged that without the US military aid, Israel would not be
able to sustain operations in Gaza for more than a few months.
Joseph Massad
In a recent interview in the Israeli
newspaper Maariv, Ami Ayalon, the former head of the Israeli intelligence
organisation Shabak, stated that if he were Palestinian, he would have fought
those who stole his land "without limits".
"As far as the Palestinians are
concerned, they lost their land, which is why when people ask me, what would
you do if you were Palestinian? I say that if someone came and stole my land,
the land of Israel, I would fight him without limits", he added.
The Palestinians, Ayalon affirmed,
"see themselves as a people. One of our tragedies is that we see them as
individuals, some of whom are good, while others are bad."
In the flurry of Israeli and
pro-Israel denunciations of Palestinians as barbarians, antisemites,
pogromists, terrorists, savages, and human animals, among other such racist
epithets that a slew of Israeli leaders have called them for the benefit of
propaganda, many of Israel's most prominent leaders, like Ayalon, have always
identified with the Palestinian struggle and would admit publicly that if they
were Palestinian and not Jewish colonists, they would have readily joined the
struggle against Zionists and Israel.
Even the famed Israeli defence
minister Moshe Dayan understood the struggle of Palestinians in Gaza and their
resistance to Israeli colonialism. In April 1956, Palestinian resistance
fighters killed a security officer in Nahal Oz, a colony that was established
one mile from the Gaza border in 1953.
The officer had beaten up several
Palestinians a few days earlier when he caught them attempting to return to
their lands after Israelis expelled them. He forced them to return to Gaza. At
his funeral, Dayan reminded the mourners:
Let us not today cast blame on the
murderers. Who are we that we would argue against their hatred? For eight years
now they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza, and before their very eyes, we
turn into our homestead the land and the villages in which they and their
forefathers had lived… We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel
helmet and the cannon we cannot plant a tree and build a home.
Ayalon's recent words are not new.
In a March interview with the American television network ABC, he declared that
if he were Palestinian, he "would fight against Israel" and
"would do everything" to achieve liberty.
Ayalon is not the first Israeli
leader to understand perfectly well the struggle of the Palestinians to end
Zionist settler-colonialism and Israeli apartheid. Indeed, he is part of a long
list of Zionist and Israeli leaders who, without hesitation, averred their
understanding or even their identification with the Palestinian struggle.
In 1923, Vladimir Jabotinsky, the
founder of Revisionist Zionism, who was later succeeded by Menachem Begin,
commented on Palestinian resistance:
Any native people - it's all the
same whether they are civilised or savage - views their country as their
national home, of which they will always be the complete masters. They will not
voluntarily allow, not only a new master, but even a new partner. And so it is
for the Arabs. Compromisers in our midst attempt to convince us that the Arabs
are some kind of fools who can be tricked… [and] who will abandon their
birthright to Palestine for cultural and economic gains. I flatly reject this
assessment of the Palestinian Arabs. Culturally they are 500 years behind us,
spiritually they do not have our endurance or our strength of will, but this
exhausts all of the internal differences… They look upon Palestine with the
same instinctive love and true fervour that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or
any Sioux looked upon the prairie… this childish fantasy of our
"Arabo-philes" comes from some kind of contempt for the Arab people…
[that] this race [is] a rabble ready to be bribed or sell out their homeland
for a railroad network.
Jabotinsky, however, did not
identify with the Palestinians (although he attempted to equate them with
European Jews, mutatis mutandis, on the level of attachment to their homeland
and the use of violence to defend their country).
He understood well that the
Palestinians "are not a rabble but a nation". As a fascist who
admired Mussolini, Jabotinsky did not allow his racism against the Palestinians
to blind him to the conditions on the ground, which is precisely why he sought
to fight the Palestinians and subject them to Zionist rule and expulsion.
Other Zionists would identify even
more with Palestinians.
David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first
prime minister, understood the Palestinian struggle fully, even though he was
committed to crushing it. He stated:
If I was an Arab leader, I would
never make terms with Israel. That is natural; we have taken their country.
Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not
theirs. We come from Israel, it's true, but that was two thousand years ago,
and what is that to them? There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hitler,
Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come and
stolen their country. Why should they accept that?
Not an aberration
Zionist leaders' identification with
Palestinians continued in the following decades and was perhaps most forcefully
expressed by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Barak was a member of an
Israeli death squad commando unit dispatched to Beirut in 1973 to kill three
Palestinian revolutionaries.
Barak's identification with
Palestinians is unreserved, and in an interview with Israeli newspaper Haaretz,
he asserted: "If I were a Palestinian, I'd also join a terror group."
Leah Rabin, the widow of the late
Yitzhak Rabin, who herself had fought in the 1948 Zionist conquest of
Palestine, was more astute in deploying her identification with the
Palestinians than all other Zionist leaders.
She asserted in 1997 that, "We
[the Jews] used terrorism to establish our state. Why should we expect the
Palestinians to be any different?" Palestinians, it would seem, are the
same as Jews and not different from them at all.
It is most important to note that in
these declarations, none of these Israeli leaders thought that the reason the
Palestinians resisted Israel was because Israel was Jewish.
On the contrary, they all affirmed
that the reason Palestinians resist Israel and Israeli Jews is because Israelis
stole and continue to steal their land and country, oppress them and deprive
them of their independence and liberty.
The current Israeli government's
appalling propaganda that the 7 October Palestinian operation targeted Israeli
Jews as Jews and not as colonisers and was, therefore, the
"deadliest" attack on Jews since the Holocaust, as western leaders
and their obedient mainstream media have not tired of telling us, aims
decidedly to cover up Israeli Jewish colonisation of the land of the
Palestinians as the reason why Palestinians resist them.
These lies aim to exonerate Israeli
Jews from the crime of stealing the land of the Palestinians and stand in
contrast to the insistence of the Palestinians and all these Zionist and
Israeli leaders who have always understood the Palestinian struggle, namely,
that the Palestinian resistance targets Israeli Jews because they are
colonisers and not because they are Jews.
The understanding and identification
with the Palestinian struggle by the very same Israeli leaders who oppressed
the Palestinians are not merely rhetorical flourishes or lapses. They speak
plainly of a clear understanding of the nature of the violence and oppression
that Israel has visited and continues to visit on the Palestinian people.
Contrary to official Israeli
propaganda and its repetition by western political leaders and mainstream
media, Palestinians who have been resisting Zionist colonisation since the
early 1880s are not an aberration at all. Indeed, Palestinians, according to
the Israeli leaders cited above, are most similar and not that different from
the colonising Zionist Jews who oppress them.
The only difference, it seems, is
that Palestinians are not Jews and, therefore, cannot be extended the western
respect and admiration that any people who have resisted colonialism for a
century and a half deserve.
Whereas Israeli leaders may still
identify with Palestinians despite their colonial racism, the deep western
racism against the Palestinians is why no western political leaders have ever
contemplated what they would do if they were Palestinian.
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