Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary general of Hezbollah in Lebanon, was martyred on Friday, September 27, 2024 during an Israeli airstrike on the southern suburbs of Beirut. The attack, carried out by Israeli terrorist warplanes, targeted Hezbollah’s headquarters in Beirut.
Evidence indicated that a very grand ceremony was held in Lebanon in honor of the martyr Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and his deputy, Martyr Sayyed Hashem Safi al-Din. Not only the people of Lebanon and the people of West Asia, but all the people of the world and the freedom-seekers those who seek the liberation of Palestine and those whose hearts are wounded by the crimes of the Zionist regime against the Palestinian people and the genocide in Gaza, all of them, from far and near, were ready to somehow honor the honor and status of the martyr Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah and his martyred comrade.
The fact is that Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah has a place in the hearts of all the people of the world; the one who made a deal with God and sacrificed his friend, his son and many companions in the path of divine pleasure, and for this reason, God created the conditions for him not only to become a martyr and go to heaven, but also for his love to be placed in the hearts of the people of the world and become permanent.
Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah was a scholar and he spent his entire life in the path of confront for the occupation of the Zionist regime and also the liberation of Palestine, and he really dealt very terrible blows to the regime during his blessed life. He was the one who forced Israel to leave the occupation of Lebanon. In fact, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah gave Lebanon and the Lebanese people a special honor and status, and in fact, he created a front in this land where everyone would unite and fight to defend the territorial integrity and national sovereignty and confront Lebanon's enemies, including the United States and Israel.
One of the characteristics of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah was that he made a great effort, both theoretically and practically, to strengthen Islamic unity; in the theoretical dimension, he believed that the Islamic world should unite; emphasize commonalities, set aside differences, and stand together unitedly to solve Muslim problems, especially the Palestinian issue. This theoretical dimension was raised in numerous seminars in the world.
In practical terms, Martyr Nasrallah, who was a Shiite, stood completely alongside his brothers in Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the resistance in Syria, who were Sunnis. For him, there was no difference between Shiites and Sunnis, and he fought alongside Sunnis. Especially in the recent war in Gaza, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah's role in defending Palestine, the majority of whose people are Sunnis, was truly unparalleled.
He had said in a meeting in Tehran that today we have passed the stage of rapprochement between Islamic sects and entered the stage of unity of Islamic Jihad, and this is a fact that Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah proved in thought and in practice. Many non-Muslims who converted to Islam and many Muslims in the world who strengthened their beliefs in Islam were due to Sayyed Nasrallah's struggles and his role in Lebanon and confronting the Zionist regime for the liberation of Palestine.
Martyr Nasrallah was also one of the disciples of the Ayatollah Khamenei Supreme Leader of the Revolution and before him Imam Khomeini. During the time of Imam Khomeini , when Hezbollah was formed, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah joined this group to defend Lebanon and the exit of the Zionist regime, as well as to defend the cause of Palestine.
He had a very close relationship with Ayatollah Khamenei and was one of his soldiers and guardians. Martyr Nasrallah loudly proclaimed this relationship as a matter of faith and belief in the leadership of the jurist.
This was while he acted completely independently and within the framework of the Lebanese government's policies to stand against Israel, but he said that Hezbollah's movement was in line with the revolution of Imam Khomeini.
Martyr Nasrallah was both a nationalist and a Muslim, a revolutionary and a very dignified person, and in fact, we can say that he was one of the people who was unique in our region in the years and in the last century.
The Palestinian resistance in Gaza, Syria, Iraq and Yemen, all with the help of Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah and his coordination and strategies, were able to humiliate and fight the usurping Zionist regime, humiliate the largest army in West Asia, and turn Lebanon and Palestine into a graveyard of Zionist aspirations. All Muslims in the world consider Sayyid Hassan to be their own.
*Mohsen Pakaein is a former Iranian diplomat. The view expressed in this article are his own.
The US president's Gaza 'Riviera' plan revives the various missionary efforts of 19th century American Protestants to colonise Palestine
Joseph Massad
Demonstrators protest against US President Donald Trump's proposed takeover of the Gaza Strip near the US embassy in Seoul, South Korea, on 5 February 2025 (Kim Jae-Hwan/SOPA via Reuters)
If Protestantism - both before and after Max Weber's seminal book on the topic - came to be identified as the poster religion of capitalism, then US President Donald Trump has always been a convert.
A former Presbyterian, he now identifies as a "non-denominational Christian" and rarely attends church services but surrounds himself with evangelical Protestants. Indeed, a majority of white American evangelical Protestants view him as "fighting for their beliefs".
In his restored capacity as the grand missionary of American capitalism and imperialism since his recent return to the White House, Trump has made several missionary declarations and announced a number of policies to advance American capitalism.
These include, but are not limited to, the sought-after imperial territorial expansion of the United States through the power of money or military force.
Trump's capitalist evangelical plan to steal and colonise Gaza, however, is not the first American project to establish colonies in Palestine.
Just as his ambition toconquerCanada, Denmark's Greenland, and the Panama Canal reflects 19th-century American imperial ideologies like "Continentalism" and "Manifest Destiny", his plan for the US colonisation of Palestine mirrors that of fanatical American Protestants from the same era.
American takeover
Over the last few weeks, Trump's plan for an American takeover of Gaza has progressed from initially calling for the expulsion - or at least the self-expulsion - of most Palestinians living in Gaza to Jordan and Egypt, to his more recent declaration advocating for the expulsion of all Palestinians and an American takeover of the Palestinian territory.
It would seem that an American-owned Gaza would be a place where 'international communities coexist' but without Palestinians
This is the same land that Israel has devastated in the course of committing genocide against its Palestinian population since October 2023.
Seemingly unimpressed by the French Riviera on the Mediterranean, Trump wants to build another "Riviera of the Middle East".
In the meantime, the expelled Palestinians would be provided with "really good quality housing, like a beautiful town, like some place where they can live and not die because Gaza is a guarantee that they're going to end up dying," Trump told reporters.
Presumably, Trump is assigning the cost of this "good quality housing" to Arab countries.
Meanwhile, Americans would build the "Riviera" under what Trump called an "ownership position"- or as CNN, an otherwise enthusiastic supporter of Israel's war on Gaza, described it, "colonialism for the 21st century".
Trump added:
"We'll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site. Level the site, and get rid of the destroyed buildings, level it out, create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area, do a real job, do something different."
What Trump most likely craves, as do the Israelis, is less the beaches of Gaza's "Riviera" and more the oil and natural gas reserves that lie in its sea - worth billions of dollars - which Trump and the Zionist settler-colony can divvy up between them.
Long before Trump's capitalist vision of an American-owned Gaza, 19th-century American Protestant missionaries sought to establish colonies in Palestine and reshape the land and its people in their own image.
It was, in fact, Trump's former co-religionists - Presbyterian American missionaries - who were dispatched to Palestine in the 1820s to convert Palestinian Muslims, Orthodox Christians, and mostly the 4,000 Palestinian Jews, as well as the few thousand messianic Lithuanian Jews who had just arrived before the Americans.
The Americans remained until 1844, when they moved to Syria and Lebanon following the establishment of British Anglican missions in Palestine, which made their presence redundant. However, before their departure, they managed to distribute thousands of copies of their Protestant Bible, leaving Palestine in the secure hands of their British co-religionists.
As part of the European Christian conquest of Palestine in the 19th century - dubbed the "Peaceful Crusade" - American Protestant millenarians and restorationists joined in the "crusade", establishing farming colonies in the city of Jaffa.
They hoped to convert the few thousand Jews they encountered in Palestine and teach them farming. However, they found them to be "lazy" and resistant to conversion.
A group of American Seventh-day Adventists, known then as Millerites (followers of one William Miller), settled in Bethlehem in 1851 alongside European Christian settlers in the village of Artas. They later moved to Jaffa to found the colony of "Mount Hope", but it did not survive for long.
Another fanatical group, the Dicksons, established the "American Mission Colony" in Jaffa in 1854, which was met with Palestinian resistance. The colony was attacked in 1858, several colonists were killed, and the survivors were repatriated to Massachusetts.
In response, the US dispatched a Navy ship, the steam frigate USS Wabash, to the shores of Palestine to pressure the Ottomans into prosecuting the attackers.
History of resistance
In 1866, another group of fanatical American Protestant millenarian artisans and farmers arrived from Maine to set up yet another colony in Jaffa.
The Adams Colony, named after its evangelical leader George Washington Joshua Adams (a former Mormon), started with 156 colonists but lasted only two years.
The Palestinians opposed the presence of the colonists, prompting the Ottomans to write to the US minister in Constantinople to protest that 'the natives' were being driven 'from their fields by a colony of Yankees'
Adams, who had met with then-President Andrew Jackson - the butcher of Native Americans - at the White House to facilitate his settler-colonial efforts with the Ottoman authorities, compared the colonisation of Palestine to that of the United States.
The Palestinians opposed the presence of the colonists, prompting the Ottomans to write to the US minister in Constantinople to protest that "the natives" were being driven "from their fields by a colony of Yankees".
Financial difficulties forced Adams to leave, with many of the colonists repatriated through Egypt.
Upon embarking on his colonisation project, Adams had declared that his colony would prepare the land for the "return" of European Jews, which in turn would expedite the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. After the colony was dissolved, only 20 American settlers remained in Palestine.
In 1881, yet another evangelical Protestant American family sought to establish a colony, this time in Jerusalem.
Horatio and Anna Spafford of Chicago led a contingent of 16 colonists to the city to hasten the second coming. They were joined by 55 Swedish fundamentalist Protestants in 1896, which grew to 150 by the turn of the century. They purchased the house of Palestinian landowner Rabah al-Husayni.
Unlike their predecessors, they refrained from proselytising too much, sparing them from local enmity. Their colony survived until the late 1950s, when internal tensions led to its demise.
The Husayni house they had bought was later transformed into the contemporary American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem.
A fool's mission
Recounting this history is not merely to reassure Trump that his colonial proposition is hardly innovative - it was, in fact, attempted repeatedly in the 19th century.
It also underscores that the Palestinians' attachment to their homeland and their will to resist its colonisers are stronger than even Trump's attachment to his capitalist and imperialist ethos.
While the fanatical American missionaries of the 19th century sought to take over the land of the Palestinians and convert its population to their brand of Christianity, Trump's plan to steal Gaza aligns squarely with his own version of an imperial and capitalist religion.
Sitting alongside Trump, war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, who failed to expel the Palestinians despite his best genocidal efforts, praised the expulsion plan as "remarkable".
But if the genocidal Israeli army has failed miserably to crush the spirit and resolve that have driven Palestinians to resist the colonisation of their homeland by American and European settler-colonists for over a century and a half, does Trump truly believe that his profiteering imperial mission - and his vision of a "Riviera in the Middle East" for "citizens of the world" - will succeed in doing so?
Joseph Massad is professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University, New York. He is the author of many books and academic and journalistic articles. His books include Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan; Desiring Arabs; The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians, and most recently Islam in Liberalism. His books and articles have been translated into a dozen languages.
Western leaders and media are helping bolster a propaganda narrative about the hostages that makes the resumption of Israel’s slaughter all but inevitable
Jonathan Cook
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends his trial on corruption charges at the district court in Tel Aviv, Israel, on 12 February 2025 (Reuters)
Israel sustained the West’s support for its slaughter in Gaza for 15 months only through an intensive campaign of lies.
With Hamas’ October 2023 crimes ever-more distant in the rear-view mirror, and Israeli crimes still all too visible in Gaza’s complete destruction – amounting to a "plausible" genocide, according to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) – Israeli leaders have been desperately trying to shift attention to a fresh narrative battleground.
They need a new set of lies to justify resuming the slaughter. And as ever, the western establishment media are actively assisting.
Both Hamas and Israel are playing a predictable propaganda game, using the regular exchanges of Israeli and Palestinian hostages in the ceasefire’s first phase to seize the moral high ground.
Israel once again has all the cards, care of rock-solid western support, and yet once again it is failing to win the public relations war.
Which explains why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threw another of his temper tantrums at the weekend, this time blaming Hamas for stage-managing the release of Israelis in what he called "demeaning" and "humiliating ceremonies".
Israel and its supporters were particularly incensed, it seems, by one of the captives, released on Saturday, beaming on stage as he warmly kissed two of his captors on the forehead.
On his walk to the handover with Red Cross staff, he put his arm around one of the captors’ shoulders in another moment of apparent affection.
Two other Israelis- up for release in the next round – were filmed watching from a car nearby, excited at the prospect of freedom and pleading with Netanyahu not to sabotage their release.
Blow up ceasefire
Predictably, western media, including the BBC, echoed Israel in suggesting these were somehow far more serious violations than Israel killing over 130 Palestinians since 19 January, when the ceasefire began, in hundreds of attacks on Gaza.
The media have similarly given fleeting coverage to Israel’s new wave of destruction, this time in the Occupied West Bank. Thousands of homes have been demolished, ethnically cleansing entire communities.
Western outlets have signally failed to note that these war crimes are also gross violations of the ceasefire agreement.
Now Netanyahu has exploited the apparent cosy relations between some of the Israeli captives and Hamas as a pretext to blow up the ceasefire before the second phase can begin next week. That is when Israel is expected to fully withdraw from Gaza and allow its reconstruction.
Buses carrying hundreds of Palestinian hostages due for release on Saturday were forced to turn back, returning them to their prisons. Even according to Israel’s own assessments, the vast majority of these Palestinians have not been "involved in combat".
Many, including medical personnel, were seized off Gaza’s streets following the 7 October Hamas attack. They have been held without charge, tortured and subjected to barbaric conditions that Israeli human rights groups have compared to "hell".
Genocidal slogans
It would be nice to imagine that Israel and its supporters were genuinely concerned that, in parading its captives in public, Hamas had violated their rights to dignity under international humanitarian law. But don’t be fooled – or foolish.
Even before Israel reneged on the hostage exchange, it had vowed that Palestinians would be subjected to their own forms of degrading treatment. They would be forced to wear T-shirts emblazoned with slogans supporting Israel’s genocidal actions against the people of Gaza.
Israel’s own hostages have been a low priority for Netanyahu from the outset. If Israel really cared so much about them, it would not have carpet-bombed Gaza for 15 months
And Israel’s supporters appeared none too concerned about the sensitivities of the 600 Palestinian hostages due for release on Saturday whose buses returned them to their torture camps in Israel just as they could scent freedom.
But in any case, Israel’s own hostages have been a low priority for Netanyahu from the outset.
If Israel really cared so much about them, it would not have carpet-bombed Gaza for 15 months.
Instead it would have grabbed the chance for a ceasefire and prisoner swap not last month – as it was forced to do under heavy pressure from incoming US President Donald Trump – but last May, when it was offered a deal on exactly the same terms.
If Israel cared so much for the captives, it would not have used US-supplied, 2,000lb bunker-buster bombs that not only destroyed huge swaths of Gaza indiscriminately but flooded the tunnels where many of the Israelis were being held with toxic gases.
A newly-released Israeli hostage Omer Shem Tov kissing the head of a Hamas fighter shortly after being set free in Nuseirat in the central Gaza Strip on 22 February 2025 (Hamas media office / AFP)
If Israel cared so much for the captives, it would not have set up undeclared "kill zones" across Gaza, where Israeli soldiers shot anyone and anything that moved.
Three shirtless Israelis waving white flags of surrender were gunned down by Israeli troops in precisely such circumstances in December 2023.
Doing as it pleases
The Israeli captives are useful to Netanyahu and his slimy apologists only in so far as they help prop up a narrative that justifies genocide.
Cornered by Trump, the Israeli prime minister had calculated that securing the return of at least some of them was the price he had to pay – to placate the new US president and much of his own public – before he could resume the mass murder of Gaza’s children.
He has repeatedly made clear that he has no intention of moving towards a permanent ceasefire after phase one, the main prisoner exchanges.
For Netanyahu, the importance of the Israeli captives is solely in providing him with a route back to the genocide.
Hamas, on the other hand, has every incentive to use the small window provided by the release of the captives to suggest it is not the bogeyman of Israeli-engineered and western-enforced dogma.
It hopes its carefully managed releases show how much it is still in charge of Gaza, despite Israel’s destructive rampage.
And Hamas has reason to cultivate reasonable relations with the Israeli captives – not least to soften its image with foreign publics, and make it harder for Netanyahu to return to the genocide.
Israel, of course, has no such reciprocal incentive. As the far stronger party - one that, even before 7 October 2023, had been holding the entire population of Gaza hostage through a 17-year siege of the enclave – it can do as it pleases, secure in the knowledge that its claims will never be subjected to proper scrutiny by the western media.
Freed Palestinian prisoners testifying to their torture, sexual assault and rape – confirmed by international human rights monitors – have been simply ignored.
'Stockholm syndrome'
Despite the odds being stacked in Israel’s favour, the differential realities are so stark that Israel is losing the propaganda war nonetheless. Which is why Netanyahu has no interest in continuing the prisoner exchanges a day longer than he is required to.
The problem is that the captives released by Hamas are mostly not helping his cause. They are hindering it.
In reducing Hamas simply to monsters, Israel’s goal was to dehumanise the entire population of Gaza – to justify its genocidal crimes
There was brief relief from Israel’s genocide apologists – noisily echoed by the western media – that one group of Israeli hostages released earlier this month looked nearly as pale and emaciated as the hundreds of Palestinian hostages released by Israel.
There was wall-to-wall outrage at the condition of this small group of Israelis, when there has been utter indifference to the even more wretched condition of freed Palestinians.
But in most cases, the released Israelis have looked reasonably healthy, especially given that Israel has been denying the entry of food and water into Gaza for 15 months and that most of the captives have had to be held deep underground to keep them safe from the Israeli bombing campaigns that have levelled almost all of Gaza.
Of even more concern to Israel, however, the captives have emerged mostly looking relaxed around their captors.
On the defensive, Israel’s supporters have dismissed these scenes as staged for the cameras or argued that the captives are suffering from severe "Stockholm syndrome" – a psychological condition in which hostages are said to identify with their captors.
Possible though this may be, it is difficult not to ponder why we have seen no Palestinian captives looking or sounding similarly affectionate towards their Israeli prison guards.
'Little time left'
However western publics weigh the evidence before their eyes, it offers little in the way of succour for Israel.
These scenes between Hamas and the captives are hard to square with the still-dominant, and evidence-free, narrative presented by Israel – and recycled by western establishments – that Hamas are barbarians who behead babies and conduct mass rape.
In reducing Hamas simply to monsters, Israel’s goal was to dehumanise the entire population of Gaza – to justify its genocidal crimes.
And yet the scenes of the captives demonstrating a human connection to their Hamas captors make that idea harder to sustain.
What are we to make of Israel’s claim to the moral high ground when its leaders have explicitly declared their genocidal intent towards Gaza’s children
If Hamas might not be quite as evil as western publics have been led to believe – if its members’ behaviour might be no worse than, or even better than, that of Israel’s soldiers and prison guards – what does that say about the reliability of western media coverage of the preceding 15 months of genocide?
And even more to the point, what does it say of our own western barbarism that our elected leaders have so casually accepted the murder of many tens of thousands – and possibly hundreds of thousands – of Palestinian civilians in Gaza in supposed revenge for Hamas’ 2023 attack?
What are we to make of Israel’s claim to the moral high ground when its leaders have explicitly declared their genocidal intent towards Gaza’s children – telling us the entire population is implicated in Hamas’ attack and are therefore legitimate targets?
What moral high ground can Israel occupy when, even during a supposed ceasefire, it has violated the terms of the agreement more than 250 times and refused to actually cease fire?
What moral high ground is Israel occupying when it drops notices over Gaza, as it did last week, restating its genocidal intent if Palestinians there fail to submit to Trump’s plan to ethnically cleanse the entire population?
The leaflet, issued by the "Israeli Security Agency", warns: "If all the people of Gaza cease to exist… No one will feel for you, and no one will ask about you… There is little time left – the game is almost over."
It ends by urging Palestinians to collaborate: "Whoever wishes to save themselves before it is too late, we are here, remaining until the end of time."
Racist calculus
Similarly, Israel has been seeking to exploit high emotions over the deaths in Gaza of the Bibas family – an Israeli mother and her two small children taken hostage on 7 October – by engaging in wholesale disinformation.
After their bodies were returned at the weekend, Israel immediately claimed that they had been killed by their captors – in their case, not by Hamas but a criminal gang, known as Lords of the Desert, that seized the family after also managing to break out of Gaza in October 2023.
Palestinian families react after Israel delayed the release of Palestinian prisoners in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah early on 23 February 2025 (AFP)
Let us assume for a moment that Israel’s story of the family’s murder "in cold blood" is factually correct.
Whereas it might be understandable - if monstrous nationalism – for Israelis to care more about those three deaths than the slaughter and maiming by the Israeli military of tens of thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza, why are western politicians and media adopting the same racist calculus?
Why are the deaths of three Israeli innocents so much more significant, so much more newsworthy, so much more painful than the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinian innocents?
Why are the deaths of three Israeli innocents so much more significant, so much more newsworthy, so much more painful than the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinian innocents?
But in fact, there are very good reasons to believe that Israel is lying once again, and that this is just a reheating of its "beheaded babies" fiction that originally whipped up the mood for genocide.
The Bibas family were widely reported killed by Israeli carpet bombing in November 2023, early on in Israel’s genocide.
Hamas offered to return their bodies - along with the still-alive father - shortly after their deaths. Entirely cynically, as pointed out by Palestinian analyst Muhammad Shehada, Israel rejected the offer so it could "deliberately pretend they were still alive and capitalize on the narrative of Palestinian ‘monsters’ holding a baby hostage".
Now the Bibas family’s suffering is being exploited by Israel and its supporters – aided by the media – to whip up support for a return to murdering Palestinian babies in cold blood.
The likelihood is that the Bibas family, like many thousands of Palestinian families, were torn apart by US-supplied bombs. That might explain the initial mix-up of body parts that led to a Palestinian woman rather than Shiri Bibas, the mother, being returned to Israel before Hamas was able to correct the mistake.
In a sign of how little credibility Israeli officials have on this matter, the surviving members of the Bibas family barred government ministers from attending the funerals due on Tuesday.
Avalanche of complaints
The western media’s complicity in these all-too-obvious manipulations has been fully on show once again.
An investigation by Declassified UK last week found staff from the BBC, Sky News, ITN, the Guardian and Times all testifying that Israeli propaganda "reigned supreme" at their outlets.
Disgruntled staff at the Guardian had compiled a spreadsheet with a "mountain of examples" of the paper "amplifying unchallenged Israeli propaganda… or treating clearly false statements by Israeli spokespeople as credible".
A Sky journalist said the channel had imposed a whole set of unwritten rules that applied exclusively to coverage of Israel: "It’s a continuous battle to report the truth." Any time Palestinians were humanised, or Israeli spokespeople scrutinised, the channel would face an "avalanche of phone calls and complaints".
Threats to withdraw Sky’s access to senior Israeli officials or to bar the channel’s correspondents from the region had the desired effect, impacting "what was and wasn’t said on air".
BBC staff once again spoke of a culture at the state broadcaster in which Palestinians were routinely dehumanised, in stark contrast to the treatment of Israelis.
One of its journalists noted that "the use of the word genocide is effectively banned, and any contributor who uses this word is immediately shut down".
Which is the context for understanding the BBC’s decision at the weekend to remove a documentary on Gaza briefly available on its streaming service iplayer.
Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone, a largely child’s eye view of the destruction of Gaza, was the first effort by the state broadcaster to properly humanise Palestinians – a full 16 months after Israel began its “plausible” genocide.
Cowardly media
Pro-Israel groups, which have ghoulishly rationalised the slaughter of Gaza’s children every step of the way, were inevitably going to throw a hissy fit. And the BBC, equally predictably, was bound to cave at the slightest pressure.
But even by the dismal standards of establishment media cowardice, this was a low.
Pro-Israel lobbyists accused the BBC of supporting terrorism and peddling disinformation because the film’s main narrator, 14-year-old Abdullah, is the son of a Hamas government deputy minister.
Ayman al-Yazouri is termed a "terrorist leader" in an official complaint to the BBC penned by 45 Jewish journalists and media executives.
The lobby’s objections, however, are the real disinformation - depending for the central premise of Israeli-inspired, draconian UK legislation that conflates any relationship to Hamas, Gaza’s government, with terrorism.
Israel has taken hundreds of medical personnel in Gaza captive, and then tortured them, on precisely the grounds that they are associated with terrorism because they work inside public hospitals overseen by the Hamas administration.
Similarly, al-Yazouri, who studied his PhD in environmental chemistry at a UK university and then worked at the United Arab Emirates’ education ministry helping to devise its science curriculum, was recruited on his return to Gaza to the education and agriculture ministries. That was for his specialist skills, not because he is a member of Hamas.
His son Abdullah, who was educated at the one English-speaking school in Gaza, was presumably selected for no more sinister reason than that he was one of the few children in Gaza who could fluently narrate to BBC audiences in their native tongue.
In any case, Abdullah’s narration is entirely unremarkable: it simply introduces the characters as they struggle through a humanitarian catastrophe engineered by Israel that the audience can see for themselves on the screen.
Extraordinary pressures
The children whose stories are told - and have now been deleted - were selected for clearly journalistic reasons: because they are doing compelling things under extraordinary pressures, from becoming a superstar chef on Tiktok, despite an Israeli-imposed food blockade, to volunteering at a hospital to ferry those maimed in Israeli attacks from ambulances to waiting doctors.
The documentary poses a danger for Israel not because of its politics but because of its humanising of Gaza's children, who have been slaughtered in such enormous numbers
Otherwise, the documentary’s framing is entirely Israel-friendly: Hamas is cursed by a suffering population more than Israel; what the world’s highest court suspects is a genocide in Gaza is described simply as a "war"; and the Israelis taken captive by Hamas, even soldiers, are uniformly referred to as "hostages".
The documentary poses a danger for Israel not because of its politics but because of its humanising of Gaza's children, who have been slaughtered in such enormous numbers.
What pro-Israel lobby groups fear - apart from a final segment in which an ambulance crew is attacked by Israeli Apache helicopters – is any portrait of Palestinians that contradicts Israeli propaganda: that every person in Gaza, even the children, are terrorists who have brought death and destruction down on their own heads.
That is an argument that should resonate only with psychopaths. And yet our broadcasters accept it unquestioningly, as does the government of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
And it is an argument justifying genocide. That is something western leaders and media ought to be working strenuously to avert. Instead they are helping craft a propaganda narrative that makes the resumption of genocide all but inevitable.
Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at www.jonathan-cook.net
The two ideologies emerged during the Crusades and continue to justify Israel's conquest, genocide, and western-backed settler-colonialism today
Joseph Massad
A young Muslim woman holding a Palestinian flag participates in an "against racism, against Islamophobia" march in Paris, France, on 21 April 2024 (Hans Lucas/Reuters)
Islamophobiaand anti-Palestinianism were born together, inseparable from the start a millennium ago.
Long before these ideologies acquired their contemporary names as masks for conquest, Palestinians had already become a target. In the 11th century, just as they are today, they were marked for elimination because they are the native inhabitants of Palestine, and the majority are Muslim.
Palestine has had the misfortune of being the site of both the first European settler-colony and the last, a calamity from which the Palestinian people continue to suffer and against which they continue to resist.
Palestinians were certainly not the first Arab Muslims or Christians to be targeted by European armies.
The first were the Arab Muslims of Spain, Sicily, and southern Italy. The latter were conquered by the Normans to extend the frontiers of Latin Christendom and wrest these territories from Arab Muslim rule.
But unlike the conquest of Muslim Arab Sicily and southern Italy, the Muslims and Eastern Christians of Palestine were the first to be targeted by Latin Christendom in a "Holy War", subsequently known as the First Crusade.
The Crusade also inspired the zealotry of the so-called Reconquista in Iberia, which came to be seen as a "second march to Jerusalem". But unlike Muslim Arab Italy and Spain, Palestine did not border Latin Christendom, even if it was the territory where the events of the faith to which European heathens had converted originated.
The sin of the people of Palestine, in the eyes of the Crusaders, was precisely that they were not Latin Christians. Similarly, since the Zionist project for the conquest of Palestine began, the sin of the Palestinian people, in the eyes of the latest Crusaders, is that they are not Jews.
In both cases, Palestine was identified as a land that the Lord had bequeathed - first to Latin Christians and, since the turn of the 20th century, to Ashkenazi Jews, both of whom originated from what became Europe.
'War on Muslims'
While anti-Islam structured the Latin Crusader wars from the 11th century onwards, by the 19th century, it would be European white Christian supremacy and Orientalism that took on this role.
Islam remained a structuring factor but was now enmeshed with several questions that Europe articulated, emerging in the 18th century - what the British called the "Jewish Question" and the "Eastern Question".
Still, the war on Muslims between the end of the 18th century and the end of the First World War did not subside. Estimates suggest that as many as five million Ottoman Muslims were killed between 1820 and 1914, with six million more made refugees.
The Palestinian people were spared some of these murderous campaigns and, by the 20th century, were conceived by the Christian West primarily as Arabs - an identity most adjacent to Muslim.
This Arab designation remained salient until 9/11, when Europe's most recent Islamophobia, which had seen its early manifestations following the triumph of the Iranian Revolution, came to be articulated as President George W Bush put it in 2001: a new "Crusade" that "is going to take a while".
It was then that Israel and the West re-identified the Palestinians as objectionable Muslims who must be defeated.
As Bush intimated, the Crusade has indeed been taking a while and remains with us. President Donald Trump's recent plans for the Palestinians of Gaza are resonant with the history of the Crusades, if not directly inspired by them.
In November 1095, Pope Urban II declared the necessity of recapturing the land where Christianity was born. Addressing the European converts to the Palestinian religion of Christianity, the Pope averred:
"Enter upon the road to the Holy Sepulchre; wrest that land from the wicked race, and subject it to yourselves. That land which as the Scripture says 'floweth with milk and honey', was given by God into the possession of the children of Israel. Jerusalem is the navel of the world; the land is fruitful above others, like another paradise of delights…This royal city, therefore, situated at the centre of the world, is now held captive by His enemies, and is in subjection to those who do not know God, to the worship of the heathens. She seeks therefore and desires to be liberated and does not cease to implore you to come to her aid. From you especially, she asks succour."
At the time, the majority of Jerusalem's native inhabitants were Arabic-speaking Christians, or what the Crusaders called "Suryani". One of the declared motives of the Crusade was to rescue them and the Eastern churches from the Muslims, even though no Eastern Christians had ever complained or appealed to the Latins for help.
Indeed, the Eastern Christians, especially those of Palestine, would be, along with Muslims, as historians have put it, the "most unwilling" and "unhappy victims" of the Crusades.
The crime of Palestine's Arab Muslims - these "enemies" of God, this "wicked race" of "heathens" - was their "unlawful possession" of the "holy" places which Latin Christendom coveted.
Frameworks of conquest
It was during the First Crusade that the fanatical Latin Christians first named Palestine the "Holy Land", replacing its biblical Old Testament nickname as the "Promised Land".
They also refused to use Jerusalem's real name, al-Quds, which had replaced its Aramaic name in the ninth century.
The people of Palestine served as a convenient foil for the papacy, as the internecine wars among Latin Christians were considered sinful by the Church and hindered their service to God.
Unifying the Latins and expanding Christendom territorially were deemed as crucial as redirecting Latin animosity towards Muslims.
Through the Bible and the sword, the Crusades established the first European settler-colony in Jerusalem following the genocidal extermination of its population
Since Latin Christians viewed Muslims as inconvertible, and the Church prohibited making peace with them, considering them heathens, they were to be slain, with any survivors expelled from the "Holy Land".
As for the Arab Christians, the Crusaders attempted to Latinise them by force but ultimately failed. Consequently, the surviving members of the large Muslim and Christian Arab populations, along with the small Arab Jewish community of Jerusalem, were expelled to make way for the Frankish settlers.
When the fanatical Crusades slaughtered between 20,000 and 40,000 of these "Saracens", as the Arab Muslims were also called, in Jerusalem and inside al-Aqsa Mosque in a horrific massacre on 15 and 16 July 1099, they were incensed that their victims fought back in self-defence.
Through the Bible and the sword, the Crusades established the first European settler-colony in Jerusalem following the genocidal extermination of its population. They called their settler-colony "the Latinate Kingdom".
After expelling the entire population, they brought in 120,000 Latin Christian colonists, who made up 15 to 25 percent of the population of the Frankish settler colony, which extended across Palestine and beyond.
In their settler-colony, the Crusaders instituted an "apartheid" legal system, as Israeli historian of the Crusades Joshua Prawer describes it.
Intertwined ideologies
Unlike Zionism, which has always been an ideology that combined religion and colonial nationalism, Palestinian resistance has largely remained intrinsically anti-colonial and nationalist rather than religious.
Still, following the tradition of the Crusaders, Zionists have used similar descriptions for Palestinians since the 1880s - portraying them as "dirty" barbaric Arabs, antisemites, and even Nazis.
After Hamas was established in 1987, the Israeli government began referring to them as antisemitic jihadist Muslims who needed to be crushed.
In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, early western media speculation frequently suggested that Hamas could be responsible, despite the fact that it had never carried out any act of resistance outside historic Palestine. The intertwining of Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism has only deepened since.
In June 2009, US President Barack Obama addressed not only a local Egyptian audience but also the entire "Muslim World" from Cairo University. He emphasised the importance of religious tolerance among Muslims towards Egyptian and Lebanese Christians and promised to end the institutionalised discrimination against American Muslims that followed 9/11.
Yet he justified the ongoing, murderous American military campaigns in Afghanistan and Pakistan - he could have added Yemen but did not - as necessary. His administration was not only killing non-American Muslims in these countries but also targeting non-white American Muslim citizens for assassination.
In the same vein, Obama sought to provide a theological justification for an American-sponsored policy: the imposition of a "peace" between Palestinians and Israelis that preserves Jewish settler-colonialism and occupation at the expense of Palestinian rights.
To achieve this, he declared that the "Holy Land of the three great faiths is the place of peace that God intended it to be; when Jerusalem is a secure and lasting home for Jews and Christians and Muslims, and a place for all of the children of Abraham to mingle peacefully together as in the [Quranic] story of Isra [sic], when Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad (peace be upon him) joined in prayer."
In doing so, Obama was clearly asserting - in a distinctly Zionist fashion - that Jewish colonisers of Palestine are exempt from the obligation to be tolerant. He argued that they are resisted not because they are colonists but solely because they are Jewish - hence his call for Muslim tolerance and ecumenical peace rather than for an end to Jewish settler-colonialism.
Of course, since the Iranian Revolution, Islamophobia has come to encompass all Muslims worldwide.
Yet, much like the Islamophobia of the Crusades, which targeted all Muslims - Turks and Arabs alike - while reserving a particular hatred for Palestinians, today's Islamophobia follows a similar pattern.
Palestinians, cast as the worst among Muslims, occupy a central place within it.
Current Crusade
Since 7 October 2023, when Palestinian resistance forces attacked Israel, Islamophobia has surged across the US and Western Europe, targeting all Muslims and those mistaken for them.
If Islamophobia once drove anti-Palestinianism as a pretext for conquest during the Crusades, today, it is anti-Palestinianism that fuels Islamophobia in Europe and the US.
If Islamophobia once drove anti-Palestinianism as a pretext for conquest during the Crusades, today, it is anti-Palestinianism that fuels Islamophobia in Europe and the US
It is hardly surprising, then, that when Palestinians rise up and resist their white Christian and Jewish colonisers today, they threaten the entire ideological structure of the western world - one built upon the inaugural moment of the Crusades.
This is why every weapon at the "Christian" world's disposal, including Islamophobia, has been and must be deployed against the Palestinians in an effort to defeat them.
Yet, a millennium later, the Palestinians continue to resist, and the new Crusaders persist in their attempts to crush them.
It is no accident that Trump's current Crusade for Gaza and his call for the expulsion of its surviving Palestinian population following Israel's genocidal extermination campaign echo the First Crusade and the Crusader-led genocide and expulsion of the survivors in al-Quds.
That both projects are rooted in white settler-colonialism in the land of the Palestinians is clear enough.
Just as the defeat of the Crusaders in the 12th and 13th centuries and the dismantling of their settler colony in Palestine brought an end to their rule, in view of the persistent and steadfast resistance of the Palestinian people, the prospects for the success of this latest Crusade are slim at best.
Joseph Massad is professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University, New York. He is the author of many books and academic and journalistic articles. His books include Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan; Desiring Arabs; The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians, and most recently Islam in Liberalism. His books and articles have been translated into a dozen languages.
