Building Global Palestine Solidarity

Victory of Leeds Palestine Solidarity Students: La Lucha Continua

By Junaid S Ahmed

In late November 2018, students, led by the Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC) at the University of Leeds, immediately mobilized to demonstrate as soon as they found out that Zionist war propagandist, Mark Regev, was visiting campus to speak. Regev has had an illustrious career in advocacy for Israeli escalation of ethnic cleansing, house demolitions, and ‘Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) murderous wars against the Palestinians, especially in Gaza in recent years.

There were a sizable number of students, there was potency of our loud vocal chords disruptively shouting incessantly, and of our specific chants, speeches, and indictments or Zionist terror and racism that Regev embodies. The amalgamation of our chants, stories by dispossessed Palestinians, drumming and dance of unshakeable resistance of our peaceful, non-violent protest – all figuratively rocked the building where Mark Regev was speaking, and haunted him throughout his visit, and throughout whatever settler-colonial genocidal rhetoric he was vomiting anyways.

But it is pivotal to understand why Regev was suddenly parachuted to the University of Leeds. Just days before his visit, the University of Leeds became the first university in the UK to divest from Israeli apartheid: an undoubtedly huge victory to celebrate.

What has been happening with regard to global Palestinian solidarity is not insignificant by any stretch of the imagination. Now global in scope and impact, the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel has generated an awareness of the ‘wretched of the earth’ conditions of Palestinians under Zionist occupation. In short, for the first time, our side, the side of justice and liberation from settler colonialism – with its effective BDS campaign – can no longer be silenced by the global Zionist machinery of propaganda.

A sober, even cautiously optimistic, analysis of the current situation does not in any way demonstrate indifference to the fact that Israeli terror has continued unabated for more than a decade against Palestinians, Lebanese, and other Arabs. But there are several factors why Israel’s legitimacy is increasingly only limited to Washington, Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and Cairo.

BDS and the international Palestine solidarity campaign have been consistently highlighting the sheer inhumane conditions that Palestinians undergo under Zionist occupation, and the gratuitous wars Israel launches whenever it fancies. This campaign, similar to that waged as part of the international solidarity movement against the white minority Apartheid regime in South Africa, compelled international actors, businesses, and ultimately states to halt all forms of engagement with such a racist regime – though, as expected the US and Israel remained the last steadfast supporters of the Apartheid regime.

However, it’s important to remember that the African National Congress (ANC) and the United Democratic Front (UDF), as well as other broad layers of the South African anti-apartheid struggle, did have one significant advantage: their oppressors, the small minority of white South Africans, never really had any intention of exterminating the local black population. Even if they wanted to, it would have been tough considering the black population’s absolute majority.

Rather, the intention was to ruthlessly exploit them, keep them ghettoized in bantustans, and maintain them in conditions of enslavement and subordination to service a life of privilege for South African whites.

South Africa was one form of settler colonialism, by first the Dutch, and then the British. The Zionist one in Palestine unfolds a bit differently. Israeli Jews never recognized even the presence of any indigenous Palestinian Arabs in the land they were coming to conquer, and if some were inconveniently there – they were to be ‘transferred,’ i.e., ethnically cleansed. Zionists who emigrated to Palestine have had every intention to seize all of its land and to live completely separate from what Israeli officials have called ‘vermin’ and ‘cockroaches,’ i.e. Palestinian Arabs.

It is precisely for this reason that Israel feels no compunction in criminally pounding Gaza repeatedly over the past few years, or Lebanon in 2006. Zionist settlers, unlike South African whites, have absolutely no need for Palestinians to exist as human beings – and therefore would relish the idea of total ethnic cleansing or even genocide – as of course other settler-colonial states (such as the US) have done.

In such abysmal conditions on the ground in occupied Palestine, how can we continue to dream and give hope to our Palestinian sisters and brothers? The first factor is that the global Palestine solidarity movement has never been stronger, including its central component of BDS. It is becoming increasingly difficult for Western liberals who for many years have had a soft spot for ‘democratic, civilized’ Israel to ignore how fanatically rightwing both the Israeli government and society have become. Hence, the morality of blindly supporting such a state in whatever murderous campaign it unleashes has finally shaken the conscience of many who were unflinching supporters of Israel in the past. This includes an increasing number of global Jewry. Norman Finkelstein documents this significant shift in his, “This Time We Went Too Far: Truth and Consequences in the Invasion of Gaza.”

But there’s a second reason why Zionist paranoia-schizophrenia is reaching new levels. It began in 2006 when Israel invaded Lebanon, thinking the IDF would just ravage the place and eliminate Hizbullah as if it’s some little isolated ant colony. The notion that Hizbullah is some alien, separate entity that can be isolated from the wider population of Southern Lebanon was shown to be demonstrably false, and very painful for the Zionist invaders. The impact on Israelis was not just a military one, but, more importantly, a deeply psychological one. Despite inflicting horrendous levels of civilian and infrastructural damage to Lebanon, Lebanese resistance fighters made Israeli soldiers flee in desperation for their lives, retreating back toward the Israeli side of the border.

This was unprecedented. The Arabs had been led to believe just one story, based on the indoctrination they had been subject to by their respective cowardly autocrats who, post-1967, always out-competed each other in servility to Zionism and Western hegemony: the Zionist entity was invincible, and had crushed our multiple armies in every war – hence, resistance is futile.

Well, a people’s resistance movement in Lebanon just proved the opposite in 2006. And despite the blockade and bombardment of Gaza, Gazans have demonstrated what can only be called a prophetic heroism: their resistance remains as steadfast as ever, despite unspeakable suffering.

It is, nevertheless, important to take stock of wider geopolitical shifts, dangers, and realignments taking place that will certainly impact the Palestinian struggle for liberation.

Hence, how can we evaluate the ongoing repression and resistance in Palestine in light of broader transformations taking place regionally and globally. These larger issues will necessarily confront those striving against the cruelties and barbarism against Palestinians, Kashmiris, the Rohingyas, blacks and immigrants in the US – the list goes on and on.

At the heart of this discussion is ascertaining whether we truly carry the capacity to break through the rigid parameters of the hegemonic social and political imaginaries that have sustained a world order marked by savage coloniality – even as the West is confronting a welcome development for the rest of the world: the West’s ‘de-centering.’ In brief, can we dispel with impoverished discourses of the ‘geo-culture’ of the last few barbaric Eurocentric centuries, the ones that have been responsible for the current oppressive impasse from Palestine to Brazil, and broaden our imaginary potential to conceive of meaningful decolonial alternatives.

The Palestine solidarity movement, and the global justice and anti-war movement generally, need not shy away from beginning to map out the coordinates of what counter-hegemonic tendencies and forces deserve our unconditional solidarity, our not uncritical, but certainly comradely, support. How can our struggles forge an innovative non-Eurocentric grammar of politics, which renders both the essential geopolitical analysis, but more fundamentally, interrogates the epistemological foundations of recurring patterns of violent hierarchies and power relations that mark ongoing global coloniality.

Returning to Palestine and the Middle East, how can we obtain a serious geopolitical assessment, so that there is greater clarity for a trajectory of ongoing and future resistance?

What can we conclude from what we have been observing in Palestine and the region? Two essential points stand out. One is that the conventional Westphalian-colonial state system has seen its most disastrous results in the Middle East. The maddeningly constructed colonial boundaries, the erection of pliant Arab autocracies, and most catastrophically of all, the planting of the settler-colonial state of Israel to be the linchpin of Western hegemony in the region – is the artificial political landscape that was established in the region in the early 20th century, intended for the sole purpose to service Western hegemony. Western interventions and wars, particularly by Washington, have turned a horrible situation into an ongoing nightmare of suffering, from Gaza to the Yemen.

The second point may be the most analytically instructive to understand the current political predicament we confront. Three pivotal moments of the new century, i.e., the 2003 US invasion and occupation of Iraq, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006, and the Saudi war against the Yemen in 2015, epitomize, despite the enormous human toll that these wars of unadulterated aggression have taken, the growing weakness of Imperial-Zionist control over the Middle East, not its strength.

These are not the decisions of sober ‘adults in the room’ enacting realpolitik, as bad enough as that has been in the past. We have now entered the phase where the emperor can see clearly that he has no clothes, and he and his minions (Israel, the House of Saud, the UAE, Egypt) will go to any length to reverse their declining fortunes. There is no other way possible to explain how in our ‘modern, civilized, human rights’ age, that the routine daily slaughter of Yemenis and Gazans have become normalized and the ‘international community’ can’t lift a finger to stop it – and of course several Western countries are directly complicit in these festivals of slaughter relished by the House of Saud and its Zionist soulmates.

What these bringing of ‘hell on earth’ policies of these reactionary regimes really signify are their last gasps to maintain control, someway, somehow, even by annihilation. They are all ‘wounded tigers’ whose heyday of domination is now long past.

This ‘wounded tiger’ syndrome afflicts the US, the House of Saud, and the Zionist state. They all know that they have lost any moral legitimacy they might have deceived some sections of global opinion to grant them in the past. For the US, it’s the multiple invasions, drone attacks, torture camps and Guantanomo and Abu Ghraib imprisonment photos – culminating in an openly racist authoritarian psychopath elected as leader of the ‘free world’. For Israel, it’s the repeated pounding of a defenseless, starving population of Gaza. The world is witnessing Israel – its mouthpiece being the murderous charlatan, Bibi Netanyahu – displaying absolute indifference to any attempt to call out is brazen and continuous violation of virtually every tenet of international humanitarian law, not to mention war crimes that by now have been normalized. And for Saudi Arabia, it has been the fact that the wealthiest country in the Arab world has now been pulverizing the poorest one, i.e. Yemen, causing one of the most grotesque human tragedies of our time. The result is an epidemic of cholera outbreak and mass starvation. Nevertheless, though the US-supported UAE-Saudi butchery of the Yemenis has been continuing for three years, it has taken the reckless behavior of Clown Prince ‘Bone Saw’ Salman (or MBS) to finally raise some eyebrows. MBS propagandists in love with the ‘reformer’ have shifting gears to seeing him as unreasonably lashing out at his royal competitors and even mild critics, in gruesome ways that are now raising serious doubts in Washington about his reliability, stability, predictability.

At this point in time, it is so patently obvious which forces of reaction want to hinder the possibility of any decolonial and counterhegemonic possibilities of resistance and liberation. On the one hand, global Zionism is ludicrously centering campaigns of social justice everywhere within the framework of their pernicious Islamophobia. This is why Iran/Muslims/Middle Easterners can be connected to Central American immigrants, collaboration with ‘rogue’ states like Venezuela, etc.

But his Islamophobia has now become the central plank of American permanent war doctrine. Parting from more quotidian definitions and explanations of the term, Islamophobia is fundamentally about restricting the sovereignty, autonomy, and political agency of the larger ‘Islamicate’: Muslim-influenced areas stretching from Java to Mindanao, Southern Thailand, Java, Tashkent, Palermo, Timbuktu, Granada, to Chicago, Toronto, Leeds, and so on. Islamophobia at the present juncture is the intolerance for how transnational Muslims really are and always have been. There is no ‘West’ – a permanently shifting social construction over time and space – that has ever been without Islam.

Such Islamophobia only accepts ‘good Muslims,’ kept on permanent probation, who demonstrate a ‘moderation’ that enables and facilitates all of the contours of ongoing global imperial penetration of Islamicate societies and the Global South. .

In the past, ‘peripheral’ (peripheral to the Middle East) nations like Iran, Pakistan, and Turkey were useful imperial satraps for this hegemonic project that kept Empire and Zionism on top, with its petro-Arab quislings at their service.

But Iran stopped playing that game since its Islamic Revolution of 1979, and Turkey and Pakistan find themselves in very different geopolitical alignments, though still unclear, from the very clearly defined ones of the Cold War.

Not just in Palestine or in Kashmir, but throughout Muslimistan, there is undoubtedly a central question that haunts the Islamicate every minute of our lives: how can one of the most venal, satanic even, regimes on the planet be the ‘Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques,’ and what does this say about the ‘state of the ummah (community of global Muslims),’ and more importantly, the planetary colonial political economy whose ‘great powers’ prop up this dismal state of affairs.

It must be stated emphatically: colonialism, Zionism, and the House of Saud – all working in tandem of course – have been the biggest plagues unto Islamicate societies in the modern period. All of them remain. Any decolonial possibilities, any genuine pluriversality, and any response from Muslim and the social majorities of all faiths under conditions of neo-colonialism, must begin with the demand for autonomy and sovereignty for their societies. Muslims must recognize that no significant rupture in the political grammar of their tripartite gang of oppressors will occur without completely annihilating all three.

Coming back to our powerful protest against the bloodthirsty Mark Regev (image on the left) at the University of Leeds, we insisted to remind everyone that Palestine remains a symbol of resistance of the oppressed for liberation everywhere. We rejected the common infantile refrain of Zionists that the Palestine solidarity movement is ‘singling out Israel’ – since, roughly, a hundred percent of us also firmly believe the tyranny of the House of Saud and other Arab autocracies who have enabled Zionist occupation, along with Empire – should also be targeted for their support for Zionist occupation and slaughter, as well as their own crimes and wars.

We had no confusion in making these linkages between movements of the oppressed (for some reason, only Zionists get confused by it – and then ask us why we are confused by it!). Within the domain of Islamicate, it is becoming abundantly clear that the majority of the global ummah (community of Believers) is making the connections, and is enraged about the very obvious political degeneration and violence in front of their very eyes. The issue of Zionist brutality against the Palestinians was fairly well understood. But only recently has much of the Muslim world discovered the extent to which the House of Saud (we especially have MBS to thank for this), along with its friends in Abu Dhabi and Cairo (and the battalions of Blackwater-style private mercenaries they’ve hired) – have collaborated to ensure Imperial-Zionist supremacy over the region.

There is no doubt that the ‘masters of the universe’ and their comprador elites in the Muslim world are taking cognizance of this mass righteous rage by ordinary Muslims as well as by the social majorities of the Global South. That is precisely why regimes like the Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt are becoming more ruthless in their repression and atrocities – in order to crush the rumblings of resistance to tyranny emerging everywhere.

The purpose of these client petro-monarchies of the Gulf, especially Saudi Arabia, has always been to sustain the fundamentally exploitative, dictatorial, and neo-colonial relationship under which ordinary Muslims and others from the Global South are coerced to live, somehow survive, or most likely, suffer painful deaths.

Such an assessment would make any decent human be averse to being anywhere near the House of Saud or the House of Zionism. If I was not a Muslim, I know that I would certainly not think twice about ever stepping foot inside the Kingdom of Saudi Arabi unless it was to assist a movement likely to succeed in its overthrow! We can – and should – address the important question of the mandatory pilgrimage for Muslims, the Hajj, and what possibilities exist to boycott, occupy, internationalize the Holy sites, etc. – somehow avoiding a penny going to the coffers of the dungeon chambers of the House of Saud. More important and immediately, how do we devise strategies to protect and preserve its sanctity from the pharaohs that run the place!

Of course, the Transcendent rarely has good endings for pharaohs anyways! That should infuse some hope in our ongoing struggles and resistance to the aforementioned pillars of violent domination in the Middle East.

(Published in Global Research, Friday, November 30, 2018)

Junaid S. Ahmad is Co-Founder of SUSTAIN – Stop US Tax-Funded Aid to Israel Now; Co-Founder of Al-Awda Virginia – The Palestine Right of Return Committee; Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC) Member and PhD Candidate in Decolonial Thought, School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Leeds; Secretary-General, International Movement for a Just World (JUST) – Kuala Lumpur; Research Fellow, Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA) – Istanbul; Director of the Center for Global Studies and Faculty of Advanced Studies; University of Management and Technology (UMT), Lahore, Pakistan

It is time to restore the UN resolution that Zionism is a form of racism

     

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

In a strange combination of fascist ideas and ideology, the Israeli Knesset has passed the so-called Nation Law, going beyond the racist policy that Israel has continued to adopt in its direct confrontation with Palestinians in the territories occupied in 1948 and the Arabs residing in territories occupied in 1967. This is considered a very dangerous development in terms of adopting the idea of the Jewish people’s supremacy as identity remains legally monopolised by the Jews. As for the others, they are considered mere residents with no rights other than those granted to them by the Jewish state.

Many Israelis, including those who regard themselves as very right-wing and racist including Moshe Arens, Israel’s ambassador to Washington in 1982, and Yitzhak Shamir’s foreign minister, consider this law to be unnecessary and excessive. This is because the previous laws regarding the Jewishness of the state and Jerusalem as the united capital of the Jewish state is more than sufficient to determine the identity of the Jewish state, according to Haaretz. I am not referring to the Israeli left-wing or the parties opposed to Netanyahu’s government that voted against the law, but to right-wing forces and elites that considered the law a mere addition that Israel did not need to debate for over for seven years and pass with a weak majority.

Why, then, is this redundant law being passed on the last day of Knesset sessions before the summer vacation, which ends in mid-October? The new Nation Law fundamentally contradicts the provisions of the Declaration of Independence on non-discrimination between the residents and citizens of Israel. This is the document that the Israeli judiciary referred to in order to revoke a number of racist laws passed through the Knesset. They do so in adherence to the declaration, which stipulates that discrimination based on ethnicity, gender, or religion should not occur. The debate in recent months between the radical right-wing and the Supreme Court over some discriminatory racist laws, reaching the point of calling for the reconsideration of this court’s authorities, makes the new law a constitutional reference to the Supreme Court. It also becomes a reference for all courts to base its rulings on since this law is considered a part of the Israeli Basic Laws, considered Israel’s constitution.

 Jewish Nation-state Law: Why Israel Was Never a Democracy

In this context, it is noted that the Knesset passed a similar or supportive law two days before the Nation Law was passed. This similar law, proposed by Minister of Justice Ayelet Shaked, revokes the Supreme Court’s power to look into the appeals and petitions filed by Palestinians living in the territories occupied in 1967. It authorises the Central Court in Jerusalem to discuss administrative decisions made by the occupation authorities in the occupied territories regarding planning, construction, and restricting the travel of its Palestinian citizens. This reflects one of the most important issues related to the annexation of the West Bank in terms of the judiciary, as this judiciary in the Jerusalem court will control these matters if the West Bank is considered a part of Israel.

The new law will provide a legal basis for the possibility of annexing the West Bank in practice away from the positions of the High Court of Justice which believes, like many elites in Israel, that the annexation process would pose “demographic risks” to the identity of the Jewish state. This is due to the increase in Palestinian residents and citizens.

In addition to the Nation Law’s violation of previous laws relating to the status of the Arabic language, which now is considered a special status law instead of an official language according to the British Mandate laws, we must also take a serious look at the law’s sixth article.  This article violates the rights of foreign countries and is a blatant interference in its internal affairs. The article stipulates a close relationship with Jews in other countries, referring to them as the “Jewish people,” meaning that the laws of the Jewish state would apply to these people, despite being citizens of other countries, based on the fact that they are Jewish. The article also stipulated the need to “preserve the cultural, historical and religious heritage of the Jewish people among Jews in the diaspora. It also implies that the responsibility of non-Israeli Jews in the diaspora falls on the Jewish state, thus constituting a flagrant interference in the responsibilities of the other countries towards their citizens, regardless of their religion.

The Knesset: A parliamentary vote to occupy history and the future

The Nation Law should take us back to the past UN resolution that was cancelled. This resolution was issued in 1876 and considered Zionism a “racist movement”. I believe that the time has come to restore this international law to the forefront of the Palestinian Arab movement in order to confront the Nation Law, which is irrefutable proof of Israel’s racist nature.

Atallah Hanna slams Israel’s ‘fascist nation state’ law

The Archbishop of the Palestinian Orthodox Church in occupied Jerusalem, Father Atallah Hanna, yesterday slammed a new law passed by the Israeli Knesset that officially recognises Israel as the “national homeland of Jewish people”.

“It is a purely fascist law which completely ignores the fact that the Palestinians are the indigenous people of this land, not some goods imported from here or there,” Hanna said during a press conference.

Hanna explained that the controversial “nation State” law reveals the true face of Israel, which claims to be democratic.

The Archbishop called on human rights advocates and organisations and the international community to reject this “new and dangerous law” which targets Palestinians in their homeland.

“The Palestinians will stay in their land despite these racist laws,” he added.

Iran’s Dynamism Spells the Doom of Global Arrogance, Zionism

By: S. Nawabzadeh

Leadership, if God-oriented, not only lays the guidelines for salvation in afterlife, but charts out the proper path of peace and prosperity in the transient life of the mortal world. This is indeed a great blessing for a nation, ensuring its freedom, independence, and development in the face of the most adverse plots, as has been proven by Iran and the Iranian people. If the Father of the Islamic Revolution, Imam Khomeini (RA), who inspired the establishment of the Islamic Republic to make Iran the cynosure of all eyes throughout the world, his worthy successor, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, has ably guided the ship of Iran through the stormy seas of US piracy, Zionist devilry, Wahhabi conspiracy, human rights hypocrisy, and anti-revolutionary treachery. It is this dynamism that has continued to nip in the bud many an intricate plot to mar the spectacular scientific progress of Iran, to prevent the growing influence of Islamic Republic in the region and beyond, and to disturb the peace and security of the homeland through thugs, traitors, and terrorists of all hue and colour. On Tuesday, January 16, in his meeting with heads of parliamentary delegations of Muslim countries, the Leader of the Islamic Revolution, as a devoted servant of Prophet Muhammad (SAWA) and the Infallible Imams of the Ahl al-Bayt, gave a grand display of not just his insight and foresight but also his magnanimity by saying: "We’re ready to act brotherly even with those from among the Muslim World who were once openly hostile to us.” These words are ample proof of the prudence of a person who strives for the unity of the Islamic Ummah and overlooks the faults of the misled, whether at home or abroad, by having a clear conviction of the eventual defeat of the Great Satan (US) end the rooting out of the illegal Zionist entity from the region.

In his address to participants of the 13th Summit of the Parliamentary Union of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in Tehran, he rightly remarked: "The World of Islam, with such a large population and plenty of facilities, can certainly create a great power in the world and become influential through unity. Internecine wars among Muslims must be stopped and we should not allow a safe haven be created for the Zionist entity.” At a time, when the frustrated US failed miserably in its plot to stir sedition in Iran, following the failure of Donald Trump’s quixotic declaration of the occupied Islamic city of Bayt al-Moqaddas as capital of the illegal Zionist entity, Iran, its leadership, and its people, have firmly demonstrated their unshaken resolve to brave all difficulties in order to liberate Islam’s first qibla. This is not a tall dream, as is evident by the setbacks Global Arrogance, the Zionists and their lackeys have continued to suffer, as those inspired by the Islamic Republic of Iran are emerging victorious in all scenes of the struggle, whether in diplomatic circles or on the battlegrounds – in Syria, in Lebanon, in Iraq, in Palestine, and in several other places, despite the treason of the Takfiris and their godfathers the Wahhabi cult ruling British-created Saudi Arabia.

As Ayatollah Khamenei said, the Zionists who are being beaten in the war of explosive weapons – despite their claim to possess state-of-the-art military technology – are about to be defeated in the soft war as well – of cyber technology, which Iranians and other Muslims have mastered, as is clear by the Islamic Republic’s astounding progress in medicine, aerospace, nano technology, nuclear energy, stem cells, and etc. The gist of the latest message of the enlightened leader was that Muslims, if they close ranks and overcome the problems in their midst, including the crises in Yemen and Bahrain, they are capable of soon materializing the cherished goal of a single Palestinian state, without the presence of the Zionist usurpers, stretching from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea. This means, the satanic plots of the traitors to the cause of Islam and Muslims, in any place, will never succeed. -Kayhan International

Understanding the True Nature of Zionism

Israel and Zionism go hand in hand By Zafar Bangash

This article was first published in the CI April 2010 issue. It is being reproduced here in view of recent developments in the Holy Land. In its long tortuous history, Europe has spawned many de-monic ideologies — colonialism, imperialism, na-tionalism, fascism, Nazism, and Zionism, to name just a few — but while most have been repudiated, at least theoretically, Zionism is venerated as a religion. Zionists masquerade it as a badge of honor. It would be difficult to find anyone calling himself a colonialist or imperialist these days, although there are plenty of countries peddling these ideologies under the guise of other labels (humanitarian intervention, the right to protect, etc). Nor would one find anyone openly proclaiming to be a fascist or a Nazi. Yet there are plenty of people who proudly claim to be Zionists. They come in all stripes: Jewish, Christian, Hindu, atheist and (yes) Muslim. It is important to clarify at the outset what Zionism, or to call it by its correct name, political Zionism, is not. Despite strenuous efforts by its proponents, Zionism has little or nothing to do with Judaism, the religion of millions of people. True, Zionist ideology was first propounded by people of Jewish background — Theodore Herzl, Ze’ev Jabotinsky et al. — but they were not religious at all. In fact, they considered Judaism as an impediment in their colonial enterprise. Herzl was a racist. He propounded the idea, in the wake of the Dreyfus affair in France (year 1894), that Jews could not assimilate in other, primarily Christian European societies; they needed a separate homeland of their own. Even before Herzl announced his racist idea at the first Zionist Conference in Basle, Switzerland (1897), most rabbis had condemned political Zionism. The Philadelphia Conference of November 3–6, 1869 adopted a resolution that stressed the radical opposition between the universalist principles of Judaism and those of political Zionism. So how did political Zionism, a racist colonial enterprise, succeed in establishing itself in the heartland of Islam despite strong opposition from leading rabbis and the indigenous population of Palestine? By the turn of the last century, British and French colonialists were busy instigating revolts in the Muslim East (aka the Middle East) by buying the loyalty of Arabian tribal chiefs to use them against the Ottoman Sultanate. The toxic brew of Western colonialism, Arabian nationalism, and political Zionism facilitated the imposition of the Zionist entity in Palestine through the infamous Balfour Declaration. On November 2, 1917, British Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur Balfour, in a letter to Baron Walter de Rothschild, outlined the British government’s favorable view of establishing “in Palestine a home for the Jewish people…” While Balfour stated, “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine,” he deliberately ignored their political rights. That the overwhelming majority of inhabitants of Palestine were Muslims and Christians whose fundamental rights were being violated was of little consequence. In typical colonial style, Balfour promised the Palestinians’ land to European Zionist Jews. Unlike European racists that have a long and gory history of persecuting Jews and other minorities in their midst, Muslims have not perpetrated any pogroms or indulged in inquisitions against religious or other minorities. Whenever Jews suffered persecution in Europe or Russia, they found refuge among Muslims, hence the presence of Jewish communities in North Africa, Turkey, and Iran to this day. Yet European racists transferred their “Jewish problem” to Palestine. The tiny minority of Jews in Palestine — 7% in 1919 and even at the time of Israel’s creation in May 1948 through a scandalous vote in the United Nations General Assembly (November 1947) — the 30% Jewish population owned a mere 6.5% of the land. Yet it was given 56% of Palestinian territory. The rapid increase in Jewish population from 7% to 30% in 29 years (1919–1948) was not the result of natural growth; it was achieved through illegal Jewish immigration into Palestine. Even Hitler’s WWII bloodbath did not convince the overwhelming majority of Jewish people to settle in Palestine. But Zionist leaders missed no opportunity to emphasize the importance of Jewish migration to Palestine and lamented the lack of interest among European and North American Jews.

While Zionists denounce anti-Semitism and advance it as the principal justification for the creation of a separate homeland for the “Jewish people,” anti-Semitism is a twin of Zionism and needed for its survival. Herzl himself wrote, “The Jews constitute a single people and cannot be integrated into other peoples. But they do become assimilated by any society if they find themselves secure in it for a long period. And that will never be to our interest.” Thus, Herzl considered anti-Semites as indispensible allies in his quest to create the Zionist State in Palestine. Today’s Zionists are no less eager to align themselves with racists and bigots. In fact many Zionists, especially in the US, are leading Islamophobes. In Palestine, the Zionists have not only expropriated Palestinian land — today the Zionists control more than 93% of the original land of Palestine through theft, forcible occupation, and other illegal means — they have also built roads, neighborhoods, communities, and settlements reserved exclusively for theJews. This is what apartheid South Africa had done, hence the designation of Israel as an apartheid state. The apartheid wall through which the Zionists have cut off Palestinian families and villages, stealing in the process more Palestinian land, caps it all. In a ruling handed down in July 2004, the International Court of Justice described Israel’s apartheid wall as illegal. Zionists are also masters at forging history. From the biblical claims that “God promised them this land” described as a “land without a people” (Palestinians are non-people in Zionist mythology), they have gone about uprooting Palestinian families from their homes and villages, often at gunpoint and frequently using it as well, to indulging in mass starvation and killings. By using the Bible as a real estate manual, ironically by people that do not even believe in God, the Zionists have added the myth of selective history to their spurious claims to Palestine. They claim that they have a historic link with Palestine because Prophets David and Solomon (a) ruled the Holy Land 3,000 years ago. It is as if in Zionist mythology, nobody existed before the Hebrew tribes arrived in Palestine — not the Philistines (hence the name Palestinians), the Moabites, the Hittites, the Amorites, or others — and subsequent to the 73-year rule of David and Solomon nobody else inhabited this land until the Zionists arrived to inhabit it. The guilt-ridden Christian West that has historically perpetrated bloodbaths against the Jewish people accepted such infantile claims at face value. Nothing could be more spurious than the claim of Christian charity assuaging the guilt of European Christendom. Christian charity requires the good believer to give from what he has; nothing could be more un-Christian than to “give” stolen property to someone else. Similarly, nothing could be more personal than Christian morality, and so how is Christian dogma appropriated to govern the behavior of nation-states, which in reality wanted to solve the Jewish problem through expulsion? The fact is, Europe and the numerous squatter/colonial entities it spawned — America, Australia, New Zealand, to name a few — never stopped being racist; long before the Third Reich, the so-called “final solution” was discussed in Britain, and a thoroughly assimilated Jew, constrained most of the time to live in his own ghetto, was still not tolerable to the European racist. And so European racism set upon a course to solve two problems with one master stroke. Perceiving themselves to be locked in a life-and-death struggle with Islam, the real purpose of the creation of the Zionist State of Israel was to position a colonial beachhead in the heartland of Islam that would empty Europe of all its Jews and simultaneously act as a permanent impediment to peace and progress in the Muslim world. Israel admirers never tire of reminding the world that it is the “only democracy” in the Middle East. Hitler’s Third Reich was also a democracy yet it perpetrated the biggest bloodbath in European history. The Zionists are busy replicating the Nazis’ horrible record in the Holy Land. There are also a number of racist laws in force in Zionist Israel. One is the Law of Return. Under this law, any Jew living anywhere in the world is automatically entitled to Israeli citizenship upon setting foot there. That the overwhelming majority of Jewish people who occupy Palestine today have no links with the land whatsoever is of little consequence. Palestinians who have lived there for millennia, have to prove their ownership to land or property before they are given any rights. Their papers were often stolen or destroyed by the very Zionist marauders who invaded Palestinian villages and towns in 1947–1948. Tens of thousands of Palestinians were murdered and others driven out through a campaign of terror — and this was before 1948. This is even more critical for Palestinians in Jerusalem; if they are away from the city for more than three months, they lose the right of return. Similarly, every effort is made, fair and foul, to force them to leave. Palestinians are denied building permits not only for new homes but are also refused permission to rebuild. Palestinian home demolitions are a common practice of the Zionists to target Palestinians involved in resistance activity. Concurrent with this was the policy of land grab, the most important consideration after illegal Jewish immigration into Palestine. If a core group of Jewish settlers, the vanguard of the Zionist movement, did not occupy a core area of territory, the Zionist enterprise would not succeed. This is what the Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling referred to as “territoriality” being at the centre of the Zionist project. At the time of Israel’s creation, the 30% Jewish/Zionist population owned only 6.5% of the land yet they grabbed 56% of the territory, quickly expanding it further through terror. Three instruments were particularly effective in this theft: the Jewish National Fund (set up in 1901), the Land Ordinance Act of 1943 and, the Emergency Laws decreed in 1945, the latter two courtesy of the British colonial occupation of Palestine. The first stipulated, in typical colonial style, that land acquired by it cannot be resold or even leased to non-Jews. The Land Ordinance Act was applied under the rubric of the “public interest” while under Emergency Law the military governor was given powers to suspend all the rights of citizens. The most convenient pretext used was that of “security” or by declaring certain areas “prohibited.” The Zionist occupiers of Palestine have all these repressive instruments to dispossess the indigenous Palestinian population. All this is done under the absurd and bogus claim that Jewish people are superior to Palestinians and they cannot live side by side with them as neighbors. How else should one describe racism? And regardless of what the cowardly Western rulers and their puppets say, Zionism is racism. What most people — and unfortunately the bulk of Muslims falls into this category as well — fail to recognise is that Israeli racism is integrally connected to the Israeli nation-state. Were it not for the state apparatus, the military, political, economic, and criminal resources required to pull off this grand deception and occupation of the Holy Land would not be possible. Zionism will never become a bitter historical memory unless its eradication is coupled with the dismemberment of the State of Israel and the thorough dezionisation of its Jewish inhabitants. However even this is not enough, as the tentacles of Zionism extend far beyond the borderless pariah State of Israel into the Arabian and imperialist capitals of the world. It is not enough to say that imperialist America and colonialist Europe prop up the Zionist cancer in the Muslim world. The Zionists would never have lasted a day without the willing 80-year complicity of Arabian despots, dictators, presidents, and princes from Morocco to the Persian Gulf. And we are witnessing this complicity explode into the open with the Arabians’ embrace of Zionist Israel. Thus the will to make Israel disappear into the pages of history must also be the will to look for an Islamic post-national alternative to the nation-state fiasco that currently grips the whole world. Were such a will to reassert itself into people-to-people associations across the world, then Jews would once again be free to settle anywhere in the Muslim world, not just in the walled-off military bunkers of Tel Aviv and Haifa. And this directional course has its starting point at the heart of the Arab world, indeed the entire Muslim world: Makkah. Jerusalem will never be free so long as its sister holy precincts in Makkah are not liberated from the crypto-Zionist clan of Saud and its people are not cleansed of their tribal-cum-nationalistic perversions acquired from the sons of Israel. This is the only way to eradicate Zionism — as ideology and as social construct. All partial solutions will land us in the same spot we are in today. Until this racist ideology is uprooted and eliminated utterly and irrevocably, there will be no peace in Palestine or anywhere else in the world.

Exposing the real faces behind the alleged Shi‘i-Sunni divide!

By Abu Dharr

Through massive propaganda, Muslims are led to believe that there deep differences between Shias and Sunnis. To advance this agenda, crises are deliberately engineered that lead to bloodshed.

As this issue of Crescent International goes to press, there are battles of an apocalyptic nature in progress in both Iraq and Syria. These conflicts and their campaigns have undergone low- and high-intensity swings for the past 15 years in Iraq and for more than 5 years in Syria. But, currently, they have reached their highest pitch of combat operations in and around two major cities: Halab (Aleppo) in Syria, and Mosul in Iraq.

The Muslim peoples in all this are deprived of accurate information, leading them to believe what the corporate media mouthpieces want them to believe. And in this toxic presentation of internal Muslim affairs the overall impression that the politically brain-dead consumer of such information is that there is a war in progress, and this war is working its way to be an all-out war between Sunnis and Shi‘is. That is what the mainstream corporate media wants you and me to believe.

The fact of the matter is that there is no war between Sunnis and Shi‘is. What needs to be pointed out here is that there are two sources of this sectarian civil war presentation: one of them is the Zionist-imperialist mass media and the other one is the combination of Sunni and Shi‘i sectarians. These two external and internal elements are on the same wavelength: both of them are fueling intra-Islamic hatred and trying to prepare their constituents for a fight to the finish, a fight that will either wipe out the Shi‘is or wipe out the Sunnis! Thanks, but no thanks, to the void in the Muslim mind, where there is no trace of informed political analysis or any reference to the Qur’an and the Prophet (pbuh) these two narratives are taking their toll on many Muslims from Makkah to Morocco westward and from Madinah to Malaysia eastward. No one can deny this. There is a noxious brew of sectarianism that has taken hold in the minds of the misinformed and the uninformed. How do you deal with this venomous sectarian cant?

Easy. You identify the sectarians.

And let us not kid ourselves. There are sectarians on both sides. It is up to the Sunni Muslims to take the wraps off their own sectarians. Likewise, it falls upon the Shi‘i Muslims to blow the whistle on their own sectarians. In the meantime the culture of ignorance that has incubated this sectarianism has to be rolled back. When Muslims are provided accurate information they will not fall into a prefabricated sectarian trap.

Thanks, but no thanks, to the void in the Muslim mind, where there is no trace of informed political analysis

Mosul and Halab (Aleppo) are being bombed day in and day out because both Syria and Iraq, according to the Zionist-imperialist master plan, are arranged to bleed to death. Why, someone might ask? Because Zionist and imperialist interests dictate that life be sucked out of both Syria and Iraq. It would not have made any difference if the majority population in one country was Buddhist and the other was Hindu, or that one was predominantly Protestant or Catholic… as long as the population in Iraq and Syria are conceived as enemies of that ungodly permutation of Zionism and imperialism. No one should lose sight of the fact that Syria and Iraq both are being guillotined precisely because they are a future existential threat to the racist colonizers of the land of the prophets.

It is true that Iraq and Syria are hemorrhaging but the feeling of impending doom is to be found in the military garrison, otherwise known by some as Israel. And the only — and I repeat, the only — immediate existential danger that has shown the Israelis the “knockout stars” is Hizbullah. This valiant resistance movement (Hizbullah) is, by virtue of a consolidation of Islamic self-determination extending from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean Sea, the most serious military challenge the Israelis have ever encountered. By the admission of Israeli officials themselves, Hizbullah has more than 100,000 missiles. Hundreds of these missiles have a range of 250km or more. Some of them are equipped with highly explosive missile heads weighing hundreds of kilograms. These thousands of missiles are capable of reaching any military target within colonized Palestine. This would include strategic infrastructure such as power plants, atomic centers, Dimona, Ben-Gurion Airport, industrial complexes, military bases, and mixed military-civilian areas.

Whatever the Israeli military has, such as its much-vaunted anti-missile Iron Dome, will be on the defensive once thousands of missiles are launched every day. If this type of war breaks out, it would mean that the civilian population, which incidentally changes from civilian to military outfits on a regular basis, would be forced to live in shelters (if they can find them) for a long time — as this will be an extended war. The war in Syria of Israeli-American origins has unintended consequences for the top brass in Tel Aviv and Washington.

That war has given Hizbullah the much-needed military training and expertise to be better equipped to take on the Israeli chicken hawks. The Israelis and their enablers would want a coming war with Hizbullah to be over as quickly as possible.

No, I don’t think so. If Hizbullah was able to fight in Syria for five years and counting, it should be able to fight in Lebanon and Palestine for that period of time. And definitely the Israeli generals and their troops cannot sustain a war of that duration and magnitude, even in their own backyard. Hizbullah has ground-to-sea missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles. Hizbullah has its own air defense capabilities.

Add to that their intelligence services and their cyberwar wherewithal for electronic warfare and we are talking about a force that puts the conventional Arabian armies to shame. Hizbullah is no rag-tag militia. Neither is it one that knocks on royal doors for handout riyals. Since the Zionist-imperialist-Arabian imposed war on it in 2006, Hizbullah has tripled its strength by one account. It is reported to have more than 40,000 men under arms — half of them are reserves who will be called to duty once the Israelis are foolish enough to fire the first shot.

In these circumstances the Israeli civilian and military leaderships would be expected to do all they can to extend the war in Syria and Iraq into an indefinite future. And if sectarianism is going to do the trick, then sectarianism it is. While these Zionist strategic satans are using their regional proxies and worldwide connections to play out a very bloody scenario to their north, they are cementing friendly relations to their south. Both the officials in Tel Aviv and Cairo are in the same trench when it comes to Islamic self-determination in Egypt and Arabia. To bring Egypt closer into the Zionist political divan the Zionists and their enablers (America and Arabia) are using ISIS and their likes to scare Egyptian officials into compromise positions.

The Zionist shayatin are a step ahead of everyone. They are using “Islamic ignorance” to combat Islamic self-determination. They are using ISIS and all its proliferating counterparts to abort the Islamic revival. They are setting ISIS and its swelling equivalents — and they are breeding like rabbits — to eventually take on Hizbullah. These Zionists are lodged deep down inside the Muslim psyche, so deep that they occupy Makkah and Madinah, even as the average Muslim has no clue. These Zionist manipulators have burrowed deep down inside the Egyptian establishment. They think that they have some type of strategic alliance with Egypt.

As far as Israeli national security, Egypt is second to the US in significance. Military and security cooperation have never been as they are today between Israel and Egypt. So much so that both Israel and Egypt now consider Hamas to be their number one enemy. Everybody talks about an Israeli blockade and sanction against Ghazzah but the Egyptian blockade and sanction hurts the most. Egypt refuses to allow its al-‘Arish port for transporting goods to and from Ghazzah. What then is the difference between the Egyptian al-‘Arish and the Israeli Ashdod?

The bottom line is that Israel is secure and self-confident when it comes to the Arabian armies and militaries. But when it comes to Hizbullah and Islamic Iran Israel needs its spies more than it needs its soldiers, it needs its (evil) specialists more than it needs its sergeants, and it needs its tranquilizers more than it needs its blitzes. For that reason it has thrown in all it has, in Syria and in Lebanon. And the sectarian divide turns out to be an Israeli war plan. Even their public statements and media presentations give them away,

The Sunni governments, the Sunni countries, the Sunni peoples” etc… are now in a matter-of-fact alliance with the “Jewish state”;

The enemy of my enemy is my friend; and

The “Iranian” enemy of Israel is the “Iranian” enemy of Saudi Arabia, the “Iranian” enemy of the Persian Gulf states, the “Iranian” enemy of the Arabian Peninsula states.

But all this does not go far enough… it does not serve the purpose. So, they do more by giving it the necessary combustible material as they replace political nation-states with religious denominations of a sectarian definition. And this is how we have today’s media sensation about Syria and Iraq.

You have to give it to them: the Zionists are so smart that they are having their enemies dig the Zionist grave. They are so twisted in their schemes that they cannot see the death trap they have in a roundabout way enthusiastically prepared for themselves,

But Allah came upon them [Yahud] in a manner they had not expected, and cast trepidation in their hearts: they destroyed their homes with their own hands as well as the hands of the committed Muslims (59:2).

THE LEAGUE OF ARAB ZOMBIES PAID BY US AND ISRAEL

The Arab League of Impotence

What kind of Arab League is the Arab League ? one wonders what has happened to all those people , what happened to Nabil Al ‘Arabi who came as an Egyptian minister of foreign affairs after the so called revolution before occupying the position of General Secretary . A person brought by the Revolution , look at him and see him and hear him , watch for anything revolutionary in him , watch for the Arab in him let alone the revolutionary , see if you can find the Arab in him as his name shows , see if he can at least stand up for his name or his surname , there is definitely nothing noble in him for sure and nothing Arab . The Arab proverb says , If you feel no shame than do whatever pleases you . Arabs think all proverbs are true and this proverb applies well to Nabil al ‘Arabi and the Arab League . The truth is we are dumfounded and mesmerized , we feel ashamed , we want to tell the League and al ‘Arabi that we feel ashamed . we feel ashamed of what he’s doing and saying , we want to tell the Qatari Hamad bin Jassem and the prince of Qatar that we feel ashamed of their Zionism , ashamed at their place ,we want to tell them to stop conspiring against Syria and stop being Zionists , not for the sake of Syria ,but for our sake , because we feel this thing in us that refuses what we see and hear . Why this Zionism , why are you Zionists , Mr al ‘Arabi and Mr Qatar , why are you Arab Zionists ? Aren’t Arab values good enough for you ? Courage and benevolence and and steadfastness and faith , Aren’t these good enough for you ? all this you have forsaken as you have forsaken the ordinances of you religion , for what ? against what? Ask people about Arab values , ask foreigners , ask George Galloway why has he made these values his ? Ask yourselves , ask you fathers and forefathers , ask the poets and the wise , ask them , ask the prophets and messengers , they lived there in the Arab desert and are still there , ask them and answer us , tell us what the Zionist is good at and what is he good for that made him so precious and important , we want to know, what is the Zionist good for or good at ? Killing others ? Invading countries ? Usurping territoties ? Genociding people ? Violating rights ? Incarcerating innocents? Offending Arabs and Palestinians? Isn’t it enough that you and your league have been for decades now the burial grounds for all Arab causes and the burial ground of the Palestinian Cause for sure and even that of the human cause because you are also a burial ground for that.

Remember Mr League and Mr Princes , Saudi and Qatari and whatever , We never expected anything from you , you slept over so many files for so long , you never did anything for anyone , not one finger you lifted for anyone, no unity , no solidarity , no nothing , and suddenly we see you wide awake and so busy ,what happened we ask ? what is keeping you so busy Mr al ‘Arabi ? and Mr Qatar? To what issue have you awoken? To the invasion of Libya by NATO ? Or to Israel’s safety and security ? Is this what has awoken you from your deep slumber , or is it the revolutions complacent with Camp David ? What happened that you seem so eager on meeting and summoning and gathering as if a new life was blown into you , and we see you plotting against Syria and against Libya and against Palestine and arranging for NATO invasion and for Syria’s fall and for UN schemes and for no fly Zones , What are you and who are you ? Puppets , Muppets , Stooges ? What are you ? You are NOT Arabs for sure , What are you then ? A new breed or species , a combination of Zionism and mischief and self hate ? Whatever you are and whatever you pose as, there is definitely one thing for sure and that is you are despicable people at all levels and for all purposes and reasons , simply despicable people of no belonging and no religion and no homeland and no feeling and no dignity , real degenerates , that is what you are! SHAME! What to do with these feelings , we don't know, throwing them at you would be best , they are yours , take them and adorn yourselves with your own shamefulness , we Arabs are free from degenerates like you , ours are the proud leaders of our Resistance , ours are the noble and dignified martyrs of our land , ours are the committed people to our cause , ours are the dedicated heroes fromwherever they came , may they enlighten our way to our glorious victory and your utter defeat!