Cutting US Support to Israel Should Be Primary Goal to Bring about A Just Peace - American Analyst

TEHRAN (FNA)- Independent political analyst Jeremy R. Hammond says that US financial, diplomatic, and military support to Israel is providing the regime with a feeling of impunity to continue with its crimes against the Palestinians.

Mr. Hammond, in an exclusive interview with FNA, said that the solution to the Palestinian issue lies in the hands of the people, and not governments. He also emphasized the need for activists and supporters of Palestine to work towards an end to American support for the Zionist regime.

Commenting on the role of the Arab states, he added “The Arab states issue lofty rhetoric about upholding Palestinians’ rights, but they are short on meaningful action and often do just the opposite.”

Jeremy R. Hammond is an independent political analyst, author and founding editor and publisher of Foreign Policy Journal. His latest book is “Obstacle to Peace: The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.”

FNA has conducted an interview with Jeremy R. Hammond about Trump’s relocation of the US embassy to Jerusalem Al-Quds and also the recent killings of Palestinian protesters by Israeli army.

Below you will find the full text of the interview.

Q: Delivering on his campaign promise and in defiance of all global warnings, Donald Trump moved US embassy to Jerusalem al-Quds. Many believe that this move by Trump has effectively killed fantasies that Washington is a neutral party in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. How do you think that would play in the current and future developments surrounding the issue?

A: In my assessment, Trump has actually done the Palestinians a favor by totally eliminating any last semblances of perceived credibility of the so-called “peace process”, which is the means by which Israel and the US have long blocked implementation of the two-state solution. It opens up a political opportunity for Palestinian leaders to pursue legal remedy for Israel’s crimes against their people via the International Criminal Court. However, that would also require unity of purpose, which is lacking among the Palestinian leadership today.

Q: Since the beginning of the protests dubbed as the “Great March of Return”, Israeli forces killed and wounded many Palestinian civilians, including the protesters, members of the press and medical workers. It seems as if the regime in Tel Aviv feels an atmosphere of impunity where it can act beyond all international laws and conventions. Where do you think this feeling of immunity comes from?

A: It comes primarily from the fact that the US provides financial, diplomatic, and military support for Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians. Working toward seeing an end to this support must be a primary goal of activists seeking a just peace.

Q: The US Ambassador to the UN said “no country would act with greater restraint than Israel” as the world was witnessing the rise in the toll of Palestinian civilians killed and wounded by Israeli live fire. What do you think about this?

A: Nikki Haley is delusional. We heard this same line during Israel’s “Operation Cast Lead” as it was systematically bombing residential homes, schools, hospitals, and other civilian infrastructure in accordance with the IDF’s announced “Dahiya Doctrine” of using deliberately disproportionate force to punish the civilian population.

Q: Israel has rejected international calls for probes into recent killings and insisted that its open-fire rules for Gaza will not change. Some Western states, particularly the US and Britain, who call themselves champions of human rights, have supported the Israeli crimes against Palestinians. The UN has also failed to restore the rights of the people. What is your assessment? What role can nations of the world play in protecting the rights of the oppressed people of Palestine?

A: We cannot place our hope in the governments of the world to solve this problem. It is up to each of us as individuals to act in whatever capacity we have to affect the necessary paradigm shift. This requires waking others up to the realities of the conflict, as opposed to the delusions and myths propagated by the likes of Nikki Haley.

Q: Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammad bin Salman, has recently said that Israelis “have the right to have their own land” and that formal relations between Tel Aviv and Riyadh could be mutually beneficial. The Saudi regime once, at least apparently, opposed Israel’s right to exist. What do you think has changed in Riyadh to now come out as an apologist for the Zionist regime and betray the Palestinian cause? How do you think would other fellow Arab and Muslim nations think of the Kingdom?

A: There is no such thing as a “right” of a state “to exist”. The proper framework for discussion is the right to self-determination. Jews as well as Arabs have this right. But the Zionists rejected this right for the Arabs from the beginning of the conflict, and the “Jewish state” was established by ethnically cleansing 700,000 Arabs from their homes in Palestine.

So what Saudi Arabia has done is effectively deny the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland, which is indeed a betrayal of Palestinians’ rights. But it is not surprising. The Arab states issue lofty rhetoric about upholding Palestinians’ rights, but they are short on meaningful action and often do just the opposite.

This is one of the reasons I say change will not come from governments, but from the people.

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).