Palestinian children hold bowls and containers as they wait to receive food cooked by a charity kitchen amid shortages of food supplies, as the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas continues, in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip. Picture: Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters
The western media establishment has intentionally obscured and obfuscated issues, systematically suppressing pro-Palestinian sentiment. Pro-Palestinian sympathisers and employees in various sectors in the west have been persecuted and terminated from employment.
Many in the US have been prohibited from expressing remorse and sorrow for the deaths of thousands of their Palestinian relatives, especially students and teachers. Protesters, including thousands who are Jewish, have been arrested.
Recently, the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University were forced to resign. The charge was “anti-Semitism” or lack of institutional protection of Jewish students, led by the American Israel Political Action Committee, that funds politicians and leaders in the defence of Israel.
The charge of “anti-Semitism” is fraudulent since the Palestinians are indigenous Semitic people, and include people who are Jewish, Christian, and Muslim. Palestine was disrupted by the Nakba (catastrophe) that dispossessed indigenous Palestine and established the Israeli state in 1948.
The leading global supporters and funders of Israel have been the US and Britain, colonial imperialist countries that have caused wars around the world to maintain economic and political hegemony.
Israel has engaged in typical colonial violence with its practice of “collective punishment”, not unlike the Portuguese occupying Mozambique, Angola, Guinea Bissau; the British occupying Zimbabwe and South Africa; the Germans occupying Namibia when they forced Herero and Nama people into the desert, destroyed cattle, and poisoned water wells and exterminated 80% of these indigenous nations.
The German actions resulted in entire villages being razed to the ground in Namibia in the late 1800s and early 1900s, just as Gaza is being flattened as punishment for the resistance actions of Hamas on October 7.
Germany has refused to pay reparations for the genocide of indigenous Namibians and has sided with Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), a dramatic irony since it was in Nazi Germany that Jews, Gypsies, Poles and others were subject to mass extermination, patterned upon the genocidal practices of confining indigenous Indians in North America to concentration camps (“reservations” today) and following those of the Congo when 10 million Bakongo people were annihilated by the Belgians from 1885 to 1908 under colonial imperial Leopold III.
One would expect Germany to consistently reject any association or endorsement of genocide and ethnic cleansing given it’s sordid and bloody history in this regard, including torturing thousands of people imprisoned during experiments at concentration camps like Dachau, of Gypsies, Jews, Poles, etc. Namibia has understandably expressed its condemnation of the German action at the ICJ.
The horrific and chillingly inhumane events unfolding in Gaza and the occupied West Bank too, fully funded and armed by the US settler-colonial empire, serve as a reminder to us all that the dispossessed Palestinian people are paying the highest price for liberation from colonial occupation and terrorist violence.
The Palestinians are sacrificing their all for the unconditional freedom of the homeland, just as the heroic Vietnamese did during the brutal US war of occupation in the late 1960s and early 1970s when 4 million were obliterated. Gaza is teaching the world the ultimate values of self-sacrifice as the noblest of ethical and religious principles, embodied in doctors staying with seriously injured babies and the wounded even while being bombed, and journalists refusing to cower and withdraw while facing lethal bombs and bullets.
Further, UN Resolution 37 and 43, of December 3, 1982, “reaffirms the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle”.
Thus, Palestinians have an internationally legal right to resist Israeli colonial occupation and violence on indigenous Palestinian ancestral lands now dispossessed. Israel’s claim of its right to self-defence in light of Hamas’ actions of October 7 at the ICJ and repeatedly endorsed by the US, is illegitimate and rings hollow in the face of the UN Resolutions 37 and 43, since Israel is the occupying regime, not the victim of occupation.
The western capitalist world headed by the US empire needs to be ashamed for its obdurate refusal to withdraw its support for apartheid Israel.
Its consistent greed signified by Israel granting “exploration” licences to predatory oil conglomerates, BP, ENI, Dana Petroleum, Ratio Energies, NewMed Energy, and the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic, to loot the 32 billion feet of “natural gas” in Gaza’s waters, underscores that oil capitalism as championed by “western civilisation” is the greatest threat to life on Earth and sustainability given climate catastrophe today.
Western regimes need to change course urgently and side with the rapidly turning wheel of history, where decolonisation, liberation, and humanity prevail over colonialism, repression and inhumanity. Colonialism from 531 years ago can never prevail.
White minority rule in the world where the wealthiest fringe of the minority illegally, unrightfully, and hypocritically laud illegitimate domination and subjugation of the world’s majority peoples of colour has no place in the 21st century.
Capitalism and militarism interwoven with anti-Islamic Zionist racism and neo-colonialism will never last in a world where the vast impoverished majority seeks collective living in peace, dignity, and life in abundance, free from greed, impoverishment, deprivation; free and decent health care and education, gainful and fairly compensated employment, and the right to enjoy familial security – in Palestine, South Africa, and the world.
History is being written painfully in these catastrophic days and western colonialism’s hands are still dripping with blood.
It’s high time that it joined the family of humanity as co-equals and not as privileged ruling elites.