BY Carlos L. Garrido The US “socialist” left currently playing the bothsides-ism game with Israeli genocide of Palestinians in the name of some bullshit notion of ‘nuance,’ must remember the words of Howard Zinn: “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.”

 

Nothing is accomplished with an abstract support of Palestine when it’s convenient. It is when the empire’s ideological apparatuses are pumping out atrocity propaganda to dehumanize Palestinian anti-colonial resistance that support for Palestinian freedom struggles count.

The recent events have shown who is willing to stand for Palestine in the concrete, when the people grab arms to throw off their occupying force. “Decolonization,” as the great Frantz Fanon noted, “is always a violent phenomenon.”

If your purity fetish requests a bloodless anti-colonial revolution, you’ll be doomed to always condemning freedom movements of colonized peoples. You’ll be chained to playing the role of the defenders of empire from the ‘left’. Your ‘siding’ with the oppressed will always be conditioned by their being oppressed; you’ll be with them only insofar as they’re the victim, but never when they fight back and become an emancipatory force.

The Western left’s treatment of violence, like everything else, is abstract. It is unable to distinguish between particular forms of violence, between the ever-present violence of the oppressor, and the emancipatory violence of the oppressed. As Maximillien Robespierre noted, to equate the violence of the people’s struggle for freedom to the violence of their exploitative and oppressive rulers is as folly and empty as saying that “the sword that gleams in the hands of the heroes of liberty resembles that with which the henchmen of tyranny are armed.”

The key issue here is violence by whom, against whom, and towards what ends. The Palestinian uprising is a legitimate, self-defensive, violence of a people against an apartheid occupational state. It is the violence of the colonized, against the colonizers, for freedom. It is a violence that has been taken up as the last resort in a long struggle against Zionist colonialism. It is the only route the colonizers have left for Palestinians to fight for their freedom. Violence, as Fidel Castro noted, is the route the oppressors force on the people, it is taken up when all other means of struggle have been exhausted. We must remember the words of Paulo Frieri, “Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed.”

But their struggle for freedom is not limited to Palestinians. A defeat of Israel, the US empire’s outpost in the so-called Middle East – the “baby child of imperialism in the Middle East” as Kwame Ture said – would be a victory for all of humanity.

A defeat of empire in any corner of the earth, as Che Guevara noted, must be celebrated cheerfully by every communist, every person driven by a deep love of humanity. The imperialists hate humanity; their capitalist system undermines, as Marx had noted, the “original sources of all wealth – the soil and the worker.” The Palestinian struggle against the racist Israeli colonial US-outpost is a struggle for humanity – for the exploited and oppressed across the earth. It is a struggle for life, a struggle against the Israeli imperialist death machine.

Paradoxically, a Palestinian victory would be the conditions for the possibility of current Israeli settlers experiencing real freedom. As the Peruvian indigenous politician Dionisio Yupanqui says in his 1810 speech to the Cortes de Cádiz, “a people that oppresses another cannot be free.” The Israeli settlers cannot be free, cannot experience genuine human autonomy, insofar as their existence necessitates the oppression and extermination of Palestinian people. In their oppression of the Palestinian they stifle their capacity to live fully human lives. As Plato had long ago noted, injustice against an other corrupts the soul; the worst evil we can be inflicted with is that which we do to ourselves when we harm others. A society predicated on such disdain and obliteration of its “other” destroys itself from within. Like Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Israel’s sins against the Palestinians are making a monstrosity out of the soul of its people.

Palestinian freedom must be acquired, in the words of Malcolm X, “by any means necessary.” A victorious Palestinian struggle is in the interests of all of humanity – of all working and oppressed peoples of the world.

US socialists must stand, as some comrades have been doing, with the Palestinian struggle for freedom. We must push back against Zionist genocidal efforts, and those echoed by our morally hollow capitalist politicians.

It is difficult to imagine that Israeli intelligence was truly caught by surprise. It is plausible to suspect that they have allowing events to play out so that they may intensify their genocidal war against Palestine while using atrocity propaganda to legitimize their efforts.

This does not change, however, the fact that Palestinians are up in arms fighting for their freedom. Neither does it change the fact that, like all hubris-filled Goliaths, this apartheid-colonial state – as we currently know it – may fall.

Humanity sees itself in the struggle of the Palestinians.

Because this great humanity has said: Enough! and has started walking. And their march of giants will no longer stop until they achieve true independence, for which they have already died more than once in vain. Now, in any case, those who will die, will die like those of Cuba, those of Playa Girón, will die for their only, true, inalienable independence! – Che Guevara

 

 

Carlos L. Garrido is a philosophy teacher at Southern Illinois University, Director at the Midwestern Marx Institute, and author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (Forthcoming 2024).

https://countercurrents.org/2023/10/the-us-left-must-unwaveringly-stand-for-palestinian-freedom/

 

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 Originally published in MidWestern Marx

 

 

BY Gideon Levy

 

Opinion | 

Israel Can’t Imprison Two Million Gazans Without Paying a Cruel Price

 

 

Behind all this lies Israeli arrogance; the idea that we can do whatever we like, that we’ll never pay the price and be punished for it. We’ll carry on undisturbed.

 

We’ll arrest, kill, harass, dispossess and protect the settlers busy with their pogroms. We'll visit Joseph’s Tomb, Othniel’s Tomb and Joshua’s Altar in the Palestinian territories, and of course the Temple Mount – over 5,000 Jews on Sukkot alone.

 

 

We’ll fire at innocent people, take out people’s eyes and smash their faces, expel, confiscate, rob, grab people from their beds, carry out ethnic cleansing and of course continue with the unbelievable siege of the Gaza Strip, and everything will be all right.

 

 

We’ll build a terrifying obstacle around Gaza – the underground wall alone cost 3 billion shekels ($765 million) – and we’ll be safe. We’ll rely on the geniuses of the army's 8200 cyber-intelligence unit and on the Shin Bet security service agents who know everything. They’ll warn us in time.

 

 

• Israel's leaders have been eternally judged. What are they thinking now?
• Israel must first bring home its own
• With each round of fighting in Gaza, more 'collateral damage,' and more futility

We’ll transfer half an army from the Gaza border to the Hawara border in the West Bank, only to protect far-right lawmaker Zvi Sukkot and the settlers. And everything will be all right, both in Hawara and at the Erez crossing into Gaza.

 

 

It turns out that even the world's most sophisticated and expensive obstacle can be breached with a smoky old bulldozer when the motivation is great. This arrogant barrier can be crossed by bicycle and moped despite the billions poured into it and all the famous experts and fat-cat contractors.

 

The Gaza Palestinians are willing to pay any price for a moment of freedom. Will Israel learn its lesson? No. 

We thought we’d continue to go down to Gaza, scatter a few crumbs in the form of tens of thousands of Israeli work permits – always contingent on good behavior – and still keep them in prison. We’ll make peace with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and the Palestinians will be forgotten until they’re erased, as quite a few Israelis would like.

 

 

We’ll keep holding thousands of Palestinian prisoners, sometimes without trial, most of them political prisoners. And we won’t agree to discuss their release even after they've been in prison for decades.

 

 

We’ll tell them that only by force will their prisoners see freedom. We thought we would arrogantly keep rejecting any attempt at a diplomatic solution, only because we don’t want to deal with all that, and everything would continue that way forever.

 

 

Once again it was proved that this isn’t how it is. A few hundred armed Palestinians breached the barrier and invaded Israel in a way no Israeli imagined was possible. A few hundred people proved that it’s impossible to imprison 2 million people forever without paying a cruel price.

 

Just as the smoky old Palestinian bulldozer tore through the world’s smartest barrier Saturday, it tore away at Israel’s arrogance and complacency. And that’s also how it tore away at the idea that it’s enough to occasionally attack Gaza with suicide drones – and sell them to half the world – to maintain security.

 

On Saturday, Israel saw pictures it has never seen before. Palestinian vehicles patrolling its cities, bike riders entering through the Gaza gates. These pictures tear away at that arrogance. The Gaza Palestinians have decided they’re willing to pay any price for a moment of freedom. Is there any hope in that? No. Will Israel learn its lesson? No.

 

On Saturday they were already talking about wiping out entire neighborhoods in Gaza, about occupying the Strip and punishing Gaza “as it has never been punished before.” But Israel hasn’t stopped punishing Gaza since 1948, not for a moment.

 

After 75 years of abuse, the worse possible scenario awaits it once again. The threats of “flattening Gaza” prove only one thing: We haven’t learned a thing. The arrogance is here to stay, even though Israel is paying a high price once again.

 

 

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bears very great responsibility for what happened, and he must pay the price, but it didn’t start with him and it won’t end after he goes. We now have to cry bitterly for the Israeli victims, but we should also cry for Gaza.

 

Gaza, most of whose residents are refugees created by Israel. Gaza, which has never known a single day of freedom.

 

https://archive.md/oKPo9#selection-827.0-1295.114

 

 

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After an Israeli reserve soldier named David Ben Zion told a reporter Palestinian militants “cut [off] heads of babies,” Biden, Netanyahu, and the international media amplified the dubious claim.The Grayzone has identified Ben Zion as a fanatical settler leader who incited riots by demanding a Palestinian town be “wiped out.”

An international outcry erupted when Israel’s Foreign Ministry announced that Palestinian militants from the besieged Gaza Strip had killed 40 “babies,” and beheaded several of them during an incursion into Kfar Aza, a kibbutz on the Gaza border. President Joseph Biden repeated the inflammatory claim during an October 10 White House Rose Garden address, while networks across the West carried the story without a shred of critical scrutiny.

According to CNN correspondent Nic Robertson, apparently citing Israeli military sources, Palestinian militants carried out, “ISIS-style executions,” in which they were “cutting the heads off of people,” including babies and pets. 

The Grayzone has now identified a key source of the claim that Palestinian militants beheaded Israeli babies. He is David Ben Zion, a Deputy Commander of Unit 71 of the Israeli army who also happens to be an extremist settler leader who incited violent riots against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank earlier this year.

In an October 10 interview with reporter Nicole Zedek of the Israeli state-sponsored i24 network, Ben Zion stated, “We walked door to door, we killed a lot of terrorists. They are very bad. They cut heads of children, they cut heads of women. But we are stronger than them.” 

He added, “We know that they are animals,” referring to Palestinians, “but we found that they don’t have any heart.”

Hours after his interview with i24, still in the village of Kfar Aza, a uniformed Ben Zion could be seen repeatedly grinning ear-to-ear in a video posted to his Facebook – an odd disposition for a supposed witness to the methodical butchering of babies.

Earlier that day, i24’s Zedek declared during a live report from Kfar Aza, “About 40 babies were taken out on gurneys… Cribs overturned, strollers left behind, doors left wide open.’” Zedek’s report has been viewed tens of millions of times on Twitter and promoted by Israel’s Foreign Ministry – which underwrites her network.

Hours later, she qualified her statement, stating, “Soldiers told me they believe 40 babies/children were killed. The exact death toll is still unknown as the military continues to go house to house and find more Israeli casualties.”

Yet the unverified tale quickly made its way to the highest levels of leadership, as if by design. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s spokesman stated unequivocally that babies and toddlers were found with their “heads decapitated,” while President Joe Biden himself vaguely gestured towards “stomach-churning reports of babies being killed.”

Likewise, cable news has flown into a frenzy, breathlessly reporting the story despite the IDF walking back its initial confirmation.

Meanwhile, some reporters who initially carried the official Israeli allegations about beheaded babies began issuing qualifications of their own. 

Oren Ziv, an Israeli reporter who joined the military’s official tour of Kfar Aza, commented on Twitter, “I’m getting a lot of question about the reports of ‘Hamas beheaded babies’ that were published after the media tour in the village. During the tour we didn’t see any evidence of this, and the army spokesperson or commanders also didn’t mention any such incidents.”

So who is the source behind the explosive claim? 

David Ben Zion, is a leader of the Shomron Regional Council of 35 illegal West Bank settlements who called this year for the Palestinian village of Huwara to be “wiped out.”

“Enough talk about building and strengthening the settlements,” Ben David said in a Twitter post on February 26, 2023. The deterrence that was lost must return now, there’s no room for mercy.”

Ben David was quoted in Israeli media proclaiming soon after, “The village of Huwara should be wiped out, this place is a nest of terror and the punishment should be for everyone,” a clear call for the collective punishment of Palestinians.

Ben David’s tweet was ‘liked’ on Twitter by Israel’s-then Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a move which prompted 22 legal scholars to call on the Attorney General to open an investigation into the official for “inducing war crimes.” When Smotrich later echoed Ben David, calling to “wipe out” Huwara the following month, the US Department of State condemned his rhetoric as “dangerous.”

The village of Huwara was at the time the target of violent rioting by settlers operating under Ben David’s watch. Following the settler assault on the town, which resulted in the torching of scores of homes and vehicles, as well as injuries to locals, Hamas characterized the attack as a “declaration of war.”

 

But Ben David’s call for collective punishment in Huwara was far from his only genocidal imprecation against Palestinians. Indeed, he has used his social media accounts to repeatedly call for war crimes as well as the “deportation of the [Palestinian] masses.”

“The Palestinian people… [are] an enemy,” Ben David wrote in 2016. “We can’t change their barbaric DNA.”

During his failed campaign for the Israeli Knesset in 2021 with the pro-settler Jewish Home party, Ben David described his mission as follows: ”I am committed to the task of restoring the political home of religious Zionism.”

Lead member of Israel’s apocalyptic Temple movement

Ben David appears to have been at the forefront of settler extremism for years. He was photographed in 2015 (below) holding a microphone for the fanatical settler ideologue Noam Livnat, a self-described “radical right-wing messianist.”

 

READ MORE:

https://thegrayzone.com/2023/10/11/beheaded-israeli-babies-settler-wipe-out-palestinian/

 

 

 

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Western virtue signaling goes hypersonic over IsraelWith all the rhetoric bluster and warmongering coming from the EU and US, it’s clear that peace isn’t their first priority BY RACHEL MARSDEN 

“Israel has the right to defend itself – today and in the days to come. The European Union stands with Israel,” tweeted European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Sunday. With that, she effectively blessed a carte blanche response by the notoriously measured and restrained Israeli leadership in response to the Hamas attacks.

“Who do you think you are? You’re unelected, and have no authority to determine EU foreign policy, which is set by @EUCouncil,” replied Irish MEP Clare Daly. “Europe does NOT ‘stand with Israel’. We stand for peace. You do not speak for us. If you’ve nothing constructive to say, and you clearly don't, shut up.” 

In a single tweet, von der Leyen managed to position all of Europe as more militant than even the editorial staff of one of Israel’s main national newspapers, Haaretz, which placed blame for the attacks squarely on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, accusing him of “annexation and dispossession” which “openly ignored the existence and rights of Palestinians.” The implication is that no action occurs in a vacuum absent the risk of sparking a reaction.

The danger of Europe’s unelected Queen Ursula unilaterally launching hypersonic virtue signaling missiles in a knee-jerk emotional response is that it can’t possibly substitute for foreign policy decided in more sobering moments. Yet these days, more often than not, it’s the only kind of foreign policy we get, on everything from Israel to Ukraine. 

In yet another example of symbolism getting ahead of policy pragmatism, the EU announced withdrawal of its support for Palestine … before walking back the move just hours later. On Monday, Israel’s defense minister announced that the IDF was going to blockade Gaza even more than usual by preventing any entry of water, food, fuel, and electricity. And just a couple hours later, EU Neighborhood and Enlargement Commissioner Oliver Varhelyi said the bloc was joining the cause – by withholding its humanitarian funding for the Palestinian people. Germany and Austria were the first to get the ball rolling on funding withdrawal. However, a few hours later, the EU aid freeze was reversed by the bloc’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, after an apparent epiphany that it would only end up “punishing all the Palestinian people” and would have “only further emboldened terrorists.” There’s no way Brussels may have been inadvertently funding those terrorists in the first place, is there?

Brussels has given $2.5 billion in direct budget support to the Palestinian Authority over 12 years from 2008, and recently said it would send some $1.24 billion from 2021 to 2024. The funding wasn’t even reduced or cut off – only held for a few months in 2021-2022, then released without preconditions – when watchdogs alleged that Palestinian school textbooks had anti-Semitic content promoting and glorifying terrorism. And now Israel’s foreign ministry is pointing the finger at Brussels. “The European Union was financing textbooks of the Palestinian authorities that were full of antisemitism and incitement for violence and terrorism against Jews,” Israeli Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesman Lior Haiat said earlier this week.

When the issue was first raised, the EU commissioner in charge at the time met with the Israeli foreign minister in Brussels and basically said, look, we’ll just make sure that doesn’t happen again – and passed a resolution to that effect. There were also NGO watchdog reports released earlier this month accusing Brussels of financing grants that ended up in the hands of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which the EU considers to be a terrorist group.

It was just earlier this year, back in February, that the EU announced another over $300 million for the Palestinian people in the presence of President Mahmoud Abbas – funding for salaries, pensions, health care, and things like “climate-smart agri business,” and “green competitiveness,” And now, suddenly, Brussels officials appear to be wondering, “Hey wait, did we fund Hamas … maybe?” Because that’s what their actions seem to be suggesting. Otherwise what’s the problem with continuing to help the Palestinian people?

Or maybe, given all the climate-conscious verbiage attached to the aid, the EU just got angry that Hamas’ hang gliders were motorized. You just know that some egghead in Brussels is watching coverage of all the gas guzzling pickup trucks used by Hamas to raid villages and kidnap people and asking, “What’s the carbon footprint on those?”

All the virtue signaling in the world can’t now compensate for a lack of due diligence that the schizophrenic withdrawal and subsequent reinstatement of Palestinian funding suggests. It wouldn’t be the first time that innocent people suffered because of Brussels’ incompetence. Just ask the people of the entire European bloc currently facing seemingly endless economic hardship so their leaders can keep patting themselves on the back for supporting Ukraine.

And just like in Ukraine, Brussels doesn’t seem too interested in availing itself of an opportunity to play any kind of a mitigating or thoughtful role amid this conflict, but is rather taking its usual seat in riding shotgun to the US neocons on whatever the current thing happens to be. 

While even Secretary of State Antony Blinken says that there’s no “smoking gun” tying Iran to the latest Hamas attacks, that hasn’t stopped the usual neocon warmongers on the American side of the Transatlantic alliance from substituting sloganeering for actual policy, either – in favor of Iranian regime change, of course. “This is one of history’s best cases for regime change,” said former US National Security Advisor John Bolton. Because, when it comes to drumming up Iranian regime change, neocons are suddenly willing to take Hamas’ word to the bank as their trustworthy source for Iran’s involvement. “The Biden Administration should get a spine and pin the blame on Tehran where it belongs,” Bolton later added. It “belongs,” facts and policy be damned, because it fits the radical neocon narrative, even if it ends up being to the detriment of American lives and interests. 

“It is long past time for the Iranian terrorist state to pay a price for all the upheaval and destruction being sown throughout the region and world,” chimed in Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). Somehow, these warmongers never manage to notice the interventionist sponsorship role long played by Washington and the West that has arguably interfered with all these Middle Eastern neighbors working things out amongst each other.  

Blustery rhetoric in the heat of crisis is cheap for the Western armchair generals, but potentially expensive for countless others. They shoot off their mouths with little regard to the knock-on effects in the interests of appeasing allies and supporters. And it’s in these desperate moments, when reason risks taking a backseat to emotion, that they have the best chance of imposing their potentially catastrophic agenda.

https://www.rt.com/news/584663-israel-warmongering-us-brussels/

 

 

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