Palestine will continue to be the problem

SAWSAN MADINA

Israel and the United States can bomb us, murder our scientists, starve our children, imprison our leaders, change our governments… and Palestine will still be the problem.

Does anyone believe that bombing Iran is really intended to bring peace to the Middle East? For more than 30 years, we've been told that "Iran is about to make a nuclear bomb." Iran was bombed because it has always supported the Palestinian cause and is the only non-client state left in the Middle East. Avigail Abarbanel writes in his article: Lies, Lies & More Lies (Lies, Lies, and More Lies): "Israel fears Iran, but not for its nuclear program. Iran has been the only major player on the world stage to call Zionism the colonialist program it is and to repeatedly denounce Israel's plan to eliminate all Palestinian presence in historic Palestine." He asserts that "Israel's aggression toward Iran is not about security, but about maintaining the psychological framework that allows genocide to be recast as 'self-defense.'"

I listen to an ABC reporter question an "expert" about regime change in Iran because of that country's human rights record, and I wonder if she's ignorant or pretending to be. Since when has the West brought us regime change because it cares about our human rights? If so, why hasn't the regime in Saudi Arabia changed?

Abarbanel writes in the aforementioned article:

“Many stories have been published in the West about religious oppression in Iran and the situation of women there. It would be interesting to see what the Western media reports when, in the not-too-distant future, Israel itself becomes a religious state. I haven't seen a single report in our press about the fact that there are places in Israel where bus drivers continue to force women to sit in the back of buses so as not to offend religious men, despite the Israeli Supreme Court having outlawed this practice. In any case, the nature of the Iranian state is not the reason why Israel is now indiscriminately bombing it with the direct help of the United States. That, too, is a lie.”

Israel and the United States attack Iran, a sovereign nation, in flagrant violation of international law, and politicians tell us that Iran, which does not possess a nuclear bomb, poses a threat to Israel, a nuclear-armed state, and that Israel has the right to self-defense. As Greg Barnes says in Bombing Iran a clear breach of international law (Bombing Iran is a clear violation of international law): "Neoconservatives and liberal internationalists, to justify their war crimes in Iraq in the first decade of this century, invented the idea of ​​anticipatory self-defense. It is intellectually untenable because it means that any nation can decide that another is a threat and therefore invade it. But it is a concept that the usual suspects trot out again to justify Israel's behavior."

I watch politicians talk about Iran's failure to engage in diplomacy and wonder where they were when the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal, negotiated under Obama by the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia, China, and Germany, was signed. Where were they when Trump withdrew the United States from the agreement in 2018? Where were they when Israel attacked Iran while the latter was negotiating a new nuclear deal with the United States? And tonight I heard Andrew Hastie, the acting opposition foreign affairs spokesman, declare on ABC News that "anyone who talks about a rules-based world order is really being nostalgic." Welcome to the brave new world.

A few days after Israel attacked Iran, Daniel Levy wrote in "America First or Israel First? Will Trump Join Netanyahu's War on Iran?" «It is not surprising that, in the context of Israel's latest "war without alternative," it has attacked and wreaked havoc in civilian areas of Iran. In yet another unprovoked Israeli war of aggression, the starting point is that there is no international law or distinction between combatants and civilians (which is not to say that Israel's adversaries adhere to such norms, but they are sanctioned by the West, while Israel has a free hand). Israel itself coined the term "Dahiya doctrine" (named after the Beirut suburb) to describe the crime of terrorizing urban civilians. That doctrine is now being applied to Tehran.»

The buzzword these days seems to be "peace through strength." Millions of Arabs and Iranians in the Middle East will interpret it differently. Born in the cradle of civilization, but treated as uncivilized, with their countries considered death camps for testing the latest military weapons, their lands stolen, and their resources plundered, they will interpret "Peace through strength" as "Surrender through bombing." And they will continue to seek "Freedom through resistance."

Suppose the United States and Israel, along with their complicit Western allies, manage to bomb Iran into submission, change its regime, and install their own puppet regime. So what? Will this bring security to Israel and peace to the Middle East? Of course not. Palestine will remain the problem.

Israel may achieve hegemony and, together with the United States, seize the region's resources, but as long as Palestinians are denied human rights, it will be surrounded by 500 million people revolting against the injustice of it all. Israel may normalize its relations with all the puppet regimes in the Middle East, but the Arab and Iranian streets will not forget the children massacred in Gaza, the Palestinians tortured in Sde Teiman (Israel), the women giving birth at checkpoints, and the Palestinian villages burned to the ground. The 1948 Nakba remains etched in the soul of every Palestinian. I am not Palestinian, and the Nakbas, both old and new, are etched in my soul. And, like most people in the region, I feel nothing but profound contempt for the Arab regimes. Israeli donor Miriam Adelson paid Trump $100 million. In return, he moved the US embassy to Jerusalem, withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal, and gifted Israel the Golan Heights. Gulf rulers paid him billions of dollars to protect them from his own people.

Decades ago, only historians, geopolitical specialists, and those of us who came from the region and had read Ilan Pappé and Robert Fisk knew the full extent of Israel's crimes against Palestinians. Today, anyone with a cell phone can see what Israel is doing. Paid journalists can remain silent, reframe, distort, or lie, but the world can see for itself the dehumanization, siege, starvation, and carnage. Complicit politicians can recite their mantra "Israel has the right to defend itself," but people have stopped listening. They are watching the ethnic cleansing and extermination in real time.

Decades of internationally backed impunity for Israel's crimes against Palestinians, of endless wars and regime changes in the Middle East by the United States, of countless assassinations by Israel, have not brought security to Israel or peace to the region. It is an illusion to think they can. Until Palestinians have equal rights in their homeland, Palestine will remain the problem and the region will continue to burn.

Sawsan Madina She is an Egyptian-born Australian journalist. She was a director of the Australian public television station SBS, which serves ethnic communities.

This article was originally published in English on the Australian portal Pearls and Irritations.