Palestine: stand or die

DANIEL SEIXO

Palestine was never an uninhabited desert, a land without a people, or an empty space on the world map waiting for its next conqueror. The history of Palestine does not begin with the Jewish colonization, nor is there a dispute over the territory beyond the Arab resistance to the Zionist occupation. Only by turning firmly away from the fallacies of propaganda and the gross manipulation of history, carried out with complete impunity for the past decades by Zionist lobbies, will we come to understand the situation in Palestine for what it really is: the attempt to colonization and forced displacement of the native population by the Zionist entity of Israel.

Imagine losing your home, your nation and your life. Imagine being born in an occupied land and being the daily prey of an Israeli soldier. Imagine the willpower and rebellion of a people that decides to resist year after year against an army willing to conquer the land that has belonged to them for countless generations. Imagine putting the dignity of resistance before daily pain and death, refusing to live on your knees or leave your homes. Imagine the value of a just cause silenced by the murmur of indifference. Only then, will they begin to be able to even minimally understand the Palestinian cause.

Let's not fool ourselves. Since the decision taken unilaterally by the Jewish community in May 1948, declaring the creation of the state of Israel, the only possible alternative for Zionism in Palestine was drawn in total war, the forced displacement and the genocide of the Arab and Muslim population. , which had been linked to that land in a fortunate way at least since the mid-seventh century.

The complicit British ambiguity, colonizing power after the Sykes-Picot Treaty, had allowed the creation of small groups of Zionist settlers, organized into firm paramilitary structures in charge of imposing their terms under the threat of terrorism. A strategy of political violence exercised not only against the Palestinian population, but also against the very interests of the British mandate. Supported by the United States and with the complicity of a Europe wishing to lose sight of as many Jews as possible, thus somehow managing to rid itself of the ghosts and responsibilities arising from WWII, the future Israel was born as a new colonialist company. An adventure based on the noise of guns, racial supremacism and a kind of holy war, which was nothing more than the opportune mask that would hide imperialist interests in the region under a fundamentalist narrative and the threat of terrorism.

During the initial war of 1948, what the Palestinian population calls the Nakba, the catastrophe, would take place. The Zionist army openly undertook a determined colonizing action aimed at the expulsion of more than half of the Arab population and the destruction of a large part of their villages and cities. During the military operations, about 750.000 Palestinians would be forced to leave their homes due to the threat and intimidation of the Zionist troops. In just a few months, more than 500 villages would be destroyed and entire urban neighborhoods in the main settlements would be emptied before the threat of military sieges aimed at persecuting and executing any hint of resistance among the local population. Through torture, rape, internment in concentration camps or outright summary murder, the Zionist Army would defeat an Arab resistance barely prepared for combat and thus achieve the objective of expelling the Palestinian population, creating a vital space for their own plans to occupy the territory.

After the so-called Arab-Israeli conflict, the Zionist expansion strategy, based on the gradual displacement of the local population and ethnic cleansing against any source of resistance, would continue its course hiding, under cynical offers of peace or fruitless negotiations, the project of colonization structured by the European Zionists for the construction of a profoundly fundamentalist "nation-State" on Palestinian territory. In the name of the suffering of the Jewish population at the hands of the Nazi regime, Zionism thus sought to appropriate a shared religious sentiment, with the sole objective of establishing a colonialist project based on the extermination of the entire indigenous population, which had previously it had already been dehumanized through Zionist propaganda, with the intention of facilitating as far as possible the genocidal enterprise essential for the achievement of the state of Israel.

After the events that took place in 1948, the Zionist entity assimilated in a particularly fundamentalist way the message that, despite the timid protests of the international community and the slight armed resistance of the Arab governments, victory on the battlefield would has granted unquestionable legitimacy to impregnate the criminal European colonialism on the Star of David, thus impurifying a common symbol of the Jews with the sole objective of carrying out on Palestinian territory the same strategy of threat, displacement and open genocide that little before the colonialist powers had implemented on the populations of the global South.

The Israeli ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population would adopt very different forms and strategies over time, but the idea of ​​displacement and the disappearance of the native population would be firmly marked over the years in the very need for survival of the state of Israel. Segregation, the systematic destruction of the local productive fabric and the creation of Arab ghettos disconnected from each other by militarized Zionist settlements, will structure the remains of Palestine. "unoccupied", as a system of guardianship based to some extent on South African apartheid. Today the Palestinian population faces its future between the hopelessness of the indifference of a large part of the world's governments and the conviction that victory lies in the firm determination of a people that decides to resist barbarism.

Jenin

The recent murder of nine Palestinians in Jenin, north of the occupied West Bank, brings to more than thirty those killed by the Zionist army in 2023, a grim balance of more than one Palestinian citizen murdered per day during the month of January. Among these murdered in cold blood, we can find the names of numerous elderly people and also children.

The large-scale incursion against this refugee camp began at dawn through the use of dozens of armored vehicles and snipers embedded in the Israel Defense Forces. Under the perennial excuse of neutralizing the Palestinian terrorist threat, the Zionist military operation was clearly intended to fan the flames of confrontation with the aim of provoking a Palestinian response to the unusual Zionist violence, which could allow Tel Aviv to launch a second phase of major offensive. harshness, with the intention of dissuading part of the local population that still resists, refusing to leave their homes.

In order for the Palestinian population to abandon the territory that to this day the "State of Israel" craves unsuccessfully, Zionism needs to force an armed response from the Palestinian population. Only by alluding to legitimate defense against Palestinian resistance can Israel maintain a weak mask of the legitimate use of force vis-à-vis the outside world. And it is here where Western complicity and indifference on the part of the international community play a certainly petty role.

The violent response by desperate young Palestinians against Zionist barbarism does not in any way fall under the definition of terrorism. In the image and likeness of the Algerian resistance against the French occupier or the Vietnamese determination against the American aggressor, the violent actions of the Palestinian people, in response to the Zionist incursions in their towns, cannot be classified in any other way than as a act of dignified and justified resistance against its colonizer. The struggle of the Palestinian people against the occupation and the forced displacement of its population responds to an axis of resistance morally similar to the one that the European Jews themselves exercised at the time against Nazi barbarism. Thus clearly identifying Zionism as the only aggressor.

We must remember, at this point, that it has been the Zionist entity itself that has historically positioned its own civilian population as an integral part of its own colonial project and the genocidal enterprise linked to it. The proliferation of militarized settlements, the use of Zionist settlers as a spearhead to intimidate the Arab population with the sole objective of making them leave their homes through armed violence or sabotage of their productive sectors, and impunity for the atrocities committed during the repeated pogroms against the Palestinian population, which even claim the lives of children like Ali Dawabsha, 18 months old, make us, from an anti-imperialist commitment and the search for a definitive resolution of this conflict, only contemplate and analyze the acts of the Palestinian resistance in the same way that we would with the actions of the National Liberation Army (ELN) during the Algerian War of Independence or the Vietcong operatives during the War for the liberation of Vietnam.

There is no room for understanding between the colonizer and the colonized, nor a truce or possible pact for those who have historically verified how Zionist territorial ambitions can only be definitively realized through the gradual establishment of a Jewish state on Palestinian territory. The forced displacement of the Arab population and the resort to ethnic cleansing at any hint of resistance show that, far from the narrative of negotiation or the search for a peaceful solution cynically shown by Israel to the world, there has never been any possibility of coexistence under the two-state solution. This mirage has never been anything other than a deception elaborated and implemented to avoid international pressure, while the Zionist troops and the projection of illegal settlements imposed the bloody reality of a genocide in stages on the Palestinian people.

Only the absolute eradication of the Zionist colonialist project in the Palestinian territory and the reparation of the damage caused by the Israeli population against the Arab population can open the door to a peaceful solution under the banner of a Palestinian state that encompasses the entirety of its territory. historical. Meanwhile, demanding the end of the resistance or the cessation of the use of violence as a legitimate defense against its colonizer by the Palestinian people, is nothing other than siding with the aggressor against the attacked. Only frontal and determined support for the Palestinian cause can prevent the achievement of genocide by the Zionist entity.

Daniel Seixo He is a sociologist and journalist.

 

DANIEL SEIXO

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