Answering the U.S./Israeli lies
The world is horrified at Palestinians being massacred in Gaza by Israel using U.S. bombs and shells. Entire families have been exterminated, with 5,000 children murdered. Another 80 Palestinians were killed on Nov. 18 when Israel bombed Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp.
These war crimes included Israeli tanks attacking Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest medical facility. Israeli soldiers fired upon doctors.
The World Health Organization described the carnage as a “death zone.” Thirty-two babies remained there in extremely critical condition.
The total death toll in Gaza by Nov. 17 is over 12,000. Meanwhile, Israeli settlers and soldiers are on a shooting spree on the West Bank, with at least 205 Palestinians killed there.
Within the United States — the center of world capitalism and political reaction — a movement in defense of Palestine has swept the country. Three hundred thousand people demonstrated in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 4 while multiple protests are happening daily, often in smaller communities. Many Jewish people have joined these anti-racist actions.
President Biden and both the Democratic and Republican parties continue to oppose a ceasefire. They insist that the killing of Palestinians continue.
The response of the capitalist media and politicians to the growing anti-war movement is always the same. They demandingly ask:
What about Hamas? What about the Oct. 7 attacks and killings of Israeli “civilians”? What about the hostages?
All these questions are misdirections meant to justify the bloody war on Gaza. Here are the facts.
Resistance is justified
1.) Oppressed people have a right to fight for their freedom. They pick their own leaders and organizations. The Islamic Resistance Movement, also known as Hamas, is the elected government of Gaza.
The attacks on Hamas as being “Islamist” are bigotry. Two billion human beings are Muslims. The attacks on Hamas are similar to the attacks on Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam.
2.) For 75 years, the Palestinian people have been driven from their homeland. The majority of Gaza’s population are refugees or descendants of refugees from the rest of Palestine.
The Great March of Return
3.) The corporate media has been silent about the 2018-19 Great March of Return. Thousands of unarmed Palestinians marched up to the fences that surround Gaza and prevent them from returning to their homes.
The protesters were also demanding an end to the Israeli economic blockade of Gaza that began in 2005. Israeli snipers responded to these protests by killing 266 Palestinians.
Forty-six of those killed were children. Another 8,000 were wounded with live ammunition, part of the over 36,000 who were injured. A single Israeli soldier was given a one-month prison sentence for the “unauthorized shooting” of a 14-year-old boy who was killed.
The Oct. 7 offensive
4.) The Al-Aqsa Flood offensive that began Oct. 7 consisted of not only Hamas but also other Palestinian resistance organizations. Among them is the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, whose founder, Dr. George Habash, was a revolutionary socialist.
This fightback was named after the famous Al-Aqsa mosque in Al-Quds (Jerusalem), which has been under attack by Zionist settlers and police.
5.) Despite unlimited backing from the Pentagon, the Zionist State could barely cope with the Al-Aqsa offensive. Their billion-dollar system of ghetto walls, automated machine guns, and sensors was overwhelmed by the Palestinian freedom fighters.
The Al-Aqsa Flood is reminiscent of the 1968 Tet offensive by Vietnamese liberation forces. It completely surprised the oppressors, both in Israel and at the Pentagon.
Some of the Palestinian freedom fighters used hang gliders to leap over the apartheid barriers. As Dr. Huey P. Newton — the founder of the Black Panther Party — said, “The power of the people is greater than the man’s technology.”
Biden and Netanyahu lie
6.) Both U.S. President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shamelessly lie about the Al-Aqsa Flood offensive. Biden even claimed he saw pictures of Israeli children who had been beheaded, a whopper that the White House had to retract.Netanyahu tried to use a picture of a burnt Israeli baby, which was actually created by artificial intelligence (AI). The latest Zionist falsehood is that an elevator shaft at Al-Shifa hospital is a secret “Hamas tunnel.”
7.) No proof has been offered for the lurid stories of the Palestinian freedom fighters committing rapes. This is the stuff used to mobilize lynch mobs. It aims to justify the mass killing of Palestinian adults, children, and babies.
Political prisoners are also hostages
8.) Two hundred forty prisoners were taken during the Al-Aqsa offensive. The media calls them hostages. They were taken so they could be exchanged for Palestinian political prisoners, which numbered 4,500 as of June.
Since the beginning of the Al-Aqsa offensive, another 2,000 Palestinians have been detained. They are being jailed under “administrative detention“ without trial or charge. Torture is routine.
9.) Israeli authorities have lowered the number of Israelis killed to 1,200. They admit that 340 were soldiers. Many of the colonial settlers — whom the U.S. media call civilians — were killed by the so-called friendly fire of Zionist troops.
Yasmin Porat, a 44-year-old mother of three, told how Israeli forces fired indiscriminately at both the Palestinian fighters and their Israeli prisoners. “They eliminated everyone, including the hostages,” she told Israeli radio. “There was very, very heavy crossfire” and even tank shelling, she said.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz also reported that Israeli tanks and helicopters fired on Israelis. The Palestinian fighters, on the other hand, wanted to take as many prisoners alive as possible to exchange them for jailed Palestinians.
Remember Attica
10.) The Israeli military’s willingness to kill their own to prevent prisoner exchanges is in line with its “Hannibal doctrine,” a slur for the great African general. This directive calls for the use of “maximum force” to prevent any Israeli soldiers or civilians from being captured, even if this results in the death of Israelis.
The “Hannibal doctrine” is no different than what happened at Attica prison in 1971. New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller had his state police open fire on the prisoners even though guards would be killed as well.
Rockefeller did this so he wouldn’t have to come to an agreement with the prisoners who were demanding human rights. The media then spread the story, later debunked, that prisoners had cut the guards’ throats.
Never forget the Nakba
11.) The colonial settler state of Israel was born In 1948 with 800,000 Palestinians forced out of their homes and 531 villages destroyed. Eighty-five percent of Palestinians were displaced.
Fifteen thousand were murdered during what Palestinians call the Nakba, which is Arabic for catastrophe.
Over 100 Palestinians were killed in Deir Yassin by Zionist terror gangs on April 9, 1948.
Malcolm X and Che visited the Gaza ghetto
12.) Malcolm X said, “The Zionist argument to justify Israel’s present occupation of Arab Palestine has no intelligent or legal basis in history.” Malcolm X went to Gaza in 1964 and saw the wretched conditions there.
Gaza is today the world’s biggest prison, with 2.3 million inhabitants.
Che Guevara visited Gaza on a solidarity mission in 1959.
Apartheid Israel
13.) The Zionist state is an apartheid regime. An apartheid wall separates Palestinians living in the Bantustans on the West Bank from their sisters and brothers within the pre-1967 borders of Israel.
Israel even has a system of segregated highways. Israelis and Palestinians have different color license plates, which determine what roads Arabs can travel on.
It’s for these reasons that Nelson Mandela, in a 1997 speech, declared, “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.” Just as Palestinians are labeled “terrorists,” Nelson Mandela was on the U.S. government’s terrorist watch list until 2008.
A racist sewer
14.) Israel continues to be a racist cesspool. Former Israeli Minister of Heritage Amichay Eliyahu called for dropping an atomic bomb on Gaza. The thousands of bombs dropped on Gaza have twice the explosive power of the atomic bomb that incinerated Hiroshima.
“We are fighting animals,” declared Zionist Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, referring to the people of Gaza. The Israeli daily newspaper Hayom stated the time had come to “send Gaza back into the Stone Age.”
15.) None of these crimes would be possible without the Pentagon’s support and $260 billion in U.S. aid. This isn’t charity. Israel is ready to intervene to preserve Big Oil’s rule in Western Asia.
For Wall Street as well as older colonial powers like Britain and France — whose immense wealth began with the African Holocaust — Israel represents the open colonial rule that they want to restore.
Solidarity Forever includes Palestine
16.) The wave of solidarity worldwide with Palestine is becoming a material force. While it took years to build an anti-war movement to stop the Vietnam War, support for Palestine has already reached millions.
Palestine is also a working-class issue. Mark Diamondstein, the 200,000-strong American Postal Workers Union president, knows that.
At a recent AFL-CIO executive council meeting, Diamondstein, who is Jewish, urged the council to demand a ceasefire. All of labor should support the APWU president.
Solidarity Forever means solidarity with Gaza. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!
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