Last May 4 a lethal Israeli missile attack against 350 targets in the Gaza Strip left over 25 dead, over 140 injured and many houses destroyed. This is the worst attack since the Israeli invasion of 2014. More than ever, we need international mobilization to stop the genocide of the Palestinian people.
The images that show Mahmud Abu Arar carrying the dead body of his 16 month-old daughter in his arms on the way to her funeral, or the images of the missile that destroys a building of several floors as if it were made of paper in the blink of an eye traveled the world. Images of the horror that 2 million Palestinians live in that open air prison that the Gaza Strip is today, where more than half the population is unemployed, basic services such as electricity and water are seriously damaged and even traditional fishing is prohibited by the Israeli blockade.
The bombings of houses, that left over 60 destroyed and more than 500 with various degrees of damage, have been qualified as “legitimate military targets” by Israeli army colonel Jonathan Conricus, who justified these attacks by explaining that those were the homes of different chiefs of the Gaza militia.
As we write these lines, there is a ceasefire in place with the mediation of Egypt and Qatar. Tension is growing, putting the conflict on the brink of an armed conflict, similar or worse than the Israeli invasion in 2014.
The Zionist attack: a response to Palestinian resistance
The new attack was a response to the launching of 690 missiles from Gaza by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, following the violent repression that left 4 Palestinians dead and 51 wounded, including many children, last May 3 at the 57th Friday of protest, of what is known as “The Great Return March” on the border with Israel.
The Israeli fury that, with the excuse of fighting the Gaza militias, unloaded its missiles on the civilian population, included, for the first time in many years, a selective assassination, the murder of Ahmed Judari, who is accused by the Zionist intelligence agency of transferring funds from Iran to the Gaza Strip. He was killed when a missile hit his vehicle.
The resurgence of Zionist violence must be understood as a response to an increasing resistance of the Palestinian people, which has not stopped mobilizing in Gaza every Friday to defy the repression of Zionist snipers, who have already claimed the lives of 270 since the protest began.
The defensive military response, though totally disproportionate in relation to the tremendous firepower that Israel has, managed to get a significant percentage of the launched rockets to cross the anti-missile system called “iron dome”. Some of them impacted in populated areas, causing the deaths of four Israelis, and thousands of settlers had to take refuge in anti-aircraft bunkers.
The Zionist monster is no longer fully armored
The other element to consider in this escalation of the conflict is the growing political polarization in the region and in which US imperialism, the key supporter of Netanyahu and Israel, has raised its bet against Iran by sending an aircraft carrier to prevent the Iranian leadership from following through on its threat to close the Strait of Ormus, against the effects that the Trump blockade is causing to its economy and the living conditions of Iranians. The United States also accuses Iran of supplying missiles to the Gaza resistance.
This polarization is seen in Israel in the rise of the voices of the most extreme Zionist right on one hand, such as the recent statements of Israeli right-wing deputy, Bezalel Smotrich, who stated that “the confrontation in Gaza should have ended with 700 terrorists killed (a Palestinian killed for each rocket launched against Israel)” (Kaosenlared 05/09/2019) and, on the other hand, in the growth of the Palestinian resistance, which strengthens more radical expressions in the confrontation with Zionism as is the case of the Islamic Jihad.
Difficulties for “the pact of the century” proposed by Trump
Although the terms of this “pact” are not known, the statements of various US officials revealed that the Trump administration has already rejected the two states policy, one Israeli and one Palestinian in the territories of the West Bank and Gaza prior to the seizure of them by the Zionist army after the last Arab-Israeli war. These agreements made between the Zionist leadership and the moderate Palestinian leadership that, with the patronage of the United States government, constituted a real betrayal of the task of destroying the genocidal Zionist state and building a secular, democratic and non-racist Palestine, that are already obsolete to imperialism.
Through the son-in-law of the president, banker Jared Kushner, a new and more realistic pact was designed, which includes changing the Palestinian “sovereignty” for an “autonomy” statute, where the territories illegally occupied by the Israeli settlers in the West Bank and the Syrian Golan Heights are recognized as belonging to the Zionist enclave, as well as Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and also the obligation of neighboring countries, such as Lebanon or Jordan, to house 5 million Palestinian refugees, to formally integrate them into their population, in exchange for better financial assistance for areas occupied by Palestinians. The agreement is so brutal that, even Egypt and Saudi Arabia, great allies of Israel and the United States, would have serious difficulties to endorse it.
The hypocrisy of European imperialism
The imperialist policy for the region has the wing of the hawks of Trump but also the “doves” of the United Nations and the European Union, who condemn the massacre of the Palestinian people and describe the situation as an Arab-Israeli conflict, when what exists it is a brutal displacement and genocide of the Palestinian population by a counter-revolutionary imperialist enclave. An artificial state created at the service of confronting the struggles for the liberation of the Arab people, whose leadership gained time when it was necessary, signing treaties with no intention of fulfilling them, while advancing in the takeover of the West Bank with illegal colonies protected by Zionist security forces and in a real plan to exterminate the Palestinian population in general and in Gaza in particular.
This political cynicism now has a new expression with the organization of the next Eurovision festival in Tel Aviv in two weeks, which once again legitimizes the Zionist assassin gendarme. More than ever, we must redouble the world campaign of “Boycott, Divestment and Sanction (BDS)” to the State of Israel to stop this festival from happening, like when we achieved that the Argentine national team not play in Jerusalem.
More than ever, we need the greatest international solidarity to stop the massacre in Gaza, to put an end to the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip, to free Palestinian political prisoners and to support the struggle of this heroic people to recover their territories and expel the imperialist enclave.
Gustavo Giménez