By Allen Perez
On a frigid night, December 5, 2023, we had the unwelcome visit of the warmonger, Joe Biden, near my home. He came to raise money to get re-elected. Blood-soaked money!
Joe Biden will be haunted in his conscience by his crimes. He will no longer be able to hide, nor will Anthony Blinken (Secretary of State), or Jake Sullivan (Director of the US National Security Council), the new malevolent Kissinger.
They are the neoconservative strategists of Biden’s administration, the hawks that only the naive or the uninformed associate exclusively with the Republicans. The Democrats are also a threat to humanity. They are the same ones who mercilessly bombed Vietnam, dropped atomic bombs on Japan, lied in Iraq and refused to apologize for any of these crimes. We should neither forget nor forgive!
On the same day, the House of Representatives passed a resolution explicitly equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism and defining many common slogans used by pro-Palestinian demonstrators as anti-Semitic. Israel is not synonymous with Judaism. Such hogwash, based on falsehoods, is an attack on freedom of speech. It signifies the cementing of censorship, the establishment of informational and organizational terror. This is a dangerous step towards the illegalization of the opposition that denounces this apartheid financed and supported by the United States. The protest this genocide is moving towards its criminalization, even in famous universities such as Harvard and MIT. I live remarkably close to these institutions, and I know how student leaders have been threatened with strong disciplinary sanctions. Just as students were threatened during the Vietnam anti-war protests. We are confronting a situation reminiscent of Vietnam, in a different time and context.
This infamy is giving an effusive applause to Netanyahu’s neo-fascist government. Why is this assertion so strong? Simply because Israel is a political and social system like the one that existed in South African apartheid, the one that Mandela (at the time considered a terrorist by the United States), an adjective also given to not a few heroes who fought against this violent oppression through armed struggle and peace talks. Now the Palestinians are fighting Israeli neo-fascism, a dictatorial regime that only grants broad democratic freedoms to Israeli Jews and excludes Arab Israelis who do not enjoy equal rights and are dehumanize like cockroaches as well as the rest of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and in the diaspora. This is the true face of ZIONISM: repopulating stolen land, expelling its historical inhabitants through humiliation, the indiscriminate material destruction of their basic possessions, and turning this violence into a genocidal war to establish an ethnic majority in all the Occupied Territories, Gaza, and the West Bank. There is no doubt, this is a true brand of depraved colonization.
It is urgent to demand an immediate ceasefire, a decision heavily influenced by the United States. The involved parties, particularly Hamas, Israel, the UN, the Palestinian National Authority, plus other countries like Brazil, South Africa, México, and Colombia; and most importantly, Washington, must come to the negotiating table in good faith. Even the Biden administration recognizes that Israel has gone too far in its barbaric behavior. Israel must undergo massive pressure to halt its slaughter.
This is crucial to understand, because Israel, as an occupying state without some unrecognized borders, specially through the West Bank, should be debated; Egypt, unfortunately, is another proxy state from the US and Israel. Gaza is a concentration camp like the Warsaw Ghetto where Jews revolted fundamentally under the leadership under the socialist Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB). The ongoing genocidal war, broadcast live worldwide, presents a disturbing reality. Furthermore, the world is witnessing this live genocide in a state of anesthesia, as if it were a spectacle in a Roman circus with spectators who are metaphorically asleep, where most onlookers seem anesthetized, lacking empathy and awareness. However, this situation is slowly changing due to the rise of the truth in social media. The solidarity with Palestine must continue to grow and be effective. The truth, like the sun, cannot be hidden by a finger.
I am proud of my Jewish and Palestinian friends, intellectuals or not, who have educated me on the facts and contexts of 75 years of this cruel colonizing war of ethnic cleansing and theft of other people’s lands. We cannot remain silent in the face of this genocide, or, like anyone else, because our banner is that of human rights. The right thing to do is for Jews and Palestinians to live in peace and democracy under one state.
Zionism is a replica of South African apartheid, both models surrounded by the stench of racism and totalitarianism. Apartheid was a reality that “since 1948, the Afrikaner National Party took over the South African government and established different laws that deepened the gap between whites, blacks and other races that inhabited the country. This party prohibited marriages and sexual relations between people of different races, established their geographical separation in terms of housing and work, and divided the use of public services, such as transportation or access to hospitals”. The UN Secretary General assured us that this wave of violence “does not come out of nowhere”, but “is born of a long-standing conflict, with 56 years of occupation and no political end in sight”.
What is the cost of this war on the people of Gaza in the struggle to regain what belongs to them? In Gaza, there are more than 13,000 civilians dead (70% women and children), more than 30,000 wounded, 45% of the bombed homes destroyed, thousands of political prisoners, hospitals almost rendered ineffective, water and electricity cut off, and humanitarian aid fundamentally obstructed. Now, what costs has Israel borne in this asymmetrical war? António Guterres, as a diplomat of world rank who has a duty to conciliate and resolve conflicts, condemned Hamas attacks on military and civilians that on the periphery of Gaza left more than 800 Israelis dead and more than 2,500 wounded. Such disproportion in times of war is unparalleled. Israel is applying cruel collective punishment.
Human Rights Watch: “Since 1948, Israel has established a regime of racial domination and oppression over the Palestinian people primarily in the domains of nationality and land. In the immediate aftermath of the Nakba, Israel adopted a series of laws, policies, and practices, which sealed the dispossession of the indigenous Palestinian people, systematically denying the return of Palestinian refugees and other Palestinians who were abroad at the time of the war. At the same time, Israel imposed a system of institutionalized racial discrimination over Palestinians who remained on the land, many of whom had been internally displaced. Such Israeli laws have constituted the legal architecture of Israeli apartheid that continues to be imposed on the Palestinian people today.”
Amnesty International recommends the following: “End all U.S. support for the Israeli government’s rights violations and crimes against humanity against Palestinians, particularly the illegal campaign of forced displacement through home demolitions, evictions and settlement expansion in occupied East Jerusalem and the Occupied Territories.”
I ask: Can denouncing these crimes against humanity be considered anti-Semitism? Or is not denouncing them abject complicity?
Again, the conscience of the United Nations through its official news organs: “The head of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) told the Security Council on Monday that the level of destruction in Gaza “is unprecedented, the human tragedy unfolding under our eyes is unbearable”. Even though the Israeli authorities have ordered half of Gaza’s population to move south, a considerable number of Gazans have died while seeking refuge. I have said it many times and I will say it again: nowhere is safe in Gaza.” “This forced displacement has left more than 670,000 people in overcrowded UNRWA schools and basements. Lazzarini went on to note that 70% of the reported dead are children and women: nearly 3200 children have been killed in Gaza in three weeks, surpassing the number of children killed annually in all conflict zones around the world since 2019. This cannot be collateral damage,” he stressed, adding that Israel is carrying out “collective punishment.”
To claim that Israel’s crimes amount to anti-Semitism is complicity because it is a fallacy, a historical aberration, and a historical manipulation typical of fascist ideologues. Let us be clear: Biden and Trump are no different, I stress, no different, when it comes to the genocide of the Palestinian people. They applaud and encourage it at any price, even if the reward is the collective death of a people who were born and raised in their own land and who are also Semites.
In Boston, we received Biden as he deserves: with powerful, spirited and determined protests. He is not a man of peace, he relishes war, and he squanders trillions of dollars on military adventures, money we Americans desperately need to improve our crumbling living conditions.
Latino Americans (like me), and the other ethnic communities and minority races, and especially the youth, will not forget in the next elections his complicity with crimes against humanity perpetrated by Israel. We will charge him for it, and we will not give him one iota of support. May he and his court go to the depths of hell.
Israel is a terrorist, racist state, and to affirm this is NOT anti-Semitism, nor is it an affirmation against the religious humanist principles of the Jewish faith, nor against the Jews as an ethnic group, nor as a culture nor as a nation, because they are also deserving of human rights like everyone else on this planet. But Israel does not represent all Jews and one fifth of Israelis are NOT Jews (Arabs or Palestinians). And they are humiliatingly treated as fifth class citizens. The clique headed by Netanyahu is the one that is truly anti-Semitic by slaughtering their own Arab cousins.
Jews are not the problem, but a prevailing ideology, colonialist and predatory, called Zionism, a kind of fascism with similar ideas of ethnic cleansing as those of the defeated in the last world war. Cruelty committed against Jews, communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, anarchists, gypsies, homosexuals, handicapped and mentally ill. In this case, Israel targets the entire Palestinian people. It is certainly another style of holocaust, if you will at a different speed, full of verbiage and lies, fabricated with a treachery that spills the blood of the oppressed and expropriated. For no infant was beheaded, nor has the existence of a single raped woman been proven. Certainly, Zionist propaganda is monumentally intimidating: a lie repeated a thousand times becomes the truth. Goebbels is credited with having said “lie, lie, that something remains”.
Zionism is a version of South African apartheid, as denounced by Archbishop Desmond Tutu: “I know firsthand that Israel has created an apartheid reality within its borders and through its occupation. The parallels with my beloved South Africa are truly painful.” He wrote this in 2014, in a call to the Presbyterian general assembly in the United States to endorse sanctions against Israel.”
Now Biden is asking for 10 billion dollars (about $31 per person in the US) more for Israel so that the extreme right-wing gangsters can continue to finance the genocide. It is not by chance that the European far right, including the German far right, fervently support the Tel-Aviv clique. So does the neo-fascist, Narendra Modi, ruler of India, not to mention, of course, the ultra-right-winger and new Argentinian president, Javier Milei. If Trump wins, it will be the sole responsibility of Biden and his advisors.
I appreciate that Boston’s Jewish youth have woken up and are fighting for Palestinian rights. My banner is that of human rights. I repudiate Israel’s “final solution”.
This is a war, and the Palestinian resistance has every right and duty to defend its people, as did the Soviets against Hitlerian imperialism, as did the partisans in many other parts of Europe, and as did the Vietnamese people victoriously. I hate wars and with Jorge Debravo, the famous Costa Rican poet, I would eliminate them one by one. But the reality is different: since the world has been a world, human beings have not been able to overcome greed and social exploitation, let alone wars. This war is genocidal, constituting crimes against humanity.
Such genocide is far from trivial: figures like Biden and Netanyahu, along with their Machiavellian cohorts, ought to face a trial like Nuremberg to account for their actions. My sympathy extends equally to the innocent victims in Russia and Ukraine, Israel, and the occupied Territories, and elsewhere, to both the attacked and the aggressors in every conflict, from every part of our planet. They are all human beings. Human beings!
Tragically, humanity has an appalling capacity for extreme cruelty. Despite this disturbing biological and moral anomaly, we must tirelessly promote peace, justice, and compassion. As global societies, we bear moral and ethical duties derived from the doctrines and laws of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I cannot overlook the thousands of civilians killed in Dresden by the relentless British and American bombing, which targeted civilians in a blatant campaign of revenge. In just two days of non-stop bombing, 25,000 to 35,000 civilians were killed. Similarly, the My Lai massacre, where over 500 South Vietnamese civilians, including children, were brutally executed and all the women sexually assaulted, cannot be forgotten. The United States often ignores its own dark history, thus continuing to commit heinous crimes, often using proxy states like Israel.
“Politics is a science of realities, and to negotiate agreements, one often must sit at the table with sworn enemies. In politics, there are no friends, only interests, only pieces to move; knowing when to be silent, knowing when to betray, knowing how to speak without hurting sensitivities, to be moved, to yield, and even to sign peace, requires diplomacy. The dilemma of this conflict is one: diplomacy or war.”