By Kelsang Trinlay
This is a callout to your editorial of October 9, 2023 on the horrific war, accompanied by death and destruction, in the Middle East between Israel and the besieged Palestinians. It would be a gross understatement to define the editorial as breathtakingly biased both in tenor and in nomenclature, not to speak of historiography. These in turn lead the reader to a dark tunnel of hypocrisy and falsified narratives. The reference to Hamas as “Militant Palestinian Islamist group Hamas” smacks of parroting the cliched narrative of western media and their social-intellectual-political circles, due mainly to the massive campaign of the Jewish lobby operating in the US and EU.
Hamas – to its own people and to progressive liberal narratives, are defined as the Palestinian Resistance Movement. That is exactly what they are to the Palestinian people of Gaza and the Occupied West Bank. They won the popular democratic mandate in an election monitored and certified by the UN. One of the few in the Middle East, as opposed to the dictatorships sponsored by the West.
“Hamas got direct backing from Iran” – I am assuming that this preposterous axiom is an opinion because no citation was provided. The Shia Republic of Iran supports the resistance and liberation movement of the Palestinian people but whether or not it directly participated in the attack on Israel is a matter of serious geo-political and strategic analysis not a fantasy allegation.
A few days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a boastful speech at the United Nations, announcing the establishment of a new Middle East centred around Israel and its new Arab “partners”, the Palestinians, whom he totally omitted from his fantasy regional map devoid all of Gaza, all of Occupied West Bank, entire Jerusalem and all of Golan Hight’s, dealt him and Israel a fatal blow, politically and strategically.
The Palestinian resistance movement, which by the way, includes not just Hamas, but other groups fighting for the freedom of Palestinians, launched a meticulously planned, well-executed lightning incursion from Gaza into Israel, by air, sea and land. In tandem with thousands of missiles fired towards Israeli targets, hundreds of Palestinian fighters attacked Israeli military and civilian areas in the southern part of the country. The latest figures are still pouring in subject to the genocide calls by the Israeli Establishment inside Gaza.
The editorial states, “By virtue of its long-held offensives and bloodshed against neighbouring Israelis, this entity is designated as a “terrorist” group by the UN and the West.” This duplicitous contention, in tune with mainline narratives needs serious addressing. Professor Norman Finkelstein, DePaul University, Chicago, who’s highly acclaimed study (and a host of other scholarly books on the subject) – Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, 1995, scrutinizes popular and official Israeli records of the conflict, says – that the standard deceptive depiction of the history of Palestine by Israeli sources, Zionist writers and their media, is that of turn-speak.
“Turn-speak – the cynical inverting or distorting of facts, which, for example, makes the victim appear as culprit.” Joan Peters, Time Immemorial, p 173… Professor Finkelstein is of Jewish origin and is a descendant of Holocaust survivors and is considered an authority of Israel-Palestine scholarship including the Holocaust. To quote him….“On 15th May 1948 the last British soldier left Palestine. The stage was set, the timing was perfect and the plan was working to a tune. When I asked Eshkol: “what are we going to do with a million Arabs?” he said: I get it. You want the dowry, but you don’t like the bride!”
Exchange between LEVI ESHKOL and GOLDA MEIR during a Mapai Party meeting September 1967 says, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine had now begun. By the time the British left in end May 1948 one third of the Palestinians had already been evicted.”
Israeli and Palestinian international human rights groups has compiled and archived over 60 major massacres from pre-1948 up to 2014 by the Israeli government or by Zionist terror groups. (www.occupiedpalestine.wordpress.com. After their ethnic cleansing from their own traditional land, evicted and made refugees in neighbouring countries, about two million Palestinians have been caged in a 256 sq.km land mass making it the largest open-air prison in the world.
Professor Ilan Pappe, senior professor of Haifa University in Israel and scholar of Middle East Studies documents each massacre of the Palestinians by the Zionist forces. I quote him – “Thus, when winter was over and spring of 1949 ushered in the, Palestine of 250 years had changed beyond recognition. The rural heart of Palestine of undulating hills and picturesque villages was ruined. Burnt and bulldozed for new Jewish settlements and for cultivation with their names acquiring Hebraized versions of their original Arab names”.
The catastrophe that befell the Palestinians would be remembered in their collective memory as The Naqba.
Hamas’s objectives in the operation are no secret: First, retaliate and punish Israel for its fifty six years of brutal occupation, massacres repeated ad nauseum, oppression, encouraging and protecting illegal settlements, and desecration of Palestinian religious symbols, especially Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem; second, take aim at Arab “normalisation” with Israel that embraces its apartheid regime in the region; and lastly, secure another prisoner exchange in order to get as many Palestinian political prisoners released from Israeli jails as possiblethe Nakbah, the catastrophe.
Hubris has finally caught up with Israel and its arrogant leaders, who long thought themselves invincible and repeatedly underestimated their enemies. Since the “surprise” Arab attack of October 1973, successive Israeli leaders have been shocked and awed, again and again, by what the people they oppressed have been capable of.
Again quoting your editorial – “Arafat recognized Israel’s right to exist and expressed a readiness for a negotiated settlement of the issues between Palestinians and Israelis. It opposed the Oslo peace accord signed between PLO and Israel.”
Yes Hamas did not recognize Israel but the PLO and the PA did, and what did they get in return? Absolutely nothing vindicating them. The Oslo Agreement signed between the PA and Israel was an exercise in useless futility. Israel openly violated the Agreement continuing the 56 years of illegal occupation of Palestinian land which in turn transformed into an Apartheid regime worse than that of South Africa, thereby prompting the Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu to say, “I know first-hand that Israel has created an apartheid reality within its borders and through its occupation. The parallels to my own beloved South Africa are painfully stark indeed….”
In these 56 years, Israel massacred civilians and children, smashed residential apartments, killed journalists point blank, the most famous being that of US citizen Shirin Abu Akleh causing international outrage, bombed out entire villages, schools, hospitals, power and water supply lines to name a few. They violated UN Resolutions and committed International War Crimes.
The editorial which states that the tiny nation of Israel has the capacity to withstand the collective pressure from the Islamic world by virtue of the wholesome support Tel Aviv gets from the US, where Jews are a dominant part of the power-club” is both an understatement as well as distortion. Here is a rogue nation formed by the Machiavellian lobbying of the British and the Americans half a century ago and now funded by them with the most highly advanced military hardware and let’s not forget in possession of nuclear weapons, committing war crimes on what remains of the Palestinian people caged and enslaved in a narrow sliver of land with international impunity.
All this with the icing on the hypocrisy cake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine where the Russians are invaders and occupiers but in the Middle East Israel is the angelic entity and the Palestinians do not exist.
What is then expected from this humungous hypocrisy and a crime against humanity of epic proportion, other than armed struggle, may I ask?
It reminds one of Malcolm X – “If you stick a knife in my back 9 inches and pull it out 6 inches there is no progress. If you pull it out all the way, that’s not progress. Progress is healing the wound. And they wouldn’t even admit that the knife is there.” Healing the wound is to terminate the illegal occupation and live in peace as neighbours. The Palestinians have made it clear today that they would rather fight on their feet for justice and freedom than die on their knees in humiliation. It is high time the Israelis heed the lessons of history.