Palestine & Ukraine: Two More Nails In Imperialism’s Coffin?

By Sachithanandam Sathananthan –

Part I: Palestine

The Palestinians’ death toll in Gaza has risen beyond 32,000 men, women and children and counting. The Interim Ruling of the International Court of Justice highlighted the Palestinians’ plausible genocide by the Israeli State. That is likely an understatement, for the Director of the New York office of the UN High Commission for Human Rights resigned in disgust asserting Gaza is a “Textbook Case Of Genocide”. Further investigation by the UN’s Special Rapporteur determined (on 28 March) that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza; for her efforts to seek the truth she has received threats.

The Zionist settler-colonists are replaying in real time the gruesome, violent expropriation of the indigenous peoples’ land and their genocide by the European settler-colonialists in north and south America for the past five centuries, and in the settler-colonies of Australia and New Zealand. In the United States between 1860s and 1910s the God-fearing white Protestants trod in the blood-drenched footsteps of their ideological forerunners, the Pilgrim Fathers, swearing similarly they are recovering the land for Christ as they slaughtered an estimated 10 million American-Indian men, women and children – a “record” the German Nazis perhaps sought to outdo but failed.

Today Zionists absurdly claim the Old Testament is their title deed to the land of Palestine while cheerfully “mowing the lawn” (mass killings) that began in earnest with Israel’s several odious attempts to crush the Palestinian nation before, during and after the 1948 Nakba. Washington and Tel Aviv are bent on killing and/or expelling Palestinians in Gaza and then in the West Bank and presenting to the world an ethnically cleansed Jewish State “from the River to the Sea” as a fait accompli.

So far Hamas has neutralised Tel Aviv’s military option. Over the past six months Gazans have bravely resisted Israel’s drive to shovel them into the neighbouring Arab States, who closed their border and thwarted the expulsions. Egypt allowed humanitarian aid to pass freely through the border crossings at Karem Abu Salem and Rafah but Tel Aviv squeezed its flow to a life-threatening trickle, inducing famine. The US, rather than compel Tel Aviv to lift the land blockade, instead is promoting the charade of “airlifts” that cannot supply more than a pittance of assistance.

Maritime “aid” corridor

The US President added a macabre twist: he announced in his State of the Union speech last month (March) that the US military would construct a “temporary” port off Gaza’s Mediterranean coast where ships could off load emergency aid (food, water, medicine, etc.); the construction has begun. Simultaneously Tel Aviv is applying starvation as a weapon of war and deploying virtually unlimited NATO-supplied bombs and munitions to intensify the genocide of Palestinian. No rocket science is needed to surmise that the sugar coated “emergency aid” narrative is a crafty smokescreen to mask the port’s real and clear diabolical aim: to drive Palestinians, inevitably at gunpoint, on to ships and push them out to sea since the neighbouring Arab states have closed their border.

Meanwhile, the US abstained on the UNSC’s resolution 2728 (of 25/mar/24), binding under International law and calling for an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza, obliges member-states to refrain from sending military supplies to Israel. Washington, however, continues to funnel bombs and weapons to Israel.

Israeli forces deliberately killed aid workers from the World Central Kitchen to block emergency relief to Palestinians. Tel Aviv and Washington’s attempts to white wash the war crime crumbled when the nationalities of the victims became known: Australia (1), Poland (1), US & Canada dual citizen (1) and Britain (3); and one Palestinian. The death of 6 white persons sent the western media into a flat spin; President Joe Biden facing an election chastised the deaths obviously of white civilians while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised to ensure “this thing does not happen again”.

The supposed benevolence of opening a maritime aid corridor is a crude deception to distract attention from the ongoing scorched earth operations; a recent one is the two-week siege, destruction of Gaza’s main hospital Al Shifa and massacre of medical staff, patients and civilians that left behind several hundred Palestinian corpses. UN experts “condemned the wholesale destruction and killing at Al-Shifa Hospital…The world is witnessing the first genocide shown in real time to the world by its victims and unfathomably justified by Israel as compliant with the laws of war.” (Emphasis added).

Fog of war

Several lies too died and are dying as Mehdi Raza Hasan has forcefully stated. The first, that “Israel has the right to defend itself” has been blown out of the water. Israeli State invaded and occupied the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem in 1967 and is enforcing the slow-motion strangulation of the Palestinian nation within the occupied territories. Under international law Israel is the Occupying Power, which has no right of self-defence against the Armed Resistance mounted by the Occupied People of Palestine.

It follows that the question “Do you condemn October 7th”, often posed by fork-tongued politicians of the collective West, pretends the war largely began on that day. This second lie is amplified by their compliant press and regurgitated by their supine aficionados in the Global South; an example is a Lankan analyst’s delusionary assertion that the October 7th “operation could have been carried out without murdering civilians, including women and children”; she added, by not limiting the attack to “military targets…Hamas provided…an invaluable excuse to the Israeli hard-right to ethnically cleanse Palestinian lands of Palestinian people”. Did Palestinians provide excuses for their 1948 Nakba and subsequent ethnic cleansing and mass killing over the past seven decades up to October 7^th

Sinhalese analysts criticising Israel are walking a political tight rope dodging obvious parallels between Palestinians on the one hand, and Tamils and Muslims on the other. To be fair, in 2014 one apparently noted the echoes in Sri Lanka of the Zionists claim to racial superiority, their State-assisted settlement of Jews (Kibbutzim) on Palestinian’s traditional land, their religious belief that God anointed the land exclusively for Jews and the violent expropriations of Palestinians’ lands that supposedly are necessary for military security or of archaeological importance for Jews. She observed, in her essay titled “Our Gaza”, that “(t)he Rajapaksas are not only building an Israeli-type peace in the North/East; they also waged an Israeli-type war there.” Other commentators have made similar assessments today; however nationalist Sinhalese opinion has denied any similarity whatsoever.

The third lie, “Israel is a democracy” in a sea of Muslim autocracies in West Asia, too died. The country stands exposed as a messianic force favouring an antediluvian theocratic Jewish rule and is a brutal Apartheid State exemplified by the illegal Wall 708 kilometres (439 miles) long to corral Palestinians in the West Bank. The Wall continues to stand despite the ICJ’s 2004 “advisory opinion” declaring the construction flouts international law, requiring it be dismantled and concluding that “Israel could not rely on a right of self-defence or on a state of necessity.”

Tel Aviv’s ethnic cleansing including genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza and soon, if not already, from the West Bank have permanently buried the fourth lie, “anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism”. The marauding Zionism has legitimated anti-Zionism as a valid critique and an urgently needed political movement.

The UN Secretary General challenged the gobbledygook surrounding October 7: “the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum” he noted. “The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished.” Furious Tel Aviv demanded his resignation for drawing attention to Israel’s criminal settler-colonialism.

The military operation by Palestinians is a legitimate act of self-defence and their Resistance is far from “terrorism”. The Peoples Republic of China is the only government we are aware of that challenged the “terrorism” lie. The PRC backed South Africa’s case against Israel in the ICJ; Beijing drew inspiration from several international conventions and argued that the “Palestinian peoples’ use of force to resist foreign oppression and to establish an independent State is an inalienable right…Armed struggle in this context is distinguished from acts of terrorism” and further defended the Palestinians’ “right to self-determination…” In contrast Germany opposed South Africa’s charge in defence of Israel.

Hamas’ strategic victory

The western media’s obsession with condemning Hamas for October 7^th also detracts from Hamas’ strategic military victory over Zionism on that day when their fighters broke out of the Gaza concentration camp. It was strategic for several reasons.

a) Hamas torpedoed the 2020 Abraham Accords, a set of bilateral agreements to supposedly normalise Arab-Israeli relations, that Washington and London (with a vigorous nod from Paris) had craftily put together to virtually sink the Palestinians’ national rights in the Mediterranean sea and to entrench their satrap, Israel as the dominant power in West Asia (coloniser’s name: “Middle East”).

b) Hamas neutralised Tel Aviv’s military objective of eliminating Hamas; despite Israel’s carpet bombing of Gaza for more than six months Hamas continues to battle the Israeli armed force.

c) Hamas has boosted its political reputation as a national liberation movement and exposed Tel Aviv’s puppets in impotent Palestinian Authority, headed by President Mahmoud Abbas.

d) Hamas shattered the myth of invincibility of Israel’s armed forces. Other Arab nationalist forces are recalibrating their approach to Tel Aviv.

The body blow to Imperialism the Organisation delivered on October 7 is the main reason for the unbridled anger against and abhorrence of Hamas in capitals of the collective West and their racist mainstream media. Hamas’ strategic victory threatens to overturn British Imperialism’s elaborate long-laid plans to entrench its client, the Zionist movement, under the 1917 Balfour Declaration. The Declaration is the outcome of the confluence of strategic interests between two major forces: a) western Imperialism – led first by London and carried over by Washington – that required an outpost in the crucial oil-rich West Asia and b) Zionism’s project for a Jewish State on Palestinian land. (The Declaration announced the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in the Ottoman region of Palestine that contained a small – less that 10%  – minority of Jewish population.)

Much crocodile tears were shed about Europe’s persecution of Jews over the centuries that morally justified the handing over of non-European land – Palestine – to build a Jewish homeland. Reading between the lines it is obvious the deeply antisemitic European powers – led by Britain – sought to jettisoned as many Jews in their midst as possible on to land outside Europe.

Imperialism groomed Israel as its regional henchman to keep Arab nationalism at bay and whip Arab governments into submission. Tel Aviv’s service to Imperialism in the 1952 Suez Crisis is emblematic and the 1967 War drove home the military superiority of Israelis over Arabs. However, October 7 exposed the myth of Jewish invincibility; the longer Hamas withstands Israel’s military onslaught the greater the damage to the alleged omnipotence of Israel’s armed forces.

The Palestinians have long fought Imperialism’s scheme to dominate and control West Asia under the 1917 Balfour Declaration by instigating and funding Israeli settler-colonialism. Hamas (and Hezbollah) are shredding Washington and London’s well-crafted plot; the latter two are desperately funnelling arms and ammunition to Tel Aviv to shore up their West Asian satrap. By neutralising Israel in Palestine Hamas would add to Imperialism’s historic defeats in Vietnam, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. The impending catastrophic military defeat in Ukraine for US-led NATO forces is likely to hasten the further decline of US Imperialism.

Next – Part II: Ukraine

*Dr Sachithanandam Sathananthan is an independent scholar who read Political Economy for the Ph.D. degree at the University of Cambridge. He was Assistant Director, International Studies at the Marga Institute, Visiting Research Scholar at the Jawaharlal Nehru University School of International Studies and has taught World History at Karachi University’s Institute of Business Administration. He is an award-winning filmmaker and may be reached at: commentaries.ss@gmail.com

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