Despite the jubilation in Israel over its recent achievements, its Palestinian victims will continue the struggle until its genocidal Jewish supremacist regime is fully dismantled
Yemenis brandish rifles and hold a picture of slain Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar during a rally in solidarity with Gaza in Sanaa on 29 November 2024 (Mohammed Huwais/AFP)
In the last two months, the Israelis and their American masters have intensified their extermination campaign in Gaza, hoping to quell Palestinian resistance to the Jewish-supremacist apartheid state once and for all.
After failing to attain any of their objectives since 7 October 2023, the United States and Israel laid the blame on the allies of the Palestinian resistance and the military aid they provided to it.
They began to target these allies based on the belief that without outside help, Palestinian resistance would dissipate and cease to exist.
Ironically, it is Israel, since its establishment in 1948, that could not survive, economically or militarily, absent massive and constant infusions of western financial, military, and diplomatic capital.
Indeed, Israel cannot survive today without such enormous levels of outside assistance and protection, without which the settler-colony would collapse in a matter of months.
This fact was made clearer over the past year, which exposed Israel as a fourth-rate military power whose only achievement is committing genocide against a civilian population.
To achieve its objectives, Israel has relied on a monumental level of US and EU military and intelligence help. With their support, Israel was able to weaken the Lebanese resistance, culminating in a ceasefire that it has since violated more than 100 times, and reach a stalemate with Iran.
In turn, the Americans, along with Turkey and Israel, were successful in helping to overthrow the Syrian regime, which had been a boon to the Palestinian and Lebanese resistance. The Israelis also targeted Iranian officials and bombed the Iranian consulate in Damascus, which led to Iranian retaliation and yet more Israeli bombings of Iran itself.
The latest US and Israeli strategy aims to erase from memory the massive military defeats the Israelis have suffered since the launch of Al-Aqsa Flood by Hamas
Meanwhile, Israel has ramped up its mass killing and starvation of Palestinians in northern Gaza, with full US and European Union support, and escalated Israeli settlers’ pogroms and military raids and invasions of West Bank cities and towns.
It also augmented its crackdown on the shackled Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem, most recently by imposing the racist anti-Palestinian Israeli curriculum on their schools and banning the Palestinian curriculum, in addition to taking over Palestinian homes and businesses for the benefit of Jewish settlers.
As for the isolated Palestinian citizens of Israel, the Israeli regime has also enacted a number of laws in recent months to erode what few rights they still had under the Israeli apartheid system.
The latest US and Israeli strategy aims to erase from memory the massive military defeats the Israelis have suffered since the launch of Al-Aqsa Flood by Hamas last October.
Above all, it seeks to fortify the Jewish settler colony against ongoing military threats from the resistance and impose Israel’s will, not only on the Palestinian people but the entire Arab world.
Palestinian resistance
Now that the US has succeeded in overthrowing all Arab dictators who deigned to refuse its orders to normalise with Israel (or insisted on conditions to normalise, which Israel refused) – Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, and Bashar al-Assad – while bolstering all other Arab dictators who fully submit to their will and pay obeisance to them – extending from Morocco through Jordan and the Palestinian Authority (PA) to the Gulf – the Americans and Israelis feel certain that quashing Palestinian resistance is entirely within reach.
This perception is based on the persistent ideological conviction on the part of the imperialist US and the genocidal Israeli state that Palestinian resistance is not generated by the genocidal and apartheid nature of the settler-colonial Israeli regime but is instead the outcome of external support for Palestinian resistance.
For these short-sighted and self-serving US and Israeli strategists, once such support is destroyed, Palestinian resistance will also disappear.
Unsurprisingly, their ignorance and refusal to learn from the history of Palestinian resistance to Zionist colonisation and Jewish supremacist rule is as intransigent as ever.
That Palestinian resistance started in the 1880s at the inception of Jewish colonisation, and without outside support, seems immaterial to the cruel and racist American and Israeli strategists.
In fact, beginning in 1882 and continuing throughout the 1890s, Palestinian peasant resistance targeted all the Jewish colonies to the point that “there was scarcely a Jewish colony which did not come into conflict” with the native Palestinian peasants.
The fact that Palestinian resistance continued since then, most of the time not only without outside support but despite the tremendous increases in the quantity and quality of outside support for the Zionist oppressors of the Palestinians, does not disabuse these strategists of this racist notion, which discounts the oppression of the Palestinians as the actual impetus for their resistance.
‘On their own’
Unlike the Palestinian people, Zionist colonisers, since the end of the 19th century, always enjoyed the support of all the colonising European countries and the US empire in quashing any resistance to Jewish colonisation and apartheid.
After World War One, the Zionists were also aided in their efforts by Arab regimes and a number of wealthy and landed Palestinian families who collaborated both with them and the British occupation of the country.
Aside from a few volunteers from across the border, the Palestinian people resisted Zionist colonisation on their own with all their might, standing up to the British Empire and the Zionist gangs in the 1920s and 1930s despite the British and the Zionists’ use of extreme terrorism and brutality against this captive population.
Transjordanian peasant revolutionaries who attempted to assist the Palestinians by providing them with refuge and targeted British interests in Transjordan were quickly put down in the second half of the 1930s by the Emir Abdullah of Transjordan and his British-controlled army which used 10 British air force planes to bomb them.
The so-called support of the few Arab armies who intervened on 15 May 1948 to stop the Zionist expulsion of almost 400,000 Palestinians – which began nearly six months earlier on 30 November 1947 – and to safeguard the 45 percent of Palestine that the empires of the north had designated as a Palestinian state in the infamous United Nations Partition Plan of 29 November 1947 – utterly backfired.
Not only were these ill-equipped Arab armies outnumbered by the much better-trained and equipped Zionist gangs, but they also failed to prevent the Zionist expulsion of yet another 360,000 Palestinians and lost more than half of the 45 percent of Palestine they were supposed to safeguard.
Whatever lands the by-then self-designated King Abdullah was able to keep, he annexed to Jordan, according to a plan he devised with the Zionists beforehand. He later refused to recognise the All-Palestine Government that was set up in Gaza in September 1948.
The imperial powers followed suit by recognising Israel’s takeover of 78 percent of Palestine and Abdullah’s takeover of 18 percent of it, which he renamed the “West Bank”. (Gaza was safeguarded by the Egyptians until it was conquered twice by the Israelis, in 1956 and again in 1967, when Israel finally took it over.)
Meanwhile, all the major imperial powers and the Soviets fully supported the 1948 Zionist conquest militarily and diplomatically.
British and American Jewish volunteer pilots and international Zionist Jewish brigades arrived in Palestine from around the western world to aid the Zionist conquest of the land of the Palestinians. Many such volunteers continue to come to Israel and assist in imposing Jewish supremacy and apartheid on the Palestinians.
Losing legitimacy
Since 7 October 2023, the US and the EU have also become fully fledged partners with Israel in its ongoing genocide of the Palestinians – a genocide that is supported openly or tacitly by all Arab regimes, including the collaborationist PA, except for Lebanon’s Hezbollah, the Ansar Allah government of Yemen, some Iraqi resistance groups, the recently fallen Syrian regime, and Iran.
The loss of support for Israel by a substantial portion of the western public has also contributed to the weakening of the legitimacy of the genocidal settler-colony
These Palestinian, Arab, and western supporters of Israel have also been instrumental in militarily protecting Israel from retaliation by the Arab forces of resistance and Iran, and in the case of the PA, through a campaign of repression of Palestinian resistors in the West Bank.
At the same time, supporters of the Palestinians launched a campaign to make it increasingly difficult for Israel’s supporters and sponsors to continue to aid its ongoing genocide.
Whether at the UN, the International Court of Justice, or the International Criminal Court, a number of resolutions, decisions, and indictments of Israel have been issued, which the US tried to neutralise with all the threats and penalties it has at its disposal.
Add to this the increasing success of the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement in pressuring countries and businesses to withdraw investments in Israel, as Norway recently did.
Moreover, the loss of support for Israel by a substantial portion of the western public, including European and American Jews, has also contributed to the weakening of the legitimacy of the genocidal settler colony in traditionally pro-Israel western circles, which had provided much-needed support historically.
Inevitable collapse
The record of the last 15 months has been mixed.
Israel has been exposed as weak militarily, economically, and diplomatically and unable to stop becoming weaker by the day on all fronts, save that of committing genocide.
Yet, thanks to the large military and financial help from the US and EU countries, the Israelis are able to continue to use every barbaric method at their disposal to destroy Palestinian resistance.
The perplexing thing for US and Israeli strategists, however, is that Palestinian resistance, which has not received any infusions of military or financial help from any outside source since 7 October 2023, continues to resist the annihilationist Israelis in Gaza and the West Bank, and in East Jerusalem.
Despite the jubilation and celebrations in Israel over its recent achievements, its Palestinian victims will continue the struggle until its genocidal Jewish supremacist regime is fully dismantled.
In view of these developments, it is more likely that genocidal Israel, and not Palestinian resistance to it, will no longer be able to survive due to diminishing outside support and international isolation.
This is something US and Israeli strategists know well, even if they refuse to take cognisance of its realism.
All the murderous horror they are visiting on the Arab region today will only delay the inevitable collapse of the genocidal settler-colonial regime, but it will not succeed in safeguarding its existence.
