At dawn on July 1, Israeli warplanes launched more than 20 sorties, bombing 36 locations, including agricultural lands in the southern, central and northern Gaza Strip.
On Wednesday, July 2, Palestinian teenager Mohammed Abu Khdeir, 16, was kidnapped and burned to death by Israeli forces in a Jerusalem forest.
Six Palestinian young people have been killed by Israel in the past three weeks, including 16-year-old Yousef Abu Zagha, who was shot in the chest early Tuesday in Jenin.
The Israeli terror has been characterized as “retaliation” for the kidnappings by imperialist media.
A cursory glance at Israel’s origins reveals, however, that the initial act of aggression was the formation of the Israeli state itself, an illegitimate, white nationalist, colonial settler state backed by U.S. and British imperialism and built through the mass slaughter of Palestinians and the brutish theft of their land by Jewish Zionist settlers.
Israel functions today as the Middle Eastern military outpost of U.S. imperialism, a parasitic social system born of the enslavement of African people and genocide against the Indigenous people of the Americas.
There has not been a day in the history of Israel’s existence that the Palestinians have not endured carnage at the hands of the Zionist state.
While the Israeli and U.S. media shed crocodile tears over the deaths of three Israeli teenagers, statistics from the Ministry of Information in Ramallah conclude that 1,518 Palestinian children were killed by Israel’s occupation forces between September 2000 and April 2013. That’s the equivalent of one Palestinian child killed by Israel every 3 days for 13 years.
An additional 6,000 Palestinian children have been severely injured by Israeli occupation forces since 2000.
Israel has now closed large areas of the West Bank and imprisoned over 500 Palestinians in daily arrest raids.
The government of Israel has blamed the execution of the three Jewish settlers on the Palestinian resistance organization, Hamas.
Hamas denied involvement in the kidnappings.
Clashes between resistant Palestinians and Israeli colonial occupiers have erupted in the West Bank and Gaza.
The origins of the conflict: settler colonialism
The imposition of the state of Israel, a hostile, antagonistic creation of a white nationalist, settler colony inhabited primarily by European fortune seekers, is among the initial aggressions against the Palestinian people that led to the current knot of contradictions embroiling Palestine and the general region.
An article published in The Burning Spear Newspaper during the 2006 Israeli invasion of Gaza explained, “The tap root of the struggle in the Middle East began in that historical period made famous by Christopher Columbus when the Europeans unleashed upon the world’s peoples a more than 500-year period of rape, plunder, pillage and genocide.”
The article goes on to explain:
“Palestine, after having been under Ottoman control since 1517, came under British mandate in 1917. The British Balfour Declaration decided that Palestine would become a ’national homeland for Jewish people.’
“In 1948, the British, the United Nations and the Zionist Movement decided to split Palestine. The Israelis with 30 percent of the population received 53 percent of the land. The Arabs with 70 percent of the population received 47 percent of the land.
“Then, as a result of the first Arab/Israeli War in 1948-49, the Israelis occupied another 22 percent giving them a total of 75 percent of Palestine. They immediately began receiving financial support from the United States.”
It must be stated here that in 1948, the United Nations was, for all practical purposes, a lily-white organization. Africa, Asia (including China), South and Central America were all under white colonial domination.
For the past 64 years, Israel has functioned as a military outpost for U.S. imperialism, used to protect the imperialist oil interests in the Middle East.
The fact is that the Israelis, in their zeal to terrorize the Palestinian people into submission, indiscriminately bombard the people 365 days a year, killing countless men, women and babies.
Palestinians have the right to resist
Therefore, we categorically reject the U.S. imperialist media’s definition of Israel’s attacks on Gaza as “retaliation” for the kidnappings. NBC, CNN and Fox have covered the Israeli attacks under the headline “Israel Strikes Back.”
Defining Israel’s latest wave of genocidal terror against the Palestinians as “retaliation” is a perfect example of why the oppressed must always reject the oppressor’s definitions of itself and the world it occupies.
We cannot equate the actions of the Palestinians and the Jewish settlers and their Zionist state. One represents an oppressed nation; the other an oppressor nation.
Whether there is disagreement or not with the tactics of Hamas and other Palestinian resistance groups, their right to resist is unquestionable, and in a struggle for national liberation, every act of aggression by the oppressed against the oppressor is an act of self-defense, or retaliation.
Israel attacks the movement for Palestinian unification
The latest siege on Occupied Palestine by the illegitimate state of Israel and Jewish settler population is an assault on the movement towards unification of the Palestinian movement which has largely revolved around the potential for peace between Hamas and Fatah, something craved by the Palestinian masses who blame Fatah for frustrating this process at the behest of the Zionist entity and the U.S.
The Israeli response to the death of the settler teenagers comes just a matter of weeks after the formation of a Palestinian unity government that involved both Fatah and Hamas.
In a statement issued before the expected announcement of the full Palestinian cabinet in early June, Netanyahu branded Hamas a “terrorist” organization and said that reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas would “strengthen terror.”
The Israeli so-called response to the death of the Jewish teenagers, its stated intent to destroy Hamas, its bombing campaigns against Palestinian targets, etc., all contribute to Israel’s intent to prevent Palestinian unification, strengthening Fatah at the expense of Hamas and maintaining the Zionist stranglehold on Palestine’s land and future.
However, Israel will fail.
This is the period of the crisis of white power, when the oppressed and colonized peoples are advancing the final offensive against imperialism, intensifying what Chairman Omali Yeshitela calls the “uneasy equilibrium” between the dying forces of imperialist hegemony and the rising struggles of Africans, Arabs, Mexicans and the oppressed nations of the world.
Daoud Shihab of the Palestinian resistance organization Islamic Jihad, who fought alongside Hamas against the Israeli siege on Gaza in 2012, told Al-Monitor News thatIsrael is “playing with fire, which will backfire and eventually explode in Netanyahu's and his government's face.”
Shihab is correct.
As the global balance of power in the Middle East continues to shift, and anti-imperial, anti-Western resistance engulfs every continent on the planet, the U.S. and Israel have nowhere to turn.
Imperialist crisis abounds on every front.
As Chairman Omali said, “There is no way to put the genie back in the bottle.”
The victorious struggles of Africans, Palestinians and other colonized peoples for our national liberation and sovereignty will dismantle the pedestal upon which worldwide, white, parasitic capitalism resides.
Victory to the Palestinian people!
Down with Israeli settler colonialism and U.S. imperialism!
Uhuru!
