By Abayomi Azikiwe
Well-armed columns of Palestinian combatants emerged from the Gaza Strip during the early morning hours of October 7 attacking European settler towns, cities and military bases in what is considered southern Israel.
At a music festival, Israeli participants were sent fleeing for their lives as Palestinians unleashed violent attacks against the decades-long occupation which has been financed and militarized by the United States and its other European allies.
Since October 7, Palestinian fighters have launched thousands of rockets at Israeli-controlled areas throughout the settler-colony. On the ground, Palestinian soldiers stormed into numerous towns, burning homes, businesses, state-owned and private properties.
The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) were completely caught off guard. Occupiers of Israeli settlements in the South were captured by Palestinian resistance fighters and taken to the Gaza Strip. Over 1,000 Israelis were reportedly killed on October 7-8 while over 2,000 others wounded and injured.
Assessments indicate that this was the deadliest military strike against the State of Israel in its 75-year sordid history. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately vowed revenge, yet Israelis have told media outlets that on October 7-8, they were frantically trying to reach the security agencies ostensibly responsible for protecting them against the Palestinians, but those agencies failed to pick up or return their calls.
As a pro-Israeli press outlet in the U.S. noted regarding the military operations carried by Palestinian fighters as a major advancement in their resistance efforts:
“The lightning-quick, multi-pronged ambush also included dozens of Hamas militants in motorboats storming Israeli beaches and engaging in fierce firefights with Israeli forces. Other armed Hamas attackers swooped into Israel through the smoke-filled skies on paragliders.
As those under attack rushed to safe rooms and bomb shelters, groups of terrorists infiltrating the county marched into towns and into kibbutz after kibbutz, opening fire on homes and killing Israeli citizens at random. Militants burst into houses, shooting residents begging for their lives and taking others — including women, children and the elderly — hostage, driving the terrified captives back into Gaza as many of them screamed for help.”
U.S. Official Denial of the Rights of Palestinians
However, despite the labeling of Palestinian freedom fighters as “terrorists” by the above-quoted news agency, this characterization of those who stand for the liberation of their people and the creation of an independent state determined by the history and social situation of the region, the report completely ignores the national oppression of millions of people. It also fails to acknowledge the central role of the U.S. in perpetuating the exploitation and degradation of the Palestinians. U.S. taxpayers provide the economic, military, technical and diplomatic resources which underpin the Zionist state, which serve as a mechanism for justifying the denial of fundamental human, political and national rights of the Palestinian people.
The notion that the current and long-term status of Palestinians is contingent upon abiding by the political parameters established by the occupying Israeli state and its benefactors in the U.S., runs counter to what has transpired in any genuine national liberation movement. Consequently, the actual foreign policy of Washington and its allies, in essence denies the humanity of the Palestinian people.
Not only does the administration of President Joe Biden not recognize the right of Palestinians to self-determination and nationhood, in reality, it is the main enabler of their oppression. Biden’s speech in response to the Palestinian offensive on October 10, advanced the same imperialist line. There was no acknowledgement of the decades-long failure to create a viable Palestinian state and the role of the U.S. in the process.
The closest ally of U.S. imperialism, the United Kingdom, through its British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), revealed in an October 10 report by their correspondent Jeremy Bowen that:
“Kibbutz Kfar Aza is a microcosm of the first few days of this war, and also a glimpse of what might come next. Until this morning fighting was still going on in the kibbutz, which is one of the Israeli communities along the border with Gaza. That’s why only now are they collecting the bodies of its Israeli residents who were killed when Hamas broke through the border wire from Gaza early on Saturday morning. Soldiers who spent much of the day in the ruins recovering bodies of civilians said that there had been a massacre. It seems likely that much of the killing happened in the first hours of the assault on Saturday.
“‘The Israeli army, caught off guard, took 12 hours to get to the kibbutz,’ said Davidi Ben Zion, the deputy commander of Unit 71, an experienced team of paratroopers who led the assault. ‘Thank God we saved many lives of many parents and children,’ he said. ‘Unfortunately, some were burned by Molotov [cocktails]. They are very aggressive, like animals.’ Mr. Ben Zion said Hamas gunmen who killed families, including babies, were ‘just a jihad machine to kill everybody, [people] without weapons, without nothing, just normal citizens that want to take their breakfast and that’s all.’ Some of the victims, he said, were decapitated.”
Referring to oppressed people as “animals” is reflective of the attempted dehumanization of those fighting for their national liberation. Such characterizations reveal clear insights into the history of Native removal and extermination in North America. Name-calling of this nature grew out of the superstructure dominant during the enslavement of African people for over two centuries and the efforts to relegate them to a permanent existence of second-class citizenship for nearly a century after the conclusion of the Civil War and the overthrow of Reconstruction.
People Must Reject the U.S.-Israeli Genocidal Foreign Policy in West Asia and North Africa
A major rebuke of Washington’s foreign policy would be to firmly support the right to genuine independence for the Palestinian people and all other states in the West Asia and North Africa geo-political regions. The overt denigration of Palestinians, Arabs and Africans by the White House, the State Department and the U.S. Congress should be attacked by those who consider themselves champions of peace and national liberation for oppressed peoples.
The Biden administration and its predecessors have upheld the collapsing myth of the supremacy of western imperialism while seeking to deceive the oppressed nations and the world as a whole into believing and politically accepting that Washington is the leader of the so-called “free world.” These issues are paramount in the contemporary international situation where the emergence of new blocs such as the Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) plus are bringing together governments and peoples from Asia, Africa, Latin America along with the Russian Federation.
A summit of the Group of 77 and China held in Havana, Cuba during September, witnessed a phenomenal meeting where the leaders in attendance represented 80% of the global population. The speakers demanded the implementation of another world order where the U.S. and the European Union (EU) are not the dominant forces. Such a renewed international network would provide hope for global peace and mutual prosperity.
These developments provide an opportunity for the nations and peoples of West Asia and North Africa to eject the imperialist outpost in Tel Aviv and move toward unity and sovereignty independent of the interference of Washington, London and Brussels. The only response by Washington and Wall Street to the upsurge in the Palestinian movement for statehood and liberation is to further vilify the oppressed while sending Pentagon troops to bolster the Zionist state in its ultimate aim of liquidating the struggles of the colonized people.
Events since October 7 illustrate the rapidly changing world situation. All those yearning for genuine social transformation should join this movement to end the continuing legacies of colonialism and neo-colonialism.
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