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Year 2007 No. 37, July 27, 2007 ARCHIVE HOME JBBOOKS SUBSCRIBE

Blair and the Middle East

Workers' Daily Internet Edition: Article Index :

Blair and the Middle East

Tony Blair: The Quartet's "Peace Envoy" – Discredited, Deluded, Disgraced

Imprisoning a Whole Nation

Palestinian Resistance Cuts the Gordian Knot

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Blair and the Middle East

This week the former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, embarked on a two-day tour of the Middle East in his new role special envoy to the so-called Quartet, which comprises the United States, the European Union, the UN and Russia. The Quartet has assumed the role of intervening in the region and in particular interfering with regard to the right to statehood of the Palestinian people. The Quartet’s "Roadmap", introduced in 2002, has established a plan to eventually create a Palestinian state alongside the state of Israel. The Quartet has stated that its objective is to promote an end to what it refers to as the "conflict" in the region. More specifically, it is to "help Palestinians as they build the institutions and economy of a viable state in Gaza and the West Bank, able to take its place as a peaceful and prosperous partner to Israel and its other neighbours".

Blair has been appointed as the Quartet’s representative, therefore, allegedly to "help create viable and lasting government institutions representing all Palestinians, a robust economy, and a climate of law and order for the Palestinian people". In other words, to continue to interfere in the internal affairs of the Palestinian people, to create and exacerbate divisions and to make sure that any future Palestinian state does not threaten the interests of the Israeli Zionists and is subservient to and dependent on the Britain, the US and the other big powers. Indeed, representatives of the US made it clear before the present trip that their new representative will have no contact with Hamas, the majority party in the last elections to the Palestinian Authority, which subsequently formed a government of national unity, because this organisation does not accept the dictate of the big powers and is prepared to militantly resist US-Israeli aggression and sabotage in order to defend the rights of the Palestinian people. For this reason it is labelled a "terrorist" organisation by Britain and the US, who are intent on maintaining their dominant position in the region. Russia and some European countries have adopted a different position in regard to Hamas and are attempting to advance their own interests in the region, for example by advocating an international force to police the Palestinian territories.

During the visit, Blair visited Israel, Jordan and the West Bank and met both Israeli leaders and President Mahmoud Abbas and other representatives of the Palestinian Authority. It was noticeable that Blair was widely praised by the government of Israel, whilst representatives of the Palestinian Authority reportedly told him that unless he addressed the issue of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory he would make little headway. The former Hamas Prime Minister, Ismail Haniya, stated that Blair should take the opportunity to "correct the mistakes he made as Britain's prime minister". He added, "We are ready for dialogue with Blair, and even the Quartet. All we want is justice for the Palestinian people." Other Palestinian representatives expressed the view that Blair would lose all credibility if he failed to talk with Hamas, which has won the support of the majority of Palestinians, noting that he was already seen as the main ally of US imperialism in the region.

The government is of course fully behind Blair’s new post in the Middle East, which clearly builds on the role that Britain played whilst he was Prime Minister. Every attempt has been made to make the Palestinian Authority dependent on the big powers, and Britain and the US in particular. Everything is done to present the British government and its former prime minister as the best friend of the Palestinian people and an "honest broker’ in the Middle East. But history tells a different story. It was successive British governments before 1948 which created modern Israel and deprived the Palestinian people of their land, sovereignty and rights, and it has been British governments since that time which have supported and armed the Israeli Zionists and continued to deny the Palestinian people their rights. Britain and the US, as well as the other big powers have used Israel as a means to create instability throughout the region and to ensure that they are provided with the justification to continue intervention throughout the Middle East.

Faced with the heroic struggle of the Palestinian people for their rights, Britain and the US in particular are now attempting to create a Palestinian Authority which is to their liking and under their influence and yet again are ignoring the rights and wishes of the Palestinian people. The attitude of the British and US governments and their representative, Tony Blair, towards Hamas shows that all their talk about "exporting democracy" and so-called "universal values" is simply a means of imposing their domination over others. There can be no illusions about the "good offices" of Blair or other representatives of the other big powers. What must be demanded is an end to big power interference throughout the Middle East and justice for the Palestinian people.

Article Index



Tony Blair: The Quartet's "Peace Envoy" – Discredited, Deluded, Disgraced

Felicity Arbuthnot, Global Research, July 10, 2007

Poor George Orwell, if only he had hung on another 70 years or so. What he could have added to his "war is peace". What he could have done with "warmonger is peacemaker". What would he have done with Blair, the first Prime Minister in history to be questioned – three times – by Scotland Yard (the last time just days before he left office) in a criminal investigation – regarding allegations that generous donors to his party were rewarded with peerages – being chosen by the UN, US, EU, and Russia as Middle East Peace Envoy.

An "honest broker"?

But "cash for honours" pales against this vain, delinquent politician joining the wholesale slaughter in Muslim countries, which posed no threat to the US or UK, based on the mother of all lies, seemingly cooked up in Number 10 Downing Street, the residence of the Prime Minister of "the mother of parliaments". The man who enjoined his country in George W Bush's "crusade", who after the recent failed bombings in London and Glasgow, called British Muslims "absurd", nurturing a "false sense of grievance" that they are being oppressed by Britain and the United States, according the Guardian. Given the abattoirs that Afghanistan and Iraq have become at US and UK hands, or under their watch, ditto the Balkans in 1999 (by some sleight of hand declared legal, as Afghanistan, more for Orwell) with more Afghans being killed by allied US troops than "insurgents", resistance, Taliban – plus the charnel house Mesopotamia has become, having lost certainly a minimum of two and a half million in excess deaths between the 13-year embargo and the four-plus-year occupation, with four million fled or internally displaced. If the recent London/Glasgow incidents were what we are led to believe and not some "black" operation closer to Whitehall (it is hard to trust official assertions ever again), grievance in the Muslim community would hardly be unreasonable. "These are people who are prepared to bomb innocent men, women and children, families in their homes or going about their business," trumpet officials, complicit in doing just that, on near unimaginable scale.

Further, as Stephen Lendman writes in his excellent "Reinventing a war criminal": "He joined in cutting off essential aid to the Palestinian people and renounced its democratically elected Hamas government without ever giving it a chance to prove itself. He also supported Israel's aggressive war against Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank, and, in short, partnered in backing war and avoiding peace. He now has a new title in his new job. His mission is the same. He'll bring no peace to the Middle East nor does he intend to."

Arms from the US have been flowing in to Israel, with Britain's backing, to kill Palestinians at crossings, children going to school, families picnicking on beaches. Heavy machinery has demolished family homes, trashed municipal offices, villages, so foreign settlers or multinational businesses can "legally" steal and build on ancient land, the heritage of families, handed down over generations; machinery which destroys their farms, citrus and olive groves. Where has been "peace envoy" Blair's unequivocal condemnation? Where has been even a bleat of protest? Did he read recent reports of a village where Bedouin have lived for sixty years, where Israeli forces were in such a hurry to demolish for more settlers, they allegedly even dragged babies out of homes, still in their playpens?

"A true friend of the State of Israel," said Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of his outgoing British counterpart Tony Blair. "Tony Blair is a very well-appreciated figure in Israel," said Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. According to an Israeli government statement, Israel "will provide [him] with all necessary assistance in order for him to carry out his duties", writes Arjan El Fassad (Electronic Intifada). You bet. Moreover: "In his speech at the Annual Reception of Labour Friends of Israel in September 2006, Blair said: ‘I have never actually found it hard to be a friend of Israel, I am proud to be a friend of Israel.’" No doubt his role to "advise" on "institutional reform" in Palestine will provide him with a front row seat at the sort of "reform" he has been party to in his invasions – destruction of life, limb and that left of Palestine's civil society.

He should be quite at home in another invading, occupying country, which has also divided Palestine as he and Bush planned to divide Iraq – and where, like Iraq, communities are walled off from each other by the policies of "democracy". The Messianic Blair, having bought lock, stock and barrel in to the neo-cons "crusade", "clash of civilisations", has never openly backed off from some seriously disturbing bedfellows.

In John Gray's newly published "Black Mass", he refers to the apocalyptic influence in the American Christian right, reminding again of another not too well bolted down on all four corners, Admiral William Boykin, who declared that the enemy in the "war on terror" was "a guy called Satan". Gray's analysis of Blair's grasp on history does not bode well for Palestine and the region (as if they do not have enough problems) " ...he was led into the Iraq debacle by the belief that history was on his side. Actually he knew very little history and what he did know he refused to accept when it undercut his hopes." Further, Blair is " ... an American neo-conservative and has been all his life and with Bush has embraced a 'missionary style of politics’." Hardly the man to bring peace, light and hope in the hearts of those in one of the most hurting, complex regions on earth, even without the smouldering ruins of Iraq and Lebanon as baggage and the blood for ever ingrained on his hands.

Blair has "signally failed in everything he ever tried to do in the Middle East" writes Robert Fisk, of Blair's appointment, remarking that when he heard of it, he checked the calendar to ensure it was not April Fool's Day. He refers to Blair's "blend of ruthlessness and dishonesty ... slippery use of language" and compares him to another man who thought he could be a peace envoy in the Middle East, former SS officer, Kurt Waldheim, who also could not believe he had ever done anything wrong. A correspondent to the Independent letters page wrote simply: "Is that ‘peace envoy’ as in ‘Atilla the Peace Envoy’?" Abdel Bari Atwan, Editor in Chief of Al Quds Al Arabi, referred to Blair as: " the most hated man in the Middle East after Bush." "He does not have a good background and a good reputation in the region," Hamas Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini told Reuters (July 1). In the Sunday Herald, political Editor Jim Cusick wrote: " ... he will not be a helpful figure in solving the region's strife because he comes with too much baggage that mirrors the political positions of both the US and Israeli governments."

Carsten Kuhntopp, ARD Middle East Correspondent in Amman, reminds that former Middle East Envoy to the Middle East, Alvaro de Soto, in his final Report, described how American diplomats had threatened to cut US subsidy to the UN if it, in the form of the Quartet did not follow US demands. De Soto described how the US "pushed for an armed confrontation between (democratically elected) Hamas and Fatah". One US "diplomat" said: "I like this violence ... it means Palestinians are resisting Hamas." He concluded that with the US as Israel's closest ally, there is no one to plead the Palestinian cause. Kuhntopp ends: "Tony Blair as Middle East envoy – truly putting the fox in charge of the henhouse. But given the Quartet's disastrous policies, it somehow fits." Blair's standing in Britain itself was reflected by the left wing Morning Star and the right wing Daily Mail again agreeing, with the former commenting on his resignation: "Good riddance" and the latter "The day Blair became an irrelevance".

Another commentator remarked on Britain's final plunge in to ignominy and irrelevance under Blair: "From bulldog to lapdog". A US Administration official, however, referred to Blair's "star quality" (perhaps he was speaking from a psychiatric ward).

Blair reportedly also has plans to establish a faith foundation to promote understanding between Islam and Christianity ("you couldn't make it up" country, again) and it seems, plans to become a Roman Catholic. Perhaps they "are short of serial killers in their congregation", pondered Craig Murray, former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan. Murray repeatedly sent extensive memos and flew back to London to inform the government, via the Foreign Office, that the "intelligence" the UK and US were gaining from this close ally was obtained under torture, extreme even by Abu Ghraib standards. Methods included boiling humans to death. For his integrity, concerns and considerable courage, a Whitehall inspired smear campaign was mounted, so vicious, it culminated in his having a nervous breakdown. (Read : Craig Murray : Murder in Samarkand, Mainstream Publishing http://www.craigmurray.co.uk

Here then, an inadequate background to Charles Anthony Lyndon Blair, QC, a man who has brought shame to the Office of Prime Minister, made the people who elected him targets, throughout the world for possibly decades to come. The man who has collided in destruction, broken lives and heartbreak beyond counting. Now the latest Middle East "Peace Envoy". A bit like making King Herod, Minister for child welfare. If there is an upside, it might be that it may take the entire Israeli Defence Force to ensure his safety, leaving them less personnel for child killing and home demolitions.

In the unlikely event Blair is thinking of reading up even a little on the Palestinians plight, two suggestions: " I Saw Ramallah", by Mourid Barghouti, the story of a young man who was at university in Cairo when the 1967 war broke out. It took him thirty years to obtain a permit to return home – for a brief visit. His story mirrors millions. The other is: "Hamas, Unwritten Chapters", by Azzam Tamimi. To begin to understand, he should turn first to page 147 and read the chapter heading, by Sheikh Ahmad Yassin: "I want to proclaim loudly to the world, that we are not fighting Jews because they are Jews. We are fighting them because they assaulted us, they killed us, they took our land and our homes; they attacked our children and our women; they scattered us. All we want is our rights. We don't want more."

Oh yes and since this former "war" (read "illegal invasion") prime minister has never been in close proximity to missile or bullet, the environs may be somewhat unsettling, Heaven forbid it should affect his apparent heart problem. However, should tragedy strike, a listener thoughtfully sent in an obituary to a radio station: "Here lies a rotter. Here rots a liar."

Article Index



Imprisoning a Whole Nation

John Pilger, New Statesman, 22 May 2007

Israel is destroying any notion of a state of Palestine and is being allowed to imprison an entire nation. That is clear from the latest attacks on Gaza, whose suffering has become a metaphor for the tragedy imposed on the peoples of the Middle East and beyond. These attacks, reported on Britain's Channel 4 News, were "targeting key militants of Hamas" and the "Hamas infrastructure". The BBC described a "clash" between the same militants and Israeli F-16 aircraft.

Consider one such clash. The militants’ car was blown to pieces by a missile from a fighter-bomber. Who were these militants? In my experience, all the people of Gaza are militant in their resistance to their jailer and tormentor. As for the "Hamas infrastructure", this was the headquarters of the party that won last year’s democratic elections in Palestine. To report that would give the wrong impression. It would suggest that the people in the car and all the others over the years, the babies and the elderly who have also "clashed" with fighter-bombers, were victims of a monstrous injustice. It would suggest the truth.

"Some say," said the Channel 4 reporter, that "Hamas has courted this [attack]..." Perhaps he was referring to the rockets fired at Israel from within the prison of Gaza which killed no one. Under international law an occupied people has the right to use arms against the occupier’s forces. This right is never reported. The Channel 4 reporter referred to an "endless war", suggesting equivalents. There is no war. There is resistance among the poorest, most vulnerable people on earth to an enduring, illegal occupation imposed by the world’s fourth largest military power, whose weapons of mass destruction range from cluster bombs to thermonuclear devices, bankrolled by the superpower. In the past six years alone, wrote the historian Ilan Pappé, "Israeli forces have killed more than 4,000 Palestinians, half of them children".

Consider how this power works. According to documents obtained by United Press International, the Israelis once secretly funded Hamas as "a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO [Palestine Liberation Organisation] by using a competing religious alternative", in the words of a former CIA official.

Today, Israel and the US have reversed this ploy and openly back Hamas’s rival, Fatah, with bribes of millions of dollars. Israel recently secretly allowed 500 Fatah fighters to cross into Gaza from Egypt, where they had been trained by another American client, the Cairo dictatorship. The Israelis’ aim is to undermine the elected Palestinian government and ignite a civil war. They have not quite succeeded. In response, the Palestinians forged a government of national unity, of both Hamas and Fatah. The latest attacks are aimed at destroying this.

With Gaza secured in chaos and the West Bank walled in, the Israeli plan, wrote the Palestinian academic Karma Nabulsi, is "a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless, destroyed, cowed, ruled by disparate militias, gangs, religious ideologues and extremists, broken up into ethnic and religious tribalism and co-opted collaborationists. Look to the Iraq of today..."

On 19 May, the Guardian received this letter from Omar Jabary al-Sarafeh, a Ramallah resident: "Land, water and air are under constant sight of a sophisticated military surveillance system that makes Gaza like The Truman Show," he wrote. "In this film every Gazan actor has a predefined role and the [Israeli] army behaves as a director... The Gaza strip needs to be shown as what it is... an Israeli laboratory backed by the international community where human beings are used as rabbits to test the most dramatic and perverse practices of economic suffocation and starvation."

The remarkable Israeli journalist Gideon Levy has described the starvation sweeping Gaza’s more than a million and a quarter inhabitants and the "thousands of wounded, disabled and shell-shocked people unable to receive any treatment... The shadows of human beings roam the ruins... They only know the [Israeli army] will return and they know what this will mean for them: more imprisonment in their homes for weeks, more death and destruction in monstrous proportions".

Whenever I have been in Gaza, I have been consumed by this melancholia, as if I were a trespasser in a secret place of mourning. Skeins of smoke from wood fires hang over the same Mediterranean Sea that free peoples know, but not here. Along beaches that tourists would regard as picturesque trudge the incarcerated of Gaza; lines of sepia figures become silhouettes, marching at the water’s edge, through lapping sewage. The water and power are cut off, yet again, when the generators are bombed, yet again. Iconic murals on walls pockmarked by bullets commemorate the dead, such as the family of 18 men, women and children who "clashed" with a 500lb American/Israeli bomb, dropped on their block of flats as they slept. Presumably, they were militants.

More than 40 per cent of the population of Gaza are children under the age of 15. Reporting on a four-year field study in occupied Palestine for the British Medical Journal, Dr Derek Summerfield wrote that "two-thirds of the 621 children killed at checkpoints, in the street, on the way to school, in their homes, died from small arms fire, directed in over half of cases to the head, neck and chest – the sniper’s wound". A friend of mine with the United Nations calls them "children of the dust". Their wonderful childishness, their rowdiness and giggles and charm, belie their nightmare.

I met Dr Khalid Dahlan, a psychiatrist who heads one of several children’s community health projects in Gaza. He told me about his latest survey. "The statistic I personally find unbearable," he said, "is that 99.4 per cent of the children we studied suffer trauma. Once you look at the rates of exposure to trauma, you see why: 99.2 per cent of the study group’s homes were bombarded; 97.5 per cent were exposed to tear gas; 96.6 per cent witnessed shootings; 95.8 per cent witnessed bombardment and funerals; almost a quarter saw family members injured or killed."

He said children as young as three faced the dichotomy caused by having to cope with these conditions. They dreamt about becoming doctors and nurses, then this was overtaken by an apocalyptic vision of themselves as the next generation of suicide bombers. They experienced this invariably after an attack by the Israelis. For some boys, their heroes were no longer football players, but a confusion of Palestinian "martyrs" and even the enemy, "because Israeli soldiers are the strongest and have Apache gunships".

Shortly before he died, Edward Said bitterly reproached foreign journalists for what he called their destructive role in "stripping the context of Palestinian violence, the response of a desperate and horribly oppressed people, and the terrible suffering from which it arises". Just as the invasion of Iraq was a "war by media", so the same can be said of the grotesquely one-sided "conflict" in Palestine. As the pioneering work of the Glasgow University Media Group shows, television viewers are rarely told that the Palestinians are victims of an illegal military occupation; the term "occupied territories" is seldom explained. Only 9 per cent of young people interviewed in the UK know that the Israelis are the occupying force and the illegal settlers are Jewish; many believe them to be Palestinian. The selective use of language by broadcasters is crucial in maintaining this confusion and ignorance. Words such as "terrorism", "murder" and "savage, cold-blooded killing" describe the deaths of Israelis, almost never Palestinians.

There are honourable exceptions. The kidnapped BBC reporter Alan Johnston is one of them. Yet, amidst the avalanche of coverage of his abduction, no mention is made of the thousands of Palestinians abducted by Israel, many of whom will not see their families for years. There are no appeals for them. In Jerusalem, the Foreign Press Association documents the shooting and intimidation of its members by Israeli soldiers. In one eight-month period, as many journalists, including the CNN bureau chief in Jerusalem, were wounded by the Israelis, some of them seriously. In each case, the FPA complained. In each case, there was no satisfactory reply.

A censorship by omission runs deep in western journalism on Israel, especially in the US. Hamas is dismissed as a "terrorist group sworn to Israel’s destruction" and one that "refuses to recognise Israel and wants to fight not talk". This theme suppresses the truth: that Israel is bent on Palestine’s destruction. Moreover, Hamas’s long-standing proposals for a ten-year ceasefire are ignored, along with a recent, hopeful ideological shift within Hamas itself that amounts to a historic acceptance of the sovereignty of Israel. "The [Hamas] charter is not the Quran," said a senior Hamas official, Mohammed Ghazal. "Historically, we believe all Palestine belongs to Palestinians, but we’re talking now about reality, about political solutions... If Israel reached a stage where it was able to talk to Hamas, I don’t think there would be a problem of negotiating with the Israelis [for a solution]."

When I last saw Gaza, driving towards the Israeli checkpoint and the razor wire, I was rewarded with a spectacle of Palestinian flags fluttering from inside the walled compounds. Children were responsible for this, I was told. They make flagpoles out of sticks tied together and one or two will climb on to a wall and hold the flag between them, silently. They do it when there are foreigners around and they believe they can tell the world.

Article Index



Palestinian Resistance Cuts the Gordian Knot

WDIE is reprinting in full for the information of our readers this position statement of the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) on the Expulsion of US/Israeli-Backed Gangster Elements from the Gaza Strip, June 14-15, 2007

These moments in Occupied Palestine and on the world scale are bringing out the very best and the very worst which human civilisation has given rise to: either solutions to the problems faced by the people based on fundamental principles of international law, or anarchy raised to the level of authority.

On June 14-15, the military arm of Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement (the Qassam Brigades) seized the headquarters, training facilities and arms caches of US-financed, Israeli-backed gangs in the Gaza Strip. It dissolved their organisation, the so-called Preventive Security Force, and put its head Mohammed Dahlan and his hired staff and allies to flight. Hamas reiterated that the Palestinians are one people but that resisting the Zionist occupation requires stopping the hands of those who act as its tools – even if some of these are Palestinian. It did this through al Aqsa TV, broadcasting messages to Gaza's 1.5 million people to reassure them, as the fighting turned from clashes to an all out assault on Dahlan held positions.

It was not an attack on Fatah, on Gaza's people or a coup d'etat the broadcasts insisted. Those under attack were the Dahlan gangs that had arrested and tortured thousands of partisans and were "collaborators with Israel and the US and traitors". The London Observer reported from Gaza on June 17: "As Hamas consolidated its grip on the narrow coastal strip last week, it produced a former senior member of Fatah Khaled Abu Helal on its TV station to say that he welcomed Hamas' cleansing of Fatah of its collaborators and traitors. He announced too that he would be forming a new Fatah committee to oversee the organisation." The London Observer further reports: "The collaboration of Fatah members with Hamas was also suggested strongly by other witnesses. One told The Observer that some officers in the Presidential Guard had sent their men home as the fighting began. Another Hamas official, the spokesman for its Qassam Brigades, Abu Obaida, insisted there was co-ordination between the two sides as the purge went on: 'Today is a day of mercy and unity,' he said on Friday. 'Hamas has issued a full pardon to all the security leaders and personnel who participated in the fight against Hamas. Our fight is not against Fatah, the one with the long history in the struggle, but against just one group of Fatah agents who were following the Zionist agenda. The decent people of Fatah were co-ordinating with us and are happy we have got rid of the corrupt people of Fatah. Now we have to enforce law and order.'"

The dramatic assertions widely spread by the Western media and different governments that the events in Gaza represented the unleashing of a fratricidal civil war and a coup d'etat by Hamas do not correspond with the facts. Such disinformation is perfidy, the stock in trade of those who accuse the Palestinians of the very crime of inciting a reactionary civil war and the decapitation of the Palestine National Authority that they themselves were planning to commit. It is the US-organised force which is striving to exploit the just resistance in Gaza to their advantage by proclaiming an "emergency government" (which Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh immediately denounced as "unconstitutional"), seizing the funds of the National Unity Government, carrying through a coup d'etat, and implementing the US-Zionist programme to dismember Occupied Palestine through subversion and blunt force. There can therefore be no doubt as to what is the real purpose of the disinformation surrounding the events in Palestine.

While untrue reports of the "peaceful and humanitarian" response of Israel and the Fatah faction are stressed, the US, Israel and their abettors camouflage the dangerous agenda they are poised to implement: the invasion of Gaza and the annexation of the West Bank.

The aim running as a black thread through all these developments is to conceal the real role of the forces in play, criminalise and demonise on the basis of fabrication those who refuse to submit to the US-Israeli dictate and to prepare a fresh basis for new repression and widening of the conflict in the Middle East.

Behind the Curtain of Disinformation

Various international media have already begun to admit that this decisive act has put an end for the time being to much of the civil disorder that had become endemic throughout the Gaza Strip. This Mediterranean coastal enclave, home to more than 1.5 million people subject to an Israeli military occupation since June 1967, is sandwiched between the State of Israel and the Egyptian border in a landmass whose area would fit several times inside that of Greater Toronto. It has come to be described as "the world's largest open air prison".

The real facts are as follows. These events marked the culmination of a months long struggle that developed out of the January 25, 2006 electoral victory of the Change and Reform slate sponsored by Hamas in the national elections for the Palestine Legislative Council. The candidates of the national slate came from diverse backgrounds, including a Christian Palestinian candidate. Fourteen of the elected lawmakers were political prisoners held in Israeli jails. Far from being a religious vote as portrayed by the media, this was a vote against occupation and for resistance, a vote for the sovereign rights of the Palestinian people and democratic governance. Within hours of the result, George W. Bush, president of the United States, which had carried out direct and indirect interference in the election including the expenditure of several millions of "aid" dollars on behalf of individual Fatah candidates to dictate a favourable outcome to it, arrogantly declared: "I've made it very clear that the United States does not support political parties that want to destroy our ally Israel and that people must renounce that part of their platform." He further stated: "I don't see how you can be a partner in peace if you advocate the destruction of a country as part of your platform. And I know you can't be a partner in peace if you have, if your party has got an armed wing." This treacherous behaviour is in conformity with the attitude toward foreign policy typical of the ruling circles of the Anglo-American countries: instead of a policy based on international law, of respect for the legitimate rights of all peoples based on the UN Charter including non-interference in their internal affairs, a policy is pursued of using every means, down to and including calumny, for the purpose of weakening an entire people, exploiting them for narrow selfish interests and striving to strengthen the position of the foreign occupying power at their expense. According to Bush, only those political platforms and political parties sanctioned by the US are permissible.

Instigating a Coup against the Palestinian National Authority

The leader of the Fatah faction, Mahmoud Abbas, retained the presidency of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) as the president is elected separately. However, the result of the election meant he otherwise lost control of the administration and cabinet of the PNA. The United States and Israel mobilised the European Union and others to inflict a massive financial embargo and other sanctions designed to "put the Palestinians on a diet", i.e., starve them into submission, as the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert infamously boasted. The sanctions, including the arrogation by Israel of Palestinian tax revenues estimated at more than 700 million US dollars, as well as US bullying of Arab and Palestinian banks to refrain from transferring Arab aid money to the cash strapped Palestinian government, further crippled the Palestinian economy, impoverished Palestinians perhaps as never before and pushed tens of thousands of Palestinian families to the brink of starvation.

Ahead of virtually the entire international community, one of the first acts of Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay of the newly installed Harper Conservative government in Ottawa was to withdraw Canada's financial support for the Palestinian Authority, citing Hamas as a "terrorist organisation". The previous Liberal government, utilising the hysteria created after the 9-11 terrorist attack in New York City, had through executive decree proscribed Hamas (as it did Hizbullah, the Lebanese resistance organisation) in such terms – falsely portraying them as "jihadists" as if they too were poised to launch attacks within Canada, as a means of isolating popular support and sympathy for the Palestine resistance amongst the Canadian people. However, the Palestinians – or, more accurately, the majority – refused to be duped by the conspiratorial Americans and their collaborators and agents into revolting against Hamas and cutting each other's throats.

The Bush Administration promised $42 million, then $50 million, then $80 million, then $60 million and (most recently) finally authorised $40 million to finance the outfitting and maintenance of a US-directed and -trained "Palestinian National Guard" under Abbas' Presidential office. It is known that this is led by his right hand man Muhammad Dahlan, operating entirely independently of the civilian control of the PNA Ministry of the Interior. The Presidential Guard at Anzar in Gaza City also received a significant amount of light weaponry such as assault rifles and ammunition, all in coordination with Israel. Washington's plan was widely reported to have been devised by Elliot Abrams, co-responsible for the Venezuelan coup attempt in 2002. The CIA plan also involved "strategic advice" to politicians and some liberal secular parties as well as mercenary journalists that agreed to work against Hamas.

By the spring of last year, the plans of various elements from this informal imperial coalition to instigate a coup against the Palestinian National Authority were openly discussed over the Internet and in other media to be followed by a blood purge of Hamas for daring to struggle and daring to win. The deafening propaganda from the US and Israel was that the Palestinians were submitting to "Islamic terrorism" by even tolerating, let alone voting for Hamas. The "civilised world" would not be long in fixing this malady, they said. On April 30, 2007 the Jordanian newspaper Al-Majd further published an important, 16-page secret document, an "Action Plan for the Palestinian Presidency", based on a Jordanian government translation of a reputed US intelligence document, that called for undermining and replacing the Palestinian national unity government. The Hashemite Jordanian government, which is suggesting that it could re-annex the West Bank as its own "peace" plan, immediately shut this newspaper down. In May, the undersecretary general of the United Nations and its envoy to the Middle East, Alvaro de Soto submitted to the UN Secretary General a detailed document, frankly accusing "the United States of a plot to depose the Palestinian government from power at any price, even the price of a bloody civil war".

Now it is these same forces of "civilisation" that are in quite a fix. In 1947-48, they were puffed up with the greatest arrogance over the success of the first partition of Palestine. They were supremely confident of the permanence of the humiliation and Nakba that their creation of the State of Israel would inflict on Arab peoples in general and the Palestinians in particular. In 1967, the Zionist praetorian guard of this "civilisation" instigated the June Israeli Arab war to divide the Arab world. It redivided the Palestinians at the same time by placing under a brutal military occupation those in the West Bank and Gaza Strip who were outside the immediate jurisdiction of Israel.

These last four decades of denial by the Zionists of any of the just claims of the Palestinian resistance and people on these occupied territories served to blind these same "forces of civilisation" from recognising the authority that this resistance has always enjoyed among the Palestinian people. That resistance enjoys such authority as the guarantor of the unquenchable national aspirations of the Palestinian people that the Fatah slate was voted out of office in January 2006 for betraying that trust.

Notwithstanding the self-serving discourse of the "forces of civilisation" that the Palestinians are thus "hopelessly divided", progressive forces everywhere defending the right of peoples to self-determination grasp and recognise that Palestine in its own right is "a land, a people, a history, a future". As such, it is not reducible to some obstacle to be demolished by imperialism and its Zionist tools. The Palestinian resistance continues to develop stepwise within definite conditions. Various forms of organisation have been developed and followed to the extent that they serve the advancement of the struggle for self-determination within those conditions.

The Resistance Prevails

The broad principle of the entire Palestine people as a liberation organisation has remained well entrenched since 1948. Based on the general principle that the liberation of the Palestinian homeland is first and foremost a deed of the Palestinian people themselves, however dispersed, since 1964 many forms of resistance were developed. These forms were under the umbrella of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) led by Yasser Arafat as head of its Fatah faction. Many of these forms and arrangements had to be shed as developments internally and outside Palestine placed new demands on their struggle, such as the first Palestinian Intifadah (uprising) in the West Bank and Gaza in December 1987 which lasted until 1992. Some of these arrangements, like the Oslo Accords of 1993, were desperate gambles that could never be turned to the account of a Palestinian nation-building project. After the Soviet Union collapsed, the US wanted to block re-entry into the region of any other foreign imperial power. Israel would use the Oslo Accords to institute a stranglehold of military checkpoints (and later, the apartheid annexation wall throughout the West Bank) in order to steal more Palestinian land for Zionist colonisation. Some Palestinians, desperately seeking accommodation with the occupier, began to feel the second Al Aqsa Intifadah unleashed by Palestinian youth and civil society in September 2001 was burning their feet. Yet throughout, the Palestinians' steadfast resistance to occupation and national humiliation never ceased even for a single moment. To date, this resistance has never given the progressive forces any grounds to doubt where final victory will lie. Furthermore, Palestinians have been impelled by a growing conviction that the opposition of many of the Arab regimes to Israel was not based on principle but on rivalry for favour with the imperial court, in which they aimed to use the Palestinian question as their bargaining chip. However, time and time again the facts show that nothing will stop the Palestinians! Last week's events proved this truth once again.

A year ago, in response to many events – the intensified military shelling of the Gazan population, the forcible kidnapping by Israel of different Hamas elected members, cabinet members and officials of the PNA (including the Speaker of the Palestinian legislative council, Aziz Duweik, his deputy Mahmoud Ramahi, and the deputy Prime Minister Nasserdin al Shae'er from their homes in the West Bank), and the various internal coups being plotted against its leadership of the Palestine Legislative Council – the Palestinian resistance unfolded a new level of struggle against the military forces of Israeli occupation when they staged a successful action to push the occupier's armed forces further back behind Gaza's perimeter and captured Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier. Every funeral of a Palestinian martyr slain by Israeli targeted assassination became the occasion for massive popular rallies.

The response from Israeli forces and their media was frantic. The calls in the Knesset and media escalated to "transfer Palestinians!" not only from the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, but also from Israel proper (those Palestinian lands occupied since 1948). The open fascists publicly declared Israel's Arab citizens a fifth column (nearly 25 per cent of the population). The Israeli Zionist armed forces, under the pretext of freeing a captured soldier, bombed or destroyed the bulk of Gaza's civilian infrastructure, including schools, colleges, streets, bridges, charities as well as thousands of homes and the only power station, forcing 1.5 million Gazans to live in total or partial darkness. It exposed once again the enormous vulnerability of the Zionist hierarchs. Whenever organised Palestinian resistance emerges right under their nose they are submerged within the reactionary public opinion of their supporting ghetto of people of mostly Jewish origins from Europe, the former Soviet Union and the US. The most remarkable feature at that particular moment however, was the evident paralysis of the Olmert government in Tel Aviv.

A few weeks later, Hizbullah forces inside Lebanon responded with a militarily organised resistance action against violation of the border by Israeli forces, capturing two more Israeli soldiers. In this moment, the Zionists retaliated full bore, unleashing a 34-day orgy of bloodletting, bombing Beirut and other major urban population centres throughout Lebanon, dropping more than 1.5 million cluster bombs throughout southern Lebanon, slaughtering more than a thousand innocent civilians and displacing tens of thousands more, while attempting to assassinate the leaders of Hizbullah.

The governments of other US allies could not find foxholes fast enough in which to dive out of the way of inquisitive reporters. However, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper waded in to declare that the Israeli military assault was a "measured response". Michael Ignatieff, running at that time for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada, refused to condemn as a war crime the deliberate slaughter by Israelis of more than 50 civilians in Qana near a UN observer post. The Canadian corporate media openly questioned why the government should pay one cent of the cost of evacuating from the war zone Canadian citizens let alone residents mostly of Lebanese origin.

When the internal organisation and morale of the Israeli government's own forces, especially those confronting the Lebanese resistance at the border, seemed to reach breaking point and to the consternation of the Western powers mass demonstrations began to develop throughout the world against the Israeli aggression, such as the more than 100,000 people in London, the 75,000 in Montreal, etc., the US rushed to the rescue of their Zionist proxy with the face saving ceasefire Resolution 1701 in the UN Security Council.

The determined stand of the Lebanese national resistance to the ferocious US-backed Zionist assault led by Hizbullah and based amongst the people and villages of southern Lebanon, marked a major watershed and turning point for the oppressed peoples of all the Arab countries in general and for the Lebanese and Palestinian resistance struggle in particular. No longer did the people flee their villages in the face of the customary Israeli terror as in 1948; their presence is vital to the resistance. Hizbullah was seen as having won. The ascendant peoples of Palestine and Lebanon buried the myth of Zionist invincibility. The great terror, the Israeli army, the Shin Beit and Mossad and all the rest, that state within a state, however numerous and well-armed with sophisticated weapons and divide and rule policy had been unable to quell the movement of the Palestinian and Lebanese peoples for their rights, national liberation, and sovereignty. This continuous resistance movement in different forms and intensities for 170 years had now reached a new quality. The Olmert government slouched towards collapse. Thousands of Israelis in northern Israel abandoned their homes. This had never happened before.

The Palestinian resistance in Gaza, meanwhile, girded itself against murderous reprisal actions by Dahlan's gangs co-ordinated with Israeli artillery and air strikes. The international media intentionally misrepresented armed self-defence against these provocations as a "Palestinian mini civil war". Matters came to a head last November in the Gaza Strip village of Beit Hanoun. US-directed forces from the Israeli army encircled Palestinian resistance fighters in the local mosque. Enabling the resistance forces' escape to safety, some 2,000 women of the village, acquitting themselves as simple people who chose principles over fear, courageously offered themselves as human shields between the forces of reaction confronting them and the hopes for their future represented by the fighters trapped in the mosque. In another instance, masses of civilians occupied the rooftop of a building to successfully prevent an Israeli targeted assassination of a Palestinian leader and his family. On November 7, an opinion poll released by the Palestinian Centre for Public Opinion in Beit Sahur showed that over 75 per cent of Palestinians blamed the US, Israel, EU and Fatah for the financial economic crisis in the Occupied Territories.

Re-Establishing the Primacy of Resistance

By last December, the Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh could enter the corridors of the Arab League with dignity as the leader of a heroic people who had once again stood up. In this phase, even with more than 30 of their elected legislators arrested or detained by Israel or prevented from travelling between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank (the Palestinian parliament is in Ramallah), the Hamas executive would begin at last to thaw the deep freeze in which US pressure had placed the PLC's access to financial resources needed to run the PNA administration. Although the Arab bloc remained split at the top – the Mubarak dynasty controlling the government of Egypt, the most populous Arab state, remains firmly on the side of the US and Israel for the moment – the leading forces of the Arab world supported Hamas' bid to prevail on President Abbas and all the Palestinian political factions to renew the governing system in the PLC as a "national unity government". In a related development contributing to breaking the US-Anglo cordon sanitaire, the government of South Africa publicly invited Prime Minister Haniyeh for a state visit. The invitation came immediately after South African Minister of Intelligence Ronnie Kasrils visited Gaza and condemned Israel for its state apartheid policies.

The most striking and creative feature of the design of this Palestinian government was its basic agenda. It would not include any kind of language or recognition for a so-called "right" of the State of Israel to exist in its current form as a Jewish-only Zionist junta. It would not exclude any of the previous calls by Palestinian and other Arab leaders for the State of Israel to lift its illegal occupation of, and remove its armed forces from, the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights and Sheba'a Farms. It was more than clear that while maintaining a full Israeli military withdrawal behind its borders of June 4, 1967 would represent one step, this would not constitute the final step in righting the historic wrong inflicted on the Palestinian people by all the forces of imperialism both Zionist and non-Zionist.

Earlier this spring, a major obstacle to overcoming the financial blockade and embargo was eliminated by arranging the Mecca Accords between the Hamas and Fatah wings of the PLC. The Saudi royal family brokered the Accords. This was followed by the inauguration of the Palestinian Unity government to which Russia gave its support and Norway recognised. While the US and European Union stewed and their Zionist proxy sank into ever deepening political incoherence, Dahlan's gangs stepped up their reign of terror in Gaza. The new game plan was to take back by force at ground level what had been finally so grudgingly conceded at the diplomatic level. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told the international media this past weekend that "nobody expected" Hamas' action or its outcome. She sounded exactly like every reactionary potentate in human history imbued with a morbid preoccupation with defeat. This must be taken as emblematic of the utter obtuseness of the Bush Administration's attitude towards the resistance of the peoples to oppression. It is certainly the declaration of bankruptcy of the entire line of its policy of "democratisation" of the Middle East over the last six years – the so-called Greater Middle East Initiative. The fact of the matter is that the reactionary provocations of its Dahlan criminal gangs were continuing as accompaniment to a situation that had become neither fish nor fowl. The US-EU-Israel bloc wanted "accommodation" and "compromise" as a waystation to crushing and exterminating Palestinian resistance. The pretext would not matter. It could be effected in the name of saving civilisation from barbarians at the gate who would not recognise the right of Israel to exist, or it could be carried out in the name of saving civilisation from what The Wall Street Journal, the entire Israeli media and Palestinian accommodationists contemptuously label "Hamastan". Hamas acted last week to cut this Gordian knot.

This development re-establishes the primacy of resistance in the Palestinian narrative over the politics of neo-colonial accommodation. As always in such moments, there is no lack of elements to which anyone could point and conclude that the resistance has acted in undue haste. How hasty, and how undue? People have an expression about "not seeing the forest for the trees". In August 2005, the Zionists were compelled by the level of resistance in Gaza, and the corresponding response within Israeli public opinion, to dismantle their internal Gaza City colony – a "settlement" whose presence had provided the justification since 1967 for permanently implanting a large Israeli military force within Gaza City and throughout the Strip. The troops were thereafter redeployed outside the perimeter of the Gaza Strip.

The Sharon government took the credit. Nine hundred journalists were deployed to Gaza from abroad to ensure this credit. Some circles took credit for fulfilling the reactionary dream of an Israeli army general that the Palestinians in Gaza needed to be "bottled up like cockroaches" and left thereafter "to kill one another". Other circles took credit for "restoring some semblance of honour to the Israeli military and people". In yet other circles, they took credit for "taking the first steps towards a 'two state' solution". But the Palestinians were very clear that the Zionist exit from within Gaza was a victory. The rest of fighting humanity is beginning to see more of the true dimension of this victory. Unlike the West Bank, there is no apartheid wall inside Gaza. The interior of the Gaza Strip is a no-go zone for the Israeli military. Last week's actions have now rendered it a no-go zone as well for collaborators and tools of that occupier.

According to the international media, the actions of the Palestinian resistance in Gaza are "undue" because it did what none of the other partners in the Unity government "expected". Such a conclusion is unwarranted on its face. In the January 2006 election result, the forces of resistance threw down the gauntlet to the forces of accommodation who in the name of high ideals seek to compromise the fundamental principles of the Palestinian right to self-determination. It is these attempts to eliminate the principles on which the Palestinian struggle is based that are responsible for the present situation, not the just resistance to these attempts. The present situation has been brought about by those who live outside the rule of law, and place themselves beyond its reach and above the principles on which it is based including the opposition to the use of force to settle conflicts within nations and between nations.

Further Developments

The new Emergency Government proclaimed by President Mahmoud Abbas in response to the Gaza events suspended the laws under the Palestinian Constitution. This move will solve no problem whatsoever. Under Palestinian Basic Law an emergency government can be constituted only for 30 days after which the matter must be brought before the Palestine Legislative Council (PLC). This body, in which Hamas has a majority, must agree by a two thirds majority vote to extend it, one time only, for another 30 days. However, this is the very body that all the forces pitted against the Palestinians' right to self-determination are determined shall not meet. According to independent Palestinian legislators, this is the only section of the Constitution that cannot be abrogated by the President. Thus, the very measures originally designed by foreign powers against Chairman Yasser Arafat return to haunt his successor. The foreign powers including Canada, instead of practicing enlightened statecraft and defending the elected Palestinian Authority including its elected Prime Minister as the embodiment of the will of its people, and proceeding from the premise of the equality and sovereignty of all nations and opposition to the use of force to resolve conflicts, have submitted to the US dictate and are once again caught in their own veneer of high ideals.

The US, Europe and Canada rushed to recognise Abbas' so-called new government and restore funding to the Abbas rump in Ramallah yet such a PNA that excludes Hamas runs against the reality of the resistance. Far from the statecraft of the middle ground proclaimed by these capitals of maintaining the illusory two state solution, this recognition constitutes a step into the abyss.

Canada's Role

How Canada has participated in this policy of accommodation is most enlightening.

In early 2006, withdrawing its financial aid to the PNA, the Harper government joined the US and Israel in taking up the blood politics of revenge, dismissing Hamas as a "terrorist" cancer soon to be excised from the body politic of the Palestinian people. To this end, personnel of the Canadian Forces covertly provided military training to Dahlan's terrorist gangs under US and CIA tutelage while just nine months earlier US and Canadian Forces had been training pilots of the Israeli Air Force in aerial bombing (Exercise Maple Leaf, Cold Lake, Alberta, May June 2005). Canada also gave free rein to Israeli state agencies to recruit Canadian nationals to fight in the Israeli armed forces through Sar El Canada, which is a criminal offence in brazen violation of the Foreign Enlistment Act, 1937. These same Israeli forces killed eight Canadian civilians in Lebanon and a Canadian UN observer in Qana. At the same time, Canada prides itself on its "balanced" humanitarian role as chair of the UN Committee on Refugees and funding this and that refugee camp, the very refugees and humanitarian disaster created by aerial bombing and other weapons of mass destruction utilised to enforce the Occupation.

Who Will Come Forward to Defend Palestine and the Rule of Law?

There is no middle ground here; there is either anarchy proclaimed above the rule of law or a just solution to the Occupation based on the principles of international law and the sovereign rights of the Palestinian people. The middle ground has caved and its undoing comes from the very Constitution designed by the West based on the model of the European state. The big powers are deluding themselves as they attempt to dictate arrangements to a world which refuses to submit to the negation of their right to be. 

Within the conditions, nothing was more timely than the actions of the Palestinian resistance in Gaza on June 14-15. The cup had been filled to overflowing and the resistance demonstrated that it means business. By its actions, the Palestinian resistance showed the world once again that it is determined to continue dismantling the Zionist occupation of their land piece by piece.

The time for Canadians to take a stand is now. Canada must take concrete steps to defend the legitimate authority of the Palestinian people. This defence must proceed from principle, the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination consistent with international law, and the cause of peace and justice. Only on this basis can solutions be arrived at. Those who put the responsibility for "civil war" on the Palestinian partisans are without shame. They do not represent Canadian conscience. Demand an immediate end to the Occupation! Isolate the Olmert and US war criminals and their Canadian sycophants who are committing crimes against humanity. Isolate those who have found accommodation with such war criminals under the high ideals of peace and the two state solution. Nor can the State of Israel be permitted indefinitely to retain the exemption it has enjoyed from the standards of international humanitarian law when it comes to the crimes it is committing against the people of Palestine. Israel must be held to account!

The Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) calls on the Canadian working class and people to come forward. Support the Palestinian people in their historic task of national independence. Demand the Canadian government normalise its relations with the Palestinian National Authority which was elected according to the Palestinian Constitution. Canada must cease providing military assistance to the Israeli armed forces and stop its political, diplomatic and economic support of the Israeli Occupation. Furthermore, it must not use the fraudulent "terrorism" issue concocted by the US to justify "regime change" of the PNA and for broader aggression and war in the Middle East.

By concretely supporting the Palestinian people, Canadians will make a contribution to peace and justice.

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