By Geraldina Colotti on November 2, 2023
Il sit in a piazza Vittorio, a Roma.
It has been years since Rome has seen a demonstration as well attended as the one that took place on Saturday the 28th with the cry of “Free Palestine”. More than 50,000 people, on average less than thirty years old, responded to the call of young Palestinians, the vanguard of the children of Arab immigrants who disturb the dream of European opportunism. A response to the shameful text with which, on October 26, the European Council of Heads of State and Government, avoiding imposing at least a truce, in fact endorsed the invasion of the Gaza Strip launched by the Zionist entity 24 hours later, thus giving a free hand to the worst war crimes. Only the socialist Sanchez (Spain) voted against the EU text, which was approved without mentioning the truce. Meloni’s Italian far right abstained.
The executive director of Unicef, Catherine Russell, denounced to the UN Security Council that Israeli attacks against the Strip are killing or injuring more than 420 children every day.
In 26 days, 9,000 Palestinians have been killed, of which about 2,000 were never recovered from the rubble. A number that increases every day, as Zionist attacks continue to intensify.
Several human rights organizations estimated that more children have been killed in Gaza than have been killed each year in all the armed conflicts in the world from 2019 until today. A figure that, according to Russell, should “shake every one of us to the core.” But for the media propaganda, Israel “has the right” to defend itself, being “the only democracy in the Middle East.” It can act without restraint and in a “disproportionate” manner, cutting off water and electricity, bombing hospitals, displacing populations and declaring that it is “hitting Hamas”.
Naming only Hamas, which the Palestinians in Gaza elected by a majority in 2006, serves the narrative of a “clash” between the “Forces of Good” (the Zionist entity and the Western camp that supports it) and “the Axis of Evil” (Hamas , listed as a “terrorist” organization, and the Arab peoples who support the Palestinians). Instead, the heroic attack against the occupation forces, carried out on October 7, was organized and launched by the coordination of all the Palestinian resistance forces in Gaza (the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command), while those in the West Bank were tasked with “distracting” the occupier.
An operation planned since September 2020, when the United States announced the signing of the Abraham Accords, a trilateral pact between the US, “Israel” and Bahrain. A project to “normalize” relations between the Arab countries and the Zionist entity, including also Saudi Arabia, the first Sunni country in the world, and which would have definitively opened the prospect of a Palestinian state. From the debate that was opened among the resistance forces, a year later, the planning of the operation “Al Aqsa Flood” took shape.
An operation which, at a very high price, has brought the Palestinian question back onto the international scene, giving a voice back to the peoples of the Arab countries more inclined towards Western interests, interests which are being called into question by the prefiguration of a multicentric and multipolar world, something already evident in the current Ukrainian conflict. A large part of the world has thus been forced to consider the analyses of those who have been denouncing for years the extermination plans envisaged by Netanyahu and his top hierarchs, who no longer keep it secret even on the television programs to which they are invited, with full honors, by the Western “democracies”.
Gaza and the “animals” (goyam ) that inhabit it (this is how former Zionist ambassadors and soldiers express themselves publicly) must disappear. Those who remain must be expelled to neighboring Arab countries (Egypt or Jordan), and even the Palestinian Authority, which is no longer considered malleable, must be swept away. In short, it is the plan for a new “nakba”, a tragedy similar to the one which, in 1948, expelled the Palestinians from their territories, then prevented their right of return.
For this reason, the claim that “Israel” is bombing only Hamas positions and not civilians is a cruel lie. A criminal lie, made explicit by the density of inhabitants present in the Gaza Strip portion of the land. Further proof was the double bombing of the Jabaliya refugee camp, located between Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun, one of the most densely populated refugee camps in the north of the Strip, which destroyed buildings inhabited by hundreds of people.
After the operations Cast Lead (2008-2009), Defense Pillar (2012), Security Margin (2014), Guardians of the Walls (2021), and Rising Dawn (2022), now the Zionist entity has the way open for the operation called Iron Swords, to “restart Gaza”, while a gigantic plan to expand the occupation of the West Bank with the arrival of thousands of settlers was already underway.
The genocide in Gaza makes explicit the structural nature of Zionist colonialism, which considers itself above the law, thanks to its role as gendarme of Western interests in the Middle East. A “paradigm” based on the overwhelming imposition of a military force on the surrounding territory and on a political advantage that allows “Israel” to take, as established in the Oslo Accords, all strategic decisions with total autonomy. A “paradigm” reiterated, in declarations and deeds by the Zionist entity, and destined to erase from the map, after years of ethnic cleansing, any possibility of existence for Palestine.
Months before Operation Al Aqsa Flood, Human Rights Watch published a detailed report, based on medical data, eyewitness accounts, video footage and field research, and with special attention to four specific cases. It is entitled “West Bank: Israeli killings of Palestinian children on the rise” and records the systematic increase in killings and injuries of Palestinian children at the hands of the occupying army or settlers over a relatively short period of time. It therefore concludes that there is an intentional plan to kill children, backed also by statements by Zionist generals calling for the murder of the mothers of Palestinian martyrs. And that is why many of the Palestinian fighters, who landed on hang-gliders in the settler settlements, attacked shouting, “This is for my son!”.
But even the figures provided by “Israel” on the alleged killings and barbaric acts committed by Hamas have raised controversy and denials coming mainly from Jewish sources, who accuse the Israeli military forces of having killed their own. In addition, some analysts have recalled the so-called Hannibal Directive. This is a military procedure established in 1986, following an exchange of prisoners (3 Israeli soldiers for 1,150 Palestinian prisoners).
This secret directive, issued to prevent a repetition of similar situations, states that, if Israelis are captured and there is no immediate possibility of releasing them, the army must kill everyone, kidnappers and hostage-takers. This serves both to explain the high number of Israeli deaths during the active phase of the Palestinian attack and the evident indifference with which Tsahal shells the Strip, despite the presence of more than two hundred Israeli civilians and soldiers.
The heroic resistance of the Palestinian people is radicalizing, even in Europe, the struggle of a new generation. Their banner of resistance is animating a worldwide sentiment against injustice, it unmasks the system of power that directs capitalist globalization against the interests of the people. A movement that is beginning to resemble that of the Vietnam era sixty years ago, and which is pressing for a choice of camps: on the one hand, the struggle of the peoples against imperialism, on the other, the hypocrisy of the European governments, guardians of the military-industrial complex dominated by the USA.
photo: Bill Hackwell
In Latin America, the ALBA countries have taken a stand. Bolivia has announced the severance of relations with “Israel”. Chile and Colombia have recalled their ambassadors for consultation. Venezuela broke off relations in 2009, following an Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip. Hugo Chavez was then the President of Venezuela and Maduro, who today as President has condemned the genocide in Gaza, was his Chancellor. There have been no relations between Cuba and “Israel” since 1973.
Palestinian trade unions have called on the international working class to organize mobilizations and, in Europe, demonstrators defy repression and continue to experience the level of closure of existing spaces for political action in “democracy”, and the need to increase the level of awareness and organization. In France, where Arab youth in the suburbs are periodically the protagonists of clashes with the police, the Macron government (the only one in Europe, along with the Hungarian government of Viktor Orbán) has banned pro-Palestinian demonstrations throughout the country, and those who raise signs with the words “Boycott Israel” are prosecuted as anti-Semites.
In France, the Islamic community, made up mainly of immigrants from the Maghreb, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, represents between 5% and 10% of the national population, and is the largest in Western Europe, where there are about 26 million Muslims (in Italy there are about 3 million). Germany, together with France, is home to the largest Jewish and Muslim communities in the European Union.
The turn taken by Paris on the Palestinian question represents well the disappearance of any ambition for autonomy towards Washington, manifested since the times of General Charles de Gaulle by French governments of both left and right with their policy of “non-alignment”. The competition is now only for those who can play the role of principal lackey within NATO. Moreover, as early as 1958, Paris had proposed entrusting European defense to a triumvirate formed by France, Great Britain and the United States.
In 1956, France took part in the Suez military expedition alongside the Israelis and the British. Then, from 1967, in order to regain influence in the Maghreb and the Middle East, a strategic region both for its geographical position and its resources, Paris tried to build a different neo-colonial relationship with the governments of the Arab countries, which were also largely damaged by the fierce repression carried out against the Algerian revolution. From this perspective, in 1966, de Gaulle removed France from NATO’s military command (but not from the Alliance) and was thus able to criticize the U.S. invasion of Vietnam.
Maintaining a passive position within NATO has allowed France greater room for diplomatic maneuver, which has also been highlighted in the Palestinian question. Not only did François Mitterrand receive Arafat in 1989, but Jacques Chirac also received the PLO leader when he was ill and was the first president to pay tribute to him after his death. And the French government opposed the 2003 attack on Iraq.
With the arrival of Nicolas Sarkozy at the Elysée, France returned to NATO’s military command on April 4, 2009, during the Strasbourg summit. A return that corresponded to an increase in military spending that year of $67 billion, equivalent to 2.5% of GDP, which placed France in fourth place in the world in terms of volume of military spending.
Paris’ ambitions were to take advantage of the gradual withdrawal of the United States in the Mediterranean in favor of the Indo-Pacific, becoming one of the United States’ key reference and operational partners on the other side of the Atlantic, along with Great Britain: the 1958 plan, updated. France is now the third largest exporter of military equipment, behind the United States and Russia.
A decisive ambition in the NATO air strike against Libya, launched in the spring of 2011, which saw French preeminence within the coalition, both in the number of aircraft made available and in the bombings carried out, and with the U.S. in the role of logistical support. A dominance called into question by the conflict in Ukraine and by the new hegemonic plans of the United States through NATO, which aim to make Europe more and more the backyard of the United States.
A backyard in which, since 2009, after an earlier massacre in Gaza, first Sarkozy, then the socialist Hollande and now Macron, compete to see who barks the loudest in defense of “Israel”. Macron has even gone so far as to investigate MPs and footballers for “apology of terrorism”, receiving the epithet “murderer” from Arab demonstrators protesting, from Lebanon to Africa, against the French embassy.
Meanwhile, to protect “Israel” from a possible Arab response, the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower has passed the Strait of Gibraltar to head for the eastern Mediterranean, where there is already the largest concentration of NATO ships in operational condition that we have not seen in decades.
From October 23 to November 6, the NATO Allied Maritime Command’s (MARCOM) Dynamic Mariner 23 exercises are being held in Italian waters, involving 30 other ships from 14 NATO countries.
These exercises are very important for Italy, where the extreme right rules on behalf of the military-industrial complex, because, in 2024, the Italian navy will be in command of the NATO Response Force Maritime Element (NRF/M). And, as revealed by the Intercept website, the United States has inaugurated a secret military base in “Israel”, mainly with an anti-Iran function.