By Chandra Muzaffar
Israel is determined to take over North Gaza. This explains its destruction of residential areas in the region. Schools and hospitals have also been targeted. People have been forced to flee their homes. Many who have chosen to stay behind have been killed.
Although some food and other essentials are now available, they are far from adequate. This is why the threat of starvation is still real.
As with the rest of Gaza and Palestine, scores of medical workers have lost their lives. Media workers would be another category of people who have been victims of Israeli aggression . It has been noted that a lot of children have also succumbed to Israeli bombs and bullets. This is a pattern that has expressed itself in almost every Israeli assault upon Gaza in the last so many years.
While Israeli atrocities in North Gaza fit in with its larger agenda of ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the intensity of its current aggression in that area appears to suggest that the Tel Aviv regime has other specific goals. It has been suggested that it is in a hurry to occupy the north to ensure that it will be able to control the oil and gas reserves off the Gaza coast as soon as feasible. There are analysts who have also argued that Tel Aviv wants to convert North Gaza into a buffer zone of sorts to enhance Israel’s security.
Whatever its ulterior motive, it is unconscionable that a country whose occupation of Gaza the International Court of Justice (ICJ) regards as “ illegal” should be allowed to get away with its blatant ethnic cleansing of a people and their land. True, people have protested. Citizens groups have condemned what Tel Aviv is doing in Gaza and Palestine as a whole. Segments of the alternative media have been overtly critical of what has been happening in Gaza and the West Bank in the last one year since October 7, 2023. Both these media channels and some citizens groups have also taken Israel to task for its current aggression in Lebanon which has also resulted in the death of hundreds of civilians. And yet Israel continues with its barbaric behaviour. It has chosen arrogantly to ignore the voices of the rest of the human family. It is utterly contemptuous of even balanced views of individuals and groups who are part of its own support base.
Part of the reason why Israel persists with its injustice is because there are some powerful states behind it. The US elite continues to shower Israel with money and weapons. It is also ever ready to protect Israeli wrongdoings by using its veto in the United Nations Security Council. The British elite is likewise a faithful supplier of arms to Israel. The rogue state also benefits from German weapons and support.
If American and British elites are colluding with Israeli elites in the ongoing massacre of Palestinians and Lebanese it is largely because Zionist Israel, as many of us have pointed out on numerous occasions, is a product of British and American colonial interests in the early part of the 20th century. The German elite’s eagerness to provide blind support to Israel has a lot to do with the nation’s collective guilt over the Nazi holocaust of the thirties and forties. It is an elite that fails to see how its endorsement of Israel has encouraged the latter to perpetrate death and destruction upon an innocent people who had lost their hearth and home to usurpers pursuing a bigoted, racist ideology.
This is why citizens groups and the alternative media in Germany, Britain and the US have a special responsibility to spread awareness of the plight of the Palestinians and why they and other inhabitants of West Asia are totally opposed to Israel and the politics of Zionism. If such awareness grows and reaches a crescendo, it is not inconceivable that the governments in these Western societies will also change their stance and adopt a more critical attitude towards Israel on the question of the legitimate rights of the Palestinians and other victims of hegemonic Israeli and Western policies in West Asia.
Such a change will remain a dream for a long while to come because the vested interests that keep Israeli and Western elites in power are formidable. Perhaps those who are determined to see a modicum of justice in Gaza, Palestine and West Asia have to go beyond pleas addressed to Western elites and the international institutions they control such as the UN Security Council. Perhaps those who are struggling for justice should begin to harness some of the resources that they and others linked to them possess such as oil and gas and utilize certain assets within their ambit such as strategic sea routes to compel Israeli and Western elites to see reason and do what is morally right.
Dr Chandra Muzaffar is the president of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST).
Malaysia.
25 October 2024.