Israel’s Brutal Attack on the World’s Largest Open Air Prison

Israel’s Brutal Attack on the World’s Largest Open Air Prison:
An historical account of the occupation of Palestine and how it might end

The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) have launched yet another brutal assault on the occupied Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank. Triggered by a surprise attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip by Hamas, the latest offensive by the IDF threatens to more punishing than ever, with Israel’s war minister clearly announcing plans to cut electricity, gas, water and all other basic amenities to what is described as the ‘world’s biggest open air prison’.

While a poverty-stricked and exceedingly young Gazan population is besieged from all sides by Israeli settlers, tanks, airstrikes and more, much of the so-called ‘international community’, including Muslim countries, are at best issuing vague statements demanding an end to violence, and at worst explicitly announcing unequivocal support for Israel. Such complicity with the brutal Zionist settler-colonial project is not new – it has been almost six decades since the West Bank and Gaza were annexed, and 75 years since the creeping occupation began, and for most of this time, western powers and Muslim states alike have been complicit with Zionist expansionism.

One need not support Hamas to understand that the crimes of the Zionist regime are far greater than any militant resistance against Israel. Indeed, the space for Islamist organisations like Hamas has steadily increased in occupied Palestine precisely because they are viewed as the only political force willing to at least challenge Israel’s systematic project of ethnic cleansing, siege and psychological terror.

In contrast, until the 1970s, when revolutionary internationalism was at its peak, complicit ruling classes in Muslim countries were challenged by left-progressives that sought freedom from imperialism, capitalist exploitation and all forms of oppression. Crucially, in Pakistan and other Muslim countries, the Palestinian cause was supported in much the same way as other anti-imperialist causes, like the Vietnamese war of national liberation led by Ho Che Minh, the Algerian freedom struggle led by Ahmed Ben Bella, the liberation of Congo led by Patrice Lumumba, and the Cuban Revolution led by Fidel Castro & Che Guevara.

In contrast, most young Pakistanis today see most political causes through a ‘Muslim’ lens, and believe that all major political and economic developments are explained by what the ideologue of US imperialism Samuel Huntington called a ‘clash of civilisations. In this worldview, that there is no link between what is happening in flashpoints like Palestine and in our own imperialist-ravaged region.

But what has happened in Afghanistan is clearly due to the machinations of imperialism, religious right and our own military establishment. Meanwhile Pakistan’s ruling class is committed to a political-economy project of exploitation and humiliation in war-torn ethnic peripheries like ex FATA, Sindh, GB and Balochistan as well as urban areas where dispossession and xenophobia are commonplace.

These linkages between global and local manifestations of capitalist-imperialism defy notions of ‘Muslims vs Jews’. To stand for the Palestinian struggle is to stand for all causes, for freedom from all forms of class, ethnic-national and patriarchal oppression.

Guest Speaker:

• Dr. Aasim Sajjad Akhtar with Fatima Shahzad as moderator