By Stuart Littlewood

I don’t think I’ve ever heard a more sickening speech from a world leader than Biden’s following Hamas’s attack on Israel, the tormentor of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. His crass ignorance, prejudice and subservience to a criminal, apartheid regime, while utterly indifferent to the suffering of the Palestinian people, sets a new low among Western administrations.

Biden says that the United States “stands with the people of Israel in the face of these terrorist assaults. Israel has the right to defend itself and its people, full stop. There’s never a justification for terrorist attacks and my administration’s support for Israel’s security is rock solid and unwavering.’’ He added that the people of Israel were “under attack, orchestrated by a terrorist organisation… The United States stands with Israel. We will not ever fail to have their back. We’ll make sure that they have the help their citizens need and they can continue to defend themselves.”

And Israel’s faithful stooges in the UK and Europe are in perfect harmony:

• UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak: “Shocked by this morning’s attacks by Hamas terrorists… Israel has an absolute right to defend itself.”
• UK Foreign Secretary James Cleverly: “The UK will always support Israel’s right to defend itself.”
• Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey: “Liberal Democrats fully condemn Hamas. This terrorism must cease. Israel has a right to defend itself.”
• UK Labour Party leader Keir Starmer: “No justification for this act of terror… perpetrated by those who seek to undermine any chance for future peace in the region.”
• Head of the EU Commission Ursula von der Leyen: The attack was “terrorism in its most despicable form… Israel has the right to defend itself against such heinous attacks”.

But who are the real “despicable” terrorists?

The US’s own definition of terrorism fits Israel itself perfectly. Under Section 3 of Executive Order 13224 “Blocking Property and prohibiting Transactions with Persons who commit, threaten to commit, or support Terrorism”, the term “terrorism” means an activity that:
(i) involves a violent act or an act dangerous to human life, property, or infrastructure; and
(ii) appears to be intended:

• to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
• to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or
• to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, kidnapping, or hostage-taking.

This instrument, signed on 23 September 2001 by George W. Bush, is used to outlaw and crush any organisation, individual or country the US doesn’t like. And the Israeli regime’s “amoral thugs”, as one British MP branded them, have plainly been terrorising Palestinian civilians for decades. Biden is one very confused bunny.

As for the other stooges, their position is demolished by Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), said to be the largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organisation in the world. “We’re organising a grassroots, multiracial, cross-class, intergenerational movement of US Jews into solidarity with Palestinian freedom struggle,” they say on their website. Here’s an extract from their statement on the hostilities.

The Israeli government may have just declared war, but its war on Palestinians started over 75 years ago. Israeli apartheid and occupation — and United States complicity in that oppression — are the source of all this violence. Reality is shaped by when you start the clock.

For the past year, the most racist, fundamentalist, far-right government in Israeli history has ruthlessly escalated its military occupation over Palestinians in the name of Jewish supremacy with violent expulsions and home demolitions, mass killings, military raids on refugee camps, unrelenting siege and daily humiliation. In recent weeks, Israeli forces repeatedly stormed the holiest Muslim sites in Jerusalem.

For 16 years, the Israeli government has suffocated Palestinians in Gaza under a draconian air, sea and land military blockade, imprisoning and starving two million people and denying them medical aid. The Israeli government routinely massacres Palestinians in Gaza; ten-year-olds who live in Gaza have already been traumatized by seven major bombing campaigns in their short lives.

For 75 years, the Israeli government has maintained a military occupation over Palestinians, operating an apartheid regime. Palestinian children are dragged from their beds in pre-dawn raids by Israeli soldiers and held without charge in Israeli military prisons. Palestinians homes are torched by mobs of Israeli settlers, or destroyed by the Israeli army. Entire Palestinian villages are forced to flee, abandoning the homes and orchards and land that were in their family for generations.

The bloodshed of today and the past 75 years traces back directly to US complicity in the oppression and horror caused by Israel’s military occupation. The US government consistently enables Israeli violence and bears blame for this moment. The unchecked military funding, diplomatic cover, and billions of dollars of private money flowing from the US enables and empowers Israel’s apartheid regime.

Meanwhile, Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP)’s team on the ground in Gaza have a close-up view of the situation. They say they “are releasing all of our pre-positioned stocks, worth $570,000 USD (approximately £465,000), to ensure hospitals and emergency responders have the supplies they need to cope with an unprecedented influx of casualties”.

Supplies provided by MAP include essential drugs and disposables, laboratory reagents and support for Gaza’s blood bank services. Even before this latest escalation Gaza’s beleaguered health system was struggling, with 48 per cent of essential medicines and 26 per cent of medical disposables unavailable or in critically short supply. Today, the Ministry of Health in Gaza is calling for blood donations for the influx of casualties. Melanie Ward, MAP’s chief executive, says: “We are deeply concerned about the potential for substantial loss of civilian life in the coming days. Gaza’s healthcare services are woefully under-equipped to respond to this emergency, and MAP’s support is needed now more than ever. We call on the international community to take urgent steps to protect civilian life and infrastructure from attack, and to launch immediate humanitarian relief efforts to ensure that health services have the resources they need to save lives and respond to casualties.”

MAP is also committed to bearing witness to the injustices caused by occupation, displacement and conflict. “We speak out in the UK and internationally, and ensure Palestinian voices are heard at the highest levels, to press for the political and social barriers to Palestinian health and dignity to be addressed.”

Self-defence? Really?

And what about this mantra-like claim that Israel, the aggressor and illegal occupier, has a right to defend itself? The West Bank, East Jerusalem (including the Old City) and Gaza are regarded as Palestinian territory under international law and by the United Nations. So what are Israel’s occupation army and armed settlers doing there?

The word “settler” is much too nice. I call these armed thugs “squatters”. They are transferred illegally onto Palestinian territory by the Israeli government to establish “facts on the ground” in the hope of eventually annexing and acquiring the territory for itself. That’s why Israel has never declared its borders – it intends to keep expanding until it has stolen all of the Holy Land.

This of course is a violation of occupation law and a war crime on the part of the individuals involved. And it is a violation of Israel’s legal obligation to respect the sovereignty of another state and a violation of Israel’s legal obligation to respect the right of self-determination of the Palestinian people; also a violation of Israel’s obligations regarding international law on the use of force. Ending these violations calls for the removal of the squatters and their squats from occupied land and an immediate end to Israel’s exercise of control, including its use of military force, over the Palestinians’ territory. It is nonsense to suggest that Israel has any right to defend its nationals when misbehaving and committing war crimes on somebody else’s territory.

The UK government is complicit in these crimes, having created the problem in the first place back in 1916/17 (Balfour’s infamous declaration and promise to the Zionists) and even today refuses to sanction Israel’s murderous behaviour and racist policies. As we so often see demonstrated, all our political parties have brainwashed elements within their ruling elite that are obedient to the Israel lobby.

Know your terrorist

Furthermore, there’s nothing anyone can teach Israelis about terrorism. They wrote the manual. If you don’t believe it, read their Dalet Plan, or ‘Plan D’. This was the Zionists’ blueprint for the violent and bloody takeover of the Palestinian homeland – some call it the Palestinian holocaust – drawn up in early 1948 by the Jewish underground militia, the Haganah, at the behest of David Ben-Gurion, then boss of the Jewish Agency.

Plan D anticipated the British mandate government’s withdrawal and the Zionists’ declaration of Israeli statehood, and plotted the ethnic cleansing that was to follow. Here is a chilling extract setting out guidelines for besieging, occupying and controlling Arab cities:

1. By isolating them from transportation arteries by laying mines, blowing up bridges, and a system of fixed ambushes.
2. If necessary, by occupying high points which overlook transportation arteries leading to enemy cities, and the fortification of our units in these positions.
3. By disrupting vital services, such as electricity, water, and fuel, or by using economic resources available to us, or by sabotage.
4. By launching a naval operation against the cities that can receive supplies by sea, in order to destroy the vessels carrying the provisions, as well as by carrying out acts of sabotage against harbour facilities.

It is one of the vilest documents in history and shows why so many people question Israel’s legitimacy. Jewish terror gangs committed a massacre at Deir Yassin to set the tone and “soften up” the Arabs for expulsion. More atrocities followed the declaration of Israeli statehood on 14 May 1948. Some 750,000 Palestinians were put to flight as Israel’s forces obliterated hundreds of Arab town and villages. The village on which Sderot now stands was one of these. It was designate an Arab town in the UN Partition Plan but that made no difference. To this day its inhabitants have been denied the right to return and received no compensation. Thirty four massacres are said to have been committed in pursuit of the Jewish nation’s racist and territorial ambitions, which immediately overran the generous borders gifted to the Zionists in the Partition Plan.

Biden, put that in your pipe and smoke it.