En Passant

1. These elections are the invitation we were waiting for the funeral of the two states solution.

Australian supporters of Israel have reacted to the growing hostility to the Gaza war with a hysterical campaign of slander and suppression against anyone who dares to criticise Israel write Corey Oakley and Daniel Taylor in Red Flag. (The link may not work all the time because pro-Israeli forces have been attacking and shutting down the Red Flag site for the last 3 weeks. The Zionists do not want the truth about Israel’s crimes revealed.)

Education Minister Christopher Pyne labels Socialist Alternative, with no evidence whatsoever, anti-Semitic. This calumny is the last refugee of Zionist scoundrels who cannot rebut the evidence of Israel’s war crimes in Gaza. In fact recent analysis shows that there has not been a global increase in anti-Semitism but rather in anti-Israeli sentiment, based on the reality of the crimes Israel is committing in Gaza. To conflate the two is a crude attempt by Zionists to bury the crimes of Israel alongside the bodies of the hundreds of murdered children in Gaza.

Israel did not win. The Palestinian Authority did not win. Hamas did. Palestine did. Gaza’s people did.

Sherry Wolf, a longtime activist for Palestinian freedom and former press officer for the Russell Tribunal on Palestine in 2012, in Socialist Worker US looks at the rise of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israeli apartheid–and the next steps for the struggle in the face of Israel’s new onslaught on Gaza. Although written for a US audience Sherry’s arguments apply in Australia and elsewhere. Let’s build BDS across the globe to isolate the brutal apartheid state of Israel.

Yochanan Gordon was just being honest in his op-ed in the online Times of Israel asking if the genocide of the Palestinians would be acceptable to secure stability and security for Israel. This is the meaning of the apartheid Israeli state –  stability and security for such a state requires genocide.

I wrote this in 2010 in response to Jeremy Jones’ attack on me for writing the article ‘The Warsaw Ghetto uprising – it is right to resist’ (an article I republished the other day in light of the invasion of Gaza as A lesson from the Warsaw Ghetto – it is right to resist). This slightly edited repost is still relevant today as the Zionists shout anti-Semite at anyone who opposes the Israeli genocide of Palestinians.

Nick Dyrenfurth in the Fairfax Daily (The Age, The Canberra Times, and I assume the Sydney Morning Herald) the other day wrote his usual unthinking rant in defence of Zionism and Israel, in effect a defence of the long slow genocide that Israel has been carrying out against Palestinians since 1948. The current massacre in Gaza is but the next step in that genocide.

Dyrenfurth pretends that he sees the suffering of Palestinians but does not understand that it is the very Zionism he embraces which is the cause of their suffering.

Ask your local and federal Parliamentarians to sign this statement from Australian MPs in support of Gaza.

On his page, the blog from Nazareth, Jonathan Cook summarises the case Norman Finkelstein and Chris Hedges make for Hamas firing rockets into Israel. He also has the links to their full article.