Palestine: genuine revolution versus another round of betrayal
Kevin Ovenden London UK
The very first thing any truly revolutionary force would do on walking into an Arab capital at the collapse of its degraded regime would be to issue a declaration of struggle for the cause of Palestine.
It would be to call on all sincere supporters of the Palestinians to come together right now to engage in mass struggle in all its forms across the piece and across the region. Appealing to solidarity internationally.
It would be instant denunciation of all those states that back Israel and are in alliance with the US, whose war against the Palestinians this is.
You may call on representatives internationally - civil and political - to join together in existing and fresh initiatives to come to the aid of the Palestinian people. Prepare for a historic Congress.
You would proclaim: there is a genocide happening in Palestine. The immediate issue now is to stop that genocide. You could demand of those Western - and Arab - governments wanting to bathe in the fall of the old regime that you will not entertain them until they declare for Palestine and break off relations with Israel.
You could say - even with some diplomatic obliquity - that the emptying of one torture prison should signal the same happening right across the region: in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Jordan, Libya, Turkey, Iran... and above all and most directly - in Israel.
And you would say that whatever those other state actors do we will fight for that and with the common people everywhere to that end.
You would say immediately that there can be no peace with the genocidaires of Israel. Nelson Mandela declared that South Africa would not be free until Palestine is free.
That or similar is not what anyone is saying in Syria right now. Not those in the decapitated regime, not the official opposition, not the HTS militia.
Instead there is the deadly hand of Realpolitik. It is a childlike delusion to imagine that that is not present via blood-soaked state actors and their proxies just because there have been statues pulled down. The biggest of those political actors is the US and its allies. It does actually control Syria's relations to the global financial system and it is occupying strategically vital territory of the country.
For us in the West, we must redouble our efforts for Palestine as the lodestone and centrepiece of what we can do to help curb our own murderous states and thus contribute to progress in the Middle East.
That is if we truly believe that there is a genocide unfolding and a growing Israeli, expansionist land grab and ethnic cleansing, greater even than the Nakba.
In the alternative, is it that we didn't really believe that but just engaged in hyperbolic rhetoric? That would mean that we deserve utter damnation and never to be trusted in our own societies ever again. It would mean we lied to people about something so absolute as a genocide. It would mean Israel and its apologists were right about us all along.
The truth is that there is indeed a genocidal war against the Palestinians. There is a catastrophic push for more Israeli war for "Lebansraum", as one public figure put it. All with the proximate additional boost of Netanyahu himself relying upon expanding war to stave off domestic opposition and legal difficulties.
Palestine and the genocide are the issue of issues here.
And when we keep our eyes firmly on that, it becomes easier to navigate what will be yet more war and unfolding chaos in the Middle East.
Hatta al nasr, hatta al quds.
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