The Palestinians are continuing their legitimate resistance against the Israeli occupation of their land, not only in the Gaza Strip, but also across the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem. The people of occupied Palestine are on the right side of international law and of history, and have been for the past eight decades, at least.
As a people living under a brutal military occupation, the Palestinians have the right to self-defence and to resist that occupation, “by all available means, including armed struggle”. Today they are doing so in the face of an existential threat. The most important message in this one year of heroic resilience is that despite the atrocities, the genocide and destruction in Gaza, the Zionist regime will not gain respect from the world through its terrorism and brutality.
It is important to remember that the struggle of the Palestinian people against Israel’s settler-colonial occupation did not begin on 7 October last year. The struggle started more than a hundred years ago, against thirty years of the British colonial “mandate”, which laid the foundations and provided weapons and infrastructure for the Zionist colonial occupation of Palestine and our people’s Nakba (Catastrophe) from 1948 until today.
For decades, the Palestinian people have suffered all forms of oppression, injustice and denial of their fundamental rights. The occupation state has imposed apartheid on the people across all of occupied Palestine, and has been adjudged to have passed the threshold for description as an “apartheid state” by major human rights organisations, including B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, as well as UN rapporteurs. Former rapporteur Michael Lynk pointed out that, “Michael Ben-Yair, a former Attorney-General of Israel, wrote in 2022 that Israel had become: ‘an apartheid regime… a one-state reality, with two different peoples living with unequal rights’.” One of Lynk’s predecessors, South African international law Professor John Dugard referred to Israeli “apartheid” in a 2004 report to the UN, and said, “I know apartheid when I see it.”
Apartheid, in case we forget, is a crime akin to a crime against humanity. It must be challenged and ended.
The Zionists are acting with the full support of the US and other Western governments. Billions of dollars of arms and ammunition have been supplied to the occupation state, almost certainly in breach of US and other national laws. The only “victory” that they can claim is the destruction of civilian infrastructure in Gaza — and now Lebanon — and the murder of tens of thousands of civilians. War crimes have taken place in real time on social media, and are ongoing.
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This outpost of Europe in the Arab and Islamic world must surely know that its days of unbridled state terrorism are numbered. According to Iran’s Imam Seyyed Ali Khamenei, “The struggle of the Palestinian and Lebanese fighters has managed to push the Zionist regime back seventy years.”
The past twelve months of genocide in Gaza have seen an unparalleled degree of solidarity for the Palestinians and their legitimate rights across the world. Free people in country after country, including those whose governments are controlled by Zionist lackeys, feel a strong sense of revulsion at what the occupation state has been allowed to do with impunity.
Even within the occupation state itself, deep cracks have opened up in society. Massive demonstrations have been held in major cities against the far-right government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The very basis of Zionism and its state built upon the terrorism of the Irgun and Stern Gang has been questioned.
The political murder of senior Palestinian and Lebanese resistance figures, such as Ismail Haniyeh and Hassan Nasrullah respectively, will not end the resistance against occupation. As one commentator has pointed out in MEMO, “For every Nasrallah who falls, more will emerge.”
The cowardly war that has shed the blood of Palestinian children, women and other civilians for a year, blockading food, medical care and other basic human needs in the process, will not be enough for the Zionists to achieve their goals. Some have acknowledged that they will never be able to defeat Hamas, Hezbollah or other legitimate resistance groups. Israeli army spokesman Daniel Hagari, for example.
The resilient and brave Palestinians in the Gaza Strip will continue their struggle for liberation from the Zionist occupation. Their efforts in the face of the Zionist killing machine will not be wasted. The blood of heroic martyrs will ensure that Palestine will one day be free of Zionism, from the river to the sea.
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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.