Sixty-six years after ending its “mandate” in Palestine, Britain remains a party in a bloody conflict where Israel is still carrying out the same policies of colonial expansion, using western - including British - funds, arms and political support.
I recall, with particular awkwardness, my first talk at a socialist student gathering at the University of Washington in Seattle nearly two decades ago. When I tried to offer an authentic view of the situation in Palestine from the viewpoint of a refugee, my hosts were hardly impressed.
What if the so-called Islamic State (IS) didn’t exist? In order to answer this question, one has to liberate the argument from its geopolitical and ideological confines.
On its own the Arabic word al-Nakhwa, means “gallantry.” Combined with the word “al-Arabiya” - “Arab gallantry” - the term becomes loaded with meanings, cultural and even political implications and subtext. But what is one to make of “Arab gallantry” during and after Israel’s most brutal war on Gaza between July 8 and August 26 which killed 2,163 Palestinians and wounded over 11,000 more?
Netanyahu’s war-turned-genocide in Gaza has backfired badly - his strategy has helped resurrect Hamas, the very movement he tried desperately to crush.
In the rush to analyze the outcome of Israel’s 51-day war in Gaza, dubbed Operation Protective Edge, some may have neglected an important factor: this was not a war by traditional definitions of warfare, thus the conventional analyses of victory and defeat is simply not applicable.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019