John Wight: Arms for Ukraine, but no arms for Palestine

Muhammad Haitham al-Tamimi was just 2-years-old — yes, you read that right, 2-YEARS-OLD — when he was shot and killed by Israeli troops in the Occupied West Bank. Muhammad goes down as yet another child-victim of the murder machine that is the State of Israel when it comes to its ongoing barbarous and brutal occupation of the Palestinians in the West Bank, and its siege and asphyxiation of same in Gaza.

The collective West has never been more united in its support for Ukrainian resistance to Russian occupation, nor has it ever wavered in its defence of Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine. The hypocrisy underpinning this sordid dynamic is so rancid it can only make you retch, such is the level of disgust engendered.

This, dear reader, is the world that our governments, mainstream media, and propagandists in the West are never done telling us is the best of all possible worlds. It leads us to ask as to the whereabouts of the reset button, so we can start human affairs again — from the beginning.

The cause of the Palestinian people is the cause of humanity in our time. For from it flows all the ills of Western so-called civilisation, chief among of which is might is right. Israel in its current form is a proto-fascist state, impervious to any constraints when it comes to is systemic and structural oppression of the Palestinian people in the name not of security, as its apologists tirelessly claim, but in the name of ethno-nationalism and white supremacy, of which Zionism is a malign species.

The timid language used by mainstream commentators when reporting on the apartheid state of Israel, its ceaseless attacks on the Palestinian people, is a tribute to the success of the pro-Israel lobby in the West when it comes to policing how this issue is reported and narrated.

Indeed, for those who’ve just arrived on earth from another dimension, you could be forgiven for believing that it is the Israelis that are being oppressed and occupied by the Palestinians, rather than the other way round. Talk of ‘clashes’ in the West Bank are all the rage by the ‘inkslingers of the jingo’ press, as James Connolly described them, establishment scribes in whose addled minds the Palestinians occupy a much lower rung on the ladder of human worth than their Israeli counterparts.

As for Israeli settlers, such people are so execrable in their extremist and fanatical belief in religious supremacy and all its works, you are left to ponder where humanity went wrong. The relentless theft of Palestinian land, the routine eviction of Palestinians from their homes, regular acts of murder and violence, such people in a world underpinned by justice would be mercilessly calumniated and chastised — and rightly so.

Alas, we today do not live in such a world, and as such injustice has become so normalised when it comes to the lived experiences of the Palestinians that one can only marvel at their tenacity and courage in the face of it.

Israel is not a democracy, it is a settler-colonial state masquerading as one. In his outstanding work, The Hundreds Years War On Palestine, author Rashid Khalidi quotes the sentiments of one Zeev Jabotinsky from as far back as 1923. Jabotinsky was the founder and father of the Zionist Revisionist movement, his ideology embraced by the such Israeli prime ministers as Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Ariel Sharon and current incumbent, Benjamin Netanyahu:

Jabotinsky:

Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope they they will be able to prevent the transformation of ‘Palestine’ into the “Land of Israel.”

Returning the central theme of the piece and the similarities that now exist Ukraine and Israel are striking. Though you may argue that Ukraine is not a settler-colonial project, the mistreatment of its ethnic and Russian speaking minority in southern and eastern Ukraine since 2014 has been equally as brutal and murderous as that meted out to the Palestinians by Israel.

Both countries are drowning in the poison of ethno-nationalism, and both are US vassal states, dependent on Washington’s support and economic largesse.

The recent murder of 2-year-old Palestinian child Muhammad Haitham al-Tamimi at the hands of soldiers of the apartheid state of Israel marks a withering indictment of the status quo ante in the collective West. Riding shotgun for such barbarism can be described as many things. Decency is not one of them.

The right of the Palestinians to resist their oppression and occupation is enshrined in international law. The right of the Israelis to oppress and occupy them is not. No amount of Hasbara or obfuscation can alter that which is inalterable.

The author is a writer and commentator and can be found on medium where this article was originally published