I want to speak to you tonight about Ukraine – what has happened to it and why, how it is likely to emerge from the ordeal to which great power rivalry has subjected it; and what we can learn from this. I do so with some trepidation and a warning to this audience. My talk, like the conflict in Ukraine, is a long and complicated one. It contradicts propaganda that has been very convincing. My talk will offend anyone committed to the official narrative. The way the American media have dealt with the Ukraine war brings to mind a comment by Mark Twain: “The researches of many commentators have already thrown much darkness on this subject, and it is probable that, if they continue, we shall soon know nothing at all about it.”
Chas Freeman: The Many Lessons of the Ukraine War
Tag: self-determination
The US Is Just As Culpable As Israel For The Atrocities Committed In Gaza
The Israeli government dropped thousands of leaflets on Gaza telling everyone who lives in the northern part of the strip that they have 24 hours to evacuate to the southern part, and then bombed the people who were trying to evacuate.
The US Is Just As Culpable As Israel For The Atrocities Committed In Gaza
Stunning State Department Memo Warns Diplomats: No Gaza ‘De-Escalation’ Talk
As Israel escalates its offensive, U.S. diplomats are being discouraged from publicly using three phrases that would urge calm.
Stunning State Department Memo Warns Diplomats: No Gaza ‘De-Escalation’ Talk (archived)
Related:
Blinken Deletes Tweet Encouraging Ceasefire Between Israel and Hamas
The Palestinians’ inalienable right to resist
In December 1982, following Israel’s devastating invasion of Lebanon six months earlier, the United Nations General Assembly passed resolution A/RES/37/43 concerning the ‘[i]mportance of the universal realization of the right of peoples to self-determination’. It endorsed, without qualification, ‘the inalienable right’ of the Palestinian people to ‘self-determination, national independence, territorial integrity, national unity and sovereignty without outside interference’, and reaffirmed the legitimacy of their struggle for those rights ‘by all available means, including armed struggle’. It also strongly condemned Israel’s ‘expansionist activities in the Middle East’ and ‘continual bombing of Palestinian civilians’, both said to ‘constitute a serious obstacle to the realization of the self-determination and independence of the Palestinian people’. In the four decades since then, Israel’s violence against the Palestinian people and its colonisation of their land has not ceased. Up to the present moment, all over historical Palestine, from the Gaza Strip to Sheikh Jarrah, Palestinians are still under that same occupation, subject to suffocating control over virtually every aspect of their lives – and the sadistic, unaccountable violence of the Zionist state.
The Palestinians’ inalienable right to resist
Leaked: CIA Front Preparing Color Revolution in Indonesia
Documents passed anonymously to MintPress News reveal the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a notorious CIA front, is laying the foundations for a color revolution in Indonesia.
Leaked: CIA Front Preparing Color Revolution in Indonesia
Why Saudi-Israel ‘peace’ will cement a violent future
Far from resolving conflicts, Saudi-Israel normalization will serve as a pillar of a repressive architecture that brings no justice for Palestinians or Arab peoples.
Why Saudi-Israel ‘peace’ will cement a violent future
At Least Five Palestinians Killed in Ain Al-Hilweh Clashes
Armed clashes were reported between gunmen in the Palestinian refugee camp of Ain al-Hilweh in southern Lebanon.
At Least Five Palestinians Killed in Ain Al-Hilweh Clashes
Video via Ramzy Baroud
Related:
Prominent Fatah Leader assassinated in Lebanon; Fatah vows justice for the martyrs
A prominent leader of the Palestinian Fatah movement, General Abu Ashraf Al-Armoushi, along with several of his comrades, was assassinated in a targeted act of terrorism in Lebanon’s Ein El-Hilweh camp on Sunday, July 30, 2023, Fatah announced in a statement.
“While carrying out their national duty to ensure the safety of their people within the camp, General Al-Armoushi and his colleagues, identified as Mouhanad Kassem, Tarek Khalaf, Mousa Fandi, and Bilal Obeid, fell victim to this horrific act.”
Israel President Herzog’s ‘honest’ speech to the US Congress
Israel President Herzog’s ‘honest’ speech to the US Congress
But if we are honest with ourselves, we should admit that we have also copied the worst of imperial Europe. We share a dark past of settler colonialism, war, ethnic cleansing of Indigenous inhabitants and a persistent history of racism and discrimination including slavery in the Americas, and apartheid in Palestine.
Our success was made possible through the blood and tears of countless victims. We’ve treated our nemeses as warmongers, our critics as enemies, and our enemies as modern-day Hitlers, but no other states have waged as many wars, or embarked on as many military interventions in the past eight decades as we have.
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But unlike him [Chaim Herzog], I can no longer keep silent as our military and civilian occupation mutates into an apartheid system in the Middle East. I do not say that lightly; I say it with a heavy heart. I do not say it out of pity for the millions of Palestinians, most of whom stubbornly linger under occupation and in refugee camps, I say it out of pity for my people and what’s become of us as decades-long occupiers and dispossessors. Our chutzpah is self-defeating. Our hasbara is wearing thin.
I never was a particularly brave or charismatic parliamentarian and head of the opposition. But that stops now, knowing I will never again have a better platform to address your people and mine. We may have become rich and powerful but we’ve never been so divided, so fanatical; so morally bankrupt.
Friends speak truth to each other. Good friends speak the bitter truth. It befalls upon you, once again, to save us from ourselves. To free us and the Palestinians from an entrenching system of apartheid that is bound to lock us in hatred and violence for decades to come. There is little I can do, as a ceremonial president, other than to speak out.
So, I urge you to condemn racism and apartheid today, as you condemned apartheid in South Africa, albeit belatedly in the past. And I urge you to push us to come to terms with the Palestinians, who soon will become the majority between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
Do not believe a word Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says about the Palestinians; he has made a career out of trafficking in fear.
Biden, Jayapal, and liberal Zionists throw Palestinians under the bus for 2024
Liberal Zionists rushed to affirm their support for Israel and hatred of anti-Zionism in the wake of the Pramila Jayapal “racist state” comment because they are afraid the Israel lobby will abandon the Democratic party.
Biden, Jayapal, and liberal Zionists rush to prop up the Israel lobby for 2024
No Palestinian State and the PA ‘Works for Us’: Netanyahu’s Remarks Should Inspire Paradigm Shift
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not just against the establishment of a Palestinian state, he wants to eliminate the very aspirations for such a state.
No Palestinian State and the PA ‘Works for Us’: Netanyahu’s Remarks Should Inspire Paradigm Shift
Video via Ramzy Baroud
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