Say no to authoritarianism, say yes to socialism. Free Palestine 🇵🇸 Everyone deserves Human Rights

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Cake day: August 18th, 2023

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  • Quote from Introduction

    First documented in the late Bronze Age, about 3200 years ago, the name Palestine (Greek: Παλαιστίνη; Arabic: , Filastin), is the conventional name used between 450 BC and 1948 AD to describe a geographic region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River and various adjoining lands. This work explores the evolution of the concept, histories, identity, languages and cultures of Palestine from the Late Bronze Age to the modern era. Moreover, Palestine history is often taught in the West as a history of a land, not as Palestinian history or a history of a people. This book challenges colonial approach to Palestine and the pernicious myth of a land without a people (Masalha 1992, 1997) and argues for reading the history of Palestine with the eyes of the indigenous people of Palestine. The Palestinians are the indigenous people of Palestine; their local roots are deeply embedded in the soil of Palestine and their autochthonous identity and historical heritage long preceded the emergence of a local Palestinian nascent national movement in the late Ottoman period and the advent of Zionist settler-colonialism before the First World War.


















  • Reminder that Rabin, the ‘left’ of Israeli politics, was also a fascist and supported ethnic cleansing; including, but not limited to, breaking the bones of Palestinian children. Zionism has always been a fascist ideology centered on the forced removal of the native Palestinians.

    Quotes and Sources

    Then-Israeli ambassador to the US Yitzhak Rabin confirmed the goal of the operation was the liquidation of Gaza’s Palestinian refugees via "a natural shifting of population to the East Bank. […] the problem of the refugees of the Gaza Strip should not be solved in Gaza or al-Arish [Sinai] but mainly in the East Bank,” by which he meant Jordan.

    https://palestinenexus.com/articles/israels-ethnic-cleansing-of-the-palestinians-1968-1993

    Under Israel’s then-defence minister Yitzhak Rabin’s orders, Israeli army commanders were instructed to break the bones of Palestinian protesters. Today, this policy has evolved to specifically target the knees and legs of Palestinian youth to disable them.

    https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/12/10/stories-from-the-first-intifada-they-broke-my-bones

    In his memoirs, which were censored by Israel but leaked to the New York Times in 1979, Rabin recalled a conversation he had with David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, regarding the fate of the Palestinians of Lydd and Ramla, writing: “We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. [Commander Yigal] Allon repeated his question, ‘What is to be done with the Palestinian population?’ Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said ‘Drive them out!’… I agreed that it was essential to drive the inhabitants out.”

    As an officer in the army, he led “Operation Danny” to capture Ramla and Lydda. In what became known as the Lydda death march, tens of thousands of Palestinians were expelled from those Palestinian villages. The military order signed by Rabin, the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) reported, read: “The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly, without regard to age.”

    The Oslo Accords were never about reaching a compromise, let alone a just peace. Israel entered into bilateral negotiations with the PLO in order to defuse and control Palestinian resistance, remake their public image to the world, and, most importantly, to codify and entrench the power imbalance on the ground.

    The framework of the Oslo Accords set in motion decades of failed negotiations and continued subjugation. The Palestinians formally recognized “the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security.” In return, Rabin’s government neither accepted the goal of a Palestinian state, nor offered guarantees that the settlement construction would stop. The “Declaration of Principles” did not mention the word “occupation.”

    Instead of a Palestinian state, the Oslo Accords offered a limited autonomy, under the direction of a newly created Palestinian Authority. Israel maintained its control over borders, airspace, and waters. Behind the fig leaf of a “peace process,” Israel continued to expand illegal settlements, tightened curfews and closures, and debilitated the Palestinian economy.

    As the IMEU explains: “Today Palestinians live in a series of isolated ghettos in the occupied territories, surrounded by Israeli walls, military checkpoints, and bases, and settlements, under a system of racial segregation, discrimination, and apartheid, all based on the Oslo Accords.”

    https://jacobin.com/2020/09/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-yitzhak-rabin-israel-palestine




  • Leaked Drone Papers

    The White House and Pentagon boast that the targeted killing program is precise and that civilian deaths are minimal. However, documents detailing a special operations campaign in northeastern Afghanistan, Operation Haymaker, show that between January 2012 and February 2013, U.S. special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. During one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets. In Yemen and Somalia, where the U.S. has far more limited intelligence capabilities to confirm the people killed are the intended targets, the equivalent ratios may well be much worse.

    The documents show that the military designated people it killed in targeted strikes as EKIA — “enemy killed in action” — even if they were not the intended targets of the strike. Unless evidence posthumously emerged to prove the males killed were not terrorists or “unlawful enemy combatants,” EKIA remained their designation, according to the source. That process, he said, “is insane. But we’ve made ourselves comfortable with that. The intelligence community, JSOC, the CIA, and everybody that helps support and prop up these programs, they’re comfortable with that idea.”

    The source described official U.S. government statements minimizing the number of civilian casualties inflicted by drone strikes as “exaggerating at best, if not outright lies.”






  • The PA is an arm of Israeli Apartheid, Occupation, and Suppression.

    The PA creates the appearance of Palestinian autonomy, but in fact, much like the governments of the Bantustans of apartheid South Africa, it is simply an extension of the colonial state, a tool of counterinsurgency that is highly effective for the repression of local rebellions, because it makes the native population police itself. Fatah, which was a revolutionary movement in the early days of the armed struggle, is now mostly contained by the PA.

    Israel’s stabilization strategy, inspired by modern counterinsurgency doctrine, has rested on two pillars: the employment of pacification measures to co-opt Palestinians and reliance on the Palestinian Authority (PA) to police its population on Israel’s behalf. However, many Palestinians are now fighting back against this approach, while the PA’s eroding legitimacy has only hardened the population’s refusal to accept its restrictive methods.

    It is presented here as it has been perceived by the Israeli policymakers and bureaucrats down the years. For them the PA was an integral and crucial component in the open-air prison model suggested in the 1990s, and one which the pragmatic elite of Israel still hopes to instate in the West Bank, at least in the near future.

    • Ilan Pappe - The Biggest Prison on Earth

    In appearance, the PA has all the trappings of a state, with ministries and a civil service, but Israel wields the real power, turning the tap on tax revenue, and controlling access to the shrinking territories – a status quo often compared with the Bantustans of apartheid-era South Africa.

    The PA has actively helped Israel to keep tight control over the Palestinian population. Many perceive the body as a tool of the Israeli security apparatus, its US-trained forces not only targeting those suspected of planning attacks on Israelis, but also arresting union figures, journalists and critics on social media.

    Israel relies on this division of the West Bank to foster the fiction that the Palestinian Authority is the entity primarily responsible for administering the life of the majority of Palestinians in the West Bank. In practice, however, Israel still retains control over the entire West Bank and all its residents.