Yossi Schwartz ISL (RCIT section in Israel/Occupied Palestine), 20.03.2024
We are told that Biden warns Netanyahu against ‘mistake’ of invading Rafah and that ‘coherent strategy’ is needed to defeat Hamas in Gaza without killing the civilians. The White House has issued its strongest public warning yet to Israel against invading the crowded city of Rafah in the Gaza Strip, saying that such a ground operation would deepen the humanitarian crisis in the besieged enclave. Before the war 300,000 people lived in Rafah and now 1.7 million came from the north and center of the enclave. They were told by Israel to move south to save their lives.
“American National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters on Monday that, while President Joe Biden remains committed to the goal of defeating Hamas, he communicated to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that a major assault on Rafah would be a mistake. It would lead to more innocent civilian deaths, worsen the already dire humanitarian crisis, deepen the anarchy in Gaza and further isolate Israel Internationally, Sullivan said.” [I]
The Zionist army has killed more than 31,000 Palestinians in Gaza since the start of the war. 70% of them are women and children. An invasion of Rafah will double the death toll. Yet Netanyahu vowed that nothing will stop him from invading Rafah even when the people who reside in Rafah have nowhere to escape as Gaza has been destroyed.
On Monday, Sullivan said that Palestinians in Rafah have nowhere else to go. “Sullivan said that Biden’s opposition to Israel’s Rafah operation is centered, in part, on the fact that over 1 million displaced people have sought refuge there and “they have nowhere else to go. Gaza’s other major cities have largely been destroyed. “And Israel has not presented us, or the world, with a plan for how or where they would safely move those civilians, let alone feed and house them and ensure access to basic things like sanitation,” he said.
Sullivan also pointed to Rafah’s role as a primary entry point for international deliveries of humanitarian aid, adding that “invasion would shut that down or at least put it at grave risk right at the moment when it is most sorely needed.” Biden may believe that it is possible to fight Hamas in Rafah without a mass killing of the civilians and he sent some humanitarian aid and promised more aid by ships in a clear PR campaign. However, he can stop the genocide by stopping the delivery of weapons and ammunition, which he refuses to do. His unconditional support for the Zionist killing machine will cost him votes in the coming presidential elections, but stopping Israel’s war may cost him even more votes.
What the US and Israel fail to see is that a massive killing in Rafah may ignite the new wave of the Arab revolution. The Arab masses support the Palestinians but not the Arab local rulers who only speak against the Zionist state. In Egypt for example El Sisi permitted and even organized controlled demonstrations, but many who came to these phony demos left them and demonstrated in Tahrir plaza. Critics say El-Sisi’s administration has been organizing staged protests to support for his embattled government, by piggybacking on public sympathy for Palestinians as the death toll from Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip goes higher
“The real pro-Palestinian supporters said they would go instead to Mostafa Mahmoud Square, where a grassroots gathering was set to take place However, the police reportedly made the gathering in the square dissolve, as happened with a similar pro-Palestinian demonstration in the Al-Azhar Mosque that same day. The demonstrators ultimately started marching towards a symbolic place in the history of Egypt’s protest movements: Tahrir Square. The 2011 Arab Spring protests converged there, culminating in the removal of then-President Hosni Mubarak“[ii]
Israel is the front line of the western imperialists in the region and in this time, they will stand behind it whatever it will do until the price they will have to pay for this support will be higher than the losses and the Netanyahu government is pushing in this direction. This is what happened in South Africa where the Western supported until the price was too high, this was the case with nazi Germany as long it paid to allow Germany repress the workers But, it became too high when Nazi Germany began to occupied colonies that in the eyes of the Western imperialists belonged to them like Czechoslovakia. After the First World War, the map of Europe was redrawn and several new countries were formed. As a result of this, three million Germans found themselves now living in part of Czechoslovakia. When Adolf Hitler came to power, he wanted to unite all Germans into one nation. In September 1938 he turned his attention to the three million Germans living in part of Czechoslovakia called the Sudetenland. Sudeten Germans began protests and there were clashes with the Czech police. Hitler claimed that 300 Sudeten Germans had been killed. This was not actually the case, but Hitler used it as an excuse to place German troops along the Czech border. During this situation, the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, flew to meet Hitler at his private mountain retreat in Berchtesgaden in an attempt to resolve the crisis. He returned from Germany saying he saved the peace. In the real-world Chamberlain’s appeasement policy made war more likely because Hitler thought he could get away with getting more colonies. Over the past five months, Rafah’s population has ballooned to more than 1.5 million people, up from about 300,000 before the war.
The same was the case with the US motivated by anti-Communism.
“From the time FDR first took office in 1933 until America entered World War II in December 1941, the Roosevelt administration’s policy was to pursue cordial, sometimes even friendly relations with the Nazi regime. Many Americans boycotted products from Nazi Germany. But the Roosevelt administration helped Nazi Germany evade the boycott in the 1930s by permitting goods from Germany to bear labels that misled consumers as to their country of origin. The administration halted this disgraceful practice only when threatened with a lawsuit by boycott activists and also sent Secretary of Commerce Daniel Roper to address a pro-Nazi rally in New York City in 1933. At that rally, Nazi Germany’s ambassador to the United States was the keynote speaker and the podium and hall were decorated with swastika flags. In 1937, the administration sent one of its senior diplomats to represent the United States at the annual Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg. IN some instances, the Roosevelt administration actually apologized for U.S. citizens’ anti-Nazi sentiment. In 1935, the administration publicly apologized to Adolf Hitler after a New York City judge released protesters who tore a swastika flag off a visiting German ship. Then, in 1937, when New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia called Hitler a “brown-shirted fanatic who is threatening the peace of the world,” Roosevelt’s secretary of state expressed the US government’s “regret” over “utterances calculated to be offensive to a foreign government.” [iii]
Down with all the imperialists!
Down with the Zionist imperialist apartheid state!
For Palestine red and free from the river to the sea!
Endnotes
[i] https://www.aa.com.tr/en/americas/biden-says-israel-should-not-invade-rafah-during-call-with-netanyahu-white-house/3167976
[ii] https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/10/21/exploiting-our-anger-egyptians-denounce-staged-pro-palestine-protests
[iii] https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/roosevelt-s-prewar-attitude-toward-hitler