Firoz Osman
The heroic resistance of Palestinian youth at Al-Aqsa Mosque in Al-Quds (Jerusalem) is clear affirmation of the utter failure of the Zionist Project to colonise the land of Palestine and empty it of its indigenous people.
With their bare hands and chests, they have defied the heavily-armed Zionist thugs that have attempted to invade and occupy the noble Sanctuary.
Defence of Masjid al Aqsa and the Haram al-Sharif is not only the responsibility of the Palestinians.
This falls on the shoulders of all Muslims. They must rise to the occasion and defend it from the Zionist marauders. It will not do to shed tears for it afterwards if, God forbid, the Zionists succeed in destroying it.
The Polish-born first prime minister of the Zionist entity David Ben-Gurion had stated in 1948: “We must do everything to insure they [the Palestinians] never do return.”
He assured his fellow Zionists that Palestinians will never come back to their homes. “The old will die and the young will forget.”
Protests by Palestinians against the ethnic cleansing and Judaization of Al-Quds (Jerusalem) in the suburb of Sheikh Jarrah demonstrates that not even former US president Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the “capital of Israel” will be accepted.
Sheikh Jarrah is named after the personal physician of the iconic liberator of Al-Quds, Salahuddin al-Ayubi (Saladin) in 1187 when it was occupied by the Crusaders.
Most of its residents are refugees ethnically cleansed by the Zionists in 1948 from the Talbiya neighbourhood.
Political Zionism is an ethnic cleansing, racist colonial ideology developed in 1896 by an Austrian Jew, Theodor Herzl.
Its main goal was the establishment of the Greater Israel Project in the heart of the Arab and Muslim world, extending from the Nile River in Egypt to the Euphrates in Iraq, as a Jewish-only homeland for what is termed the “Jewish People”.
By the turn of the last century, British and French colonialists were busy instigating revolts in the Middle East by buying the loyalty of Arabian tribal chiefs to use them against the Ottoman Sultanate.
The toxic brew of Western colonialism, Arabian nationalism, and political Zionism facilitated the imposition of the Zionist entity in Palestine through the infamous Balfour Declaration.
Political Zionism, despite strenuous efforts by its proponents, has little or nothing to do with Judaism, the religion of millions of people.
In fact, leading rabbis at The Philadelphia Conference of November 3–6, 1869, adopted a resolution that stressed the radical opposition between the universalist principles of Judaism and those of political Zionism.
The racism of political Zionism is a coherent system that inspires all the laws and practices of Israel.
It encompasses all the odious characteristics of colonialism including ethnic cleansing, regular massacres, bombardment of entire civilian populations, wars of aggression, dispossession, exile, systemic racism, apartheid and destabilisation.
With a massive infusion of financial, diplomatic and military help from the British and French colonial powers, the Zionists accomplished their Project to establish the state of Israel on the occupied Palestinian land after the genocide and ethnic cleansing of a majority of Palestinian Arabs.
Significantly for the Zionist Project, the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire fragmented Islam’s Arab heartland into some 40 weak and dependent territories and oil-rich protectorates.
It has failed to further fracture Syria, Iraq and Lebanon into smaller ethnic enclaves of Alawites, Sunnis, Shias, Kurds, Christian fiefdoms.
Al-Quds (Jerusalem), which houses the Aqsa compound, was taken over under the protection of the international community, administered by the UN.
It was granted this special status for its importance to the three Abrahamic religions.
Zionist Israel has pursued a policy of creeping annexation of Al-Quds (Jerusalem). In 1948, it illegally occupied half of Al-Quds (Jerusalem).
In June 1967, it illegally occupied the rest of the holy city of Al-Quds (East Jerusalem), including the Old City.
This violates several principles of international law, which outlines that an occupying power does not have sovereignty in the territory it occupies.
Israel has changed the demography of Palestine, controlling and Judaizing the Old City and East Jerusalem as a whole.
Palestinians in Al-Quds (Jerusalem) hold only permanent residency status, not citizenship, in contrast with Jews who are born in the city.
The explosion in Sheikh Jarrah is a consequence of decades of expulsion, oppression and injustice.
This is what apartheid South Africa had done, hence the designation of Israel as an apartheid state.
The apartheid wall through which the Zionists have cut off Palestinian families and villages, stealing in the process more Palestinian land, caps it all.
In a ruling handed down in July 2004, the International Court of Justice described Israel’s apartheid wall as illegal.
From spurious biblical claims that “God promised them this land” described as a “land without a people” (Palestinians are non-people in Zionist mythology), they continue to uproot Palestinian families from their homes and villages, often at gunpoint by Jewish settlers, the vanguard of the Zionist colonial movement.
South Africans should never forget the UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 titled “Elimination of all forms of racial discrimination” which reads “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination”.
The measure was adopted 40 years ago, on November 10, 1975, and the majority of the international community backed it.
It is time for the South African government to stop issuing inane press statements of supporting the long-dead “two-state” fraud and trite “condemnation” of the heinous crimes that Israel commits.
There is no alternative but for SA to support the Palestinians to return to the time-honoured and internationally sanctioned armed resistance against the “incremental genocide” by Israel, as the Israeli author, Ilan Pappe, calls it.
Until this racist ideology is uprooted and eliminated utterly and irrevocably, there will be no peace in Palestine or anywhere else in the world.
Dr Firoz Osman is the co-author of Why Israel? The Anatomy of Zionist Apartheid: An SA Perspective, and executive member of the Media Review Network, an advocacy group based in Gauteng.
