Perhaps no issue defines the historical, political, and civilizational line between the ‘West’ and the Global South more starkly than the Zionist entity implanted in Palestine. The ‘West,’ with its history of over half a millennium of invasion, occupation, massacre, ethnic cleansing, and colonization, supports "Israel". The Global South, invaded, massacred, occupied, ethnically cleansed, and colonized by the ‘West,’ over half a millennium, understands from collective experience what the Palestinians are going through and supports the justice of their cause. It is not just the Palestinians and the settler entity who are at war but history itself. 

Had the West behaved responsibly we would not be where we are now, on the verge of an all-in regional war that could turn global. The ‘West’ created "Israel" in violation of its own principles and in abuse of Palestinian rights. At a time of decolonization, the creation of a new colonial settler entity was such a contradiction – such a violation – of the fundamental UN principle of self-determination that the partition resolution would not have been passed by the General Assembly in 1947 if the US had not bullied vulnerable delegations.   

The ‘West’ then sat by when Zionist militias ethnically cleansed Palestine, driving 750,000- 800,000 out of their homeland and destroying nearly 500 of their villages. It sat by when "Israel" began slaughtering Palestinians in Gaza in the 1950s and it has sat by ever since, refusing to punish or restrain "Israel" whatever the terrible gravity of its war crimes and crimes against humanity. This is what the Palestinians have had to live with for nearly eight decades yet when they strike back in a way that seriously hurts the Zionist entity; it is they who are the “human animals” as Gallant calls them. 

Downing Street and the Brandenburg Gate are draped in the Israeli flag, and the White House is lit up in blue and white, which it always has been anyway. The media indulges in an anti-Palestinian hate fest, devoid of any understanding of the past, and licensing "Israel" to raze Gaza to the ground in revenge. Dwelling on the suffering of Jewish children and their parents, it is no more interested in the suffering of Palestinian parents and their children now than it has been in the past. They are just human animals, savages, barbarians, a horde. The media rhetoric is 19th century in its viciousness. 

"Israel" has lived in standing violation of international law since 1948, yet the ‘West,’ blinded by its guilt, deeply anti-Semitic under the surface, not only allows it but authorizes it, funding, arming, and protecting "Israel" at every turn, whatever it does, whatever crime it commits. It is no wonder that we have reached the current point of a confrontation that could envelop the Middle East and bring in outside powers.  

The Palestinians are abused as if the past never happened, when nothing can be understood except through the lens of the past. 1948 was only the beginning of an open war against the Palestinians and anyone who supported them. In the coming decades, in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Jordan, the Zionists slaughtered tens of thousands of men, women and children. 

In three months alone in Lebanon in 1982, they killed close to 20,000 Palestinians and Lebanese, almost all of them civilians, pulverizing them from air, sea, and land. Only the most heinous single atrocity, the killing of 1200-3000 people in the Israeli-supervised Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, was enough for the ‘West’ to sit up and take notice, and even then "Israel" was not punished.   

In Lebanon in 2006, the Israelis slaughtered another 1400 people, including hundreds of women and children: in Gaza, 2008/9 and 2014, more than 1000 were killed on each occasion. In these onslaughts, entire apartment blocks and entire families were destroyed. There is not a Palestinian family that has not lost parents, grandparents, children, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends in these attacks. Hospitals, schools, and ambulances were bombed while the same settlers sobbing in the media now sat in garden chairs and cheered the death and destruction on the other side of the Gaza fence.    

Snipers murder Palestinians, soldiers and settlers kill with impunity on the West Bank, where land is settled in violation of international law, and governments that back Israel didn’t flinch. Dozens of children have already been killed this year, hundreds over the years. They are being killed in Gaza even as this article is being written.

In occupied Jerusalem, protected by soldiers and police, hundreds of fanatics regularly invade the Haram al-Sharif, planning for and looking forward to the day when Al-Aqsa could be destroyed. No provocation could be more incendiary to Muslims around the world, but this is what the settler entity encourages. 

The Gazans are locked up in an open-air concentration camp, as it is often described, deliberately deprived over years of the necessities of life for themselves and their children, intermittently slaughtered in large numbers, yet when they finally break out, they were solely to blame. The Zionist state has turned their lives into a struggle for basic survival, while young people party only at a short distance from where Palestinians are miserably imprisoned. Has indoctrination been so successful that they do not know they are dancing on ethnically cleansed land? 

In the 1990s the Palestinians were ready to accept 22 percent of their land for the sake of peace but they could not get even that. "Israel" has debauched, debased, thrown aside, or dismissed every peace initiative made by the Palestinians and the Arab states because it does not want to share, it wants all of Palestine. By force, it has taken it and by force, it intends to maintain it. 

As there is no statute of limitations on theft, the Palestinians will keep resisting. That is their right in accordance with the international law. They have the support of the Muslim World, as well as Christians and the many ordinary citizens in the West who know what "Israel" is and what it has done, who do not support the irresponsible policies of their governments. The Palestinians are not without friends.  In the Middle East, they sit at the center of an ‘axis of resistance’ in the Middle East which is armed and prepared to stand up against "Israel" in defense of Palestinian and Muslim rights.  

Encouraged and enabled by the ‘West,’ against all the warning signs and flashing lights, the Zionist regime has set itself on a destructive, counter-productive, and self-destructive path. "Israel" seems determined to follow until the bitter end, causing massive destruction to its people, for the Palestinians, and for the region.