Even as European imperialists and imperialist client Arab states try to save the Zionist state with a proposal to disarm the Palestinian Resistance and put the quisling Palestine Authority in charge of Gaza,1 many Israeli Zionists are signalling that it’s too late.
Middle East Spectator reports that six hundred members of the ‘Commanders for Israel’s Security’ (CIS) have written a letter to President Trump urging him to pressure Benjamin Netanyahu to stop the war in Gaza due to Israel’s ‘desperate situation’ regarding ‘global legitimacy’.
The MES source is TheJerusalem Post. The ‘Commanders’ consists of former senior officials from the IDF, Mossad, and Shin Bet, which is to say the ‘Israeli’ armed forces, external and internal state intelligence services.
On the popular free-to-air Channel 12 TV, ex-general Noam Tibbon complained that ‘Israel’ was facing international isolation through its starvation of Gaza while its unsuccessful “Gideon Chariots”2 military campaign has resulted in the deaths of 50 of its soldiers.
Cartoon by D.Breatnach
Actually the Zionist army’s deaths are almost certainly under-reported3 as are the 6,145 wounded stated by the IOF, in comparison to the Defense Ministry’s Rehabilitation Division reported 18,500 soldiers and other security forces wounded with varying severity.4
In addition, seven of its soldiers took their own lives during July this year. Seventeen IOF suicides were recorded in 2023 and twenty-one in 2024 with another 17 already this year. Those figures do not include reservists taking their lives in periods after military duty.5
The IOF’s losses in damaged tanks, armoured bulldozers and personnel carriers are also high. Despite this situation, the Zionist State is also carrying out military operations in Syria and Lebanon and its leaders talk about resuming its war with Iran, which had disastrous results for ‘Israel’.
Palestinian Resistance operations of various factions occur every day, while every second day or so ‘Israeli’ media reports “a security incident” in Gaza, their coded description for a Resistance operation resulting in the death of at least one IOF soldier.
In addition to the armed resistance of Palestinians particularly in Gaza putting a strain on the armed Zionist Occupation, it has strained also the relationship between the latter and the Government coalition led by Netanyahu, as discussed on Zionist Army radio and reported by The Cradle.
IOF Army Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir is quoted as saying that the Zionist army lacks clear strategic direction from the Government and that it favours a deal with Hamas allowing it to return to Gaza’s periphery as before October 8th and to ‘exhaust’ Gaza.6
As a practical alternative the IOF could occupy the whole of Gaza, which Zamir says can be done in a period of months but the ‘clearing’ of the Resistance above and below ground (in the tunnels) would take years and though he left it unsaid, would drain the IOF to cracking point.
The Resistance is fighting a long war of attrition. While the IOF can and does kill civilians in thousands it cannot operate with impunity on the ground against the Resistance fighters, despite its high technology and drones, both for surveillance and attack, in addition to artillery and air cover.
2IOF Codeword for the military operation since they broke the ceasefire agreement in March this year and restored the genocidal blockade, along with bombing of residential areas and ethnic cleansing of whole districts.
6What this term entails is not clear but could be a return to the conditions of constant power cuts, restriction on food entry to the minimum and heavy restrictions on entry and departure, along with regular raids in force to capture or kill Palestinians.
The fact that the Irish Times reported ‘tens of thousands’ on Saturday’s march in Dublin was telling, avoiding their usual euphemism of ‘thousands’ or even ‘hundreds’ for a demonstration’s great multitude.1
Even so, it was much larger, the organisers claiming 70,000 participants.
It was huge, without a doubt. From the D’Olier Street northern corner, the front of the march organised by the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign had gone to the gates of Trinity College while the rest of it could be seen northwards the length of O’Connell Street and possibly beyond.
In the distance marchers may be seen along the length of O’Connell Street. Behind the photographer, a section of the march is proceeding while the front has reached the Trinity College gates. (Photo: D.Breatnach)
This was the 16th national mobilisation in Palestine solidarity since October 2023 organised to take place in Dublin, while many smaller marches, pickets, vigils, public meetings, talks, film shows and other solidarity events have been held weekly across the nation.
BANNERS, FlAGS & PLACARDS
In addition to local branches of the IPSC, banners on the march also proclaimed party, trade union and professional body allegiance, along with specific declarations and calls for actions.
Placards included the professionally-printed but also a wide range of the ‘home-made’ examples and these can be of particular interest, such as the one that declared that “Blaming Hamas for firing rockets at Israel is like blaming a woman for punching her rapist.” Indeed.
“Gaza is a death camp”. (Photo: D.Breatnach)
As the marchers passed the iconic General Post Office a small group organised by socialist Irish Republican organisation Éirigí held up giant letters spelling SAVE THE GPO.2 A group wearing blue tops with PRESS on the back marched and held up photos of individual journalists in Gaza.3
The PBP-Solidarity contingent carried a banner calling for the enacting of the Occupied Territories Bill which seemed a rather tame demand of the Irish State from an organisation claiming to be revolutionary socialist (see Irish State Options section).
A bagpiper playing amongst the marchers. (Photo: D.Breatnach)
The most popular non-party flag on the march was of course the Palestinian one but the Irish Tricolour has been making a greater appearance on these marches of late and not before time.4 I noted only one Starry Plough, in green with the Plough design in gold and white stars.
DESTINATIONS AND ROUTES
The IPSC marches tend to begin at the Garden of Remembrance and end near Leinster House,5 seat of the Irish State’s parliament, or occasionally at the Department of Foreign Affairs. Saturday’s march also went to Molesworth Street but through a longer circular route.
This route saw the march take in part of Dame Street, then the whole of South George’s St. and Aungier Street, turn left towards Stephens Green and proceed along the Green’s west side, then along part of its southern side before turning down Dawson Street.
(Photo: D.Breatnach)
Molesworth Street was full of marchers already but IPSC stewards hustled marchers off Dawson Street, eventually giving up their usual endeavour to push the crowd past the Schoolhouse Lane junction so the Gardaí could erect barriers across that section to enclose the marchers.
The unusual route on this occasion avoided the temptation to march up the pedestrianised shopping area of Grafton Street, which the Gardaí do not like and at which there was a confrontation during the previous IPSC march when a number of protesters tried to take that route.
One of the supporters of the march. (Photo: D.Breatnach)
Despite the crucial role of the USA as chief supplier of arms, funding and political cover for the genocidal Zionists of the ‘Israeli’ state, since 2023 the IPSC have approached Dublin’s US Embassy only twice, no doubt respecting the Gardaí wish not to have the main road outside blocked.
On those two occasions the IPSC halted the march in a street behind the Embassy and away from one of the main roads into Dublin from the south (and along which the ill-fated Northumberland Fusiliers marched in April 1916). Marches to the Israeli Embassy were rare during the period too.6
(Photo: D.Breatnach)
IRISH STATE & OPTIONS
Both leaders of the Irish Coalition Government7 have built up some kudos with many anti-genocide people around the world for publicly stating that Israel is committing genocide – the first leaders of an EU or indeed Western state to say so.
In addition, the Irish Government joined with those of the Spanish and Norwegian states in a failed attempt last week to have the EU remove ‘Israel’ from its preferential trade agreement for violation of the human rights conditions of the Agreement.8
(Photo: D.Breatnach)
However, as a number of speakers at the IPSC rally and some marchers’ placards declared, the Irish State is in fact complicit in genocide by allowing military equipment for ‘Israel’ to fly through Irish airspace and by not enforcing its neutrality on US military transit through Shannon Airport.
And in allowing the Central Bank of Ireland to process ‘Israeli’ war bonds, which was the target of a number of representations including its huge logo on the march and a speech by Gary Gannon, DCC Councillor of the Social Democrats party.
(Photo: D.Breatnach)
The glacial progress of the moderate Occupied Territories Bill,9 delayed and then attempted weakening of it by removing services from the ban,10 is another hallmark of the Irish Government’s collusion (notwithstanding expressed Zionist rage and bullying by some US Congressmen).
Next to the USA, the Irish state is the biggest importer of ‘Israeli’ goods and a ban on these would greatly affect the genocidal state not only morally but also practically. In the absence of government action, the trade unions could impose a ban on their members handling those goods.
The contradiction is that the Western state most overwhelmingly pro-Palestinian is the biggest importer of ‘Israeli’ products and having hardly any practical effect towards preventing the genocide against the Palestinians, contrary to what the majority in Ireland actually want.
End. Note: For the photos in this report I concentrated on the more unusual of those participating.
(Photo: D.Breatnach) (Photo: D.Breatnach)Molesworth Street, the destination, is full from one end to the other. (Photo: D.Breatnach)
4The Irish far-Right of fake patriots has been permitted illegitimately to almost monopolise the Irish Tricolour.
5‘Near’ rather than at Leinster House, because the Gardaí set up a crowd barricade at the end of Molesworth Street across the street from the House and that is as far as the march goes and also where the speakers’ platform is set up.
6This was so even before the Israeli Ambassador abandoned her Dublin post in disgust at popular Irish hostility to genocide and prior to the reputed closure of the Embassy (despite which the site has a 24-hour Garda guard).
7Taoiseach (Prime Minister equivalent) Mícheál Martin of the Fianna Fáil party and Tánaiste (Deputy PM equivalent), also Minister of Defence Simon Harris of the Fine Gael party. The Green Party is also a member of the Coalition.
(Reformatted entire for publishing in Rebel Breeze from article of same title in his Substack)
(Reading time: 8 mins.)
Kneecap’s music is not really my thing. I am perhaps too old, or maybe my musical tastes are more conservative. But I do love their politics and their stance on Palestine.
I don’t think much of Hezbollah, but I do think waving their flag is not a criminal offence.
The BBC think otherwise as evidenced by their decision to not broadcast Kneecaps’s performance at the Glastonbury festival. The only reason for this was their support for Palestine. There was no other reason.
Though, it didn’t work out well for the BBC as Bob Vylan who was broadcast live got the crowd to chant Death to the IDF!, one of the noblest of chants ever to be heard at Glastonbury.
But there is a long history to the BBC and other British media censoring musicians. The BBC in its statement said:
Whilst the BBC doesn’t ban artists, our plans ensure that our programming meets our editorial guidelines.
We don’t always livestream every act from the main stages and look to make an on-demand version of Kneecap’s performance available on our digital platforms, alongside more than 90 other sets.[1]
In other words, the BBC does ban artists.
The rapper trio under the band name of Kneecap (Image sourced: on line)
It is not like this is the first time they have banned some of them. Following the Bloody Sunday massacre by the British Army in Derry in 1972, Paul McCartney, penned a song titled Give Ireland Back to the Irish.[2] It was the debut single of Wings.
It was instantly banned in Britain by the BBC but managed to get to No. 16 in the British charts nonetheless and got to No. 1 in Ireland.
They banned songs that mentioned sex, even Shirley Bassie’s Burn My Candle[3] and they banned songs that were considered more political such as The Sex Pistols’ Anarchy in the UK,[4] a song that wasn’t really political at all.
Not surprisingly they banned the then relatively unknown Heaven 17’s debut (We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang,[5] over concerns it might upset the then recently-elected US president Ronald Reagan.
This was a man whose government through the CIA went on to support deaths squads in Latin America and set up cocaine smuggling networks to finance them through his loyal servant Oliver North.[6] Reagan of course is referred to in the song.
Democrats are out of power Across that great wide ocean Reagan’s president elect Fascist god in motion
That wasn’t the last of it either. The BBC went on to ban a song by The Police, Invisible Sun[7] because of a possible slight on the British Army contained in the lyrics and of course the official video to the song.
I don’t want to spend the rest of my life Looking at the barrel of an Armalite I don’t want to spend the rest of my days Keeping out of trouble like the soldiers say
I don’t want to spend my time in hell Looking at the walls of a prison cell I don’t ever want to play the part Of a statistic on a government chart
The BBC would, during the 1st Gulf War ban a total of 67 songs for the duration of the war, amongst them songs by such establishment figures as Elton John whose song Act of War[8] recorded in 1985 with Millie Jackson was put on the list.
As was Pat Benatar’s Love is a Battlefield,[9] recorded even earlier in 1983. It takes little to upset the BBC it would seem.
The former Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Leo Varadkar criticised Keir Starmer’s call for Kneecap to be not allowed play at Glastonbury stating that
It’s not great for politicians to get into deciding which artists should be allowed to perform where or not.
To me, that’s illiberalism. Part of the whole point of art and music and literature is to be inappropriate, is to be challenging, is often to be anti-establishment,” he said.
We’ve had a situation now for quite some time in Ireland and in Europe and Britain, where politicians didn’t get into the space of saying who should be allowed to perform, who shouldn’t, what books you should be allowed to read, and I hope we don’t slip back into doing that under the guise of national security and anti-terrorism when it isn’t really about that.[10]
Varadkar tut tuts the BBC and Starmer. Sounds great, except his party and the Irish state in general does not have a great record in the matter.
The state broadcaster took an insidious approach to censorship with songs rarely being banned outright. Rather they were just not simply played on the radio station. Hint hint, nudge nudge. A very Irish way of doing things.
The Irish group The Wolfe Tones released many songs over the years about the conflict in the north of Ireland and got little to no airtime. Such was the situation that they even recorded a song about it, called Radio Toor I Li Ay (sometimes called They Don’t Play Our Songs on the Radio) [11].
The lyrics are pertinent to Kneecap and Starmer and sum up exactly what the Establishment are about.
You don’t play our songs on radio You say they’re too political! Who controls the mind, where’s the mind’s control? For the music on the airwaves Follows empty minds, those empty heads Play songs of sex and drugs instead Don’t tell them how it really is
Won’t MI5 look after you, control your thoughts Feed information to your hearts and minds To save you all from thinkin’, thinkin’, thinkin’, thinkin’
It is a fact that RTE didn’t give them much airtime and still don’t. So much so that in 2024, Derek Warfield the lead singer with the group said it was time to end the ban on them.[12] It still hasn’t happened, nor will it.
In fact, the Irish women’s football team got into trouble for singing one of their songs, Celtic Melody,[13] and were excoriated by British sports journalists, who are not renowned for their knowledge of music, politics, history or much else aside from who ran how fast and where.
Not exactly intellectual heavyweights. Nonetheless these idiots led to the Irish women’s team being eventually fined €20,000 for singing the song.[14]
The Irish singer Christy Moore found himself on the wrong end of state repression in Ireland on many occasions and his songs, like those of The Wolfe Tones were not banned per se, but they never received much airplay.
Except those that were considered to be humorous and non-political, such as Don’t Forget Your Shovel.[15]
But other songs of his were censored on the radio without the need for an official ban, such as Ninety Miles From Dublin,[16] which was about the IRA and INLA prisoners on the Blanket and Dirty Protests in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh.
Likewise, other songs he recorded about the prisoners and later on about the Hunger Strikers equally received no airplay. There was one brief exception to this.
Patsy O’ Hara (INLA) died on hunger strike on May 21st 1981 after 61 days. His mother Peggy O’Hara was initially adamant that she would not let her son die and that when he lapsed into a coma she would intervene and give the doctors the order to break his strike with an intravenous drip.
However, in her last conversation with her son, he said to her that he was sorry they had not won and asked her to let the fight go on, before lapsing back into unconsciousness. Christy Moore wrote a song about that exchange called The Time Has Come.[17]
It was well received and got airplay and praise. Then someone informed the ignorant and arrogant mandarins at RTE what the song was about and suddenly it got no more airplay. Listening to the song, it is obvious what it is about.
The gentle clasp that holds my hand Must loosen and let go Please help me through the door Though instinct tells you no
Our vow it is eternal And will bring you dreadful pain But if our demands aren’t recognized Don’t call me back again
Ironically Christy Moore would record another song that got no airplay. It was called Section 31,[18] a reference to the article of the Broadcasting Authority Act (1960) that gave the minister power to ban interviews with members of Sinn Féin and proscribed organisations such as the IRA.
But in effect it led to RTE’s scant reporting of or carrying out of few interviews that were critical of state policy on the conflict. The song explained exactly why some issues are censored.
Who are they to decide what we should hear? Who are they to decide what we should see? What do they think we can’t comprehend here? What do they fear that our reaction might be, might be?
The Kneecap trio with friends at the Sundance Festival in January. (Photo sourced: RTÉ)
It is always about silencing the opposition and preventing a reaction to their repression and in this case genocide.
So back to Kneecap. They stand in a long line of artists who have put their money where their mouths are. They stand side by side with giants from other musical genres such as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger who were repressed by the McCarthyite wave in the US in the 1950s.
The BBC for its part continues to be the propaganda arm of the British Empire, or what is left of it, covering up, lying about or justifying murder, massacre, torture and plunder from India to Kenya, Ireland and now Palestine.
Woody Guthrie had the words This Machine Kills Fascists carved into his guitar, a slogan that might earn him a jail sentence nowadays.
It was meant more in the sense that his music was part of the struggle against fascism, carrying political messages to workers, Dustbowl refugees and migrants.
It didn’t literally kill anyone, though in his song Ludlow Massacre,[19] Guthrie celebrated the workers taking up arms to kill the scab thugs that came to shoot them.
Scabs at the behest of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, owned by the infamous Rockefeller family murdered 26 people, mainly the wives and children of the striking miners.
However, the massacre was just one large incident, the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency had harried and harassed the striking miners, murdering them in ones and twos.
The detective agencies celebrated in comics and films were what would later become known in Latin America and elsewhere as death squads. The miners fought back and Guthrie celebrated this in his song. Resistance, including armed resistance was legitimate.
The state soldiers jumped us in a wire fence corners, They did not know we had these guns, And the Red-neck Miners mowed down these troopers, You should have seen those poor boys run.
The press, at the time, described the striking miners as savages.
Any similarity to the current media onslaught on Palestine is not a coincidence, it shows the class interests of the media moguls and the western states. Working class people, foreign resistance movements will always be savages to the media.
And the use of armed masked thugs by the state is not new either. Before ICE, there were the detective agencies. Most of the dead at Ludlow were migrant workers. The final death toll according to Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the US was sixty six men women and children.
Kneecap have contributed to the fight against fascism and Bob Vylan’s chant Death to the IDF! should be on everyone’s lips. There is no reforming the IDF, just like there was no reforming Hitler’s SS. Only the complete destruction of the IDF will bring any change.
Can their music, like Guthrie’s be said to kill fascists? I don’t know, time will tell, but from the reception they got at Glastonbury it is looking good.[20] What I do know is Keir Starmer and Trump finance fascists.
Starmer like a fascist wants to ban Palestine Action. The BBC covers up for fascists, praises them and censors those who stand up to fascists. I know who is on the right side of history.
Trump says he convinced Netanyahu to agree to a Gaza ceasefire and the Palestinian Resistance1 had better take it because it’s the best they are going to get. Does the deal include the IOF pulling out of or an end to bombing Gaza? No, neither.
Mass media speculation abounds that the Resistance are under pressure (by starving Gaza residents in the midst of daily massacres) to agree to the ceasefire promoted by Trump and that it will be announced during Netanyahu’s visit to meet his imperialist backers in the USA.
Netanyahu says he won’t agree to ultimate peace nor even to the IOF pulling out of Gaza. His aim, he declares is the total defeat of Hamas (i.e. all the Palestinian resistance and the expulsion of their leaderships). Details of the deal mention a 60-day ceasefire.
Older now but still holding hands: back on 23 May 2017, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, right, and US President Donald Trump shake hands at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. (Photo cred: Sebastian Scheiner/AP)
And Gaza afterwards? All options are open, perhaps even the Israeli seaside resort of which Trump and Netanyahu were speaking earlier.2 But not a Palestinian administration by free and popular elections, because that would mean the election of supporters of the Resistance).3
No doubt in order to increase the pressure on the Resistance, the IOF intensifies its daily bombing of civilian housing and refugee centres and food queue massacres. Starvations deaths begin to appear, first of children then of adults too, emaciated bodies and skull-like faces.
July 2025 cartoon by D.Breatnach
The Palestinian Resistance factions led by Hamas have been adamant all along that they will sign up to an end to the war but not to a temporary ceasefire. The IOF must pull out of Gaza and the gates must be opened to let desperately-needed food, medicine, fuel and water in.
The Resistance will release living Israeli prisoners and dead (bodies) and ‘Israel’ will release Palestinian hostages. This has been their position for a long time and was part of the US envoy’s (Witkoff)-approved agreement of 19 January with ‘Israel’ this year which the latter broke on 18March.4
Smotrich and Ben Gvir threaten to bring down Netanyahu’s coalition if there is a ceasefire agreement, saying the war should continue without pause until the defeat of the Resistance. But Smotrich and Ben Gvir also shadow-box against one another through the Israeli media.
There are elements of pantomime and farce between some pushing for a deal and those against – “Look out, Netanyahu: Ben Gvir’s behind you!” But Trump and Zionists are playing with real lives, primarily those of the Palestinians but also those of their own IOF on the ground.
Funeral of IOF Captain Elkana Vizel in Mount Herzl Military Cemetery Jerusalem 23 January 2024. Vizel was killed with 20 other IOF when the Resistance fired a rocket into a house where the IOF had stored explosives intended for demolishing Palestinian houses. (Photo: Getty)
The armed Resistance, fighting in areas of Gaza cleared of civilians by the IOF have been hitting the latter hard, Israeli media reporting “a security incident” (its shorthand for fatalities of their soldiers by Resistance action) every second day or so (sometimes a number in the same day).
This after 20 months of attack by the strongest and best-supplied military force in the region which has undisputed air cover over Gaza.
Jon Elmer, in his Resistance Report on Electronic Intifada Updates podcast on Thursday evening said that June had been the worst month for the IOF in a year of battle fatalities and injuries. He recorded nearly 200 Resistance operations with IEDs, snipers, RPGs, rocket and mortar attacks.5
The IOF are being hit in areas they have invaded before and claimed to have ‘cleared’ of the Resistance. In approaching two years Netanyahu has failed to achieve his two declared war objectives: to defeat Hamas (Resistance leading faction) and recover the captives.
By any sober assessment Netanyahu and his coalition government have lost the Gaza war so far but he wants to cover that over and knock out the Israeli opposition which demands a deal with the Resistance to free the Israeli prisoners held by the Palestinians.
Netanyahu and his wife face a trial for corruption as soon as he can no longer use the war in Gaza (or with Iran!) as an excuse not to stand trial. So peace is not a good option for him personally. A deal releasing the prisoners of the Resistance followed by renewal of the war might be best for him.
The Resistance is taking heavy toll of the IOF whenever they try to move forward in Gaza. But in the limited area of the Resistance, possibly the IOF can defeat them eventually by massive continuous bombing with ordnance supplied by the USA, the UK and some EU states.
But who knows what other factors might develop in the meantime and whom they might favour?
The resistance of the Palestinian people and the operations of their armed Resistance factions have challenged not only the actions of the Zionist colonial state but its very legitimacy to a degree not seen before, across the world and among the people of the Zionist-supplying heartlands.
The desperation of the ruling classes of the colonial state and of its principal backer was behind their short recent war against Iran, leading to a danger of World War. They were defeated for now but in the logic of imperialist power must try again.
The world is changing but whether that will favour the Palestinians in the short or medium-term is not certain. However that the question can even be asked is the result of the long cultural and political resistance of the Palestinian people and of their armed resistance movement.
End.
FOOTNOTES & SOURCES
1Trump, Netanyahu and the western mass media generally identify the Resistance as Hamas, whether to avoid the legitimising term, as a shorthand or to conceal the fact that the Palestinian resistance is composed of a number of factions, some of them Islamist (e.g. like Hamas and Islamic Jihad and others secular (such as the People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine, perhaps the longest-surviving Resistance organisation.
5The Resistance in Gaza have made June the worst month for the IDF in a year (mostly in just one area, Khan Younis). “180 (resistance infantry) operations in Khan Younis in one month alone plus 60 artillery operations” (discussion at end of Jon Elmer’s Resistance Report @ 3.16 minutes mins.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4nuYJp5RC0&t=11283s)
The media and some British politicians have been in a furore about what a performer of one of the acts at the Glastonbury Festival1 called from the stage and got most of the audience to chant with him: Death, death to the IDF!2
The performer was not, for change, one of the Kneecap trio (who also performed at Glastonbury) despite British politician complaints after another anti-Zionist “controversy” (i.e. unlike daily Zionist genocide of Palestinians, supplied by UK weapons, which is not at all controversial).
The latest performer to raise the genocide-proof ire of British politicians and mass media commentators was a member of the Bob Vylan group and the call which caused such anger in pro-Zionist circles was uttered from the West Holts stage during the Festival on Saturday.
Bob Vylan lead singer performing on the West Holts stage during the Glastonbury Festival at Worthy Farm in Somerset. (Photo cred: Yui Mok/AP)
This call was not only denounced by right wing conservative and social-democratic figures such as the UK’s Prime Minister, Keith Starmer, who dubbed it ‘hate speech’ but also went too far for the liberal Glastonbury Festival management who issued a statement declaring it “appalling”.3
To call for the ‘death’ of an organisation or a power is to call for it to cease to exist, to end. So what is the IDF? Well, the acronym stands for Israeli Defence Force, often and more realistically referred to as the IOF, i.e. the Israeli Occupation Force.
Now this organisation is the military wing of the Zionist European settler colony which is ‘Israel’, and with a history of attacks on the indigenous Palestinians, in addition to the people of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and, the week before last, Iran.4
APPALLING OR MODERATE AND REASONABLE?
On that basis alone, surely it would be moderate and reasonable to call for such a military organisation to cease to exist, i.e. to call for its death?
But there’s more – a lot more! The IOF has since 9th October 2023 been enforcing a water and starvation blockade on Gaza, also depriving it of importation of medicines.5 The IOF ground and air forces have destroyed at least in part but mostly completely every hospital and medical facility in Gaza.6
Cartoon regarding the Israeli water blockade on Gaza (D.Breatnach)
In addition to starving the population of Gaza by military blockade, the IOF has, with the direct assistance of the USA, set up the “killing fields” in which hungry Palestinian people are sniped, machine-gunned and shelled as they queue for meagre GHF food parcels.7
The IOF has assassinated or caused the death of at least 54,607 Palestinians and wounded 125,341 between 7 October 2023 and 4 June this year,8 including hundreds of first responders and civil defence workers,9 over 230 journalists10 and many police and security workers.11
This same organisation is the one primarily responsible for the mass demolition in Gaza of Palestinian residential buildings and the displacement of 1.9 million people,12 along with destruction of water and sewage infrastructure, desalination plants, water tanks and agriculture.
Many massacres by the IOF have been carried out in areas they had declared safe whendisplacing Palestinians from another area. (D.Breatnach)
The evidence of daily genocide by the IOF is incontrovertible and even the weak and hesitant International Court of Justice in the Hague stated that there was a plausible case to answer.13 The court also ordered the arrest of some leading government ministers who control the IOF.14
UNCONTROVERSIAL, A DUTY
To call for the death of an army of genocide is surely not only not controversial but is instead correct, a duty, one which all reasonable institutions and individuals should emulate.
According to the Genocide Convention of 1948, all signatory states have a dutyto act to prevent genocide,15 not only not to collude with it. Bob Vylan is to be commended for their call and those who condemn them should, at the very least, face widespread opprobrium.
Bob Vylan’s call is absolutely correct and humanity awaits its implementation, not only death to the IOF but also to the regime and colonial state that gave rise to and which program it follows. Let us join our voices to the humanitarian call and expand upon it.16
Death to the IOF — and to the Zionist settler colony that spawned it!
End.
Sources:
1The Glastonbury music festival is an annual event of a liberal alternative ambience.
8Gaza health Ministry figures, quoted in https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0r1xl5wgnko (which incorrectly quotes the Israeli figures on Israelis killed by Hamas on October 7th despite a number of Israeli sources indicating that an unknown number of those were killed by the IOF in implementation of the “Hannibal Doctrine”.
Reprinted in full from G.Ó.L’s substack and formatted for the Rebel Breeze blog.
Feminism used to be associated with pacifist anti-militarist movements, but times have changed and now there are feminists who call for war, whilst they still continue to blame all wars on men. It is an enormous contradiction.
For the last two years Gaza has lived under a siege and a genocide, supported by some sectors of feminism and in the midst of the conflict with Iran, once again feminist voices come out with a clamour for war. The reason is their supposed rush to free the women of Iran.
Four female political prisoners in Evin prison in Tehran (before it was bombed by Israel), conscious of the cynicism of some feminist groups in the West issued a communiqué denouncing the war and those who support it.
They stated that Israel wanted a submissive and weak Middle East and they opted to continue their own struggle against the government in Tehran without allying themselves with Yankee imperialism.
Our liberation…from the dictatorship ruling the country is possible through the struggle of the masses and by resorting to social forces – not by clinging to foreign powers or placing hopes in them.
The powers that have always brought destruction to the countries of the region through exploitation and colonisation, by inciting wars and killing in pursuit of greater benefits, will have no way out for us except for new destruction and exploitation.[1]
The four women are pro-Kurdish and also women detained in the protests following the death of Masha Amini at the hands of the Morality Police in 2022. One of them fought against ISIS in Syria. They are not coffee house feminists.
Women ‘of colour’ probably of the Combahee Collective with banner in what seems to be a general women’s liberation demonstration in the early 1970s. (Photo sourced: Internet)
They branded as traitors those Iranian who have called for war, amongst them the son of the despotic Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah imposed by the USA in 1953 following the CIA coup.
He ruled with an iron hand murdering and torturing the opposition, both the Left and Right, men and women. His son wants to go back to robbing the country’s coffers.
Traitors to Iran and traitors to the peoples of the Middle East and traitors to the people’s years of freedom-seeking struggles against oppression will know that their betrayal and disdain will be recorded in the memory of the Iranian people and in history.
Future generations will remember with shame those who stand on the corpses of defenceless people and trample them.[2]
Whilst these women who did actually rise up against the regime are opposed to the war, in the West there are those bourgeois feminists who in between their macchiatos ask for more attacks on Iran, in order to “free” the women.
They only think of Iran when a US president or the Nazis in Tel Aviv want to attack the country. They believe that the sexual predator who acts as US president is going to fight for the women. Maybe the way he did in Syria by installing ISIS.
One of the first to invoke the repression of women was none other than Netanyahu,[3] a man who has bombed maternity hospitals in Gaza killing women and children all around.
The US said something similar about Afghanistan and various bourgeois feminists came out to justify the war, deliberately ignoring that without US support the Taliban would never have existed.
It was Jimmy Carter and then Reagan who started to finance the troglodytes of the Mujahadeen and later the Taliban i.e. the bourgeois feminists too.
I should clarify that many of those feminists are not bourgeois in the sense of their social class, they have no capital, they are not rich, though there is no lack of those who are.
They are bourgeois in an ideological sense, although they use terms such as liberal, radical, separatist etc., but what unites them is their defence of capitalism and the bourgeoisie.
You could say right wing feminists but many of them like to present themselves as progressive when they are bourgeois, or in the case of the less wealthy ones, acolytes of the bourgeoisie.
Hillary Clinton, a bourgeois feminist (both in the ideological sense and also in terms of her bank balance) who has her hands stained with the blood of women in Libya and other parts is one of the spokeswomen for bourgeois feminism.
Much though they may shout, down with patriarchy! Their favourite slogan is Long Live Capitalism and Imperialism! This includes feminist intellectuals like Julie Bindel.
They kept silent about the genocide in Gaza and now believe that whoever criticises the war against Iran supports the regime. I suppose this includes the political prisoners who don’t sip macchiatos in their cells.
Bindel writing in The Sun said that those who criticise the war support Iran and the oppression of women. She repeated the usual lies about October 7th, mixed with some truths about Iran with the aim of supporting the war.[4] Bindel has kept silent about the massacres of women in Gaza.
She doesn’t support the women of Iran, but rather the West. It is worth pointing out that the owner of the paper, where she writes, has supported reactionary governments around the world, including in Great Britain where Bindel lives.
It is a misogynist, homophobic paper that frequently runs campaigns against the poor and migrants. Bindel is not alone, Kelly Jay Keen shares videos of the son of the Shah, perhaps to indicate that she supports the monarchy.[5]
The bourgeois feminists, like all of the bourgeoise in practice see other cultures as inferior ones. They use the same imperialist language to justify wars as did Rudyard Kipling, the author of the infamous poem The White Man’s Burden. They boast about the White Woman’s Burden.
It should be remembered that Kipling wrote that poem to seek and to justify the US invasion of the Philippines.
Take up the White Man’s burden The savage wars of peace Fill full the mouth of Famine And bid the sickness cease; And when your goal is nearest The end for others sought, Watch Sloth and heathen Folly Bring all your hopes to nought.
Then they say that men are to blame for wars and not their dear capitalist system. Over and again the bourgeois feminists call for war.
But if they want wars and invasions, well why not ask for the US to be invaded, where women are pursued fleeing from one state to another to obtain an abortion, or where access to sex education is restricted and deficient as is access to contraceptives,[6] where women earn less than men and are under-represented in a wide range of fields.
Afghanistan is a country where women are more repressed than in any other part of the world. Throughout the conflict the US financed the Mujahadeen and later the Taliban.
They had the option of supporting organisations such as the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, a women’s organisation that opposed the Islamists and also the Russians and later the US invasion.[7]
No, between one macchiato and another our dear bourgeois feminists let the men in the Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton support the Taliban troglodytes.
They said the same in Iraq. I am sure more than one reader is asking themselves what Iraq has to do with it all. It was a secular country, that promoted women’s education and participation.
However, one of the reasons bandied about by Bush was that he was rescuing and defending women and he compared their situation to that of Afghanistan, despite Saddam promoting women’s education.[8]
In fact, under Saddam, 30% of faculty staff were women, trained in Europe and the USA with full funding from the government. It is no longer like that, in fact there is no intellectual world in Iraq, the bombs the bourgeois feminists asked for, put paid to that.[9]
In the US the bourgeois feminists paid to go to universities, but Iraq promoted women as a state policy, something the Yanks have never done. In Britain, just 31% of the lecturers were women.
Iraq almost beat them, but in-between macchiatos the bourgeois feminists called for a war to improve the situation of women in Iraq and of course their investment portfolios.
Now the drums of war are beating again and the bourgeois feminists once more give themselves over to the war, despite believing that wars are a male product rather than a capitalist one.
They are not going to analyse their own participation, whilst a refugee from one of their wars prepares another macchiato for them.
As the female political prisoners in Evin said, it will be the Iranian people and the Iranian women who will free Iran and the Iranian women and not the bourgeois with the macchiatos, wine and caviar.
They are just as much the enemy of the women of Iran as the male bourgeois and are as deserving of our contempt.
There is no lack of Iranian voices asking for war and not just the son of the despot Pahlevi. Masih Alinejad is an exiled journalist. She took part in the movement against the obligatory use of head coverings in Iran and other things.
So far so good, unlike others she has fought against the oppression of women in the country.
But in exile, she turned out to be a Zionist and in the first Trump government met with the hawk Mike Pompeo and also worked at the official US propaganda radio station, Voice of America, transmitting programmes in Farsi.
Masih Alinejad & Jake Sullivan, Intelligence Adviser to US President Biden 2021 2025. (Source: Wikipedia)
Now she criticises Netanyahu, but not for bombing Iran and killing civilians but because of his bad timing. She believes he should have waited for protests against the government and attacked at that time. Of course the bombs were not going to fall on her, safe in New York.
Those feminists who keep silent about the genocide in Gaza do not seek the liberation of women in Iran, but rather a geopolitical reorganisation of the region and the victory of Zionism.
But that slogan doesn’t sound too good and you can easier convince the dozy in the world by talking about the rights of women in Iran. Meanwhile they have little to say about why their governments installed and recognised the Islamists from ISIS in Syria.
It is an exercise in public relations rather than real concern for the future of women in Iran. At the end of the day bourgeois feminists defend the bourgeoisie more than they defend women.
As Israel and Iran slug it out with some criminal interventions from the USA, the older war continues in Gaza – the one that’s been ongoing since the late 1940s and has intensified sharply since 8th October 2023.
The antagonists in this war are the Israeli Occupation forces, supplied not only by the USA, the UK, and the EU but to practical purposes by the whole western imperialist alliance, against the Palestinian resistance, now reduced to their existing stockpiles and own inventions.
But the IOF is not fighting the armed resistance in Gaza – it is rarely fighting at all. It is killing unarmed civilians in GHF food traps, in bombings of homes and refugee centres and targeting media workers, first responders, security personnel. And arresting hundreds.
The IOF has destroyed huge areas of Gaza by air bombing, demolition charges and bulldozing by machines built in the USA. Areas are declared unsafe where Palestinians may be sniped but nowhere is safe really, whether from random missile or shell strikes or targeted assassinations.
But there IS armed resistance and it IS fighting, even if we are not told of it, unless by some well-connected sources outside the heavily-censored and biased western mass media. There are Resistance operations almost daily – 50 reported the week before last alone.1
Israeli tank in Gaza after hit by the Resistance, presumably with the tandem Yassin. Date unknown. (Cred: Palestine Chronicle)
Several times a week the Zionist military or public media reports “a serious security incident” in Gaza, their usual code for an event in which either a very senior IOF officer has been killed or more usually, one in which two or more IOF have been killed or injured.
Many of these operations are Resistance ambushes or traps by previously-laid IED2 either detonated electronically or by pressure of the heavy tanks or armoured bulldozers. These may be followed up by ambush of rescuing force or attack on survivors, then a fast evacuation from the scene.
And it needs to be fast because the IOF has control of the sky and the ordinance from which to blast whole areas in the hope of killing a couple of fighters.
The IOF also take over Palestinian buildings as sniper and observation posts and sometimes the Resistance has pre-mined the building. The IOF soldiers and dogs check for hidden explosives but rarely find them before they explode around, underneath or above them.3
Or their post may get hit by Resistance rocket with thermobaric warhead. Again, the detonation of the building4 may be followed by ambush of the rescuing IOF forces, such battles sometimes lasting for considerable time, occasionally in close combat, despite the IOF control of the sky.
There are also Palestinian bombardments by light and heavy mortars or missiles from hidden positions targeting IOF infantry and vehicle concentrations, after which the firing positions are concealed and the vicinity quickly abandoned in advance of IOF artillery or missile targeting.
Resistance sniping operations continue and, where possible, commanding officers are targeted. The Palestinians have developed their own Al-Ghoul single-shot sniper rifle, effective up to 2,000 metres.5 Tanks, armoured bulldozers and troop carriers may be hit by shoulder-launched rockets.6
Incredibly, video exists of fighters emerging from a ruined building carrying a bomb, placing the explosive device at an IOF tanks’s most vulnerable spot and racing back to shelter before the explosion.
A Palestinian Resistance fighter (PFLP by headband) firing a medium mortar shell in Gaza. (Photo sourced: Internet)
What are the weapons of the Resistance and where from are they obtained?
The Resistance has many weapons, mostly automatic rifles, which they were supplied by allies in the past but none of those supply routes are probably open now. They have also taken weapons from dead IOF7 and constructed their own.
Aside from the Al-Ghoul, there is also the tandem Al-Yassin8 in which the Resistance has developed a shoulder-launched rocket of limited penetration strenght into a deadly armour-penetrating missile, seen on occasion blowing the entire turret off an IOF tank.
The IEDs employed as mines or carried to place against tanks contain high explosive donated by the IOF in their hundreds of unexploded bombs littering Gaza. With a failure-to-explode rate estimated as high as 20%9 the Resistance looks unlikely to run out of source for years.
Recently too the Resistance filmed themselves removing sacks of high explosive from an IOF stack intended for the demolition of homes. Both missiles and mortars are developed and produced in engineering shops below ground, as are bullets and IEDs and they too are filled with explosives.
The Tandem Yassin, manufactured in Gaza by the Resistance. (Sketchfab)
Where are these operations taking place? In the areas of Gaza which the IOF and Netanyahu boasted of “clearing of Hamas” over a year ago, mostly now devoid of civilians, into which the IOF moves tentatively — and have recently been instructed to move even more cautiously.
Where from are the Resistance fighters coming? Sometimes from still-standing fractured buildings but mostly from the network of tunnels which they have been constructing for years. Here they live frugally, waiting the chance to attack the Occupier of their land,10 the killer of their children.11
Whoare the armed Resistance in Gaza? They vary in history and in ideological basis, religious or secular but all unite in resistance and often take joint actions. The Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades of Hamas, of course are the main force but not the only ones.
Next in size and influence are the Al-Quds Brigades of Islamic Jihad. Other factions include the Al-Nasser Salah Ad-Din Brigades of the Popular Resistance Committees12 and the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades of the marxist-leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.13
Representatives of different Palestinian Resistance factions posing for photograph to show their unity against the Zionist Occupation as the ceasefire approached in March 2024, soon after breached and abandoned by ‘Israel’. (Photo cred: Workers World)
The IOF collects their dead and wounded by helicopter, rushing them to some of the World’s most up-to-date war trauma treatment facilities. They drop smoke cannisters to obscure surveillance, not to protect from snipers: the Palestinian resistance never fires on those ‘copters.
Perhaps they should – the IOF — “the most moral army in the world”14 – certainly has no qualms about firing on Palestinian ambulances, paramedics, first responders and they hold the world record for destruction of hospitals and medical facilities. But clearly the Resistance has higher standards.
All military matters in the Zionist Entity are subject to military censorship and this includes numbers of dead and injured IOF, which allows them to conceal the numbers; they have military liaison officers stationed at hospitals to deal with queries.
Analysts have concluded that the IOF masks the numbers of killed and injured15 while wildly expanding the numbers of Palestinian Resistance fighters killed. Of course in war both sides engage in propaganda and it is said that Truth is the first casualty.
However, while there have been a great many videos of the Resistance in action filmed by themselves, there are none of the IOF fighting the Resistance at anything like close quarters. Clearly this is not due to modesty or even less to delicacy – it is due to absence of occasion.
Cartoon comment by D.Breatnach
While the Zionist state continues its daily genocidal actions in Gaza (and in the West Bank) and its aggressive actions in Lebanon, Syria and now in Iran, in 19 months they have failed to defeat the armed Resistance factions in Gaza. And now they have admitted to arming criminal looters.16
The IOF is unfit for standard military combat, even against insurgents and specialises only in assassinations, usually from the air and in genocidal operations against unarmed civilians, from air, sea and on the ground. Oh, and in destruction of homes, hospitals, schools, infrastructure, wells …
According to increasing number of reports, it is becoming unfit even for those.17
13They are the only organisation of the Gaza resistance which is also part of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, which bars Islamic-ideological organisations from membership. The PFLP has called for unity of all Palestinian resistance (as have the Islamic organisations) but the PLO is dominated by the Fatah party and holds only internal functions to formally approve its own manoeuvres. It also controls the undemocratic, repressive, corrupt and Israeli collaborator Palestinian Authority under Fatah nominee Mahmoud Abbas.
Reformatted entire for Rebel Breeze from article same title in his Substack
Iran, in response to Israeli aggression against it, launched a series of missile attacks. We should be clear that in this case the aggressor is the Zionist state and the Iranian response is a justified defence of its sovereignty in response to an act of war.
There can be no doubt about it.
But one of its missiles supposedly hit a hospital in Beer Sheva and Israel didn’t waste time in denouncing the attack on the hospital. Without blushing they said that attacks on hospitals are a war crime banned under International Humanitarian Law (IHL).
Their hypocrisy is plain to see, given that there is not a hospital left standing in Gaza thanks to the Nazis in Tel Aviv. But what does IHL say about hospitals?
Article 18 of The Geneva Convention (IV) relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of Warstates
Civilian hospitals organized to give care to the wounded and sick, the infirm and maternity cases, may in no circumstances be the object of attack, but shall at all times be respected and protected by the Parties to the conflict.[1]
It is not as simple as it would seem though. A hospital is protected but that protection is not just the responsibility of the attacking force, but of everyone. So, Israel is also obliged to not expose the medical installations to the danger of an attack. The same Article 18 reads
In view of the dangers to which hospitals may be exposed by being close to military objectives, it is recommended that such hospitals be situated as far as possible from such objectives.[2]
This means Israel should not place military targets near hospitals. And beside the hospital in Beer Sheva there are various military depots.
One of them is the HQ of C4i, the intelligence agency that controls the computer systems of the Zionist armed forces and communications in the battle field, i.e. a key part of the war against Iran.[3]
There is also the technological park Gav-Yam Negev which functions as C4i’s centre of technological development and the area is the epicentre of Israeli military industries.[4] A legitimate target in a war. In fact, Iran justified the attack for that very reason.[5]
Undisputed diagram developed by Iranian broadcaster Tasnim News. (Image sourced: The Cradle on Telegram)
Even in such situations the attacking force is obliged to ensure that it doesn’t damage civilian or protected installations under IHL, but there is a shared responsibility with those who violated IHL by placing military targets in the vicinity of a hospital.
And it is clear that the hospital was there first and then came the military installations. Israel uses them as human shields, something expressly prohibited by the Geneva Convention (IV). Article 28 bans it.
The presence of a protected person may not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations.[6]
Hospitals only lose their protected character under IHL if they are used as military installations. This does not mean that there are many soldiers in the hospital receiving medical attention, nor even if there are many soldiers present protecting them.
Article 19 of the Convention is clear about when a hospital becomes a military target.
The protection to which civilian hospitals are entitled shall not cease unless they are used to commit, outside their humanitarian duties, acts harmful to the enemy.[7]
It would seem that there was no base under the hospital just key installations for the war in the vicinity of the Soroka Hospital.
Al Ahli Hospital Gaza attacked by Israel April 2025, one of around 40 hospitals and medical centres in Gaza attacked by the IOF (Photo cred: Olga Cherevko/ OHCHR)
Up till now the only power in the region that has violated IHL by deliberately attacking hospitals protected under the Geneva Convention is Israel, with its attacks in Gaza that have destroyed all of the medical capacity in the zone.
Israel’s hysterical denunciation is more a confession than an accusation.
The declared preparedness of a number of states, including the Irish one, to give formal recognition to the State of Palestine is widely seen as a step in favour of the Palestinian people and generally opposed by the Israeli state.
So on that basis many people who support the Palestinians may think that recognition of the State of Palestine is a good thing. How can it be otherwise? And yet …
Recognition of the Palestinian State is predicated upon the “two-state solution” (sic), in which the Zionists and the Palestinians supposedly get to live in separate states as neighbours, everybody happy. Except that the Zionists get most of the land and water while the indigenous get the least.
Effectively “Recognition of the Palestinian State” as advocated is to agree to
Zionists occupying 80% of Palestinian land
Palestinians getting 20% of their land
With least water
Forever under Zionist surveillance
and Zionist guns.
Area in pink shows territory notionally available to the “Palestinian State” in a “two-state” proposal; however the Zionist state is not in agreement and nor are many Palestinians. (Image: BBC)
In any case, Zionism is a colonial settler project and inherently expansionist; even in the unlikely situation that the two-state proposal were accepted by Zionists and Palestinians, the Zionists would always be looking to expand as even now they are extending further into Syria.
Currently the ‘State of Palestine’ is represented by the Palestinian National Authority,1 widely seen as the Israeli occupation’s proxy, run by Mahmoud Abbas and backed by the Fatah party. Its police force attacks solidarity demonstrations, arrests and even kills resistance fighters and critics.
The PA was created as part of the Oslo pacification process2 and supposed to hold elections every five years thereafter. The first elections3 saw the Fatah party elected to govern the West Bank and Gaza. But as the Second Intifada4 erupted against Oslo, the popularity of Fatah plummeted.
The Fatah administration was widely considered corrupt, repressive, violent and collusive with the Occupation.
The next elections, in 2006 saw Hamas win most seats across both areas. But Fatah would not accept the popular verdict and in 2017 Hamas removed them in Gaza after a brief struggle5 but however did not do so in the West Bank. Abbas has not held another election since.
At a special conference allegedly of the PLO (which was attended by none of its organisations apart from Abbas’ lackeys), Abbas called the leading organisation of the Palestine national resistance, Hamas, “Sons of Dogs.” (Cartoon: D.Breatnach)
The PA kept the grants it was getting from other states including those intended for the administration of Gaza, western powers cut off funding, Israel and Arab states initiated punitive economic sanctions against Gaza and Israel began a siege with periodic massacres.
In the West Bank, the PA’s security forces have suppressed demonstrations in solidarity with the Resistance and also against the PA’s brutality. They have jailed Resistance activists and fighters, including killing a number of them. This year they began and then colluded in the siege of Jenin.
Recognising the State of Palestine means supporting this corrupt and brutal Israeli State proxy and also accepting 80% of the land of Palestine going to the Zionist colonial occupation which, with the ‘two state proposal’ is also the policy of the PA.
There may be some, including probably some Palestinians, who think to accept it would be better than nothing, especially if it stops the genocide. But genocide is the basic program of the colonial invader: to take the land, the indigenous must be enslaved and if not enslaved, removed.
How else is a colonial minority to rule in security? The other option is not to rule but to share, in a democratic secular state of Palestine with equal rights for all of whatever background. Yes, but that is not ‘the Palestinian State’ being promoted.
The Zionists say they are in an existential fight and in a sense they are right. The Palestinians are in a fight for their life as a people too. A huge difference is that the Zionists have the option to stop being racist colonial occupiers oppressing the indigenous people.
For a few years also the PA has been mooted as the ‘Palestinian’ governing force for Gaza to replace the elected choice of the people, Hamas, with a proxy of the Occupation. This has been suggested by envoys of the US and also more recently by Egypt (although opposed by ‘Israel’).
This would find favour with some Arab client states and all of the European imperialist states who can’t see any other way of stability for the Middle East in particular and for their exploitation of the world in general. Without that ‘peace’ their whole imperialist world could be endangered.
The option of a democratic, secular all-Palestine state is not going to be supported by the imperialists because such a state would encourage the masses of Arab states to carry out their own revolutions. However it is the option for all democratic and revolutionary people to support.
To support ‘the Palestine State’ is to encourage the continuation of colonialism, genocide and ethnic cleansing, enable the current specific Zionist plan for Palestine and to support the US imperialist and Egyptian proxy plan to have Gaza run by the traitorous Palestine Authority.
1Usually referred to just as The Palestinian Authority.
2With South Africa’s, this was the beginning of a wave of imperialist pacification processes starting in the 1990s that went around the word wherever national liberation struggles had strong popular support. Those who had succumbed to it were used to encourage others to do so too: the ANC and Fatah attended annual congresses of Sinn Féin to recommend it to Irish Republicans; Sinn Féin and S. Africans in turn ‘sold’ it to the Basques and to the FARC in Columbia; there were attempts to get the Kurds in Turkey, the Tamils in Sri Lanka and some of the Philippines fighters to accept it. Wherever the process took hold the resistance split first between those who would collaborate and those who would not but the latter also fragmented further. None of the movements that embraced the process won anything more than the partial release of prisoners, with the exception of S. Africa where the people won universal suffrage (but also experienced increased imperialist exploitation and poverty).
3The first legislative elections were held in 1996, won by Fatah; the next in 2006, won by Hamas; there have been none since.
4In 2000, against the Zionist Occupation, the collusion and corruption of Fatah, against denial of the right of return to the refugees.
5Represented in most Western mass media and online history sources as “Hamas seized power in Gaza”.
Dublin city centre on Saturday witnessed another giant Palestine solidarity march with a breakaway group; also a picket against internment of Irish Republicans; fascist provocations and Gárda repression resulting in the arrest of a demonstrator.
The national demonstration march had been called by the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign as part of a solidarity and protest pattern that included fortnightly Dublin marches last year but is now generally monthly and at times with other events in addition.
One of the banners just having crossed O’Connell Bridge on the IPSC-organised march (Sourced: IPSC Facebook)
Numbers on these marches in a city of only around 1.5 million population are impressive, though they draw on some participation from outside Dublin but there also regular local pickets and demonstrations of much smaller numbers at locations of high visibility or of specific significance.1
The march set off from the Garden of Remembrance in the north city centre proceeding towards Leinster House, seat of the parliament of the Irish State, near O’Connell Bridge passing a picket with an anti-Internment banner organised by the Anti-Imperialism Action organisation.
Anti Imperialist Action displaying a banner against extradition to the passing Palestine solidarity march. (Photo sourced: Anti Imperialism Action Leinster FB page)
As the march reached the non-pedestrianised stretch of Grafton Street a half-dozen fascists made their presence felt on the sidelines by throwing insults at a section of the marchers, who responded with louder From Ireland to Palestine – Occupation is a crime! and antifascist slogans.
Not just the Irish state but fascists and other far-Right elements in Ireland have a real problem with Palestine solidarity, claiming that’s because the protesters should be marching for Ireland. However those elements for the most part have zero track record in marching for Irish independence.
No, for them ‘Irish nationalism’ consists of demonstrating against immigration and burning buildings intended – or which they believe intended – for housing refugees. Clearly as fascists and far-Right what they detest about marches such as these is internationalist solidarity itself.
Placard calling for what is surely the minimum we have the right to expect from the Irish Government, followed by some of the placards of Mothers Against Genocide. (Photo sourced: IPSC FB page)
Incongruously for those who want only internal causes upheld, the fascists of the Loyalist variety in the occupied Six Counties uphold the Zionist state of ‘Israel’ and those inside the Irish state, as was seen in Dublin on Saturday too, laud and uphold as an example Donald Trump!
Mock Icon of Irish Central Bank carried against processing Israeli Bonds (Source photo: IPSC FB page).
Very shortly after the verbal exchange with the fascists, a section of the march diverted to walk up the pedestrianised section of Grafton Street. A couple of Gardaí, reinforced by the fascists, attempted to prevent this but the marchers flowed around the obstruction to continue up the street.
On Wednesday evening, some of those present had marched down that very street on their way to occupy O’Connell Bridge, bringing traffic in both directions to a halt for half an hour.3
Further along the pedestrianised street the breakaway, including Ireland Action for Palestine and Saoirse Don Phalaistín groups, joined with another section of marchers who had earlier broken away from the IPSC march, this one led by the Mothers Against Genocide banner.
The shouted slogans from what were broadly two differing sections tended to merge with regard to calls to stop the bombing, opposition to genocide and broad support for Palestine but differed in that one section was also calling for support for the Palestinian Resistance and resistance generally.4
Content of slogans from the groups differed less markedly in calling for Irish Government intervention in support of Palestine, with the ‘Mothers’ mostly demanding the enactment of the Occupied Territories Bill5 and others condemning Government collusion in Shannon Airport.
The whole breakaway mass marched along South Stephens Green and turned north into Dawson Street, to pause inside the junction with Molesworth Street, where the tail of the main march, was already beginning to reduce although speakers and artists were performing on the IPSC platform.
Molesworth Street facing Dawson Street after the breakaway sections arrived and before the later incidents. (Source: R. Breeze)View of the IPSC-organised march at its destination, the Garda barriers in Molesworth Street across the road from the entrance to Leinster House. (Photo: R. Breeze)
On Dawson Street, across from the junction, the fascists had installed themselves, including a man in a red ‘Trump’ hat waving a “Make America great again” flag.
Two known fascists from the group trying to harass Palestine solidarity marches from Grafton Street to Dawson Street. (Photo sourced: AFAhttps://www.facebook.com/afaireland)
The Palestine solidarity protesters here – some distance from the diminishing main march crowd,6 with some IPSC stewards standing watching nearby, responded to the fascists’ jeers and Trump fan with jeers of their own, slogans and some bursts of song.7
According to a report form Anti-Fascist Action observers nearby and posted later that day, a senior Garda officer approached one of the fascists and had a quiet word with them, after which the fascists packed their banner and went away quietly smiling while the Public Order Unit arrived.
Soldiers of the master race (ehem) packing up after notification from their friend in the Gardaí that the POU would soon be deployed against some of the Palestine solidarity demonstrators. (Photo sourced: AFA Ireland)
These then began to aggressively push the demonstrators back towards Molesworth Street and as a demonstrator remarked it was the POU that were now blocking Dawson Street to traffic.
Soon the Gardaí seemed to decide to arrest one of the Palestine solidarity demonstrators and charged into the crowd, shoving, knocking down and even punching people who resisted strongly or just held on to the intended victim as long as they were able to.
A woman struck back at a POU man who had seized her by the throat but even so it took the intervention of one of his unit to get him to release his hold. The marks of his hand on her throat could be seen afterwards. Interestingly a press report later stated the Gardaí denied there was any incident.
Eventually the Gardaí succeeded in their intent and the protester was taken away to chants of Let him go! Numbers of the main march were dwindling greatly by this point but so were those of the breakaway section and people there were concerned to support their arrested comrade.
One of three police stations was the likely destination: Store Street, Pearse Street or Kevin Street. It was established that he was held at the latter station and was later released, given a few days to decide, under the Public Order Act whether to accept a caution or to be charged and face trial.
More confrontations of various sorts are likely as the Zionist genocide in Palestine ratchets even higher and frustration mounts at the Irish Government’s persistent refusal to end their collusion with the Zionist state and with its main supplier, US imperialism.
2Breakaway actions by groups often take place when they seek another target to that of the march organisers or to spread the visual and auditory impact of the demonstration or to break the ‘normalisation’ pattern, as when protesters feel the IPSC leadership is organising set marches of minimum disruption, on routes agreed with the Gardaí (which is not legal requirement in the Irish state).
4There is only one solution – Intifada revolution! From Ireland to Palestine – Occupation is a crime!
5 Agreed years ago in the Irish Parliament before but prevented from enactment by successive coalition Governments.
6As soon as the IPSC march arrives numbers always begin to leave, either to commence return home journeys or because they feel they are not going to hear anything new and their contribution was to be part of a visible mass, which they have now done.
7The Irish-language Gráinne Mhaol and English-language Come Out Ye Black n’ Tans.
rebelbreeze 