A SALAFIST group yesterday claimed responsibility for a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip towards the Israeli town of Ashkelon on Saturday night, as Israel carried out retaliatory airstrikes on what is left of Gaza City.
In a statement, the Salafist group, calling itself ‘Sheikh Omar Hadid-Bayt al-Maqdis,’ claimed that its fighters had fired a Katyusha-130 rocket at Ashkelon on Saturday evening. In response, Israeli jets launched airstrikes on a military training base operated by Hamas’ military wing, the al-Qassam Brigades, in the northern Gaza Strip.
The truth of the matter is that the Islamist group, part of the Al Nusrah Front-IS trend, are provocateurs. Gaza City was virtually destroyed in the recent 50-day war by Israel, and not a single house has been reconstructed, after donors, including the Gulf Arab feudal states, which have a record of financing the Salafist movements, refused to honour their pledges.
However, while the Palestinian masses including the people of Gaza stand tall, Israel is reeling.
This is because of the success and the growth of the boycott campaign which now includes international business groups like the French, Orange telecoms company, and organisations such as the British National Union of Students.
What has proven to be the last straw for many has been the recent sight of Israeli police beating up black Ethiopians in Tel Aviv, part of the drive to send them back to where they came from. Israel is now preparing to stabilise the situation in the only way that it knows, by killing lots of Arabs, and has already been warned by Hezbollah not to attempt an invasion of southern Lebanon. Now the Salafists are providing the Israeli government with a reason to begin a new assault on Gaza, to allegedly safeguard the Israeli people from ‘enemy rocket fire’.
Israel has also been treating wounded Islamist fighters in its hospitals on the occupied Golan Heights, recognising with them, that Assad and the Arab revolution is the enemy. In fact, the Al Nusrah Front that split with IS and is now a section of Al Qaeda has made it perfectly clear that it is under orders not to attack the West.
This is in line with the US position that the thousands of volunteers that it is training in Jordan and Turkey will be used against the main enemy, President Assad. The Al Nusrah front and the US-formed ‘rebel alliance’ calling itself the ‘Army of Conquest’, are now allies fighting Assad’s army and Hezbollah in north western Syria. The situation has reached the point where the Al Nusra Front leader, Jolani, has attacked the IS movement for not being serious enough about ‘fighting the regime of President Assad’.
In his interviews with the Qatari TV station, Al Jazeera, Jolani, an ‘Al-Qaeda in the Levant’ flag flying beside him, has again rejected a political solution to Syria’s four-year war, saying an end to the crisis could only come through ‘jihad’, or holy war. We will cut off the hands of Iran in the region,’ he threatened.
He also said he had received orders from Al-Qaeda’s central command not to attack the West. ‘Our mission in Syria is the downfall of the regime, its symbols, and its allies, like Hezbollah,’ Jolani said, referring to the powerful Shi’ite movement fighting alongside the Bashar al-Assad regime. The Al Nusra front is an ally of the US and Israel in its fight to smash the Assad regime in Syria, the Hezbollah movement in the Lebanon, in order ‘to cut off the hands of Iran in the region’.
It is good news that the Fatah movement in Palestine, which split with Syria after the Tal Al Zataar massacre has opened offices in Damascus. The Palestinian masses of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, must join hands with the Hezbollah movement and the Syrian people to drive imperialism and its Zionist and Salafist agencies out of the Middle East.
This will create the principled unity of the Arab peoples and their Kurdish neighbours through the formation of a Middle Eastern Federation of Socialist States, which may well choose to have Jerusalem, Damascus and Baghdad as its joint capitals.
