IRAN’S president Ebrahim Raeisi has condemned comments made by US president Joe Biden at a meeting last week with Israeli leaders where he pronounced: ‘I have long said: If Israel didn’t exist, we would have to invent it.’
Raeisi, addressing a meeting of the Iranian cabinet on Sunday, described Biden’s remarks as ‘reactionary, anti-democratic, and inhuman’. He pointed out: ‘Such statements amount to unwanted admission of the fake nature of the usurping Zionist regime.’
Raeisi added: ‘The Americans must answer the question: Which international law, agreement or regulations are compatible with such remarks?’
Imperialism, of course, has never been bound by international law – the only law it recognises is the law that confers on the imperialist nations the absolute right to impose their rule across the globe by military force.
What Biden has openly admitted, and not for the first time, is that Israel is nothing but a creation of imperialism imposed on the Middle East through terror.
The origins of Israel go back to the infamous Balfour Declaration of 1917 which came in the form of a letter from the British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to the British Zionist community granting them a national home in Palestine.
With all the arrogance of British imperialism it gifted Palestine to the Zionists despite the fact that Britain had no presence in Palestine at the time.
The Balfour Declaration is widely seen as the precursor to the 1948 Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe) when Zionist armed militia groups, trained and armed by the British, drove over 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland.
What followed in the decades after has been constant occupation of Palestinian land, hundreds of illegal settlements established in direct contravention of UN laws, and near-daily violent attacks that have claimed the lives of thousands of Palestinian men, women and children.
All this has been carried out without a word of condemnation from the US which has consistently vetoed anti-Israeli resolutions at the United Nations Security Council.
As Raeisi highlighted, Biden is openly declaring Israel to be nothing more than a creation of imperialism to protect and defend its interests and, further, Biden’s comments also serve as a ‘warning’ to all states in the region.
Raeisi said: ‘Such remarks are indicative of the fact that for the United States, preserving the Zionist regime is considerably more important than protecting the lives of human beings, especially women and children.’
By yesterday, the barbaric Israeli onslaught on the Gaza Strip had killed 4,741 Palestinians and wounded nearly 16,000. 40% of those killed were children.
This message – that Israel, with the full support and military backing of the US and UK governments is preparing for a war across the entire Middle East to fulfil its role as the agent of world imperialism in the region – was spelt out on Sunday by Israeli Economy Minister Nir Barkat.
He stated that Israel would ‘eliminate’ the Lebanese group Hezbollah if it intervened on the side of the Palestinians, and boasted that after that Israel ‘will go to the head of the snake, which is Iran’.
Barkat said: ‘We are saying to them, look what’s happening in Gaza – you are going to get the same treatment if you attack us. We are going to wipe you off the face of the Earth.’
Wiping out Hamas and the Palestinian resistance to Zionist occupation and wiping Iran ‘off the face of the Earth’ is the stated aim of the Zionist regime and its imperialist backers as they drive to impose their domination over all the countries in the oil-rich region through a barbaric war of annihilation.
The working class internationally has demonstrated its overwhelming support for the Palestinians and its hatred of imperialist war.
The time has come to use the massive strength of the working class to end imperialist war through socialist revolution.
In Britain, the immediate issue is to force the TUC to act by calling a general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers’ government that will break with the imperialist war alliance and give its full support and backing to the Palestinian people for an independent state of Palestine.
This is the only way forward today.