THE Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad has called for Israel to be ‘wiped off the map’.
He also said that ‘a world without the US and Israel is possible’, and added: ‘Anyone who signs a treaty which recognises the entity of Israel means he has signed the surrender of the Muslim world’.
These remarks, made at a time when the US and its allies are seeking to get the Palestinian leadership to agree to Gaza and a few strips of the West Bank constituting a Palestinian state so that the US’ Gulf allies, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia etc. can recognise Israel, exchange embassies and sign a peace treaty with it, have touched off a furious response.
Britain, the US and France say they have been ‘sickened’, while Israel has urged that Iran be expelled from the United Nations.
Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres said Iran posed a ‘clear and present danger’. He added: ‘We must submit a clearcut request to the UN secretary general and the Security Council to obtain Iran’s expulsion from the United Nations.’
In fact, the Israelis are keen to see Iran thrown out of the UN so that it can use some of its illegally held nuclear weapons against an ‘outlaw state’ to bomb it back to the stone age.
Iran is no clear or present danger to either the US or to Israel. It is a regional power in the Gulf, with great oil resources but militarily unable to dominate its neighbours, as the 1979-1988 war with Iraq proved.
Despite the fact that Iran has three times the population of Iraq, and that it was gripped by a revolutionary fervour at the time, Iran was unable to defeat Saddam Hussein’s armies with their vast military resources provided by the US, UK, and France.
What has touched off the hysterical response of the US and its satellites is the fact that the war in Iraq is going badly, that pro-Iranian movements are dominating southern Iraq, and the US is poised to risk all by attempting to force regime changes in Syria and the Lebanon, to try to dampen down the Iraqi insurgency, rein in Hezbollah and convince the Palestinians to settle for what little they have and to forget about establishing a viable state on both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank with Jerusalem as its capital.
The stakes, the vast oil wealth of the Middle East, are great, and the US is not about to let the Iranians upset the applecart in any way.
However, there is no doubt the people in the Gulf and the Middle East would all sign up in support of the Iranian President’s remarks.
It is a fact that Britain and other imperialist powers did promise Palestine to the Zionists, and did create the conditions for the establishment of the state of Israel through driving over a million Palestinians out of their homes and into refugee camps.
Britain and France did take part alongside Israel in an attack on Egypt in 1956 to seek to overthrow Nasser after the Egyptian people nationalised the Suez Canal.
Britain and the US have supported Israel’s drive to establish settlements in the West Bank where hundreds of thousands of settlers, many of them US and British citizens, openly call for the murder of Palestinians and for the rest to be driven into Jordan.
Britain and the US are still supplying military equipment to Israel which it is still using to kill Palestinians who have lived under occupation since either 1948 or 1967.
The same imperialist powers have allowed Israel to acquire over 200 nuclear bombs and countless other wmds for use against the Arabs.
President Ahmadinejad of Iran was speaking the truth. There will be no peace in the Middle East until imperialism and Zionism are driven out of the region and a Palestinian state established in the whole territory of Palestine where Arabs, Christians and Jews will be able to live side by side in peace.
