ISRAELI military forces stormed the al-Aqsa Mosque compound yesterday, attacking Palestinian worshippers with sound grenades, rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse them and allow dozens of settlers to barge their way in.
This was the latest invasion by settlers protected and encouraged by the military, and was organised to coincide with what the Zionists call ‘Independence Day’.
Independence Day for the Israelis is a celebration of the events 74 years ago when armed Zionist gangs attacked Palestinians, driving an estimated 750,000 from their land and homes turning them into refuges in their own country.
In the coming weeks leading up to the 15th May, Palestinians will remember the Nakba or ‘the catastrophe’.
The Zionists will be celebrating it, waving the Israeli flag and singing the Israeli national anthem while police attempt to force Palestinians, who have barricaded themselves within the site of the mosque, out of the courtyards so that the settlers can take over.
Last month, heavily armed Israeli police broke into the compound to disperse hundreds of worshippers gathered before dawn for prayers in a violent invasion. Palestinian presidential spokesman Abu Rudeineh called for urgent international intervention to halt these blatant attempts by the Zionist regime to drive Palestinians out of their most holy sites as part of a programme of complete ethnic cleansing.
These attacks are a continuation of the same violent attacks during Ramadan in 2021 that culminated in an Israeli onslaught on Gaza.
Unsurprisingly, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas has slammed the West’s ‘double standards’, saying: ‘Despite the crimes of the Israeli occupation that amount to ethnic cleansing and racial discrimination … we find no one who is holding Israel responsible for behaving as a state above the law.’
Israel enjoys ‘double standards’ because it is a creature of imperialism. Its continued existence is only made possible by the support, funding and invulnerability from sanctions due to its position as an imperialist outpost in the Middle East.
The role of imperialist attack dog in the region allows Israel to posture as a ‘democracy’ while practising racist policies.
This duplicity has now been revealed by Russia that, despite publicly proclaiming neutrality in the imperialist war on Russia, Israeli mercenaries are fighting alongside the neo-Nazi Azov brigade in Ukraine.
Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Wednesday: ‘Israeli mercenaries, too, are fighting practically shoulder-to-shoulder with Azov militants,’ and on Tuesday Russia’s foreign ministry accused Israel of backing ‘the neo-Nazi regime in Kiev’. This was met with denials from the Israeli government and dismissed by the bourgeois press as ‘bizarre’. In fact, Israel exists because of its 1948 war with the inhabitants of Palestine to drive them off their land. Israel continues this war today!
The Azov brigade started life as fascist street gangs that led the coup in Ukraine in 2014 and then went on to burn down the Hall of the Trade Unions in Odessa with 48 workers burnt to death.
They were welded into a battalion and imbedded in the Ukrainian army by the coupist government to lead the murderous attacks on the Donbass region that left 14,000 men, women and children dead!
The leaders of the Azov brigade openly boast of ‘cleansing’ Ukraine of non-white and Russian speakers, while the Zionist regime owes its existence to imperialist support for the barbarism of the Nakba and its continuing racist policy to ethnically cleanse the country from Palestinians.
There is nothing bizarre about Israel arming and supporting the Azov brigade. The Zionists have been terrorising the Palestinians, while the Azov brigade took great pleasure in killing trade unionists and driving black students out of the Ukraine, treating them like dirt to the point where the Indian government officially complained.
Both the Zionists and the Azovs enjoy the support and military aid of the US and world imperialism to the point of risking nuclear war to regain the territories lost to capitalism by the Russian Revolution.
The only answer to this crisis is for the powerful world working class to rise up against the common enemy – capitalism in its final and most barbaric imperialist stage – and put an end to it with the victory of the world socialist revolution, which will shatter the Zionists and the Ukrainian fascists forever!
