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by Cynthia McKinney
I don’t know how to begin this article. I could write that we are now in Day 23 of the “Hot War” between Israel and Palestine that began on Oct. 7, 2023. But, that would contain an error because Israel has been in a hot war against Palestine since Zionists chose the land of Palestine as their final object of interest after considering a British colonial territory in modern-day Kenya as a Jewish homeland.
Yes, on Aug. 26, 1903, the “Father of Zionism,” Theodor Herzl, proposed the creation of a Jewish homeland in British East Africa. This became erroneously known as “The Uganda Plan” despite being denoted as “The Nairobi Plan” in Herzl’s notes. After a long line of synagogue burnings, Talmud burnings and Jewish expulsions throughout Eurasia, organized Jewry began to focus on Palestine as a future homeland when, in November 1917, the British issued the Balfour Declaration, which stated the commitment of the monarchy “to the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”
Despite a Soviet decree creating the Jewish Autonomous Oblast (province), the German Zionist Organization signed an agreement in August 1933 with the Zionists’ Anglo-Palestine Bank and Hitler’s Economics Ministry that allowed Jews to emigrate from Germany to Palestine while taking some of their money with them. Haaretz writes that 60,000 German Jews took advantage of this opportunity, known as the Transfer (or Haavara, in Hebrew) Agreement. In this way, Jewish Palestine received an economic boost of about 100 million reichsmarks, according to encyclopedia.com.
The creation of Jewish paramilitary organizations in Palestine could be marked as the beginning of the low-level skirmishes. And, one could say that there has been a hot war between Zionist Jewish Israel and multi-religious Arab Palestine since even before Nov. 29, 1947, when, according to Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the United Nations passed “Resolution 181, adopting a plan to partition the British Mandate into two states, one Jewish, one Arab.”
So, to call what is happening now something new, is, sadly, erroneous. I personally wandered into this important political issue when I first entered national level politics in the United States when I was invited to sign a pledge of loyalty to Israel during the opening days of my campaign for election to Congress. Naturally, I rejected it, indignant that supporters in the U.S. of another state would even think that such a proposal didn’t amount to treason. I recalled George Washington’s Farewell Address of 1796, wherein the outgoing president warned the people of the U.S. against future follies. Washington orated that “a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils,” and I felt that I had just experienced such an evil.
Moreover, such demands for loyalty to Israel were a commonplace practice in Washington, D.C., so much that I was viewed as a kook and a conspiracy theorist for blowing the whistle on the practice. There were many practices that tilted U.S. policy toward Israel and, in my opinion, away from justice – and even further away from our first president’s admonition.
Moreover, U.S. policy cannot be a surprise when the children and grandchildren of the men and women who participated in Zionist political and paramilitary organizations in Israel have become today’s U.S. policymakers. Moreover, they have a “mighty Wurlitzer” of heavy propaganda and media manipulation to undergird their policy initiatives. Thus, I am certainly not surprised that there would be a lot of misunderstanding or even indifference within the U.S. population about what is actually happening between the Zionist Jews of Israel and its Arab citizens and neighbors.
Operation Al Aqsa Flood
On Oct. 7, 2023, after multiple Israeli provocations, raids and beatings against Muslims praying at the Al Aqsa Mosque, the Palestinian Resistance did something that it had rarely done: It organized, it united its many factions, it coordinated with its larger base of support outside of Palestine, and it went on the offense by attacking Israel from Gaza.
Just one correction is needed here: This is a war between Israel and the Palestinian Resistance – and not just Hamas. It might be media shorthand to call the name Hamas, an organization that has been much maligned in the press of The West. However, it must be noted that what we’re seeing is more than just Israel versus Hamas. In fact, there are at least 10 different organizations that have united for the purpose of carrying out Operation Al Aqsa Flood.
This Operation has brought to mind several critical questions by veteran Israel-Palestine watchers whose answers, I believe, can help to clarify what we’re watching unfold. The following Questions are issues that I have heard raised by those on the progressive end of the political spectrum while I provide my responses to these issues and questions raised.
Question Number 1: Hamas was born of the Muslim Brotherhood and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and is therefore not deserving of support from those in the West who support the Palestinians’ resistance to Israeli occupation.
Response: While it is true that the political wing of Hamas has dubious parentage, one cannot ignore that in the only free and fair elections held in Palestine, the Palestinian people chose Hamas members as their leaders, who were immediately arrested and imprisoned by Israel, thus denying Palestinians the self-determination for which they fight today. And while Hamas was created to divide Palestinian loyalties and to crush the Palestine Liberation Army (PLA), the military wing of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) led by Yasir Arafat, today, the PLO is viewed by many as the collaborationist organization. So, the roles have flipped and Bibi Netanyahu has declared war against Hamas in Israel’s “Operation Swords of Iron,” Israel’s response to Operation Al Aqsa Flood.
Question Number 2: Bibi Netanyahu knew about Operation Al Aqsa Flood in advance and let it happen, calling the Oct. 7 attack Israel’s 9/11.
Response: Exactly mirroring U.S. events in the lead-up to Sept. 11, 2001, there were early reports of warnings to Israel from Egypt. Journalist Seymour Hersh also asks in his Oct. 24 article entitled, “The Mysteries of October 7,” describing the many anomalies of Oct. 7, 2023, on the Israeli side of the border, he asks, “Why did Hamas stage an early morning raid on October 7 in what turned out to be a series of unguarded kibbutzim in Israel south?” and “Why were only a few Israeli soldiers on duty that morning?”
In a previous Oct. 12 article, entitled “Netanyahu Is Finished,” Hersh reminds his readers that Bibi Netanyahu actually thought that he could control Hamas, and Operation Al Aqsa Flood is the result of that gigantic miscalculation.
Question Number 3: Why is Operation Al Aqsa Flood so different from other clashes between Israel and Palestine?
Response: According to Rasanah, a Saudi International Institute for Iranian Studies, this Operation is different in several significant ways: A) It succeeded in “breaching Israel’s first line of defense, taking the battle deep into Israeli territory and even calling into question the principle of invincible Israeli power.” B) Palestinian Resistance was able to infiltrate areas inside the Occupied Territories as well as Israel itself. And C) The Netanyahu government failed to protect the settlers. Thus, according to Rasanah, Israel’s domestic politics will change amid a backdrop of growing prominence of the Palestinian Resistance, possibly sidelining the inept collaborationists [my characterization] in a “crisis of credibility.”
Finally, Rasanah’s report, entitled, “Operation Al Aqsa Storm (Flood),” concludes: “Overall, this operation is considered a quantum leap in terms of timing, scale, rules, outcomes and implications. This is the first time since the creation of Israel 75 years ago in which Palestinian fighters have infiltrated into the Israeli territories occupied after 1948.”
And after the Flood?
Saudi-Israeli normalization of relations has been stopped in its tracks – at least for now. Palestinian “Unity for Liberation” has taken a huge step forward with concrete results – so far. U.S., Israeli and Western “prestige” in the region has taken a serious hit as what was once viewed by the world as an invincible fortress has been breached in full view of the world. And so it goes with The West and the Global North.
A “white” supremacist, apartheid international structure is heaving and cracking under the stress of this current round of decolonization that could be taking place. It very well could be on its way to a complete collapse. Thus, the proposed new U.S.-backed trade route to counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and destroy Global South solidarity in newly expanded BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) by pulling India away from its usual non-aligned stance and towards Israel and the U.S. by way of the India-Middle East [sic]-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) could also be as dead in its tracks as is Saudi-Israeli normalization.
It is no secret that the U.S. is doing everything in its power to thwart the emerging multipolar world order where the vision is less wealth inequality globally and locally inside countries and less big power interference in the domestic affairs of smaller countries. In other words, sovereignty. Toward a more equitable world.
That vision requires a realignment of global powers and is happening today with the strategic partnership between Russia and China, global dedollarization, and the emergence of strategic regional groupings of the formerly colonized world like the newly expanded BRICS and China’s BRI that offer infrastructure investments and development goals to smaller countries beyond what The West’s neoliberalism has to offer them as they try to escape the lingering effects of colonialism and neocolonialism.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said that the United States needs a revolution of values. Perhaps the world in the Flood’s aftermath might force the people of the U.S. to have their own Day of Reckoning with themselves and the values they allow their elected leaders to manifest as they formulate U.S. policies for home and abroad.
Cynthia McKinney is an international peace and human rights activist, noted for her inconvenient truth-telling about the U.S. war machine. She was held for seven days in an Israeli prison after attempting to enter Gaza by sea and traveled to Libya during U.S. bombing and witnessed the crimes against humanity committed against that country’s people. In addition to Libya, she has traveled to Cuba, Syria, Russia, Iran, Pakistan and as she puts it: “Wherever U.S. bombs are dropping or U.S. sanctions are biting.” She is the author or editor of four Clarity Press books: She has written one book, “Ain’t Nothing Like Freedom,” and edited “The Illegal War on Libya” and the 2018 book, “How the U.S. Creates Sh*thole Countries.” She was in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) researching U.S. and Western allegations that Chinese Muslims were being subjected to genocide at the time of the discovery of SARS-CoV-2. After just barely exiting China before it and the world “locked down,” Cynthia shifted the focus of her next book from Muslims in China to the viral phenomenon gripping the world. This resulted in the first book published on the political economy of the coronavirus: “WHEN CHINA SNEEZES, From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis.” McKinney holds a B.A. from the University of Southern California, an M.A.L.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and a Ph.D. from Antioch University. Cynthia McKinney is a former U.S. Congresswoman and Green Party nominee for president of the United States and is an assistant professor at a leading Asian University. She can be reached at https://www.allthingscynthiamckinney.com/contact/.
