Redress Information & Analysis considers the implications of the Anglo-European walkout at the UN anti-racism conference for campaigners for justice for the Palestinians who believe in action through the democratic process.
Today will go down as a historic day for everyone who cares about justice for the people of Palestine – the ethnically cleansed refugees in the diaspora and the 1.2 million Arabs who make up nearly 20 per cent of Israel’s citizens.
For years, campaigners for justice for the Palestinians have pinned their hopes on using fact and reason to persuade the United States and its allies in Europe and elsewhere to deliver justice to the Palestinians. They encouraged people to use the democratic process to persuade their governments to right the wrongs they had inflicted on the people of Palestine. They urged their fellow citizens to use whatever media were willing to give them a voice to reach out to people, to educate them about the Palestinian cause and to mobilize them in support of justice. They lobbied their parliamentary representatives, calling upon them to put pressure on their governments to do the decent thing and cut the umbilical cord that feeds Israeli crimes and aggression and keeps Israel’s Zionist infrastructure of racism intact.
Great strides have been made at the grassroots and today, thanks partly to the internet and the freedom it gave to pro-Palestinian campaigners to break free from the Zionist stranglehold over the mainstream Western media, the Palestinian cause is right at the centre of mainstream opinion, at least in Britain.
However, these strides have not been reflected at the centres of power, among the elites, at heart of the establishments that rule Britain, the United States and the rest of Europe. In fact, the opposite has happened and today we have the proof.
Today, the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, spoke the truth at the United Nations conference on racism. He spoke the truth, the absolute truth, but the old imperialist powers of Europe, led by Britain, and their hangers on from the former communist camp, responded by walking out, in a premeditated move aimed at snubbing the Iranian leader. They walked out on the truth in the same way that they have been turning their backs on justice for the people of Palestine for the past 60 years.
Let us us take look at what the Iranian president actually said at today’s conference in Geneva.
The victorious powers [of the world wars] call themselves the conquerors of the world, while ignoring or down-treading the rights of other nations by the imposition of oppressive laws and international arrangements...
After World War II, they resorted to making an entire nation homeless on the pretext of Jewish suffering. They sent migrants from Europe, the United States and other parts of the world in order to establish a totally racist government in the occupied Palestine. In compensation for the dire consequences of racism in Europe, they helped bring to power the most cruel and repressive, racist regime in Palestine....
It is all the more regrettable that a number of Western governments and the United States have committed themselves to defending those racist perpetrators of genocide, while the awakened consciences and free-minded people of the world condemn aggression, brutality and the bombardment of civilians of Gaza...
Today, the human community is facing a kind of racism which has tarnished the image of humanity. In the beginning of the third millennium, the word Zionism personifies racism, that falsely resorts to religion and abuses religious sentiments to hide hatred...
Efforts must be made to put an end to the abuse by Zionists and their supporters of political and international means... Governments must be encouraged and supported in the fight aimed at eradicating this barbaric racism and moving towards reforming the current international mechanisms...
You are all aware of the conspiracy of some powers and Zionist circles against the goals and objectives of this conference... It should be recognized that boycotting such a session is a true indication of supporting the blatant example of racism.
These are not just President Ahmadinejad’s views. These are established facts.
There is no dispute that decades of intrigue and collaboration between the Zionist movement and the West – principally Britain – led in 1948 to the establishment of the state of Israel, mainly by European settlers, and the dispossession of an entire people, the Palestinians, who today remain the world's largest group of refugees.
Nor is there any doubt that Israel is a racist state comparable to apartheid South Africa. As the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan – another blot on Britain's conscience – Craig Murray said:
Citizens of [Israel] are defined and confined by race. It is not just that all ethnic Jews, wherever they were born, have a right to live in Israel whereas many ethnic Palestinians who were actually born in Israel do not. Jews in Israel have a right of immigration for their spouses; Arabs in Israel do not. Arab Israelis are actually forbidden by law from marrying Palestinians outside Israel. Many Arab communities are physically cut off by barbed wire.
Israel's racist discrimination against its Arab citizens is beyond doubt
So, what are Israel’s Western friends, led by Britain, objecting to? Which part of President Ahmadinejad's speech did they think was not true?
The answer was provided by Britain’s representative at the conference, Peter Gooderham, and by one of the conference’s organizers, Rupert Colville. Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s PM programme, Gooderham said that Britain objected to Israel being described as a racist state, and did not take kindly to the Iranian president recalling how Israel was set up. For his part, Colville could not even remember what Ahmadinejad said and, after some prodding by the programme presenter, said that equating Zionism with racism was unacceptable to his masters.
That is it, then. The objection is to calling a spade a spade. To saying that white is white and black is black. In other words, do not dare to acknowledge the fact that Israel is an implanted, racist, colonial, aggressor, rogue state that indulges in ethnic cleansing, land theft and the mass murder of innocent civilians lest we be asked by our people to explain and justify our open-ended support for it.
But there is also another reason. That is the fact that Israel’s agents of influence have penetrated deep into the British, US and European governments, controlling key policies and putting Israel’s interests ahead of the national interests of the countries they have hijacked.
Where does all this leave British, US and other European citizens who believe in using the democratic process in order to influence their governments’ policies towards Israel and the Palestinians? The answer, it would seem, is nowhere. As long as Western polities remain firmly under the clutches of Israel’s stooges and agents of influence, these polities will remain thoroughly impervious to public opinion as far as the holy cow of Israel is concerned.
And where does this leave the Palestinian struggle for justice? Also nowhere, but only as long as Israel remains the preponderant military power in the Middle East.
This is where Iran potentially holds the key to a just and lasting peace in the Palestinian-Israeli struggle. Today, the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, spoke the truth that the British, European and American apologists for racism dare not utter. If, tomorrow, Iran answers the prayers of the dispossessed and the downtrodden and acquires a nuclear weapons capability, then there shall be justice and peace in the Middle East, probably without a shot being fired. As everyone knows, cowards and bullies understand only one language: force and the threat of force.
