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Wi’Am Zoughbi, founder and director of the Palestinian Conflict Transformation Center (https://www.alaslah.org/) in Bethlehem, recently spoke at the Oakhurst Presbyterian Church in Decatur. Zoughbi discussed what it’s like to live in an apartheid-occupied Palestine, the Genocide in 1948 and 2024, and Gaza’s offshore gas and oil.
THE 2024 GENOCIDE IN GAZA
Netanyahu’s right-wing government and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), enabled by weapons from President Joe Biden, have bombed Gaza into the dark ages.
Of the 1.2 million Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Strip, nearly 137,500 are internally displaced, sheltering in 83 United Nations Relief Work Agency (UNRWA) schools in all areas of the Gaza Strip. Approximately 43,000 are dead from bombs, with an unknown number buried under the rubble. Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war continues to kill children and the elderly. One hundred thousand are wounded, and many are dying from infection and disease. Researchers estimate at least 186,000 died from direct and indirect causes.
Israel has bombed, starved, and terrorized the Palestinian people. Their cruel, excessive overkill of children, women, and civilians, leaving Gaza in ruins, was out of proportion to the Hamas attack that killed 1,200 and took 254 as hostages. Still, it gave Netanyahu the pretext to destroy Gaza. Israel’s current assault on Gaza is a continuation of its 2014 attack on Gaza that killed over 2,104 Palestinians, most of whom were civilians.
Israel’s goal was not merely to destroy Hamas but to claim the Gaza Strip and control the recently discovered natural gas and oil off the coast of Gaza worth billions.
GAZA’S GAS AND OIL
A United Nations, Trade and Development study, identified large reserves of oil and natural gas off Gaza’s coast that could benefit the Palestinian people, which Israel is either preventing them from exploiting or exploring without due regard for international law.
The Levant Basin of the East Mediterranean Sea stretches from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. This area includes the maritime territories of Israel, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Cyprus, and Syria. The new oil and natural gas reserves are valued at $524 billion. Most of those assets can only be sourced from Palestine’s occupied territory.
“Netanyahu is not interested in a one-state or a two-state solution for the Palestinians. He wants us to disappear. He wants to see more Jews coming to Israel. Already, some Jewish groups are buying pieces of land in Gaza and the West Bank,” Zoughbi said.
The underlying military objective of the occupation of Gaza is the expulsion of Palestinians from their ancestral homeland and the confiscation of Gaza’s multi-billion-dollar gas resources.
Israel is not fighting terrorism, but they are fighting the resistance to their decades of crimes against humanity and Palestine. They are fighting for an exclusively Jewish state and all the resources in Palestine. They plan to relocate the survivors in Gaza to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and Palestinians in the West Bank to Jordan.
Netanyahu’s plan for Israel is to become a free trade zone to make Gaza a global center for exporting gas and oil.
Israel will never allow the Palestinians sovereignty over their land or territorial waters, which is further evidence of Israel’s deliberate intentions to displace the Palestinians from their historical lands and confiscate their natural resources, reports the Middle East Eye.
HISTORY DID NOT START ON OCTOBER 7, 2023
“Palestinians are in a no-win situation: We accepted a two-state solution, but it was not implemented. We will accept a one-state solution, but that did not happen. We want to be nonviolent, but Israel is leading a genocide in Gaza, a slow genocide in the West Bank, and massive attacks on Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen,” Zoughbi said.
Some people believe that October 7 was the beginning of a catastrophe for Jews. But the beginning for Palestinians was in 1948 with the Nakaba or catastrophe.
The UN in 1947 had a Partition Plan giving the Jews 55% of the land and the Arabs 42%. Palestinians did not agree to their land being given away. “This was the beginning of the injustices, aggression, and occupation of Palestine for many years,” Zoughbi said.
The Jewish groups were very well armed to the point that they drove the Palestinians out and occupied almost 77.7 percent of the holy land in the 1948 war. The Israelis called it a War of Independence. The Palestinians call it the Nakba or genocide.
It was the first genocide or ethnic cleansing when 15,000 Palestinians were murdered, 750,000 were removed from their homes and ancestral lands, and 530 villages were destroyed. This is when the catastrophe began for Palestinians.
Jews have always lived in communities with Arabs in peace and safety. But when the Zionist movement came along, they planned to establish an exclusive Jewish state in Historic Palestine, so they had to rid the area of Arabs.
“Not only did the land fragment, but our people are fragmented, with half of us in the diaspora and half living in Gaza, the West Bank, or occupied Israeli territories,” Zoughbi said.
NETANYAHU EXPANDS THE WAR INTO THE MIDDLE EAST
Palestinians are living in an untenable situation of apartheid, occupation, and genocide. To make a bad situation worse, Israel is bombing Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran to allegedly kill terrorist cells in those Arab countries. Arabs are responding by bombing Israel, but Israel has protection, an Iron Dome, that intercepts missiles coming in and weapons and money from the U.S.
Up to 70% of the West Bank, with up to one million illegal settlements, has been annexed to Israel, but the right-wing government wants to see all of the West Bank as part of Israel.
“Netanyahu would like to have a larger Israel; despite how many people will be killed, he doesn’t care, neither from Palestine nor from Israel. Netanyahu wants to be king of Israel and king of the Middle East. The only power that can stop Israel is the United States,” Zoughbi said. But the U.S. is enabling the genocide with money and bombs to Israel.
“Why do American politicians give unconditional support to Israel, giving them 40 billion in weapons and money in the last year? No one questions this. Every year, the U.S. gives 3.7 billion to Israel. Why are our tax dollars going to murder women and children in Gaza and the West Bank and enslave the Palestinian people?” Zoughbi and many Americans want to know.
Amnesty International reports that the Israeli army has used white phosphorus in Lebanon and Gaza on civilians in violation of international humanitarian law.
The International Criminal Court has charged Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, and Yoav Gallant, Minister of Defence of Israel, with war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in the Gaza Strip since October 8, 2023. Gallant calls Palestinians human animals.
“What is going on in Israel is religious extremism, fanaticism, fundamentalism, and hate, which are not suitable for peace. We need a ceasefire now to be everlasting and lead to transformation. Not even the UN can stop the aggression and genocide against the Palestinian people.” Zoughbi said.
JEWS, MUSLIMS AND CHRISTIANS FOR PEACE
“The Israeli government is defying international law, recklessly violating human rights, and endangering millions of lives across the Middle East, including the lives of its own citizens. And it has been doing so for decades. Over the last year, the Israeli military carried out a genocide in Gaza, and the U.S. government-funded and enabled these atrocities”, part of a statement from Jewish Voice for Peace. “We call on all people of conscience to stop the imminent genocide of Palestinians.”
“We need collective responsibility through non-violence to get rid of the occupation. We need a pro-peace camp in Israel to help the government get rid of being an occupied force. We need to break this cycle of violence. We don’t want victims to be perpetrators of violence. We need justice, economic justice, political justice, social justice, environmental justice, gender justice, and restorative justice to stop this aggression against our people,” Zoughbi said.
Not all Jews support Netanyahu’s extreme right-wing warmongering government. Jewish Voice for Peace says to Netanyahu’s genocide, “Not in our Name,” and many anti-Zionist Israeli and American Jews do not support the Israeli genocide of Palestinians.
This violence is based on the unrealistic Zionist belief that the land of Palestine was given to them two thousand years ago by God. This makes the Bible a quick claim deed and “God a real estate agent or cheerleader for war,” Zoughbi said.
Israel can not kill their way to peace and security. Their misguided actions are making enemies all over the world. And the more Arabs they kill, the more resistance fighters they create. An eye for an eye, and soon everyone is blind.
written by Gloria Tatum
Streets of Atlanta 