Al Nakba – Day 8

A people’s applause for those who face their own erasure with a smile
And the tyrant’s fear of songs.
We have on this land all of that which makes life worth living
On this land
– Mahmoud Darwish

Israel, the most powerful army in the region, is attempting to drive the Palestinians from their homeland for the third time in 75 years. The Palestinian resistance stands alone save for the support of the ordinary people in Palestine, in Lebanon, in Jordan, in Egypt, everywhere. Leaders have forsaken their country and constructed a wall of lies assisted by utter nonsense: in the media, in the parliament, on the Internet.

Let us take a look at how Israel is attempting to fight the resistance in Gaza in the occupied territories in Lebanon and in Syria.

Transcript

Okay, there’s been a lot of nonsense on the internet about what is happening in Palestine. I want to make this short video just to give some basic geopolitical realities about this region. So we’re looking now at a map where the Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, what is called by the English, the Middle East (East of where?), or what I call the Levant is in the center of the screen.

So, as we zoom in, if we have a look at the current situation (in Palestine), if we go all the way in, we can see that the Gaza Strip is a very small strip of land on the edge of the Mediterranean. And in the north of that strip is Gaza City, which Israeli military is intending to invade. And they’ve been bombing allof the strip (Gaza City, Khan Younis and Rafah) now for a week.

Now, in that area, underneath the (Gaza) city itself, there are a lot of subterranean tunnels. And those tunnels cannot be viewed by sensors or by satellite equipment. So that presents a problem for the invasion of that part of Palestine by the Israeli war machine. And they are, if you look at the cursor, they’re all around this area. And they (Israeli army) are right on the border fences, which is shown by the 1950 Armistice Agreement line (the so-called Green line: the Palestinians were not party to the drawing of the Green Line and they rejected it).

And they’ve asked (told) 1.1 million people who are already refugees from this area here (outside the 1950 Armistice Line) in 1948; Israel has asked (told) 1.1 million people to evacuate south down over this water here, it’s really a dry bed. This is an impossible task for a people without proper transport and where the roads have been reduced to rubble by continuous Israeli bombardment.

It’s a seasonal water, it’s a Wadi*, and they’ve asked the people to go down here into the south of the Gaza Strip to this main town of Khan Yunis. There are a total of about 2.3 million people in this very small 140 square kilometer area. Now, if we look at the broader front of things after the attack on Israel by the Hamas says military al Qassam, there are a number of things that have that have taken place. One of them is that the conflict has been broadened somewhat.

And this has been largely by the Israelis. They have requested and received American warships, the Gerald Ford has come in here: the biggest aircraft carrier in the world. And the US has come in here. And the purpose of that warship (and others) has got nothing to do with what’s happening in Gaza. But everything to do with keeping Iran out of the conflict. So if you go to the east, you see a long way over to the east is Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and then Iran.

Iran is a very big country, of well over 45 million people. It’s got a very high standard of living. And it’s, you know, it is sizable power in the region, and it’s quite wealthy as well. So a small country like Israel can’t really contend with Iran. So they need the United States for military support, which has been given at the same time, in the occupied territories is Google doesn’t really recognize this. But in the occupied territories, there have been a lot of Israeli activity, especially in towns like Nablus, the old city of Nablus in Geneen. They have been arresting a lot of people.

They’ve been shooting a lot of people and they’re in total lockdown under the influence of the occupation army, which is the Israeli so what is going on here is a Aren’t extension of the colonial experiment that Israel has set about. And they are colonizing. And taking back the land in Gaza.  Israel are trying to expel people from the West Bank. This area here, already they expelled a lot of people from Jerusalem. And what we’re looking at is the third hour Nakba. So the first one was in 1948, where they killed a lot of people and drove them out from their land.

The second one was in 1967, during the Six Day War, and this one is the third Nakba. It’s a catastrophe. Now, to the north, we have another contending force of quite a strong military. And that is the military of Hezbollah. Now, it drove Israel out of the southern part of Lebanon “the July war” 2006that we’re looking at now. It drove the Israeli tanks and military out of southern Lebanon. And the Israelis have been pretty upset about that. But they can’t really do much about it, because Hezbollah is quite heavily armed.

They have a lot of rockets, a lot of missiles, like the Israeli guardian, put their gunboats, you know, got gunboats off of Gaza, but they can’t really put many gunboats off here because they get shot out of the water, which happened during the war with Hezbollah, back in the day,

So here we have the capital of Lebanon, and then Damascus now two days ago, the Israeli Air Force as they are want to do, they found the main international airport of Damascus, just as a diplomat from Iran was flying in. He had to skedaddle out of there. So they bombed Damascus airport. And they also bombed an airport in the north of Aleppo. Aleppo has been the subject of of the Syrian civil war for when one of the better term, but there’s still one airport that Syria has, and that’s Latakia, which is right up in the north here. And it is Latakia is on the Mediterranean.

So if you’re a Syrian, really, the only way you can get out is through this airport up here at Latakia on the Mediterranean Seaboard. So they’re really shutting down the whole region. They’re not allowing this is something that the Australian Prime Minister should be talking about. They’re not allowing humanitarian aid to get into Gaza, through the wrath across it. And that a lot of the humanitarian charities in, in Egypt, this is to the south is all Egypt. They want to send in trucks to give relief to the people who have run out of food, water, and, and, and energy, you know, petrol and electricity. So that’s this current situation that we’re looking at today, which is Sunday.

So we’re eight days into the siege of Gaza by Israel, in response to the military attack by Hamas on their bases, upon some of the towns, they’re always towns here. They were formerly towns that are owned by the people who had to flee to Gaza as a result of the 1948 al Nakba.

Now, I’m I’m led to believe that a lot of these towns have been evacuated by the Israeli military as well. So a lot of Israelis have gone up north or gone elsewhere, to get out of this, really, this whole military operation that’s going on at the moment. So I’ll just leave it at that. And if there are any questions, just put them down below and I’ll try to answer them

Ian Curr from 4PR Voice of the People

Signing off, see you.

*Wadi Gaza springs from the Negev hills and the southern heights of Hebron. The length of the Wadi is about 105 km from its source, and extends from the Truce line in East Gaza to the coast where it discharges into the sea.