Message from Maung Zarni

 

Do you condemn Israel on 7 Oct.?: TMS Special on the 3rd anniversary of Israel’s “world-changing genocide” in Gaza, in Martin Shaw’s coinage.

At the core of October 7 is about 100-years of Palestinian erasure & dispossession at the policy hands of Anglo-American imperialists who enabled the forever land theft by Europe’s unwanted Jews.

Maung Zarni Oct 7

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In this 3rd Anniversary of Oct. 7 Palestinian jail break, TMS has frontloaded the resisters’ voices, from Susan Abulhawa’s victorious fight to force the Oxford Union to restore her full address at the student-run debating society, which it sought to censor, to placate genocidal Zionist sensitivities to the Palestinian publications including the Palestine Chronicle and the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy.

First, my own personal reflections on the wretched of Gaza and their humanly attempts to break the chains of semi-enslavement by the Jewish Supremacist Israel.

Just like the two 9/11s - Chilean General Pinochet’s CIA-orchestrated coup against the democratically elected soft-leftist Salvador Allende in 1973 and the immortalised 9/11 of the New York’s Twin Tower tragedy - there were two October 7s.

The original Oct. 7 was the organised revolt of the Jewish inmates at Auschwitz-Birkenau Crematorium IV in 1944, just a few months before the Soviet Red Army liberated the death camp on 27 January 945.

The curatorial sign and the ruins of Crematorium IV at Auschwitz II, (photos by Zarni, 23 March 2017).

Palestinians’ Oct. 7 three years ago is widely known, contemporary and too fresh on our collective memories as a human community for me to spill more ink on it here.

Properly contextualised, both Oct 7s. were, in essence and in effect, suicidal jail break by the two groups of victims of the two types of institutionalised savagery or barbarism, namely Nazi SS’s mass extermination and the Gaza enclave which Shin Bet (or Shabeck), the Israeli equivalent of Gestapo, have been running like “an open air prison”, since the Palestinians democratically elected the Hamas as their governing body in a free and fair election held in 2007.

This public characterisation or confession that Gaza, with 2.4 million Palestinians of whom 40% were children and youth, was run by Israel like “an open air prison”, came from the horse’s mouth, namely the decorated Israeli admiral (retired) and former Director of Shin Bet Ami Ayalon. He is someone I personally met and confronted face-to-face on the issue of Palestinians’ right of return to their indigenous homeland of Palestine at a private Zionist fundraiser my former Zionist Jewish friend organized at this super-posh Lanesborough Hotel in London sixteen years ago.

[See Former Shin Bet director Ami Ayalon: ‘If I were Palestinian, I would fight against Israel’, Mid-East Monitor, 16 March 2024]

Both the rebellious Jewish members of the sonderkommando (prisoner special work unit) who in 1944 prolonged their lives by assisting the death camp’s SS administration by doing the dirty job of cleaning up gas chambers after every cycle of genocidal slaughter at the Crematorium and the Palestinians who were members of the armed resistance networks including the Hamas that organised their suicidal jail break on October 7 three years ago can only be fully understood as acts of caged humans who preferred to die standing on their feet, as opposed to live subjugated and futureless lives on their knees.

As someone who, since his tender age as a young Burmese boy in Mandalay, was raised with a deep sense of anti-colonial/imperialist resistance by any means necessary, I have never condemned any type of resistance by the oppressed, particularly in the face of an uncompromising system of colonial oppression, barbarisms of Nazi Germany and the contemporary Jewish Supremacist (the latter-day Fascist) Israel, or Mandela’s brand of underground movement against S. African apartheid.

Three years ago today, I sent my dear friend Professor Penny Green at Queen Mary University of London — her highly qualified nomination for the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories was viciously blocked by Zionists — an early morning email, asking her if she had seen the news of the Palestinian revolt.

Her terse - and prophetic - reply came back instantly in my inbox: “It’s going to be apocalypse!” (in terms of Israel’s response).

And surely, apocalypse, it has been.

Gaza is NOT “a war”, in any sense of the word.

The apocalypse in Gaza wasn’t the result of the complexity of fighting an urban warfare, as my former LSE senior colleague and host Professor Mary Kaldor, also a friend of the former Head of Shin Bet Ami Ayalon, initially sought to explain Israel’s “Gaza war”. The Norwegian peace research institute in Oslo mis-frames as “Gaza War” Israel’s annihilationist scheme in Gaza, a textbook Lemkinian genocide, with an added intent of making Gaza “unlivable”.

(See Israeli Ecocide Brings Renewed Interest in the Crime - FORSEA, Nov. 2023)

The apocalopse in Gaza wasn’t an inevitable outcome of the “excessive use of force” — like the vile and callous Hilary Clinton tried to normalize when she told a hostile audience, “It’s a war (in Gaza). People die.” — in retaliation against the Palestinian assaults that took place in Israeli settlements - built on the 11 originally Palestinian villages, erased in the Nakba of 1948.

For Israelis - politicians, the military-security apparatus, the Nazi-like Jewish Supremacist society, and the Zionist media - it was their widely shared genocidal wet dream of a Hitlerite total annihilation (or extermination) of the population which they have long collectively viewed as “human animals”. They are evidently elated to see the IOF- livestreamed apoclyptic scenes of the 28-miles long Palestinian living space.

Angela Davis has repeatedly said that Palestine is the moral litmus test of our time. My own personally specific test is simply, “Do you condemn Israel?”

There is a place for righteous rage - and even angry curse words - in the face of savagery and barbarism - or simply EVIL.

Here I want to make clear that I and I alone are responsible for any choice of words or sentiments in this note of mine, not my TMS Editorial Colleagues.

One of my favourite memes since 8 October 2023 reads, “If you are wondering what you would have done were you alive in the Nazi-occupied Europe, you are doing it now.”

I therefore condemn Israel - and its Western genocidal collaborators, supporters, and defenders.