LYNA AL TABAL A hundred years of hell in Palestine

Dr Lyna Al Tabal, Rai Al Youm, 1/8/2025

Translated by Tlaxcala

France has finally decided to recognise the State of Palestine.

In the month when the leaves fall and lies blossom on the banks of the Seine, France has finally granted recognition — timid, belated, seven decades behind...

And UK, the very country that sold off land that did not belong to it, has decided in turn to make a gesture... But Resolution 67/19, adopted by 138 countries at the United Nations General Assembly in 2012, had already granted Palestine the status of ‘non-member observer state’, on the same footing as the Vatican. It was on this basis that Palestine was able to join international organisations and treaties, such as the International Criminal Court and UNESCO.

Okay, you Europeans number 450 million. Your economy is worth $20 trillion. You shine on the stock markets and dominate the markets... But tell me: can your governments weigh even a kilogram of justice? A handful of dignity? Recognition seventy years late – is that your offer? You call that a gesture? You are giving Palestine nothing. Nothing. Is that all you have to offer? Really?

Will this recognition stop a tank? Will it warm the cold bed of a murdered mother? Bring a child back to life? No.

Yes, Europe loves Palestine... but from afar. Like one loves a lost cause, an oriental myth, a poem by Mahmoud Darwish framed on the wall of a Parisian living room. And you know it: Israel will swallow this recognition like it swallows the West Bank — whole.

Enough talk.

The world doesn't need another declaration. It just needs you to stop arming the killer.

This recognition is a caricature. What Palestine needs is for this complicity to end. The UN condemns Israel every day. What has that changed? Gaza is dying of hunger, suffering genocide, crimes, misery...

Three colours dominate: the grey of the ruins, the red of the blood, and the bright gold of disaster – that of the markets thriving on the rubble. There is no need for further statements. Keep your ‘courageous’ gestures. Jeffrey Sachs is not a revolutionary. He is an expert, a man who simply tells the truth: ‘Stop supplying arms to Israel, and the war will end.’

The solution begins with one word: responsibility. The responsibility of Israel, but also of all those who support it. Imposing sanctions is the minimum. Their Prime Minister is accused? Then let him be taken to The Hague in handcuffs and let the trials begin – if you still believe in that word: peace.

The only measure that makes sense in this region is the disarmament of Israel.

But what can Europe do in the face of the great powers that dictate their laws and impose their will? The Trump administration has not even bothered to hide its imperialism: ‘We will do what we want, you are worthless,’ it has proclaimed.

All this is merely the logical consequence of a choice: that of the Western world, which has preferred unipolarity to justice.

Let's not waste our time today by condemning Abu Mazen (President of the Palestinian [In]Authority)... There's no point in shooting at a hearse: history will judge him in the end.

And for goodness' sake, stop shouting ‘Where are the Arabs?’ — that question no longer makes sense. It's a stupid question.

The Arabs, my friend, have disappeared...

All that's left is you, me, and a handful of believers, dreamers, who can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

They have disappeared, like ancient species. So don't ask where they are.

All this has happened because the Western world has decided to move towards a single empire that does not resemble it and does not respect it. Europe could have prevented this war or mitigated its violence... but it chose to fall in love!

Europe is like an old lady wearing a hat made of colourful peacock feathers, who believes that America loves her... She is blinded by her love for America. Since the late 1990s, Europe has not adopted an independent foreign policy, except for a policy of hostility towards Russia... Russia is a Soviet nightmare for her, when it should have been a trading partner, but she has decided to be Washington's unhappy mistress.

Ursula von der Leyen, the official spokesperson for the American empire within the European Commission, is a ridiculous woman! You know, of course, that it is American officials who run Europe, but you continue to pretend that Brussels is the capital of Europe.

You know very well that it is Washington that calls the shots...

And yet, despite everything, you smile and wave the European flag proudly.

There is no security for Ukraine, nor for Europe, nor even for your children's dreams, in this insane American adventure that you have joined and become the leaders of.

You are complicit in a million deaths. Yes, you knowingly participated in this massacre in Ukraine.

You have sown only death. And what has changed? Nothing.

Let's return to the American position. Trump, true to form, threatens: ‘America will enter Ukraine to finish the job.’

And Putin, also true to form, bursts out laughing: “Let him talk... He always does the opposite of what he says”.

In Palestine, the situation is very clear, Mike Huckabee says there is no possible solution in Palestine!

The US has abandoned its policy in the Mashreq and handed it over to Benjamin Netanyahu... It is the Israeli lobby that dominates US policy. It's a joke!

In 1996, at the height of the peace talks, while Israelis and Palestinians were sitting in the negotiating rooms, shaking hands in Madrid, negotiating in Oslo and placing Palestinian flags alongside United Nations flags, and while Yasser Arafat was modifying the pact in the hope of a state, Netanyahu and his USAmerican Zionist advisers were preparing a plan to replace the two-state solution with a ‘solution by force’: encircle Syria, strike Iraq and suffocate the Palestinians. And strike any alliance that formed to support Palestine, including Hezbollah and Hamas. They called this solution "A Clean Break " because they had decided to break away permanently and impose their reality.

Based on this document, the US waged seven wars in five years. General Wesley Clark carried out the instructions of the Israeli political bureau. You can listen to General Wesley Clark on the Internet, he talks about this subject. He was NATO's commander-in-chief in 1999... These are Netanyahu's wars, by the way: to eliminate the remnants of the Soviet allies, dismantle the system of every state, every alliance and organisation hostile to Israel, and sow chaos in the region.

And every time a war broke out, Netanyahu would flash that same smile — the smile of a man lighting a cigarette at the first sign of depression. For thirty years, he has tirelessly repeated his vision: there will be only one state, Israel.

‘And any dissenting voice will be crushed — not by us directly, but by our American friends,’ he said. That, in general, is the policy of the United States in the Mashreq, even today.

This policy did not begin with Trump, nor with Biden, and it was not invented by Clinton, Bush or Obama. It is the tedious game of U.S.  politics: if you are not with us, you are against us, and if you are against us, wait for your regime to collapse from within. Is this not the daily reality of U.S. politics? Since World War II, the US has constantly intervened directly in the affairs of other countries, under the guise of a fallacious discourse on democracy. Between 1945 and 1989, it brought about seventy regime changes. It accused the Soviets of wanting to conquer the world, then used this pretext to conquer the world itself...

Our destiny is already mapped out, set in stone for the next hundred years... But we have this habit of surprising them, of sabotaging their most sinister plans. They thought Gaza would collapse in a month. They dug our graves, pitched their tents in the Sinai and redrew the maps of the region.

What a grotesque illusion! They believed that Gaza was just an inconvenient detail to be swept away in a few weeks. But every massacre gave birth to a new missile: from the Qassam to the Yassin, then the Badr-3; from the Ayyash 250 to the R160, to the Al-Quds and the Asif al-Ghadab.

What impotence! Have you forgotten that Gaza defies even the laws of physics? Everything that is thrown at it... ends up bouncing back.

They gambled on the colonisation of the West Bank — and they won that gamble.

They believed that a military victory would signify the end of the conflict. But Gaza reminds them every moment: this is not a battle, it is an existence.

What victory can be claimed when the stability of an army depends on a box of Prozac? A state that can only stand with antidepressants is not a state: it is a patient.

This is not advice, but a warning — cold, clear — from an enemy who does not like you... but does not even wish you dead.

It is simply telling you: go home.

The further you extend the borders of Greater Israel, the closer you run to the wall of nothingness.

For the closer you get to this imperial dream, the more it loses its meaning.

You may have won a few battles, but you are wasting what matters most: time.

And history never forgets arrogance.

The more you expand, the more vulnerable you become. The further you go, the more you exhaust yourselves. Look at Ben Gvir: a sham minister, ranting like a simpleton — ‘Send bombs, not aid to Gaza!’ "

He believes that history is written by shouting. He thinks that missiles can replace memory.

But war is not won only on the battlefield. It is won — or lost — in books, in people's minds, in the mark you leave behind.

And history, my enemies, is not dictated by megaphones. It remembers. And it will consign you — you, your bombs, your buffoons — to the red margin of eternal shame.

Tell me how? Tell me, for God's sake, how can a state claim victory when it has already lost the story?

Because one day — soon — everyone will read that Israel was a fascist state, an apartheid regime that razed cities, annihilated peoples, brought down governments to survive... and then collapsed, suffocated by its own hatred.

And that history is not being written by Tel Aviv. It is being written by Gaza.

Gaza is writing it with its rockets, with its blood, with a will that neither bombs nor tanks can break.

You will read it in a few years. And your children will read it in their school textbooks.

And on that day, they will look at you... and they will feel ashamed.

 

 

TUCKER CARLSONJeffrey Sachs: The Untold History of the Cold War, CIA Coups Around the World, and COVID’s Origin

Professor Jeffrey Sachs is the President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. He is the author of many best selling books, including The End of Poverty and The Ages of Globalization.

Consumerism, another inheritance from the slavery system

 Jorge Majfud

HowTheLightGetsIn Conference, Institute of Art and Ideas, London, September 2021

Translated by Andy Barton, Tlaxcala

 

 I
Strategy and dogma

To declare the abolition of traditional slavery for their possessions in the Caribbean, the British envisioned a new type of enslavement that the new slaves would themselves desire. On 10th June 1833, Rigby Watson, a member of parliament, clearly summarised this idea: “To make them labour, and give them a taste for luxuries and comforts, they must be gradually taught to desire those objects which could be attained by human labour. There was a regular progress from the possession of necessaries to the desire of luxuries; and what once were luxuries, gradually came, among all classes and conditions of men, to be necessaries. This was the sort of progress the Negroes had to go through, and this was the sort of education to which they ought to be subject in their period of probation”.

In 1885, Henry Dawes, a U.S. senator from Massachusetts recognised as an expert in indigenous matters, gave a report on his most recent visit to the Cherokee territories that still remained. According to this report, “there was not a family in that whole nation that had not a home of its own. There was not a pauper in that nation, and the nation did not own a dollar. It built its own capitol, and it built its schools and its hospitals. Yet the defect of the system was apparent. They have got as far as they can go because they own their land in common … There is no selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilisation. Til this people will consent to give up their lands, and divide them among their citizens so that each can own the land he cultivates, they will not make much more progress…”. Naturally, the opinions of people like Dawes would prevail, in other words, those who manage others’ success, and the Cherokee territories would be divided up and generously offered back to their inhabitants as private property. The Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz would impose the same exact privatisation programme on the communal production system as a way to emulate the success of the United States, achieving the feat of leaving 80% of the rural population without any land of their own, something which would culminate in the Mexican Revolution many years later.

In 1929, Samuel Crowther, the journalist and prized asset of the United Fruit Company (and Henry Ford’s friend), reported that in Central America “people only work when they are forced to. They are not used to it because the land gives them what little they need… However, the desire for material things is something that must be cultivated… Our advertising is slowly having the same effect as in the United States —and it is reaching the mozos. For when a periodical is discarded, it is grabbed up, and its advertising pages turn up as wallpaper in the thatched huts. I have seen the insides of huts completely covered with American magazine pages and with the timetables and folders issued by our railroads… All of this is having its effect in awakening desires”. Samuel Crowther viewed the Caribbean as the lake of the U.S. empire, which protected and guided the destiny of its constituent countries towards glory and universal development.

The political defeat of the pro-slavery Confederacy around this time was avenged by various cultural and ideological victories. All passed by unnoticed. In record timing, hundreds of monuments to the defeated ‘heroes’ were erected, films were made idealising the proponents of slavery and the theories about a superior race in danger of extinction flooded the desks of politicians and army generals.

One of these secret victories consisted in idealising the masters and demonising the slaves. In modern terms: the owners and the salaried workers. For that reason, in the many generations that were to follow, the United States would celebrate “Memorial Day” (in memory of the casualties of war) and “Veterans Day” (in honour of the former soldiers in these imperialist wars), all in the name of defence and of freedom, a carbon copy of the rhetoric of the Southern slaveowners who forayed into indigenous, Mexican and overseas territories and created the new American empire.

The imperialist expansion of the United States at the expense of the Hispanic world

Eduardo Madroñal Pedraza, Diario16, 30/10/2020

Translated by Andy Barton

Eduardo Madroñal Pedraza (Madrid, 1951) is a pedagogical advisor, author of poetry, writer of articles, member of the National Platform for the Constitutional Protection of Pensions (Mesa Estatal por el Blindaje de las Pensiones-MERP), member of Zero Budget Cuts (Recortes Cero) and activist of Unificación Comunista de España (UCE) Author of : Prosas y otros versos (2012), Versos y otras prosas (ed. Contrabando, 2014) and Anomalías (ed. Contrabando, 2018).

“From the deepest basements to the highest attics, it was possible to admire different regions and traditions superposed over one other, societies in various states of existence that slotted in and out of each other like a global chest of drawers” (Benito Pérez Galdós in Los ayacuchos)

A spectre haunts the consciousness of world’s Hispanic communities. It is the spectre of their own identity. Meanwhile, united in holy alliance, the world’s imperialist powers crow out in unison: “the blame for your underdevelopment lies with Felipe II.” From Wall Street to the French intellectual left-wing, stopping by the German radicals along the way, all tirelessly repeat that “Spanish colonisation, with the repercussions of its fanatism and intransigence, its greed and its sheer idleness, its arbitrariness and its despotism, is the root of all your current ills”.

Which city in the Spanish-speaking world with a sense of self worth does not have its own museum dedicated to the Spanish Inquisition to demonstrate the supposedly undeniable truth that it is all Felipe II’s fault? How many seemingly lucid minds in the Hispanic world are not plagued by the plaintive “if only we were Anglo-Saxons”?

After nearly two centuries of Anglophone-led division and exploitation of Ibero-American nations, including wars, annexations, interventions, invasions, “Panamization” and “Pinochetization”, an unbelievable, incredibly ambitious exercise in subverting the collective memory and alienating individual consciousnesses is currently underway. Its goal is to ensure that Hispanic nations renounce their shared history, their common cultural universe, their blood, family and ancestral ties, in a word, their own existence, to become mere spectres in search of a fate of exploitation, looting and destruction, a fate which the indigenous people of North America know better than anyone.

This reality has two consequences: firstly, the identity and unity of Hispanic nations is highlighted by the great imperialist powers as a force to be controlled and neutralised; secondly, as a reaction to the first consequence, it is now time for Hispanic nations to reconstruct and expose, both to the light of day and to the entire world, their own history, a history read from objective facts and data, grounded in reality. In short, a rigorous and accurate reading of our history, not the version of history that suits General Motors.

We need an objective, materialist vision of what we are and how we arrived at this point, starting with the social classes and their struggles. May this exercise reveal and shine a light on the enormous potential of what we could be. The task of writing the history of Hispanic nations is a prerequisite for us to freely decide our destiny.

This revolutionary undertaking is as relevant today as over. The sharp edges of an externally imposed imperial past, paid in fire and blood just like all others, are used to generate divisions and confrontations between Hispanic nations, something that always benefits the powers that have dominated these nations from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean for centuries. We must forge a unified, revolutionary mass that uses individual differences and plurality to reposition each member of the Hispanic world so that, in the face of the USAmerican hegemon that causes so much suffering for Ibero-America, as well as Spain and Portugal, we may defend our own interests and freely decide our destiny.

The shaping of today’s USA