Iran-Palestine vs. US-Israel: Who’s the Terrorist?

It’s time. It’s time Jews admit that armed resistance against any country committing genocide, especially Israel, is legitimate. It’s time Americans admit that Iranian armed resistance against US-Israeli targets and those of its allies, is legitimate. That includes retaliatory strikes by its regional allies, Hezbollah and the Houthis. You can call Iran  “the world’s leading sponsor of state terrorism” till the views come home. But it would have no need for them if it (and they) were not attacked.

For some, this may be shocking. American Jews are not in the habit of saying it is legitimate to kill Israeli soldiers.  But we are long past the time for such tribal allegiance and so-called moral distinctions.  Israelis are engaged in genocide. Not Jews.  We have no bond with mass murderers, no matter what their religion.

Israel has even destroyed a synagogue in Tehran, Rafa-Nia.  Zionism desecrated this holy space.  Zionism is an enemy of Judaism.   It has no use for Judaism, except as a means of legitimizing itself. Zionism is an enemy of all religions as we can see in Israel itself with near daily attacks on Christians in Jerusalem’s Old City; and the regular desecration by Israeli police of Al Aqsa mosque, the third holiest site in Islam.

 

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To those who argue that we must make a distinction between Israeli combatants and civilians, much of the Israeli public has some affiliation to the security state. They either serve/d in the IDF, work in law enforcement, as weapons engineers, cyber-security/surveillance, or are settlers.  Out of 9-million Israelis, 650,000 currently are on active army duty; 500,000 IDF veterans live in the US alone; over 100,000 are directly employed in the arms industries (not including those working for suppliers); over 100,000 have either professional or volunteer police jobs; there are 800,000 settlers. That’s at minimum 2-million Israelis. All of them are combatants and legitimate targets of armed resistance; even (or especially) the settlers, who live on invaded, occupied and stolen land, and are currently engaged in a campaign of mass terror and ethnic cleansing.

MAGA, the Israel Lobby and pro-Israel think tankers get themselves in high dudgeon over Iran’s resistance against US-Israel aggression, and its targeting of US bases and the infrastructure of its Gulf allies.  They become apoplectic when Iran strikes a purported “civilian” target. But when a berserk US president boasts of the “fucking bastards” who will suffer “hell” tomorrow: “Bridge Day” and “Power Plant Day,”…crickets.  Not to mention the 4,000 dead in the conflict so far, all of whose corpses I lay on Trump and Netanyahu’s doorstep. Who’s the terrorist now?

In the warped colonialist western mindset, any Arab resistance is terrorism. Iran is the “world’s greatest state-sponsor of terrorism,” “Iranian missiles will strike the US,” etc., etc. I’ve got news for them: the US is the world’s greatest perpetrators of terrorism. Israel is the Middle East’s greatest perpetrator.  Why do they get a pass, when the Iranians are pikers by comparison?

History of Armed Resistance Against Tyranny

History is filled with examples of subject peoples rebelling against invaders in order to throw off the yoke of oppression.  Their rebellion almost always takes the form of armed resistance.  Jewish history too is replete with such stories: the Maccabees overthrew their Selucid rulers; Judeans fought two armed rebellions against Rome, one led by Bar Kochba; WWII Jewish partisans engaged in armed resistance against Nazi murderers.  All of them are lionized as heroes today.

Leaders of the Irgun and Lehi, notably Yitzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin, were Judeo-terrorists conducting a terror campaign against British colonial rule, in which they executed British soldiers.  The former eventually became Israeli prime ministers.  Why do we deny Palestinians what Israelis consider part of their own patriotic patrimony?

The African National Congress conducted armed struggle against the white apartheid government. Thus, it considered ANC fighters to be terrorists and regularly arrested and executed them. Mandela himself received a death sentence. Eventually, the ANC won and the apartheid regime fell. Now, the ANC former political prisoners and its martyrs are viewed as national heroes.

In US history, the signers of the Declaration of Independence were considered traitors by the Crown. Had their revolution failed they faced death by hanging. The British viewed George Washington, leader of American forces during the Revolutionary War, as chief traitor. He was the 18th century version of a modern terrorist.   Yet, he became the nation’s first president and “Father of his country.”

It’s little known that while in exile in Paris, Ho Chi Minh befriended David Ben Gurion (both had traveled there to lobby at the post-WWI Versailles peace conference).  Later, Ho led the Vietnamese to defeat both the French colonial power and the US in his battle to unify his country and expel the foreign invaders.   That war was one of the worst military disasters this country had ever suffered…till this war.

Thus, while the US assassinates Iranian leaders such as Qassem Soleimani and Ayatollah Khamenei and labels them as terrorists, they are Iranian heroes today, and will be global heroes tomorrow; because they spearheaded the resistance against foreign armies engaged in aggression against their country.

Under UN General Assembly resolution armed resistance against foreign attack is legitimate.  Anyone who refuses to recognize this is, wittingly or unwittingly, an accessory to genocide.