Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh was the head of the orthopedic wing at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. During the war, he had to wander from one hospital to the next, as they were all destroyed by the IDF. He has not been back to his home in Jabalya since the start of the war, and last December all trace of him disappeared. Recently, it transpired that he had died in an Israeli jail, apparently due to the torture of beatings during interrogation.
The last people to see him were other doctors and detainees who have been released. They told Haaretz correspondents Jack Khoury and Bar Peleg that they had barely recognized him. “It was clear he had been through hell, torture, humiliation, and sleep deprivation. He wasn’t the person we knew; he was a shadow of himself.” (Haaretz, May 12.) A photo of him published after his death showed an elegant man. A photo from during the war showed his hospital gown covered in blood. He had a wife, Jasmine, and they had six children. He studied medicine in Romania and did a residency in the United Kingdom. The rapper Tamer Nafar wrote a beautiful lament for him. (Haaretz, May 6.)
A doctor, a hospital ward director, was beaten and tortured to death in an Israeli jail. That did not set off alarms here. Nearly all his physician colleagues, including heads of the medical establishment and those who take part in the horrific torture ongoing at Sde Teiman base and in Israeli prisons, did not say a word. A department director was beaten to death. So what? After all, almost 500 doctors and medical staffers have been killed in the war and their fate failed to arouse any attention. So why should Al-Bursh‘s death attract any attention? Because he was a department director? No war crime committed by Israel in Gaza has aroused any feelings here in Israel, with the exception of the joy felt by the bloodthirsty right-wing.
On top of the doctor’s death came another heinous act: the response of the authorities. The Shin Bet was silent as usual. Ex-Shin Bet officers are now star commentators on television, asked to show us the way, to give us their opinion, but the Shin Bet never talks about those it has interrogated and tortured. The IDF shirked responsibility; the doctor was only “processed” at an army detention facility, and was immediately transferred to the Shin Bet interrogation facility in Kishon, and from there to Ofer Prison, which is under the charge of the Israel Prison Service. The IPS response was pure audacity: “The service does not address the circumstances of the deaths of detainees who are not Israeli citizens.”
A man dies in prison, yet the Israel Prison Service does not think it should report the circumstances of his death to the public because he was not a citizen of the state. In other words, the lives of those who are not citizens have no value in Israeli prisons. We should remember this when an Israeli is arrested in Cyprus for rape, or in Peru for drugs, and we are outraged by the conditions of his detention. We remember this even more poignantly when we complain to the world, and rightly so, about the fate of our hostages.
Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh, who was the head of orthopedics at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.
How can people identify with the pain felt by Israelis over the fate of the hostages, when these same Israelis turn out to be cold-hearted and indifferent to the fate of the other side’s hostages? Why isn’t there a single banner in Tel Aviv’s “Hostage Square” calling for an investigation into the killing of the doctor from Gaza? Is his blood less red than the blood of the Israeli hostages who died? Why should the whole world take an interest and work only for our for hostages, and not for the Palestinian hostages, whose conditions of imprisonment and whose deaths in Israeli prisons should horrify everyone?
Ever since the death of Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser, none of the regional powers in the Middle East had shown genuine solidarity with the Palestinian liberation movement.
Jordan severed its ties with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1970; Lebanon ceased to be the geographical hinterland for the movement in 1982; Syria, which probably was more loyal than other states, did not allow Palestinian independent strategy and visions while Egypt altogether ceased to play a prominent role in regional politics.
Other Arab countries were also quite absent from the Palestinian struggle.
Türkiye, under Erdogan, at times showed greater solidarity, in particular with the besieged Gaza since 2005, but also pursued an ambivalent policy due to its strategic relationship with Israel.
The only regional power that constantly and unconditionally supported the Palestinian cause was Iran.
Erroneous Equation
The Western narrative equates erroneously, and probably intentionally, Iran with the Islamic State (ISIS), that very same organization that, in actuality, planted bombs in Iran, killing many people.
It should also be remembered that the Western support of Sunni Jihadism as a counterforce to the secular and left anti-colonial movement planted the seeds from which both Al-Qaeda and ISIS grew and prospered.
Their violence was also directed against Shia groups in Southeast Asia and the Arab world. Many of these groups are directly linked to Iran.
Contrary to Western propaganda, the Iranian support to mainly Shia resistance groups is part of its perception of self-defense and not derived from a wish to impose a kind of Jihadist regime all over the world.
De-Zionized Palestine
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, over 30 years ago, Israel is the only state in the region that enjoyed unconditional support from an external superpower and its allies.
And it is important, even at the risk of sounding trite, to mention once more what this unconditional support is for.
Under this US-championed international immunity, Israel stretched over the whole of historical Palestine, ethnically cleansed more than half of its population over the years, and subjected the other half to a regime of apartheid, colonization and oppression.
Thus, direct support for the Palestinian cause from an important regional power such as Iran is meant to counteract the existential danger faced by the Palestinian people in the last 75 years.
Iran is a complicated ally. It still has some way to go in terms of its own human rights record.
The vocabulary and reservoir of images used by Iranian leaders and, at times, media does a disservice to the truly genuine Iranian solidarity.
Slogans such as “Small Satan” or “Death to Israel”, along with promises of total destruction, are all unnecessary tropes for galvanizing a nation that is already galvanized. Indeed, during the dictatorship of the Shah, the Iranian people supported Palestine and resented their regime for its close ties with Israel.
Aside from rhetoric, however, the policy itself is highly valuable in terms of redressing the imbalance of power between apartheid Israel and the occupied Palestinians, who, again, are facing an existential threat.
It should also be noted that the language Israeli propaganda uses in referring to Iran, the Palestinians or Hamas is far worse – as was revealed in full in the material the government of South Africa handed over to the International Court of Justice last December.
In this respect, many of us share Iran’s vision of a de-Zionized and decolonized one-state solution in historical Palestine, which, at least I hope, will also be a democratic welfare state.
Iran’s policies towards Israel are portrayed in the West as motivated by antisemitism of the worst kind.
Due to Israel’s intrinsic resentment of any pro-Palestine sentiments, in the Middle East or anywhere else in the world, Iran’s strong position in support of the Palestinians makes it the main target for Israel and its allies. In order for Israel to maintain Western-led pressure on Iran, it often, if not always, rewrites the history, the very chronology of the events, thus always presenting Iran as an aggressor and Israel as a country in a permanent state of self-defense.
Israel’s Aggressions and Iranian Counterattack
For a long time, Iran has tolerated sabotage acts on Iranian soil, including the assassination of scientists, the killing and wounding of its personnel in Syria and the Israeli pressure on the US to abolish the Iran nuclear deal in 2015.
Imagine if Iran would have destroyed an American embassy, killing some of the most senior officers of the US army, one would only imagine what the American reaction would have been.
In their last attack on Israel, on April 13, Iran did everything in its power to show that it is not seeking collateral damage or wishing to target civilians. In fact, they gave Israelis more than ten days to get ready for the strike.
Yet, Israel and the West were very quick to declare that the Iranian attack was an utter failure that caused no damage at all. A few days later, however, they had to admit that two Israeli air bases were, indeed, directly hit in the Iranian strike.
But this is hardly the point. Of course, both sides have the capability to inflict great damage and loss of life on each other. This balance of power, however, has implications that are far more important than the ones analyzed by military experts.
A Counterweight
If the Hamas operation on October 7 cast doubt on the invincibility of the Israeli army, the technological know-how Iran has introduced is another indicator that Israel is not the only military superpower in the region.
It should also be noted that Israel needed direct support from Britain, France, the US, Jordan and some other Arab countries to protect itself from the Iranian attack.
So far, there is no sign Israelis internalized the important lessons they should have learned in the last seven months: about the limitations of power, the inability to exist as an alien state in the midst of the Arab and Muslim world, and the impossibility to permanently maintain a regime of racial apartheid and military oppression.
In this respect, the technological capacities of a powerful regional power such as Iran, by itself, is not a game changer. But it does constitute a counterweight to a strong and wide coalition that has always supported the Zionist project since the very beginning. A counterweight that was not there for many years.
It is obvious that the situation in historical Palestine will not change through the development or transformation of one single factor. Indeed, change will occur as a result of many factors. The combination of these processes will eventually merge into a transformative event, or a series of events, which will result in a new political reality that is situated within decolonization, equality and restorative justice in historical Palestine.
This matrix requires a strong Iranian presence, which can even be more effective if coupled with reforms inside Iran itself. It also requires the global south to prioritize Palestine; a similar change should also be registered in the global north.
A united and younger Palestine liberation movement, alongside the de-Zionization of the global Jewish communities, are also two important factors.
The social implosion inside Israel, the economic crisis and the inability of the government and the army to address the current needs, are also crucial developments.
When fused, all of these factors will create a powerful transformation on the ground, which will lead to the creation of a new regime and a new political outfit.
It is too early to give the new outfit a name and it is premature to predict the outcome of the liberation process.
However, what is quite visible is the need to help this new reality to unfold as soon as possible. Without it, the genocide in Gaza would not be the last horrific chapter in Palestine’s history.
– Ilan Pappé is a professor at the University of Exeter. He was formerly a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa. He is the author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, The Modern Middle East, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, and Ten Myths about Israel. He is the co-editor, with Ramzy Baroud of ‘Our Vision for Liberation.’ Pappé is described as one of Israel’s ‘New Historians’ who, since the release of pertinent British and Israeli government documents in the early 1980s, have been rewriting the history of Israel’s creation in 1948. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
The most repulsive thing I saw yesterday was a Zionist justifying the genocide of Palestinians by reference to the genocide of Syrians. Three points. One: One genocide doesn’t make another OK. Obviously.
Two: Israel was a major reason why the US stopped serious weapons reaching the Free Army. Other than a few rhetorical comments, the US worked with Iran (doing a deal) and Russia (welcoming it into Syria to ‘solve the chemical weapons problem’, which of course it didn’t) to save Assad. This, according to what American officials told Syrians lobbying for weapons, was because Israel was worried about ‘instability’, especially about Syrians having anti-aircraft missiles and heavy weapons. So hundreds of thousands of Syrians were murdered, millions expelled, and the country utterly destroyed, for the sake of the apartheid state’s ‘stability’.
Three: Israel is doing exactly the same to Gaza as what Assad/Iran/Russia did to Homs, Aleppo, the Ghouta, etc: it is destroying the civilian infrastructure, imposing starvation sieges, hitting schools, hospitals, residential blocks, bakeries. Its aim is the same – to remove or annihilate the civilian population. Its genocidal rhetoric is the same, but it seems to be far more deeply spread amongst Israeli Jews than it is amongst Assad’s ‘loyal’ Alawi community. The difference in method is that Israel does the killing faster and more efficiently, with more advanced western (American and German) weapons.
So Israel does the same as Assad/Iran/Russia, only faster, and Israel contributed to the disaster in Syria anyway, and you can’t justify your fascist genocide in the south of bilad ash-sham by pointing to the fascist genocide in the north. You are all fascists, and the people of the region in their overwhelming majority despise you both. There will be no peace until both of your ideologies and murderous power systems are dismantled.
It is because the Assad regime (murderer of tens of thousands of Palestinians, which kept the border with the occupied Golan quiet for decades and silenced all Syrian political organisation) and Israel have so much in common that they have protected each other over the decades.
The Zionist line on this is : ‘look how Assad committed a real genocide, whereas Israel does its best to protect civilians.’ These people are worse than liars. They are propagandising to cover a clear genocide, whose sole aim is to destroy civilians. It’s ‘look at the savages doing genocide, whereas we are civilised people doing gentle, civilised police work.’ But you, if you are Zionists, are perpetrating genocide, murdering the children first, in order to defend an apartheid state built on land stolen from another people.
(Meanwhile, there are also ‘leftists’ and supposed ‘anti-Zionists’ who say, against all evidence, that Assad/Iran/Russia are anti-imperialists working to stop Israel. Such people are ignorant at very best, fascists laughing at the slaughter of Arabs and Muslims at worst. Don’t trust them.)
Maybe it was German Zionists who invented the ‘look at the Syrian genocide’ tactic, because their usual argument is ‘because of our genocide of Jews, we should also commit genocide against Palestinians’. They are used to justifying one genocide by referring to another. (And this is their genocide, their weapons, their arrests of protesting Jews and Muslims, their visa bans, their racist hysteria against Arab immigrants. This genocide is being perpetrated by the US and Germany as well as Israeli Jews, and the UK, France, Canada, and many others are complicit. This is the worst thing the west has done in half a century, and it changes everything.)
Some perspective on the new and hilariously named ‘Antisemitism Awareness Act’, and two predictions
First, let’s remember reality (always important when dealing with propaganda, and I’ll touch on this in a sec). In real life, Israel and Netanyahu don’t have anywhere to go.
Wherever Israel and Netanyahu look in real, head reality, there is a very serious wall of opposition. Iran and Hizbullah tower over Israel’s ambitions (read: delusions), Egypt and Jordan, pliable as they are, cannot be just swept aside, and politically as well as geographically, Israel and Netanyahu can expand nowhere. A heavy wall of ideological and military resistance makes any major advance impossible. Even Rafah is going to be pricey, and killing another 20,000 Palestinians will only make Israel’s situation more dire while providing absolutely no benefit.
So where can Netanyahu and Israel go? In reality, nowhere. But there is one place where he (and the deranged beliefs that he represents) can make substantial gains, and that’s America. Or, to be more precise, American consciousness.
Knowing he has hypnotic power over American lawmakers and absolute control over mainstream media, Netanyahu knows he can create an illusion of progress by making American public life crazier and crazier, haunted, paranoid, and clinically insane.
So this is where he concentrates his efforts at the moment. By throwing America in an antisemitic scare, he can present his and Israel’s war as a heroic war of defense waged by brave fearless warriors, rather than a campaign of senseless killing that has no purpose.
Netanyahu exploits his (and his Zionist followers) unlimited access to American consciousness to distort how his idiot’s murder crusade is perceived, and he cannot care less if America is destroyed in the process. As a matter of fact, I think he’ll enjoy it very much. This is both ancient revenge, but also a sense of self-affirmation in a license to do whatever the hell you want (If you can kill and annihilate with impunity, then you must really be God’s chosen one).
But there is an even more sinister aspect to this onslaught on America (which is just beginning). This is the political objective of destroying the American left, which is connected deeply to the Palestinians, but also sees fighting Islamophobia as an important part of its mission.
So by presenting Palestinians and Muslims, and their American sympathizers, as antisemites, Netanyahu can employ the full force of the American state to completely crush them. This is the strategic aspect of this effort, of which ‘Antisemitism Awareness Act’ is a nig first step.
Netanyahu needs Americans to see Arabs as Muslims, and those who support them, as enemies of the state, which is the American wording for dehumanization.
Legislation is not enough: violence is needed, and it will suddenly and spontaneously (of course) start to appear soon. American Jews will all of a sudden be under a great and imminent threat, and it will be used to delegitimize, criminalize, and punish a political camp.
Predictions
I was asked yesterday what I think was going to happen in America. So the rise of violence and tensions between Jewish and Arab and Muslim communities, and far-left activists, is my first prediction. I have two more.
The deep connection between Israel and the US became a symbiosis and now is a complete unity. This unity is not making Israel strong anymore. It only makes America weak, as it absorbs and embraces Zionist views as its own. One major aspect of this is victimhood. Soon you’ll start to hear what you never heard before: American politicians speaking as if they were victims of dark, conspiratorial, global forces.
This will be part of the shift America is undergoing from (at least partially, if not mostly) reality-based discourse to one completely dominated by fantasy and fiction (and this is why resistance must bring up reality first, always).
2. As the protest spreads and becomes radicalized by establishment brutality, thousands will be arrested, and then more. If the war is not seen as coming to an end, and as freedom of speech continues to be crushed in America, new legal mechanisms for detaining large numbers of people will be discussed and perhaps implemented. I have no doubt Israel is already providing guidance on this issue. Some of these new measures will bear a prominent resemblance to Israel’s ‘Administrative Detention’.
It is really hard to see how this Zionist takeover of American consciousness is going to end. I don’t know American society enough, and this is really unchartered territory. I do know, though, that reversing from this back to normalcy is going to be long and painful. But you have to fight for your future and your country, that’s all I know
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