JUST 2.4 million people — five per cent of Shanghai’s population — and a superpower sends two aircraft carriers to threaten them and reassure Benjamin Netanyahu, a war criminal, of its unconditional loyalty. Hats off to the Gaza people! Are there people braver than those resisting the Israeli invasion?

Amazing it is to see American, British and French leaders line up, as if in a state of panic, to reassure Netanyahu that the future of the Third Temple will be different from that of the Third Reich. The Third Temple wants more land for Eretz Yisrael, just as the Reich wanted lebensraum.

The Nazis sought land in Russia; the Zionists, as correctly pointed out by Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour Party leader in Britain, want it at the expense of the Palestinian people.

One way to satisfy Israel’s inexhaustible greed for land is to ensure there will be no ceasefire call by the UN Security Council because Netanyahu doesn’t will it. Let us accept it. For all practical purposes, Israel is a ‘permanent member’ of the Security Council and has a veto. The American delegate merely implements the orders coming from Israel via the White House. He knows what the consequences of refusing an Israeli order will mean.

In late November, with a view to securing the release of its hostages, Israel agreed to a brief truce with Hamas — the Harkat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya, or the Islamic Solidarity Movement. Once the hostages were exchanged, Netanyahu resumed the bombardment of Gaza’s civilian targets, and the Security Council was unable to pass a ceasefire resolution.

There is one Jewish state but two Zionist governments.

Normally, when the Security Council takes up a tricky geopolitical issue and the delegates fail to agree on a solution, the first thing they do is to pass a harmless resolution for an end to bloodshed. However, in the current situation, such a motion will evoke Israeli wrath, because it will stop its ongoing genocide of the Gazan people.

As Israel’s loyal allies, the Council’s Western members, by blocking a ceasefire resolution, have shown a pathological indifference to a medical situation in which doctors carry out operations without anaesthetics. This sadistic morbidity reminds us of Reichsfuhrer Himmler’s SS men at Belsen and Treblinka.

The Zionists were not interested in just killing; they wanted to enjoy and prolong the sadistic pleasure of seeing women — many of them wounded and pregnant — writhing in pain and waiting for medical relief, which seemed never to arrive. As expected, Washington dutifully obeyed their directive on Rafah.

On Israel’s orders, with the Egyptian government collaborating, planes carrying food and medical supplies land at El Arish airport, and trucks carrying the cargo, instead of going to Rafah, proceed to some contact point on the 206 kilometre-long Egyptian-Israeli border. After inspection, they go to the Rafah crossing, where the process is further delayed by Israeli officials to deny early relief to the wounded and dying.

The truth is there is one Jewish state but two Zionist governments, one in occupied Jerusalem, the other in Washington. The latter is subservient to the one in Jerusalem, its function being basically to carry out orders from Israel. Notice President Joe Biden’s sheepish decision to absolve the Likud regime of the crime of bombing Al Ahli hospital.

He had no opinion of his own, he was in Israel and evidently didn’t bother to consult American intelligence officials; instead, he just iterated what Netanyahu asked him to. As later confirmed by New York Times and Al Jazeera investigations, it was an Israeli missile that turned the hospital into a mortuary.

Is the Zionist influence on Am­­erican body politic exaggerated? One gets a scholarly answer in the classic The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy by two American professors, John J Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt.

Surprisingly, there seems to be a modest change in Biden’s attitude. Speaking at a fundraising event, he said the Likud regime was the “most conservative government in Israel’s history”, and Netanyahu must change his policies, adding, “Israel can’t say no a Palestinian state”.

However, the truth about Israeli influence is uttered by someone who represents the Zionist stereotype in every sense of the term and was aptly called the Butcher of Beirut for his macabre tour de force at Sabra-Chatila.

In October 2011, during a cabinet meeting, Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres had a nasty exchange with Ariel Sharon the prime minister. Losing his temper, Sharon said: “Every time we do something you tell me Americans will do this and will do that.

I want to tell you something very clear, don’t worry about American pressure on Israel, We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it.“ The news was broadcast by Kol Yisrael, an Israeli radio station.

The writer is Dawn’s External Ombudsman and an author.

Published in Dawn, December 16th, 2023