The State of Palestine rejects in the strongest terms the provocative and hateful Speech delivered by the Israeli Prime Minister at the United Nations General Assembly General Debate.

From the podium of the United Nations, Israel’s Prime Minister confirmed, yet again, the colonial designs of his government and the objectives of Israel’s illegal occupation: the forcible and violent annexation of the Palestinian homeland and negation of the presence and rights of the Palestinian people, including their rights to self-determination and return.

The International Community must firmly reject and condemn Israel’s racist denigration of the Palestinian people and its vehement denial of their roots in the land – an indigenous, centuries-old presence borne out by history.

This is being done, openly all in grave breach of international law, including the Charter of the United Nations and Humanitarian and Human Rights law, and brazen contempt of the international community, for over seven decades. In 2023, Israel stands at the world’s podium boasting of its illegal occupation and apartheid regime in Palestine, confident it will never be held accountable.

Such criminality must never be normalised. It is past time to hold Israel, the occupying Power, accountable for all its grave breaches in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem. It is time to enforce consequences for its war crimes and crimes against Humanity against the Palestinian people.

Israel takes its last breath

Under this headline, the Hebrew newspaper ‘Haaretz’ published an article by my colleague the famous Zionist writer (Ari Shavit), in which he says: It seems that we are facing the most difficult people in history, and there is no solution with them, except recognising their rights and ending the occupation.

Shavit” began his article by saying: It seems that we have passed the point of no return, and it is possible that Israel” can no longer end the occupation, stop settlements and achieve peace, and it seems that it is no longer possible to reform Zionism, save Democracy and divide the people in this country.

He added, if this is the case, there is no taste for living in this country, there is no taste for writing in Haaretz”, and there is no taste for reading Haaretz”.  We should do what Rogel Alpher suggested two years ago, which is to leave the country.  If Israeli” and Judaism are not a vital factor in identity, and if every Israeli” citizen has a foreign passport, not only in the technical sense but also in the psychological sense, then the matter is over.  You have to say goodbye to friends and move to San Francisco, Berlin or Paris.

From there, from the country of the new German ultra-nationalism, or the country of the new American ultra-nationalism, you must look quietly and watch the State of Israel” breathe its last.  We must take three steps back, and watch the democratic Jewish State sink.  It may be that the issue has not yet been established.

We may not have passed the point of no return yet.  It is still possible to end the occupation, stop settlements, reform Zionism, save democracy and divide the country.

And the writer continued, I put my finger in the eyes of Netanyahu, Lieberman and the neo-Nazis, to wake them from their Zionist delusion, that Trump, Kushner, Biden, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are not the ones who will end the occupation.

It is not the United Nations and the European Union that will stop the settlements.  The only power in the world capable of saving Israel” from itself, are the Israelis” themselves, by devising a new political language that recognises reality and that the Palestinians are rooted in this land.  I urge you to find the third way in order to survive here and not die.

The writer asserts in Haaretz newspaper: that the Israelis”, since they came to Palestine, realise that they are the product of a lie invented by the Zionist movement, during which they used all the cunning in the Jewish personality throughout history.

By exploiting and exaggerating what Hitler called the Holocaust, the movement was able to convince the world that Palestine is the Promised Land” and that the alleged temple is located under the Al-Aqsa Mosque.  A nuclear monster.

The writer sought the help of Western and Jewish archaeologists, the most famous of whom is Israel Finkelstein from Tel Aviv University, who confirmed that the Temple is also a lie and a fairy tale that does not exist, and all excavations have proven that it disappeared completely thousands of years ago, and this was explicitly stated in a large number of Jewish references.”  And many Western archaeologists have confirmed that…

The last of them was in 1968 AD, British Archaeologist Dr. Catelyn Kapinos, when she was Director of Excavations at the British School of Archeology in Jerusalem. She carried out excavations in Jerusalem and was expelled from Palestine for exposing Israeli” myths about the presence of traces of Solomon’s Temple at the bottom of the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Where I decided that there had never been any traces of Solomon’s Temple, and discovered that what the Israelites call  Solomon’s Stables Building” has nothing to do with Solomon or stables at all. Rather, it is an architectural model of a palace that is commonly built in several regions in Palestine, and this is despite the fact that Kathleen Kenyon” came from the Palestine Exploration Fund Society, for the purpose of clarifying what was stated in the biblical accounts, because She showed great activity in Britain in the middle of the 19^th century on the history of the Near East”.

He stressed that it is the curse of lying that pursues the Israelis”, and day after day, it slaps them in the face in the form of a knife in the hands of Jerusalemites, Khalili and Nabulsi, or with a group stone or a bus driver from Jaffa, Haifa and Acre.

The Israelis” realise that they have no future in Palestine, as it is not a land without a people, as they lied.  Here is another writer who recognises, not the existence of the Palestinian people, but his superiority over the Israelis”, is (Gideon Levy), the left-wing Zionist, as he says:

It seems that the Palestinians are different from the rest of mankind. We occupied their land and called their young prostitutes, prostitutes and drugs, and we said that a few years will pass, and they will forget their homeland and land, and if their young generation explodes the Intifada of the 87… We put them in prisons and said we will raise them in prisons.

Years later, and after we thought that they had learned the lesson if they would return to us with an armed uprising in 2000, which ate the green and the dry, we said we would demolish their homes and besiege them for many years, and if they would extract impossible missiles to strike us with, despite the siege and destruction, so we began to plan for them with walls and barbed wire.

And if they came to us from underground and in tunnels, until they killed us in the last war, we fought them with brains, so they took over the Israeli” satellite (Amos)?  And, they terrorise every home in Israel by spreading threats and threats, as happened when their youth managed to take over the Israeli Channel Two.  In sum, it seems that we are facing the most difficult people in history, and there is no solution with them, except recognising their rights and ending the occupation.

The Declaration of War by Israel

The occupying Power, on a civilian population, which has been illegally and forcibly occupying and oppressing for decades is a continuation of its record of criminality and impunity. This is reinforced and affirmed by Israeli officials who have issued genocidal and hateful calls for ethnic cleansing publicly and unashamedly.

The scenes of devastation inflicted on Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip are harrowing. The international impunity Israel enjoys is a moral, political, and legal stain affront to humanity and basic decency as well as the principles of international law. Any attempt to excuse or cover these crimes is unacceptable and outright reprehensible.

The facts are not in dispute. Israel, as an occupying Power, is fully responsible for this situation because it insists on keeping the Palestinian people captive and stripping them of their rights for over half a century. Israel has illegally used force and the threat of force, confiscation of land, persecution, collective punishment, and reprisals to deny the Palestinian people their fundamental rights and serve the common aim of displacing and replacing the Palestinian people, in violation of their right to self-determination and other peremptory norms of international law.

We are in this situation because the world failed to do what is needed and turned its back on Palestinian rights. Simplistic statements that omit Palestinian lives and rights and encourage their violation have to stop. As an occupying Power, Israel has no right or justification to target the defenceless civilian population in Gaza or elsewhere in Palestine.  Reprisals against civilians in armed hostilities are illegal under international humanitarian law and must stop.

In view of the open war declared by Israel on the Palestinian people in Gaza and the critical and ever-worsening situation of the Palestinian people under Israel’s colonial occupation and apartheid regime in the rest of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, the international community must immediately intervene and provide international protection to the Palestinian people and end Israel’s barbarous campaign of death and destruction. The international community must also act on their collective political, legal, humanitarian, and moral responsibilities towards this prolonged injustice. It has a responsibility to promote accountability, which is the only viable remedy for this illegal, abhorrent situation.

The Palestinian people will continue to defend themselves, their homes, and their fundamental right to live in freedom and dignity, free from occupation, apartheid, and persecution.

When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty– Thomas Jefferson

The writer is an Anthropologist (Defence), Intelligence Data Scientist, rasheen_bappu@aol.com

(The views and opinions expressed in this article are the writer’s own and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Ceylon Today)

By Prof. Rasheen Bappu