Ranjeet Brar: Palestine Catastrophe: from British mandate to al Nakba
What led to the original orgy of terroristic ethnic cleansing in Palestine, and how does this help us understand the resistance war now being waged?
In this video, Dr Ranjeet Brar provides the vital context that is entirely missing from western corporate media when they report on what they have historically described as the ‘Palestine-Israel conflict’ and what they today refer to as the ‘Hamas-Israel war’.
But the story of Palestine is not one of ‘conflict’ between two peoples or even two states. It is a history of colonisation, oppression and resistance. British imperialism adopted the zionist project as a useful tool to deepen and perpetuate its control over the entire middle-eastern region when it became clear that oil had become the most strategically important of all raw materials.
For this reason the British government signed the Balfour declaration in 1917 as it moved to colonise the country. For this reason it oversaw the mass migration of zionist settlers during the interwar period. For this reason it armed jewish settlers and disarmed and suppressed all Palestinian opposition.
For this reason it drew up the plan for the partition of the country, which it pushed through the United Nations at a time when that institution didn’t have representatives from the majority of the world’s colonised peoples and on the back of a wave of sympathy for European jews following the Nazi holocaust.
Dr Ranjeet gives a profound overview of the events that led up to the terroristic orgy of ethnic cleansing that the Palestinians remember as ‘al Nakba’, the Catastrophe. In the process, he lays bare the true motives of the imperialists and the true nature and history of the racist and colonial ideology of zionism.
The settler colonial state of Israel did not materialise from thin air. It was an integral part of the British and French Sykes-Picot secret treaty – the plan to conquer and redivide the Ottoman empire that was the real motivation for the 1914-18 interimperialist war. Britain wanted to extend its middle-eastern colonies in order to better safeguard its existing colonial possessions and sea routes to India. And it wanted in particular to control the newly-discovered oil reserves of the region, which were already becoming of vital economic importance.
Fully two thirds of global oil reserves lie beneath the ground of the Arabian peninsula and west Asia. This explains why Anglo-American imperialism created Israel and continues to back it. It is also why it maintains support for the feudal relics of the Saudi monarchy, the Gulf states and Jordan as loyal stooges in the quest to maintain its stranglehold over the region.
It is these economic interests that underly all the terrorist outrages committed by the Nato states and their proxies in the region, from the Nakba to the Iraq and Afghan wars, the Syrian and Libyan genocides, and the ongoing maintenance of the medieval theocracies that syphon off the region’s wealth from the impoverished masses, grotesquely offering footballers $2bn contracts while the Palestinian people are slowly starved, bombed and strafed into oblivion.
But the heroic fight of the Axis of Resistance has turned the tide. The people of the region have refused to succumb to their allotted fate.
The temper of the masses is quickening. The balance of forces changing, and imperialism now faces the inevitable prospect of losing its hold over the region.
This video is essential viewing for anyone who wants to understand what lies behind the war that is now raging in Gaza and spreading across the region – a war between the forces of zionism and imperialism on the one hand and the combined forces of Arab national liberation on the other.
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Further reading
Harpal Brar, Zionism: A Racist, Antisemitic and Reactionary Tool of Imperialism
Various authors: World War One: An Interimperialist War to Redivide the World
Harpal Brar: Imperialism in the Middle East
Harpal Brar: Imperialism and War
