Al-Qalam 
A Palestinian woman stands in front of Israeli soldiers during a protest in the West Bank village of Bilin, near Ramallah against Israel's offensive in Gaza (Eric Gaillard/ Reuters
Islamic Jihad’s successful thwarting of Israel’s unprovoked onslaught in Gaza has allowed it to emerge victorious and an important component of Palestinian resistance, writes Iqbal Jassat.
Pariah regimes are known to decay until they turn lifeless. South Africa under white minority rule is a perfect example. It stagnated both in morality and authority, despite claiming staunch Christian values and nuclear power.
Israel faces a similar ignominious end. As a replica of South African National Party’s apartheid ideology, coupled with racist Zionism and underpinned by settler colonialism, Israel has reached the end of an inglorious reign.
Just as South Africa in its final throes committed horrendous atrocities in the foolish belief that slaughter of anti-apartheid opponents would allow it to sustain its oppressive rule, Israel today is caught in the same rut.
Israel naively believes that possessing nukes along with a powerful army replenished with sophisticated weapons and having the back of the United States of America, makes it invincible.
The “go to hell” approach whereby it conducts daily rituals of cold-blooded assassinations has all the hallmarks of a rotten regime. Brute military force to punish Palestinians for daring to demand fundamental human rights, epitomises medieval tyranny.
As successive Israeli war criminals keep repeating blunders in pursuit of misplaced Jewish supremacy, they clearly are blinded by hate and prejudice against the indigenous Palestinian population of Muslims and Christians.
Foolhardy and stubborn adherence to policies which are not only in conflict with universally accepted norms of human rights but also at odds with divinely inspired religious and spiritual values, is a mirror-reflection of the old South Africa.
Unlike rational understanding and acceptance of the inevitability of mistakes having an ability to come back to haunt, Israel persists doggedly to discriminate, oppress and punish Palestinians, with gusto and impunity.
Four decades ago in 1982, Israel miscalculated as it continues to do, by thinking that driving Yasser Arafat and his PLO fighters out of Beirut into exile in Tunisia, would annihilate Palestinian resistance.
In fact, Menachem Begin, an arch-terrorist responsible for genocidal acts resulting in ethnic cleansing, suggested during a speech as Prime Minister to the Knesset during the PLO’s expulsion, that Israel was on the verge of enjoying 40 years of peace.
Begin cited the Biblical passage “and the land was quiet for forty years,” saying it might well apply to Israel now that “the northern border threat had been dealt with.”
Exactly a repeat of South Africa’s false paradigm which Israeli leaders have followed since 1948: the narrative that applying military force will keep the colonial entity “safe and peaceful”.
The blunder of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon not only failed to bring “peace”, it resulted in forty years of painful consequences.
According to a Haaretz report, Zionist leadership failed to recognise and acknowledge that resistance to Israeli occupation in general and by the Palestinian movement in particular was much bigger than the PLO.
Massacres
To its cost, Israel’s War on Lebanon saw the emergence of Hezbollah, a potent adversary of the colonial regime’s invasion and horrendous massacres in Sabra and Shatilla among others.
And all the while in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, grievous atrocities committed by Israel against a defenceless population, sowed the seeds of the first Intifada in 1987 and the rise of Hamas.
Israel’s calculation of weakening the PLO by exiling Arafat, backfired as dismally as apartheid South Africa’s war on the liberation movements. Imprisoning leaders of the freedom struggle such as Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Ahmed Kathrada, Robert Sobukwe and cold blooded execution of Steve Biko, Ahmed Timol and many more cadres, failed to secure apartheid’s illegal reign.
Whether Israel assassinates journalists such as Shereen Abu Akleh; imprisons and tortures leaders of the Resistance; demolishes homes and destroys farmlands; raids, plunders and bombs Gaza; it cannot subdue Palestine’s spirited struggle to free itself from the yoke of Zionist brutality.
As South Africa learned, so will Israel, that wielding military power to eliminate as many targets as it wants, will not attain “security” nor sustain any of Zionism’s ill gotten gains.
Islamic Jihad’s successful thwarting of Israel’s unprovoked onslaught in Gaza, has allowed it to emerge victorious and an important component of Palestinian resistance.
Alongside Hamas and Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad has entrenched itself as a force capable to deter Israeli aggression. More importantly, the message it proclaims is that Palestinian people will neither retreat nor surrender.
*Iqbal Jassat is an Executive Member of the Media Review Network, Johannesburg.
