The assault on Jenin

Israel’s latest West Bank bloodbath is a major test for both Abbas and Hamas

If ‘president’ Mahmoud Abbas cannot protect his people and halt the ongoing Israeli massacre in Jenin, he should announce the dissolution of his Palestinian Authority (PA) and order his 60,000-strong security forces to join the resistance brigades in the occupied West Bank in fighting the Israeli onslaught.

Abbas has declared many times that he does not want to die a traitor. With his health failing, age advancing, and his PA all but bankrupt, this is his golden opportunity to make good on that undertaking if he is sincere about it. That could atone for all his sins and failed bets on a poisoned peace with an occupier mired in racism. Running away to the UN Security Council to implore it to intervene to protect the Palestinian people is a shameful dereliction of duty.

What is going on in Jenin at present is a real war. The Israeli army is using hundreds of tanks, armoured vehicles, drones, helicopters and bulldozers and thousands of troops to pulverise Jenin refugee camp. Ambulances have been prevented from going in to rescue the wounded. So, what are the ‘Palestinian ‘ security forces waiting for? Will they continue performing their treacherous service of safeguarding the occupation and its settlers, on the pretext of complying with the Oslo Accords that successive Israeli governments have spat on and ripped to shreds?

The fighters in Jenin have fought heroically despite the massive imbalance of power against an enemy equipped with planes, tanks, and the most modern weaponry, and backed by the hypocritical colonial West in collusion with corrupt and shameless Arab regimes. They will never surrender, but fight on to the last bullet and drop of blood. It is their indomitable courage and determination that makes the occupation so scared of them.

They have brought down drones and besieged the Israeli forces that invaded the camp, repelling repeated attempts by the army to break through . The longer the assault lasts the more likely that the resistance battleground will expand, with other Palestinian towns and villages joining the confrontation. The young fighters who triggered an armed uprising in response to the occupation’s crimes, forming local brigades with home-made weapons, will overturn all the balances despite their modest means and the stifling Israeli and Arab siege to which they are subjected. They are nothing if not resilient. The armed uprising launched by their forbears in 2000 continued for five years. Theirs will persist until the occupation is ended. And this time they will not be fooled by the lies of the ‘international community’ or the mediation of Arab regimes that designate them as terrorists, care more about Israeli blood than theirs, and sell out in return for a few dollars or illusory American protection.

The massacres in Jenin are a major test of the so-called unity of fronts, the joint resistance operations room, and all the armed factions, especially in the Gaza Strip. It is unacceptable for the authority there to be another PA that looks on at the carnage as a mere spectator. What use are those missiles and drones if they are kept in their hiding places while the people of Jenin are being slaughtered and Israeli tanks and bulldozers crush their children’s bones?

By launching this assault, Benjamin Netanyahu and his government may have inadvertently set in motion the beginning of the end of the occupation state. The Palestinian people waited in vain for 80 years for international justice, and 30 years for the Oslo Accords signed on the White House lawn to be implemented. They have decided to take the fight for their right into their own hands and lit the spark of armed revolt from Jenin to Nablus and Gaza. They will not be taken in by duplicitous international initiatives such as war criminal Tony Blair’s Quartet or the US Roadmap drawn up by the worst aggressor and colluder in occupation and oppression in history.

Poor rice-farmers in Vietnam resisted the forces of the US superpower with their Phantom jets and napalm bombs and beat them. Barefoot Taliban fighters fought them for 20 years and sent them scurrying out of Afghanistan like frightened rabbits. We all saw the outcomes in Saigon and Kabul. The Palestinian people are no less courageous and determined than these and all the other peoples who resisted colonialism and won.

The assault on Jenin