By Kevin Barrett*
I recently attended the 6th International Conference on the Palestinian Intifada, held in Tehran on February 21 and 22, 2017. The high point of the Conference was the opening speech by Supreme Leader Sayyed Ali Hosseini Khamenei, who summarized the problem forcefully and accurately: “(Israel’s) entity and identity are dependent on the gradual destruction of the entity and identity of Palestine.” In other words, Zionism equals genocide. Ayatollah Khamenei termed Zionism a “cancerous tumor” and said the cure is resistance, not compromise.
Iran’s Supreme Leader pointed out that compromise with the Zionist regime is futile due to that regime’s greedy, uncompromising nature. The history of the so-called peace process, whose centerpiece was the Oslo accords, proves him right. Rather than relinquishing the lands stolen in 1967 in return for peace — the centerpiece of the Oslo agreement — the Zionists murdered their own Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin. Then they sent more than 600,000 murderous, racist fanatics to settle on the stolen lands. Those 600,000-plus terrorists will never leave until the Palestinian resistance and its allies remove them by force. The peace process, if it ever existed, is obviously dead.
Responding to those who question the effectiveness of Resistance, Ayatollah Khamenei said: “The Resistance’s success lies in imposing a war of attrition on the enemy. In other words, it has managed to defeat the main plan of the Zionist regime, namely dominating the whole region.”
That statement is borne out by history. Let us consider some of the historical details to which the Supreme Leader was implicitly referring.
The Zionists have long sought to extend the borders of “Greater Israel” until it stretches from the Nile to the Euphrates, and to subordinate the whole MENA region to their empire. As Oded Yinon wrote in “A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties,” the Zionists seek the “dissolution” or “liquidation” of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Jordan, and the Arabian Peninsula, as well as the final ethnic cleansing of historic Palestine. Only the determined Resistance of Palestinians and other regional power centers has prevented this nightmare from being fully realized.
In 1996, Netanyahu commissioned a document entitled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.” Its co-authors were eight American neoconservatives led by Richard Perle, the self-described “Prince of Darkness.” This document definitively states that Israel will never trade land for peace as it promised in the Oslo Accords. Instead, the Zionists lay claim to all the land between the Nile and the Euphrates: “Our claim to the land — to which we have clung for hope for 2000 years — is legitimate and noble.”
In other words, Israel would do everything it could to weaken, destabilize, or destroy Syria and Iraq. Israel would simultaneously attempt to “wean the south Lebanese Shia away from Hizballah, Iran, and Syria.”
To that end, Perle and his colleagues issued the PNAC document “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” in September, 2000 calling for a “New Pearl Harbor” to re-militarize the USA and send it into the Middle East to do Israel’s bidding. The neoconservatives’ “New Pearl Harbor” on September 11, 2001 was designed to destroy “seven countries in five years” — the very enemies of Israel targeted in the Clean Break document — as Gen. Wesley Clark has revealed.
The steadfast Resistance extolled by Iran’s Supreme Leader has prevented the Zionists from fully accomplishing their demonic plan. Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Iran have not fallen. And in Palestine itself the Intifada continues.
The clever chess game played by Ayatollah Sistani and other Iraqis has prevented Iraq from becoming an Israeli puppet state, as the Zionists had envisioned. Syria, though damaged and destabilized, has not fallen and will not fall to the Zionists and their proxies. Lebanon continues to be a steadfast member of the Axis of Resistance, with Hezbollah’s influence increasing day by day. And Iran remains the center and inspiration of Resistance forces in the region.
Thus the anti-Zionist “war of attrition” referred to by the Supreme Leader is on a course toward success. Zionist plans to dominate the region have been foiled and set back.
As the Resistance wears down the Zionists, preventing them from quickly and decisively achieving their goals, global public opinion continues to slowly shift in favor of the Palestinians. The Zionists’ endless crimes — their systematic sniper-murders of Palestinian children, bulldozing and expropriations of Palestinian property, bombings and white phosphorous attacks on such civilian targets as hospitals, schools, ambulances, and NGOs — are gradually becoming visible to the world. The relative decline of Zionist-dominated Western mainstream media, and the rise of alternative media, has helped spread the truth about Palestine across the planet. Sympathy for the Palestinian cause is increasing everywhere, even in the most Zionist-occupied countries such as the USA, France, Canada, Australia and the UK. Thus the “war of attrition” is succeeding ideologically as well as militarily.
In short, Iran’s Supreme Leader is right. Only steadfast Resistance against Zionist aggression, not just in Palestine but throughout the whole region, can continue to build on previous successes and move toward the ultimate liberation of Palestine.
*Dr. Kevin Barrett, a Ph.D. Arabist-Islamologist, is a well-known critic of the War on Terror. He is Host of TRUTH JIHAD RADIO; a weekly live radio show. He has appeared on various news outlets including Press TV, Fox, CNN, PBS. Dr. Barret has published feature stories and op-eds in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Chicago Tribune, and other leading journals. Dr. Barrett has taught at colleges and universities in San Francisco, Paris, and Wisconsin but he lost his academic position at the University of Wisconsin for incorporating 9/11-related subjects into his research and pedagogy. He also ran for Congress in 2008. He currently works as a nonprofit organizer, author, and talk radio host.
The views, opinions and positions expressed on Op-Ed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions or positions of Khamenei.ir .
