Lies and fears in the Israeli premier’s speech at the UN by Sayid Marcos Tenório

On 27 September, the world watched as the war criminal and Prime Minister of Israel, Naftali Bennett, before the General Assembly of the United Nations gave a speech full of lies and which configured an unmistakable demonstration of fear concerning the future of the Zionist colonial occupation in Palestine.

For the first time—and deliberately—an occupation premier did not mention the Palestinian issue. For Bennett, this is Israel’s domestic issue and none of the world’s business. Bennett told the Jerusalem Post that “Making us Siamese twins with the Palestinians is wrong and unhelpful. Relations with other countries will not be defined by them.”

Bennett’s speech was a demonstration of the failure of the Jewish state’s colonial project in Palestine, which intended to conquer the entire territory of historical Palestine and advance towards the conquest of the entire Middle East with the motto “From the Nile to the Euphrates”, the two rivers that are represented by the blue lines of the Israeli flag.

We must remember that, when discussing the Partition Plan for Palestine at the United Nations (UN) in 1947, Rabbi J L Fischmann, the official representative of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, made repeated speeches and lobbied the demands of his leader, Theodor Herzl. He defended that the “Promised Land”, one of the fundamental myths used by the Zionists, would extend from the River Nile in Egypt to the Euphrates River, a claim that would include Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, in addition to Palestine.

As usual, what we saw was one more Israeli leader playing the role of victim in the UN tribune, despite the widely known colonialist character of the Zionist occupation, which continues to expand while committing crimes to prevent the emergence of a Palestinian State, as determined by UN resolutions and International Law.

Nowadays, it is coherent to say that the Nakba’s pandemic (tragedy) did not end in 1948 with the founding of Israel, much less with the massacre perpetrated by Israeli forces during the terrorist aggression of the Six-Day War in June 1967, occupying the Gaza Strip, vast territories of Sinai, Egypt and the Golan Heights that belong to Syria. The effort continues today, with the usurping Zionists rushing to carry out the process of the complete uprooting and destruction of Palestine.

Bennett used the time allotted for his speech to complain, claiming that his entity is “literally surrounded” by Palestinian resistance groups (Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), by Lebanese Hezbollah and other groups and countries. The Israeli representative pointed a dirty finger at Iran, stating that, “From Lebanon to Syria, through Gaza and Iraq and Yemen, they all want to destroy ‘my country’ and they all have the support of the Tehran regime.”

Most of his time was devoted to attacking and complaining about Iran and the Persian nuclear program, which he claims are aimed at developing nuclear weapons. Bennett went so far as to say that “Israel does not have that privilege. Let’s not get tired. We will not allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon”, although he continues to deny that Israel has more than 200 nuclear warheads, a fact revealed by the British newspaper, the Sunday Times, based on the information disclosed by Israeli nuclear scientist, Mordechai Vanunu.

The premier confessed fragility, highlighting an aspect to be noted which was the reference to Iranian drones. He said that “the Tehran regime” has created a fleet of thousands of drones that “can attack us anytime, at any place”. Also, according to him, “One of them, a Shahed-136, has already fatally attacked a ship. Iran and its representatives in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon … are armed with them and challenge us all the time.”

However, what burdens the Israeli occupation is not confined to Israel’s military failures in Gaza last May and to the Palestinians’ determination to resist aggression in the West Bank. Bennett expressed the Zionists’ fear of the emergence of the geostrategic pole called the “axis of resistance”, which includes Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and occupied Palestine with their resistance forces.

The premier did not mention it, but the conflict in May severely affected the Israeli economy, causing damages of over $2 billion due to the closure of activities in ports and airports, of 30% of factories and gas exploration at the platforms in the Tamar field, to the unprecedented fall in the stock market, in addition to the devaluation of the Israeli currency, the shekel, which fell 14% against the dollar, increasing the economic recession already hit by the covid-19.

While Bennett praises the friendship and support of the United States, the events of May raised many voices in the US Congress, with lawmakers criticizing Washington’s support for Israel. One of them is Senator Bernie Sanders, who published an article in The New York Times in which he states that the US could not continue to play “the role of defence attorney for the far-right and racist Israeli government.”

On the other hand, observed within the Israeli population is the feeling that there was not, and will hardly be, a victory of the Zionist entity over the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) and the other Palestinian resistance forces. They demoralized and destroyed the so-called normalization agreements between the Zionist regime and some Arab states, which diminished the enthusiasm and discouraged other ongoing processes.

There is a healthy connection among Iraq, Iran, Syria and Lebanon, four geographically connected and strategically allied countries, which are creating a corridor from the Mediterranean to Central Asia by land and sea with enormous geostrategic and economic implications. The axis of resistance may extend beyond the Middle East. It is worth mentioning that the unity of the resistance forces with the forces that, in the Arab Maghreb, constitute a front of rejection to normalization with the Israeli enemy.

It is necessary that all forces that defend justice and respect for International Law demand from independent countries, especially the United Nations, to help stop the Israeli colonial occupation and guarantee the return of Palestinian refugees and displaced people, so that they can live with dignity in their ancestral land of Palestine, with holy Jerusalem as its capital.