Image by Levi Meir Clancy.
The Israeli bombing of Gaza since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack has been marked by one demand: the release of all Israeli hostages taken by Hamas. As has been documented, Hamas, US, and Qatar came close to agreeing to a ceasefire deal May of last year put forward by Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, who willfully sabotaged it by expanding its war. Israel went on a murderous rampage across the Middle East, violating every rule of war: the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Iran; the 3,000 killer pagers let loose on people carrying about their quotidian lives in Lebanon; and the bombing and invasion of Lebanon preceded by the murder of Hassan Nasrallah and other top Hezbollah officials.
Dropping explosives equivalent to several atomic bombs on Gaza; starving and depriving Palestinian civilians of food, water, medicine, and international aid; and the destruction of hospitals, bombing and burning alive hospital patients and refugees, women and children in tents. Torturing and killing doctors, health workers, journalists, the Zionist state has committed the most horrific and unspeakable war crimes in the 21st century to date. Netanyahu and his government face prosecution by the International Criminal Court for committing genocide against people of Gaza.
None of this is news to us, and certainly not to the major Western news outlets, who’ve turned a blind eye to the expanding Israeli genocide of Palestinians. The Western press has repeated the mantra of freeing the Israeli hostages held somewhere in Gaza. Not once have these news outlets given us any understanding of the entire Palestinian population held hostage by one of the most powerful and dangerously lethal militaries in the world called the Israel Defense Forces.
Moreover, the genocidal IDF gets its backing from the world’s most technologically advanced militaries—the US, UK, and Germany. The Palestinians remain hostage not only to Israel, but to NATO member countries, all of whom have stood behind Israel’s genocide against Palestinians, save for Spain and Ireland. The Western nuclear power club, including Israel, have not only taken all of Palestine hostage since the creation of Isreal, but the entire Middle East with the inking of the Sykes-Picot agreement and the discovery of oil.
Israel plays the role of an oil watchdog for the West, enjoying a long leash to commit whatever crimes against Palestinians and across the region to keep those Arabs frightened and subdued. Except for a few oil Sheikdoms, Western oil companies and governments have enjoyed riches and profits unprecedented in human history. War is made across the Middle East (and around the world) by the US and Western countries for one thing: oil. Oil in Iraq. Oil in Somalia. Oil in Libya. Oil in Syria. Oil in Iran. Oil in Venezuela. Oil has mutated into a curse for the planet and metastasized into an incurable cancer for the people of the Middle East, if not the entire planet.
Oil symbolizes today’s gold and silver (during his inauguration speech, Trump called oil “liquid gold”), which enabled the extinction of millions of natives of the Americas following the celebrated 1492 voyage of Columbus and the discovery of the “New World.” Just as the discovery of gold and silver turned into a genocidal disaster for the natives of the New World, oil has turned into a genocidal disaster for the people of the Middle East, and perhaps for all living creatures on our hapless planet. Some 5 million people killed during the War on Terror (to protect American oil interests in the Middle East by killing “terrorists”), the temperature of the earth predicted to reach 3.1 Celsius by the end of this century, tens of thousands of burned homes in Southern California, not to mention bombed, burnt and charred Gaza and its inhabitants, all point to the worst hostage-taking and war crimes committed by Western governments and their corporate class profiting from oil since the dawning of the 20th century.
One must raise the inevitable question in the hope of an honest answer: Who has taken whom hostage?
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