Rejoice as Palestinian resistance humiliates racist Israel

People march in solidarity with the Palestinian resistance in Manchester last weekend

The Israeli state is humiliated, shaken and scared. It has vowed to extract bloody revenge for its defeats last weekend.

“We need to break the ­enemy’s bones,” ran a commentary in the Israel Hayom newspaper last Sunday. “We need to bring it to its knees until it begs us to stop, to strike at it mercilessly and to pummel it viciously.”

The state is going to ignore all international law and inflict a collective punishment on millions of people in Gaza.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said last Sunday that the Israeli occupation will “halt electricity, fuel and goods transfer to Gaza.”

He added, “We are heading into a long and gruelling war.” Within 24 hours the UN reported that Israeli shelling and air strikes had driven 123,540 Palestinians from their homes in Gaza.

The suffering, murder and massacres will be horrific. Everyone should rise up against them. But no revenge will wipe out what was achieved.

A good comparison is the January 1968 Tet Offensive by the Vietnamese National Liberation Front.  This humbled the US government and the world’s most powerful military machine.

In the South Vietnamese capital Saigon, liberation fighters blasted a hole into a US embassy compound and stepped foot on their occupiers’ soil. This happened last Saturday as Palestinians tore down the fences that imprison them and trod on land seized by Israel.

The Tet Offensive was the moment US power was exposed as fallible. Just like last weekend, it underlined that the oppressed are the subjects of history, not just victims and objects of pity.

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Just like the Israelis, the US had ignored the coming storm. US official Sam Oglesby said spies in Vietnam were “barricaded in their compound with the noise of ear-splitting generators blocking them from the real world outside and fed fabricated ‘intelligence’ by paid informers”.

Israeli officials had falsely ­concluded that Hamas was not ­interested in or capable of a major confrontation with Israel.

According to Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, an assessment by security services last week found that Hamas was eager “to avoid a ­fully-fledged war with Israel”. Officials were unaware of plans for the combined rocket assault and raids on the south.

Tet was, eventually, a military failure. Of the estimated 84,000 soldiers that took part, over 58,000 are thought to have been killed, wounded or captured.

US war criminal Henry Kissinger said, “We fought a military war—our opponents fought a political one. In the process we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla war—the guerrilla wins if he does not lose.”

From Vietnam to Palestine, it is right to resist imperialism. Resistance can win.