Palestinians win war, take giant leap toward final victory
With the news of the truce stipulating the end of the blockade of Gaza, Palestine erupted in victory celebrations Tuesday.
After nearly two months of vicious and pointless Zionist assaults on hospitals, ambulances, UN emergency shelters, high-rise apartment buildings, children playing soccer, and other non-military targets, Palestine has emerged as the clear winner in the latest round of conflict.
The bottom line: no amount of Zionist butchery can break the Palestinians' spirit of resistance.
Will Israel respect the truce and lift the blockade? Or will the Zionists break their word, as they so often do?
Either way, the Palestinians have won. Israel's failure to achieve any of its military objectives, and its loss of any international respect it may have had due to outrageous massacres of civilians, have handed the Palestinians victory on a silver platter. In the larger sweep of history, this summer's Gaza war will be seen as a decisive step toward the end of the Zionist occupation of Palestine.
The Zionists are trying to convince themselves, and the world, that they won – or at least achieved something – through the spasm of violence they termed "Operation Protective Edge." They claim they needed to "mow the lawn," an expression suggesting that bloodily mowing down Palestinian women and children is no different from cutting grass.
The metaphor is as senseless as it is offensive. From a military perspective, the Israeli aim was to stop the occupied people of Gaza from firing rockets as a relatively non-lethal form of protest. Operation Protective Edge failed to stop the rockets.
It also failed to stop the Palestinians from "digging in" by constructing tunnels – including some leading under the barbed wire and into that part of Occupied Palestine that the Zionists call "Israel." These tunnels allowed Hamas fighters to launch incredibly courageous raids on the Israeli military forces, killing more than 60 Zionist soldiers (according to Israel) and as many as 150 according to Hamas.
Virtually all of the Israeli victims were soldiers. Hamas worked hard to avoid inflicting civilian casualties – instead, they went after Israeli military targets, with striking success. Therefore, Hamas clearly did not engage in terrorism, which is defined as the intentional targeting of civilians.
Israel, for its part, murdered 2,139 Palestinians, the vast majority of whom were civilians. Abundant evidence proves that Israel deliberately targeted civilians; for the stomach-churning details, read my Press TV article "Child-Killing Sociopaths of Israel."
This summer's carnage in Gaza has shown that Hamas is a legitimate resistance group that attacks military targets. And it has shown that the Zionist entity is a bloodthirsty and cowardly gang of terrorists who are afraid to take on Hamas fighters face-to-face, but revel in inflicting unspeakable horrors on helpless civilian populations.
While the Israelis killed nearly 2,000 Palestinian civilians, while Hamas killed roughly 100 Israeli soldiers, Israel's vast lead in the body count amounts to a colossal Pyrrhic victory. If the Zionists "win" any more conflicts like this one, their apartheid “state” will be finished.
The great Chinese military philosopher Sun Tzu pointed out that wars are won and lost in the hearts and minds of men and women. Whatever happens on the battlefield is just a small part of the larger picture.
Ho Chi Minh personally translated Sun Tzu's The Art of War into Vietnamese and made his officers study it. Though the Vietnamese lost more than three million people to the American invaders, while the Americans lost fewer than sixty thousand, the result was a small nation's stunning victory over the world's biggest superpower. The Vietnamese won because their spirit of resistance never flagged; while the Americans' slaughter of millions backfired in the global court of public opinion.
The Zionist slaughter of Palestinian civilians has similarly increased the Palestinians' determination to resist until victory. And Israel's assault on Gaza has alienated the world, just as the American slaughter of Vietnamese turned the world against that war and led to Uncle Sam's defeat.
As "War Nerd" John Dolan a.k.a. Gary Brecher writes:
"In a situation like this, the real winner is likely to be the Gazans...It's a good grim proof of the old guerrilla-warfare line: 'Victory will go to those who can endure the most, not those who can inflict the most.' And there’s no doubt about who wins that contest."
Professor Dolan is not a pro-Palestinian; he is just a realist.
Even the Zionists are implicitly admitting they lost. The right-wing Zionist website Breitbart.com recently published an article headlined "Israel Wins the War But Loses the Peace." It opens:
"The long-term ceasefire that took effect Tuesday, after a surprise Egyptian-brokered agreement between Israel and Hamas, is being hailed by the terror group (sic) as a 'victory.' In this case, the claim is more than propaganda. According to the details of the agreement, the Gaza border crossings are to be opened, the fishing zone is to be widened, and talks are to commence soon about air and sea ports. No wonder half Israel's Cabinet is opposed."
The Times of Israel agreed. Its headline: "Hamas victory celebrations should not be easily dismissed."
America's leading international affairs journal Foreign Affairs saw it coming. They published the article "How Hamas Won" more than a month ago. Then the liberal Zionist flagship The New York Times chimed in with "How Hamas Beat Israel in Gaza." But even those articles, published before Tuesday's truce, did not foresee the scope of Palestine's victory.
The past two months' events have shown that the Palestinian spirit of resistance will continue to surge forward toward the final victory, while the Zionists have exposed themselves as cowards and terrorists who have squandered whatever portion of the world's sympathy they once possessed. Events are now moving irrevocably in one direction: Toward the liberation of Palestine.
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Dr. Kevin Barrett, a Ph.D. Arabist-Islamologist, is one of America's best-known critics of the War on Terror. Dr. Barrett has appeared many times on Fox, CNN, PBS and other broadcast outlets, and has inspired feature stories and op-eds in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Chicago Tribune, and other leading publications. Dr. Barrett has taught at colleges and universities in San Francisco, Paris, and Wisconsin, where he ran for Congress in 2008. He is the co-founder of the Muslim-Christian-Jewish Alliance, and author of the books Truth Jihad: My Epic Struggle Against the 9/11 Big Lie (2007) and Questioning the War on Terror: A Primer for Obama Voters (2009).
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Source: PressTV. URL: http://www.a-w-i-p.com/index.php/2014/08/27/palestinians-win-war-take-giant
