You have to be half-baked or reprobate to hold out any hopes for a bantustate solution for Palestine. Palestinians, with extreme generosity of spirit, long ago proposed the only workable solution: a democratic, secular state where Palestinians & Jews can live as brothers & sisters. A Jewish-only state is an affront to the highest principles of humankind. Would we accept a Muslim-only or Christian-only state that persecutes all others? The Jewish holocaust is not a justification for Israel & Zionism is not a liberation theology. Zionism is a rightwing ideology that separated persecuted Jews from the international struggle against racism & colonialism suffered by black & brown peoples & aligned with colonial powers to broker a better deal for Jews. It’s a dead-end strategy which has led to apartheid & genocide & it must be defeated.

There is a video of Israel firing tear gas at Palestinians during Friday prayers at the Great Return March yesterday. Any gathering of Palestinians is considered a provocation by Israel.

Assad propagandist Eva Bartlett has repeatedly attempted to discredit Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders for lying when they report that Syrian & Russian bombers target medical facilities & have demolished hospitals in Syria. She didn’t explain what their motive for lying about Syria would be but since she claims to be a supporter of Palestinians, does she think they are lying now when they report from their field hospitals in Gaza about the severity of gunshot wounds by Israeli snipers?

Photo is Alyarmouk Quarter, a Palestinian Quarter in Damascus being bombed today.

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-gaza-s-refugees-have-always-haunted-israel-now-they-re-on-the-march-1.5958265?=&ts=_1524320006239
This is a quite useful article from Haaretz just before the Great Return Marches started on March 30th which elaborates the reasons why the right of return for Palestinian refugees is so imperative & immediate. There are 8 refugee camps with over 1.2 million registered refugees in Gaza within a very small geographical area. Since so many homes in Gaza have been bombed by Israel, there are likely thousands more displaced who are not registered with the UN. There are 19 refugee camps in the West Bank with close to a million refugees & also refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, & Syria. Many living in the 13 Syrian camps had to flee the bombing & it’s not certain where they fled since Jordan closed the borders to Palestinians from Syria. The Syrian regime is now bombing one of the largest of these at Yarmouk, claiming that terrorists are holed up there.

There were four Palestinians killed by Israeli snipers yesterday: 24-year-old Ahmad Rashad Al Athamna, 25-year-old Ahmed Nabiel Abu-Aqel, 19-year-old Abd Al-Aal Abu Taha, & 15-year-old Mohammed Ayoub. Mohammed was killed by a gunshot to the head. It’s safe to assume that Israel deployed its best sharpshooters against unarmed, peaceful protesters at the Great Return March with the express intent to kill young men, though they have also shot women. These deaths are summary executions & are human rights crimes for which Israel should be tried in an international tribunal. They cannot be called war crimes since only one side is armed.

May our four young brothers Rest In Peace. May we not rest in our support for Palestinians in their struggle against colonialism, occupation, apartheid, genocide.

This young boy at the march yesterday is a target whose exhaustion in battle shows in his face.

(Photo from Great Return March on Twitter)

Great Return March in Gaza on April 20th:

“They say: “why are you sending children to war?!”
War?
Who said it’s a war?
It’s only you who are trying to manipulate the fact that your terrorist soldiers are facing civilian unarmed peaceful protesters with brutal barbaric inhumane force.”

(Photos & quote from Great Return March on Twitter)

From the Great Return March in Gaza on April 20th: it isn’t reported if this young boy on crutches died from his injuries or not or if he was hit by gunfire. But this image of Israel’s brazen disregard for Palestinian lives should be etched in our minds.

“Whether you are a child, woman, or disabled, you will always be regarded as an existential threat to the Israeli Occupation.”

(Photo & quote from Great Return March on Twitter)

http://www.msf.org/en/article/palestine-msf-teams-gaza-observe-unusually-severe-and-devastating-gunshot-injuries

This is a very damning report by Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders on the 500 people they treated for gunshot wounds inflicted by Israeli snipers on unarmed, peaceful protesters at the Great Return March in Gaza. This report predates yesterday when Israel killed four more Palestinians & injured 729, 100 of them by gunfire.

I have no objections to people speaking in their own language. Many feel more comfortable expressing themselves in their own tongue & many are not comfortable in English. But if you cloak abuse toward Kashmiris, Palestinians, Rohingya, women, etc. or toward a person I respect, that’s another issue entirely. If you’re called out, I’ll bounce your ass to Blockland–which judging by those I’ve already bounced, is a hellish place.

This piece is written by an Assad regime guppy, a disciple to Bartlett & Beeley, named Mindi Sitterud-McCluskey who once denounced the Rohingya & Kashmiri freedom struggles as “Saudi-backed Wahhabi/Salafi terrorists.” This is her comment rebutting the Mehdi Hasan article about the Assad regime in the Intercept. Tariq Ali also came out against the Hasan article & if you go to his wall, you will see that he has no more political coherence than this halfwitted Islamophobic gibberish:

“As ludicrous as it may sound, people like Mehdi gain a following largely by offering a psychological wage to establishment liberals who need to assure themselves they are not Islamophobes. Lol. So what if the Islamic militants are head chopping Salafi fanatics who would create a caliphate where no Western liberal would last a day, and so what if the majority of the people fighting these militants are Muslim. The idea is to ease some collective guilt left over from the Iraq War (because establishment liberals don’t seem to be bothered by Obama’s wars) by romanticizing the militants & demonizing the Syrian “regime.” I think there’s a bit of orientalism going on there, as well, as if head-chopping degenerate Salafis are more genuinely Middle Eastern than Assad’s secular, educated & progressive Syria. One of Medhi’s friends (based on their twitter interactions) is obsessed with digging up biographies of dead ISIS fighters, and in a very “lost civilization” kind of way. Lol”

Tariq Ali’s incoherent piece:
“What’s going on at Intercept re Syria? The Mehdi has arrived with his clutch of cliches and demagogy on the war. He opposed the Afghan war. Were the Taliban better than Assad? More tolerant, more democratic, more protective of minorities? And applauded by my old friend Roane Carey at The Nation who at the very least should understand the difference between primary and secondary contradictions in time of war. ….The Baathists in Iraq and Syria in their post-Kassem and Assad father and son reincarnations have been brutes. No doubt at all. Is that the reason the US is and did wage war on them? Why did we oppose the Iraq war? Because Saddam hadn’t obliged Washington with the odd massacre. Had he done so would the Iraq war have been justified. After all many liberals and former Communists argued for it (sometimes in private). The reality is that the US did try and encourage a Shia rebellion to coincide with their invasion of Iraq, but having been let down badly when the did in 1991 during the First Gulf War they were reluctant to do so. More importantly, talk to pro-war Iraqi intellectuals today and most of them say that it was ‘better under Saddam.’ The wretched Makiya doesn’t go that far but even he was shaken by the outcome and Hitchens in his last debate with me came close to admitting the same.
Questions to answer for Intercept:
(a) Do you sympathise withe the US-UK-French missile raids on Syria?
(b) If the West and Israel toppled Assad who would you like in its place. A Sunni dictatorship divided into Jihadi factions as in post-conquest Libya? Or an Iraqi model of de facto partition with Turkey making the Kurdish areas an effective protectorate? There is no third choice I’m afraid. The dilemma is terrible, but it must be faced. Imperialist petulance at being denied Syria is no excuse for progressives to crumble.”