“One prince of the present time, whom it is not well to name, never preaches anything else but peace and good faith, and to both he is most hostile”. Machiavelli, The Prince THOUGH Machiavelli talks here about Ferdinand of Aragon, it is as well true about the present president of the United States of America – Barack Obama, whom we can as well name. A Nobel Peace prize winner and one who had won the election on an anti-war plank, now deep into his second-term of presidency, his true Machiavellian colours are out. Secretary of State John Kerry, is ably assisting this 'prince'. Now in Israel, and before in Ukraine, he is globe-trotting under the guise of dousing the flames of war. It is another matter that the fire is lit by his good masters and those before him. Israel, Taliban, Al Qaeda, ISIS, neo-Nazis in Ukraine, name them and all of them have sourced their funds and ammunition from the US and its allies, who have been sub-contracted for the job. Thanks to the imperialist art of unleashing 'constructive chaos' around the world, particularly in those regions rich in natural resources and navigation routes, we are treated with waves of cruelty. Before humanity could come out of the shock unleashed by imperialism in Iraq and Afghanistan, came Libya and Syria; immediately followed Ukraine and again Iraq and Palestine again and again. In a thoroughly commercialised world of instant news and memory, imperialism is blunting our sensitivities by converting the loss of lives of hundreds of innocent people into a statistical piece of information recorded by history for posterity. Propaganda is launched brandishing the victim as the culprit and the culprit as the victim. ISRAEL THE AGGRESSOR Israel once again launched its military offensive, Operation Protective Edge, on Gaza murdering more than 700 Palestinians. The ruse was that three Israelis were abducted and killed by unknown and unestablished persons. The blame was instantly put on Hamas and punishment was evenly distributed among all the Palestinians in Gaza, for the fault of electing them. What goes unreported or under-reported is Israel's aggression and violation of several international treaties, laws and even ceasefire that it had agreed upon. Let us consider some basic facts: since 2000 Israel has killed 1,500 Palestinian children, while Palestinians have killed 132 Israeli children; in its 2009 Gaza massacre, Israel killed overall from 1,400 to 7,000 Palestinians, almost all civilians, while 13 Israelis were killed, several from friendly fire; in the history of all rocket and mortar fire into Israel, 26 people, total, have been killed; Israel breaks far more ceasefires than Palestine – this includes firing of the Palestinian rockets and Israel has violated more UN resolutions than any other country. To blame Hamas and Palestinians for the present predicament is nothing but an outrageous lie. Lying in fact is an art perfected by Israel to justify its occupation of Palestinian territories. BRIEF HISTORY The land in and around Jerusalem is considered sacred by Christians, Muslims and Jews as they identify it with the birth of their respective religions. The mythology associated with the rise and spread of these religions is usually used to stake claim for exclusive rights on the lands and sacred sites in this region. Professor C.Z'e'zv Herog of Tel Aviv University reviewing the archaeological findings carried out in the entire last century and half wrote in Ha' Aretz magazine: “This is what archaeologists have learned from their excavations in the Land of Israel: The Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land in a military campaign and did not pass it on to the twelve tribes of Israel. Even harder to swallow is the fact that the united monarchy of David and Solomon, which is described in the Bible as a regional power, was at most a small tribal kingdom”. More recent facts point that the first Jewish settlement was built in the second half of the 19th century and at that time, the Jews consisted less than 3 percent of the population, while the Palestinian Arabs constituted 97 percent of the population. The demand for a homeland for Jews in these lands gained currency during this period and influential Jews started influencing the then colonial power Britain and in confrontation with the Ottoman Empire, which controlled most of the land in this region. The First World War, whose centenary is being observed this year, saw both these powers in opposite camps and ended with the defeat of the Ottomans. SYKES–PICOT AGREEMENT AND FIRST WORLD WAR It is during the First World War that Britain and France entered into the infamous Sykes–Picot Agreement. This secret agreement defined the proposed spheres of influence and control in West Asia and effectively divided the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire outside the Arabian peninsula into areas of future British and French control or influence. The Russian tsarist government was also a party to the Sykes–Picot agreement, but with the success of the Great October Socialist Revolution in 1917, the Bolshevik government led by Lenin had exposed the agreement and imperial designs. This was done weeks after the notorious Balfour declaration which stated: “His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object...” David Lloyd George, who was the prime minister of Britain at that time categorically stated the intentions: “In this critical situation it was believed that Jewish sympathy or the reverse would make a substantial difference one way or the other to the Allied cause. In particular Jewish sympathy would confirm the support of American Jewry, and would make it more difficult for Germany to reduce her military commitments and improve her economic position on the eastern front”. Thus it is clear all through that it was colonial interests that drove the division of territories, without the slightest consideration of the opinions or the plight of the people inhabiting those territories. Present genocide of Palestinians is the fruit of the seeds sown hundred and more years ago. During the 1930s, with the growth of Nazis and anti-Semitic persecution, migration of Jews away from Europe had started in a big way. Some of the migrants also reached the Palestinian lands and started settling there. The local Arabs wanted the number of migrants to their lands limited, but could not succeed. The end of the Second World War saw the weakening of colonial powers and the British and French controlling most of the Arab territories were forced to leave these lands. Not wanting to leave these resource rich lands to fend for themselves as independent and sovereign countries, they used the then newly constituted United Nations, to unjustly divide Palestine into two states – Israel and Palestine. On 29 November 1947, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted Resolution 181(II) recommending the adoption and implementation of a plan to partition Palestine into an Arab state, a Jewish state and the City of Jerusalem. This proposal was resented by the Palestinians, while the Jews led by David Ben-Gurion welcomed the decision as they were allotted 58 percent of the land. Gurion declared the formation of Israeli State on 15 May 1948. Israel expelled 750,000, which is nearly half of the then Palestinian population from their land into concentrated areas, the present day Gaza and West Bank. Israel has slowly continued colonising even those areas, which were specifically reserved by the UN for Palestinians. The objective was to drive away the Palestinians from the region by taking away all their best land and resources, such as water. Immediately, after its formation, Israel invaded Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, the states sympathetic to the cause of Palestinians, but was defeated. From then had started the expansion of Israel, which continues to this day. The presence of Israel in the region, right from the beginning was used by imperialist forces to ensure their control over the entire West Asia. When Nasser had nationalised the Suez canal in Egypt, Britain and France joined Israel to launch a military offensive on Sinai peninsula in Egypt in 1956. It is during this period, 1964, that the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) was formed with the aim of liberating the entire Palestinian territories from Israeli occupation with Yasser Arafat as its leader. The year 1967 marks another important milestone in the history of the Israel and Palestine conflict. Israel, backed by the US, launched another military offensive on its neighbours and occupied Sinai from Egypt, Golan heights from Syria and West Bank and old Jerusalem from Jordan. All this together bring more than 78 percent of Palestinian land under the possession of Israel. Though Israel had returned Sinai to Egypt, a result of the truce brokered by US, it still occupies all other territories it had captured, till this day. 1980s, is a period when the famous Yinon plan detailing the strategic policy direction that Israel should pursue came out. It detailed the path for Israel to become a regional super power and also what it should do to destabilise and weaken the neighbouring Arab States like Iraq, which were stronger than it. During this period, Israel had started a systematic occupation of the remaining parts of the Palestinian land by encouraging settlements. Enraged by the Israeli aggression, PLO launched its first Intifada or popular uprising. Israel, in the name of self-protection responded by launching a vicious attack on the Palestinians. With the collapse of Soviet Union, PLO decided to give up military struggle and went to the peace negotiations with Israel in the early 1990s, culminating in the famous Oslo Peace Accord of 1993. A series of negotiations starting from Oslo to Camp David followed between 1993 and 1999. They were on the premise that both the parties would develop a relationship of trust that would allow them to resolve the larger and more difficult issues. Certain core principles were agreed upon: (i) that the interim period would be of a limited duration (ii) that nothing would be done to prejudice the outcome of permanent status negotiations and (iii) that the final settlement ‘will lead to the implementation of Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338’ which reaffirm the principle that territory cannot be acquired by force and that Israel would withdraw its troops gradually from the occupied territories. Throughout this period Israel violated the spirit and the letter of the Agreements and continued its violations of Palestinian rights as embodied in the international law. With the advent of the 21st century, Israel aggression also reached a new crescendo with the construction of an unethical and illegal wall, which further pushed Palestinians to only 12 percent of the historic Palestine. This 663 km wall is twice the length of the 1967 boundary, which is 320 km. This is in contravention of all the international treaties and the promise it had made during the Oslo negotiations. With this, Israel annexes practically more than 60 percent of the West Bank land, 60 percent of its water resources and leaves even the 40 percent of land dissected and cantoned. As a result, Gaza is reduced to a tiny strip of land surrounded on three sides by Israel and the Mediterranean on the other side (with a small tiny border with Egypt in the south, which is blocked with the help of the present elected-military government) making it virtually a prison. Nothing can pass in or out of Gaza without the permission of the Israeli authorities. Israel is strangling Gaza and its intensity increased after the victory of Hamas in 2006. Quite remorselessly Israel defends its polices. Dov Weisglass an adviser to the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, said: “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger”. It is in this historical background of Israeli aggression and inhuman strangulation that the attack on Gaza has to be viewed and resisted.