A Modern-Day Guernica, by Alexander Prokhanov

What is happening in Gaza is a prison rebellion and its bloody suppression. There was fascists’ horrible putting down of the Jewish rebellion in the Warsaw ghetto and the Afghani islamists merciless suppression of the rebellion of Soviet prisoners of war in a prison near the Pakistani borders… and today Israel, with a beastly cruelty, is putting down the rebellion in Gaza.

In 1948 the Israeli State descended upon Palestinian lands like a meteorite, burning everything around and leaving a giant crater. Since then, Israel has been herding Palestinians from their native lands into refugee camps while filling its jails with Palestinian insurgents. The Palestinians are martyrs, warriors, prophesiers of justice. The battle of Palestinians with Israel is a battle of the downtrodden with their torturers and executioners.

The Zionists claim that in 1948 Israel came to its historical homeland. The Bible relates how this “historical homeland” was created. Jews led by Moses didn’t come to an empty place or a desert: they came to lands inhabited by a prosperous people — Canaanites — who had built towns and planted olive groves. And the Jews ruined the Canaanite towns, slaughtered them all, threw them into pits of unslaked lime.

They exterminated the Canaanites with the same cruelty, with which they are now exterminating Gaza. Gaza is a town of ghosts, a gas chamber where children and the old expire in anguish. If you want to understand godlessness and cruelty, look at the ruins of Gaza, which seep blood, where each stone cries with the voice of a murdered child, every remnant of a ruined wall is filled with the prayers of murdered women and the old.

Israel is America’s nursling. Billions of dollars flow from America to Israel, nourishing Israeli army and defending the order that America wishes. In battling against Israel, the Palestinians battle against America. The Russian army, in battling against the Ukrainians, battles against America. America is the enemy of Palestine and of Russia. The Hamas attack on Israel — the sight of burning Merkava tanks and the imprisoned Israeli generals — has dispelled the myth of Israeli invincibility. [The myth of American invincibility will die next — my comment.]

I have been to Gaza and saw for myself how this concentration camp operates. The land border of Gaza is surrounded by a huge concrete wall. The wall is topped by barbed wire and equipped with machine gun towers, optical sensors and night vision sensors. Anyone that falls into the field of vision of this deadly equipment is killed by automatic machine gun fire. Day and night the coastline is guarded by Israeli patrol boats which interdict Palestinian fishing boats.

Palestinians battle this blockade as prisoners everywhere: by digging tunnels under the concrete wall. Through these tunnels Gaza received food, clothing, plumbing valves, communications equpment and weapons for rebellion.

While in Gaza, I prayed at a 5th century Christian temple, I attended lectures at the Islamic university, I met with the Russian wives of Palestinian engieers, doctors and teachers who had studied in the Soviet Union, and now their children, who live in Gaza, are speaking Russian.

Together with Palestinian women, I helped plant an olive grove near Gaza City. And now, among the olive trees, there is my tree, and Israeli rockets fly over it, knocking off its leaves with the shock waves from the explosions. This is my tree; this tree is me. And I am covered in shell fragments.

With the whole world watching, Gaza is being murdered, while humanity mumbles about humanitarian concerns and gathers the UN Security Council.Meanwhile, bombs and rockets are turning Gaza into rubble. The blood of Gaza is on all of us.

Picasso had painted a great painting, “Guernica”, about a town destroyed by fascist bombers. Gaza is a modern-day Guernica.