Israel has intensified its aggression against Iran and Lebanon, seeking greater political domination over the Middle East, alongside impunity for its Gaza genocide. Israeli Minister Bezalel Smotrich has threatened to turn Lebanon into another Khan Younis. According to Lebanon’s resistance, Israel offers a stark choice: either war or else total surrender. Indeed, the Zionist project was always a permanent threat against national sovereignty. For several decades it has turned Palestine into a laboratory for a means to subjugate the entire region.
Now Western governments have provided greater military and ideological support for Israel’s attack. Together they help Israel to strengthen neocolonial domination and destroy any regional resistance. We denounce Israel for weaponizing the global focus on a war with Iran to intensify its criminal attacks by settlers and soldiers in the West Bank —with at least 6 killings in a single week—while simultaneously tightening the genocidal blockade on Gaza.
The UK’s colonial-military base in Cyprus, RAF Akrotiri, was always central to European complicity with Israel’s Gaza genocide, especially through electronic surveillance. This role has been extended in the US-Israel war against Iran. Since Iran sent a drone attack against RAF Akrotiri, Western psychological warfare has celebrated NATO countries expanding their military forces, supposedly crucial for ‘European security’.
Those countries have sent military forces to the region, supposedly ‘to support Cyprus’. In early March, Greece and France undertook to send frigates to Cyprus. Germany has sent its frigate FGS Nordrhein-Westfalen. Italy has been deploying naval and air-defense assets to the Eastern Mediterranean. This greater role provoked stronger protest against RAF Akrotiri, escalating the long-time local campaign for its closure. The Left-wing opposition party AKEL has emphasised this demand in Cyprus’ parliamentary election campaign.
Meanwhile NATO countries have intensified their war-mongering and psychological warfare. They equate support for Israel with ‘European security’ and greater militarisation in the Middle East. Indeed, alongside the NATO-Russia war in Ukraine, militarising the Middle East has become another pretext for expanding their own arms production into a war economy. Business has been booming for death merchants.
In those ways, Western aggression has intensified complicity with the US-Israel war for regional imperialist domination. This role echoes the real driver for the 1917 Balfour Declaration supporting the Zionist project, namely: that a ‘Jewish homeland’ in historic Palestine would provide a ‘little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism’ (as Ronald Storrs wrote a century ago). A Jewish state was always a racist settler-colonial partnership with imperialist forces, contrary to the Zionist promise to liberate Jews from oppression.
What tasks now for Jewish groups? The latest escalation illustrates the inherent Zionist threat to regional peace, justice and security – in the perverse name of our security. The entire world should oppose the Western-Zionist partnership for subjugation. Jews in particular must liberate ourselves from the Zionist project. We need an exodus from Zionism, as explained a 2024 Seder service.
This should be our Passover message to everyone.