In 1982 I was working as a secondary teacher, and I had just graduated from the University. I was happy with my life, and I bought a car and rented an apartment in the Lebanese city of Tyr. On Friday, I went from southern Lebanon to Beirut to attend a conference to discuss social issues in the Palestinian camps in Lebanon because I was a member of the Palestinian Teachers Union. The situation was tense. Menachem Begin, the prime minister of Israel and responsible for the Deir Yasin massacre in 1948, had threatened to invade Lebanon to destroy the Palestine Liberation Organization situated in Lebanon.
It was a nice conference in the Hamra Hotel in Beirut, and there I had the pleasure of meeting friends whom I had not seen for some time. But during one of the lectures, a person came and whispered in the professor’s ear. Then the professor announced that the conference had been canceled and asked everyone to return to his area because we were coming from several regions. I drove quickly back to south Lebanon at a time when the Israeli planes were flying and bombing several places.
I went to the camp where my parents live. I met my worried father. I still remember the worry on his face. I tried to calm him down but told him that the satiation was tense and nobody knew how the events would develop.
In the evening, I visited the Norwegian medical team that was there to help the Palestinians. They were also worried, so I tried to calm them down and explain the situation to them. And only two days later, on Sunday, June 6, the invasion began. The sky was covered with the Israeli planes bombing here and there.
The sea was also covered with Israeli military ships. Despite the weakness of the Palestinian resistance forces compared to the forces of the Zionist enemy, a lot of courageous resistance took place, which was hindering the progress of the hostile forces.
I was in the camp with my family when the plane bombardment began, which I had never seen like that before.
The bombing destroyed everything moving, the Bombing of homes, schools, and shelters where the camp residents was hiding.
The world should know that the Zionist strategy is based on the merciless Killing of civilians to weaken the resistance. And it is a policy that has not changed. The Zionists do not know international laws or Morals because they know that the hypocritical West supports them.
The American Veto is ready in the United Nations to prevent their condemnation.
The planes were bombing and leaving, then other planes came and continued the bombing.
They destroyed the whole camp, including the neighborhood in which my family live. It was impossible to know the roads because everything was in ruin.
In a place not far to my family house, there was the shelter of the Hula Club, in which more than a hundred people from the camp’s residents hid. I heard the screams of people; they were screams that I will never forget. They were cries of sadness, anger, and pain. I ran with some young men towards the shelter of the Hula Club in an attempt to save the people. One extended his hand to a woman, and only her hand came out with him. It was a horrible thing beyond all description. All shelters were hit with phosphorous bombs.
I could hear people screaming and crying everywhere in the camp, which had turned into rubble. Women were screaming, and children were crying. I heard someone screaming saying, “Where are you, God? You did allow these murderers to do this and do not interfere.”
Unfortunately, only a Palestinian writer wrote about the Hula shelter massacre. So the Hula massacre was not widely known.
The killed in the Hula shelter have stayed there until now after the place became a mass grave for those killed by Zionist criminals.
Ps. I devote this article to my friend Abu Fadi who lost all his family in the Hula shelter including his five children, and yet faced the Zionist made tragedy with patience beyond description.
Salim Nazzal is a Palestinian Norwegian researcher, lecturer playwright and poet, wrote more than 17 books such as Perspectives on thought, culture and political sociology, in thought, culture and ideology, the road to Baghdad. Palestine in heart.
Since I am originally from Pakistan and have been teaching interdisciplinary studies (including political science) at City College of San Francisco, I have been following the developments there with great interest and concern, both from professional and personal points of view. For brevity and clarity, I am itemizing my impressions as follows:
- From the reports available so far, it seems likely that the U.S. government colluded with anti-Imran Khan Pakistani politicians to have him removed from power. According to Khan, members of the U.S. Consular staff met several times with the opposition leaders and with only the dissident members of Khan’s party. That choice of meeting only with anti-Khan people points an accusing finger at the U.S. There are many other details that support the likelihood of possible U.S. interference in Pakistan’s internal matters. On becoming the U.S. President, Joe Biden called almost every world leader, but he did not call Imran Khan. In a Congressional hearing, the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, accused Pakistan of ties with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Most people do not know that of the total number of the Pashtun people (most Taliban are Pashtun), nearly 40 percent are Pakistani citizens; the rest live in Afghanistan. Like a good leader, he has to look after the interests of the citizens of his country who have close ties with their brethren in Afghanistan. At the same time, for regional solidarity and security, a good Pakistani leader would certainly want to have cordial ties with a neighboring country that has been the victim of the world’s two super powers’ brutal invasions since 1979. Khan believes in diplomatic solutions to political problems and warned the U.S. that there was no military solution to their war in Afghanistan. He was right. It took the U.S. government an expense of trillions of dollars and sacrifice of innumerable lives to replace the Taliban with the Taliban in Afghanistan.
- I coined the term “indirect colonialism” in my teaching about the U.S. regime-change strategy that it employs consistently. In this kind of colonialism, the colonizing power uses local brown-skinned self-seeking, nation-betraying leaders to sacrifice national interest for the sake of self-advancement. The colonizer does not have to spend its resources on launching a formal invasion to occupy a country. Local corrupt politicians prostitute national interest to do the colonizer’s bidding.
- Just a few examples of indirect colonialism will suffice. In 1953, the U.S. government colluded with the British government to overthrow the democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister, Dr. Mohammad Mosaddegh, and replace him with the dictator, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran, who did whatever he was asked to do by the United States. Like Imran Khan, Dr. Mosaddegh was putting his national interest above the greed of foreign, imperial powers that tried to force him to accept an insultingly low royalty from its own oil. In Imran Khan’s case, he refused U.S. military bases in Pakistan and refused to let his country be used as a “hired gun” to fight for the U.S. the so-called “war on terror.” A more accurate phrasing will be to call it the “war OF terror.”
- On July 5, 1977, the U.S. government used the then Pakistan’s army chief Gen. Zia-ul-Haq to overthrow the democratic government of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, whom he arranged to be hanged on murky, unconvincing charges. This blatant intrusion into Pakistan’s internal affairs was hatched inside the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan on July 4, 1977. In that case, U.S. just carried out Henry Kissinger’s threat to Bhutto: “We will make an example of you” if you do not stop pursuing the bomb. After India detonated its nuclear device, Bhutto was trying to assemble a similar bomb to maintain the balance of power.
- It should be noted that the same fate befell the democratically elected Egyptian President, Dr. Mohamed Morsi. He was allowed to stay in power for just one year. Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi removed him in a coup d’etat in 2013. Morsi died in jail under mysterious circumstances. Representing the will of the Egyptian people and acting on their mandate, Morsi was demanding that Israel end its brutal occupation of Palestine. At one point, the Israeli ambassador had to be rescued from Egypt. Egyptians asked their President to close down the Israeli embassy and consulates in Egypt until the Zionist country complies with the United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 and other Resolutions. It is the same demand that Pakistan’s Imran Khan made in his speech at the United Nations when he unequivocally declared that Pakistan would not recognize Israel until the Palestinian rights were met. Both Morsi and Khan stood for justice and rule of law, which was too much for Israel and its patron U.S. to allow. Hence their removal from power.
- Yet another example of U.S. interference is the 9-11-73 U.S.-engineered coup in which the democratically elected Chilean President, Dr. Salvador Allende, was overthrown and replaced with the dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet. All of the above regime changes resulted in massive violence, unrest, and loss of lives. Since the Second World War, the U.S. has interfered negatively and disastrously in the internal affairs of more than 70 countries in its regime-change misadventures.
- The people who brought the no-confidence motion against Imran Khan have been proven to be ill-educated, incompetent, corrupt, and always putting personal interest above the national interest. The Panama Papers revealed that the Nawaz Sharif family has laundered billions of dollars out of Pakistan and put it in foreign banks. As for the other clan, the Zardaris, their leader was known as Mr. 10 percent because for every government contract during his Presidency, his share was automatic 10 percent. He is suspected of having Benazir Bhutto’s brother Murtaza Bhutto assassinated when he ran against Zardari’s wife Benazir to become Pakistan’s PM. Murtaza’s daughter, the famous journalist and author Fatima Bhutto, has spoken out about her father’s assassination.
- By comparison, Imran Khan is highly educated and the only unselfish Pakistani political leader I have seen in the past half century. When he became Prime Minister, Pakistan was teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. Through personal efforts and charisma, he arranged to get close to $ 6 billion from Saudi Arabia and United Arab Amirates to pay off the IMF so that the country could be saved from defaulting on the loan. Despite COVID-19, global skyrocketing inflation, and zero cooperation from the opposition parties, whose only focus was to make him fail, he was able to reduce the national deficit from Rs. 22 billion during Nawaz Sharif’s administration in 2018 to Rs. 1 billion in 2022 at the time of his ouster. These figures are from a broadcast on Pakistan television. In three years, he created close to 6 million jobs. He introduced health cards for the poor to provide them free healthcare. His “No one will sleep hungry” program in the country’s most vulnerable populations looked after the very poor. He encouraged exchanges between students from private and public schools to promote national integration. A major achievement of Imran Khan is that he rid the country of terrorism. Pakistanis and foreign visitors could walk the streets without fear of being kidnapped for ransom. That freedom had never been possible during the Zardari and Nawaz Sharif eras when terrorism was rampant and no one felt safe. Many such accomplishments go to his credit. It was not in his power to control the world-wide phenomenon of inflation.
- For the first time since Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan occupied a respectable position in the comity of nations. At the United Nations, Khan brought to world attention the Israel-perpetrated ethnic cleansing and other atrocities on Palestinians living under the Zionists’ illegal occupation. The world knows that Israel’s defiance and violations of numerous UN Security Council Resolutions could never happen without the patronage and military, financial, and diplomatic support of the United States. He stated clearly that Pakistan would not recognize Israel until Palestinians are given their rights. Similarly, he placed on the world stage the India-perpetrated human rights disaster in Kashmir.
- Khan cultivated close ties with the neighboring China (much to the dislike of the U.S.) and adopted a friendly stance toward another neighboring country, Russia (another of his peace-motivated moves that the U.S. did not like). The U.S. government has been following this dangerous Bush doctrine: “You are either with us or against us,” leaving no room for neutrality. However, the U.S. does not threaten big countries like India for their neutrality. The kinds of threat that a U.S. Assistant Secretary of State is reported to have used in the case of Imran Khan are reserved for those countries like Pakistan that have found that 100 percent subservience to the United States has not been beneficial to them. It seems impossible for the U.S. to understand this simple logic: The interests of the United States are not necessarily those of other countries.
- Khan’s meeting with Putin had been scheduled long before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Instead of cancelling his long-scheduled visit, he went to meet with Putin but never made any statement about Ukraine. His cultivation of close ties with Russia and adopting a neutral position like India was another irritant for the U.S. government that fails to see the positive side of neutrality: Pakistan could play an important role in bringing the U.S. and Russia together, as it did in arranging the first secret meeting between the two estranged powers, U.S. and China. According to the Dawn report, “Former US secretary of state Dr. Henry Kissinger recognised Pakistan’s ‘key’ role in arranging his secret visit from Islamabad to Beijing in 1971 for making breakthrough in China-US relations.” https://www.dawn.com/news/1613819
- In cultivating good relations with China and Russia, Khan was just doing the right thing for his country’s progress. With the spineless and incompetent interim government that has replaced Imran Khan, the country is poised to slip back into U.S. vassalage, to the grave detriment of Pakistan’s sovereignty. Before Khan, the preceding governments sacrificed close to 30,000 Pakistani lives to fight America’s war of terror, incurring also financial loss of billions of dollars. Before Khan, the U.S. drone attacks on Pakistan, with tacit approval of the then Pakistani governments, killed thousands of innocent Pakistanis. The Obama Administration had adopted this insane policy that anyone over the age of 12 should be treated as a potential terrorist, subject to elimination. It was atrocities like these that made Pakistan’s author Mohsin Hamid write in his novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist: “No other country inflicts death so rapidly upon the inhabitants of other countries, frightens so many people so far away, as America.” Acting as a sovereign leader, Khan ordered all those drone attacks to be stopped.
- Imran Khan is not perfect. No one is. He made some mistakes. Everyone does. But given the overwhelming odds against him, he did accomplish a great deal.
- I have yet to see anyone in U.S. media mention the important fact that Imran Khan served as the Chancellor of University of Bradford in England for nine years (2005-2014). He left that prestigious and honorable position to pursue his political career in Pakistan.
- From the massive demonstrations inside and outside Pakistan in support of Imran Khan, he seems certain to return to power in due course of time.
Abdul Jabbar, Ph.D,Emeritus Professor of English and Interdisciplinary Studies, City College of San Francisco, California
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