Former Stormont first minister Reg Empey has said it’s “very doubtful” the current approach to negotiations regarding Gaza’s future will be successful. Empey was a senior negotiator for the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) in the run-up to the Good Friday Agreement, heavily involved in talks on decommissioning of weapons by paramilitary groups.

Empey’s intervention comes in the wake of US president Donald Trump’s typically thuggish pledge to ensure Hamas is “blown away” if they refuse to disarm. Both the resistance group and Washington have been sending contradictory signals about their intentions on what will be done with Hamas weaponry. As Al-Monitor reports, in contrast to Trump:

…last month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested negotiators could accept a disarmament plan that would allow Hamas to retain some of its smaller arms while surrendering its rockets and other heavy weapons.

Hamas senior official Basem Naim told the media outlet in December that they would:

…begin laying down its weapons as part of a long-term ceasefire that includes guarantees that Israel won’t resume its attacks.

However, spokesperson Hazim Qassim recently struck a harder line when speaking to Iran’s Press TV, saying:

The issue of Hamas weaponry is tied to the full withdrawal of the occupation from all Palestinian lands. These weapons are for the defence of the Palestinian people and the continuation of the struggle to reclaim our right.

Furthermore the status of this weaponry can be resolved through internal Palestinian consensus to open a horizon for the establishment of a Palestinian state with Al-Quds [Jerusalem] as its capital.

Gaza destroyed by Zionist criminals, yet we’re told Hamas should disarm?

Empey emphasised the disparity between Hamas and the Israeli Genocide Forces that have dropped the equivalent of more than six atomic bombs on an area one quarter the size of London:

I mean, you’re talking about a modern western style army [IGF] with every piece of kit under the sun versus Hamas – which has some rocket capability, I suppose, or did have – but there’s no air force, there’s no navy, there’s no regular soldiers, there’s no tanks.

We’re not talking about two equal parties here.

The Belfast Telegraphquotes the UUP man saying that the “most critical difference” between the situation in Palestine and that in Northern Ireland 27 years ago is:

…the absence of a shared commitment to ending the conflict.

This is represented starkly by evidence from so-called ‘Israel’, where polling of the land thieves that make up most of the population indicated 47% think that when their genocidal forces enter a Palestinian city, they should “kill all its inhabitants”.

The survey also found that:

…82 percent of Israeli Jews support “the transfer (expulsion) of residents of the Gaza Strip to other countries”

Empey also highlighted the Zionist practice of murdering potential peacemakers on the Palestinian side:

The Israelis have succeeded in killing most of their negotiators in the past, so you would need to get agreement, in my view, on a set of principles, which would be the foundation of any negotiating process. Because without that, it’s just going to be probably the use of force from one direction or another that decides things.

It’s fair to say the talks preceding the Good Friday agreement would have gone less smoothly had David Trimble gunned down Gerry Adams during a tea break, but that has essentially been the Zionist practice for decades. Politicians in the settler-colony have frequently spoken of a “Palestinian peace offensive“. This conception of attempts at peace being an act of hostility towards the ongoing program of ethnic cleansing and land theft is revealing.

Hamas has a right to resist under international law

Miko Peled – son of a revered Zionist general but now an advocate for Palestinian liberation – spoke recently on the absurdity of placing emphasis on the far weaker party to disarm:

If we’re talking about demilitarisation, it has to be the demilitarisation of the party that is conducting the genocide, which is the apartheid state, the state of Israel, as they are continuing to allow millions of Palestinians in the Gaza concentration camp to die.

He continued:

The apartheid state, the state of Israel, is the destabilising party in region, in West Asia, and it has to be dismantled. The apartheid state is the problem.

One means of destabilising Gaza further is to give Zionist backed gangs free run of the place, which will be much easier against a defanged Hamas.

Though it almost feels redundant to speak of international law at a point where it has been so brutally assaulted by the Zionist entity, Hamas has a legal right to resist the occupation of Palestinian land. To do that, they need weaponry. The apartheid colony squatting on Palestine has no right to defend itself, and all calls for disarmament should be directed at the butchers who have murdered more than 100,000 innocent people.

Featured image via the Canary

By Robert Freeman

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