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The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain

Tension rises as peace talks stall

by our Arab Affairs correspondent

An uneasy lull over the Persian Gulf as the Americans prolong their ceasefire with Iran indefinitely to allegedly give the Iranians more time to prepare for another round of peace talks in Pakistan. But the scheduled second round of top level negotiations, which was to have been held in Islamabad this week, has been postponed and the double blockade continues with a tit-for-tat struggle between Iranian patrol boats and American warships for control of the Persian Gulf.

Central to reopening the narrow sea route is the halt of the Zionist aggression on Lebanon and the end of the American naval blockade around the Hormuz Strait. But while the Americans continue to turn a blind eye to Chinese and Russian vessels they’ve stepped up their provocations against the Islamic Republic. This week American warships seized an Iranian oil tanker bound for the Indian ocean and Iranian patrol boats boarded two Western container vessels who were in breach of their own blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.

The right to impose a toll on the Strait, which has hitherto been regarded as an international waterway open to all, has become a key Iranian war-aim in the current conflict. They’ve said that in any future settlement they’re prepared to share fees with Oman on the other side of the Strait. In the meantime they’ve started to collect their first revenue from tolls imposed on ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz, which is responsible for 20 per cent of global oil and liquid natural gas shipments.

The Israelis endlessly claim that the “only democracy in the Middle East” is also the protector of the Christian Arab communities in the region. Only last year their leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, told the United Nations that Israel is the only place in the Middle East where Christians feel safe. Palestinian church bodies thought otherwise. The Higher Presidential Committee for Church Affairs described Netanyahu’s comments as “lies aimed at whitewashing the occupation and distorting the truth”.

The committee asserted that Israeli settlements and military policies are what destroyed the historic Christian presence in Palestine – through the confiscation of church lands, closure of roads leading to places of worship, restrictions on freedom of movement, and even direct attacks on churches in Jerusalem and Gaza during military operations.

This year, Israeli authorities blocked Jerusalem’s Catholic cardinal from observing Palm Sunday at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre prompting international outcry. Christian opinion was further outraged when an Israeli soldier smashed the head off a statue of Jesus in a Catholic village in southern Lebanon.

This was too much even for the bible-punching Christian Zionists of America to swallow. Ayman Odeh, the leader of the communist-led Democratic Front for Peace and Equality (Hadash) in the Israeli parliament sardonically said: “We’ll wait to hear the police spokesperson claim that ‘the soldier felt threatened by Jesus’.”

Ahmad Tibi, another Hadash bloc MP, added that those who blow up mosques and churches in Gaza and spit on Christian clergy in occupied East Jerusalem without punishment are not afraid to destroy a statue of Jesus. “Perhaps these racists have also learned from Donald Trump to insult Jesus Christ and insult Pope Leo?” he asked, referring to Trump’s now-deleted AI generated image that portrayed him as a Jesus-like figure and his feud with the head of the Roman Catholic Church, who has criticised the war on Iran.