U.S. opposes peace as Israel ethnically cleanses Palestinians, waging war on ‘entire nation’ of Gaza
By Ben Norton (Posted Oct 16, 2023)
Originally published: Geopolitical Economy Report on October 15, 2023 (more by Geopolitical Economy Report) |
The Israeli government is in the process of ethnically cleansing more than 1 million Palestinians, pushing them out of their homes in Gaza.
According to senior Israeli officials, the plan of the far-right Benjamin Netanyahu government is to force Palestinians into the desert of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, where they will live in so-called “tent cities”.
At the same time, Israel is brutally bombing the besieged Gaza strip—one of the most densely populated areas on Earth.
There are even reports that Israel has attacked convoys of Palestinian civilians who were abiding by its evacuation order and fleeing from the north to the south of the 40-kilometer strip.
Meanwhile, the United States has adamantly refused to support calls for peace.
Instead, the State Department told U.S. diplomats not to mention the phrases “de-escalation/ceasefire”, “end to violence/bloodshed”, and “restoring calm” when discussing Gaza, according to a memo obtained by HuffPost.
On 12 October, Israel ordered the roughly 1.1 million Palestinians living in the northern half of Gaza to evacuate to the south.
The United Nations warned that it would be “impossible for such a movement to take place without devastating humanitarian consequences”.
The UN “strongly appealed” for the Israeli evacuation order “to be rescinded”, noting it “could transform what is already a tragedy into a calamitous situation”.
Israel ignored the UN and instead cracked down even harder, bombing Palestinian civilians as they evacuated.
The BBC acknowledged that the Israeli military attacked a Palestinian convoy, writing,
These vehicles were carrying civilians, who were fleeing northern Gaza after the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) issued an evacuation order.
The BBC verified a video of the attack, describing it as “a scene of total carnage”, which “is too graphic for us to show”.
“Bodies, twisted and mangled, are scattered everywhere”, the BBC described, adding that many of the victims of the Israeli attack were women and children, including infants aged 2 to 5 years old.
The Associated Press confirmed the same, writing:
Two witnesses reported a strike on fleeing cars near the town of Deir el-Balah, south of the evacuation zone and in the area Israel told people to flee to. Fayza Hamoudi said she and her family were driving from their home in the north when the strike hit some distance ahead on the road and two vehicles burst into flames. A witness from another car on the road gave a similar account.
As of 14 October, Israel had killed at least 2,215 Palestinians, including 724 children and 458 women, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
Another 8,714 Palestinians have been wounded in a week of Israeli attacks, among them 2,450 children and 1,536 women.
Meanwhile, top Israeli officials have engaged in borderline genocidal rhetoric.
Israel’s President Isaac Herzog declared at a press conference that the country is at war with the “entire nation” of Gaza.
“It is an entire nation out there that is responsible” Herzog said, in reference to Palestinians.
“It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up [against Hamas]”, he argued, in comments reported by HuffPost.
According to Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, Israel’s plan is to ethnically cleanse Palestinians and force them into Egypt.
Citing an anonymous high level source, Hersh wrote, “I have been told by an Israeli insider that Israel has been trying to convince Qatar, which at the urging of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was a long-time financial supporter of Hamas, to join with Egypt in funding a tent city for the million or more refugees awaiting across the border”.
This plan was in fact confirmed by Israel’s former deputy foreign minister, Danny Ayalon, who previously served as the Israeli ambassador to the United States and a foreign policy adviser for far-right Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In an interview with Al Jazeera reporter Marc Lamont Hill on 12 October, Ayalon stated:
DANNY AYALON: This was, this is thought out. It’s not something that we tell them, go to the beaches, go drown yourselves, God forbid, not at all. There is a huge expense, almost endless space in the Sinai desert, just on the other side of Gaza.
The idea is—and this is not the first time it will be done—the idea is for them to leave over to the open areas where we and the international community will prepare the infrastructure, you know, tent cities, with food and with water—you know, just like for the refugees of Syria that fled the butchering of Assad a few years ago to Turkey; Turkey received 2 million of them.
This is the idea. Now Egypt will have to play ball here, because once the the population is out of sight, then we can go…
…
I’ll tell you in a practical manner what we should do, and what we can do: create, like in the past, in history, a humanitarian corridor.
When there is a humanitarian corridor—and we have been discussing this with the United States—then we can guarantee in this corridor that nobody will get hurt.
Now, again, I say, there is a way to receive them all on the other side for temporary time, on the Sinai, because what did Hamas turn—
MARC LAMONT HILL: On the other side? Are we talking about Rafah? Are you saying the other side, they go to Egypt?
DANNY AYALON: Yes, absolutely, absolutely. And Egypt will have to play ball.
While Israel is ethnically cleansing Palestinians and killing large numbers of civilians, Western governments have showed unflinching support.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen both traveled to Tel Aviv to symbolically back the far-right Netanyahu government.
The Financial Times reported that some EU officials are concerned “that the European Commission president could look as if she is endorsing military actions that will cause mass civilian casualties–and that will swiftly be labelled as war crimes”.
An unnamed EU diplomat told the Times, “We may be about to see massive ethnic cleansing”—a clear indication that Western capitals know exactly what Israel is doing.
“Our fear is that we’ll pay a heavy price in the global south because of this conflict”, an anonymous EU official confessed to the newspaper.
The vast majority of countries in the Global South support the Palestinian people in their struggle against Israeli colonialism. A rare exception is the far-right government in India, whose Prime Minister Narendra Modi represents a vehemently anti-Muslim Hindu-nationalist party, the BJP, which sees Israel’s religious ethnostate as an inspiration and potential model for its own plans for a so-called “Hindu rashtra”.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu has suggested that Israel plans to further escalate its extreme violence. He told soldiers near the border of Gaza that the “next stage is coming”.
The Israeli military has also been attacking neighbors Lebanon and Syria.
Human Rights Watch confirmed that Israel used white phosphorous in strikes on both Gaza and Lebanon. The human rights organization made it clear that this “puts civilians at risk of serious and long-term injuries” and “violates the international humanitarian law prohibition on putting civilians at unnecessary risk”.
Israel has likewise bombed Syria multiple times, even targeting the international airport in Aleppo.
For the roughly 2.3 million Palestinians trapped in the besieged Gaza strip, conditions are virtually unlivable.
Israel has cut off Gaza’s access to electricity, water, food, and fuel. The Associated Press reported,
When water does trickle from pipes, the meager flow lasts no more than 30 minutes each day and is so contaminated with sewage and seawater that it’s undrinkable, residents said.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) cautioned,
Mass casualties are unlike anything seen in past years.
“The medical system is on its knees. As Gaza loses power, hospitals lose power. Water cannot be pumped. Sewage systems will likely flood. People have nowhere else to go”, the humanitarian organization stated.
https://mronline.org/2023/10/16/u-s-opp ... n-of-gaza/
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OCTOBER 16, 2023 BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR
US faces defeat in geopolitical war in Gaza
China’s Special Envoy on Middle East Zhai Jun met the envoys of Arab states in Beijing at the latter’s request for a group meeting to discuss the grave situation in Gaza, Beijing, October 13, 2023
One hundred years after the Arab Revolt (1916-1918) against the ruling Ottoman Turks amidst the impending defeat of Germany and the Triple Alliance in World War I, another armed uprising by the Arabs has erupted — this time around, against Israeli occupation, in the backdrop of the looming defeat of the United States and the NATO in Ukraine War — presenting a thrilling spectacle of history repeating unabridged.
The Ottoman Empire disintegrated as a result of the Arab Revolt. Israel too will have to vacate its occupied territories and make space for a state of Palestine, which of course, will be a crushing defeat for the US and marks the end of its global dominance, reminiscent of the Battle of Cambrai in Northern France (1918) where Germans — surrounded, exhausted and with disintegrating morale amidst a deteriorating domestic situation — faced the certainty that the war had been lost, and surrendered.
The torrential flow of events through the past week is breathtaking, starting with a phone call made by Iran’s President Sayyid Ebrahim Raisi to the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on Wednesday to discuss a common strategy toward the situation following the devastating attack by the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, against Israel on October 7.
Earlier on Tuesday, in a powerful statement, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had emphasised that “From the military and intelligence aspects, this defeat (by Hamas) is irreparable. It is a devastating earthquake. It is unlikely that the (Israeli) usurping regime will be able to use the help of the West to repair the deep impacts that this incident has left on its ruling structures.” (See my blog Iran warns Israel against its apocalyptic war.)
A senior Iranian official told Reuters that Raisi’s call to the Crown Prince aimed to “support Palestine and prevent the spread of war in the region. The call was good and promising.” Having forged a broad understanding with Saudi Arabia, Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian held discussion with his Emirati counterpart, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed, during which he called upon Islamic and Arab countries to extend their support to the Palestinian people, emphasising the urgency of the situation.
On Thursday, Amir-Abdollahian embarked on a regional tour to Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Qatar through Saturday to coordinate with the various resistance groups. Notably, he met Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Doha. Amir-Abdollahian told the media that unless Israel stopped its barbaric air strikes on Gaza, an escalation by the Resistance is inevitable and Israel could suffer a “huge earthquake,” as Hezbollah is in a state of readiness to intervene.
Axios reported on Saturday citing two diplomatic sources that Tehran has delivered a strong message to Tel Aviv via the UN that it will have to intervene if the Israeli aggression on Gaza persists. Simply put, Tehran will not be deterred by the deployment of 2 US aircraft carriers and several warships and fighter jets off the shores of Israel. On Sunday, White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan acknowledged that the US couldn’t rule out that Iran might intervene in the conflict.
In the meantime, while Iran was coordinating with the resistance groups on the military front, China and Saudi Arabia shifted gear on the diplomatic track. On Thursday, even as the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was heading for Arab capitals after talks in Tel Aviv, seeking help to get the hostages released by Hamas, China’s Special Envoy on the Middle East Zhai Jun contacted the Deputy Minister for Political Affairs of the Saudi foreign ministry Arabia Saud M. Al-Sati on the Palestine-Israel situation with focus on the Palestine issue and the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Gaza, in particular. The contrast couldn’t be sharper.
On the same day, an extraordinary event took place in the Chinese foreign ministry when the Arab envoys in Beijing sought a group meeting with Special Envoy Zhai to underscore their collective stance that a “very severe” humanitarian crisis has emerged following Israel’s attack on Gaza and “the international community has the responsibility to take immediate actions to ease the tension, promote the resumption of talks for peace, and safeguard the Palestinian people’s lawful national rights.”
The Arab ambassadors thanked China “for upholding a just position on the Palestinian question … and expressed the hope that China will continue to play a positive and constructive role.” Zhai voiced full understanding that the “top priority is to keep calm and exercise restraint, protect civilians, and provide necessary conditions for relieving the humanitarian crisis.”
After this extraordinary meeting, the Chinese Foreign Ministry posted on its website at midnight a full-bodied statement by Member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and Foreign Minister Wang Yi titled China Stands on the Side of Peace and Human Conscience on the Question of Palestine. This reportedly prompted a call by the Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan to Wang Yi.
Interestingly, Blinken too called Wang Yi from Riyadh on October 14, where, according to the state department readout, he “reiterated U.S. support for Israel’s right to defend itself and called for an immediate cessation of Hamas’ attacks and the release of all hostages” and stressed the importance of “discouraging other parties (read Iran and Hezbollah) from entering the conflict.”
Succinctly put, in all these exchanges involving Saudi Arabia — especially, in Blinken’s meetings in Riyadh with Saudi FM and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, while the US focused on the hostage issue, the Saudi side instead turned the attention to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The state department readouts (here and here) bring out the two sides’ divergent priorities.
Suffice to say, a coordinated Saudi-Iranian strategy backed by China is putting pressure on Israel to agree to a ceasefire and to de-escalate. The UN’s backing isolates Israel further.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s exit is to be expected but he won’t throw in the towel without a fight. US-Israel ties may come under strain. President Biden is caught in a bind, harking back to Jimmy Carter’s predicament over the Iran hostage crisis in 1980, which ended his bid for a second term as president. Biden is already backtracking.
Where do things go from here? Clearly, the longer the Israeli assault on Gaza continues, the international condemnation and demand to allow a humanitarian corridor will only intensify. Not only will countries like India which expressed “solidarity” with Israel lose face in the Global South, even Washington’s European allies will be hard-pressed. It remains to be seen whether an invasion of Gaza by Israel is anymore realistic at all.
Going forward, the Arab-Iran-China axis will raise the plight of Gaza in the UN Security Council unless Israel retracted. Russia has proposed a draft resolution and is insisting on a voting. If the US vetoes the resolution, the UN GA may step in to adopt it.
Meanwhile, the US project to resuscitate the Abraham Accords loses traction and the plot to undermine the China-brokered Saudi-Iranian rapprochement faces sudden death.
As regards the power dynamic in West Asia, these trends can only work to the advantage of Russia and China, especially if the BRICS were to take a lead role at some point to navigate a Middle East peace process that is no longer the monopoly of the US. This is payback time for Russia.
The era of petrodollar is ending — and along with that, the US’ global hegemony. The emergent trends, therefore, go a long way to strengthen multipolarity in the world order.
https://www.indianpunchline.com/us-face ... r-in-gaza/
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Iran Warns of War Expansion if Israel Continues Attacks on Gaza
Destruction caused by Israeli bombings in Gaza, Oct. 15, 2023. | Photo: X/ @OnlinePalEng
Published 16 October 2023
Jordanian King Abdullah II also warned against Israel's attempts to displace Palestinians.
On Sunday, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi warned of the expansion of the conflict if Israel continues its attacks on the Gaza Strip.
"If the Zionist regime seeks to pay for its defeat through the continuation of these crimes (against Palestinians), the dimensions of the developments will expand," said Raisi in a phone conversation with French President Emmanuel Macron.
Raisi strongly condemned Israel's attacks on the Palestinians over the past few days and criticized the French government for preventing a rally in support of the Palestinian people, according to a statement published on the website of the Iranian president's office.
The French president voiced concern over the escalation of the crisis in the Gaza Strip and called on Iran to play its influential role in controlling the situation in the region. However, Raisi said that "resistance groups can decide for themselves."
The Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) launched military operations againsts on the Israeli occupation forces on Oct. 7. The ongoing conflict, now in its ninth day, has killed about 4,000 on both sides and wounded even more.
On Sunday, Jordanian King Abdullah II also warned against Israel's attempts to displace Palestinians or force their internal displacement.
In separate phone calls with United Arab Emirates (UAE) President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and King Felipe VI of Spain, the Jordanian king urged joint efforts to galvanize international support to stop the escalation in Gaza.
He underlined the importance of ensuring medical and relief aid to Gaza while guaranteeing international organizations' operations in the enclave to undertake their humanitarian duties.
The king also stressed the importance of creating a political horizon in order to guarantee the prospects for just and comprehensive peace based on the two-state solution and prevent further cycles of violence and war in the region
https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Ira ... -0003.html
Lebanon: Missile Falls on UN Peacekeeping Mission Headquarters
A rocket struck a location within the UNIFIL headquarters in Naqoura, Lebanon, Oct. 15, 2023. | Photo: X/ @L_Team10
Published 15 October 2023 (22 hours 33 minutes ago)
So far, at least 16 individuals have lost their lives in the crossfire on both sides of the border between Lebanon and Israel.
On Sunday, the Lebanese Council of Ministers confirmed that a missile had landed at the headquarters of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) amid crossfire between the Hezbollah Shiite group and Israeli troops.
Prime Minister Najib Mikati contacted UNIFIL Commander Gen. Aroldo Lazaro to inquire about the missile's impact on the headquarters in Naqoura, where no casualties were reported.
The border area witnessed an escalation of violence on Sunday, when Israel retaliated with artillery fire and airstrikes, as the Hezbollah Shiite group carried out five missile attacks by on various locations in northern Israel.
In the past week, Israeli occupation forces and Hezbollah have engaged in a series of cross-border attacks in the region, with some incidents also attributed to Palestinian factions present in Lebanese territory.
So far, at least 16 individuals, including three Lebanese civilians, have lost their lives in the crossfire on both sides of the border.
UNIFIL, comprised of nearly 10,000 peacekeepers from 49 different countries and currently under the command of Spain, is deployed in the southern strip of Lebanon from the de facto border with Israel to the Litani River.
Since the outbreak of border violence on Oct. 8, the peacekeepers have repeatedly called for restraint and emphasized their ongoing communication with authorities on both sides of the border to prevent "misunderstandings."
https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Leb ... -0010.html
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Lawless in Gaza: Why Britain and the West Back Israel’s Crimes
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on OCTOBER 15, 2023
Jonathan Cook
As Western politicians line up to cheer on Israel as it starves Gaza’s civilians and plunges them into darkness to soften them up before the coming Israeli ground invasion, it is important to understand how we reached this point – and what it portends for the future.
More than a decade ago, Israel started to understand that its occupation of Gaza through siege could be to its advantage. It began transforming the tiny coastal enclave from an albatross around its neck into a valuable portfolio in the trading game of international power politics.
The first benefit for Israel, and its Western allies, is more discussed than the second.
The tiny strip of land hugging the eastern Mediterranean coast was turned into a mix of testing ground and shop window.
Israel could use Gaza to develop all sorts of new technologies and strategies associated with the homeland security industries burgeoning across the West, as officials there grew increasingly worried about domestic unrest, sometimes referred to as populism.
The siege of Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians, imposed by Israel in 2007 following the election of Hamas to rule the enclave, allowed for all sorts of experiments.
How could the population best be contained? What restrictions could be placed on their diet and lifestyle? How were networks of informers and collaborators to be recruited from afar? What effect did the population’s entrapment and repeated bombardment have on social and political relations?
And ultimately how were Gaza’s inhabitants to be kept subjugated and an uprising prevented?
The answers to those questions were made available to Western allies through Israel’s shopping portal. Items available included interception rocket systems, electronic sensors, surveillance systems, drones, facial recognition, automated gun towers, and much more. All tested in real-life situations in Gaza.
Israel’s standing took a severe dent from the fact that Palestinians managed to bypass this infrastructure of confinement last weekend – at least for a few days – with a rusty bulldozer, some hang-gliders and a sense of nothing-to-lose.
Which is part of the reason why Israel now needs to go back into Gaza with ground troops to show it still has the means to keep the Palestinians crushed.
Collective punishment
Which brings us to the second purpose served by Gaza.
As Western states have grown increasingly unnerved by signs of popular unrest at home, they have started to think more carefully about how to sidestep the restrictions placed on them by international law.
The term refers to a body of laws that were formalised in the aftermath of the second world war, when both sides treated civilians on the other side of the battle lines as little more than pawns on a chessboard.
The aim of those drafting international law was to make it unconscionable for there to be a repeat of Nazi atrocities in Europe, as well as other crimes such as Britain’s fire bombing of German cities like Dresden or the United States’ dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“Gaza is about as flagrant a violation of this prohibition as can be found”
One of the fundamentals of international law – at the heart of the Geneva Conventions – is a prohibition on collective punishment: that is, retaliating against the enemy’s civilian population, making them pay the price for the acts of their leaders and armies.
Very obviously, Gaza is about as flagrant a violation of this prohibition as can be found. Even in “quiet” times, its inhabitants – one million of them children – are denied the most basic freedoms, such as the right to movement; access to proper health care because medicines and equipment cannot be brought in; access to drinkable water; and the use of electricity for much of the day because Israel keeps bombing Gaza’s power station.
Israel has never made any bones of the fact that it is punishing the people of Gaza for being ruled by Hamas, which rejects Israel’s right to have dispossessed the Palestinians of their homeland in 1948 and imprisoned them in overcrowded ghettos like Gaza.
What Israel is doing to Gaza is the very definition of collective punishment. It is a war crime: 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks of every year, for 16 years.
And yet no one in the so-called international community seems to have noticed.
Rules of war rewritten
But the trickiest legal situation – for Israel and the West – is when Israel bombs Gaza, as it is doing now, or sends in soldiers, as it soon will do.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu highlighted the problem when he told the people of Gaza: “Leave now”. But, as he and Western leaders know, Gaza’s inhabitants have nowhere to go, nowhere to escape the bombs. So any Israeli attack is, by definition, on the civilian population too. It is the modern equivalent of the Dresden fire bombings.
Israel has been working on strategies to overcome this difficulty since its first major bombardment of Gaza in late 2008, after the siege was introduced.
A unit in its attorney general’s office was charged with finding ways to rewrite the rules of war in Israel’s favour.
At the time, the unit was concerned that Israel would be criticised for blowing up a police graduation ceremony in Gaza, killing many young cadets. Police are civilians in international law, not soldiers, and therefore not a legitimate target. Israeli lawyers were also worried that Israel had destroyed government offices, the infrastructure of Gaza’s civilian administration.
Israel’s concerns seem quaint now – a sign of how far it has already shifted the dial on international law. For some time, anyone connected with Hamas, however tangentially, is considered a legitimate target, not just by Israel but by every Western government.
“If you do something for long enough, the world will accept it”
Western officials have joined Israel in treating Hamas as simply a terrorist organisation, ignoring that it is also a government with people doing humdrum tasks like making sure bins are collected and schools kept open.
Or as Orna Ben-Naftali, a law faculty dean, told the Haaretz newspaper back in 2009: “A situation is created in which the majority of the adult men in Gaza and the majority of the buildings can be treated as legitimate targets. The law has actually been stood on its head.”
Back at that time, David Reisner, who had previously headed the unit, explained Israel’s philosophy to Haaretz: “What we are seeing now is a revision of international law. If you do something for long enough, the world will accept it.
“The whole of international law is now based on the notion that an act that is forbidden today becomes permissible if executed by enough countries.”
Israel’s meddling to change international law goes back many decades.
Referring to Israel’s attack on Iraq’s fledgling nuclear reactor in 1981, an act of war condemned by the UN Security Council, Reisner said: “The atmosphere was that Israel had committed a crime. Today everyone says it was preventive self-defence. International law progresses through violations.”
He added that his team had travelled to the US four times in 2001 to persuade US officials of Israel’s ever-more flexible interpretation of international law towards subjugating Palestinians.
“Had it not been for those four planes [journeys to the US], I am not sure we would have been able to develop the thesis of the war against terrorism on the present scale,” he said.
Those redefinitions of the rules of war proved invaluable when the US chose to invade and occupy Afghanistan and Iraq.
‘Human animals’
In recent years, Israel has continued to “evolve” international law. It has introduced the concept of “prior warning” – sometimes giving a few minutes’ notice of a building or neighbourhood’s destruction. Vulnerable civilians still in the area, like the elderly, children and the disabled, are then recast as legitimate targets for failing to leave in time.
And it is using the current assault on Gaza to change the rules still further.
The 2009 Haaretz article includes references by law officials to Yoav Gallant, who was then the military commander in charge of Gaza. He was described as a “wild man”, a “cowboy” with no time for legal niceties.
Gallant is now defence minister and the man responsible for instituting this week a “complete siege” of Gaza: “No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel – everything is closed.” In language that blurred any distinction between Hamas and Gaza’s civilians, he described Palestinians as “human animals”.
That takes collective punishment into a whole different realm. In terms of international law, it skirts into the territory of genocide, both rhetorically and substantively.
But the dial has shifted so completely that even centrist Western politicians are cheering Israel on – often not even calling for “restraint” or “proportionality”, the weasel terms they usually use to obscure their support for law breaking.
Britain has been leading the way in helping Israel to rewrite the rulebook on international law.
“Britain has been leading the way in helping Israel to rewrite the rulebook on international law”
Listen to Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour opposition and the man almost certain to be Britain’s next prime minister. This week he supported the “complete siege” of Gaza, a crime against humanity, refashioning it as Israel’s “right to defend itself”.
Starmer has not failed to grasp the legal implications of Israel’s actions, even if he seems personally immune to the moral implications. He is trained as a human rights lawyer.
His approach even appears to be taking aback journalists not known for being sympathetic to the Palestinian case. When asked by Kay Burley of Sky News if he had any sympathy for the civilians in Gaza being treated like “human animals”, Starmer could not find a single thing to say in support.
Instead, he deflected to an outright deception: blaming Hamas for sabotaging a “peace process” that Israel both practically and declaratively buried years ago.
Confirming that the Labour party now condones war crimes by Israel, his shadow attorney general, Emily Thornberry, has been sticking to the same script. On BBC’s Newsnight, she evaded questions about whether cutting off power and supplies to Gaza is in line with international law.
It is no coincidence that Starmer’s position contrasts so dramatically with that of his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn. The latter was driven out of office by a sustained campaign of antisemitism smears fomented by Israel’s most fervent supporters in the UK.
Starmer does not dare to be seen on the wrong side of this issue. And that is exactly the outcome Israeli officials wanted and expected.
Israeli flag on No 10
Starmer is, of course, far from alone. Grant Shapps, Britain’s defence secretary, has also expressed trenchant support for Israel’s policy of starving two million Palestinians in Gaza.
Rishi Sunak, the UK prime minister, has emblazoned the Israeli flag on the front of his official residence, 10 Downing Street, apparently unconcerned at how he is giving visual form to what would normally be considered an antisemitic trope: that Israel controls the UK’s foreign policy.
Starmer, not wishing to be outdone, has called for Wembley stadium’s arch to be adorned with the colours of the Israeli flag.
“The media is playing its part, dependably as ever“
However much this schoolboy cheerleading of Israel is sold as an act of solidarity following Hamas’ slaughter of Israeli civilians at the weekend, the subtext is unmistakeable: Britain has Israel’s back as it starts its retributive campaign of war crimes in Gaza.
That is also the purpose of home secretary Suella Braverman’s advice to the police to treat the waving of Palestinian flags and chants for Palestine’s liberation at protests in support of Gaza as criminal acts.
The media is playing its part, dependably as ever. A Channel 4 TV crew pursued Corbyn through London’s streets this week, demanding he “condemn” Hamas. They insinuated through the framing of those demands that anything less fulsome – such as Corbyn’s additional concerns for the welfare of Gaza’s civilians – was confirmation of the former Labour leader’s antisemitism.
The clear implication from politicians and the establishment media is that any support for Palestinian rights, any demurral from Israel’s “unquestionable right” to commit war crimes, equates to antisemitism.
Europe’s hypocrisy
This double approach, of cheering on genocidal Israeli policies towards Gaza while stifling any dissent, or characterising it as antisemitism, is not confined to the UK.
Across Europe, from the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, to the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the Bulgarian parliament, official buildings have been lit up with the Israeli flag.
Europe’s top official, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, celebrated the Israeli flag smothering the EU parliament this week.
She has repeatedly stated that “Europe stands with Israel”, even as Israeli war crimes start to mount.
The Israeli air force boasted on Thursday it had dropped some 6,000 bombs on Gaza. At the same time, human rights groups reported Israel was firing the incendiary chemical weapon white phosphorus into Gaza, a war crime when used in urban areas. And Defence for Children International noted that more than 500 Palestinian children had been killed so far by Israeli bombs.
It was left to Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur on the occupied territories, to point out that Von Der Leyen was applying the principles of international law entirely inconsistently.
Almost exactly a year ago, the European Commission president denounced Russia’s strikes on civilian infrastructure in Ukraine as war crimes. “Cutting off men, women, children of water, electricity and heating with winter coming – these are acts of pure terror,” she wrote. “And we have to call it as such.”
Albanese noted Von der Leyen had said nothing equivalent about Israel’s even worse attacks on Palestinian infrastructure.
Sending in the heavies
Meanwhile, France has already started breaking up and banning demonstrations against the bombing of Gaza. Its justice minister has echoed Braverman in suggesting solidarity with Palestinians risks offending Jewish communities and should be treated as “hate speech”.
Naturally, Washington is unwavering in its support for whatever Israel decides to do to Gaza, as secretary of state Anthony Blinken made clear during his visit this week.
President Joe Biden has promised weapons and funding, and sent in the military equivalent of “the heavies” to make sure no one disturbs Israel as it carries out those war crimes. An aircraft carrier has been dispatched to the region to ensure quiet from Israel’s neighbours as the ground invasion is launched.
“Washington is unwavering in its support for whatever Israel decides to do to Gaza”
Even those officials whose chief role is to promote international law, such as Antonio Gutteres, secretary general of the UN, have started to move with the shifting ground.
Like most Western officials, he has emphasised Gaza’s “humanitarian needs” above the rules of war Israel is obliged to honour.
This is Israel’s success. The language of international law that should apply to Gaza – of rules and norms Israel must obey – has given way to, at best, the principles of humanitarianism: acts of international charity to patch up the suffering of those whose rights are being systematically trampled on, and those whose lives are being obliterated.
Western officials are more than happy with the direction of travel. Not just for Israel’s sake but for their own too. Because one day in the future, their own populations may be as much trouble to them as Palestinians in Gaza are to Israel right now.
Supporting Israel’s right to defend itself is their downpayment.
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/10/ ... ls-crimes/
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Out of ignorance & fantasy can come truth & reconciliation: we must bring Americans into the anti-Zionist cause
RAINER SHEA ☭
OCT 15, 2023
The most insidious kind of pro-Israel propaganda is not the one where reactionary demagogues share AI-generated pictures of Jewish children who’ve supposedly been beheaded by Hamas; that trick is too easy to counteract. The most insidious manipulation used to ensure public support for aid to Israel stays sufficiently high is the one which discourages the better-informed minority, who know about the reality of Palestinian oppression, from trying to bring the majority to the pro-Palestine stance. Because what better way to ensure the pro-Palestine movement fails, than by making this movement relegated to an insular niche?
This is a hidden reason behind why opposition to Zionism has been so ineffective in the USA: the country’s authentic communist and anti-imperialist movement was virtually destroyed decades ago, so the only mainstream political formations that support Palestine are ones which don’t seek to get out of the movement and into the masses. These left opportunist formations may be denouncing Israel’s crimes, but they’re committing a self-defeating error: being concerned with building influence inside that niche, rather than with reaching the broader population.
As long as the anti-Zionist movement is monopolized by political actors who are satisfied with staying powerless, our government’s project to aid the genocide of Palestinians will remain viable. What can truly end this project is a scenario where tens of millions of more Americans undergo the revelatory experience on Israel which Scott Ritter did; the experience where, as he explains, he went from being complicit in Zionism’s atrocities to an ally of national liberation:
I arrived late to the Palestinian cause. I was too wrapped up in the Israeli saga, too invested in the Israeli fantasy, to see the forest for the trees. I was too busy hating Hamas to realize that I should instead be hating that which enabled Hamas to carry out the crimes it has committed for the past four decades. Simply put, I was blind to the tragedy of the Palestinian people. Today I know that the only true victims in the Israeli saga (outside the children from every walk of life who are caught up in the tragic events foisted upon them by adults who claim to be working for a bright and shiny tomorrow, but only deliver death and destruction) are the Palestinian people. At least Israel’s founding fathers were honest enough to acknowledge this. The Zionists of today lack the moral character to admit that Israel can only be built and sustained at the cost of a viable, free, and independent Palestine, that Israel will never allow such a Palestine to exist, and that if there is a Zionist Israel, there will never be an independent Palestine.
I must clarify that as much as Ritter deserves respect for his contributions to the anti-imperialist cause, I’m not treating his statements throughout this essay uncritically; I dislike his use of terms like “terrorism” to describe the present Palestinian resistance, as this doesn’t take into full account the context in which Hamas and its partnered groups are operating. Is it fair or productive to to call a group that’s fighting to free its people from a massive open-air concentration camp “terroristic?” Definitely not. Another important piece of context regarding Hamas is that even though Israel nurtured Hamas to try to create divisions between Palestinian groups like it and the groups to its left, these groups have since mended their disputes, and formed into a united front. To ignore this is to adopt the same mindset as the imperialism-compatible U.S. leftists who are “anti-imperialist” only in theory, while repeating their government’s lies about every country which challenges Washington’s hegemony. Our response to the Zionists should be “yes, we refuse to condemn Hamas—and?”
Therefore, Ritter’s framing of Hamas as deserving of scorn is based in an understanding which lacks crucial context; but Ritter has shown to be someone who’s open to learning, and I myself didn’t learn what I just said until someone closer to the situation recently confronted me about the problems with reiterating Ritter’s perspective on Hamas without talking about that context. I’m holding up Ritter as a positive example not because I think he gets everything right about the situation, but because he shows even a professional Israel supporter can change.
There are enough Americans like the one who Ritter used to be; those being the kinds who only still support Israel because they haven’t yet seen the truth about the “country”; for a majority of the people to be brought towards anti-Zionism. Most Americans have already been brought halfway to supporting the cause of the Russians who are fighting to demilitarize and denazify fascist Ukraine, with more than half of Americans now being opposed to further Ukraine aid. And many of these Americans are the same conservative-leaning people who are at present supporting Israel. We can interpret their lack of willingness to apply the same critical thinking to Israel which they’ve applied to Ukraine as reason for being discouraged about the antiwar movement’s future; or we can interpret it as a reason to believe the antiwar movement’s recent gains can be built upon.
Are the majority of the USA’s people (who’ve said they sympathize with Israel) truly unable to ever come to the right side of history on this issue, even though they’ve been able to do so on Ukraine? Ritter was able to undergo this transformation because his support for Israel was based within a genuine belief that Israel represented humanitarian values; though Ritter is a Republican, he’s of a different nature than the right-wing agents of Zionist hate, who are fully aware that Israel is deliberately murdering Gazan civilians and are cheering Israel on for doing so. He could only be “pro-Israel” for as long as he didn’t know what he was supporting; and what helped him recognize the reality of Israel’s genocide against Palestine were the pieces of evidence that “Israel” is fundamentally fake.
Netanyahu’s bragging about how easy it is for Israel to influence U.S. officials; the efforts by Netanyahu and others to bring Hamas into power; Israel’s working to divide Palestinians by supporting one faction over another; these weren’t the actions of the kind of state Ritter thought Israel was. In the Israeli fantasy, whatever harms Israel may be responsible for happen in spite of the state’s nature, not because of it. And to maintain this myth, Israel has to perpetually cover up its war crimes and corrupt political tricks. Minds like Netanyahu’s can rationalize these evils due to their single-minded desire for anti-Palestinian violence; as one of Ritter’s Israeli guides once said about Netanyahu, “he only knows hate.” Minds like that of the younger Ritter, though, need to be unaware of Israel’s criminal nature in order to keep being pro-Israel.
This concealment of reality, combined with the efforts to suppress anti-Zionist speech and assembly, is why the U.S. empire is (for now) able to maintain the narrative that supporting Israel’s supposed right to exist is essential for supporting Jewish people against antisemitism. The imperialist media has an incentive to avoid platforming the Jews who oppose Zionism; and these kinds of Jews are subjected to unhinged Zionist intimidation tactics both on and offline, while their community and the the rest of society get targeted with intensive pro-Israel psyops. The imperial state is going to continue providing endless resources for the projects to dox, harass, censor, and excommunicate pro-Palestine individuals, because the hegemon needs Israel to exist in order to remain the hegemon. As Joe Biden once said, if an Israel weren’t here, we would need to invent one.
When I accuse American leftists of failing the Palestinian cause, I’m not primarily thinking of the “leftists” whose failure is so complete that they’ve condemned both sides in the present conflict. Those kinds are easily recognizable as opportunists. I’m mainly thinking of the leftists who understand everything I just wrote about why Israel doesn’t have a right to exist, yet insist on staying in a ditch when it comes to movement-building; who act according to the belief that we can defeat the capitalist state while seeking to appeal only to liberals, and to those already within the activist niche. We can’t defeat Zionism; or the imperial state that’s behind it; while denouncing every anti-imperialist rally, political actor, and organization which threatens the efforts of the major “left” orgs to monopolize activism spaces.
We can’t afford such pettiness, we need to focus on the next tasks in our mission as anti-imperialists: bringing the majority of Americans to the pro-Palestine stance, preemptively combating the pro-war psyops about Mexico, exposing the hegemon’s crimes in its emerging hybrid war on BRICS, raising awareness about Uhuru’s persecution, and creating the same mass opposition towards war with China and Iran which has come to exist in regard to Russia. Americans have more revolutionary potential than the ineffectual left believes they do, and most of them can be made into allies in these efforts.
https://rainershea.substack.com/p/out-o ... um=reader2
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Bombing Kids And Blaming It On Hamas
There’s no “collateral damage” in Gaza. Collateral damage is when you unintentionally kill civilians. You can’t drop military explosives on places you know are densely packed with children and then call their deaths unintentional.
Caitlin Johnstone
October 16, 2023
There’s no “collateral damage” in Gaza. Collateral damage is when you unintentionally kill civilians. You can’t drop military explosives on places you know are densely packed with children and then call their deaths unintentional. It’s like calling the death and destruction caused by Hiroshima and Nagasaki unintentional.
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The “human shields” narrative is just Israel bombing civilians and blaming it on someone else. That’s all it’s ever been.
The “human shields” argument is like if London had responded to an IRA attack by dropping thousands of bombs on Belfast, killing thousands of Irish civilians and hundreds of children, and justifying its bombing campaign by calling it an unfortunate but necessary measure to take out the IRA’s Belfast Brigade because they’re located in the same places as civilians.
It’s like if the western political/media class defended and supported the carpet bombing of Belfast, saying “All those thousands of deaths are the fault of the IRA, because they’re in Belfast where the civilians are. England has a right to defend itself, after all.”
It’s like if Belfast was walled in with nowhere for civilians to escape to, and London carpet bombed it targeting schools, churches and hospitals, and the western press framed this relentless assault on civilian buildings as “the UK-IRA war” in which London is exclusively bombing “IRA targets in Belfast”.
It’s like if the British spent a week dropping military explosives on locations it knew were packed with Irish children, and anyone who criticized this was accused of anti-Britishism and blood libel.
And to be clear this is not something I’d put past the British actually doing during the Troubles… if the Irish were Muslim and their skin was a little darker.
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The US and its allies need to invade Syria immediately to stop Assad’s brutal bombing of civilians, siege warfare and criminally indiscriminate use of white phosphorus. Save the children of Syria!
Oh wait it’s just Israel killing Palestinians? Shit, never mind.
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Step 1: Abuse and kill Muslims
Step 2: Wait for Muslims to respond to those abuses with violence
Step 3: Cite that violence as justification for more killing and abuse to fight “radical Islamic terrorism”.
Works for the US empire’s bogus “war on terror”, and it works for Israel.
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Pretty wild how the world is full of grown adults who truly believe the Hamas attack came completely out of nowhere and happened solely because some Palestinians are evil and love killing Jews.
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The only reason people think Muslims are violent is because they are often born on top of oil. That’s the only reason for the US empire’s butchery in the middle east and its support for the ongoing military operation known as Israel, which is all Muslims there are ever reacting to. It’s not okay for grown adults to believe extremist groups spring up in a vacuum in the Islamic world, completely out of nowhere, and would exist whether or not they’d watched their loved ones killed and displaced by western interventionism over resource control.
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Israel apologist translation guide:
“You’re an anti-semite” = “I cannot defend Israel’s actions using facts and logic.”
“You hate Jews” = “I cannot defend Israel’s actions using facts and logic.”
“You want Jews to die” = “I cannot defend Israel’s actions using facts and logic.”
“You love Hamas” = “I cannot defend Israel’s actions using facts and logic.”
“You side with the terrorists” = “I cannot defend Israel’s actions using facts and logic.”
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Not that it really matters but for the record I personally have a great love for Jews and Jewish culture. Always have, since I was a kid. Most of my anti-war heroes are Jewish, and Jewish artists and thinkers have played a tremendous role in shaping my worldview. My criticisms are directed solely at the apartheid state which cannot exist in the way it exists without nonstop violence and war, which is falsely framed by the western empire as the monolithic source and stronghold of all things Jewish.
Conflating the abuses of that state with Jewishness and Judaism is profoundly anti-semitic. Jews are not anything remotely close to a monolith on the issue of Israel and Zionism. Most of what I’ve learned about Israel over the years I’ve learned from the brilliant Jewish people I follow who oppose it.
https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2023/10 ... -on-hamas/
(@JackRussell2022) October 15, 2023
16 October 2023
