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By Romi Mahajan

Growing up, I heard much about the Vietnam “War” from my parents and brother.   Few in the United States know that 6 million Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians were killed in a mechanized slaughter.  Just over 58,000 Americans were killed.  Death is bad, murder worse.  But ratios of one-to-a-hundred indicate something different than a two-sided “war.”  That should be obvious to anyone, including those who remember that after Heydrich was killed, the Nazis decided that one-hundred Czechoslovakians would be killed for every Nazi.  It is what I call “The Lidice Ratio.”

I also came to understand that the Vietnamese were as tough a people as one could imagine. Poor, with little modern infrastructure, they “won” against the mightiest military the world had ever seen.  “Won” of course is a strange term when your country is in ruins and millions are dead or maimed.  “Won” is a strange term when even after victory, your foliage is destroyed, your land pockmarked with mines, and your people starving and embargoed.  But they did win, in many ways.

Here’s the thing though:  They won for others not for themselves.  They fought hard to protect their country and to stave off imperialism and from their struggle, others gained.  The “Vietnam Syndrome” kept America at bay for years.  Not that it didn’t finance wars or commit acts of global violence.  But it didn’t go to war and stopped physically-corporeally intervening for decades, until Iraq was unlucky enough to draw the short straw.  Along the way, sure, it destroyed Central America and intervened successfully to ensure East Timorese were massacred (and of course there is more), but it was still held at bay in relative terms.

The Palestinians are the Vietnamese of 2024.  Not in the sense that they are “fighting” a superpower (after all, they are being bombed to smithereens, starved, displaced, murdered, and have no real defenses) but in the sense that their dignity in suffering and unwavering commitment to their own culture has awed the world.  On campuses worldwide, students are in solidarity with Palestinians.  Often inert folks who are good people but don’t have a political vocabulary are speaking out in disgust at Israeli aggression.

In the Palestinians is a reflection of our humanity, our dignity, our souls.

Generations hence peoples who are left in relative peace by an oppressive force will have the Palestinians to thank.  They are not going to disappear howsoever hard the Likud thugs try to eliminate them.  Their dignity and their fight, even under impossible conditions, are a beacon to the entire world, to anyone suffering under the yoke of oppression.  Now and in the future.

24 April 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Jordan Shilton

The number of bodies discovered in four mass graves at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis in southern Gaza rose to at least 310 Tuesday. The horrific discovery over the past 72 hours provides further evidence of Israel’s imperialist-backed genocide against the Palestinians, which is set to escalate imminently due to the looming assault on the more than 1.5 million men, women and children struggling to survive in Rafah.

Palestinian Civil Defence personnel continued Tuesday to discover bodies, including women and elderly people, buried under piles of waste. Zaina Haroun, a representative of the West Bank-based al-Haq Palestinian rights group, told Al Jazeera that the grisly discovery was “stark evidence of war crimes and of course the genocide which is being perpetrated against the Palestinian people in Gaza by Israel.”

Referring to the uncovering of similar mass graves several weeks ago at Shifa hospital in Gaza City, she continued, “One family member was desperate to find just a trace of his uncle; he said that he found his sandals but even if he could find a body part, an arm or a leg, that they could at least take that and bury him so they’re able to sleep at night.”

The inhuman scenes from Khan Younis and Gaza City, reminiscent of the genocides of the 20th century, underscore the barbarism of the imperialist-backed Israeli regime.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s fascistic government has openly declared its intention to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip, denounced Palestinians as “human animals,” systematically denied aid to hundreds of thousands stranded in the north of the enclave, and killed over 34,000 people during 200 days of non-stop bombardments.

With the fulsome support of US imperialism and its European allies, the Israeli regime has brushed aside the charge of genocide brought against it by South Africa at the International Court of Justice and continued its onslaught as famine takes hold in Gaza.

On Tuesday, US special envoy for humanitarian issues David Satterfield described the threat of famine in Gaza as “very high.” Gaza’s Government Media Office reported that 30 children have died so far as “a result of famine.”

In its latest situation report on Gaza, the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) noted that there has been “very little significant change” in the amount of aid entering Gaza or the approval by Israel of aid convoys to the north of Gaza over recent weeks.

Three weeks ago, after Israel’s targeted killing of seven aid workers from the World Central Kitchen organisation, the Netanyahu government claimed it was prepared to open a land border crossing into northern Gaza and increase the flow of trucks into the enclave to over 300 per day. UNRWA head Philippe Lazzarini reported that 310 trucks crossed into Gaza Tuesday, well short of the 500 to 600 trucks most aid organisations agree are necessary to supply adequate food and other basic necessities to Gaza’s population.

The UNRWA report also noted that at least 435 attacks have been conducted by Israel on health workers or institutions since the onset of the genocide, a monthly rate that is higher than any other recent conflict. Since October 7, 180 UNRWA employees have been killed by Israel.

Israel’s destruction of Gaza has displaced over 75 percent of Gaza’s inhabitants, with 1.7 million people forced to flee “multiple times.” The repeated displacements have fueled the spread of infectious diseases, which have infected some 1.09 million people, or close to 50 percent of the population. According to UN human rights chief Volker Turk, a child is being killed or wounded in Gaza “every 10 minutes.”

The systematic dismantling of all civilian infrastructure by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) has created a situation in which disease and famine will soon claim more lives than the daily air strikes. Only 10 of the 36 hospitals in the enclave prior to the war are still functioning to any degree as health care facilities. Hospitals have either been turned into killing fields, as at al-Shifa or Nasser hospitals, or taken over by the IDF. The Turkish-Palestinian Friends hospital south of Gaza City, formerly home to the only specialist cancer unit in Gaza, has been transformed by the IDF into a military base.

In a report released this week entitled “Manufacturing Famine: Israel is committing the war crime of starvation in the Gaza Strip,” B’Tselem-the Israeli Centre for Human rights in the Occupied Territories documents Israel’s culpability in the hunger crisis in the enclave, and its short- and long-term implications. Basing itself on the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, the report noted that Gaza was in phase 4 during February and March, immediately below phase 5, which is famine.

During these months, 55 percent of households in the north, and 25 percent of households in the central and southern areas were already at phase 5. These figures are expected to rise to 70 percent for the north, 50 percent for central Gaza, and 45 percent for the south, which would put Gaza as a whole in a famine. The report noted that Samantha Power, head of USAID, became the first US official to publicly admit that famine has already taken hold in northern Gaza at a hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee in early April.

Khamis al-A’araj, a 52-year-old resident of the Falujah neighbourhood of the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza, described the horrendous living conditions in the report:

“There is no food or water here. In fact, there’s nothing here. You can’t get food in the market, either—no canned food, flour or rice. There isn’t even barley left. Sometimes we manage to find khubeiza [a flowering, edible plant] growing by the roadside or in the fields and we pick it. If we manage to find some cardboard or wood to make a fire, we cook it in water and eat it for a day or two and at least manage to sleep better at night. We used to eat khubeiza maybe once a year, and now it’s almost our only source of food. In the last four days, we didn’t sleep at all because we’re so hungry. We didn’t eat a single thing. We couldn’t get any food. All I do is look for food, all the time, and I can’t stop thinking about it at night, either. Everyone here in the camp is pale with hunger and can barely stand on their feet.

Strengthened by the bipartisan vote in the US House on Saturday and Senate on Tuesday to provide $26 billion in additional aid for its genocidal onslaught, Israel’s far-right government is preparing to turn Rafah, like the north and Khan Younis before it, into rubble.

The Associated Press published Tuesday satellite images showing the construction of a tent city to the west of Khan Younis, a sign of preparations to displace Rafah’s population. The IDF told AP that it was not involved in establishing the tent compound. Israeli daily Haaretz reported that the Egyptian government was constructing the site in order to prevent Palestinians from crossing the border into the Sinai.

Whatever the case may be, a tent compound for over 1.5 million people would in effect be a massive concentration camp for more than half of Gaza’s population and create the conditions for the further spread of disease.

As Fabrizio Carboni, Middle East regional director for the International Committee of the Red Cross, told AFP, humanitarian workers have no knowledge of a plan to evacuate Rafah’s population, and such a plan would be impossible to implement. “When we see the level of destruction in the middle area [of Gaza] and in the north, it’s not clear to us where people will be moved to … where they can have decent shelter and essential services,” he said. “So today, with the information we have and from where we stand, we don’t see this [massive evacuation] as possible.”

The normalisation of the IDF’s barbarism in Gaza has been fully endorsed by Washington, which sees the genocide as a key component of its escalation of a region-wide war aimed at Iran. This conflict, through which American imperialism aims to consolidate its hegemony over the energy-rich Middle East, is one front in a rapidly developing third world war between the major powers for a redivision of the world.

Putting a stop to the Gaza genocide and imperialist war demands the building of an international anti-war movement led by the working class. Under conditions in which the imperialist powers are cracking down on all forms of opposition to war and genocide with extreme ruthlessness, workers must respond in every country by mobilizing politically on the basis of a socialist and internationalist programme to put an end to the capitalist profit system, which is reviving all the horrors of the 20th century.

24 April 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies

16 Apr 2024 – The Israeli online magazine +972 has published a detailed report on Israel’s use of an artificial intelligence (AI) system called “Lavender” to target thousands of Palestinian men in its bombing campaign in Gaza. When Israel attacked Gaza after October 7, the Lavender system had a database of 37,000 Palestinian men with suspected links to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).

Lavender assigns a numerical score, from one to a hundred, to every man in Gaza, based mainly on cellphone and social media data, and automatically adds those with high scores to its kill list of suspected militants. Israel uses another automated system, known as “Where’s Daddy?”, to call in airstrikes to kill these men and their families in their homes.

The report is based on interviews with six Israeli intelligence officers who have worked with these systems. As one of the officers explained to +972, by adding a name from a Lavender-generated list to the Where’s Daddy home tracking system, he can place the man’s home under constant drone surveillance, and an airstrike will be launched once he comes home.

The officers said the “collateral” killing of the men’s extended families was of little consequence to Israel. “Let’s say you calculate [that there is one] Hamas [operative] plus 10 [civilians in the house],” the officer said. “Usually, these 10 will be women and children. So absurdly, it turns out that most of the people you killed were women and children.”

The officers explained that the decision to target thousands of these men in their homes is just a question of expediency. It is simply easier to wait for them to come home to the address on file in the system, and then bomb that house or apartment building, than to search for them in the chaos of the war-torn Gaza Strip.

The officers who spoke to 972+ explained that in previous Israeli massacres in Gaza, they could not generate targets quickly enough to satisfy their political and military bosses, and so these AI systems were designed to solve that problem for them. The speed with which Lavender can generate new targets only gives its human minders an average of 20 seconds to review and rbber-stamp each name, even though they know from tests of the Lavender system that at least 10% of the men chosen for assassination and familicide have only an insignificant or a mistaken connection with Hamas or PIJ.

The Lavender AI system is a new weapon, developed by Israel. But the kind of kill lists that it generates have a long pedigree in U.S. wars, occupations and CIA regime change operations. Since the birth of the CIA after the Second World War, the technology used to create kill lists has evolved from the CIA’s earliest coups in Iran and Guatemala, to Indonesia and the Phoenix program in Vietnam in the 1960s, to Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s and to the U.S. occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Just as U.S. weapons development aims to be at the cutting edge, or the killing edge, of new technology, the CIA and U.S. military intelligence have always tried to use the latest data processing technology to identify and kill their enemies.

The CIA learned some of these methods from German intelligence officers captured at the end of the Second World War. Many of the names on Nazi kill lists were generated by an intelligence unit called Fremde Heere Ost (Foreign Armies East), under the command of Major General Reinhard Gehlen, Germany’s spy chief on the eastern front (see David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard, p. 268).

Gehlen and the FHO had no computers, but they did have access to four million Soviet POWs from all over the USSR, and no compunction about torturing them to learn the names of Jews and communist officials in their hometowns to compile kill lists for the Gestapo and Einsatzgruppen.

After the war, like the 1,600 German scientists spirited out of Germany in Operation Paperclip, the United States flew Gehlen and his senior staff to Fort Hunt in Virginia. They were welcomed by Allen Dulles, soon to be the first and still the longest-serving director of the CIA. Dulles sent them back to Pullach in occupied Germany to resume their anti-Soviet operations as CIA agents. The Gehlen Organization formed the nucleus of what became the BND, the new West German intelligence service, with Reinhard Gehlen as its director until he retired in 1968.

After a CIA coup removed Iran’s popular, democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, a CIA team led by U.S. Major General Norman Schwarzkopf trained a new intelligence service, known as SAVAK, in the use of kill lists and torture. SAVAK used these skills to purge Iran’s government and military of suspected communists and later to hunt down anyone who dared to oppose the Shah.

By 1975, Amnesty International estimated that Iran was holding between 25,000 and 100,000 political prisoners, and had “the highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture that is beyond belief.”

In Guatemala, a CIA coup in 1954 replaced the democratic government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman with a brutal dictatorship. As resistance grew in the 1960s, U.S. special forces joined the Guatemalan army in a scorched earth campaign in Zacapa, which killed 15,000 people to defeat a few hundred armed rebels. Meanwhile, CIA-trained urban death squads abducted, tortured and killed PGT (Guatemalan Labor Party) members in Guatemala City, notably 28 prominent labor leaders who were abducted and disappeared in March 1966.

Once this first wave of resistance was suppressed, the CIA set up a new telecommunications center and intelligence agency, based in the presidential palace. It compiled a database of “subversives” across the country that included leaders of farming co-ops and labor, student and indigenous activists, to provide ever-growing lists for the death squads. The resulting civil war became a genocide against indigenous people in Ixil and the western highlands that killed or disappeared at least 200,000 people.

This pattern was repeated across the world, wherever popular, progressive leaders offered hope to their people in ways that challenged U.S. interests. As historian Gabriel Kolko wrote in 1988, “The irony of U.S. policy in the Third World is that, while it has always justified its larger objectives and efforts in the name of anticommunism, its own goals have made it unable to tolerate change from any quarter that impinged significantly on its own interests.”

When General Suharto seized power in Indonesia in 1965, the U.S. Embassy compiled a list of 5,000 communists for his death squads to hunt down and kill. The CIA estimated that they eventually killed 250,000 people, while other estimates run as high as a million.

Twenty-five years later, journalist Kathy Kadane investigated the U.S. role in the massacre in Indonesia, and spoke to Robert Martens, the political officer who led the State-CIA team that compiled the kill list. “It really was a big help to the army,” Martens told Kadane. “They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands. But that’s not all bad – there’s a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment.”

Kathy Kadane also spoke to former CIA director William Colby, who was the head of the CIA’s Far East division in the 1960s. Colby compared the U.S. role in Indonesia to the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, which was launched two years later, claiming that they were both successful programs to identify and eliminate the organizational structure of America’s communist enemies.

The Phoenix program was designed to uncover and dismantle the National Liberation Front’s (NLF) shadow government across South Vietnam. Phoenix’s Combined Intelligence Center in Saigon fed thousands of names into an IBM 1401 computer, along with their locations and their alleged roles in the NLF. The CIA credited the Phoenix program with killing 26,369 NLF officials, while another 55,000 were imprisoned or persuaded to defect. Seymour Hersh reviewed South Vietnamese government documents that put the death toll at 41,000.

How many of the dead were correctly identified as NLF officials may be impossible to know, but Americans who took part in Phoenix operations reported killing the wrong people in many cases. Navy SEAL Elton Manzione told author Douglas Valentine (The Phoenix Program) how he killed two young girls in a night raid on a village, and then sat down on a stack of ammunition crates with a hand grenade and an M-16, threatening to blow himself up, until he got a ticket home.

“The whole aura of the Vietnam War was influenced by what went on in the “hunter-killer” teams of Phoenix, Delta, etc,” Manzione told Valentine. “That was the point at which many of us realized we were no longer the good guys in the white hats defending freedom – that we were assassins, pure and simple. That disillusionment carried over to all other aspects of the war and was eventually responsible for it becoming America’s most unpopular war.”

Even as the U.S. defeat in Vietnam and the “war fatigue” in the United States led to a more peaceful next decade, the CIA continued to engineer and support coups around the world, and to provide post-coup governments with increasingly computerized kill lists to consolidate their rule.

After supporting General Pinochet’s coup in Chile in 1973, the CIA played a central role in Operation Condor, an alliance between right-wing military governments in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia, to hunt down tens of thousands of their and each other’s political opponents and dissidents, killing and disappearing at least 60,000 people.

The CIA’s role in Operation Condor is still shrouded in secrecy, but Patrice McSherry, a political scientist at Long Island University, has investigated the U.S. role and concluded, “Operation Condor also had the covert support of the US government. Washington provided Condor with military intelligence and training, financial assistance, advanced computers, sophisticated tracking technology, and access to the continental telecommunications system housed in the Panama Canal Zone.”

McSherry’s research revealed how the CIA supported the intelligence services of the Condor states with computerized links, a telex system, and purpose-built encoding and decoding machines made by the CIA Logistics Department. As she wrote in her book, Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America:

“The Condor system’s secure communications system, Condortel,… allowed Condor operations centers in member countries to communicate with one another and with the parent station in a U.S. facility in the Panama Canal Zone. This link to the U.S. military-intelligence complex in Panama is a key piece of evidence regarding secret U.S. sponsorship of Condor…”

Operation Condor ultimately failed, but the U.S. provided similar support and training to right-wing governments in Colombia and Central America throughout the 1980s in what senior military officers have called a “quiet, disguised, media-free approach” to repression and kill lists.

The U.S. School of the Americas (SOA) trained thousands of Latin American officers in the use of torture and death squads, as Major Joseph Blair, the SOA’s former chief of instruction described to John Pilger for his film, The War You Don’t See:

“The doctrine that was taught was that, if you want information, you use physical abuse, false imprisonment, threats to family members, and killing. If you can’t get the information you want, if you can’t get the person to shut up or stop what they’re doing, you assassinate them – and you assassinate them with one of your death squads.”

When the same methods were transferred to the U.S. hostile military occupation of Iraq after 2003, Newsweek headlined it “The Salvador Option.” A U.S. officer explained to Newsweek that U.S. and Iraqi death squads were targeting Iraqi civilians as well as resistance fighters. “The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists,” he said. “From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation.”

The United States sent two veterans of its dirty wars in Latin America to Iraq to play key roles in that campaign. Colonel James Steele led the U.S. Military Advisor Group in El Salvador from 1984 to 1986, training and supervising Salvadoran forces who killed tens of thousands of civilians. He was also deeply involved in the Iran-Contra scandal, narrowly escaping a prison sentence for his role supervising shipments from Ilopango air base in El Salvador to the U.S.-backed Contras in Honduras and Nicaragua.

In Iraq, Steele oversaw the training of the Interior Ministry’s Special Police Commandos – rebranded as “National” and later “Federal” Police after the discovery of their al-Jadiriyah torture center and other atrocities.

Bayan al-Jabr, a commander in the Iranian-trained Badr Brigade militia, was appointed Interior Minister in 2005, and Badr militiamen were integrated into the Wolf Brigade death squad and other Special Police units. Jabr’s chief adviser was Steven Casteel, the former intelligence chief for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in Latin America.

The Interior Ministry death squads waged a dirty war in Baghdad and other cities, filling the Baghdad morgue with up to 1,800 corpses per month, while Casteel fed the western media absurd cover stories, such as that the death squads were all “insurgents” in stolen police uniforms.

Meanwhile U.S. special operations forces conducted “kill-or-capture” night raids in search of Resistance leaders. General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of Joint Special Operations Command from 2003-2008, oversaw the development of a database system, used in Iraq and Afghanistan, that compiled cellphone numbers mined from captured cellphones to generate an ever-expanding target list for night raids and air strikes.

The targeting of cellphones instead of actual people enabled the automation of the targeting system, and explicitly excluded using human intelligence to confirm identities. Two senior U.S. commanders told the Washington Post that only half the night raids attacked the right house or person.

In Afghanistan, President Obama put McChrystal in charge of U.S. and NATO forces in 2009, and his cellphone-based “social network analysis” enabled an exponential increase in night raids, from 20 raids per month in May 2009 to up to 40 per night by April 2011.

As with the Lavender system in Gaza, this huge increase in targets was achieved by taking a system originally designed to identify and track a small number of senior enemy commanders and applying it to anyone suspected of having links with the Taliban, based on their cellphone data.

This led to the capture of an endless flood of innocent civilians, so that most civilian detainees had to be quickly released to make room for new ones. The increased killing of innocent civilians in night raids and airstrikes fueled already fierce resistance to the U.S. and NATO occupation and ultimately led to its defeat.

President Obama’s drone campaign to kill suspected enemies in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia was just as indiscriminate, with reports suggesting that 90% of the people it killed in Pakistan were innocent civilians.

And yet Obama and his national security team kept meeting in the White House every “Terror Tuesday” to select who the drones would target that week, using an Orwellian, computerized “disposition matrix” to provide technological cover for their life and death decisions.

Looking at this evolution of ever-more automated systems for killing and capturing enemies, we can see how, as the information technology used has advanced from telexes to cellphones and from early IBM computers to artificial intelligence, the human intelligence and sensibility that could spot mistakes, prioritize human life and prevent the killing of innocent civilians has been progressively marginalized and excluded, making these operations more brutal and horrifying than ever.

Nicolas has at least two good friends who survived the dirty wars in Latin America because someone who worked in the police or military got word to them that their names were on a death list, one in Argentina, the other in Guatemala. If their fates had been decided by an AI machine like Lavender, they would both be long dead.

As with supposed advances in other types of weapons technology, like drones and “precision” bombs and missiles, innovations that claim to make targeting more precise and eliminate human error have instead led to the automated mass murder of innocent people, especially women and children, bringing us full circle from one holocaust to the next.

Medea Benjamin is cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher with CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.

22 April 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Marjorie Cohn

Unlike Washington, Berlin — Israel’s second-largest arms supplier — has consented to full jurisdiction of the ICJ so it is an easier target for Nicaragua’s lawsuit.

18 Apr 2024 –  As Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinians in Gaza — which has killed more than 33,000 Gazans — enters its seventh month, Nicaragua sued Germany in the International Court of Justice (ICJ, or World Court) for facilitating genocide.

Nicaragua charged that, “Germany has provided political, financial and military support to Israel fully aware at the time of authorization that the military equipment would be used in the commission of great breaches of international law,” adding,

“The military equipment provided by Germany enabling Israel to perpetrate genocidal acts and other atrocities, included supplies to the front line and warehouses, and assurances of future supplies such as ammunition, technology and diverse components necessary for the Israeli military.”

Nicaragua also cited Germany’s defunding of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which “provides essential support to the civilian population.”

Germany is the second-largest arms supplier to Israel, accounting for 30 percent of imports between 2019 and 2023. The United States, Israel’s chief enabler, provided it with 69 percent of its arms imports during the same period.

On Oct. 12, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz stated,

“At this moment, there is only one place for Germany: the place at the side of Israel. This is what we mean when we say that Israel’s security is a German raison d’État. Our own history, our responsibility arising from the Holocaust, makes it our perpetual duty to stand up for the existence and security of the State of Israel. This responsibility guides us.”

In a historic hearing on April 8 and 9, Nicaragua presented its case to the ICJ and Germany denied the charges. Nicaragua asked the World Court to order five provisional measures “as a matter of extreme urgency” for Germany’s alleged “participation in the ongoing plausible genocide and serious breaches of international humanitarian law and other peremptory norms of general international law occurring in the Gaza Strip.”

Daniel Müller, a lawyer on Nicaragua’s legal team, reminded the ICJ that 10 days prior, when the court ordered additional provisional measures against Israel in South Africa’s case, it called the living conditions in Gaza “catastrophic” and the recent developments “exceptionally grave.” The court found “an imminent risk of irreparable harm to ‘the right of the Palestinians in Gaza to be protected from acts of genocide’.”

“Nicaragua is acting not only on its own behalf on the basis of the rights and obligations conferred by the peremptory norms invoked, but also on behalf of the Palestinian people that is being subjected to one of the most destructive military actions in modern history,” Carlos José Argüello Gómez, Nicaragua’s ambassador to the Netherlands, told the court.

Gómez said that although Nicaragua hasn’t been subjected to as much inhuman treatment and destruction as the Palestinians have suffered for more than 75 years, “it has also been subject to intervention and military attacks for most of its existence and feels empathy for the Palestinian people.”

In the 1984 case of Military and Paramilitary Activities in and against Nicaragua (Nicar. v. U.S.), the ICJ ruled against U.S. intervention in Nicaragua, which included the mining of ports, the destruction of oil installations, and the training, arming and equipping of the Contras (who were trying to overthrow the Nicaraguan government).

Gómez stated the Israeli government “should not be confused and equated with the Jewish people,” noting that Jewish victims of the Holocaust “would feel sympathy and empathize with the more than 30,000 civilians, including 25,000 mothers and children massacred so far in Palestine, and the 20,000 children orphaned and the two mothers being killed every hour.”

Military Aid, Cuts to UNRWA as Genocide Unfolded

The Genocide Convention imposes on third parties the obligation to prevent genocide from the time they become aware that genocide might be committed. Gómez told the court “there can be no question” that Germany “was well aware and is well aware of at least the serious risk of genocide being committed, most certainly after your Order of 26 January [for provisional measures].”

Gómez argued that Germany was on notice of Israel’s international lawbreaking, citing 32 statements made from Oct. 9, 2023 to April 5, 2024, by hundreds of highly respected experts, authorities, organizations, legal scholars and practitioners accusing Israel of breaching or plausibly breaching the Genocide Convention.

“With all this undeniable knowledge of the situation,” Gómez declared, “Germany’s reaction was to increase its military assistance to Israel.” He also cited Germany’s announcement that it would intervene in favor of Israel in the case of South Africa v. Israel, which is pending in the ICJ.

And, Gómez said, in spite of the ICJ’s Jan. 26 finding that Israel was plausibly committing genocide, “Germany continued, and still continues to this day, to supply weapons and military assistance in general to Israel.”

For the year 2023, the German government authorized 326 million euros for exports of military equipment and weapons of war to Israel, Nicaragua’s attorney Müller told the court.

Export licenses for war weapons worth 20 million euros included “3,000 anti-tank weapons — which according to one manufacturer in Germany are ‘a complete toolbox of shoulder-launched infantry weapon[s]’ used against tanks, but also vehicles, structures and buildings, and persons — 500,000 rounds of machine gun ammunition, 44 propellant charges — a key component in artillery ammunition — and 239 ignition charges.”

Müller said these weapons are “built to and aimed at destroying and killing, or to quote from Germany’s own definition, ‘objects [and] substances . . . capable . . . of causing destruction or damage to persons or property and of serving as a means of using force in armed conflicts between States.’”

In spite of the Security Council resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire, Germany continues to provide military assistance to Israel. Germany is facilitating or improving the provision of humanitarian aid in Gaza. But, Müller argued,

“It is indeed a pathetic excuse to the Palestinian children, women and men in Gaza to provide humanitarian aid, including through air drops, on the one hand, and to furnish the weapons and military equipment that are used to kill and annihilate them — and to kill also humanitarian aid workers as most recently evidenced by the missile attack against vehicles and workers of World Central Kitchen, on the other hand.”

Gómez noted the involvement of German companies in the military industry which “are directly profiting from the situation as they have seen their share prices rise since October and they have substantially increased the joint development contracts for weapons with their Israeli counterparts.”

Nicaragua also cited Germany’s suspension of funding for UNRWA in Gaza the day after the ICJ’s Jan. 26 order, “based on the sole say-so of the Israeli government,” as evidence of Germany’s facilitation of genocide. “UNRWA is the most important partner for providing assistance to the people in the Gaza Strip,” Germany’s federal minister admitted on Nov. 7, 2023. The suspension of funding deprived UNRWA of $450 million.

Debunked Self-Defense Argument

Nicaragua argued that Israel was confusing the right to protect its people with the right of self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter, citing the 2004 ICJ’s advisory opinion in Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. In that case, the court held that Israel, as an occupying power, cannot claim self-defense in the territory it occupies. “Surprisingly,” Gómez stated, “Germany seems not to be able to differentiate between self-defense and genocide.”

Moreover, Nicaragua asserted that “the Palestinian people have the right to self-determination” which includes “the right to take up arms against alien occupation and against racist régimes in the exercise of their right of self-determination as enshrined in the [UN] Charter” and the Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Cooperation among States.

Gómez noted that the events of Oct.  7 “did not occur in a void, on the spur of the moment, without any provocation.” He quoted UN Secretary-General António Guterres, who said on Oct. 24, “It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.”

“If the actions of Israel continue unrestrained as they have since its birth as a State, and they continue to receive the indiscriminate support of States like Germany, then a new generation of Palestinians will rise up again in the near future,” Gómez predicted.

Seeking 5 Provisional Measures

Nicaragua asked the ICJ to order that Germany not make the situation in Gaza worse, by “providing or allowing the provision of munitions of war and other direct support for Israel at this juncture and by depriving UNRWA . . . of funding and of the ability to continue working in accordance with its mandate.”

These are the provisional measures that Nicaragua is requesting:

(1) Germany shall immediately suspend its aid to Israel, in particular its military assistance including military equipment, in so far as this aid may be used in the violation of the Genocide Convention, international humanitarian law or other peremptory norms of general international law such as the Palestinian People’s right to self-determination and to not be subject to a regime of apartheid;

(2) Germany must immediately make every effort to ensure that weapons already delivered to Israel are not used to commit genocide, contribute to acts of genocide or are used in such a way as to violate international humanitarian law;

(3) Germany must immediately do everything possible to comply with its obligations under humanitarian law;

(4) Germany must reverse its decision to suspend the funding of UNRWA as part of the compliance of its obligations to prevent genocide and acts of genocide and the violation of the humanitarian rights of the Palestinian People which also includes the obligation to do everything possible to ensure that humanitarian aid reaches the Palestinian people, more particularly in Gaza;

(5) Germany must cooperate to bring to an end the serious breaches of peremptory norms of international law by ceasing its support, including its supply of military equipment to Israel that may be used to commit serious crimes of international law and that it continue the support of the UNRWA on which this Organization has counted and based its activities.

Germany Claims It Can’t Be Held Responsible 

Germany’s legal team raised two main defenses. First, the ICJ has no jurisdiction in the case because Germany’s responsibility is dependent on a finding that Israel is committing genocide and Israel is not a party to this case. Second, Germany has a “robust legal framework” to assess on a case-by-case basis whether export licenses comport with its domestic and international obligations and most of its exports since October 2023 have not been “war weapons.”

Agent Tania von Uslar-Gleichen argued on behalf of Germany that Nicaragua’s accusations “have no basis in fact or law. They are dependent on an assessment of conduct of Israel, not a party to these proceedings.” She said the case was brought to the court “on the basis of the flimsiest of evidence.”

Samuel Wordsworth, also representing Germany, told the ICJ it had no jurisdiction to hear this case. He explained that Israel was not before the court and determinations about its conduct were a prerequisite to finding responsibility on the part of Germany. In South Africa v. Israel, the ICJ held it was “plausible” that Israel was committing genocide.

A final determination on the merits will take a number of years. Before determining whether Germany is breaching its international obligations, “the Court must first determine that Israel has committed genocide,” Wordsworth maintained.

“The responsibility of Germany is alleged, but in complete reliance on asserted wrongful acts of Israel.” Thus, he said, Israel is “an indispensable third party.”

But Anne Peters, another member of Germany’s legal team, admitted that if the court found it “plausible” that Israel is violating international law, it can then determine whether “plausible facts” establish “plausible violations” by Germany.

Germany Says Most Exports Aren’t ‘War Weapons’

Peters said that Nicaragua hasn’t presented any evidence that “military equipment from Germany could have made a significant contribution to an alleged genocide or to breaches of international humanitarian law” in light of “Germany’s stringent licensing standards.”

Von Uslar-Gleichen told the court that since Oct. 7, 2023, 98 percent of the licenses granted in Germany for exports to Israel were not for “war weapons,” but rather for “other military equipment.” Eighty percent of the volume approved for export was authorized in October 2023, she said.

Since October 2023,

“we see no artillery shells, no munitions. Nearly all exports involve what is known as ‘other military equipment,’ typically of a subordinate or defensive nature,” she stated. This generally includes “defense equipment against chemical hazards, protective gear such as helmets or body protection plates, communication equipment, camouflage paint and components, parts and other equipment of a subordinate character.”

Von Uslar-Gleichen admitted, however, that Germany did license the export of war weapons to Israel four times in the past six months. Two licenses for “training” (not combat) ammunition, including 500,000 pieces of ammunition, were approved in November, and an additional 1,000 pieces were approved in early 2024.

A third license was approved for propellant charge in connection with a joint project between German and Israeli industry but they were for test purposes. The fourth license was for the export of 3,000 portable anti-tank weapons “in the immediate context of Hamas massacres,” she said.

In 2023, Israel asked Germany for tank ammunition, but no license has yet been granted. One license has been granted for a submarine, but since it is a “war weapon” it requires two licenses for export so it has not yet been approved, Von Uslar-Gleichen told the ICJ. Nicaragua’s references to artillery shells and munitions to be used in Gaza “simply bear no relation to reality. Germany rejects them,” she stated.

Gómez argued on behalf of Nicaragua that “it does not matter if an artillery shell is delivered straight from Germany to an Israeli tank shelling a hospital” or replenishes Israel’s stockpiles.

“The fact is that the assurance of supplies and replacement of armaments is crucial to Israel’s pursuit of the attacks in Gaza,” he told the ICJ, adding that Germany is aware of “the serious risk of genocide being committed.”

Diplomatic & Organizing Tool

Although the United States is by far the largest provider of weapons to Israel, it hasn’t been sued in the ICJ because it won’t accept the court’s jurisdiction except in cases where the U.S. government explicitly consents. Germany has consented to full jurisdiction of the ICJ so it is an easier target than the U.S. for Nicaragua’s lawsuit.

“The ICJ is not going to end the war in Gaza, but it is a diplomatic tool that foreign policy uses to apply additional pressure on Israel,” Brian Finucane, senior adviser at the International Crisis Group, told The New York Times. “In the Nicaragua case, it further applies pressure on Germany.”

Civil society also stepped up the pressure to coincide with the ICJ hearing on Nicaragua’s case against Germany. CODEPINK delegations picketed, rallied and delivered petitions to German missions throughout the U.S.

These actions were part of an international campaign of solidarity with Palestinian Germans who risk beatings and arrest when they demonstrate against Germany’s complicity in Israel’s genocide.

The ICJ will issue a ruling on Nicaragua’s request for provisional measures in Nicaragua v. Germany in the next few weeks.

Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, and a member of the national advisory boards of Assange Defense and Veterans for Peace, and the bureau of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers.

22 April 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Jeffrey D. Sachs and Sybil Fares

The Two Powers That Have Done the Most to Wreck the Middle East

18 Apr 2024 – This week, the U.S. and U.K. had the chance to correct decades of their blatant geopolitical errors in the Israel-Palestine conflict by welcoming Palestine as the 194th United Nations member state.

[On Thursday, however, the U.S. in the Security Council vetoed granting Palestinian Authority full membership  while the U.K and Switzerland abstained.]

More than any other countries, the U.S. and U.K. have wrecked the Middle East through their non-stop meddling and imperial arrogance. This week they had the chance to make some amends.

A total of 139 countries already recognize the State of Palestine, more than two-thirds of the U.N. member states. Several European states will soon join the list. Yet the U.S. has so far blocked Palestine’s membership in the U.N., with the U.K. always sticking close to the U.S. lead. Both have relentlessly backed Israel’s apartheid rule over Palestine and are currently actively backing Israel in its horrific destruction of Gaza.

Back in 2011, Palestine had the support of the U.N. Security Council for membership, except that the U.S. forced the Palestinians to accept “observer” status instead, promising that full membership would soon follow, yet another U.S. deception.

In a comparison of the wreckage by the U.S. and U.K. in the Middle East, the lead role certainly goes to Britain, whose imperial machinations in the region date to the 19th century and continue until today.

Britain kept Egypt under its thumb for decades, from the 1880s to the 1950s. It deceitfully promised overlapping parts of the Ottoman Middle East three times over during World War I: to the French (in the Sykes-Picot Agreement), to the Arabs (in the McMahon–Hussein Correspondence) and to the Zionists (in the Balfour Declaration), purporting to allocate what was not theirs in the first place.

After World War I, Britain took Palestine for itself under a so-called mandate of the newly created League of Nations, while France grabbed a mandate over Lebanon and Syria.

Britain left Palestine in shambles in 1947, but continued its relentless meddling by teaming up with France and Israel to invade Egypt in 1956. Britain’s meddling has also contributed to destruction and disarray in Yemen, Iraq and many more parts of the Middle East.

After World War II, the U.S. picked up where Britain left off, first joining Britain in the MI6-C.I.A. overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, and then going on to a long career of C.I.A.-led regime-change operations including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, among others.

Throughout the entire postwar period, the U.S. has been the lead dishonest broker between Israel and Palestine, for example calling for the Palestinian legislative elections in 2006 but then boycotting and trying to overthrow Hamas when it won those elections.

In 2011, when Palestine applied for U.N. membership, and won the support of the U.N. Security Council membership committee, the U.S. leaned on Palestine to wait and to accept observer status instead, promising that full membership would soon follow. This was yet another lie.

Despite numerous U.N. Security Council resolutions over the years calling for a two-state solution of the Israel-Palestine conflict, the Israeli governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu have blatantly rejected an independent State of Palestine.

The current Netanyahu cabinet includes right-wing extremists such as Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir who openly call for ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and Gaza to create a Greater Israel from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

Yet despite Israel’s relentless provocations, routine killing of Palestinians (known colloquially as “mowing the grass”), repeated violations of the U.N. Security Council and now the slaughter in Gaza, the U.S. and U.K. have remained steadfast in backing Israel and opposing Palestine as if nothing at all is amiss.

The question is whether the U.S. and U.K. have any sense and any shame at this point. They may think they are supporting Israel by blocking Palestine’s U.N. membership, but the fact is that Israel is more isolated and endangered than ever because of the Israeli government’s extremism, its shocking violence against the Palestinian people and its apartheid rule.

Since the start of the war last fall, 33,000 Palestinians are officially counted as dead, yet the actual death toll is vastly higher, with tens of thousands more still buried under the rubble or dead from extreme deprivations of food, water, and healthcare.

Alas, in recent days, the double standards and falsehoods of the U.S. and U.K. have been on full display.

The U.S. and U.K. adamantly refused to condemn Israel’s brazenly illegal bombing of Iran’s diplomatic compound in Damascus, Syria, on April 1, but then heatedly condemned Iran when it counter-attacked two weeks later. This absurd double-standard makes the U.S. and U.K. look like crass bullies in the eyes of the rest of the world.

After more than a century of U.K. and U.S. meddling in the Middle East, it’s time to be honest about the facts and the solutions. Most importantly, welcoming Palestine as a U.N. member state and implementing the two-state solution according to international law would have been the path to peace, justice, and security for both Israel and Palestine.

Jeffrey D. Sachs, Professor of Sustainable Development and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University, is Director of Columbia’s Center for Sustainable Development and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

Sybil Fares is a specialist and adviser in Middle East policy and sustainable development at SDSN.

22 April 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Caitlin Johnstone

The drones play recordings of crying babies and women screaming in distress in order to lure people out into the open, and then shoot them.

22 Apr 2024 – They’re hunting civilians with armed quadcopters in Gaza.

The drones play recordings of crying babies and women screaming in distress in order to lure people out into the open, and then shoot them.

This is reportedly happening at the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, where people live in total darkness at night and have no connection to the outside world.

Other times the drones play the sounds of explosions and gunshots and rolling tanks, and sometimes songs in Hebrew or Arabic, all to terrorize these refugees hiding in the darkness afraid for their lives.

This is the sort of report that a critical thinker would normally dismiss as absurd atrocity propaganda if it was being made about any other military power, but this is the IDF we’re talking about, and this specific allegation is pretty well-supported now.

When the destruction of Gaza first began I used to read the jarring claims about the horrific things the IDF were doing and often think, “No, no way. That can’t be the whole story. It’s too cartoonishly evil. There must be some information missing.” Then a few days or weeks later confirmation would come out, showing it’s even worse than I thought before.

I don’t experience that kind of dubiousness when reading such stories anymore. There are only so many atrocities you can see documented, so many videos of IDF troops recording themselves gleefully behaving like monsters, so many hospitals you can see attacked, so many journalists you can see assassinated, before you read a new report about new unfathomable acts of depravity and find yourself saying “Yeah, that sounds about right.”

This baby-crying-sniper-drone story is something else, though. It’s like something out of a weird post-apocalyptic horror movie or something. It’s the kind of information that makes you sort of re-evaluate your previous assumptions about humanity, the world, and the kind of reality we’re experiencing here.

It is really astonishing, how cruel people can be. How cruel a whole nation of people can be made to be, if they’re indoctrinated just right. You spend your whole childhood being indoctrinated into the belief that one group of people are inferior to your own and don’t deserve the same rights and treatment your group receives, and before you know it you’re blockading aid trucks from bringing that group food, and playing recordings of crying babies on an assassination drone in order to murder civilians at a refugee camp.

That’s how Nazi Germany happened, it’s how the genocidal apartheid state of Israel has happened, and it’s how the murderous US-centralized empire has happened. It turns out it’s not all that hard to manipulate a population into supporting shocking abuses at mass scale with modern propaganda and indoctrination from early childhood. It turns out the human mind is a lot more hackable than we’d like to believe it is, and that this can be used to unleash living nightmares upon our world a lot more easily than we’re comfortable acknowledging.

This is how the entire western world has been manipulated into accepting nonstop war, militarism, nuclear brinkmanship, imperialism and exploitation as fine and normal, and into assuming that a better world isn’t possible. As long as the powerful are able to manipulate the way a sufficiently large percentage of the population thinks, speaks, acts and votes, we’re going to be stuck in this horrifying dystopia where the sky rains fire upon the innocent, where war profiteers reap vast fortunes from machines which rip apart human bodies, and where sniper drones cry like babies.

We can help weaken the empire’s propaganda machine by spreading awareness of what it’s doing and how it operates, because propaganda only works if you don’t know it’s happening to you. Help people to see the ways in which the mass media are deceiving them, point out all the signs that we live under an empire of lies, and help spread awareness of what’s really true and what’s really possible.

All positive changes in human behavior of any scale are always preceded by an expansion of consciousness. Spreading awareness is the first step toward a healthy world, and we can each do that in our own small way every single day.

Caitlin Johnstone is a rogue journalist, poet, and utopia prepper. Contact: admin@caitlinjohnstone.com

22 April 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Meg Kelly, et al.

16 Apr 2024 – For three-and-a-half long hours on Jan. 29, the cellphone in 6-year old Hind Rajab’s hands was the closest thing she had to a lifeline. Alone in the back seat of a car outside a Gaza City gas station, she was drifting in and out of consciousness, surrounded by bodies, as she told emergency dispatchers that Israeli tanks were rumbling closer.

By Jake Johnson

“While the attention of the world is focused on Gaza, abuses in the West Bank, fueled by decades of impunity and complacency among Israel’s allies, are soaring.”

17 Apr 2024 – Israeli soldiers have either passively watched or participated in the uprooting of at least seven communities in the West Bank since October of last year, Human Rights Watch said today in a new report documenting surging settler violence in the occupied Palestinian territory.

By Richard Falk

18 Apr 2024 – This is a revised text published in Turkish, a contribution invited by Semin Gumusel on 14 Apr 2024; developments arising from the convergent incidents on 1 Apr continue to reverberate, making updating a high priority.

********************************

April 1^st Pivot from Gaza: Damascus Massacre, Al Shifa Hospital, World Central Kitchen Attack, the Biden/Netanyahu Diplomatic Dance, and Iran’s Retaliation

Certain dates become iconic through being engraved in the public consciousness of an era. The 21^st century has already had two such enduring occurrences: the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in the United States, initiating ‘the war on terror’ and the Hamas cross-border attack on Israel prompting a genocidal response. April 1^st has not yet such heightened significance. Yet the five events that arose from what took place on this single day in April exhibit the dangerous and both visible and secretive interactions affecting the political life of the Middle East. The fallout from April 1^st that might come to be regarded as producing a cycle of responses of such magnitude as to mark  the end of the post-Cold War Era.

These five happenings associated April 1^st are inter-connected developments that if considered together bring a sense of coherence to the long ordeal of the Gaza population of 2.3 million Palestinians. Each occurred during a slowly unfolding crisis throughout the Middle East that has heightened dangerously combustible regional global tensions.  As a result, attention, energies, and resources have been in recent months diverted from a series of urgent global challenges arising from climate change, regressive forms of nationalism, and failures of political leadership made worse by a weakening transnational populist engagement. Earlier it was hoped such engagement from below might exert sufficient pressures on governments and economic elites to produce needed regulations and reforms with respect to the seemingly distinct underlying problematic issues. Despite the dark skies now overhead, the confluence of these five events at the start of April might even induce shifts in policy priorities in ways that could influence regional and international behavior to enhance or further diminish prospects for ecological resilience and humane global governance.

Pivot to Iran: Temporary or Transformative?

The first of the April 1^st events to be considered was the Israeli missile attack on a consular building within the Iranian embassy compound in Damascus. Twelve persons were killed, including seven members of the Iranian Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps who were apparently serving as military. Among these latter victims, presumably the Israeli targets, was General Mohammed Reza Zahedi, the highest ranking Iranian to be assassinated since the US Baghdad high-profile assassination of Gen. Qassem Suleimani, a popular political figure and military leader in Iran who was killed while he was on a diplomatic peace mission in January 2021 during the last days of the Trump presidency.

Carrying out such violent actions across international borders is itself an international crime, often treated as an act of war, and certainly a political provocation. In addition, in the present instance the assassinations of these Iranians were aggravated by being not only an unlawful use of force that violated Syrian territorial sovereignty but additionally involved the illegal targeting of a foreign diplomatic facility, which international law treats as a prohibited target area. Such attacks are forbidden in deference to the reciprocal interests of all sovereign states, even when relations between governments are strained, in the security of diplomacy and the safety of their diplomats.

The Supreme Guide of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was not wrong when he denounced the attack as equivalent to an assault on Iranian territory that was located in Syria. Iran’s leader vowed to retaliate for Israel’s allegedly evil acts by attacking Israeli territory. The Israeli government lost no time officially warning Tehran that any retaliation from Iran that causes harm on Israeli territory will result in an Israeli response intended to harm targets in Iran. Israel’s Foreign Minister, Israel Katz, and Prime Minister Netanyahu responded to Ayatollah Khamenei’s statement with their own escalatory threats in the form of policy statements—Israel harms any country or non-state actor that harms it, and given its past practice, it will do so disproportionately as it has against the entire Palestinian population in Gaza during the past six months in response to the October 7 Hamas attack. [Israeli reliance on disproportionate force has long been a feature of its national security practice. See Falk, “Dahiya Doctrine: Justifying Disproportionate Warfare—A Prelude To Genocide,” April 1, 2024, blog, richardfalk@wordpress.com]

This provocation of both Iran and Syria on April 1st somewhat surprisingly posed no acknowledged difficulties for Biden’s foreign policy, which remained steadfastly both anti-Iranian and anti-Syrian, despite the fact that this non-retaliatory Israeli attack flagrantly violated international law, caused death and destruction, and escalated risks of a wider war in the region if, as was expected, Iran carries out its threat of retaliation. Biden while lecturing Netanyahu on attacking and otherwise interfering with humanitarian aid for Palestinians in Gaza, went out of his way at the same time to reaffirm the US resolve to stand with Israel in any future eruption of violent struggle with Iran, Syria being left in limbo, but also without doubts about the willingness of America to side with Israel should Syria decide to retaliate or to join Iran in a joint response.

World Central Kitchen Attack

The second incident at the start of April caused a more immediate policy  impact. It consisted of an enraged Western response to the much publicized Israeli attack on a World Central Kitchen (WCK) well-marked foreign aid convoy of three vehicles delivering 100 tons of desperately needed food and medical supplies to starving and wounded Palestinians in northern Gaza, an attack that killed six aid workers and their driver. Similar atrocity incidents affecting the foreign delivery of equally needed aid to Gaza had occurred ever since the start of Israeli military operations in the days after October 7. Indeed many far worse incidents if measured by the deaths of innocent aid workers than this one had occurred ever since Israel started retaliating for the October 7 Hamas attack. What made WCK attack different from other attacks was the fact that the aid workers killed were nationals of Western countries supporting Israel rather than Palestinians or nationals of Global South states. From a moral and legal perspective the national identity of the victims should make no difference, but if assessed from a political perspective a different story emerges.

What followed the WCK attack was a flurry of high-profile media and governmental expressions of outrage directed at Israel’s presumed deliberate responsibility for such an attack, holding both Netanyahu and Biden responsible for such deliberate lethal violence directed at nationals of their allies. The fact that 2024 Biden’s reelection prospects have become clouded by growing criticism of his unconditionally pro-Israeli policy in the face of the Gaza genocide, which were further aggravated by this incident. It was clear that Israel had crossed a red line. The deliberate killing of Western aid workers by Israel was not acceptable and must not be repeated. What followed, was a sharp criticism of the WCK attack a warning to Israel that if such incidents were repeated it would lead to a revision of US willingness to give the same level of support to Israel. What immediately followed was directly responsive, Biden’s public criticism of Israel which until the WCK attack was as rare as Netanyahu’s apologies to the Western governments of the victims. Sometimes, words matter more than deeds!

Geopolitical Panic: Biden/Netanyahu Fence-Mending Diplomacy

This concurrence of April 1^st happenings produced a geopolitical panic attack in both Tel Aviv and Washington, prompting an emergency fence-mending telephone conversation between Biden and Netanyahu a few days later with Blinken reportedly listening quietly on the line. Although the actual conversation took place on April 4, it was organically tied to the WCK attack three days earlier. Netanyahu was so backed into a corner that he felt the need to apologize in public to the governments of the WCK aid workers killed without seeming to be either weak or antagonistic in addressing the concerns of Israel’s chief backers, especially the US. Biden, in contrast, was walking a tightrope straddling contradictory domestic critics with one side pushing for the US Government to break with Israel by pushing harder for a ceasefire and the other side seeking reassurance that Israel would continue to enjoy Western support come what may.

What gave away this unusual double diplomatic game was the immediate public disclosure of a normally private conversation between two embattled leaders. This represented a sharp departure from diplomatic practice in international crisis situations suggesting that special considerations were present. The usual practice in similar circumstances is to regard such direct conversations between heads of state as highly confidential, at least for a decent interval, leaving the public and even the media to engage in conjectures as to the exchange, and to make their best unverified guess as to the presumed blend of anger, explanation, and regret. But because the main purpose of the Biden/Netanyahu conversation seemed to be to reassure Americans, and the West more generally that Israel was neither abandoned nor any longer assured of unconditional support unless it changed its ways of interfering with the international aid and humanitarian efforts of Western countries, it became expedient for both leaders to disclose the content of what was said.

On reflection it is far more acceptable in the West for Israel to attack the aid workers of the UN (so long as no Westerners are killed), especially those working heroically throughout the crisis within the confines of UNRWA to mitigate Palestinian suffering, enduring the loss of their own staff throughout the Gaza onslaught.

In this sense, the most dangerously irresponsible feature of this complex public relations initiative was to reveal a strong pledge of continuing US support for Israel’s anti-Iran approach, which plausibly could have the effect of heightening Netanyahu’s incentives to foment a direct encounter with Iran to hide his multiple failures–to destroy Hamas, to gain the release of October 7 hostages, to minimize a surging global backlash against Israeli legitimacy, and to win back his own popularity among Israelis. It also conveyed to the leadership in Iran the unwelcome news that Israel would be backed in relation to Iran even when Israel violated basic rules of international law. This renewed show of solidarity with Israel made a devastating wider war much more likely and was obviously intended to frighten Iran sufficiently to moderate the retaliatory response that it had warned would be forthcoming. To send such signals to Tehran and Tel Aviv was to reinforce the impression that the US remained dedicated to achieving regime-change in Iran and willing to give Netanyahu indirect encouragement to hide his failures in Gaza by widening the conflict zone to include Iran and those non-state actors in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen.

As could have been anticipated, and perhaps desired by the Netahyahu leadership, was Iran’s retaliation by military drones and missile programmed to hit targets within Israel. Most of the Iranian attack weapons were intercepted and destroyed by a combination of US military operations, the collaborative efforts of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, France, and the UK, as well by Israel’s formidable defense forces, and cause little damage within Israel. This attack occurred on April 13^th, but as with the sharp shift in the tone of the Biden/Netanyahu relationship, the retaliation by Tehran was a direct consequence of the Damascus attack on April 1^st. As suggested earlier, Netanyahu is fighting for his political life in Israel, making a wider war seemingly his tempting option to avoid facing the likely consequences of personal and national defeat. The recklessness of the Damascus attack makes little sense otherwise. The US involvement in Israel’s defense and Netanyahu’s initial reaction to the effect that Israel remains determined to attack Iran directly in view of its attempted military strike. Such a posture confirms Israel’s encouragement of a shift of attention away from Gaza, and in the direction of Iran with uncertain consequences. The reactions of other countries in the region, as well as China and Russia will determine just how wide this new phase of conflict becomes.

Atrocities at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City

The final noteworthy occurrence on April 1^st took place when Israel withdrew its forces from devastated al-Shifa Hospital and surroundings in Gaza City. On that day Israel ended its two weeks of atrocity behavior at al-Shifa Hospital, where Palestinian patients confined to their beds were shot dead as were doctors who refused to abandon the hospital, and several hundred Palestinians killed in the course of the military operation. Hamas and Islamic Jihad suspects, often with no evidence of affiliation or even sympathies were killed on the spot after being seized. Of course, for this there was no apology from Netanyahu or pretense from Biden of issuing a warning to Israel to refrain from such behavior. If atrocity victims in military operations are Palestinian, whatever befalls them, no feathers are ruffled in Washington. For its own domestic reasons, the US Government wants to show that it supports humanitarian aid efforts without challenging Israel’s war-fighting methods or insisting that international law guidelines be respected in struggles with regional rivals even as here under conditions of occupation subject to the constraints of international humanitarian law. For such admonitions, only the voices of moral authority in the West, such as Pope Francis or UN Secretary General Guterres can hope to be heard by the peoples of the world. The views of dissenters from the grotesque ordeal of genocide in Gaza are shunted to the sidelines of general awareness and media reportage. Their online words, analysis, and appeals, while influential for those opposed to the genocide, especially as reaching eyes and ears unfiltered by the informal censorship of the main media platforms in the Global West. These pleas for peace and in denunciation of international crime seldom carry weight with governments and political elites unless compatible with strategic interests of major states. The silence of the West in the face of genocide is a complicity crime shamelessly accentuated by the material, intelligence, and diplomatic forms of active support given to Israel since October 7, deserving criminalization.

Reflections on Convergence and the Future of the Middle East

Recounting these events makes it evident that April 1 is a day worth reflecting upon to gain an appreciation of the criminal dimensions of Israel reaction of the October 7 attack and the overall response of the Western liberal democracies (former European colonial powers except Spain, and breakaway British colonies, particularly the US, Canada, and Australia). Whether these focal points will drift toward a devastating regional inter-civilizational clash or hasten the declaration of a much overdue ceasefire cannot be currently known. Obviously embarking upon a genuine peace process is the haunting question that overhangs the prior discussion. This lends abiding interest to how we come to perceive these five events, and how they play out in the weeks and months ahead, with the immediate preoccupation being the prospect of an Israel military strike against Iran. Whether this strike is symbolic or substantive may either avert the drift toward major warfare or accelerate it. Wiser heads do not often prevail in Israel, and so the fate of the region and world may depend on this being an exception.

The defense of Israel by military and intelligence cooperation of the Global West and several Sunni Arab governments suggests that containment of Iran, especially with respect to its nuclear program, has precedence over solidarity with the Palestinian people and their struggle. Whether the peoples of these countries will challenge these priorities of the governments who came to the defense Israel is a question that will be clarified in the years ahead. The policy choice in West between escalating hostility toward Iran and the renewal of normalization initiatives will remain relevant even if calm is eventually restored to Israel/Palestine relations, which itself can turn out to be delusional if Israel is faced with a combination of resistance activities and solidarity initiatives.

Prof. Richard Falk is a member of the TRANSCEND Network, Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, Chair of Global Law, Faculty of Law, at Queen Mary University London, Research Associate the Orfalea Center of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Fellow of the Tellus Institute.

22 April 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Richard Falk

This petition offers international lawyers to show solidarity with the grave plight of the Palestinian civilian population of Gaza that is continuing to endure daily onslaught by Israel that causes widespread suffering so far supported to varying degrees by the leading liberal democracies of the West.

International Lawyers Calling for Ceasefire in Gaza and Respect for International Law

Why This Petition Matters – International Lawyers

Started on 4 Apr 2024 – We, a group of international lawyers and academics dedicated to resolving international disputes through peaceful means, cannot remain silent in the face of the acute humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

Due to the armed hostilities in Gaza over thirty thousand people have died, many of them children, and there have been significantly more casualties. According to representatives of the United Nations and various organisations attempting to provide relief, the humanitarian situation in Gaza is catastrophic. In its order of 28 March 2024 in the case of Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel), the International Court of Justice (“ICJ”) observed that the Palestinians in Gaza “are no longer facing only a risk of famine … but that famine is setting in” (see paragraph 21 of Order at https://www.icj-cij.org/node/203847

Guided by the principles of the rule of law, peaceful conflict resolution and the protection of the civilian population, we call for an immediate and durable ceasefire and full adherence to the rules of international law and specifically international humanitarian law. We also call for the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages. We specifically recall the UN Security Council Resolutions 2728 (2024), 2720 (2023), and 2712 (2023) as well as UN General Assembly Resolution A/ES-10/L.27 (2023).

We further call for Israel to comply with the ICJ Orders dated 26 January 2024 and 28 March 2024 and to take all necessary measures to ensure unhindered provision of humanitarian aid through international organisations, including through UNRWA.

We express our condolences and deepest sympathy to all those who are experiencing suffering and loss in Gaza and Israel.

We invite members of the international legal community, whether involved in dispute resolution or otherwise, to join us in calling for immediate ceasefire and the just and peaceful resolution to the current conflict by signing this petition.

Signatories as of 12 April 2024 include:

• Taiwo Adeshina
• Ali Al-Karim
• Céline Aymé-Wauthier
• Domitille Baizeau
• Professor Ilias Bantekas
• Sylvie Bebohi Ebongo
• Mohammed Dele Belgore SAN
• Professor George Bermann
• Le Batonnier Joachim Bilé Aka
• Professor Laurence Boisson de Chazournes
• Juliet Blanch
• Gabriel Bottini
• Professor Ronald Brand
• Judge Charles Brower
• Professor Nael Bunni
• Professor Peter Cameron
• Yemi Candide-Johnson SAN
• Eliséo Castineira
• Dong Chungang
• Professor Giuditta Cordero-Moss
• Bernardo Cremades
• Nadia Darwazeh
•  Yves Derains
• Diamana Diawara
• Caroline Duclercq
• Professor John Dugard SC
• Bernd Ehle
• Professor Richard Falk
• Professor Maximin de Fontmichel
• Julien Fouret
• Teresa Giovannini
• Nina Hall
• Laura Halonen
• George Hazboun
• Professor Kaj Hobér
• Jean-Christophe Honlet
• Sami Houerbi
• Vera van Houtte
• Professor Hans van Houtte
• Professor Gabrielle Kaufmann-Kohler
• Fathi Kemicha
• Gaston Kenfack
• Ben Knowles
• Gisela Knuts
• Professor Stefan Kroll
• Professor Nikos Lavranos
• Philippe Leboulanger
• Françoise Lefèvre
• Carole Malinvaud
• Samy Markbaoui
• Professor Pierre Mayer
• Professor Brian McGarry
• David Méheut
• Professor Loukas Mistelis
• Yasmin Mohammad
• Alexis Mourre
• Sara Nadeau Seguin
• Marina Papadatou
• Wolfgang Peter
• Pierre Pic
• Noradèle Radjai
• Mohamed Abdel Raouf
• Hery Frédéric Ranjeva
• Professor Catherine Rogers
• José Rosell
• Michael Schneider
• Professor Thomas Schultz
• Ronen Setty
• Patricia Shaughnessy
• Mohamed Shelbaya
• Ana Stanič
• Professor Attila Massimiliano Tanzi
• Former President Danilo Türk
• Professor Dorothy Ufot SAN
• Christopher Vajda KC
• Sun Wie
• Karim Youssef
• Roland Ziadé

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Prof. Richard Falk is a member of the TRANSCEND Network, Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, Chair of Global Law, Faculty of Law, at Queen Mary University London, Research Associate the Orfalea Center of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Fellow of the Tellus Institute.

22 April 2024

Source: transcend.org