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By Ahmet Gurhan Kartal

– Trump’s idea is a declaration ‘effectively to commit a war crime,’ Zarni tells Anadolu

– ‘The US’ 300-year history speaks volumes about how these white supremacist land thieves view the rest of the world,’ says Zarni

LONDON

US President Donald Trump has declared to the entire world that he intends to commit a war crime in Gaza by expelling its Palestinian population, according to a prominent genocide scholar.

Trump’s remarks were made “without any conscience or compassion, as if the Palestinian people, including hundreds of thousands of children, don’t mean anything to him,” Maung Zarni, a renowned genocide scholar, educator, and human rights activist, told Anadolu.

Trump first made the comments during a press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who visited Washington last week despite a warrant from the International Criminal Court seeking his arrest for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.

Dismissing fierce condemnation from world leaders, rights activists, and legal experts, Trump has doubled down on his controversial proposal, telling reporters on Sunday that the US remains “committed to buying and owning Gaza.”

For Zarni, Trump’s idea is a declaration “effectively to commit a war crime.”

“Outrageously, Trump presented his proposal to deport the entire population of Palestinians into other countries without having any sovereign jurisdiction over them,” he said, describing the absurdity of the plan.

Zarni emphasized that Trump’s proposal is not only illegal but also a continuation of historical colonialist policies rooted in white supremacist ideologies.

He further criticized Trump’s framing of the idea as a so-called humanitarian effort.

“He presented that proposal as if it was out of his humanitarian heart,” Zarni said, calling it a cynical attempt to justify ethnic cleansing.

Calls for emergency UN Security Council meeting

Zarni argued that Trump’s declaration of intent regarding Gaza should trigger an immediate response from the international community, particularly the UN Security Council.

“Under international humanitarian and criminal law, you cannot remove the population under occupation,” he explained, referring to the fact that Palestinians have been under Israeli occupation for nearly six decades now.

No matter how “powerful and imperial” the US may be, it is still part of the UN system and bound by international laws and agreements, he added.

“The US is still a member of the Security Council,” Zarni stressed.

“At the very least, the Security Council should be holding an emergency meeting to discuss why the head of a member state, particularly a permanent member state, is blatantly declaring his intent to commit a war crime.”

Threat of Trump and his ‘oligarchical Cabinet’

Zarni also linked Trump’s comments to a broader shift in global politics, warning of the dangers posed by rising authoritarianism and oligarchic rule in the US.

He argued that the current political climate in the US, dominated by billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, is creating a society that is even more dangerous than the former Soviet Union.

“This … completely insane and criminal mind of Donald Trump, supported by guys like Elon Musk, (Mark) Zuckerberg, and others, makes the US far worse than the former USSR,” he said.

Zarni further asserted that while the USSR “never threatened the entire welfare of the world,” Trump and the powerful oligarchic forces backing him pose an existential threat not only to American democracy but also to global stability.

“Trump and the oligarchical Cabinet that he has assembled pose the greatest threat to the American people, American democracy, and as far as I’m concerned, to people around the world,” he warned.

“And Palestinians are being made an example of this.”

‘Classic genocidal white man’s colonialism’

The genocide scholar also placed Trump’s Gaza plan within the broader historical context of European imperialism, drawing parallels to the colonial era when European powers forcibly displaced Indigenous populations and plundered resources.

“We are being dragged back 100 plus years into the past,” Zarni said, emphasizing how Trump’s policies reflect a resurgence of colonialist ideology.

“Israel is allowed to behave as if the world is stuck in the 19th century, where white men came and plundered any resources of value, moved populations, committed atrocities, and took over land … That is precisely what Israel has been doing since the proclamation of the Israeli state in 1948.”

Zarni added that the recent escalation of Israeli aggression, combined with Trump’s statements, marks the “blatant revival of Western white supremacist imperialism at the expense of millions of Palestinian people.”

“This is classic genocidal white man’s colonialism,” he said.

“That is why many of us from former colonies of European powers identify with the Palestinian people, and we will do everything in our power to stand up for them.”

According to Zarni, Trump’s declaration is not an isolated incident but rather a continuation of the US’ long history of colonial expansion and land grabs.

“Trump has declared that the US wants control of Canada, the Panama Canal, Greenland, and now Gaza. Maybe later, he will claim other countries – or even Mars, Venus, and Jupiter,” he added.

He argued that this expansionist ideology is deeply embedded in American history.

“The history of the United States is a history of colonial expansion, of controlling land, people, and populations through violence since the early 17th century,” he explained.

Zarni contended that Israel represents the latest iteration of this colonial project, comparing it to other settler-colonial states.

“This is not simply about Trump thinking criminally. From the perspective of the US and any other settler colony in the world, Israel is the latest white supremacist land-grabbing settler colony,” he said.

Zarni urged people to view Trump’s statements within this historical context.

“We don’t need to get into Trump’s mind to understand how he thinks,” said the scholar. “The US’ 300-year history speaks volumes about how these white supremacist land thieves view the rest of the world.”

13 February 2025

Source: aa.com.tr

By Chris Hedges

The billionaires, Christian fascists, grifters, psychopaths, imbeciles, narcissists and deviants who have seized control of Congress, the White House and the courts, are cannibalizing the machinery of state. These self-inflicted wounds, characteristic of all late empires, will cripple and destroy the tentacles of power. And then, like a house of cards, the empire will collapse.

Blinded by hubris, unable to fathom the empire’s diminishing power, the mandarins in the Trump administration have retreated into a fantasy world where hard and unpleasant facts no longer intrude. They sputter incoherent absurdities while they usurp the Constitution and replace diplomacy, multilateralism and politics with threats and loyalty oaths. Agencies and departments, created and funded by acts of Congress, are going up in smoke.

They are removing government reports and data on climate change and withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement,. They are pulling out of the World Health Organization. They are sanctioning officials who work at the International Criminal Court — which issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant over war crimes in Gaza. They suggested Canada become the 51st state. They have formed a task force to “eradicate anti-Christian bias.” They call for the annexation of Greenland and the seizure of the Panama Canal. They propose the construction of luxury resorts on the coast of a depopulated Gaza under U.S. control which, if it takes place, would bring down the Arab regimes propped up by the U.S.

The rulers of all late empires, including the Roman emperors Caligula and Nero or Charles I, the last Habsburg monarch, are as incoherent as the Mad Hatter, uttering nonsensical remarks, posing unanswerable riddles and reciting word salads of inanities. They, like Donald Trump, are a reflection of the moral, intellectual and physical rot that plague a diseased society.

I spent two years researching and writing about the warped ideologues of those who have now seized power in my book “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” Read it while you still can. Seriously.

These Christian fascists, who define the core ideology of the Trump administration, are unapologetic about their hatred for pluralistic, secular democracies. They seek, as they exhaustively detail in numerous “Christian” books and documents such as the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, to deform the judiciary and legislative branches of government, along with the media and academia, into appendages to a “Christianized” state led by a divinely anointed leader. They openly admire Nazi apologists such as Rousas John Rushdoony, a supporter of eugenics who argues that education and social welfare should be handed over to the churches and Biblical law must replace the secular legal code, and Nazi party theorists such as Carl Schmitt. They are avowed racists, misogynists and homophobes. They embrace bizarre conspiracy theories from the white replacement theory to a shadowy monster they call “the woke.” Suffice it to say, they are not grounded in a reality based universe.

Christian fascists come out of a theocratic sect called Dominionism. This sect teaches that American Christians have been mandated to make America a Christian state and an agent of God. Political and intellectual opponents of this militant Biblicalism are condemned as agents of Satan.

“Under Christian dominion, America will no longer be a sinful and fallen nation but one in which the 10 Commandments form the basis of our legal system, creationism and ‘Christian values’ form the basis of our educational system, and the media and the government proclaim the Good News to one and all,” I noted in my book. “Labor unions, civil-rights laws and public schools will be abolished. Women will be removed from the workforce to stay at home, and all those deemed insufficiently Christian will be denied citizenship. Aside from its proselytizing mandate, the federal government will be reduced to the protection of property rights and ‘homeland’ security.”

The Christian fascists and their billionaire funders, I noted, “speak in terms and phrases that are familiar and comforting to most Americans, but they no longer use words to mean what they meant in the past.” They commit logocide, killing old definitions and replacing them with new ones. Words — including truth, wisdom, death, liberty, life and love — are deconstructed and assigned diametrically opposed meanings. Life and death, for example, mean life in Christ or death to Christ, a signal of belief of unbelief. Wisdom refers to the level of commitment and obedience to the doctrine. Liberty is not about freedom, but the liberty that comes from following Jesus Christ and being liberated from the dictates of secularism. Love is twisted to mean an unquestioned obedience to those, such as Trump, who claim to speak and act for God.

As the death spiral accelerates, phantom enemies, domestic and foreign, will be blamed for the demise, persecuted and slated for obliteration. Once the wreckage is complete, ensuring the immiseration of the citizenry, a breakdown in public services and engendering an inchoate rage, only the blunt instrument of state violence will remain. A lot of people will suffer, especially as the climate crisis inflicts with greater and greater intensity its lethal retribution.

The near-collapse of our constitutional system of checks and balances took place long before the arrival of Trump. Trump’s return to power represents the death rattle of the Pax Americana. The day is not far off when, like the Roman Senate in 27 BC, Congress will take its last significant vote and surrender power to a dictator. The Democratic Party, whose strategy seems to be to do nothing and hope Trump implodes, have already acquiesced to the inevitable.

The question is not whether we go down, but how many millions of innocents we will take with us. Given the industrial violence our empire wields, it could be a lot, especially if those in charge decide to reach for the nukes.

The dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) — Elon Musk claims is run by “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America” — is an example of how these arsonists are clueless about how empires function.

Foreign aid is not benevolent. It is weaponized to maintain primacy over the United Nations and remove governments the empire deems hostile. Those nations in the U.N. and other multilateral organizations who vote the way the empire demands, who surrender their sovereignty to global corporations and the U.S. military, receive assistance. Those who don’t do not.

When the U.S. offered to build the airport in Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince, investigative journalist Matt Kennard reports, it required that Haiti oppose Cuba’s admittance into the Organization of American States, which it did.

Foreign aid builds infrastructure projects so corporations can operate global sweatshops and extract resources. It funds “democracy promotion” and “judicial reform” that thwart the aspirations of political leaders and governments that seek to remain independent from the grip of the empire.

USAID, for example, paid for a “political party reform project” that was designed “as a counterweight” to the “radical” Movement Toward Socialism (Movimiento al Socialismo) and sought to prevent socialists like Evo Morales from being elected in Bolivia. It then funded organizations and initiatives, including training programs so Bolivian youth could be taught American business practices, once Morales assumed the presidency, to weaken his hold on power.

Kennard in his book, “The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs The American Empire,” documents how U.S. institutions such as the National Endowment for Democracy, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Inter-American Development Bank, USAID and the Drug Enforcement Administration, work in tandem with the Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency to subjugate and oppress the Global South.

Client states that receive aid must break unions, impose austerity measures, keep wages low and maintain puppet governments. The heavily funded aid programs, designed to bring down Morales, eventually led the Bolivian president to throw USAID out of the country.

The lie peddled to the public is that this aid benefits both the needy overseas and us at home. But the inequality these programs facilitate abroad replicates the inequality imposed domestically. The wealth extracted from the Global South is not equitably distributed. It ends up in the hands of the billionaire class, often stashed in overseas bank accounts to avoid taxation.

Our tax dollars, meanwhile, disproportionately funds the military, which is the iron fist that sustains the system of exploitation. The 30 million Americans who were victims of mass layoffs and deindustrialization lost their jobs to workers in sweatshops overseas. As Kennard notes, both home and abroad, it is a vast “transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich globally and domestically.”

“The same people that devise the myths about what we do abroad have also built up a similar ideological system that legitimizes theft at home; theft from the poorest, by the richest,” he writes. “The poor and working people of Harlem have more in common with the poor and working people of Haiti than they do with their elites, but this has to be obscured for the racket to work.”

Foreign aid maintains sweatshops or “special economic zones” in countries such as Haiti, where workers toil for pennies an hour and often in unsafe conditions for global corporations.

“One of the facets of special economic zones, and one of the incentives for corporations in the U.S., is that special economic zones have even less regulations than the national state on how you can treat labor and taxes and customs,” Kennard told me in an interview. “You open these sweatshops in the special economic zones. You pay the workers a pittance. You get all the resources out without having to pay customs or tax. The state in Mexico or Haiti or wherever it is, where they’re offshoring this production, doesn’t benefit at all. That’s by design. The coffers of the state are always the ones that never get increased. It’s the corporations that benefit.”

These same U.S. institutions and mechanisms of control, Kennard writes in his book, were employed to sabotage the electoral campaign of Jeremy Corbyn, a fierce critic of the U.S. empire, for prime minister in Britain.

The U.S. disbursed nearly $72 billion in foreign aid in fiscal year 2023. It funded clean water initiatives, HIV/Aids treatments, energy security and anti-corruption work. In 2024, it provided 42 percent of all humanitarian aid tracked by the United Nations.

Humanitarian aid, often described as “soft power,” is designed to mask the theft of resources in the Global South by U.S. corporations, the expansion of the footprint of the U.S. military, the rigid control of foreign governments, the devastation caused by fossil fuel extraction, the systemic abuse of workers in global sweatshops and the poisoning of child laborers in places like the Congo, where they are used to mine lithium.

I doubt Musk and his army of young minions in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — which isn’t an official department within the federal government — have any idea about how the organizations they are destroying work, why they exist or what it will mean for the demise of American power.

The seizure of government personnel records and classified material, the effort to terminate hundreds of millions of dollars worth of government contracts — mostly those which relate to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), the offers of buyouts to “drain the swamp” including a buyout offer to the entire workforce of the Central Intelligence Agency — now temporarily blocked by a judge — the firing of 17 or 18 inspectors generals and federal prosecutors, the halting of government funding and grants, sees them cannibalize the leviathan they worship.

They plan to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education and the U.S. Postal Service, part of the internal machinery of the empire. The more dysfunctional the state becomes, the more it creates a business opportunity for predatory corporations and private equity firms. These billionaires will make a fortune “harvesting” the remains of the empire. But they are ultimately slaying the beast that created American wealth and power.

Once the dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency, something the dismantling of the empire guarantees, the U.S. will be unable to pay for its huge deficits by selling Treasury bonds. The American economy will fall into a devastating depression. This will trigger a breakdown of civil society, soaring prices, especially for imported products, stagnant wages and high unemployment rates. The funding of at least 750 overseas military bases and our bloated military will become impossible to sustain. The empire will instantly contract. It will become a shadow of itself. Hypernationalism, fueled by an inchoate rage and widespread despair, will morph into a hate-filled American fascism.

“The demise of the United States as the preeminent global power could come far more quickly than anyone imagines,” the historian Alfred W. McCoy writes in his book “In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power”:

Despite the aura of omnipotence empires often project, most are surprisingly fragile, lacking the inherent strength of even a modest nation-state. Indeed, a glance at their history should remind us that the greatest of them are susceptible to collapse from diverse causes, with fiscal pressures usually a prime factor. For the better part of two centuries, the security and prosperity of the homeland has been the main objective for most stable states, making foreign or imperial adventures an expendable option, usually allocated no more than 5 percent of the domestic budget. Without the financing that arises almost organically inside a sovereign nation, empires are famously predatory in their relentless hunt for plunder or profit — witness the Atlantic slave trade, Belgium’s rubber lust in the Congo, British India’s opium commerce, the Third Reich’s rape of Europe, or the Soviet exploitation of Eastern Europe.

When revenues shrink or collapse, McCoy points out, “empires become brittle.”

“So delicate is their ecology of power that, when things start to go truly wrong, empires regularly unravel with unholy speed: just a year for Portugal, two years for the Soviet Union, eight years for France, eleven years for the Ottomans, seventeen for Great Britain, and, in all likelihood, just twenty-seven years for the United States, counting from the crucial year 2003 [when the U.S. invaded Iraq],” he writes.

The array of tools used for global dominance — wholesale surveillance, the evisceration of civil liberties including due process, torture, militarized police, the massive prison system, militarized drones and satellites — will be employed against a restive and enraged population.

The devouring of the carcass of the empire to feed the outsized greed and egos of these scavengers presages a new dark age.

NOTE TO SCHEERPOST READERS FROM CHRIS HEDGES: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Bob Scheer, who runs ScheerPost on a shoestring budget, and I will not waver in our commitment to independent and honest journalism, and we will never put ScheerPost behind a paywall, charge a subscription for it, sell your data or accept advertising. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my now weekly Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, The Chris Hedges Report.

8 February 2025

Source: scheerpost.com

The 47th president of the United States is a danger to his country, Britain and the world. Who would have thought that sentence would ever be written? And yet, less than three weeks into Donald Trump’s second term, it is barely controversial to many people looking on from shell-shocked democracies beyond America’s shores. By his destructive, vindictive, illegal and irrational actions, Trump sets himself beyond the pale. In place of American exceptionalism, the world must now learn to manage, and if necessary confront, a gross American objectionablism.

Proof of these assertions is to be found in the White House’s daily outpourings. Seeking revenge against those who tried to punish his attempted 6 January 2021 electoral coup, Trump is weaponising the justice department by executive order. Political opponents, FBI agents, prosecutors, media outlets and journalists are in his sights. In contrast, about 1,500 convicted Capitol Hill rioters have been pardoned. He has even had the gall to withdraw the security clearance of his predecessor, Joe Biden, citing mental incapacity.

Trump is treating federal government agencies like enemy territory to be stormed and purged of deep state, so-called woke and liberal elements. To this end, he has recruited the sycophantic billionaire, Elon Musk, and teams of youthful, unaccountable acolytes to physically take over offices and computer systems, suspend, lock out or sack civil servants and seize control of programmes and budgets. The treasury, the education department, the federal election commission and independent government watchdogs are all under the hammer wielded, principally, by Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency”. Nor has the CIA and the wider “intelligence community” escaped Trump’s vendetta. It, too, faces mass firings under the proposed leadership of Tulsi Gabbard, a Russia apologist. Putting the anti-vax conspiracy theorist, Robert F Kennedy Jr, in charge of health and human services demonstrates how little Trump really cares about ordinary people’s welfare.

“Diversity, equity and inclusion polices, in particular transgender rights, are under siege

Trump’s arbitrary, often unlawful orders indulge other far-right obsessions. Diversity, equity and inclusion polices, in particular transgender rights, are under siege. He has demanded a halt to the rollout of EV charging stations, declared open season on wildlife and the environment by relaxing oil and gas drilling regulations, and withdrawn from the Paris climate agreement. He even wants to ban paper straws, preferring plastic. From an immediate international perspective, Trump’s decision to eviscerate USAid, the world’s biggest foreign aid provider, and the attempted sacking of nearly all its staff, is the most savagely objectionable misdeed of all.

His freezing of USAid’s $42.8bn (£34.5bn) budget spells death or renewed suffering for millions of dependent people, from Sudan to Bangladesh to Ukraine. The US accounts for about $4 in every $10 spent globally on humanitarian aid. To the instant human toll, as Britain’s former prime minister Gordon Brown points out, must be added a loss of US global influence that will benefit authoritarian rivals China and Russia. “The era when American leaders valued their soft power is coming to an end,” Brown wrote. His view was echoed by foreign secretary David Lammy, who described Trump’s mindless aid vandalism as a “big strategic mistake”.

Trump’s egotistic rampage is causing widespread additional international damage and confusion. His on-off tariff wars with China, Canada and, prospectively, the EU; his militarisation of migration policy along the US border with Mexico; his imperialistic vow to seize Greenland by force from Nato ally Denmark; and his disdain for the UN, typified by his withdrawal from the World Health Organization and the UN Human Rights Council, are all decisions underscoring his broader contempt for the multilateralist, rules-based international order. Nothing more damningly illustrates that contempt than yet another outrageous executive order sanctioning the international criminal court (ICC).

Trump’s ICC attack was prompted in part by a wish to protect Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister and court-indicted war crimes suspect, who was feted at the White House last week. He used this occasion to unveil his most absurd, most dangerous idea to date: a forcible “clean-out” of the 2 million inhabitants of Gaza and a US-owned “Riviera” real estate development amid the ruins of their Palestinian homeland. This wheeze is too ignorant, too insulting and too inhumane to be taken entirely seriously. Yet that has not stopped Israeli and US rightwingers using it as potential justification for wrecking the ceasefire, resuming the war and laying the ground for annexations in Gaza and the West Bank.

Trump, the convicted felon, proves each day that he is unfit for the high office he holds. He aims to destroy the fundamentals of American democracy: the separation of powers, civil and voting rights, secularism, free speech and equality under the law. He is a menace to global peace, stability and prosperity. Pushback has begun, largely through the courts. Yet a few defiant judges cannot win this huge, rapidly developing struggle. The Democrats, stunned into virtual silence, must wake up. Meanwhile, Britain and the western democracies must take a united stand. So far, Keir Starmer and his ministers have been too circumspect. They must be bolder and braver in their criticism and in upholding British values.

The rise of Trump and like-minded far-right populists, lawless bullies and anti-democratic autocrats around the world is the great challenge of our age. Trump the objectionable is setting the world on fire.

8 February 2025

Source: theguardian.com

By Jean Shaoul

Under the cover of the Gaza ceasefire, the far-right government of indicted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu has launched a military offensive focusing on the refugee camp in the northern city of Jenin in the occupied West Bank, and the towns of Tulkarem and Tammun.

The Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) Operation Iron Wall has pulverised whole neighbourhoods of Jenin and Tulkarem with massive aerial bombardments and drone attacks, forced the displacement of tens of thousands of Palestinians, and seen a new wave of house-to-house searches and mass killings.

Al-Haq, the Palestinian human rights group, warned that Israel is employing many of the same tactics in the West Bank that it used in Gaza, stating, “Israel’s genocidal tactics to destroy the Palestinian group are further evident in the West Bank, including Jerusalem.” UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese issued a similar warning on X, “If it is not forced to stop, Israel’s genocide of Palestinians will not be confined to Gaza. Mark my words.”

The IDF operation that began on January 21 comes just weeks after the Palestinian Authority of President Mahmoud Abbas, working as Israel’s subcontractor, carried out a four-week long operation against militants in the Jenin area that left dozens dead, displaced thousands and caused widespread losses of water and power.

The IDF was far more destructive. It targeted 23 buildings in the Jenin refugee camp that it claimed were being used by “militants” and ripped up all the roads leading to the camp as well as some of the roads within the camp. The tactic, widely used in Gaza, is aimed at widening the roads to facilitate the IDF’s movement of armoured vehicles through the area and the division of the camp into separate enclaves.

Almost 90 percent of the camp’s population have been forced to flee their homes, with many seeking refuge in towns and villages across Jenin governorate. According to Al-Haq, “The remaining families are living in grave danger with no access to water, electricity, and other basic services.”

The Israeli military also continued its wide-scale assault on Tulkarem city and its refugee camp in the western West Bank, causing extensive damage to infrastructure and civilian property. It stormed several areas in the Ramallah governorate and assaulted and arrested two Palestinians in the Old City of Hebron as they were distributing bread.

Also in the northern area, the Israeli army continued its offensive in Tammun and the Far’a refugee camp, conducting house-to-house searches under the cover of air strikes and drone attacks targeting various locations in the town. Residents are reportedly suffering from a severe shortage of supplies and a near-total power outage.

As in Gaza, IDF strikes on hospitals, medical staff and patients have been a particular feature of the campaign. The army laid siege to Jenin Governmental Hospital, after bulldozing the main entrance and the main road leading to it in previous raids. It fired stun grenades directly at an ambulance responding to an emergency and wounded a paramedic during a raid in the town of Beita. It has besieged Thabet Thabet Governmental Hospital.

Medecins Sans Frontieres’ report Inflicting harm and denying care cited World Health Organisation data showing 647 attacks on healthcare facilities and personnel in the West Bank in the first 12 months since the start of the Gaza war, “with Israeli forces routinely encircling hospitals, refugee camps, and villages—hence creating unprecedented barriers to medical access.”

The IDF operation killed 25 people in the Jenin area and wounded 65 others, according to the Palestinian Authority’s Health Ministry. It killed at least 10 others in other cities and arrested 100 people, bringing the total number killed in the West Bank to 70 since the beginning of the year and more than 900 since October 2023.

All this takes place as Israel’s ban on UNRWA, the main United Nations aid agency for Palestinian refugees—preventing it from operating in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem—comes into effect. Aid organisations have warned of the disastrous impact on aid delivery jeopardizing regional stability. UNRWA provides vital aid and public services, including health and education, to around 2.5 million Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, as well as 3 million more in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon.

Last August, Defense Minister Israel Katz, who was then foreign minister, called for Israel to display “the same determination” in the West Bank as in Gaza to root out “terrorists” and called for the “temporary evacuation of Palestinian residents and any necessary measures.” More recently, he suggested that the IDF’s aim was to remove armed resistance from the Jenin refugee camp so that “terrorism does not return to the camp after the operation is over—the first lesson from the method of repeated raids in Gaza.” The IDF would, he said, remain in the Jenin refugee camp even after the operation is completed.

A few weeks ago, Finance Minister and Religious Zionism leader Bezalel Smotrich demanded the IDF employ the same violence in Jenin as that used in Gaza, saying, “Funduq, Nablus and Jenin need to look like Jabaliya [the refugee camp in Gaza].”

The online Israeli magazine +972 has published a study by Israeli NGO Kerem Navot, which monitors Israel’s dispossession of Palestinian land in the West Bank, showing that at least 57 Palestinian communities—mostly in the northern Jordan Valley, east of Ramallah, southeast of Bethlehem, and the South Hebron Hills—have been forced to flee their homes since the start of the war on Gaza as a result of Israeli settler attacks. Of these, seven have been partially displaced, while 50 have been wiped off the map entirely.

Kerem Navot and Peace Now estimate that Israeli settlers have established at least 41 settlement outposts and herding farms in the West Bank, of which at least 10 were set up close to the Palestinian communities forced to flee their lands. The settlers have also set up “observation posts” or planted Israeli flags to prevent the Palestinians returning to their property. According the Medecins Sans Frontieres’ report, they have impeded Palestinians’ access to healthcare, intimidating and attacking healthcare workers and implementing roads blocks that particularly affect the more remote communities.

All this proceeds with the collusion of the IDF. It is no longer a case of settlers in civilian clothes harassing and attacking the Palestinians and their property but settlers in military uniform and armed, taking advantage of their role as army reservists. They carry out violent raids, break into homes, steal livestock and even arrest Palestinians as well as Israeli and international activists who come to support vulnerable shepherding communities. In December, settler leaders called for the government to mount an operation in the West Bank “like in Gaza.”

Last month, dozens of masked Israelis ran riot through the village of Al-Funduq, setting fire to Palestinians’ property and a nursery. They surrounded a house where a family was sheltering and hurled stones. Settlers rioted in the nearby village of Jinsaput, setting fire to buildings and vehicles. None were arrested.

As well as a green light from Israel’s far-right politicians, the ultra-nationalist settler movement has the open support of the Trump administration.

In the three weeks since taking office, Trump has lifted the Biden administration’s hold on the supply of 2,000 pounds bombs—amid a supposed ceasefire—and the sanctions against settlers and groups responsible for land grabs and violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. He has slapped sanctions on the International Criminal Court—accusing it of attacking Israel and the United States by way of its indictment of Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes—and is leading efforts at the UN to replace UNRWA.

On Friday, the US State Department told Congress that it plans to sell a more than $7.4 billion package of weapons to Israel, including thousands of bombs and missiles, that “improves Israel’s capability to meet current and future threats, strengthen its homeland defence, and serves as a deterrent to regional threats,” confirming Israel’s role as Washington’s attack dog in the region.

These actions have been welcomed by Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s former security minister until he resigned in opposition to the Gaza ceasefire, and Smotrich, who added, “The state of Israel looks forward to continued fruitful cooperation to further enhance our national security, expand settlement across all parts of our homeland, and strengthen Israel’s standing in the world.”

Trump has said he will make an announcement about Israel’s annexation of the West Bank in four weeks’ time. His previous initiative, From Peace to Prosperity, announced in 2020, approved Israel’s unilateral annexation of more than one third of the West Bank, a move that has since been supported by his officials. These include his proposed ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, an evangelical Christian who has previously endorsed Israel’s “right” to the West Bank, which he refers to by its Hebrew and biblical name of Judea and Samaria, and Elise Stefanik, another evangelical Christian, as his ambassador-designate to the United Nations.

Trump, referring to Israel’s size, said. “It’s a pretty small piece of land, and it’s amazing that they’ve been able to do, what they’ve been able to do when you think about it. There’s a lot of good, smart brainpower. But it is a very small piece of land, no question about it.” Last August, he told a crowd at an event in New Jersey, “It’s really a tiny spot. I actually said, ‘Is there any way of getting more?’”

10 February 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Kathy Kelly

“There is something sick and rotten about states and societies that not only support and enable mass killings but also make money off of them.”

                                                               – Pankaj Mishra, January 30, 2025

At a February 4^th, 2025, press conference in Washington, D.C., President Trump, standing alongside Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, announced U.S. intent to turn the Gaza Strip into something that could be phenomenal…the Riviera of the Middle East.

Reading from prepared notes, he stated “The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip.” He said Palestinians in Gaza would be relocated to other countries, and he later questioned why they would ever want to return. He went on to say that he would decide about Israeli annexation of the West Bank in the next month.

According to international law, forcibly transferring people from their land is a crime against humanity. Annexation violates people’s right to self-determination, a fundamental principle of international law.

States and societies around the world harshly condemned President Trump’s total disregard for international law. And yet, every member state of the United Nations General Assembly has a duty, now, under international law, to abstain from any actions enabling the Israeli military to continue its illegal occupation of the Occupied Palestine Territory.

This means every state must stop shipments of weapons to Israel. The U.S., for instance, is required not to send the one billion dollars’ worth of bombs, rifles, ammunition, and Caterpillar bulldozers which President Trump had readied to send Israel.

In the past, Democrats in positions of power allowed President Biden to provision Israel with massive arms sales, enabling a killing spree, over the past 15 months, which has left Gaza in ruins. In June, 2024, following intense pressure from the Biden administration, the U.S. Congress moved forward on an $18 billion arms sale to Israel.

Pankaj Mishra, an Indian essayist and novelist, sadly describes the bleak reality of international weapon peddling. “There is something sick and rotten,” Mishra writes, “about states and societies that not only support and enable mass killings but also make money off of them.”

Throughout the world, grass roots groups struggle to uphold international law and resist governments which support the wholesale Israeli slaughter and destruction of Palestinians in the Occupied Palestine Territory.

In Ireland, activists across the country hold weekly demonstrations insisting Ireland must not allow use of Shannon Airport for transport of weapons or equipment to Israel’s military.

A flier announcing an upcoming action at Shannon airport on February 9, 2025 calls for protest against “the use of Irish airspace to deliver arms, tech and logistical support to the genocidal, apartheid state of Israel that has killed more than 47,000 Palestinians over the past 15 months, including more than 17,000 children, while more than 100,000 have been maimed. In the West Bank, more than 800 people have been killed, and Israel’s brutal illegal occupation continues…”

European human rights activists emphasize that the European Union is Israel’s biggest trade partner, accounting for 28.8% of its trade in goods in 2022. Israel is also among the EU’s main trading partners in the Mediterranean area.

Now, a coalition of over 160 human rights organizations, trade unions, and civil society groups is calling on the European Commission to take immediate action to ban all trade and business with Israel’s illegal settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem. The coalition’s demand follows a landmark advisory opinion issued by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in July 2024, which reaffirmed that:

“Pending an end to Israel’s occupation, third states must immediately stop all forms of aid or assistance that help maintain the unlawful occupation, including halting arms transfers to Israel and ceasing all trade with illegal settlements.”

Robert Jereski, an attorney in NYC, works with Code Pink and a coalition of activists campaigning for UN member states to suspend Israel from the United Nations because it has murdered Palestinians and driven them off their land. Jereski and his colleagues note that Israel’s renewed offensives in the West Bank mark a shift in the tactics of genocide rather than an actual ceasefire. Israel’s bombing of Jenin has led to the forced displacement of 26,000 Palestinians. The Israeli military has escalated widespread arrests and restrictions while settlement expansion continues at an unprecedented pace, with frequent approvals for new outposts and housing.

President Trump’s most recent statements, coupled with his withdrawal of the United States from the United Nations Human Rights Council, underscore the urgent need for the United Nations General Assembly to hold an emergency meeting. The UNGA should judge whether the United States fails to be an impartial arbiter and is, instead, party to the genocide in Gaza. Further, the UNGA should decide whether to suspend the United States veto power at the Security Council visavis matters pertaining to Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Mindful of Pankaj Mishra’s observation that there is something sick and rotten in the act of enabling and profiting from mass killings, we must vow never to stop clamouring for the United Nations member states to fulfil their obligations under international law and live up to the UN’s founding mission: to eradicate the scourge of war for future generations.

This article appeared in The Progressive Magazine

Kathy Kelly (kathy.vcnv@gmail.com) is board president of World BEYOND War
She has co-coordinated the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal.

8 February 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Asem Alnabih

When the ceasefire in Gaza began, my main focus became finding an answer to this question: Where is Dr. Refaat Alareer’s body?

I wanted to fulfill the wish of Refaat’s mother, who had told me soon before the ceasefire: “I just want to know where he is and give him a proper burial so he can rest in peace.”

The question was agonizing. The search turned out to be even more complex, harrowing and painful than I had anticipated.

I never imagined that searching for a friend’s body would become part of my daily routine for more than two weeks.

Even though I was the last known person still alive to be with Refaat in his final hours, I was unable to bury him or take part in any funeral rites.

At the time, in early December 2023 following the week-long ceasefire, Israel had cut off communications in Gaza and its bombardment was overwhelming. Most residents of Gaza City, where Refaat was killed, had already fled due to the ground invasion.

Even Refaat’s parents, wife, children and siblings had no idea where or when he was buried.

I visited the site of his assassination multiple times, hoping to piece together what had happened, but each time I was met with contradictory accounts.

Eventually, with the help of one of Refaat’s relatives, I found someone who had participated in his burial. But much of what had happened was unclear – lost to time, confusion and the extreme danger of that moment.

Uncertainty

Throughout my search, I met numerous people, combed through makeshift cemeteries and read hundreds of handwritten notes taped to hastily improvised graves – each bearing the name of a martyr, a family name, or just a date of death.

Many of these papers had faded and the writing had disappeared, making it nearly impossible to locate and identify the graves of the missing.

Refaat was buried without a funeral and without any formal rites. After extensive inquiries, it became clear that no relative or friend had been present when he was laid to rest.

Instead it transpired that Refaat was buried by neighbors from the building where he had been sheltering at the time of his assassination. His body was wrapped in fabric and placed alongside the remains of members of his family – some of whom were mere fragments, indistinguishable from one another.

Their bodies were never separated, never examined by forensic specialists, never transported to a hospital. The medical system had already collapsed and there were simply not enough medical teams to handle the overwhelming number of casualties.

One of the most shocking aspects of this ordeal was the uncertainty surrounding the number of Refaat’s relatives who were buried with him. Even within his own family, the numbers varied – some said six, others nine, some claimed eight, while others said seven.

After 15 days of searching, I am still unsure how many people were with him in that unmarked grave.

No room in Gaza’s cemeteries

It was an immense effort to locate what we believe to be Refaat’s grave. And the struggle did not end there. His family’s pain only deepened when we realized how difficult it would be to find an alternative burial site.

Gaza’s cemeteries are full. Families have been forced to open old graves to bury their loved ones or dig in the narrow spaces between existing graves, packing burial plots tightly together.

Since Refaat was buried alongside multiple relatives, finding enough graves for their reburial was even more challenging. In the end, we had no choice but to place several martyrs together in shared graves. And, heartbreakingly, they will not even be laid to rest beside one another.

After securing a new burial site, we turned our attention to the procedures required for the transfer. There was no one specialized in handling exhumations and even obtaining plastic bags was a struggle – what little we found was not enough for all the remains.

I keep thinking about what comes next. I don’t know how I will begin digging. I don’t know how we will carry the remains – most of which have likely decomposed – how we will place them in the plastic bags, and how we will transport them to their new resting place.

I have no idea how I will do any of this, but I know that I must. There is no other option.

Silent agony

Refaat’s story is not unique. Thousands of martyrs remain trapped beneath the rubble, or their graves are unknown, their fates uncertain. This tragedy will persist for years and decades, perhaps forever.

The silent agony of families searching for their loved ones is but one of the many enduring consequences of Israel’s war on Gaza. This is not just a logistical challenge; it is part of a systematic erasure of lives and identities. It is yet another aspect of genocide.

I am writing this on Monday, 3 February, just hours before transferring Dr. Refaat Alareer’s body from the makeshift grave where he was hastily buried. Tomorrow, we will carry him to his final resting place: a shared grave on the outskirts of Shujaiya, the vibrant, bustling neighborhood where he was born, lived and loved until the day he was taken from us.

I can only hope that every family in Gaza will one day have the chance to retrieve the remains of their loved ones and grant them a dignified burial. And I pray that no one, anywhere in the world, will ever have to endure this kind of unbearable and unimaginable pain.

Editors’ note: On 4 February, Dr. Refaat Alareer’s body was transferred along with the remains of his brother Salah, his sister Asma and four of his nephews to Ibn Marwan Cemetery near Shujaiya.

Asem Alnabih is an engineer and PhD researcher currently based in north Gaza. He serves as the spokesperson for the Gaza Municipality and has written for many platforms in both Arabic and English.

8 February 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky

Israel’s “Fake Ceasefire”. A “Pause”. Genocide, Exodus of Palestinians from their Homeland

Scroll Down for AI Translation into Arabic

“وقف إطلاق النار المزيف” في إسرائيل. “توقف مؤقت”. الإبادة الجماعية، خروج الفلسطينيين من وطنهم

قم بالتمرير لأسفل لترجمة الذكاء الاصطناعي إلى اللغة العربية

*****

Introduction

A  cease fire invariably constitutes a first step towards a peace agreement. In the case of Gaza, the objective is “a pause” in what constitutes a carefully planned genocide of which the “End Game:” is the Exodus of Palestinians from their Homeland. US-NATO are indelibly behind the genocide project. President Trump has pressured both Jordan and Egypt to facilitate the immigration of Palestinians.

From a propaganda standpoint the cease-fire’s intent is to mislead public opinion.

Gaza is almost fully destroyed. The atrocities and loss of life are beyond description. Estimates which remain to be corroborated suggest that up a quarter of Gaza’s population have died.

The Cease fire is not intended to lead to a peace agreement. Quite the opposite.

Already Israel is accusing Hamas of having violated the cease-fire.

The Voice of Tun Mahathir Mohamad

The fraudulent nature of the proposed cease fire (details below) is expounded by Malaysia’s former Prime Minister Tun Mahathir Mohamad who sent me the following statement:

1.⁠ ⁠I am doubtful of the Gaza ceasefire deal.

2.⁠ ⁠Perhaps I am pessimistic, but should anyone believe that a nation that violates countless United Nations resolutions, disregarding and disrespecting world opinion, would honour its undertaking.

3.⁠ ⁠Would anyone believe that Israel, that had violated past ceasefire deals with Hezbollah would choose to observe this time around?

4.⁠ ⁠Israel is a rogue; a belligerent nation. The belligerence will not allow it to respect any agreements or laws.

5.⁠ ⁠Days before the ceasefire they are upping the ante, killing as many Palestinians as they can. It is second nature to them to go on a murderous rampage.

6.⁠ ⁠And they will blame everyone else for it.

7.⁠ ⁠Excuse my pessimism. But the jubilation shown by the Gazans is premature. I hope I’m wrong.

The Alleged Ceasefire: Three Stages

The ceasefire consists of three phases of so-called negotiations, which largely consist in the release of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners. The third stage involves “the reconstruction of Gaza”.

The ceasefire also includes two unspoken objectives:

1. Exodus of Palestinians from their homeland,
2. The outright appropriation of Palestinian lands in both Gaza and the West Bank.

It’s the Appropriation of an Entire Country

The first stage —which was negotiated in Doha– pertained to the exchange of prisoners (six weeks). Ironically, the second stage which is led by Israeli Intelligence, has already commenced. There are fraudulent and criminal  objectives which must be addressed. The cease-fire does not mean that the genocide has been terminated.

Gaza Then and Now

Dramatic Drone Footage Shows Mass Destruction in Gaza

Fake Ceasefire Talks 

Ironically, the Netanyahu government is represented by top intelligence officials rather than civilian members of his cabinet: the heads of Mossad and Shin-bet who are the architects of a carefully planned Genocide, predicated and supported by A False Flag. have been entrusted with the cease-fire  mandate.

There is nothing to negotiate. Palestine is NOT represented in the Cease-Fire Talks. The Palestine Authority was not invited to attend. There is only one token representative of Hamas, Khalil al-Hayya who succeeds Saleh al-Arouri who was assassinated in early January of last year by Israel.

Khali al Hayya is controlled by Israeli Intelligence. He’s an intelligent asset, based in Qatar “who does not meet with Israeli officials”. He is categorized as Hamas’ chief negotiator.

Trump’s Appointee

Steve Witkoff, is a close friend of Donald Trump, a lawyer and billionaire real estate investor. He will largely be representing  the Trump White House. His role is also related to the so-called Gaza reconstruction project which consists in a multibillion real estate development project of luxury houses and hotels.

Steve Witkoff asserts his commitment to reaching the second phase of the Gaza hostage deal, in light of concerns that Israel will resume fighting after the first stage is over.

“We have to make sure that the implementation goes well, because if it goes well, we’ll get into phase two, and we’re going to get a lot more live bodies out,” Witkoff says, in an interview with Fox News.

Brett McGurk who was until recently Biden’s Middle East adviser will most likely play a secondary role.

The Prime Minister of Qatar Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani is also part of the Ceasefire Initiative, acting as mediator.

Is The Ceasefire  An Intelligence Op.? 

Invariably, cease fire negotiations are undertaken by politicians representing the various parties, e.g. the government of Israel, representatives of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.

In this case it’s the Israeli intelligence apparatus in consultation with the CIA which is calling the shots. In fact there are no meaningful negotiations.

The negotiation team is dominated by three intelligence agencies, namely Mossad, Shin Bet and Egypt’s General Intelligence Agency (GIA), which have been actively collaborating with their US-NATO intelligence counterparts including the (former) Director of the CIA William Burns (replaced by Trump’s CIA appointee John Ratcliffe).

The Head of Mossad David Barnea is “Israel’s Top Negotiator”

ISRAEL’S “FAKE CEASE-FIRE” AGAINST PALESTINE

Ronen Bar, head of Shin-bet (internal intelligence) (image above) was in Cairo for discussions with his GIA counterpart Hassan Rachad  last July.  More recently (January 22, 2025) “Mossad Director David Barnea together with Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar travelled to Cairo  to discuss arrangements for the second phase of the Gaza ceasefire agreement” (Anadolu citing Israeli TV)

While media reports focus on negotiations pertaining to the release of prisoners and hostages, the unspoken objective of these negotiations by Israeli, Egyptian and US intelligence officials is to implement, coordinate and finance the EXODUS of Palestinians.

Trump’s appointee to the CIA John Radcliffe (image left) was confirmed by the Senate. on January 23, 2025. Undoubtedly, he will become actively involved in partnership with David Barnea,  Ronen Bar and Hassan Rashad (GIA Egyptian intelligence)

Exodus from Their Homeland

President Donald Trump has stated in no uncertain terms that Palestinians should leave their homeland: Exodus to the Sinai Desert in Egypt and to Jordan from the West Bank. Exodus and the destruction of the Palestinian Nation State is an act of genocide

Trump Says Gaza is A “Demolition Site”

Trump’s call for Palestinians to leave Gaza condemned as ethnic cleansing | BBC News

President Trump: “Clean Out Gaza”

Trump’s Proposal For Gazan Displacement Rejected By Jordan, Egypt, And Palestinians | News9

Exodus of Palestinians

Trump Floats Plan To ‘clean Out’ Gaza, Move Palestinians To Egypt And Jordan | World News | WION

Egypt-Israel “Secret Bilateral Talks”: The Offshore Natural Gas Reserves

The ultimate objective is not only to exclude Palestinians from their homeland, it consists in confiscating the multi-billion dollar Gaza offshore Natural Gas reserves, namely those pertaining to the BG (BG Group) in 1999, as well the Levant discoveries of 2013. (see Felicity Arbuthnot, Michel Chossudovsky)

In 2021-22, Egypt and Israel were involved in “secret bilateral talks” regarding “the extraction of natural gas off the coast of the Gaza Strip.

“Egypt succeeded in persuading Israel to start extracting natural gas off the coast of the Gaza Strip, after several months of secret bilateral talks.

This development … comes after years of Israeli objections to extract natural gas off the coast of Gaza on [alleged] security grounds, … 

Was It a False Flag. The Evidence is Overwhelming

There is ample evidence that the genocide from the very outset was  part of a carefully planned False Flag.

Moreover, the intelligence officials  involved in formulating and implementing the False Flag, are now  planning the so-called “ceasefire”, which constitutes a “pause” in the genocide. Media reports largely focus on the exchange of prisoners and hostages. The nature of the next phase of an intelligence operation is barely mentioned.

In the words of Philip Giraldi: 

“As a former intelligence officer, I find it impossible to believe that Israel did not have multiple informants inside Gaza as well as electronic listening devices all along the border wall which would have picked up movements of groups and vehicles.

Netanyahu: “Yes it Was a False Flag”:

Netanyahu has tacitly acknowledged that it  was “A False Flag” intent upon justifying a carefully planned genocidal attack against the people of Palestine . This attack in the course of the “cease fire” has now been extended to the West Bank.

Hamas is considered by Israeli intelligence as an intelligence asset.

“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” he [Netanyahu] told a meeting of his Likud party’s Knesset members in March 2019. “This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.” (Haaretz, October 9, 2023, emphasis added)

The False Flag agenda has resulted in the deliberate deaths perpetrated by the Netanyahu government of both Israeli civilians and military (IDF). The conduct of a False Flag deaths is a crime against humanity under both Israeli and International law.

The Hamas (Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya) (Islamic Resistance Movement), was founded in 1987 by Sheik Ahmed Yassin. It was supported at the outset by Israeli intelligence as a means to weaken the Palestinian Authority:

“Thanks to Mossad, (Israel’s “Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks”), Hamas was allowed to reinforce its presence in the occupied territories. Meanwhile, Arafat’s Fatah Movement for National Liberation as well as the Palestinian Left were subjected to the most brutal form of repression and intimidation.

Let us not forget that it was Israel, which in fact created Hamas. According to Zeev Sternell, historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, “Israel thought that it was a smart ploy to push the Islamists against the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO)”. (L’Humanité, translated from French)

The Ceasefire and “Post War Reconstruction”

Post war reconstruction is outlined in phase 3 of the Cease-fire.

The False Flag implemented by Israeli Intelligence plays an important role. The reconstruction of Gaza is not on behalf of the Palestinians, who are accused of having waged war on Israel, when in fact Israel has committed genocide. 

The funding of post-war reconstruction is intended for Israel. It will be used to finance a giant real estate project of luxury houses, hotels and apartment buildings. 

What is at stake is a plan to WIPE OUT PALESTINE OFF THE MAP AS A NATION STATE

Parts of the funds will be channelled towards Egypt to finance the refugee camps in the Sinai desert. 

Insidious Role of Wall Street and the IMF  

Post-war reconstruction is invariably on the behalf of the victims of a war. In the case of Palestine, an entire Nation State is slated to by eliminated, taken over by the State of Israel, which is upheld by the West as the alleged “victim of Palestinian aggression”.

What reconstruction entails is multi-billion operation. It’s planning requires a “pause”.

Already in February 2024, Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi  was allegedly “helping Israel transfer 1.4 million Palestinians from Rafah to tent cities in the Sinai Desert”.

Egypt’s foreign debt is in the billions. Its creditors are willing to provide funds to finance the Exodus of Palestinians. The IMF has already promised to provide financing.

There’s a clear money-trail connecting the dodgy Egyptian president to a policy-change that will more than accommodate Netanyahu’s ambitious ethnic cleansing plan.

 So the IMF now provides financial support for ethnic cleansing? 

It certainly looks that way. The IMF wants to make sure that El-Sisi has sufficient money to cover the costs of feeding and housing one and a half million refugees. (Mike Whitney).

Western Governments are Complicit

There is a “Cease Fire”. The Genocide is slated to continue.

In solidarity with Palestine, it should be understood that heads of State and heads of government who are supporting the genocide are “complicit”under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Article III (e) Complicity in genocide. 

Article IV. Persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III shall be punished [Article III(e)], whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.”  *emphasis added)

It is important that the peace movement take cognizance of the fact that their own heads of State and heads of government, namely Biden, Starmer,  Macron, Scholz, et. al. (see them smiling) are from a legal standpoint “complicit”   inasmuch as they are supportive of Israel’s atrocities committed against the People of Palestine.

It’s the “Criminalization of Politics”. 

“Persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III shall be punished [article III e], whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals”.

Western Politicians would be categorized under Article III(e) as Complicit in genocide

Article III

The following acts shall be punishable:
(a) Genocide;
(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;
(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
(d) Attempt to commit genocide;
(e) Complicity in genocide.

THEY ARE CRIMINALS UNDER INTERNATIONAL LAW

QUESTION THEIR LEGITIMACY

This is a powerful instrument for the anti-war movement.

Confront your “responsible rulers” and “public officials”, not to mention the Big Money and financial institutions who are behind the genocide.

4 February 2025

Source: globalresearch.ca

By Iqbal Jassat

The Hague Group signals a turning point in the Global South’s push for accountability—will South Africa’s NPA rise to the challenge?

In welcoming the latest initiative by a group of nine countries from the Global South known as The Hague Group who have committed themselves to pursue several key goals seeking accountability for Israel’s brutal and bloody devastation wreaked upon Palestinians, it is equally encouraging to note the participation and leading role of South Africa.

In addition to the Director of South Africa’s Department of International Relations (DIRCO) Zane Dangor, representatives from the governments of Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, Honduras, Malaysia, Namibia, Belize and Senegal met at the Hague to inaugurate this historic movement.

Hosted by Progressive International (PI), a global political organization comprised of activists and organizations worldwide, the new formation has been described by the PI’s Gandikota-Nellutla as a group for “collective action at a national level, international level and at a multilateral level” to enforce international law and protect the inalienable right of Palestinians to self-determination.

However, in contrast to the silence of South Africa’s security cluster in particular the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) and the Hawks who have a direct interest in upholding the government’s quest to seek justice for Palestinians, the UN’s Special Rapporteur has hailed the formation of The Hague Group.

Francesca Albanese has described it as the “best news” from a coalition of policymakers “in a long time”. She also said on social media: “Let’s make it real. And let’s keep growing.”

Being aware that the NPA has yet to decisively move on a cluster of comprehensive complaints lodged by various Palestinian solidarity groups, including the Media Review Network, seeking the arrest and punishment of locals engaged in Israel’s genocidal army, it is hoped that the following message will be plastered on Shamila Batohi’s office wall:

“The Hague Group’s formation sends a clear message — no nation is above the law, and no crime will go unanswered,” said the South African Minister of International Relations and Cooperation Ronald Lamola.

Against the background of South Africa’s legal challenges mounted at both the International Criminal Court (ICC) as well as the International Court of Justice (ICJ), it is pertinent to question why the NPA has failed to hold local mercenary terrorists accountable.

For the NPA to remain unmoved and passive in the face of both domestic and international crimes, is in direct contradiction to the lofty ideal DIRCO has committed itself to in The Hague Group.

The seriousness of purpose by the nine nations is underscored by DIRCO Deputy Minister Alvin Botes’ address at the High-Level Summit in the Hague, wherein he emphasized the need to impose economic and diplomatic sanctions on Israel in response to its violations of international law and ongoing war crimes in Gaza.

He reminded the audience that following South Africa’s groundbreaking application at the ICJ pursuant to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide against the State of Israel for their brutal assault on Palestinians in Gaza, and an order seeking Provisional Measures to compel Israel to end its genocidal acts in Palestine, the court made such orders, but Israel refused to abide by them.

Subsequently, the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to endorse the ICJ’s Advisory Opinion resulting in a resolution to put in place countermeasures for Israel’s breaches of international law.

A key component of the resolution which seems to not have registered on Batohi’s radar is that all states have an obligation not to recognize as legal the situation arising from the unlawful presence of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) and not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by Israel’s Illegal presence in the OPT.

If these decisions are binding on states and their respective institutions responsible for implementing them, it is scandalous for the NPA and the Hawks to not have moved yet by investigating local pro-Israel individuals and organizations known to be complicit in the settler colonial regime’s crimes.

Batohi needs to be reminded that part of the Hague Declaration emphasized the need to ensure accountability for the most serious crimes under international law through appropriate, fair, and independent investigations and prosecutions at the national or international level, and to ensure justice for all victims and the prevention of future crimes.

Doesn’t the NPA derive its mandate from section 179 of the Constitution? Of course and its mandate is clear:

“Section 179(2) expressly empowers the prosecuting authority to institute criminal proceedings on behalf of the state. Legislation requires the National Prosecuting Authority exercise its mandate without fear, favour, or prejudice.”

In addition, the constitution also empowers the NPA to carry out any necessary function incidental to instituting criminal proceedings on behalf of the state.

South Africa’s solidarity movements in support of Palestine’s freedom struggle and the wider civil society formations aggrieved by the loss of “lives, livelihoods, communities, and cultural heritage” due to Israel’s “genocidal actions in Gaza and the remainder of the OPT”, have legitimate concerns about the NPA’s failure to prosecute the hundreds (if not thousands) of SA citizens actively engaged in the genocide.

It does not require much digging by Batohi and her team to unearth criminal activities by local pro-Israel supporters and their organizations in violation of UN Security Council resolution 2334 (2016) of December 2016, which reaffirmed that “the establishment by Israel of settlements in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, has no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law”.

The Hague Declaration makes it clear that the legal norms violated by Israel “include certain obligations of an erga omnes character that are, by their very nature, the concern of all States and, in view of the importance of the rights involved, all States can be held to have a legal interest in their protection”.

In its declaration, the steps outlined by the Hague group reflect growing frustration in the Global South over what is perceived as Western double standards regarding international law.

However, in the local context, the question remains whether the NPA will respond positively now that the Hague ball has landed in its court to institute and conduct criminal proceedings against South Africa’s Zionist enablers, funders, and participants in Israel’s wide array of crimes.

Iqbal Jassat is an Executive Member of the South Africa-based Media Review Network. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.

2 February 2025

Source: palestinechronicle.com

By Maryam Sakeenah

While the bombs have gone silent in Gaza, there is something that has fundamentally changed about the world as we know it, and about ourselves. The fragile assumptions on which most of us had constructed our worldview have fallen apart. So many things we took for given have been rendered questionable and uncertain. So much about our own selves has been laid bare before the mirror that Gaza holds up to us. The carefully crafted façade of modernity has turned out to be a dystopian abyss we cannot make sense of. Gaza has told us loud and clear that the Emperor has no clothes on.

The ‘isms’ that came from the Western Enlightenment boasting of human ingenuity and prowess have fallen apart. The horrific scale of genocidal violence unleashed upon Gaza exposes humanity’s blood-lust and makes us shrink from our own brutal and sadistic selves.

In the realm of international relations, the Palestinian genocide has made it clear that the Westphalian world order based on sovereign nation-states has had its day, and that world peace is as elusive and as nebulous as it ever was.

The near-consensus of Western states and institutions over the bloodbath in Gaza shows how violence has been engendered and endemic in the very body politic of modern Western nation-states with all pillars of state and society fully complicit- policy and governance, economics and finance, education and the media. Gaza lays bare the endemic structural violence built into the bare bones of modernity. Violence of these gargantuan proportions cannot occur all of a sudden in a vacuum. It takes centuries, millennia and generations to build a system in which violence against a group becomes normalized.

Under the veneer of democratic progress, supremacist narratives of ‘other-ization’ have been transmitted inter-generationally. Metanarratives of hate and fear lie at the very root of social structures which allow genocides to happen to ‘others’ for fifteen months. Violent ideologies that dehumanize the ‘otherized’ are interwoven into the very structures of modern secular societies, normalizing and mainstreaming hate, bias, discrimination and prejudice, letting the suffering of the target group continue as a matter of course. Gaza continued to burn for 15 months while for the rest of the world it was business as usual.

But what of our shared innate humanity, our capacity to empathize? As people are fed with narratives of Western moral superiority through mainstream media and education that celebrate secular democracy and liberty as progressive ideals, voices on the contrary are discredited and silenced. When this happens over decades, only the narrative of the powerful begins to hold sway. This makes the un-seeing of another community’s suffering and erasure of its voices possible. The enormity of the suffering in Gaza is apparently not enough to move those who believe a state implanted in the Middle East by the West has the ‘right to defend itself’ using all means fair and foul.

Gaza rubbishes all hegemonic narratives of Western essentialism. It makes clear that the Western colonial project that began in the 17^th century and of whom Israel is the last vestige, never really ended. In fact, the might of the entire Western civilization is invested into the preservation of the Zionist blue-eyed boy amidst hostile brown Arabs.

Many systemic biases have come to the fore over the course of the Gaza genocide, reflected in the rhetoric of Western politicians and the way the global media covered the genocide- without, of course, ever calling it a genocide. According to Francesca Albanese in an interview with ‘The Thinking Muslim’, “There are double standards towards Palestine in the West, which are now fully exposed.”

It is important to understand the roots of this inherent bias that this rhetoric comes packed in. The roots go deep into the centuries-old deep-seated Orientalist biases in the Western imagination. Although the Jewish people have a history of victimization in Europe, over the years with the rise of the Capitalistic economy and the participation of the Jewish community in it on a global scale, Jews came to be seen as vital and central to the modern laissez faire economy. Driven by political and economic exigencies at the end of the First World War, it was Western diplomats who allowed the colonial implantation of the Jewish state upon Arab land. At the time, Europe was embroiled in conflict with the Islamic Ottoman empire, and it was expedient to get the support of the well placed and powerful Jewish community. Israel, therefore, began as a Western project. It was also a quick and ill thought-out ‘fix’ for a Western problem: the Jewish holocaust in Hitler’s Germany.

The US being the ‘land of opportunity’ attracted sizeable Jewish populations who made the best of American capitalism and thrived, developing a powerful and influential Zionist lobby. The American Jewish lobby exercises tremendous power and influence over elections as well as the global news media. The lobby works to perpetuate unconditional political and economic support for Israel in Western houses of power and to mainstream the Zionist narrative through the media.

Most of those who settled in the ‘holy land’ were immigrants and refugees from Europe and then America. Most settlers are ethnically white Europeans and bring with them the culture and values of Europe and the US. Israel therefore became part of the West in the midst of a religiously and ethnically different yet strategically important region: the Middle East. It was perceived as part of the ‘Us’ pitted against ‘Them.’ The Palestinian Arabs whose lands and homes were stolen to make way for Israel were never perceived as worthy of human rights, dignity and self-determination, as they were the hostile ‘Other’ of a different race and religion, dehumanized and negatively stereotyped.

As the tide of manic Islamophobia rose in the wake of 9/11, Israel came to be seen as the victim of the common enemy of so called ‘Islamic terrorism’ or ‘Jihadism.’ Hence the legitimate struggle of the Palestinians came to be seen as violence and terror, and gelled perfectly well with the raison de etre of the US’s so-called ‘War on Terror.’ The Palestinian cause continued to be disregarded, even erased from the Western imagination, and Palestinians continued to be depicted as perpetrators rather than victims in Western discourse.

The same mindset has also dominated scholarship and academia. At the front of the effort to snuff out the Palestinian Solidarity Movement mushrooming in universities were academic administrations. Once again, UN Human Rights Rapporteur Ms Albanese lamented, “Human rights are only good to be taught in universities, not to be demanded in the streets trying to exercise freedom of assembly all the more for Palestine… that is what you are teaching your young generations.” Western universities which fully control higher education, academic research and scholarship have established an epistemic hegemony over Knowledge itself. The language and ideology of coloniality has infiltrated and dominated the Academy itself. It is academic scholarship from these seats of learning in the West that is mainstreamed, accorded prestige and credibility, whereas other forms of knowledge, learning and alternative education models are shorn of these.

Yet Gaza has created a paradigm shift. It has raised important questions about how lasting peace can ever be conceived within a system rooted in endemic structural violence. How can authentic knowledge be sought in an academic culture created by this epistemic hegemony of knowledge that sustains genocide and erasure?

Gaza has exposed the gaping-wide cracks beneath the veneer of modern civilization. The site of credible knowledge has begun to shift away from the Western Academy. The site of credible information has shifted away from the mainstream global news media. It is those standing against these oppressive structures- those marginalized voices- wherein a possible future for humanity resides.

The only task ahead of us worth taking up to save what remains of our humanity is to dismantle and challenge this metanarrative of coloniality and epistemic hegemony. To do so, the focus must shift away from institutions of power that have enabled the genocide. The hope to rescue our humanity is embodied by all those who have stood against the false narratives that come from powerful Western institutions: journalists, Gen Z students, poets, artists, academics and scholars, lawyers and activists, Imams and faith leaders… Their voices need to be empowered and their work needs to be projected.

Critical perspectives and voices of resistance, alternative reimagined systems of knowledge and education need to be explored and developed in order to decolonize education. In the alternative media, marginalized voices need to be mainstreamed as we question, reject and make accountable all those institutions that sustained the genocide. Engaged activism needs to continue with the same courage and spirit.

On the economic front, large corporations and enterprises that have contributed to the genocide need to be dismantled through sustained boycotts as we promote smaller cleaner businesses that do not serve political agendas.

The seismic waves for a tectonic shift to a better world where genocides are not let happen will not begin from Western corridors of power, podiums of authority or international forums. These will arise from the hearts and minds of artists, writers, poets, teachers, activists, speakers of truth, thinkers of meaningful change who can dare to dream and reimagine another world. From the debris and rubble of devastated, decimated Gaza, a new world must be birthed in order for our humanity to be salvaged.

Maryam Sakeenah is a Pakistan-based independent researcher and freelance writer on International politics, human rights and Islam.

28 January 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Rima Najjar

Caption: “Palestinian journalist (Ali Abunimah) detained in Switzerland ahead of speaking event for his ongoing press tour, as Swiss authorities attempt to suppress pro-Palestine speech.” – Palestinian Youth Movement

The issue, as a circulating petition on social media for the release of Ali Abunimah states, is this: “Award-winning Palestinian-American journalist and human rights defender Ali Abunimah, executive director of the media platform ‘Electronic Intifada,’ was violently and forcibly taken by unidentified individuals in civilian clothing while walking on the streets of Zurich on Saturday 25th January 2025. He is now held in administrative detention by the Zurich cantonal police who intend to deport him out of the country on Monday.

He was on his way to give a lecture on the history of Palestine, after another event he was going to deliver the following day was cancelled due to external pressure, following a defamatory article in a local newspaper baselessly accusing him of radical islamism and antisemitism. The cantonal police supposedly obtained a prohibition for him to enter the territory once he was already in the country, a decision which was not subjected to any legal review. Ali Abunimah was brutally abducted in violation of due process.”

Let me say at the outset that I believe the appalling arrest of Ali Abunimah in Zurich (during which he was accosted violently and brutally) will do nothing except raise Ali Abunimah’s profile and increase donations to his publication. It will also probably result in a very interesting and important report that everyone is already awaiting — everyone, that is, who is familiar with Ali Abunimah’s writing and his decades-long activism for Palestinian liberation on American campuses and knows these accusations are not simply false, they are ludicrous.

Caption: Ilan Binyamin on Facebook: “This is hard to believe. Switzerland has fallen into a trap here, for its own sake it should release Ali immediately. This is insane, but this is the world we live in. A Swiss government that was silent about the genocide in Gaza is now acting on behalf of dark forces. My only hope they will discover quickly it was a mistake.”

Switzerland is attempting to isolate Ali Abunimah and other activists (such as Mohammed Khatib, the EU coordinator of Samidoun: Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, who has been denied access to speak in Switzerland for ten years) and the Palestinian cause on the global stage. Ali Abunimah has long focused on exposing EU hypocrisy regarding Palestinian human rights, especially when these countries expressed concerns about Israel’s repressive laws and actions vis-à-vis Palestinians and the implications of such laws for human rights and international law, but never backed the lip-service with any action.

Laws and policies that label all forms of advocacy for the liberation of Palestine as terrorism (or mischaracterize and criminalize criticism of Israel as “antisemitism” and “radical Islamism”) create a “catch-22” situation for activists, forcing them to face a no-win scenario.

Such laws label resistance and advocacy for Palestine as terrorism, and a threat to “national security.” Even peaceful and legitimate forms of protest and activism are criminalized. This means that activists can be arrested, prosecuted, and punished for actions that are fundamentally about expressing their rights, condemning well-documented Israeli atrocities and seeking justice for Palestinians.

As a result, activists might feel compelled to self-censor their actions and speech. They might be socially stigmatized and marginalized. This can damage the reputation of activists and their organizations, making it harder to gain support from the public and other stakeholders. The experience of Samidoun: Palestinian Prisoner solidarity Network is a case in point of this latter dynamic. Additionally, legal battles and the threat of legal action can drain the resources of activist groups, diverting time, money, and energy away from their primary goals and missions.

The laws in Israel that lead to the repression and criminalization of activists for Palestine, including peaceful protests and political expressions, are laws such as the Anti-Terrorism Law of 2016 with its broad definitions of terrorism and terrorist activities and Israeli Military Orders in the occupied Palestinian territories, which have been used to detain Palestinians without charge or trial, often for extended periods.

In the EU, pro-Palestine activists often face repression under the guise of maintaining “public order” and “security.” Authorities in several EU countries have used these justifications to preemptively ban protests and demonstrations. Additionally, there have been instances of excessive force, such as the use of pepper spray, police dogs, and physical aggression, to disperse peaceful protests. These measures violate international human rights standards and disproportionately affect Palestinians, people of Arab descent, and Muslims.

In the Case of Ali Abunimah’s arrest in Zurich, the following question arises: Why does a country like Switzerland, whose neutrality has deep historical roots and is a defining characteristic of its foreign policy, deviate from this policy when it comes to Palestine/Israel? Why is a “Swiss government that was silent about the genocide in Gaza” acting “on behalf of dark forces?”

Clearly, there is an intersection of financial interests, Western political alliances, and international obligations that bely Switzerland’s stated commitments to neutrality in foreign affairs and human rights.

The measures taken by Swiss authorities, such as banning Hamas and Hezbollah and suspending funding for certain human rights organizations in Palestine/Israel, align closely with the political priorities of Western allies, including the United States and Israel. While Swiss authorities cite national security concerns as the justification for these actions, the perceived threats are about protecting Israel’s interests/agenda rather than addressing direct threats to Switzerland or the US or any other country. Switzerland’s neutrality is being influenced by external political pressures, political alliances and economic factors.

Switzerland is one of Israel’s major trading partners in the Middle East and North Africa region. The two countries have a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) in place since 1993, which facilitates trade and economic cooperation. Swiss investments in Israel exceed 1 billion CHF annually. Swiss companies have made significant investments in various sectors, including food, pharmaceuticals, machinery, infrastructure, and financial services. Switzerland and Israel have deepened their cooperation in financial services. In 2017, they signed a Memorandum of Understanding to enhance collaboration in this area. Switzerland has shown a keen interest in Israel’s innovation and technology sector. Several Swiss companies are active in the Israeli ecosystem, collaborating with local startups and venture capital firms.

Let’s now compare and contrast the financial interests between Israel and Switzerland on the one hand with those between Arab Gulf states and Switzerland on the other. We know that The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and Switzerland signed a Free Trade Agreement in 2009, enhancing trade and investment relations. Switzerland is a key trading partner for the GCC states. Arab Gulf states have made substantial investments in Switzerland, particularly in real estate, banking, and luxury goods. Direct investments from Arab countries in Switzerland reached CHF 17.2 billion in 2022. Switzerland’s position as a global commodity trading hub has led to strong business ties with major oil and gas producers in the Middle East. Swiss banks maintain branches in financial centers like Dubai and Abu Dhabi, while Gulf financial institutions also establish a presence in Switzerland. The Swiss Alps attract a significant number of tourists from the Arab world, driving investments from Gulf countries into Switzerland’s tourism sector.

Switzerland’s financial interests in both regions are strong, but the impact varies based on the nature and scale of these interests. This is assuming that Gulf states even actively desire to impact Switzerland’s policies toward Palestinian liberation positively.

Switzerland’s strong economic ties with the Gulf States have not led to less bias in favor of Israel in its policies towards the liberation of Palestine and lasting peace. The 17.2 billion Gulf investment (in 2022) in Swiss “real estate, banking, and luxury goods” are balanced against Switzerland’s billion-dollar investment in Israel’s innovation and technology sector. It’s clear which side has proved to be more impactful.

For lasting peace and a meaningful resolution, it’s crucial to understand and address the full context of the events leading up to the partition of Palestine in 1947, which proposed the division of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states when the vast majority of the Palestinian population was Arab and opposed the plan, because it allocated a significant portion of their land to the newly established Jewish state, against their will.

Palestinian right to self-determination was undermined by external powers then just as it is being undermined now in 2025 by the suppression of Palestinian resistance in its various forms.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued an advisory opinion in 2024, concluding that Israel’s occupation and annexation of Palestinian territory are unlawful under international humanitarian law. The ICJ’s opinion called on all states to refrain from recognizing or supporting the situation created by Israel’s illegal presence in the occupied Palestinian territories. It sounds like the memo has not reached Zurich.

Note: First published on Medium.

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Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa.

28 January 2025

Source: countercurrents.org