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By David Hearst

Video: Gaza ceasefire: After 15 months of brutality, Israel has failed on every front

When push came to shove, it was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who blinked first.

For months, Netanyahu had become the main obstacle to a Gaza ceasefire, to the considerable frustration of his own negotiators.

That much was made explicit more than two months ago by the departure of his defence minister, Yoav Gallant. The chief architect of the 15-month war, Gallant said plainly that there was nothing left for the army to do in Gaza.

Still Netanyahu persisted. Last spring, he rejected a deal signed by Hamas in the presence of CIA director William Burns, in favour of an offensive on Rafah.

In the autumn, Netanyahu turned for salvation to the Generals’ Plan, aiming to empty northern Gaza in preparation for resettlement by Israelis. The plan was to starve and bomb the population out of northern Gaza by declaring that anyone who did not leave voluntarily would be treated as a terrorist.

It was so extreme, and so contrary to the international rules of war, that it was condemned by former Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon as a war crime and ethnic cleansing.

Key to this plan was a corridor forged by a military road and a string of outposts cutting through the centre of the Gaza Strip, from the Israeli border to the sea. The Netzarim Corridor would have effectively reduced the territory’s land mass by almost one third and become its new northern border. No Palestinian pushed out of northern Gaza would have been allowed to return.

Red lines erased

No-one from the Biden administration forced Netanyahu to rethink this plan. Not US President Joe Biden himself, an instinctive Zionist who, for all his speeches, kept on supplying Israel with the means to commit genocide in Gaza; nor Antony Blinken, his secretary of state, who earned the dubious distinction of being the least-trusted diplomat in the region.

Even as the final touches were being put on the ceasefire agreement, Blinken gave a departing news conference in which he blamed Hamas for rejecting previous offers. As is par for the course, the opposite is the truth.

Every Israeli journalist who covered the negotiations has reported that Netanyahu rejected all previous deals and was responsible for the delay in coming to this one.

It fell to one short meeting with US President-elect Donald Trump’s special Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, to call time on Netanyahu’s 15-month war.

After one meeting, the red lines that Netanyahu had so vigorously painted and repainted in the course of 15 months were erased.

As Israeli pundit Erel Segal said: “We’re the first to pay a price for Trump’s election. [The deal] is being forced upon us … We thought we’d take control of northern Gaza, that they’d let us impede humanitarian aid.”

This is emerging as a consensus. The mood in Israel is sceptical of claims of victory. “There’s no need to sugarcoat the reality: the emerging cease-fire and hostage release deal is bad for Israel, but it has no choice but to accept it,” columnist Yossi Yehoshua wrote in Ynet.

The circulating draft of the ceasefire agreement is clear in stating that Israel will pull back from both the Philadelphi Corridor and the Netzarim Corridor by the end of the process, stipulations Netanyahu had previously rejected.

Even without this, the draft agreement clearly notes that Palestinians can return to their homes, including in northern Gaza. The attempt to clear it of its inhabitants has failed. This is the biggest single failure of Israel’s ground invasion.

Fighting back

There is a long list of others. But before we list them, the Witkoff debacle underscores how dependent Israel has been on Washington for every day of the horrendous slaughter in Gaza. A senior Israeli Air Force official has admitted that planes would have run out of bombs within a few months had they not been resupplied by the US.

It is sinking into Israeli public opinion that the war is ending without any of Israel’s major aims being achieved.

Netanyahu and the Israeli army set out to “collapse” Hamas after the humiliation and shock of its surprise attack on southern Israel in October 2023. They demonstrably haven’t achieved this goal.

Take Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza as a microcosm of the battle Hamas waged against invading forces. Fifteen months ago, it was the first city in Gaza to be occupied by Israeli forces, who judged it to have the weakest Hamas battalion.

Israeli minister Ben Gvir calls developing ceasefire deal ‘surrender to Hamas’

But after wave upon wave of military operations, each of which was supposed to have “cleansed” the city of Hamas fighters, Beit Hanoun turned out to have inflicted one of the heaviest concentrations of Israeli military casualties.

Hamas kept on emerging from the rubble to fight back, turning Beit Hanoun into a minefield for Israeli soldiers. Since the launch of the most recent military operation in northern Gaza, 55 Israeli officers and soldiers have perished in this sector, 15 of them in Beit Hanoun in the past week alone.

If any army is bleeding and exhausted today, it is Israel’s. The plain military fact of life in Gaza is that, 15 months on, Hamas can recruit and regenerate faster than Israel can kill its leaders or its fighters.

“We are in a situation where the pace at which Hamas is rebuilding itself is higher than the pace that the [Israeli army] is eradicating them,” Amir Avivi, a retired Israeli brigadier general, told the Wall Street Journal. He added that Mohammed Sinwar, the younger brother of slain Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, “is managing everything”.

If anything demonstrates the futility of measuring military success solely by the number of leaders killed, or missiles destroyed, it is this.

Against the odds

In a war of liberation, the weak and vastly outgunned can succeed against overwhelming military odds. These wars are battles of will. It is not the battle that matters, but the ability to keep on fighting.

In Algeria and Vietnam, the French and US armies had overwhelming military advantage. Both forces withdrew in ignominy and failure many years later. In Vietnam, it was more than six years after the Tet Offensive, which like the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023 was perceived at the time to be a military failure. But the symbol of a fightback after so many years of siege proved decisive in the war.

In France, the scars of Algeria last to this day. In each war of liberation, the determination of the weak to resist has proved more decisive than the firepower of the strong.

In Gaza, it was the determination of the Palestinian people to stay on their land – even as it was being reduced to rubble – that proved to be the decisive factor in this war. And this is an astonishing feat, considering that the 360-square-kilometre territory was entirely cut off from the world, with no allies to break the siege and no natural terrain for cover.

Hezbollah fought in the north, but little of this was any succour to Palestinians in Gaza on the ground, subjected to nightly bombing raids and drone attacks shredding their tents.

Neither enforced starvation, nor hypothermia, nor disease, nor brutalisation and mass rape at the hands of their invaders, could break their will to stay on their land.

Never before have Palestinian fighters and civilians shown this level of resistance in the history of the conflict – and it could prove to be transformative.

Because what Israel has lost in its campaign to crush Gaza is incalculable. It has squandered decades of sustained economic, military and diplomatic efforts to establish the country as a liberal democratic western nation in the eyes of global opinion.

Generational memory

Israel has not only lost the Global South, in which it invested such efforts in Africa and South America. It has also lost the support of a generation in the West, whose memories do not go back as far as Biden’s.

The point is not mine. It is well made by Jack Lew, the man Biden nominated as his ambassador to Israel a month before the Hamas attack.

In his departing interview, Lew, an Orthodox Jew, told the Times of Israel that public opinion in the US was still largely pro-Israel, but that was changing.

“What I’ve told people here that they have to worry about when this war is over is that the generational memory doesn’t go back to the founding of the state, or the Six Day War, or the Yom Kippur War, or to the intifada even.

“It starts with this war, and you can’t ignore the impact of this war on future policymakers – not the people making the decisions today, but the people who are 25, 35, 45 today and who will be the leaders for the next 30 years, 40 years.”

Biden, Lew said, was the last president of his generation whose memories and knowledge go back to Israel’s “founding story”.

Lew’s parting shot at Netanyahu is amply documented in recent polls. More than one-third of American Jewish teenagers sympathise with Hamas, 42 per cent believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, and 66 percent sympathise with the Palestinian people as a whole.

This is not a new phenomenon. Polling two years before the war showed that a quarter of American Jews agreed that “Israel is an apartheid state”, and a plurality of respondents did not find that statement to be antisemitic.

Deep damage

The war in Gaza has become the prism through which a new generation of future world leaders sees the Israel-Palestine conflict. This is a major strategic loss for a country that on 6 October 2023 thought that it had closed down the issue of Palestine, and that world opinion was in its pocket.

But the damage goes further and deeper than this.

The antiwar protests, condemned by western governments first as antisemitism and then legislated against as terrorism, have created a global front for the liberation of Palestine. The movement to boycott Israel is stronger than ever before.

Israel is in the dock of international justice as never before. Not only are there arrest warrants out for Netanyahu and Gallant on war crimes, and a continuing genocide case at the International Court of Justice, but a myriad of other cases are about to flood the courts in every major western democracy.

A court action has been launched in the UK against BP for supplying crude oil to Israel, which is then allegedly used by the Israeli army, from its pipeline from Azerbaijan to Turkey.

In addition, the Israeli army recently decided to conceal the identities of all troops who have participated in the campaign in Gaza, for fear that they could be pursued when travelling abroad.

This major move was sparked by a tiny activist group named after Hind Rajab, a six-year-old killed by Israeli troops in Gaza in January 2024. The Belgium-based group has filed evidence of war crimes with the International Criminal Court against 1,000 Israelis, including video, audio, forensic reports and other documents.

A ceasefire in Gaza is thus not the end of Palestine’s nightmare, but the start of Israel’s. These legal moves will only gather momentum as the truth of what happened in Gaza is uncovered and documented after the war has ended.

Internal divisions

At home, Netanyahu will return from war to a country more divided internally than ever before. There is a battle between the army and the Haredim who refuse to serve. There is a battle between secular and national religious Zionists. With Netanyahu’s retreat on Gaza, the settler far right are sensing that the opportunity to establish Greater Israel has been snatched from the jaws of military victory. All the while, there has been an unprecedented exodus of Jews from Israel.

Regionally, Israel is left with troops still in Lebanon and Syria. It would be foolish to think of these ongoing operations as restoring the deterrence Israel lost when Hamas struck on 7 October 2023.

Iran’s axis of resistance might have received some sustained blows after the leadership of Hezbollah was wiped out, and after finding itself vastly overextended in Syria. But like Hamas, Hezbollah has not been knocked out as a fighting force.

And the Sunni Arab world has been riled by Gaza and the ongoing crackdown in the occupied West Bank as rarely before.

Israel’s undisguised bid to divide Syria into cantons is as provocative to Syrians of all denominations and ethnicities, as its plans to annex Areas B and C of the West Bank are an existential threat to Jordan. Annexation would be treated in Amman as an act of war.

Deconfliction will be the patient work of decades of reconstruction, and Trump is not a patient man.

Hamas and Gaza will now take a backseat. With the enormous cost in lives, every family has been touched by loss. But what Gaza has achieved in the last 15 months could well transform the conflict.

Gaza has shown all Palestinians – and the world – that it can withstand total war, and not budge from the ground upon which it stands. It tells the world, with justifiable pride, that the occupiers threw everything they had at us, and there was not another Nakba.

Gaza tells Israel that Palestinians exist, and that they will not be pacified until and unless Israelis talk to them on equal terms about equal rights.

It may take many more years for that realisation to sink in, but for some it already has: “Even if we conquer the entire Middle East, and even if everyone surrenders to us, we won’t win this war,” columnist Yair Assulin wrote in Haaretz.

But what everyone in Gaza who stayed put has achieved is of historic significance.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

David Hearst is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye. He is a commentator and speaker on the region and analyst on Saudi Arabia.

15 January 2025

Source: middleeasteye.net

By Quds News Network

Occupied Palestine (Quds News Network)- Around 200 Israeli soldiers have signed a letter stating they’d stop serving in Gaza if the government didn’t secure a ceasefire. The soldiers acknowledged their involvement in war crimes, including the indiscriminate killing of Palestinians and the destruction of homes.

According to The Associated Press ( AP), while the movement is small, the soldiers say it’s the tip of the iceberg and they want others to come forward.

The move comes amid increasing pressure on both Israel and Hamas to reach a ceasefire agreement. Ceasefire talks are currently underway, with both President Joe Biden and President-elect Donald Trump calling for a deal to be in place by the January 20 inauguration.

Trump and Biden said on Monday that a ceasefire deal is “very close” and on the “brink.”

Israeli and Hamas officials also reported progress in talks ongoing in Doha, the Qatari capital, mediated by Qatar, Egypt, and the United States.

On Monday, Qatar handed Israel and Hamas a “final” draft of a ceasefire and prisoner release agreement designed to end the war in Gaza, an official briefed on the negotiations told Reuters.

A breakthrough was reached in Doha after midnight following talks between Israel’s spy chiefs, President-elect Trump’s Middle East envoy an

The Israeli military told AP it condemns the refusal to serve and takes any call for refusal seriously, with each case examined individually. Soldiers can go to jail for refusing to serve, but none who signed the letter has been detained, according to Soldiers for the Hostages, the group that organized the letter.

Crossing Ethical Lines

Seven soldiers who’ve refused to continue serving in Gaza spoke with AP, describing how Palestinians were indiscriminately killed and houses destroyed. Several said they were ordered to burn or demolish homes that posed no threat, and they saw soldiers loot and vandalize residences.

Yotam Vilk, an officer in the armored corps, told the AP that the image of Israeli soldiers killing an unarmed Palestinian teenager in Gaza is seared in his mind.

He said the instructions were to shoot any unauthorized person who entered an Israeli-controlled buffer zone in Gaza. He saw at least 12 people killed, he said, but it is the shooting of the teen that he can’t shake.

“He died as part of a bigger story. As part of the policy of staying there and not seeing Palestinians as people,” Vilk, 28, told the AP.

Vilk is among a growing number of Israeli soldiers speaking out against the 15-month assault in Gaza and refusing to serve anymore, saying they saw or did things that crossed ethical lines.

When Vilk entered Gaza in November 2023, he said, he thought the initial use of force might bring both sides to the table. But as the war dragged on, he said he saw the value of human life disintegrate.

On the day the Palestinian teenager was killed last August, he said, Israeli troops shouted at him to stop and fired warning shots at his feet, but he kept moving. He said others were also killed walking into the buffer zone — the Netzarim Corridor, a road dividing northern and southern Gaza.

Vilk acknowledged it was hard to determine whether people were armed, but said he believes soldiers acted too quickly.

Some soldiers told AP it took time to digest what they saw in Gaza. Others said they became so enraged they decided they’d stop serving almost immediately.

Yuval Green, a 27-year-old medic, described abandoning his post last January after spending nearly two months in Gaza, unable to live with what he’d seen.

He said soldiers desecrated homes, using black markers meant for medical emergencies to scribble graffiti, and looted homes, looking for prayer beads to collect as souvenirs.

The final straw, he said, was his commander ordering troops to burn down a house, saying he didn’t want Hamas to be able to use it. Green said he sat in a military vehicle, choking on fumes amid the smell of burning plastic. He found the fire vindictive — he said he saw no reason to take more from Palestinians than they’d already lost. He left his unit before their mission was complete.

“Moral Injury”

Some of the soldiers who spoke to AP said they feel “conflicted and regretful.”

Many soldiers suffer from “moral injury,” said Tuly Flint, a trauma therapy specialist who’s counseled hundreds of them during the war. It’s a response when people see or do something that goes against their beliefs, he said, and it can result in a lack of sleep, flashbacks, and feelings of unworthiness.

Talking about it and trying to spark change can help, Flint said.

One former infantry soldier told AP about his feelings of guilt — he said he saw about 15 buildings burned down unnecessarily during a two-week stint in late 2023. He said that if he could do it all over again, he wouldn’t have fought.

“I didn’t light the match, but I stood guard outside the house. I participated in war crimes,” said the soldier, speaking on condition of anonymity over fears of retaliation. “I’m so sorry for what we’ve done.”

15 January 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Aaron Kirshenbaum

Earlier on Wednesday, January 8th, I saw a prominent Zionist commentator and Twitter/X User post, “Has Greta Thunberg taken her keffiyeh off to address the fires in LA yet or are there too many Jews living here for her to be concerned?” The weird implications about a mythical antisemitic malice that climate activist Greta Thunberg has to supposedly fuel her anti-genocide and ecocide beliefs aside, the post is equally embarrassing in its lack of understanding about the exacerbators of Los Angeles’ most destructive fires in the metropolitan area’s history. Sadly, the disconnect that this post showcases is representative of many people and institutions, not only in explicitly pro-Israel spaces but also in the environmental movement. The US military is the #1 institutional polluter in the world. Cities across the country have been sacrificed by the local and federal prioritization of militarism and policing. Our endless wars have pushed forward the climate crisis, and now its catastrophic results are once again terrifyingly visible inside the belly of the beast.

For decades, the military-industrial complex has been destroying ecosystems, cities, and nations across the SWANA region for the sake of dominance in the oil industry. For 15 months, the US-Israeli bombing unleashed on Gaza has released insane amounts of fossil fuel into the atmosphere while poisoning the soil with each shell. Israel recently detonated an “earthquake bomb,” which some reports have suggested could have been possibly nuclear. The genocide in Gaza has devastated the ecosystem and will make agricultural survival in any eventual rebuilding effort extremely difficult. The war in Ukraine has resulted in explosions of the  Nordstream pipeline. Bases around the world, expanded for meaningless escalation with China, have resulted in soil contaminated with toxic PFAS chemicals, harming the soil. Biodiversity is at risk globally.

Forest fires are a natural part of California’s ecosystem. They are needed to survive. The long-time development in inevitable natural burn zones, combined with the suppression of these natural cycles for the sake of billionaire Malibu homes, has not helped this situation at all. This disregard for a balanced ecosystem has historically and continuously come at the expense of middle and working-class neighborhoods in LA vulnerable to preventable fires. The threat to LA is only further magnified by the extra dry air and almost 100mph wind speeds created by the war economy’s climate crisis.

This local neglect of the natural environment comes from a similar place as the Jewish National Fund’s planting of non-native pine trees across Palestine, often above bulldozed Palestinian villages, at the expense of crucial biodiversity. In both instances, the interests of the war economy that prioritizes those in power are what remain above respect for Indigenous caretaking practices and life. And the results in both cases are catastrophic. Amidst a world that has gone through imperialist ecocidal war for decades, the world’s biodiversity, much of which is in sovereign Indigenous land, has been decimated.

This climate-sacrificial militarism isn’t just on the international stage either. In Atlanta, the proposed “Cop City” police training facility is supposed to be built on the Weelaunee Forest:  sacred indigenous land also described as the “lungs” of the city. Not only does the forest provide crucial air quality, but it also acts as flooding protection. Recently, Appalachia and Atlanta suffered extreme flooding. Cop City will only make this worse as the forest is destroyed. Those prioritizing these military training facilities and exchange programs with Israeli Occupation Forces are doing so at the expense of the city itself. LA’s Mayor, Karen Bass, recently proposed allocating an extra $123 million to the police while cutting the budget of the fire department by $23 million. Now, the city is burning uncontrollably, and the fire department can only attempt to save residents.

This was avoidable. The flooding in Appalachia is avoidable. Future devastating flooding in a post-cop city Atlanta, NYC, and the entire coastal region is avoidable. Did anyone really think that we could continue to wage ecocide across the world without it coming back to us? Or prioritize militarism at home that trains with our genocidal proxy above human services? The fires in Gaza are the fires in LA. They are brought about by the same institutions and are fixable through overlapping measures. The former was intentional, and the latter is a ricochet. Both are devastating, heartbreaking, terrifying, and infuriating.

Climate organizations are warning about what the fires in LA represent. Some amount of federal funding left over from our shiny new nearly $1 trillion military budget will be allocated to helping the people of L.A. But the same organizations releasing these statements and the same politicians allocating emergency funds are the ones fanning the flames. Either by the silence that deliberately or neglectfully hides the crisis or warmongering that actively drives it further.

So no, Greta Thunberg should not “take off her keffiyeh” to talk about the fires. The only way to fight the fires is through the understanding that should come with wearing one.

_______________________________________________________

Aaron Kirshenbaum is CODEPINK’s War is Not Green campaigner and East Coast regional organizer.

11 January 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Quds News Network

Gaza (Quds News Network)- 203 Palestinian journalists have been killed in Israeli attacks since the start of the ongoing Israeli genocidal war in Gaza, according to Gaza’s Government Media Office.

The last victim was journalist Sa’ed al-Nabhan who was killed after being shot directly by an Israeli sniper while covering Israeli attacks in the Al-Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip on Friday.

Palestinian journalist Sa’ed al-Nabhan was shot and killed by an Israeli sniper while covering Israeli attacks in central Gaza on Friday, making him the 203rd Palestinian journalist to be killed in Israeli assaults since the start of the ongoing genocide.

Gaza’s Government Media Office confirmed Sa’ed’s killing, stating that he is the 203rd Palestinian journalist killed in Israeli attacks since the start of the ongoing Israeli offensive.

The office also condemned Israel’s killings of journalists, calling on the international community and rights groups to condemn Israeli crimes and prosecute them in international courts.

[https://twitter.com/QudsNen/status/1877785267211227572]

What Happened?

The Israeli forces first surrounded an area in the Al-Jadeed Refugee Camp, located in al-Nuseirat camp in central Gaza, where many journalists were present, before targeting those in the area.

Footage from the scene shows a wounded individual being rushed out of a house on a stretcher with the help of aid workers.

Nearby, Sa’ed is seen trying to run while covering the attack with his equipment. At that moment, he is targeted by what appears to be a shot fired from a long-range rifle.

He then falls to the ground and lies motionless. People nearby struggle fearfully to approach him due to the threat of being targeted by Israeli bullets.

Anadolu Agency recognized him as its freelance cameraman.

Last month, Sa’ed performed the funeral prayer for his uncle, Khaled al-Nabhan, the Palestinian man who became widely known after a video showed him kissing the eyes of his slain granddaughter and calling her “soul of my soul”.

[https://twitter.com/QudsNen/status/1878003060233949473]

[https://twitter.com/QudsNen/status/1878006672959971643]

[https://twitter.com/QudsNen/status/1878013695495680251]

[https://twitter.com/QudsNen/status/1878021923365409222]

[https://twitter.com/QudsNen/status/1877758131498786986]

The office condemned Israel’s killings of journalists, calling on the international community and rights groups to condemn Israeli crimes and prosecute them in international courts.

“Bloody Year”

Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has been considered the deadliest for journalists and media workers in the world in 30 years.

Critics accuse Israel – which banned foreign reporters from entering Gaza – of targeting journalists in the Palestinian territory to obscure the truth about its war crimes there.

“Deliberately targeting journalists is a war crime under international law. This attack must be independently investigated and the perpetrators must be held to account,” Programme Director at Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Carlos Martinez de la, said.

In a recent report, the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) described 2024 as a “particularly bloody year.”

According to the IFJ’s annual report, as of December 10, 2024, 104 journalists have been killed worldwide since January 1, with more than half of them in Gaza.

Seventy-five percent of all reporters killed in the world in 2023 were killed between October 7 and the end of last year.

IFJ Secretary General Anthony Bellanger described 2024 as “one of the worst years” for media professionals. He condemned the “massacre taking place in Palestine before the eyes of the entire world.”

In a separate report, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said Palestine is the most “dangerous country for journalists, recording a higher death toll than any other country over the past five years.” The report covers data up to December 1.

11 January 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Seymour Hersh

Gaza has become a killing field—that is the view of a well-informed Israeli veteran who was an enthusiastic supporter of the initial Israeli response to the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023. He believes that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the mastermind of the all-out retaliatory bombing and ground attack there, is now a contemporary Colonel Kurtz, the psychotic killer of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, the famed Vietnam War movie of 1979 based on Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness.

What began as a retaliatory war by the internationally revered Israel Defense Forces against a disciplined Hamas guerilla force turned into the systematic starvation of a society whose civilian survivors—men, women, and children—are the victims of an Israeli military whose combat units are often led by the second generation of Israeli settlers. These officers, increasingly prominent as the war in Gaza goes on, are religious zealot majors and lieutenant colonels who believe it is their calling to shoot and kill any Palestinian who moves, whether combatant or civilian.

There are more than 120 Israeli settlements in the West Bank, including fifteen in East Jerusalem. There are also more than two hundred illegal outposts that are supplied with weapons by the increasingly radical Israeli government while not officially sanctioned by that government. Violence against Palestinians in the West Bank has grown steadily, including Israeli Air Force bombing missions.

The IDF recruiting pattern explains the growing violence against Palestinian men, women, and children in the war. I was told that 40 to 45 percent of today’s higher officers in the IDF come from settler families in the West Bank who combine “deep religiosity with Netanyahu’s political fervor.’’ The Israeli veteran told me of watching in horror, with colleagues, as Israeli bombings and earth-moving machinery were continuing to, as he put it, “level” north Gaza and turn it into a dead zone. He said that there “have been more and more reports of colonels and even generals issuing orders to kill every Palestinian you see and destroy every building still standing. Israel’s war in Gaza has become fanatical. It’s apocalypse now. Killing for killing’s sake. It is corruption like never before.”

10 January 2025

Source: seymourhersh.substack.com

By Joseph Camilleri

Over the last fifteen months the world has watched in disbelief Israel’s horrifying military assault on the people of Gaza and its escalating use of force in the West Bank, Lebanon, and now Syria.

The inescapable question is: how do we explain this descent into barbarism? To begin to answer it, we must first put together several key pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, dreary and distasteful though the exercise may be.

The mounting human toll is indescribable. The latest figures released by the Health Ministry in Gaza indicate at least 45,129 people killed (including 17,492 children) and 107,338 wounded. Many thousands more are believed buried under the rubble.

UNRWA reports some 1.9 million displaced out of a population of 2.2 million, with some 380,000 displaced people currently sheltering in over 100 UNRWA school buildings across the Gaza strip. Shelter, however, remains illusory, as schools, hospitals and refugee camps come under relentless fire. And now we see the rising prospect of death through starvation and disease.

According to a report just published by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) “the signs of ethnic cleansing and the ongoing devastation – including mass killings, severe physical and mental health injuries, forced displacement, and impossible conditions of life for Palestinians under siege and bombardment – are undeniable.” All of which leads MSF to conclude that “genocide is taking place in Gaza.”

Nor has the West Bank been spared Israel’s unrelenting use of force. Between January 2023 and November 2024, Israeli attacks have resulted in close to 1,000 Palestinian fatalities and 16,000 injuries.

Following the escalation of hostilities with Hezbollah in September, Lebanon has been subjected to intensive bombardment and land incursions. As of early December, the death toll reached 4,000 Lebanese, with those injured numbering well over 16,600. With this has come mass displacement, destruction of entire villages, farmland and livestock and disruption of essential services, including healthcare facilities, water systems, and schools.

The fall of the Assad regime has provided the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) with the opportunity to launch hundreds of military strikes aimed at Syria’s strategic military assets. In violation of existing agreements, Israeli forces have moved into the demilitarized buffer zone between the Israel-occupied Golan Heights and the rest of Syria, occupying several villages.

It is, however, the exchange of fire with Iran that has brought the present conflict to new heights. On April 1, 2024, the IDF struck an Iranian consulate in Damascus, killing an Iranian commander and his deputy. Two weeks later, Iran retaliated by launching 300 missiles and drones towards Israel, many of which, but by no means all, were foiled by a US-led regional coalition.

Military hostilities continued with an explosion in Tehran which killed visiting Hamas leader Ismail Haniyyah. Weeks later Israel launched an air offensive into Lebanon killing Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Iran responded by firing some 180 ballistic missiles towards Israel. Then came a series of precise and targeted Israeli airstrikes on Iran’s air defence batteries and radar, missile and drone factories, and military launching sites.

How is this mayhem to be explained? What is it that has driven the State of Israel to unleash such a catastrophic use of firepower?

The official explanation offered by the Israeli political-military establishment is simple enough. Israel is exercising its right to defend itself in the wake of the Hamas attack on 7 October.

The actions of Hamas that led to the deaths of many Israelis and the taking of over 200 hostages were abominable, and those responsible had to be brought to account. But the events of 7 October offer no justification and certainly no explanation for what has ensued.

Why is it that Israel’s response has been so brutal, so lacking in humanity, seemingly incapable of distinguishing between civilian and military targets? Why has it lasted so long, spread far beyond the Palestinian territories to engulf Lebanon, Syria, and even Yemen and Iraq?

Another explanation on offer is that the Netanyahu government, dependent as it is on a precarious coalition that includes extremist elements with strong fascist tendencies, has been consumed by a lust for blood, a desire to wipe out the Palestinian adversary once and for all, and so bring the Zionist project to its final and irreversible conclusion.

There is something to be said for this explanation. Zionism was born historically as a reaction to the longstanding oppression and persecution endured by Jewish minorities in Europe. In this sense, Christian antisemitism has much to answer for.

But once it was given the all-clear by the imperial power, Britain, the Zionist project soon assumed a profile which, notwithstanding subtle variations over time, is best characterised as settler colonialism.

A report published by Amnesty International in February 2022 sets out how the State of Israel has over several decades built an Apartheid system of oppression and domination involving massive seizures of Palestinian land and property, unlawful killings, forcible transfer, drastic movement restrictions, and the denial of nationality and citizenship to Palestinians.

Perhaps, the Hamas attack generated a fear that this system of oppression was now under serious threat. Alternatively, the governing elite may have concluded that this was a never to be repeated opportunity not just to eliminate the Hamas virus once and for all, but to extinguish any prospect of Palestinian self-determination and the creation of a Palestinian state.

The historical context no doubt offers useful insights, but of itself is not an adequate or comprehensive explanation. There is a missing link, and that link is Iran.

The Israeli establishment has developed an obsessive fear of Iran, precisely because of its perceived capacity to support in military, political and other ways the many groups that are deeply hostile to the Zionist project, not least Hamas and Hezbollah.

It was therefore critically important to counter the Iranian threat, first by administering a crippling blow on Hamas and Hezbollah, which explains the savage forays into Gaza and Lebanon, but also on Syria’s military assets, given its longstanding connection with Iran. Much the same can be said for Israel’s hostility to Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen.

This said, Israel would not have been able to move as ferociously as it has without US support, which it has had in full measure throughout.

Why has the United States refused to apply any meaningful brakes on Israel’s military fury? Why has it continued to provide vital economic support and military protection, in the face of war crimes and plausibly the crime of genocide?

Because successive US administrations have regarded Israel as an irreplaceable asset in their determined effort to maintain geopolitical dominance in the Middle East, a region they consider to be of paramount economic and strategic importance. Iran stands as the principal threat to that objective, especially as it develops closer links with Russia, China and other members of the rapidly expanding BRICS bloc.

Here then was an unparallelled opportunity to use Israel as the proxy that would deliver the coup de grâce to Iran’s geopolitical ambitions and to the effectiveness of the axis of resistance.

At face value, it would appear that the imperial power and its sub-imperial protégé have triumphed. But not all is at it seems. In the course of the last fifteen months Israel has become a pariah state.

UN General Assembly resolutions, driven by an increasingly assertive Global South, have sharpened their denunciation of Israel’s conduct and by ever larger majorities. The UN Secretary-General and every relevant UN agency have condemned with unusual vigour Israel’s flouting of international law and the basic standards of civilised conduct.

To this must be added the adverse judgments of the International Court of Justice and the recent decision of the International Criminal Court to issue warrants of arrest for Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant.

Many US allies in Europe and elsewhere, including Australia, are increasingly uneasy with America’s unquestioning support of Israel and are now prepared to break ranks with the US when voting on UN Security Council and General Assembly resolutions.

Especially telling has been the shift in public opinion in much of the Western world, where support for the Palestinian cause has gathered pace, and is steadily gaining prominence in university campuses and in the electoral arena.

The fluidity of Middle East and global politics is now on full display. So is the uncertainty that pervades the future of US politics.

Nothing that has happened since October 2023 is likely to enhance Israeli security. The State of Israel remains imprisoned in a decidedly hostile neighbourhood. As for Israel’s economy, it is already paying a high price for its skyrocketing defence expenditure.

The goal of Palestinian self-determination may seem distant, but the Zionist project is more fragile than many would care to think.

Joseph Camilleri is Emeritus Professor at La Trobe University in Melbourne, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences, Convener of Conversation at the Crossroads, and Co-Convener of SHAPE (Saving Humanity and Planet Earth). He is also a member of the JUST International Advisory Panel (IAP).

22 December 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Medea Benjamin

As President Biden greenlights another $8 billion in weapons to Israel in his last days in office and Secretary Blinken gives a parting New York Times interview in which he denies that a genocide is taking place in Gaza, many pro-Palestine activists are anxiously counting down the days until “Genocide Joe” and his crew exit the White House. But what will activists have to contend with under the Trump presidency?

Donald Trump proved his pro-Israel agenda in his first term, by moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, supporting West Bank settlements, recognizing the Golan Heights as part of Israel, pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal and enacting the Abraham Accords to normalize relations between Israel and Arab states, while disregarding the plight of Palestinians. Recently, Trump has said that the U.S. should let Israel “finish the job,” warned that there will be “all hell to pay” if the hostages aren’t released by the time he takes office, and threatened to blow Iran to smithereens.

Trump has signalled his intentions this time around by the people he has selected for key positions. Mike Huckabee, his pick for U.S. ambassador to Israel, is a religious fanatic who doesn’t think Israeli settlements are illegal and says “There is no such thing as a West Bank. It’s Judea and Samaria [the territory’s biblical name, revived in Israeli propaganda].” He even insists there is no such thing as a Palestinian. Elise Stefanik, Trump’s pick for U.S. ambassador to the UN, used her position in Congress to stifle free speech on college campuses and advocates deporting pro-Palestinian protesters who have student visas.

What about Congress? While the 118th Congress was overwhelmingly pro-Israel, the new one, with both the Senate and the House under Republican control, will be even more aggressively biased. Members want to pass a host of horrific bills that will further cement U.S. ties to the Israeli government, punish international actors that dare try to hold Israel accountable, and repress the domestic movement for Palestinian rights. This legislation includes a bill that equates criticism of Israel with anti-semitism, a bill that gives the Treasury Department the power to investigate non-profit groups for links to “terrorism” and then shut them down, a bill to sanction the International Criminal Court for issuing an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu, a bill to make permanent the U.S. ban on funding the relief agency UNRWA, and a bill to cancel trade agreements with South Africa because of its genocide case against Israel in the International Court of Justice.

And of course, we can’t leave out the challenges posed by three powerful forces: AIPAC, Christian Zionists and military contractors. Best known is the lobby group AIPAC, which used its financial muscle in the recent elections to knock out two of the most pro-Palestinian members of Congress, Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman, leaving others terrified of becoming AIPAC targets. Lesser known but enormously powerful are the tens of millions of Christian Zionists, who are driven by the radical belief that Israel is key to Jesus’ return to Earth after a bloody final battle of Armageddon in which only those who accept Jesus as their savior will survive. Christian Zionists—already numerous in Congress, the White House and even the military—will be emboldened by Trump.

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The third powerful lobby group are the military contractors, which has more lobbyists than members of Congress. Thanks to the $18 billion that Congress allocated for Israel in 2024, weapons stocks have soared over the past year, dramatically outperforming the major stock indexes.

But there are countervailing forces as well. The American public has become more and more sympathetic to Palestinians. A November opinion poll showed that, despite the pro-Israel bias of our government and corporate media, most Americans (63 percent) want a ceasefire and 55 percent think the U.S. should not provide unrestricted financial and military assistance to the Israeli government.

This is especially true among young people and among Democrats. And with a Republican in the White House, more Democrats in positions of power should be willing to oppose Israel’s actions since they will no longer be defying their own party’s president. And it’s not just Democrats. Many Trump supporters oppose U.S. involvement in overseas wars, and Trump himself, on the campaign trail, repeatedly claimed that he wants to bring peace to the Middle East.

Worldwide, more countries are not only voting for a ceasefire at the UN, but taking concrete measures to hold Israel accountable. The long list of countries and parties that have either submitted or announced their intention to join South Africa’s case at the International Court of Justice include Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ireland, Jordan, Libya, Maldives, Mexico, Namibia, Nicaragua, Palestine, Spain, Türkiye and the Arab League. Countries that have either banned, limited or announced their intention to embargo arms to Israel include Italy, Spain, the UK, Canada, Belgium, The Netherlands, Türkiye, Russia and China.

In the coming year, the Palestine solidarity movement must find and expand the cracks in the pro-Israel war machine. It must strengthen the spine of Democrats who live in fear of AIPAC and  reach out to Republicans who oppose funding foreign conflicts. The same arguments many Republicans make about defunding Ukraine must be applied to Israel. Activists must expand campaigns against companies supporting Israel’s genocide, as well as efforts at the state, city, labor, university, faith-based and sectoral level to condemn Israel’s actions and promote divestment. The recent resolution by the American Historical Association condemning “scholasticide” is a good example.

While activists are bracing for a torrent of Trump policies that will create even more global and domestic chaos, including increased attacks on pro-Palestine organizations and individuals, the U.S. movement must be as resolute as the Palestinians themselves, who have demonstrated that, no matter what Israel does to destroy them, they remain determined to resist. The year 2025, with Donald Trump in the White House, will not be a time for despair or retreating in fear, but a time for action.

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

8 January 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Phil Pasquini

In reaction to Israel’s continued and purposeful efforts to destroy the health care system in Gaza, activists across the country this past week have been protesting and calling for international intervention to end the intentional destruction of this vital lifeline. The deliberately planned destruction by Israeli forces of hospitals, accompanied by the killing and kidnapping of health care workers, doctors, nurses and others along with attacks against ambulances has resulted in a death toll of around an estimated 1,000 medical professionals since last September.

Of particular concern is the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, who was kidnapped and later imprisoned while preparing to evacuate the hospital as directed by the Israeli army in December of last year.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor (Euro-Med) based in Geneva on January 3 reported that Dr. Abu Safiya, presently detained at Sde Teyman military base in southern Israel, has been suffering from deteriorating health and noted that there were “alarming indications of torture and ill-treatment since his detention in late December.”

Euro-Med further warned of their concern by stating that there is a “ grave risk to his life, following patterns of deliberate killings and deaths under torture previously suffered by other doctors and medical staff arrested from Gaza since October 2023.” Their concern is partly based on former Israeli detainees who have given testimony that during their confinement in prisons and detainment centers operated by the Israeli army, they faced “severe torture and solitary confinement.”

Doctors Against Genocide along with members of Code Pink’s Flood Congress for Palestine campaign and other human rights activists on January 8 gathered at legislative office buildings across Capitol Hill demanding of legislators as their constituents that Dr. Abu Safiya be released immediately due to concerns about his present medical condition while being illegally held and tortured.

Together the groups composed of activists and doctors in white coats visited several dozen Senate and Congressional legislators’ offices in asking each representative to issue a statement demanding the immediate release of Dr. Abu Safiya along with all the health care workers illegally detained, in violation of the Geneva Convention, who are presently imprisoned by Israel. They are also calling on legislators to cosponsor the forthcoming UNRWA Funding Emergency Restoration Act and to respect numerous worldwide human rights organizations that have concluded “Israel is committing genocidal acts against the Palestinian people.”

In addition, they are demanding that the representatives “take decisive action to stop the U.S. from arming Israel” in saying that “The U.S. has both the responsibility to protect and the responsibility to prevent genocide. Inaction in the face of such atrocities constitutes complicity, which is a legally punishable crime under U.S. federal law on genocide and the Genocide Convention.” They are also asking for immediate humanitarian relief for all Gazans and to hold Israel accountable for all its actions in Gaza.

Each visit to the eight Democrats Senate offices this reporter witnessed followed the same script of staff listening to the statements of the activists as they pressed their concerns for immediate action and asked to meet one on one in person with their respective representative. In every instance, they were assured that their concerns would be passed on to the representative and that they should request a meeting by email.

One doctor when speaking to a staff member spoke of the oath, he took to preserve life and that as a Jew felt compelled morally and ethically to speak out against the genocide by Israel. Another activist expressed her frustration with the billions of taxpayer dollars given to Israel for its genocide in Gaza when the funds are need domestically to address many pressing issues including that of the climate crisis. This while a TV in the senator’s office was showing a reporter in Los Angeles where uncontrollable wildfires are raging, destroying thousands of homes.

Report and photo by Phil Pasquini

9 January 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Vijay Prashad

From early December 2024 to early January 2025, the body temperature of eight babies fell below any acceptable amount and they froze to death. This condition is known as hypothermia. The most recent of these children to die, Yousef, was sleeping beside his mother because, as she told Al Jazeera, of the very cold weather. Temperatures in Gaza have fallen to just above freezing, which in the context of a lack of housing, blankets, and warm bedclothes is deadly. Body heat is the only protection, which is minimal for an infant. Yousef’s mother said, “He slept next to me and in the morning I found him frozen and dead. I don’t know what to say. No one can feel my misery. No one in the world can understand our catastrophic situation.”

[https://twitter.com/QudsNen/status/1876597212832268389]

Each of these stories is incomprehensible. The al-Batran family in Deir al-Balah are living in a tent made of blue plastic. Their bedding is only acceptable to them because their entire household has been destroyed, and they have not received any relief. Twin brothers Ali and Jumaa were born during this ugly genocidal bombardment in November 2024, but then one after the other succumbed to hypothermia. When the father felt Jumma’s head, it was as “cold as ice.”

By early January 2025, studies by the United Nations and the Palestinian government showed that at least 92 percent of housing units in Gaza had been destroyed. Most Palestinians who remain in northern Gaza have no homes in which to shelter. They are living in makeshift tents, not even having access to the United Nations tents that are sparsely available. Because there are now no hospitals open in northern Gaza, children are being born in these tents, and they are not receiving any medical care. “The health sector is being systematically dismantled,” Dr. Rik Peeperkorn of the World Health Organization told the United Nations Security Council on January 3. In the so-called “safe zone” of al-Mawasi, near Khan Younis, three babies died of hypothermia, mocking the idea that this is indeed a safe zone. Mahmoud al-Faseeh, the father of Sila Mahmoud al-Faseeh (who died in her third week), told Al Jazeera, “We sleep on the sand and we don’t have enough blankets and we feel the cold inside our tent.” The story is the same up and down Gaza’s length: the cold has come at night, ceaseless rain has made everything damp, the tents are inadequate, the blankets are thread worn, and the infants—the most vulnerable—have begun to die.

The map of such suffering is not restricted to Gaza or to the Palestinians. Such stories of a parent walking to find their child beside them in an inadequate tent, with no blankets because of the lack of relief in a war zone, are sadly not unique. The children frozen in the Kabul slum of Chaman-e-Babrak in 2012 had names that are utterly forgotten outside their families. These were victims of a war that trudged on and threw these rural Afghans into cities where they lived in glorified plastic bags. Similarly, there is little memory of the precious infants who froze to death in the unnamed camps north of Idlib, Syria, along the Turkish border. The parents of these children went from tent to tent over a decade, trying desperately to find a stable life. Some of their children froze to death; other families perished as their dangerous heaters in these plastic tents set their entire families on fire.

Wars on Civilians

War zones are no longer places where combatants fight each other. They have become charnel houses for civilians, and entire populations taken hostage and brutalized. In May 2024, before the full toll of the Israeli genocide had been measured, the UN Secretary-General provided a report to the Security Council on civilian deaths. The data is stunning:

The United Nations recorded at least 33,443 civilian deaths in armed conflicts in 2023, a 72 percent increase as compared with 2022. The proportion of women and children killed doubled and tripled, respectively, as compared with 2022. In 2023, 4 out of every 10 civilians killed in conflicts were women, and 3 out of 10 were children. Seven out of 10 recorded deaths occurred in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel, making it the deadliest conflict for civilians in 2023.

The number regarding the Occupied Palestine Territory includes the Israeli violence from October to December 2023, but not the violence that intensified across the entirety of 2024. Those numbers will come later this year.

A look backward at the post-9/11 Western wars on Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen shows the bleakness of the general attitude toward civilians in these parts of the world. The direct deaths from the bombs and the gunfire have been calculated to be nearly one million, an enormous underestimation but still a very large number. Adding in excess deaths, including from starvation and hypothermia, the toll is calculated to be nearing five million, also an underestimation but at least indicative of the impact on these parts of the world.

On August 29, 2021, two U.S. MQ-9 Reapers hovered over a white Toyota Corolla that had pulled into a parking area of a multi-family home in Kabul’s working-class Khwaja Burgha neighborhood. The U.S. drone operators, who had tracked the car for the past eight hours, watched as a man left the car, as a group of people came to greet him, and as one person took out a black bag from the rear seat of the car. At that point, the U.S. decided to fire a hellfire missile at the man and the people around him. They were all killed. It turned out that the man, Zemari Ahmadi, was not a member of the enemy group ISIS-K, but was an employee of a California-based non-governmental organization called Nutrition and Education International (NEI). The people who came to greet him from inside the house were his children, grandchildren, and their cousins. The black bag, which the U.S. claimed might have had explosives, carried a laptop from NEI, and another bag carried water bottles. The secondary explosion that the operators saw on their video feed was not from a bomb but from a propane tank in the carport.

The list of people killed by the United States on that day should give one pause because of the youth of so many of them: Zemari Ahmadi (age 43), Naser Haidari (age 30), Zamir (age 20), Faisal (age 16), Farzad (age 10), Arwin (age 7), Benyamen (age 6), Malika (age 6), Ayat (age 2), and Sumaya (age 2). This is the last U.S. drone strike before the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Not one U.S. soldier was charged with the murder, let alone found guilty. Not one Israeli soldier will be charged or found guilty of the deaths of the Palestinian children in Gaza. This is the impunity that defines the assault on civilians, including those little Palestinian babies freezing to death in their blue tents, lying beside desperate parents.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter.

9 January 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Chris Hedges

Israel and the U.S. government will continue the genocide in Gaza for many months until the Palestinians are annihilated or driven from their homeland and Greater Israel is consolidated.

Joe Biden’s parting gift of $8 billion in weapons sales to the apartheid state of Israel acknowledges the gruesome reality of the genocide in Gaza. This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. This is a permanent, endless war designed not to destroy Hamas, or free Israeli hostages, but to eradicate, once and for all, Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. It is the final push to create a Greater Israel, which will include not only Gaza and the West Bank, but chunks of Lebanon and Syria. It is the culmination of the Zionist dream. And it will be paid for with rivers of blood — Palestinian, Lebanese and Syrian.

Minister of Agriculture and Food Security of Israel Avi Dichter was probably offering conservative estimates when he said “I think that we are going to stay in Gaza for a long time. I think most people understand that [Israel] will be years in some kind of West Bank situation where you go in and out and maybe you remain along Netzarim [corridor].”

Mass extermination takes time. It is also expensive. Fortunately for Israel, its lobby in the U.S. has a stranglehold on Congress, our electoral process and the media narrative. Americans, although 61 percent support ending weapons shipments to Israel, will pay for it. And those that express dissent will be frog-marched into Zionist black holes where their voices are silenced and their careers jeopardized or destroyed. Donald Trump and the Republicans have an open disdain for democracy, but so do the Democrats and Joe Biden.

The U.S. provided $17.9 billion in military aid to Israel from October 2023 to October 2024, a substantial increase from the already $3.8 billion in military aid the U.S. gives Israel annually. This is a record for a single year. The State Department has informed Congress that it intends to approve another $8 billion in purchases of U.S.-made arms by Israel. This will provide Israel with more GPS guidance systems for bombs, more artillery shells, more missiles for fighter jets and helicopters, and more bombs, including 2,800 unguided MK-84 bombs, which Israel has a habit of dropping on densely packed tent encampments in Gaza. The pressure wave from the 2,000-pound MK-84 pulverizes buildings and exterminates life within a 400-yard radius. The blast, which ruptures lungs, rips apart limbs and bursts sinus cavities up to hundreds of yards away, leaves behind a 50-foot-wide and 36-foot-deep crater. Israel appears to have used this bomb to assassinate Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah, in Beirut on September 27, 2024.

The genocide, and the decision to fuel it with billions of dollars, marks an ominous turning point. It is a public declaration by the U.S. and its allies in Europe that international and humanitarian law, although blatantly disregarded by the U.S. in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and a generation earlier in Vietnam, is meaningless. We will not even pay lip service to it. This will be a Hobbesian world where nations that have the most advanced industrial weapons make the rules. Those who are poor and vulnerable will kneel in subjugation. The genocide in Gaza is the template for the future. And those in the Global South know it.

The “wretched of the earth” who lack sophisticated weapons, who do not have modern armies, artillery units, missiles, navies, armored units and warplanes, will strike back with crude tools. They will match individual acts of terror against massive campaigns of state terror.

Are we surprised we are hated? Terror begets terror. We saw this in New Orleans where a man who was allegedly inspired by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) killed 14 people when he drove his pickup truck into a crowd on New Year’s Day. We will see more of it. But let’s be clear. We started it. The moral void of the suicide bomber is birthed from our moral void.

Israel’s frustration at the dogged resistance in Gaza, the West Bank, Yemen and Lebanon increases the bloodlust. Members of Israel’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee sent a letter to Minister of Defense Israel Katz, calling on the government to intensify the siege of Gaza.

“Effective control of the territory and the population is the only means towards cleansing enemy lines from the strip, and naturally towards decisive victory, rather than treading [water] in a war of attrition, where the side that is most worn is Israel,” they write. “Therefore we end up inserting our soldiers again and again into neighborhoods and alleys that were already conquered by them many times.”

Israel, the letter reads, must carry out “remote elimination of all energy sources, that is fuel, solar panels and any relevant means (pipes, cables, generators etc.)” It should ensure the “elimination of all food sources including warehouses, water and all relevant means (water pumps etc.)” and it must facilitate the “remote elimination of anyone who moves in the area and does not exit with a white flag during the days of the effective siege.”

The letter concludes that “after these actions and the days of siege upon those who remain, [the] IDF must enter gradually and conduct a full cleansing of the enemy nests…. This should be done in the northern Gaza Strip, and similarly in any other territory: encirclement, evacuation of the population to a humanitarian zone, and effective siege until surrender or full elimination of the enemy. This is how every army acts, and so must the IDF act.”

In short, exterminate the brutes.

Shamsud-Din Jabbar, the 42-year-old U.S. military veteran who plowed his pick-up truck into a crowd of New Year’s revellers in New Orleans killing 14 people and injuring 35 others, spoke to us in the language we use to speak to the Arab world. Indiscriminate death. The targeting of innocents. The callous indifference to life. The thirst for revenge. The demonization of others. The belief that fate or God or western civilization has decreed that we have a right to impose our vision of the world with violence. Jabbar, who posted videos online in which he professed his support for Islamic State, is our murderous doppelgänger. He will not be the last.

“When a society is dispossessed, when the injustices thrust upon it appear insoluble, when the ‘enemy’ is all-powerful, when one’s own people are bestialised as insects, cockroaches, ‘two-legged beasts,’ then the mind moves beyond reason,” Robert Fisk writes in The Great War for Civilization. “It becomes fascinated in two senses: with the idea of an afterlife and with the possibility that this belief will somehow provide a weapon of more than nuclear potential. When the United States was turning Beirut into a NATO base in 1983, and using its firepower against Muslim guerrillas in the mountains to the east, Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Baalbek were promising that God would rid Lebanon of the American presence. I wrote at the time — not entirely with my tongue in my cheek — that this was likely to be a titanic battle: U.S. technology versus God. Who would win? Then on 23 October 1983 a lone suicide bomber drove a truckload of explosives into the U.S. Marine compound at Beirut airport and killed 241 American servicemen in six seconds…I later interviewed one of the few surviving marines to have seen the bomber. ‘All I can remember,’ he told me, ‘is that the guy was smiling.’”

These acts of terrorism, or in the case of Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Yemen armed resistance, are used to justify endless mass killing. This Via Dolorosa leads to a global death spiral, especially as the climate crisis reconfigures the planet and international bodies, such as the United Nations and the International Criminal Court, become hollow appendages.

We are sowing the Middle East with dragon’s teeth and, as in the ancient Greek myth, these teeth are rising from the soil as enraged warriors determined to destroy us.

Chris Hedges, who graduated from seminary at Harvard Divinity School, worked for nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, National Public Radio and other news organizations in Latin America, the Middle East and the Balkans.

7 January 2025

Source: countercurrents.org