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By Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor

Palestinian Territory – Since resuming its genocidal war on the Gaza Strip on 18 March, Israel has been killing at least 103 Palestinians and injuring 223 more every day. Additionally, it never stopped employing other genocide tactics prior to 18 March, and has imposed lethal living conditions since 7 October 2023 designed to eradicate the Palestinian population in the Strip, including starvation and the tightening of its illegalblockade.

Since dawn on Tuesday 18 March, the Israeli occupation forces have killed 830 Palestinians and injured an additional 1,787 in hundreds of airstrikes, artillery shellings, and fire from military vehicles and drones throughout the Gaza Strip, according to the Euro-Med Monitor field team.

The Israeli occupation army also continues tobomb homes with occupants still inside, killing large numbers of people. The most recent incident occurred at dawn today (26 March) in Jabalia, in the northern Gaza Strip, when the Israeli army bombed the al-Najjar family’s homeand killed eight Palestinians, including five children.

Without any military justification, the Israeli occupation army has committed the crime oftargeting homes—or what is left of them—every day, including targeting tents where civilians have sought safety following almost 18 months of genocide. This is a clear component of a systematic Israeli policy that aims to kill Palestinians, ruin their lives, and impose a horrificreality that makes it impossible to survive.

Two Palestinian journalists were killed by Israel in two different, deliberate attacks on 24 March. Palestine Today TV journalist Mohammed Mansour was killed and his wife was gravely injured when Israeli planes bombed his home in Khan Yunis, in the south of the Gaza Strip. Journalist Hossam Shabat, who worked as a correspondent for Al Jazeera Mubasher, was killed when his car was targeted.

The Israeli army has also recently killed civilian government officials in administrative positions, including supervisors working in the education sector. The victims include Jihad al-Agha, the head of the Supervision Department at the East Khan Yunis Education Directorate, who was killed in an airstrike targeting his home on 23 March along with his wife, child, and three daughters, and Manar Abu Khater, the Director of Education in East Khan Yunis, who was killed along with two of his sons in an Israeli airstrike on Khan Yunis on 24 March.

An individual does not lose their civilian status or become a legitimate target for attack simply because they hold an administrative or civilian position within a governmental or organisational structure, unless they are actively and consistently engaged in hostilities, which was not the case in the situation of al-Agha or Abu Khater.

The Israeli occupation forces have also been invading the Tel al-Sultan neighbourhood in the west of Rafah since 23 March, committing heinous crimes, including unjustified field killings.

According to testimonies given to Euro-MedMonitor, the occupation forces shot civilians while they were trying to escape, leaving their bodies lying in the streets. Around 50,000 civilians are still confined to a small geographic area in Rafahwhile Israeli military activities, such as shelling, bombing, and raids, are taking place around them.

For the fourth day in a row, the Israeli occupation army has kept the whereabouts of 15 ambulance and civil defence workers in Rafah a secret, raising concerns that they might be killed, subjected to torture, or otherwise mistreated. Since these people are humanitarian personnel protected by the Geneva Conventions, their continued detention without formal notification of their whereabouts or health status is a serious violation of international law and a full-fledged crime of enforced disappearance.

For the roughly 2.3 million people in the Gaza Strip who now face Israeli policies of daily killings and starvation due to the continued closure of the border crossings and the denial of aid and medicine, Israel’s return to widespread killing andthe systematic destruction of buildings and property imposes a catastrophic reality on their lives. These acts of genocide are similar to thoseexperienced by residents of the Strip for 15 months before the January 2025 ceasefire.Israel’s recent intensification of its genocide, demonstrated by the increasingly lethal living conditions imposed on Palestinians, will result in slow and gradual death without international intervention.

The public declarations made by Israeli officials regarding their acceptance of United StatesPresident Donald Trump’s plan to drive Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip and the proposal of its execution are alarming. Following the destruction of the vast majority of homes, shelters, and buildings in the Strip by the Israeli occupation army, hundreds of thousands of people are being forced to flee yet again, without any shelter, under the pretence of evacuation orders for residents’ “own safety” and ongoing intense aerial bombardment.

These statements represent a reality that is being played out on the ground through mass killingsand the imposition of intolerable living conditions, rather than just threats. The US gives political and military cover for the continuation of Israeli crimes in the Gaza Strip by providing financial and military aid, blocking international efforts to hold Israel accountable, and interfering to stop the issuance or implementation of UN resolutions that could stop these violations. Israel’s actions are carried out with the direct support and acquiescence of the US, making the US a major actor in the ongoing crime of genocide.

In just one week, over 200,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have been forced to leave their homes, and thousands more are preparing to leave by looking for temporary housing. Meanwhile, basic services and security remainunavailable across the Strip.

The international community’s virtual silence has incited Israel to carry out its crimes, includingkilling and injuring people without consequenceand attacking international organisations and UN headquarters in the Gaza Strip. Israel’s complete disregard for the rules of international law—rules that give UN headquarters and employees special protection—alone is an international crime of the highest calibre that needs to be addressed right away.

All states, both individually and collectively, must fulfil their legal obligations and act quickly to halt the genocide in the Gaza Strip. The Palestinian civilians there must be protected in every way possible; the blockade must be lifted completely and immediately; the movement of people and goods must be unhindered; all crossings must be opened without arbitrary conditions; and effective measures must be taken to protect Palestinians from the slow killing and forced displacement plans of Israel and the United States. An urgent international response is needed to appropriately address the population’s immediate needs including the provision of adequate temporary housing.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor is a Geneva-based independent organization with regional offices across the MENA region and Europe

27 March 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Seth Staton Watkins

Original Song

Oh Palestine, Oh Palestine (Original Song) by Seth Staton Watkins

31 March 2025

Source: transcend.org

By Middle East Monitor

28 Mar 2025 – Israeli occupation forces executed nine missing Palestinian medics from the Red Crescent and Civil Defence in Rafah, buried them and destroyed their ambulances, the Palestinian Civil Defence confirmed yesterday.

The medics had been missing for five days after Israeli forces advanced into western Rafah. Their fate remained unknown until rescue teams, coordinated with the Red Cross, entered the area. They discovered that Israeli occupation troops had executed the missing medics and buried them near the barracks. The soldiers also destroyed all Palestinian Red Crescent and Civil Defence ambulances at the site.

By Jonathan Cook

24 Mar 2025 – Israel has justified bombing a Gaza hospital, killing civilians, because an injured Hamas politician was there. The laws of war only ever seem to be forgotten when it is Israel violating them. If Hamas struck a hospital treating Netanyahu it would not be justifiable. But the laws of war are forgotten when Israel violates them.

Israel and its genocide cheerleaders are claiming Israel’s air strike on the Nasser Hospital in Gaza last night – which killed several patients and staff – was justified because a Hamas politician was being treated there for injuries from an earlier Israeli strike.

Israel has also seized on the fact that a Hamas official was in the hospital to retroactively rationalise its destruction of Gaza’s entire health sector, leaving more than 2 million Palestinians with barely functioning medical care in the midst of Israel’s genocidal bombing campaign.

At the weekend, the Israeli army blew up the entire Turkish Hospital in Gaza and did so without any possible military justification. Its soldiers had been occupying the hospital, using it as a military post, for much of the past year.

The hospital had served its purpose for Israel – and Israel sees no purpose for Palestinian hospitals actually serving the Palestinian population. After all, Israel’s goal is to drive Palestinians out of Gaza, and that is made easier if Palestinians have no surviving medical facilities in the enclave.

[https://twitter.com/TheCradleMedia/status/1903033960109605265]

Once again, Israel’s “justification” for the latest attack on Nasser Hospital doesn’t even bother to suggest it accords with any known principle of international law.

Here are a few reminders about the long-established laws of war that only ever seem to be forgotten when it is Israel violating them.

Even fighters are considered non-combatants – that is, not legitimate targets for military attack – when they are injured and no longer engaged in combat. That rule applies even more obviously to politicians.

All Israel’s hospitals, such as Rambam in Haifa, regularly treat Israeli soldiers injured in combat. Israeli hospitals are doing so right now – Israel makes no secret of this.

No one, least of all the people defending last night’s attack on Nasser Hospital in Gaza, would for one moment consider it legitimate for Hamas to bomb Rambam Hospital, killing patients and staff there, to hit an injured soldier being treated at the facility.

But what Israel did is even more clearly a violation of the laws of war because it bombed the hospital to hit an injured Hamas politician, not a fighter.

That is the equivalent of Hamas striking a hospital in Israel, killing Israeli staff and patients, to assassinate an Israeli politician.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently spent several days in the Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital in Jerusalem for a prostate operation.

Had Hamas hit the hospital, can one imagine Israel and its supporters – or western politicians and media – accepting that as legitimate grounds for a military attack? The question doesn’t even need asking.

The only reason it is okay for Israel to attack a Palestinian hospital, killing Palestinian civilians, to assassinate a Palestinian politician is because the western political and media class are out-and-out anti-Palestinian racists.

Palestinian life is meaningless to them. Israel calls Palestinians ‘human animals’ – and western leaders secretly concur.

Once Jews were seen that way – as human animals. Their lives were worthless. They were killed on an industrial scale across Europe.

Today’s Europe is no different, nor is the US. It’s just that Jews are no longer the objects of the West’s institutional racism and its structural violence. Palestinians are.

The West’s racism that led to the Holocaust is still with us. We have not learnt from history. Our politics has not evolved beyond that of our great-grandparents’ generation. The Gaza genocide is our generation’s Holocaust. And we are equally complicit.

Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, since 2001.

31 March 2025

Source: transcend.org

By Chris Hedges

Liberal institutions, including universities, traditionally surrender without a fight to the dictates of autocrats. Ours are no exception.

24 Mar 2025 – I was not surprised when Columbia University’s interim president Katrina Armstrong caved to the demands of the Trump administration. She agreed to ban face masks or face coverings, prohibit protests in academic buildings and create an internal security force of 36 New York City Police officers empowered to “remove individuals from campus and/or arrest them when appropriate.” She has also surrendered the autonomy of academic departments, as demanded by the Trump administration, by appointing a new senior vice provost to “review” the university’s department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies and the Center for Palestine Studies.

Elite universities such as Harvard, Princeton, Columbia or Yale, were created to train and perpetuate the plutocracy. They are not and never have been centers of cutting-edge intellectual thought or hospitable to dissidents and radicals. They cloak themselves in the veneer of moral probity and intellectualism but cravenly serve political and economic power. This is their nature. Don’t expect it to change, even as we fall headlong into authoritarianism.

Armstrong, like most of the heads of our universities, is fruitlessly humiliating herself. She would, I expect, happily make space on her office wall to hang an oversized portrait of the president. But what she does not know, and what history has taught us, is that no appeasement is sufficient with autocrats. She, and the rest of the liberal elites, groveling abjectly in an attempt to accommodate their new masters, will be steadily replaced or dominated by buffoonish goons such as those seeded throughout the Trump administration.

The Department of Education has warned 60 colleges and universities that they could face “potential enforcement actions,” if they do not comply with federal civil rights law that protects students from discrimination based on race or nationality, which includes antisemitism. Columbia, stripped of $400 million in federal grants, is desperately trying to restore the funding. I doubt it will work. Those mounting these assaults against universities intend to turn them into indoctrination machines. The so-called campaign against antisemitism is simply a cynical tool being used to achieve that end.

The warning follows an open letter signed by 200 faculty members on Feb. 3 urging Columbia University implement measures to “protect Jewish students.” Amongst their demands are the removal of Professor Joseph Massad who teaches Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at the university and beginning a Title VI investigation against him, that the university adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, which conflates criticism of Israel with racism against Jews, and the university hire tenured pro-Israel faculty.

These institutions of privilege — I attended Harvard and have taught at Columbia and Princeton — have always been complicit in the crimes of their times. They did not, until the world around them changed, speak out against the slaughter of Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans, the crushing of labor and socialist organizations at the turn of the twentieth century and the purging of institutions, including the academy, during the Red Scare in the 1920s and 1930s, and later the witch hunts under McCarthyism. They turned on their students protesting the war in Vietnam in the 1960s as viciously as they are turning on them now.

Many of the dregs of the Trump administration are products of these elite academic institutions. I can assure you their children will also attend these schools despite their public denunciations. Rep. Elise Stefanik, who humiliated in congressional hearings the presidents of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, graduated from Harvard. Vice President JD Vance graduated from Yale Law School. Trump graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth went to Princeton University and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who has ordered a review of grants to universities from his agency over allegations of antisemitism — graduated from Harvard.

Professor Katherine Franke, who taught at Columbia Law School for 25 years, recently lost her position at the university for defending Columbia students’ right to protest in favor of a ceasefire of the Israeli slaughter in Gaza and for Columbia University to divest from Israel. She also condemned the spraying of pro-Palestinian protesters on the campus with a toxic chemical that left students hospitalized.

“Part of why I think Colombia was such an easy target — and it’s not just Columbia, I think this is true for Harvard, for Yale, for the elite universities — is that the boards of trustees are no longer made up of people who are involved in education — committed to the educational mission, in some way professionally or otherwise — see themselves as custodians of the special role that the academy plays in a democracy,” she told me.

“Instead, they are hedge fund managers, venture capitalists, corporate lawyers and in our case, arms manufacturers as well.” She went on:

And they see that responsibility is to protect only the endowment. I often describe Columbia — which is the largest residential landlord in New York City — as a real estate holding operation that has a side hustle of teaching classes. It has evolved over time into just a business that enjoys nonprofit status. And so when the pressure started here, there were no voices on the boards of trustees to say, ‘Hey, wait a minute, we have to be the front line of resistance.’ Or at a minimum, we have to defend our academic mission.’ When I was sitting in my living room watching [former] president Minouche Shafik testify before that House committee…I was upset because they mentioned me, but more importantly, the fact that president Shafik did not even begin to defend Columbia, its faculty, its students, our project, our history of being one of the premier universities in the world. Instead, she groveled before a bully. And we all know that when you grovel before a bully, it encourages the bully. And that’s exactly what’s happened here up until today, where they’re still negotiating with the Trump administration on terms that the administration has set. And this university, I think, will never be the same if it survives at all.

You can see my interview with Professor Franke here.

Universities and colleges across the country have shut down free speech and squandered their academic integrity. They have brutalized, arrested, suspended and expelled faculty, administrators and students that decry the genocide. They have called police to their campuses — in the case of Columbia three times — to arrest students, often charging them with trespassing. Following the lead of their authoritarian masters they subjected students to internal surveillance. Columbia University, out front on the repression of its students, banned Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace a month after Israel’s genocide in Gaza had begun in November 2023, when both organizations called for a ceasefire, long before the protests and encampments began.

Columbia’s violent suppression of protests and decision to lock down its campus, which is now surrounded by security checkpoints, paved the way for the abduction of Mahmoud Khalil, who was a graduate student at the School of International Public Affairs. He is a legal permanent resident. He did not commit a crime. But the university administration had already demonized and criminalized Khalil and the other students, many of whom are Jewish, who dared to protest the mass slaughter in Gaza.

The video — shot by his wife on March 8 — of Khalil being taken away by plainclothes federal agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) who did not identify themselves, is a chilling reminder of the secret police abductions I witnessed on the streets of Santiago during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

The law in authoritarian states protects the criminality of the powerful. It revokes due process, basic freedoms and the rights of citizenship. It is an instrument of repression. It is a very small step from the stripping of rights from a legal resident holding a green card to the stripping of rights of any citizen. This is what is coming.

Khalil was ostensibly arrested under the Immigration Nationality Act of 1952, also known as the McCarran-Walter Act. It gives the Secretary of State the power to deport foreign nationals if he has “reasonable ground[s] to believe” their presence or activities in the U.S. “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” It was used to deny entry to the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, the Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Márquez and the British author Doris Lessing. It was also used to deport the poet and essayist Margaret Randall and civil rights activist and journalist Claudia Jones. Senator Patrick McCarran, an open admirer of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and a rabid antisemite, formulated the act to target not only dissidents and communists, but also Jews. When the law was enacted, it was used to ban Eastern European Jewish Holocaust survivors from entering the U.S. due to their alleged sympathies with the Soviet Union.

“The irony of that is not lost on any of us, that these are laws that are at their core, deeply antisemitic, that are now being deployed in the name of protecting Jewish citizens or our foreign policy goals with the state of Israel,” Franke said. “And that’s the cynicism of this administration. They don’t give a darn that there’s that history. They’re looking for every piece of power that they can get, every law, no matter how ugly that law may be. Even the laws that interned Japanese people during World War Two. I’m sure they would be more than happy to use those at some point.”

James Luther Adams, my mentor at Harvard Divinity School, was in Germany in 1935 and 1936 until he was arrested and deported by the Gestapo. He worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known as the Confessing Church, led by dissident clergy such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Adams saw how swiftly and cravenly German universities, which like ours were considered some of the best in the world, surrendered to the dictates of fascism and self-destructed.

The theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich, a close friend of Adams, was fired from his teaching post and blacklisted ten weeks after the Nazis came to power in January 1933. Tillich’s book “The Socialist Decision” was immediately banned by the Nazis. Tillich, a Lutheran pastor, along with the sociologist Karl Mannheim and the philosopher Max Horkheimer, who wrote “Eclipse of Reason” which examines the rise of authoritarianism, were branded as “enemies of the Reich,” blacklisted and forced into exile. The 1933 “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” saw all Jewish professors dismissed. The vast majority of academics cowered in fear or, as with the case of the philosopher Martin Heidegger, joined the Nazi Party, which saw him appointed as the Rector of Freiburg University.

Adams saw in the Christian Right disturbing similarities with the German Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi. He was the first person I heard refer to the Christian Right as “Christian fascists.” He also warned us about universities and academics which, if the country fell into authoritarianism, would debase themselves to protect their status and privileges. Few would speak out or defy authority.

“If the Nazis took over America, 60 percent of the Harvard faculty would happily begin their lectures with the Nazi salute,” he quipped.

And this is where we are. None of the liberal institutions, including the universities, the commercial media and the Democratic Party, will defend us. They will remain supine, hypocritically betray their supposed principles and commitment to democracy or willingly transform themselves into apologists for the regime. The purges and silencing of our most courageous and accomplished intellectuals, writers, artists and journalists — begun before Trump’s return to the White House — is being expedited.

Resistance will be left to us. Enemies of the state.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief.

31 March 2025

Source: transcend.org

By TFF Transnational Foundation

Mineral Deal Gives US TOTAL Control Over Ukraine’s Future

Imagine Russia or China had suggested a deal with this content and these intentions, depriving Ukraine of its sovereignty.

28 Mar 2025 – This is posted on Sebastian Sas’ important YouTube Channel with no less than 120,000 subscribers. His succinct analysis is based on an article published by the NED, EU and NATO-supported Ukraine-based newspaper, European Pravda.

I hope you are half as shocked as Sas – and I – are. Because, remember that this war, this destruction of Ukraine has been caused by the Russia-NATO conflict – that is, by the Obama administration’s regime change in Kiev in 2014, the US-led NATO’s expansion and the US/Western pumping of arms into Ukraine.

Now, Ukraine is destined to be paying for generations ahead and give away its natural resources to an extent that makes it impossible to see it as a sovereign state in the future. The Trump Regime’s proposal is in colonial-slave style – also meant to undermine the European Union’s plans…

31 March 2025

Source: transcend.org

By Rick Sterling

27 Mar 2025 – There are many contrasts between the 35th president, John F. Kennedy, and the 45th and 47th president, Donald J. Trump. One extreme example is regarding U.S. policy toward Israel.

JFK and Israel/Palestine

Unknown to many people today, JFK supported Palestinian rights and sought a sustainable peace in the region.

In 1960, when JFK was campaigning to be president, he spoke at the convention of the Zionists of America. In his speech, Kennedy was complimentary about Israel but frankly said,

“I cannot believe that Israel has any real desire to remain indefinitely a garrison state surrounded by fear and hate.”

That warning, issued when Israel had only existed for 12 years, was ignored.

Kennedy did not just issue warnings. To the chagrin of the Israelis, JFK established friendly relations with Egypt’s President Nasser. The Kennedy administration provided loans and aid to Egypt.

The JFK administration supported UN resolution 194 which called for the right of return for Palestinian refugees driven out of their homeland. Although Israel committed to abide by UN resolutions when it was admitted to the United Nations in 1949, the Israelis reneged on this commitment and were hostile to the resolution. The day before JFK was assassinated, the New York Times reported (p 19), “Israel Dissents as U.N. Group Backs U.S. on Arab Refugees” and “U.S. Stand Angers Israel.”  The second item begins, “Premier Levi Eshkol expressed extreme distaste today for the United States’ position in the Palestinian-refugee debate.”

John Kennedy’s brother Robert was Attorney General and headed the Department of Justice. For two years, up until the end of 1963, the DOJ made increasingly strict demands that the American Zionist Council (AZC)  register as agents of a foreign country. In response, the AZC stalled, delayed, and created the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

The most intense disagreement between Tel Aviv and Washington was regarding the nuclear site under construction at Dimona. JFK was intent on stopping the expansion of countries which possessed nuclear weapons. Although Israeli Prime Minister Ben-Gurion said the nuclear site was for peaceful purposes, JFK insisted that the US needed to inspect and confirm this. The inspection deadline was December 1963.

In each of these four areas of contention, US policy changed dramatically after JFK was assassinated and Lyndon Johnson became president. Dimona was never properly inspected, and LBJ did not object to Israeli acquisition of nuclear weapons. The demand that the American Zionist Council register as an agent of a foreign country was dropped. Over time, the US withdrew their support of UN resolution 194, and LBJ was hostile to Nasser and ended US loans and support. Details of this process are described in this article and this book.

Israel Policy since JFK and Today

With few exceptions, US policy has been subservient to Israel’s wants ever since JFK.  An extreme low point was the treachery of President Johnson in covering up the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty during the June 1967 “Six Day War”. News about the Israeli killing and injuring of over 200 US sailors was suppressed for decades.

Now we are in a new extreme low point. In his first presidency, Trump flouted international law and longstanding US policy by moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The significant move was driven by mega donor Sheldon Adelson who wanted it announced on Trump’s first day in office.  Another prime concern of Adelson was to torpedo the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran. Trump responded as expected and withdrew the US from the agreement, effectively killing it.

Now President Trump’s administration is trampling on the right to free speech and aggressively suppressing critics of Israel. This repression on behalf of Israel was taking place under Biden but has escalated dramatically. Authorities have imprisoned a perfectly legal resident, Mahmoud Khalil. They have forced Columbia University to punish students without just cause and to impose obvious restrictions and prohibitions on speech and opinion. Why did they do this? It appears to follow the wishes of megadonor Miriam Adelson. She is president and chief funder of the Maccabee Task Force, which has campaigned on these issues for months.

As reported at Responsible Statecraft, “Adelson’s support for the administration’s campaign to stifle criticism of Israel on college campuses isn’t a new focus but her alignment with the levers of state powers to implement her vision are unprecedented. In fact, tax documents reveal that she is directly overseeing a social media campaign targeting Khalil and Columbia University.”

In addition to suppressing free speech and punishing critics of Israel, the Trump administration has bombed and attacked They are doing this despite the fact that Yemen did NOT threaten U.S. ships in the region. The Houthi government only threatened Israeli ships after Israel unilaterally broke the ceasefire and prevented food and other necessary humanitarian aid into Gaza. Israel, with U.S. support,  is blatantly defying the International Court of Justice which ordered Israel to “Maintain open the Rafah crossing for unhindered provision at scale of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance” and “Immediately halt its military offensive, and any other action in the Rafah Governorate, which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” Israel is in violation of this order and the US is complicit by providing most of the weapons.

President Trump, who campaigned and won election on the pledge to STOP needless wars, has started a new war with Yemen which is of no benefit to the US but serves the interests of Netanyahu’s Israel.  Will he authorize attacks on Iran, in further subservience to Bibi?

Corruption of the Political Process

When Jewish donors to JFK’s 1960 campaign suggested they should determine his Mideast policy, JFK was shocked and definitively said NO.  As reported by Seymour Hersh in “The Samson Option”, Kennedy talked with a friend who described what happened:

“As an American citizen he (JFK) was outraged to have a zionist group come to him and say, ‘We know your campaign is in trouble. We’re willing to pay your bills if you’ll let us have control of your Middle East policy.’”

At that time, JFK vowed to change the US electoral system to prevent this corruption if he got elected.  As president, he tried,but faced big hurdles and did not succeed.

Ever since JFK’s death, pro-Israel forces have had undue influence on U.S. policy.  If the International Court of Justice decides that Israel is committing genocide, as seems likely, the U.S. will be the primary collaborator in the war crimes. The US is increasingly alone in supporting the zionist state as it practices apartheid within Israel, theft of land in the West Bank, and massacres in Gaza including attacks on hospitals, schools, and UN facilities. Fourteen countries now support South Africa’s charges of genocide against Israel.

Under Democratic President Joe Biden, U.S. policy to Israel was unwaveringly obsequious. Despite 70% of Democratic Party voters wanting the U.S. to get a ceasefire in Gaza, the Biden/Blinken team refused to do this.  The Democratic Party leaders zionist ideology combined with zionist financial influence superseded their party members’ wishes. Netanyahu ignored Biden’s “red lines” with impunity.

Republican  President Trump has taken this to a new level. His zionist donors determine his Israel policy. To protect Israel, Trump issued an executive order which weaponizes antisemitism. Universities are being compelled to implement a new definition of antisemitism which conflates criticism of Israel with ethnic discrimination.  Trump’s campaign to “Make America Great Again” has evolved into “Miriam Adelson Gets All”.

It is a remarkable descent from the days when JFK did what was best for the U.S. as well as being best for Palestinians and non-zionist Jews.

Rick Sterling is a member of the TRANSCEND Network and an investigative journalist who lives in the SF Bay Area, California.

31 March 2025

Source: transcend.org

By Ilan Pappé

12 Mar 2025

Is the Zionist narrative collapsing? Historian Ilan Pappé breaks down the ideological contradictions at the heart of Israel’s settler-colonial project and why October 7 exposed the impossibility of being both a Zionist and a democrat.

From Gaza’s destruction to the West’s complicity, Pappé unpacks the Nakba al-mustamirra (ongoing Nakba), Israeli genocide, and the urgent need for global solidarity to challenge apartheid and safeguard human rights. What does this mean for the future of Palestine—and the world?

Video:

The Unraveling: Zionism, October 7, and the Ongoing Nakba w/ Ilan Pappe

Prof Ilan Pappé was born in Haifa, Israel in 1954. He graduated from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1979 and received his Ph.D. from the University of Oxford in 1984. He taught at the University of Haifa until 2006 and then moved to the University of Exeter in the UK, where he is currently the director of the European Center for Palestine Studies. Pappé is the author of 20 books, among them The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2007) and On Palestine, with Noam Chomsky (2010).

31 March 2025

Source: transcend.org

By Richard Falk

28 Mar 2025

In this unmissable, must-watch conversation, Professor Richard Falk—international law expert, former UN Special Rapporteur for Palestine, and leading scholar on global justice—breaks down the complexities of international law, the right of resistance, and the enforcement gaps in global governance.

From the historic context of decolonization to the current war in Gaza, Falk sheds light on the accountability challenges facing Israel and the role of civil society in pushing for change. Listen to his insights on the urgent need for justice-driven action and the role of geopolitical dynamics in shaping the international order.

Video:

UNMISSABLE: Do Palestinians Have the Right to Resist? w/ Richard Falk

31 March 2025

Source: transcend.org

By Jonathan Kuttab

One of the key strategic elements to Israel’s control over Palestinians has been the establishment of a focused system of fragmentation of the Palestinian community. Palestinians have been forcefully divided into distinctly separate categories, each with a different legal system, economic system, leadership, and community-specific concerns. These include: Israeli Citizens, East Jerusalemites, West Bankers, Gazans, and the Diaspora (lacking any status whatsoever). Israel adamantly refuses to interact with the Palestinian people as a unified entity and insists on dealing with each component separately, sometimes making it physically impossible for members of each group to communicate with, trade with, or even intermarry with members of the other Palestinian communities.

An explicit hierarchy of rights and privileges has also been established by Israel between each category. The highest level (within the Israeli hierarchy of control) are those Palestinians who have Israeli citizenship, who managed to remain in the land in 1948. There are currently about 2 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, constituting approximately 20% of the Israeli citizen population. They enjoy the highest standard of living, the greatest freedom of movement, and some of the benefits of Israeli society because they do hold citizenship. Some of them are occasionally trotted out as proof of the tolerance and equality in a “democratic” state of Israel, as promised in the not-legally-binding Declaration of Independence.

This community often complains of systematic discrimination, in a state which openly declares itself to be a Jewish state and NOT a state for all its citizens. Yet, compared to other Palestinians, their situation is truly enviable. It reminds me of free blacks living in the American North during the pre-Civil War era. Often victims of terrible discrimination, but surely they are to be envied when compared with those living under brutal conditions of chattel slavery.

I have been curious as to how this segment of my people are faring these days. In my travels this month, I met and talked with many of them, particularly in the Galilee, where (in addition to the Negev) most Palestinian citizens of Israel today live. In addition to their usual situation, as Arabs (second-class citizens) in a Jewish state, they had two major concerns.

First, is the rampant criminality in the Arab Community, which the Israeli police—particularly under their Minister of Police Ben Gvir—is doing very little to curb. Protection rackets, municipal corruption, shootings and homicides are frightening daily occurrences. Already, 55 homicides have been reported this year, with the vast majority not “solved” by the police. In fact, it has even been admitted by the authorities that many of the criminal elements have special relationships with the Shin Bet (Israeli secret service) and perform “valuable services” to the security of the state, giving them wide latitude if not outright immunity.

Second, they report that since October 7 there has been open hostility, hatred and repression, particularly on free speech and political expression. While Israeli Jews daily demonstrate, block roads, disrupt government offices, and debate intra-Jewish differences almost to the point of civil war, Palestinian citizens of Israel are often forced to cower in fear. They face persecution, the loss of jobs, criminal charges and jail time, with long sentences for even the mildest expressions of concern for the victims of the Gaza genocide or even expressing “grief for the innocent babies” being killed in Gaza. Technical eavesdropping and artificial intelligence is used to monitor, report, and prosecute any postings on social media, or even “likes” on individual posts, that show sympathy for the people of Gaza. Such expressions are considered “support and sympathy for terrorism” and are being harshly repressed. Even Israeli Jews opposed to Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies feel some of the heat, but for Palestinian citizens of Israel there does not exist even the semblance of democracy or freedom of speech.

A friend of mine told me, “The Israel that you knew previously no longer exists. There is not even the pretense that we have democracy or freedom of expression.”

One well-known TV journalist lost her job and was threatened with criminal persecution when she commented on the apparent good health of some of the released female Israeli hostages. One university student was jailed and persecuted for tweeting on her social media that “God is Victorious.”

An attorney colleague of mine said, “I feel like this is the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad on steroids. You have to watch every word and especially anything you say on the phone or on social media. I can still say some things in court that I would not dare put in an email or say on my Facebook account. I do not know how long this will last.”

I even heard on the radio a “Public Service Announcement” urging anyone who hears or sees anything suspicious, anything appearing to reflect enemy propaganda giving aid and comfort to the enemy, to “call *911 and report it to a special unit that fights hostile cyber propaganda!”

Indeed, many reports about outlandish behaviour by the police seem to be in response to complaints by Jewish citizens upset at the utterances or “unpatriotic behavior” of Palestinian citizens. One Jewish lawyer lodged a complaint to the bar association against a Palestinian lawyer who dared to write on her social media “Good Morning Gaza!” a few days after October 7. This complaint is being investigated.

The Arab members of the Knesset and leaders of the community who usually speak fearlessly in the Knesset on behalf of their community have been silent, and everyone seems intimidated. Genocidal language by Israelis against Palestinians, clearly in violation of Israeli law, is widely tolerated. Yet, the mildest expressions of Palestinian views, symbols, or even sympathy are immediately investigated and prosecuted. The fear among Palestinian citizens of Israel is that the wrath being visited upon Gaza, and now the West Bank, may next be turned on them. The thin façade of democracy and freedom seems to have been removed, and they find themselves facing the full force of unmitigated bigotry, racism, and anti-Arab hatred.

It does not bode well for future coexistence.

29 March 2025