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By Emanuel Fabian

26 Aug 2024 – Five hundred transport planes and 107 ships have delivered more than 50,000 tons of armaments and military equipment from the United States to Israel since the start of the war [genocide], the Defense Ministry says.

The military equipment delivered to Israel since the beginning of the atrocities includes “armored vehicles, munitions, ammunition, personal protection gear, and medical equipment,” according to the ministry.

The deliveries are “crucial for sustaining the IDF’s operational capabilities during the ongoing war [genocide].”

The “large-scale logistical effort” has been carried out by the ministry’s Directorate of Production and Procurement, the ministry’s mission to the US, the IDF’s Planning Directorate, and the Israeli Air Force.

2 September 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Jeffrey D. Sachs

26 Aug 2024 – With the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, the US assumed that it would dominate the world as the unrivaled hegemon. Yet the US “unipolar” moment proved to be short-lived.  US geopolitical dominance ended with the rise of China, the recovery of Russia from the period of Soviet collapse, and the rapid development of India.  We have arrived at a new multipolar age.

The US still fights to remain world hegemon, but this is delusional and doomed to fail. The US is in no position to lead the world, even if the rest of the world were to want it, which is not the case. The US share of world output (at international prices) is 16% and declining, down from around 27% in 1950, and 21% in 1980.  China’s share is 19%.  China’s manufacturing output is roughly twice that of the US, and China rivals the US in cutting-edge technologies.

The US is also militarily overextended, with some 750 overseas military bases in 80 countries. The US is engaged in protracted wars in Yemen, Israel-Palestine, Ukraine, Syria, Libya, and elsewhere.  The US wars and quest for hegemony are financed through debt, including debt owed to rival powers such as China.

Moreover, America’s budget politics is paralyzed. The rich, who fund the political campaigns, want lower taxes, while the poor want more social outlays.  The result is a standoff, with chronic budget deficits (now above 5% of GDP).  The public debt has swelled from around 35% of GDP in 2000 to 100% of GDP today.

The US sustains technological dynamism in areas such as artificial intelligence and microchip design, yet US breakthroughs are quickly matched in China through the spread of knowhow and advances pioneered by China.  Most of the world’s green and digital hardware — including advanced solar modules, wind turbines, nuclear power plants, batteries, chips, electric vehicles, 5G systems, and long-distance power transmission – is manufactured in Asia, with a large share in China or Chinese-dominated supply chains.

In view of its budget deficits, the US shirks the financial burdens of global leadership. The US demands that NATO allies pay their own way for military defense, while the US is increasingly stingy in its contributions to UN system for climate and development finance.

In short, while US deludes itself that it remains the world’s hegemon, we are already in a multipolar world.  This raises the question of what the new multipolarity should mean.  There are three possibilities.

The first, our current trajectory, is a continued struggle for dominance among the major powers, pitting the US against China, Russia, and others.  The leading US foreign policy scholar, Professor John Mearsheimer, has put forward the theory of “offensive realism,” according to which the great powers inevitably struggle for dominance, yet the consequences can be tragic, in the form of devastating wars.  Surely our task is to avoid such tragic outcomes, not accept them as a matter of fate.

The second possibility is a precarious peace through a balance of power among the great powers, sometimes called “defensive realism.”  Since the US cannot defeat China or Russia, and vice versa, the great powers should keep the peace by avoiding direct conflicts amongst themselves.  The US should not try to push NATO into Ukraine, against Russia’s strenuous objections, nor should the US arm Taiwan over China’s vociferous opposition.

In short, the great powers should act with prudence, avoiding each other’s red lines.  This is surely good advice, but not enough.  Balances of power turn into imbalances, threatening the peace.  The Concert of Europe, the balance of power among the major European powers in the 19^th century, eventually succumbed to shifts in the power balance at the end of the 19^th century, which led onward to World War I.

The third possibility, scorned in the past 30 years by US leaders, but our greatest hope, is true peace among the major powers.  This peace would be based on the shared recognition that there can be no global hegemon and that the common good requires active cooperation among the major powers.  There are several bases of this approach, including idealism (a world based on ethics), and institutionalism (a world based on international law and multilateral institutions).

Sustained peace is possible.  We can learn much from the long peace that prevailed in East Asia before the arrival of Western powers in the 19^th century.  In her book Chinese Cosmopolitanism, philosopher Shuchen Xiang cites historian David Kang, who noted that “from the founding of the Ming dynasty to the opium wars – that is, from 1368 to 1841 – there were only two wars between China, Korea, Vietnam, and Japan. These were the China’s invasion of Vietnam (1407-1428) and Japan’s invasion of Korea (1592-1598).” East Asia’s long peace was shattered by Britain’s attack on China in the First Opium War, 1839-1842, and the East-West (and later Sino-Japanese) conflicts that followed.

Prof. Xiang attributes the half-millennium of East Asian peace to Confucian norms of harmony that underpinned the statecraft among China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, in contrast to the struggle for hegemony that characterized Europe’s statecraft. China, during this long period, was the region’s uncontested hegemon, but did not use its predominant power to threaten or harm Korea, Vietnam, or Japan.

Dr. Jean Dong, an expert in China’s foreign policymaking, makes similar points about the differences between Chinese and European statecraft in her book Chinese Statecraft in a Changing World: Demystifying Enduring Traditions and Dynamic Constraints.

I have recently proposed 10 Principles for Perpetual Peace in the 21^st Century, building on China’s five principles for peaceful co-existence, plus five practical further steps, hence, a mixture of Confucian ethics and institutionalism.  My idea is to harness the ethics of cooperation and the practical benefits of international law and the UN Charter.

As the world assembles in September at the UN Summit of the Future, the key message is this.  We don’t want or need a hegemon.  We don’t need a balance of power, which can too easily become an imbalance of force.  We need a lasting peace built on ethics, common interests, and international law and institutions.

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

2 September 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Maung Zarni

The US secretary of state’s genocide memorial tweet is a Zombie-esque, self-unaware act of supreme hypocrisy.

27 Aug 2024 – On 24 Aug, in the midst of the US-financed genocide in Gaza by Israel, and on the eve of the seventh anniversary of Myanmar’s genocide of Rohingya people, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken tweeted:

“Today marks the seventh anniversary of the Burma military’s genocide and crimes against humanity targeting Rohingya. The United States continues to honour the victims and stand with the survivors as they seek justice and accountability for these atrocities.”

His tweet received 1 million views on X though it is impossible to see how many viewers take the American diplomat seriously. But, most certainly, students of “hypocrisy” will find Blinken’s genocide memorial tweet a Zombie-esque, self-unaware act of “supreme hypocrisy”, to borrow Noam Chomsky’s characterisation of a quintessentially American feature of Pax Americana.

In fact, such acts of supreme hypocrisy are an exclusive and special characteristic of all colonisers that hailed from the old Europe (and its white settler colonial offshoots). More so in the case of the United States, whose Declaration of Independence thundered as a self-evident truth that “all men are created equal” while in the same breath, the same venerable statement openly dehumanise as “Savages”  the native peoples from whom America’s “founding fathers” stole vast swathes of lands to build a permanent settler colonial state.

On August 25, the Rohingyas commemorated the seventh anniversary of their own “Never again!”.  Nearly eight decades after the total defeat of the Nazi regime in 1945, and the end of the Nazis’ genocidal colonial project, everyone in their right mind is painfully cognisant of the moral emptiness of this post-Holocaust promise.

There have been dozens of recurring cases of genocide during the 79 years since the closure of the Nazi’s main site of the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Question’. Recurring, because the leading nations of the world with veto or dictatorial power at the United Nations have either been incapable of preventing crimes against humanity, including the crime of genocide, or, worse still, have been directly and indirectly involved in these organised horror shows worldwide.

As a matter of historical record, Blinken’s own United States has played an instrumental role in several genocides and other crimes against humanity in my own Asian neighbourhoods, as well as throughout Latin America.  Enter Indonesia under Suharto, the American War in Vietnam, the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia, Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, and Ecuador, to name just some of the well-documented cases of US-enabled, financed or patronised atrocity crimes.

When I was a young academic in a teacher education university in Chicago some 25 years ago, I became friends with an African-American gentleman, a generation older than me, who was in charge of the university’s postal services. With a detectable air of pained bitterness, he recounted his experience as a US veteran of the Vietnam War. In his words, which came to be etched in my memory after so many years,  “You know we (black men) were sent to Vietnam (by the US government) and told that we were there to defend democracy and freedom. Then we came home, and we were told, ‘you can’t eat sandwich at this counter or drink coffee at that table.”

He wryly laughed at what he painfully experienced as stomach-turning American hypocrisy.

Likewise, a decade ago in Phnom Penh, I heard live from the public gallery an angry complaint about official American hypocrisy from a radically different type of character.

Sitting inside the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, with its bullet-proof glass wall, in his closing statement, the Pol Pot regime’s Brother Number Two, Noun Chea asked, in effect, why American policymakers (for instance, Henry Kissinger who was considered a key architect of the carpet bombing of Indochina, specifically Northern Cambodia along the Vietnamese-Khmer borders) were not in the defendant’s dock, along with him.

By throwing millions of US taxpayer money into establishing a genocide documentation post facto, a UN-Cambodia hybrid criminal court, and running it for over 10 years, the United States had by then washed its official blood-stained hands in Cambodia’s bloody civil war of which the emergence of the genocidal Pol Pot regime was a devastating outcome.

To belabour the obvious, Blinken is not responsible for what the early crop of European genocidal settlers – euphemistically framed as “founding fathers” –  did to the Indigenous populations of the United States, nor the carpet-bombing of Indochina (Laos, Northern Cambodia and Vietnam) during the undeclared war fought in the name of “the defence of freedom”.  That last American “big war” in Asia claimed the lives of millions of humans on both sides of the conflict: nearly 3 million Vietnamese and 86,000 American troops, and left many more millions, deeply wounded, psychologically and physically.

But, in his capacity as US Secretary of State, running the “Israel, right or wrong” policy, Blinken certainly is amongst a sizeable pool of genocide enablers, including US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, British PM Sir Keir Starmer, EU External Affairs Chief Ursula von der Leyen who have been aiding and abetting Israel’s ongoing genocide of 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, under Tel Aviv’s openly announced “total siege”.

Against US President Joe Biden’s apparent mental incapacity to lead or manage US foreign policy, specifically, the US policy towards Israel and its ongoing genocide in Gaza and the blatantly illegal and expansionist land grab in the Occupied Territories in West Bank, Blinken is not merely executing orders to supply the state of Israel with additional two dozen billion dollars worth of weapons  such as 1,000 to 2,000-ton bombs, advanced killing machines such as fighter-bombers, drones, etc., but rather as a self-proclaimed Zionist, Blinken is personally and officially involved in Israel’s “physical destruction” of the Palestinian people, in the name of the settler coloniser-occupier’s “self-defence”.

Like the Rohingya, the Palestinians in Gaza (and all the Occupied Territories) have been declared by the UN’s highest court and principal judicial organ – the International Court of Justice –  “a protected group” under the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

So, for Blinken as the official who is calling the shots on US policy towards Israel, to publicly declare that “the United States continues to honour the [Rohingya] victims and stand with the survivors as they seek justice and accountability for these atrocities”, is, in my view, more than an act of hypocrisy.

Ordinary citizens and individuals often act in ways that qualify as hypocritical. But men like Blinken with an extraordinary amount of institutional power – to ship, or not to ship, billions of dollars worth of weapons to a state, which by all indications, is engaged in the “physical destruction” of a human population under occupation – cannot be considered simply  “hypocritical”. The words hypocrisy and hypocritical just won’t do.

As a matter of fact, our network of Asian scholar activists – the Forces of Renewal SouthEast Asia – has recently published former Malaysian PM Mahathir Mohammad’s 10-point statement, which he titled “hypocrisy”.  In it, the world’s oldest statesman listed key US crimes and pointed out Washington’s complicity in global crimes, past and present while focusing on the present American financing and direct involvement in Israel’s genocide.

Mahathir is not alone in seeing through the American fog of liberal propaganda framed in the discourses of “rule of law”, “accountability”, “rule-based world order”, and other grandiose statements. From his deathbed, the late Harold Pinter, the renowned British playwright, devoted half of his acceptance lecture for the Nobel Prize for Literature, urging the world to begin taking stock of the worldwide crimes of the United States.

Professor Noam Chomsky, one of the greatest thinkers and activists alive today – albeit sadly in a state of paralysis – has publicly characterised his own native country as “Number One Rogue State”. The tweet Blinken sent out on the eve of the Rohingya genocide anniversary is beyond hypocrisy. It reflects the quintessentially American disease, which the psychologically inclined among us might call schizophrenia.

The legally informed, on the other hand, would see Blinken’s tweet as Kafkaesquely criminal.  For one can’t be involved in one case of genocide (Israel) while at the same time demanding accountability and justice for victims in another (Myanmar).

A Buddhist humanist from Burma (Myanmar), Maung Zarni, nominated for the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, former Visiting Lecturer with Harvard Medical School, specializing in racism and violence in Burma and Sri Lanka, and Non-resident Scholar in Genocide Studies with Documentation Center – Cambodia.

2 September 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Richard Falk

31 Aug 2024 – Modified responses to questions posed by Rodrigo Craveiro, a journalist with the Brazilian newspaper, Correio Braziliense, on 29 Aug 2024, addressing the concerted Israeli military operation, extending the tactics and devastation of its attack on the Gaza Strip since last October, to the occupied West Bank. Again, Washington’s silence is almost as dismaying as Israel blatant disregard of law and standards of decency.

• I would like to quote you on this military operation in West Bank. How do you see that? What was the purpose?

From the outset of Israel’s response to the October 7 attack, I believed that it was being used as a pretext for ‘ethnic cleansing’ to induce massive departures of the resident Palestinian populations from the three Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), with a long undisclosed priority being systemic expulsion coupled with massive devastation of the West Bank. It should not be forgotten that when the Netanyahu coalition at the start of 2023, that is, months before the Hamas attack, took over occupation and administration of the OPT it was viewed even in Western circles as the ‘most extreme’ in Israel’s history. What made it extreme from Day One were two characteristics: the appointment of Itmar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, leaders of the far right religious Zionist parties in the Netanyahu coalition insistent on an ethnic cleansing agenda, as the chief administrators of Occupied Palestine, and the closely associated greenlighting of West Bank widespread settler violence in West Bank villages while the political leadership in Israel smiled obligingly.

What could be clearer than that the Zionist Religious Right was persuaded to join the Netanyahu coalition because it was given unconditional assurances that a Jewish supremist state would be pursued to complete the Zionist Project of establishing Greater Israel in all of the Promised Land. The prominence given Ben Gvir and Smotrich and the intensity of settler violence could not have been a clearer signal that two-staters were pursuing a Zombie solution, and yet the somewhat sullen silence of Diaspora liberal Zionism in the face of these developments exposed both liberal delusions and its self-righteous superficiality. The liberal approach was always more about us in the Diaspora than about ‘them’ (including even Israeli Jews but certainly the Palestinians long recruited against their will to make the major sacrifices to allay the guilt feelings of the Western democracies for hardly lifting a finger in opposition to the grotesque excesses of European antisemitism).

The Israeli response in Gaza over the last 11 months has horrified most peoples of the world, especially of the Global South, while enjoying the active complicity of the liberal democracies of most elites in the Global West. It has now reached a stage where it has undermined Israel’s reputation as a legitimate political actor, creating a vital decision point, signaled by these lethal attacks on the West Bank cities of Jenin, Tulkarm, and Juber. The IDF commander of this latest military operation, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, was quick to point out to the media that this was not an isolated incident to discourage Palestinian militancy but the beginning of a sustained military operation in the West Bank. This represents both a military and political escalation motivated by a commitment ‘to finish the job’ while regional and global anti-Israeli sentiments are already at fever pitch, but now ‘the job’ is revealed to the more attentive public to be what it has always secretly been, a campaign to achieve the coercive incorporation of the West Bank into Israel. This enlarged view of ‘the job’ that American pro-Israelis were earlier tricked into believing they were supporting, which was supposedly limited to the destruction of Hamas as a terrorist political actor and the elimination of its leaders, effectively propagandized as dehumanized  ‘terrorists.’

The Israeli leadership as ever master of shaping the public discourse, still seeks to pull wool over eyes by describing this escalation of the scope of their post-October 7 rampage, insist on justifying their West Bank behavior as directed at West Bank Palestinian militancy. Any fool knows that the most effective way to achieve such a result would be to rein West Bank settler violence, but that is not even part of the conversation. It should not be forgotten that from the perspective of international law the West Bank remains an Occupied Territory subject the 4^th Geneva Convention that prohibits Jewish settlements, collective punishment, and imposes legal duties on the Occupier to uphold the safety, security, and material health and wellbeing of an Occupied People. This reading of international law as it pertains to the West Bank was given an authoritative confirmation in the July 19^th Advisory Opinion of a nearly unanimous International Court of Justice, which was met in Tel Aviv with a show of condescending scorn and in Washington by looking away altogether.

Even the brave, knowledgeable, and perceptive current UN Special Rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, who rarely takes a false step bought into the core of the Israeli public narrative when she described this surge of official Israeli violence as “a serious pattern parallel with what is happening in the Gaza Strip” in the course of an interview with Drop Site News. I believe it is not parallel but integral to the politics underlying Israel’s response to October 7, which from the outset set up its campaign to induce a new nakba in the West Bank, preceded by this genocidal sideshow in Gaza. In effect, Gaza was Act 1 in a political theater piece of at least two acts.

From this follows my judgment that virtually the entire Israeli response since October 7 has been about land and only incidentally, if at all, about security, except in the secondary sense of warning (or deterring) regional enemy attacks, which means mainly Iran . If security had been the primary concern there were much less bloody and more effective and legally acceptable ways to go about a response: tightening border security, using sophisticated intelligence/surveillance skills to control opposition and resistance in Gaza, and even seeking a normalization of relations based on mutual respect for international law. Relevant here is the near unanimous July 19 Advisory Opinion of the International Court that clearly set forth multiple reasons for regarding Israel’s continued occupation of Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank as unlawful, calling on the UN and UN member states to implement its rulings, and on Israel to comply.

If my conjectures are even only partly a corrective of the official version of the Hamas attack, it makes essential an official, trustworthy international investigation of what  really happened on October 7 and how it was decontextualized to serve Israel’s need for a self-serving rationale of the violence that was unleashed for reasons other than the attack. In retrospect, it seems clears that the events themselves were hyped in ways that invalidated criticism of Israel’s behavior and did not contextualize the attack in relation to pre-October 7 recent and structural provocations, the validity of resistance against settler colonialism, and the prolonged nature and severity of Israeli collective punishment of Gazans, the denial not only of rights of self-determination but of rights of return.

A final observation in the form of a conjecture. US diplomacy used its leverage to discourage further Israeli provocations of Iran to lessen risks of being drawn into a regional war. In exchange, Israel was quietly assured that if it extended the Gaza military operation to the West Bank it would not meet with significant governmental resistance from the US or Europe. In other words, it could get away with completing its master plan of extinguishing the territorial existence of Palestine as well burying the prospect of Palestinian statehood in any viable form once and for all.

• Do you see the risk of a third intifada after what is happening in Gaza and West Bank?

I believe the greater threat as of now is of a second nakba (catastrophe) involving confronting Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank with a choice between enduring genocide or fleeing across borders to neighboring Arab countries; so far, Gazan have withstood the pressure to leave, and enduring the unspeakable alternatives of genocide or a permanent refugee status. Such an outcome would be a further stage in a process that goes back to pre-Israel Zionism, which is to make Palestinians so persecuted in their own country that many are compelled to flee for safety across international borders as happened in 1948, and under international law unlawfully denied any right of return.

Such an exclusionary second nakba is not necessarily inconsistent with a third intifada, which would be more like the second than the first, that is it would include armed resistance. What probably prevents a new intifada, which would undoubtedly enjoy more sympathy and gain greater support than the earlier two, is the absence of Palestinian political will to expose themselves to an even more extensive genocidal response.

Beyond this, the resolution of East Jerusalem still awaits further action. Almost off camera have been exhortations and symbolic encroachment on the Al Aqsa compound by settler extremists. Even a wider religious war cannot be ruled out if the Netanyahu coalition continues to call the shots when it comes to the Palestinian future.

• The Israeli leader, Benny Gantz claimed it´s necessary to repeat in West Bank the military strategy for Gaza. How do you see that?

As with other Israeli leaders, Gantz is using a security rationale for what is better understood as a land-grabbing and people-emptying undertaking. As argued above the overriding purpose of Israel’s behavior since October 7 is to take advantage of the attack (as its propaganda specialists have portrayed it) to address the primary Zionist agenda item of establishing Greater Israel as a Jewish supremist state stretching from at least the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, a pre-Netanyahu image of Israeli sovereign territory explicitly embedded in a 2018 Basic Law adopted by the Knesset.

The difference between the Israeli mainstream and the Netanyahu-led extremists is best interpreted as one of style and patience, not substance. The dominant expectations of opposed Israeli establishment groupings raise questions of religion and Jewish tradition, but more fundamentally about power in controlling state/society and international relations of Israel’s government.

Prof. Richard Falk is a member of the TRANSCEND Network, Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, Chair of Global Law, Faculty of Law, at Queen Mary University London, Research Associate the Orfalea Center of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Fellow of the Tellus Institute. He directed the project on Global Climate Change, Human Security, and Democracy at UCSB and formerly served as director the North American group in the World Order Models Project. Between 2008 and 2014, Falk served as UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Occupied Palestine.

2 September 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Thomas Scripps

Israel’s intensified ethnic cleansing in the West Bank continued Thursday, taking the death toll since the military operation began to at least 18.

Five were killed in a mosque in the Tulkarem refugee camp, apparently amid a firefight. The camp was placed under siege by the Israeli military, with soldiers including special forces carrying out house raids, snipers taking up positions on rooftops and aircraft flying low overhead. The Thabet Thabet Governmental Hospital and al-Israa Specialised Hospital were blockaded, and the Palestinian Red Crescent prevented from entering the camp to douse fires and help the injured.

There were overnight raids in Far’a, al-Khader, Arroub, Nur Sham, Nablus and Nabi Saleh, with multiple Palestinians reported injured by shooting, beatings or fire. Electricity and Internet services were cut in a large swathe of Jenin city, where snipers shot “anyone who is moving” according to Mohammed al-Atrash of Al Jazeera Arabic, reporting from the scene. The Jenin Governmental Hospital was besieged, with ambulances blocked.

The huge deployment of lethal military force has been coupled with calls for mass evictions, with Foreign Minister Israel Katz leading the pack. He repeated his threats today, saying removals were necessary for the “dismantling of terror infrastructures” which must be accomplished “by all necessary means”.

Multiple organisations have condemned the offensive. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Al-Haq, and Al Mezan Center for Human Rights issued a joint statement warning of “even more escalated violence in the West Bank, with the employment of tactics that mirror those used in Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, particularly attacks on hospitals and healthcare facilities, and the use of excessive and indiscriminate force.”

A statement issued on behalf of United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he was “deeply concerned by the latest developments in the occupied West Bank, including Israel’s launch today of large-scale military operations in Jenin, Tulkarm and Tubas governorates, involving the use of airstrikes, which resulted in casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure. He strongly condemns the loss of lives, including of children.”

Amnesty International’s Erika Guevara explained that the “military assault on cities and towns across the occupied West Bank follows an escalation in unlawful killings by Israeli forces in recent months,” a “horrifying spike in lethal force by Israeli forces and violent state-backed settler attacks”.

She continued, “It is likely that these operations will result in an increase in forced displacement, destruction of critical infrastructure and measures of collective punishment, which have been key pillars of Israel’s system of apartheid against Palestinians and of its unlawful occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”

Over 600 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank by the Israeli military since October 7, over a fifth of them by airstrikes. Among the dead are more than 140 children. Just in the days August 20-26, before the latest assault began, 13 Palestinians were killed, eight in airstrikes, including four children.

Close to 10,000 have been arrested, held in prisons and detentions centres where abuses of human rights including torture and sexual violence are endemic.

Meanwhile, 12.7 square kilometres of land seizures have been officially approved by the Israeli government—the largest area in three decades. This process is spearheaded by far-right Israeli settlers who have carried out 1,270 attacks against Palestinians documented by the UN in the last 10 months, leading to 11 deaths and driving many communities out of their homes.

On Thursday, several dozen settlers staged a provocation in the al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem again, under the protection of Israeli security forces and while they restricted the entry of Palestinian worshippers—under conditions of an effective lockdown of Palestinian quarters of the Old City.

Former director of Human Rights Watch Kenneth Roth told Al Jazeera, “Frankly, the dream of the far-right ministers in Netanyahu’s government is to ‘solve the problem’ of the West Bank. ‘Solve the problem’ of the apartheid regime that Israel is maintaining there, by just getting rid of the Palestinians… a massive war crime.”

This is true, but the project is shared by the whole Netanyahu regime currently implementing it. The gleefully vicious comments of the likes of Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich serve as a convenient scapegoat for sections of the ruling class keen to be seen condemning Israeli actions from time to time but totally committed to supporting its government.

The apartheid, Jewish supremacist character of the state was highlighted by the treatment even of one of the recently returned hostages—in whose name Israel is waging its war. Kaid Farhan al-Kadi, the latest hostage to be brought back alive, is returning to a demolition notice.

Al-Kadi is one of Israel’s 300,000 heavily discriminated against Bedouin Arabs. Seventy percent of the residents are being evicted from his home village Khirbet Karkur—among the one-third of Bedouin Arab settlements the Israeli government intends to destroy. A local authority spokesperson cynically commented that Al-Kadi and his family would be exempt “in light of the situation”.

Over 1,300 Bedouin homes have been demolished in the first half of 2024, a 50 percent increase over the same period in 2022, according to the Negev Coexistence Forum for Civil Equality.

While the war on the West Bank unfolds, scores of people continue to be killed in Gaza every day, amid a worsening humanitarian disaster. Israeli strikes killed and wounded Palestinians, including women and children, across the Strip, in Khan Younis, Rafah, Gaza City, the Nuseirat refugee camp and Deir el-Balah.

Hina Khoudary, reporting for Al Jazeera, described how “eight Palestinians were killed when Israeli forces targeted al-Amal Hotel. It was obvious that displaced Palestinians were sheltering there, and they burned alive because no one was there to rescue them.” The ability of the Gaza Civil Defence to respond to these incidents has been massively cut back by Israel’s attacks on ambulances and fire trucks and on shops supplying spare parts.

Conditions for the almost entirely displaced population are so dire that Gaza has recorded its first polio case in 25 years, a 10-month-old baby now partially paralyzed by the infection, sparking fears of an epidemic. Hepatitis A is already spreading rapidly, with 40,000 cases reported earlier this month. For three months, the Israeli government has blocked Doctors Without Borders’ efforts to import 4,000 hygiene kits containing soap, toothbrushes, shampoo, and laundry powder.

Vials of polio vaccine have now been sent to Gaza but cannot be distributed due to the chaos of Israel’s repeated displacement and bombardment of the population. The issue has built up steam in the corporate media, where capitalist politicians are trying to gain a reputation for humanitarianism by insisting children must have the opportunity to be vaccinated before being buried under rubble.

Netanyahu has dismissed talk of any pause in the genocide, suggesting only the “designation of specific places” for vaccinations, a designation whose only practical impact is to require the Israeli military to claim their bombing is “accidental”.

30 August 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Kathy Kelly

During a week of action focused on UN potential to end Israel’s genocidal attacks, I was part of a coalition that met with twelve different permanent missions to the United Nations. We urged that if countries that are parties to the Genocide Convention or the Geneva Conventions stop trading with Israel as international law demands, (cf. the July 19^th advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice), the genocide will end quickly.

In each encounter at a Permanent Mission to the UN, its staff asked if we, as U.S. citizens, have addressed our government’s unwavering support for the genocide against impoverished and forcibly displaced people.

It was a deeply meaningful moment when the Irish Ambassador to the United Nations showed our delegation a miniature replica of John Behan’s poignant statue depicting the Irish exodus – it showed weary, hungry people disembarking from a boat after a stormy ocean voyage.

“You have to see each one of these as a human being,” he said.

My mother was an Irish indentured servant first in Ireland and then in England. As things go, she was among the more fortunate. She never endured being chained day and night in the Middle Passage of a slave ship carrying captives here, or in a human trafficker’s overcrowded, lethally airless truck container. Nor did she have to cling to the remains of an overcrowded ship to keep from drowning after it capsized in the Mediterranean.

Life in Gaza is a desperate moment-to-moment ordeal of clinging to such wreckage, trying to stay above water, to stay alive, while both major U.S. political parties struggle to push you under.

In an article published by The Guardian, Israeli-American Omer Bartov, an eminent Holocaust historian and expert on genocide, lamented the unwillingness of many Israelis—some of whom are his friends, neighbors, colleagues, and even former students—to see Palestinians as human beings. He comments: “Many of my friends…feel that in the struggle between justice and existence, existence must win out…it is our own cause that must be triumphant, no matter the price… This feeling did not appear suddenly on 7 October.”

Is it futile to ask Israelis to reconsider this vengeance – avenging hundreds of civilians with several hundred thousand, half of them children – while the U.S. continues to arm Israel for the task?

Bartov continues: By the time I travelled to Israel, I had become convinced that …Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions. … the ultimate goal of this entire undertaking from the very beginning had been to make the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable, and to debilitate its population to such a degree that it would either die out or seek all possible options to flee the territory. In other words, … as the 1948 UN Genocide Convention puts it, … Israel was acting ‘with intent to destroy, in whole or in part’, the Palestinian population in Gaza, ‘as such, by killing, causing serious harm… inflicting conditions of life meant to bring about the group’s destruction’”.

How can United States citizens cope in a nation not just gone mad on war, but gone mad on genocide? We do not have to cope with lingering, state-enforced starvation or the memory of our lifeless children pulled from under rubble. But we must cope with our complicity.

When we can, we must act.

We cannot say we did not know. The United Nations member states watch the entire edifice of international law crumble as a genocide is broadcast across our screens. Israeli military forces may have killed close to 200,000 Gazans although only 40,000 bodies have been recovered for counting. The Israeli government’s siege is starving Palestinian children and has brought Gaza to the brink of a full-blown famine. Meanwhile, polio has made a return.

From September 10 – September 30, World BEYOND War, Code Pink, Veterans For Peace, Pax Christi and other coalition partners will leaflet, demonstrate, and nonviolently act to expose and oppose Israeli and U.S. actions which flout international law. We will gather before both the United States’ U.N. Mission and the Israeli consulate demanding both nations desist from further massacres, forcible displacement, and the use of starvation and disease as weapons.

We will remind people that Israel possesses thermonuclear weapons but refuses to acknowledge this fact and thereby avoids any assessment or safeguards by the International Atomic Energy Association and any involvement in the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.

We will express earnest concern both for Hamas’ prisoners and the more than a thousand Palestinians incarcerated without charge by Israel, many of them women and children.

Currently, the United States and Israel have effectively decided on death for the remaining hostages rather than a settlement that would free Palestinian women and children. In a reckless bid to spark a U.S.-Iran war, Israel recently assassinated, in Tehran, the chief Hamas negotiator for a hostage release.

And still the U.S.’ arms flow continues.

Last week, the world watched as the Democratic Party leadership, at its convention, squelched voices of the uncommitted delegates. DNC speakers repeated the lie that their party was seeking a ceasefire, while flatly refusing to stop replacing the guns and missiles Israel has used to shed blood and destroy infrastructure.

We all should rely on the covenant virtues of traditional Judaism, those virtues celebrated as essential for survival: truth, justice, and forgiving love. We should appeal to secular and faith-based people across the United States as we face precarities of nuclear annihilation and ecological collapse. Securing a better future for all children requires bolstering respect for human rights, searching always for ways to abolish war.

The U.S. government is complicit in genocide, and we, in whose name it is acting, are also complicit if we remain silent.

It is time for the United Nations to liberate itself from a Security Council structure giving five permanent, nuclear armed members a vise-like grip on the world’s ability to counter the scourge of war. We must join with the call of the South African government which bravely upheld international law. We must clamor for the General Assembly to enact the “uniting for peace” resolution.

As the forthright Jewish delegate at last week’s DNC, after he and two others unfurled a banner “STOP ARMING ISRAEL”, said, “Never again means never again!”

We invite you to join us. https://events.worldbeyondwar.org/

A version of this article first appeared on World BEYOND War’s website. https://worldbeyondwar.org/hanging-on-with-gaza/

Kathy Kelly (Kathy.vcnv@gmail.com) is board president of World BEYOND War and a co-coordinator of the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal.

30 August 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Chris Marsden

Ilan Pappé is an internationally renowned Israeli historian.

Formerly a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa, he is now professor of Middle Eastern studies at the University of Exeter.

Pappé has written more than 20 books on the history of Palestine and the State of Israel, including the seminal work, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006), which makes clear that the driving out of 700,000 Palestinians and the seizure of their land during the founding of Israel in 1947-48 was a deliberate Zionist policy.

His latest work, Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic (2024), examines how pro-Israel lobbies convinced British and American policymakers “to condone Israel’s flagrant breaches of international law, grant Israel unprecedented military aid and deny Palestinians rights,” while subjecting anyone who questioned unconditional support for Israel to “relentless smear campaigns.”

Pappé is a longtime political activist and defender of the Palestinians, including standing for the Knesset twice, in 1996 and 1999, for Hadash, the Communist Party-led electoral front. He has been repeatedly attacked by Zionist and state forces for his political views and historical work, being questioned at Detroit airport for two hours by the Department of Homeland Security in May.

Pappé spoke to Chris Marsden, the National Secretary of the Socialist Equality Party (UK).

Chris Marsden: If I may, I’d like to begin with your detention at Detroit Metropolitan Airport. Could you explain what happened?

Ilan Pappé: I was taken aside by agents that I only later learned were from Homeland Security. At first I thought they were FBI. And they detained me for about two-and-a-half hours, asking mainly political questions.

They also took my phone and copied everything that was on it. They refused to tell me why I had to go through this procedure. They just produced all kinds of documents that showed that they had the right to do what they were doing. Some of the questions I refused to answer.

But these were very weird questions for even Homeland Security people. I mean, there were some questions which I was very vague about, but I can understand at least where they’re coming from. Like, “Who do you know in the United States?”, “Who invited you?”, “What is your connection to the Arab and Muslim communities, in the United States in general and in Michigan?” Which I didn’t like and I thought it was outrageous, but at least I understood where it came from.

And then there were these questions such as “How do you define the Israeli actions in Gaza?”, “Do you believe in the slogan, ‘Palestine should be free from the river to the sea’?” and that kind of question, most of which I refused to answer. I politely invited them to my talks, because I said I’m beginning a series of talks in the United States, and I’m sure that many of the questions you ask will be answered!

So this was harassment for two-and-a-half hours. They were not particularly impolite, but I’m going to the States again at the end of this month and I have no idea whether this is going to be repeated—become standard practice—but I’ll be better prepared this time—I’ve already lined up some lawyers—just to make sure that this time I’m not totally defenceless as I was then.

I’m a professor of history. OK, I’m an activist and so on. But everything I do is so open. I’m an open book, you know. It’s not as if I’m involved in any clandestine activity. All they had to do was open my YouTube or read one of my 20 books. That’s why I think it was just an intimidation, just, “Think twice whether you want to go through this again.”

Chris Marsden: They’re also pushing an envelope here, aren’t they? It was not long between you being questioned at the airport and the FBI raiding Scott Ritter’s home.

Ilan Pappé: Exactly. I agree with this, also, on one level, it’s encouraging. I’ll tell you why. Because I think that the pro-Israeli lobby, which I think is the main body behind these kinds of behaviours or attitudes, does not have a total grip anymore on civil society and the universities and so on—on alternative media. And so they are escalating their repressive actions. It’s a battle not just between people of power against people who are powerless. It’s a moral battle that they have very little to bring onto the battle.

This is also an indication of a certain success of changing public opinion on Israel and Palestine, even making it an electoral issue, which, if you told me 20 years ago that support for Palestine could be an electoral issue in any American political party, I wouldn’t think it would be possible.

Chris Marsden: I can’t think of an issue in which the opinion in ruling circles has been so out of step and hostile to the views of the broad mass of the world’s population as the genocide in Gaza since 2003 and the Iraq war. And it means they have to rely increasingly on slander campaigns and repression.

Are you aware of what happened to the journalist Richard Medhurst at Heathrow? His treatment was horrendous. Detained and questioned for almost 24 hours. They did it earlier to Craig Murray as well.

But you’re a historian and your treatment is of immense significance. You are very respected in your field. You’ve undertaken decades of examination of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the history of the State of Israel, the Palestine question. History is now a battlefield and the question is when they will begin book burning.

Ilan Pappé: There was there was a funny moment when one of the Homeland Security Officers wanted to tell me what he thought were the historical roots of the conflict and I said, “Stop! I’m not telling you how to run the security of the United States. Don’t teach me about history. That would be the final indignity.”

But you’re right. I agree with this assessment. The gap between civil society, including the global North and even the United States, the gap between what position people think everybody should take towards the genocide, on the one hand, and the policies the governments are pursuing, on the other hand, the gap is so wide and so illogical. That the only way to narrow it is by force and intimidation.

I was in France between the two rounds of the elections. Opposition to the Gaza genocide is a cement that kept this amazing alliance of the left together and to overcome, you know, some other issues that may have in the past fragmented the left. It was not the only reason, of course, I’m not deluding myself, but it was very, very important.

Because for the left in France, all its kinds of factions and parties, the attitude of the French government and of Europe as a whole towards the genocide in Palestine was indicative of the attitude towards poverty, immigration, social justice, and so on. That was the power of the left that I hope we will regain, to see these connections, to link them together, to understand that these are not atomized problems, that they emanate from a certain worldview, from a certain definition of what politics is, what political elites shouldn’t do.

Chris Marsden: But in France you’ve got the New Popular Front [NFP] in which Jean-Luc Mélenchon of France Unbowed, who has made supportive comments and statements with regards to the Palestinians, formed an electoral coalition with the Socialist Party, which is a vehicle for Raphaël Glucksmann, Olivier Faure, and which is pro-Zionist. And this is the actual position taken by the NFP. And the manoeuvre now by President Macron is to say to the Socialist Party and the Communist Party: ditch Melenchon and then you may have a governmental role to play.

Ilan Pappé: Yeah, it’s a fight for the definition of politics, I think. And Palestine is such a fundamental part of this discussion.

Chris Marsden: You were bracketed with the New Historians, and that was a catch-all. I don’t think you’re any longer to be bracketed with Benny Morris! I know something about your background, and I know that you’re the son of German Jews who fled Hitlerite fascism. But how did your interest, an abiding interest and a really serious interest, in the Palestinian question develop?

Ilan Pappé: It was a journey. It didn’t happen in a day. It started with a very early love for history, as a teenager. Whenever people ask me what gifts I wanted for my birthday, it was always history books and so it came naturally to me when I thought of an academic career that history would be the main interest. And it was quite logical to be interested in your own history.

By itself, that takes you out of tribal boundaries. But I think that the fact that I was born and lived in a city such as Haifa, which is relatively, without romanticising it, a bit more open about Arab-Jewish relationships, also had its impact.

Because of the requirements for a successful academic career, even in Israel, it’s good to complete your studies outside of the country in a good university. I made the conscious decision that I would like to work with an Arab supervisor, to see things from the other side. And my years in studying for the doctoral dissertation meant I was exposed to suppressed information, because of the topic I chose and without knowing beforehand this was going to happen. But I chose the topic 1948.

[Pappé studied history at Oxford, completing a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1984 under the supervision of historians Albert Hourani, of Lebanese descent, and Roger Owen. Both specialised in the history of the Middle East. Pappé’s doctoral thesis became his first book, Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict.]

This was at a time when very important documents were declassified in many parts of the world, including many in Israel thirty years after its founding. And what I saw there challenged everything I knew, or I thought I knew, about 1948 and beyond. And the fact that I shared this journey into the past with an Arab supervisor and then with a lot of Palestinian friends who otherwise I would not have met in Israel itself, began the most serious part of the journey.

It’s not a moment of Epiphany, where you wake up and suddenly you are on the other side of the Rubicon. It takes time. But there is a moment where you feel that you know enough and you understand enough and you have heard enough to challenge fundamentally the narrative of your own society, of your own state. You understand the cowardice or conformist nature of your academic colleagues, of a community to which you once belonged. And it’s at one point that you understand you have a choice.

You can either leave the topic, or the country, or try to challenge it and understand that this is not going to be received very well. And there’s a moment where you are at peace with yourself. You know, you’re OK with yourself. You’re OK with what you have done. And you don’t look back anymore.

Chris Marsden: When you first accessed the archives demonstrating that ethnic cleansing was a deliberate policy of the Zionist elite, how did you proceed from there?

Ilan Pappé: You have to understand the evidence I saw. The documents are not evasive. It’s not ambivalent, really. You don’t need to be very learned person. You need some Hebrew. A friend of mine says that Israelis treat Hebrew as if it’s a secret language and therefore they can write and do things and say things in Hebrew that nobody in the world will ever understand and then they can say the opposite in English!

Also, I began my study because I was already doing a doctorate dissertation outside of Israel. I began to gather some information from Palestinians. And I was very surprised that they said, “Yes, of course, we know because we are the victims of this.” They said, “We didn’t know what you’re telling us, that this was all planned, but we saw the manifestation of the policy.”

It began to add up. I was very naive at the beginning when I came back from my doctorate, when I received my doctorate in 1984 and came back to Israel, and I really believed that all I would have to do is just tell the Israelis, especially the younger ones, what happened. And when you understand what really happened that should change our whole attitude towards the current situation.

But I was shocked to learn that the narrative that I brought back with me was not challenged as a lie, or a fabrication. It was dismissed because it does not serve the State of Israel. And I said, why should I, as an academic, serve the State of Israel? I should say the truth of what I know. Isn’t that what academics are supposed to do?

And I learned my lesson. This is not how the world works. There was a loss of naiveté, of waking up to realities, understanding the price that might be attached to such a journey. But of course I have to say all along I didn’t remain in the ivory towers of the academia and, from very early on, after I arrived from England in 1984, I understood this is not just a debate between me and Israeli academics. This is a debate between me and the Israeli Jewish society, and therefore, alongside my academic career, I have to be an activist.

And I tried all kinds of activism. I joined the Communist Party. I was a candidate for the Knesset. Then I thought that politics from above in Israel was not for me and not very effective. So I joined the civil society where I was much more consensual, did not belong to one particular political party. And I’m still all the time trying to combine activism and academic research. I don’t think one can separate them. And for the benefit of the struggle for justice, where you can combine them both it’s very powerful.

That also alienates you from the academic world because it’s bad enough that you’re questioning the hegemonic narrative. It’s even worse when you say that academics are also political. People don’t like to hear that. They think about themselves as objective scientists.

You get accused. There was this amazing attack in the Literary Review in Britain, with Auberon Waugh saying I’m a Nazi, a postmodernist and a communist!

I would say that academic courage is an oxymoron. Academics find it very difficult to risk their own career.

Chris Marsden: At the time you were researching 1948, you were still a Zionist?

Ilan Pappé: Yeah, definitely. In my first book, which was my PhD in 1984, I did not connect the Israeli policies to the ideology of Zionism. And it’s only when I began to write my book on ethnic cleansing, which I started writing in 2000 against the background of the Second Intifada, that’s when I began such an examination.

I was in very good intellectual connection with the emerging scholars of settler colonialism in Australia, the late Patrick Wolf, and Lorenzo Veracini, and I began to see the connection. I also had a very close relationship with the late Edward Said.

I began to understand the connection between the Zionist ideology the massacres and ethnic cleansing that occurred after 1948, the Israeli behaviour towards the occupied Palestinians after 1967, and so on. That also influenced my activism. But first I had to be personally persuaded as a scholar that Zionism was the problem, not policy.

Chris Marsden: Did you examine the actual genesis of the Zionist movement in Europe?

Ilan Pappé: Yeah, and it was really interesting. Because after I wrote The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, in which I do connect Zionist ideology to the ethnic cleansing, I was commissioned by the Cambridge University Press to write a book about what they suggested was the history of Israel and Palestine.

I said, I’m not going to write the history of Israel and Palestine because the series to which you want me to add this book is a series on the history of countries, not of states. I said the state is called Israel, and I don’t deny it, but the country is not Israel. The country is Palestine. I said I’m willing to write the history of modern Palestine. It was 65 years of Israel’s existence as well.

They did allow me to write the book, but then they commissioned a book called A History of Modern Israel. So they decided that both what they would call the Zionist narrative and the Palestinian narrative should be represented.

I now understand much better the whole story of Zionism after I finished the book I just published, Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic. I was surprised how little I knew of many things that connected Zionism to political economy, to world politics; not the simple story of people having an idea and having the power to implement it. It’s far more complicated. What Zionism was supposed to solve for different groups of people, different states, different actors. These are fundamental ideologies that change the life of people. It’s not that easy to unpack them.

Chris Marsden: All political ideologies and tendencies have a social base.

Ilan Pappé: Exactly. That’s why when I apologise to people and say my last book is the longest I’ve ever written, 500 pages, it’s because you have as an historian to follow the development of these ideologies. The ideology cannot be separated from its historical dynamism, the way it changes over time, which is true about any “ism,” not just Zionism.

Chris Marsden: Then you have to work out which social forces, what class, is represented. But the cultivation of the Zionist movement by the major powers in Europe was because it was conceived of as hostile to the Enlightenment, and integration, but above all it was hostile to the socialist movement.

Ilan Pappé: Exactly, you know, for example, I knew but I’ve never examined this as an historian, how supportive the Labour Party in Britain very early on was of Zionism. Partly from misguided ideas about it. Partly because, contrary to what people remember of the Atlee government, it played a very hawkish role in the Cold War. All kinds of things that I think you need to patiently go through and look at the facts, and then have a much better picture. You don’t learn everything from history, but I think it does tell you a lot about the present realities and the foundations are there.

Chris Marsden: I must send you this. We put out a series of lectures by David North, who is the chair of the World Socialist Web Site editorial board, The Logic of Zionism: From Nationalist Myth to the Gaza Genocide. It places Zionism in the context of the fundamental struggle in Europe at the time between the emerging socialist movement and the defenders of capitalist orthodoxy and the nation state system.

One of the points I found strongest about your book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, was that you took a sober and correct approach to the role played by the Soviet Union under Stalin, including the arming of the Zionists. When did you become aware of this?

Ilan Pappé: Well, it was not easy to become aware of this because I found it out when I was still a member of the Communist Party. I was made aware of it by talking to one of the leaders at the time, Meir Vilner, who has passed away.

It began by me asking him why did he sign the Israeli Declaration of Independence? And he said, well, we believed in the right of the two national movements to have a state. But of course, he said, without discriminating against the Palestinian citizens. And then I understood that because of the loyalty at the time of the Communist Party to Stalinism and the Soviet model, they were willing to use their contacts to bring weapons to the emerging Jewish state.

So it was through conversations. There was also some documentation in the Israeli archives about it. And it seemed to be quite known to a lot of people who lived at that period, but wasn’t spoken of. And yeah, it was also difficult because, you know, talking to people who were from that period they denied it. The Palestinian members of the party are very angry when this issue is brought up.

I’m glad a lot of Palestinian historians took it over to deal with it, because it’s not so much the moral dilemma of the Jewish members of the Communist Party, it’s the moral dilemma of the Palestinian members of the Communist Party, who were part of this.

Chris Marsden: The role of the Communist Party at that time was despicable, including splitting the party in two and having members killing each other.

Ilan Pappé: I think one day someone will write a good book about the Communist parties in the Arab world. The people in the West think that they understand them, as if they are just sort of models like the European ones. They’re not. It’s a far more complex story.

The story of the Jews who led the Communist parties in Iraq and Egypt is incredible. In the 1930s, before Zionism is trying to destroy them. It’s a far more authentic local version of communism. I always say the best way to try to indicate how complex it is is that when I was a member, during Ramadan, our communist members were fasting.

Chris Marsden: In an article I read, you raised that the Zionist left was “in limbo,” a good term but I would say rather in a state of intellectual, political and moral collapse.

Ilan Pappé: Yeah, yeah, definitely. And it’s a long process and it didn’t happen yesterday. This whole idea that you can reconcile universal values with the settler colonial ideology. I mean, with all the juggling of words and the squaring the circle, it doesn’t work. And usually you’re aware it doesn’t work in the moments when you expect some sort of humanity or universal values to trump other national ideological values. And always in these moments, like now in the genocide, they push aside the universal values.

They’re very angry with what they call the “global left” for not allowing them to determine what should be the moral position towards what happened on October 7 and afterwards. If you read their angry articles, they are published mostly in Hebrew, day after day, saying that the left in the world doesn’t understand that it should have condemned October 7 without any context. And it should understand the right of Israel to do what it does in in Gaza.

Of course, they say Israel should not feed the violence and so on. But it’s like they live on another planet, you know, not understanding that this “left” that they’re talking about has been trying to tell them for more than two or three decades, “You cannot be a Zionist, a leftist Zionist, just as you cannot be a progressive ethnic cleanser.” And you cannot be a leftist genocider, and you cannot be a socialist occupier. What matters is that you are an occupier, an ethnic cleanser or a genocider, that’s what matters. And if you are one of those things then you’re not part of the left.

Chris Marsden: That was played out on a mass scale in the anti-Netanyahu protests, which were massive, but they never challenged the occupation and the oppression of the Palestinians. And they allowed leading Zionists, the supposed anti-Netanyahu opposition, to lead them—the same elements that are now in government with him and supporting genocide.

Ilan Pappé: That’s what I’m saying. It was before the 7th of October, but they were unwilling to see the tragic situation that begins with the idea of imposing a European-settled state on the Arab world, in the midst of the Arab world, in the midst of the Muslim world.

OK, not everything can be rectified. You cannot turn the clock backwards for sure. That’s fine. And there’s already a third generation of settlers and everybody, most of the Palestinians and most of the people in the Arab world, accept it, say, “OK, you’re here. But you cannot be here as a super military Sparta that alienates and endangers the region as a whole and most importantly, continues by force to oppress the colonised people.” Not in the 21st century. This is not going to work.

It doesn’t matter how many nuclear bombs you have, you know, and how strong your connection with American imperialism is. It’s not going to work and you got the taste that it’s not going to work from the smallest guerilla force in history that already nearly brought you down. You would have hoped that this was something of a wake-up call. But there’s no indication that there was a wake-up call.

Chris Marsden: Netanyahu’s calculations are not based on popular public opinion, but on the fact that Israel is backed by US imperialism, British imperialism, French imperialism. And that they also confront these absolutely filthy Arab regimes, who are oppressing their own peoples, and that the “normalisation of relations” continues.

Ilan Pappé: Yeah, definitely. That’s a big question. You know, how far can it go? So 40,000 Palestinians are dead, and this is not enough to wake up the powers that be. But it has changed the public opinion and the civil societies’ action. The student encampments are a new phenomenon in the case of Palestine. And I’m sure we’ll see next year, even more, the galvanising of a united solidarity movement.

So we should never lose hope. As you rightly say, it’s a fundamental issue not just for the sake of the Palestinians but for the sake of us as a human society. We can’t take a deterministic view about this and say let’s reconcile with it. We’re not. We do all we can to change it.

Chris Marsden: Your initial position was support for a two-state solution. I know that you now support a unitary state.

Ilan Pappé: That that went hand-in-hand with my realisation that Zionist ideology is as an obstacle for any kind of genuine reconciliation. And the moment you realise it, the idea that it would be good enough to have a Zionist state just over part of Palestine instead of having it all over Palestine, is not a solution. If you want to decolonize you don’t de-Zionise just part of the country.

It wasn’t easy to do this move because I had these very good, influential friends who were really admired, Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein, who, as you know, are still today advocates of the two-state solution. With the argument that this is what international law suggests and it has the best chance of being implemented. I’m strong enough intellectually today to disagree with them. But you know, it wasn’t easy, because they’re powers to reckon with.

Chris Marsden: When did you transition to this viewpoint?

Ilan Pappé: I think after I published my book on ethnic cleansing. I saw the structure and not just the event, you know. And in 2010, I wrote this book with Noam, On Palestine, in which we argue about how this can be fixed. You learn so much by arguing with him because he knows so much. But I was happy that, after the dialogue with him, I was even more convinced I’m right.

You meet some of your idols, almost, and then you are not following everything they say. It’s a very good thing for everyone. I say it also to my students. Do argue, do put the counterpoint. None of us is perfect and it’s good to challenge us and maybe get even better ideas of how to move forward.

Chris Marsden: I don’t know how much you know about the World Socialist Web Site, but it’s published by the International Committee of the Fourth International. We are a Trotskyist publication. And our position was to oppose the setting up of the State of Israel.

An early statement that was published in 1948, “Against the Stream,” insisted that partition was not meant to solve Jewish misery, nor was it ever likely to do so. It insists, “The Hebrew state may well turn out, as Trotsky said, a bloody trap. For hundreds of thousands of Jews.”

It said it was utopian to believe that harmonious development within an isolated and closed economy in the midst of a capitalist world is possible. Without the expansion of the economy, millions of Jewish immigrants could not be absorbed to a Jewish state that could not exist amid the openly hostility of tens of millions of Arabs, or that antisemitism could be eradicated simply granting nationality to the Jews, ignoring its social, historical and ideological roots.

And it was reactionary because Zionism serves as a support for imperialist domination, including by dividing Jews and the Arabs and encouraging nationalism on both sides. The Fourth International’s call was for a United Socialist States of the Middle East.

Ilan Pappé: Very prophetic.

Chris Marsden: I admire the fact that you don’t accept that this situation is inevitable: you’re fighting to change it, you’ve dedicated your life to changing it. Your position is for a unitary state. But how can that in-and-of-itself be an answer, given the fact that, throughout the Middle East, you see regimes which have achieved unitary states of sorts, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc? These Arab regimes are filthy despotic governments who are hostile to their own people and are more interested in preserving relations with US imperialism and its Zionist attack dog than they are with the suffering of the Palestinian people.

Our position is for the unified mobilisation of the working class of the region to resolve these questions. You have raised comparisons with the anti-apartheid struggle, but if you look at the government in South Africa it’s pretty disgusting and presides over huge inequality.

Ilan Pappé: Just very quickly to respond to this. First of all, I think one of the reasons the Arab regimes don’t want a democratic, secular state in Palestine is exactly their realisation that such a state can have an immense influence on the future of their own regimes. I think you have to start somewhere. Waiting for a coordinated revolution in the whole region is very fine, but I don’t think it’s very easy to achieve and I think it’s good to start somewhere.

And the second point I would like to make is that the Middle East has socioeconomic problems, and you’re absolutely right about the unified action of working class people. But I think the left sometimes misunderstands the importance of group identities for people like the Azeris, the Alawites and so on. They can be very good communists and they can be very great believers in social equality and the working class. But their collective identities are still important to them and will be important to them. So in order to make this revolution successful, all these affiliations also have to be taken into account.

But as I say, it’s not fair for me to give this as a sound bite. This is really something that demands a more profound response because it is very important. And we saw what happened when the “left” left a void behind it in the 60s and the 70s, giving up to authoritarian regimes. You saw who filled the void. Political Islamic groups representing, in some cases, the working class much better than the bourgeois left.

Yes, we need a soul searching, analysis, and it has to be done here in the Middle East, not in London, for finding a new and enhanced role for the left, both for the sake of Palestine and, you’re absolutely right, for the sake of the region as a whole.

But I think our main starting point is that if you want to discuss human rights violations and workers’ rights violations and civil rights violation in the Arab world, you cannot exempt Israel from this discussion. And I think that’s not a bad starting point for a discussion that connects the predicaments of the Arab world, social ones, economic ones.

30 August 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By JONATHAN COOK

The arrest yesterday of Palestine solidarity activist Sarah Wilkinson, following the arrest of journalist Richard Medhurst last week – both based on an improbable claim they have violated Section 12 of the Terrorism Act – is definitive proof that Keir Starmer’s authoritarian purges of the Labour left are being rolled out against critics on a nationwide basis.

Now safely ensconced in No 10, Starmer can crush the basic rights of British citizens with as much relish as he earlier pummelled the remnants of democracy inside the Labour party – and for much the same reason.

The British prime minister is determined to terrorise into silence critics highlighting his, and now his government’s, complicity with Israel and its genocide in Gaza.

Starmer would rather dramatically expand the scope of already draconian “counter-terrorism” laws than act against the wishes of the United States, either by stopping arms sales to a fascist Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu or by joining South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.

There, judges have already ruled that the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians over the past 11 months is a “plausible genocide”. The next step is for South Africa and the many states backing it to persuade the World Court that the genocide is proven beyond doubt.

The usual Israel lobby ghouls, such as David Collier, have been salivating over Wilkinson’s arrest. She faces up to 14 years in jail for supposedly “supporting” a proscribed organisation – namely, Hamas.

According to reports, she was told she was being arrested over “content that she has posted online”. Police seized all her electronic devices. According to her daughter, she has been released on bail on condition she “never” uses those devices.

Let’s be clear: the police are using the Terrorism Act in this way only because they have received political direction to do so. Wilkinson’s arrest is only possible because the police and Starmer, supposedly a human rights lawyer, are rewriting the meaning of the term “support for terrorism”.

This is political repression in its clearest form.

Traditionally, making it a crime to “support” a terror group was about giving the authorities the power to punish anyone who offered material assistance, such as sending money or weapons, hiding armed fighters, providing information useful in an attack, and so on.

Even standard criminal laws against speech usually require evidence that someone has credibly incited direct violence or put other people’s lives in danger, such as the charges against those involved in recent far-right riots that included attempted pogroms against Muslims and immigrants.

That is entirely different from criminalising as “support for terror” any positive assertion about something done by a proscribed organisation – all the more so if we remember that Hamas has not just a military wing, but also a political section and a welfare arm.

The need for careful distinctions should be obvious. Would praising Hamas leaders, even its military leaders, for agreeing to sit down in peace talks amount to “support” for a terror organisation? Should it lead to arrest and jail time?

It was never a crime to “support” Sinn Fein – the political wing of the IRA – in the sense of having complimentary things to say about its long-time leader, Gerry Adams, or backing its political positions.

It wasn’t even illegal to “support” actual IRA “terrorists”. Back in the early 1980s, many people criticised the Ulster authorities and the British government of Margaret Thatcher for their barbaric treatment of IRA prisoners. It was not an arrestable offence, for example, to “support” the hunger strike of the IRA’s Bobby Sands that led to his death in the Maze prison.

The Jewish News sets out the apparent grounds for the raid on Wilkinson’s home by a dozen or so police officers, and the decision to arrest and investigate her on terrorism charges. Those reasons, if they are right, should send a terrifying chill down all our spines. That doubtless was Starmer’s intent.

1. According to the Jewish News, Wilkinson violated Section 12 by describing Hamas’ airborne assault into Israel on October 7 as an “incredible infiltration”. Which it clearly was. By any measure, it was an infiltration. And my dictionary gives as one of the main definitions of “incredible”: “difficult to believe”, or “extraordinary” in the sense of “very far from ordinary”.

Seeing Hamas use hang-gliders to get past one of the most sophisticated military structures ever built to imprison millions of people is the very definition of “incredible”. It was indeed hard to believe Hamas managed technically to do what it did that day.

Even were the police to ignore this established meaning of the word and instead assume that “great” or “wonderful” was intended – as a description of Hamas breaking out from the cage in which the people of Gaza had been imprisoned for decades and deprived of the essentials of life for 17 years – that would hardly constitute a crime, let alone “support” for terrorism.

As is well-established in international law, occupied people such as the Palestinians have a right to resist an army that occupies their territory, including through the use of violence. Just ask Starmer about that right in relation to the people of Ukraine.

Further, as even the Jewish News has to quietly concede, Wilkinson wrote her tweet on October 7 – that is, the very day Hamas’ attack happened. She could have had no idea at the time of writing that civilians were being killed in large numbers.

(The extent of Hamas’ atrocities against civilians on October 7 is far more disputed than the western media cares to admit. It quickly became clear Hamas did not, as claimed, kill babies, let alone behead them. No substantive evidence has been produced so far to show there were rapes that day, let alone the use of rape as a systematic policy, as Israel and its supporters allege. Some Israeli civilians, we now know, were killed by Israel’s own security forces when the so-called Hannibal protocol was invoked. And other Israeli civilians may have been targeted by some of the armed groups and individuals not allied to Hamas that poured out of Gaza through breaches created in the electronic fence around the enclave.)

But even if we assume both that Wilkinson knew civilians had been killed that day, and in large numbers, and that her use of “incredible” was meant to signal her approval of the killings, it should still not constitute a crime to note the extraordinary military feat of breaking out of Gaza.

No one should be locked up for being impressed by violence. If we wanted to make that some sort of principle, we would have to go around arresting large numbers of Zionist Jews and non-Jews in Britain who have been keen to voice their enthusiasm for Israel’s months of slaughter in Gaza.

2. The Jewish News also cites Wilkinson’s praise for Ismail Haniyeh, head of Hamas’ political bureau, shortly after he was assassinated by Israel in Tehran. She referred to him as a “hero”.

As context, let us note that, before his murder, Haniyeh was widely viewed as a moderate, even in Hamas’ political wing. Living in exile from Gaza, he appears to have had no foreknowledge of the October 7 attack. He was also one of the main players in efforts to end the bloodletting in Gaza and bring about a ceasefire through negotiations with Israel.

Killing Haniyeh was intended by Netanyahu to bolster the hardliners in Hamas’ military and political wings. By sabotaging hopes of a ceasefire, Israel’s government has been able to continue its genocide.

It is no more unreasonable to view Haniyeh as a “hero” for conducting a political struggle to free the people of Gaza from what the World Court has decried as an illegal occupation and a system of brutal Israeli apartheid than it was to view Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams as a hero for his political struggle to free Northern Ireland’s Catholic community from the oppressive rule of Britain and Ulster loyalists.

You may disagree with Haniyeh or Adams’ politics. You may denounce anyone who supports their positions. But you should most certainly not be in a position to lock such supporters away – not if we want to continue believing we live in a free society.

Adams spent many years as an elected member of the British parliament, though he refused to take up his seat in Westminster in protest. No one ever seriously suggested that those who supported him – either by calling him a hero or by voting for him in elections – should be arrested and jailed. Anyone who had done so would rightly have been called out as monstrously authoritarian and deeply anti-democratic.

3. Finally, the Jewish News suggests that Wilkinson made historic online posts – some eight years ago – amounting to Holocaust denial. Wilkinson apparently disputes this and has argued that the allegations were a smear campaign.

Even if we assume the worst – that Wilkinson did actually cast doubt on the Holocaust, rather than being smeared as having done so – that should not be a matter for the “terrorism” police. Having irrational, unfounded, or immoral views are not the equivalent of “support” for terrorism. Not even close.

Let us remember too that, if Britain’s terrorism laws are going to be enforced so expansively, the first person who should be arrested for “supporting” terrorism is Starmer himself. Months ago he insisted numerous times that Israel had a right to block food, water and power to 2.3 million people in Gaza, a policy Israel has indeed pursued and has resulted in a man-made famine that is starving Palestinians to death. The International Criminal Court’s prosecutor is seeking Netanyahu’s arrest for that starvation policy because it is a crime against humanity.

Israel ‘has the right’ to withhold water from Gaza, Keir Starmer tells LBC

Starmer, the human rights lawyer, knew that the starvation of Gaza was terrorism – or collective punishment, as it is known in international law. And yet he gave that very act of terror his full-throated backing. And his words had much more power to influence events than Wilkinson’s could ever have.

As opposition leader, he was in a position to add tangible pressure on Israel to stop its starvation policy by pointing out it amounted to state terror. As prime minister, he is in a position to advance the arrest of Israeli leaders for their terrorist acts under the principle of universal jurisdiction. He can stop arming the genocide too.

If we had a functioning system of international law, Starmer would undoubtedly be at serious risk of ending up in the dock of The Hague, accused of complicity in war crimes.

We now face the terrifying, Orwellian reality that a genocide-complicit prime minister can repurpose Britain’s “counter-terrorism” laws to jail anyone who opposes Israel’s genocide and Starmer’s complicity in it, charging them with “support” for terror.

Starmer wants to be judge, jury and executioner. We must not let him get away with it.

30 August 2024

Source: jonathan-cook.net

By Areeb Ullah

The co-founder of Palestine Action has been charged with violating the Terrorism Act after a series of speeches in Manchester and Bradford.

Richard Barnard stands accused of “expressing an opinion that is supportive of a proscribed organisation contrary to section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000”.

Barnard, 41, will appear before the Westminster Magistrates’ Court on 18 September, where he also faces two charges of encouraging or intending to encourage criminal damage.

The charges stem from an investigation by the specialised Counter Terrorism Policing North West (CTPNW) unit into a demonstration held on 8 October in Manchester after Hamas launched an attack on southern Israel.

Police have accused Barnard of expressing an opinion or belief in support of a proscribed organisation, namely Hamas, and of encouraging criminal damage.

He also faces an additional charge of encouraging criminal damage for a speech he delivered in Bradford.

Elbit raid

On the same day Barnard was charged, counterterrorism police raided the home of another Palestine Action activist suspected of involvement in a breach at an Elbit Systems research facility.

Last month, police arrested 10 activists who participated in the raid on a factory in Bristol, detaining them without charge under the Terrorism Act. They were later charged with non-terror offences and remanded to prison.

Middle East Eye delivers independent and unrivalled coverage and analysis of the Middle East, North Africa and beyond.

30 August 2024

Source: middleeasteye.net

By David Cronin

The organization which spread the lies used as a pretext for the genocidal war against Gaza is seeking funds from the European Union.

ZAKA – nominally an emergency rescue group – won praise from Benjamin Netanyahu for playing an important role in influencing public opinion as his government sought international backing during the initial stages of the genocide. Israel’s prime minister repeated claims fabricated by the group that Hamas burned and killed dozens of children on 7 October last year.

European Union diplomats enjoy a warm relationship with ZAKA despite – or perhaps because of – its blatant dishonesty. Dimiter Tzantchev, the EU’s ambassador to Tel Aviv, has contended that the group carries out “hard and holy work.”

[https://twitter.com/DTzantchev/status/1720088670282383776]

[https://twitter.com/AJIunit/status/1771945074840244384]

Documents obtained under freedom of information rules show that Tzantchev’s team has discussed the possibility that ZAKA could receive EU aid.

In January, a ZAKA representative emailed the EU’s Tel Aviv embassy with a request for information about possible funding. The message – see below – referred to an earlier conversation with the embassy on Zoom.

An EU diplomat replied swiftly with a promise that “I will definitely add your name to our distribution list” on calls for funding proposals.

The diplomat notified ZAKA that one such call had just been launched. It concerned the EU Peacebuilding Initiative.

The stated aim of that scheme is “to achieve greater public and political support for the two-state solution among specific constituencies and groups in Israel and Palestine through civil society’s positive engagement.”

Who do these EU officials think they are kidding?

A two-state solution has been a mirage for years, if not decades. At a time when Israel is slaughtering and starving Gaza’s people and intensifying its colonization in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), Western diplomats remain dedicated to a fantasy whereby historic Palestine is carved up into two viable states.

ZAKA’s correspondence with the EU’s Tel Aviv embassy indicates that it viewed the separate Partnership for Peace program as a future source of money.

That program is ostensibly focused on supporting activities that “promote peace, tolerance and nonviolence in the Middle East.”

ZAKA is committed to none of those things.

Motivated by racism

This week the organization expressed its approval for Israel’s latest ground and air attack on the West Bank.

According to ZAKA, the operation is a “critical step in securing the country” – indicating that it regards the occupied West Bank as part of Israel. The operation is concentrated, ZAKA claimed, on “ ‘refugee’ camps that have become strongholds for Palestinian terror groups.”

By putting scare quotes around the word “refugee,” ZAKA has proven that it is motivated by anti-Palestinian racism.

The camps in question host people who were driven from their homes by Zionist forces during the Nakba – the ethnic cleansing of Palestine between 1947 and 1949 – and their descendants.

No genuine humanitarian would question the accuracy of the term “refugee” in this context. Despite posing as altruistic, ZAKA is smearing victims of a mass expulsion.

ZAKA noted that this week’s operation against the West Bank involved “drones, bulldozers, military and security forces, four battalions of the Israel Border Police and an elite unit of undercover troops” before describing the attack as “necessary.”

It is by no means the first time that ZAKA has endorsed Israel’s acts of extreme violence.

In March, ZAKA defended what it called Israel’s “difficult decision” to invade al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City.

The invasion, ZAKA alleged, was “based on concrete intelligence that senior Hamas officials were using the hospital’s premises to plan and execute terror activities.”

No evidence for that accusation has ever been provided. That has not stopped ZAKA from becoming one of the world’s few, if not the only, “emergency rescue” groups to applaud an offensive in which a major hospital would be destroyed.

By inventing and spreading the main lies used to “justify” the current war on Gaza, ZAKA is complicit in genocide. Such complicity is a recognized and punishable offense under international law.

Rather than holding it and other Israeli bodies accountable, the European Union is giving ZAKA advice on how it can be funded.

29 August 2024

Source: electronicintifada.net