Archives: Articles

By Jeffrey D. Sachs

4 Sep 2024 – In 1989 I served as an advisor to the first post-communist government of Poland, and helped to devise a strategy of financial stabilization and economic transformation.  My recommendations in 1989 called for large-scale Western financial support for Poland’s economy in order to prevent a runaway inflation, enable a convertible Polish currency at a stable exchange rate, and an opening of trade and investment with the countries of the European Community (now the European Union).  These recommendations were heeded by the US Government, the G7, and the International Monetary Fund.

Based on my advice, a $1 billion Zloty stabilization fund was established that served as the backing of Poland’s newly convertible currency.  Poland was granted a standstill on debt servicing on the Soviet-era debt, and then a partial cancellation of that debt.  Poland was granted significant development assistance in the form of grants and loans by the official international community.
Poland’s subsequent economic and social performance speaks for itself.  Despite Poland’s economy having experienced a decade of collapse in the 1980s, Poland began a period of rapid economic growth in the early 1990s.  The currency remained stable and inflation low.  In 1990, Poland’s GDP per capita (measured in purchasing-power terms) was 33% of neighboring Germany.  By 2024, it had reached 68% of Germany’s GDP per capita, following decades of rapid economic growth.

On the basis of Poland’s economic success, I was contacted in 1990 by Mr. Grigory Yavlinsky, economic advisor to President Mikhail Gorbachev, to offer similar advice to the Soviet Union, and in particular to help mobilize financial support for the economic stabilization and transformation of the Soviet Union. One outcome of that work was a 1991 project undertaken at the Harvard Kennedy School with Professors Graham Allison, Stanley Fisher, and Robert Blackwill. We jointly proposed a “Grand Bargain” to the US, G7, and Soviet Union, in which we advocated large-scale financial support by the US and G7 countries for Gorbachev’s ongoing economic and political reforms. The report was published as Window of Opportunity: The Grand Bargain for Democracy in the Soviet Union (1 October 1991).

The proposal for large-scale Western support for the Soviet Union was flatly rejected by the Cold Warriors in the White House.  Gorbachev came to the G7 Summit in London in July 1991 asking for financial assistance, but left empty-handed.  Upon his return to Moscow, he was abducted in the coup attempt of August 1991.  At that point, Boris Yeltsin, President of the Russian Federation, assumed effective leadership of the crisis-ridden Soviet Union.  By December, under the weight of decisions by Russia and other Soviet republics, the Soviet Union was dissolved with the emergence of 15 newly independent nations.

In September 1991, I was contacted by Yegor Gaidar, economic advisor to Yeltsin, and soon to be acting Prime Minister of newly independent Russian Federation as of December 1991. He requested that I come to Moscow to discuss the economic crisis and ways to stabilize the Russian economy. At that stage, Russia was on the verge of hyperinflation, financial default to the West, the collapse of international trade with the other republics and with the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe, and intense shortages of food in Russian cities resulting from the collapse of food deliveries from the farmlands and the pervasive black marketing of foodstuffs and other essential commodities.

I recommended that Russia reiterate the call for large-scale Western financial assistance, including an immediate standstill on debt servicing, longer-term debt relief, a currency stabilization fund for the ruble (as for the Zloty in Poland), large-scale grants of dollars and European currencies to support urgently needed food and medical imports and other essential commodity flows, and immediate financing by the IMF, World Bank, and other institutions to protect Russia’s social services (healthcare, education, and others).

In November 1991, Gaidar met with the G7 Deputies (the deputy finance ministers of the G7 countries) and requested a standstill on debt servicing.  This request was flatly denied.  To the contrary, Gaidar was told that unless Russia continued to service every last dollar as it came due, emergency food aid on the high seas heading to Russia would be immediately turned around and sent back to the home ports.  I met with an ashen-faced Gaidar immediately after the G7 Deputies meeting.

In December 1991, I met with Yeltsin in the Kremlin to brief him on Russia’s financial crisis and on my continued hope and advocacy for emergency Western assistance, especially as Russia was now emerging as an independent, democratic nation after the end of the Soviet Union.  He requested that I serve as an advisor to his economic team, with a focus on attempting to mobilize the needed large-scale financial support.  I accepted that challenge and the advisory position on a strictly unpaid basis.

Upon returning from Moscow, I went to Washington to reiterate my call for a debt standstill, a currency stabilization fund, and emergency financial support.  In my meeting with Mr. Richard Erb, Deputy Managing Director of the IMF in charge of overall relations with Russia, I learned that the US did not support this kind of financial package.  I once again pleaded the economic and financial case, and was determined to change US policy.  It had been my experience in other advisory contexts that it might require several months to sway Washington on its policy approach.

Indeed, during 1991-94 I would advocate non-stop but without success for large-scale Western support for Russia’s crisis-ridden economy, and support for the other 14 newly independent states of the former Soviet Union. I made these appeals in countless speeches, meetings, conferences, op-eds, and academic articles. Mine was a lonely voice in the US in calling for such support.  I had learned from economic history — most importantly the crucial writings of John Maynard Keynes (especially Economic Consequences of the Peace, 1919) — and from my own advisory experiences in Latin America and Eastern Europe, that external financial support for Russia could well be the make or break of Russia’s urgently needed stabilization effort.

It is worth quoting at length here from my article in the Washington Post in November 1991 to present the gist of my argument at the time:

This is the third time in this century in which the West must address the vanquished. When the German and Hapsburg Empires collapsed after World War I, the result was financial chaos and social dislocation. Keynes predicted in 1919 that this utter collapse in Germany and Austria, combined with a lack of vision from the victors, would conspire to produce a furious backlash towards military dictatorship in Central Europe. Even as brilliant a finance minister as Joseph Schumpeter in Austria could not stanch the torrent towards hyperinflation and hyper-nationalism, and the United States descended into the isolationism of the 1920s under the “leadership” of Warren G. Harding and Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge.

After World War II, the victors were smarter. Harry Truman called for U.S. financial support to Germany and Japan, as well as the rest of Western Europe. The sums involved in the Marshall Plan, equal to a few percent of the recipient countries’ GNPs, was not enough to actually rebuild Europe. It was, though, a political lifeline to the visionary builders of democratic capitalism in postwar Europe.

Now the Cold War and the collapse of communism have left Russia as prostrate, frightened and unstable as was Germany after World War I and World War II. Inside Russia, Western aid would have the galvanizing psychological and political effect that the Marshall Plan had for Western Europe. Russia’s psyche has been tormented by 1,000 years of brutal invasions, stretching from Genghis Khan to Napoleon and Hitler.

Churchill judged that the Marshall Plan was history’s “most unsordid act,” and his view was shared by millions of Europeans for whom the aid was the first glimpse of hope in a collapsed world. In a collapsed Soviet Union, we have a remarkable opportunity to raise the hopes of the Russian people through an act of international understanding. The West can now inspire the Russian people with another unsordid act.

This advice went unheeded, but that did not deter me from continuing my advocacy.  In early 1992, I was invited to make the case on the PBS news show The McNeil-Lehrer Report.  I was on air with acting Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger.  After the show, he asked me to ride with him from the PBS studio in Arlington, Virginia back to Washington, D.C.  Our conversation was the following.  “Jeffrey, please let me explain to you that your request for large-scale aid is not going to happen.  Even assuming that I agree with your arguments — and Poland’s finance minister [Leszek Balcerowicz] made the same points to me just last week — it’s not going to happen.  Do you want to know why?  Do you know what this year is?”  “1992,” I answered.  “Do you know that this means?”  “An election year?” I replied.  “Yes, this is an election year.  It’s not going to happen.”

Russia’s economic crisis worsened rapidly in 1992.  Gaidar lifted price controls at the start of 1992, not as some purported miracle cure but because the Soviet-era official fixed prices were irrelevant under the pressures of the black markets, the repressed inflation (that is, rapid inflation in the black-market prices and therefore the rising the gap with the official prices), the complete breakdown of the Soviet-era planning mechanism, and the massive corruption engendered by the few goods still being exchanged at the official prices far below the black-market prices.

Russia urgently needed a stabilization plan of the kind that Poland had undertaken, but such a plan was out of reach financially (because of the lack of external support) and politically (because the lack of external support also meant the lack of any internal consensus on what to do).  The crisis was compounded by the collapse of trade among the newly independent post-Soviet nations and the collapse of trade between the former Soviet Union and its former satellite nations in Central and Eastern Europe, which were now receiving Western aid and were reorienting trade towards Western Europe and away from the former Soviet Union.

During 1992 I continued without any success to try to mobilize the large-scale Western financing that I believed to be ever-more urgent.  I pinned my hopes on the newly elected Presidency of Bill Clinton. These hopes too were quickly dashed. Clinton’s key advisor on Russia, Johns Hopkins Professor Michael Mandelbaum, told me privately in November 1992 that the incoming Clinton team had rejected the concept of large-scale assistance for Russia. Mandelbaum soon announced publicly that he would not serve in the new administration. I met with Clinton’s new Russia advisor, Strobe Talbott, but discovered that he was largely unaware of the pressing economic realities. He asked me to send him some materials about hyperinflations, which I duly did.

At the end of 1992, after one year of trying to help Russia, I told Gaidar that I would step aside as my recommendations were not heeded in Washington or the European capitals.  Yet around Christmas Day I received a phone call from Russia’s incoming financing minister, Mr. Boris Fyodorov. He asked me to meet him in Washington in the very first days of 1993.  We met at the World Bank. Fyodorov, a gentleman and highly intelligent expert who tragically died young a few years later, implored me to remain as an advisor to him during 1993.  I agreed to do so, and spent one more year attempting to help Russia implement a stabilization plan. I resigned in December 1993, and publicly announced my departure as advisor in the first days of 1994.

My continued advocacy in Washington once again fell on deaf ears in the first year of the Clinton Administration, and my own forebodings became greater.  I repeatedly invoked the warnings of history in my public speaking and writing, as in this piece in the New Republic in January 1994, soon after I had stepped aside from the advisory role.

Above all, Clinton should not console himself with the thought that nothing too serious can happen in Russia. Many Western policymakers have confidently predicted that if the reformers leave now, they will be back in a year, after the Communists once again prove themselves unable to govern. This might happen, but chances are it will not. History has probably given the Clinton administration one chance for bringing Russia back from the brink; and it reveals an alarmingly simple pattern. The moderate Girondists did not follow Robespierre back into power. With rampant inflation, social disarray and falling living standards, revolutionary France opted for Napoleon instead. In revolutionary Russia, Aleksandr Kerensky did not return to power after Lenin’s policies and civil war had led to hyperinflation. The disarray of the early 1920s opened the way for Stalin’s rise to power. Nor was Bruning’sgovernment given another chance in Germany once Hitler came to power in 1933.

It is worth clarifying that my advisory role in Russia was limited to macroeconomic stabilization and international financing.  I was not involved in Russia’s privatization program which took shape during 1993-4, nor in the various measures and programs (such as the notorious “shares-for-loans” scheme in 1996) that gave rise to the new Russian oligarchs.  On the contrary, I opposed the various kinds of measures that Russia was undertaking, believing them to be rife with unfairness and corruption.  I said as much in both the public and in private to Clinton officials, but they were not listening to me on that account either.  Colleagues of mine at Harvard were involved in the privatization work, but they assiduously kept me far away from their work. Two were later charged by the US government with insider dealing in activities in Russia which I had absolutely no foreknowledge or involvement of any kind.  My only role in that matter was to dismiss them from the Harvard Institute for International Development for violating the internal HIID rules against conflicts of interest in countries that HIID advised.

The failure of the West to provide large-scale and timely financial support to Russia and the other newly independent nations of the former Soviet Union definitely exacerbated the serious economic and financial crisis that faced those countries in the early 1990s.  Inflation remained very high for several years.  Trade and hence economic recovery were seriously impeded.  Corruption flourished under the policies of parceling out valuable state assets to private hands.

All of these dislocations gravely weakened the public trust in the new governments of the region and the West. This collapse in social trust brought to my mind at the time the adage of Keynes in 1919, following the disaster Versailles settlement and the hyperinflations that followed: “There is no subtler, no surer means of over- turning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and it does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”

During the tumultuous decade of the 1990s, Russia’s social services fell into decline.  When this decline was coupled with the greatly increased stresses on society, the result was a sharp rise in Russia’s alcohol-related deaths.  Whereas in Poland, the economic reforms were accompanied by a rise in life expectancy and public health, the very opposite occurred in crisis-riven Russia.

Even with all of these economic debacles, and with Russia’s default in 1998, the grave economic crisis and lack of Western support were not the definitive breaking points of US-Russian relations.  In 1999, when Vladimir Putin became Prime Minister and in 2000 when he became President, Putin sought friendly and mutually supportive international relations between Russia and the West.  Many European leaders, for example, Italy’s Romano Prodi, have spoken extensively about Putin’s goodwill and positive intentions towards strong Russia-EU relations in the first years of his presidency.

It was in military affairs rather than in economics that the Russian – Western relations ended up falling apart in the 2000s.  As with finance, the West was militarily dominant in the 1990s, and certainly had the means to promote strong and positive relations with Russia.  Yet the US was far more interested in Russia’s subservience to NATO than it was in stable relations with Russia.

At the time of German reunification, both the US and Germany repeatedly promised Gorbachev and then Yeltsin that the West would not take advantage of German reunification and the end of the Warsaw Pact by expanding the NATO military alliance eastward.  Both Gorbachev and Yeltsin reiterated the importance of this US-NATO pledge.  Yet within just a few years, Clinton completely reneged on the Western commitment, and began the process of NATO enlargement.  Leading US diplomats, led by the great statesman-scholar George Kennan, warned at the time that the NATO enlargement would lead to disaster: “The view, bluntly stated, is that expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era.” So, it has proved.

Here is not the place to revisit all of the foreign policy disasters that have resulted from US arrogance towards Russia, but it suffices here to mention a brief and partial chronology of key events.  In 1999, NATO bombed Belgrade for 78 days with the goal of breaking Serbia apart and giving rise to an independent Kosovo, now home to a major NATO base in the Balkans.  In 2002, the US unilaterally withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty over Russia’s strenuous objections.  In 2003, the US and NATO allies repudiated the UN Security Council by going to war in Iraq on false pretenses.  In 2004, the US continued with NATO enlargement, this time to the Baltic States and countries in the Black Sea region (Bulgaria and Romania) and the Balkans.  In 2008, over Russia’s urgent and strenuous objections, the US pledged to expand NATO to Georgia and Ukraine.

In 2011, the US tasked the CIA to overthrow Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, an ally of Russia.  In 2011, NATO bombed Libya in order to overthrow Moammar Qaddafi.  In 2014, the US conspired with Ukrainian nationalist forces to overthrow Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych.  In 2015, the US began to place Aegis anti-ballistic missiles in Eastern Europe(Romania), a short distance from Russia. In 2016-2020, the US supported Ukraine in undermining the Minsk II agreement, despite its unanimous backing by the UN Security Council.  In 2021, the new Biden Administration refused to negotiate with Russia over the question of NATO enlargement to Ukraine.  In April 2022, the US called on Ukraine to withdraw from peace negotiations with Russia.

Looking back on the events around 1991-93, and to the events that followed, it is clear that the US was determined to say no to Russia’s aspirations for peaceful and mutually respectful integration of Russia and the West.  The end of the Soviet period and the beginning of the Yeltsin Presidency occasioned the rise of the neoconservatives (neocons) to power in the United States. The neocons did not and do not want a mutually respectful relationship with Russia.  They sought and until today seek a unipolar world led by a hegemonic US, in which Russia and other nations will be subservient.

In this US-led world order, the neocons envisioned that the US and the US alone will determine the utilization of the dollar-based banking system, the placement of overseas US military bases, the extent of NATO membership, and the deployment of US missile systems, without any veto or say by other countries, certainly including Russia.  That arrogant foreign policy has led to several wars and to a widening rupture of relations between the US-led bloc of nations and the rest of the world.  As an advisor to Russia during two years, late-1991 to late-93, I experienced first-hand the early days of neoconservatism applied to Russia, though it would take many years of events afterwards to recognize the full extent of the new and dangerous turn in US foreign policy that began in the early 1990s.

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.

9 September 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Jonathan Cook

Western governments will never isolate and sanction Israel. The war machine will roll on until either we stop it or its lethal games blow up in all our faces.

4 Sep 2024 – There are many reasons Gaza has been mostly off the radar of the western establishment media for months now, even as the enclave turns into an ever-bigger killing zone.

One is that, nearly a year into what the World Court has termed a “plausible genocide”, where Israel has kept out western journalists and killed off most Palestinian journalists, as well as driving out international aid organisations and the United Nations, there is almost no one left to tell us what is happening.

We have only snapshots of individual suffering, but not the big picture. How many Palestinians are dead? We know there are at least 40,000 killed by Israel – the deaths recorded by Palestinian officials before the health system collapsed. But how many more? Double that figure? Quadruple it? Times it by 10? The truth is, no one knows.

What about the famine in Gaza that has been raging for many, many months as Israel has systematically blocked aid into the enclave, in line with its promise last October to deny the Palestinians there food, water and power?

The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, has requested arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, because the pair’s starvation of Gaza is a crime against humanity.

But the prolonged famine is presented as a near-victimless crime. Where are the dead from this famine? They are certainly not on our TV screens or on our front pages.

The true death toll will probably never be reported, just as it wasn’t after the West’s Middle East bloodbaths in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. Western politicians have no interest in knowing the truth, and the western establishment media has no interest in discovering it.

Democracy gutted

The news from Gaza is being actively buried for another reason. Israel’s genocide continues to be tangible, shocking proof that western capitals are not the bastions of democracy and bulwarks against barbarianism they claim to be.

Western politicians have been utterly complicit in the genocide – a fact impossible to hide from their publics. The killing could have been stopped at any point, had the Biden administration so willed it.

Ordinary people have made clear they want the slaughter to end, which is why Biden has to pretend to be “working tirelessly” to negotiate a ceasefire – a ceasefire he could impose whenever he chooses to.

Israel is entirely dependent on US military, diplomatic and financial largesse, as is only too clear from the 50,000 tonnes of weapons the Biden administration has so far shipped to Israel since last October.

But the truth is that western politics is now entirely unresponsive to popular demand. The last vestiges of democratic accountability were gutted many years ago as the West’s political systems were completely captured by powerful globe-spanning corporations.

Tens of millions of people turned out on the streets of Europe to try to halt the US and Britain’s illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, and it made not a jot of difference.

The situation with Gaza is even worse. It is not just that, as before, no one in power is listening. Those opposing Israel’s genocide, and western complicity in it, are being utterly maligned. The millions marching against the slaughter are reported as “tens of thousands”, while being actively smeared as “antisemites”.

Western states – and their self-professed “defensive alliance”, Nato – are not there to represent the public interest. They have become chiefly vehicles for the promotion of the narrow interests of a corporate elite, whose purpose, in turn, is to siphon into private hands the profits from publicly funded, permanent wars.

Profits from slaughter

It isn’t just arms manufacturers and the hi-tech industries, with their booming surveillance businesses, whose shares are soaring on the back of the slaughter in Gaza and Ukraine.

Bloomberg reported last month that Israeli air strikes on Gaza had turned the homes of 2.3 million Palestinians into 42m tonnes of rubble. That’s enough to fill a line of dump trucks from New York to Singapore.

It won’t be Gaza companies raking in the profits from the mammoth clean-up operation. After a 17-year blockade of the enclave by Israel, Gaza’s industrial and commercial sector barely existed even before Israel’s current wrecking spree. The beneficiaries, once again, will be western corporations.

If the “day after” ever arrives, it will be western corporations bidding to rebuild Gaza – and most likely not for the current Palestinian inhabitants. Israel wants them either dead or ethnically cleansed from the territory.

A razed, emptied Gaza will be a tabula rasa. Expensive new beachfront properties can be marketed to wealthy Israeli Jews. New industrial zones and ports will be able to export easily to Europe and North Africa.

And that’s before we consider who gets to exploit the bountiful natural gas just off Gaza’s coast, which western corporations have been greedily eyeing for the past two decades.

Excuses for repression

Western corporations have been growing ever fatter at the same time as western publics have been required to submit to endless belt-tightening.

The UK’s new prime minister, Keir Starmer, who understands that his own political survival depends on continuing this corporate raiding of the public wealth, is busily managing Britons’ expectations.

Armed with a massive parliamentary majority, he had no message of hope or change. He told the British public last week that “things are worse than we ever imagined”. There was no reference to why they might be so bad, beyond predictable political point-scoring against the previous government.

Starmer warned of the need to “do things differently”. But the difference he offered was actually a commitment to more austerity – the signature policy of his predecessors.

And, just as Starmer’s agenda is one of no change on the domestic front, it is also one of no change on foreign policy. The endless wars will continue.

The new British government, like the old one, keeps peddling excuses to continue to sell arms to an Israeli military using them to massacre civilians.

Foreign Secretary David Lammy grovelled before Israel on 2 September as he announcedhe was suspending 8 percent of such sales after he had been warned of their possible use in Israeli war crimes. It is apparently fine to send the other 92 percent of military contracts, including components used in Israel’s squadron of F-35 warplanes, to a regime actively engaged in genocide.

Meanwhile, the new government, like the old one, pursues with what it calls “laser focus” wider business opportunities with Israel.

In the US, Kamala Harris, shoe-horned in as the Democrats’ presidential candidate to replace Joe Biden, without a single vote cast, is sold by a compliant media as the candidate of “joy” – vapid political messaging as void of content as former President Barack Obama’s much-celebrated slogan of “hope”.

“Joy” is serving as an excuse to repress. Demonstrators outside the Democratic National Convention as it crowned Harris protested against her and Biden’s near-year-long complicity in the Gaza genocide. But they were not going to be allowed to sour the “joyful” mood inside. They were forcefully swept out of view by police.

In her first interview since being nominated, Harris promised US support for the genocide in Gaza would continue – even if, as seems quite possible, it robs her of a handful of swing states in November and ensures Donald Trump is elected president.

The ‘antisemitism’ formula

Both Starmer and Harris are faithful creatures of a permanent bureaucracy that was long ago captured by the West’s profit-hungry corporate war machine.

Its most favoured son is Israel, a highly militarised state – a colonial outgrowth of the West – implanted into an oil-rich Middle East like a bone stuck in the back of the throat. Israel is there to advance an openly belligerent Jewish supremacism, mirroring a western supremacism that nowadays prefers to veil its imperial ambitions.

From early on, Israel’s backers were given a perfect cover story for the crimes they sponsored against the native inhabitants of the land, the Palestinians – and one that could be adapted to justify Israel’s permanently warlike posture in the region.

In a self-serving narrative promoted by the West, the continuing threat of antisemitism required Jews to have their own militarised fortress state – a modern Pale of Settlement – as a bulwark against a future Holocaust.

Western capitals accepted one marker only of whether westerners were rehabilitated from their earlier Jew-hatred: they must agree to indulge Israel’s every military wish.

Those in the West who armed Israel and helped it expel the native Palestinians in 1948 and 1967, those who turned a blind eye as it built the region’s only nuclear arsenal, those who encouraged its wars against its neighbours, and those who lobbied for the undermining of international law in the pursuit of those wars, proved themselves to be free of the virus of Jew-hatred.

Those who opposed western imperialism and the excesses of its favourite Middle East client state, those who stood up for human rights and international law, could be dismissed and denounced as antisemites.

That well-worn formula, extraordinary as it seems, has persisted even as Israel has pursued Jewish supremacism to its logical end-point in Gaza: exterminating the population there.

Those in favour of arming a genocide are the good guys. Those opposed are the antisemites and supporters of terrorism.

Independent journalists and Palestinian solidarity activists are now being rounded up and intimidated under draconian anti-terrorism laws in Britain.

Social media platforms are limiting the reach of posts critical of Israel, herding opposition to the genocide into small online ghettoes.

Universities are starting to draft new rules to make being a Zionist – subscribing to Israel’s extremist political ideology – a protected characteristic, no different from being born Hispanic or Black.

The aim is to silence all Palestinian solidarity activism on campus as equivalent to racism, extinguishing any chance of a repetition of the large protests that swept US universities during the spring and summer.

Inversion of reality

For good reason, western establishments are making it impossible to explain the roots of Israel’s genocide. They are excising the very terminology needed to begin that conversation.

Zionism is an ideology that originated centuries ago, embedded in an antisemitic Christian fundamentalism that required forcing the Jews of Europe to “return” to the Holy Land. That way, a supposed biblical prophecy would be fulfilled, bringing about an end times in which Christians alone would find redemption.

Little more than a century ago, Zionism started to make inroads into the thinking of a small European Jewish elite, who saw Christian antisemitism as a path towards the creation of a Jewish state they could rule on licence from the West.

The antisemitic Christian Zionists wanted the Jews out of Europe and ghettoised in the Holy Land – and so did the new breed of Jewish Zionists.

Theodor Herzl, the father of Jewish Zionism, precisely understood this confluence of interests when he wrote in his Diaries: “The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.”

To understand how and why Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, and why it is being allowed by the West, it is vital to analyse the historic role played by Zionism, and how antisemitism has been weaponised over decades to serve as the perfect cover for the dispossession, and now extermination, of the Palestinian people.

Which is precisely why, on his path to power, Starmer, Britain’s new prime minister, made sure to conflate anti-Zionism – opposition to Zionism – with antisemitism.

The corporate war machine requires of anyone it allows near the centres of power to prove that they will maintain this inversion of reality: that those who support war are the good guys, and those who oppose genocide are the antisemites.

In trying to turn reality back onto its feet, Starmer’s predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, doomed himself to endless smears.

Now those who try to maintain – in the face of a genocide – their grasp on reality, as well as their humanity, find themselves similarly vilified.

Genocide by proxy?

This is the hidden context for interpreting the ever-more dangerous developments unfolding around the Gaza genocide.

Israeli political and military leaders are split on where to head next.

There are those ready – having laid waste to Gaza – to do a deal on the remaining Israeli hostages, pull back somewhat and let the rest of the genocide gradually play out.

Aluf Benn, editor of Israel’s venerable Haaretz newspaper, recently set out the emerging plan for “the day after”.

Israel will split Gaza into northern and southern territories along the Netzarim corridor, and starve anyone in the north to death if they refuse to leave.

North Gaza will be settled by Jews, attracted by its “convenient topography, a sea view, and proximity to central Israel”.

South Gaza, packed with destitute, homeless and often maimed refugees deprived of housing, schools and hospitals, will be left to rot under an Israeli siege, an intensification of Israel’s policy before 7 October. The media, it is expected, will lose what little interest it already exhibits in the plight of Palestinians there.

Benn avoids mentioning what happens next. The enclave’s population will face a long, cold, wet winter with no power or sanitation. Starvation will deepen, epidemics will spread.

A genocide by proxy.

Unless, that is, neighbouring states, most especially Egypt, can be blackmailed into agreeing to become complicit in Gaza’s ethnic cleansing.

This is the view of much of the military command, expressed in defence minister Gallant’s reported “shouting match” with Netanyahu at a cabinet meeting on 30 August over the prime minister’s continuing moves to obstruct a hostage deal with Hamas.

It is also the impulse behind the huge protests in Israeli cities this week, and the calling of a general strike by the main labour union, after six hostages were brought back from Gaza dead.

Two birds, one stone

The question is whether Netanyahu’s government can be persuaded to stick to this “minimalist” genocide.

Impatient to complete the slaughter in Gaza, and aware that Israel is already a pariah state in the eyes of non-western states and now, increasingly, with western publics, the far right in Netanyahu’s government see only opportunity. They wish to block a ceasefire indefinitely, and use that time to expand the genocide into the larger, more prized Palestinian territory of the West Bank.

This is Israel’s version of killing two birds with one stone. It is also the only way for Netanyahu to keep his far-right coalition together and exploit his role as “wartime leader” to put off his date with the courts in his long-running corruption trial.

Last week’s large-scale attacks on major West Bank cities, with Israeli officials warning the population to be ready to flee invaded areas at short notice, are a foretaste of what is intended.

Having received no meaningful pushback from western capitals over the Gaza genocide, the Israeli right has grown more confident that the same template can be rolled out for the West Bank.

Foreign Minister Israel Katz noted that invasions of the West Bank would be handled “exactly as we deal with terror infrastructure in Gaza, including the temporary evacuation of Palestinian civilians”.

In response, a US official indicated that Washington was ready to sign up to an expansion into the West Bank of Israel’s war against the Palestinian people: “We recognise that localised evacuation orders may be necessary in certain instances to protect civilian lives during sensitive counter-terrorism operations.”

The sense of urgency has only been underscored to Israeli leaders by the World Court’s recent ruling that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories is illegal and constitutes apartheid rule.

Rampaging through the West Bank can be justified indefinitely on the pretext of foiling an “Iranian-backed terror threat”.

And US support will only deepen if Trump wins in November. Should he manage to foreclose on Nato’s proxy war in Ukraine, the military resources expended there can be redirected towards Israel.

Israeli pyromania

Netanyahu and his allies understand that his solution for the “Palestinian problem” risks a regional conflagration, which is why they need to drag the US deeper into the mire.

And they have multiple potential provocations up their sleeve that can further entangle Washington in neutralising a regional “axis of resistance” that stands as an obstacle to Israel’s military hegemony in the region.

Itamar Ben Gvir, the fascist minister in charge of the police, is seeking to light a match under al-Aqsa in occupied East Jerusalem. His police militias have been running protection for Jewish extremists breaking into the mosque complex to pray there.

On 26 August, Ben Gvir stepped up his incitement by calling publicly for the first time to build a synagogue inside al-Aqsa.

But the real target is Iran and groups allied to it. Netanyahu’s pyromania has extended to a series of executions designed both to humiliate Tehran, the main sponsor of resistance, and its Hezbollah allies in Lebanon, while making negotiations to end the bloodletting in Gaza impossible.

Back in April, Israel struck Iran’s consulate in Damascus, killing 16 people. And on 31 July, it assassinated Hamas’ political leader and chief negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh, while he was being hosted in Tehran.

A day earlier, Israel killed Fuad Shukr, a Hezbollah military commander, in an attack on the Lebanese capital, Beirut.

Simmering border

Netanyahu knew the inevitable consequences.

Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’ much less compromising military leader, has filled the void left in the group by Haniyeh’s execution.

And both Hezbollah and Iran have even stronger grounds for launching retaliation operations against Israel that could quickly spiral into an all-out war.

That came close to happening late last month with an exchange of heavy fire across the Lebanese border, with Israeli warplanes bombing more than 40 sites in Lebanon while Hezbollah launched more than 300 rockets and drones at military sites in Israel.

Israel’s northern border has been simmering for months.

Senior Israeli politicians have been noisily demanding that the Israeli military destroy south Lebanon and reoccupy it. In June, Israel was reported to have approved a plan for a war in Lebanon. The US envoy to Lebanon was said to have told Hezbollah that Washington “won’t be able to hold Israel back”.

The New York Times has reported soaring recruitment of Palestinians in Lebanon by armed Hamas brigades there, adding another unpredictable element to the mix.

And in a useful feedback loop for Israel, the more it can provoke Iran, the greater excuse it creates to repeat the Gaza genocide formula in the West Bank, bombing its cities and driving out its population.

Foreign Minister Katz has been setting out precisely this thesis in English-language posts for western audiences, suggesting that Iran is smuggling weapons through Jordan into the West Bank.

He claims Tehran is “working to establish an eastern terror front against Israel through special units of the IRGC [Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps], involved in smuggling weapons, funding, and directing terror organisations”.

Western politicians and media are never going to admit that Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza. The moment they do, the veil of illusions fostered for decades about Israel – designed to conceal the West’s complicity in Israeli crimes – would be torn away.

In committing a genocide, a state crosses a threshold. It cannot be armed into moderation. Nor can it be reasoned into peacemaking. It must be aggressively isolated and sanctioned.

There is no sign western establishments are willing to do that for one very simple reason: they cannot afford to do it.

So they will continue feeding the war machine until either we stop them or its lethal games blow up in all our faces.

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

9 September 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Caitlin Johnstone

The West Truly Doesn’t See Palestinians as Human – Israelis dying is a terrible tragedy, while Palestinians dying is just the normal way of things. Israeli strikes killed 47 Palestinians in Gaza on Sunday [1 Sep], receiving not a fraction of the attention Western officials have given six Israeli hostages.

3 Sep 2024 – You never see the dehumanization of Palestinians in western society exhibited so clearly as when something bad happens to Israelis during the genocidal assault on Gaza.

Today western officials are publicly weeping about six dead Israeli hostages, including one Israeli-American, who the IDF says were recently killed by Hamas.

Whoever’s been writing Joe Biden’s press releases for him published a statement about how “devastated and outraged” the president is about the death of the American hostage, Hersh Goldberg-Polin.

The statement says the president knows Goldberg-Polin’s parents, saying “I admire them and grieve with them more deeply than words can express” and that “Hamas leaders will pay for these crimes.”

“I have worked tirelessly to bring their beloved Hersh safely to them and am heartbroken by the news of his death,” the statement reads, which for the record is a lie — the Biden administration has been collaborating with Benjamin Netanyahu to sabotage a hostage deal at every turn.

https://x.com/ryangrim/status/1830257386159751441

Similar sentiments are being expressed in statements by western officials like Vice President Kamala Harris, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

All of these statements frame the deaths of these six Israeli hostages as an earth-shakingly horrific tragedy, and all frame Hamas as a band of evil villains who must be brought to justice for their crimes.

No similar statements have ever been made by any of these officials about the far, far greater number of innocent Palestinians who have been killed in Gaza by the state of Israel with their assistance. No similar expressions of condolence have ever been uttered by these leaders for the millions of Palestinians who’ve had their lives completely ruined by Israel’s atrocities in Gaza and the West Bank over the last eleven months, or for the untold thousands of parents who’ve had to bury children who were exterminated in Israel’s genocidal onslaught.

Western government officials are making it clear that they do not see Palestinians as human in the same way they see Israelis as human, as are the mass media propaganda institutions who’ve been covering the deaths of these hostages with an intensity never seen regarding the IDF’s daily massacres of civilians in Gaza. Israeli strikes killed 47 Palestinians in Gaza in one 24-hour period between Saturday and Sunday, receiving not the tiniest fraction of the attention as those six Israeli hostages.

https://x.com/Antiwarcom/status/1830385799122362426

The message is clear: Israelis dying is a terrible tragedy, while Palestinians dying is just the normal way for things to be. An Israeli dying should matter as much to you as your own family or friends dying, while a Palestinian dying should be regarded as a routine and natural event like a drop of rain falling from the sky.

And that’s an important message for westerners to be indoctrinated with. Can you imagine if we all started caring about western bombs being dropped in the middle east as much as we would care if they were being dropped on our own country, or on a country we’ve been conditioned to sympathize with? All their carefully manufactured consent would crumble, and people would cease allowing the western empire to do what it needs to do to dominate the planet.

These people are actively working to subvert our basic sense of human empathy. To twist our psyches into being unable to recognize the same level of humanity among empire-targeted populations as empire-supported ones. To see authorized populations as worthy of care and sympathy, and to see unauthorized populations as vermin in need of extermination.

Yes, our rulers really are that evil, and so are the propagandists who run the mass media.

So today I would like to extend my deepest condolences to the millions of Palestinians who’ve lost loved ones and had their lives thrown to the winds of chaos by Israel’s western-backed campaign of extermination, ethnic cleansing, and terrorism.

And I would like to remind my readers that Israel has exponentially more hostages than Hamas has, and murders them routinely, and rapes and tortures them constantly.

And it is right that we should care deeply about that. Even if the people who rule over us do not.

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

9 September 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Rick Sterling

7 Sep 2024 – The Biden/Harris administration is renewing its attacks on Venezuela. On Monday, September 2, US officials seized a jet plane belonging to the Venezuelan government when it was in the Dominican Republic for servicing, then flew it to Florida.

Contrary to a false report in the NY Times, the plane was not “owned by Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro”. It is owned by the Venezuelan government and used for travel by various Venezuelan officials in addition to the president.

The NYT article claims, “The Biden administration is trying to put more pressure on Mr. Maduro because of his attempts to undermine the results of the recent presidential election.” This is another inversion of reality. The US government is trying to undermine the results determined by the Venezuelan National Election Council (CNE) and ratified by their Supreme Court.

Contrary to Western claims, the Supreme Court and Election Council are not synonymous with the government. They are approved by Venezuela’s elected national assembly. While one opposition member of the Election Council criticized the results, he did not attend the count or meetings.  He does not ordinarily live in Venezuela and has returned to his home in the USA. Meanwhile, another opposition member of the Election Council, Aime Nogal, participated and approved the council’s decision.

Before the election, polls showed vastly different predictions. The US-funded polling company, Edison Research, showed the Gonzalez/ Machado opposition winning. Other polls showed the opposite. Polls are notoriously unreliable, especially when the poll is funded by an interested party. A better indication was the street demonstrations where the crowd in support of the coalition led by Maduro was near one million people. In contrast, the crowd for Gonzalez was a small fraction of that.

Before the election, polls showed vastly different predictions. The US-funded polling company, Edison Research, showed the Gonzalez/ Machado opposition winning. Other polls showed the opposite. Polls are notoriously unreliable, especially when the poll is funded by an interested party. A better indication was the street demonstrations where the crowd in support of the coalition led by Maduro was near one million people. In contrast, the crowd for Gonzalez was a small fraction of that.

Increasingly, countries throughout the Global South are rejecting and criticizing Washington’s intervention in other nations’ internal affairs. On August 28, the president of Honduras, Xiomara Castro Zelaya, terminated the long standing extradition treaty with the United States and denounced US meddling after the US Ambassador commented negatively on Honduran – Venezuelan discussions.  Along with many other Latin American countries but the dismay of the U.S., Honduras  recognized the results of the Venezuelan election.

For over twenty years, the US has been trying to overturn the Bolivarian revolution. In 2002, the US government and elite media supported a coup attempt against President Hugo Chavez. To their chagrin, the attempt collapsed due to popular outrage. Since then, there have been repeated efforts with the US supporting street violence, assassination attempts, and invasions. Under Obama, Venezuela was absurdly declared to be a “threat to US national security”. This was the bogus rationale for the economic warfare which the US has waged ever since. Multiple reports confirm that tens of thousands of Venezuelans have died as a result of  hunger and sickness due to US strangulation of the economy. Again, the truth is the opposite of what Washington claims: the US is a threat to Venezuela’s national security.

Unknown to most U.S. residents, in December 2020 the U.N. General Assembly declared US unilateral coercive measures (sanctions) are “contrary to international law, international humanitarian law, the Charter of the United Nations and the norms and principles governing peaceful relations among States.”

Illegal U.S. measures were used to justify the kidnapping and imprisonment of Venezuelan diplomat, Alex Saab. They have now been used to justify the theft of a jet plane needed by Venezuelan officials.

Previously, sanctions were used to justify the seizure of Venezuela’s CITGO gas stations and freezing gold reserves in London. It comes after the U.S. and allies pretended for several years that an almost unknown politician, Juan Guaido, was the president of Venezuela.

The reasons for Washington’s repeated efforts to overturn the Bolivarian revolution are clear: Venezuela has huge oil reserves and insists on its sovereignty. Under Chavez and Maduro, the Bolivarian revolution has sought to benefit the vast majority of Venezuela’s people instead of a small elite of Venezuelans and foreigners. Washington cannot tolerate the idea that those resources are used to benefit the Venezuelan people instead of billionaires like the Rockefeller clan, which made much of its wealth from Venezuela.

Under the Bolivarian revolution, Venezuela insists on having its own foreign policy. In 2006, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez denounced the U.S. invasion of Iraq and compared U.S. President Bush to the devil. In May this year, Venezuelan President Maduro denounced Israel’s genocide in Gaza and accused the West of being “accomplices.”

The cost of seizing Venezuela’s plane on foreign soil was probably greater than the $13 million value of the plane. So why did the Biden administration do this now? Perhaps it is to garner the votes of right-wing Cubans and Venezuelans in Florida. Perhaps it is to distract from their foreign policy failures in Gaza and Ukraine.

Whatever the reason, the theft of the Venezuelan jet plane is an example of U.S. foreign policy based on self-serving “rules” in violation of international law. It shows who is the rogue state.

President Xiomara Castro of Honduras is representative of the wave of disgust with US interference, crimes, and arrogance. In the past, Honduras was called a “banana republic” and known as “USS Honduras”.  Now it’s president says, “The interference and interventionism of the United States … is intolerable. They attack, disregard and violate with impunity the principles and practices of international law, which promote respect for the sovereignty and self-determination of peoples, non-intervention and universal peace. Enough.”

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

9 September 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Prof. Richard Falk

“Israel will pay a high price whether or not they comply.” Richard Falk, a professor of international law emeritus at Princeton University, speaks about the significance of the International Court of Justice’s decision. He emphasized the importance of the ruling and stated that regardless of Israel’s compliance, there will be consequences.

Richard Falk discusses ICJ ruling and implications for Israel

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. His book, (Re)Imagining Humane Global Governance (2014), proposes a value-oriented assessment of world order and future trends. His most recent books are Power Shift (2016); Revisiting the Vietnam War (2017); On Nuclear Weapons: Denuclearization, Demilitarization and Disarmament (2019); and On Public Imagination: A Political & Ethical Imperative, ed. with Victor Faessel & Michael Curtin (2019). He is the author or coauthor of other books, including Religion and Humane Global Governance (2001), Explorations at the Edge of Time (1993), Revolutionaries and Functionaries (1988), The Promise of World Order (1988), Indefensible Weapons (with Robert Jay Lifton, 1983), A Study of Future Worlds (1975), and This Endangered Planet (1972). His memoir, Public Intellectual: The Life of a Citizen Pilgrim was published in March 2021 and received an award from Global Policy Institute at Loyala Marymount University as ‘the best book of 2021.’ He has been nominated frequently for the Nobel Peace Prize since 2009.

9 September 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Syed Zafar Mehdi

Israeli regime is resorting to Nazi-like policies of collective punishment with the intent to bring about the physical destruction of the population of Gaza, says a renowned genocide scholar.

In an interview with the Press TV website on Monday, Dr. Maung Zarni an academic and human rights activist from Myanmar who just returned from his visit to Gaza and occupied Palestinian territories, said the Tel Aviv regime has since October 7, 2023, sought to accelerate the “genocidal slaughter and the physical destruction of a sub-population of Palestinian nation under occupation since 1967.”

The death toll from the genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza has soared past 41,000, most of them children and women. The unofficial fatality figure, however, is believed to be much higher.

Dr. Zarni, a world-renowned genocide scholar, said he is not comfortable in creating a hierarchy of evil (and crimes) but he is prepared to say that Israel is “resorting to Nazi SS (Schutzstaffel)-like policies of collective punishment with the intent to bring about the physical destruction of the population of Gaza.”

“Gazans have fared worst for a number of concrete reasons:  According to Ami Ayalon, former naval admiral and former head of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, Israel has run Gaza with its 2.3 million people as “an open-air prison,” he told the Press TV website.

“On top of that, Israel has maintained a permanent blockade simply because it wasn’t prepared to respect the democratic will of the Gazans, who elected Hamas twice as their government.”

Hamas-led Operation Al-Aqsa Flood (Storm) was launched in response to decades of military occupation and atrocities unleashed on Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

However, the response from the Israeli regime was totally disproportionate and brutal, which Dr. Zarni refers to as a “collective punishment of the entire population.”

“When the prisoners of Gaza rebelled, as in the Oct 7 attacks, Israel launched a collective punishment of the entire population. Israel’s response is straight out of the Nazi SS playbook,” he asserted.

[https://twitter.com/PressTV/status/1830993740179095881]

“On 7 October 1944, the Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz-Birkenau killed all 4-SS officers who managed the gas chamber and dynamited the Crematorium Number 4. The SS responded by slaughtering all Jewish inmates in the entire barrack.”

According to the Gaza media office, 69 percent of total victims are children and women.

Dr. Zarni said the Israeli regime’s kill rate of children and infants in the besieged territory is “far worse” than the number of children slaughtered at the Mauthausen Concentration camp in Hitler’s native upper Austria.

“The SS slaughtered 23,000 children at Mauthausen in roughly 7 years ( between the autumn of 1939 and Spring of 1945) whereas Israel has brought about the direct murder or death of 17,000 Gazan children and infants in mere 11 months,” the scholar and activist told the Press TV website.

While the world is still debating whether the Israeli regime is committing genocide and war crimes in Gaza, Dr. Zarni said the “moral majority” of the world – as evidenced by the protests around the world, in both Global North and Global South – “are not debating about Israel’s crimes in Gaza.”

“It is Western politicians, Western states, ideological institutions such as the media, universities, and thinktanks – themselves built via settler colonialist genocides and colonial loot, theft and pre-colonial slavery and slave trade – that are splitting legal hair and propagating this lie of “Israel has the right to defend itself,” he emphasized.

He said that based on his studies and research of the Cambodian genocide, the Nazi genocide or the Burmese genocide of Rohingya, the Israeli genocide in Palestine has produced what he calls “the ecosystem of genocidal methodologies.”

“I will say that Israel’s Zionist project of establishing, maintaining and expanding the Jewish majority (or supremacy) state has produced what I call “the ecosystem of genocidal methodologies” with a singular mission of destroying, at varying speeds, the native population of Palestine,” he noted.

[https://twitter.com/PressTV/status/1831406648226930776]

“Specifically, different pockets of Palestinian populations have been subjected by Israel to very inventive methods of population destructions and induced mass deprivation (pervasive mass poverty, chronic and acute humanitarian crises) through 810 k of the illegal wall and unpredictable check-points, permanent regimes of political, psychological, cultural, and social subjugation, denigration and destruction.”

There is no war between Palestinians as a nation under occupation and the Israeli occupation, he said.

“There is Palestinian resistance, armed and non-violence, against the decades of settler colonial occupation and expansion of the land that clearly belongs to the Indigenous Palestinian people, of different faiths, including a small percentage of Jewish Palestinians,” the Burmese scholar said

On whether we would see the total extermination of Palestinians if the genocidal war continues, Dr. Zarni said even Nazis under Hitler failed to exterminate the entire Jewish population in Nazi-occupied Europe between 1933 and 1945.

“None other than Adolf Eichmann, head of the Jewish Affairs in the SS, lamented on the audio-recording the fact that the Nazis failed to achieve their own stated objective of the physical destruction of the entire population of Jewish people,” he stated.

“So, I think Israel will find itself in a similar predicament as Eichmann and the Nazis.”

He elaborated that the Nazi racial supremacist ideology and Israel’s Jewish supremacist racism (Zionism) have much in common: “targeted populations of European Jews and Indigenous Arab Palestinians are seen as “subhumans” or “animals”.”

“But there is one fundamental difference. The Nazis went for total extermination of their victims, primarily Jews, whereas Israel is categorically more interested in grabbing and expanding the land.”

“So, Israel has instituted a very creative mix of policies aimed at depopulating the land of its original Arab people, including wars of choice, physical destruction of communities, institutions essential for sustaining any life, humans and livestock.”

What the Israeli regime is doing in Gaza, Dr. Zarni said, is “a textbook Lemkinian genocide.”

9 September 2024

Source: presstv.ir

By Dr. Ramzy Baroud

Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir vowed, on August 26, to build a synagogue inside the Muslim holy site Al-Haram Al-Sharif.

Ben-Gvir, as a representation of Israel’s powerful religious Zionist class in the government and society at large, has been candid regarding his designs in occupied East Jerusalem and the rest of Palestine.

He has advocated a religious war, calling for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, the starvation or killing of prisoners and the annexation of the West Bank.

In his capacity as a minister in the equally extremist government of Benjamin Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir has worked hard to translate his language into action. He has raided the Palestinian Al-Aqsa Mosque repeatedly, and implemented his starvation policies against Palestinian detainees, going as far as defending rape inside Israeli military detention camps and calling the accused soldiers “our best heroes”.

His supporters have carried out hundreds of assaults and dozens of pogroms targeting Palestinian communities in the West Bank.

According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, at least 670 Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank since the start of the Gaza war. A large number among those killed and injured were victims of illegal Jewish settlers.

But not all Israelis in the political or security establishments agree with Ben-Gvir’s behavior or tactics. For example, on August 22, Israel’s Shin Bet chief, Ronen Bar, warned against the “indescribable damage” to Israel caused by Ben-Gvir’s actions in East Jerusalem.

“The damage to the State of Israel, especially now … is indescribable: global delegitimization, even among our greatest allies,” Bar wrote in a letter sent to several Israeli ministers.

Bar’s letter may seem odd. The Shin Bet has been instrumental in the killing of numerous Palestinians, in the name of Israeli security. Bar himself is a strong supporter of the settlements, and as hawkish as is required for the person who leads such a notorious organization.

Bar’s conflict with Ben-Gvir, however, is not that of substance, but style. This conflict is only an expression of a much greater ideological and political war among Israel’s top institutions. This war, however, began before the October 7 attack and the ongoing Israeli war and genocide in Gaza.

Seven months before the start of the war, Israeli President Isaac Herzog said in a televised speech that “those who think that a real civil war … is a border we won’t cross, have no idea.”

The context of his comments was the “real, deep hate” among Israelis resulting from the attempts by Netanyahu and his extremist government coalition partners to undermine the power of the judiciary.

The fight over the Supreme Court, however, was merely the tip of the iceberg. The fact that it took Israel five elections in four years to settle on a stable government in December 2022 was itself indicative of Israel’s unprecedented political conflict.

The new government may have been ‘stable’ in terms of the parliamentary balances, but it destabilized the country on all fronts, leading to mass protests, involving the powerful, but increasingly marginalized military class.

The October 7 attack took place at a time of social and political vulnerability, arguably unprecedented since the founding of Israel atop the ruins of historic Palestine in May 1948.

The war, but particularly the failure to achieve any of its objectives, deepened that existing conflict. This led to warnings from politicians and military men that the country was collapsing.

The clearest of these warnings came from Yitzhak Brik, a former top Israeli military commander. He wrote in Haaretz on August 22 that the “country … is galloping towards the edge of an abyss,” and that it “will collapse within no more than a year.”

Though Brik was, among various factors, blaming Netanyahu’s losing war in Gaza, the anti-Netanyahu political class believes that the crisis mainly lies in the government itself.

This solution, according to recent comments made by Herzog himself, is that “Kahanism needs to be removed from the government.”

Kahanism here is a reference to the Kach Party of Rabbi Meir Kahane. Though now banned, Kach has resurfaced in numerous forms, including in Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit party. As a disciple of Kahane, Ben-Gvir is set to achieve the vision of the extremist rabbi, that of the complete ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.

Ben-Gvir and his ilk are fully aware of the historic opportunity that is now available to them as they hope to ignite the much-coveted religious war. They also know that if the war in Gaza ends without advancing their main plan of colonizing the rest of the occupied territories, the opportunity may not present itself ever again.

Ben-Gvir’s rush to achieve the religious Zionist agenda contradicts the traditional form of Israeli colonialism, predicated on the ‘incremental genocide’ of Palestinians and the slow ethnic cleansing of Palestinian communities from East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Though the Israeli military believes that illegal settlements are essential, they perceive these colonies in strategic language as a ‘security’ buffer for Israel.

The winners and losers of Israel’s ideological and political war are most likely to emerge following the end of the Gaza war, the outcomes of which will determine other factors, including the very future of the state of Israel, per the estimation of General Yitzhak Brik himself.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle.

7 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Prof. Junaid S. Ahmad

Here, we have a devastating indictment of state terror in Pakistan by our indefatigable comrade, Khadijah Shah – the prominent Pakistani public figure and political activist.

[https://twitter.com/Academicatarms/status/1832512892111069572]

[https://twitter.com/Academicatarms/status/1832512041552412939]

After being violently harassed, abused, and jailed for eight months by Pakistan’s military and civilian parasitical kleptocratic elite, Shah was not deterred and after finally being released from prison, courageously began to politically organize even more fiercely. Indeed, she is relinquishing her American nationality (an act unthinkable by our ‘Lifestyle Left’) so that she can be directly participate in Pakistani political life. Since being released from jail, she has been working tirelessly to free thousands of female political prisoners languishing in the country’s dungeons, as well as being tenaciously involved in rehabilitation work for the women and their families who have been subject to unspeakable forms of repression over the past two years.

Khadijah Shah is precisely the type of Pakistani woman that our good friends at Democracy Now (DN) will never invite. Shah’s putative ‘false consciousness’ has prevented her from being a card-carrying member of the dozens of sectarian ‘Left’ groups in the country – the privileged folks that DN privileges even more by excluding anyone else.

Hence, the Pakistani liberal-left has deemed Shah unworthy of offering a ‘true’ woman’s perspective since she is ostensibly a ‘self-hating’ woman whose delusional self has led her to join at least 75 percent of the Pakistani population as critical – not blind – supporters of former Prime Minister Imran Khan. As is displayed in the photo here, the ‘Movement for Justice’ has not allowed the past two years of brutal harassment, mass murder campaign, torture, and disappearances to intimidate them from, once again, mounting some of the most massive demonstrations and rallies in the country’s history – despite the violent police state crackdown and more of the same: mass arrests, beatings, and so on.

On the one hand, women like Khadijah Shah are sacrificing everything (including the ultimate price, their lives) to fearlessly fight the Pakistani establishment’s war on women. On the other hand, the liberal-left aristocrats sitting in their silos are planning their ‘revolution.’ The actual mass movement of ordinary women confronting the tyrannical Pakistani regime is, sadly, of no concern to the country’s mainstream women’s and human rights movement…at least until the former renounce their perspectives and politics and make a blood oath of absolute loyalty to the mosaic of Trotskyist, Maoist, and Stalinist bourgeois conclaves.

Prof. Junaid S. Ahmad teaches Law, Religion, and Global Politics and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID).

9 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

 

By Dr. Justin Whitaker

An interfaith peace delegation has traveled to Palestine to advocate for a ceasefire and an end to violence amid escalating tensions in the region. The delegation, organized by Rabbis for Ceasefire and Christians for Ceasefire, included Christians, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, and a Buddhist scholar, who aimed to meet with Palestinians affected by the ongoing conflict and express solidarity with those enduring hardships.

The 35 faith representatives, who included Maung Zarni, a Burmese human rights activist and genocide scholar, were invited to join the peace mission in Palestine. “As a Burmese and a Buddhist, I cannot keep my mouth shut when Israel is perpetrating a fully-fledged textbook genocide in Gaza,” Zarni said of his visit. “Seeing the tanks coming out of Gaza and hearing the airstrikes at this Rafah Crossing makes me feel I am standing in front of a mass grave. Gaza is a mass grave in the making.” (American Kahani)

The director of Hindus for Human Rights (HfHR-UK), Rajiv Sinha, was denied entry by Israeli authorities. Sinha, who had planned to protest for the past 10 months, was detained for more than five hours, along with several Palestinians. Executive director of Hindus for Human Rights, Sunita Viswanath, wrote that Sinha “got a bitter taste of what ordinary daily life has been for Palestinians for the past seven decades.” (The Wire)

During their time in Palestine, Viswanath noted that the delegation visited several sites, including Shufat Refugee Camp in East Jerusalem, which they reported had been frequently subjected to tear gas and live fire from Israeli forces.

The delegation also visited the Silwan neighborhood in East Jerusalem, where they met local community leader Fakhri Abu Diab, whose family home was demolished by Israeli authorities in February, despite a personal assurance from US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken that it would be spared. Fakhri told the delegation that settlers often invited Palestinians to destroy their own homes, which many did. His family has since begun rebuilding, although they face the possibility of further demolitions.

In Al-Makhrur, west of Bethlehem, the delegation met with the Kassieh family, who reported facing constant harassment from settlers. According to the Kassiehs, settlers have physically attacked them and filed false complaints, claiming that the family had initiated the violence. The delegates spoke with Alice Kassieh, who leads a grassroots movement resisting these pressures.

The group also traveled to the South Hebron Hills, where they visited the village of Umm Al Khair, which has been subjected to repeated demolitions by the Israeli military. The village is located near Carmel Settlement, an area under Israeli control.

The interfaith visit comes amid renewed international attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Hindus for Human Rights called on the global community “to act with urgency and compassion, to bear witness to the unfolding humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and to demand an immediate end to the violence.” (American Kahani)

The ongoing conflict has deep historical roots and has been marked by periods of intense violence and failed peace negotiations. Recent months have seen an increase in hostilities, drawing renewed calls from international leaders and activists for a peaceful resolution.

The interfaith delegation’s visit highlights the efforts of global communities to bring attention to the conditions faced by Palestinians and to promote dialogue and understanding between all parties involved in the conflict. The group plans to continue its advocacy for a ceasefire and an arms embargo, emphasizing the need for sustained international pressure to end the cycle of violence in the region.

Maung Zarni, who has been a vocal human rights advocate in Myanmar, has spoken out previously about the situation in Palestine. In an interview with Anadoul English, he said that the International Court of Justice usually made conservative judgments, but that the case presented by South Africa against Israel had won a judgement suggesting genocide. “The court was convinced by the evidence presented . . . that Israel is very likely, very plausibly violating its obligations under the Convention on the Prevention of Genocide,” he said. (YouTube)

Dr. Justin Whitaker is a Senior Correspondent for Buddhistdoor Global (BDG). Previously, he was a visiting instructor at Hong Kong University’s Centre for Buddhist Studies.

5 September 2024

Source: buddhistdoor.net

By Mazin Qumsiyeh

Takes 4 minutes to read. Please do not turn away from injustice.

An entrenching apartheid regime gets more genocidal. Not only besieging us the indigineous Palestinians in ever shrinking concentration camps but actually committing a genocide supported by Western Governments. It is now spreading to cities and towns in the West Bank. Israeli colonization forces intentionally destroyed infrastructure (roads, water, sewage) in Jenin for example. The weapons are primarily from the US and Germany but the

political and media cover come from many western countries (thanks to the Zionist lobby). The Palestinian people for 76 years have faced the most brutal regime almost alone relying on trying different tactics of resistance (see my book on this http://qumsiyeh.org/popularresistanceinpalestine/ ). But genocide continues and almost 10% of the population of the Gaza strip were murdered, injured, or “dissapppeared.” Israeli policy of erasing the indigenous people was like the British policy with aboriginal people in Australia or the USA except that relative to land size and population, things are different in scale. Palestine is a tiny country and now 8 million are refugees/displaced and 250,000 Palestinians were murdered. As noted in my last message, it also has far more global ramifications.

Most people avoid taking on challenges to make things better for the people. The 1-2% who face the challenges of oppression and dual occupations here in Palestine are truly heroic. I cannot begin to tell you how blessed I am to have met people like the late Nizar Banat (killed by Palestinian security forces) or Basil AlAraj, or Shireen AbuAqleh or Rachel Corrie (killed by the Zionist apartheid forces). Dozens of my friends and colleagues murdered in the past few years. Their faces and words haunt my nights.  I check on other friends in Gaza regularly to see if they are still alive. I am blessed to know many people who protested the ongoing genocide globally and some of them were then arrested and mistreated.

But what does not kill you makes you stronger and I find it humbling to see how Palestinians beaten and oppressed grow to resist in stronger ways. Oppression does not create silence or pacification. Further, Palestininians resist oppression in many ways and light candles of hope via positive work every day. Just as an example, the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability (palestinenature.org) has been serving people and nature for seven years. Children are now here for summer camps and the environment created to them by staff and volunteers ensures transformative experiences that change lives.  We also have women’s activities almost weekly. Words cannot describe how important work is in areas like agriculture, environment, early education, health, and justice!

All people understand that it takes both resistance to evil in this world and also building a better future for our children. But most of those same people spend far more of their time consuming: consuming news, consuming food, consuming products. Retweeting and liking on facebook may be useful but I think most people understand this is not an answer to existential questions. Many who respond to my weekly newsletter ask what can they do. I point them to this list of 76 things that can be done: http://qumsiyeh.org/whatyoucando/ The young people, being idealistic are in the streets trying to actually change things. But there is very little protection for them or organizing and long term planning (Palestinian ageing political parties seem unable or unwilling to provide that). Progressive groups abroad do great work but are hardly networked and all overstretched. Below are questions many of us are asking and you can either: a) visit us today after 2:30 PM for us to chat and to act together, or b) write to us of your thoughts and actions and additional questions/answers, or c) bring a circle of trusted friends together to answer these or similar questions:

What are the best methods for helping those in most need (e.g. hundreds of thousands of families made homeless by Israeli bombings)?

How do we respect ourselves (empowerment), respect others (joint struggle), and respect nature?

How do we stop the mad dash to armaments particularly weapons of mass destruction (Israel has hundreds of those including on German supplied nuclear-powered submarines)?

How do we protect idealistic youth from the relentless attack and pressures they encounter (arrests, beatings, etc.?)

How do we ensure maximum impact for the utilized resources?

How do we network the thousands of local and global organizations working for Palestinian human rights and sustainability and increase their effectiveness?

How do we both oppose evil deeds such as the killing of innocents (17 children so far in last 3 days) while also building an alternative positive future for all children?

How do we reach out to churches and mosques around the world?

How do we grow our own food instead of consuming products that fund wars and harm our health?

What are best practices to counter the destructive power of special interests like AIPAC and other lobbies on western governments?

How do we counter media spin that distorts reality and blames the victims?

How do we support each other emotionally? How to be transparent, express emotions, yet be guarded from being exploited?

What is the best way to work on changing the destructive direction of many Arab states (normalizing and colluding with colonial oppressors and damaging the interests of teir own people)?

How do we organize to make (civil) resistance sustainable and that it achieves discrete short term and long term goals?

Please gather in small groups and address these and/or other questions. Your public communication needs to be guarded and your private communications limited to trustworthy people. Doing so, we not only can help come up with some answers to these questions but to ask many more questions and answer them together towards a better future.

Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton and others did not let daily news/challenges prevent them from literally changing the world. They had a passion. We must use injustices to motivate (not frustrate us) and positive liberating action must follow. What we find most interesting is that people who worry too much end-up losing the opportunity to build a better future. This is precisely why many years ago we decided that, while it is important to stay abreast of “current events” (and even use them to motivate us), we must devote the vast majority of our time and effort and money to build a better future. We envision a future of caring and respect: for ourselves, for fellow human beings, and for all other living beings that share this beautiful but fragile planet.  This is the vision of the pioneering “Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability” at Bethlehem University (palestinenature.org). The questions are raised in line with our vision to seek sustainable human and natural communities

Changing others? Changing ourselves!  Posted at

https://popular-resistance.blogspot.com/2021/06/changing-ourselves.html

You can’t be neutral on a moving train. Stay Human/e and keep Palestine alive

5 September 2024

Mazin Qumsiyeh
A bedouin in cyberspace, a villager at home
Professor, Founder, and (volunteer) Director
Palestine Museum of Natural History
Palestine Institute of Biodiversity and Sustainability
Bethlehem University
Occupied Palestine

http://qumsiyeh.org

http://palestinenature.org