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University students across the country, facing mass arrests, suspensions, evictions and explusions are our last, best hope to halt the genocide in Gaza.

By Chris Hedges

PRINCETON, N.J. — Achinthya Sivalingam, a graduate student in Public Affairs at Princeton University did not know when she woke up this morning that shortly after 7 a.m. she would join hundreds of students across the country who have been arrested, evicted and banned from campus for protesting the genocide in Gaza.

She wears a blue sweatshirt, sometimes fighting back tears, when I speak to her. We are seated at a small table in the Small World Coffee shop on Witherspoon Street, half a block away from the university she can no longer enter, from the apartment she can no longer live in and from the campus where in a few weeks she was scheduled to graduate.

She wonders where she will spend the night.

The police gave her five minutes to collect items from her apartment.

“I grabbed really random things,” she says. “I grabbed oatmeal for whatever reason. I was really confused.”

Student protesters across the country exhibit a moral and physical courage — many are facing suspension and expulsion — that shames every major institution in the country. They are dangerous not because they disrupt campus life or engage in attacks on Jewish students —  many of those protesting are Jewish — but because they expose the abject failure by the ruling elites and their institutions to halt genocide, the crime of crimes. These students watch, like most of us, Israel’s live-streamed slaughter of the Palestinian people. But unlike most of us, they act. Their voices and protests are a potent counterpoint to the moral bankruptcy that surrounds them.

Not one university president has denounced Israel’s destruction of every university in Gaza. Not one university president has called for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire. Not one university president has used the words “apartheid” or “genocide.” Not one university president has called for sanctions and divestment from Israel.

Instead, heads of these academic institutions grovel supinely before wealthy donors, corporations — including weapons manufacturers — and rabid right-wing politicians. They reframe the debate around harm to Jews rather than the daily slaughter of Palestinians, including thousands of children. They have allowed the abusers — the Zionist state and its supporters — to paint themselves as victims. This false narrative, which focuses on anti-Semitism, allows the centers of power, including the media, to block out the real issue — genocide. It contaminates the debate. It is a classic case of “reactive abuse.” Raise your voice to decry injustice, react to prolonged abuse, attempt to resist, and the abuser suddenly transforms themself into the aggrieved.

Princeton University, like other universities across the country, is determined to halt encampments calling for an end to the genocide. This, it appears, is a coordinated effort by universities across the country.

The university knew about the proposed encampment in advance. When the students reached the five staging sites this morning, they were met by large numbers from the university’s Department of Public Safety and the Princeton Police Department. The site of the proposed encampment in front of Firestone Library was filled with police. This is despite the fact that students kept their plans off of university emails and confined to what they thought were secure apps. Standing among the police this morning was Rabbi Eitan Webb, who founded and heads Princeton’s Chabad House. He has attended university events to vocally attack those who call for an end to the genocide as anti-semites, according to student activists.

As the some 100 protesters listened to speakers, a helicopter circled noisily overhead. A banner, hanging from a tree, read: “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free.”

The students said they would continue their protest until Princeton divests from firms that “profit from or engage in the State of Israel’s ongoing military campaign” in Gaza, ends university research “on weapons of war” funded by the Department of Defense, enacts an academic and cultural boycott of Israeli institutions, supports Palestinian academic and cultural institutions and advocates for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire.

But if the students again attempt to erect tents – they took down 14 tents once the two arrests were made this morning – it seems certain they will all be arrested.

“It is far beyond what I expected to happen,” says Aditi Rao, a doctoral student in classics. “They started arresting people seven minutes into the encampment.”

Princeton Vice President of Campus Life Rochelle Calhoun sent out a mass email on Wednesday warning students they could be arrested and thrown off campus if they erected an encampment.

“Any individual involved in an encampment, occupation, or other unlawful disruptive conduct who refuses to stop after a warning will be arrested and immediately barred from campus,” she wrote. “For students, such exclusion from campus would jeopardize their ability to complete the semester.”

These students, she added, could be suspended or expelled.

Sivalingam ran into one of her professors and pleaded with him for faculty support for the protest. He informed her he was coming up for tenure and could not participate. The course he teaches is called “Ecological Marxism.”

“It was a bizarre moment,” she says. “I spent last semester thinking about ideas and evolution and civil change, like social change. It was a crazy moment.”

She starts to cry.

A few minutes after 7 a.m, police distributed a leaflet to the students erecting tents with the headline “Princeton University Warning and No Trespass Notice.” The leaflet stated that the students were “engaged in conduct on Princeton University property that violates University rules and regulations, poses a threat to the safety and property of others, and disrupts the regular operations of the University: such conduct includes participating in an encampment and/or disrupting a University event.” The leaflet said those who engaged in the “prohibited conduct” would be considered a “Defiant Trespasser under New Jersey criminal law (N.J.S.A. 2C:18-3) and subject to immediate arrest.”

A few seconds later Sivalingam heard a police officer say “Get those two.”

Hassan Sayed, a doctoral student in economics who is of Pakistani descent, was working with Sivalingam to erect one of tents. He was handcuffed. Sivalingam was zip tied so tightly it cut off circulation to her hands. There are dark bruises circling her wrists.

“There was an initial warning from cops about ‘You are trespassing’ or something like that, ‘This is your first warning,’” Sayed says. “It was kind of loud. I didn’t hear too much. Suddenly, hands were thrust behind my back. As this happened, my right arm tensed a bit and they said ‘You are resisting arrest if you do that.’ They put the handcuffs on.”

He was asked by one of the arresting officers if he was a student. When he said he was, they immediately informed him that he was banned from campus.

“No mention of what charges are as far as I could hear,” he says. “I get taken to one car. They pat me down a bit. They ask for my student ID.”

Sayed was placed in the back of a campus police car with Sivalingam, who was in agony from the zip ties. He asked the police to loosen the zip ties on Sivalingam, a process that took several minutes as they had to remove her from the vehicle and the scissors were unable to cut through the plastic. They had to find wire cutters. They were taken to the university’s police station.

Sayed was stripped of his phone, keys, clothes, backpack and AirPods and placed in a holding cell. No one read him his Miranda rights.

He was again told he was banned from the campus.

“Is this an eviction?” he asked the campus police.

The police did not answer.

He asked to call a lawyer. He was told he could call a lawyer when the police were ready.

“They may have mentioned something about trespassing but I don’t remember clearly,” he says. “It certainly was not made salient to me.”

He was told to fill out forms about his mental health and if he was on medication. Then he was informed he was being charged with “defiant trespassing.”

“I say, ‘I’m a student, how is that trespassing? I attend school here,’” he says. “They really don’t seem to have a good answer. I reiterate, asking whether me being banned from campus constitutes eviction, because I live on campus. They just say, ‘ban from campus.’ I said something like that doesn’t answer the question. They say it will all be explained in the letter. I’m like, ‘Who is writing the letter?’ ‘Dean of grad school’ they respond.”

Sayed was driven to his campus housing. The campus police did not let him have his keys. He was given a few minutes to grab items like his phone charger. They locked his apartment door. He, too, is seeking shelter in the Small World Coffee shop.

Sivalingam often returned to Tamil Nadu in southern India, where she was born, for her summer vacations. The poverty and daily struggle of those around her, to survive, she says, was “sobering.”

“The disparity of my life and theirs, how to reconcile how those things exist in the same world,” she says, her voice quivering with emotion. “It was always very bizarre to me. I think that’s where a lot of my interest in addressing inequality, in being able to think about people outside of the United States as humans, as people who deserve lives and dignity, comes from.”

She must adjust now to being exiled from campus.

“I gotta find somewhere to sleep,” she says, “tell my parents, but that’s going to be a little bit of a conversation, and find ways to engage in jail support and communications because I can’t be there, but I can continue to mobilize.”

There are many shameful periods in American history. The genocide we carried out against indigenous peoples. Slavery. The violent suppression of the labor movement that saw hundreds of workers killed. Lynching. Jim and Jane Crow. Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. Libya.

The genocide in Gaza, which we fund and support, is of such monstrous proportions that it will achieve a prominent place in this pantheon of crimes.

History will not be kind to most of us. But it will bless and revere these students.

The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication.

25 April 2024

Source: chrishedges.substack.com

By Ahmet Gurhan Kartal

– ‘This is a collective white imperialist man’s genocide,’ Nobel Peace Prize nominee tells Anadolu

LONDON

What is happening in Gaza is a “repeat of Auschwitz” and a “collective white imperialist man’s genocide,” according to a prominent human rights activist and genocide scholar.

Maung Zarni, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize this year for his lifelong pro-democracy work and research on genocides, believes it is clear that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

The activist and scholar from Myanmar, who has studied genocides and Nazi concentration camps extensively, told Anadolu he has “paid close attention to what has been done by Israel, not just since Oct. 7 … (but) for decades.”

Genocide is simply the “destruction of a population or populations under occupation,” he explained in an interview with Anadolu.

“Palestinians have lived under Israeli occupation for over 50 years,” said Zarni, who has been nominated for a Nobel by 1976 winner Mairead Corrigan Maguire.

“Not just in Gaza, but in all occupied territories … There are 3 million Palestinians in West Bank also under occupation,” he added.

ICJ ‘was convinced by the evidence’

Referring to the case against Israel brought to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) by South Africa, Zarni said the court normally makes “very conservative judgments or rulings.”

However, an “overwhelming majority of the judges on the ICJ decided that the case presented by South Africa met their bar of plausibility of genocide,” he said.

“The court was convinced by the evidence presented,” he emphasized.

“On the face of the evidence presented in a single day, (the court) was convinced that Israel is very likely, very plausibly violating its obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.”

‘Repeat of Auschwitz’

Zarni said what has been happening in Gaza for more than 200 days now “is only the latest episode,” asserting that “Israel has institutionalized the destruction of the (Palestinian) population.”

“What we are seeing in Gaza is simply mass extermination without the gas chambers,” he said, referring to the brutal Nazi method of killing prisoners in concentration camps during World War II.

“You don’t need to destroy a population with gas chambers only. If you are able to carpet bomb … 80% of the living space, the residential area, most schools, hospitals, you are destroying the population.”

Zarni also pointed out Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s statement that “no one in Gaza is innocent.”

“That’s 2.3 or 2.4 million Palestinian people, including infants. Half of the 2.3 million Palestinians are children and youth,” he said.

“So, what we are seeing is the repeat of Auschwitz in Gaza.”

‘Collective punishment’

Zarni said he has visited Auschwitz four times for research on one of the biggest Nazi death camps, where some 1.5 million people were killed.

“I made a documentary for the Burmese about Auschwitz. In Auschwitz, the calorie intake was minutely calculated by the SS (Nazi elite death squads),” he explained.

When Jewish prisoners killed 4 SS officers and blew up a crematorium with the help of Polish workers from a nearby village, the Nazis “responded with collective punishment, killing the entire barracks of 500 Jewish inmates in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest camp,” he said.

“That is what we are seeing today because Hamas resisters killed 1,000 civilian and Israeli soldiers in the areas where 11 original Palestinian villages were erased to the ground, and Zionists moved in and settled,” said Zarni.

“So, what did Israel, the IDF, and the Netanyahu government do? They adopted the SS strategy of collective punishment.”

‘White man’s genocide’

Zarni also emphasized the role of Western nations in the Gaza genocide, criticizing their support of the Israeli government.

“This isn’t simply Israel’s genocide. This is a collective genocide,” he said.

“This is the white imperialist man’s genocide, the white man’s genocide. Just look at the amount of money and weapons provided to Israel, by firstly the US, second the UK and third Germany, and there were so many European states that have stood up for the Nazi-like Israeli government,” the rights activist added.

26 April 2024

Source: aa.com.tr

By Richard Falk

GAZA, PALESTINIAN RIGHTS, AND DAMASCUS ATTACK

[Prefatory Note: Questions Posed to Richard Falk by The Qods News Agency in Iran, April 23, 2024—on Gaza, Palestinian Rights, Damascus Lethal Attack on Israeli Consular Building]

1. Given the fact that Israel has killed over 34,000 Palestinians in Gaza, mostly women and children, and prevented the entry of international humanitarian aid into the besieged strip, what is your opinion on nearly 200 days of onslaught in Gaza and its aftermath on Palestinians’ lives? How do you describe the genocidal onslaught and war crimes in Gaza?

 What has taken place over the last 200 days in Gaza is the most transparent genocide in all of human history. It is the first time that the daily atrocities were broadcast and seen by the peoples of the world in real time. Past genocides have been known almost totally in retrospect through official reports, films and memoirs, which reconstruct horrifying events but after a passage of time. Those Palestinians who managed to survive physically such sustained violence of this extreme character are reported to bel suffering from mental disabilities that could persist for their entire life. It is a tragic, dehumanizing ordeal, above all for children. It is further shocking that Israel should remain insulated from denunciation and accountability despite its continuing practice of such extreme criminality.

Genocide should be understood to exist from three quite distinct moral, political, and legal perspectives. The moral perspective is made clear in Gaza by the declared intentions, policies, and practices of Israel’s highest leaders, and carried out in a totally disproportionate, indiscriminate, and lawless manner, and aggravated by consistently sadistic and demeaning treatment of Palestinian civilians who fall under the control of the Israeli armed forces. The political perspective is established in Gaza by numerous trustworthy witnesses and victims, as well as by vivid visual evidence of genocide line of justifications adopted by Israel and its supporters. The legal perspective relies on the presentation of evidence and interpretations of international law, above all by the delineation of genocide in the Convention on the  Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948). Provisional conclusions as to international law can be derived from the opinions of legal experts holding important professional positions. For instance, the current UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine issued an excellent report entitled ‘The Anatomy of a Genocide’ that carefully analyzed the elements of the crime and concluded that the facts and law supported the allegation of genocide. And yet until a qualified national or international tribunal with jurisdictional authority to assess the charge of genocide examines the evidence and hears the arguments of the defendant government or political actor it is impossible to say with technical propriety that the behavior in question is genocide from a legal perspective.

2. How can the world public put pressure on governments to force Israel to stop atrocities in Gaza?

 It has proven difficult to challenge Israel effectively at the UN and elsewhere. Powerful countries are complicit in supporting Israel’s policies and practices in Israel, including Israel’s claim that it possesses an unlimited right to defend itself in response to the Hamas attack of October 7. The liberal democracies of Western Europe and North America are prominent among governments lending varieties of support to Israel that extends to endorsing Israel’s distortions of facts and law, which has had a detrimental effect on the authority of international law and the UN. The US above all has been guilty of double standards, using international law as a policy instrument to attack its adversaries such as Russia and China and disregarding its relevance with respect to the behavior of allies and friends such as Israel.

South Africa has been applauded widely for taking the initiative to bring allegations of genocide to the International Court of Justice under Article XI of the Genocide Convention that legally empowers any party to the treaty to bring a dispute with another party before the ICJ. Although the ICJ rose above politics to give a historically important, near unanimous, decision granting several of South Africa’s requests for Provisional Measures on January 26, 2024. Unfortunately, this preliminary ICJ order has little effect as Israel defied its interim obligatory adjustments in behavior pending a subsequent decision on whether the allegation of genocide has been established. There was exposed ‘a crisis of implementation’ as any effort to enforce the ICJ Interim Orders would depend on action by the Security Council, which would almost certainly be vetoed by the United States. Additionally, an ICJ decision following oral arguments and written pleadings would not be forthcoming for several years while the crisis in Gaza persisted.

Nevertheless, the ICJ Interim Order was an impressive vindication of international law and a legitimating demonstration of the legal professionalism of the Court. It has an authenticating impact on the governments of the Global South and even more worldwide in relation to civil society, including even in the United States and other complicit countries. Whether this pressure will result in coercive actions by way of boycotts and sanctions, and pariah status, remains to be seen, but at minimum it suggests that even in this unfavorable setting international law and populist activism offer some hope that genocide can be stopped and its perpetrators held accountable, if not formally, then by the action of peoples around the world.

3. What do you think about Palestinian resistance fighters’ right to initiate the October 7 operation against Israel?

 The right of resistance on the part of a people long occupied and abused is well established. Prior to October 7, the crime of apartheid had been documented in detailed reports by the most respect human rights NGOs, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, as well as by the Israeli NGO, B’tselem, and by the UN ESCWA.

While the right to resist is certainly justified by the conditions imposed over the long period of occupation, which ignored the Israeli duty to protect Palestinian civilians under its control, it does not confer unlimited rights. Resistance fighters, as other armed groups, are obliged to comply with international criminal law, and not abuse or target civilians, or commit atrocities. Yet unlike the allegations against Israel, there is no authoritative account of what happened on October 7. There were wildly exaggerated claims of barbarous behavior by Israel, but later retractions and much skepticism about Israel’s depiction of events on that day. Until an international factfinding commission is established and given full cooperation there will be doubt about the extent to which the criminality of the Hamas attack tainted its resistance claims.

4. How can the Palestinian people achieve their rights and overcome the ongoing occupation?

The Palestinian people are winning the struggle for public support in civil society and among many governments in the Global South. The rise of popular support for Palestinian rights even in complicit governments may erode somewhat their willingness to continue their support of Israel. Whether this is enough at this stage to make a difference with regard to ending the occupation is not clear at present. Prior anti-colonial struggles have been eventually won by the colonized people if they survive the genocidal assault on their existence. The breakaway British colonies in North America, Australia, and New Zealand managed through genocidal tactics to marginalize or eliminate the resistance of native peoples and complete their settler colonial projects; South Africa failed, and the project collapsed. Israel is in that space where it will either join the settler colonial ‘success’ stories or it will succumb to national resistance, with Jews either giving up the Jewish supremacy claims of

Zionism or finding to coexist with Palestinians on the basis of true equality.

5. As you know, Israel attacked Iran’s consulate, killing its military advisors in Syria which is considered contrary to international conventions, which prompted a military response by the country. What is your take on Iran’s punitive response to Israel, especially in terms of international laws?

The Iranian retaliatory strike against Israel caused neither deaths nor damage, although had its array of missiles and large number of drones not been destroyed, it might have had a war-generating disproportionate effect. The interpretation of Iran’s retaliation remains ambiguous. Did it intend to display its capabilities without inflicting major damage or was it an operational failure in the sense that the intention was to be as destructive as possible. Without clarity on this question, it is impossible to make an intelligent assessment of the relevance of international law.

The legal status of retaliatory violence is a gray area of conflicting opinions. On the one side are legalists who suggest that all retaliations violate the UN Charter and international law by validating uses of international force only in situations of a sustained armed attack across an international border. By this reading even a modest retaliation against the Damascus attack was not lawful.

As with other issues, this strict reading of international law is not descriptive of practice with respect to acts of retaliation, which in practice over the years validate retaliations so long as proportionate in relation to the provocation. Israel’s second attack on Iran, however, would seem to be unlawful, ignoring the reality that it initiating the cycle of violence on April 1^st by their lethal attack on Iran’s consular facility in Damascus, which killed high ranking it national military advisors.

ISRAEL/IRAN TENSIONS: PROVOCATION, RETALIATIONS, WIDER WAR

OPTION/DANGERS

[Prefatory Note: Questions posed by Mohammad Ali Haqshenas on

behalf of International Quran News Agency and responses of

Richard Falk, April 19, 2024; this text is slightly modified. The

focus is on the Israeli April I attack on Iran’s Damascus consular, and the

international law implications of Iran’s retaliation against Israeli targets on April 13, followed a week later a by Israel’s second drone attack on a military base not far from Isfahan, which both countries somewhat

downplayed. Israel seemed to have given up the wider war option

at least for the present in response to diplomatic pressures from allies to

deescalate regional tensions. The future remains uncertain, especially,

if Israel goes ahead with the threat of a major military operation in

Rafah].

​1. What do international laws and conventions say when it comes to targeting a country’s diplomatic mission?

The immunity of consular facilities from international attack is one of the most widely respected, useful, uncontroversial commitments of international law since its inception. It was formalized and details specified in the Vienna Convention on Consular Immunity. Even without this Convention Israel would be bound by a similar body of constraints that are considered part of ‘customary international law’ that enjoy the status of ‘jus cogens’ norms, that is, standards of behavior binding on all sovereign states whether or not a treaty exists. When as here a widely ratified treaty does exist, then disputes about obligatory behavior are decides by reference to the treaty, with an optional Protocol conferring compulsory jurisdiction on International Court of Justice to adjudicate. From the above it follows that being a non-party does not relieve a government of a sovereign state from the obligation to comply with the legal framework.

In this instance such arguments are superfluous as both Israel and Iran are parties to the Vienna Convention as are another 180 states.

Although Israel is widely assumed to have launched the attack on the Damascus concular facility located within the larger Iran embassy compound in Syria. In a strange twist the US State Department spokesperson refuses as if April 24 to confirm that targeted facility was indeed a consular facility entitled to immunity from hostile action. It is strange as the build struck has been uniformly assumed to deserve treatment as Iran’s consular facility. The US continues to contend three week after the attack that the location and identity the building in question is still ‘under investigation.’

2. Following the Israeli strike against the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Tehran urged the UN Security Council to condemn the strike but the Council failed to do that due to the US support for Israel. What does this inaction mean when we take into account the responsibilities of the UN to maintain international peace?

Such action in the UNSC by the USA to insulate Israel from its obligation to comply with international law with regard to consular and embassy immunity is a reminder that when it comes to enforcing international law, the UN was designed to be weak, unmistakably intended to allow the P5 in the Security Council to  by giving an unrestricted right of veto to the five countries victorious in World War II. The veto is arguably the UN’s greatest deficiency when it comes to achieving the paramount war prevention goals of the UN. In effect, the 1945 architects of the UN subordinated upholding international law to strategic primacy for these five geopolitical actors in relation to enforcement or even interpretation of relevant legal obligations. Although only five countries are accorded a right of veto in the UN Charter, it has been used, especially by the US to thwart the will of overwhelming majorities among Member governments by being extended to shield ‘friends’ and allies from accountability.

Some years ago the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, called critical attention to this situation with the pithy phrase ‘the world is greater than five.’ The world is certainly greater, but regretably the UN is not. There are many situations of this kind concerned with securing compliance with international law by UN members who cannot veto a proposed UN decision but enjoy a sufficient special relationship with one of the five that suffices to block any UN enforcement initiative taken against it. In the 1999 Kosovo War, for instance, NATO avoided seeking authorization from the UNSC because it anticipated a Russian veto.

3. What are the long-term implications for international law if such attacks go unchecked?

The implications for international law are what they have always been in modern times. When the obligations of law clash with the strategic interests of powerful states, geopolitical policies prevail, and the core obligation of the rule of law (treating equals, equally) is ignored. This generalization applies to the pre-UN history of international relations. A good example is the war crimes trials conducted at Nuremberg and Tokyo in 1945 where the crimes of the victors were exempted from legal scrutiny while the crimes of the losers were the subject of indictment, prosecution, and punishment. More concretely, the atomic bombings of Japanese cities and the strategic bombing of German cities were accorded impunity. A double standard highlighted by being described as ‘victors’ justice,’ but an ideological defeat for advocates of law-governed behavior as shaping behavior among sovereign states and in the relation of states to the rights of peoples.

It is a mistake to conclude that international law is useless because of this subordination to geopolitics. For one thing, an effective international legal order is essential to sustain the stability of relations in most areas of interaction among sovereign states. Trade, investment, finance, communications, travel and tourism, diplomacy are among the areas of international life that depend on mutuality of interests and the practice of equality when it comes to enforcement and implementation. Beyond this, ‘responsible statecraft’ by dominant states (‘dominance’ does not necessarily refer to the same political actors that possess veto rights at the UN) can unilaterally exercise restraint in the use of the veto or in pursuing conflictual behavior. Many would insist that the US has weakened the UN by its ‘irresponsible statecraft.’ The extent to which the US has managed relations between the UN and Israel in an excessively indulgent manner, illustrated by its complicity with genocide is illustrative.  Unconditional support for Israel is also as much of a reflection of domestic political considerations in the US and Western Europe as it is of the international conflictual context.

Even when international law is flagrantly violated as it was in the Damascus attack, and Israel is protected against a punitive response at the UN, the impact on world opinion, global solidarity initiatives, and the clarification of legitimacy ensure that international law plays a role in the behavior of states and the outlook of global public opinion. Populist action often influences the policies and behavior of leading geopolitical actors. In the post-1945 anti-colonial wars the weaker side militarily generally prevailed politically, in part because international law and the flow of history seemed to everywhere on their side. Transnational activism in the form of boycotts and sanctions often is vindicated by assessments that the targeted country is violating international law in serious and obvious ways. In short, international law, even if not implemented by the inter-governmental order of states or by the UN, is helpful in mobilizing civil society to take a variety of nonviolent coercive actions. This dynamic contributed to the collapse of the apartheid regime in South Africa 30 years ago and it is mounting ever stronger pressure on Israel in light of its Gaza genocide, further justified by its defiance of international law.

4. Iran said it used its legitimate right to self-defense by launching strikes against Israel. What do international laws say about this?

There are several issues present. Does a single attack of this nature, however unlawful, engage the right of self-defense as specified in Article 51 of the UN Charter. This Charter definition is linked to “a prior armed attack” as distinct from an act of aggression, but given the paralysis in the UN, it might be deemed reasonable in view of the frequency of past lethal violations of Iran’s sovereign rights and the failure by the UN to take any punitive action, or even a resolution of censure, against Israel’s defiant attitude in shaping national policy in the security domain.

A further international law issue concerns matters of proportionality and discrimination. Estimates vary as to the scale of the Iranian attack involving 170 or more drones, 120 ballistic missiles, and 30 cruise missiles seems both disproportionate and indiscriminate, and yet little damage resulted, and no one killed. As Iran gave some notice of its planned retaliation to the US and other governments, it may have intended, as some commentators have suggested, that its retaliation for Israel’s responsibility in relation to the Damascus attack, to be symbolic and performative, rather than a full-scale attack as suggested by the array of drones and missiles.

To some extent, because of enforceability issues, what a state does in retaliation for such one-off violations of its sovereignty is assessed and judged in relation to precedents reflecting past practice. If deemed to be consistent with such practice it is legitimized and widely viewed as acceptable, whereas if not, it is regarded as unacceptably provocative. Israel has reacted to the Iranian attack of April 13 as an unacceptable provocation, despite its own prior attack causing high-profile Iranian deaths and the paucity of damage inflicted by Iran’s retaliation. Israel is proposing a retaliation to Iran’s retaliation. If Israel has carried out its threat in a way that causes death and destruction in Iran it is almost certain to have escalated the conflict in dangerous ways. When acting in these grey sectors of law, such as is the law governing international retaliation, the criterion of reasonableness offers some guidance to both actor and responder, and affects public discourse and media treatment. Of course, perceptions of reasonableness may vary greatly, and often make assessments based on alignments rather than. the characteristics of behavior.

In my judgment the sequence of events is revealing, a highly provocative attack on Iran’s diplomatic facilities in Syria, killing seven Revolutionary Guards, including a leading general with command responsibility for Iran’s role in Lebanon and Syria, followed by Iran’s ambiguous retaliation that could be viewed as a failure to inflict major damage in Israel or a successful symbolic display of capabilities programmed to avoid substantive damage, and a similarly ambiguous second Israeli retaliation, this time against an Air Base near Isfahan that was not highly provocative. Overall, Netanyahu in the Damascus attack was exploring the wider war option, backed off after the US and other regional and supporting governments insisted upon not elevating the tensions with Iran to overt combat, and possibly a regional war.

5. Some analysts believe that the Israeli regime targeted the consulate to escalate tensions with Iran and use this as a cover to continue its massacre of Palestinians in Gaza. What is your take on this and how can Tel Aviv be held accountable for its crimes in Gaza?

As suggested above, Netanyahu has failed to achieve the goals of Israel’s massively destructive and inhumane response to October 7, seeming to leave his last best option, the widening of the war in ways that make Iran the main antagonist of Western interests in the Middle East. The backgrounding of the Ukraine War in light of the events in Gaza lend plausibility to this kind of ‘politics of deflection.’ Israel is a master of shifting public attention from its crimes to its critics or to quite different objects of concern that better suit its national interests..

Achieving accountability in a legal sense is almost impossible so long as the Global West, especially the US, supports Israel. Any attempt to impose accountability through the UN would almost certainly be blocked by casting a veto in the Security Council, which the US has not been reluctant to do. Accountability in its political dimensions could be achieved if Israel is treated by many governments in the Global South and civil society activism as ‘a pariah state’ as was the experience of apartheid South Africa; solidarity initiatives rooted in civil society activism combined with resistance to apartheid seemed to explain the radical moves of the Pretorria regime, releasing Nelson Mandela from prison and negotiating a peaceful transition to constitutional democracy and racial equality. Accountability in a moral sense is exhibited by public expressions of outrage on the part of peoples the world over as well as by the frustrations caused by unenforceability of ICJ decisions and General Assembly activism in reaction to the unlawfulness of apartheid.

6. What do you think about the efforts of the ICJ to hold Israel accountable for its genocide in Gaza, especially given that the regime is planning an attack on Rafah where more than 1.5 million displaced have taken refuge?

This question raises complicated issues. The initiative in the ICJ has been greatly important for passing judgment on Israel’s moral and political wrongdoing with respect to the Gaza genocide yet limited in effectiveness as to behavior. The ICJ has been unable to implement the persuasive legal pronouncements of its Interim Orders of January and March instructing Israel to take actions to mitigate further suffering of the Palestinian people while the Court ponders the allegations of genocide. Israel has refused compliance with the Provisional Measures requested in the South African ICJ initiative. Israe backed by the US, and seems poised to go ahead with its threatened attack on grossly overcrowded Rafah, despite expectations of shockingly high casualties.

The ICJ and the UN generally are neutralized by ‘a crisis of implementation.’ In the face of stubborn geopolitical resistance it lacks the mandate, will, and capabilities to enforce international law, let alone promote global justice. If the UN became more robustly endowed, an obvious undertaking would be to form an International Protection Force that would give meaning to the UN Responsibility to Protect norm adopted with much fanfare by the Security Council 20 years ago, and then deceptively invoked a little over a decade ago to justify a regime-changing intervention in Libya. As things presently are, a justifiable coercive and punitive response to genocide in Gaza is unthinkable, which tells us a lot about why so many people are disappointed by or frustrated with the UN, not realizing that it was structurally designed to vest control over international security issues, broadly defined, in the P5, the winners in World War II, and the last stand of a world order based on a dying European colonialism and an ascendant America.

 

By Bharat Dogra

Gaza and West Bank have been recording one of the highest rate of imprisonments and detentions in the world for several years. However this has increased at perhaps the fastest ever pace in recent times, doubling during the last six months or so of the conflict.

On the other hand, Hamas also took many Israeli civilian hostages (including women) at the time of the October 7 attack, saying that they will be able to use them to secure release of Palestinian prisoners. This cannot be supported or justified. The taking of innocent civilians as hostages is wrong under all circumstances. In the eyes of all justice loving people of world, this will harm the Palestinian cause, not help it.

Today there is a very strong case for the Hamas releasing all these hostages and Israel releasing at least 95% of all Palestinian prisoners, may be keeping a few in prison about whom there is very strong evidence of extreme violence. In addition, of course, it is of the highest urgency to declare an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza and halt all cases of attacks by settlers in West Bank.

Let us consider the extreme injustice faced by Palestinians, including children, over the years in the form of imprisonments and detentions. We first examine the situation existing before October 7 2023 and then see how this has deteriorated since then.

A document of ‘United Nations Human Rights—Office of the High Commissioner’ released on 10 July 2023 tells us regarding the situation a little before the October 7 attack. This document says—“Frances Albanese, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, presenting her report on arbitrary deprivation of liberty, said since 1967, Israel has detained approximately one million Palestinians in the occupied territory, including tens of thousands of children. Presently there were 5000 Palestinians in Israeli prisons including 160 children, and 1100 of them were detained without charges or trial.”

This statement must be read in the context of a total population of about five million Palestinians in the two territories so that this amounts to one out of five Palestinians being detained or arrested at one point or the other. This very high percentage of arrested or detained persons would be higher if data for only men is considered; it may then be closer to 2 out of 5.

Further the statement of United Nations Human Rights says—“ The occupying power framed the Palestinians as a collective incarcerable security threat , ultimately de-civilianizing them, namely eroding their status as protected persons…Israel’s unlawful carceral practices were tantamount to international crimes which warranted an urgent investigation by the International Criminal Court. All the more as these offences appeared to be part of a plan of ‘de-Palestinisation’ of the territory. This threatened the existence of people as a national cohesive group.”

Around the same time as this UN report appeared, in July 2023, another leading organization ‘Save the Children’ also released a report on Palestinian children who had been detained or arrested by the Israeli authorities. This study based on 228 former child detainees revealed that 86% of them had been beaten during detention, even though 42% were already injured at the point of arrest, and some had suffered sexual violence too. The period of detention ranged from 1 to 18 months, and left long-lasting scars and adverse impacts. Many child detainees were handcuffed and kept in small cage like structures.

After October 7 2023 the number of arrested and detained persons increased rapidly, reaching around 9000 to 11000 according to various published estimates, thus almost doubling. The increase has been more in the West Bank region. Most of them are in Israeli jails which have rapidly become overcrowded and hence the condition of prisoners has deteriorated. In addition there are those detained in military camps in Gaza for varying lengths of time. Their number may be in hundreds at any given time but at other times it may be less. It is very difficult to estimate. In both kinds of detentions some deaths have been reported, increasing fears of mistreatment and torture.

Clearly the situation of Palestinian prisoners is very serious and urgency of release and relief for them should be highlighted in the form of a strong worldwide campaign. There should also be a campaign for the release of Israeli hostages.

Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now.

25 April 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

Military operations are invariably planned well in advance. Was “Operation Al-Aqsa Storm” a “surprise attack” ? Or Was it “A False Flag”.

In the words of Philip Giraldi:

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

In other words, the whole thing might be a tissue of lies as is often the case.”

A Tissue of Lies 

“A Tissue of Lies” has served to justify the killing in the Gaza Strip of more than 34,000 civilians, of which 70% are women and children coupled with total destruction and an endless  string of atrocities.

The Cat is out of the bag. Netanyahu has tacitly acknowledged that it was “A False Flag” which was intent upon justifying a carefully planned genocidal attack against Palestine:

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

Does this candid statement not suggest that Netanyahu and his military-intelligence apparatus are responsible for the killings of innocent Israeli civilians? 

On that same day of October 7, 2023 Netanyahu launched a carefully planned military operation against the Gaza Strip entitled “State of Readiness For War”.  

Military operations are invariably planned well in advance.

Had  “Operation Al-Aqsa Storm” been a “surprise attack” as parroted by the media, Netanyahu’s “State of Readiness For War” could not have been carried out (at short notice) on that same day, namely October 7, 2023.

South Africa’s  Legal Procedure against The State of Israel 

On January 11, 2024, The Republic of South Africa  presented to The Hague World Court, a carefully formulated Legal Procedure against the State of Israel predicated on  The Genocide Convention.

This legal procedure, however, has not contributed to repealing the ongoing genocide and saving the lives of tens of thousands of civilians.

I should mention that the False Flag issue –which constitutes a crime against humanity– was casually ignored by the ICJ.

Our suggestion is that  an investigation followed by a legal procedure pertaining to the “False Flag” should be undertaken.

The heads of State and heads of government who have endorsed Israel’s Genocidal Acts are from a legal standpoint complicit. 

The ICJ Judgement was contradictory. The Presiding Judge (former legal advisor to Hillary Clinton) was in conflict of interest:

The ICJ Judgment of January 26, 2024 assigns the Netanyahu government representing the State of Israel –accused by the Republic of South Africa of genocide against the People of Palestine– with a mandate to “take all measures within its power” to “prevent and punish” those responsible for having committed “Genocidal Acts”. (under Article IV of the Genocide Convention)

Sounds contradictory? What the ICJ judgment intimates –from a twisted legal standpoint– is that Netanyahu’s Cabinet which was “appointed” to implement  the “prevent and punish” mandate cannot be accused of having committed “Genocidal Acts”.

See

“Fake Justice” at The Hague: The ICJ “Appoints” Netanyahu to “Prevent” and “Punish” Those Responsible for “Genocidal Acts”

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, April 24, 2024

The titles of the videos, articles and texts presented below:  

1. Is the Gaza-Israel Fighting “A False Flag”? They Let it Happen? Their Objective Is “to Wipe Gaza Off the Map”?, by Dr. Philip Giraldi.
2. Video: ICJ Hearings in The Hague, 
3. Text of Israel’s Secret Intelligence Memorandum. Planning the Forcible Exclusion of Palestinians from Their Homeland
4. Video: “False Flag. Wiping Gaza Off the Map”, Interview. Michel Chossudovsky with Caroline Mailloux
5. “False Flag. Wiping Gaza Off the Map”, by Michel Chossudovsky
6. Gaza Strikes Back. It’s Another 9/11 or Pearl Harbor? But Who Actually Did What to Whom? “This Was More Likely a False Flag Operation”, by Philip Giraldi

 

In solidarity with the People of Palestine.

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, January 11, 2024, April 25, 2024

Part I

Is the Gaza-Israel Fighting “A False Flag”?

They Let it Happen?

Their Objective Is “to Wipe Gaza Off the Map”?

by Dr. Philip Giraldi 

October 8, 2023

Am I the only one who read about a speech given by Netanyahu or someone in his cabinet about a week ago in which he/they in passing referred to a “developing security situation” which rather suggests (to me) that they might have known about developments in Gaza and chose to let it happen so they can wipe Gaza off the map in retaliation and, possibly relying on the US pledge to have Israel’s “back,” then implicating Iran and attacking that country.

I cannot find a link to it, but have a fairly strong recollection of what I read as I thought at the time it would serve as a pretext for another massacre of Palestinians.

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

In other words, the whole thing might be a tissue of lies as is often the case.

And as is also ALWAYS the case Joe Biden is preparing to send some billions of dollars to poor little Israel to pay for “defending” itself.

Part II

VIDEO. ICJ Hearings in The Hague

ICJ Hearings 

1. January 11, 2024. Click Here to View the ICJ Hearings,

2. January 12, 2024. Israel’s Legal Team’s response to South Africa, ICJ The Hague at 10 am. Video in Real Time

3. Video: South Africa’s Closing Argument against Israel for Genocide. January 11 Hearing at the World Court

South Africa’s Closing Argument Against Israel for Genocide at the ICJ

Part III

Israel’s Secret Intelligence Memorandum

Planning the Forcible Exclusion of Palestinians from Their Homeland

An official “secret” memorandum authored by Israel’s  Ministry of Intelligence “is recommending the forcible and permanent transfer of the Gaza Strip’s 2.2 million Palestinian residents to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula”, namely to a refugee camp in Egyptian territory. There are indications of Israel-Egypt negotiations  as well as consultations with the U.S.

The 10-page document, dated Oct. 13, 2023, bears the logo of the Intelligence Ministry … assesses three options regarding the future of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip … It recommends a full population transfer as its preferred course of action. … The document, the authenticity of which was confirmed by the ministry, has been translated into English in full here on +972.

click here or below to access complete document (10 pages)

For further details and analysis see:

“Wiping Gaza Off the Map”: Israel’s “Secret” Intelligence Memorandum “Option C” by Michel Chossudovsky

Part IV 

Video: “False Flag. Wiping Gaza Off the Map”

Interview: Michel Chossudovsky and Caroline Mailloux 

October 17, 2023

MICHEL CHOSSUDOVSKY – FALSE FLAG: ERADICATING GAZA FROM THE MAP

To comment or access Rumble 

Part V 

“False Flag”. Wiping Gaza Off the Map

by Prof. Michel Chossudovsky

October 12, 2023.

Introduction

.

Early Saturday October 7, 2023, Hamas launched “Operation Al-Aqsa Storm” led by Hamas’ Military Chief Mohammed Deif. On that same day, Netanyahu confirmed a so-called “State of Readiness For War”.  

Military operations are invariably planned well in advance (See Netanyahu’s January 2023 statement below). Was “Operation Al-Aqsa Storm” a “surprise attack” ?

U.S. intelligence say they weren’t aware of an impending Hamas attack. 

“One would have to be almost hopelessly naïve to buy the corporate state media line that the Hamas invasion  was an Israeli “intelligence failure”. Mossad is one of, if not the, most powerful intelligence agencies on the planet.”

Did Netanyahu and his vast military and intelligence apparatus (Mossad et al) have foreknowledge of the Hamas attack which has resulted in countless deaths of Israelis and Palestinians.

Was a carefully formulated Israeli plan to wage an all out war against Palestinians envisaged prior to the launching by Hamas of  “Operation Al-Aqsa Storm”? This was not a failure of Israeli Intelligence, as conveyed by the media. Quite the opposite.

Evidence and testimonies suggest that the Netanyahu government had foreknowledge of the actions of Hamas which have resulted in hundreds of Israeli and Palestinian deaths. And “They Let it Happen”:

“Hamas fired between 2-5 thousand rockets at Israel and hundreds of Israeli are dead, while dozens of Israelis were captured as prisoners of war. In the ensuing air response by Israel, hundreds of Palestinians were killed in Gaza.” (Stephen Sahiounie)

Was the Hamas Attack a “False Flag”? 

“I served in the IDF 25 years ago, in the intelligence forces. There’s no way Israel did not know of what’s coming.

A cat moving alongside the fence is triggering all forces. So this??

What happened to the “strongest army in the world”?

How come border crossings were wide open?? Something is VERY WRONG HERE, something is very strange, this chain of events is very unusual and not typical for the Israeli defense system.

To me this suprise attack seems like a planned operation. On all fronts. 

If I was a conspiracy theorist I would say that this feels like the work of the Deep State.

It feels like the people of Israel and the people of Palestine have been sold, once again, to the higher powers that be. 

🇮🇱 Israel-Hamas War – An Update

(Statement by Efrat Fenigson, former IDF intelligence,  October 7, 2023, emphasis added)

Ironically, the media (NBC) is now contending that the “Hamas attack bears hallmarks of Iranian involvement”

History: The Relationship between Mossad and Hamas

What is the relationship between Mossad and Hamas? Is Hamas an “intelligence asset”? There is a long history.

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

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

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

The links of Hamas to Mossad and US intelligence have been acknowledged by Rep. Ron Paul in a statement to the U.S Congress: “Hamas Was Started by Israel”?

“You know Hamas, if you look at the history, you’ll find out that Hamas was encouraged and really started by Israel because they wanted Hamas to counteract Yasser Arafat… (Rep. Ron Paul, 2011)

What this statement entails is that Hamas is and remains “an intelligence asset”, namely “an “asset” to intelligence agencies”

See also the WSJ (January 24, 2009) “How Israel helped to Spawn Hamas”. 

Instead of trying to curb Gaza’s Islamists from the outset, says Mr. Cohen, Israel for years tolerated and, in some cases, encouraged them as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah. (WSJ, emphasis added)

“The Hamas Partnership” is confirmed by Netanyahu

“The Cat is Out of the Bag”

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

Does this statement not suggest that Netanyahu and his military-intelligence apparatus are responsible for the killings of innocent Israeli civilians? 

“Support” and “Money” for Hamas. 

“Transferring Money to Hamas” on behalf of Netanyahu is confirmed by a Times of Israel October 8, 2023 Report:

“Hamas was treated as a partner to the detriment of the Palestinian Authority to prevent Abbas from moving towards creating a Palestinian State. Hamas was promoted from a terrorist group to an organization with which Israel conducted negotiations through Egypt, and which was allowed to receive suitcases containing millions of dollars from Qatar through the Gaza crossings.” (emphasis added)

.The Dangers of Military Escalation?

Let us be under no illusions, this “false flag” operation is a complex military-intelligence undertaking, carefully planned over several years, in liaison and  coordination with US intelligence, the Pentagon and NATO.

In turn, this action against Palestine is already conducive to a process of military escalation which potentially could engulf a large part of Middle East.

Israel is a de facto member NATO (with a special status) since 2004, involving active military and intelligence coordination as well as consultations pertaining to the occupied territories.

Military cooperation with both the Pentagon and NATO is viewed by Israel’s Defence Force (IDF) as a means to “enhance Israel’s deterrence capability regarding potential enemies threatening it, mainly Iran and Syria.”

The premise of NATO-Israel military cooperation is that “Israel is under attack”. Does Israel’s agreement with the Atlantic Alliance “obligate” NATO “to come to the rescue of Israel” under the doctrine of “collective security” (Article 5 of the Washington treaty)?

In recent developments, U.S. military deployments in the Middle East are ongoing allegedly to avoid escalation.

According to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg:

There is always the risk that nations and/or organisations hostile to Israel will take try to take advantage. And that includes, for instance, organisations like Hezbollah or a country like Iran. So this is a message to countries and organisations hostile to Israel that they should not try to utilise the situation. And the United States have deployed, or has deployed more military forces in the region, not least to deter any escalation or prevent any escalation of the situation. (NATO Press Conference, Brussels, October 12, 2023, emphasis added)

Netanyahu’s “New Stage”

“The Long War” against Palestine

Netanyahu’s stated objective, which constitutes a new stage in the 75 year old war (since Nakba, 1948) against the people of Palestine is no longer predicated on “Apartheid” or “Separation”. This new stage –which is also directed against Israelis who want peace— consists in “total appropriation” as well as the outright exclusion of the Palestinian people from their homeland:

“These are the basic lines of the national government headed by me [Netanyahu]: The Jewish people have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas of the Land of Israel. The government will promote and develop settlement in all parts of the Land of Israel — in the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan, Judea and Samaria.” (Netanyahu January 2023. emphasis added)

We bring to the attention of our readers the incisive analysis of  Dr. Philip Giraldi pointing to the likelihood of a “False Flag’”. 

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, October 8, 2023, Above text updated on October 12, 2023

Part VI

Gaza Strikes Back. It’s Another 9/11 or Pearl Harbor?

But Who Actually Did What to Whom?

“This Was More Likely a False Flag Operation”

by Dr Philip Giraldi

October 16, 2023

.“As a former on-the-ground intelligence officer, I am somewhat convinced that this was likely more like a false flag operation rather than a case of institutional failure on the part of the Israelis.”

It’s amazing how America’s thought-controlled media is able to come up with a suitable narrative almost immediately whenever there is an international incident that might be subject to multiple interpretations.

***

Since 1948 Israel has expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes,

has occupied nearly all of the historic Palestine, has empowered its army to kill thousands of local people, and

has more recently established an apartheid regime that even denies that Palestinian Arabs are human in the same sense that Jews are.

Netanyahu-allied government minister Ayelet Shaked memorably has called for Israel not only to exterminate all Palestinian children, whom she has described as “little snakes,” but also to kill their mothers who gave birth to them.

But when the Arabs strike back against the hatred that confronts them with their limited resources it is Israel that is described as the victimand the Palestinians who are dehumanized and portrayed as the “terrorists.”

Media in the US and Europe were quick to label the Hamas offensive breaching the formidable Israeli border defenses as “Israel’s 9/11” or even “Israel’s Pearl Harbor” to establish the context that the Israelis have been on the receiving end of an “unprovoked” attack by a cruel and heartless enemy.

Israel has responded to the attack with a heavy bombardment of Gaza that has destroyed infrastructure, including hospitals and schools, while also cutting off food supplies, water and electricity.

It has demanded that residents of north Gaza, all 1.1 million of them, evacuate to make way for a possible ground offensive but there is nowhere to go as all the borders are closed, and the United Nations is calling it a demand with “devastating humanitarian consequences.” Journalist Peter Beinart has commented “This is a monstrous crime. It’s happening in plain view, with US support.”

And the United States government is indeed typically on the same page as Israel. President Joe Biden, citing fabricated stories about dead Jewish babies, speaks of how Israel has a “duty” to defend itself, while the Palestinians somehow have no right to protect themselves at all, much less to rise up against their persecutors in a struggle for freedom.

And Washington has also unhesitatingly chosen to directly involve itself in the conflict, completely on the side of the Jewish state, asserting repeatedly that “Israel has a right to defend itself” and telling the Israelis that “we have your back” while also dispatching two aircraft carrier groups to the scene of the fighting as well as the 101^st Airborne to Jordan and increasing the readiness of Marines stationed in Kuwait.

The White House could have taken more aggressive steps to encourage a ceasefire and talks but has chosen instead to issue essentially toothless calls to let the trapped civilians escape while also backing a devastating Israeli military response.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv, Oct. 12, 2023. – Secretary Antony Blinken on X

Israel is also hosting the worthless and brain dead Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin who will be providing advice along the lines of his insightful comment that Hamas is “evil” and “worse than ISIS.” Secretary of State Antony Blinken is already in Jerusalem, announcing that the US is there to support Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s unity government “as long as America exists” after first saying “I come before you not only as the United States Secretary of State, but also as a Jew.”

Blinken’s explicit association of his personal religion with his official role as a representative of the US government makes clear that a key element in why he is there is because he is “a Jew.” Perhaps he should recuse himself from policy making involving Israel as being “a Jew” would not appear to be a United States national interest and is likely to produce irrational responses to developing situations.

If all of this sounds a lot like Ukraine it should, except that in Ukraine the US and NATO are fighting against Russia, which is being demonized for occupying what is claimed Ukrainian territory, whereas in Palestine they are supporting the occupier of actual Palestinian territory, Israel.

Funny thing that, and the word “hypocrisy” comes immediately to mind. As it turns out, however, I am somewhat on the same page as much of the media, agreeing that the Hamas incursion is something like 9/11, though I am sure that my take would not be found acceptable to the CNN Jake Tappers of this world.

My thinking is that Israel knew in advance about 9/11 in the United States due to its extensive spying network and chose not to share the information because it was to their advantage not to do so.

Indeed, a pleased Netanyahu even stated several years later that “9/11 was a good thing because it made the United States join us in our fight.”

That the attacks killed 3,000 Americans did not bother the Israeli government as Israel has a long history of killing Americans when it can benefit from so doing, starting with the attack on the USS Liberty in 1967 which killed 34 sailors.

So too in this case in Gaza, Netanyahu may have decided to encourage an unexpected development, making it like 9/11, that would enable him to escalate and “mow the grass” as the Israelis put it, in the remainder of Arab Palestine.

And bear in mind that the actual incident that triggered the uprising was a rampage involving at least 800 Israeli settlers in and around the al-Aqsa mosque, the third holiest site in Islam, beating pilgrims and destroying Palestinian shops, all without any interference from the nearby Israeli security forces. The rioting was clearly allowed and even encouraged by the government.

Drawing on my experience as a former on-the-ground intelligence officer, I am somewhat convinced that this was likely more like a false flag operation rather than a case of institutional failure on the part of the Israelis.

Israel had an extensive electronic and physical wall backed by soldiers and weaponry that completely surrounded Gaza on the landward side, so effective that it was claimed that not even a mouse could get in.

The Mediterranean side of Gaza was also tightly controlled by the Israeli Navy and boats to and from Gaza were completely blocked.

Egypt tightly controlled the southern part of Gaza bordering on the Sinai. So Gaza was under 24/7 complete surveillance and control at all times. Israeli military intelligence also certainly had a network of recruited informants inside Gaza who would report on any training or movements, easy enough to do when you can approach people who are starving and make them an offer they cannot refuse just for providing information on what they see and hear.

And then there was a warning from the Egyptian government to Israel ten days before the Hamas attack, with Egypt’s Intelligence Minister General Abbas Kamel personally calling Netanyahu and sharing intelligence suggesting that the Gazans were likely to do “something unusual, a terrible operation.” Other media accounts reveal how Hamas trained and practiced their maneuvers publicly. There were also assessments made by US intelligence, which were shared with Israel, suggesting that something was afoot. So, given all of the evidence, there likely was no intelligence failure to anticipate and counter the Hamas attack but rather a political decision made by the Israeli government that knew what might be coming and chose to let it proceed to provide a casus belli to destroy Gaza, vowing that “Every member of Hamas is a dead man,” and then go on from there. And “from there” might well include Lebanon, Syria and Iran, possibly with the assistance of the United States to do the heavy lifting. Iran in particular is already being blamed by the usual suspects as a party involved in the Hamas attack, so far without any evidence whatsoever, which is typical of how these stories evolve.

And Israel has moved far to the right politically to such an extent that it might appreciate a little ethnic cleansing to demonstrate its seriousness. Netanyahu and other senior government officials in his cabinet have recently been making passing references to a “developing security situation” in the country to justify the intensifying of the raids by the army against Palestinian towns and refugee camps. The new government in Israel has also placed police under the control of ultra-nationalist Jewish Power party head Itamar Ben-Gvir as National Security Minister. He has been exploiting his position to call in particular for a war to destroy Hamas in Gaza, which is precisely what is happening. Gaza might be of particular interest to Ben-Gvir and others as it uniquely shelters an armed and organized resistance in the form of Hamas, which, oddly, was founded with the support of Israel to split the Palestinian political resistance with Fatah controlling the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza.

There is another issue relating to the recent fighting that one would like to know the answer to, namely how did Hamas get its weapons in the first place?

Some were clearly manufactured from parts and scrap but others were sophisticated and, as Gaza is blockaded on all sides, smuggling them in becomes problematical. One argument is that they were supplied by Iran and others to be brought in by tunnels, but the tunnels on two sides would end up in Israel and on the third side in Egypt. The fourth side is the Mediterranean Sea. So how did they arrive? Is there a possible triple or even quadruple cross taking place with different parties lying to each other? And should there be concerns that after the American armada arrives off the coast of Gaza there just might be some kind of false flag incident engineered by Netanyahu that will involve Washington directly in the fighting?

And there is what amounts to a related issue that should be of concern to everyone in the US and generically speaking the “Western world” where human rights are at least nominally respected. The message from almost all Western governments is that Israel has a carte blanche to do whatever it likes even when it involves war crimes to include mass forced displacement or genocide. In this case, the coordinated government-media response which is intended to protect Israel from any criticism almost immediately began circulating fabricated tales of atrocities while also delivering a hit on freedom of speech and association. President Biden, who should be trying to defuse the crisis, is instead adding fuel to the flames, saying of Hamas that “Pure, unadulterated evil has been unleashed on the earth!”

In Florida the arch Zionist stooge Governor Ron Desantis met with Jewish leaders in a synagogue to announce draconian measures against Iran to include sanctions on companies that are in any way linked to that country. One might point out that those businesses have done nothing wrong and Desantis also called for “eradication of Hamas from the earth.” His intellectual depth was at the same time revealed when he said the US should not take in any Gazan refugees because they are “antisemites.”

And in South Carolina, America’s favorite he/she Senator Lindsey Graham is calling for a US attack on Iran as well as declaring the war against Hamas to be “a religious war” and urging the Israeli army to invade Gaza and do “Whatever the hell you have to do to” to “level the place.”

And the Europeans are equally spineless in their deference to Israel. The Israeli president declared the that there are no innocent civilians in Gaza, and not long after that top European Union representatives met with him to offer their unqualified support. Meanwhile in France, the spineless and feckless government of Emmanuel Macron has sought to outlaw any gathering that expresses support for Palestinian rights.

And in the UK, the Home Secretary Suella Braverman has proposed criminalizing any protest against Israeli actions or anything in support of Palestine to include banning any public display of the Palestinian national flag, which she regards as a “criminal offense toward the Jewish community in Britain.”

She has also said that “I would encourage police to consider whether chants such as: ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ should be understood as an expression of a violent desire to see Israel erased from the world, and whether its use in certain contexts may amount to a racially aggravated section 5 public order offence.” Berlin’s Public Prosecutor’s Office has also classified the use of the expression as a “criminal offense.” The manner in which most Western political elites are lining up unquestionably and even enthusiastically behind Israel and its craven leaders’ desire for bloody vengeance is truly shocking but comes as no surprise.

Beyond the issue of Gaza itself, some in Israel are arguing that Netanyahu has personally benefitted from the unrest through the creation of the national unity government which has ended for the time being the huge demonstrations protesting his judicial reform proposals. If all of this comes together politically as it might in the next several weeks, we could be seeing the initial steps in what will develop into the complete ethnic cleansing of what was once Palestine, in line with Netanyahu’s assertion that “the Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel. The government will promote and develop the settlement of all parts of the Land of Israel.” So all of the former Palestine is now a land to be defined by its Jewishness where Jews are in full control and are free to do whatever they want without any objection, referred to by the Israeli government as “an exclusive right to self-determination.” And it has all possibly been brought to fruition by the enablement provided by the current developments in Gaza.

The original source of Dr. Giraldi’s October 16, 2023 article.

Gaza Strikes Back. It’s Another 9/11 or Pearl Harbor but Who Actually Did What to Whom? “This Was More Likely a False Flag Operation”

By Philip Giraldi, October 16, 2023

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.

27 April 2024

Source: globalresearch.ca

 

Dr. Ghulam Nabi Fai

Chairman

World Forum for Peace & Justice

April 25, 2024

Displaying a calculated and considered callousness and insensitivity to the wishes and aspirations of the people of Indian occupied Kashmir, Amit Shah, the Home of Minister of India has announced that “Assembly poll will be held in Jammu and Kashmir before September 30, 2024.” He added that “BJP believes in winning hearts.” Election Commission of India has notified that Parliamentary election in Jammu will take place in two phases on April 26 and election in Srinagar constituency will take place on May 13 in four phases. Hirdesh Kumar, Chief Election Officer of Jammu & Kashmir said on August 17, 2022, that “We are expecting an addition of (2 to 2.5 million) new voters in the final list,” including non-Kashmiris living in the region.

Today, India confronts a Kashmir Rubicon in the disputed territory to elect members to the Indian Parliament. If India boldly crosses the Rubicon by conducting free, fair and transparent elections reflective of the genuine sentiments of the Kashmiri people, then a final peaceful settlement of the 77-year-old Kashmir conflict will be in sight. If India balks at a crossing and continues its old bad habit of election rigging and denying Kashmiri self-determination celebrated in United Nations Security Council resolutions, then Kashmir will remain beleaguered by repression, misery and destitution.

India always persisted in its colonial and antidemocratic ways in Kashmir. British historian, Bertrand Russell said in 1964, “The high idealism of the Indian government in international matters breaks down completely when confronted with the question of Kashmir.”

Jay Prakash Narayan who was known as ‘The Second Gandhi of India” confided to Indira Gandhi, then the Prime Minister of India in 1960: “We profess democracy but rule by force in Kashmir…[The Kashmir] problem exists not because Pakistan wants to grab Kashmir, but because there is deep and widespread political discontent among the people.”

George Fernandes, then the Federal Minister of Kashmir Affairs spoke at Harvard University, Center for International Affairs on October 12, 1990. “In so far as the immediate situation in Kashmir is concerned, I feel that we need to go back to 1984, when an elected government was dismissed by Delhi. The dismissal of the government sent signal to the people of Kashmir that any honest decision that they take in regard to the governance of the State could easily be set aside by the power that be in Delhi. Naturally, the anger against Delhi built up. In 1987, there could have been a fair election. Unfortunately, there was not. A lot of people were roughed up. A lot of young people were subjected to considerable humiliation. The Kashmiris felt that Delhi would prevent for all times any expression of people’s will in a fair and objective election. All this created among the youth a sense of total despondences and alienation.”

1. K. Dave, former Chief Secretary of the Jammu and Kashmir Government, confessed in 1991 that, “Elections in Kashmir have been rigged from the beginning.”

Arundhati Roy, Booker Prizewinner said on September 27, 2009, “Elections in Kashmir have had a long and fascinating past. The blatantly rigged state election of 1987 was the immediate provocation for the armed uprising that began in 1990. Since then, elections have become a finely honed instrument of the military occupation, a sinister playground for India’s deep state. It is Intelligence agencies more than anyone else who decide what the outcome of each election will be. After every election, the Indian establishment declares that India has won a popular mandate from the people of Kashmir.”

Dr. Shri Prakash in his book, ‘Twenty Tumultuous Years Insights into Indian Polity’ on page 568 writes, “The Kashmiri anger actually began with the mass rigging of elections in 1987..”

Amy Waldman wrote in the New York Times on August 24, 2002, that “Rigged elections in Kashmir in 1987 helped trigger the armed uprising that India estimates has taken more than 35,000 lives.”

We know it now that the fraudulent elections in 1987 extinguished the last flicker of hope among Kashmiris that India would bow to a free and fair plebiscite as ordained by the Security Council.

The cure for counterfeit elections in Kashmir, however, is not more of the same, but providing the genuine democratic article. Thus, the people of Kashmir are eager to participate in the referendum if it is conducted with the trapping of free and fair choice, monitored and supervised by a neutral agency like the United Nations.

The status of East Timor was resolved in 1999 by a free and fair vote of the East Timorese. The same, championed by the United States and the European Union happened in Kosovo, Montenegro and Southern Sudan. The solution of Kashmir’s indigenous upheaval is no different. The irresponsible coveting of dignity, liberty and pride that comes with self-determination knows no territorial or regional boundaries.

The Security Council has denounced the “subterfuge” of elections in a 1957 resolution # 122. It reminded the concerned governments and authorities “of the principle embodied in its resolution that the final disposition of the State of Jammu and Kashmir will be made in accordance with the will of the people expressed through the democratic method of a free and impartial plebiscite conducted under the auspices of the United Nations.”

The resolution further elaborated that “the convening of a Constituent Assembly…and any action that Assembly may have taken or might attempt to take to determine the future shape and affiliation [of Kashmir]” would be no surrogate for Kashmiri self-determination.

I propose the following steps to be taken to make a referendum happen in Kashmir.

First, the demilitarization of the State of Jammu & Kashmir on either side of the Cease-fire Line.

Second, an atmosphere of peace and security must be created.

Third, all draconian laws, including Domicile Law which is designed to change the demography of Kashmir must be annulled.

Fourth, all political prisoners, including Mohammad Yasin Malik, Shabir Ahmed Shah, Masarat Aalam Bhat, Aasia Andrabi, Khurram Parvaiz and others must be released immediately and unconditionally.

Fifth, the rights of peaceful association, assembly and demonstrations must be restored.

Sixth, Kashmiri political resistance leadership must be permitted to travel abroad without hindrance,

Seventh, any solution must satisfy democratic principles, the rule of law, and security for every inhabitant of Kashmir, irrespective of their religious affiliations.

Eighth, an international and neutral team must be deputed to conduct the referendum.

Kashmir’s suffering is a rebuke to the United Nations for its inaction. The situation is a call on the conscience of the members of the Security Council, particularly to the United States.

A sincere and serious effort towards a just settlement of the Kashmir dispute must squarely deal with the realities of the situation and fully respond to the people’s rights involved in it. Indeed, any process that ignores the wishes of the people of Kashmir and is designed to sidetrack the United Nations will not only prove to be an exercise in futility but can also cause incalculable human and political damage.

Dr. Fai is also the Secretary General, World Kashmir Awareness Forum He can be reached at: WhatsApp: 1-202-607-6435 or gnfai2003@yahoo.com  www.kashmirawareness.org

By Romi Mahajan

Growing up, I heard much about the Vietnam “War” from my parents and brother.   Few in the United States know that 6 million Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians were killed in a mechanized slaughter.  Just over 58,000 Americans were killed.  Death is bad, murder worse.  But ratios of one-to-a-hundred indicate something different than a two-sided “war.”  That should be obvious to anyone, including those who remember that after Heydrich was killed, the Nazis decided that one-hundred Czechoslovakians would be killed for every Nazi.  It is what I call “The Lidice Ratio.”

I also came to understand that the Vietnamese were as tough a people as one could imagine. Poor, with little modern infrastructure, they “won” against the mightiest military the world had ever seen.  “Won” of course is a strange term when your country is in ruins and millions are dead or maimed.  “Won” is a strange term when even after victory, your foliage is destroyed, your land pockmarked with mines, and your people starving and embargoed.  But they did win, in many ways.

Here’s the thing though:  They won for others not for themselves.  They fought hard to protect their country and to stave off imperialism and from their struggle, others gained.  The “Vietnam Syndrome” kept America at bay for years.  Not that it didn’t finance wars or commit acts of global violence.  But it didn’t go to war and stopped physically-corporeally intervening for decades, until Iraq was unlucky enough to draw the short straw.  Along the way, sure, it destroyed Central America and intervened successfully to ensure East Timorese were massacred (and of course there is more), but it was still held at bay in relative terms.

The Palestinians are the Vietnamese of 2024.  Not in the sense that they are “fighting” a superpower (after all, they are being bombed to smithereens, starved, displaced, murdered, and have no real defenses) but in the sense that their dignity in suffering and unwavering commitment to their own culture has awed the world.  On campuses worldwide, students are in solidarity with Palestinians.  Often inert folks who are good people but don’t have a political vocabulary are speaking out in disgust at Israeli aggression.

In the Palestinians is a reflection of our humanity, our dignity, our souls.

Generations hence peoples who are left in relative peace by an oppressive force will have the Palestinians to thank.  They are not going to disappear howsoever hard the Likud thugs try to eliminate them.  Their dignity and their fight, even under impossible conditions, are a beacon to the entire world, to anyone suffering under the yoke of oppression.  Now and in the future.

24 April 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Jordan Shilton

The number of bodies discovered in four mass graves at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis in southern Gaza rose to at least 310 Tuesday. The horrific discovery over the past 72 hours provides further evidence of Israel’s imperialist-backed genocide against the Palestinians, which is set to escalate imminently due to the looming assault on the more than 1.5 million men, women and children struggling to survive in Rafah.

Palestinian Civil Defence personnel continued Tuesday to discover bodies, including women and elderly people, buried under piles of waste. Zaina Haroun, a representative of the West Bank-based al-Haq Palestinian rights group, told Al Jazeera that the grisly discovery was “stark evidence of war crimes and of course the genocide which is being perpetrated against the Palestinian people in Gaza by Israel.”

Referring to the uncovering of similar mass graves several weeks ago at Shifa hospital in Gaza City, she continued, “One family member was desperate to find just a trace of his uncle; he said that he found his sandals but even if he could find a body part, an arm or a leg, that they could at least take that and bury him so they’re able to sleep at night.”

The inhuman scenes from Khan Younis and Gaza City, reminiscent of the genocides of the 20th century, underscore the barbarism of the imperialist-backed Israeli regime.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s fascistic government has openly declared its intention to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip, denounced Palestinians as “human animals,” systematically denied aid to hundreds of thousands stranded in the north of the enclave, and killed over 34,000 people during 200 days of non-stop bombardments.

With the fulsome support of US imperialism and its European allies, the Israeli regime has brushed aside the charge of genocide brought against it by South Africa at the International Court of Justice and continued its onslaught as famine takes hold in Gaza.

On Tuesday, US special envoy for humanitarian issues David Satterfield described the threat of famine in Gaza as “very high.” Gaza’s Government Media Office reported that 30 children have died so far as “a result of famine.”

In its latest situation report on Gaza, the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) noted that there has been “very little significant change” in the amount of aid entering Gaza or the approval by Israel of aid convoys to the north of Gaza over recent weeks.

Three weeks ago, after Israel’s targeted killing of seven aid workers from the World Central Kitchen organisation, the Netanyahu government claimed it was prepared to open a land border crossing into northern Gaza and increase the flow of trucks into the enclave to over 300 per day. UNRWA head Philippe Lazzarini reported that 310 trucks crossed into Gaza Tuesday, well short of the 500 to 600 trucks most aid organisations agree are necessary to supply adequate food and other basic necessities to Gaza’s population.

The UNRWA report also noted that at least 435 attacks have been conducted by Israel on health workers or institutions since the onset of the genocide, a monthly rate that is higher than any other recent conflict. Since October 7, 180 UNRWA employees have been killed by Israel.

Israel’s destruction of Gaza has displaced over 75 percent of Gaza’s inhabitants, with 1.7 million people forced to flee “multiple times.” The repeated displacements have fueled the spread of infectious diseases, which have infected some 1.09 million people, or close to 50 percent of the population. According to UN human rights chief Volker Turk, a child is being killed or wounded in Gaza “every 10 minutes.”

The systematic dismantling of all civilian infrastructure by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) has created a situation in which disease and famine will soon claim more lives than the daily air strikes. Only 10 of the 36 hospitals in the enclave prior to the war are still functioning to any degree as health care facilities. Hospitals have either been turned into killing fields, as at al-Shifa or Nasser hospitals, or taken over by the IDF. The Turkish-Palestinian Friends hospital south of Gaza City, formerly home to the only specialist cancer unit in Gaza, has been transformed by the IDF into a military base.

In a report released this week entitled “Manufacturing Famine: Israel is committing the war crime of starvation in the Gaza Strip,” B’Tselem-the Israeli Centre for Human rights in the Occupied Territories documents Israel’s culpability in the hunger crisis in the enclave, and its short- and long-term implications. Basing itself on the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, the report noted that Gaza was in phase 4 during February and March, immediately below phase 5, which is famine.

During these months, 55 percent of households in the north, and 25 percent of households in the central and southern areas were already at phase 5. These figures are expected to rise to 70 percent for the north, 50 percent for central Gaza, and 45 percent for the south, which would put Gaza as a whole in a famine. The report noted that Samantha Power, head of USAID, became the first US official to publicly admit that famine has already taken hold in northern Gaza at a hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee in early April.

Khamis al-A’araj, a 52-year-old resident of the Falujah neighbourhood of the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza, described the horrendous living conditions in the report:

“There is no food or water here. In fact, there’s nothing here. You can’t get food in the market, either—no canned food, flour or rice. There isn’t even barley left. Sometimes we manage to find khubeiza [a flowering, edible plant] growing by the roadside or in the fields and we pick it. If we manage to find some cardboard or wood to make a fire, we cook it in water and eat it for a day or two and at least manage to sleep better at night. We used to eat khubeiza maybe once a year, and now it’s almost our only source of food. In the last four days, we didn’t sleep at all because we’re so hungry. We didn’t eat a single thing. We couldn’t get any food. All I do is look for food, all the time, and I can’t stop thinking about it at night, either. Everyone here in the camp is pale with hunger and can barely stand on their feet.

Strengthened by the bipartisan vote in the US House on Saturday and Senate on Tuesday to provide $26 billion in additional aid for its genocidal onslaught, Israel’s far-right government is preparing to turn Rafah, like the north and Khan Younis before it, into rubble.

The Associated Press published Tuesday satellite images showing the construction of a tent city to the west of Khan Younis, a sign of preparations to displace Rafah’s population. The IDF told AP that it was not involved in establishing the tent compound. Israeli daily Haaretz reported that the Egyptian government was constructing the site in order to prevent Palestinians from crossing the border into the Sinai.

Whatever the case may be, a tent compound for over 1.5 million people would in effect be a massive concentration camp for more than half of Gaza’s population and create the conditions for the further spread of disease.

As Fabrizio Carboni, Middle East regional director for the International Committee of the Red Cross, told AFP, humanitarian workers have no knowledge of a plan to evacuate Rafah’s population, and such a plan would be impossible to implement. “When we see the level of destruction in the middle area [of Gaza] and in the north, it’s not clear to us where people will be moved to … where they can have decent shelter and essential services,” he said. “So today, with the information we have and from where we stand, we don’t see this [massive evacuation] as possible.”

The normalisation of the IDF’s barbarism in Gaza has been fully endorsed by Washington, which sees the genocide as a key component of its escalation of a region-wide war aimed at Iran. This conflict, through which American imperialism aims to consolidate its hegemony over the energy-rich Middle East, is one front in a rapidly developing third world war between the major powers for a redivision of the world.

Putting a stop to the Gaza genocide and imperialist war demands the building of an international anti-war movement led by the working class. Under conditions in which the imperialist powers are cracking down on all forms of opposition to war and genocide with extreme ruthlessness, workers must respond in every country by mobilizing politically on the basis of a socialist and internationalist programme to put an end to the capitalist profit system, which is reviving all the horrors of the 20th century.

24 April 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies

16 Apr 2024 – The Israeli online magazine +972 has published a detailed report on Israel’s use of an artificial intelligence (AI) system called “Lavender” to target thousands of Palestinian men in its bombing campaign in Gaza. When Israel attacked Gaza after October 7, the Lavender system had a database of 37,000 Palestinian men with suspected links to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).

Lavender assigns a numerical score, from one to a hundred, to every man in Gaza, based mainly on cellphone and social media data, and automatically adds those with high scores to its kill list of suspected militants. Israel uses another automated system, known as “Where’s Daddy?”, to call in airstrikes to kill these men and their families in their homes.

The report is based on interviews with six Israeli intelligence officers who have worked with these systems. As one of the officers explained to +972, by adding a name from a Lavender-generated list to the Where’s Daddy home tracking system, he can place the man’s home under constant drone surveillance, and an airstrike will be launched once he comes home.

The officers said the “collateral” killing of the men’s extended families was of little consequence to Israel. “Let’s say you calculate [that there is one] Hamas [operative] plus 10 [civilians in the house],” the officer said. “Usually, these 10 will be women and children. So absurdly, it turns out that most of the people you killed were women and children.”

The officers explained that the decision to target thousands of these men in their homes is just a question of expediency. It is simply easier to wait for them to come home to the address on file in the system, and then bomb that house or apartment building, than to search for them in the chaos of the war-torn Gaza Strip.

The officers who spoke to 972+ explained that in previous Israeli massacres in Gaza, they could not generate targets quickly enough to satisfy their political and military bosses, and so these AI systems were designed to solve that problem for them. The speed with which Lavender can generate new targets only gives its human minders an average of 20 seconds to review and rbber-stamp each name, even though they know from tests of the Lavender system that at least 10% of the men chosen for assassination and familicide have only an insignificant or a mistaken connection with Hamas or PIJ.

The Lavender AI system is a new weapon, developed by Israel. But the kind of kill lists that it generates have a long pedigree in U.S. wars, occupations and CIA regime change operations. Since the birth of the CIA after the Second World War, the technology used to create kill lists has evolved from the CIA’s earliest coups in Iran and Guatemala, to Indonesia and the Phoenix program in Vietnam in the 1960s, to Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s and to the U.S. occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Just as U.S. weapons development aims to be at the cutting edge, or the killing edge, of new technology, the CIA and U.S. military intelligence have always tried to use the latest data processing technology to identify and kill their enemies.

The CIA learned some of these methods from German intelligence officers captured at the end of the Second World War. Many of the names on Nazi kill lists were generated by an intelligence unit called Fremde Heere Ost (Foreign Armies East), under the command of Major General Reinhard Gehlen, Germany’s spy chief on the eastern front (see David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard, p. 268).

Gehlen and the FHO had no computers, but they did have access to four million Soviet POWs from all over the USSR, and no compunction about torturing them to learn the names of Jews and communist officials in their hometowns to compile kill lists for the Gestapo and Einsatzgruppen.

After the war, like the 1,600 German scientists spirited out of Germany in Operation Paperclip, the United States flew Gehlen and his senior staff to Fort Hunt in Virginia. They were welcomed by Allen Dulles, soon to be the first and still the longest-serving director of the CIA. Dulles sent them back to Pullach in occupied Germany to resume their anti-Soviet operations as CIA agents. The Gehlen Organization formed the nucleus of what became the BND, the new West German intelligence service, with Reinhard Gehlen as its director until he retired in 1968.

After a CIA coup removed Iran’s popular, democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, a CIA team led by U.S. Major General Norman Schwarzkopf trained a new intelligence service, known as SAVAK, in the use of kill lists and torture. SAVAK used these skills to purge Iran’s government and military of suspected communists and later to hunt down anyone who dared to oppose the Shah.

By 1975, Amnesty International estimated that Iran was holding between 25,000 and 100,000 political prisoners, and had “the highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture that is beyond belief.”

In Guatemala, a CIA coup in 1954 replaced the democratic government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman with a brutal dictatorship. As resistance grew in the 1960s, U.S. special forces joined the Guatemalan army in a scorched earth campaign in Zacapa, which killed 15,000 people to defeat a few hundred armed rebels. Meanwhile, CIA-trained urban death squads abducted, tortured and killed PGT (Guatemalan Labor Party) members in Guatemala City, notably 28 prominent labor leaders who were abducted and disappeared in March 1966.

Once this first wave of resistance was suppressed, the CIA set up a new telecommunications center and intelligence agency, based in the presidential palace. It compiled a database of “subversives” across the country that included leaders of farming co-ops and labor, student and indigenous activists, to provide ever-growing lists for the death squads. The resulting civil war became a genocide against indigenous people in Ixil and the western highlands that killed or disappeared at least 200,000 people.

This pattern was repeated across the world, wherever popular, progressive leaders offered hope to their people in ways that challenged U.S. interests. As historian Gabriel Kolko wrote in 1988, “The irony of U.S. policy in the Third World is that, while it has always justified its larger objectives and efforts in the name of anticommunism, its own goals have made it unable to tolerate change from any quarter that impinged significantly on its own interests.”

When General Suharto seized power in Indonesia in 1965, the U.S. Embassy compiled a list of 5,000 communists for his death squads to hunt down and kill. The CIA estimated that they eventually killed 250,000 people, while other estimates run as high as a million.

Twenty-five years later, journalist Kathy Kadane investigated the U.S. role in the massacre in Indonesia, and spoke to Robert Martens, the political officer who led the State-CIA team that compiled the kill list. “It really was a big help to the army,” Martens told Kadane. “They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands. But that’s not all bad – there’s a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment.”

Kathy Kadane also spoke to former CIA director William Colby, who was the head of the CIA’s Far East division in the 1960s. Colby compared the U.S. role in Indonesia to the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, which was launched two years later, claiming that they were both successful programs to identify and eliminate the organizational structure of America’s communist enemies.

The Phoenix program was designed to uncover and dismantle the National Liberation Front’s (NLF) shadow government across South Vietnam. Phoenix’s Combined Intelligence Center in Saigon fed thousands of names into an IBM 1401 computer, along with their locations and their alleged roles in the NLF. The CIA credited the Phoenix program with killing 26,369 NLF officials, while another 55,000 were imprisoned or persuaded to defect. Seymour Hersh reviewed South Vietnamese government documents that put the death toll at 41,000.

How many of the dead were correctly identified as NLF officials may be impossible to know, but Americans who took part in Phoenix operations reported killing the wrong people in many cases. Navy SEAL Elton Manzione told author Douglas Valentine (The Phoenix Program) how he killed two young girls in a night raid on a village, and then sat down on a stack of ammunition crates with a hand grenade and an M-16, threatening to blow himself up, until he got a ticket home.

“The whole aura of the Vietnam War was influenced by what went on in the “hunter-killer” teams of Phoenix, Delta, etc,” Manzione told Valentine. “That was the point at which many of us realized we were no longer the good guys in the white hats defending freedom – that we were assassins, pure and simple. That disillusionment carried over to all other aspects of the war and was eventually responsible for it becoming America’s most unpopular war.”

Even as the U.S. defeat in Vietnam and the “war fatigue” in the United States led to a more peaceful next decade, the CIA continued to engineer and support coups around the world, and to provide post-coup governments with increasingly computerized kill lists to consolidate their rule.

After supporting General Pinochet’s coup in Chile in 1973, the CIA played a central role in Operation Condor, an alliance between right-wing military governments in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia, to hunt down tens of thousands of their and each other’s political opponents and dissidents, killing and disappearing at least 60,000 people.

The CIA’s role in Operation Condor is still shrouded in secrecy, but Patrice McSherry, a political scientist at Long Island University, has investigated the U.S. role and concluded, “Operation Condor also had the covert support of the US government. Washington provided Condor with military intelligence and training, financial assistance, advanced computers, sophisticated tracking technology, and access to the continental telecommunications system housed in the Panama Canal Zone.”

McSherry’s research revealed how the CIA supported the intelligence services of the Condor states with computerized links, a telex system, and purpose-built encoding and decoding machines made by the CIA Logistics Department. As she wrote in her book, Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America:

“The Condor system’s secure communications system, Condortel,… allowed Condor operations centers in member countries to communicate with one another and with the parent station in a U.S. facility in the Panama Canal Zone. This link to the U.S. military-intelligence complex in Panama is a key piece of evidence regarding secret U.S. sponsorship of Condor…”

Operation Condor ultimately failed, but the U.S. provided similar support and training to right-wing governments in Colombia and Central America throughout the 1980s in what senior military officers have called a “quiet, disguised, media-free approach” to repression and kill lists.

The U.S. School of the Americas (SOA) trained thousands of Latin American officers in the use of torture and death squads, as Major Joseph Blair, the SOA’s former chief of instruction described to John Pilger for his film, The War You Don’t See:

“The doctrine that was taught was that, if you want information, you use physical abuse, false imprisonment, threats to family members, and killing. If you can’t get the information you want, if you can’t get the person to shut up or stop what they’re doing, you assassinate them – and you assassinate them with one of your death squads.”

When the same methods were transferred to the U.S. hostile military occupation of Iraq after 2003, Newsweek headlined it “The Salvador Option.” A U.S. officer explained to Newsweek that U.S. and Iraqi death squads were targeting Iraqi civilians as well as resistance fighters. “The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists,” he said. “From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation.”

The United States sent two veterans of its dirty wars in Latin America to Iraq to play key roles in that campaign. Colonel James Steele led the U.S. Military Advisor Group in El Salvador from 1984 to 1986, training and supervising Salvadoran forces who killed tens of thousands of civilians. He was also deeply involved in the Iran-Contra scandal, narrowly escaping a prison sentence for his role supervising shipments from Ilopango air base in El Salvador to the U.S.-backed Contras in Honduras and Nicaragua.

In Iraq, Steele oversaw the training of the Interior Ministry’s Special Police Commandos – rebranded as “National” and later “Federal” Police after the discovery of their al-Jadiriyah torture center and other atrocities.

Bayan al-Jabr, a commander in the Iranian-trained Badr Brigade militia, was appointed Interior Minister in 2005, and Badr militiamen were integrated into the Wolf Brigade death squad and other Special Police units. Jabr’s chief adviser was Steven Casteel, the former intelligence chief for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in Latin America.

The Interior Ministry death squads waged a dirty war in Baghdad and other cities, filling the Baghdad morgue with up to 1,800 corpses per month, while Casteel fed the western media absurd cover stories, such as that the death squads were all “insurgents” in stolen police uniforms.

Meanwhile U.S. special operations forces conducted “kill-or-capture” night raids in search of Resistance leaders. General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of Joint Special Operations Command from 2003-2008, oversaw the development of a database system, used in Iraq and Afghanistan, that compiled cellphone numbers mined from captured cellphones to generate an ever-expanding target list for night raids and air strikes.

The targeting of cellphones instead of actual people enabled the automation of the targeting system, and explicitly excluded using human intelligence to confirm identities. Two senior U.S. commanders told the Washington Post that only half the night raids attacked the right house or person.

In Afghanistan, President Obama put McChrystal in charge of U.S. and NATO forces in 2009, and his cellphone-based “social network analysis” enabled an exponential increase in night raids, from 20 raids per month in May 2009 to up to 40 per night by April 2011.

As with the Lavender system in Gaza, this huge increase in targets was achieved by taking a system originally designed to identify and track a small number of senior enemy commanders and applying it to anyone suspected of having links with the Taliban, based on their cellphone data.

This led to the capture of an endless flood of innocent civilians, so that most civilian detainees had to be quickly released to make room for new ones. The increased killing of innocent civilians in night raids and airstrikes fueled already fierce resistance to the U.S. and NATO occupation and ultimately led to its defeat.

President Obama’s drone campaign to kill suspected enemies in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia was just as indiscriminate, with reports suggesting that 90% of the people it killed in Pakistan were innocent civilians.

And yet Obama and his national security team kept meeting in the White House every “Terror Tuesday” to select who the drones would target that week, using an Orwellian, computerized “disposition matrix” to provide technological cover for their life and death decisions.

Looking at this evolution of ever-more automated systems for killing and capturing enemies, we can see how, as the information technology used has advanced from telexes to cellphones and from early IBM computers to artificial intelligence, the human intelligence and sensibility that could spot mistakes, prioritize human life and prevent the killing of innocent civilians has been progressively marginalized and excluded, making these operations more brutal and horrifying than ever.

Nicolas has at least two good friends who survived the dirty wars in Latin America because someone who worked in the police or military got word to them that their names were on a death list, one in Argentina, the other in Guatemala. If their fates had been decided by an AI machine like Lavender, they would both be long dead.

As with supposed advances in other types of weapons technology, like drones and “precision” bombs and missiles, innovations that claim to make targeting more precise and eliminate human error have instead led to the automated mass murder of innocent people, especially women and children, bringing us full circle from one holocaust to the next.

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

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher with CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.

22 April 2024

Source: transcend.org