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By Israel Shahak and Prof Michel Chossudovsky

Update and Analysis

On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched “Operation Al-Aqsa Storm” which was led by its Military Chief Mohammed Deif.  On that same day, Netanyahu confirmed a so-called “State of Readiness For War.” Israel has now (October 7, 2023) officially declared an illegal war on Palestine. 

The current Netanyahu government is committed to the “Greater Israel” and the “Promised Land”, namely the biblical homeland of the Jews.

Benjamin Netanyahu is pressing ahead to formalize “Israel’s colonial project”, namely the appropriation of all Palestinian Lands.

His position defined below 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: 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.”

The Nakba

With an economy in free fall, 70 per cent youth unemployment, widely contaminated drinking water and a collapsed health care system, Gaza has become “unliveable”, [in 2018] according to the Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian Territories”

The above UN assessment dates back to 2018. Under Netanyahu, Israel is currently proceeding with the plan to annex large chunks of Palestinian territory “while keeping the Palestinian inhabitants in conditions of severe deprivation and isolation.“

Creating conditions of extreme poverty and economic collapse constitute the means for triggering the expulsion and exodus of Palestinians from their homeland.  It is part of the process of annexation.

“If the manoeuvre is successful, Israel will end up with all of the territories it conquered during the 1967 war, including all of the Golan Heights and Jerusalem and most of the Palestinian Territories, including the best sources of water and agricultural land.

The West Bank will find itself in the same situation as the Gaza strip, cut off from the outside world and surrounded by hostile Israeli military forces and Israeli settlements.” (South Front)

Human rights ended at the Palestinian border. The bought and paid for US Congress couldn’t genuflect enough:

“On July 19, 2023 the US Congress convened a special joint session for Israeli President Isaac Herzog. Both Democrats and Republicans bobbed up and down to applaud him 29 times.”

”Watching Palestine Disappear”, Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, September 12, 2023

“Greater Israel would create a number of proxy states. It would include parts of Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, the Sinai, as well as parts of  Iraq and Saudi Arabia.”

“Palestine Is Gone! Gone! راحت فلسطين . The Palestinian plight is savagely painful and the pain is compounded by the bafflingly off-hand dismissal and erasure by Western powers of that pain, Rima Najjar, Global Research, June, 7, 2020

Michel Chossudovsky, September 19, 2023, October 8, 2023

Introductory Text on “The Greater Israel Project” 

by Michel Chossudovsky 

The following document pertaining to the formation of “Greater Israel” constitutes the cornerstone of powerful Zionist factions within the current Netanyahu government,  the Likud party, as well as within the Israeli military and intelligence establishment.

President Donald Trump had confirmed in January 2017 his support of Israel’s illegal settlements (including his opposition to UN Security Council Resolution 2334, pertaining to the illegality of the Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank). The Trump administration expressed its recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. And now the entire West Bank is being annexed to Israel.

Under the Biden administration, despite rhetorical shifts in the political narrative, Washington remains supportive of Israel plans to annex the entire Jordan River valley as well the illegal settlements in the West Bank.

Bear in mind: The Greater Israel design is not strictly a Zionist Project for the Middle East, it is an integral part of US foreign policy, its strategic objective is to extend US hegemony as well as fracture and balkanize the Middle East.

In this regard, Washington’s strategy consists in destabilizing and weakening regional economic powers in the Middle East including Turkey and Iran. This policy –which is consistent with the Greater Israel–  is  accompanied by a process of political fragmentation.

Since the Gulf war (1991), the Pentagon has contemplated the creation of a “Free Kurdistan” which would include the annexation of  parts of Iraq, Syria and Iran as well as Turkey.

According to the founding father of Zionism Theodore Herzl, “the area of the Jewish State stretches: “From the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates.”  According to Rabbi Fischmann,  “The Promised Land extends from the River of Egypt up to the Euphrates, it includes parts of Syria and Lebanon.”

By Priti Gulati Cox and Stan Cox

It’s been almost two months since the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to stop killing Gazans and destroying their means of subsistence. So let’s look back and ask (1) how Israel has responded to its “orders,” and (2) how hard the Biden administration has pushed Israel to abide by those orders. Spoiler alert: the short answers are (1) not well and (2) not very.

The American government has provided most of the armaments and targeting technologies being used to kill Gazans by the thousands while turning many of the rest of them into refugees by destroying their homes, offices, schools, and hospitals. Nor did the Biden administration threaten to withdraw that support when Israel blocked shipments of crucial food and fuel to the 25-mile-long Gaza Strip. It also keeps vetoing U.N. Security Council resolutions that would hold Israel accountable. And President Biden, despite an increasing amount of rhetorical shuffling, continues to back Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), even though they have ignored the International Court’s orders and continue committing atrocities.

Flouting the Order to Stop the Killing

On January 26th, the International Court of Justice handed down a ruling in a case brought by the Republic of South Africa accusing Israel of genocide. It ordered that Israel must “ensure with immediate effect that its military does not commit any acts described” in the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

The court’s first order prohibited “killing members” of the Palestinian population or “causing serious bodily or mental harm” to them. How did Israel respond? Consider that, between late December 2023 and January 21st of this year, the IDF had killed about 5,000 Palestinians, already pushing the death toll in the Gaza Strip past 25,000. The court’s order, issued days later, would have essentially zero effect. Another 5,000-plus Palestinians would be killed by late February, raising the death toll to more than 30,000.

During the month after the ruling, Israeli troops repeatedly killed or injured civilians fleeing to, or taking shelter in, areas the IDF had advertised as “safe zones.” Typically, when, on February 12th, Israeli aircraft attacked 14 homes and three mosques in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, killing 67 Palestinians, some of the survivors told reporters that they’d been inside tents in a refugee camp. Similarly, on February 22nd, Israeli warplanes struck a residential area in central Gaza, killing 40 civilians, mostly women and children, and wounding more than 100.

Worse yet, the Biden administration has enabled that ongoing killing spree by approving 100 separate military sales to Israel since the conflict began in October. As a former administration official told the Washington Post, “That’s an extraordinary number of sales over the course of a pretty short amount of time, which really strongly suggests that the Israeli campaign would not be sustainable without this level of U.S. support.”

In other words, the backbone of the war on Gaza comes with a label: “Made in USA.” In the decade leading up to October 7th, as the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute has reported, two-thirds of Israel’s arms imports came from the United States. (From 1950 to 2020, the U.S. share was a whopping 83%!)

In just the first couple of months of the war, the Biden administration sent 230 cargo planes and 20 ships full of military goods to Israel, a trove that included 100 BLU-109 bombs (2,000-pounders designed to penetrate hardened structures before exploding), 5,400 MK84 and 5,000 MK82 bunker-busters, 1,000 GBU-39 bombs, 3,000 JDAM bomb-guidance kits, and 200 “kamikaze drones.”

Such powerful bombs, reported Al Jazeera, “have been used in some of the deadliest Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip, including a strike that leveled an apartment block in the Jabalia refugee camp, killing more than 100 people.” And yes, such bunker-busters were widely used in the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but not in places as densely populated as Gaza’s cities. Israeli sources tried to justify that particular death toll by insisting it was necessary to kill one of Hamas’s leaders. If so, we’re talking about a 100-to-1 ratio, or a kind of collective punishment being supported by our tax dollars.

Worse yet, our military seems to have been participating directly in the IDF’s operations. According to the Intercept’s Ken Klippenstein and Matthew Petti, the Defense Department has been providing satellite intelligence and software to help the IDF find and hit targets in Gaza. An “Air Defense Liaison Team,” they report, even traveled to Israel in November to offer targeting help, adding that “for the first time in U.S. history, the Biden administration has been flying surveillance drone missions over Gaza.”

And even then, some members of Netanyahu’s government felt it wasn’t enough. Far right-wing Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich put it this way when it came to President Biden’s warning not to send the IDF into the southern Gazan city of Rafah where hundreds of thousands of refugees were gathered: “American pressure or fear of harming civilians should not deter us from occupying Rafah and destroying Hamas.”

The Israeli hostages held by Hamas are the excuse for so much of this, but the way to free them would be to negotiate, as Israel did successfully last fall, not try to “wipe Hamas off the face of the earth.” The Israelis are mostly bombing civilian sites in that campaign, because they’re reluctant to fight their way through the vast fortified network of tunnels from which the military wing of Hamas, the Qassam Brigades, mounted a formidable resistance to the invasion, largely with weaponry they manufactured themselves, along with ammunition recycled from unexploded ordnance dropped in past Israeli attacks.

Conditions of Life (and Death)

In the second of its orders, the International Court of Justice prohibited “deliberately inflicting… conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part [or] imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”

The Netanyahu government and the IDF blew off this directive as well. In the month that followed the ruling, Israeli troops continued to besiege hospitals across Gaza, thoroughly crippling, if not destroying, its healthcare system, especially two of its most important facilities: al-Shifa Hospital in the north and Nasser Hospital in the south. Before it was put out of service in mid-February, Nasser was one of the last hospitals still operating there in any capacity whatsoever. Not surprisingly, the World Health Organization has since reported a striking rise in respiratory infections, diarrhea, chickenpox, jaundice, skin rashes, and scabies, among other horrors.

Israel’s military has also been making conditions unlivable by restricting the food aid entering the territory and destroying local fishing boats, greenhouses, and orchards. It’s a formula for mass starvation. As Michael Fakhri, the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food, told the Guardian in late February, “The speed of malnourishment of young children is also astounding. The bombing and people being killed directly is brutal, but this starvation — and the wasting and stunting of children — is torturous and vile.” Around the same time, UNICEF announced that 90% of children under five in Gaza were consuming “two or fewer food groups a day,” the functional definition of “severe food poverty.” About the same percentage were suffering from infectious diseases, most commonly diarrhea, which only exacerbated their malnutrition.

The world’s top group tracking food emergencies reported on March 17th that famine “is now projected and imminent” in northern Gaza within six weeks, and that “half of the population of the Gaza Strip (1.11 million people) is expected to face catastrophic conditions,” with starvation and death expected to be widespread. Keep in mind that, under the Geneva Conventions, it’s a war crime to starve civilians or “attack, destroy, remove, or render useless any items necessary for civilians’ survival.” Attacking a hospital can also be a war crime. In that context, here’s a thought experiment: What would President Biden and his top officials do if they suspected any other country of committing acts it knew could potentially lead to mass civilian deaths from starvation and disease? Would they shower it with more weaponry?

In defiance of the International Court’s orders — and undeterred by mild tut-tutting from Washington — the Israeli military is also inflicting intolerable “conditions of life” with its approach to Gaza’s water supply. With fuel shipments blocked by the Israelis, Gazans are unable to keep running the desalinization plants that produce a significant amount of the Strip’s water. As a result, by late February, the water supply had dropped to 7% of its prewar level. In desperation, many Gazans, especially children, have been forced to turn to polluted water sources, putting them at risk of severe gastrointestinal disease with no functional hospitals to help them.

Israel is also, in effect, violating the International Court’s bar on “measures intended to prevent births,” since pregnant women are considered especially vulnerable to the food deprivation that is now the essence of life in Gaza. At the Deir al Balah clinic in central Gaza, one out of five maternity patients were being treated for malnutrition in February, causing doctors deep concern, since any malnourished mother will be carrying a malnourished fetus (with awful health prospects for both of them). Meanwhile, the U.N. Population Fund reports that women are miscarrying at a higher rate than before the war, while doctors are being forced to perform emergency caesarian sections without anesthetics, posing a high risk to both mother and child.

Smoke and Parachutes

The International Court of Justice’s third order was to “enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.” Israel’s leaders are ignoring that as well — or maybe they’ve just reinterpreted “enable” to mean “thwart.”

In January, before the court order, the IDF had been allowing approximately 140 aid trucks through their checkpoints into Gaza daily, instead of the 500 of the prewar period. If Gazans’ needs were to be fully satisfied, that flow of aid should have been steeply increased. Instead, the Israelis reduced the number of trucks allowed into Gaza to only 96 per day in February, all too literally feeding fears of starvation.

To make matters worse, groups of Israeli civilians have been blocking aid convoys, some by lying on the ground in front of the trucks. On a single day in February, 130 trucks were blocked and the IDF made no effort to deter the demonstrators. The Association of International Development Agencies reported that, even when their trucks were getting through the southern border crossings, most of them weren’t managing to reach the central or northern parts of the Strip, including Gaza City, because they were “hindered by Israeli military operations, including constant bombardment and checkpoint closures.”

The most notorious aid-denial incident occurred on February 27th, when at least 118 Palestinians were killed after Israel forces opened fire on a crush of people in Gaza City trying to get food from a truck convoy. Most of the victims of this “Flour Bag Massacre” seem to have been killed either by IDF troops firing from tanks or to have died in the crush of people desperately trying to escape being shot.

The Biden administration did not respond to such incidents as it should have — by threatening to cut off war funding and supplies to Israel, as it had earlier suspended financial support for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), Gaza’s biggest prewar supplier of food, water, and shelter. The reason: allegations that some Palestinian UNRWA staff had, in the past, aided Hamas. Now, however, Reuters and the Times of Israel suggest that several agency staff members released from Israeli detention were coerced into falsely “admitting” to Hamas affiliations through physical beatings, waterboarding, and threats to their family members. (U.S. aid is still being withheld from UNWRA.)

Instead of pushing the Netanyahu government ever harder to allow more aid, the Biden administration decided to put on an airshow by dropping pallet-loads of packaged food into Gaza from military aircraft. Aid organizations panned the airdrops as little more than empty “gestures,” or a “theater of cruelty.” Even a hulking C-130 cargo plane can carry only the equivalent of one or two aid trucks. And despite similar expenditures, such airdrops can deliver only one-eighth to one-tenth as much food as a truck convoy. Worse yet, tons of cargo dropped from the sky can itself prove deadly. During an airdrop over a refugee camp along the northern Gaza coast on March 8th, a parachute failed to open, and the heavily loaded pallet attached to it plummeted into a group of adults and children who had been watching the drop from a rooftop. Five of them were killed, and 10 injured.

To Netanyahu & Co., the orders issued by the International Court of Justice have had about as much impact as a mosquito bite. And the United States, which could put more pressure on Israel than any other nation, has shied away from substantive action of any sort. President Biden and other officials continue to act largely as if they were just bystanders and the carnage in Gaza was being caused by some random natural disaster.

We aren’t policy experts, but it seems to us that any national leader with a strong sense of justice, of right and wrong, would do whatever was necessary to stop a genocide like the one now unfolding in Gaza. He or she would at least threaten to end all military support to Israel and press other supplying nations to do the same. He or she would put real effort into forcing Israel to let the aid trucks roll in and allowing Palestinians to decide their own fate.

Sadly, those aren’t our leaders. For now, Palestinians remain trapped in a nightmare vividly evoked by a recent photo that shows pallets of food aid parachuting earthward into Gaza as plumes of smoke from Israeli airstrikes rise to meet them — with both the food and the munitions courtesy of the United States of America.

Priti Gulati Cox, (@PritiGCox), a TomDispatch regular, is an artist and writer.

Stan Cox, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of The Path to a Livable Future: A New Politics to Fight Climate Change, Racism, and the Next Pandemic, The Green New Deal and Beyond: Ending the Climate Emergency While We Still Can, and the current In Real Time climate series at City Lights Books.

20 March 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Marwan Asmar

The Israeli army doesn’t only hate the word but the picture and image too.

Journalists are today bearing the brunt of the Israeli war on Gaza. Their targeting by the Israeli army has been clear over the past six months. Israel doesn’t want them to report the extent of their atrocities on the civilian Palestinian population in the enclave.

Last February for instance it targeted three prominent journalists, making sure it muffled their voice and putting them out of action. The following report focuses on photojournalist Abdullah Al Hajj who was struck by an Israeli drone and whose legs were amputated.

Shortly before that, two Al Jazeera journalists, a reporter and a cameraman named Ismail Abu Omar and Ahmad Mattar, were also directly hit by an Israeli quadcopter in Rafah. They lie in the European hospital after life-threatening injuries, including injuries to the skull.

All three needs desperate, urgent surgery and treatment not found in Gaza and need to travel outside the enclave.

By Chris Hedges

The “temporary pier” being built on the Mediterranean coast of Gaza is not there to alleviate the famine, but to herd Palestinians onto ships and into permanent exile.

Piers allow things to come in. They allow things to go out. And Israel, which has no intention of halting its murderous siege of Gaza, including its policy of enforced starvation, appears to have found a solution to its problem of where to expel the 2.3 million Palestinians.

If the Arab world will not take them, as Secretary of State Antony Blinken proposed during his first round of visits after Oct. 7, the Palestinians will be cast adrift on ships. It worked in Beirut in 1982 when some eight and a half thousand Palestine Liberation Organization members were sent by sea to Tunisia and another two and a half thousand ended up in other Arab states. Israel expects that the same forced deportation by sea will work in Gaza.

Israel, for this reason, supports the “temporary pier” the Biden administration is building, to ostensibly deliver food and aid to Gaza – food and aid whose “distribution” will be overseen by the Israeli military.

“You need drivers that don’t exist, trucks that don’t exist feeding into a distribution system that doesn’t exist,” Jeremy Konyndyk, a former senior aid official in the Biden administration, and now president of the Refugees International aid advocacy group told The Guardian.

This “maritime corridor” is Israel’s Trojan Horse, a subterfuge to expel Palestinians. The small shipments of seaborne aid, like the food packets that have been air dropped, will not alleviate the looming famine. They are not meant to.

Five Palestinians were killed and several others injured when a parachute carrying aid failed and crashed onto a crowd of people near Gaza City’s Shati refugee camp.

“Dropping aid in this way is flashy propaganda rather than a humanitarian service,” the media office of the local government in Gaza said. “We previously warned it poses a threat to the lives of citizens in the Gaza Strip, and this is what happened today when the parcels fell on the citizens’ heads.”

If the U.S. or Israel were serious about alleviating the humanitarian crisis, the thousands of trucks with food and aid currently at the southern border of Gaza would be allowed to enter any of its multiple crossings. They are not. The “temporary pier,” like the air drops, is ghoulish theater, a way to mask Washington’s complicity in the genocide.

Israeli media reported the building of the pier was due to pressure by the United Arab Emirates, which threatened Israel with ending a land corridor trade route it administers in collusion with Saudi Arabia and Jordan, to bypass Yemen’s naval blockade.

The Jerusalem Post reported it was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who proposed the construction of the “temporary pier” to the Biden administration.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who has called Palestinians “human animals” and advocated a total siege of Gaza, including cutting off electricity, food, water and fuel, lauded the plan, saying “it is designed to bring aid directly to the residents and thus continue the collapse of Hamas’s rule in Gaza.”

“Why would Israel, the engineer of the Gaza famine, endorse the idea of establishing a maritime corridor for aid to address a crisis it initiated and is now worsening?” writes Tamara Nassar in an article titled “What’s the Real Purpose of Biden’s Gaza Port?” in  The Electronic Intifada. “This might appear paradoxical if one were to assume that the primary aim of the maritime corridor is to deliver aid.”

When Israel offers a gift to the Palestinians you can be sure it is a poison apple. That Israel got the Biden administration to construct the pier is one more example of the inverted relationship between Washington and Jerusalem, where the Israel lobby has bought off elected officials in the two ruling parties.

Oxfam in a March 15 report accuses Israel of actively hindering aid operations in Gaza in defiance of the orders by the International Court of Justice. It notes that 1.7 million Palestinians, some 75 percent of the Gaza population, are facing famine and two-thirds of the hospitals and over 80 percent of all health clinics in Gaza are no longer operable. The majority of people, the report reads, “have no access to clean drinking water” and “sanitation services are not functioning.”

The report reads:

The conditions we have observed in Gaza are beyond catastrophic, and we have not only seen failure by Israeli authorities to meet their responsibility to facilitate and support international aid efforts, but in fact seen active steps being taken to hinder and undermine such aid efforts. Israel’s control of Gaza continues to be characterized by deliberate restrictive actions that have led to a severe and systemic dysfunctionality in the delivery of aid. Humanitarian organizations operational in Gaza are reporting a worsening situation since the International Court of Justice imposed provisional measures in light of the plausible risk of genocide, with intensified Israeli barriers, restrictions and attacks against humanitarian personnel. Israel has maintained a ‘convenient illusion of a response’ in Gaza to serve its claim that it is allowing aid in and conducting the war in line with international laws.

Oxfam says Israel employs “a dysfunctional and undersized inspection system that keeps aid snarled up, subjected to onerous, repetitive and unpredictable bureaucratic procedures that are contributing to trucks being stranded in giant queues for 20 days on average.” Israel, Oxfam explains, rejects “items of aid as having ‘dual (military) use,’ banning vital fuel and generators entirely along with other items essential for a meaningful humanitarian response such as protective gear and communications kit.” Rejected aid, “must go through a complex ‘pre-approval’ system or end up being held in limbo at the Al Arish warehouse in Egypt.” Israel has also “cracked down on humanitarian missions, largely sealing off northern Gaza, and restricting international humanitarian workers’ access not only into Gaza, but Israel and the West Bank including East Jerusalem too.”

Israel has allowed 15,413 trucks into Gaza during the past 157 days of war. Oxfam estimates that the population of Gaza needs five times that number. Israel allowed 2,874 trucks in February, a 44 percent reduction from the previous month. Before Oct. 7, 500 aid trucks entered Gaza daily.

Israeli soldiers have also killed scores of Palestinians attempting to receive aid from trucks in more than two dozen incidents. These attacks include the killing of at least 21 Palestinians, and the wounding of 150, on March 14, when Israeli forces fired on thousands of people in Gaza City. The same area had been targeted by Israeli soldiers hours earlier.

“Israel’s assault has caught Gaza’s own aid workers and international agencies’ partners inside a ‘practically uninhabitable’ environment of mass displacement and deprivation, where 75 percent of solid waste is now being dumped in random sites, 97 percent of groundwater made unfit for human use, and the Israeli state using starvation as a weapon of war,” Oxfam says.

There is no place in Gaza, Oxfam notes, that is safe “amid the forcible and often multiple displacements of almost the entire population, which makes the principled distribution of aid unviable, including agencies’ ability to help repair vital public services at scale.”

Oxfam blasts Israel for its “disproportionate” and “indiscriminate” attacks on “civilian and humanitarian assets” as well as “solar, water, power and sanitation plants, UN premises, hospitals, roads, and aid convoys and warehouses, even when these assets are supposedly ‘deconflicted’ after their coordinates have been shared for protection.”

The health ministry in Gaza said Monday that at least 31,726 people have been killed since the Israeli assault began five months ago. The death toll includes at least 81 deaths in the previous 24 hours, a ministry statement said, adding that 73,792 people have been wounded in Gaza since Oct. 7. Thousands more are missing, many buried under the rubble.

None of these Israeli tactics will be altered with the building of a “temporary pier.” In fact, given the pending ground assault on Rafah, where 1.2 million displaced Palestinians are crowded in tent cities or camped out in the open air, Israel’s tactics will only get worse.

Israel, by design, is creating a humanitarian crisis of such catastrophic proportions, with thousands of Palestinians killed by bombs, shells, missiles, bullets, starvation and infectious diseases, that the only option will be death or deportation. The pier is where the last act in this gruesome genocidal campaign will be played out as Palestinians are herded by Israeli soldiers onto ships.

How appropriate that the Biden administration, without whom this genocide could not be carried out, will facilitate it.

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

19 March 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Marwan Asmar

The fate of 80 people including a group of journalists, including Al Jazeera reporter, hangs in the balance as they are taken for Interrogation by the Israeli army.

The life of journalists in the Gaza Strip has been a dangerous and a deadly one since Israel launched its war on the enclave after 7 October. Many were deliberately targeted, killed and injured by Israeli snipers and bombers. So far 133 Palestinian journalists were killed.

But this figure is likely to increase vastly upward with the latest Israeli onslaught on Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. Israeli soldiers arrested at least 80 people, including doctors, medical staff and a group of journalists which they took away to an unknown destination.

Interrogation

On such journalist is Ismail Al Ghoul, TV satellite reporter for Al Jazeera. He was arrested together with his crew with reports that he was beaten before being taken away no doubt for interrogation. Up till then, journalists had taken Al Shifa as their place of residence mainly because of its convenience.

It was in the center of the Strip and easier to move around and cover the rapid news taken place as a result of the incessant Israeli strikes. From Al Shifa, you could travel to the north of the Gaza Strip, to the east, west, south and off course, the refugee camps sprawling in the mainly central areas of Gaza and which had taken a battering in this one-sided war.

At the time of the arrests as well, the Israeli army smashed the broadcasting equipment of the journalists stationed there. In Al Shifa, media workers could also power their broadcasting equipment in an enclave where electricity had long been cut off over the whole of Gaza by the Israelis.

At present nobody knows the whereabouts of the journalists except to say the first thing the Israeli soldiers did was to round them up and strip them of their clothes, a practice followed by the Israelis over the past six months.

This is the fourth raid on the hospital by the Israeli army in as many months with the first being taken place last November in search of the infamous “Hamas headquarter” underneath the grounds of the hospital and which was nowhere to be found.

However, Al Shifa continued to be targeted. The latest raid on the hospital ground was a result of an Israeli intelligence tip off that Hamas operatives were in the vicinity and hence it was reported that fierce fighting ensued which resulted in one soldier killed as admitted by the Israeli army.

The raid on the hospital which was made in the early hours of Monday morning resulted in fire exchange throughout the day with Israeli soldiers with tanks surrounding the hospital and calling for military backup from the air bombing different places surrounding the once-proud medical complex but now lies in tatters thanks to Israeli bombing. According to Israeli army estimates, the military operations resulted in 20 people killed.

One woman was seen crying hysterically after seeing her house in a building flattened by an Israeli missile. She had left earlier ago to look for food to feed her children. When she came back the building was gone with probably everyone inside it under the rubble.

Because of what happened to Al Shifa previously, it no longer functioned as a medical facility. It offers the bare minimum of medical care to those who come it and doesn’t have the medicines and pharmaceuticals because of the Israel siege and the grip of Zionist army.

However, according to estimates it has about 30,000 displaced persons in the hospital grounds who came to it for shelter from Israeli bombing and missiles. Anyone who moved was shot at by an Israeli sniper who was carefully placed in one of the buildings of the hospital.

In this last raid, the soldiers quickly began ordering all of the people – excluding those it took in custody – to make their way further down south, naming these places such as Al Mawasi to the west of Khan Younis, erroneously, as safe areas. But these safe areas including the far-southern city of Rafah, are frequently bombed from the air with a possible full-scale Israeli troop invasion, soon.

Today no one knows what the fate of those arrested will be. No one knows what will happen to Ismail Al Ghoul and the other journalists. But the Israeli army keeps saying this would only be a short operation and will leave the medical facility soon. But we are yet to see.

Marwan Asmar is an Amman-based journalist

19 March 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Chris Hedges

The Democratic Party had one last chance to implement the kind of New Deal Reforms that could save us from another Trump presidency and Christian fascism. It failed.

Joe Biden and the Democratic Party made a Trump presidency possible once and look set to make it possible again. If Trump returns to power, it will not be due to Russian interference, voter suppression or because the working class is filled with irredeemable bigots and racists. It will be because the Democrats are as indifferent to the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza as they are to immigrants, the poor in our impoverished inner cities, those driven into bankruptcy by medical bills, credit card debt and usurious mortgages, those discarded, especially in rural America, by waves of mass layoffs and workers, trapped in the serfdom of the gig economy, with its job instability and suppressed wages.

Biden and the Democrats, along with the Republican Party, gutted antitrust enforcement and deregulated banks and corporations, allowing them to cannibalize the nation. They backed legislation in 1982 to green light the manipulation of stocks through massive buybacks and the “harvesting” of companies by private equity firms that resulted in mass layoffs. They pushed through onerous trade deals, including the North American Free Trade Agreement, the greatest betrayal of the working class since the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which crippled union organizing. They were full partners in the construction of the vast archipelagos of the U.S. prison system — the largest in the world — and the militarization of police to turn them into internal armies of occupation. They fund the endless wars.

The Democrats dutifully serve their corporate masters, without whom most of them, including Biden, would not have a political career. This is why Biden and the Democrats will not turn on those who are destroying our economy and extinguishing our democracy. The slops in the trough would dry up. Advocating reforms jeopardize their fiefdoms of privilege and power. They fancy themselves as “captains of the ship,” labor journalist Hamilton Nolan writes, but they are “actually the wood-eating shipworms who are consuming the thing from inside until it sinks.”

Authoritarianism is nurtured in the fertile soil of a bankrupt liberalism. This was true in Weimar Germany. It was true in the former Yugoslavia. And it is true now. The Democrats had four years to institute New Deal reforms. They failed. Now we will pay.

A second Trump term will not be like the first. It will be about vengeance. Vengeance against the institutions that targeted Trump – the press, the courts, the intelligence agencies, disloyal Republicans, artists, intellectuals, the federal bureaucracy and the Democratic Party.

Our imperial presidency, if Donald Trump returns to power, will shift effortlessly into a dictatorship that emasculates the legislative and judicial branches.  The plan to snuff out our anemic democracy is methodically laid out in the 887-page plan amassed by the Heritage Foundation called “Mandate for Leadership.”

The Heritage Foundation spent $22 million to draw up policy proposals, hiring lists and transition plans in Project 2025 to save Trump from the rudderless chaos that plagued his first term. Trump blames “snakes,” “traitors,” and the “Deep State” for undermining his first administration.

Our industrious American fascists, clutching the Christian cross and waving the flag, will begin work on day one to purge federal agencies of “snakes” and “traitors,” promulgate “Biblical” values, cut taxes for the billionaire class, abolish the Environmental Protection Agency, stack the courts and federal agencies with ideologues and strip workers of the few rights and protections they have left. War and internal security, including the wholesale surveillance of the public, will remain the main business of the state. The other functions of the state, especially those that focus on social services, including Social Security and protection of the vulnerable, will wither away.

Unfettered and unregulated capitalism, which has no self-imposed limits, turns everything into a commodity, from human beings to the natural world, which it exploits, until exhaustion or collapse. It first creates a mafia economy, as Karl Polanyi writes, and then a mafia government. Political theorists, including Aristotle, Karl Marx and Sheldon Wolin, warn that when oligarchs seize power, the only options left are tyranny or revolution.

The Democrats know the working class has abandoned them. And they know why. Democratic Party pollster Mike Lux writes:

[C]ontrary to many pundits’ assumptions, economic issues are driving the problems of Democrats in non-metro working class counties far more than the culture war…[T]hese voters wouldn’t care all that much about cultural difference and the woke thing if they thought Democrats gave more of a damn about economic challenges they face deeply and daily…The voters we need to win in these counties are not inherently right-wing on social issues.

But the Democrats will not alienate the corporations and billionaires who keep them in office. They have opted instead for two self-defeating tactics: lies and fear.

The Democrats express a faux concern for workers who are victimized by mass layoffs while at the same time courting the corporate leaders who orchestrate these layoffs with lavish government contracts. The same hypocrisy sees them express concern for civilians being slaughtered in Gaza while funneling billions of dollars in weapons to Israel and vetoing ceasefire resolutions at the U.N. to sustain the genocide.

Les Leopold in his book Wall Street’s War on Workers, filled with exhaustive polling and data, illustrates that economic dislocation and despair is the engine behind an enraged working class, not racism and bigotry.

He writes about the decision by Siemens to close its plant in Olean, New York with 530 decent paying union jobs. While Democrats bemoaned the closure, they refused to deny federal contracts to Siemans to protect the workers at the plant.

Biden then invited Siemens’ USA CEO Barbara Humpton to the White House signing of the 2021 infrastructure bill. The photo of the signing shows Humpton standing in the front row along with New York Senator Chuck Schumer.

Mingo County in the early 20th century was the epicenter of an armed clash between the United Mine Workers and the coal barons, with their hired gun thugs from the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency. The gun thugs evicted striking workers in 1912 from company housing and beat up and shot union members until the state militia occupied the coal towns and broke the strike. The federal siege was not lifted until 1933 by the Roosevelt administration. The union, which had been banned, was legalized.

“Mingo County didn’t forget, at least not for a long time,” Leopold writes. “As late as 1996, with more than 3,200 coal miners still at work, Mingo County gave Bill Clinton a whopping 69.7 percent of its vote. But every four years thereafter, support for the Democrats declined, going down and down, and down some more. By 2020, Joe Biden received only 13.9 percent of the vote in Mingo, a brutal downturn in a county that once saw the Democratic Party as its savior.”

The 3,300 Mingo County coal mining jobs by 2020 had fallen to 300, the largest loss of coal jobs in any county in the country.

The lies of Democratic politicians did far more damage to working men and women than any of the lies spewed by Trump.

There have been at least 30 million mass layoffs since 1996 when the Bureau of Labor Statistics started tracking them, according to the Labor Institute. The reigning oligarchs, not content with mass layoffs and reducing the unionized workforce in the private sector to a paltry 6 percent, have filed legal papers to shut down the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal agency that enforces labor rights. Elon Musk’s SpaceX as well as Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s targeted the NLRB – already stripped of most of its power to levy fines and force corporate compliance – after it accused Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s of breaking the law by blocking union organizing. The NLRB accused SpaceX of illegally firing eight workers for criticizing Musk. SpaceX, Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joes are seeking to get the federal courts to overturn the 89-year-old National Labor Relations Act to prevent judges from hearing cases brought against corporations for violating labor laws.

Fear — fear of the return of Trump and Christian fascism — is the only card the Democrats have left to play. This will work in urban, liberal enclaves where college educated technocrats, part of the globalized knowledge economy, are busy scolding and demonizing the working class for their ingratitude.

The Democrats have foolishly written off these “deplorables” as a lost political cause. This precariat, the mantra goes, is victimized not by a predatory system built to enrich the billionaire class, but by their ignorance and individual failures. Dismissing the disenfranchised absolves the Democrats from advocating the legislation to protect and create decent-paying jobs.

Fear has no hold in deindustrialized urban landscapes and the neglected wastelands of rural America, where families struggle without sustainable work, an opioid crisis, food deserts, personal bankruptcies, evictions, crippling debt and profound despair.

They want what Trump wants. Vengeance. Who can blame them?

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

18 March 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Andre Damon

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that Israel would proceed with its plans to assault Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza, where over 1.5 million refugees are sheltering.

“No international pressure will stop Israel,” Netanyahu said during a meeting of Israel’s cabinet, adding, “If we stop the war now before achieving all of its goals, the meaning is that Israel had lost the war, and we will not allow this.

“We will operate in Rafah,” Netanyahu said. “This will take several weeks, and it will happen.”

On Friday, the Israeli military approved a plan for an offensive in Rafah, combined with the displacement of refugees sheltering there to camps to the north, which Israeli officials called “humanitarian islands.”

Netanyahu reiterated his plans to attack Rafah following a speech Thursday by US Democratic Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, who called Netanyahu an “obstacle” to “peace” and said the prime minister had “lost his way.” US President Joe Biden effectively endorsed Schumer’s remarks, saying it was a “good speech.”

But Netanyahu’s statements Saturday demonstrated that these verbal criticisms by US officials have no effect on the conduct of the genocide. Israel continues to kill over 100 people every single day, while the entire population of Gaza is on the verge of starvation.

Amid all this, US funding and weapons to Israel continue to flow uninterrupted, and the White House has made it clear it has no “red lines” for what crimes Israel is allowed to commit before the US stops providing it with arms and funding.

The United States has already offered a pre-emptive endorsement of the assault on Rafah by making the only qualification the existence of a “plan” to relocate the civilian population.

On Sunday, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reported that 13,000 children have been killed in Gaza to date, adding that many children affected by malnutrition in Gaza “don’t even have the energy to cry.”

“What’s happening now is more than 13,000 children already have been killed, which is an astronomical, horrifying number,” said UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell in an interview on CBS News Sunday.

She added, “Thousands more have been injured or we can’t even determine where they are. They may be stuck under rubble. Thousands more have lost one or both parents. Some of these children, you’ve seen them on the news, they’re just by themselves managing their younger siblings. I mean, it’s a horrifying situation.”

Russell said that one in three children under the age of two is suffering from acute malnutrition.

She continued, “I’ve been in wards of children who are suffering from severe anemia and malnutrition, and the whole ward is absolutely quiet because the children, the babies, don’t even have the energy to cry.”

In a report published Sunday, the UK-based charity Oxfam said Israel continues to “systematically and deliberately block and undermine any meaningful international humanitarian response.”

Oxfam reported that the deliberate starvation of the population of Gaza has only worsened since the ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) calling on Israel to stop killing Palestinians and to allow food into Gaza.

“The ICJ order should have shocked Israeli leaders to change course, but since then conditions in Gaza have actually worsened,” Oxfam Middle East and North Africa Director Sally Abi Khalil said Sunday. “Israeli authorities are not only failing to facilitate the international aid effort, but are actively hindering it. We believe that Israel is failing to take all measures within its power to prevent genocide.”

To date, Israel has killed over 32,000 people in Gaza since October 7, with tens of thousands more missing. Between March 14 and 15, Israeli forces killed 149 Palestinians in Gaza and injured 300 more.

On Sunday, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) announced that the military is once again launching a raid on Al-Shifa Hospital, raising the prospect that doctors and patients will be killed by IDF troops.

“The IDF is conducting a high-precision operation in limited areas of Shifa Hospital following concrete evidence that demanded immediate action,” the IDF said in a statement.

18 March 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Marwan Asmar

Al Jazeera correspondent Anas Al Sharif reports on the starvation experienced by people in north Gaza and what they are doing to overcome their hunger. He talks to three young boys about picking shrubs near the Jabalia Camp.

This report was made slightly before aid started to trickle to north Gaza, a 13-truck convey of flour that entered the region from the south, the first in months.

This is a drop in the ocean but many hope, it will be the first of other trucks that will be allowed by the Israelis to enter this area of the Strip.

People in northern Gaza are in starvation mode. The 700,000 people here, are acutely worse than those in the south and international agencies speak of a looming famine if aid trucks are not allowed in.

The clip is in a question/answer form:

Salamu Alaikum. hi, how are you, what are you doing?

“We are picking shrubs so we can cook and eat for dinner tonight.

What, near the beach, here?

“We have come here to wait for aid (planes, now-a-days, drop bundles of aid from the sky). I heard they are going to drop aid today and we have been waiting for them since 7 o’clock this morning.

(Another small boy muttered in agreement). Today the Gaza is frequently filled with black parachutes that open in the skies while carrying the airdrops.

And

“We are still waiting. We don’t want to go home empty-handed, so we thought we’d pick shrubs and to take home to cook.

(The reporter addresses the third boy): “What are you gathering?

“Same…some wood and shrubs.” The wood is for fire as many Gazan families today have no gas and cook on fire.

Are you going to eat this?

All replied “yes. We want to feed the children back home, so they wouldn’t starve to death.”

“We are all dying from hunger here,” added Al Sharif.

“They are for the kids which we want to feed. There is supposed be a ceasefire and allow the entry of aid so that the children won’t die.”

“Kids are dying every day in the Kamal Al Adwan and nobody pays any attention to them,” the bigger boy emphasized.

“This is the prevailing scene” the reporter interjects. “The children came to wait for the planes that drop the aid but they haven’t arrived till now so the boys started picking what sparse shrubs they can from this place so they can provide for the Iftar meal of the day in the Muslim month of Ramadan.

Maybe, these shrubs are not fit for eating but many families today in this part of the world are forced to do that.”

Marwan Asmar is a journalist from Amman Jordan writing on Middle East affairs

18 March 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Ram Puniyani

The leaders of BJP, the ruling dispensation have been claiming to be winning more that 400 (370BJP +30 Allies) seats in the forthcoming parliamentary elections (Char sau paar) of 2024.  This is not based on any psephological analysis but purely propagated for political reasons.

Justifying this ‘char sau par’ the Karnataka BJP MP of long standing Anantkumar Hegde explained the need for such a figure. As per him BJP intends to change the Constitution for which 2/3^rd majority is needed. In a public meeting he stated, that the party needs 400 seats to change the Constitution, “If the Constitution has to be amended — the Congress fundamentally distorted the Constitution by forcefully filling unnecessary things in it (added, secularism, socialism), especially by bringing in laws that were aimed at suppressing the Hindu society — if all of this has to be changed, it is not possible with this (current) majority,”

BJP distanced itself from this statement of the sitting MP, as if they do not really approve of such a statement. There are some news items saying that due to this statement he may be denied the ticket. Whether he is denied a ticket on this ground or not; one thing is sure that BJP has no aversion to such statements. This MP had said the same thing in 2017, when he was a Central minister in the BJP government. He was duly given the ticket from this party in 2019 General elections by BJP.

Rahul Gandhi, Congress MP, and many others feel that what Hegde is saying is precisely what explains the figure of 400. “The statement of the BJP MP that he needs 400 seats to change the Constitution is a public declaration of the hidden agenda of Narendra Modi and his ‘Sangh Parivar’. The ultimate goal of Narendra Modi and the BJP is to destroy Baba Saheb’s Constitution. They hate justice, equality, civil rights and democracy,” Rahul Gandhi wrote in Hindi on X (formally Twitter).

The former Congress president also alleged that “by dividing society, guarding the freedom of expression and crippling independent institutions, they want to turn India’s great democracy into a narrow dictatorship by conspiring to eliminate the opposition”.

The BJP has a twin track strategy to undermine the democratic values, the values of equality of our Constitution. Its parent organization RSS opposed the constitution right from the beginning. After the Indian Constitution came into being RSS unofficial mouthpiece Organiser wrote, “…In Our Constitution, There Is No Mention of That Unique Constitutional Development in Ancient Bharat. To This Day His Laws As Enunciated In The Manusmriti Excite The Admiration Of The World And Elicit Spontaneous Obedience And Conformity. But To Our Constitutional Pundits That Means Nothing.”

When BJP came to power as NDA in 1998 one of the first things it did was to appoint a commission to review the Constitution. This Commission’s, (Venkatchaliah Commission), report could not be undertaken for implementation as there was a severe opposition to any tampering with our Constitution. From 2014, when BJP has been in power; times and over again it has used the preamble of our Constitution by deleting the words Secular and Socialist.

Prior to this when K.Sudarshan became the Chief of RSS in 2000, he frankly stated that the Indian Constitution is based on Western values so should be replaced by one based on Indian holy books. “Sudarshan said the constitution was of no use for the people of the country as it was based on the Government of India Act of 1935, …We need not fight shy of altering the constitution completely,…”

Not too long ago, Chief of PM’s economic advisory council, Dr. Vivek Debroy had also called for a change of constitution in a lead article in Livemint on August 15, 2023. So voices of major stature from within the BJP organization and state officials do keep raising such voices while officially the BJP or BJP led Government makes the show of distancing itself from such utterances.

On another track; since BJP has been in power for the last one decade, what has it done to the core value of the Indian Constitution: Democracy and equality? As far as democracy is concerned, all the pillars of democratic state, Constitutional institutions ED, CBI, IT, EC all are being controlled by the executive and the executive itself is restricted to one person. The Judiciary at various levels has been weakened by various mechanisms. There are numerous examples of this; one such being the detention of Umar Khaild and refusal to hear his bail plea from the last three years.

Freedom of expression is down in the dumps. With the mainstream media under the belt of pro Government Corporate, it is the Voice of Ruling Government which is broadcast through major TV channels and newspapers. The independent voices have limited space available to articulate their opinions. Freedom of Expression; the major pillar of a democratic society has gone for a toss.

Freedom of Religion has been declining with many International indices. ‘India as a country of particular concern,’ is the label for India as per US freedom of religion watchdog. As per V-Dem India ranked 104 on democracy Index, between Niger and Ivory Coast! This is what has happened during the last ten years, to practically denigrate the democratic freedoms through executive actions leading to such a drastic fall in democratic index.

Not long ago it was Lal Krishna Advani, who had said that India is living through an undeclared emergency. All the components of freedom have been stifled through the foot soldiers of Hindu nationalists apart from state officials, while the ruling Governments merrily looks the other way around, a clear signal to these elements that this regime grants full impunity to violations of democratic rights of minorities and weaker sections of society.

As such if we look around every ‘religious nationalist’ outfit is averse to democratic freedoms. They do resort to tuning their constitutions in such a direction, also their ground level workers resort to the actions promoting divisive and oppressive politics. India is joining this club of ‘Democracy suppressors’ like Pakistan or Sri Lanka. BJP is resorting to twin track politics, aiming for changing the Constitution on one hand and practically undermining it, on the other!

17 March 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Marwan Asmar

A woman narrates how she escaped alive while her house was being bulldozed

“What happened to us is beyond imagination,” said a displaced person in Gaza.

“It was like anybody who moved outside the home was shot and left outside for the cats,” the woman who moved from the north of the Gaza Strip continued.

It happened so fast

“A youth was sent by our neighbors to see if we were alright and it happened all so fast. He was talking to me just as I opened the door and he was shot dead right there, in front of me,” she added.

“He was left outside the house we were living for nine days,” she told Al Jazeera TV channel.

But this was only the beginning of a chain of events that eventually landed her in the Abu Yousef Al Najar Hospital in Rafah in the south of Gaza where 1.4 million internally displaced refugees are now located thanks to the Israeli army.

“The Israeli army started bulldozing right on top of our heads but miraculously, me and mother, were able to leave the house alive. At the time, the bodies of other martyrs were scattered outside,” she continued.

Burying inside homes

The situation was scary and chaotic.  “Our neighbors were forced to bury their martyrs inside their houses and this applied to many people, for there was no way anyone could bury their dead outside of their homes because of the intensity of the bombardment.”

In the case of her neighbor’s house, she narrated the story of the family that had been living there before it was bombed. “A doctor was living there, he had worked in the Indonesian Hospital in the north then Kamal Al Adwan Hospital then moved to a clinic in Jabalia before making it down here, she narrated.

The fateful day happened when “the Israeli army knocked on their door, shot the doctor point blank and then immediately fired a tank missile on the house killing him and his children instantly.”

This account was edited from Al Jazeera Mubasher with the handle of @ajmubasher by Dr Marwan Asmar, an Amman-based journalist who writes on Middle East affairs.

17 March 2024

Source: countercurrents.org