Archives: Articles

By Mehdi Hasan

Mr President, make the call. End this genocide

Picture the scene. An Israeli prime minister launches airstrikes on an Arab population. Civilians are killed in their thousands. An American president, stunned and shocked by the scenes of carnage on his TV screen, makes a call to his Israeli counterpart. And … within minutes … the bombing is over.

Sound crazy? Or maybe simplistic? Perhaps naive, even?

Yet, the year was 1982. What was supposed to have been a limited incursion into southern Lebanon by the Israeli military over the summer, under the leadership of Ariel Sharon, then defense minister (remember him?), morphed into a months-long siege of Beirut and an all-out assault on the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Between June and August, the Israelis cut off food, water and power to the Lebanese capital in a brutal attempt to destroy the PLO, whose fighters were holed up inside a tunnel network below Beirut. (Sound familiar?)

On 12 August, in what would later be dubbed “Black Thursday”, Israeli jets bombed Beirut for 11 consecutive hours, killing more than 100 people. That same day, a horrified Ronald Reagan placed a phone call to Menachem Begin, then Israeli prime minister, to “express his outrage” and condemn the “needless destruction and bloodshed”.

“Menachem, this is a holocaust,” Reagan told Begin.

Yes, an American leader used the H-word in conversation with an Israeli leader. Begin responded with sarcasm, telling the US president that “I think I know what a holocaust is.” Reagan, however, didn’t budge, insisting on the “imperative” for a ceasefire in Beirut.

Twenty minutes. That’s all the time it took for Begin to call back and tell the president he had ordered Sharon to stop the bombing. It was over. “I didn’t know I had that kind of power,” a surprised Reagan told an aide, upon putting down the phone.

Flash forward 42 years and the Israeli assault on Gaza has now gone on for twice as long as the siege of Beirut. In 1982, Reagan was said to have been moved by the image of a single wounded Lebanese child. As of last week, more than 12,300 Palestinian children had been killed in Gaza, and tens of thousands maimed and injured, in just four months.

Then, it was the nightly news. Now, we all have Instagram. “The international community continues to fail the Palestinian people,” the Irish lawyer Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh told the international court of justice (ICJ) at the Hague last month, “despite the horror of the genocide against the Palestinian people being livestreamed from Gaza to our mobile phones, computers and television screens. The first genocide in history where its victims are broadcasting their own destruction in real time in the desperate, so far vain, hope that the world might do something.”

Forget the world. Joe Biden, like Reagan before him, could end the current carnage with a single phone call to Benjamin Netanyahu. He too has “that kind of power”.

Don’t believe anyone who tells you otherwise. Those in the media who say that “America is discovering the limits of its leverage on Israel.” Those in Congress who argue that US presidents “don’t have as much leverage over Israel as they thought”. Those in the White House who claim “they are unable to exert significant influence on America’s closest ally in the Middle East to change its course”.

This is all disingenuous nonsense. It is, to quote the media critic Adam Johnson, a “feigned powerlessness” that has been buttressed, he notes, by a series of “self-serving leaks” from the Biden White House that insist the president “may or not be kind of annoyed over” Israel’s actions.

The truth is that the commander-in-chief of the richest country in the history of the world is far from powerless and, like every commander-in-chief before him, possesses plenty of leverage.

How do we know? First, because members of the US defense establishment say so. Take Bruce Riedel, who spent three decades in the CIA and at the national security council, advising four different presidents. “The US has immense leverage,” Riedel pointed out in a recent interview. “Everyday we provide Israel with the missiles, with the drones, with the ammunition, that it needs to sustain a major military campaign like the campaign in Gaza.”

And yet, Riedel admitted, “American presidents have been notably shy about using that leverage for domestic political reasons.”

Second, we know Biden has major leverage because members of the Israeli defense establishment – as plenty of observers have pointed out – say so, too. In late October 2023, Israeli lawmakers challenged Yoav Gallant, the defense minister, over the decision to allow (a little) humanitarian aid into Gaza, before the release of any hostages. How did Gallant respond? “The Americans insisted and we are not in a place where we can refuse them. We rely on them for planes and military equipment. What are we supposed to do? Tell them no?”

The following month, retired Israeli Maj Gen Yitzhak Brick went even further than Gallant. “All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the US,” Brick said in an interview in November. “The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability … Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”

Got that? The Israelis cannot “refuse” the Americans. In fact, the president of the US could “turn off the tap” – ammunition, bombs, intel – and thereby end what the ICJ has deemed to be a plausible genocide in Gaza.

Third, we know Biden has the power to stop Netanyahu from killing Palestinians en masse in Gaza because … he has done it before. In May 2021, Israel bombed the strip for 11 straight days, killing more than 100 Palestinians, including 66 children. Over that same period, Hamas and other armed Palestinian groups in Gaza fired more than 4,000 rockets at Israel, killing 14 civilians. Then as now, Netanyahu rejected calls for a ceasefire – from Hamas, as well as from France, Egypt and Jordan.

But guess who he couldn’t reject? Yes, the president of the United States. “We need to accomplish more,” pleaded Netanyahu when Biden called him on 19 May, according to the journalist Franklin Foer. The president’s response? “Hey, man, we are out of runway here. It’s over.”

Two days later, a ceasefire was announced. And, less than a month later, the Israeli prime minister had been ejected from office.

So why then, but not now? Perhaps because Biden, like millions of Americans and others around the world, was understandably horrified by the terror endured by Israelis on 7 October. But where is his horror over the ongoing terror in Gaza? Over the two Palestinian mothers being killed there every hour or the 10 Palestinian kids having one or both of their legs amputated every day or the one in four Palestinians literally starving in Gaza right now?

Could it be that Biden places less value on Arab lives than … Reagan? “The president does not seem to acknowledge the humanity of all parties affected by this conflict,” a former Biden administration official told Mother Jones in December. “He has described Israeli suffering in great detail, while Palestinian suffering is left vague, if mentioned at all.”

The president’s admirers like to refer to him as the “comforter-in-chief”. His aides call him a “devout Catholic”. He himself has talked, movingly and at length, about grief, loss and pain. So how does that same Biden sleep at night, as US-made bombs continue to fall on innocents in Gaza? How does he justify his inaction and complicity? Here is a man who has experienced devastating personal tragedies, losing his 29-year-old wife and one-year-old daughter in a car crash and then, decades later, losing a son to brain cancer. Yet he now possesses the power, unique among the 8 billion people who live on this planet, to pick up the phone, dial a number beginning +972, and halt the daily killing of hundreds of wives and children.

It really is that simple.

So Mr President, there’s no point “venting” your frustration in private and telling only your aides that the war “has to stop”.

Tell that to Netanyahu. Make the call. End this genocide.

21 February 2024

Mehdi Hasan is a broadcaster and author, and a former host on MSNBC. He is a Guardian US columnist.

Source: theguardian.com

By Maung Zarni

One day after the Union of Burma Day this year (12-February), to mark the formation of a new post-colonial Burma as a union of multiple ethnic nations, the Office of the Commander-in-Chief of the Defence Services posted the transcript (verbatim) of the speech delivered at a press conference by its spokesperson, Major General Zaw Min Tun.

It concerns the embattled coup regime’s announcement that it is enforcing the two acts – the People’s Military Service Act (or conscription) and the Reserve Military Force Law – that were adopted in November 2010, something that has caused panic among the country’s public, particularly the age groups which are deemed eligible for conscription.

The conscription law concerns both men and women of certain age groups being called to serve in the country’s defence services.

The Reserve Military Force Law is about the veterans who retired from, or were allowed to discharge from active duties, automatically being required to stay in the Reservist Corps for the next 5 years since the day of retirement, or discharge.

The good general-spokesman is a popular laughingstock and derisively nicknamed, in Burmese, as Zaw Mae Lone, by the public at home and in the diaspora, for his loathsome lies and all too apparent distortions of the country’s realities of violence, wars, and the junta’s incurable leadership and policy failures. So, I shall refer to the junta spokesperson as Zaw Mae Lone.

In the press conference, Zaw Mae Lone took aim at the “nation-destroying” Myanmar language media which refused to call out on the practice of conscription by anti-junta forces in non-Bama ethnic regions such as Shan state. He then framed the nationwide armed uprising against the junta as “a proxy war” by foreign funders, without being able to offer a shred of evidence. And he couldn’t because not a single foreign government has financed, armed or trained hundreds of anti-junta resistance organizations, which organically mushroomed after the coup three years ago, or others that have been in existence for decades.

Then Zaw Mae Lone went on to deny that the junta’s curious timing behind the enforcement of these acts had anything to do with a steady stream of verified news reports about hundreds of its troops including battalion and strategic command commanders, abandoning their posts and bases in various ethnic states. Chin, Rakhine, Shan, Karenni and Karen regions bordering on India, Bangladesh, China and Thailand have witnessed the junta troops seeking refuge across borders in India and Bangladesh or simply surrendering to the anti-junta ethnic resistance organizations (EROs). As they abandon their bases – and the General Staff’s Orders to fight on – these deserting units have gifted massive caches of assorted military hardware and munition including armoured vehicles, and a few Howitzers.

It is as if Zaw Mae Lone wanted to hurl insults at the intelligence of the general public, who have seen, in their social media feeds, the humiliating video news of the junta troops fleeing for their lives, with their families, as the EROs overran their regimental, or battalion bases.

In 2017, the public in Burma and the world saw over 730,000 Rohingya genocide survivors filing across the country’s western land borders into neighbouring Bangladesh.

In the early months of 2024, the same Myanmar public were treated to the video news images of Myanmar Border Guards and other infantry units walking across the same border for their survival, only here they are less traumatized and more orderly. Presumably, these rank-and-file soldiers now seeking temporary refuge on Bangladesh soil, were the ones who perpetrated genocidal acts of mass killings of thousands of Rohingya, burning over 300 villages and gang-raping the young and old Rohingya women in 2016 and 2017. Some of them openly gloated how many Rohingya they had killed in a given day on their Facebook walls.

On my own Facebook feed, I have noticed more than a few “Karma is a bitch” postings from Rohingya people.

Instead of exploring an honourable exit for the universally reviled junta in particular, and the country’s largest military force, its instrument of decades-old repression, from national politics, the junta leaders have once again doubled down. They sent Zaw Mae Lone to lie to the country via its diabolical press conferences.

A week after his press briefing on the conscription plan, the junta had court-martialled and sentenced to death the three generals whose troops in the Northern Shan State gambling town on the Sino-Burmese borders, known as Laukkai, surrendered to the Three Brotherhood Alliance resistance in the resistance offensive known as 10/27, after the date of October 27, 2023.

Stating, with a straight face, that all is well with the junta’s troops, the spokesperson who heads the True News Committee explained to the public that his bosses’ decision to enforce the nationwide conscription act, was made solely with the legitimate concerns for the peace and security of the nation – and in the interests of a post-junta multiparty democracy.

Therefore, there was no reason for the public to panic, Zaw Mae Lone assured the public.

According to the statistic he offered there are a total of 13 million Myanmar (6.3 million men and 7.7 million women) who are, based on their age groups, can be called up for the National Service. The age brackets for conscription are 18-35 years for men and 18-27 years for women.

Because there are over 60,000 administrative units, or wards, at different village and town levels, there will be only 2 or 3 conscripts on average for each ward. That will generate about 120,000 new recruits for the country’s Defence Services. And not everyone thus “honorably” drafted into these defence services will need to see combat. Economists, entrepreneurs, cyber-specialists, teachers, doctors, and so on will be able to carry out their own respective professional duties within the junta’s broad definition of “national defence”.

But no Burmese in his or her right mind has bought into this “service to the nation” spin from the junta leadership. Reportedly, young men and women are frantically finding ways to exit the country. The oldest ERO, Karen National Union, publicly urged the country’s draft-age people to dodge it and join the resistance instead.

The public are cognizant that the junta has been losing territories and troops at the hands of the EROs and anti-coup People Defence Forces (PDFs), at an unprecedented rate since the founding of Myanmar’s national armed forces in December 1942.

It has been nearly 80 years since the Panglong Agreement, stipulating ethnic group equality as the basis of forming a voluntary union of a post-colonial Burma out of a myriad of various ethnic groups with their own ancestral regions, was signed in Shan state, eastern Burma. Under successive military regimes since 1962, when General Ne Win established a military dictatorship under the banner of a Fake Socialism after the first coup, Burma, as a union of multiple nations, has been unravelling.

For her part, Aung San Suu Kyi, as Myanmar State Counsellor in her office from 2015-2020, also failed to pursue federalist policies or practices which could have renewed the commitment to the country’s founding principle of ethnic equality as an effective bond. She even sided with “my father’s military” in both cases of Rohingya genocide, and the army’s vicious attacks against Kachin and Rakhine resistance movements and communities.

In the past three years since Min Aung Hlaing, the head of Burma’s national armed forces, staged his universally opposed coup which ousted the re-elected Suu Kyi government, both the spirit and substance of the Panglong Agreement (or a political union forged voluntarily by different ethnic communities) has unravelled drastically, and, perhaps beyond repair, on one hand.

On the other hand, no ethnic armed resistance organization today really buys into the ethnic Bama-controlled National Unity Government’s (NUG) polemic of re-building the military-destroyed country as a federalist democracy, with the NUG leaders as the new heads of the post-coup Union of Burma. Neither Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) party and her followers, nor the central military, have treated non-Bama ethnic nations with respect, or the principle of group equality, in these past decades.

The important leaders of the non-dominant ethnic groups such as Kachin, Karen, and Karenni who have offered their backing, protection and sanctuary to the NUG as a mix of the old Suu Kyi loyalists and non-Bama ethnic representatives, are fed up with the monopolistic way in which NUG’s Bama leaders have been running this best-known anti-junta group.

Worse still, the male chauvinist and/or Bama-centric leaders who backseat drive the NUG have similarly triggered widespread deep resentment and anger among one of the key pillars of anti-coup resistance, namely women’s revolutionary groups. The male chauvinists who lead NUG have blocked proper representation of women in leadership and policy roles with the token woman leader as its “Foreign Minister”.

Burma’s woes are not confined to the majoritarian Bama.

Ethnic resistance organizations which have made significant territorial gains over the last 6 months – for instance, the Arakan Army on the coastal state of Rakhine, the Ta’ang National Liberation Army, and Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army of Northern Shan state in eastern Burma – are primarily focused on consolidating their gains and building autonomous sub-, or semi-states, based on their own respective ethnocentric visions and territorial claims internally. These militarily victorious groups seek to build their own economic ties with important neighbours such as China, Bangladesh and India.

In brief, the country is certainly undergoing a self-contained process of quasi-Balkanization, albeit without the emergence of new republican states.

In the areas which are still under the junta’s effective control, for instance, cities and large towns, the multi-ethnic populations feel most vulnerable to the junta’s plan to enforce the Conscription Law. Worryingly, in Rakhine state, the site of the Rohingya genocide, the junta is reportedly trying to implement its conscription scheme among Rohingya Muslims, putting the genocide survivors between the rock and a hard place. For post-genocide group relations between Rakhine and Rohingya have been extremely fragile, uncertain and distrust-ridden. Contrary to the rosy view of the coastal Arracan as a success story of quasi-Balkanized sub-state, led by the Arakan Army, gifted with the multi-billion $ Chinese pipeline, Indian development zone, Japan-funded agri-economy, massive destruction and death appear to be on the horizons. Besides, Putin’s Russian navy, none of these external powers are prepared to see the core of Burma – the largest military called Tatmadaw – go the way of Saddam’s Barthists state.

Additionally, the generals are signalling no indication of finding a compromise, thanks to ‘business-as-usual’ from the United Nations technical agencies with their Memoranda of Understanding with the generals, the unconditional support from Putin’s Russia, Modi’s Hindutva India, China, Thailand and the authoritarian bloc within the Association of Southeast Asia Nations (ASEAN). This is despite the anti-junta organizations’ spin to the contrary – that the junta is on the verge of a collapse.

Dr Maung Zarni is a scholar, educator and human rights activist with 30-years of involvement in Burmese political affairs, Zarni has been denounced as an “enemy of the State” for his opposition to the Myanmar genocide.

23 February 2024

Source:: forsea.co

By Jonathan Kuttab

Across the country, a multitude of actions have been undertaken every day for the past four months:

• 300 Mennonites held a sit-in at the US Capital calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. 150 of them were arrested for trespassing.

• Protesters shut down the San Francisco Bay Bridge calling for an end to genocide in Gaza.

• Durham, North Carolina City Council just passed a resolution calling for a ceasefire, joining about 70 US cities to do so, including Chicago, Oakland.

• A group of citizens held a prayer vigil at the town square of Lancaster, Pa.

• A group of protesters “serenaded” Secretary of State Blinken outside his residence, waking him up in the early hours of the morning accusing him of genocide.

• Over 100 African American Ministers signed a strongly worded statement demanding an immediate Ceasefire and the release of hostages.

• Some have hung giant banners on an overpass over the highway calling for a ceasefire now. End the Genocide in Gaza. Such banners are cropping up all over.

• President Biden was interrupted by protestors from Code Pink among other groups, and it is likely he will not be able to make a single election stump between now and November without being heckled by protestors demanding a Ceasefire and chants of “Genocide Joe.”

• Brown University students went on hunger strike to highlight the horror of starving Gazans.

• Hundreds of Thousands of people are protesting in the streets of the US, joining millions protesting in Britain, Canada, Germany, France, Spain, Turkey, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Yemen, Jordan, and tens of other countries throughout the world demanding an end to the war, the lifting of the siege of Gaza, and calling for a free Palestine.

• Piles of manure were dumped outside Nancy Pelosi’s house, with a message to cut the cr*p and end her support for Apartheid and Genocide.

• The Pilgrimage for Peace from Philadelphia to D.C.

• Hundreds gathered at Pennsylvania’s State Capitol in Harrisburg presenting 1000s of mock bodies shrouded and marched to governor’s mansion calling for justice and ceasefire.

• The recent 35-person Presbyterian delegation to Palestine to witness and stand in solidarity.

• Hundreds of thousands of citizens have written, emailed, and phoned the offices of their legislative representatives demanding that they take immediate action for a ceasefire and cut off military aid or at least condition its use on concrete actions to protect civilians and provide them with humanitarian aid. This includes, I suspect, all of you reading this article. If you have not done so, please do so immediately.

Despite the above actions and the fact that polls indicate a clear majority of Americans support an immediate ceasefire (81% per the latest poll) and an end, or at least a conditioning, of aid to Israel, this administration just vetoed yet again a Security Council Resolution calling for a ceasefire. Furthermore, the vast majority of our representatives in Congress are unwilling to support a ceasefire. One wonders, then, why protest in the first place. What will  be the likely outcome?

First, we protest because our country is directly implicated and an active participant in this ongoing genocide. It is our money, our weapons, and our government’s diplomatic support that is complicit in every death and all of the destruction and suffering in Gaza today. When the corporate media continues to repeat government talking points and support government policies, and when our representatives fail to do our asking and listen instead to wealthy donors and powerful lobbyists, we need to be creative and find new ways to get their attention and force them to take action.  People are willing to take dramatic actions to bring attention to this genocide. This includes not only protests, calls, and letters, but even civil disobedience, a nonviolent disruption of lives and basic services. This may include tax resistance. I hope more and more actions are taken to name and shame those involved in this genocide undertaken without money and in our name.

This is how nonviolence works. We not only express solidarity, but we implicate third party players to create sufficient pressure—economic, political, cultural, and moral—to bring an end to this horror. BDS (Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions) are not just a slogan, but a toolbox of nonviolent tactics and weapons available to all of us to take action that our governments and institutions are unwilling to take, until such pressure yields the required results. Nonviolence International has an updated list of over 300 tactics that have been used for nonviolent resistance. By choosing nonviolence, we wish to break the vicious cycles that lead to death, destruction, and continued hatred. However, the hope is that such actions will indeed be painful and therefore effective, by exacting a real price to be paid by those unwilling to abide by international law or respect moral and ethical positions.

But, even if our actions are ultimately insufficient for achieving the desired results on the ground and putting an end to this madness, they nevertheless constitute a direct statement, a clear moral witness to our just demands and of speaking truth to power.

Future generations will ask each one of us: What did you do during the Palestinian Genocide? Where were you while Gaza was being systematically flattened? Just as the Church still wrestles with questions of its silence and complicity during the Holocaust of the Jews in Nazi Germany, so too will each of us be asked what we did and failed to do to stop the evil we know is taking place before us as clear as day.

More importantly, for Christians, is the scepter of our Lord who will one day ask us a similar question:  What did you do when he was hungry, thirsty, in prison, and in dire need? How will we answer him? Are we failing to provide for him? We cannot claim ignorance as the voice of Lord Jesus proclaims: “Inasmuch as you did it to the least of these my [Palestinian] brethren, you did it to me.”

FOSNA members and regional groups have been involved in planning and leading so many actions resisting the ongoing genocide of Palestinians. We urge all of our subscribers to do the same.

22 February 2024

Source: fosna.org

Professor Ilan Pappe spoke at IHRC’s annual Genocide Memorial Day in London, UK on 21^st January 2024, on the need to understand that the genocide of Palestinians we are currently witnessing, as brutal as it is, is also the demise of the so-called Jewish state. We need to be ready to imagine a new world beyond it.

The idea that Zionism is settler colonialism is not new. Palestinian scholars in the 1960s working in Beirut in the PLO Research Centre had already understood that what they were facing in Palestine was not a classical colonial project. They did not frame Israel as just a British colony or an American one, but regarded it as a phenomenon that existed in other parts of the world; defined as settler colonialism. It is interesting that for 20 to 30 years the notion of Zionism as settler colonialism disappeared from the political and academic discourse. It came back when scholars in other parts of the world, notably South Africa, Australia and North America agreed that Zionism is a similar phenomenon to the movement of Europeans who created the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. This idea helps us to understand much better the nature of the Zionist project in Palestine since the late 19^th century until today, and it gives us an idea of what to expect in the future.

I think this particular idea in the 1990s, that connected so clearly the actions of European settlers especially in places such as North America and Australia, with the actions of the settlers who came to Palestine in the late 19^th century elucidated clearly the intentions of the Jewish settlers who colonised Palestine and the nature of the local Palestinian resistance to that colonisation. The settlers followed the most important logic adopted by settler colonial movements and that is that in order to create a successful settler colonial community outside of Europe you have to eliminate the natives in the country you have settled. This means that the indigenous resistance to this logic was a struggle against elimination, and not just liberation. This is important when one thinks about the operation of the Hamas and other Palestinian resistance operations ever since 1948.

The settlers themselves as the case of many of the Europeans who came to North America, Central America or Australia, were refugees and victims of persecution. Some of them were less unfortunate and were just seeking better life and opportunities. But most of them were outcasts in Europe and were looking to create a Europe in another place, a new Europe, instead of the Europe that didn’t want them. In most cases, they chose a place where someone else already lived, the indigenous people. And thus the most important core group among them was that of their leaders and ideologues who provided religious and cultural justifications for the colonisation of someone else’s land. One can add to this, the need to rely on an Empire to begin the colonisation and maintain it, even if at the time the settlers rebelled against the empire that helped them and demanded and achieved independence, which in many cases they obtained and then renewed their alliance with empire. The Anglo-Zionist relationship that turned into an Anglo-Israeli alliance is a case in point.

The idea that you can remove by force the people of the land that you want, is probably more understandable—not justified—against the backdrop of the 16^th, 17^th and 18^th centuries—because it went together with full endorsement for imperialism and colonialism. It was fed by the common dehumanisation of the other non-Western, non-European people. If you dehumanise people you can more easily remove them. What was so unique about Zionism as a settler colonial movement is that it appeared on the international arena at a time where people all around the world had begun to have second thoughts about the rights of removing indigenous people, of eliminating the natives and therefore we can understand the effort and the energy invested by the Zionists and later the state of Israel in trying to cover up the real aim of a settler colonial movement such as Zionism, which was the elimination of the native.

But today in Gaza they are eliminating the native population in front of our eyes, so how come they have almost given up 75 years of attempting to hide their eliminatory policies? In order to understand that we have to appreciate the transformation in the nature of Zionism in Palestine over the years.

At the early stages of the Zionist settler colonialist project, its leaders carried out their eliminatory policies with a genuine attempt to square the circle by claiming that it was possible to build a democracy and at the same time to eliminate the native population. There was a strong desire to belong to the community of civilised nations and it was assumed by the leaders, in particular after the Holocaust, that the eliminatory policies will not exclude Israel from that association.

In order to square this circle, the leadership insisted that their eliminatory actions against the Palestinians were a ‘retaliation’ or ‘response’ against Palestinian actions. But very soon, when this leadership wanted to move into more substantial actions of elimination, they deserted the false pretext of ‘retaliation’ and just stopped justifying what they did.

In this respect, there is a correlation between the way the ethnic cleansing in 1948 developed and in the operations of the Israelis in Gaza today. In 1948, the leadership justified to itself every massacre committed, including the infamous massacre of Deir Yassine on 9^th April, as the reaction to a Palestinian action: it could have been throwing stones at the bus or attacking a Jewish settlement, but it had to be presented domestically and externally as something that doesn’t come out of the blue, as self-defence. Indeed, that is why the Israeli army is called “Israeli Defence Forces”. But because it is a settler colonial project it cannot rely all the time on ‘retaliation’.

The Zionist forces began the ethnic cleansing during the Nakba in February 1948, for a month all these operations were presented as retaliation to the Palestinian opposition to the UN partition plan of November 1947. On 10^th March 1948, the Zionist leadership ceased talking about retaliation and adopted a master plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. From March 1948 to the end of 1948 the ethnic cleansing of Palestine that led to the expulsion of half of Palestine’s population, the destruction of half of its villages and the de-Arabisation of most of its towns, was done as part of a systematic and intentional master plan of ethnic cleansing.

Similarly, after the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in June 1967, whenever Israel wanted to change fundamentally the reality or engage in a full scale ethnic cleansing operation, it dispensed with the need of justification.

We are witnessing a similar pattern today. At first the actions were presented as retaliation to operation Tufun al-Aqsa, but now it is the war named “sword of war” aiming to return Gaza under direct Israeli control, but ethnically cleansing its people through a campaign of genocide.

The big question is why politicians, journalists, and academics in the west fell into the same trap they had fallen into in 1948? How can they still today buy into this idea that Israel is defending itself in the Gaza Strip? That it is reacting to the actions of 7^th October?

Or maybe they are not falling into the trap. They might know that what Israel is doing in Gaza is using 7^th October as a pretext.

Either way, so far, the Israelis claim to a pretext every time they assault the Palestinians, has helped the state to sustain the immunity shield that allowed it to pursue its criminal policies without fear of any meaningful reaction from the international community. The pretext helped to accentuate the image of Israel as part of the democratic and western world, and hence beyond any condemnation and sanctions. This whole discourse of defence and retaliation is important for the immunity shield that Israel enjoys from governments in the Global North.

But as in 1948, today too, Israel as its operation lingers on, they dispense with the pretext, and this is when even their greatest supports find it difficult to endorse its policies. The magnitude of the destruction, the massive killings in Gaza, the genocide, are on such a level that Israelis find it more and more difficult to persuade even themselves that what they are doing is actually self-defence or reaction. Thus, it is possible that in the future more and more people would find it difficult to accept this Israeli explanation for the genocide in Gaza.

For most people it is clear that what is required is a context and not a pretext. Historically and ideologically, it is very clear that 7^th October is used as a pretext to complete what the Zionist movement was unable to complete in 1948.

In 1948 the settler colonial movement of Zionism used a particular set of historical circumstances that I have written about in detail in my book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, in order to expel half of Palestine’s population. As mentioned, in the process they destroyed half of the Palestinian villages, demolished most of the Palestinian towns, and yet half of the Palestinians remained inside Palestine. The Palestinians who became refugees outside the boundaries of Palestine continued the resistance of the Palestinians and therefore the settler colonial ideal of eliminating the native was not fulfilled and incrementally Israel used all its power from 1948 to today to continue with the elimination of the native.

The elimination of the native from the beginning to the end includes not just a military operation, by which you would occupy a place, massacre people or expel them. Elimination needs to be justified or become an inertia and the way to do it is constant dehumanization of those you intend to eliminate. You cannot massively kill people or genocide another human being unless you dehumanise them. Thus, dehumanisation of the Palestinians is an explicit and an implicit message conveyed to the Israeli Jews through their educational system, their socialisation system in the army, the media and the political discourse. This message has to be conveyed and maintained if the elimination is to be completed.

So we are witnessing a particular cruel new attempt to complete the elimination. And yet, it is not all hopeless. In fact, ironically, this particular inhuman destruction of Gaza exposes the failure of the settler colonial project of Zionism. This may sound absurd, because I’m describing a conflict between a small resistance movement, the Palestinian liberation movement and a powerful state with a military machine and an ideological infrastructure that is focused solely on the destruction of the indigenous people of Palestine people. This liberation movement does not have a strong alliance behind it, while the state it faces, enjoys a powerful alliance behind it—from the United States to multinational corporations, military industry security firms, mainstream media and mainstream academia—we’re talking about something that almost sounds hopeless and depressing because you have this international immunity for the policies of elimination that begin from the early stages of Zionism until today. It will seem probably the worst chapter of the Israeli attempt to push forward eliminatory policies to a new kind of level into a much more concentrated effort of killing thousands of people in a short period of time as they have never dared to do before.

So how can it be also a moment of hope? First of all, this kind of a political entity, a state, that has to maintain the dehumanisation of the Palestinians in order to justify their elimination is a very shaky basis if we look into the more distant future.

This structural weakness was already apparent before 7^th October and part of this weakness is the fact that if you take out the elimination project, there is a very little that unites the group of people who define themselves as the Jewish nation in Israel.

If you exclude the need to fight and eliminate the Palestinians, you are left with two warring Jewish camps, which we saw actually fighting on the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem up to 6^th October 2023. Huge demonstrations between secular Jews, those who describe themselves as secular Jews—mostly of European origin—believing that it’s possible to create a democratic pluralistic state while maintaining the occupation and the apartheid towards the Palestinians inside Israel, were confronting a messianic new kind of Zionism that developed in the Jewish settlements in the West Bank, what I called elsewhere the state of Judea, which suddenly appeared in our midst, believing they now have a way of creating a kind of a Zionist theocracy with no consideration for democracy, and believing that this is the only vision for a future Jewish state.

There is nothing in common between these two visions apart from one thing: both camps don’t care about the Palestinians, both camps believe that the survival of Israel depends on the continuation of the elimination policies towards the Palestinians. This is not going to hold water. This is going to disintegrate and implode from within because you cannot in the 21^st century keep together a state and a society on the basis that their shared sense of belonging is being part of an eliminatory genocidal project. It can work for some definitely, but it cannot work for everyone.

We have seen already the indication for that before 7^th October, how Israelis who have opportunities in other parts of the world due to their dual nationality, professions and their financial abilities, are thinking seriously of relocating both their money and themselves outside of the state of Israel. What you will be left with is a society that is economically weak, that is led by this kind of fusion of messianic Zionism with racism and eliminatory policies towards the Palestinians. Yes, the balance of power at first would be on the side of the elimination, not with the victims of the elimination, but the balance of power is not just local, the balance of power is regional and international, and the more oppressive the eliminatory policies are (and it’s terrible to say but it’s true) the less they are able to be covered up as a ‘response’ or ‘retaliation’ and the more they are seen as a brutal genocide policy. Thus, it is less likely that the immunity that Israel enjoys today would continue in the future.

So, I really think that at this very dark moment what we are experiencing—and it is a dark moment because the elimination of the Palestinians has moved to a new level, is unprecedented. In terms of the discourse employed by Israel, and the intensity and the purpose of the eliminatory policies—there wasn’t such a period in history, this is a new phase of the brutality against the Palestinians. Even the Nakba, which was an unimaginable catastrophe does not compare to what we are seeing now and what we are going to see in the next few months. We are in my mind in the first three months of a period of two years that will witness the worst kind of horrors that Israel can inflict on the Palestinians.

But even in this dark moment we should understand that settler colonial projects that disintegrate are always using the worst kind of means to try and save their project. This happened in South Africa and South Vietnam. I am not saying this as a wishful thinking, and I am not saying this as a political activist: I am saying this as a scholar of Israel and Palestine with all the confidence of my scholarly qualifications. On the basis of sober professional examination, I am stating that we are witnessing the end of the Zionist project, there’s no doubt about it.

This historical project has come to an end and it is a violent end—such projects usually collapse violently and thus it is a very dangerous moment for the victims of this project, and the victims are always the Palestinians along with Jews, because Jews are also victims of the Zionism. Thus, the process of collapse is not just a moment of hope it is also the dawn that will break after the darkness, and it is the light at the end of the tunnel.

Collapse like this however produces a void. The void appears suddenly; it is a like a wall that is slowly eroded by cracks in it but then it collapses in one short moment. And one has to be ready for such collapses, for the disappearance of a state or a disintegration of a settler colonial project. We saw what happened in the Arab world, when the chaos of the void, was not filled by any constructive and alternative project; in such a case the chaos continues.

One thing is clear, whoever thinks about the alternative to the Zionist state should not look for Europe or the West for models that would replace the collapsing state. There are much better models which are local and are legacies from the recent and more distant pasts of the Mashraq (the eastern Mediterranean) and the Arab world as a whole. The long Ottoman period has such models and legacies that can help us taking ideas from the past to look into the future.

These models can help us build a very different kind of society that respects collective identities as well as individual rights, and is built from scratch as a new kind of model that benefits from learning from the mistakes of decolonialisation in many parts of the world, including in the Arab world and Africa. This hopefully will create a different kind of political entity that would have a huge and positive impact on the Arab world as a whole.

Ilan Pappé is Professor of History and Director for the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter.

1 February 2024

Source: mronline.org

By The India Palestine Solidarity Forum (IPSF) & Global Campaign for Return to Palestine (GCRP)

Statement of Resolutions passed in Kathmandu at the World Social Forum 2024 (14th-19th February)

1) We call for an immediate end to the Genocidal Israeli War on Gaza, and all of historic Palestine.

2) It’s a Holocaust! Stop the Collective Punishment & Ethnic Cleansing!

Israel & the US-UK backed warmongers stand guilty of perpetrating a “Holocaust on the Palestinian nation”.

Out of a population of 2.3 million, in the course of the last 4 months, more than 36,000 lay dead, this includes 11,000 children & 9,000 women, with yet 7,000 under the rubble, and another 68,000 grievously injured. Therefore, the percentage of those either dead or maimed equal to more than 4.82% of the population. This is indeed a Holocaust!

The Israelis have targeted & destroyed residential buildings, hospitals, ambulances, health centres, schools, colleges, universities, water treatment and electric plants, the entire civilian infrastructure, with now more than 70% of the population having no shelter. This is indeed a Holocaust!!

The Israelis have murdered journalists, doctors, nurses, teachers, professors, thus targeting the pillars of society, the intellectuals.

Israel and its Western backers stand in utter violation of – The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 1948.

It’s indeed a Holocaust, no less!

3) Just as the German Nazis starved and tortured the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, today the Judeo-Zionist Nazis are starving and torturing the Palestinians in the Gaza Ghetto.

4) We thus support the “7th of October Gaza Ghetto 2023 Uprising” against the Judeo-Zionist Nazis, just as we supported the “Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1944”, against the German Nazis.

5) We thus call for an Immediate Ceasefire, the withdrawal of all Israeli military forces and an End to the Siege of Gaza, which is akin to a Judeo-Zionist-Nazi Concentration Camp.

6) We call for the release of all the Palestinian Political Prisoners from Israeli jails. In reality, the entire Palestinian population across historic Palestine is being held hostage and imprisoned by the Zionist occupation.

7) The entire Israeli political & military leadership must be tried for war crimes, along with those of US & UK, all of whom are complicit in the genocidal war on Gaza.

8) We demand that Israel stop targeting the Masjid al Aqsa, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and all other Islamic & Christian holy sites. The Judaisation of Jerusalem poses a threat to the ancient syncretic character of Jerusalem, all of Palestine.

9) We condemn and oppose the so-called Abraham Accords, as they are a betrayal of the Palestinian cause. All the countries that have signed these accords must immediately cancel the same.

10) We laud the role of South Africa in filing the case in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against Israel. South Africa has remained true to the legacy of the great Nelson Mandela and the anti-apartheid struggle and has clearly emerged as the leading nation of the Global South.

11) We call for the establishment of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.

12) We support the Palestinian Right of Return (UNGA Resolution 194, 1948)

9) We support the Palestinian Right to Resist the Occupation by all means (UNGA Resolutions 3246 (1974 & 1978).

10) As per International Law, no occupying Colonial power has the Right to Defend itself. Thus, the much-repeated lie that “Israel has a Right to Defend itself”, has no basis in international law or basic human values. We therefore reject this claim. In fact, under international law, every colonial occupying power has a responsibility to protect the people in the land and nation that it occupies. Here Israel is clearly guilty of violating these basic international norms and laws with utter impunity.

10) All the Israeli Settlements & Check-Points in the West Bank must all be disbanded.

11) The Apartheid Wall that imprisons the West Bank must be dismantled immediately.

12) We reaffirm that “Zionism is Racism”. It is an ideology of Apartheid, Settler Colonialism, Ethno-Religious Supremacism & Ethnic Cleansing.

We thus call upon the nations of the world to reinstate UNGA Resolution 3379 (10th November 1975), “Determines that Zionism is a form of racism & racial discrimination”.

13) We laud the global solidarity movements that have stood in support with the Palestinian struggle for freedom over the decades.
We call upon all solidarity movements to further strengthen the BDS movement of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel.

14) The solidarity movements and the people of the world have performed admirably in spreading the Palestinian narrative across the world. The Palestinian narrative dominates the social media, where the Israeli-US hegemony stand diminished and challenged. We need to keep marching, protesting and talking about Palestine and thus defeat the western hegemony over the media.

15) The US-led Western hegemony and the so-called rules-based order stands exposed for its hypocrisy and the double standards over decades of wars and neo-colonial exploitation. A new multipolar world is emerging, even as the power of the Western hegemon is in decline. This too augurs well for the liberation of Palestine, for all of West Asia, and all those nations fighting for the cause of their liberation from centuries of Western domination.

16) We stand in utter admiration at the courage and bravery of the Palestinian people, there resilience against all odds and the resistance. The Palestinian nation stands at the very vanguard of the Resistance to International Zionism and Imperialism.

The Palestinian issue is the greatest moral issue of our times and stands at the very epicentre of the geopolitical balance of power.

The world will not be free till Palestine is free. Thus, the struggle for the liberation of Palestine is the cause of every nation, all the people of the world.

Feroze Mithiborwala, Founder, National General Secretary, India Palestine Solidarity Forum
feroze.moses777@gmail.com

20 February 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Ilan Pappe

Professor Ilan Pappe spoke at IHRC’s annual Genocide Memorial Day in London, UK on 21^st January 2024, on the need to understand that the genocide of Palestinians we are currently witnessing, as brutal as it is, is also the demise of the so-called Jewish state.  We need to be ready to imagine a new world beyond it.

The idea that Zionism is settler colonialism is not new. Palestinian scholars in the 1960s working in Beirut in the PLO Research Centre had already understood that what they were facing in Palestine was not a classical colonial project.  They did not frame Israel as just a British colony or an American one, but regarded it as a phenomenon that existed in other parts of the world; defined as settler colonialism.  It is interesting that for 20 to 30 years the notion of Zionism as settler colonialism disappeared from the political and academic discourse.  It came back when scholars in other parts of the world, notably South Africa, Australia and North America agreed that Zionism is a similar phenomenon to the movement of Europeans who created the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.  This idea helps us to understand much better the nature of the Zionist project in Palestine since the late 19^th century until today, and it gives us an idea of what to expect in the future.

I think this particular idea in the 1990s, that connected so clearly the actions of European settlers especially in places such as North America and Australia, with the actions of the settlers who came to Palestine in the late 19^th century elucidated clearly the intentions of the Jewish settlers who colonised Palestine and the nature of the local Palestinian resistance to that colonisation. The settlers followed the most important logic adopted by settler colonial movements and that is that in order to create a successful settler colonial community outside of Europe you have to eliminate the natives in the country you have settled. This means that the indigenous resistance to this logic was a struggle against elimination, and not just liberation. This is important when one thinks about the operation of the Hamas and other Palestinian resistance operations ever since 1948.

The settlers themselves as the case of many of the Europeans who came to North America, Central America or Australia, were refugees and victims of persecution. Some of them were less unfortunate and were just seeking better life and opportunities. But most of them were outcasts in Europe and were looking to create a Europe in another place, a new Europe, instead of the Europe that didn’t want them.  In most cases, they chose a place where someone else already lived, the indigenous people. And thus the most important core group among them was that of their leaders and ideologues who provided religious and cultural justifications for the colonisation of someone else’s land. One can add to this, the need to rely on an Empire to begin the colonisation and maintain it, even if at the time the settlers rebelled against the empire that helped them and demanded and achieved independence, which in many cases they obtained and then renewed their alliance with empire. The Anglo-Zionist relationship that turned into an Anglo-Israeli alliance is a case in point.

The idea that you can remove by force the people of the land that you want, is probably more understandable – not justified – against the backdrop of the 16^th, 17^th and 18^th  centuries – because it went together with full endorsement for imperialism and colonialism. It was fed by the common dehumanisation of the other non-Western, non-European people. If you dehumanise people you can more easily remove them.  What was so unique about Zionism as a settler colonial movement is that it appeared on the international arena at a time where people all around the world had begun to have second thoughts about the rights of removing indigenous people, of eliminating the natives and therefore we can understand the effort and the energy invested by the Zionists and later the state of Israel in trying to cover up the real aim of a settler colonial movement such as Zionism, which was the elimination of the native.

But today in Gaza they are eliminating the native population in front of our eyes, so how come they have almost given up 75 years of attempting to hide their eliminatory policies?  In order to understand that we have to appreciate the transformation in the nature of Zionism in Palestine over the years.

At the early stages of the Zionist settler colonialist project, its leaders carried out their eliminatory policies with a genuine attempt to square the circle by claiming that it was possible to build a democracy and at the same time to eliminate the native population. There was a strong desire to belong to the community of civilised nations and it was assumed by the leaders, in particular after the Holocaust, that the eliminatory policies will not exclude Israel from that association.

In order to square this circle, the leadership insisted that their eliminatory actions against the Palestinians were a ‘retaliation’ or ‘response’ against Palestinian actions.  But very soon, when this leadership wanted to move into more substantial actions of elimination, they deserted the false pretext of ‘retaliation’ and just stopped justifying what they did.

In this respect, there is a correlation between the way the ethnic cleansing in 1948 developed and in the operations of the Israelis in Gaza today.   In 1948, the leadership justified to itself every massacre committed, including the infamous massacre of Deir Yassine on 9^th April, as the reaction to a Palestinian action: it could have been throwing stones at the bus or attacking a Jewish settlement, but it had to be presented domestically and externally as something that doesn’t come out of the blue, as self-defence. Indeed, that is why the Israeli army is called “Israeli Defence Forces”.  But because it is a settler colonial project it cannot rely all the time on ‘retaliation’.

The Zionist forces began the ethnic cleansing during the Nakba in February 1948, for a month all these operations were presented as retaliation to the Palestinian opposition to the UN partition plan of November 1947. On 10^th March 1948, the Zionist leadership ceased talking about retaliation and adopted a master plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.  From March 1948 to the end of 1948 the ethnic cleansing of Palestine that led to the expulsion of half of Palestine’s population, the destruction of half of its villages and the de-Arabisation of most of its towns, was done as part of a systematic and intentional master plan of ethnic cleansing.

Similarly, after the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in June 1967, whenever Israel wanted to change fundamentally the reality or engage in a full scale ethnic cleansing operation, it dispensed with the need of justification.

We are witnessing a similar pattern today. At first the actions were presented as retaliation to operation Tufun al-Aqsa, but now it is the war named “sword of war” aiming to return Gaza under direct Israeli control, but ethnically cleansing its people through a campaign of genocide.

The big question is why politicians, journalists, and academics in the west fell into the same trap they had fallen into in 1948? How can they still today buy into this idea that Israel is defending itself in the Gaza Strip?  That it is reacting to the actions of 7^th October?

Or maybe they are not falling into the trap.  They might know that what Israel is doing in Gaza is using 7^th October as a pretext.

Either way, so far, the Israelis claim to a pretext every time they assault the Palestinians, has helped the state to sustain the immunity shield that allowed it to pursue its criminal policies without fear of any meaningful reaction from the international community.  The pretext helped to accentuate the image of Israel as part of the democratic and western world, and hence beyond any condemnation and sanctions.  This whole discourse of defence and retaliation is important for the immunity shield that Israel enjoys from governments in the Global North.

But as in 1948, today too, Israel as its operation lingers on, they dispense with the pretext, and this is when even their greatest supports find it difficult to endorse its policies. The

magnitude of the destruction, the massive killings in Gaza, the genocide, are on such a level that Israelis find it more and more difficult to persuade even themselves that what they are doing is actually self-defence or reaction.  Thus, it is possible that in the future more and more people would find it difficult to accept this Israeli explanation for the genocide in Gaza.

For most people it is clear that what is required is a context and not a pretext. Historically and ideologically, it is very clear that 7^th October is used as a pretext to complete what the Zionist movement was unable to complete in 1948.

In 1948 the settler colonial movement of Zionism used a particular set of historical circumstances that I have written about in detail in my book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, in order to expel half of Palestine’s population.  As mentioned, in the process they destroyed half of the Palestinian villages, demolished most of the Palestinian towns, and yet half of the Palestinians remained inside Palestine.  The Palestinians who became refugees outside the boundaries of Palestine continued the resistance of the Palestinians and therefore the settler colonial ideal of eliminating the native was not fulfilled and incrementally Israel used all its power from 1948 to today to continue with the elimination of the native.

The elimination of the native from the beginning to the end includes not just a military operation, by which you would occupy a place, massacre people or expel them.  Elimination needs to be justified or become an inertia and the way to do it is constant dehumanization of those you intend to eliminate.  You cannot massively kill people or genocide another human being unless you dehumanise them.  Thus, dehumanisation of the Palestinians is an explicit and an implicit message conveyed to the Israeli Jews through their educational system, their socialisation system in the army, the media and the political discourse. This message has to be conveyed and maintained if the elimination is to be completed.

So we are witnessing a particular cruel new attempt to complete the elimination. And yet, it is not all hopeless. In fact, ironically, this particular inhuman destruction of Gaza exposes the failure of the settler colonial project of Zionism. This may sound absurd, because I’m describing a conflict between a small resistance movement, the Palestinian liberation movement and a powerful state with a military machine and an ideological infrastructure that is focused solely on the destruction of the indigenous people of Palestine people. This liberation movement does not have a strong alliance behind it, while the state it faces, enjoys a powerful alliance behind it – from the United States to multinational corporations, military industry security firms, mainstream media and mainstream academia – we’re talking about something that almost sounds hopeless and depressing because you have this international immunity for the policies of elimination that begin from the early stages of Zionism until today.  It will seem probably the worst chapter of the Israeli attempt to push forward eliminatory policies to a new kind of level into a much more concentrated effort of killing thousands of people in a short period of time as they have never dared to do before.

So how can it be also a moment of hope? First of all, this kind of a political entity, a state, that has to maintain the dehumanisation of the Palestinians in order to justify their elimination is a very shaky basis if we look into the more distant future.

This structural weakness was already apparent before 7^th October and part of this weakness is the fact that if you take out the elimination project, there is a very little that unites the group of people who define themselves as the Jewish nation in Israel.

If you exclude the need to fight and eliminate the Palestinians, you are left with two warring Jewish camps, which we saw actually fighting on the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem up to 6^th October 2023.  Huge demonstrations between secular Jews, those who describe themselves as secular Jews – mostly of European origin – believing that it’s possible to create a democratic pluralistic state while maintaining the occupation and the apartheid towards the Palestinians inside Israel, were confronting  a messianic new kind of Zionism that developed in the Jewish settlements in the West Bank, what I called elsewhere the state of Judea, which suddenly appeared in our midst, believing they now have a way of creating a kind of a Zionist theocracy with no consideration for democracy, and believing that this is the only vision for a future Jewish state.

There is nothing in common between these two visions apart from one thing: both camps don’t care about the Palestinians, both camps believe that the survival of Israel depends on the continuation of the elimination policies towards the Palestinians.  This is not going to hold water.  This is going to disintegrate and implode from within because you cannot in the 21^st century keep together a state and a society on the basis that their shared sense of belonging is being part of an eliminatory genocidal project.  It can work for some definitely, but it cannot work for everyone.

We have seen already the indication for that before 7^th October, how Israelis who have opportunities in other parts of the world due to their dual nationality, professions and their financial abilities, are thinking seriously of relocating both their money and themselves outside of the state of Israel.  What you will be left with is a society that is economically weak, that is led by this kind of fusion of messianic Zionism with racism and eliminatory policies towards the Palestinians.  Yes, the balance of power at first would be on the side of the elimination, not with the victims of the elimination, but the balance of power is not just local, the balance of power is regional and international, and the more oppressive the eliminatory policies are (and it’s terrible to say but it’s true) the less they are able to be covered up as a ‘response’ or ‘retaliation’ and the more they are seen as a brutal genocide policy. Thus, it is less likely that the immunity that Israel enjoys today would continue in the future.

So, I really think that at this very dark moment what we are experiencing – and it is a dark moment because the elimination of the Palestinians has moved to a new level, is unprecedented. In terms of the discourse employed by Israel, and the intensity and the purpose of the eliminatory policies – there wasn’t such a period in history, this is a new phase of the brutality against the Palestinians.  Even the Nakba, which was an unimaginable catastrophe does not compare to what we are seeing now and what we are going to see in the next few months.  We are in my mind in the first three months of a period of two years that will witness the worst kind of horrors that Israel can inflict on the Palestinians.

But even in this dark moment we should understand that settler colonial projects that disintegrate are always using the worst kind of means to try and save their project.  This happened in South Africa and South Vietnam.  I am not saying this as a wishful thinking, and I am not saying this as a political activist: I am saying this as a scholar of Israel and Palestine with all the confidence of my scholarly qualifications. On the basis of sober professional examination, I am stating that we are witnessing the end of the Zionist project, there’s no doubt about it.

This historical project has come to an end and it is a violent end  – such projects usually collapse violently and thus it is a very dangerous moment for the victims of this project, and the victims are always the Palestinians along with Jews, because Jews are also victims of the Zionism. Thus, the process of collapse is not just a moment of hope it is also the dawn that will break after the darkness, and it is the light at the end of the tunnel.

Collapse like this however produces a void. The void appears suddenly; it is a like a wall that is slowly eroded by cracks in it but then it collapses in one short moment. And one has to be ready for such collapses, for the disappearance of a state or a disintegration of a settler colonial project. We saw what happened in the Arab world, when the chaos of the void, was not filled by any constructive and alternative project; in such a case the chaos continues.

One thing is clear, whoever thinks about the alternative to the Zionist state should not look for Europe or the West for models that would replace the collapsing state. There are much better models which are local and are legacies from the recent and more distant pasts of the Mashraq (the eastern Mediterranean) and the Arab world as a whole. The long Ottoman period has such models and legacies that can help us taking ideas from the past to look into the future.

These models can help us build a very different kind of society that respects collective identities as well as individual rights, and is built from scratch as a new kind of model that benefits from learning from the mistakes of decolonialisation in many parts of the world, including in the Arab world and Africa. This hopefully will create a different kind of political entity that would have a huge and positive impact on the Arab world as a whole.

The article was originally published by the Islamic Human Rights Commission

Ilan Pappé is an Israeli historian and socialist activist. He is a professor of history at the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, director of the university’s European Centre for Palestine Studies, and co-director of the Exeter Centre for Ethno-Political Studies.

17 February 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Vijay Prashad

On February 9, 2024, Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that his army would advance into Rafah, the last remaining city in Gaza not occupied by the Israelis. Most of the 2.3 million Palestinians who live in Gaza had fled to its southern border with Egypt after being told by the Israelis on October 13, 2023, that the north had to be abandoned and that the south would be a “safe zone.” As the Palestinians from the north, particularly from Gaza City, began their march south—often on foot—they were attacked by Israeli forces, who gave them no safe passage. The Israelis said that anything south of Wadi Gaza, which divides the narrow strip, would be safe, but then as the Palestinians moved into Deir-al-Balah, Khan Younis, and Rafah, they found the Israeli jets following them and the Israeli troops coming after them. Now, Netanyahu has said that his forces will enter Rafah to combat Hamas. On February 11, Netanyahu told NBC news that Israeli would provide “safe passage for the civilian population” and that there would be no “catastrophe.”

By Andre Damon

In multiple statements over the past 24 hours, US officials have made clear that they will take no action against Israel no matter how many civilians it massacres in its planned assault on Rafah, where one million displaced people are sheltering. These statements effectively give Israel a blank check to commit unrestrained war crimes in its assault on the city.

On Monday, US National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby was asked whether the United States will reduce its military aid to Israel if it assaults Rafah without taking into consideration “what happens to civilians.”

To this, Kirby replied, “We will continue to support Israel. They have a right to defend themselves against Hamas, and we will continue to make sure they have the tools and capabilities to do that.”

To drive this point home, Politico reported on Tuesday, based on statements by three US officials, that “The Biden administration is not planning to punish Israel if it launches a military campaign in Rafah without ensuring civilian safety.”

Politico continued, “No reprimand plans are in the works, meaning Israeli forces could enter the city and harm civilians without facing American consequences.”

Over one million Palestinians have been forced into Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza, as a result of Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign throughout the Gaza Strip. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made it clear on Sunday that Israel intends to proceed with a full-scale military assault on Rafah, pledging “final victory.”

On Sunday, Biden declared, “The major military operation in Rafah should not proceed without a credible plan for ensuring the safety and support of more than 1 million people sheltering there.”

The statements by Kirby and the officials who spoke on background to Politico made it clear that this declaration is meaningless, and that the United States will endorse Israeli actions no matter how many people it massacres.

In a testament to how brazenly American imperialism is endorsing the genocide, Kirby was asked again on Tuesday, “What happens if Israel does not provide this plan and moves into Rafah?”

Kirby dismissed the question as a “game,” declaring, “I’m not going to get into a hypothetical game.”

The question is, however, neither a game nor hypothetical. Israel is killing between 100 and 200 people every single day in Gaza, and the death toll stands above 35,000. These victims were killed by US bombs, launched with US logistical support, and given political cover by the Biden administration.

The open support for Israel’s genocidal actions is all the more striking given statements by figures within the US political establishment that Israel is committing war crimes.

Speaking on the Senate floor on Monday, Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen accused Israel of committing a war crime by withholding food from the population of Gaza. “Kids in Gaza are now dying from the deliberate withholding of food. … That is a war crime. It is a textbook war crime. And that makes those who orchestrate it war criminals.” This did not stop Van Hollen from voting for a bill that includes billions in additional funding for Israel.

If these words apply to the Netanyahu government, they apply with even greater force to the Biden administration.

Israel continued to pound Rafah with airstrikes on Tuesday, killing dozens of people in the city even before the planned full-scale invasion. According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, 133 people were killed between Monday and Tuesday afternoon.

On Monday, Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, warned that a “potential full-fledged military incursion into Rafah—where some 1.5 million Palestinians are crammed into a tiny area—is terrifying, given the prospect that an extremely high number of civilians, again mostly children and women, will likely be killed and injured.”

On Tuesday, the World Food Program said in a statement that its efforts to feed starving people in Gaza were “constantly hampered” by the Israeli government. “WFP is deeply concerned about an expanded military offensive in Rafah, where over a million people are crammed into a tiny area. WFP has expanded our distribution points, but efforts to reach people in need throughout Gaza are constantly hampered,” it added. “There is nowhere safe.”

United Nations humanitarian affairs chief Martin Griffiths warned that the looming offensive against Rafah would be a “slaughter,” declaring, “Today, I am sounding the alarm once again: Military operations in Rafah could lead to a slaughter in Gaza. They could also leave an already fragile humanitarian operation at death’s door.”

The International Court of Justice (ICJ), meanwhile, confirmed that it received a request by South Africa to intervene to stop the assault on Rafah. In its filing, South Africa “calls upon the Court to consider as a matter of the greatest urgency whether the developing circumstances in Rafah require that it exercise its power to prevent further imminent breach of the rights of Palestinians in Gaza.”

Last month, the ICJ ruled that Israel could “plausibly” be committing genocide in Gaza. But in the wake of the ruling, Israel, with the support of the US, has only intensified its bombing of civilians, summary mass executions and deliberate starvation of the population of Gaza.

On Tuesday, Israeli forces targeted Al Jazeera Arabic correspondent Ismail Abu Omar, seriously injuring him and photojournalist Ahmed Matar. In a statement, Al Jazeera wrote that the attack is “a full-fledged crime added to Israel’s crimes against journalists, and a new part in the series of the deliberate targeting of Al Jazeera’sjournalists and correspondents in Palestine.”

Israeli officials, meanwhile, have threatened to expand the geographic scope of the war. On Tuesday, the Israeli military carried out strikes in southern Lebanon. Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared that there is “a realistic possibility” that the Israeli army will have “to return the northern residents to their homes forcefully,” implying a broader military offensive against Lebanon.

He added, “This means creating a different security situation by force, and that could lead to anything … we can reach anywhere we decide to go in Lebanon and beyond that.”

14 February 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Jim Miles

There have been many achievements by Israel in the last four months of their genocidal attacks on Gaza.  After reading and watching many websites the following achievements are notable.

First is the uniting of the Arab community against the occupation, settlement, and ethnic cleansing/genocide of the Palestinian people.   The people of the street are forcing their respective governments to align with Hamas and Gaza, and now that the last refuge in Rafah is threatened with military slaughter, there is increased risk/momentum towards a wider regional war.

Another big achievement, bigger perhaps in a global perspective, is the highlighting of the U.S.’ racist and militaristic policy in supporting the genocide.  For decades the U.S. has doled out (sure, think of it as welfare for the Zionist settlers) billions of dollars a year, and are now proposing many billions of dollars more in support, most of which goes to the military.  Beyond that the U.S. donates huge quantities of military equipment and ordinance in order to sustain the bloody cleansing, money the U.S. taxpayer could well use at home.

But beyond the U.S., it is the global community being shown in much detail through modern media that the U.S. cares nothing at all about the lives of women, children, and men being able to live their lives in peace and security.  The Middle East has lived this for decades, even before 9/11, and now the world can see it all at its best attempts to retain its global hegemony through “supreme spectrum dominance” – the mantra of the U.S. establishment.

Freedom and democracy?  Hogwash, malarkey, balderdash and many terms I refuse to print – it is all about dominance and control through the U.S. military for the sake of the U.S. oligarchy.

The military in itself is shown to be rather ineffective (along with the highly touted IOF) as the navy sits offshore, threatening the Houthis while the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb are avoided by many global marine shippers. Sure they can bomb the sand dunes and villages of an already much assaulted region, but against the irregular forces of the Houthis, they are very much sitting ducks should the war escalate.

A similarly large achievement for Israeli Zionists has been to highlight for the world its hatred and racism for all people other than those anointed by self-proclamation to be the only possessors of the land.

The pictures of detainees, stripped, bound, and held under illegal conditions are bad enough, but the pictures of wounded and murdered children and women, killed without remorse – more than likely with psychopathic glee – churn the stomach and fray the nerves.  The recently highlighted murder of Hind Raja speaks volumes about the cruelty of the IOF presenting itself far outside the bounds of anything moral.  The attempted humiliation of another Palestinian, Hamza Abu Halima – now given the moniker of the “Lion of Gaza” – clearly shows the pride, defiance and sumud of the Palestinian people against an immoral, self-righteous, intolerant Zionist fanaticism.

I shudder to think what further achievements might come from Israel’s aggression in the Middle East.  With over thirty thousand killed and missing, and the millions of displaced Palestinians now huddled near the Egyptian border, what kind of slaughter have they conceived next?

The ethnic cleansing of Palestine is their ultimate goal, to be achieved by murder and slaughter and/or by push and shove across international borders.  Allow that this “achievement” will be marked by failure before too much more damage has been achieved.

Jim Miles is a Canadian educator

13 February 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Andre Damon

Israel launched a massive aerial bombardment of Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza, on Sunday night into Monday morning, killing over 100 people. As the sun came up, the world was horrified by images of the mangled bodies of children, in a chilling demonstration of what is to come in the weeks ahead.

Over the weekend, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged to carry out a full-scale military onslaught against the besieged city, declaring, “Our goal … is total victory.” For the Israeli regime, “total victory” means killing as many Palestinians as possible and driving the rest from their homes.

Over one million people—almost half of the population of the Gaza Strip—are crowded into Rafah, with most living in squalid tents without clean water, food or sewerage systems. With the hospital system having collapsed, disease is running rampant, and famine is growing. Four out of five of the world’s hungriest people currently reside in Gaza, according to the United Nations.

The full-scale assault on Rafah will further swell the death toll in Gaza, where over four months of nonstop Israeli bombardment and deliberate mass summary executions have killed over 35,000 people.

The overnight massacre took place just one day after US President Joe Biden gave the administration’s approval for the offensive on Rafah, replacing the assertion that an offensive “cannot proceed” with the declaration that the offensive requires a “plan” for the evacuation of Rafah.

Biden “reaffirmed our shared goal to see Hamas defeated and to ensure the long-term security of Israel and its people,” according to the readout of a call between Biden and Netanyahu published by the White House.

Following a meeting with Jordan’s King Abdullah II on Monday, Biden repeated this empty condition, while referring to “our military operation in Rafah” in one of his “mistakes” that reveals the essential truth.

It is indeed “our military operation”—that is, an operation carried out by Israel but with the coordination of American imperialism. Biden could just as correctly call it “our genocide.”

The “plan,” worked out between Israel and the United States, appears to have taken shape, with the Wall Street Journal reporting, “The Israeli evacuation proposal includes establishing 15 campsites of around 25,000 tents each across the southwestern part of the Gaza Strip, Egyptian officials said.”

The tent cities would be funded by the United States and its allies in the Middle East, the Journal wrote, and would be operated by Egypt, headed by the dictator El-Sisi.

In other words, with the direct complicity, funding and participation of the United States, one million sick, hungry and exhausted people will be marched across the desert and crammed into tent cities.

Significantly, when asked whether the United Nations will participate in the “evacuation” of Rafah, Stephane Dujarric, the spokesperson for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, declared, “We will not be party to forced displacement of people,” adding, “As it is, there is no place that is currently safe in Gaza.”

The clear implication is that the United States is precisely a party to this “forced displacement”—i.e., genocide and ethnic cleansing.

The events of the past 24 hours have made clear the extent to which US imperialism is directly implicated in the Gaza genocide. Israel undertakes no major actions without the approval of the Biden administration, which is not only funding and arming but politically directing the mass murder of Gaza’s population.

Biden’s reaffirmation of his support for the genocide is particularly striking given the major escalation of the US political crisis over the weekend, amid a collapse of support for the US president over his role in the Gaza massacre.

Last week, the New York Times published a report of a meeting by Deputy National Security Adviser Jon Finer, who told a group of Arab American politicians in Dearborn, Michigan, that the administration has carried out a series of “missteps” in its open-ended support for Israel.

According to the Times, Finer said, “We have left a very damaging impression based on what has been a wholly inadequate public accounting for how much the president, the administration, and the country value the lives of Palestinians.”

He added, “I do not have any confidence in this current government of Israel” and admitted that Israeli politicians compared “residents of Gaza to animals,” with no criticism by US officials. He added, “We did not sufficiently indicate that we totally rejected and disagreed with those sorts of sentiments.”

Biden’s actions, however, speak louder than Finer’s words. The systematic public dehumanization of the Palestinian people by the White House flows precisely out of the Biden administration’s support for Netanyahu’s massacre in Gaza. The same goes for the hand-wringing by imperialist politicians in France, Germany and the EU, who have criticized certain aspects of Israel’s policy while in fact backing and financing the genocide.

The Biden administration sees support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza as a critical element of its Middle East strategy. American imperialism seized on the events of October 7 to carry out a long-planned military offensive throughout the Middle East, which has already led to the bombing of Iraq, Syria and Yemen, and leads ultimately toward a direct clash with Iran.

The conflict with Iran is itself part of a global struggle for world domination against Russia and China, in what the Biden administration has called the “decisive decade” that will set “the terms of geopolitical competition between the major powers.”

Biden, speaking for the predatory interests of American capitalism supported by both the Democrats and Republicans, is driven by far deeper necessities of American imperialism, which sees war as a means to shore up the United States’ global hegemony and the viability of the US dollar.

The horrors unfolding in Gaza offer humanity a glimpse of the brutality with which imperialism will conduct a full-scale war against Iran, Russia, China or all three.

The past four months of unending and escalating brutality and barbarism against the Palestinian people has demonstrated the futility of appealing to any section of the political establishment of the imperialist countries. Nor can workers and youth rely on the United Nations, which, whatever its statements condemning Israel’s actions, is entirely subordinate to the imperialist and capitalist powers.

It is the international working class that must be mobilized to stop the impending assault on Rafah and the genocide itself. This includes the escalation of global protests, combined with strike action by dockworkers, transportation workers and other sections of the working class to stop the funneling of arms and supplies to Israel and shut down production.

This must be connected to the building of a socialist leadership in the working class in every country. The genocide in Gaza is imperialist barbarism in its most brutal form. Just as the fight against the genocide is necessarily a fight against imperialism, the fight against imperialism is necessarily a fight against capitalism, for the conquest of power by the working class and the socialist reorganization of economic life on a world scale.

13 February 2024

Source: countercurrents.org