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By Dr Ranjan Solomon

Gaza is going through a murderous genocide at the hands of a barbaric Israeli army assault. It is in this context that Christians around the world must find solidarity in the call of the Heads of Churches in Palestine who have called on their people to desist from Christmas celebrations.

It’s a hard-hitting call that demands sacrifice and a deep understanding of what it means to be a human community. While bright lights, fancy decorations, classy gifts, (an imaginary Santa Claus), parties, booze and dances are the culture of modern Christmas, this has been deprived to the people of Palestine who live in uncertainty not knowing when their homes will be bombed or a random sharp shooter will kill a kid. Every 30 minutes, a child is killed.

At least 18,787 people, including more than 7,700 children, have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war, according to Palestinian officials in less than six weeks. Schools, hospitals, and offices, of relief agencies lie in ruins making welfare and relief near-impossible.

It is easy for Churches, priests, and Christian leaders to insist that we must live in hope. The anguish in Gaza and in multiple cities in the West Bank leave the notion of hope looking empty.

What is the sacrifice we can each make in the here and now for the children of Gaza who have no shelter? No crib for a bed. Not even a cow-shed.

But we’re not talking about Gaza alone or Bethlehem, or Jenin or Jerusalem or a dozen other cities and villages where people live in terror and anxiety. Around the world, the Manger scene is played out for migrants, the rural and urban poor, street children, slum dwellers living under polluted conditions.

It is not a Merry Christmas for millions upon millions. Their tragedy drags on for an eternity – even until they die. Hope is the only instrument we have in this dire state of affairs?

We are saddened at how those who have no hope survive this cold shelter less Christmas time. Our hearts are heavy with the burdens our suffering sisters and brothers live through. We can utter all the words of sadness at the killing of our brothers and sisters. The challenge is to lift up our eyes and fix them on Christ alone. (Heb 12:2.). Amidst persecution, we must worship in spirit and truth, and continue to worship and offer our treasures like the wise men to Him, who has set us free and secured life and eternity before us.

Meanwhile cancel Christmas celebrations because this is not time to celebrate!

Ranjan Solomon is a political commentator

19 December 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Press Release

As the brutal slaughtering in Gaza unfolds in increasingly horrific proportions, we, as an experienced research foundation for peaceful conflict resolution and peace-making since 1986, feel the urge to contribute our analytical points, sentiments and constructive conflict-resolution ideas.

The Transnational Foundation for Peace & Future Research (TFF) also wants to be on record with this Statement so that when historians look back on this moral calamity, they will see who stood with whom and who advocated peace instead of ongoing genocide.

The killing has to stop, and we call, together with the UN and so many others, for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire.

The horrific attack of Hamas on October 7, 2023, with the death of over 1100 people, is indefensible. There is no excuse for the killing of absolutely innocent people. While there is a painful history of 75 years of brutal occupation and apartheid regime against the Palestinian people, there is no justification for such an act of senseless violence.

However, Israel’s response can by no means be seen as practising the right to self-defence. It is an utterly out-of-proportion massacre of civilians, mainly women and children, executed by the military of the most totalitarian and racist government Israel ever had since it was established. It is an unprecedented murderous revenge. It is genocide.*

Despite the strongest condemnation by the UN, despite the unprecedented calls of its Secretary General, Israel continues with its systematic high-tech slaughter, and the Western governments are standing silent or, like Germany, declare their ”unwavering support for Israel.“ EU leaders declared immediately that ’Europe’ is ”standing with Israel.” The US voted against a ceasefire.

It is heartbreaking and painful beyond words to helplessly watch the unfolding of this massacre.

After two months, these are the facts:

> 7.900 children bombed to pieces, hundreds of them trapped under the debris, thousands of children mutilated, a whole young generation traumatised forever.

> 17.500 dead. Crying doctors in utterly dysfunctional hospitals, operating without anaesthetics.

> The homes of tens of thousands of people in shambles, 24 of 36 hospitals, schools, mosques, libraries, the beautiful university of Gaza – destroyed, erased to the ground.

> 1,9 million out of 2.2 million people forced out of their homes into the streets, deliberately starved of food, water and medical help, trapped under more and more bombing without any possibility to escape – it is a war crime of monstrous proportions.

> More than 100 UN staff members and over 60 journalists and media people have been killed, 54 of them Palestinians.

But while much of Israel and many of the Western governments seem to be blinded by the idea of eternal victimhood of Jews and Israel, that can’t be used as an equally eternal excuse for just every atrocity. Fortunately, hundreds of thousands of Jews in and outside Israel show in unequivocal terms, that this is not happening in their name.

Hundreds of Jews with kippas packed New York Central Station as early as three weeks after the beginning of the forced exodus of 1 million Palestinians and the following slaughtering and blocked the whole station for hours, all of them in black t-shirts with huge letters ”This Jew is for immediate ceasefire“. And they keep protesting.

35 Jewish-Palestinian organisations in Israel are calling for an unconditional ceasefire, and the International Jewish Voice for Peace is raising its voices everywhere around the globe.

Hundreds of Rabbis all around the world, including in Israel, have been condemning the unparalleled killing and are calling for an immediate ceasefire.

Little do you read in the Western mainstream media about this, nor about the millions of other people around the world who manifest their solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Amnesty International condemned Israel in non-mistakable terms, and the Security Council nearly unanimously called for an immediate ceasefire – vetoed shamefully by the United States alone.

The WHO called out Israel and urged for an immediate ceasefire.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Netanyahu repeatedly states that he will not be moved: the ”war on Hamas” (the Western media’s deceptive narrative for the genocide) will continue. Palestine did not exist on the map of the New Middle East he showed at the UN.

By all means available, this Israeli government should be isolated until it stops the genocide. Its political and military leaders must be held accountable for the horrible crimes against humanity and be brought to justice. What is at stake is the strength of international law, several conventions and UN Charter norms.

Every country that has delivered and continues to deliver the military means enabling this immoral, illegal and barbaric policy must be seen as complicit and likewise be held accountable. Without the ongoing military and political support of the US and Western States, Germany in particular – that 10-folded its weapon deliveries since October 23 – this horrible war and the unlawful occupation would be over soon.

There is no doubt that this will backfire on Israel and the West.

The whole world is watching the slaughtering and the collaboration of the Western states with horror and disgust. The arrogance of the ”leading nations” and their claim to act in the name of democracy, freedom, and human rights – as well as their ’rules-based international order’ – is fast falling apart.

How can we move towards long-term peace?

• We still believe that Jews and Palestinians can live together – and so do many of them themselves. Even under shocking conditions, people and organisations on both sides still insist that their lives are inextricably linked and that peaceful coexistence is possible.

It will be a long and painful path to make this happen – and it will only be possible with equal rights for all.

And it will need tremendous pressure from the outside and a non-violent revolution from the inside to change Israel into a just, human rights and law- respecting true democracy.

• We need to look at the entire Middle East as a region – we need its dense network of economic, cultural, and political ties to set up an all-regional conflict-resolution mechanism á la the OSCE. This way, over several years, all parties can dialogue their way through to something they can live with in the long term.

There are many possible elements – tie peace into economic and political mechanisms and relations; think of cantons and autonomies; think of mutually beneficial/cooperative uses of territories; think of the relations of it all with the Rest of the World, including the Global South. Tie it in with China’s Belt and Road Initiative, BRI.

Warfare requires no intellect or creativity; peace-making requires both.

• The violence must die down to move towards such a civilised process. We need an immediate ceasefire.

Ideally, we need a huge UN mission to disarm Israel and Hamas to such a level that neither can re-start a war. And then all the good offices around the world, governmental but certainly more so non-governmental, to help mediate, consult, dialogue every detail: What do the many parties fear and what do they want?

And then – at the end, after years of such a peace-building process – the parties would come to a final negotiation table and then sign an agreement of peaceful coexistence with all its civilian and military modalities.

• Conflict resolution means solving problems that stand between the parties. It cannot succeed by violence, looking to the past, or tit-for-tat for what was done yesterday.

It is, instead, one big, complex and long peace workshop where better futures/visions/ scenarios are brought up, evaluated, and sorted out – ending in combining the best elements into a comprehensive future arrangement.

You can’t change the past, but you can change the future. And – no! – everybody will not be happy, but all can be happy with something – and see a better future for their children.

And this is also where truth and reconciliation commissions come in – the healing and forgiveness that is found in all religions.

Peace is still possible.

Signed by TFF Associates:

Christina Spännar – PhD in sociology, founder, Sweden.

Jan Oberg – PhD in sociology, founder and director, Sweden.

Annette Schiffmann – Veteran peace activist & organiser of numerous international conferences on alternatives to war and violence: Iraq, Death Penalty, Israel/Palestine, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Heidelberg, Germany.

David Swanson – Co-Founder, Executive Director, and a Board Member of World Beyond War, author, activist, journalist, and radio host, the United States.

Liu Jian – Co-founder of Ichi Foundation, Beijing, China.

Erni Friholt – Secretary, the Orust Peace Movement, Orust, Sweden.

Claus Kold – PhD, senior researcher, director of TurningPoints, Denmark.

Biljana Vanskovska – Professor, Head of the Global Changes Center, Ss. Cyril and Methodius University, Skopje, Macedonia.

Farhang Jahanpour – Retired professor and Editor for Middle East and North Africa at BBC Monitoring, England.

Radmila Nakarada – Professor, Faculty of Political Science, University of Belgrade, Distinguished Fellow, New South Institute, Johannesburg, Belgrade, Serbia.

Ola Friholt – Chairman, the Orust Peace Movement, Orust, Sweden.

Richard Falk – Professor Emeritus, Princeton University, public intellectual and former UN Rapporteur for the Occupied Territories, US/Turkey.

Elaheh Pooyandeh – MA in peace studies, peace educator and mediator, Tehran, Iran.

Ina Curic – Sociologist, M.A. in Gender Studies as well as Peace and Conflict Studies; former TFF project coordinator in Burundi, creator of Imagine Creatively story-telling for peace, Romania.

David Loy – Retired professor of Buddhist and comparative philosophy, writer, and Zen teacher in the Sanbo Zen tradition of Japanese Zen Buddhism.

Chantal Mutamuriza – Former TFF project coordinator in Burundi, human rights advocate and humanitarian worker, Switzerland and Ethiopia.

Chaiwat Satha-Anand – Professor emeritus, Faculty of Political Science, Thammasat University and prolific writer on Islam and nonviolence, Bangkok, Thailand.

Brajna Greenhalgh – PhD Researcher; MSc in psychology, licensed counsellor, Bangor University, Wales.

Mairead Maguire – Nobel peace laureate, co-founder of Peace People, Northern Ireland, Kilcief County Down.

Gareth Porter – historian, independent investigative journalist, author and policy analyst specializing in U.S. national security issues, the United States.

Shastri Ramachandaran – Independent Journalist, editor, writer, publication & media consultant, New Delhi, India.

Peter Peverelli – Retired professor, School of Business and Economics, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam and lifelong expert on China, The Netherlands.

Neelakanta Radhakrishnan – Dr., The Gandhi Peace Mission, India; former Director of Gandhi Darshan and International Centre of Gandhian Studies in New Delhi, India.

Jorgen Johansen – Editor at Irene Publishing, independent peace researcher and writer, Sweden.

Majken Sorensen – Associate Professor of Social Science at Østfold University College and Karlstad University, Sweden.

Jake Lynch – Associate Professor in the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. He also writes, reports and broadcasts regularly as a journalist working in peace journalism, as well as making documentary films.

* Appendix: Why we use the word ”genocide.”

The use of the word ’genocide’ is controversial in many circles and may evoke emotional reactions. We are also aware that it has been used by some for political purposes to denigrate some other country or people.

But we do not use the term lightly or for political purposes. Given the links we provide below to trustworthy sites and organisations, legal documents such as the Genocide Convention, as well as expert opinion, we believe this is the term that best summarises what has unfolded in Gaza and subjected the Palestinians to unspeakable, unprecedented suffering as a people.

One central criterion is intentionality – that there is a deliberate intention to harm, eradicate, humiliate, displace or make life impossible for a nation – in part or, over time, in whole.

Most of the links provided by professor John Mearsheimer here, in which various Israeli leaders are on record, make it abundantly clear that the suffering cannot be explained merely by ’collateral damage,’ i.e. civilian casualties caused by unintended consequences of bombings and other warfare activities.

Furthermore, according to the Genocide Convention of 1948 – “Article 2 of the Convention defines genocide as … “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such:

1. Killing members of the group;
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

All these criteria do not have to be present – as the word ”any” indicates. In the case of Gaza, it should be abundantly clear that the Israeli government’s activity falls within criteria a, b and c.

To that can be added a multi-decade occupation (since 1967), apartheid, humiliation and other elements that, in and of themselves, do not constitute genocide.

Finally, it is extraordinarily important to note that – as pointed out by UN experts:

“The international community has an obligation to prevent atrocity crimes, including genocide, and should immediately consider all diplomatic, political and economic measures to that end.”

We believe that this obligation does place the West’s complicity in the genocide – thanks to arms and ammunition export and political side-taking statements – in a particularly tragical light.

Links on genocide

The Convention

The Convention

Wikipedia about the Convention

Arguments and judgements

Oct. 12, 2023
Gaza: UN experts decry bombing of hospitals and schools as crimes against humanity, call for prevention of genocide

Oct. 15, 2023
Public Statement: Scholars Warn of Potential Genocide in Gaza
On 15 October 2023, over 800 scholars and practitioners of international law, conflict studies and genocide studies signed a public statement warning of the possibility of genocide being perpetrated by Israeli forces against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

Oct. 20, 2023
Genocide Scholars and 100 Palestinian and International Civil Society Organisations Call on Prosecutor Khan to Issue Arrest Warrants, Investigate Israeli Crimes and Intervene to Deter Incitement to Commit Genocide in Gaza

Oct. 24, 2023
The Guardian: Israel is clear about its intentions in Gaza – world leaders cannot plead ignorance of what is coming

Nov. 7, 2023
Washington Post – Israel’s war in Gaza and the spectre of ‘genocide.’

Nov. 12, 2023
Aljazeera – Genocide in Gaza: A call to urgent global action. What is happening in Gaza fits the definition of genocide.

Nov. 13, 2023
Center for Constitutional Rights
Stop the Genocide: United States Complicity and Failure to Prevent the Israeli Government’s Unfolding Genocide of Palestinians

Nov. 14, 2023
Time
Is what is happening in Gaza a genocide. Experts weigh in.

Nov. 16, 2023
United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, OHCHR
Gaza: UN experts call on international community to prevent genocide on the Palestinian people

Dec. 1, 2023
Aljazeera – Former ICC chief prosecutor: Israel’s siege of Gaza is a ‘genocide’
Luis Moreno Ocampo discusses accusations of war crimes and genocide against both Hamas and Israel.

Dec. 6, 2023
As part of its genocide in Gaza, Israel escalates its targeting of schools housing displaced people

Dec. 11, 2023
‘Time for Action to Prevent Genocide Is Now’:
The 56 scholars said in their open letter that Palestinians in the West Bank and those who are citizens of Israel also faced “grave danger” if Israel’s attack on Gaza were to continue and escalate.

Dec. 12, 2023
International Middle East Media Center, IMEMC
Euro-Med Monitor: “In Gaza, Israel’s Army Replicates the Crimes Committed by Zionist Gangs in 1948.”

Finally, another statement, ”Declaration of Conscience and Concern of Global Intellectuals on Gaza Genocide,” drafted by world-renowned Princeton University Professor Emeritus of International Law and TFF Associate Richard Falk, together with former Turkish Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, determines that the word ’genocide’ describes the situation in Gaza. It is signed by many scholars, diplomats, former ministers, etc. and addresses the world community, including the UN (forthcoming).

17 December 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Marwan Asmar

Friday 15 December will be remembered as another black day for the Palestinian people. The killing of Samer Abu Daqqa by Israeli forces is another nail in the coffin of freedom from occupation and free speech.

Ever since the war on Gaza started a few days after 7 October, the Israeli military has been targeting Palestinian journalists and seeking to muzzle their words and reporting. Abu Daqqa, a cameraman for the Arabic Al Jazeera becomes journalist no 89 to have been targeted and killed by the Israeli big guns and sophisticated gadgetry.

He was killed on day 70 of Israel’s war on Gaza when its army continued bombarding the Strip, day and night. By late November, Israel dropped 40,000 tons of explosives on different parts of Gaza and it continues to do so till today.

For him, Friday 15 September proved to be a fateful day, an end to a career long dedicated to the Palestinian cause and revealing oppression experienced by the people of Gaza under Israeli occupation and siege imposed since 2007.

On that day, together with his colleague Wael Al Dahdouh, Al Jazeera’s Gaza Bureau Chief, were in the field covering the Israeli military strikes of the Farhanah UNRWA school in the vicinity of Khan Younis.

Israeli warplanes were striking at the school, beginning Friday early morning, telling the displaced people there to move further south to the city of Rafah on the border of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. This had been the policy of the Israeli military ever since they unleashed their war on Gaza of ordering people first, from the north of Gaza, to move to the south.

An Israeli drone

They were returning to the school having been in an ambulance that was struck by an Israeli drone having been given permission to transport people whose house had just been bombed.

But suddenly, and according to reports an Israeli reconnaissance drone appeared, armed with missiles and targeted the ambulance that reached the school. Both Al Dahdouh and Abu Daqqa were hit by shrapnel’s and injured, chaos ensued, people around started running asunder and the two got separated.

Al Dahdouh retreated quickly out of the area; Al Duqqa couldn’t, he was too badly hurt and stayed laying on the ground bleeding with the other civilians.

They were besieged by more Israeli firepower and warplanes and were stuck in the school. At that moment any human movement would be fatal, thuds from above continued and the cameraman stayed helpless on the ground whiles hemorrhaging.

Meanwhile, Al Dahdouh said he walked for at least 10 minutes – hundreds of meters – before a rescue teams got to him. He was struck in the arm and abdomen and in great pain. He told them about rescuing his friend but after intense firepower, they told him it would be better to get him to the hospital and send another ambulance for his colleague.

Meanwhile, and caught on camera, he was beseeching the doctors and nurses to get to Al Duqqa through the Red Cross. He said the man was laying in the courtyard of the school bleeding profusely, it was imperative that help be sent, not only for him but the rest of the displaced people also hurt.

And so, the long waiting begun while the channels of communications wired, trying to persuade the Israeli politicians, their military people and air force to send an ambulance to rescue the bleeding man in the middle of the school ground.

According to the Israelis, the area was already declared a military zone which meant the are was under bombardment. The chains of command moved painfully slow. Who to contact, which to contact, who has the ability to make the decision, all these issues took around five hours to sort out.

In the end an ambulance was given permission to enter the area but had to move slowly. The anti-climaxes continued, it was a long drive, for such a short period to the Nasser Hospital. The ambulance had to turn back because the road was potholed with craters from bombs and missiles.

It was then that Samer Al Duqqa, a long-dedicated hero to the word and the image said goodbye to the world and declared dead. He last breath was on the ground of the school because of Israeli military-bureaucratic wrangles who didn’t care which Palestinians they killed and/or maimed.

After all, they had been bombing and missiling Gaza for the last 70 days non-stop with the number of those killed at over 18,000 not to say anything about the injured at over 50,000 as well as the thousands –estimated at 7000 – under the rubble and waiting for burials.

The cameraman’s life was dedicated, working for Al Jazeera since 2004. In 2021 his hand was injured during similar Israeli strikes on Gaza but insisted on continuing to work in the field, although he was offered a job by the station in its Belgium office where his family lives.

Al Duqqa was quoted as saying that, during this latest onslaught, he slept for less three hours a day but it was enough for him to continue coverage of the merciless war.

Annoyed

The Israelis are annoyed with Al Jazeera as they long made that clear to US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken who conveyed the message to the Qataris who own the satellite station during his frequent trips to the region. But Al Jazeera wouldn’t relent.

On 25 October, Al Dahdouh’s family were targeted. For safe reasons, not that there is really any safe place in Gaza, his family moved to the Al Nuseirat camp – one of eight refugee camps in the 365-kilometer enclave – but they were targeted. His wife was killed so was his son, daughter and grandbaby.

In early December, Israeli warplanes targeted the family of two Al Jazeera correspondents. First, it was Momen Al Sharafi, his father, mother and 20 of his relatives were killed in an Israeli strike. As well, and in a separate attack days later, the 65-year-old father of Anas Al-Sharif was also killed in the Jabalia refugee camp which had been the subject of untense Israeli bombing.

This is not to say anything about the other local journalist who are constantly at the end of the Israeli barrel. Their lives continue to be in danger so long as the war on Gaza continues, and the bombing is likely to be longer than expected with talk now of “precision targeting” as a new phase and as conveyed to the Americans who seem to take that as winding down the conflict.

Marwan Asmar is a journalist from Amman, Jordan

18 December 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Ben Norton

10 Dec 2023 – The US government has paralyzed the United Nations, voting alone against the rest of the world and preventing peace in Gaza by vetoing three different resolutions in the Security Council. Meanwhile, Washington [the Good Guys] continues giving weapons to Israel.

The United States has used its veto power in the United Nations Security Council three times in less than two months to kill resolutions calling for peace in Gaza.

Meanwhile, Washington is sending billions of dollars worth of weapons to Israel, directly assisting the country as it commits war crimes against Palestinian civilians.

US blocks Gaza peace proposal at UN for 3rd time, holding world hostage

On December 8, the Security Council voted on a resolution that called for an “immediate humanitarian ceasefire” and the unconditional release of all hostages.

The United States was the only country on the 15-member council that voted against the measure.

This resolution had been introduced by the United Arab Emirates, and had the support of more than 90 UN member states.

The 13 Security Council members that voted for the measure were Albania, Brazil, China, Ecuador, France, Gabon, Ghana, Japan, Malta, Mozambique, Russia, Switzerland, and the UAE.

Close US ally the United Kingdom was the only country to abstain in the vote.

The United States helped to design the United Nations after World War II, concentrating power in the Security Council and giving permanent seats with veto power to the victors: the US, UK, France, USSR (now Russia), and China.

Many countries in the Global South have called to expand the Security Council and to eliminate the veto.

China and Russia have repeatedly expressed support for expanding the council. But Washington has adamantly opposed the initiative.

Global South leaders are particularly frustrated by the fact that the UK and France, each of which has a population of fewer than 70 million people, both have permanent seats on the Security Council, but not many of the most populous countries on Earth, such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Nigeria, or Brazil.

Brazil’s left-wing President Lula da Silva stressed this November that the failure of the UN to bring peace to Palestine demonstrates that the system is “broken” and has a “lack of credibility”.

“The UN needs change”, Lula said, calling to expand the Security Council and remove the veto.

“The UN of 1945 does not work in 2023”, the Brazilian leader added.

US Rebukes UN Secretary-General’s Historic Invocation of Article 99

UN Secretary-General António Guterres has publicly called for a ceasefire in Gaza, but was rejected by Washington.

Guterres took the extraordinary measure of invoking article 99 of the UN Charter, for the first time in five decades.

Article 99 states, “The Secretary-General may bring to the attention of the Security Council any matter which in his opinion may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security”.

The Associated Press noted, “Article 99 is extremely rarely used. The last time it was invoked was during fighting in 1971 that led to the creation of Bangladesh and its separation from Pakistan”.

In the case of the Bangladeshi national liberation war of 1971, Pakistan’s right-wing military regime ethnically cleansed and committed genocide against Bengalis, with the support of the US government – specifically President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger.

The genocidal situation in Palestine is strikingly similar today.

This November, top UN experts warned that “grave violations committed by Israel against Palestinians… point to a genocide in the making”.

The UN experts wrote:

[Israeli officials] illustrated evidence of increasing genocidal incitement, overt intent to “destroy the Palestinian people under occupation”, loud calls for a ‘second Nakba’ in Gaza and the rest of the occupied Palestinian territory, and the use of powerful weaponry with inherently indiscriminate impacts, resulting in a colossal death toll and destruction of life-sustaining infrastructure.

The Wall Street Journal reported on December 1 that the “U.S. has provided Israel with large bunker buster bombs, among tens of thousands of other weapons and artillery shells”.

In less than two months, Washington sent Israel approximately 15,000 bombs and 57,000 artillery shells.

In fact, Gaza is now one of the most heavily bombed areas in history, according to a report in the Financial Times.

US Vetoed Two Other Security Council Resolutions on Gaza

The United States voted against two similar resolutions in October.

On October 16, the US and its allies the UK, France, and Japan voted against a measure introduced by Russia that called for a humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza.

TO CONTINUE READING Go to Original – geopoliticaleconomy.com

18 December 2023

Source: www.transcend.org

By Craig John Murray

Why the Genocide Convention has not been activated at the ICJ? It is not that people are worried that a claim of genocide will not be successful, but that it will succeed. It follows that not only Benjamin Netanyahu but also “Genocide Joe” Biden and Rishi Sunak will be criminally liable for complicity.

13 Dec 2023 – Al Jazeera are leading their news with the execution of Palestinian civilians, including women and toddlers, inside the school in Jabalia where they were sheltering. They were all shot at point blank range, with no signs of a bomb or missile strike.

On the BBC, the Daily Politics show – which consists of discussion between senior British MPs – does not discuss Palestine at all, because the British political class supports the genocide, so for them there is nothing to discuss.

Also in Jabalia, the Israelis today destroyed the last remaining bakery.

It is worth stating why this is plainly a genocide in Gaza:

1) Deliberate destruction of the infrastructure which supports the civilian population, including water treatment, electricity, sewerage systems, bakeries and fishing boats;

2)  Deliberate destruction of almost all medical facilities;

3) Deliberate destruction of educational facilities, from universities to primary schools;

4) Deliberate destruction of the infrastructure of civil society, including Supreme Court, Parliament, Ministries and Council buildings and deliberate destruction of administrative records;

5) Deliberate blocking of food aid inducing mass starvation;

6) Massive and indiscriminate bombardment. In wars the general percentage of children among those killed varies from 6 to 8 percent. In Ukraine it is 6 percent. In Gaza it is 42 percent. This is indiscriminate destruction of an ethnic group;

7) Mass executions of civilians;

8) Acts of dehumanisation of the Palestinians, including parading prisoners naked for public and media show and humiliation, beating and sexually abusing them;

9) Forced mass movement of population;

10) Deliberate targeting of religious and cultural heritage buildings;

11) Deliberate targeting of intellectual leadership, including journalists, doctors, poets, university lecturers and senior administrators;

12) Numerous declarations of open genocidal intent from the President and Prime Minister down through almost the entire fabric of both civilian and military establishment.

This is the official definition of Genocide in international law, from the

Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide:

Article II
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

On Tuesday [12 Dec] I attended a session called by Palestine at the United Nations in Geneva. Over 120 states attended. While the formal session consisted of statements of national position with few surprises, I was able to discuss with a large number of delegates in the corridors why the Genocide Convention has not been activated triggering a reference to the International Court of Justice.

The answer is now clear to me. It is not that people are worried that a claim of genocide will not be successful at the International Court of Justice. It is that everybody is quite sure it will succeed. There is no respectable argument that this is not a genocide in the terms outlined above.

The problem is that once the ICJ has determined that this is a genocide, it follows that not only are Benjamin Netanyahu and hundreds of senior Israeli officials and military personally liable, but it is absolutely plain that “Genocide Joe” Biden, Rishi Sunak and members of their administrations are also criminally liable for complicity, having provided military support for the genocide.

The International Criminal Court cannot ignore a judgment of genocide from the International Court of Justice and will have no choice but to issue arrest warrants.

A genocide is the worst of crimes. Just how appalling this one is has been shown to the world like never before, through the power of social media.

But to the global 1 percent whose interests rule the world, no number of dead Palestinians makes any real difference to their interests. On the other hand, the ramifications for the international system of wealth concentration, if western political elites start to be held accountable for their crimes, are uncertain and therefore carry more risk.

This is particularly the concern of ruling classes of both Western and Arab states.

It may sound astonishing, but to the world’s diplomats the enormity of a genocide appears less troubling than the enormity of doing something about it.

Craig John Murray (born 17 Oct 1958) is a Scottish author, human rights campaigner, journalist, and former diplomat for the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

18 December 2023

Source: www.transcend.org

By Jeffrey D. Sachs

11 Dec 2023 – The nearly unanimous vote in the UN Security Council on Friday [8 Dec] calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza is a moment of honor for the United Nations and shame for the United States. By voting to stop Israel’s war on Gaza by a vote of 13 yes, 1 no (US), and 1 abstention (UK), the vast majority put itself on the side of international law. The US stood alone against international law, with its sidekick and tutor in imperial brutality, the United Kingdom, dutifully abstaining.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres honored the UN and human decency by invoking Article 99 of the UN Charter, calling for the UN Security Council to stop the killing in Gaza as a basic responsibility under the UN Charter. Each day, UN officials on the ground in Gaza heroically struggle to feed, shelter, and protect the population from Israeli bombs. More than 100 UN staff have been killed in the Israeli assault.

The situation in Gaza is as clear as it is brutal. The State of Palestine, recognized by 139 nations, has long suffered from the brutalities of Israeli occupation in Gaza and the West Bank. Gaza has been called the world’s largest open-air prison by Human Rights Watch. After the Hamas-led horrific terrorist attack on October 7, in which 1,200 Israelis died, Israel began to ethnically cleanse Gaza. Legal specialists at the Center for Constitutional Rights regard Israel’s actions as a genocide.

To date, more than 17,400 Gazans have been killed, and an unfathomable 1.8 million Gazans have been displaced. Tens of thousands are at risk of imminent death. Last month, Guterres warned that “Gaza is becoming a graveyard for children.” Israel pushed the population from northern Gaza to the south, and then invaded the south. Israeli authorities told Gazans to flee for their life to zones within the south, and then bombed the places to which the Gazans had been directed.

The US is more than a protector of Israel. It is an accomplice. The US supplies, in real-time, the munitions Israel uses for mass murder, even as US authorities pay lip-service to Gazan civilian lives.

The President of Israel Isaac Herzog justifies the slaughter by declaring that there are no innocent civilian Gazans: “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible.” The Israeli government’s biggest lie is that Israel has no options other than the mass killing of Gazans, supposedly to defeat Hamas.

The fact that Israel was lulled by its arrogance into letting its guard down on October 7 does not make Hamas an existential threat. Hamas has only a tiny fraction of Israel’s military might. October 7, like 9/11 in the US, was a colossal security blunder that should be immediately corrected by stepped-up border security, not an existential threat that in any remote manner justifies the killing of thousands or tens of thousands of innocent civilians, with women and children constituting 70% of the victims. The killing frenzy is being led by the very same politicians who were responsible for the October 7 security failure and who now manipulate the deepest anxieties of the Israeli population.

There is a larger and far more important point. Hamas can be demobilized through diplomacy, and only through diplomacy. Israel and the United States need finally to abide by international law, accept a sovereign state of Palestine alongside Israel, and welcome Palestine as the 194th member state of the UN. The US needs to stop arming the Israeli operation of ethnic cleansing in Gaza and stop protecting Israel’s rampant violations of basic human rights in the West Bank. Fifty-six years after its illegal occupation of Palestinian lands, and after decades of illegal settlements in the occupied territories, Israel needs finally to withdraw from the occupied Palestinian lands.

With such steps, peace between Israel and the neighboring countries could and would be secured. On that basis, UN peacekeepers, including both Arab and Western troops, would in turn secure the Israel-Palestine border for a needed transition period. At the same time, all international flows of financing to anti-Israel militants would be choked off by joint and coordinated actions of the US, Europe, and Israel’s Arab and Islamic neighbors.

The diplomatic route is open because the Arab and Islamic countries (including Iran) have once again reiterated their long-standing desire for peace with Israel as part of a peace agreement that establishes Palestine along the 1967 borders and its capital in East Jerusalem.

The real reason for Israel’s war in Gaza is that the Government of Israel rejects the two-state solution, and points to extremists on the other side rather than to the Arab and Islamic states, which want peace based on the two-state solution.

Israeli zealots, including several in the cabinet, believe that God promised them all of the lands from the Euphrates to the Mediterranean. This belief is fatuous. As Jewish history should make clear to religious Jews, and as all human history should make clear generally, no group, whether Jewish or otherwise, has an unconditional “right” to any land. For rights to be secured and internationally respected in our day, governments need to abide by the international rule of law. In the case of Israel and Palestine, international law, as expressed repeatedly by the UN Security Council, holds that two sovereign states, Israel and Palestine, have both the right and responsibility to live side by side in peace according to the 1967 borders.

Not only Israel, but even perhaps more so the United States, has lost its way. The deep reason was clear to Senator J. William Fulbright sixty years ago, when Fulbright was Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and wrote the magnificent book, The Arrogance of Power. Fulbright pointed to arrogance as the deep cause of America’s reckless war in Vietnam in the 1960s. In its ongoing arrogance, the US military-security state repeatedly ignores the will of the international community and international law because it believes that weapons and power enable it to do so. US foreign policy is based heavily on covert, illegal regime-change operations and on perpetual warfare that caters to the US military-industrial complex.

We must not become cynical about the UN. It is currently blocked by the US, the country that led its creation under America’s greatest president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The UN is doing its job, building international law, sustainable development, and universal human rights, step by step, with advances and reverses, over the opposition of powerful forces, but with the arc of history on its side. International law is a relatively new human creation, still in the works. It is difficult to achieve in the face of obstreperous imperial power, but we must pursue it.

It is important to note that opposing Israel’s war crimes has absolutely nothing to do with antisemitism. This point has been made eloquently in an open letter by dozens of Jewish writers. Netanyahu doesn’t speak for Judaism. The Israeli Government violates the most sacred of all Jewish injunctions, to protect life (Pikuach Nefesh) and to love your neighbor as yourself (Leviticus 19:18). The message of Jewish ethics is found in the words of the Prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 2:4) inscribed on a wall directly facing the United Nations: “They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”

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

18 December 2023

Source: www.transcend.org

By Chris Hedges

Settler colonial states have a terminal shelf life. Israel is no exception.

17 Dec 2023 – Israel will appear triumphant after it finishes its genocidal campaign in Gaza and the West Bank. Backed by the United States, it will achieve its demented goal. Its murderous rampages and genocidal violence will exterminate or ethnically cleanse Palestinians. Its dream of a state exclusively for Jews, with any Palestinians who remain stripped of basic rights, will be realized. It will revel in its blood-soaked victory. It will celebrate its war criminals. Its genocide will be erased from public consciousness and tossed into Israel’s huge black hole of historical amnesia. Those with a conscience in Israel will be silenced and persecuted.

But by the time Israel achieves its decimation of Gaza — Israel is talking about months of warfare — it will have signed its own death sentence. Its facade of civility, its supposed vaunted respect for the rule of law and democracy, its mythical story of the courageous Israeli military and miraculous birth of the Jewish nation, will lie in ash heaps. Israel’s social capital will be spent. It will be revealed as an ugly, repressive, hate-filled apartheid regime, alienating younger generations of American Jews. Its patron, the United States, as new generations come into power, will distance itself from Israel the way it is distancing itself from Ukraine. Its popular support, already eroded in the U.S., will come from America’s Christianized fascists who see Israel’s domination of ancient Biblical land as a harbinger of the Second Coming and in its subjugation of Arabs a kindred racism and white supremacy.

Palestinian blood and suffering — 10 times the number of children have been killed in Gaza as in two years of war in Ukraine — will pave the road to Israel’s oblivion. The tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of ghosts will have their revenge. Israel will become synonymous with its victims the way Turks are synonymous with the Armenians, Germans are with the Namibians and later the Jews, and Serbs are with the Bosniaks. Israel’s cultural, artistic, journalistic and intellectual life will be exterminated. Israel will be a stagnant nation where the religious fanatics, bigots and Jewish extremists who have seized power will dominate public discourse. It will find its allies among other despotic regimes. Israel’s repugnant racial and religious supremacy will be its defining attribute, which is why the most retrograde white supremacists in the U.S. and Europe, including philo-semites such as John Hagee, Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene, fervently back Israel. The vaunted fight against antisemitism is a thinly disguised celebration of White Power.

Despotisms can exist long after their past due date. But they are terminal. You don’t have to be a Biblical scholar to see that Israel’s lust for rivers of blood is antithetical to the core values of Judaism. The cynical weaponization of the Holocaust, including branding Palestinians as Nazis, has little efficacy when you carry out a live streamed genocide against 2.3 million people trapped in a concentration camp.

Nations need more than force to survive. They need a mystique. This mystique provides purpose, civility and even nobility to inspire citizens to sacrifice for the nation. The mystique offers hope for the future. It provides meaning. It provides national identity.

When mystiques implode, when they are exposed as lies, a central foundation of state power collapses. I reported on the death of the communist mystiques in 1989 during the revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania. The police and the military decided there was nothing left to defend. Israel’s decay will engender the same lassitude and apathy. It will not be able to recruit indigenous collaborators, such as Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority — reviled by most Palestinians — to do the bidding of the colonizers. The historian Ronald Robinson cites the inability to recruit indigenous allies by the British Empire as the point at which collaboration inverted into noncooperation, a defining moment for the start of decolonization. Once noncooperation by native elites morphs into active opposition, Robinson explains, the Empire’s “rapid retreat” is assured.

All Israel has left is escalating violence, including torture, which accelerates the decline. This wholesale violence works in the short term, as it did in the war waged by the French in Algeria, the Dirty War waged by Argentina’s military dictatorship and during Britain’s conflict in Northern Ireland. But in the long term it is suicidal.

“You might say that the battle of Algiers was won through the use of torture,” the British historian Alistair Horne observed, “but that the war, the Algerian war, was lost.”

The genocide in Gaza has turned Hamas fighters into heroes in the Muslim world and the Global South. Israel may wipe out the Hamas leadership. But the past — and current — assassinations of scores of Palestinian leaders has done little to blunt resistance. The siege and genocide in Gaza has produced a new generation of deeply traumatized and enraged young men and women whose families have been killed and whose communities have been obliterated. They are prepared to take the place of martyred leaders. Israel has sent the stock of its adversary into the stratosphere.

Israel was at war with itself before Oct. 7. Israelis were protesting to prevent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s abolition of judicial independence. Its religious bigots and fanatics, currently in power, had mounted a determined attack on Israeli secularism. Israel’s unity since the attacks is precarious. It is a negative unity. It is held together by hatred. And even this hatred is not enough to keep protestors from decrying the government’s abandonment of Israeli hostages in Gaza.

Hatred is a dangerous political commodity. Once finished with one enemy, those who stoke hatred go in search of another. The Palestinian “human animals,” when eradicated or subdued, will be replaced by Jewish apostates and traitors. The demonized group can never be redeemed or cured. A politics of hatred creates a permanent instability that is exploited by those seeking the destruction of civil society.

Israel was far down this road on Oct. 7 when it promulgated a series of discriminatory laws against non-Jews that resemble the racist Nuremberg Laws that disenfranchised Jews in Nazi Germany. The Communities Acceptance Law permits exclusively Jewish settlements to bar applicants for residency on the basis of “suitability to the community’s fundamental outlook.”

Many of Israel’s best educated and young have left the country to places like Canada, Australia and the U.K., with as many as one million moving to the United States. Even Germany has seen an influx of around 20,000 Israelis in the first two decades of this century. Around 470,000 Israelis have left the country since Oct. 7. Within Israel, human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists — Israeli and Palestinian — are attacked as traitors in government-sponsored smear campaigns, placed under state surveillance and subjected to arbitrary arrests. The Israeli educational system is an indoctrination machine for the military.

The Israeli scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz warned that if Israel did not separate church and state and end its occupation of the Palestinians, it would give rise to a corrupt Rabbinate that would warp Judaism into a fascistic cult. “Israel,” he said, “would not deserve to exist, and it will not be worthwhile to preserve it.”

The global mystique of the U.S., after two decades of disastrous wars in the Middle East and the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, is as contaminated as its Israeli ally. The Biden administration, in its fervor to unconditionally support Israel and appease the powerful Israel lobby, has bypassed the congressional review process with the Department of State to approve the transfer of 14,000 rounds of tank ammunition to Israel. Secretary of State Antony Blinken argued that “an emergency exists that requires the immediate sale.” At the same time he has cynically called on Israel to minimize civilian casualties.

Israel has no intention of minimizing civilian casualties. It has already killed 18,800 Palestinians, 0.82 percent of the Gazan population — the equivalent of around 2.7 million Americans. Another 51,000 have been wounded. Half of Gaza’s population is starving, according to the U.N. All Palestinian institutions and services that sustain life — hospitals (only 11 out of 36 hospitals in Gaza are still “partially functioning”), water treatment plants, power grids, sewer systems, housing, schools, government buildings, cultural centers, telecommunications systems, mosques, churches, U.N. food distribution points — have been destroyed. Israel has assassinated at least 80 Palestinian journalists alongside dozens of their family members and over 130 U.N. aid workers along with members of their families. Civilian casualties are the point. This is not a war against Hamas. It is a war against the Palestinians. The objective is to kill or remove 2.3 million Palestinians from Gaza.

The shooting dead of three Israeli hostages who apparently escaped their captors and approached Israeli forces with their shirts off, waving a white flag and calling out for help in Hebrew is not only tragic, but a glimpse of Israel’s rules of engagement in Gaza. These rules are — kill anything that moves.

As the retired Israeli Major General Giora Eiland, who formerly headed the Israeli National Security Council, wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth, “[T]he State of Israel has no choice but to turn Gaza into a place that is temporarily or permanently impossible to live in…Creating a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza is a necessary means to achieve the goal.” “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist,” he wrote. Major General Ghassan Alian declared that in Gaza, “there will be no electricity and no water, there will only be destruction. You wanted hell; you will get hell.”

Settler colonial states that endure, including the United States, exterminate through diseases and violence nearly the entirety of their indigenous populations. Old World plagues brought by the colonizers to the Americas, such as smallpox, killed an estimated 56 million indigenous people over about 100 years in South, Central and North America. By 1600 less than a tenth of the original population remained. Israel cannot kill on this scale, with nearly 5.5 million Palestinians living under occupation and another 9 million in the diaspora.

The Biden presidency, which ironically may have signed its own political death certificate, is tethered to Israel’s genocide. It will try to distance itself rhetorically, but at the same time it will funnel the billions of dollars of weapons demanded by Israel — including $14.3 billion in supplemental military aid to augment the $3.8 billion in annual aid — to “finish the job.” It is a full partner in Israel’s genocide project.

Israel is a pariah state. This was publicly on display on Dec. 12 when 153 member states at the U.N. General Assembly voted for a ceasefire, with only 10 — including the U.S. and Israel — opposed and 23 abstaining. Israel’s scorched earth campaign in Gaza means there will be no peace. There will be no two state solution. Apartheid and genocide will define Israel. This presages a long, long conflict, one the Jewish State cannot ultimately win.

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.

18 December 2023

Source: www.transcend.org

By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

14 Dec 2023 – Ain Dubai, in English, The Eye of Dubai, is touted as the world’s largest Ferris wheel. The 820-foot tall wheel dominates the man-made island on which it rests. The massive, unblinking Eye permanently stares upon Dubai’s beachfront, its thicket of high rise luxury hotels and its marina, brimming with foreign-owned yachts. The Eye operated for only a few months before being abruptly shuttered in 2022. People can only speculate why, as the United Arab Emirates, the autocratic petrostate that governs Dubai, won’t say. One theory posits the wheel is slowly sinking into the sand, and that the structure, 25% heavier than the Eiffel Tower, will eventually topple, crushing the luxury residential high rises that surround it. The Eye thus stands as a glaring metaphor for humankind’s folly, trying to bend Nature to our will, and failing.

Across Dubai, Expo City is the sprawling facility where the UAE hosted COP28, this year’s annual summit of the three-decades-long global effort to tackle climate change, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). All-night negotiations heated up as the two-week event neared its scheduled conclusion. Led by this year’s COP president, Dr. Sultan Al Jaber, the CEO of the UAE’s state-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, the gathered diplomats missed their Tuesday deadline, arguing over whether or not the final document would encourage a total “phase out” of fossil fuels or only the more mildly worded “phase down.”

In the end, the bleary-eyed negotiators used neither phrase, perhaps overwhelmed by the assembled army of petrostate representatives and 2,400 or more fossil fuel lobbyists. The final text promised, instead, the “[t]ransitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner.” Activists praised the first-time use of “fossil fuels” in a UNFCCC document. The climate activist group 350.org called it a “weak but welcome nod” in an otherwise “loophole-ridden text.”

As COP28 started, climate scientist Kevin Anderson predicted on social media, “This is a Cabal of Oil Producers not a climate COP. The outcome is known.”

Anderson didn’t attend COP28, in part because he won’t fly due to aviation’s global greenhouse gas emissions, but also because of his growing skepticism with the process.

“At every single level, the tendrils of Big Oil are changing our society and fundamentally changing our climate,” Anderson said on the Democracy Now! news hour, halfway through COP28. “These COPs have become little more than a scam under which the oil and other fossil fuel companies are hiding that nothing is being done.”

The outcome of COP28 includes a Global Stocktake, an assessment of how the world’s 200+ nations are doing eight years after the UNFCCC’s Paris Agreement was hammered out in 2015, with its aspirational goal of limiting global warming over pre-industrial levels to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).

The loopholes mentioned by 350.org allow continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels. “Phasing out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies” is encouraged, which suggests that “efficient” fossil fuel subsidies exist, a point the climate divestment movement refutes. The document also claims that “transitional fuels can play a role in facilitating the energy transition.” This clearly refers to methane, marketed by the industry as “natural gas,” which is many times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

Then there is the issue of who is going to pay to move the global economy off of its dependence on fossil fuels.

“None of the transition is funded,” Asad Rehman, lead spokesperson for the Climate Justice Coalition, said from COP28 after the deal was finalized. “The idea of providing climate finance, public climate finance, that is really desperately needed, is being frittered away. Instead, the only mentions of finance are about private capital.” To attract the vast sums needed, Rehman says, “you’re lowering environmental standards. You’re lowering workers’ rights standards. You make your economy much more attractive to private capital…so now the responsibility has fallen on developing countries to guarantee profit. It’s utter madness.”

COP29, next year’s summit, will be in Baku, Azerbaijan, another repressive petrostate. Human Rights Watch reported on December 5th, “A new wave of repression in Azerbaijan is targeting foreign-funded independent media as well as journalists who criticize the government and expose high-level corruption.” Six journalists were arrested.

Petrostates like the UAE and Azerbaijan play predictable roles in protecting the status quo, but it’s the world’s biggest petrostate that brandishes the most power inside the COPs: the United States. As the largest producer and exporter of fossil fuels, and as the world’s largest historical emitter of greenhouse gasses, the US bears the most responsibility for the climate crisis. While negotiations move from the shifting sands of Dubai with its sinking Eye to Azerbaijan, what people demand of their elected leaders, here in the United States, matters around the world.

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 900 stations in North America.

Denis Moynihan is the co-founder of Democracy Now! Since 2002, he has participated in the organization’s worldwide distribution, infrastructure development, and the coordination of complex live broadcasts from many continents.

18 December 2023

Source: www.transcend.org

Read Part I:

The Hidden Reasons Behind the War on Gaza. Netanyahu’s Plan for “A New Middle East”

By Richard Medhurst, December 04, 2023

“Israel” and the United States have been planning for decades to build the so-called “Ben Gurion Canal,” a rival to the infamous Suez Canal in Egypt. This Ben Gurion Canal would begin at “Eilat”, and finish right next to, if not directly through, Gaza.

The Suez Canal is one of the most important construction and irrigation projects in history, connecting the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea. So vital to trade is the Suez Canal that a war was even fought over it in 1956: “Israel”, Britain, and France attacked Egypt for daring to nationalize the Suez Canal – its own land.

A document declassified in the 1990s showed that just a few years after the Suez Crisis, the Americans hatched a secret plan in 1963 to detonate 520 nuclear bombs in al-Naqab desert to help “Israel” construct the “Ben Gurion Canal.”

US classified document from 1963 proposing the use of nuclear bombs to clear a path for the “Ben Gurion Canal” in al-Naqab Desert, Palestine

The Suez Canal is a geostrategic asset in every sense of the word: it sits at the intersection of three continents and two bodies of water.

It cuts shipping times and costs by so much that today 12% of global trade and 30% of global container traffic pass through the Suez Canal.

Egyptian President el-Sisi was told in the last weeks that if he accepts “Israel’s” plan to take Palestinians in Gaza and put them in the Sinai desert, which “Israel” would pay for, then the United States would wipe Egypt’s national debt.

This is why “Israel” is absolutely obliterating Gaza – they want to seize Gaza for themselves and kill off all Palestinians and the Resistance.

Nile River

In addition to offering debt relief, the United States and “Israel” have another incentive for Egypt lined up.

Egypt has been suffering from acute water shortages since its neighbor Ethiopia built the so-called Renaissance Dam in 2011, cutting much-needed water from the Nile to both Sudan and Egypt. It has caused a huge dispute ever since that has yet to be resolved.

Ethiopia’s Renaissance Dam, built in 2011

Ethiopia has a significant Jewish population. The United States and “Israel” could theoretically lean on Ethiopia, as they have done before, and pressure it not to fill up its reservoirs, which would be detrimental to Egypt and incentivize el-Sisi to take in Palestinians from Gaza.

While it is a natural human response to flee war, Palestinians have refused to abandon their homes in Gaza for a very good reason: they know that if they leave, they will never see their homes again. Most people in Gaza originally came from other parts of Palestine. They already lost their homes once to Israeli settlers from 1948 onward, and they are not willing to lose their homes again.

So despite the appeal of having Gazans move to supposed “safety” in the Sinai, this would be a betrayal of the Palestinian cause and the surrender of even more land to the Zionist occupation. The Israelis would then build their “Ben Gurion Canal,” cementing Washington and “Tel Aviv’s” control over the world’s most important shipping lane and global maritime trade.

The “Ben Gurion Canal” is the last piece of the puzzle in “Israel” and the United States attempts to control all strategic shipping lanes

1. The Red Sea

The Red Sea, which would feed into the “Ben Gurion Canal,” already has a huge presence of American and Israeli troops. Did you know that “Israel’s” biggest military base is located in the Red Sea, on the Island of Dahlak, in Eritrea?

This base was hit by Yemen in the last few weeks, in support of Gaza, as Yemen is an integral part of the Resistance Axis.

2. The Gulf of Aden and Bab el-Mandab Strait

Yemen is located near Eritrea, in a crucial area: the Gulf of Aden and Bab al-Mandab Strait. Tens of thousands of ships pass this area every year, including a large percentage of the world’s petroleum vessels.

The US has been trying for decades to control this important shipping lane by putting troops right opposite Yemen, inside Djibouti, Somalia, and the region known as the Horn of Africa.

The United States has also tried to control this area by attacking Yemen from the rear, using Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries, and carrying out its own drone strikes. This war has been ongoing for 8 years; it devastated Yemen, and the media barely covered it.

3. Socotra Island

We come then to the Yemeni island of Socotra. To remind you how strategic this area is, it is located between the Horn of Africa, the Gulf of Aden, the Arabian Sea, and the Indian Ocean.

The UAE, after normalizing ties with “Israel”, helped “Israel” to establish a military presence and spy bases on Socotra.

The importance of the Bab al-Mandab Strait is that both Iran and China need to use this shipping lane, for Iran to export fuel and for China as the world’s largest economy and largest trading partner of most countries.

4. The Strait of Hormuz

Continue up the Arabian coast, and you get to another vital strait: the Strait of Hormuz.

There is an entire de facto Cold War taking place here: a tanker war.

The US and “Israel” constantly try to sink Iranian fuel ships, and Iran responds in kind by hitting Israeli-owned ships. Britain also tried playing this game in the Strait of Gibraltar by hijacking an Iranian ship. Only when Iran gave Britain a taste of its own medicine did Britain get the message and let the Iranian ship go.

The US has gone so far as to even steal Iranian fuel tankers and sell off the cargo – a practice commonly referred to as piracy.

The US and “Israel” want to control this vital part of the world, so they can attack Iranian and Chinese ships in Bab al-Mandab Strait, up into the Red Sea, and of course by replacing the Suez Canal with the “Ben Gurion Canal.”

This final piece of the puzzle will allow the US and “Israel” to dominate world maritime trade.

They can use this not only to the benefit of their own economies but also to damage and attack other countries’ economies, such as those of China, Iran, Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon. It is literally a robbery highway on the high seas.

And the “Ben Gurion Canal” is the key to all of this.

Where Are the Arabs and Muslims?

Egypt could stop this war in Gaza right now by shutting down the Suez Canal. Were late Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser still here, he wouldn’t have even thought twice.

It’s bewildering that Egypt doesn’t shut the Suez– if not for Gaza’s sake, then for its own sake. It is Egypt’s economy and the Suez Canal that will suffer if “Israel” gets away with genocide in Gaza and building its “Ben Gurion Canal.”

Why doesn’t Saudi Arabia threaten to cut oil production for one week – even just for a day to try and stop the war? Or is there something in it for them, were Gaza to be replaced with a canal?

Where are the Arabs? Where are the Muslims? Why don’t the kingdoms in the Gulf use their wealth and resources to help Gaza?

If you look at the European Union, they have nothing in common except geography. They speak over 24 languages. Whereas the Arab world today, from Morocco to Oman, has a common tongue, common geography, common religion, common history, and common culture.

This automatically makes the Arabs a global superpower – not to mention the enormous wealth of natural resources, the geographical landmass, and the population, which are all essential criteria of “hard power”.

It is not only the size of the Arab world, but look at the straits: all the vital straits and shipping lanes are located in Arab countries: The strait of Gibraltar, (originally Jabal Ṭāriq), the Suez Canal, the Bab al-Mandob Strait, and the Strait of Hormuz between Iran and Oman.

All vital straits are located in Arab countries

European colonial powers understood how powerful Arab countries were a long time ago, so they planted “Israel” right in the middle to create chaos. And then they worked on bringing the Arab kingdoms over to their side and to make them normalize ties with “Israel”.

All these borders in the Middle East didn’t even exist until Britain and France – the same European powers that created and back “Israel” today – drew them.

Europe’s foreign policy toward the Middle East is a divide-and-conquer strategy. It is all about colonialism and theft. It is about dividing up the Arab world, creating instability, and controlling the resources and straits.

European colonial powers always play the sectarian card to achieve this: they pitted Sunni against Shia in Iraq and Lebanon. Now they try to do it between Arabs and Iran. In Palestine, they lie again and say the struggle is “between Jews and Muslims”. It has never been about that. This war has nothing to do with Hamas or religion. It has always been about colonialism because the West is afraid of unity between Arabs and Muslim countries.

The entire world can’t believe how “Israel” is allowed to slaughter Palestinians like this in broad daylight and get away with it. How is it that the so-called “civilized West” supports this behavior? Why won’t Western leaders even call for a ceasefire? The answer is that this genocide in Gaza is their project too. “Israel” itself is a European and American imperialist project, and these “leaders” are all complicit.

The theft of Arab resources and control over the straits and canals will ultimately impact everybody in the Middle East negatively – not to mention all the suffering Palestinians have had to endure. And that is precisely why the whole Axis of Resistance – Palestine, Yemen, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon – is involved in this fight on multiple fronts. It is about time for other Arab and Muslim countries to do their part for Gaza too: cut all ties with “Israel”, impose an oil embargo on the West, and shut down the Suez Canal. The entire world is watching you.

*

5 December 2023

Source: www.globalresearch.ca

By Rima Najjar

Ismail Haniyeh’s statement yesterday (Dec 13, 2023) was eloquent and powerful. Haniyeh is the senior Hamas leader and former prime minister of the Palestinian Authority (2006–07) and of the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip (2007–14). His statement was carried on many Arabic news channels.

I listened to the speech carefully as it was being broadcast live on Al Jazeera Arabic during its coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza, and then had a hard time finding it again on Al Jazeera’s website, likely because Israel and the U.S. continue to disfigure the reality of Hamas and Palestinian resistance generally (whether violent or non-violent) as terrorism, instead of what it is, which is a national movement of resistance to occupation and for liberation and self-determination.

You may be surprised to learn that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the organization with whom Israel negotiated the Oslo Accords in 1993, was designated as a “foreign terrorist organization” by the U.S. in 1997 and still holds that designation. Bafflingly, rather than dropping the designation, the US uses a “presidential waiver” that allows US diplomatic engagement with the PLO (such as it is today), as the “sole representative of the Palestinian people,” to take place.

But Biden is not about to waive the US designation of Hamas as a “terrorist organization” to engage diplomatically with the Palestinian Islamic armed resistance. On the contrary, it continues to hurl invective and dehumanizing language at this side of what it perversely describes as a defensive war by the occupier against “terrorists,” exhibiting callous, shocking and inhumane disregard to a humanitarian situation that practically the whole world now recognizes as a series of continuing massacres by Israel against civilians, mostly women and children, and a scorched-earth tactic on vast areas of a densely populated strip of Palestinian occupied land under blockade for 17 years (See “What was Hamas Thinking?”).  Moreover, as Jonathan Cook points out, the BBC and other media keep revisiting Hamas crimes that day, but fail to report on growing evidence that Israel killed its own citizens, often in grotesque fashion.

Biden continues to call for the eradication of Hamas, long after every rational and informed political analyst has declared that to be an impossible task.

What resonated most for me in Ismail Haniyeh’s speech is his reassurance that Palestinian sacrifice, blood and suffering shall not be in vain, God willing; Palestine will be free.

Ismail Haniyeh: “Every life lost, whether of a boy or girl, man or woman, young or old, every tear shed by a mother, father, or child, is precious. Every home or dream destroyed by zionist attacks, and all suffering from hunger, thirst, lack of money, lives, and crops, will remain etched in our memory, never to be forgotten or forgiven. The enemy will pay the price for all of it, no matter how long it takes.”

That price is the liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea, the freedom and self-determination of the Palestinian people.

To my ears, Haniyeh was echoing the sentiments Abraham Lincoln described so eloquently in his Gettysburg address as he commemorated the dead on the battlefield by saying they gave their lives so that the nation could live.

Abraham Lincoln: “… from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish on this earth.”

Palestinian government of the Palestinian people, by the Palestinian people, for the Palestinian people is not in Joe Biden’s calculations, let alone Netanyahu’s. But they most certainly are in the calculations of Hamas:

Ismail Haniyeh: “Any bets on arrangements in Gaza without Hamas and the resistance factions are illusions and mirages, illusions and mirages, illusions and mirages… We are certain that the brutal aggression will end, and the resistance will remain a faithful guardian of the rights and legitimate aspirations of our people…”

Abraham Lincoln: “It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.”

Ismail Haniyeh: “I affirm that we are steadfast, our resistance is capable, our people are patient and firmly struggling, and we are confident that the occupation will disappear, God willing.”

Palestinians everywhere are similarly steadfast and confident. A new poll conducted across the West Bank and Gaza shows skyrocketing support for Palestinian resistance and dissatisfaction with the Palestinian Authority.

The above comparison of rhetoric between Haniyeh and Lincoln is meant to juxtapose US virtuous national rhetoric against what it designates as terror and so highlight US hypocrisy. To Abraham Lincoln “the nation” was a settler-colonial entity that had massacred much of the indigenous population on the land. Haniyeh is a leader of a real liberation effort for indigenous freedom, currently defending against both genocide and ecocide.

And because you are unlikely to come across what Hamas has to say on the 36th anniversary of the movement, here is a translation of the Arabic text of that statement as provided by Resistance News Network on Telegram:

In the Name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful

On the occasion of the 36th anniversary of the launch of the Hamas movement and amidst the blessed Al-Aqsa Flood battle, we renew our commitment to continue the resistance until the occupation is removed and to achieve our people’s aspirations for liberation, return, and the establishment of the Palestinian state with Al-Quds as its capital.

 O patient and steadfast masses of our Palestinian people, both in proud Palestine and abroad, today marks the 36th anniversary of the launch of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), and we live in days of glory and pride, under the shadows of the glorious Al-Aqsa Flood battle. This battle inaugurated a new phase in our struggle with the brutal zionist occupier, who indulges in the blood of our people, denies our national rights, steals our land, and Judaizes our Islamic and Christian sanctities, including Al-Quds and Al-Aqsa Mosque. The Al-Aqsa Flood battle is a title of steadfastness and resistance on the path to freedom and liberation from occupation and the establishment of the Palestinian state with Al-Quds as its capital, God willing.

Since its inception, the movement has kept the covenant of the righteous martyrs, carrying the banner of jihad and resistance to complete our people’s journey towards liberation and independence. It has offered its leaders and soldiers alongside the martyrs of our people to create a free and dignified future for our patient and steadfast people. Al-Aqsa Flood is a continuation of this approach, which we will not abandon until the zionist Nazi occupation is ended.

We live the pain and suffering with our people everywhere, especially in proud Gaza, which faces a savage zionist aggression and a genocidal war targeting its existence on its land by destroying all elements of life. Yet, we will never succumb to humiliation and defeat, and this brutal enemy will not succeed in its malicious schemes. Our great people and our valiant resistance in Gaza and the West Bank remain steadfast on the land, and we will not leave it except to return to Al-Quds as the capital of our independent Palestinian state.

We mourn the righteous martyrs of our people, pray for the speedy recovery of our wounded, and freedom for our heroic prisoners.
We affirm the following:

First: Our promise to our great Palestinian people is to remain faithful to their sacrifices, pains, and hopes. We will not abandon our duty to defend them, our land, and our sanctities. Hamas and its victorious Al-Qassam Brigades will continue to be the protective shield for the Palestinian national project and our people’s aspirations for liberation, return, and independence. The Al-Aqsa Flood battle is a page of glory and pride in the history of our people’s struggle against the zionist Nazi colonizer, and our resistance will continue to escalate until the occupation is gone and the Palestinian state with Al-Quds as its capital is established, God willing.

Second: The Hamas movement is an integral part of this great people, expressing their will for freedom and independence. The movement will remain a fortress defending our people’s national rights. We will accept no guardianship and will not allow the passing of any suspicious plans to circumvent our people’s right to self-determination and the establishment of their fully sovereign state.

Third: The zionist occupation and President Biden’s administration, with their obstinacy and arrogance, refusing all efforts and UN resolutions calling for an end to aggression, bear full responsibility for the ongoing massacres against our people and the destruction in Gaza. This historical responsibility will not expire with time, and the day will come when they will be held accountable.

Fourth: We are open to all efforts leading to stopping the aggression against our people in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, to the release of our prisoners in the occupation’s prisons, and to forming a national reference on the path to restoring our people’s national rights and establishing their independent Palestinian state with Al-Quds as its capital.

Fifth: We salute the steadfast and resistant Palestinian masses in proud Gaza, the West Bank, throughout Palestine, and the diaspora. We call on them to further steadfastness, solidarity, and escalation of resistance against the occupation everywhere. The occupation will be eradicated by the determination of the revolutionaries and the bravery of the heroic resistance fighters.

Sixth: We salute all the forces and parties that have stood in solidarity with our people, championed Al-Quds and Al-Aqsa, and committed to standing by the right, in the face of the occupation and the zionist project threatening Palestine and the region.

Seventh: We salute the nations of our Arab and Islamic nation and all the free people of the world who have come out in solidarity with the just cause of the Palestinian people, rejecting the massacres and aggression of the occupation in the Gaza Strip, and rejecting President Biden’s administration’s bias towards the new Nazis. We call on them to increase their escalating activism in support of the Palestinian people and their right to freedom and self-determination, like all peoples.

Eighth: We appreciate all Arab, Islamic, and international efforts that have sought and are seeking to stop the aggression, to aid our people in the Gaza Strip. We call on them and the international community for more political action to stop the double standards policy pursued by President Biden’s administration and some Western countries biased towards the occupation, to work to end the zionist occupation threatening international peace and security, and to enable our people to exercise their inalienable national rights, no matter how long it takes.

Indeed, it is a jihad of victory or martyrdom.
Islamic Resistance Movement — Hamas

Thursday: 01 Jumada al-Akhirah 1445H
Corresponding to: December 14, 2023

In short, as the commander-in-chief of the Martyr Izz El-Din Al-Qassam Brigades (the armed branch of Hamas) Mohammad Deif said in his historic speech announcing Al-Aqsa Flood: “The era of bets has ended, and the occupation must be expelled.”

Related: Barakat: US and Israel heading towards strategic defeat

Note: First published on Medium
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Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa.

16 December 2023

Source: countercurrents.org