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By Andrew Bacevich

One way of understanding the ongoing bloodbath pitting Israel against Hamas is to see it as just the latest chapter in an existential struggle dating back to the founding of the Jewish state in 1948. While the appalling scope, destructiveness, and duration of the fighting in Gaza may outstrip previous episodes, this latest go-around serves chiefly to reaffirm the remarkable intractability of the underlying Arab-Israeli conflict.

Although the shape of that war has changed over time, certain constants remain. Neither side, for instance, seems capable of achieving its ultimate political goals through violence. And each side adamantly refuses to concede to the core demands of its adversary. In truth, while the actual fighting may ebb and flow, pause and resume, the Holy Land has become the site of what is effectively permanent conflict.

For several decades, the United States sought to keep its distance from that war by casting itself in the role of regional arbiter. While providing Israel with arms and diplomatic cover, successive administrations have simultaneously sought to position the U.S. as an “honest broker,” committed to advancing the larger cause of Middle Eastern peace and stability. Of course, a generous dose of cynicism has always informed this “peace process.”

On that score, however, the present moment has let the cat fully out of the bag. The Biden administration responded to the gruesome terrorist attack on October 7th by unequivocally endorsing and underwriting Israeli efforts to annihilate Hamas, with Gazans thereby subjected to a World War II-style obliteration bombing campaign. Meanwhile, ignoring tepid Biden administration protests, Israeli settlers continue to expel Palestinians from parts of the West Bank where they have lived for generations. If Hamas’s October assault was a tragedy, proponents of a Greater Israel also saw it as a unique opportunity that they’ve seized with alacrity. As for the peace process, already on life support, it now seems altogether defunct. Prospects of reviving it anytime soon appear remote.

More or less offstage, the fighting is having this ancillary effect: as Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) employ U.S.-provided weapons and munitions to turn Gaza into rubble, the “rules-based international order” touted by the Biden administration as the latest organizing principle of American statecraft has forfeited whatever slight credibility it might have possessed. Russia’s assault on Ukraine appears almost measured and humane by comparison.

As if to emphasize Washington’s own limited fealty to that rules-based order, President Biden’s immediate response to the events of October 7th focused on unilateral military action, bolstering U.S. naval and air forces in the Middle East while shoveling even more weapons to Israel. Ostensibly tasked with checking any further spread of violence, American forces in the region have instead been steadily edging toward becoming full-fledged combatants.

In recent weeks, U.S. forces have sustained dozens of casualty-producing attacks, primarily from rockets and armed drones. Attributing those attacks to “Iran-affiliated groups,” the U.S. has responded with air strikes targeting warehouses, training facilities, and command posts in Syria and Iraq.

According to a Pentagon spokesman, the overall purpose of American military action in the region is “to message very strongly to Iran and their affiliated groups to stop.” Thus far, the impact of such messaging has been ambiguous at best. Certainly, U.S. retaliatory efforts haven’t dissuaded Iran from pursuing its proxy war against American military outposts in the region. On the other hand, the scale of those Iran-supported attacks remains modest. Notably, no U.S. troops have been killed — yet.

For the moment at least, that fact may well be the administration’s operative definition of success. As long as no flag-draped coffins show up at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, Joe Biden may find it perfectly tolerable for the U.S.-Iran subset of the Israel-Hamas war to simmer indefinitely on the back burner.

This pattern of tit-for-tat violence has received, at best, sporadic public attention. Where (if anywhere) it will lead remains uncertain. Even so, the U.S. is at risk of effectively opening up a new front in what used to be called the Global War on Terror. That war is now nearly dormant, or at least hidden from public view. The very real possibility of either side misinterpreting or willfully ignoring the other’s “messaging” could reignite it, with an expanded war that directly pits the U.S. against Iran making the Israel-Gaza war look like a petty squabble.

Then there are the potential domestic implications. No doubt President Biden’s political advisers are alive to the possibility of a major war affecting the outcome of the 2024 elections (and not necessarily to the incumbent’s benefit either). One can easily imagine Donald Trump seizing on even a handful of U.S. military fatalities in Middle East skirmishing as definitive proof of presidential ineptitude, akin to the bungled withdrawal from Kabul, Afghanistan, during Biden’s first year in office.

Two Wars Converge

Understanding the larger implications of these developments requires putting them in a broader context. In Gaza in the last two months, two protracted meta-conflicts that had unfolded on parallel tracks for decades have finally converged. That is likely to have profound implications for basic U.S. national security policy, even if few in Washington appear aware of the potential implications.

On the one track, dating from 1948 (although its preliminaries occurred decades earlier) is the Arab-Israeli conflict. Enshrined among Israelis as the War for Independence, for Arabs the events of 1948 are seen as the Nakba, or “Catastrophe.” Subsequent eruptions of violence have ensued from time to time, as Arab nations vented their anger at the Jewish state and Israel pursued opportunities to create a strategically more coherent and more economically viable, not to mention biblically endorsed, “Greater Israel.”

Initially intent on steering clear of the Arab-Israeli conflict — occasionally even denouncing Israeli misbehavior — American officials allowed themselves over time to be incrementally drawn into becoming Israel’s closest ally. Yet under the terms of the relationship as it evolved, the Israeli leaders insisted on retaining a large measure of strategic autonomy. Over Washington’s vociferous objections, for example, it acquired a robust nuclear arsenal. To guarantee their security, Israelis placed paramount emphasis on their own military capabilities, not those of the United States.

Meanwhile, on the other track, dating from the promulgation of President Jimmy Carter’s Carter Doctrine in 1980, U.S. forces have had their hands full in the region. With Israel exacerbating or fending off threats to its own security, successive American administrations undertook a series of new military commitments, interventions, and occupations across the Greater Middle East that had little or nothing to do with protecting Israel.

In the Persian Gulf, the Levant, the Horn of Africa, the Balkans, and Central Asia, the Pentagon dealt with problems of its own as those regions became venues for hosting American forces engaged in operations intended to protect, punish, or even “liberate.” Such military exertions and the presence of U.S. forces became commonplace throughout the Middle East — except in Israel. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Washington’s military actions reached their apotheosis when President George W. Bush embarked on a global campaign with the aim of eliminating evil.

Meanwhile, the various engagements undertaken by Israeli forces from the 1950s into the present century achieved mixed results. On the one hand, the Jewish state persists and has even expanded — a minimalist definition of “success.” On the other hand, recent events affirm that threats to Israel’s existence also persist.

In comparison, the U.S.-led Global War on Terror proved an outright failure, even if strikingly few ordinary Americans (and even fewer members of the political establishment) appear willing to acknowledge that fact.

Once the U.S.-supported regime in Kabul collapsed in 2021, it appeared American military misadventures in the Greater Middle East might be petering out. The humiliating result of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan in the wake of the disappointing outcome of Operation Iraqi Freedom had seemingly exhausted Washington’s appetite for remaking the region. Besides, there was Russia to tend to — and China. Strategic priorities seemed to be shifting.

Alarm Bells, American-Style

Now, however, in the wake of the atrocities committed on October 7th and Washington’s tacit acquiescence in Israel’s maximalist war aims, the dubious notion that vital American interests are still at stake in the Greater Middle East has taken on new life. Dating from the 1980s, Washington had cycled through a variety of arguments for why that part of the world was worthy of spending American blood and treasure: the threat of Soviet aggression, U.S. reliance on foreign oil, radical Arab dictators, Islamic jihadism, weapons of mass destruction falling into hostile hands, potential ethnic cleansing and genocide. All of those were pressed into service at one time or another to justify continuing to treat the Middle East as a strategic U.S. priority.

In truth, though, none of them has stood the test of time. Each has proven to be fallacious. Indeed, efforts to cure the sources of dysfunction afflicting the region proved to be a fool’s errand that has cost the United States dearly in money and lives while yielding little of value.

For that reason, allowing Israel’s conflict with Hamas to draw the United States into a new Middle Eastern crusade would be the height of folly. In fact, however, with little public attention and even less congressional oversight, that is precisely what may be happening. The Global War on Terror seems on the verge of absorbing the Gaza War into its current configuration.

In recent years, a shift in Pentagon priorities to the Indo-Pacific and to a future face-off with China has left only about 2,500 U.S. troops in Iraq and 900 more in Syria. The nominal mission of such modestly sized garrisons is to carry on the fight against the remnants of ISIS.

White House officials have, however, never gone out of their way to explain what those troops are really doing there. In practice, they have effectively become inviting stationary targets. As a consequence and not for the first time, “protecting the troops” has emerged as a convenient pretext for mounting a broader punitive response.

With Congress accepting claims that the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) enacted in response to 9/11 suffices to cover whatever U.S. forces in the region may be up to 22 years later, the Biden administration functionally has a free hand to act as it wishes. The course it has chosen is to use Israel’s war in Gaza as a rationale for reversing course in the Middle East and once again making violence and threats of violence the basis of U.S. policy there. On that score, the fact that some American forces are now covertly operating in Israel itself should set off alarm bells.

The Gaza War will change Israel in ways that may be difficult to foresee. The failure of its vaunted military and intelligence establishments to anticipate and thwart the worst terrorist attack in that country’s history leaves Jewish Israelis with a sense of unprecedented vulnerability. It will hardly be surprising if they look to Washington for protection, in which case Israel’s survival could become an American responsibility.

The invitation is one that the United States would do well to refuse. Accepting it will confront Americans with challenges they are ill-equipped to meet and with obligations they can ill afford. Deepening the Pentagon’s involvement in the Greater Middle East will only compound the failures to which the Carter Doctrine has already subjected this nation, while scrambling U.S. strategic priorities in ways sure to prove counterproductive.

In 1796, George Washington warned his countrymen of the dangers of allowing a “passionate attachment” to another nation to affect policy. That warning remains relevant today. The Gaza War is not and should not become America’s war.

Andrew Bacevich, a TomDispatch regular, is chairman and co-founder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

8 December 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By John P Ruehl

Militant groups are increasingly threatening Myanmar’s military government. But other non-state actors, as well as China, are playing powerful roles in the divided country.

Myanmar’s stability has eroded significantly since the 2021 military coup. But the coordinated attack by multiple separatist and pro-democracy groups in October and November 2023 has seen military outposts, villages, border crossings, and other infrastructure overrun. While the Tatmadaw, Myanmar’s military, clings to control in central and coastal regions populated by the country’s ethnic majority, much of the country’s border areas are increasingly slipping into anti-government control.

This current turbulence is not an aberration but deeply rooted in Myanmar’s history. Since gaining independence from British rule in 1948, the country has grappled with what is commonly described as the world’s longest-running civil war. Initial experiments with democracy witnessed limited clashes between Myanmar’s central government and Ethnic Armed Organizations (EAOs.) Following a military coup in 1962 that established the junta, more EAOs emerged to challenge government power.

Infighting and splintering among EAOs, coupled with their growing antagonism toward the Burma Communist Party (BCP), itself waging a war on the central government, allowed the junta to implement fragile ceasefires in exchange for limited autonomy. By the end of the Cold War, democratic protests in 1988, the collapse of the BCP in 1989, and free elections in 1990 all suggested Myanmar was cautiously embracing a peaceful future.

Despite losing the elections in 1990, however, the junta did not relinquish power, drawing international condemnation. EAOs and other groups like the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA), which split from the BCP, then continued their struggle for two decades until the junta ceded some powers to a civilian administration in 2011. Elections in 2015 and 2020 saw landslide victories for the National League for Democracy (NLD), as well as some progress toward reconciliation.

But in 2021, the Tatmadaw reestablished the junta and plunged the country back into destabilization, culminating in the 2023 autumn offensive by anti-junta forces. In addition to EOAs and a reorganized BCP, the junta has also been forced to contend with People’s Defense Forces (PDFs), loose armed organizations backed by the National Unity Government (NUG), set up by lawmakers and politicians in the aftermath of the coup. Additionally, the role of the Burman ethnic majority and grassroots civil defense forces in opposing the junta has also complicated its response to unrest.

The junta has proven adept at managing its restive elements before, and can also rely on its Border Guard Forces (BGFs) and other pro-government militia groups. But the broad swathes of Myanmar’s society fighting against it have made the junta’s traditional policy of divide and rule far less effective. Myanmar’s Acting President Myint Swe has said the country could “split into various parts”, prompting Myanmar military officials to retreat to the capital, Naypyidaw, a planned city completed in 2012 that effectively serves as a fortress located near the most restive regions.

China’s role in Myanmar has undergone significant shifts since the latter’s independence. Despite Chinese support for the BCP and other communist groups, Myanmar grew closer to China after its isolation from the West in the 1990s. Beijing supported the junta to stabilize Myanmar and prevent adversaries from establishing a foothold on China’s southern border. Other interests included maintaining access to Myanmar’s raw materials and natural resources, as well as infrastructure development to turn Myanmar into a strategic gateway to the Bay of Bengal through the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC), part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

China maintained ties to the junta, democracy advocates, and ethnic groups from 2011 to 2021. However, the 2021 coup disrupted development projects and led to attacks on Chinese-run facilities by rebel groups, and the junta’s inability to protect infrastructure exacerbated historical tension between it and Beijing. Four Chinese civilians were killed in 2015 after a Myanmar military airstrike hit across the border into Yunnan, while the junta burned down a Chinese-owned factory and killed Chinese and Myanmar civilians in 2021.

China’s ongoing support to some militia groups, such as the United Wa State Army (UWSA) and MNDAA, provides Beijing leverage over the junta and a say in the ceasefire processes. Chinese firms also often work with armed groups in “special economic zones” near the border, and some of the anti-junta groups regularly cross the border to China to escape the junta and its proxy forces. Beijing’s tacit approval of their activities may also be partially fueled by wariness that rebel groups were becoming closer to the U.S. prior to the new offensive.

Beijing has nonetheless attempted to sustain a balancing act, arresting a UWSA deputy military chief in October 2023 and initially ignoring calls for assistance from the rebels after the launch of their offensive. But following the steady string of defeats suffered by the junta, China has since altered its outlook. China’s affiliates now form some of the most powerful groups operating in Myanmar, and China’s foreign ministry has called for a ceasefire.

Myanmar’s porous borders have not only allowed armed groups to flourish but also facilitated the expansion of organized crime networks. Increased cooperation between militant and criminal groups in recent decades, known as the terror-crime nexus, has elevated the power of these groups worldwide.

American efforts to counter communism inadvertently helped develop drug networks in Myanmar during the early Cold War, while transnational organized crime in Southeast Asia burgeoned in the 21st Century. The COVID-19 pandemic further established Myanmar as a hub of criminal activity, expanding the funding networks available to the country’s armed groups. Both local and international criminal networks operate in Myanmar’s special economic zones, engaging in human and wildlife trafficking, slavery, cybercrimes, money laundering, communication fraud, illegal casinos, and online gambling centers.

The relationships between these entities and governments are intricate, with shifting alliances commonplace. Beijing and transnational Chinese gangs play central roles in Myanmar’s heightened criminal activity. The junta has also had close ties to criminal networks for decades, and since the 2021 coup has become increasingly reliant on criminal activity to finance itself and offset international isolation.

China, while entangled in Myanmar’s criminal underworld, has grown steadily more concerned with rising illicit activity on its border with Myanmar and the willing and unwilling participation of Chinese citizens. China’s signals to the junta to address the forced-labor networks since May 2023 went unheeded, leading to China issuing arrest warrants for junta allies and the UWSA to raid online scam compounds and trafficked labor centers in border regions.

However, the resilience of regional criminal groups became evident after the NLD failed to disrupt their activities during the decade of partial democratic rule from 2011 to 2021, and they have only grown financially stronger since. And despite their interweaving with regional elites, criminal networks and their militant partners have developed newfound agency and an ability to act independently from governments since the 2021 coup.

Additionally, while the junta styles its current campaign as a counterinsurgency, Myanmar’s armed groups possess significant military capabilities. Minority groups such as those belonging to the Karen ethnic group were prominent in Myanmar’s armed forces during the British colonial administration, gaining valuable experience. As in Ethiopia, certain ethnic groups have developed and maintained well-equipped forces capable of both insurgency and conventional warfare.

Like other anti-government forces around the world, Myanmar rebel groups have also embraced new technologies and strategies in recent years. This includes crowdfunding initiatives, which have expanded significantly since 2021, to offset the junta’s control over the central bank and other national economic levers. Large-scale application of drone warfare has also made a marked difference on the battlefield, even before the current offensive by the rebels.

Myanmar’s militant groups have also worked with European criminal groups to obtain weapons, and groups like the UWSA have proven capable of manufacturing weapons since 2008. The use of 3D-printed guns by Myanmar rebel groups, just ten years after the first 3D-printed gun was produced, also marks a distinctive feature of the current conflict. The NUG has meanwhile been busily setting up local civic administration and public services and People’s Administrative Teams (PATs) in PDF-controlled or contested areas, indicative of their state-building capabilities.

Hindered by international isolation, increasingly powerful rebel groups, and a growing dependence on a Chinese leadership willing to support multiple sides, the junta’s outlook appears bleak. But it does maintain some other allies abroad. Russia grew closer to the junta throughout the 2010s and despite being tied down in Ukraine, Moscow has offered more support for Myanmar since the coup, including the first ever Russia-Myanmar joint naval exercise in November 2023. Bordering states Laos and Thailand also maintain friendly ties to the junta, and Laos, holding the chairmanship of ASEAN since September 2023, has shielded Myanmar from greater institutional isolation.

Myanmar’s other neighbors, India and Bangladesh, are also wary of additional instability and the potential emergence of a failed state on their borders. India has already seen tens of thousands of refugees (as well as soldiers from the junta) cross the border since 2021, while Bangladesh has seen close to one million Rohingya refugees enter the country since 2016, and India has recently shown it is still willing to engage with the junta despite its vulnerability.

Efforts to further unite anti-government forces meanwhile face obstacles due to differences in strategies, objectives, and allegiances. Several organizations have been set up to encourage greater coordination, but infighting is still common. Some EAOs, like the Restoration Council of Shan State (RCSS), are still open to adhering to the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA) while others consider a federal system a viable alternative to complete independence. Perceived indifference to the Rohingya crisis in 2017 on behalf of the democratic government at the time also reveals the persistent ethnic tensions among Myanmar’s population despite alternative leadership.

Convincing criminal and militant groups to give up their lucrative illicit networks, as well as untangling their links to the junta-dominated economy, will also prove challenging. And with the U.S. diplomatically tied down in Ukraine and Israel and ASEAN’s divided approach to the crisis, China enjoys relative freedom to manipulate the situation on its border. Yet despite positive relations across Myanmar’s political spectrum, Beijing’s reluctance to intervene more directly only amplifies the persistent uncertainty surrounding Myanmar’s future.

John P. Ruehl is an Australian-American journalist living in Washington, D.C., and a world affairs correspondent for the Independent Media Institute.

8 December 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Ramzy Baroud

Those unfamiliar with Gaza and its history are likely to always associate Gaza with destruction, rubble and Israeli genocide.

And they can hardly be blamed. On November 3, the UN Development Programme and the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) announced that 45 percent of Gaza’s housing units have been destroyed or damaged since the beginning of the Latest Israeli aggression on Gaza.

But the history of Gaza is also a history of great civilizations, as well as a history of revival, rebirth.

Shortly before the war, specifically September 23, archaeologists in Gaza announced that four Roman-era tombs had been unearthed in Gaza City. They include “two lead coffins, one delicately carved with harvest motifs and the other with dolphins gliding through water,” ARTNews reported.

According to Palestinian and French archaeologists, these are Roman-era tombs dating back 2,000 years.

The finding was preceded, two months earlier, in July, by something even more astonishing: a major archaeological discovery, of at least 125 tombs, most with skeletons still largely intact, along with two extremely rare lead sarcophaguses.

In case you assume that the great archaeological finds were isolated events, think again.

Indeed, Gaza has existed not only hundreds of years, but even thousands of years before the destruction of the modern Palestinian homeland during the Nakba, the subsequent wars and all the headline news that associate Gaza with nothing but violence.

I grew up in the Nuseirat refugee camp located in central Gaza. As a child, I knew that something great had taken place in Nuseirat without fully appreciating its grandeur and deep historical roots.

For years, I climbed the Tell el-Ajjul – The Calves Hill – located to the north-east of Nuseirat, tucked between the beach and the Gaza Valley – to look for Sahatit, a term we used in reference to any ancient currency.

We would collect the rusty and often scratched pieces of metal and take them home, knowing little about the value of these peculiar finds. I always gifted my treasures to my Mom, who kept them in a small wooden drawer built within her Singer sewing machine.

I still think about that treasure that must have been tossed away following my mother’s untimely death. Only now do I realize that they were Hyksos, Roman and Byzantine currencies.

Once Mom would diligently scrub the Sahatit with lemon juice and vinegar, the mysterious Latin and other writings and symbols would appear, along with the crowned heads of the great kings of the past. I knew that these old pieces were used by our people who dwelled upon this land since time immemorial.

The region upon which Nuseirat was built was inhabited by ancient Canaanites, whose presence can be felt through the numerous archeological discoveries throughout historic Palestine.

What made Nuseirat particularly unique was its geographical centrality in the Gaza region, its strategic position by the Gaza coast, and its unique topography. The relatively hilly areas west of Nuseirat and the fact that it encompasses the Gaza Valley have made Nuseirat inhabitable since ancient times to the present.

Evidence of Hyksos, Roman, Byzantine, Islamic and other civilizations which dwelled in that region for thousands of years, is a testimony to the historical significance of the area.

When the Hyksos ruled over Palestine during the Middle Bronze Age II period (ca. 2000-1500 BC), they built a great civilization, which extended from Egypt to Syria.

So powerful was the Hyksos Dynasty that they extended their jurisdiction into Ancient Egypt, remaining there until they were driven out by the Sea Peoples. Though the Hyksos were eventually defeated, they left behind palaces, temples, defense trenches and various monuments, the largest of which can be found in the central Gaza region, specifically at the starting point of the Gaza Valley.

Like the Calves Hill, Tell Umm el-’Amr – or Umm el-’Amr’s Hill – was the location of an ancient Christian town, with a large monastery complex, containing five churches, homes, baths, geometric mosaics, a large crypt and more.

The discoveries of Tell Umm el-’Amr were recent. According to the World’s Monuments Fund (WMF), this Christian town was abandoned after a major earthquake struck the region sometime in the seventh century. The excavation process began in 1999, and a more serious preservation campaign began in earnest in 2010.

In 2018, the restoration of the monastery itself started. The discovery of the St. Hilarion Monastery is one of the most precious archeological finds, not only in Gaza’s southern coastal region, but in the entire Middle East in recent years.

There is also the Shobani Graveyard, tucked by the sea and located near the western entrance of Nuseirat, the Tell Abu-Hussein in the north-west part of the camp, also close to the sea, along with other sites, which are of great significance to Nuseirat’s past.

A Gaza historian told me that it is almost certain that Tell Abu Hussein was of some connection to Sultan Salah ad-Din al-Ayyubi’s military campaign in Palestine, which ultimately defeated and expelled the Crusaders from the region in 1187.

The history of my old refugee camp is essentially the history of all of Gaza, a place that played a significant role in shaping ancient and modern history, its geopolitics as well as its tragic and triumphant moments.

What is taking place in Gaza now is but an episode, a traumatic and a defining one, but nonetheless, a mere chapter in the history of a people who proved to be as durable and resilient as history itself.

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

4 December 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Priti Gulati Cox & Stan Cox

In 1981, India’s post office issued a stamp showing the flags of India and occupied Palestine flying side by side above the phrase “Solidarity with the Palestinian people.” That now seems like ancient history. Today, Hindu nationalists are flying the flags of India and Israel side by side as a demonstration of their support for that country’s catastrophic war on Gaza.

It’s a match made in heaven (or do we mean hell?), because the two nations have similar “problems” they’re trying to “solve.” Israel has long been engaged in the violent suppression of Palestinians whose lands they occupy (including the current devastation of Gaza, an assault that 34 U.N. experts have labeled a “genocide in the making”). Meanwhile, India’s Hindu nationalist government continues the harsh oppression of its non-Hindu minorities: Muslims, Christians, Dalits, and indigenous people.

About the time Zionist settlers were beginning their occupation of Palestine in the early 1920s, an Indian right-wing figure, V.D. Savarkar, fashioned the ideology of Hindutva (Hindu-ness). Today, right-wing Hindu nationalists employ Hindutva and physical violence to further its vision of India as a nation for Hindus and Hindus only. Similarly, Zionism views historic Palestine as a land for Jews and Jews only. These parallel visions, along with the two governments’ increasingly authoritarian tendencies and ready use of violence, have drawn them into a dark alliance the consequences of which are unpredictable.

India Makes New Friends

The Republic of India and the State of Israel were born nine months apart in 1947 and 1948, each an offspring of partition. The British-ruled Indian subcontinent was then split into Muslim-majority Pakistan and Hindu-majority India, while Israel was carved out of a portion of the British Mandate Palestine.

Throughout the Cold War, India would be a leader of what came to be known as the nonaligned movement — formerly colonized nations that sought to develop independently of both American and Soviet influence. In the 1980s, it also became the first non-Arab nation to recognize the state of Palestine. A similar recognition of Israel didn’t come until 1992, around the time India was shifting away from its nonaligned social-democratic stance toward its current adherence to neoliberalism.

In recent decades, India and Israel have established strong trading relationships, especially in the military sphere. In fact, given the massive militarization of its borders with China and Pakistan and its suppression of occupied Kashmir and its people, India has become the top importer of weapons and surveillance equipment from Israel. In 2014, the Hindu-supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won power and its leader, Narendra Modi, became prime minister. In the process, India and Israel grew ever closer.

By 2016, as the Washington Post reported, “after Indian commandos carried out a raid inside Pakistan-controlled Kashmir in response to an attack by militants on an Indian army post, Modi trumpeted the action, saying: ‘Earlier, we used to hear of Israel having done something like this. But the country has seen that the Indian army is no less than anyone else.’”

Today, the Israeli weapons-robotics firm Elbit Systems has even established a drone factory in India and now has a $300 million contract to supply drones to the Indian army occupying Kashmir. Meanwhile, Modi and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have established a mutual-admiration society, dubbed by the media of both countries the “Modi-Bibi bromance.” And New Delhi has all but abandoned the Palestinians.

Economic Alliances

When, on October 27th, the U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution calling for an “immediate, durable, and sustained humanitarian truce leading to a cessation of hostilities” in Gaza, only the U.S., Israel, and a handful of small nations voted “no.” India abstained. (Apparently, the Modi-Bibi bromance wasn’t quite enough to sustain a “no” vote.) Modi, however, immediately responded to the measure’s passage by declaring his “solidarity” with Israel.

Economic, political, and diplomatic relations between New Delhi, Tel Aviv, and Washington (all nuclear powers, by the way) had been strengthening even before the current conflict. Last year, for instance, India, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States formed the “I2U2 Group” to attract corporate investment for their mutual benefit. Projects now underway include “food parks across India” with “climate-smart technologies” and a “unique space-based tool for policymakers, institutions, and entrepreneurs” (whatever in — or out of — the world “food parks” and “space-based tools” might be).

Then, in September, the G-20 summit of the group of 20 major nations, meeting in New Delhi, approved an India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor which, according to Voice of America, would “establish a rail and shipping network linking the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan to the Israeli port of Haifa on the Mediterranean Sea.” And guess who now operates that very port? A company led by Gautam Adani, India’s richest person and (naturally!) a Modi buddy. Foreign Policy notes, “It is also palatable for the Middle East to have India as a major energy market to diversify its exports and offset Chinese influence over critical commodities such as oil and gas.”

But not surprisingly, the war in Gaza has thrown plans for such a new Indian-oriented economic corridor through the Middle East into limbo.

High-, Medium-, and Low-Tech Warfare

Militarily, the conflicts in occupied Palestine and occupied Kashmir are both lopsided mismatches. In each, a powerful nation-state is assaulting resource-poor populations, though the scale of slaughter, displacement, immiseration, and death wrought by the Indian regime doesn’t faintly approach what’s currently being done by Israel in the Gaza Strip — at least not yet. While the cases have similarities, magnitude isn’t one of them.

In Gaza, you have the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), a massive high-tech killing machine financed in large part by the world’s richest nation, facing off against Palestinian resistance groups, including the Qassam Brigade, whose most effective weapons are homemade Yassin antitank grenades and whose defenses largely consist of a network of fortified tunnels. Instead of engaging in face-to-face subterranean combat with the Qassam fighters — something that could turn out badly indeed for the IDF — the Israelis have been carrying out an industrial-scale bombardment of densely populated areas. As of late November, the result was approximately 15,000 civilians killed (including more than 6,000 children) and the displacement of 1.6 million people, or two-thirds of Gaza’s population.

In India, the Hindu nationalists’ onslaught against non-Hindu minorities has not been carried out by the Indian Army itself, but by a paramilitary organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), in partnership with the BJP. That unofficial army, founded almost a century ago and modeled on Italian fascist Benito Mussolini’s “blackshirts” and Adolph Hitler’s Nazi stormtroopers, has a membership of five to six million and holds daily meetings in more than 36,000 different locales across India. Its shock troops rarely even carry firearms; their weapons are low-tech, crude, and exceptionally cruel, and their targets are unarmed, unsuspecting civilians. They kill or maim using batons, machetes, strangulation, sulfuric acid to the face, and rape, among other horrors.

Such attacks by Hindu-nationalist gangs, different as they are from the military assault on Gaza, do have parallels in the occupied West Bank. There, Israeli settlers, some carrying government-supplied small arms, maraud through parts of that area (where they live illegally), beating, torturing, and killing Palestinians, including ethnic Bedouin families. They have expelled people from their homes, stolen their money and possessions, including livestock, and destroyed houses and schools. It is now olive harvest season and Jewish settlers have attacked Palestinians in their olive groves, sometimes forcing them off their ancestors’ land, perhaps permanently. More than 200 Palestinians have been killed this way since October.

Common Language

One of the worst atrocities perpetrated against Muslims since India’s partition occurred in 2002 in the western state of Gujarat. (Not coincidentally, that state’s chief minister at the time was Narendra Modi.) Following the alleged torching of a train compartment in which 58 Hindu nationalist “volunteers” were traveling, Hindu mobs inflicted state-sponsored terrorism on the Muslim community across Gujarat. More than 2,000 Muslims were killed. Speaking in the aftermath of that horror, then-prime minister A.B. Vajpayee offered a perfunctory admission of regret for the carnage, only to ask rhetorically, “Lekin aag lagayi kisne?” (“But who lit the fire?”) The implication was that since some from their community were accused of committing the initial crime, all Gujarat Muslims were responsible and that, however regrettably, justified their slaughter.

Similar allegations of collective guilt and justifications for collective punishment have a long history in Israel, as in the current conflict. In October, Israeli President Isaac Herzog claimed that “there is an entire nation out there that is responsible.” That comment earned Herzog a place in a greatest-hits video of Israeli leaders attempting to defend atrocities inflicted on Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants. Similarly, a former Israeli ambassador to the U.N. told Sky News, “I am very puzzled by the constant concern which the world… is showing for the Palestinian people, and is actually showing for these horrible inhuman animals.”

Some of the language surrounding it can be similar. Allegations that, in their October 7th attack on Israel, Hamas fighters beheaded children and tore fetuses from women’s wombs — none of which have been substantiated — eerily echo the sexualized violence committed by Hindu mobs in Gujarat in 2002 (rape, mutilation, the killing of women and their babies, and other horrors). A report of attackers using a sword to cut a fetus out of a Muslim woman and burning the bodies of both fetus and mother has been told and retold countless times over the past two decades.

And within mere hours of the October 7th attack in Israel, BJP politicians and Hindu nationalists in India were spreading propaganda on social media, including accusations that Palestinians were “worse than animals” and were cutting fetuses from wombs, beheading children, and taking girls as “sex slaves.” This started in India before IDF spokespeople began spreading similar claims.

An Unnatural Disaster

Drawing a comparison to the ethnic cleansing of 1948, the Israeli agriculture minister, a member of the security cabinet, recently explained his government’s goal to a reporter for the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz this way: “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba.” (Nakba was a reference to Israel’s forcible expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians from large portions of their territory in 1948.) When the incredulous reporter tossed the minister a lifeline, asking if he really meant what he’d said, he doubled down: “Gaza Nakba 2023. That’s how it’ll end.”

As of now, it certainly looks that way. The IDF bombed apartment blocks, shelters, schools, and hospitals in northern Gaza to force the migration of the population there toward supposedly “safe” south Gaza. They then began bombing southbound car caravans and even ambulances in which refugees were fleeing. Large groups of other Gazans were forced to make the long journey south on foot through narrow IDF-designated corridors. As the Guardian reported in mid-November,

“Those walking south under the tense gaze of Israeli troops, through a hellscape of tangled rubble that had been buildings two months ago, along roads shattered by weapons and churned to mud by tanks, had little hope of rest when they reached the south. Shelters are crammed, food and water supplies are so low the UN has warned that Palestinians face the ‘immediate possibility’ of starvation, infectious diseases are spreading, and the war there is expected to intensify in coming days.”

Israel soon began bombing parts of South Gaza, too, clearly trying to drive the refugees further south, possibly even through the Raffah gate into Egypt. But Egypt has refused to participate in such an ethnic-cleansing campaign. So, figuratively speaking, millions of desperate Palestinians have their backs to the wall, or in this case, fence, with nowhere to run.

As economic and geopolitical ties among Israel, India, and the U.S. have only continued to strengthen, Joe Biden has chummed it up with both Netanyahu and Modi, averting his eyes from their antidemocratic and all-too-violent national visions. He has backed the assault on Gaza all the way and as late as November 18th was still arguing in the Washington Post against a ceasefire. At the same time, he called for increasing the flow of humanitarian assistance to Gaza to remedy critical staggering shortages of food, water, housing, and fuel. In other words, the Biden administration is treating the catastrophe there like a natural disaster, acting as if there’s something terrible happening, something beyond his (or anyone’s) power to prevent, so all that can be done is to aid the survivors.

In truth, administrations in Washington have been treating Israel’s occupation and immiseration of the West Bank and Gaza like a natural disaster for more than half a century now. Liz Theoharis, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, recently pointed out an incident that suggests just how disingenuous that claim is. In November, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant came under withering criticism for permitting a few small, wholly inadequate truckloads of humanitarian aid to enter Gaza from Egypt. As Theoharis noted, Gallant defended his decision to allow the aid this way: “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?” This puts the lie to the idea that Washington has no influence over the progress or outcome of this war. It does have influence over Israel — more than $3 billion worth in the form of military aid provided by Washington every year, not to speak of the $14 billion the Biden administration still wants to reward Israel with.

As we write this, we don’t know what will happen to the people of Gaza once the temporary ceasefire for prisoner exchanges expires. But rest assured that the governments of India and Israel will continue to feed off each other as they develop new strategies, tactics, and propaganda for their respective campaigns of occupation and oppression, campaigns the U.S. government, through both action and inaction, is endorsing. Consider them now three nations under god(s) of hell.

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

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

4 December 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

 

By Andre Damon

Saturday was the deadliest day since Israel began its bombardment of Gaza, with over 1,000 people killed, the Euro-Med human rights monitoring group said Sunday.

The organization documented “a string of Israeli airstrikes with strong fire belts on Saturday. The strikes targeted buildings and inhabited residential blocks in Shuja’iya, Jabalia, and Beit Lahia without prior notice, demolishing them above the heads of their residents and burying dozens beneath the debris.”

After forcibly displacing over a million people from northern Gaza into the south, Israel launched a ferocious air bombardment and ground offensive aimed at forcing the population of Gaza into the Sinai Desert. Already 1.8 million people in Gaza, or about 80 percent of the population, are internally displaced.

Bisan Owda, the Palestinian filmmaker who has amassed a following of millions of people around the world by documenting her life as a refugee in Gaza, explained what is taking place in a social media post:

This is the emptying of the Gaza Strip. This is the displacing of 2.25 million people to be homeless. To be displaced in the Sinai desert. They are emptying Gaza. They are saying that the South is a combat zone and the North is a combat zone. Where to go? They never told us before and they will never tell us. They told us to go to the South. And we came to the South and they tell us to go to anywhere else.

On Saturday, the New Arab, the London-based pan-Arab news outlet, cited sources close to the Egyptian negotiators who said that Israel’s plan to push the Palestinians into the Sinai Desert was becoming more clear.

The source told the newspaper,

By reviewing the map published by the occupation army (yesterday, Friday) and dividing the Gaza Strip and the south into squares, with alternating strikes west and east within the south, it becomes clear that the goal is to slowly displace or move the population towards the Egyptian border.

The newspaper cited Mohamed Mahmoud Mahran, professor of public international law, saying: “What Israel did is a flagrant violation of the principles of international humanitarian law and the Geneva Conventions.” He continued, “The Israeli occupation authority does not have the right to forcibly displace Palestinian civilians or transfer them outside their areas of original residence, even if it distributes leaflets or issues warnings of the need to move to other areas.”

The death toll currently stands at more than 15,523 Palestinians killed in Gaza, 70 percent of whom were women and children, Gaza’s Ministry of Health said.

This includes 198 doctors and medics, 112 employees of the United Nations and 77 journalists.

Over the weekend, Israel designated about 28 percent of Gaza for evacuation, under conditions in which those who have already evacuated were not being allowed to return to their homes.

On Sunday, the World Food Program reported, “there is a high risk of famine for all the people of Gaza.” It added, “Gaza’s food system is on the brink of collapsing. Most shops are either shut down or have nearly empty shelves. Inflation is high as prices of essential food items have spiked while aid delivery has not been sufficient during the humanitarian pause to cater for the food and nutrition needs of people in Gaza.”

Against this backdrop, the United States has unequivocally endorsed Israel’s genocide and vowed to support it without conditions.

Appearing on the “Meet the Press” Sunday talk show, Pentagon Spokesman John Kirby was asked if there would be “consequences … if the United States feels as though Israel is not following a specific plan to protect civilians?”

To this, Kirby replied, “We’re going to continue to support Israel as they go after Hamas. The security assistance continues to flow. That’s not going to change.”

Kirby defended Israel’s targeting of the civilian population, declaring, “They have actually given civilians in Gaza a list, a map—it’s online—a list of areas where they can go to be more safe. There’s not too many modern militaries, in advance of conducting operations, that would actually do that. So they are making an effort to at least inform the civilian population about where to go and where to avoid.”

In reality, the entire purpose of the forcing the civilian population to flee is to facilitate the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, accompanied by the total destruction of social infrastructure, from housing, to schools and hospitals.

The actual genocidal attitude of the US ruling class toward the people of Gaza was summed up by Senator Lindsey Graham, who justified attacks against the civilian population by claiming it was “radicalized”—i.e., that it opposed Israel and the United States.

“This is a radicalized population,” he said. “I don’t want to kill innocent people, but Israel is fighting not just Hamas, but the infrastructure around Hamas.”

Asked whether he believes “that too many Palestinian civilians have been killed,” Graham replied, “What is too many people dying in World War II after Pearl Harbor? Did the American public worry about how many people were dying to destroy Tokyo and Berlin?”

The UK, meanwhile, has announced plans for a more direct intervention, declaring that it will be flying surveillance drones over the territory of Gaza in support of Israel’s military onslaught.

4 December 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr. Ghulam Nabi Fai

Chairman

World Forum for Peace & Justice

December 30, 2023

The second Meeting of States Parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons began at the United Nations Headquarters on 27 November and will continue until 1 December 2023. Ambassador (Dr.) Juan Ramón de la Fuente (Mexico) was elected as President of the Meeting.

António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations calls the Treaty “an important step towards the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons and a strong demonstration of support for multilateral approaches to nuclear disarmament.”

Ambassador Melissa Parke of Australia and the Executive Director of ‘International campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons’ (ICAN) warned the world body during the high level opening statement that “Nuclear-armed states, instead of pursuing disarmament in accordance with their legal obligations, are squandering tens of billions of dollars every year to ‘improve’ and expand their arsenals. A theft from the world’s poor. An insult to all who value peace…Some of these same states are also waging wars of aggression – with staggering death tolls and undeniable nuclear risks…Against this backdrop of bloodshed, we must renew our call not only for nuclear disarmament, but also, more broadly, for multilateral approaches to peace and security, and for adherence to the international rule of law, based on the UN Charter.”

It is worth mentioning here that ICAN was awarded Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 for the leadership role it played in achieving Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

Arundhati Roy, an Indian novelist and activist was representing the aspirations of hundreds of millions of people all over the world when she wrote in “Cost of Living” that “It is such a supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if they’re used. The fact that they exist at all, their presence in our lives, will wreak more havoc than we can begin to fathom. Nuclear weapons pervade our thinking. Control our behavior. Administer our societies. Inform our dreams. They bury themselves like meat hooks deep in the base of our brains. They are purveyors of madness. They are the ultimate colonizer. Whiter than any white man that ever lived. The very heart of whiteness.”

I completely agree with Ms. Roy for her foresight about the danger of the existence of nuclear weapons. Perhaps not by coincidence, the danger of nuclear threat in South Asia should be of paramount interest to the world body. Kashmir is clearly the bone of contention of nuclear confrontation between India and Pakistan. It has been regarded by President Bill Clinton as the most dangerous place on earth. Former Prime Minister of New Zealand, Helen Clark said, “Kashmir is a nuclear flashpoint.” Kashmir is the only nation in the world which is surrounded by three nuclear powers – India, Pakistan & China. Perhaps that was the reason that former President Obama said on November 10, 2010, in New Delhi, “the resolution of Kashmir is in the interest of India, Pakistan and the region and the United States.”

Kashmir currently has more than 900,000 military and paramilitary troops occupying the Valley with no more than 10 million people, a ratio of one soldier for every 10 citizens. However, because of their concentration in the towns and cities, the density is more like 5 to one. Imagine what that would be like on your city block.

Having so many troops in this small country whose size is no greater in square miles than the U.S. state of Tennessee should certainly be a cause for concern by anyone. Why are Indian forces there? Where’s the war? Is neighboring Pakistan about to invade? Is China? Do they have a similar number of troops amassing at the border? This is more than three times the number of troops the U.S. had at the height of the Iraq War. The answer is None of the Above. It’s a curious fact that we have a very circular problem inherent in a deep paranoia India has long had of an uprising and its use of such troops to maintain control and put down any threat has become a way of life. It’s like avoiding a fire by burning down the house first.

The possibility of such an uprising is greatly enhanced and exacerbated by the presence of these troops and would more likely be a direct provocation for such an uprising and in fact has been. Rather than relieve the pressure in the cooker by taking it off the fire, India’s solution has been to simply turn up the burner. The greatest cause of discontent is this constant abrasive to the social conscience, this erosion of trust in New Delhi, and a pervasive atmosphere of fear. People look for leadership elsewhere in their own ranks, and they have. There is a deeply entrenched movement at the grassroots level that has become very influential in being the voice of public opinion.

It is a historical fact that when the Kashmir dispute erupted in 1947-1948, the United States championed the stand that the future status of Kashmir must be ascertained in accordance with the wishes and aspirations of the people of the territory. The United States was the principal sponsor of the resolution # 47 which was adopted by the Security Council on 21 April 1948 and which was based on that unchallenged principle. Following the resolution, the United States as a leading member of the United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan (UNCIP), adhered to that stand.  The basic formula for settlement was incorporated in the resolutions of that Commission adopted on 13 August 1948 and 5 January 1949.

But India would not then and will not now honor that commitment or admit that its claim to Kashmir is illegitimate. And it will not admit to the world that the people of Kashmir have no faith in Indian democracy. Perhaps India believes that if it keeps repeating the same lie over and over again, that Kashmir is an integral part of India, things will settle down if a few carrots are offered, and the problem will go away.

Who knows it better than India that the cry for azadi (Freedom) in Kashmir has simply gotten louder? As such the level of tensions between India and Kashmir and between India and Pakistan show few signs of letting up any time soon. And ignoring the decades old problem of refusing to resolve the question of Kashmiri sovereignty and self-determination has not only led to deep unrest among the Kashmiris; it has also led to two wars between India and Pakistan. That they are now both nuclear-armed states raise the stakes dramatically and calls for action to defuse these tensions immediately.

Perhaps it’s time the major powers take this seriously. The answer is plain as day for anyone. Kashmir has international legitimacy. It has international sanctity. It has the commitment from the United Nations Security Council. These commitments should once and for all be honored. The clock is ticking. Every day that passes without resolution of Kashmir dispute is one day closer to a cataclysm that will reach far beyond the borders of all countries involved.

Dr. Ghulam Nabi Fai is also Secretary General

World Kashmir Awareness Forum.

He can be reached at: WhatsApp: 1-202-607-6435

gnfai2003@yahoo.com

ww.Kashmirawareness.org

Dear All, (français dessous)

Five years ago, you expressed your support for Tariq Ramadan when he faced false accusations of rape and sexual violence. Today things are finally becoming clearer. Find here some updates :

1. Tariq Ramadan was acquitted in Switzerland in May 2023. The judges noted that the complainant had lied and was in contact with “people whose goal was to smear and bring down Tariq Ramadan” They cited the name, among others, of Caroline Fourest. They noted that it was the complainant who wrote obsessively to Tariq Ramadan ( therefore nothing justified the qualification of him being “a predator”) and that all the elements put together did not give credence to her version. It was added that she was in contact with the complainants in France for the last 14 years.

2. In France, the file is now only based on a psychiatrist’s report which has been contested, in legal terms, because the expert did not answer the questions and copied more than 15 pages from a previous report which had been canceled. This is illegal. He is also a member of a research center based in Paris and Tel Aviv, 15 of whose members have written against Tariq Ramadan in the past.

3. The NewYorker and an international media consortium revealed the United Arab Emirates paid the company ALP SERVICES $8 million to sully the reputation of high profile Muslim leaders in the West. The matter is currently being handled by the Swiss government. A meeting took place in Abu Dhabi in August 2017: the documents found spoke of two main targets “(Tariq) Ramadan and Qatar”. There was talk of tarnishing the reputation of Tariq Ramadan. The journalist Ian Hamel was recorded during that meeting and he received money from Alp Services. Toda,y he has just been sentenced in Geneva for defamation about Tariq Ramadan. He has affirmed that the Geneva State Council confirmed that the professor had had relations with students. The report stipulated in its conclusion, on the contrary, that these were just unconfirmed rumors. Ian Hamel lied. Read an excerpt of the judgment below :

“Ian HAMEL’s fault is not negligible. He attacked the appellant’s honor by attributing to him criminally reprehensible behavior. He pretended to base his remarks on an official report, commissioned by the State, while truncating its content. In doing so, he deceived the reader, which, beyond the criminal aspect, constitutes professional misconduct. His personal situation does not explain his actions. On the contrary. He had to comply with the duties of a journalist, report the truth, say what the report in question really was, and not distort, not disguise. He persists in denying any responsibility, any fault. Awareness of the seriousness of his actions is therefore lacking. He doesn’t express regrets, he doesn’t apologize.”

After 5 years, we know that this is a French case with political ramifications in the Middle-East. It is but a political case. Meanwhile, two complaints withdrew. Tariq Ramadan remains confident and he asks us to convey his thanks to those who still support him, knowing the truth and the political game behind this case.

Yours sincerely.
Free Tariq Ramadan team

30 November 2023

By Habib Siddiqui

Is Zionism anything but crass racism? Do the Indigenous people have any right to exist in their homeland? Apparently not, if they are Palestinians who are evicted and killed by the Apartheid Zionist state of Israel.

Are not the Palestinian Arabs Semites? Apparently not – in the dictionary of the Zionists.

On Nov. 28, 2023, all but two members of the US House of Representatives voted in favor of a resolution (H.Res.888) which reaffirmed Israel’s right to exist and recognized that “denying Israel’s right to exist is a form of antisemitism.”

Coming as it did in the midst of the latest genocidal campaign of Israel that witnessed the sheer barbarity of its settler-colonial occupation forces, the so-called Semites,  against the unarmed Palestinian civilians once again showed the moral bankruptcy of the Capitol Hill. It has become a mouthpiece for the Knesset, justifying and funding colonization, violence, and its genocidal agenda against the “other” people who happen to be non-Jewish.

Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), the only Palestinian in the US Congress, voted “present,” effectively an abstention. One may recall that earlier last month, Tlaib was censured by her colleagues in the House for her defense of Palestine. To the ‘Amen Corner’ humans are unequal, Palestinians lives do not matter, and the life of a single Israeli Jew is more important than lives of hundreds of Palestinians.

Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) wrote on X that he voted against the resolution because “it equates anti-Zionism with antisemitism. Antisemitism is deplorable, but expanding it to include criticism of Israel is not helpful.”

Such resolutions passed in the ‘Amen Corner’ that is long mortgaged to the interest of the pro-Israel, Zionist power-lobby should not surprise anyone.

The 2024 election is only 11 months away. With Israel’s latest brutality in Gaza — and the strong backlash from the American public that has come with it — we are told that AIPAC is expected to spend at least $100 million in the Democratic primaries to oust people like Tlaib and the rest of the “Squad” who support Palestinian human rights.

Democratic candidate Nasser Beydoun posted a video on social media last week revealing that AIPAC offered him $20 million to run against Tlaib. Previously,  Politico reported that Hill Harper, another Democratic hopeful from Michigan, was offered $20 million in a phone call on October 15 from Michigan businessman Linden Nelson — who has long been involved with groups affiliated with AIPAC in efforts to unseat Tlaib — to drop out.

This corruption of U.S. politics with AIPAC’s dirty-money explains the reason why even the so-called most progressive representatives like Cori Bush, who introduced a ceasefire resolution, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman, and Ilhan Omar voted in favor of this House resolution.

The House resolution is criminally silent about the Palestinian people, as if they do not exist. It also omitted the mere fact that  prior to the influx of European Zionists, 95 per cent of the population of Palestine comprised of Muslim and Christian Palestinians. More problematically, despite the fact that only 5 per cent of Jews were native and indigenous to Palestine, Tuesday’s resolution declared that Jewish people are “native to the land of Israel.”

What a mockery! Truly, this resolution once again shows what is wrong with Zionism and its corrupting influence on the ‘Amen Corner’ that is complicit in crimes against humanity.

Historical facts cannot be whitewashed by such irresponsible resolutions that try to sanctify Zionism and its horrendous crimes against humanity.

As I have long maintained, political Zionism remains a curse for humanity. It betrayed Judaism and perverted Christianity. The entire policy of the state of Israel, internal or external, has been a colonial enterprise, but it wears the “chador” (cloak) of pseudo-theological myth. Israel remains a racist, settler-colonial enterprise that denies equality of humankind.

To the father of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl, universal brotherhood “is not even a beautiful dream, antagonism is essential to man’s greatest efforts.” [Jewish State, (1897)] In his Diary, Herzl writes about the establishment of a Jewish state: “We should form there a portion of rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.” Here, it clearly shows his colonial, racist mentality. He first disregards the rights of the Indigenous inhabitants of the Arab Palestinians, and then calls them barbarians. All the Israeli leaders since the establishment of the Zionist state in 1948 have ensured that Israel remains a “rampart” of the West. In so doing, Zionism has transformed Israel into an apartheid state.

As expected, the western leaders have seen the emergence and protection thereof the Zionist state as a necessary, small investment. Its unholy establishment in the Holy Land allowed them to get rid of the Untermensch from Christian Europe and plant them in the heart of an oil-rich region that had no prior history of antisemitism (in contrast to the false allegation in the H.Res. 888). Zionism sanctioned eviction, dispossession and slaughter of the native Palestinians who are denied the right to return to their ancestral home while allowing non-native Jews to settle in as bona fide citizens.

Thus, it was no surprise that on Nov. 10, 1975, General Assembly of the UN equated Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination. The Resolution 3379 was approved by a vote of 72 to 35 (opposition coming mostly from former colonial and racist regimes like the USA, UK, FRG, Australia, New Zealand, France, Canada, Belgium, Italy, Netherlands, Sweden and some client states and of course, Israel).

The text of Resolution 3379 (XXX), Elimination of all forms of racial discrimination, reads:

“The General Assembly, Recalling its resolution 1904 (XVIII) of 20 November 1963, proclaiming the United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, and in particular its affirmation that “any doctrine of racial differentiation or superiority is scientifically false, morally condemnable, socially unjust and dangerous” and its expression of alarm at “the manifestations of racial discrimination still in evidence in some areas in the world, some of which are imposed by certain Governments by means of legislative, administrative or other measures”,

Recalling also that, in its resolution 3151 G (XXVIII) of 14 December 1973, the General Assembly condemned, inter alia, the unholy alliance between South African racism and Zionism…”

The resolution also stated that international co-operation and peace require the achievement of “national liberation and independence, the elimination of colonialism and neo-colonialism, foreign occupation, zionism, apartheid and racial discrimination in all its forms, as well as the recognition of the dignity of peoples and their right to self-determination”. Additionally, it recognized, “the racist regime in occupied Palestine and the racist regime in Zimbabwe and South Africa have a common imperialist origin, forming a whole and having the same racist structure and being organically linked in their policy aimed at repression of the dignity and integrity of the human being”.

It continued, “Taking note also of the Political Declaration and Strategy to Strengthen International Peace and Security and to Intensify Solidarity and Mutual Assistance among Non-Aligned Countries, adopted at the Conference of Ministers for Foreign Affairs of Non-Aligned Countries held at Lima from 25 to 30 August 1975, which most severely condemned zionism as a threat to world peace and security and called upon all countries to oppose this racist and imperialist ideology,

Determines that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.”

It took another 16 years when the UN General Assembly revoked the Resolution 3379. Why? Israel had made revocation of Resolution 3379 a condition of its participation in the Madrid Peace Conference, which was aimed  at reviving the Israeli–Palestinian peace process through negotiations in the last quarter of 1991.

George H. W. Bush personally introduced the motion to revoke 3379. He said: “To equate Zionism with racism is to reject Israel itself, a member of good standing of the United Nations. This body cannot claim to seek peace and at the same time challenge Israel’s right to exist. By repealing this resolution unconditionally, the United Nations will enhance its credibility and serve the cause of peace.”

As the subsequent events proved, Bush Sr. was grossly wrong and so was the UN, which lost its credibility. Peace has been a mirage in the holy land. The UN-revocation simply emboldened Israel to disregard Palestinian rights altogether and commit its genocidal crimes with more vigor, thanks to its powerful backers within the UN Security Council.

International criminal law, including the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid and the 1998 Rome Statute to the International Criminal Court, define apartheid as a crime against humanity consisting of three primary elements: (1) an intent by one racial group to dominate another; (2) systematic oppression by the dominant group over the marginalized group; and (3) particularly grave abuses known as inhumane acts.

Under the Rome Statute and customary international law, persecution consists of severe deprivation of fundamental rights of a racial, ethnic, or other group with discriminatory intent.

Israel has remained an Apartheid state that epitomizes racism and bigotry. It is a slap on our collective intelligence and wisdom to say otherwise.

The charge that Israel is committing apartheid has long been made and supported by United Nations investigators, the African National Congress (ANC), several human rights groups, and many prominent Israeli and Jewish political and cultural figures.

“I’ve been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land,” wrote the Nobel Peace Prize-winning bishop Desmond Tutu in 2002. “It reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa.”

The testimonies of prominent South Africans who defeated apartheid have been harsher. “The current situation” is “worse than conditions were for blacks under the apartheid regime,” said the former South African president Kgalema Motlanthe; it is “far worse than apartheid,” said the speaker of the South African parliament Baleka Mbete; “the Israeli measures, the brutality, make apartheid look like a picnic,” said the former South African intelligence minister Ronnie Kasrils who served in the ANC’s armed wing from its inception in 1961.

After witnessing the genocide of July-August 2014 in Gaza, Kasrils said, “We have known apartheid. The freedom fighters among us visiting the occupied Palestinian territories have unanimously declared ‘we are reminded of apartheid but what we see is far worse’… no African (black) townships or Bantustan settlements were ever bombed from the sky or attacked by tanks and artillery.” He continued, “We cannot tolerate a critique that questions the Palestinian people’s right to resist by whatever means they deem necessary. We reject the attempts to equate the violence of the two sides as though there can be parity with Israel’s state terrorism and Palestinian resistance. We reject the nonsense of the “terrorism” of the Resistance having the sinister motive of “digging tunnels”. They have enough right to do so as we sometimes did during our armed struggle and as the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto did in their courageous action in their 1943 uprising against the Nazis. We easily understand that it was precisely those tunnels on the borders of Gaza that halted Israeli land forces from advancing to inflict greater carnage.”

To Nelson Mandela, justice for the Palestinians is ‘the greatest moral issue of our time’. “After we toppled the Apartheid regime in 1994,” he went further, saying “We, South Africans, cannot consider ourselves free until the Palestinian People are free”.

Sadly, the Palestinian people remain colonized by the Zionists thirty years after the fall of the Apartheid regime in South Africa.

The 2017 UN Report argued that Israel is “guilty of policies and practices that constitute the crime of apartheid”, a “crime against humanity under customary international law and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court”. It urged governments to “support boycott, divestment and sanctions [BDS] activities and respond positively to calls for such initiatives”. It recommended that the UN and its member states should “revive the Special Committee against Apartheid, and the United Nations Centre Against Apartheid (1976-1991)”.

As we know too well, thanks to Israel’s supporters, the UN recommendation was never put to practice.

In a 2021 report, Human Rights Watch said, “Applying the facts to the laws, Human Rights Watch concluded that Israeli authorities are committing the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution. We found that the elements of the crimes come together in the occupied territory as part of a single Israeli government policy. That policy is to maintain the domination by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians across Israel and the occupied territory. It is coupled in the occupied territory with systematic oppression and inhumane acts against Palestinians living there.”

It further said, “Today, apartheid is not a hypothetical or future scenario. A 54-year-occupation is not temporary. The threshold has been crossed. Apartheid, and parallel persecution, is the reality for millions of Palestinians.”

It recommended, “Recognizing and correctly diagnosing a problem is the first step to solving it and ending apartheid is vital to the future of both Palestinians and Israelis and the cause of peace.”

The latest mass slaughter and wanton destruction in Gaza once again showed the evil of Zionism. Israel lives in an alternative reality in which genocide and apartheid have been normalized.. It is high time that the UN General Assembly reinstates the Resolution 3379 and convict the mass murdering Israeli leaders, and their western backers in the Hague for crimes against humanity.

Zionism is hideous. Anti-Zionism is noble and humane. Zionism is oppression and colonization. Anti-Zionism is freedom. Humanity demands resistance against oppression and apartheid.

Desmond Tutu reminded us: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”

The choice is ours. Let us choose what is morally and humanely right.

Habib Siddiqui has a long history of a peaceful activism in his effort towards improving human rights and creating a just and equitable world.

3 December 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Jay Janson

Israelis are very proud of their Biblical God given cry and order, ‘Let My People Go,’ but never seem to accept, nor hear, nor acknowledge, that ‘Let Us Have Our Freedom’ be the imagined cry of generations of captive Palestinians suffering Israel’s merciless, and very often deadly, illegal military occupation.

Israeli government policies have consistently made Israel’s intentions seem to be something like ‘We Will Keep These People Captive While We Take Their Land As Ours Piece by Piece,’ and ‘Get These People Gone the sooner the better.'[1].

‘I, Me Mine’ or this case, ‘We Us Ours’ is a phrase that comes to this writer’s mind when considering Israel’s intentions regarding the land of Palestinians, and most certainly no consideration whatever for the ‘They Them Theirs’ of Palestinians.[1]

Since the event of October 7, 2023, CIA overseen Western media[2] has up to now made little or no mention that Hamas is fighting against the decades long Israeli military occupation of Palestine land and Israel’s  sealing off the population of Gaza from the outside world. Little or no mention is made of Hamas fighting for Palestinian freedom and independence. CIA controlled Western media [} does not wish to admit that one side is fighting for freedom and justice when going overboard in massacring, while the other side is fighting to keep its captives imprisoned (and vulnerable to the colonization of their land) as it has gone beyond sane behavior and massacred thousands of children, women and men with the weapons and warplanes the USA has provided, while cutting off all electricity, fuel, food and water.

During the same period of time, Israel has made it clear that it aims to completely destroy Hamas, both its military and its government of Gaza.

Although Israel’s Prime Minister leaves the question of the future of Gaza aside for now, it is noteworthy that the future of the West Bank and East Jerusalem goes unmentioned in media as if there is no change expected despite its present long occupation by Israel, which for years has been colonizing the West Bank with Israeli settlements now containing a total of some million and a half settlers. For both Israel and the US, the strategy continues to be Israel’s domination and subjugation of the Palestinian people and theft of their land and resources.

Is it conceivable that Israeli military power can defeat the Palestinian fight for freedom and justice, which Hamas seems to have instilled anew in the minds and hearts of a substantial segment of the Palestinian population since winning a huge majority in the 2006 parliamentary election in both the West Bank and Gaza with Palestinian voters rejecting the long-time rule of the Fatah movement? (The subsequent collaboration of Fatah with UK secret services and the US CIA in fomenting a bloody civil war against Hamas, has been for some time an ‘open secret’ for Palestinians.'[3]

Will Netanyahu (now criticized for having once supported Hamas in order to divide Palestinian solidarity for a Palestinian state [4]) retain power for himself and rescue and protect the Israeli state’s status quo by killing thousands more Palestinian children, destroying their homes and starving to death even more thousands?

Hardly imaginable. Netanyahu defending his now internationally condemned mega genocidal collective punishment rained down upon Gaza with outrageous allegations, such as the story of Hamas “beheading 40 babies‘ and repeated gruesome tales of Hamas terror, a good deal of which Israeli Hebrew newspapers have debunked [5], will eventually no longer wash.

Too many people remember as do Palestinians that the state of Israel was founded in 1948 by the most reprehensible Israeli massacres of Palestinians in order to ethnic cleanse British misgoverned Palestine of its 2 to 1 Arab majority by Israelis owning only 7% and constituting only 1/3 of its population.

Israel condemning Hamas terror is like ‘the kettle calling the pot black.] On December 4, 1948, Albert Einstein condemned the macabre Israeli massacre at the Arab village of Deir Yassin and warned against supporting Fascism in Israel in a letter to the New York Times signed by other prominent Jews

If he tries to keep to his genocidal agenda, will Netanyahu not alienate even Israel’s  closest allies, who will be needing to protect their own public projected honorable images?

Hamas is demanding an independent Palestinian state, one that, according to its 2017 manifesto, would at the very least include the land Palestinians held in 1967, and include Jerusalem, and the right of return.[6]

What shall the hundreds of times wealthier state of Israel be offering Palestinians remains a mystery. Could it possibly be further bondage and poverty? How many Israelis see or sense and are ashamed of the similarity between Israel’s persecution and treatment of Palestinians and their own past persecution and treatment under the Nazis? Will these conscience bound Israelis not begin to clash with their fellow citizens who are gung-ho fanatic for a bible based ‘Greater Israel’ encompassing and swallowing up even more than just the Palestinian lands?[1]

As humanity’s majority in the world’s southern hemisphere begins to become aware of its power and influence in today’s modern changing world, could it spell trouble for the apartheid nature of Israel and Israel’s dependence on, relationship with, and support from, the still all powerful USA/NATO, which is now for the first time being internally discussed and questioned because of the international embarrassment of having too long continued to support the inhuman and genocidal excesses of Israel’s war in Gaza? –

A  ‘war?’ against one’s own long ago captured and surrounded population of Israeli’s former Arab neighbors in British ruled Palestine imprisoned on their own but less than half smaller land. A ‘war?’ In which there is little or no reporting of militaries clashing with each other, but lots of reporting of tens thousands of dead and maimed women and children, of tens of thousands of their homes destroyed often with family members buried underneath the ruble.

Maybe it’s time to go back and recall when, how and why this intractable murderous violence in Palestine began.

In November of 1946, American power over an incipient United Nations of only 56 nations, produced a genocidal stratagem of torching the Holy Land with a phony, never expected nor intended to be implemented resolution for a crazy quilt partition [7] of Palestine meant to immediately provoke a civil war prepared for and expected by the Colonial Powers supported revisionist Zionists leadership and their terrorist groups the Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organization) and Lehi or the Stern Gang – ultimately led by future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin.

(The vote for partition was approved with 25 in favor versus 32 against, abstaining or absent)

If the reader would like to read Albert Einstein’s commentary on events in Palestine from 1923 through 1948 please read on.

More than a year before this civil war producing vote, Albert Einstein made headlines in the New York Times, EINSTEIN URGES UNITED NATIONS RUN PALESTINE, February 15, 1946

“A government in Palestine under the UN’s direct control and a constitution assuring Jews’ and Arab’ security against being outvoted by each other would solve the Jewish-Arab difficulties.” [8] 

During the debate of two UN plans for Palestine, Egyptian delegate Fawzi noted

“an aim to establish military bases for the benefit of Powers that wanted to gain a strong hold in the oil rich Middle East,” 

Fawzi had asked for an advisory opinion on the legal issues from the International Court of Justice.  His delegation denied that the General Assembly had any power to decree the partition of Palestine, and described the partition plan as “shameless illegality,” contrary to the principle of self-determination for the overwhelming majority of the people of Palestine.

If the alternate UN plan for an independent and democratic Palestine had not been suffocated by colonial power politicking, Jews would have had access to the entire Mandate of Palestine. With all the intellectual prowess that immigrating Jews were bringing as engineers, doctors, scientists and workers knowledgeable in advanced technology, and the international financial connections available to their leaders, both sides might have opted to stay mixed, legislating a great degree of regard for cultural, religious distinctions that would see Jews sharing economic social benefits with Arabs in a Israel-Palestine smack in a sea of Arab nations accepting a Jewish lead in the affairs of a prospering single unique mixed Jewish-Arab state. The culturally rich Ladino culture in Muslim ruled Spain comes to mind.

How welcomed by all the concerned world would freedom and justice for Palestinians be!  

It is to be expected that Israel will try to continue to deny freedom and independence and justice, even dignity, for Palestinians by continuing to delay acceptance of any kind of two state arrangement. But, a single democratic state might even become to be preferable to Israel’s having to remove the Israeli settlers from the West Bank, and having to tolerate a still belligerent Arab population on its border and along its Mediterranean shore. The homeland Jewishness within a wisely negotiated new Israel-Palestine state could continue alongside or interspersed within a Muslim population equally at home in a Middle East of Islamic religion.

In 1927, in “The Jews and Palestine, “ in  About Zionism, Einstein wrote referring to his experience during his 1923 visit,

“At no time did I get the impression that the Arab problem might threaten the development of the Palestine project. I believe rather that, among the working classes especially, Jew and Arab on the whole get on excellently together.” 

Albert Einstein writing in regard to his joy in participating in fund raising for a Hebrew University there.

“I firmly believe that the Jews, given the smallness and  dependence of their colony in Palestine, will be immune from the folly of power.” (Einstein Letter to Maurice Solovine, March 8, 1921)

Four months later Einstein tempered his joy with his first apprehension about Zionist organizing.

“I am very glad to have followed Weizmann’s invitation. In several places, however, a high-tensioned Jewish nationalism shows itself that threatens to degenerate into intolerance and bigotry, but hopefully this is only an infantile disorder.” (Einstein Letter to Paul Ehrenfest, June18, 1921)

After Einstein’s stay in Palestine in 1923, he had written in his ‘My Impressions of Palestine’ article for New Palestine Magazine,

“A remarkable tribute to the real power of Palestine is the fact that the Jewish elements which have been resident in the country for decades stand distinctly higher, both in the matter of culture and in their display of energy, than those elements which have only recently arrived.”

(An observation that would reflect itself as a Revisionist conquering attitude eventually replaced the original Labor Zionists international socialist philosophy, which was shared by Einstein.)

 I have myself seen more than once insurance of friendly relations between Jewish and Arab workers. I believe that most of the difficulty comes from the intellectuals and, at that, not from the Arab intellectual alone.” Einstein, Albert,“My Impression of Palestine,” in New Palestine Magazine February 3rd 1928.  Published by The Zionist Organization of America.

Two years later, Einstein said he would not remain associated with the Zionist movement unless it tried to make peace with the Arabs, in deed as well as in word.

“The Jews should form committees with the Arab peasants and workers, and not try to negotiate only with the leaders.”Clark, Ronald W., Einstein: The Life and Times, (William Morrow & Company) p.482, citing Norman Bentwich, My 77 years, (NY: Jewish Publication Society) p.99

Interestingly, Einstein never wavered from expressing confidence in Arab-Jewish peaceful and cooperative co-existence even after the horrific Arab massacre of Jews at Hebron and other places in August of 1929.

On November 25, 1929, Einstein wrote to Chaim Weizmann – the future first President of Israel – stating:

“If we do not succeed in finding the path of honest cooperation and coming to terms with the Arabs, we will not have learned anything from our two thousand year old ordeal and will deserve the fate which will beset us.”  (“Einstein and Germany – Physics Today,” [Letter to Chaim Weizmann, 29 November. 1929, in the Weizmann Archives; Einstein on Peace, Schocken, New York (1960), p. 25.)

Einstein, a strong and outspoken socialist, (see his ‘Why Socialism?’[9])followed the progress of Jewish settlement in the British Mandate, and when, in the 1930s, international socialist Zionism came under pressure from the political right, he wrote,

“Under the guise of nationalist propaganda Revisionism seeks to support the destructive speculation in land; it seeks to exploit the people and derive them of their rights,” in JEWISH-ARAB AMITY URGED BY EINSTEIN, New York Times. April 20, 1935

Quoting below perceptive writings of Albert Einstein during the morphing of a Zionism that had begun as Cultural and International Socialist Labor Zionism into its domination by Revisionist Zionism and some militant terroristZionism. In 1938, the Irgun instituted a wave of bombings against Arab crowds. *(The Irgun was a Zionist paramilitary organization that operated in Mandate Palestine between 1931 and 1948.)

In August 1945, Einstein was publicly sharply critical of the Jewish underground paramilitary groups, such as the Irgun and the Stern Group. In his words,

“I regard it [the Irgun] as a disaster. I am not willing to see anyone associated with those misled and criminal people.” (letter to Shepard Rifkin)

In an Address by Einstein at the Manhattan Opera House to the National Labor Committee for Palestine, on January 11, 1946, Einstein spoke of what he saw as the basic human problem in Palestine, namely, colonialism, British Empire colonialism

“I wish to explain why I believe the difficulties in Palestine exist.  First, the difficulties between the Jews and Arabs are artificially created, and are created by the English…Of course the English had two interests. First was to have raw materials for their industry. Also the oil in those countries. I find everywhere there are big landowners who are exploiters of that race of people. …The British are always in a passive alliance with those land possessing owners which suppress the work of the people in the different trades. It is my impression that Palestine is a kind of small model of India… Now how can I explain otherwise that national troublemaking is a British enterprise? I believe that the Palestinian people, under severe influence of the United Nations, will be able to create a better state of affairs. But with the British rule as it is, I believe it is impossible to find a real remedy…The state idea is not according to my heart. I cannot understand why it is needed. It is connected to many difficulties and a narrow-mindedness. I believe it is bad.… If people are united with each other and they come to the idea that they do not need the foreign rule, then they want to make themselves independent.”

Einstein Hits British Rule Testifying before the AngloAmerican inquiry commission on Palestine Jewish Telegraphic Agency WASHINGTON January 18, 1946.

Prof. Albert Einstein charges that British colonial rule was responsible for the trouble between the Arabs and Jews. Accuses Great Britain Of Double Dealing.” Prof. Albert Einstein, testifying before the Anglo-American Inquiry Commission, said he was against a Jewish State…He urged, however, that the bulk of the Jewish refugees in Europe be brought to Palestine. Emphasizing that he believes there will be no peace between Jews and Arabs as long as the British rule Palestine, Prof. Einstein charged Britain with violating the basic responsibilities undertaken in the Balfour Declaration. Asked by British members of the committee whether the Americans should take over Palestine from the British, Prof. Einstein replied that the administration of Palestine should be international. He emphasized that he holds Americans responsible for what the British are doing in Palestine.                           

“Difficulties between Jews and Arabs were largely artificially created by the British,” Einstein declared.

He criticized the British colonial policy as based on the principle of “divide and rule,” and charged the British administration with using the ex-Mufti of Jerusalem to foment trouble. Queried by Dr. Frank Aydelotte, one of the American members of the committee, as to what he would do if Arabs resisted the immigration of Jews from Europe into Palestine, Prof. Einstein replied,

“this will not be the case if they are not incited.”

Questioned by Dr. Aydelotte concerning political versus cultural Zionism, he stated:

“I was never for a political state.”

A few days later, Einstein again made his position clear,

“I am in favor of Palestine being developed as a Jewish Homeland but not as a separate state. It seems to me a matter of simple common sense that we cannot ask to be given political rule over Palestine where two thirds of the population are not Jewish.” (Letter to Maurice Dunay, January 19, 1946)

——————November 1946——————

With the announcement of the partition resolution, the Jewish and Arab communities of British Mandate Palestine immediately began to clash in violence.  After the partition resolution, the British, again unilaterally, brought the date of the end of its mandate forward to May 14. 

Britain announced that it would accept the partition plan, but refused to enforce it, arguing it was not accepted by the Arabs. Britain also refused to share the administration of Palestine with the UN Palestine Commission during the transitional period, and requested the UN Palestine Commission not to enter Palestine until two weeks before the British withdrawal.

The UN General Assembly by its charter was and still is only granted the power to make recommendations, therefore, UN General Assembly Resolution 181 was actually not legally binding, but there was no significant expression of doubt about the de facto power of the UN resolution and its having torched Palestine.

Supposedly in response to the civil war already raging, or making it look like in response, President Harry S. Truman made a statement on 25 March proposing UN trusteeship rather than partition. This dissimulating statement, clearly so woefully belated, to have any effect, by a US president who had overseen all his administration’s threats and arm twisting machinations to accrue the votes needed for the passing of the partition resolution which brought the deadly violence about, must be seen as pure window dressing – a pretending that a civil war had not been contemplated by the plainly absurd UN resolution, plan,

The British decided in early February 1948 to support the annexation of the Arab part of Palestine by Transjordan.

As the last British were leaving on May 14 ending the Mandate, in Tel Aviv, Jewish Agency Chairman David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the State of Israel comprising 73% of Palestine for 33% of its people.

Letter to the New York Times, December 4, 1948, from Albert Einstein and other prominent Jews, warning of Zionist Facism In Israel, denouncing Menachem Begin, a future prime minister of Israel and his Irgun’s horrific massacre of a peaceful Arab village.

Complete text with all the names of those who signed it. From Letters to the Editor, New York Times, December 4, 1948

“Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the “”Freedom Party”” (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine.

The current visit of Menachem Begin, leader of this party, to the United States is obviously calculated to give the impression of American support for his party in the coming Israeli elections, and to cement political ties with conservative Zionist elements in the United States. Several Americans of national repute have lent their names to welcome his visit. It is inconceivable that those who oppose fascism throughout the world, if correctly informed as to Mr. Begin’s political record and perspectives, could add their names and support to the movement he represents.

Before irreparable damage is done by way of financial contributions, public manifestations in Begin’’s behalf, and the creation in Palestine of the impression that a large segment of America supports Fascist elements in Israel, the American public must be informed as to the record and objectives of Mr. Begin and his movement.

The public avowals of Begin’’s party are no guide whatever to its actual character. Today they speak of freedom, democracy and anti-imperialism, whereas until recently they openly preached the doctrine of the Fascist state. It is in its actions that the terrorist party betrays its real character; from its past actions we can judge what it may be expected to do in the future.

Attack on Arab Village

A shocking example was their behavior in the Arab village of Deir Yassin. This village, off the main roads and surrounded by Jewish lands, had taken no part in the war, and had even fought off Arab bands who wanted to use the village as their base. On April 9 (THE NEW YORK TIMES), terrorist bands attacked this peaceful village, which was not a military objective in the fighting, killed most of its inhabitants —— 240 men, women, and children —— and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem. Most of the Jewish community was horrified at the deed, and the Jewish Agency sent a telegram of apology to King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan. But the terrorists, far from being ashamed of their act, were proud of this massacre, publicized it widely, and invited all the foreign correspondents present in the country to view the heaped corpses and the general havoc at Deir Yassin.

The Deir Yassin incident exemplifies the character and actions of the Freedom Party.

Within the Jewish community they have preached an admixture of ultranationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority. Like other Fascist parties they have been used to break strikes, and have themselves pressed for the destruction of free trade unions. In their stead they have proposed corporate unions on the Italian Fascist model.

During the last years of sporadic anti-British violence, the IZL and Stern groups inaugurated a reign of terror in the Palestine Jewish community. Teachers were beaten up for speaking against them, adults were shot for not letting their children join them. By gangster methods, beatings, window-smashing, and wide-spread robberies, the terrorists intimidated the population and exacted a heavy tribute.

The people of the Freedom Party have had no part in the constructive achievements in Palestine. They have reclaimed no land, built no settlements, and only detracted from the Jewish defense activity. Their much-publicized immigration endeavors were minute, and devoted mainly to bringing in Fascist compatriots.

Discrepancies Seen

The discrepancies between the bold claims now being made by Begin and his party, and their record of past performance in Palestine bear the imprint of no ordinary political party. This is the unmistakable stamp of a Fascist party for whom terrorism (against Jews, Arabs, and British alike), and misrepresentation are means, and a “”Leader State”” is the goal.

In the light of the foregoing considerations, it is imperative that the truth about Mr. Begin and his movement be made known in this country. It is all the more tragic that the top leadership of American Zionism has refused to campaign against Begin’’s efforts, or even to expose to its own constituents the dangers to Israel from support to Begin.

The undersigned therefore take this means of publicly presenting a few salient facts concerning Begin and his party; and of urging all concerned not to support this latest manifestation of fascism.”

(signed) Albert Einstein and twenty-seven other prominent Jews [10]in New York, Dec. 2, 1948 

In spite of Einstein’s efforts, the Palestinians Arabs, while still suffering British military occupation as a colony since the end of the First World War, became re-colonized after the Second World War by another group of Europeans through a genocidal civil war openly planned and provoked by Anglo-American machinations.

Ever since then, Israel has been in bed with the Military Industrial Complex of a US business elite that once heavily invested in Hitler, was itself anti-Semitic in outlook and coldly indifferent and even complicit during the Holocaust its investments had made possible.

The U.S., via military aid between 1950 and 2022, has provided Israel with over 70,000 weapons — aircraft, ground vehicles, missiles and bombs — , of which a considerable amount has been used according to an Axios analysis of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute

“I think it’s a safe assumption to say that U.S. weapons are being used extensively in the current Israeli operations in Gaza,” (a U.S. arms transfer expert at the Stimson Center, told Time Magazine, November 3, 2023)

Yes, and the U.S. weapons, as so often in the past, are indiscriminately killing and maiming thousands of Palestinians, who by international law are wards of the illegal occupying State of Israel. However, this time a large enough part of humanity in this age of instant world wide communication is outraged enough to bring about a larger confrontation, and a somewhat consequential moral defeat for the White nations’ ‘Rules Based International Order,’ for their seventy years of support of Israeli crimes against humanity.

That is to say if Hamas has forced Israel into perpetrating unacceptable crimes against humanity, while not stopping Hamas from continuing to fire rockets into Israel, then Hamas has already won the current confrontation and won in the name of freedom and justice for Palestinians.

Present circumstances might lead to the present State of Israel suffering future options that now are still thought of as intolerable.

In 1991, the famous violinist Yehudi Menuhin, had advised:

The only solution is keep intact the territory and create a federated union, allow people to live where they were, together, apart, schools apart or together – what ever they want – with Jerusalem capital of both like Bern is the capital of German Switzerland and French Switzerland and each president is there for a year and no one knows his name – that is the only solution, otherwise there’ll always be war.” Yehudi Menuhin in 1991

These are not the words and sentiments of an accusing Iranian President Ahmadinejad, or of a defiant Hezbollah, Hamas or other Palestinian spokesperson, but the words of a sensitive, soft spoken, internationally beloved and Israeli prize awarded musician whose very given name, Yehudi, means “the Jew” in Hebrew, his first language.

Menuhin, who died in 1999, had insisted that a single federated state “is the the only solution possible,” echoing the statements of Albert Einstein, Martin Buber, Eric Fromm and so many other Jewish intellectuals and a good many orthodox rabbis who had warned against partition before it became a fact more than seventy-seven years ago.

If Menuhin was right that a single federated state is the only possible solution, then it would seem to be just a matter of time before those who presently wield power, or those who follow them, come around to effecting its realization – strict interpretations of religious fanatics, of nationalist Zionism and U.S. foreign policy goals notwithstanding.

End Notes

1. Nov 5, 2023 — Rabbi at Israeli Military Training Base Says ‘Whole Country’ Is ‘Ours,’ Including Gaza and Lebanon – Israel News – haaretz.com.
2. “Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A,” December 26, 1977, New York Times

3.  “Israel, US, and Egypt back Fatah’s fight against Hamas” Archived October 26, 2010, at the Wayback Machine, Christian Science Monitor, 25 May 2007)

The Presidential Guard of Mahmoud Abbas was enlarged and equipped, and its members trained by the US, Egypt and Jordan. The US had helped build up the Presidential Guard to 3,500 men since August 2006. The US committed $59 million for training and non-lethal equipment for the Presidential Guard, and persuaded Arab allies to fund the purchase of further weapons. Israel, too, allowed light arms to flow to members of the Presidential Guard. Jordan and Egypt hosted at least two battalions for training. Institute for Strategic Studies, Volume 13, Issue 5; June 2007

4.  Many accuse Netanyahu of deliberately empowering the Hamas for decades as part of a strategy to sabotage a two-state solution based on the principle of land for peace.

“There’s been a lot of criticism of Netanyahu in Israel for instating a policy for many years of strengthening Hamas and keeping Gaza on the brink while weakening the Palestinian Authority,” said Mairav Zonszein of the International Crisis Group. CBC News, 10/28/2023

5.  A report in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has said that Israel Defense Forces (IDF) combat helicopter that engaged Hamas fighters at the Nova music festival near the Kibbutz Re’im during the Oct 7 attack hit festival participants as well. The Hebrew-language Haaretz newspaper article published on 20 October quotes a kibbutz resident survivor trembling as he spoke of Israeli Defense Force shelling houses with all their occupants inside in order to eliminate the terrorists. Photos show that only the heavy munitions of the Israeli army could have destroyed residential homes in this manner. Yasmin Porat, another survivor from Kibbutz Be’eri, said in an interview for an Israeli radio-show, hosted by state-broadcaster Kan, that Israeli forces “eliminated everyone, including the hostages,” going on to state that “there was very, very heavy crossfire” and even noted tank shelling.

Israel’s fleet of Hermes 450 “Zik” armed drones carried out attacks on Israeli military bases, settlements, and civilians during the Hamas attack on 7 October, according to a 14 November report from Mishpacha Magazine.

6. Wilson Center article: Doctrine of Hamas, October 20, 2023

7. UN Map of proposed partition.                                           https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-208958/

8. New York Times of February 15, 1946

9. “Why Socialism?” By Albert Einstein, Monthly Review 

10. ISIDORE ABRAMOWITZ, HANNAH ARENDT, ABRAHAM BRICK, RABBI JESSURUN CARDOZO, ALBERT EINSTEIN, HERMAN EISEN, M.D., HAYIM FINEMAN, M. GALLEN, M.D., H.H. HARRIS, ZELIG S. HARRIS, SIDNEY HOOK, FRED KARUSH, BRURIA KAUFMAN, IRMA L. LINDHEIM, NACHMAN MAISEL, SYMOUR MELMAN, MYER D. MENDELSON, M.D., HARRY M. ORLINSKY, SAMUEL PITLICK, FRITZ ROHRLICH, LOUIS P. ROCKER, RUTH SAGER, ITZHAK SANKOWSKY, I.J. SCHOENBERG, SAMUEL SHUMAN, M. ZNGER, IRMA WOLPE, STEFAN WOLPE

Jay Janson is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer; has lived and worked on all continents; articles on media published in China, Italy, UK, India and in the US by Dissident Voice, Global Research; Information Clearing House; Counter Currents and others; now resides in NYC; First effort was a series of articles on deadly cultural pollution endangering seven areas of life emanating from Western corporate owned commercial media published in Hong Kong’s Window Magazine 1993; Howard Zinn lent his name to various projects of his; Weekly column, South China Morning Post, 1986-87; reviews for Ta Kung Bao; article China Daily, 1989.

3 December 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dan Lieberman

A few days of truce allows a few days to ponder events and examine apartheid Israel’s response to Hamas’ October 7 attack. Engaging in talks and achieving mutual agreements that release captives prompts the question of why wasn’t this done much earlier, before the entire population of Gaza was subjected to brutal bombardments that killed 14000 Palestinians, displaced  80 percent, destroyed 50 percent of the buildings in Gaza city, and killed more than 50 of the captured Israelis?

From the devastation emerges a chilling vision of a new world order — a nationalist, militarist, irredentist, far-right command of governments, kept in play by obedient media that shape information and exercise mind control. Coincidental with Israel’s attack on Gaza’s population and the West Bank Palestinians, Argentina and the Netherlands elected far-right leaders who are ardent supporters of Israel’s government, adding to established far-right governments in Italy and Hungary.

Post-World War II featured 45 years of a Cold War, of Capitalism contending Communism, followed by democratic neo-liberalism extending its reach worldwide, and igniting populist movements against globalization and liberalism from ultra-conservatives and authoritarians. The responses have graduated to a worldwide battle between those who believe everyone has the right to live freely, peacefully, equally, and without oppression and those who compose a ‘might make right’ force that acts with license to commit genocide. Revelations from an Israeli intelligence ministry document and a pronouncement by the director of the New York office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights certify the intended genocide.

Although not entirely authoritative, The Asia Times has discovered What Gaza might look like ‘the day after’ the war.

Less than a week after Hamas’s devastating attacks on October 7, Israel’s intelligence ministry produced a chilling document. It advocated that Israel remove all of Gaza’s Palestinian population and forcibly resettle them in the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula. What is more likely is that Israel will indefinitely occupy parts of Gaza, while seeking to eschew responsibility for civilian governance.

Craig Mokhiber, director of the New York office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, resigned and said, “The current wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people, rooted in an ethno-nationalist colonial settler ideology, in continuation of decades of their systematic persecution and purging, based entirely upon their status as Arabs … leaves no room for doubt that this is a text book case of genocide.”

Hamas’ attack was more due to failure of Israeli border security than the well-prepared and well-coordinated Hamas militia. Failure has consequences and attempts to circumvent consequences and properly address failure may lead to greater failures, and this has happened. A rational government that placed its people before embarking on a mission of ‘might make right’ and  ’might cannot fail’ would  have:

(1)    Operated behind the scenes and obtained agreement to release all captives. Each day that women and children are captive is a day of mental and physical deterioration leading to lifelong illnesses and possible death.

(2)    Immediately secured the border in a firm and organized manner so there is no possibility of another Hamas attack.

(3)    Carefully ascertained the reasons for the attack, determined what may follow, and learned if the attack might be part of a larger campaign that includes other adversaries. Gather the facts before facing the facts.

News reports have not shown that Israel prioritized captive release and firm border security before waging destruction.

The media uses the word ‘war’ instead of ‘destruction.’ Where is the war, where is anybody able to contest Israel’s unilateral actions? Buildings and civilians do not fight and wage war; they are victims of destruction. Why does Israel wage destruction? The answer is obvious ─ Israel considered Hamas’ vicious attack as an opportunity to advance its agenda of physically and psychologically destroying the Palestinians. Keeping the conversation on the Hamas massacre alive while Israel mobilized its forces for its intended massacre and constantly referring to the brutality of the hostage-taking suppressed complaints to Israel’s genocidal tactics. But not for long. International protests to Israel’s deranged actions and an internal outcry at the neglect of the hostages forced Netanyahu to grant a temporary truce and trade captives.

To give a twisted rationale to Israel’s genocidal plan, Israeli officials and its worldwide media companions embarked on a media campaign that dehumanized the Palestinians and aroused sympathy for Israeli suffering. The Israeli propaganda machine worked quickly, using rumors and unverified stories to replace demon ISIS with new demon Hamas. Stop here for a moment of contention. Does the brutality of Hamas’ vicious attack permit unverified stories to circulate and prevent the airing of narratives that contradict the accepted narratives?

CNN commentator, Erin Burnett, interviewed  Yasmin Porat, an Israeli woman taken hostage. Ms. Porat related her witnessing the killings, being taken hostage, and being used as a human shield, but not really, she wasn’t a shield for a gun-toting killer; Yasmin Porat shielded a defenseless Hamas operative from being killed by Israeli forces before surrendering. Cutting the interview at its most crucial point, when Ms. Porat was prepared to reveal information inconsistent with published reports demonstrated how the media manipulates the message. In a radio interview, which can be heard below, the Israeli woman gave additional details of her capture.

Hamas Assault – SURVIVOR Spoke Out – Yasmin Porat

Another website at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/yasmin-porat-speaks-out-israeli-hostage-contradicts-official-account/ar-AA1iGlG3 summarized her interview.

Yasmin Porat spoke in an exclusive interview about the events she witnessed. Amid the chaos of heavy crossfire and the ominous sound of tank shells exploding, Porat made a shocking claim: Israeli forces didn’t spare anyone in their path. “They eliminated everyone, including the hostages,” Porat said during her conversation with Israeli radio.

Her account paints a picture where the hostages, instead of being rescued, were caught in a deadly crossfire instigated by the very forces meant to save them. The event turned from a potential rescue operation to an unfortunate catastrophe where lives from both sides were lost.

In a surprising revelation, Porat also mentioned that Palestinian fighters treated the hostages with humanity. Despite the volatile situation, they offered the hostages hope, hinting at a safe passage to Gaza.

This act of compassion stands in stark contrast to the later chaos where the hostages found themselves caught between warring factions. Yet, the revelation hasn’t found widespread coverage. Porat’s testimony mysteriously disappeared from the “Haboker Hazeh” program, leading to rampant speculation about censorship.

Israeli official interpretation of the events made the Gazans who voted for and supported Hamas equally guilty in the slaughter and deserving equal retribution. By similar logic, this makes the slaughtered Israelis who voted for the present government, equally guilty in the destruction of the Palestinians. Although Hamas attacked and kidnapped Asian workers, and Hamas would have acted the same if Israelis were Mormons, Israel insisted Hamas was intent on committing genocide of world Jewry. The Hamas military wing of supposed 50,000 warriors, which has few armored vehicles, no air force, no naval force, and already demonstrated that it cannot penetrate Israel for more than a few kilometers without being demolished, is considered able to defeat the fourth most powerful military in the world and destroy world Jewry. Meanwhile, Israel’s military is committing genocide against the Palestinian people, and “powerful” Hamas is unable to prevent the catastrophe.

Hamas committed a despicable massacre and deserves the most serious condemnation. Israel commits continuous massacres plus human crimes plus human rights violations that daily impinge on the survival of the Palestinians. Add them up and Israel has committed a massacre that has a beyond comprehension magnitude.

The physical nature of the genocide is apparent but its numbers are relatively small, not what is expected in a genocide. Not apparent is the psychological genocide — the anxiety Israel creates for the Palestinians, the violence that causes traumas and deadens spirit and emotions. This is the major component of the genocide. Two examples:

After the release of Palestinians held in Israel’s prisons, the Israeli military forbade the Palestinian families to celebrate. Denying expression of joy after internalizing grief maintains the grief. No relief for the suffering.

Randomly, Israeli soldiers will stop an auto, take the driver, beat him senselessly, and throw him down on the road; the purpose being to terrorize Palestinians, show they are powerless, cannot control their lives, and have nobody to protect them. This practice enraged one young Palestinian who suffered a random beating. The next day he shot dead an Israeli soldier in what was described as a terror attack. The Israeli military followed the ‘“terror attack” with their usual practice of demolishing the “terrorist’s “ home, causing more trauma to those in the extended family.

After tying together the usual spurious charge of anti-Semitism, substituting killings of Jews for killing of Israelis, and associating the violence with the WWII Holocaust (worst attack on the Jewish community since the Holocaust), the pro-Israel contingent introduced a new sorrowful element to grab the twisted sensibilities of their legions of dishonor. Israel, which has the backing of the most powerful forces in the universe and gets more attention than other nations, is alone, nobody considers Jewish suffering, and the Jews are the lonely people of history.

Yossi Klein Halevy, an American-born Israeli author and journalist, who led a confusing and peripatetic intellectual life, had an initial attraction to the extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane, eventually supported the two-state solution, and criticizes the Israeli settler movement, wrote an article titled, The Lonely People of History in the November 16, 2023 edition of the Times of Israel. The article received excessive attention and mass circulation. Some excerpts that describe the Israeli mind.

But now we are at one of those defining moments in Jewish history when we find ourselves at a moral disconnect with much of the international community. As we struggle to absorb the enormity of the October 7 massacre and to confront a global wave of antisemitism, the trauma of aloneness has returned.

Instead of delving into self-pity and victimization, Halevi should find reality. The moral disconnect comes from Halevi’s cohorts’ refusal to recognize and halt the oppression of the Palestinian people – resolve that situation and the “global wave of antisemitism” will disappear.

During the Second Intifada, when the IDF fought suicide bombers in Palestinian towns and villages, an exasperated Kofi Anan, then secretary-general of the UN, demanded: “Can the whole world be wrong and only Israel is right?” Israelis unhesitatingly replied: Absolutely.

A sure way to become alone.

Speaking at the gravesite, Yonadav’s brother called on the government to resist world pressure and persevere. He invoked Israel’s first prime minister: “David Ben-Gurion said that it doesn’t matter what the gentiles say, only what the Jews do.”

Really? Can any rational person accept David Ben-Gurion’s bigoted and egocentric statement?

More disconcerting than Halevi’s separatist attitude that invites exclusion were comments to the article that indicate paranoia, delusion, and mental aberration.

“We are always alone. On a good day, we are tolerated. When we suffer enough, we receive sympathy from some. But accepted? Never.”

“When Jews suffer, nobody sees it. That is going for 2 thousand of years. And suddenly Israelis do not have rights to protect themself. Just be quiet and do not resist! This is a new Muslim norm!

The Israeli mind
It is impossible for a rational and thoughtful human being to be unable to recognize that Israel intends to totally destroy the Palestinian community. Where will the Gazans go after hostilities end? Almost all of North Gaza, which is mainly Gaza City, is destroyed. There will be few places to live, less agricultural land to provide food, no work to find, few places to shop, nowhere to relax, and fewer schools to attend. The already crowded Gazan prison will have six times the number of people in a square mile. The precarious life of a Gazan will become many times more precarious. What mind prepares a future of pain and anguish leading to death for a community of millions? It is a distorted mind, characterized by the actions of Jewish settlers in the West Bank. From https://www.972mag.com/hebron-area-settler-violence-expulsions/.

At 10 p.m. on Oct. 13, I received a phone call from Amer Abu Awad, a Palestinian resident of Khirbet Al-Radeem, a small rural community south of Hebron in the occupied West Bank. “The settlers attacked me,” he told me in a frightened voice. “Some of them were wearing army uniforms.”

“They assaulted me, beat my elderly father, pushed him to the ground, dragged him through the puddles, and pointed weapons at us,” Abu Awad continued, pausing to catch his breath. “They said I had to leave by morning, or my family and I will be finished.”

Early the next day, Abu Awad called me again. “I want to leave, but the roads are closed.” After hours of interventions, he managed to escape with his family of five along with his flock of sheep to the town of As-Samu, leaving behind his house, furniture, livestock barracks, and grain for the sheep. Abu Awad and his family had to carry all their belongings by foot; the Israeli army would not allow any vehicles to enter the area.

Palestinians in the rural communities surrounding Hebron live marginal and peaceful lives. They need assistance to enrich their living standard. Instead of giving assistance, the Jewish settlers, strangers to the land and for no valid reason, push the marginal Palestinians to desperation, hopelessness, and impoverishment, leaving them bare of means to survive, all done with blessing from the apartheid Israeli government.

Incidents of bodily injury to Palestinians in the United States indicate how pro-Israel media foments terrorism. In the south Brooklyn neighborhood of Bay Ridge, men, waving Israeli flags, attacked a Palestinian man, three Palestinian students were shot in Vermont and a Muslim-American child was stabbed to death in Illinois by a man enraged against Muslims.

Those who demonstrate against the genocide are accused of anti-Semitism; those who support the genocide are defending the Jews who commit the genocide. Students for Justice in Palestine has been banned or suspended by Brandeis, Columbia, and George Washington University. Columbia University suspended a student chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) after JVP held demonstrations that Columbia said, “repeatedly violated university policies.” Universities are defending the initiators of genocide and protecting those who approve of the genocide.

Getting it backward does not lead to a path forward. Permitting right-wing extremists to engineer a front-seat genocide cannot be accomplished without thought control and threatens all civilization. The Israeli Jews and their Western supporters must be challenged, stopped, and removed from positions of power. One manner of challenge spreads information that reveals the truth of the genocide. Tough to find when Israel blocks and assassinates reporters in Gaza and the West Bank.

Al Jazeera manages to have on-site correspondents and receives videos, images, and reports from locals. Their publication is available at https://www.aljazeera.com/. Click on LIVE and receive Al Jazeera TV.

Another means is economic boycott, guidance from the BDS movement and other institutions that highlight companies that actively support Israel. BDS is reached at https://bdsmovement.net/get-involved/what-to-boycott ; another list is available from Innovative Minds at: http://www.inminds.com/boycott-israel.php

Keep it up, support the demonstrations, spread the word, and shout it loud,

STOP THE GENOCIDE OF THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE

Dan Lieberman publishes commentaries on foreign policy, economics, and politics at https://dlieb10gmailcom.substack.com/.

2 December 2023

Source: countercurrents.org