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By Kim Scipes

On December 1, 2023, the story on the upper right side of the front page of the physical copy of the New York Times is headlined “Israelis Saw Plan for Hamas Attack Over a Year Ago,” and is by-lined to Ronen Bergman and Adam Goldman.

The story begins, “Israeli officials obtained Hamas’s battle plan for the Oct. 7 terrorist attack more than a year before it happened, documents, emails and interviews show.  But Israeli military and intelligence officials dismissed this plan as aspirational, considering it too difficult for Hamas to carry out.

It continues:  “The approximately 40-page document, which the Israeli officials codenamed ‘Jericho Wall,’ outlined, point by point, exactly the kind of devastating invasion that led to the deaths of about 1,200 people.

“Hamas followed the blueprint with shocking precision.  The document called for a barrage of rockets at the outset of the attack, drones to knock out the security cameras and automated machine guns along the border, and gunmen to pour into Israel en masse in paragliders, motorcycles and on foot—all of which happened on Oct. 7.

“The plan also included details about the location and size of Israel’s military forces, communications hubs and other sensitive information, raising questions about how Hamas gathered its intelligence and whether there were leaks inside the Israeli security establishment.”

—

Obviously, there is a terribly damaging and devastating report to the Israeli state, somehow getting through the Times’ efforts to downplay the death and destruction inflicted on Gaza by the Israeli military.  It has been obvious to this observer that the Times’ recent coverage—and especially the lack of photographs of Gaza today—has been far below its own standards of covering most conflicts (at least other than Ukraine).  “Important” stories such as covering elite Western US fire-fighting teams—in late November, far from fire season?—have been given front page coverage recently, along with extensive photographic evidence inside.  No, the editors have chosen to downplay Israeli death and destruction in Gaza.

And yet, somehow, this report of the humongous Israeli intelligence failure made it to the front page of the physical copy of the paper.

In any case, that it appeared, nonetheless, it was a damaging rebuke to the Israeli intelligence system—so long overplayed as “all-but-perfect”—and the Israeli government under Benjamin Netanyahu.

Again, from the Times’ report:  “Israeli security officials have already acknowledged that they failed to protect the country, and the government is expected to assemble a commission to study the events leading to the attacks.  The Jericho Wall document lays bare a yearslong cascade of missteps that culminated in what officials now regard as the worst Israeli intelligence attack that led to the Arab-Israeli war of 1973.”

I personally think this is a stunning rebuke also to the US Government, which has slavishly protected Irael’s activities from the world community.

In any case, this article is stunning news, and is the type that makes journalists’ careers and often leads to Pulitzer Prizes.  I was sure the Times would want to circulate this report—once they decided to cover it—all over social media, etc.

Yet, when I went to the Times’ web site, somehow, this story did not appear.  It seems that the death of retired Supreme Court Justice, Sandra Day O’Connor, was much more important a news item than this incredible Israeli intelligence failure.

“All the News That’s Fit to Print” my ass!  Soon, they’ll probably claim “Fair and Balanced” as their next slogan regarding the Middle East.

Kim Scipes, PhD, is a Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Purdue University Northwest in Westville, Indiana.

2 December 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Chris Hedges

Phase One of Israel’s genocidal campaign on Gaza has ended. Phase Two has begun. It will result in even higher levels of death and destruction.

The skies over Gaza are filled — after a seven-day truce — with projectiles of death. Warplanes. Attack helicopters. Drones. Artillery shells. Tank shells. Mortars. Bombs. Missiles. Gaza is a cacophony of explosions and forlorn screams and cries for help beneath collapsed buildings. Fear, once again, is coiling itself around every heart in the Gazan concentration camp.

By Friday evening, 184 Palestinians — including three journalists and two doctors — had been killed by Israeli air strikes in the north, south and central Gaza, and at least 589 injured, according to the Ministry of Health in Gaza. Most of them are women and children. Israel will not be deterred. It plans to finish the job, to obliterate what is left in the north of Gaza and decimate what remains in the south, to render Gaza uninhabitable, to see its 2.3 million people driven out in a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing via starvation, terror, slaughter and infectious diseases.

The aid convoys, which brought in token amounts of food and medicine — the first batch was shrouds and coronavirus tests according to the director of al-Najjar hospital — have been halted. No one, least of all President Joe Biden, plans to intervene to stop the genocide. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Israel this week, and while calling for Israel to protect civilians, refused to set conditions that would disrupt the $3.8 billion Israel receives in annual military assistance or the $14.3 billion supplemental aid package. The world will watch passively, muttering useless bromides about more surgical strikes, while Israel spins its roulette wheel of death. By the time Israel is done, the 1948 Nakba, where Palestinians were massacred in dozens of villages and 750,000 were ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias, will look like a quaint relic of a more civilized era.

Nothing is off limits. Hospitals. Mosques. Churches. Homes. Apartment blocks. Refugee camps. Schools. Universities. Media offices. Banks. Sewer systems. Telecommunications infrastructure. Water treatment plants. Libraries. Wheat mills. Bakeries. Markets. Entire neighborhoods. Israel’s intent is to destroy Gaza’s infrastructure and daily kill or wound hundreds of Palestinians. Gaza is to become a wasteland, a dead zone that will be incapable of sustaining life.

Israel began to bomb Khan Younis on Friday after dropping leaflets warning civilians to evacuate further south to Rafah, located on the border crossing with Egypt. Hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians had sought refuge in Khan Younis. Once Palestinians are pushed to Rafah, there is only one place left to flee — Egypt. The Israeli Ministry of Intelligence, in a leaked report, calls for the forcible transfer of Gaza’s population to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. A detailed plan to intentionally displace the Palestinians in Gaza and push them into Egypt has been embedded in Israeli doctrine for five decades. Already, 1.8 million Palestinians in Gaza have been driven from their homes. Once Palestinians cross the border into Egypt — which the Egyptian government and Arab leaders are seeking to prevent despite pressure from the U.S. — Palestinians will never return.

This is not a war against Hamas. It is a war against Palestinians.

Israeli strikes are generated at a dizzying rate, many of them from a system called “Habsora” — The Gospel — which is built on artificial intelligence that selects 100 targets a day. The AI-system is described by seven current and former Israeli intelligence officials in an article by Yuval Abraham on the Israeli sites +972 Magazine and Local Call, as facilitating a “mass assassination factory.” Israel, once it locates what it assumes to be a Hamas operative from a cell phone, for example, bombs and shells a wide area around the target, killing and wounding tens, and at times hundreds of Palestinians, the article states.

“According to intelligence sources,” the story reads, “Habsora generates, among other things, automatic recommendations for attacking private residences where people suspected of being Hamas or Islamic Jihad operatives live. Israel then carries out large-scale assassination operations through the heavy shelling of these residential homes.”

Some 15,000 Palestinians, including 6,000 children and 4,000 women, have been killed since Oct. 7. Some 30,000 have been wounded. Over six thousand are missing, many buried under the rubble. More than 300 families have lost 10 or more members of their families. More than 250 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since Oct. 7, and more than 3,000 injured, although the area is not controlled by Hamas. The Israeli military claims to have killed between 1,000 and 3,000 of some 30,000 Hamas fighters, a relatively small number given the scale of the assault. Most resistance fighters shelter in their vast tunnel system.

Israel’s playbook is the “Dahiya Doctrine.” The doctrine was formulated by former Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot, who is a member of the war cabinet, following the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Dahiya is a southern Beirut suburb and a Hezbollah stronghold. It was pounded by Israeli jets after two Israeli soldiers were taken prisoner. The doctrine posits that Israel should employ massive, disproportionate force, destroying infrastructure and civilian residences, to ensure deterrence.

Daniel Hagari, spokesman of the IDF, conceded at the start of Israel’s most recent attack on Gaza that the “emphasis” would be “on damage and not on accuracy.”

Israel has abandoned its tactic of “roof knocking” where a rocket without a warhead would land on a roof to warn those inside to evacuate. Israel has also ended its phone calls warning of an impending attack. Now dozens of families in an apartment block or a neighborhood are killed without notice.

The images of mass destruction feed the thirst for revenge within Israel following the humiliating incursion by Hamas fighters on Oct. 7 and the killing of 1,200 Israelis, including 395 soldiers and 59 police officers. There is a sadistic pleasure voiced by many Israelis over the genocide and a groundswell of calls for the murder or expulsion of Palestinians, including those in the occupied West Bank and those with Israeli citizenship.

The savagery of the air strikes and indiscriminate attacks, the cutting off of food, water and medicine, the genocidal rhetoric of the Israeli government, make this a war whose sole objective is revenge. This will not be good for Israel or the Palestinians. It will fuel a conflagration throughout the Middle East.

Israel’s attack is the last desperate measure of a settler colonial project that foolishly thinks, as many settler colonial projects have in the past, that it can crush the resistance of an indigenous population with genocide. But even Israel will not get away with killing on this scale. A generation of Palestinians, many of whom have seen most, if not all, of their families killed and their homes and neighborhoods destroyed, will carry within them a lifelong thirst for justice and retribution.

This war is not over. It has not even begun.

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

2 December 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Thomas Scripps

Israel resumed its genocidal assault on Gaza Friday morning within minutes of the seven-day “operational pause” expiring. By the end of the day, at least 178 more Palestinians had been reported killed, and 589 injured. A woman and her son were killed in Lebanon by Israeli artillery fire, after shooting restarted across the border.

The Netanyahu government blamed Hamas for ending the truce—the latest in a long list of lies. Rocket fire into Israel, still unattributed, came only after Israel claimed that Hamas had failed to honour commitments to free all the women and children it was holding when it released eight hostages yesterday.

Hamas responded that there were no more such hostages to return. They had offered to hand over the bodies of a mother, Shiri Bibas, her 10-month-old son, Kfir, and his four-year-old brother, Ariel, who were killed by an Israeli bomb. “Hamas also offered to transfer the Bibas family’s bodies and release their father [Yarden] for their burial, along with two Zionist detainees,” it said in a statement, but Israeli authorities “remained unresponsive.”

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had already determined to resume military action, come what may, after repeated complaints that it was “losing momentum”. Citing Hamas’s supposed failure to uphold its side of the bargain was a transparent justification for doing so.

Only a day before, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich had raved that Israel would “chase and destroy” its enemies “everywhere with the help of God.” The pretext for this outburst was an attack in Jerusalem in which two alleged Hamas members killed four people at a bus stop before they were fired on by an armed civilian and then killed by the IDF.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir boasted that this proved he was correct to arm civilians with assault rifles. The “hero gunman” died Friday from multiple gunshot wounds inflicted by the IDF, who mistook him for an enemy combatant.

Netanyahu’s response made clear that what is planned in the name of eliminating Hamas is the ethnic cleansing not only of Gaza, but of the West Bank and Israel itself. “All Hamas terrorists will die—in Jerusalem, in Gaza, in the West Bank, and everywhere,” he thundered.

No secret is made of the brutal, criminal character of the second phase of the IDF’s assault now underway. Government spokesperson Eylon Levy told reporters thuggishly, “Having chosen to hold onto our women, Hamas will now take the mother of all thumpings.”

Reviewing the day’s slaughter, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said, “The results are impressive. Hamas only understands force and therefore we will continue to act until we achieve the goals of the war.”

The destruction wrought in the north of the Gaza strip is now planned for the south, focussing on the city of Khan Yunis, where Israel claims Hamas is headquartered. Leaflets have been dropped on the city, which has already come under repeated and deadly attack, telling residents to evacuate and describing the area as a “dangerous battle zone”.

Given that the vast bulk of northern Gaza’s population is already crowded into the south—with 1.8 million of a 2.3 million total population displaced—there is nowhere to go. The IDF has told civilians to move towards the border with Egypt at Rafah, confirming fears that Israel is seeking to drive the Palestinians out of the strip entirely and into the Sinai desert.

Al Jazeera journalist Zoran Kusovac commented, “the south is now so overcrowded that there is a danger that an all-out ground assault from Israel might leave the people of Gaza with no option but to try to force their way across the border fence into Egypt.

“From the beginning of the conflict, Egypt has been warning that it would not accept any refugees, fearful of political destabilisation and security risks. If it is confronted with that reality, it might find itself in the worst-case scenario of having to use force.”

The humanitarian situation in Gaza was described by the World Health Organization as a “horror movie”. During the truce, roughly 150 trucks of aid entered the strip each day, less than a third of the 500 a day on average before October 7, and less even than the 200 a day believed necessary to meet the most basic needs of the population. Supplies have ground to a halt again with the resumption of the bombing.

International agencies have issued dire warnings. Speaking from the strip’s largest still-functioning hospital, shortly after an airstrike landed barely 50 metres away, UNICEF chief of communications James Elder asked, “Has humanity given up on the children of Gaza?

“I cannot overstate how the capacity has been reduced in hospitals over the last seven weeks. We cannot see more children with the wounds of war, with the burns, the shrapnel littering their body, with their broken bones. Inaction from those with influence is allowing the killing of children. This is a war on children.”

At al-Nasr hospital, International Red Cross surgeon Paul Ley warned, “We are already overwhelmed. There are something like 2,000 patients in a hospital built for 300, and over half need surgery. But we don’t have enough drugs, and insufficient anaesthetics. There is very little pain control and we have to use techniques that have been abandoned for many years because they are seen as dangerous.”

Head of the UN relief agency for Palestinian refugee UNRWA Philippe Lazzarini referred to a “staggering human tragedy” and a “race against time…  already disease is becoming as much a threat as the bombardment.”

He described the south of Gaza as “completely overloaded… It simply cannot cater to so many people. Remember people from Gaza City and the north have been asked to go to the south because they were told the south would be safer. Yet a large proportion have been killed in the south.”

Condemning the “siege on an entire population” as “collective punishment”, he referred to the “one million people in UN installations, including 100,000 in the north… Their locations are known, and despite that, nearly 100 installations have been hit directly or indirectly.”

A joint investigation by Israeli outlets 972+ Mag and Local Call, published Thursday, confirmed the deliberate process used to carry out strikes on civilians in unprecedented numbers.

A source told the journalists, “The numbers increased from dozens of civilian deaths [permitted] as collateral damage as part of an attack on a senior official in previous operations, to hundreds of civilian deaths as collateral damage.”

An artificial intelligence programme called “The Gospel” has been used to select targets, powering what one source called a “mass assassination factory,” with the “emphasis… on quantity and not on quality.” Reporting the story, the Guardian explained that the programme “was created to address a chronic problem for the IDF: in earlier operations in Gaza, the air force repeatedly ran out of targets to strike.”

At the start of the war, the head of the Israeli air force made a point of emphasising that in carrying out “around the clock airstrikes… We are not being surgical.”

The massacre in Gaza resumes with the continuing support of US and world imperialism. Speaking in Dubai, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken backed Israel’s lie that the pause “came to an end because of Hamas, Hamas reneged on the commitments it made.” He reiterated Washington’s “strong solidarity with Israel defending itself” while cynically insisting that it was doing “everything possible to protect civilians.”

2 December 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Binoy Kampmark

“‘He’ll have ye smilin’,” an old Irish saying goes, “while he takes the gold out of your teeth’.”

Charles Glass, London Review of Books, Oct 20, 2022

The obituaries of criminals, masterful or otherwise, are always going to be sordid matters.  Either one has time for the deeds, giving column space to their execution and legacy, or one focuses on the extraneous details: voice, accent, suit, demeanour. “He may have killed the odd person or two, but he did have style.”

Much of the Henry Kissinger School of Idolatry is of the latter propensity.  The nasty deeds are either misread or diminished – notably when they have to do with the global infliction of mass death, prolongation of conflict, or the overthrow of democratic governments.  Instead, time is given to the perceptions of what is supposedly meant to have been the workings of an oversized brain in international relations.  Rather than seeing the inside of a prison or being bothered to the gallows by overly fussy lawyers, Kissinger spent ample time at high level receptions receiving huge wads of cash for offering his inner expertise.  He was admired, adulated and pampered; the critics kept at bay.

As former National Security Advisor and US Secretary of State, he was meant to be the great exponent of realism, which, rebadged, might simply be described as elevated gangsterism at play.  His 1957 work, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-1822 studied the Europe of the admired diplomat Prince Clemens von Metternich, revealing a mind keen on keeping international power in fine equilibrium.  Stability and order were primary goals; justice and human rights were concepts that had little to no role to play.

Metternich, alongside British Foreign Secretary, Viscount Robert Stewart Castlereagh, was to construct a post-Napoleonic order suspicious, even paranoid of revolutionary movements.  It held social and political progress in check; doused the fires of freedom.  As a result, Kissinger reasons, Europe maintained stability from Napoleon’s defeat in 1815 to the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914. For all that, Kissinger would write that Metternich lacked “the ability to contemplate an abyss, not with the detachment of a scientist, but as a challenge to overcome – or perish in the process.” As if envisaging his own future role in US diplomacy, he suggested that “men become myths, not by what they know, nor even by what they achieve, but the tasks they set themselves.”

This gnomic drivel was precisely the sort that fed a media illusion of the big-brained sage in command.  His bloodied hands were washed on the international stage by such absurd titles as “Henry of Arabia,” one given to him by Time Magazine in 1974.  The same magazine would give him front-cover billing in February 1969 as one keen on “New Approaches to Friends and Foes”, and repeat the treatment on no fewer than fourteen other occasions.  Not to be outdone, Newsweek was positively crawling in depicting the German-Jewish émigré who made his name at Harvard and on the world stage as “Super K”.

As the Establishment Courtesan, Kissinger sought out such society reporters as Sally Quinn of The Washington Post to emetically inquire why she did not assume the master strategist to be “a secret swinger”.  Sadistic touches to his curriculum vitae could thereby be ignored, including a butcher’s bill that would eventually run into roughly 3 million souls from the Vietnam War to Cambodia, East Timor, Bangladesh, the “dirty wars” of Latin America, and a number of encouragements and interventions in Africa.

This also meant that such abysmal contributions such as his spoiling role in prolonging the war in Vietnam by several years in order to satisfy the electoral lust of his eventual boss, Richard Nixon, could be overlooked in favour of “shuttle diplomacy ” in ending the Arab-Israeli War of October 1973.  In this, he resembled, as Charles Glass suggested with striking salience, a certain “American frontier archetype: the pedlar whose wagonload of patent medicines promised to cure every ailment.  By the time the rubes realised that his bottles contained snake oil, he had left town.”

A far better appreciation of the Kissinger legacy would be gained by consulting such publications as that ever reliable, if bleak source of primary documents, the National Security Archive.  The Archive pursued the US government with admirable tenacity, alleging that Kissinger had sought to remove, retain and control some 30,000 pages of daily transcripts of his phone conversations (“telcons”) as “personal papers” when he left office in 1977.

As the director of the Archive, Tom Blanton, piquantly remarked, “Kissinger’s aides later commented that he needed to keep track of which lie he told to whom.”  But the telcons are also illustrative, less of Kissinger the realist who furnished his employer with fearless advice than that of a truckler, obedient to his paymaster.  When Nixon made the decision to commence the secret bombing of Cambodia to target Hanoi’s supply routes in March 1969, Kissinger conveyed the order to Secretary of Defence Melvin Laird without demur. He also states firmly that “there is to be no public comment at all from anyone at any level either complaining or threatening”.  When public comment did make its way to the New York Times in May that year, Kissinger badgered the FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to place a number of selected government officials and journalists under surveillance.

While one’s death is rarely a planned thing – the Grim Reaper makes calls at all unexpected hours – there was a sense in Kissinger’s case that he had cheated it just long enough.  He made it to a century without his collar being fingered.  He avoided, in the early 2000s, attempted legal suits for human rights violations in the UK and France.  Despite failing health, he was surrounded by the Establishment sycophants of which he had been one, worshipping power over principle while proffering snake oil.  And there were a goodly number of them for the sendoff.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He currently lectures at RMIT University.

1 December 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Gideon Polya

Despite Apartheid Israeli censorship, and the entrenched culture of lying of neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel and its US Alliance politician and media Western backers, there is mounting evidence, in particular from eminent Western journalists such as Chris Hedges and Jonathan Cook, that many of the Israelis killed on the 7 October 2023 were killed by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) in an Israeli  false-flag operation designed to enable the genocidal massacre and expulsion of Gaza Palestinians.

The Mainstream media and politicians of Zionist-subverted and  Zionist-perverted America and the US-beholden West continue  to give saturation coverage to  the “lying official version of 7 October ” purveyed by the genocidally racist and utterly mendacious Israeli and US governments unforgivably involved in this latest horrendous and genocidal Gaza Massacre – most Gazans homeless,  20,300 Palestinians killed, 8,600 Palestinian children killed, 37,700 injured, and 2.3 million Occupied Palestinians in Gaza mortally threatened not just by bombing but even more so by lack of water, food, shelter, medical requisites, and medical treatment, and all this in reprisal for 1,200 Israeli Occupiers killed on 7 October with quite possibly most having been killed in the Israel Defence Force (IDF) response to the Palestinian breakout from the Gaza Concentration Camp.

The Popperian scientific method for improving our understanding of reality involves the critical testing of potentially falsifiable hypotheses. In contrast anti-science “spin” involves the partisan selection of asserted facts to support a particular chosen model of reality [1]. Importantly, science has zero tolerance for lying whereas the anti-science spin of Apartheid Israel and the US Alliance Mainstream embraces a scale of “truthiness” and the pre-Enlightenment notion of the truth as what the Establishment deems it to be.

By way of summary, the “official US-Zionazi lying version of 7 October” slavishly adopted by racist and mendacious Western Mainstream presstitutes about what it calls  “war” in Gaza is as follows, with the evidence-based, alternative view of reality set out systematically point-by-point:

(a) Neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel says “On 7 October 2023 Hamas terrorists invaded Israel in a surprise attack  and massacred 1,200  Israeli civilians”, but:

(i) World’s best Israeli intelligence permitted the breakout of several thousand  lightly-armed Palestinian fighters from the Gaza Concentration Camp to legitimately attack their military captors and to secure 240 hostages for self-protection and negotiations for the release of 10,000 Occupied Palestinians highly abusively  held hostage in Israeli military prisons and indeed of 2.3 million  Gazans and 5.6 million impoverished Occupied Palestinians in total highly abusively held hostage by the Israeli military in the now 56-year war criminal Occupation.

(ii) Of the 1,200 Israelis killed 84.2% (1,010) were 18-39 years old (i.e. were current Israeli military, conscripts  or reservists), 13.3% (160) were 40 and older (with most being former or existing military), and  2.5% (30) were aged under 18 (i.e. were children) i.e. over 84% of those killed were legitimate military targets as serving Occupying forces [2].

(iii) It is not known how many of the Israeli deaths on 7 October were caused by the overwhelming IDF response that involved heavy machine-gun fire and missiles from helicopter gunships, high explosive shelling from tanks, and the killing of 1,500 Palestinian fighters plus any Israelis hiding with them [3-7].

(iv) Occupied people have the right of armed rebellion against their oppressors) [8-10].

(b). Neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel says “Israel proclaimed its right to self-defence, declared war on Hamas, vowed to exterminate Hamas in retaliation, imposed a total siege, commenced  bombing Gaza, and promised a post-war new order”, but:

(i) A belligerent Occupier has no right to self-defence from its brutally subjugated Subjects [10].

(ii) The so-called “Hamas-Israel War” is not a war but a war criminal and genocidal Gaza Massacre in which an ancient  and densely populated city of 2.3 million has been substantially destroyed  leaving (as of 1 December ) most Gazans homeless,  20,300 Palestinians killed, 8,600 Palestinian children killed, 37,700 Palestinians injured, and 2.3 million Occupied Palestinians in Gaza mortally threatened not just by bombing but even more so by lack of water, food, shelter, medical requisites, and medical treatment [2].

(iii) “Extermination” of Palestinian civilians and military resistance is adumbration of war crimes for which German generals were tried and hung at Nuremberg after WW2.

(iv) Imposition of a total siege on the Gaza Concentration Campo that had already been illegally blockaded and bombed for 16 years is war criminal collective punishment of a captive population.

(v) The leaking of a secret Israeli government report reveals that it favours total ethnic cleansing of Gaza by pushing 2.3 million people into the Sinai desert, and threatens genocide by war criminal mass population expulsion [11] that has already occurred in northern Gaza (1 million expelled), the 1948 Nakba or Catastrophe (0.8 million or 60% of the Palestinian population violently expelled) and the 1967 Naksa or Setback (0.4 million violently expelled) [12-14].

(c). Neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel says “Israel  agreed to a 6-day temporary cessation of bombing to permit exchange of Israeli and Palestinian hostages but opposes a permanent Ceasefire until it achieves its objectives, including extermination of Hamas”, but:

(i) With the exception of the decent, humane and International Law-observant Greens, all Australian Federal MPs (Coalition = Koalition, Independent   and Labor or KILs) unforgivably opposed a permanent Ceasefire in Gaza and thus became unforgivably complicit in the mass Killing of Occupied Palestinians by neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel in the Gaza Concentration Camp.

(ii) There is no Ceasefire in the Occupied West Bank where as of 29 November and since 7 October Israeli settlers and soldiers have killed over 242  Occupied Palestinians including 50 children, and injured more than 2,750, with the Israelis arresting more than 3,325 people [15].

(iii) As of 29 November 60 Israeli hostages had been exchanged for 180 Occupied Palestinian women and children “hostages” [15], noting that the freed Israelis  are actually free, whereas all Indigenous Palestinians are simply not free – whether imprisoned in military prisons (10,000), “freed” hostages (180), inmates of the besieged, starved and bombed Gaza Concentration Camp (2.3 million), brutally subjugated Occupied Palestinians without human rights under highly-abusive military rule in the West Bank (3.3 million), Israeli Palestinians able to vote but subject to 50 Nazi-style, race-based discriminatory laws (2.0 million),  and 7 million mostly impoverished Exiled Palestinians of whom  about 6 million are “stateless”, deprived of human rights and confined endlessly to refugee camps for up to 75 years [12-14].

(iv) This immense “hostage exchange lie” is parroted in the Zionist-subverted West by US Government-beholden Mainstream journalist, editor, politician, academic and commentariat  presstitutes  who further also routinely parrot a massive body of some 35 Zionist lies [2].

(v) US lackey Australia is second only to  the US as a supporter of Apartheid Israel and does so by diplomacy, massive lying [16-20], current Gaza Massacre-assisting intelligence via the joint US-Australia Pine Gap spying and drone-targeting base in Central Australia, extensive military co-research in Australian universities [21, 22], and current high technology arms supplies assisting the Gaza Massacre and in particular the war criminal and genocidal bombing [23]. The unforgivable Australian Federal Parliament Koalition, Independent and Labor Liars who opposed a permanent Ceasefire and back genocidal and mendacious neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel merit the acronym  KILLs. The precisely appropriate double anagram for genocidal and mendacious ISRAEL is SERIAL E-LIARS.

(d). Neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel describes the 7 October breakout as  “Israel’s 9/11”, but:

(i). Google the phrase “Israel’s 9/11” and you get about 200,000 results, this illustrating the success of Zionist and Western pro-Zionist lying to supposedly “justify” the Israel mass murder of (so far) over 20,000 Occupied Palestinians including nearly 9,000 children in war criminal reprisals for the deaths of 1,200 Israelis on 7 October of whom most may have been killed by the IDF.  97.5%  (1,170)  were mostly past and present Israeli military under Israel’s compulsory military service regime (and hence as past or present Occupiers legitimate military targets for the subjugated Occupied Palestinians), and 2.5% (30) were innocent children [2]. Nearly all  of the 3,000 killed on 9/11 were innocent Americans.

(ii). Numerous science, architecture, engineering, aviation, demolition, military, politics and intelligence experts reject the “lying Bush official version of 9/11” and conclude that the egregiously violent and mendacious US Government was responsible with the likely involvement of US Zionists, and neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel [24]. In 2015 it was estimated that 32 million Muslims had died from violence, 5 million, and from imposed deprivation, 27 million, in 20 countries invaded by the US Alliance in the US War on Terror (aka the US War on Muslims) since the US Government’s 9/11 false flag atrocity that killed about 3,000 Americans on 9/11 [24, 25]. Former President Donald Trump and former Vice-President Al Gore have both strongly condemned the extraordinary intelligence failure that enabled the 9/11 atrocity to happen [24]. Similarly, variously eminent expert and informed academic, military and other commentators have expressed astonishment over the intelligence failure that enabled the Occupied Palestinian breakout on 7 October [26-31].

(iii). The compelling case from the available information and argued cogently by numerous science, architecture, engineering, aviation, demolition, military, politics and intelligence experts is that the US Government killed 3,000 of its citizens on 9/11 to provide an excuse for the US to invade the Muslim World for oil and geopolitical hegemony [24]. Similarly, variously eminent Western truth-tellers, notably the award-winning  writers Chris Hedges (Pulitzer Prize), Jonathan Cook ( the Martha Gellhorn special award for journalism) and Max Blumenthal  (2014 Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom Award), concluded from carefully adduced evidence that Israel very likely killed a very substantial but as yet unknown proportion of the 1,200 Israelis killed on 7 October [3-7].

(iv). There was enormous, racism- indicating disproportionality in the number of people killed in response to those killed in America’s  9/11 atrocity (3,000)  and those killed on 7 October (1,200), noting that many of the latter were very likely killed in the IDF response. Thus about 3 million  Iraqis  and 7 million Afghans, or a total of 10 million) died from violence and deprivation after 9/11 (although no Iraqis or Afghans were involved in the 9/11 atrocity according to the “lying Bush official version of 9/11”) [32-36] for a Death Ratio of 10 million Iraqis and Afghans / 3,000 9/11 deaths =  3,333.  In the present genocidal Gaza Massacre the Death Ratio is presently (7 October – 1 December 2023) 20,500 Palestinian deaths /1,200 Israeli deaths = 17 but could reach 2.3 million/1,200 = 1,917 if neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel opts for a murderous non- nuclear or even nuclear “final solution” for the Occupied Palestinians in the Gaza Concentration Camp. Genocidally racist Apartheid Israel wants all the land of Palestine (plus land of its neighbours and Gaza’s rights to Eastern Mediterranean gas fields) but not the Indigenous Palestinian and Arab inhabitants. One notes that the Occupied/Occupier Reprisals Death Ratio  was 21 (Gaza, 1 April 2008-30 September 2023),  is presently 17 (Gaza, 7 October-1 December 2023), and was ordered to be 10 by Nazi leader Adolph Hitler in 1944, his order being effected with the execution of 335 Italian men and boys in the Ardeatine Cave Massacre, Rome,  in reprisals for the ambushing and killing of 30 German soldiers by Italian Partisans [17, 37-41].

(v). While a holocaust involves the death of a huge number of people, genocide is precisely defined by Article 2 of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide as follows: “In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group [43]. While the mass murder of Muslims in the post-9/11 US War on Terror was genocide in the sense of involving “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”, the ongoing Palestinian Genocide has involved mass killing and also 3 mass population expulsion events: (1) the 1948 Nakba or Catastrophe (0.8 million or 60% of the Palestinian population violently expelled), (2) the 1967 Naksa or Setback (0.4 million violently expelled) and now (3)  the mass population expulsion from the northern half of Gaza [12-14]. The genocidally racist Zionists from the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, to the present Israeli PM, serial war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, have explicitly, obscenely and criminally demanded the expulsion of the Indigenous Palestinians [44].

(vi). While the massive fraudulence of the “lying Bush official version of 9/11” is obvious to anyone with scientific training, the US-beholden West immediately adopted the “US official version” and science-informed scientists and engineers offering a science-informed explanation of the atrocity (remote controlled planes and explosive demolition of the 3 World Trade Center buildings) were reviled and side-lined as “conspiracy theorists” [24]. Similarly the official US and Israeli version of 7 October (a “Hamas terrorist massacre of 1,200 Israeli civilians” ) was immediately adopted by Western Mainstream media and the evidence-based alternative views of prize-winning, truth-telling Western journalists were denounced as “crazy” and “lunacy” (notably by the Australian ABC, Australia’s equivalent of the racist and mendacious UK BBC and which regularly violates the core ethos of Humanity, namely Kindness and Truth). Indeed numerous courageous and ethical Australian  journalists recently wrote an Open Letter condemning Mainstream media bias in reporting on Palestine but for their decency were threatened by Murdoch media and ABC “managers” [45]. In the last dozen years I have been substantially rendered “invisible” to Mainstream  Australia by false, anti-Jewish anti-Semitic, Zionist defamation but have resolutely published extensively on the past and present deluge of scores of Zionist lies about Palestine from Mainstream journalist, editor, politician, academic and commentariat  presstitutes [2, 16-20, 46, 47]. Interestingly, of 5 huge and exhaustively referenced Submissions I have made to the newly-established Australian National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC) all have been rejected outright except for my submission on the  Australian Labor Government’s lying for Apartheid Israel in 15 areas [19, 20]. Corporate media can and do lie out of ideology and self-interest, but for taxpayer-funded national broadcasters  like the Australian ABC and UK BBC lying in the interests  of  inimical foreign powers (e.g. neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel and pro-Apartheid America) is treason as well as theft, fraud and repugnant deception of the public.

Final comments and conclusions.

After a week of temporary Ceasefire Neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel is preparing to resume its genocidal Gaza Massacre while the West looks on, and the Zionist-subverted  US under the obscenely  geriatric paedocide Joe Biden and cowardly US lackey Australia  assist Israel militarily. The rest of the world is utterly horrified at this slaughter of innocents but the US Congress supports it. In the Australian Federal Parliament, except for the decent and humane Greens, all other MPs – i.e. the Zionist-subverted Coalition opposition aka the Koalition, the Independent group and the Labor government  Liars (the KILLs) – were too scared of their  American masters and the powerful and malignant Israel Lobby  to support a permanent Ceasefire (at the best ignorant, stupid and cowardly, and at the worst genocidally racist like the genocidal, child-killing, neo-Nazi Apartheid Israeli state that they so fervently support).

What can decent Humanity do to stop this appalling and genocidal child-killing madness by US- and Australia-backed neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel? Decent Humanity must (a)  overcome scores of malignant and deadly Zionist lies  by informing everyone they can, (b) demand all Human Rights Now for all Palestinians, a Ceasefire Now, cessation of the killing, cessation of the 56-year Israeli Occupation and cessation of  the 100-year Palestinians Genocide; and (c) urge and apply stringent global Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel and all people, politicians, collectives, companies and countries  supporting this nuclear terrorist, genocidally racist, grossly human rights -abusing, and child-, mother- and woman-killing Apartheid rogue state.

Actually the easiest, simplest and surely the most unexceptional demand that the World must make is for “all Human Rights Now for all Palestinians” (and indeed for all peoples) as set out in the 30 Articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) [8]. Thus, for example, 7 million Exiled Palestinians are presently “stateless”, 2.0 million Israeli Palestinians are subject to 60 Nazi-style, race-based  discriminatory laws [48, 49], and careful Article-by-Article  analysis shows that the 5.6 million Occupied Palestinians are excluded from the Human Rights specified in all 30 Articles of the UDHR [50]. This can be achieved immediately – today, tomorrow – simply by the stroke of a pen and says nothing about borders, the Occupation, the now impossible “2-state solution”,  the humane, democratic and secular  “1-state solution” (as in post-Apartheid South Africa) or the “no state solution for Palestinians” that has been the explicitly stated and insistent preference of the genocidally racist Zionist settler-colonialists for 130 years [44]. Thus in a reductio ad absurdum (and actually not unreasonable) scenario one could imagine Palestinians being finally and wonderfully accorded all UDHR-specified Human Rights while  happily remaining Occupied by decent,  peace-loving and UN-appointed people like the Irish, Swiss or Fijians.

Article 3 of the UDHR states “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person” [8] but this is grossly violated by genocidally racist, neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel in its remorseless bombing and mass murder of Occupied Palestinians in the Gaza Concentration Camp where it has killed 20,500 Gazans,  8,600 of them children,  in just 7 weeks. As a scientist and humanist I am intrinsically optimistic but realistically it seems very unlikely that  a presently utterly morally degenerate, genocidally racist, child-abusing, child-killing and neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel would agree to  “all UDHR-specified Human Rights Now for all Palestinians”. In the absence of this minimal improvement happening the World must urgently apply comprehensive  Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) to neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel and to all its morally degenerate US Alliance supporters as were successfully applied to bring down the utterly evil obscenity of Apartheid in South Africa

References.

[1]. “Gideon Polya”: https://sites.google.com/site/drgideonpolya/home .

[2]. Gideon Polya, “Gaza Massacre: 35 Ways Zionist-perverted US, Australia & West Lie For Child-killing, Neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel”, Countercurrents, 23 November 2023: https://countercurrents.org/2023/11/gaza-massacre-35-ways-zionist-perverted-us-australia-west-lie-for-child-killing-neo-nazi-apartheid-israel/ .

[3].Asa Winstanley, “The evidence Israel killed its own citizens on 7 October”, Electronic Intifada 23 November 2023: https://electronicintifada.net/content/evidence-israel-killed-its-own-citizens-7-october/41156  .

[4]. Chris Hedges, “ Israel’s Final Solution for the Palestinians. When Jewish extremists, fanatic Zionists, religious zealots, ultranationalists and crypto-fascists in the apartheid state of Israel say they want to wipe Gaza off the face of the earth, believe them”, Global Research, November 09, 2023: https://www.globalresearch.ca/israel-final-solution-palestinians-chris-hedges/5839428  .

[5]. Max Blumenthal , “October 7 testimonies reveal Israel’s military ‘shelling’ Israeli citizens with tanks, missiles”, The Grayzone, 27 October, 2023: https://thegrayzone.com/2023/10/27/israels-military-shelled-burning-tanks-helicopters/ .

[6].  Jonathan Cook, “What our Media fails to tell you about October 7”, Pearls & Irritations, 6 November 2023: https://johnmenadue.com/what-the-bbc-fails-to-tell-you-about-october-7/ .

[7]. Anonymous for self-protection, “A growing number of reports indicate Israeli forces responsible for Israeli civilian and military deaths following October 7 attack”, Mondoweiss, 22 October 2023: https://mondoweiss.net/2023/10/a-growing-number-of-reports-indicate-israeli-forces-responsible-for-israeli-civilian-and-military-deaths-following-october-7-attack/ .

[8]. “Universal  Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)”: https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights .

[9]. “UN Charter”: https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/full-text .

[10]. Francesca Albanese’s Address to the National Press Club of Australia, 14 November 2023: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAnn07kilFk .

[11]. Jonathan Cook: Mounting evidence suggests Israel may be ready to ‘cleanse’ Gaza”, Modern Diplomacy, 7 November 2023: https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2023/11/07/jonathan-cook-mounting-evidence-suggests-israel-may-be-ready-to-cleanse-gaza/ .

[12]. Gideon Polya, “Australia must stop Zionist subversion and join the World in comprehensive Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Apartheid Israel and all its supporters”, Subversion of Australia, 15 April 2021: https://sites.google.com/site/subversionofaustralia/2021-04-15 .

[13]. “Palestinian Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/palestiniangenocide/ .

[14]. 2023, 75th Nakba Anniversary – 1948 Nakba (Catastrophe) & Palestinian Genocide: https://sites.google.com/site/palestiniangenocide/1948-nakba-catastrophe-palestinian-genocide .

[15]. “Israeli forces kill two Palestinian children in occupied West Bank raid”, Al Jazeera, 29 November 2023: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/29/israel-kills-two-children-in-latest-raid-on-jenin-refugee-camp .

[16]. Gideon Polya, “85 Ways Zionist Australian Labor Government Betrays Palestinian Human Rights & Humanity”, Countercurrents, 16 March 2023: https://countercurrents.org/2023/03/85-ways-zionist-australian-labor-government-betrays-palestinian-human-rights-humanity/ .

[17]. Gideon Polya, “Neo-Nazi Australia Backs Genocidal Israel & Says No To Indigenous Australians & Palestinians”, Countercurrents, 23 October 2023: https://countercurrents.org/2023/10/neo-nazi-australia-backs-genocidal-israel-says-no-to-indigenous-australians-palestinians/ .

[18]. Gideon Polya, “Letter To Australian Labor MPs Exposes Australian Crimes & IHRA Anti-Semitism”, Countercurrents, 9 October 2021: https://countercurrents.org/2021/10/letter-to-australian-labor-mps-exposes-australian-crimes-ihra-anti-semitism/ .

[19]. Gideon Polya, “Submission To National Anti-Corruption Commission: Australian Labor Government’s Lying For Apartheid Israel”, Countercurrents, 22 July 2023: https://countercurrents.org/2023/07/submission-to-national-anti-corruption-commission-australian-labor-governments-lying-for-apartheid-israel/ .

[20]. Gideon Polya, “Australian National Anti-Corruption Commission Rejects Submissions Re Huge Australian War Crimes and Carbon Debt”, Countercurrents, 2 October 2023: https://countercurrents.org/2023/10/australian-national-anti-corruption-commission-rejects-submissions-re-huge-australian-war-crimes-and-carbon-debt/ .

[21]. Gideon Polya, “Australian Universities Complicit With  Pro-Zionist CensorshipAnd Genocidal Israeli  Militarism”, Countercurrents, 24 May 2012: https://countercurrents.org/polya240512.htm .

[22]. Vacy Vlazna, “Israeli Hawkademia in Australian Universities”, Palestinian Chronicle, 5 February 2012: http://palestinechronicle.com/view_article_details.php?id=19268 .

[23]. Kellie Tranter, “Australia’s role in the bombing of Gaza”, Pearls & Irritations, 23 November 2023: https://johnmenadue.com/australias-role-in-the-bombing-of-gaza/ .

[24]. “Experts: US did 9/11”: https://sites.google.com/site/expertsusdid911/ .

[25]. Gideon Polya, “Paris Atrocity Context: 27 Million Muslim Avoidable  Deaths From Imposed Deprivation In 20 Countries Violated By US Alliance Since 9-11”, Countercurrents,22 November, 2015: https://countercurrents.org/polya221115A.htm .

[26]. “‘Netanyahu Got All the Warnings’, Says Former Head of Israeli Military Intelligence”, Countercurrents, 25 October 2023: https://countercurrents.org/2023/10/netanyahu-got-all-the-warnings-says-former-head-of-israeli-military-intelligence/ .

[27]. Emily Harding, “How Could Israeli Intelligence Miss the Hamas Invasion Plans?”, Center for Strategic & International Studies, 11 October 2023: https://www.csis.org/analysis/how-could-israeli-intelligence-miss-hamas-invasion-plans .

[28]. Paul Craig Roberts, “Hamas’ Attack on Israel Is Puzzling: “Hamas Fighters entered Israel without Being Detected””, Global Research, 17 October 2023: https://www.globalresearch.ca/hamas-attack-israel-puzzling/5836617 .

[29]. Tia Goldenberger, “What went wrong? Questions emerge over Israel’s intelligence prowess after Hamas attack”, AP, 9 October 2023: https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-gaza-attack-intel-a5287a18773232f26ca171233be01721 .

[30]. Ben Bartee, “No, the Hamas Invasion Was Not an Israeli ‘Intelligence Failure’”, Global Research, 9 October 2023: https://www.globalresearch.ca/no-hamas-invasion-not-israeli-intelligence-failure/5835433 .

[31]. Paul Craig Roberts, “Section Commander of the Gaza Fence: “The obstacle is built so that even a fox cannot pass it”. They Let It Happen. The Hamas Attack Was Allowed to Close the Book on Palestine”, Global Research, 21 October 2023: https://www.globalresearch.ca/speculation-mark-hamas-attack-allowed-close-book-palestine/5836029 .

[32]. Gideon Polya, “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History. Colonial rapacity, holocaust denial and the crisis in biological sustainability”, Third edition, Korsgaard Publishing, Germany, 2020.

[33]. Gideon Polya, “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950”, 2nd edition, Korsgaard Publishing, Germany, 2021.

[34]. Gideon Polya, “US-imposed Post-9/11 Muslim Holocaust & Muslim Genocide”, Korsgaard Publishing, Germany, 2020.

[35]. Gideon Polya, “Racist Mainstream Ignores “US-Imposed Post-9/11 Muslim Holocaust & Muslim Genocide””, Countercurrents, 17 July 2020: https://countercurrents.org/2020/07/racist-mainstream-ignores-us-imposed-post-9-11-muslim-holocaust-muslim-genocide/ .

[36]. “Report genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/reportgenocide/ .

[37]. Gideon Polya, “Horrendous Death Ratios, Child Deaths & Palestinian Genocide Demand Immediate Cessation Of Gaza Massacre”, Countercurrents, 30 October 2023: https://countercurrents.org/2023/10/horrendous-death-ratios-child-deaths-palestinian-genocide-demand-immediate-cessation-of-gaza-massacre/ .

[38]. Gideon Polya, “Ceasefire Now To Stop Mass Murder Of Palestinian Children By Neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel”, Countercurrents, 14 November 2023: https://countercurrents.org/2023/11/ceasefire-now-to-stop-mass-murder-of-palestinian-children-by-neo-nazi-apartheid-israel/ .

[39]. “Ardeatine Massacre”, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ardeatine_massacre .

[40]. UNOCH (United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs), “Data on casualties”: https://www.ochaopt.org/data/casualties .

[41]. Gideon Polya, “Stop Apartheid Israel’s  Palestinian Genocide in Gaza”, Green Left,  18 October 2023: https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/stop-apartheid-israels-palestinian-genocide-gaza .

[42]. Gideon Polya, “491 Sins & Gaza Genocide: Neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel Leads World In Killing Children & Journalists”, Countercurrents, 6 November 2023: https://countercurrents.org/2023/11/491-sins-gaza-genocide-neo-nazi-apartheid-israel-leads-world-in-killing-children-journalists/ .

[43]. “UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide”: https://treaties.un.org/doc/publication/unts/volume%2078/volume-78-i-1021-english.pdf .

[44].  “Zionist quotes re racism and Palestinian Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/palestiniangenocide/zionist-quotes .

[45]. “Letter from Journalists to Australian Media Outlets”, Tasmanian Times, 24 November 2023: https://tasmaniantimes.com/2023/11/letter-from-journalists-to-australian-media-outlets/ .

[46]. Gideon Polya “Feature Letter – How Mainstream Media Lies for Apartheid Israel”, Tasmanian Times,  26 November 2023: https://tasmaniantimes.com/2023/11/feature-letter-how-mainstream-media-lies-for-apartheid-israel/ .

[47]. Gideon Polya, “35 Zionist Media Lies, the Killing of Children, Neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel”, Global Research, 24 November 2023:  https://www.globalresearch.ca/35-zionist-lies-child-killing-neo-nazi-apartheid-israel/5841145 .

[48]. Susan Abulhawa, “Israel’s “nation-state law” parallels the Nazi Nuremburg Laws”, Al Jazeera, 27 July 2018: https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/israel-nation-state-law-parallels-nazi-nuremberg-laws-180725084739536.html .

[49]. “Discriminatory laws in Israel:, Adalah, https://www.adalah.org/en/law/index?page=4 .

[50]. Gideon Polya, “Apartheid Israel Excludes Occupied Palestinians From All Provisions Of The Universal Declaration Of Human Rights”, Countercurrents, 20 May 2012: https://countercurrents.org/polya200512.htm .

Dr Gideon Polya taught science students at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia over 4 decades.

1 December 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Countercurrents Collective

Infamous war criminal, former U.S. Secretary of State and Nobel Peace Prize winner Henry Kissinger passed away at age 100 on Wednesday.

The renowned diplomat, and infamous to many people in the Third World, died at his home in Connecticut, his consulting firm, Kissinger Associates, said in a statement.

The former U.S. secretary of state and national security advisor “oversaw, overlooked and at times actively perpetrated some of the most grotesque war crimes the United States and its allies have ever committed,” HuffPost reporters Travis Waldron and George Zornick wrote in a scathing obituary of Kissinger, calling him “America’s most notorious war criminal.”

Kissinger’s life story began with his family escaping Nazi Germany for the U.S. in 1938.

After quitting the U.S. military, Kissinger earned a PhD at Harvard University and taught international relations before becoming President Richard Nixon’s top national security adviser in 1969.

He eventually served as secretary of state under Nixon and his successor, President Gerald Ford.

A skilled negotiator committed to realism, Kissinger was instrumental in improving U.S. relations with the Soviet Union in the 1970s and paved a way for the normalization of Washington’s ties with China.

With Kissinger’s stewardship, the Nixon administration’s easing of travel and trade restrictions against Beijing was instrumental in kick-starting China’s rise to prominence as an industrial economy.

In 1973, influential U.S. foreign policy thinker Kissinger shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Vietnamese diplomat Le Duc Tho for negotiating the Paris Peace Accords, which facilitated the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam. Kissinger accepted the Nobel Peace prize but no-showed the ceremony, blaming the pressure of official duties. Tho refused the prize, explaining that he considered the negotiations to have been a failure.

In 1974, Kissinger helped to negotiate Israel’s disengagement agreements with Syria and Egypt, which officially ended the Yom Kippur War.

Bombed Cambodia Without Congressional Approval

A book by U.S.-British journalist Christopher Hitchens ‘The Trial of Henry Kissinger’ accused the diplomat of ordering the first round of Cambodia bombings in the 1960s without congressional approval.

Behind More Than 3 Million Civilian Deaths

An Intercept report released in May to mark the Kissinger’s 100th birthday claimed that he was behind more than 3 million civilian deaths, and that he helped to prolong the Vietnam War while fostering strife and civil wars in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

In Chile, after the overthrow of Salvador Allende and the coup by Augusto Pinochet, at least 3,000 dissidents were killed, and some 40,000 tortured. In Argentina, some estimates put the number of those “disappeared” by the government as high as 30,000 people.

Lectures On World Affairs

Kissinger remained active after leaving office, giving lectures and interviews, in which he commented on world affairs. One of his last trips was a visit to Beijing in July 2023, during which he met with President Xi Jinping. He also repeatedly warned the U.S. and China that if they continued on their current foreign policy course, they risked sliding into open military confrontation.

NATO’s Mistake

On the Ukraine conflict, Kissinger described the West’s decision to offer Kiev a pathway to NATO as “a grave mistake” which led to the hostilities in the first place. While the veteran diplomat opposed Ukraine’s membership in the U.S.-led military bloc before the conflict, he later changed his stance, arguing that the country’s neutrality is “no longer meaningful” amid the ongoing fighting.

Last year, he also suggested that Ukraine could relinquish its territorial claims to Crimea and grant autonomy to the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics – all Russian territories now – to achieve peace, an idea repeatedly rejected by Kiev.

A Secret War

A Huffpost report – Anthony Bourdain did not hold back when writing about Henry Kissinger – said on November 30, 2023:

An excerpt from Anthony Bourdain’s 2001 book (Bourdain’s memoir, “A Cook’s Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines) dragging Henry Kissinger resurfaced on Wednesday following the infamous war criminal’s death.

While speaking about his culinary explorations around the world in “A Cook’s Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal,” published after his death in 2018, Bourdain said that “you will never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands” after visiting Cambodia, referring to one of Kissinger’s most heinous acts, the approval of a secret war beyond the borders of Vietnam. It was one of many actions he promoted during his eight years as secretary of state under former Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford that are now considered shameful chapters in U.S. foreign affairs.

Carpet Bombing Of Laos

In 1969, Kissinger ordered the clandestine carpet-bombing of Cambodia and Laos. For four years, the U.S. dropped 540,000 bombs, slaughtering 150,000 to 500,000 Cambodian civilians.

“You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking,” Bourdain wrote in his book.

“Witness what Henry did in Cambodia ― the fruits of his genius for statesmanship ― and you will never understand why he is not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to [Serbian President Slobodan] Milošević.”

Decades after the book’s release, Bourdain’s comments lingered in people’s minds and even made a comeback online following news of Kissinger’s death on Wednesday.

This was not the first dig the chef had taken at Kissinger. In a 2017 New Yorker profile on Bourdain, his publisher, Dan Halpern, lauded the influence he had with “Parts Unknown,” a travel and food show in which Bourdain traveled around the world and discussed the cuisines, cultures and political issues of various countries.

Halpern said that Bourdain had “become a statesman” as his show made people aware of conflicts in other countries.

But Bourdain pushed back on the notion, saying, “I am not going to the White House Correspondents’ dinner. I do not need to be laughing it up with Henry Kissinger.”

Despite being responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, Kissinger had been seen having amicable exchanges with notable figures, including former President George W. Bush, Nixon, Oprah Winfrey and Princess Diana.

“Any journalist who has ever been polite to Henry Kissinger, you know, fuck that person,” Bourdain said. “I am a big believer in moral gray areas, but, when it comes to that guy, in my view he should not be able to eat at a restaurant in New York.”

Rightwing Dictatorships In Chile And Argentina

A Los Angeles Times report – Anthony Bourdain’s scathing Henry Kissinger remarks resurface after foreign policy figure’s death – said on November 30, 2023:

Kissinger was always a controversial figure, and his most outspoken critics — Bourdain among them — saw him as ruthless and accused him of war crimes, mainly for the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia and the support Washington gave to brutal right-wing dictatorships in Chile and Argentina.

U.S. Interests

A Salon report – “Murderous scumbag”: Anthony Bourdain’s brutal takedown of “war criminal” Henry Kissinger goes viral – said on November 30, 2023:

His positions allowed him to direct the Vietnam War and Cold War with the Soviet Union, while carrying out a foreign policy approach that valued U.S. interests and domestic political achievements over any potential for atrocity that could occur as a result.

“The former led to perhaps the most infamous crime Kissinger committed: a secret four-year bombing campaign in Cambodia that killed an untold number of civilians, despite the fact that it was a neutral nation with which the United States was not at war,” HuffPost reporters Waldron and Zornick wrote.

The campaign killed between 150,000 and a half-million Cambodian civilians, per various estimates, and, according to a Pentagon report released late, Kissinger personally “approved each of the 3,875 Cambodia bombing raids” that occurred between 1969 and 1970.

Bangladesh

The Salon report said:

While in charge of U.S. foreign policy, Kissinger also directed illegal arms sales to Pakistan as it executed a brutal suppression of Bengalis in present-day Bangladesh in 1971.

The genocide in Bangladesh led to killing of 3 million Bengali people.

Indonesia And Dirty War

The Salon report said:

Kissinger also backed a 1973 military coup overthrowing a democratically elected socialist government in Chile, granted Indonesia permission to carry out its 1975 invasion of East Timor, and supported Argentina’s military dictatorship as it launched its “dirty war” against dissenters and leftists in 1976.

Civil Wars In Africa

The report said:

During the Ford administration, Kissinger’s policies also inflamed civil wars in Africa, most notably in Angola.

The Intercept’s obituary said Kissinger “stoked a war in Angola and prolonged apartheid in South Africa,” as well as leaving the Middle East “in chaos,” per  Yale historian Greg Grandin. For Kissinger, the protection of US economic and foreign policy interests took precedence over human life.

Millions Of Death And Millions Of Rights Abuse

“Even the most generous calculations suggest that the murderous regimes Kissinger supported and the conflicts they waged were responsible for millions of deaths and millions of other human rights abuses, during and after the eight years he served in the American government,” Waldron and Zornick write, noting that Kissinger never expressed any remorse for his actions or was held to any account for carrying them out.

Kissinger approached criticism of his human rights abuses with a mocking tone and remained in good standing in Washington’s political elite until the time of his death.

“The covert justifications for illegally bombing Cambodia became the framework for the justifications of drone strikes and forever war. It is a perfect expression of American militarism’s unbroken circle,” historian Greg Grandin, author of “Kissinger’s Shadow,” told The Intercept earlier this year. According to Common Dreams, the historian has estimated that Kissinger was responsible for at least 3 million deaths.

Millions Of Argentinians, Bangladeshis, Cambodians, Chileans, East Timorese

“What is undeniable, on the occasion of his death, is that millions of Argentinians, Bangladeshis, Cambodians, Chileans, East Timorese and others cannot offer their opinion on Henry Kissinger’s legacy or the world he helped create, because they died at the hands of the tyrants Kissinger enabled,” Waldron and Zornick wrote.

Other reporters further lamented Kissinger’s approach to policy and the notorious legacy it left throughout the nation — and the world — across social media and in articles about his death.

In an obituary of Kissinger for Rolling Stone, journalist Spencer Ackerman compared Kissinger to “white supremacist terrorist Timothy McVeigh,” who Ackerman described as “the worst mass murderer ever executed by the United States.”

“McVeigh, who in his own psychotic way thought he was saving America, never remotely killed on the scale of Kissinger, the most revered American grand strategist of the second half of the 20th century,” Ackerman continued. “Every single person who died in Vietnam between autumn 1968 and the Fall of Saigon — and all who died in Laos and Cambodia, where Nixon and Kissinger secretly expanded the war within months of taking office, as well as all who died in the aftermath, like the Cambodian genocide their destabilization set into motion — died because of Henry Kissinger.”

“We will never know what might have been, the question Kissinger’s apologists, and those in the U.S. foreign policy elite who imagine themselves standing in Kissinger’s shoes, insist upon when explaining away his crimes,” Ackerman added. “We can only know what actually happened. What actually happened was that Kissinger materially sabotaged the only chance for an end to the war in 1968 as a hedged bet to ensure he would achieve power in Nixon’s administration or Humphrey’s. A true tally will probably never be known of everyone who died so Kissinger could be national security adviser.”

The Intercept’s D.C. Bureau Chief Ryan Grim noted that “Henry Kissinger killed so many people that we uncovered new atrocities he directed JUST THIS YEAR” in a post to X/Twitter, linking to an article the outlet published titled, “Survivors of Kissinger’s Secret War in Cambodia Reveal Unreported Mass Killings.”

Journalist Conor Powell highlighted former President George W. Bush’s opening statement on Kissinger’s death — “America has lost one of the most dependable and distinctive voices on foreign affairs with the passing of Henry Kissinger” — as an indication of “just how problematic #Kissinger’s legacy is.”

“These words are not a ringing endorsement of Kissinger,” Powell tweeted. “And yet George W Bush as president did more to put Kissinger’s foreign policy ideas into practice than just about any other US president. Bush can barely say a thing positive about Kissinger in 2023.”

Against The Kurds, In Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, And Cyprus

A Teen Vogue report – Henry Kissinger Was a War Criminal Responsible for Millions of Deaths – said on November 30, 2023:

On November 29, former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who NPR calls “one of the country’s most important foreign policy thinkers for more than half a century,” died at 100. Kissinger was responsible for an estimated 3 to 4 million deaths, according to one historian, and millions of human rights violations across a long list of nations. That list was recalled by Yale historian Greg Grandin in his obituary of Kissinger for The Nation: “Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, East Timor, Bangladesh, against the Kurds, in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Cyprus, among other places.”

In May, Grandin wrote another story for the same magazine about Kissinger making it to age 100, outliving his contemporaries who share some of the blame, like Richard Nixon. That month, MSNBC commentator Medhi Hasan “celebrated” Kissinger’s birthday by recalling “some of the many, many people around the world who didn’t get to live till 100, or even 60, 70 or 80, because of Henry Kissinger, because of his support for brutal dictators, brutal regimes, brutal wars, and war crimes.”

Bombs, Instrument Of Diplomacy

Kissinger used, as Grandin put it, “bombs as an instrument of diplomacy” — an approach which, HuffPost’s obituary observed, “has become a hallmark of U.S. foreign policy.”

Upon news of Kissinger’s death, the internet celebrated possibly more than it did after the last elderly imperial death, but that celebration has been darkened by the basis for it. Joshua Hill posted a video from the 2010s of Kissinger being “unrepentant” about the deaths of Cambodians, where Kissinger’s personally approved carpet-bombing campaign still wounds and takes lives from cluster bombs left there more than 50 years later. (The US provided the same sort of bombs to Ukraine this year.) C-SPAN posted footage from 2016 of Kissinger defending his role in Vietnam. A biting missive from the late Anthony Bourdain — painful enough given that Kissinger got almost twice as long on this Earth than Tony — got posted over and over again.

Within 10 minutes of seeing the news, I started seeing the headlines: “America’s Most Notorious War Criminal” dead, a Teen Vogue classic; “Controversial Diplomat;” and some spicier ones, such as “Finally” at the leftist Tribune. Publishers Verso and Jacobin had a book fully prepared and ready for a print run for the occasion. It is hard to exaggerate how long the media had to get ready for this moment. A contributor to the New York Times’s obituary died in 2010.

Apparently, the preparedness to dance on Kissinger’s grave went hand-in-hand with an assumption, proven right, that those currently in power would not hesitate to eulogize a war criminal. Eric Adams and George W. Bush are among those publicly mourning. In life, Kissinger was a friend to Hillary Clinton, an advisor to Trump, and feted by the Obama administration in 2016 — at the same time that Obama acknowledged the U.S.’s role in Argentina’s “dirty war” against dissenters and leftists.

Kissinger has advised or been celebrated by every presidency since he joined Nixon’s cabinet, though less so with President Biden. However, current Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, whose name has been sprawled across coverage of America’s 2023 involvement in overseas wars, attended Kissinger’s 100th-birthday party at the New York Public Library, leading the State Department to “awkwardly” sidestep calls for Blinken to justify his attendance.

New York City’s social strata was a respite for Kissinger, according to New York magazine’s Choire Sicha, who noted that from 1977 onward — when, even then, “in all the world there were fewer names more hated than his” — he left his academic and diplomatic careers behind to attend socialite parties after his campaign of death.

Kissinger Enabled The Deaths Of Between 300,000 And 3 Million In Bangladesh

The Teen Vogue report said:

“Historical memory is short, and U.S. politicians from both parties have a habit of bestowing accolades and kind words on officials who deserve nothing of the sort,” wrote Azadeh Shahshahani for Teen Vogue in 2021 following the death of fellow war criminal Donald Rumsfeld, calling for accountability for both Rumsfeld and Kissinger. Shahshahani pointed out that, in 1971, in Bangladesh alone, Kissinger had enabled the deaths of between 300,000 and 3 million people by providing arms to the Pakistani Army.

Ultimately, there’s little to celebrate about a war criminal who lived without regret to 100 years old, comfortably admired by the political class that created and supported him, with millions of deaths in his tracks. I’m reminded of a lyric: “Not everybody gets the chance to live/A life that isn’t dangerous.”

Our tech overlords, modern-day robber barons with hubris and unchecked power, aspire to never age, never die, to outlive us on other planets rather than save ours. There is not much dignity left in the “lesser evil” that is folks gladly burning our planet to the ground in favor of supposed American business interests. Things are dark right now. But, as writer Edward Ongweso Jr. tweeted, “At least one less literal demon walks among us.”

While death tolls keep rising over the world at the hands or arms of the U.S. empire, to outlive one of its proudest, prolifically murderous foots soldiers offers some small karmic comfort.

1 December 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies

While Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has been frantically shuttling around the Middle East trying to stop the Israeli coflict in Gaza from exploding into a regional war, the United States has also sent two aircraft carrier strike groups, a Marine Expeditionary Unit and 1,200 extra troops to the Middle East as a “deterrent.” In plain language, the United States is threatening to attack any forces that come to the defense of the Palestinians from other countries in the region, reassuring Israel that it can keep killing with impunity in Gaza.

But if Israel persists in this genocidal war, U.S. threats may be impotent to prevent others from intervening. From Lebanon to Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Iran, the possibilities of the conflict spreading are enormous. Even Algeria says it is ready to fight for a free Palestine, based on a unanimous vote in its parliament on November 1st.

Middle Eastern governments and their people already see the United States as a party to Israel’s massacre in Gaza. So any direct U.S. military action will be seen as an escalation on the side of Israel and is more likely to provoke further escalation than to deter it.

The United States already faces this predicament in Iraq. Despite years of Iraqi demands for the removal of U.S. forces, at least 2,500 U.S. troops remain at Al-Asad Airbase in western Anbar province, Al-Harir Airbase, north of Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan, and another small base at the airport in Erbil.  There are also “several hundred” NATO troops, including Americans, advising Iraqi forces in NATO Mission Iraq (NMI), based near Baghdad.

For many years, U.S. forces in Iraq have been mired in a low-grade war against the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) that Iraq formed to fight ISIS, mainly from Shia militias. Despite their links to Iran, the armed groups Kata’ib Hezbollah, Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq and other PMFs have often ignored Iranian calls to de-escalate attacks on U.S. forces. These Iraqi groups do not respect Iran Quds Force leader General Esmail Qaani as highly as they did General Soleimani, so Soleimani’s  assassination by the United States in 2020 has further reduced Iran’s ability to restrain the militias in Iraq.

After a year-long truce between U.S. and Iraqi forces, the Israeli war on Gaza has triggered a new escalation of this conflict in both Iraq and Syria. Some militias rebranded themselves as the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, and began attacking U.S. bases on October 17. After 32 attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq, 34 more in Syria and 3 U.S. airstrikes in Syria, U.S. forces conducted airstrikes against two Kata’ib Hezbollah bases in Iraq, one in Anbar province and one in Jurf Al-Nasr, south of Baghdad, on November 21, killing at least nine militiamen.

The U.S. airstrikes prompted a furious response from the Iraqi government spokesman Bassam al-Awadi. “We vehemently condemn the attack on Jurf Al-Nasr, executed without the knowledge of government agencies,” al-Awadi said. “This action is a blatant violation of sovereignty and an attempt to destabilize the security situation… The recent incident represents a clear violation of the coalition’s mission to combat Daesh (ISIS) on Iraqi soil. We call on all parties to avoid unilateral actions and to respect Iraq’s sovereignty…”

As the Iraqi government feared, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq responded to the U.S. airstrikes with two attacks on Al-Harir airbase on November 22 and several more on November 23rd. They attacked Al-Asad airbase with several drones, launched another drone attack on the U.S. base at Erbil airport, and their allies in Syria attacked two U.S. bases across the border in northeastern Syria.

Short of a ceasefire in Gaza or a full U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and Syria, there is no decisive action the U.S. can take that would put a stop to these attacks. So the level of violence in Iraq and Syria is likely to keep rising as long as the war on Gaza continues.

Another formidable and experienced military force opposing Israel and the United States is the Houthi army in Yemen. On November 14, Abdul-Malek al-Houthi, the leader of the Houthi government in Yemen, asked neighboring countries to open a corridor through their territory for his army to go and fight Israel in Gaza.

The Houthi Deputy Information Secretary Nasreddin Amer told Newsweek that if they had a way to enter Palestine, they would not hesitate to join the fight against Israel, ”We have fighters numbering hundreds of thousands who are brave, tough, trained and experienced in fighting,” Amer said. “They have a very strong belief, and their dream in life is to fight the Zionists and the Americans.”

Transporting hundreds of thousands of Yemeni soldiers to fight in Gaza would be nearly impossible unless Saudi Arabia opened the way. That seems highly unlikely, but Iran or another ally could help to transport a smaller number by air or sea to join the fight.

The Houthis have been waging an asymmetric war against Saudi-led invaders for many years, and they have developed weapons and tactics that they could bring to bear against Israel. Soon after al-Houthi’s statement, Yemeni forces in the Red Sea boarded a ship owned, via shell companies, by Israeli billionaire Abraham Ungar. The ship, which was on its way from Istanbul to India, was detained in a Yemeni port.

The Houthis have also launched a series of drones and missiles towards Israel. While many members of Congress try to portray the Houthis as simply puppets of Iran, the Houthis are actually an independent, unpredictable force that other actors in the region cannot control.

Even NATO ally Türkiye is finding it difficult to remain a bystander, given the widespread public support for Palestine. President Erdogan of Türkiye was among the first international leaders to speak out strongly against the Israeli war on Gaza, explicitly calling it a massacre and saying that it amounted to genocide.

Turkish civil society groups are spearheading a campaign to send humanitarian aid to Gaza on cargo ships, braving a possible confrontation like the one that occurred in 2010 when the Israelis attacked the Freedom Flotilla, killing 10 people aboard the Mavi Marmara.

On the Lebanese border, Israel and Hezbollah have conducted daily exchanges of fire since October 7, killing 97 combatants and 15 civilians in Lebanon and 9 soldiers and 3 civilians in Israel. Some 46,000 Lebanese civilians and 65,000 Israelis have been displaced from the border area. Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant warned on November 11, “What we’re doing in Gaza, we can also do in Beirut.”

How will Hezbollah react if Israel resumes its brutal massacre in Gaza after the brief pause is over or if Israel expands the massacre to the West Bank, where it has already killed at least 237 more Palestinians since October 7?

In a speech on November 3, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah held back from declaring a new war on Israel, but warned that “all options are on the table” if Israel does not end its war on Gaza.

As Israel prepared to pause its bombing on November 23, Iranian foreign minister Hossein Amirabdollahian held meetings in Qatar, first with Nasrallah and Lebanese officials, and then with Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.

In a public statement, Amirabdollahian said, “the continuation of the ceasefire can prevent further expansion of the scope of the war. In the meeting with the leaders of the resistance, I found out that if Israel’s war crimes and genocide continue, a tougher and more complicated scenario of the resistance will be implemented.”

Amirabdollahian already warned on October 16 that, “The leaders of the resistance will not allow the Zionist regime to do whatever it wants in Gaza and then go to other fronts of the resistance.”

In other words, if Iran and its allies believe that Israel really intends to continue its war on Gaza until it has removed Hamas from power, and then to turn its war machine loose on Lebanon or its other neighbors, they would prefer to fight a wider war now, forcing Israel to fight the Palestinians, Hezbollah and their allies at the same time, rather than waiting for Israel to attack them one by one.

Tragically, the White House is not listening. The next day, President Biden continued to back Israel’s vow to resume the destruction of Gaza after its “humanitarian pause,” saying that attempting to eliminate Hamas is “a legitimate objective.”

America’s unconditional support for Israel and endless supply of weapons have succeeded only in turning Israel into an out-of-control, genocidal, destabilizing force at the heart of a fragile region already shattered and traumatized by decades of U.S. warmaking. The result is a country that refuses to recognize its own borders or those of its neighbors, and rejects any and all limits on its territorial ambitions and war crimes.

If Israel’s actions lead to a wider war, the U.S. will find itself with few allies ready to jump into the fray. Even if a regional conflict is avoided, the U.S. support for Israel has already created tremendous damage to the U.S. reputation in the region and beyond, and direct U.S. involvement in the war would leave it more isolated and impotent than its previous misadventures in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.

The United States can still avoid this fate by insisting on an immediate and permanent ceasefire and the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza. If Israel will not agree to that, the U.S. must back up this position with an immediate suspension of arms deliveries, military aid, Israeli access to U.S. weapons stockpiles in Israel and diplomatic support for Israel’s war on Palestine.

The priority of U.S. officials must be to stop Israel’s massacre, avoid a regional war, and get out of the way so that other nations can help negotiate a real solution to the occupation of Palestine.

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, published by OR Books in November 2022.

30 November 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Ramzy Baroud

Shortly after the start of a four-day ceasefire in the war on Gaza, the prime ministers of Spain and Belgium, Pedro Sanchez and Alexander De Croo, appeared in a joint press conference at Rafah Crossing.

While Sanchez described “what is happening (as) a disaster,” De Croo called for a “permanent cessation of hostilities” and for an end to the killing of children.

Equally significant, the two European leaders declared that “we may decide to recognize the State of Palestine, if the European Union does not”.

Coupled with the strong position of Ireland, some in Europe seem to be waking up to the fact that the Israeli occupation is the primary cause of the recent Gaza ‘hostilities’.

Israel was not pleased by the evolving European position. It immediately summoned the ambassadors of both countries, and sharply ‘rebuked’ them. This exaggerated response comes to show that Israel is not willing to give Europe even the narrowest of margins – as in condemning the killing of children or, expecting some kind of a peaceful settlement centered round Palestinian sovereignty.

Spain and Belgium’s phrase of “we may decide” to recognize Palestine even without EU consensus is indicative of an actual foreign policy schism within Europe itself. It turned out that not all EU governments have the same tolerance towards the genocide in Gaza as, for example, Germany and Britain.

Interestingly, other EU officials, too, are calling for a Palestinian State, though their intention is neither to ensure Palestinian freedom nor to safeguard Palestinian rights.

EU’s chief diplomat Josep Borrell, for example, argued on November 20 that “the creation of a Palestinian state would be the best way of ensuring Israel’s security”.

Even the former British Prime Minister, now Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, used similar logic. Israel will not have security unless it guarantees “long-term safety, security and stability” for the Palestinian people, Cameron said.

Regardless of the reasoning behind the growing emphasis on a ‘solution’ and rights for the Palestinians, this language was almost entirely absent from the Western political discourse prior to October 7.

The truth is that Palestinians have succeeded, through their resistance and sumud, to reassert Palestine on the global agenda. But how did Palestinians succeed in doing so, despite the utter marginalization of their cause before the war?

First, unlike previous wars, especially those that preceded the Unity Intifada of May 2021, this time around Palestinians spoke in unison.

Without rehearsing or even coordinating, it felt as if the Palestinian message flew seamlessly, when all Palestinians, regardless of their ideological backgrounds, placed the focus on the Israeli atrocities, without falling into the trap of the typical factional blame game.

Even children who have lost members of their families in Gaza would stand bravely in front of cameras reiterating that they will never weaken and that nothing would remove them from their homeland. Young and old repeated the same logic, used similar language, even from their hospital beds.

This led Israel to do everything in its power to excommunicate the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza from the rest of the world, shutting down the internet, electricity and any form of communications, even among Palestinians themselves.

Yet, somehow, a clear, united Palestinian message continued, amplified countless times by an army of social media activists who impressively helped balance out mainstream media bias, eventually overpowering corporate media’s control over the war narrative altogether.

The Palestinians have done this, and more, without powerful lobby groups, media consultants or a hasbara machine, like that which attempted, to no avail, to sway the public opinion in favor of Israel.

Secondly, the factional Palestinian suddenly disappeared.

For years, factional narratives, dividing Palestinians into conflicting interest groups, have thwarted the Palestinian people’s attempt to unify behind a single leadership – one that is capable of conveying, representing and defending Palestinian political aspirations.

Yet, all the Fatah-Hamas talks and agreements have failed, leaving the people with no other alternative but to explore different manifestations of unity that go beyond the interests of politicians.

This unity is now on full display, compelling everyone, including those affiliated with the Palestinian Authority itself, to adhere to the line of the people. While Gazans fought to free prisoners in the West Bank, West Bankers rose, and died in large numbers, in defense of Gaza.

This popular unity must continue, so that it would eventually be harnessed in the form of  political unity, which will bring all Palestinian groups together under a single leadership. This is the only way to ensure the tremendous Palestinian sacrifices and the precious blood that spilled in Gaza, eventually translate into the freedom that all Palestinians covet.

Thirdly, unity beyond Palestine also proved critical.

Arabs and Muslims served as the core of Palestinian solidarity throughout the Israeli war on Gaza. They protested, boycotted, fought and mobilized. Moreover, tens of millions of people, beyond the confines of the Arab and Muslim worlds, also marched around Palestinian rights and priorities.

Indeed, whole new conversations on Palestine are now occupying many public spheres around the globe. The Global South is once more embracing the struggle for Palestine, while the Global North is challenging governments, big corporations and mainstream media for justifying, supporting and financing the Israeli genocide.

The Palestinian people would now have to lead and direct this momentum of solidarity so that it may serve their righteous objectives, those of equality, justice and freedom – all enshrined in international law.

No public space should be left without engagement, no audience should be overlooked or neglected, and no stone should be left unturned in the search of that critical mass needed to hold Israel accountable for its crimes.

Western leaders and officials are speaking out now because they understand that the Palestinian cause has become a global one, and that the prolonging of Israeli occupation and apartheid will not bode well, neither for Tel Aviv nor for the collective West.

It is time for Palestinians to utilize this significant moment. It is time for them to lead the process of their own liberation. In fact, in Gaza, Jenin and elsewhere, this process has already begun.

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

30 November 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Andre Damon

On Monday, the World Health Organization issued a dire warning: Even after the relentless Israeli bombing that has left over 20,000 Gazans dead or missing, the death toll from infectious disease in the period ahead is likely to be even higher.

“We will see more people dying from disease than from bombardment if we are not able to put back together this health system,” Margaret Harris, a spokesperson for the WHO, said at a briefing in Geneva on Tuesday.

For two months, Israel has systematically targeted Gaza’s hospital system for destruction. To date, 207 health personnel have been killed, and 56 ambulances have been attacked. Twenty-six hospitals and 55 health centers have ceased operations.

In the latest horrific scene, footage has emerged of premature babies being left to die and decompose in hospital beds at Al-Naser Hospital after Palestinian medical personnel were forced at gunpoint to abandon them.

“We were subjected to a direct targeting operation by the Israeli forces after strangling the health system on the first day of the aggression by cutting off medical supplies, fuel and electricity,” said Palestinian Health Ministry spokesman Ashraf Al-Qudra.

The destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system compounds the catastrophic consequences of the starvation and dehydration of the population by Israel’s blockade of food, fuel and water, and the mass displacement of nearly three-quarters of the population.

In an interview with Al Jazeera last week, WHO spokesperson Harris described the medical conditions in Gaza as “misery being piled on misery.”

She continued, “It’s catastrophic in so many ways. As the needs rise from the terrible crush injuries, the burns, the amputated limbs, the multiple complex fractures due to all the bombing, the hospital supply is reducing as fewer and fewer hospitals are able to function.

“Because people are so crowded, because they are in such poor condition, because they lack food and they lack water, and they are unable to wash themselves or drink clean water, we are seeing huge rises in infectious diseases, particularly in diarrheal diseases—diarrheal disease is going up exponentially. It’s increased 31 times more than you would expect in children under 5; also in adults: 104 times greater than you would expect.” Dysentery has increased 14 times, she said.

These conditions are deliberate. Their intentional character is publicly acknowledged by Israeli officials. Last week, Giora Eiland, the former head of the Israeli National Security Council, published an article in which he urged the Israeli military to create medical conditions in which as many Gazan civilians die as possible from preventable disease.

Eiland wrote:

Who are the “poor” women of Gaza? They are all the mothers, sisters or wives of Hamas murderers…

The international community warns us of a humanitarian disaster in Gaza and of severe epidemics. We must not shy away from this, as difficult as that may be. After all, severe epidemics in the south of the Gaza Strip will bring victory closer and reduce casualties among IDF soldiers.

Eiland argues that inflicting death and misery through infectious disease should be a goal, not a mere byproduct, of Israel’s actions. Its aim is “not the mere killing of more Hamas fighters” but “irreversible harm to their families.”

Such monstrous statements would seem to be the mere ravings of a lunatic. In reality, the deliberate subjection of a population to conditions that facilitate mass infection has been a critical component of past historical genocides, including the Holocaust. The parallels between Israel’s deliberate withholding of food, fuel and water from the Palestinians and descriptions of the Nazi regime’s treatment of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto are striking.

In his landmark book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, jurist Raphaël Lemkin, who introduced the term “genocide” in its contemporary understanding, explained how the Nazis used the blockade of food, fuel and water in the Warsaw Ghetto as a deliberate means of killing its inmates:

The undesired national groups … are deprived of elemental necessities for preserving health and life. … No fuel at all has been received since then by the Jews in the ghetto.

Moreover, the Jews in the ghetto are crowded together under conditions of housing inimical to health, and in being denied the use of public parks they are even deprived of the right to fresh air. Such measures, especially pernicious to the health of children, have caused the development of various diseases.

Payam Akhavan, a special adviser to the International Criminal Court, wrote in 2021:

Extermination through disease and starvation in the ghettos became the staging grounds for the concentration camps. An estimated 700,000 Jews died in the ghettos from diseases such as typhus, having been abandoned to “perish in their filth.” In the Warsaw Ghetto “the death toll from typhus was estimated at 15 percent, even though the Germans prevented proper treatment … and refused to allow the necessary preventive measures to be taken and enforced.”

In Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?, historian Arno J. Mayer described the conditions of concentration camp inmates:

half-starved and practically without medical care, the frail and the sick were particularly imperiled, the more so since at the journey’s end the whole of Auschwitz was intermittently in the grip of a devastating typhus epidemic. The result was an unspeakable death rate…

The Nazi leaders decided to transport frail and sick Jews, and Gypsies, to Auschwitz in full awareness of the perils they would face, and they continued to do so once there was no ignoring and denying the deadly conditions there, including the endemic danger of epidemics.

The United Nations defines “genocidal acts” as including “the deliberate deprivation of resources needed for the group’s physical survival and which are available to the rest of the population, such as clean water, food and medical services,” and the “Creation of circumstances that could lead to a slow death, such as lack of proper housing, clothing and hygiene or excessive work or physical exertion.”

It notes: “Deprivation of the means to sustain life can be imposed through confiscation of harvests, blockade of foodstuffs, detention in camps, forcible relocation or expulsion to inhospitable environments.”

This language reads as a perfect description of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Notably, the destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system takes place amid a new global upsurge of the COVID-19 pandemic—a disease that becomes exponentially more deadly in the absence of adequate healthcare to treat the sickest patients.

The ruling classes of the world responded to the COVID-19 pandemic with homicidal indifference to human life, with UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson praising the disease as “nature’s way of dealing with old people.” In Gaza, the sociopathic indifference to human life manifested in these remarks has metastasized into a full-scale genocide.

Not one single member of the Biden administration has made a public statement condemning the Israeli government’s systematic destruction of Gaza’s public health infrastructure and the starvation of its population. When Israel bombed the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital killing hundreds, US President Joe Biden blamed the Palestinians. The White House has made clear that there are “no red lines” limiting the number of civilians the US will allow Israel to kill, or the scale of the war crimes it will be allowed to commit.

The apologists for capitalism have argued that the vast crimes committed by the imperialist powers during the 20th century, the gravest of which was the Holocaust, were an exception, the actions of singularly evil individuals the likes of which would never appear again.

Twenty-three years into the new century, many of the means by which the Nazis carried out their “Final Solution” are being applied in Gaza, with the full support of all the imperialist powers.

This reality must bear upon the analysis not only of the present but also of the past. The Holocaust and Nazism were not the result of historical accidents but expressed the essential barbarism of the capitalist system in its “highest stage” of modern imperialism, which Leon Trotsky called its “death agony.”

Millions of people have taken part in mass demonstrations against the genocide in Gaza. They must understand what they are fighting against. It is not merely Netanyahu, or even just the governments that are funding and arming Israel’s genocide. It is the entire capitalist social order that is responsible for this monumental crime.

30 November 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Abubaker Abed

Al Jazeera’s bureau chief in Gaza Wael al-Dahdouh was live on air when he heard the worst possible news: His family had been attacked by Israel.

His wife Amna, son Mahmoud, daughter Sham and grandson Adam were all killed.

It has been almost a month since the massacre yet Wael has not had any space to grieve. He has continued reporting with great courage on the genocide being inflicted on his people.

“The pain of loss can never be described,” he said in an interview. “It was unbearable but I am a different person because of the profession I hold. I fully believe that God has pearls of wisdom and he is the one who provides a man with patience and strength.”

Wael believes that by documenting Israel’s crimes, he is fulfilling a duty to his family.

“I was determined to return to work and appear on the screen out of loyalty to their blood and the blood of all the martyrs. I refused to let the occupation achieve its goal of shattering this voice. So I overcame my pain to appear to the world again and convey my message and the message of every Palestinian suffering in Gaza.”

“Absolute horror”

Wael has witnessed all five of the previous major Israeli attacks on Gaza since December 2008.

“The 2023 war on Gaza is an absolute horror,” he said. “It is totally different and undoubtedly the bloodiest, the most destructive and the most monstrous. Throughout all the wars we have seen violence, destruction and injuries. But none comes close to this level of brutality and bloodshed.”

While Israel has bombed residential buildings without warning on many occasions, it is doing so far more frequently this time.

“It’s the first war when electricity was fully cut off, water was wholly cut off, and when crossings were completely closed for more than 25 days, preventing aid from entering the Strip,” he said.

I asked Wael when there will be peace and liberty in Gaza.

“When the occupation ends,” he said. “The occupation means aggression and the continuation of these painful images of destruction, horror and hardship. Its end will mean the return of Gaza, Palestine, and the Arab region to the hugs of peace, freedom, love, calm, security and every beautiful thing.”

Aged 53, Wael has no retirement plans despite everything that he has endured. He vows to keep working “no matter the cost.”

Journalists have paid a heavy price during this current war. More than 50 have been killed.

“We are all journalists in these circumstances,” said Wael. “We are not a party to this war. All we do is report events and what is happening around us.”

The bravery of Wael and other Palestinian journalists is at odds with how Western media outlets generally refuse to hold Israel accountable.

“As a human being and a Palestinian, I have a message to people all over the world,” Wael said. “We want you to listen to the narrative of the Palestinians, not just the Israelis. Please do not let the world apply any double standards. We have our narrative and we only ask for justice. Justice must prevail in the world.”

Abubaker Abed is a journalist and translator based in Gaza.

26 November 2023

Source: countercurrents.org