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By Jonathan Kuttab

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

22 February 2024

Source: fosna.org

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1 February 2024

Source: mronline.org

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s indeed a Holocaust, no less!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

20 February 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Ilan Pappe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The article was originally published by the Islamic Human Rights Commission

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

17 February 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Vijay Prashad

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

By Andre Damon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

14 February 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Jim Miles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jim Miles is a Canadian educator

13 February 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Andre Damon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

13 February 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

The Israeli campaign against the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) has escalated to taking measures to replace the Agency in the Gaza Strip and evict it from Jerusalem. As an UN mandated agency that acts in accordance with States’ international responsibilities towards Palestinian refugees, Israeli actions that hinder or disrupt its mandate constitute complete disregard of international will and law. Additionally, these actions are the precursor to eliminating the issue of Palestinian refugees, whose rights to return, property restitution and compensation (reparations) have been denied by Israel since 1948.

The UNRWA is an international agency with a permanent mandate until such time as UNGA Resolution 194 of 1948 and UNSC Resolution 237 of 1967 are put into effect. Israeli attempts to delegitimize and defund UNRWA, banning its work in Jerusalem, and obstructing and replacing its operations in the Gaza Strip, are part of its larger goal to completely dismantle UNRWA and eliminate the Palestinian refugee issue. These actions are in violation of international law, both with respect to UNRWA’s mandate, the international legal status of Jerusalem, and the obligation to provide reparations to Palestinian refugees and internally displaced persons. Further, the deliberate obstruction of UNRWA services in the Gaza Strip by Israel constitutes a violation of its obligation to prevent Genocide.

The so-called ‘Constitution and Judicial Committee’ in the Israeli Knesset approved on 11 February a new draft law to evict the UNRWA from Jerusalem. The draft law was passed to the Ministerial Committee for Legislation, in preparation for a first reading vote, as the Foreign Affairs and Security Committee in the Knesset will discuss this bill on 20 February. In 2018, the then Jerusalem mayor and Likud member, Nir Barkat, presented a similar bill to replace UNRWA services with municipal provisions. In cooperation with other Knesset members, he has submitted the bill again, hoping to take advantage of the current Israeli defamation campaign against UNRWA, which has led 16 states fully or partially suspending their funding. Additionally, last week Barkat organized demonstrations against UNRWA in front of its offices in Jerusalem, which were attended by representatives from the right-wing Zionist group Im Tirzu and the Tikva Forum. Former Foreign Ministry official Noga Arbell also spoke on stage, after releasing a video calling for the “destruction” of UNRWA at the Knesset.

On 12 February, the Construction and Housing Minister, Yitzhak Goldknopf, issued an immediate directive for the eviction of UNRWA from Jerusalem, specifically targeting the discontinuation of UNRWA’s office operations in Sheikh Jarrah and in Kufr ‘Aqab, along with halting further lease agreements.

Israeli campaigns to demonize, disable, defund, restrict and transfer UNRWA’s responsibilities are not new. They are a component of Israel’s colonial-apartheid regime, which aims at ongoing forced displacement and transfer of Palestinians, and liquidating the issue of the 9.17 million Palestinian refugees and internally displaced persons through the dismantlement of UNRWA.

Similar calls to expel UNRWA from Jerusalem were made following Trump’s so called “Deal of the Century” and his decision to end American funding for the agency in 2019. Amongst other issues, the Trump Deal contains provisions to cater to Israel’s strategy to end the Palestinian refugee issue through serious breaches of international law. The Biden administration restored funding to UNRWA in July 2021, but included conditions that impose securitization measures on the UN mandated humanitarian agency.

The USA was one of the first states to suspend its funds in response to Israel’s newest unfounded allegations against the Agency. Additionally, a newly proposed Republican bill called “Stop Support for UNRWA Act” is to be presented to Congress, and if passed, it would bar the USA from ever making any voluntary or assessed contributions to the Agency – in other words, permanently defund UNRWA. The defunding of UNRWA constitutes political blackmail by weaponizing humanitarian aid and deepens states’ involvement in the Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip.

The targeting of the UNRWA’s presence and services in Jerusalem will have negative impact on the 375,000 Palestinians that reside there, but more importantly, it aims to end international presence in Jerusalem. For the Palestinian people, its presence is not just symbolic; rather, it has significant strategic political and legal ramifications. The international presence of UNRWA is a strong challenge to and firm rejection of the Israeli occupation, its sovereignty over the city, and its recognition of Jerusalem as the united capital of Israel.

Accordingly, to preserve UNRWA’s presence in Jerusalem and in the Gaza Strip, BADIL calls on:

1. The UN Secretary General to reaffirm the entitlement of UNRWA to protection under the UN system, and states’ duty to fulfill their obligation to respect, support and facilitate UNRWA’s mandate, staff and facilities.
2. The UN General Assembly to clearly condemn and declare the illegality of Israel’s measures aiming at delegitimizing the UNRWA presence in Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip and obstructing its operations;
3. The UNRWA’s international and local staff to maintain its presence and services in Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip;
4. States to reject the elimination or replacement of UNRWA’s presence and services in Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, and to continue and increase their financial contributions to UNRWA.

14 February 2024

Source: www.badil.org

By Junaid S. Ahmad

Pakistan’s election lived up to some expectations, but didn’t live up to other expectations. What was predicted was that there would vote rigging and outright fraud as a central feature of the Pakistani generals’ plan, and there was. What was not anticipated was that former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s party, the PTI (Movement for Justice), would win the most parliamentary seats of any single party. It was a miraculous outcome, given the horrendous levels of repression of the PTI, and the efforts by the military establishment to prevent the party from even contesting in the election.

What we know now is that the Pakistani military-intelligence establishment, following its violence and terror campaign against the population after Khan was ousted in April 2022, is the proverbial emperor with no clothes. It stands exposed not only for its reign of terror, corruption and fraud, but also for its incompetence by failing to deliver the election results desired by domestic and foreign power centres.

In many ways, perhaps the most analogous relatively recent event was the victory of Hamas in the 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council election. The Israelis, the Americans and the Gulf monarchies wanted to give legitimacy to their chosen occupation sub-contractor, the collaborationist and hopelessly corrupt Palestinian Authority (PA) largely controlled by Hamas rival Fatah. These forces believed that they had invested enough financial and political capital to enable Fatah candidates to win an “election under occupation”. To their great surprise — and to the surprise of Hamas, to be fair — the Islamic Resistance Movement won.

“Similarly, the military and political elites in Pakistan had guaranteed themselves and their patrons in Washington that the election in Pakistan was a done deal.

This narrative claimed that the appeal of the PTI had diminished, and any remaining popularity of Khan and his political party would be offset by the investment of tens of millions of dollars to buy off the military high command, politicians in all of the provinces and, crucially, the judges of the provincial high courts, as well as the Supreme Court.

The generals said that they had plan B, and if needed, plan C, ready in case plan A did not work. Plan A was the simple ousting of Khan from power in April 2022. It was thought that this would eradicate the “Khan virus”. To the surprise of many, including Khan himself, a massive, unprecedented outpouring of support erupted spontaneously, with rallies taking place in cities and towns in every province of the country.

So, the military elites began the charge sheet against Khan to get him embroiled in one court case after another: plan B. That failed to work, and Khan’s popularity continued to soar. Incessant reassurances were meted out from former Chief of Army Staff General Bajwa to Washington and the House of Sharif, the family in control of one of the two dominant dynastic political parties, the PML(N). Bajwa claimed that the situation was under control and that his successor, General Asim Munir, would finish the job. Bajwa was lucky. All he agreed to was to remove Khan from power, and he delivered. He was detested, but he was able to leave the political scene after a few months. Munir was not so fortunate.

Plan C needed to be activated. Public sentiment was turning so antagonistic towards the military top brass for their unashamed targeting of Khan that the “final solution” had to be implemented: assassination. Two attempts, one of which injured Khan in the shin, were unsuccessful.

There really was no plan D, and so one was concocted quickly. Khan faced the most absurd but very serious charges of terrorism and treason, and was imprisoned in complete isolation. He was charged with leaking state secrets in the now infamous “cypher-gate” case, with the allegation that he spoke recklessly about a top-secret diplomatic cable sent to the foreign ministry by Pakistan’s ambassador to the US. The cable stated, in no uncertain terms, Washington’s desire that Khan be removed from power.

Both the military elite as well as, sadly, many in the intellectual class, mocked Khan and his supporters for over a year for this “conspiracy theory” and for inventing this “fictional” cypher. Only when the The Intercept confirmed the veracity of the contents of the diplomatic cable as Khan had described them, did Munir and other senior army officers not only concede that such a cypher does exist, but that Khan would now face charges of treason for revealing its contents. This leak by the former prime minister constituted a grave threat to “national security”. In reality, it presented a palpable unmasking of the collusion of the US foreign policy establishment, Pakistani generals and Pakistani kleptocrats of the two major political parties — the House of Sharif and the House of Bhutto-Zardari – in wanting to depose the democratically-elected Khan from power.

Once the hastily assembled plan D was put in motion, the idea was that it would lead seamlessly to plan E, the ruthless repression of the PTI, so that by the time of this election there would be nothing left of Khan and his party. What the election results last week demonstrated, however, is that even though Khan’s party members could not run on their party ticket and had to run as independents, there is huge popular support for the PTI.

There doesn’t seem to be a plan F, considering the frantic responses of the army chief and the head of the intelligence agencies, or the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Munir is no longer concerned with his big picture “obligations”. He has been reduced to trying to save himself. The only party that he is trying to please at this point is the one footing the bill: the House of Sharif. The general is now arguably the most hated Chief of Staff in Pakistan’s history, and there has been no shortage of competition for that title.

What about Washington’s planners? How are they reacting? One senior State Department official commented very bluntly: “These imbeciles can’t even crush a political novice like Khan. They command one of the largest armed forces in the world, nuclear armed. What is all that for?”

The US foreign policy establishment, after the ouster of Khan, had outsourced the job of managing the old “Af-Pak” (Afghanistan-Pakistan) theatre of the “Global War on Terror” to the Pentagon. Washington believed that its Cold War framework of dealing with the generals would produce a “stable” and pliant Pakistan. There is no entity as irate at the incompetence of the Pakistani military high command as the US Department of Defence, to which both Bajwa and Munir promised the moon. Actually, though, State Department officials are equally incensed since they were tasked to prevaricate for almost two years to conceal Washington’s role, as well as that of Pakistani generals, in this entire scenario.

The State Department had denied any knowledge of the cypher, but that position began to change after the Intercept’s publication of the contents of that damning diplomatic cable. At that point, it was not so much about asserting the non-existence of the cypher, but underscoring how such communication between two governments was nothing abnormal. Washington was willing to give Islamabad a few more months to fix everything by holding faux elections that would quash Khan and his party once and for all.

And now, it seems clear that the US foreign policy establishment is looking for vengeance, and keen on punishing the generals who promised to produce an unashamedly subservient Pakistani political establishment. This is why there has been such an explosion of harsh criticism of the Pakistani army from the State Department and numerous members of Congress.

There were, undoubtedly, members of Congress, such as Representative Ilhan Omar, who wanted to express their displeasure much earlier. But they also acquiesced to their Democratic Party leadership in the White House and in Congress, who hung on by a thread to the idea that “stability” would be brought about by the traditional political and military elites. The White House maintained unceasingly that “our guys” in Islamabad would facilitate a smooth and relatively quiet transition to the post-Khan period, without ringing any international alarm bells.

Of course, now it’s become patently obvious that Washington is revising its stance radically, one that effectively tells Pakistan’s generals, “You had your chance, you failed, and now you’re making things worse.” America’s 180-degree turnaround is an attempt to salvage some respect, or at least some tolerance, from the people of Pakistan who know full well Washington’s role in the regime change operation. The generals have put Washington in a deeply embarrassing situation.

However, Washington apparatchiks may be unfair in their treatment of their clients in khaki in Pakistan. The former do not realise that it’s the political has-beens who the generals can control, not the relative new boys on the block like Khan. The old political bigwigs know the rules of the game — proper balance between the enrichment of both the political and military elites — and abide by them. The newbies are too recalcitrant to even learn those rules properly, let alone abide by them. In sum, Washington now considers General Munir a dreadful liability, after only his first year as Chief of Staff, unlike General Pervez Musharraf, who provided Washington with “stability in Pakistan” for eight years until he also became a liability in 2007.

In this entire saga, what’s been truly disappointing is the role of the Pakistani media. The country’s leading and, deservedly, most respected periodical, Dawn, suddenly began to churn out columns praising the democratic “defiance” of the people in this election. It’s a shame that the people’s defiance was not covered over the past twenty months, when apparently it was simply an expression of a cult-following, and the totalitarian and conspicuously undemocratic repression was not worth reporting. The resistance of the Pakistani people could have certainly benefited from some coverage then. Now, such voices in the media are commonplace. It’s rather sad how the Pakistani media seems to be taking its cues from the US State Department about when to cover/report, and when not to. Dawn columnists had many months to praise the democratic will of the people, but did not.

At this point, the divisions within the military officer corps have become evident. Munir and others in the top brass realise how dangerous it is to give the wrong orders to junior officers and soldiers. How many times will the Pakistani armed forces be commanded to open fire, imprison, torture and disappear their population on a massive scale? The crimes of the military establishment in the provinces of Balochistan and KPK have been bad enough.

For almost two years now, the brutal suppression by the army was meant to instil paralysing trepidation in the population. But just as the people of Gaza, of Palestine, of West Asia, have overcome a psychological sense of fear of Israel, so too have the people of Pakistan lost any fear of their national security state and its violent shenanigans. This is a major development.

Whatever political configuration emerges after the election, one thing is certain: this round has been a resounding victory for former Prime Minister Imran Khan, smiling in his wretched jail cell, as well as the people of Pakistan, regardless of their political affiliation.