As the world, and especially Muslims, correctly has been focused on the Zionist genocide in Gaza, we seem to have forgotten President Biden’s criminality in another part of the world. Indeed, just as Israel’s savagery has been wholeheartedly supported by the Biden Administration, the regime change operation in March-April of 2022 in Pakistan was also on Biden’s watch. More and more Pakistanis, especially in the largest and politically dominant province of Punjab, have come to recognize the venality of the military establishment. Though the other provinces of Pakistan had no illusion of the nefarious and violent role of the generals in Pakistani social and political life, people in Punjab had to experience the torturous wrath of the military top brass after the removal of former Prime Minister Imran Khan – to realize the cold-bloodedness of the military high command.
Khan has been languishing in prison since August of last year on various trumped up and farcical charges. And now, he and another senior member of Khan’s political party, former foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi, have been sentenced to a ten-year jail sentence because of the ostensible cypher-gate scandal. The ‘cypher,’ a secret diplomatic cable sent to Islamabad by Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington in March of 2022, stated quite explicitly the American desire to oust Khan from power. The task was left to Washington’s old Cold War friends in Pakistan’s praetorian guard to fulfill the mission.
After Khan was removed from power by a military establishment-US embassy.in-Islamabad engineered vote-of-no-confidence in parliament, he made it very clear to Pakistanis that this was a regime change conspiracy involving the US on the one hand, and Pakistan’s generals and kleptocratic politicians on the other. At the time, sadly, those who had historically opposed the role of the military in Pakistan’s politics, refused to believe Khan – essentially considering him a conspiratorial nutcase. After more than a year after Khan’s ouster, the American online publication, The Intercept, confirmed that the official diplomatic cable that Khan referred to was in fact real, and that its content laid out in no uncertain terms the American insistence on removing Khan from power. By now, even the most ardent ‘cypher deniers’ have had to acknowledge the veracity of Khan’s claims at the time of the successful regime change operation in the country. The tragedy was that the big media houses in Pakistan acceded to state pressure to erase the name Imran Khan from any public discourse, and that it took a foreign publication’s stellar investigative journalism to expose the treacherous collaboration between Washington and the generals in Pakistan – in particular, the Chief of Army Staff (COAS), Gen. Bajwa – in subjecting Khan and his political party, PTI, to the most totalitarian forms of repression.
After two decades of the ‘War on Terror’ having created some friction between the American and Pakistani military-intelligence apparatuses, both came to realize that, ultimately, they will always be joined at the hip. The Pakistani military is one of the most vicious relics of colonialism. It transitioned quite smoothly in its neo-colonial relationship with Washington throughout the Cold War. Pakistan’s generals never lose sight of the fact that they make billions from American machinations in West and Southwest Asia. Other than excelling as a satrapy of the American empire, the powerful Pakistani armed forces are good for nothing but extreme levels of repression, torture, disappearances, and murdering its own population.
However, throughout the past two years, Pakistanis have been somewhat bewildered at the extent of the vendetta and ferocious repression targeted at Khan and his political party. It seems to be the case that the military establishment has never felt as insecure as it has after Khan’s ouster and the subsequent massive outpouring of support for him and his party. The well-understood arrangement between any civilian government and the COAS and the military-intelligence establishment was that the former agrees to cede full control of ‘national security’ and foreign policy to the latter. The generals increasingly felt that Khan began to violate this ‘code of conduct’ by positioning himself as the one who would carve out the direction of the country on the world stage. In addition, the generals’ Western patron-masters saw Khan as a thorn in their control of Muslim despots in West Asia, most of whom were on the path of normalization with Israel, turning a blind eye to Hindutva fascism in India, and engineering a pro-Empire- friendly Islam. On the contrary, Khan spoke passionately about justice for Palestinians and Kashmiris, rejected the imperial categories of ‘moderate’ or ‘extremist’ Islam, and denounced the rise of Islamophobia and its dreadful social and political impact throughout the world. His popularity among, and keen desire to bring together, nations such as Malaysia, Turkey, Indonesia, Iran, and Qatar was correctly seen as a counter-hegemonic bloc to the Saudi domination of the Muslim world. And finally, Khan’s praise of China’s ability to lift more than 800 million out of poverty and the lessons it offers for developing countries like Pakistan, as well as remaining neutral in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, convinced the US national security state that this man must be eliminated.
It’s important to note that generals’ detestation of Khan was not because he was some revolutionary. But he did help to politicize significant chunks of the population, young and old, and especially in the military establishment’s base of support – the province of Punjab. Punjabis protesting en masse against the military establishment was something unforgivable for the generals. Punjabis were supposed to love or at least respect their military leaders, not despise them as they did following Khan’s ouster.
Comparisons are often made with the popular leader of Pakistan during the 1970s, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto – who certainly had a revolutionary character in his rhetoric. But two key differences are often overlooked. Bhutto came to power on the backs of Bengali blood, the genocidal campaign of West Pakistani generals against the population of East Pakistan – which became Bangladesh after winning its war of liberation. Bhutto’s party, the PPP, would have lost to the Awami League political party in East Pakistan had it not been for the merciless military assault on the future nation of Bangladesh. In a cynically transactional manner, Bhutto repaid the favor by effectively rescuing and rehabilitating a humiliated and defeated Pakistani military. In fact, Bhutto would go on to rely on that same military to target political opponents, especially in the provinces of NWFP (now renamed KPK) and Balochistan. Of course, none of this is to deny that Bhutto was a very popular leader.
But secondly, Bhutto’s own shortcomings and political authoritarianism while in power ultimately led to disillusionment within his support base, resulting in a fairly reticent popular response to his ouster by the military dictator, Gen. Zia-ul-Haq – and, as in the case of Khan, a regime change completely supported by Washington.
One can claim that Khan also came on the backs of the military establishment’s very temporary squabble with the other two major dynastic political parties. But like Bhutto, no one can claim that Khan was not immensely popular. The major difference, of course, is the massive outpouring of support for Khan after his ouster, in rallies across the country sustained for more than a year until the barbaric military crackdown began in May of 2023. In fact, the surprise for many was that despite a rather lackluster performance in his period of governance, still Khan was popular as ever, if not more.
The saga of the cases, charges, and convictions against Khan are seen by virtually all of Pakistan’s 240 million people as a politically motivated clown-show. Specifically, the recent convictions in ‘courts’ for which the term ‘kangaroo court’ would be way too generous, deferential, and respectful, are intended to further demoralize and terrorize the population before ‘elections’ to be held on Feb. 8th. Some think that these elections would give Saddam Hussain’s and Hosni Mubarak’s forms of elections good competition.
While Pakistanis in and outside of the country continue to witness one travesty after the next, to see the totalitarianism of the generals and their favored political mafias reach newer and more ruthless heights, the hope remains that, just like in Gaza, the people’s resistance and international solidarity may be able to mount a serious impediment to Biden’s generals’ torture chambers imposed on the country. And the perennial palace intrigues and squabbles of the political and military elite have a tendency to derail all major plans of coordinated and disciplined perpetual punishment of the population.
Nevertheless, one underreported story during the past two years has been of the many officers and overwhelming majority of soldiers who’ve had nothing but revulsion for the shenanigans of the bloodthirsty high command, causing many of them to be ‘disappeared’ or forced to resign, or just resigning on their own, without pension.
Absent the ability of the people to, at this point, initiate an effective and formidable challenge to Washington’s comprador military and political elite, a progressive officers’ coup may not be a bad idea.
Prof. Junaid S. Ahmad teaches religion, law, and global politics and is the Director of the Center for Islam and Decoloniality, Islamabad, Pakistan.
In 2005, Palestinians called on the world to boycott Israel until it complied with international law. What if we had listened?
Exactly 15 years ago this week, I published an article in the Guardian. It began like this:
Enough. It’s time for a boycott
Naomi Klein
It’s time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa. In July 2005 a huge coalition of Palestinian groups laid out plans to do just that. They called on ‘people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era’. The campaign Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions was born.
Back in January 2009, Israel had unleashed a shocking new stage of mass killing in the Gaza Strip, calling its ferocious bombing campaign Operation Cast Lead. It killed 1,400 Palestinians in 22 days; the number of casualties on the Israeli side was 13. That was the last straw for me, and after years of reticence I came out publicly in support of the Palestinian-led call for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel until it complies with international law and universal principles of human rights, known as BDS.
Though BDS had broad support from more than 170 Palestinian civil society organizations, internationally the movement remained small. During Operation Cast Lead, that began to shift, and a growing number of student groups and trade unions outside Palestine were signing on.
Still, many wouldn’t go there. I understood why the tactic felt fraught. There is a long and painful history of Jewish businesses and institutions being targeted by antisemites. The communications experts who lobby on Israel’s behalf know how to weaponize this trauma, so they invariably cast campaigns designed to challenge Israel’s discriminatory and violent policies as hateful attacks on Jews as an identity group.
For two decades, widespread fear stemming from that false equation has shielded Israel from facing the full potential of a BDS movement – and now, as the international court of justice hears South Africa’s devastating compendium of evidence of Israel committing the crime of genocide in Gaza, it truly is enough.
From bus boycotts to fossil fuel divestment, BDS tactics have a well-documented history as the most potent weapons in the nonviolent arsenal. Picking them up and using them at this turning point for humanity is a moral obligation.
The responsibility is particularly acute for those of us whose governments continue to actively aid Israel with deadly weapons, lucrative trade deals and vetoes at the United Nations. As BDS reminds us, we do not have to let those bankrupt agreements speak for us unchallenged.
Groups of organized consumers have the power to boycott companies that invest in illegal settlements, or power Israeli weapons. Trade unions can push their pension funds to divest from those firms. Municipal governments can select contractors based on ethical criteria that forbid these relationships. As Omar Barghouti, one of the founders and leaders of the BDS movement, reminds us: “The most profound ethical obligation in these times is to act to end complicity. Only thus can we truly hope to end oppression and violence.”
In these ways, BDS deserves to be seen as a people’s foreign policy, or diplomacy from below – and if it gets strong enough, it will eventually force governments to impose sanctions from above, as South Africa is attempting to do. Which is clearly the only force that can get Israel off its current path.
Barghouti stresses that, just as some white South Africans supported the anti-apartheid campaigns during that long struggle, Jewish Israelis who oppose their country’s systemic violations of international law are welcome to join BDS. During Operation Cast Lead, a group of roughly 500 Israelis, many of them prominent artists and scholars, did just that, eventually naming their group Boycott from Within.
In my 2009 article, I quoted their first lobbying letter, which called for “the adoption of immediate restrictive measures and sanctions” against their own country and drew direct parallels with the South African anti-apartheid struggle. “The boycott on South Africa was effective,” they pointed out, saying it helped end the legalization of discrimination and ghettoization in that country, adding: “But Israel is handled with kid gloves … This international backing must stop.”
That was true 15 years ago; it is calamitously so today.
The price of impunity
Reading BDS documents from the mid- and late 2000s, I am most struck by the extent to which the political and human terrain has deteriorated. In the intervening years, Israel has built more walls, erected more checkpoints, unleashed more illegal settlers and launched far deadlier wars. Everything has gotten worse: the vitriol, the rage, the righteousness. Clearly, impunity – the sense of imperviousness and untouchability that underpins Israel’s treatment of Palestinians – is not a static force. It behaves more like an oil spill: once released, it seeps outwards, poisoning everything and everyone in its path. It spreads wide and sinks in deep.
Since the original call for BDS was made in July 2005, the number of settlers living illegally in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, has exploded, reaching an estimated 700,000 – close to the number of Palestinians expelled in the 1948 Nakba. As settler outposts have expanded, so has the violence of settler attacks on Palestinians, all while the ideology of Jewish supremacy and even overt fascism have moved to the center of the political culture in Israel.
When I wrote my original BDS column, the overwhelming mainstream consensus was that the South African analogy was inappropriate and that the word “apartheid”, which was being used by Palestinian legal scholars, activists and human rights organizations, was needlessly inflammatory. Now, everyone from Human Rights Watch to Amnesty International to the leading Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem have done their own careful studies and come to the inescapable conclusion that apartheid is indeed the correct legal term to describe the conditions under which Israelis and Palestinians lead starkly unequal and segregated lives. Even Tamir Pardo, the former head of the Mossad intelligence agency, conceded the point: “There is an apartheid state here,” he said in September. “In a territory where two people are judged under two legal systems, that is an apartheid state.”
Moreover, many also now understand that apartheid exists not only in the occupied territories, but inside Israel’s 1948 borders, a case laid out in a major 2022 report from a coalition of Palestinian human rights groups convened by Al-Haq. It’s hard to argue otherwise when Israel’s current far-right government came to power under a coalition agreement that states: “The Jewish people have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas of the Land of Israel … the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan, Judea and Samaria.”
When impunity reigns, everything shifts and moves, including the colonial frontier. Nothing stays static.
Then there is Gaza. The numbers of Palestinians killed in Operation Cast Lead felt unfathomable at the time. We soon learned that it was not a one-off. Instead, it ushered in a murderous new policy that Israeli military officials casually referred to as “mowing the grass”: every couple of years brought a fresh bombing campaign, killing hundreds of Palestinians or, in the case of 2014’s Operation Protective Edge, more than 2,000, including 526 children.
Those numbers shocked again, and sparked a new wave of protests. It still wasn’t enough to strip Israel of its impunity, which continued to be protected by the US’s reliable UN veto, plus the steady flow of arms. More corrosive than the lack of international sanctions have been the rewards: in recent years, alongside all of this lawlessness, Washington has recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and then moved its embassy there. It also brokered the so-called Abraham accords, which ushered in lucrative normalization agreements between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco.
It was Donald Trump who began showering Israel with these latest, long-sought-after gifts, but the process carried on seamlessly under Joe Biden. So, on the eve of 7 October, Israel and Saudi Arabia were on the verge of signing what had been giddily hailed as the “deal of the century”.
Where were Palestinian rights and aspirations in all these deals? Absolutely nowhere. Because the other thing that had shifted during these years of impunity was any pretext that Israel intended to return to the negotiating table. The clear goal was crushing the Palestinian movement for self-determination through force, alongside physical and political isolation and fragmentation.
We know how the next chapters of this story go. Hamas’s horrific 7 October attack. Israel’s furious determination to exploit those crimes to do what some of the government’s senior leaders had long wanted to do anyway: depopulate Gaza of Palestinians, which they currently appear to be attempting through the combination of direct killing; mass home demolition (“domicide”); the spread of starvation, thirst and infectious disease; and eventually mass expulsion.
Make no mistake: this is what it means to allow a state to go rogue, to let impunity reign unchecked for decades, using the real collective traumas suffered by the Jewish people as the bottomless excuse and cover story. Impunity like that will swallow not only one country but every country with which it is allied. It will swallow the entire international architecture of humanitarian law forged in the flames of the Nazi holocaust. If we let it.
A decade of legal attacks on BDS
Which raises something else that has not stayed stable over the past two decades: Israel’s escalating obsession with crushing BDS, no matter the cost to hard-won political rights. Back in 2009, there were many arguments being made by BDS’s critics about why it was a bad idea. Some worried that cultural and academic boycotts would shut down much-needed engagement with progressive Israelis, and feared it would veer into censorship. Others maintained that punitive measures would create a backlash and move Israel further to the right.
So it is striking, looking back now, that those early debates have pretty much disappeared from the public sphere, and not because one side won the argument. They disappeared because the entire idea of having a debate was displaced by one all-consuming strategy: using legal and institutional intimidation to put BDS tactics out of reach and shut the movement down.
To date in the United States, a total of 293 anti-BDS bills have been introduced across the country, and they have been enacted in 38 states, according to Palestine Legal, which has closely tracked this surge. It explains that some legislation targets university funding, some requires that anyone receiving a contract with a state or working for a state sign a contract pledging they will not boycott Israel, and “some call on the state to compile public blacklists of entities that boycott for Palestinian rights or support BDS”. In Germany, meanwhile, support for any form of BDS is enough to get awards revoked, funding pulled, and shows and lectures cancelled (something I have experienced first-hand).
This strategy is, unsurprisingly, most aggressive inside Israel itself. In 2011, the country enacted the Law for Prevention of Damage to the State of Israel through Boycott, effectively nipping the nascent Boycott from Within movement in the bud. The Adalah legal center, an organization working for Arab minority rights in Israel, explains that the law “prohibits the public promotion of academic, economic or cultural boycott by Israeli citizens and organizations against Israeli institutions or illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank. It enables the filing of civil lawsuits against anyone who calls for boycott.” Like the state-level laws in the US, “it also prohibits a person who calls for boycott from participating in any public tender”. In 2017, Israel began openly barring pro-BDS activists from entering Israel; 20 international groups were placed on the so-called BDS blacklist, including the anti-war stalwart Jewish Voice for Peace.
Meanwhile, across the US, lobbyists for oil and gas companies and gun manufacturers are taking a page from the anti-BDS legal offensive and pushing copycat legislation to restrict divestment campaigns that take aim at their clients. “It points to why it’s so dangerous to permit this kind of Palestine exception to speech,” Meera Shah, a senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal, told the magazine Jewish Currents. “Because not only is it harmful to the Palestinian rights movement – it eventually comes to harm other social movements.” Once again, nothing stays static, impunity expands, and when the rights to boycott and divest are stripped away for Palestinian solidarity, the right to use these same tools to push for climate action, gun control and LGBTQ+ rights are stripped away as well.
In a way, this is an advantage, because it presents an opportunity to deepen alliances across movements. Every major progressive organization and union has a stake in protecting the right to boycott and divest as core tenets of free expression and critical tools of social transformation. The small team at Palestine Legal has been leading the pushback in the US in extraordinary ways – filing court cases that challenge anti-BDS laws as unconstitutional and supporting the cases of others. They deserve far more backup.
Is it finally the BDS moment?
There is another reason to take heart: the reason Israel goes after BDS with such ferocity is the very same reason that so many activists have continued to believe in it despite these multipronged attacks. Because it can work.
We saw it when global companies started pulling out of South Africa in the 1980s. It wasn’t because they were suddenly struck by anti-racist moral epiphanies. Rather, as the movement became international, and boycott-and-divestment campaigns started to affect car sales and bank customers outside the country, these companies calculated that it would cost them more to stay in South Africa than to leave. Western governments began belatedly imposing sanctions for similar reasons.
That hurt the South African business sector, parts of which put pressure on the apartheid government to make concessions to the Black liberation movements that had been rebelling against apartheid for decades through uprisings, mass strikes and armed resistance. The costs of maintaining the cruel and violent status quo were growing higher, including for South Africa’s elite.
Finally, by the end of the 80s, the pincer of pressure from the outside and inside grew so intense that President FW de Klerk was forced to release Nelson Mandela from prison after 27 years, and then to hold one-person-one-vote elections, which carried Mandela to the presidency.
The Palestinian organizations that have kept the flame of BDS alive through some very dark years still place their hope in the South African model of outside pressure. Indeed, as Israel perfects the architecture and engineering of ghettoization and expulsion, it may be the only hope.
That’s because Israel is markedly more insulated from internal pressure from Palestinians than white South Africans were under apartheid, who depended on Black labor for everything from domestic work to diamond mining. When Black South Africans withdrew their labor, or engaged in other kinds of economic disruption, it could not be ignored.
Israel has learned from South Africa’s vulnerability: since the 90s, its reliance on Palestinian labor has been steadily decreasing, largely thanks to so-called guest workers and to the influx of roughly a million Jews from the former Soviet Union. This helped make it possible for Israel to move from the oppression model of occupation to today’s ghettoization model, which attempts to disappear Palestinians behind hulking walls with hi-tech sensors and Israel’s much vaunted Iron Dome air defense.
But this model – let’s call it the fortressed bubble – carries vulnerabilities of its own, and not only to Hamas attacks. The more systemic vulnerability comes from Israel’s extreme dependence on trade with Europe and North America, for everything from its tourism sector to its AI-powered surveillance-tech sector. The brand Israel has fashioned for itself is that of a scrappy, hip, western outpost in the desert, a little bubble of San Francisco or Berlin that just happens to find itself in the Arab world.
That makes it uniquely susceptible to the tactics of BDS, including cultural and academic boycotts. Because when pop stars wanting to avoid controversy cancel their Tel Aviv stops, and prestigious US universities cut their official partnerships with Israeli universities after witnessing the detonation of multiple Palestinian schools and universities, and when beautiful people no longer choose Eilat for their holidays because their Instagram followers won’t be impressed, it undermines Israel’s entire economic model, and its sense of itself.
That will introduce pressure where Israel’s leaders clearly feel little today. If global tech and engineering firms stop selling products and services to the Israeli military, that ups the pressure still further, perhaps enough to shift the political dynamics. Israelis badly want to be part of the world community, and if they find themselves suddenly isolated, many more voters could start demanding some of the very actions that Israel’s current leaders dismiss out of hand – like negotiating with Palestinians for a lasting peace rooted in justice and equality as defined under international law, rather than trying to secure its fortressed bubble with white phosphorus and ethnic cleansing.
The hitch, of course, is that for BDS’s nonviolent tactics to work, the wins cannot be sporadic or marginal. They need to be sustained and mainstream – at least as mainstream as the South African campaign, which saw major corporations like General Motors and Barclays Bank pull their investments, while massive artists like Bruce Springsteen and Ringo Starr joined a quintessentially 80s supergroup to belt out “ain’t gonna play Sun City” (a reference to South Africa’s iconic luxury resort).
The BDS movement targeting Israel’s injustice has certainly grown over the past 15 years; Barghouti estimates that the “labor and farmers unions, as well as racial, social, gender and climate justice movements” that support it “collectively represent tens of millions worldwide”. But the movement has yet to reach a South Africa-level tipping point.
That has come at a cost. You don’t need to be a historian of liberation struggles to know that when morally guided tactics are ignored, sidelined, smeared and banned, then other tactics – unbound by those ethical concerns – become far more appealing to people desperate for any hope of change.
We will never know how the present could have been different if more individuals, organizations and governments had heeded the BDS call made by Palestinian civil society when it came in 2005. When I reached out to Barghouti a few days ago, he was not looking back at two decades of impunity, but on 75 years. Israel, he said, “would not have been able to perpetrate its ongoing televised genocide in Gaza without the complicity of states, corporations and institutions with its system of oppression”. Complicity, he stressed, is something we all have the power to reject.
One thing is certain: the current atrocities in Gaza dramatically strengthen the case for boycott, divestment and sanctions. Nonviolent tactics that many wrote off as extreme or feared would get them labelled antisemitic look very different through the dim light of two decades of carnage, with new rubble piled upon old, new grief and trauma etched in the psyches of new generations, and new depths of depravity reached in both word and deed.
This past Sunday, for his final show on MSNBC, Mehdi Hasan interviewed the Gaza-based Palestinian photojournalist Motaz Azaiza, who risks his own life, day after day, to bring images of Israel’s mass killing to the world. His message to US viewers was stark: “Don’t call yourself a free person if you can’t make changes, if you can’t stop a genocide that is still ongoing.”
In a moment such as ours, we are what we do. So many people have been doing more than ever before: blocking arms shipments, occupying seats of government demanding a ceasefire, joining mass protests, telling the truth, however difficult. The combination of these actions may well have contributed to the most significant development in the history of BDS: South Africa’s application to the international court of justice (ICJ) in The Hague accusing Israel of committing genocide and calling for provisional measures to stop its attack on Gaza.
A recent analysis by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz notes that if the ICJ rules in South Africa’s favor, even if the US vetoes military intervention at the United Nations, “an injunction could result in Israel and Israeli companies being ostracized and subject to sanctions imposed by individual countries or blocs”.
Grassroots boycotts, meanwhile, are already beginning to bite. In December, Puma – one of BDS’s top targets – let it be known that it will terminate its controversial sponsorship of Israel’s national football team. Before that, there was an exodus of artists from a major comics festival in Italy, after it emerged that the Israeli embassy was among the sponsors. And this month, the McDonald’s chief executive, Chris Kempczinski, wrote that what he called “misinformation” was having “a meaningful business impact” on some of its sales in “several markets in the Middle East and some outside the region”. This was a reference to a wave of outrage sparked by news that McDonald’s Israel had donated thousands of meals to Israeli soldiers. Kempczinski has sought to separate the global brand from “local owner operators”, but few people in the BDS movement are persuaded by the distinction.
It will also be critical, as momentum for BDS continues to pick up steam, to be acutely aware that we are in the midst of an alarming and real surge of hate crimes, many of them directed at Palestinians and Muslims, but also at Jewish businesses and institutions simply because they are Jewish. That is antisemitism, not political activism.
BDS is a serious, nonviolent movement with an established governing model. While giving local organizers autonomy to determine which campaigns will work in their areas, the BDS national committee (BNC) sets the movement’s guiding principles and carefully selects a small group of high-impact corporate targets, chosen “due to their proven complicity in Israel’s violations of Palestinian human rights”.
The BNC is also very clear that it is not calling for individual Israelis to be boycotted because they are Israeli, stating that it “rejects, on principle, boycotts of individuals based on their opinion or identity (such as citizenship, race, gender or religion)”. The targets, in other words, are institutions complicit in systems of oppression, not people.
No movement is perfect. Every movement will make missteps. The most pressing question now, however, has little to do with perfection. It is simply this: what has the best chance of changing a morally intolerable status quo, while stopping further bloodshed? The indomitable Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy has no illusions about what it will take. He recently told Owen Jones: “The key is in the international community – I mean, Israel will not change by itself … The formula is very simple: as long as Israelis don’t pay and are not punished for the occupation and not taken accountable for it and don’t feel it on a daily basis, nothing will change.”
It’s late
In July 2009, a few months after my original BDS article was published, I traveled to Gaza and the West Bank. In Ramallah, I gave a lecture on my decision to support BDS. It included an apology for failing to add my voice sooner, which I confessed had come from a place of fear – fear that the tactic was too extreme when directed at a state forged in Jewish trauma; fear that I would be accused of betraying my people. Fears that I still have.
“Better late than never,” a kind audience member said to me after the talk.
It was late then; it’s later still now. But it’s not too late. Not too late for all of us to create our own foreign policy from below, one that intervenes in the culture and economy in intelligent and strategic ways – ways that offer tangible hope that Israel’s decades of unchecked impunity will finally come to an end.
As the BDS national committee asked last week: “If not now, when? The South African anti-apartheid movement organized for decades to gain broad international support leading up to the fall of apartheid; and apartheid did fall. Freedom is inevitable. The time is now to take action to join the movement for freedom, justice and equality in Palestine.”
Enough. It’s time for a boycott.
Well, 2023 didn’t exactly go to plan, did it?
Here in the UK, the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, had promised us a government of stability and competence – not forgetting professionalism, integrity and accountability – after the rollercoaster ride of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. Remember Liz? These days she seems like a long forgotten comedy act. Instead, Sunak took us even further through the looking-glass into the Conservative psychodrama.
Elsewhere, the picture has been no better. In the US, Donald Trump is now many people’s favourite to become president again. In Ukraine, the war has dragged on with no end in sight. The danger of the rest of the world getting battle fatigue and losing interest all too apparent. Then there is the war in the Middle East and not forgetting the climate crisis …
But a new year brings new hope. There are elections in many countries, including the UK and the US. We have to believe in change. That something better is possible. The Guardian will continue to cover events from all over the world and our reporting now feels especially important. But running a news gathering organisation doesn’t come cheap.
With your help, we can make our journalism free to everyone. You won’t ever find any of our news reports or comment pieces tucked away behind a paywall. We couldn’t do this without you. Unlike our politicians, when we say we are in this together we mean it.
Happy new year!
Naomi Klein is a Guardian US columnist and contributing writer.
It has been more than 100 days since Israel has unleashed a history of horror. Killing thousands of Palestinians especially Children & making millions homeless, making them refugees in their own land . In past 100 days At least 23,700 people in Gaza have lost their lives. Which means 1 in every 100 has lost his Or her life. 60 thousand people in Gaza have been injured in these 100 days. These include at least 8,663 children and 6327 women , which means 3 out of every hundred people in Gaza. More than 1000 children have lost their one or both legs. 2.2 million people in Gaza are suffering from crisis level food insecurity. 9 out of every 10 goes without food for 24 hours or more. 359000 Houses have been damaged or destroyed. Which means 6 out of every 10 houses in Gaza are damaged or destroyed. 1.9 million people have been internally displaced . Which means more than 8 out of every 10 people in Gaza. Nearly 1.72 million are sheltering in 155 UNRWA facilities. 100 journalists and media workers have been killed. Which means nearly one journalist everyday. This war on Gaza is proving to be deadliest for journalists. 625000 students are out of school. With 7 out of every 10 schools have been damaged in Israeli attack. 15 out of 36 hospitals in Gaza function partially. Israel’s bombardment have destroyed most of the hospitals. The hospitals face a dire shortage of Doctors , medical supplies , medicines and urgently needs fuel for life saving equipment. 5,500 women are due to give birth. More than 180 babies are born every day. Both mother and new born doesn’t receive proper care.
In a voice choked with sadness and emotion, two hours after the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi on 30th January 1948, Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru, first Prime Minister of India, while announcing the dastardly act to the nation through All India Radio, inter alia said: “…The light that has illumined this country for these many years will illumine this country for many more years, and a thousand years later, that light will be seen in this country and the world will see it and it will give solace to innumerable hearts…”
Seventy-six years ago, Mahatma Gandhi’s life was abruptly terminated. Surely, he would have never thought that his end would be so unexpected, less than six months after he and the whole band of freedom fighters, many of whom had suffered greatly and sacrificed their lives, for India’s freedom from the colonial yoke.
Those who sacrifice their life and endure persecution for the benefit of humankind have a very high station in the sight of God. While none of us can fully fathom the mysteries of martyrdom and why so much innocent blood is shed, the history of humankind is replete with soul-stirring episodes of supreme sacrifice, such as that of Jesus Christ and his apostles; Imam Husayn and his entire family, massacred on the plain of Karbila; Guru Tegh Bahadur, who at the urging of his minor son, later Guru Gobind Singh, willingly offered his life, refusing to yield to the diktat of a tyrant; the assassination of Gandhiji, Father of the Nation, are just a few examples.
Today let’s reflect on the life of Gandhiji. What was the message of his death? What does he have to teach the world? With so much violence everywhere today, what is so significant about Bapu’s killing? We can answer these questions with the word “yagna”. Yagna was the spirit of his life and the message of his death. Every breath of his life, including the last, was an oblation to his country, his principles and his faith in God. The theme of his life was truly sacrifice. He could have been a wealthy attorney. He could have had a life of relative ease and prosperity. However, he was man devoted to his country and to its freedom. Through his tireless effort and his simple piety, he showed the world how through principles of satyagraha, ahimsa and sarvodaya his fellow-country men and women could be inspired and motivated to achieve greatness. However, in spite of national and international acclaim, he never lost his humility, his dedication and his spirit of sacrifice. Rather, the flames of his true yagna to Bharat mata seemed to only to grow until he, himself, was the poornahuti, or final offering.
Gandhiji’s spirit of nonviolence and sacrifice did not only pertain to overt actions. It was a quality of the spirit—a quality of humble love for all human beings. There is a story of a man travelling by train to Porbandar in the same coach as Gandhiji. However, the man did not know that the skinny old man in his coach was Mahatma Gandhi. So, all night long this man lay down on the seat, occupied the entire berth and pushed Gandhiji and put his feet on him and left Gandhiji with barely enough room to sit upright. However, Gandhiji did not fight, nor complain. How easy it would have been to shout and say, “I am Mahatma Gandhi; give me room in the coach.” But Gandhiji’s ahimsa was an ahimsa of the tongue and an ahimsa of the heart. So, he simply let the man use as much of the seat as he desired.
As the train pulled into Porbandar the man mentioned that he was going to see the famous Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhiji still remained silent. He had no need to stray from divine humility and disclose his identity. As Gandhiji descended from the train to a welcoming crowd of thousands, the man fell at his feet, begging for forgiveness. Gandhiji, of course, blessed and forgave him, telling him only that he should be more respectful of others, regardless of who they are. He taught the man the true lesson of sarvodaya, for the man learned that everyone must be treated with dignity and respect even those who are less fortunate.
Fully aware of his shortcomings, Gandhiji tenaciously clung to truth and virtue all his life. The Bhagavad-Gita was his closest companion and source of guidance. How unfortunate it is that today so many people claim that their lives and their work are “God’s”. Yet, they use this as an excuse to lie, to cheat and even to kill. And, at the end it is clear that they merely used God’s name in the service of themselves. Gandhiji remained pure and his death is the clearest example. Due to his commitment to ahimsa and complete surrender in God he refused to have bodyguards. Hence, on that fateful day as he climbed the four sandstone steps where people had gathered for the evening prayer meeting, a ‘stout young man in khaki dress’ made obeisance to him and the very next moment fired three shots from his pistol that was hidden in his pocket. Gandhiji collapsed on the ground and gasping for breath uttered “hey Ram,” “hey Ram.” It was 17 minutes past 5:00 pm.
Gandhiji would not have wanted to be only remembered in history books. He would not want to be remembered only as the freedom fighter who led India to independence. He would want his message to live on; he would want his yagna to continue burning, to continue bringing light and warmth to all the world. He was steadfast in his commitment to the law of nonviolence which he believed was the law of love and fervently wanted to make it the law of our species.
It is within the power of everyone, just as Gandhiji showed through his life to bring about positive change. When enough of us prioritize the well-being of future generation above our own instant gratification, the country will progress rapidly and every citizen will benefit greatly from positive and sustainable development. To this end, the words of Martin Luther King Jr., also a martyr, are so pertinent: “If humanity is to progress, Gandhi is inescapable…We may ignore him at our own risk.”
Dr. A. K. Merchant is a social worker, independent researcher working with some non-governmental organizations in the fields of education, environment and the interfaith movement.
Joe Biden relies on advisors who view the world through the prism of the West’s civilizing mission to the “lesser breeds” of the earth to formulate his policies towards Israel and the Middle East.
21 Jan 2024 – Joe Biden’s inner circle of strategists for the Middle East — Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan and Brett McGurk — have little understanding of the Muslim world and a deep animus towards Islamic resistance movements. They see Europe, the United States and Israel as involved in a clash of civilizations between the enlightened West and a barbaric Middle East. They believe that violence can bend Palestinians and other Arabs to their will. They champion the overwhelming firepower of the U.S. and Israeli military as the key to regional stability — an illusion that fuels the flames of regional war and perpetuates the genocide in Gaza.
In short, these four men are grossly incompetent. They join the club of other clueless leaders, such as those who waltzed into the suicidal slaughter of World War One, waded into the quagmire of Vietnam or who orchestrated the series of recent military debacles in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Ukraine. They are endowed with the presumptive power vested in the Executive Branch to bypass Congress, to provide weapons to Israel and carry out military strikes in Yemen and Iraq. This inner circle of true believers dismiss the more nuanced and informed counsels in the State Department and the intelligence communities, who view the refusal of the Biden administration to pressure Israel to halt the ongoing genocide as ill-advised and dangerous.
Biden has always been an ardent militarist — he was calling for war with Iraq five years before the U.S. invaded. He built his political career by catering to the distaste of the white middle class for the popular movements, including the anti-war and civil rights movements, that convulsed the country in the 1960s and 1970s. He is a Republican masquerading as a Democrat. He joined Southern segregationists to oppose bringing Black students into Whites-only schools. He opposed federal funding for abortions and supported a constitutional amendment allowing states to restrict abortions. He attacked President George H. W. Bush in 1989 for being too soft in the “war on drugs.” He was one of the architects of the 1994 crime bill and a raft of other draconian laws that more than doubled the U.S. prison population, militarized the police and pushed through drug laws that saw people incarcerated for life without parole. He supported the North American Free Trade Agreement, the greatest betrayal of the working class since the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. He has always been a strident defender of Israel, bragging that he did more fundraisers for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) than any other Senator.
Whose Child is This? Whose child is this? Is this child an Iraqi . . . an Israeli . . . a Chechnyan . . . an Afghani . . . a Kurd . . . a Nigerian? Is she or he English, Indonesian, Spanish, Lebanese, Turkish, Congolese, Bosnian, Persian? Does it matter? Is this child not a daughter or son to each of us?
Is this child not a human being born of a union of a man and woman whose intimacy, whose passion, whose very breathe yielded a life that sought only to live . . . to enjoy some moments of laughter and delight, some moments of comfort and calm . . . to make yet another life.
Now this child rests amidst the dust and debris of war . . . lifeless . . . torn and shattered . . . killed by someone whom she or he never knew, and would likely never meet. Death from a distance. . . a bomb from a plane, a shell from a mortar, a strap of explosives . . . intentional and willing, calculated and planned, a measured effort to destroy.
The Source: an agent of death and destruction, a pilot or soldier, an insurgent or terrorist . . . does it matter? They have killed their own child . . . they have killed our child. And in doing so, they have diminished each of us as human beings, each of us as creatures of consciousness and conscience, each of us as reflections and carriers of life. Words cannot console her or his parents, if they, indeed, survived this horror. They are left with only endless pain . . . memories of a child eating, sleeping, playing . . . a reminder of a tragic moment inscribed in mortar and blood.
Enough! Enough! Stand, speak, write, act against those who advocate violence and hate no matter the source — be they presidents, prime ministers, generals, terrorists, mullahs, rabbis, dictators, ministers, true believers . . . tell them that we do not share their quest for power and greed. Tell them we do not share their hate, nor their blindness and indifference to suffering. Tell them we do not share their empty post-tragedy rhetoric designed to keep us mired in the fulfillment of their selfish needs. We are not pacified and contented by their explanations and assurances. We challenge and contest their motives! We resent and resist their excuses. How shallow their words in the face of dying or dead child.
THIS IS OUR CHILD! Today, we claim this child as our own, too late to keep her or him alive, too late to know her or his hopes and dreams, too late to know the promise and possibilities of their life had it been given the chance to be lived free of oppression, abuse, and indignity.
But we are not too late to affirm to all living children that we will try to protect you, to guard you, and to shelter you from the terror of war and violence, and from an untimely, painful, and meaningless death, by choosing peace over war, compassion over violence, voice over silence, and conscience over comfort.
Note: I first wrote this brief appeal in July, 2005, following a conference in Savannah, Georgia, in which Dr. Amer Hosin shared photos of death and suffering in the Middle East. I emailed this appeal in the December holiday season, when the poignant holiday carol, “What child is this?” is played endlessly on radio and television, testimony to Christian faith, but indirectly testimony to the consequences of violence against children, and the reality our hope for recovery and redemption reside in children – all children!
Today, as I viewed the now iconic photo of the stalwart Syrian boy, covered in dust, his mind and body shattered by bombs he could never fathom, and I recalled the iconic photo of the naked Vietnamese girl escaping napalm. I decided I must share this appeal today. It is upon all of us. What can we do to stop the destruction of life? What can we do end the reflexive response of violence and hate toward those we deem enemies.
I say to you, I plead with you now: “Hate begets violence, and violence begets hate, and always innocents become the victims.” We use the word “hate” daily, casually expressing our so often disgust or revulsion with something as benign as broccoli, or an athletic team. “I hate __________!
The powerful emotion of “hate” has escaped our conscious awareness! We “hate” too much, too often, too easily; the consequences of the word and the behaviors it implies are lost to us. Ask: Do I have a right to “hate?” Is “hate” a choice? What do I mean when I say I “hate”! Stare at the image of a dead Iraqi child? Embed the image of the struggling shocked Syrian boy in your mind. Make room for it! It is more important than so many other images you hold. Ask: Whose child is this? He or she is your child! If you deny this reality, then await the day the face returns to remind you of your failure, to haunt your minds as you look at your child.
Anthony J. Marsella, Ph.D., a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, is a past president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, Emeritus Professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii’s Manoa Campus in Honolulu, Hawaii, and past director of the World Health Organization Psychiatric Research Center in Honolulu.
In the topsy-turvy world of corporate media reporting on U.S. foreign policy, we have been led to believe that U.S. air strikes on Yemen, Iraq and Syria are legitimate and responsible efforts to contain the expanding war over Israel’s genocide in Gaza, while the actions of the Houthi government in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Iran and its allies in Iraq and Syria are all dangerous escalations.
In fact, it is U.S. and Israeli actions that are driving the expansion of the war, while Iran and others are genuinely trying to find effective ways to counter and end Israel’s genocide in Gaza while avoiding a full-scale regional war.
We are encouraged by Egypt and Qatar’s efforts to mediate a ceasefire and the release of hostages and prisoners-of-war by both sides. But it is important to recognize who are the aggressors, who are the victims, and how regional actors are taking incremental but increasingly forceful action to respond to genocide.
A near-total Israeli communications blackout in Gaza has reduced the flow of images of the ongoing massacre on our TVs and computer screens, but the slaughter has not abated. Israel is bombing and attacking Khan Younis, the largest city in the southern Gaza Strip, as ruthlessly as it did Gaza City in the north. Israeli forces and U.S. weapons have killed an average of 240 Gazans per day for more than three months, and 70% of the dead are still women and children.
Israel has repeatedly claimed it is taking new steps to protect civilians, but that is only a public relations exercise. The Israeli government is still using 2,000 pound and even 5,000 pound “bunker-buster” bombs to dehouse the people of Gaza and herd them toward the Egyptian border, while it debates how to push the survivors over the border into exile, which it euphemistically refers to as “voluntary emigration.”
People throughout the Middle East are horrified by Israel’s slaughter and plans for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, but most of their governments will only condemn Israel verbally. The Houthi government in Yemen is different. Unable to directly send forces to fight for Gaza, they began enforcing a blockade of the Red Sea against Israeli-owned ships and other ships carrying goods to or from Israel. Since mid-November 2023, the Houthis have conducted about 30 attacks on international vessels transiting the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden but none of the attacks have caused casualties or sunk any ships.
In response, the Biden administration, without Congressional approval, has launched at least six rounds of bombing, including airstrikes on Sanaa, the capital of Yemen. The United Kingdom has contributed a few warplanes, while Australia, Canada, Holland and Bahrain also act as cheerleaders to provide the U.S. with the cover of leading an “international coalition.”
President Biden has admitted that U.S. bombing will not force Yemen to lift its blockade, but he insists that the U.S. will keep attacking it anyway. Saudi Arabia dropped 70,000 mostly American (and some British) bombs on Yemen in a 7-year war, but utterly failed to defeat the Houthi government and armed forces.
Yemenis naturally identify with the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza, and a million Yemenis took to the street to support their country’s position challenging Israel and the United States. Yemen is no Iranian puppet, but as with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran’s Iraqi and Syrian allies, Iran has trained the Yemenis to build and deploy increasingly powerful anti-ship, cruise and ballistic missiles.
The Houthis have made it clear that they will stop the attacks once Israel stops its slaughter in Gaza. It beggars belief that instead of pressing for a ceasefire in Gaza, Biden and his clueless advisers are instead choosing to deepen U.S. military involvement in a regional Middle East conflict.
The United States and Israel have now conducted airstrikes on the capitals of four neighboring countries: Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen. Iran also suspects U.S. and Israeli spy agencies of a role in two bomb explosions in Kerman in Iran, which killed about 90 people and wounded hundreds more at a commemoration of the fourth anniversary of the U.S. assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in January 2020.
On January 20th, an Israeli bombing killed 10 people in Damascus, including 5 Iranian officials. After repeated Israeli airstrikes on Syria, Russia has now deployed warplanes to patrol the border to deter Israeli attacks, and has reoccupied two previously vacated outposts built to monitor violations of the demilitarized zone between Syria and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
Iran has responded to the terrorist bombings in Kerman and Israeli assassinations of Iranian officials with missile strikes on targets in Iraq, Syria and Pakistan. Iranian Foreign Minister Amir-Abdohallian has strongly defended Iran’s claim that the strikes on Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan targeted agents of Israel’s Mossad spy agency.
Eleven Iranian ballistic missiles destroyed an Iraqi Kurdish intelligence facility and the home of a senior intelligence officer, and also killed a wealthy real estate developer and businessman, Peshraw Dizayee, who had been accused of working for the Mossad, as well as of smuggling Iraqi oil from Kurdistan to Israel via Turkey.
The targets of Iran’s missile strikes in northwest Syria were the headquarters of two separate ISIS-linked groups in Idlib province. The strikes precisely hit both buildings and demolished them, at a range of 800 miles, using Iran’s newest ballistic missiles called Kheybar Shakan or Castle Blasters, a name that equates today’s U.S. bases in the Middle East with the 12th and 13th century European crusader castles whose ruins still dot the landscape.
Iran launched its missiles, not from north-west Iran, which would have been closer to Idlib, but from Khuzestan province in south-west Iran, which is closer to Tel Aviv than to Idlib. So these missile strikes were clearly intended as a warning to Israel and the United States that Iran can conduct precise attacks on Israel and U.S. “crusader castles” in the Middle East if they continue their aggression against Palestine, Iran and their allies.
At the same time, the U.S. has escalated its tit-for-tat airstrikes against Iranian-backed Iraqi militias. The Iraqi government has consistently protested U.S. airstrikes against the militias as violations of Iraqi sovereignty. Prime Minister Sudani’s military spokesman called the latest U.S. airstrikes “acts of aggression,” and said, “This unacceptable act undermines years of cooperation… at a time when the region is already grappling with the danger of expanding conflict, the repercussions of the aggression on Gaza.”
After its fiascos in Afghanistan and Iraq killed thousands of U.S. troops, the United States has avoided large numbers of U.S. military casualties for ten years. The last time the U.S. lost more than a hundred troops killed in action in a year was in 2013, when 128 Americans were killed in Afghanistan.
Since then, the United States has relied on bombing and proxy forces to fight its wars. The only lesson U.S. leaders seem to have learned from their lost wars is to avoid putting U.S. “boots on the ground.” The U.S. dropped over 120,000 bombs and missiles on Iraq and Syria in its war on ISIS, while Iraqis, Syrians and Kurds did all the hard fighting on the ground.
In Ukraine, the U.S. and its allies found a willing proxy to fight Russia. But after two years of war, Ukrainian casualties have become unsustainable and new recruits are hard to find. The Ukrainian parliament has rejected a bill to authorize forced conscription, and no amount of U.S. weapons can persuade more Ukrainians to sacrifice their lives for a Ukrainian nationalism that treats large numbers of them, especially Russian speakers, as second class citizens.
Now, in Gaza, Yemen and Iraq, the United States has waded into what it hoped would be another “US-casualty-free” war. Instead, the U.S.-Israeli genocide in Gaza is unleashing a crisis that is spinning out of control across the region and may soon directly involve U.S. troops in combat. This will shatter the illusion of peace Americans have lived in for the last ten years of U.S. bombing and proxy wars, and bring the reality of U.S. militarism and warmaking home with a vengeance.
Biden can continue to give Israel carte-blanche to wipe out the people of Gaza, and watch as the region becomes further engulfed in flames, or he can listen to his own campaign staff, who warn that it’s a “moral and electoral imperative” to insist on a ceasefire. The choice could not be more stark.
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.
US Central Command claimed Sunday that three US soldiers were killed and 25 injured in a drone strike against a US base in Jordan near the Syrian border. US officials told the New York Times that the strike hit a barracks housing troops at a US base known as Tower 22.
The Islamic Resistance in Iraq, a group for Iranian-linked militias, claimed credit for the attack, stating it was retaliation for US support for the genocide in Gaza.
US politicians seized upon the deaths of the American soldiers to call for a direct US attack on Iran, which would greatly intensify the sprawling war throughout the Middle East triggered by Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham called on the United States to strike “targets of significance inside Iran.”
“Hit Iran now, hard,” Graham declared. “The only thing the Iranian regime understands is force,” said Graham, adding, “Until they pay a price with their infrastructure and their personnel, the attacks on US troops will continue.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican, called on the administration to impose “serious crippling costs” on Iran.
Republican Senator Dan Sullivan called for “a clear, lethal and overwhelming response.”
Republican Senator Tom Cotton called for a “devastating military retaliation against Iran’s terrorist forces, both in Iran and across the Middle East.”
Some Democrats also joined the clamor for war. Retired US General and former NATO Commander Wesley Clark, once a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, said, “The US should stop saying ‘we don’t want to escalate.’ This invites them to attack us. Stop calling our strikes ‘retaliation.’ This is reactive. Take out their capabilities and strike hard at the source: Iran.”
President Joe Biden, in announcing the deaths, declared, “We will hold all those responsible to account at a time and in a manner of our choosing.”
Bloomberg News reported, citing unnamed sources, that the US was contemplating direct attacks inside Iran. “One possibility is covert action that would see the US strike Iran without claiming credit for it but sending a clear message regardless,” the news service wrote. “The Biden administration could also target Iranian officials directly, as former President Donald Trump did when he ordered the killing of General Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad in 2020.”
A direct US attack inside Iran would massively inflame what is already a regional shooting war throughout the Middle East.
In an article headlined “The Ever-Expanding Middle East War,” The Economist explained:
If you drew a diagram of who is shooting at whom in the Middle East, it would look increasingly like a bowl of spaghetti. What began in October as a war between Israel and Hamas has now drawn in militants from four other Arab states. In addition, Iran, Israel, and Jordan all bombed Syria this month. Iran also unexpectedly bombed Pakistan, which must have wondered how it got dragged into this mess.
In the past two weeks, the United States has carried out strikes inside Syria, Iraq and Yemen, while its ally Israel is exchanging daily fire across its northern border with Lebanon, struck at alleged Iran-linked targets in Syria, and had military clashes with the Egyptian armed forces. Two US Navy SEALs were killed earlier this month during a raid on a ship the US alleged was carrying weapons to be used by Houthi rebels in Yemen.
The escalating war throughout the Middle East takes place as the United States is deepening its complicity in the genocide in Gaza.
On Friday, the Biden administration announced that it would suspend funding for United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). The organization is the main lifeline for food and medical aid getting into Gaza, whose population is facing widespread starvation due to a deliberate Israeli blockade. The UK, Finland, Australia, Canada, Italy, the Netherlands and Switzerland also announced that they would suspend funding for the organization.
The US claimed that the action, which would only further mass death throughout Gaza, was in response to allegations that a dozen UNRWA employees took part in the October 7 attack on Israel. UNRWA employs 13,000 people in Gaza.
World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared, “We appeal to donors not to suspend their funding to @UNRWA at this critical moment. Cutting off funding will only hurt the people of #Gaza who desperately need support.”
Last week, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to suspend its blockade of Gaza in response to a case brought by South Africa alleging Israel was carrying out genocide in Gaza.
Agnes Callamard, the secretary-general of Amnesty International, condemned the move in a statement on Twitter. “Sickening heartless decision of the richest countries in the world to punish the most vulnerable population on earth because of the alleged crimes of 12 people. Right after the ICJ ruling finding risk of genocide. Sickening.”
Israel has responded to the ICJ ruling by intensifying its forcible displacement of Palestinians. In a statement published Sunday, the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor warned,
Less than two days after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that Israel would be subject to temporary measures as a result of its military operations infringing upon its obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, including mass forced displacement to unsafe locations, thousands of people were forcibly evacuated from the Khan Yunis refugee camp and several other parts of the governorate to the Strip’s western coastal areas.
To date, 32,000 Gazans have been killed, including those both confirmed dead and who have been missing for more than two weeks, according to the monitor. These include 115 journalists, 675 healthcare workers and 165 civil defense workers. The vast majority of the dead are either women or children; 1.95 million people have been internally displaced.
Israel is in mourning. It’s a catastrophic, devastating, painful day for the country – a black Monday filled with trepidation and fear.
The day of 23 January 2024 will be printed on the Israeli psyche as a bloody event for decades to come and a turning point in its deadly conflict with the Palestinians of Gaza and in which it’s trying to erase their national identity but with little success.
The end result is the killing of 24 of its soldiers and officers in Gaza over a 24-hour period which is stark and harrowing. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says this is the worst day Israel has experienced since it waged its deadly war on the Gaza Strip after 7 October.
Twenty-one of these 24 soldiers were killed in the area near the Al Maghazi Camp to the east of the enclave, and specifically, around 600 meters after the siege border that divides the strip from Israel.
How?
It seems the Israeli soldiers who are now fighting in the center of Gaza around Dier Al Balah and the camps of Nuseirat and Al Breij – were in the middle of a booby-trap operation that blew up in their faces on a massive scale and heard one kilometer away. The soldiers had been busy wiretapping two houses with explosives and TNT to blow them up for senseless reasons. It is suggested the objective had been to clear up the area as a prelude to creating a military buffer zone Israel wants to create in the east and north of the Gaza Strip to bolster its own security.
Hamas, Palestinian resistance and the Izz Al Din Al Qassam operatives got to hear of what the Israeli soldiers were up to through intelligence gathering and took the initiative by launching RBG missiles on the two houses and thus resulted in the deaths of the soldiers while they were busy doing the wiring.
A lot of question so far continue to remain unanswered and that is why the Israeli army has already launched an official investigation to ascertain what happened and how the soldiers were killed. This being not the first time Israeli soldiers were killed in mysterious circumstances.
And it is bearing in mind the ground soldiers were supposed to be protected by a tank stationed outside the buildings. They may have been actually hit by Palestinian rocket launchers that triggered a chain-reaction and killed the soldiers in total.
Another theory may lie in the fact that these ground troops frequently call for help from the air and thus it could have been Israeli warplanes that may either bombed the tank and/or the building that already had waiting bombs to go off and this explains the large explosions heard in the surrounding areas.
This theory led to another which suggests that 1 in 5 soldiers killed in Gaza do so in friendly-fire attacks according to Israeli army figures which also form 17 percent of the number of killed.
According to Fayez Al Duwairi, military strategists and commentator for Al Jazeera, this is a high figure. First of all, he disputes the 17 percent number and says it logically should be 20 percent based on the 1 in 5 equation and the fact there is a prevailing Hannibal Directive in Israeli military strategy. It states it’s better to have an Israeli soldier killed rather than have him taken alive by the enemy.
Of course, this is not to say anything about the scores of injured that are feared to have resulted from the blasts. The Israeli army would only talk about the number of those killed with many saying they could be even higher.
Consequences
The killing of the soldiers is likely to have major consequences for Israeli society and the military and political establishments with demands for much answers. These soldiers are not from the professional army but are only reservists who have families, homes and daily jobs to go to.
One of the questions likely to be asked therefore, is why put these soldiers in such positions that require technical expertise in bomb-making and wiring? They are too inexperienced for such work and as reservists should not have been there in the first place.
The Israeli war on Gaza is turning out to be a nightmare despite the mass bombing of the Palestinians, yet Netanyahu and his army seem to be blindfolded by the fact that they say we will continue till we get the job done and finish off Hamas but the problem is Izz Al Din operatives and Saraya Al Quds fighters of Islamic Jihad are nowhere to be found.
The Israeli army keeps saying “we are getting the job done” but the problem with that is there is no documentary evidence as those provided by the Palestinian organizations. Netanyahu says despite the heavy losses, the war on Gaza will continue.
The author, based in Amman, Jordan, writes on Middle East Affair
The first and the last time I met John Pilger in person was in 2018.
I was invited to deliver a speech at the NSW Parliament in Sydney, Australia. Among the large crowd were many that I knew and respected – a former foreign minister, socially conscientious MPs, morally driven intellectuals and activists, and so on.
As I stood at the podium, glancing at the crowd, I saw John Pilger. He had a big smile on his face, as if he was in great anticipation to hear me talk.
The reality was entirely different. I would have rather listened to John than to lecture before him.
As I expressed my many “thank yous”, I made a point of emphasizing that I have modeled my journalism around that of John Pilger.
The painful truth is that, growing up in a refugee camp in Gaza, we rarely affiliated Western media, intellect or journalists with truth-telling, in general. Though, with time, I realized that this wholesale assumption was hardly fair, associating bias with everything Western had its own justification, if not logic.
Aside from the typical corporate biased media narrative on Palestine, the Middle East, the Arab and Muslim world – in fact, the entirety of the Global South – there were those who were identified as part of the ‘left’.
We were told that those supposed leftist are the exception to the norm. But experience has taught me that, aside from ideological nuances, even the so-called left still saw the non-Western world based on a different set of unique biases. They perceived the rest of the world through judgmental eyes, as if they, and they alone, had access to a moral code according to which the rest of us must be filtered.
Those ‘leftists’ are only against certain kinds of wars, especially if they perceive military interventions to be channeled by imperialist agendas. For them, so-called humanitarian intervention is morally justified, although there is no evidence that Western interventions of that kind ever bode well for any country.
Ultimately, that reasoning tends to have little impact on the outcome of international conflicts. Worse, some leftists often find themselves siding with the very imperialist powers they supposedly loathe, whenever it is convenient.
And then, there are the John Pilgers of this world: Principled to the core, and able to understand, dissect and convey the political, cultural and historical complexities of conflicts to millions of people around the world.
“We are beckoned to see the world through a one-way mirror, as if we are threatened and innocent and the rest of humanity is threatening, or wretched, or expendable,” Pilger said at his Sydney Peace Prize acceptance speech, in 2009.
For the Australian-born journalist, whose impact on our understanding of major global conflicts is arguably unparalleled in modern history, these were not mere words but principles to which he adhered to throughout his life, until his passing on December 30.
In his book, and documentary, ‘The New Rulers of the World’, Pilger brilliantly connects the dots of major global issues – social injustice, inequality, the so-called war on terror and more – demonstrating the powerful maxim that “injustice everywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”.
Pilger’s enemies were never a certain race, a nation or even an ideology. He simply served as the sharp critic and, at times, the mobilizer against all sorts of government-orchestrated injustices, whether within national boundaries or internationally.
He challenged imperialism in all of its forms, colonialism wherever it may be. This put him on a crash course with Washington, Canberra, London and other Western capitals.
His dedication to the causes of indigenous people, from Australia to Palestine to Indonesia were all reflected in great volumes and documentaries, such as ‘Utopia’, ‘Palestine is Still the Issue’ and the ‘New Rulers of the World’.
Pilger’s powerful texts as an academic, an author and a journalist, must not distract from his equally powerful and hard-hitting documentaries as a filmmaker. More important than the many awards he had achieved as a filmmaker, starting with ‘The Quiet Mutiny’, was the impact of these films on the way that millions of people around the world perceived issues, conflicts and wars that had only been communicated through non-critical eyes.
“Many journalists now are no more than channelers and echoers of what George Orwell called the ‘official truth’. They simply cipher and transmit lies,” he said during an interview with David Barsamian in 2007.
Though, at times, some intellectuals of Pilger’s caliber may have deviated from their commitment to the uncompromising moral code of principled journalism and intellect, Pilger’s legacy suggests otherwise.
He stood firmly on the side of oppressed people, spoke strongly against the injustices meted out by the powerful, and uncompromisingly defended free speech whenever it is threatened.
Indeed, Pilger was one of the most stalwart supporters of Julian Assange in his war against censorship in all of its forms.
“This is not about the survival of a free press. There is no longer a free press. (…) The paramount issue is justice and our most precious human right: to be free,” Pilger wrote in an article in July 2023.
Before our meeting, I exchanged many messages with John. The first time he responded to my request for an endorsement of a book, I was truly thrilled. I was also moved by his kind response to a young author who was merely starting his own quest for a just world.
Many messages and years later, we finally met in person. I quickly made my way to him through the crowd to thank him for all that he has done for Palestine and for all the oppressed people of this world.
His death, especially during these difficult times, is a major loss for humanity. But I know that, deep down, John must have known that things would eventually get better. He did his part, and much more.
Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle.
