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By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies

13 Nov 2023 – We have both been reporting on and protesting against U.S. war crimes for many years, and against identical crimes committed by U.S. allies and proxies like Israel and Saudi Arabia: illegal uses of military force to try to remove enemy governments or “regimes”; hostile military occupations; disproportionate military violence justified by claims of “terrorism”; the bombing and killing of civilians; and the mass destruction of whole cities.

Most Americans share a general aversion to war, but tend to accept this militarized foreign policy because we are tragically susceptible to propaganda, the machinery of public manipulation that works hand in hand with the machinery of killing to justify otherwise unthinkable horrors.

This process of “manufacturing consent” works in a number of ways. One of the most effective forms of propaganda is silence, simply not telling us, and certainly not showing us, what war is really doing to the people whose homes and communities have been turned into America’s latest battlefield.

The most devastating campaign the U.S. military has waged in recent years dropped over 100,000 bombs and missiles on Mosul in Iraq, Raqqa in Syria, and other areas occupied by ISIS or Da’esh. An Iraqi Kurdish intelligence report estimated that more than 40,000 civilians were killed in Mosul, while Raqqa was even more totally destroyed.

The shelling of Raqqa was the heaviest U.S. artillery bombardment since the Vietnam War, yet it was barely reported in the U.S. corporate media. A recent New York Times article about the traumatic brain injuries and PTSD suffered by U.S. artillerymen operating 155 mm howitzers, which each fired up to 10,000 shells into Raqqa, was appropriately titled A Secret War, Strange New Wounds and Silence from the Pentagon.

Shrouding such mass death and destruction in secrecy is a remarkable achievement. When British playwright Harold Pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, in the midst of the Iraq War, he titled his Nobel speech “Art, Truth and Politics,” and used it to shine a light on this diabolical aspect of U.S. war-making.

After talking about the hundreds of thousands of killings in Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile and Nicaragua, Pinter asked:  “Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes, they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy,”

“But you wouldn’t know it,” he went on.”It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”

But the wars and the killing go on, day after day, year after year, out of sight and out of mind for most Americans. Did you know that the United States and its allies have dropped more than 350,000 bombs and missiles on 9 countries since 2001 (including 14,000 in the current war on Gaza)? That’s an average of 44 airstrikes per day, day in, day out, for 22 years.

Israel, in its present war on Gaza, with children making up more than 40% of the more than 11,000 people killed to date, would surely like to mimic the extraordinary U.S. ability to hide its brutality. But despite Israel’s efforts to impose a media blackout, the massacre is taking place in a small, enclosed, densely-populated urban area, often called an open-air prison, where the world can see a great deal more than usual of how it impacts real people.

Israel has killed a record number of journalists in Gaza, and this appears to be a deliberate strategy, as when U.S. forces targeted journalists in Iraq. But we are still seeing horrifying video and photos of daily new atrocities: dead and wounded children; hospitals struggling to treat the injured; and desperate people fleeing from one place to another through the rubble of their destroyed homes.

Another reason this war is not so well hidden is because Israel is waging it, not the United States. The U.S. is supplying most of the weapons, has sent aircraft carriers to the region, and dispatched U.S. Marine General James Glynn to provide tactical advice based on his experience conducting similar massacres in Fallujah and Mosul in Iraq. But Israeli leaders seem to have overestimated the extent to which the U.S. information warfare machine would shield them from public scrutiny and political accountability.

Unlike in Fallujah, Mosul and Raqqa, people all over the world are seeing video of the unfolding catastrophe on their computers, phones and TVs. Netanyahu, Biden and the corrupt “defense analysts” on cable TV are no longer the ones creating the narrative, as they try to tack self-serving narratives onto the horrifying reality we can all see for ourselves.

With the reality of war and genocide staring the world in the face, people everywhere are challenging the impunity with which Israel is systematically violating international humanitarian law.

Michael Crowley and Edward Wong have reported in the New York Times that Israeli officials are defending their actions in Gaza by pointing to U.S. war crimes, insisting that they are simply interpreting the laws of war the same way that the United States has interpreted them in Iraq and other U.S. war zones. They compare Gaza to Fallujah, Mosul and even Hiroshima.

But copying U.S. war crimes is precisely what makes Israel’s actions illegal. And it is the world’s failure to hold the United States accountable that has emboldened Israel to believe it too can kill with impunity.

The United States systematically violates the UN Charter’s prohibition against the threat or use of force, manufacturing political justifications to suit each case and using its Security Council veto to evade international accountability. Its military lawyers employ unique, exceptional interpretations of the Fourth Geneva Convention, under which the universal protections the Convention guarantees to civilians are treated as secondary to U.S. military objectives.

The United States fiercely resists the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC), to ensure that its exceptional interpretations of international law are never subjected to impartial judicial scrutiny.

When the United States did allow the ICJ to rule on its war against Nicaragua in 1986, the ICJ ruled that its deployment of the “Contras” to invade and attack Nicaragua and its mining of Nicaragua’s ports were acts of aggression in violation of international law, and ordered the United States to pay war reparations to Nicaragua. When the United States declared that it would no longer recognize the jurisdiction of the ICJ and failed to pay up, Nicaragua asked the UN Security Council to enforce the reparations, but the U.S. vetoed the resolution.

Atrocities like Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the bombing of German and Japanese cities to “unhouse” the civilian population, as Winston Churchill called it, together with the horrors of Germany’s Nazi holocaust, led to the adoption of the new Fourth Geneva Convention in 1949, to protect civilians in war zones and under military occupation.

On the 50th anniversary of the Convention in 1999, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which is responsible for monitoring international compliance with the Geneva Conventions, conducted a survey to see how well people in different countries understood the protections the Convention provides.

They surveyed people in twelve countries that had been victims of war, in four countries (France, Russia, the U.K. and the U.S.) that are permanent members of the UN Security Council, and in Switzerland where the ICRC is based. The ICRC published the results of the survey in 2000, in a report titled, People on War – Civilians in the Line of Fire.

The survey asked people to choose between a correct understanding of the Convention’s civilian protections and a watered-down interpretation of them that closely resembles that of U.S. and Israeli military lawyers.

The correct understanding was defined by a statement that combatants “must attack only other combatants and leave civilians alone.” The weaker, incorrect statement was that “combatants should avoid civilians as much as possible” as they conduct military operations.

Between 72% and 77% of the people in the other UNSC countries and Switzerland agreed with the correct statement, but the United States was an outlier, with only 52% agreeing. In fact 42% of Americans agreed with the weaker statement, twice as many as in the other countries. There were similar disparities between the United States and the others on questions about torture and the treatment of prisoners of war.

In U.S.-occupied Iraq, the United States’ exceptionally weak interpretations of the Geneva Conventions led to endless disputes with the ICRC and the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI), which issued damning quarterly human rights reports. UNAMI consistently maintained that U.S. airstrikes in densely populated civilian areas were violations of international law.

For instance, its human rights report for the 2nd quarter of 2007 documented UNAMI’s investigations of 15 incidents in which U.S. occupation forces killed 103 Iraqi civilians, including 27 killed in airstrikes in Khalidiya, near Ramadi, on April 3rd, and 7 children killed in a helicopter attack on an elementary school in Diyala province on May 8th.

UNAMI demanded that “all credible allegations of unlawful killings by MNF (Multi-National Force) forces be thoroughly, promptly and impartially investigated, and appropriate action taken against military personnel found to have used excessive or indiscriminate force.”

A footnote explained, “Customary international humanitarian law demands that, as much as possible, military objectives must not be located within areas densely populated by civilians. The presence of individual combatants among a great number of civilians does not alter the civilian character of an area.”

UNAMI also rejected U.S. claims that its widespread killing of civilians was the result of the Iraqi Resistance using civilians as “human shields,” another U.S. propaganda trope that Israel is mimicking today. Israeli accusations of human shielding are even more absurd in the densely populated, confined space of Gaza, where the whole world can see that it is Israel that is placing civilians in the line of fire as they desperately seek safety from Israeli bombardment.

Calls for a ceasefire in Gaza are echoing around the world: through the halls of the United Nations; from the governments of traditional U.S. allies like France, Spain and Norway; from a newly united front of previously divided Middle Eastern leaders; and in the streets of London and Washington. The world is withdrawing its consent for a genocidal “two-state solution” in which Israel and the United States are the only two states that can settle the fate of Palestine.

If U.S. and Israeli leaders are hoping that they can squeak through this crisis, and that the public’s habitually short attention span will wash away the world’s horror at the crimes we are all witnessing, that may be yet another serious misjudgment. As Hannah Arendt wrote in 1950 in the preface to The Origins of Totalitarianism.

“We can no longer afford to take that which was good in the past and simply call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury in oblivion. The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition. This is the reality in which we live. And this is why all efforts to escape from the grimness of the present into nostalgia for a still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of a better future, are vain.”

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

20 November 2023

Source: transcend.org

 

 

By Ann Garrison

15 Nov 2023 – On November 2, the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly for a resolution calling on the US to lift the trade embargo against Cuba that President John Kennedy imposed in 1962. The US and Israel were the only two nations to vote no, with Ukraine abstaining. Total dependence creates total compliance.

The US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control records complex specifics of sanctions on Cuba. There are so many that they amount to a virtual blockade.

“You talk about sanctions,” says Cuban journalist Liz Oliva Fernández, “you think ‘OK, maybe the United States has one, two, or three sanctions on Cuba,’ but I’m talking about a blockade—a system of sanctions. There are so many sanctions together on Cuba that it’s unique. This is the only country that has been suffering under so many sanctions for so long.

“The goal is to overthrow the government, to suffocate the people so hard that they want to overthrow their own government.”

Sanctions, she said, also isolate Cuba from the rest of the world, because US trade, banking, and business relations are so far- flung that doing business with other parts of the world also involves business with the US. In her six-part documentary series “The War on Cuba,” she gives the example of Ernesto, a farmer who needs two prosthetic legs. Ernesto has prosthetics but can’t get the flexible type he needs because they’re made by a German company that uses a US-manufactured material for more than 10% of their content.

“The 10% of the raw material that they use for these prosthetic legs is made in the United States, or by a United States company,” she says. “So that means it’s illegal for Cuba to buy the prosthetic legs that Ernesto needs.”

“I’d walk more. I’d even be able to work a lot more,” Ernesto says. “But we don’t have access to them because of the blockade.”

“And this is with everything,” says Fernández. “Imagine that you want to buy tractors. Maybe the seats of the tractors are made in Mexico but they have parts that are made in the US, or a US company owns part of the company that makes the tractors, so it’s a violation of US law for anyone to sell Cuba the whole tractor.”

Her docuseries includes Cuban farmers using horse-drawn plows.

“This is the United States. It’s an empire. So they have businesses around the world. They have stocks around the ` world in different companies. So we can’t even purchase what we most need to purchase in Cuba, including medicines and materials needed to manufacture medicines.

“US law makes it illegal for companies to do business with Cuba. If you do business with Cuba, you could lose your business with the United States. You have to choose between doing business with the United States and doing business with Cuba, and of course, if they’re forced to make that choice, most every company will choose to do business with the United States.”

Trump added Cuba to the State Sponsors of Terrorism list, which made foreign companies even more afraid of doing business there.

Uphill on the Hill

Fernández has been touring the US showing “Uphill on the Hill,” a film in which she narrates the story of her quest to ask members of the US Congress why they and the Biden Administration are so determined to sustain the brutal sanctions. In particular she seeks to speak to the Cuban American legislators who have most aggressively insisted that the sanctions be sustained.

Not surprisingly, they all give her the brush-off, and she wryly checks them off her list one by one. Ultimately she does manage to join a delegation meeting with Massachusetts Congressman Jim McGovern, a longtime opponent of the sanctions on Cuba. Pierre LaBossiere of Haiti Action Committee has a cameo in that scene in which he asks why the US punishes Cuba and lends so much support to Haiti, where the corrupt government kills its own people.

After the Cuban American legislators refuse to meet with her, Fernández meets Medea Benjamin and other members of Code Pink. Fernández then says she’s realized that Washington, DC is a Black city, so, being Afro Cuban, she’s going out to talk to people who look like her. One after another, they tell her that there’s no reason for the sanctions and they oppose them. In a choice comic moment, one says he’d like to see the sanctions lifted because he’s a cigar smoker.

Obama, Trump, and Biden

During his second term, when he no longer had to worry about the Miami Cuban vote in the swing state of Florida, President Obama loosened the trade restrictions, saying it did not serve US interests to make the Cuban state collapse. He even traveled to Cuba to announce his policy. This, Fernández said, brought a sudden, short-lived burst of optimism, trade and prosperity to Cuba, which she describes in Episode One of “The War on Cuba.” The Rolling Stones even appeared to perform in Havana after the embargo was lifted.

Trump reversed Obama’s policy, even though he himself had actually applied for licenses to do business in Cuba before becoming president. After becoming president, he tightened and even instituted new sanctions in order to placate the reactionary Miami Cubans.

“All the concessions that Barack Obama has granted the Castro regime were done through executive order, which means the next president can reverse them,” he said, speaking at a campaign rally in Miami. “And that I will do.” And he did.

Fernández said that Biden has not returned to Obama’s policies, most likely because he has unrealistic hopes of winning Florida in 2024.

Fernández on tour

The dates, times, and locations of Liz Fernández’s upcoming appearances in Seattle, Albuquerque, and Tampa are on the website bellyofthebeastcuba.com, where you can also find “The War on Cuba.”

During the Q&A at her appearance at Oakland’s La Pena Cultural Center, someone asked her how the Cuban economy works, to which she teared up and answered, “It doesn’t, because of the blockade.”

Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She attended Stanford University and is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment.

20 November 2023

Source: transcend.org

By Mazin Qumsiyeh

14 Nov 2023 – The genocide goes on: several babies died when taken out of incubators that had no power and many more cancer patients sent home died. Most injured people cannot be helped since the medical system is completely collapsed and there are 27,000 injured.  A friend I have in Gaza told me U.S. flag was seen on a tank and unusual soldiers not Israeli are seen (wonder if these are the US Delta forces that Biden was photographed shaking their hands in this country). Rotting dead human bodies are all over Gaza. Stray hungry dogs are eating some! Of course Israel does not allow international observers or even international journalists to enter Gaza to check on its lies and distortions. They even killed 1 Lebanese and 37 Palestinian  journalists (majority reporting for international agencies). I do not know if some people have yet thought of eating other humans to survive (at least in North Gaza were starvation and thirst are more since Israel carpet-bombed the area).  Now to be sure there are many genocides/holocausts in human history but there are six unique features of this ongoing one:

1) It is so blatantly obvious and live broadcast live 24 hours a day and available for anyone willing to switch off the mainstream media and go to live footage like  aljazeera.com or almayadeen or even telegram, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, etc. The images and sounds are horrifying (imagine people there also feeling and smelling the death and dying)

2) It is self-admitted by the Zionists themselves including that they denied water, foo, medicine, fuel, electricity etc  to the 2.3 million inhabitants of Gaza and even proudly explained that there are “no civilians in Gaza” (Israeli president), and we deny food because we are dealing with human animals (Israeli minister of war), see https://popular-resistance.blogspot.com/2023/11/are-we-being-duped-to-focus-only-on.html

3) It is accompanied by the highest number of LIES spoken by Israeli officials and parroted by those with no conscience. Is anything the Israeli government say to be believed after a long history of past and present lies challenged by facts- see https://popular-resistance.blogspot.com/2023/11/does-truth-matter.html )??,

4) Due to the money and resources of strong lobbies (most of it funded by Western taxpayer money), the colonization, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid are supported by a) many western and arab governments, b) the mainstream media parroting the Israeli (false) talking points

5) Palestinians are not only victimized (8 million are refugees/displaced people, millions who remain in Palestine stored in ghettos/Bantustans/concentration camps and subjected for decades to the most brutal oppression. Bu Palestinians and their supporters asking for human rights are also dehumanized and defamed as hating Jews etc (ironic since thousands of Jews were willing to be arrested and even brutalized for their support of Palestinian rights)

6) There is a vicious brutalization of people for being Palestinian by Israeli occupation forces (and here there is no distinction between settlers and soldiers since everyone serves in the army and all behave similar). Collective punishment and torture are rampant. Beatings of and shooting civilians happen regularly. The attempt to suppress free speech goes on, destroying any semblance or pretense of “democracy”. A new law in Israel forbids people from watching some videos considered “terrorist propaganda” (and of course anything against Israeli apartheid si considered such). People under Israeli rule lost their jobs, were jailed or tortured or all for social media posts even mildly speaking of the horrors of Gaza. In Gaza now, if you post message critical of Israeli actions your home can be bombed. In the Western countries also, citizens showing sympathy to Palestine or working against apartheid or colonialism are targeted. There are laws in some US states against engaging in Boycotts, Divestments, Sanctions and in some European countries working for freedom for Palestine is considered illegal.

On the positive side this injustice has garnered unprecedented public outrage around the world. Millions were in the streets protesting and hundreds of thousands are acting and engaged in civil disobedience, in boycott of Israeli and US products that support colonization etc. (see ongaza.org item #  21) . That is also unique!! Everything helps so please keep the pressure on the cheerleaders and participants in genocide.

***********************

I wrote some open letters before and here for the sake of those who missed some of those letters here are the links:

Letter to Gaza https://popular-resistance.blogspot.com/2023/10/letter-to-gaza.html

Letter to the world https://popular-resistance.blogspot.com/2023/10/letter-to-world.html

Letter to US Citizens https://popular-resistance.blogspot.com/2023/11/open-letter-to-us-citizens.html

Letter to Israelis and Jews who support Israel https://popular-resistance.blogspot.com/2023/10/questions-to-israelis-and-jews.html

Letter to PLO https://popular-resistance.blogspot.com/2023/11/open-letter-to-plo.html

Letter to Mainstream media https://popular-resistance.blogspot.com/2023/11/mainstream-media-kills-truth.html

Update on numbers of victims from the UN https://www.ochaopt.org/updates

Chris Hedges The Horror https://scheerpost.com/2023/11/11/chris-hedges-the-horror-the-horror/

Israeli soldiers beat father in front of wife and child and mother tries to reassure child

https://tinyurl.com/fatherbeaten

Other interesting videos stripping prisoners (most with no charge or simple workers) and beating them while many are naked https://tinyurl.com/palestiniansabused

https://youtu.be/d3D0Vrn7DQ8

My podcast on 100 years of injustice

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/understanding-israel-palestine/id1656552317?i=1000632420017

An Open Letter from Palestinian Christians to Western Church Leaders and Theologians

Mazin Qumsiyeh, associate professor of genetics and director of cytogenetic services at Yale University School of Medicine, is founder and president of the Holy Land Conservation Foundation and ex-president of the Middle East Genetics Association.

20 November 2023

Source: transcend.org

By teleSUR

In Gaza and the West Bank, 11,517 Palestinians have been killed and 32,000 injured in Israeli attacks since October 7.

16 Nov 2023 – South African President Cyril Ramaphosa today called on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to launch an investigation into Israel’s war crimes in the Gaza Strip.

“We join many other countries and organizations in asking the ICC to investigate what is happening and, in fact, we can see with our own eyes in Israel,” the president said in statements to the press.

Ramaphosa said that “war crimes are being committed” and brought up the case of the Al Shifa hospital, completely blockaded by Israeli forces, without water, electricity or food.

In Gaza and the West Bank, 11,517 Palestinians have been killed and 32,000 injured in Israeli attacks since October 7. In this regard, Ramaphosa said that there is no precedent in the history of a war that has claimed the lives of so many innocent children in such a short time.

The president also denounced Israel’s flagrant violation of international law. “We abhor what is happening in Gaza, which has become a concentration camp and a genocide,” Ramaphosa said.

The South African president called on the international community to join forces for an immediate ceasefire and ensure the protection of civilians.

The South African government announced last week that it would withdraw all its diplomats from Israel for consultations in rejection of Israel’s unbridled aggression against the Palestinian population of Gaza.

South Africa and China strengthen political and trade relations

20 November 2023

Source: transcend.org

By Mairead Maguire

13 Nov 2023 – Talk World Radio
Making peace instead of wars in Gaza and Ukraine.

Talk World Radio: Mairead Maguire on Ending the Current Wars

Mairead Corrigan Maguire, co-founder of Peace People, is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment. She won the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize for her work for peace in Northern Ireland.

20 November 2023

Source: transcend.org

By Maha Nassar

What does the call “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” mean to Palestinians who say it? And why do they keep using the slogan despite the controversy that surrounds its use?

As both a scholar of Palestinian history and someone from the Palestinian diaspora, I have observed the decades-old phrase gain new life—and scrutiny—in the massive pro-Palestinian marches in the U.S. and around the world that have occurred during the Israeli bombing campaign in the Gaza Strip in retaliation for Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel.

Pro-Israel groups, including the U.S.-based Anti-Defamation League, have labeled the phrase “antisemitic.” It has even led to a rare censure of House Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian-American member of Congress, for using the phrase.

But to Tlaib, and countless others, the phrase isn’t antisemitic at all. Rather, it is, in Tlaib’s words, “an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence.”

I cannot speak to what is in the heart of every person who uses the phrase. But I can speak to what the phrase has meant to various groups of Palestinians throughout history, and the intent behind most people who use it today.

Simply put, the majority of Palestinians who use this phrase do so because they believe that, in 10 short words, it sums up their personal ties, their national rights, and their vision for the land they call Palestine. And while attempts to police the slogan’s use may come from a place of genuine concern, there is a risk that tarring the slogan as antisemitic—and therefore beyond the pale—taps into a longer history of attempts to silence Palestinian voices.

An Expression of Personal Ties

One reason for the phrase’s appeal is that it speaks to Palestinians’ deep personal ties to the land. They have long identified themselves—and one another—by the town or village in Palestine from which they came.

And those places stretched across the land, from Jericho and Safed near the Jordan River in the east, to Jaffa and Haifa on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea in the west.

These deeply personal ties were passed down over generations through clothing, cuisine, and subtle differences in Arabic dialects that are specific to locations within Palestine.

And those ties continue today. Children and grandchildren of Palestinian refugees often feel a personal connection to the specific places their ancestors hailed from.

A Demand for National Rights 

But the phrase is not simply a reference to geography. It’s political.

“From the river to the sea” also seeks to reaffirm Palestinians’ national rights over their homeland and a desire for a unified Palestine to form the basis of an independent state.

When Palestine was under British colonial rule from 1917 to 1948, its Arab inhabitants objected strongly to partition proposals advocated by British and Zionist interests. That’s because, buried deep in the proposals, were stipulations that would have forced hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs off their ancestral lands.

In 1946, the Delegation of Arab Governments proposed instead a “unitary state” with a “democratic constitution” that would guarantee “freedom of religious practice” for all and would recognize “the right of Jews to employ the Hebrew language as a second official language.”

The following year, the United Nations instead approved a partition plan for Palestine, which would have forced 500,000 Palestinian Arabs living in the proposed Jewish state to choose between living as a minority in their own country or leaving.

It’s in this context that the call for a unified, independent Palestine emerges, according to Arabic scholar Elliott Colla.

During the 1948 war that led to the formation of the state of Israel, around 750,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their villages and towns. By the end of the war, Palestine was split into three: 78% of the land became part of the Jewish state of Israel, while the remainder fell under Jordanian or Egyptian rule.

Palestinian refugees believed they had a right to return to their homes in the new state of Israel. Israeli leaders, seeking to maintain the state’s Jewish majority, sought to have the refugees resettled far away. Meanwhile, a narrative emerged in the West in the 1950s claiming that Palestinians’ political claims were invalid.

Future Vision

Palestinians had to find a way to both assert their national rights and lay out an alternative vision for peace. After Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the call for a free Palestine “from the river to the sea” started to gain traction among those who believed that all the land should be returned to the Palestinians.

But it soon also came to represent the vision of a secular democratic state with equality for all.

In 1969, the Palestinian National Council, the highest decision-making body of the Palestinians in exile, formally called for a “Palestinian democratic state” that would be “free of all forms of religious and social discrimination.”

This remained a popular vision among Palestinians, even as some of their leaders inched toward the idea of establishing a truncated Palestinian state alongside Israel in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem.

Many Palestinians were skeptical of this two-state solution. For refugees exiled since 1948, a two-state solution would not allow them to return to their towns and villages in Israel. Some Palestinian citizens of Israel feared that a two-state solution would leave them even more isolated as an Arab minority in a Jewish state.

Even Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip—those who stood the most to gain from a two-state solution—were lukewarm to the idea. A 1986 poll found that 78% of respondents “supported the establishment of a democratic-secular Palestinian state encompassing all of Palestine,” while only 17% supported two states.

That helps explains why the call for a free Palestine “from the river to the sea” became popular in the protest chants of the First Intifada, or Palestinian uprising, from 1987 to 1992.

Notably, Hamas, an Islamist party founded in 1987, did not initially use “from the river to the sea,” likely due to the phrase’s long-standing ties to Palestinian secular nationalism.

Two States or One?

The 1993 signing of the Oslo Accords led many to believe that a two-state solution was just around the corner.

But as hopes for a two-state solution dimmed, some Palestinians returned to the idea of a single, democratic state from the river to the sea.

Meanwhile, Hamas picked up the slogan, adding the phrase “from the river to the sea” to its 2017 revised charter. The language was part of Hamas’ broader efforts to gain legitimacy at the expense of its secular rival, Fatah, which was seen by many as having failed the Palestinian people.

Today, broad swaths of Palestinians still favor the idea of equality. A 2022 poll found strong support among Palestinians for the idea of a single state with equal rights for all.

Offensive Phrase?

Perhaps colored by Hamas’ use of the phrase, some have claimed it is a genocidal call—the implication being that the slogan’s end is calling for Palestine to be “free from Jews.” It’s understandable where such fears come from, given the Hamas attacks on October 7 that killed 1,200 people, according to the Israeli foreign ministry.

But the Arabic original, “Filastin hurra,” means liberated Palestine. “Free from” would be a different Arabic word altogether.

Other critics of the slogan insist that by denying Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, the phrase itself is antisemitic. Under such thinking, protesters should instead be calling for a Palestinian state that exists alongside Israel—and not one that replaces it.

But this would seemingly ignore the current reality. There is strong scholarly consensus that a two-state solution is no longer viable. They argue that the extent of settlement building in the West Bank and the economic conditions in Gaza have eaten away at the cohesion and viability of any envisioned Palestinian state

Further Demonization 

There is another argument against the slogan’s use: That while not antisemitic in itself, the fact that some Jewish people see it that way—and as such see it as a threat—is enough for people to abandon its use.

But such an argument would, I contend, privilege the feelings of one group over that of another. And it risks further demonizing and silencing Palestinian voices in the West.

Over the last month, Europe has seen what pro-Palestine advocates describe as an “unprecedented crackdown” on their activism. Meanwhile, people across the U.S. are reporting widespread discrimination, retaliation, and punishment for their pro-Palestinian views.

On November 14, George Washington University suspended the student group Students for Justice in Palestine, in part because the group projected the slogan “Free Palestine From the River to the Sea” on the campus library.

Principle, Not Platform 

None of this is to say that the phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” doesn’t have multiple interpretations.

Palestinians themselves are divided over the specific political outcome they wish to see in their homeland.

But that misses the point. Most Palestinians using this chant do not see it as advocating for a specific political platform or as belonging to a specific political group. Rather, the majority of people using the phrase see it as a principled vision of freedom and coexistence.

Maha Nassar is an associate professor in the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Arizona and the author of Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World.

19 November 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Countercurrents Collective

A Hamas health official said more than 80 people were killed Saturday in twin strikes on a northern Gaza refugee camp, including a UN school used as a shelter for people displaced by the Israel-Hamas war.

Social media videos — verified by AFP — showed bodies covered in blood and dust on the floor of a building, where mattresses had been wedged under school tables in Jabalia, the Palestinian territory’s biggest refugee camp.

“At least 50 people” were killed in a dawn strike on the UN-run Al-Fakhura school in the camp, which has been converted into a shelter for displaced Palestinians, a health ministry official in Hamas-controlled Gaza told AFP.

The army’s relentless air and ground campaign has since killed 12,300 people, more than 5,000 of them children, according to the Hamas government which has ruled Gaza since 2007.

According to UN figures, some 1.6 million people have been displaced inside the Gaza Strip by six weeks of fighting.

UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths denounced the “tragic news of the children, women and men killed”.

“Shelters are a place for safety,” he posted on X, formerly Twitter. “Schools are a place for learning.

“Civilians cannot and should not have to bear this any longer.”

A separate strike Saturday on another building in Jabalia camp killed 32 people from the same family, 19 of them children, the Hamas official said.

Israel has told Palestinians to move from north Gaza for their safety, but deadly air strikes continued to hit central and southern areas of the narrow coastal territory.

On Saturday, hundreds of people fled on foot after the director of Gaza’s main hospital said the Israeli army ordered the evacuation of the facility where some 2,000 people were trapped.

Columns of sick and injured — some of them amputees — were seen making their way out of Al-Shifa hospital towards the seafront without ambulances along with displaced people, doctors and nurses, as loud explosions were heard around the complex.

On the way, an AFP journalist saw at least 15 bodies, some in advanced stages of decomposition, along a road lined by heavily damaged shops and overturned vehicles.

The health ministry said 120 wounded, along with an unspecified number of premature babies, were still at Al-Shifa hospital.

Israel has been pressing military operations inside the hospital, searching for the Hamas operations centre it says lies under the sprawling complex — a charge Hamas denies.

In Gaza City, Israeli troops had called over loudspeakers to evacuate Al-Shifa “in the next hour”, an AFP journalist at the hospital reported.

They also called the hospital’s director, Mohammed Abu Salmiya, telling him to ensure “the evacuation of patients, wounded, the displaced and medical staff, and that they should move on foot towards the seafront”, he said.

According to Ahmed El Mokhallalati, a doctor at the hospital, “most of the medical staff and patients had left” but he was staying at Al-Shifa along with five other doctors.

Despite the evacuation order, “many patients cannot leave the hospital as they are in the ICU beds or the baby incubators,” Mokhallalati said on X.

19 November 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Phil Pasquini

In support of invoking an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, members from the American Palestinian Women’s Association, CODEPINK: Women for Peace, and members of Doctors Against Genocide descended on the Hart Senate Office Building November 16. The groups called on ten women senators — six of whom have received substantial campaign donations from American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) — to do everything they can to bring about a ceasefire in Gaza in ending the senseless slaughter there.

At each office, several activists spoke to attentive staff members imploring them to convey their messages, asking that the member vote in favor of an immediate ceasefire. They also provided a binder with photographs of victims in Gaza especially children, along with the names of 5,000 children killed to show compelling evidence of the horrific and brutal carnage the Israeli invasion has imposed upon so many innocent people.

Only Senator, Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) whose staff who was contacted by telephone refused to meet with the activists.

Outside of Senator Maria Cantwell’s (D-WA) office, speaking with a staff member, CODE Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin asked why the senator had not called for a ceasefire to which he responded: “She has not called for a ceasefire yet because that is not her position right now.” When asked why it was not her position, he said: “She has a different view, you know although she has not made a public statement, she is certainly talking to her colleagues and accessing what the options are. I have nothing else I can say about her position.”

That answer was challenged by a doctor who asked if her position was that “Israel has a right to defend itself” and if so to make it clear to Senator Cantwell that “under international law, Israel has committed a number of war crimes and right now as we speak, the ICC (International Criminal Court) is going to sue Biden and the Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense. The doctor reminded the staff member that under the Leahy Law “We (the U.S. by law) cannot not supply weapons to those who can possibly commit genocide and war crimes. So, all of the senators and all of the congressmen are under warning now that they can get sued. And they will be held accountable.”

“She should be on the right side of history and if she or you or any of you have ever questioned what you would have done during the Holocaust or during the Civil Rights movement, you’re doing it right now.”

Another doctor reflected that she likened the war in Gaza to a “genocide televised” with international media and online access. “If we can’t end this genocide with all this information, I don’t know what has become of us. Netanyahu cannot use this war for his own personal gain, these are people, they are human. Our hearts go out to the people and especially to the doctors in Gaza. They are our heroes and our angels.”

A member of the American Palestinian Women’s Association made the urgent plea to the senators’ staff members that she could not believe that “We are here pleading for your humanity,” that seeing images of injured and dead children on TV and babies dying “We have to speak up, we cannot stand silent for this. We have to stop the bombing of the kids, our babies (paid for) with our tax money. Noting that every five minutes a child is being killed, it is in our politicians’ hands to stop the war now!”

Another doctor described Israeli fliers being dropped on residents’ homes in Northern Gaza warning them to leave or they could be considered as “colluding” with Hamas and subject to attacks and bombing. “There are many of us who know people who do not have that ability to move. They have family who are disabled, they have family who are elderly, they have newborn children.”

“I don’t understand the concept of providing aid to allow for our tax dollars to provide bombs to create the victims…and then we are going to ask people to stich them up to try and save them. This is idiotic. It is insanity.”

Another activist conveyed a message from a Gaza resident to staff members in telling of cooking on open wood fires, that having canned food or vegetables were now a luxury and that having drinkable water now “…is like a dream. I see many people now on the roads holding their packs, their eyes tearing up at the memories they are leaving behind at the destruction of all their efforts over the years. I see children injured with muddy feet. Mothers running bare feet with their babies.”

The writer went on to say “Now I am on a roof when I look up at the night sky and see all the stars, I am enjoying them when I realize there is something abnormal about them. Normal stars don’t move around or turn off. I’m puzzled until I realize that my sky is full of unmanned war planes and drones. I wish that one day I will be able to stare at real stars in the sky without being bombed any second.”

The senators who were visited during the direct action are listed below. Those who have received campaign donations from AIPAC are shown with their total career donations reported in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs as of September 2022.

Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) $422,490

Maria Cantwell (D-WA)

Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) $573,073

Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) $742,311

Maggie Hassan (D-NH) $710,936

Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) $463,499

Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) $572,075

Kristen Sinema (A-I)

Tina Smith (D-MN)

Elizabeth Warren (D-MA)

https://doctorsagainstgenocide.org/

(This article has appeared in Nuzeink)

Phil Pasquini is a freelance journalist and photographer.

18 November 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Sonali Kolhatkar

Americans are funding a genocide and no one asked our permission.

We are being dragged, unwillingly, into a war that is decimating a people. We are being forced to become involuntary accomplices to mass slaughter.

Palestinians, on the basis of their legal right against being wiped out, have filed a major lawsuit against President Joe Biden’s administration for funding Israel’s ongoing pogrom in Gaza, one that has killed more than 11,000 people, including 4,700 children. Represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the plaintiffs include Palestinians who have collectively lost at least 116 family members to U.S.-funded Israeli military attacks.

The U.S. has sent Israel a total of about $317 billion in inflation-adjusted tax-payer money, which amounts to more than $4 billion annually. Almost all that funding has gone toward the Israeli military. Israel is the largest recipient of American foreign aid, receiving more money than what we give to far larger, far poorer nations, ones that have a far greater post-colonial claim to Western aid.

Now, the U.S. Congress and the Biden administration want to give even more of our tax dollars to Israel, specifically to continue bankrolling the unfolding genocide. They are quibbling over the political strings attached to the aid but are united in their desire to send the supplemental funds.

But, according to CCR, “The United States has a duty under Article 1 of the Genocide Convention to prevent and punish acts of genocide, an obligation the U.S. Congress made law in 1988.” It’s not just the number of dead Palestinians that ought to result in a withholding of U.S. aid but the fact that Israeli officials have been overt about their genocidal aspirations.

The lawsuit offers evidence of how various Israeli politicians have referred to Palestinians with dehumanizing language such as Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who promised that the “human animals” in Gaza would suffer the consequences of his order for “a complete siege on the Gaza Strip,” resulting in “no electricity, no food, no fuel.”

Days into Israel’s bombing campaign, United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese warned on October 14, 2023, of a grave danger of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, saying, “The international community has the responsibility to prevent and protect populations from atrocity crimes.” Referring to the first great displacement that Palestinians suffered, Albanese added, “There is a grave danger that what we are witnessing may be a repeat of the 1948 Nakba, and the 1967 Naksa, yet on a larger scale.”

At the time Albanese made the warning, Israel had killed 1,900 Palestinians.

A month later, on November 13, Israel’s Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter described his nation’s bombing campaign with a concise phrase, worthy of an operational name for planned genocide: “Gaza Nakba 2023. That’s how it’ll end.”

By then the official death toll of Palestinians was more than 11,000. United Nations experts warned that “the Palestinian people are at grave risk of genocide,” and, added, “Israel’s allies also bear responsibility and must act now to prevent its disastrous course of action.”

One journalist named Chris McGreal, wrote in The Guardian, “I covered the Rwandan genocide as a reporter. The language spilling out of Israel after the butchery of the Hamas attacks is eerily familiar.” McGreal also correctly called out U.S. elected officials such as Senator Lindsey Graham for picking up the pitchfork and joining the violent mob. “We are in a religious war here. I’m with Israel. Do whatever the hell you have to do to defend yourself. Level the place,” said Graham.

It’s a simple calculus: Israeli officials promise to wipe out people who they view as less than human, with the full blessing and financial might of the U.S. The predictable outcome is a fulfillment of their promises, one that is happening in real-time. Not only are politicians responsible for Palestinian genocide, but so too is the media for uncritically reporting on the explicit goals and desires of genocidal maniacs.

Why shouldn’t we believe leaders when they tell us exactly who they are and what they intend to do? History is replete with naïve denials of stated intentions to violate human decency even as crimes unfold in plain sight. Recall that when Donald Trump told the nation in 2015 that he would launch a white supremacist presidential bid. Media outlets refused to call him a racist until several years later after the damage was done and he was in the White House. Hate crimes surged against Black people, Latinos, Muslims, and Jews. It wasn’t until the summer of 2019 that media outlets finally decided it was okay to label him a racist—that too after much hand-wringing. About a year and a half later, Trump mobilized an attack on the U.S. Capitol in January 2021 in what legal experts describe as an “insurrection” by a majority white mob. Trump told us who he was. Mainstream media outlets refused to believe him until it was too late.

We’re seeing a familiar hand-wringing today. Take the New York Times’s insistence on using euphemisms like “extremist,” “incendiary,” and “inflammatory” to avoid describing Israeli officials’ language and the Israeli military’s actions as genocidal.

This type of discussion dilutes an understanding of Israel’s stated goal by attempting to grapple with the technical definition of genocide. For example, Omer Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University wrote in a November 10 New York Times op-ed that, “I believe that there is no proof that genocide is currently taking place in Gaza.” Still, Bartov admits that his “greatest concern watching the Israel-Gaza war unfold is that there is genocidal intent, which can easily tip into genocidal action.” (Notice how he doesn’t say “Israel has genocidal intent”—a common use of the passive voice to dilute blame.)

Countering this concern in comments to Vox, Raz Segal, an associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University asked, “How many Palestinians need to die for these statements [by Israeli officials] to be recognized as what they are?”

It is the job of journalists to warn against abuse, exploitation, and corruption, and to shine a light on power so that an informed citizenry can decide on the course of its government. Many journalists are indeed speaking out against sidestepping the responsibility to report on genocide. More than a thousand have signed on to a letter saying they “hold Western newsrooms accountable for dehumanizing rhetoric that has served to justify ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.”

That ethnic cleansing is in full force. CCR’s lawsuit is seeking an injunction to immediately block U.S. tax dollars from supporting Israel’s war in a concrete effort to block the genocide, or at least wash the stain of Palestinian blood off American hands. Meanwhile, public support for U.S. aid to Israel has dropped, with more Americans now opposed to the military assistance than supporting it according to a Reuters-Ipsos poll. Nearly 70 percent support a ceasefire.

International leaders, government offices, and media institutions, often ignore or deny genocides as they are unfolding, express regret after it’s too late, and then make promises of “Never again.” When warning signs of the next genocide arise, the cycle repeats. It’s up to us to stop it and we have that chance right now.

Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations.

18 November 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Chris Hedges

CAIRO, Egypt: The Palestinians are human laboratory rats to the Israeli military, intelligence services and arms and technology industries. Israel’s drones, surveillance technology — including spyware, facial recognition software and biometric gathering infrastructure — along with smart fences, experimental bombs and AI-controlled machine guns, are tried out on the captive population in Gaza, often with lethal results. These weapons and technologies are then certified as “battle tested” and sold around the world.

Israel is the 10th biggest arms dealer on the planet and sells its technology and weapons to an estimated 130 nations, including military dictatorships in Asia and Latin America. Israeli weapons sales totalled $12.5 billion last year. Its close relationship with these military, internal security, surveillance, intelligence-gathering and law enforcement agencies, explains the fulsome support Israel’s allies give to its genocidal campaign in Gaza. When Colombian President Gustavo Petro refused to condemn the Oct. 7 attack by Palestinian resistance groups as a “terrorist attack” and said “terrorism is killing innocent children in Palestine,” Israel immediately halted all sales of defense and security equipment to Colombia. This global cabal, dedicated to permanent war and keeping its populations monitored and controlled, has hundreds of billions of dollars a year in sales. These technologies are cementing into place a supranational corporate totalitarianism, a world where populations are enslaved in ways that past totalitarian regimes could only imagine.

The genocidal assault on Gaza is another chapter in the century-long ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians by the Israeli settler colonial project. It is accompanied, as is true for all settler colonial projects, by the theft of natural resources, land, water and the natural gas in the Gaza Marine fields, 20 nautical miles off the coast of Gaza, which could contain up to 1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. In a world of diminishing resources, especially water in the Middle East, and the dislocations caused by the climate crisis, Gaza is the prelude to a frightening new world order. As democracies wither and die, as economic inequality expands, as poverty and desperation mounts, the global ruling class will increasingly do to us – once we become restive and attempt to rebel – what they are doing to the Palestinians.

It is not a far cry from Gaza to the camps and detention centers set up for migrants fleeing to Europe from Africa and the Middle East. It is not a far cry from the carpet bombing in Gaza to the endless wars in the Middle East and the global south. It is not a far cry from the anti-terrorism laws used to criminalize dissent in Israel to the anti-terrorism laws introduced in Europe and the U.S.

On Oct. 7, Palestinians in Gaza escaped from their laboratory cage. They went on a killing spree against their sadistic masters. Almost 12,000 Palestinians have been killed and some 30,000 wounded, including 4,700 children, since Oct. 7 in the hurricane of shells, bullets, bombs and missiles that are turning Gaza into a wasteland. Nearly 3,000 Palestinians are missing or buried under the rubble. Soon Palestinians will be convulsed by infectious diseases and starvation. Those who survive, if Israel succeeds in its ethnic cleansing, will become refugees, yet again, over the border in Egypt. There remain plenty of Palestinian test subjects in the West Bank. Gaza will be closed for business.

Israel, which is not a signatory of the Arms Trade Treaty, has long supplied some of the most heinous regimes on the planet with weaponry, including the apartheid government of South Africa and Myanmar. India is Israel’s largest purchaser of military drones. Israel provided UAVs, missiles and mortars to Azerbaijan for its invasion and occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh, which displaced 100,000 people, more than 80 percent of the enclave’s ethnic Armenians. Israel sold napalm and weapons to the Salvadoran military, as well as the murderous regime of General José Efraín Ríos Montt in Guatemala, when I covered the wars in the 1980s in Central America. Israeli-made Uzi submachine guns were the weapons of choice for Central American death squads. Israel also sold weapons to the Bosnian Serbs, despite international sanctions, when I covered the war in Bosnia in the 1990s, a conflict that took the lives of 100,000 people.

“Israel is a key player in the EU battle to both militarize its borders and deter new arrivals, a policy that hugely accelerated after the massive influx of migrants in 2015, principally due to the wars in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan,” writes Anthony Loewenstein in “The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World,” “The EU has partnered with leading Israeli defense companies to use its drones, and of course years of experience in Palestine is a key selling point.”

“The similarities between the US–Mexico border and Israel’s wall through the occupied territories are growing by the year,” he writes. “One informs and inspires the other, with tech companies always looking for new ways to target and capture perceived enemies. The use of high-tech surveillance tools to monitor the border was backed by both Republicans and Democrats. One company during the Trump years, the billionaire Peter Theil–backed Brinc, tested the possibility of deploying armed drones that would taser migrants with a stun gun along the US–Mexico border.”

Heron TP “Eitan” drones, manufactured by Israel Aerospace Industries – Israel’s largest aerospace and defense company and the country’s largest arms exporter – are used by Frontex, the European Union’s external border and coastal agency, to monitor and deter migrant and refugee boats in the Mediterranean. The drones, which fly up to 40 hours continuously, can be modified to carry four Spike rockets with fragmentation sleeves of thousands of 3mm tungsten cubes that puncture metal and “cause tissue to be torn from flesh,” in essence shredding the victim. They are routinely used on Palestinians.

“It’s almost impossible to cross the Mediterranean [as a migrant],” Felix Weiss, of the German NGO Sea-Watch, told Loewenstein. “Frontex has become a militarized actor, its equipment coming from war zones,” he added.

Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest private weapons firm, supplies U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) with hi-tech surveillance towers which it uses along the border with Mexico. It also supplied the CBP with its Hermes drone in 2004 in order to test the feasibility of using UAVs on the border.

Pegasus, a phone-hacking tool produced by the Israeli NSO Group, a cyber intelligence agency, was used by Mexican drug cartels to target the journalist Griselda Triana, after her husband Javier Valdez Cárdenas, also an investigative reporter, was assassinated in 2017. The Mexican government is directly implicated in targeting journalists and civil society members with Pegasus spyware, according to research and analysis by Canada’s Citizen Lab. After the reporter Jamal Khashoggi was killed and dismembered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in Oct. 2018, it was discovered that an NSO client targeted the phone of his fiancé, Hanan Elatr. Pegasus transforms a cellular phone into a mobile surveillance device, with microphones and cameras activated without the user’s knowledge.

Skunk water, a putrid smelling liquid, was tested and perfected on Palestinians, often with Israeli film crews recording the attacks to show potential clients the effectiveness of the chemical.

“Israeli forces routinely douse entire Palestinian neighborhoods in skunk water, deliberately spraying it into private homes, businesses, schools and funerals in what the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem calls ‘a collective punitive measure’ against Palestinian villages that engage in protest against Israel’s colonial violence,” The Electronic Intifada reported in 2015. That same year, the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department purchased 14 canisters of skunk to use against protesters following demonstrations that erupted after the police killing of unarmed African American teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri.

Israel created a sophisticated facial recognition system, Red Wolf, to document every Palestinian in the occupied territories. The technology “is used extensively” to “consolidate existing practices of discriminatory policing, segregation, and curbing freedom of movement, violating Palestinians’ basic rights,” Amnesty International explains in its recent report titled “Automated Apartheid.” The French investigative outlet Disclose revealed that French police have been unlawfully using facial recognition software provided by the Israeli tech firm BriefCam for eight years. BriefCam’s technology allows users to “detect, track, extract, classify [and] catalog” people “appearing in video surveillance footage in real-time.”

AI-machine guns, manufactured by the Israeli company SMARTSHOOTER, can fire stun grenades and sponge-tipped bullets as well as tear gas. They were perfected in trials on the Palestinians in the West Bank. SMARTSHOOTER was recently awarded a contract to supply the British Army with its SMASH “automatic targeting and firing system” which can be attached to small arms such as automatic rifles.

Israel, according to Jeff Halper in his book “War Against the People,” has done cutting edge work on cyborg soldiers. It developed a radar system that sees through walls, he writes. As The Electronic Intifada explains, Israel’s military-industrial complex has built “a tank named Cruelty, a 20-gram drone in the shape of a butterfly, a stealth ‘wonder boat’ called the Death Shark, a series of weapons named after insects or natural phenomena (bionic hornets, smart dust, dragonfly drones and smart dew robots), cybernetic insects, a 600-building ‘urban warfare’ training center nicknamed Chicago and a one-megaton bomb containing electromagnetic pulse capability.”

Harper notes that during the occupation of Iraq, the U.S. military replicated the tactics used by Israel against the Palestinians. It constructed a security barrier around the Baghdad Green Zone, imposed closures on towns and villages, carried out targeted assassinations, copied Israeli torture techniques and used checkpoints and roadblocks to isolate towns and villages.

Israel trains and equips U.S. police forces, teaching aggressive tactics, backed up by heavy military hardware and vehicles, which were used in Ferguson and Atlanta during the police confrontations with activists who were protesting Cop City.

Halper calls this the “Palestinianization” of global conflicts.

“With so many Israeli companies involved in maintaining the infrastructure around the occupation, these firms found innovative ways to sell their services to the state, test the latest technology on Palestinians, and then promote them around the world,” Loewenstein explains. And while “the defense industries are increasingly in private hands,” following decades of neoliberal privatization, “they continue to act as an extension of Israel’s foreign policy agenda, supporting its goals and pro-occupation ideology.”

The global ruling class will counter the destabilizing forces of inequality, curtailment of civil liberties, collapsing infrastructure, failing health systems and increasing shortages caused by an accelerating climate crisis, by branding all who resist as “human animals.” This new world order began in Gaza. It ends at home.

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

18 November 2023

Source: countercurrents.org