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By Dr. Ramzy Baroud

On October 20, Secretary-General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, stood on the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing, between Egypt and besieged Gaza.

Guterres was not the only international figure to travel to the Gaza border, hoping to mobilize the international community in the face of an ongoing genocide, in an already impoverished and besieged Strip.

“Behind these walls, we have two million people that is suffering (sic) enormously,” Guterres said.

These efforts, however, paid little dividends.

The spokesperson for the Ministry of Health in Gaza, Ashraf al-Qudra, said in a statement on October 24, that the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza is “too slow (for it to) change the reality” on the ground.

This means that the seemingly endless UN Security Council debates, General Assembly resolutions and calls for action did little to alter the tragic situation in Gaza in any meaningful way.

This begs the question, what is the use of the elaborate international political, humanitarian and legal systems, if they are unable to stop, or even slow down a genocide that is being aired live on TV screens all across the world?

In previous genocides, whether those accompanying the Great Wars or that of Rwanda in 1994, various justifications were offered to explain the lack of immediate actions. In some cases, no Geneva Conventions existed and, as in Rwanda, many pleaded ignorance.

But, in Gaza, no excuse is acceptable. Every international news company has correspondents or some presence in the Strip. Hundreds of journalists, reporters, bloggers, photographers and cameramen are documenting and counting every event, every massacre and every bomb dropped on civilian homes. It is important here to note that scores of journalists have already been killed in Israeli attacks.

Scientific approximations are telling us, for example, that nearly 25,000 tons of explosives have been dropped on Gaza by Israel in the first 27 days of war. It is equivalent to two atomic bombs, like those dropped by the US on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

When US President Joe Biden callously tried to question the numbers of the Palestinian dead, the Gaza medical staff, who are forced to perform life-saving surgeries on the dirty grounds of hospitals, took the time to prove him wrong. On October 26, they produced a list containing the names of 6,747 Palestinian casualties who were killed in the first 19 days of war.

Thousands have been killed and wounded since then, yet Washington and its Western allies insist that “Israel has the right to defend itself” even if this comes at the expense of a whole nation.

The Israelis are not masking their language in any way. The New York Times reported on October 30 that “in private conversations with American counterparts, Israeli officials referred to how the United States and other allied powers resorted to devastating bombings in Germany and Japan during World War II … to try to defeat those countries.” A few days later, Israeli Minister Amichai … has openly declared that nuking Gaza is an option in his country’s genocidal war on the Palestinian people.

On the day the NYT report appeared, Karim Khan, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), arrived at the Egyptian side of the Rafah border.

He still used the same guarded language, as if not to offend the sensibilities of Israel and its Western allies.  “Crimes allegedly committed in both places have to be looked into,” he said, referring to both Israel and Gaza.

One could excuse Khan by arguing that legal jargon must be restrained until a thorough investigation is conducted. But thorough investigations are rarely conducted when it comes to Israeli crimes in Gaza or anywhere else in Palestine.

When an investigation is carried out, international judges frequently find themselves accused by the US and Israel of bias or worse, anti-Semitism. In the case of the investigation spearheaded by a respected South African judge, Richard Goldstone in 2009, the man was forced to retract part of his report.

Khan knows this too well because he is currently sitting on a large and growing file of Israeli war crimes in Palestine, insisting on delaying the procedure under various excuses. Obviously, the US does not favorably view ICC judges who advance war crime cases against Israel. The anti-ICC sanctions imposed by the Trump Administration in 2020 are an example.

Many officials in Western institutions are becoming aware of this hypocrisy. On October 28, Craig Mokhiber resigned from his position as the Director of the New York office of the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights in protest of the UN’s failure to stop “a genocide unfolding before our eyes in Gaza.”

On October 20, around 850 members of the EU staff signed a letter to EU Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, criticizing her “unconditional support” for Israel.

The letter was polite and diplomatic, considering the horrendous moral failure of Von der Leyen, especially when her gung-ho approach to the Russian war in Ukraine is compared to her blind support of Israeli crimes in Gaza. “Only if we acknowledge Israel’s pain, and its right to defend itself, will we have the credibility to say that Israel should react … in line with international humanitarian law,” she said.

The International Olympic Committee, which insists on separating between politics and sports, has no problem meddling in politics when the enemy is a Palestinian.

The IOC issued a statement on November 1, warning any participant in the Paris Olympics, scheduled for 2024, from engaging in any “discriminatory behavior” against Israeli athletes, because “athletes cannot be held responsible for the actions of their governments”.

The word ‘hypocrisy’ here does not even begin to describe what is taking place, and the repercussions of this moral failure will be felt around the world for years to come. Never again should the West be allowed to play the role of the mediator, the impartial politician, the judge or even the self-serving humanitarian.

This is not a difficult conclusion to reach. Gaza has been turned into a Hiroshima as a result of Western bombs and the blank political check handed to Israel by Western governments and leaders from the onset of the war, in fact, 75 years prior.

Nothing will ever alter this fact, and no ‘strongly worded’ future statements will ever help the West redeem its collective moral failure.

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

9 November 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

Sheikh Hasina and her Awami League party are seeking a fourth consecutive term and are accused of harassing the rival BNP party

By Hannah Ellis-Petersen

Thousands of other political prisoners have already been inside these cells for months, many facing dozens, perhaps hundreds, of criminal charges. Rajshahi central jailhas a capacity of about 4,000 prisoners. It now holds more than 13,600.

As Bangladesh heads to elections in January, with Hasina and her Awami League party seeking a fourth consecutive term in office, the authorities have overseen a ruthless crackdown on the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist party (BNP). Few believe the election will be free, fair or remotely democratic; the BNP have stated that as long as Hasina is in charge, they will not even participate.

While the harassment of the opposition has been ongoing for months, a BNP rally held in Dhaka on 28 October to demand Hasina’s resignation prompted the government crackdown to intensify further.

In the days leading up to the rally, hundreds of BNP leaders were detained. On the day, as hundreds of thousands of supporters took to the streets, activists from Hasina’s Awami League, accompanied by police, were seen attacking the rallies, armed with sticks, iron rods, machetes and other weapons. At least three people died in the violence, including a BNP activist, a police officer and a journalist.

Ali Riaz, professor of political science at Illinois State University, said the violence appeared premeditated by the authorities as a means to crack down on the BNP.

“The response of the police, which triggered the violence, seemed to be planned well ahead of the rally,” he said. “Internet services were blocked, not only to disrupt communication among the activists but also to prevent live transmission of the police actions.”

“The response of the police, which triggered the violence, seemed to be planned well ahead of the rally,” he said. “Internet services were blocked, not only to disrupt communication among the activists but also to prevent live transmission of the police actions.”

In the aftermath, BNP leaders and rank-and-file members say they have been subjected to a relentless witch-hunt to prevent them campaigning against Hasina’s government.

“The sheer number of arrests of opposition leaders, activists and protesters in Bangladesh in the past few weeks is a good indicator of how extreme the crackdown on dissent has become,” said Angelita Baeyens, vice-president of international advocacy and litigation at the Robert F Kennedy human rights organisation.

Among the thousands who have been arrested was one of the BNP’s most senior leaders, Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir. Speaking to the Guardian hours before he was detained on 29 October, he had expressed his fears of being picked up on false charges.

“We have seen countless incidents where our activists were arrested on trumped-up charges, and the police and judiciary seem to be working together with the Awami League to silence us,” said Alamgir, who has more than 100 cases against him. “It is clear that the government’s goal is to put all of our leaders behind bars and hold a one-sided election.”

An endless cycle of arrest and release

The few BNP leaders to have evaded arrest are now in hiding. Habibun Nabi Khan Sohel, the BNP’s joint secretary general, now has more than 450 cases filed against him and is among 170 leaders accused of violence and murder after the 28 October protests. For the past week, he has gone underground.

From an undisclosed location, Sohel described how the past few months of his life had been defined by endless politically motivated cases being filed against him, forcing him in and out of the courts, consuming his life. He faced a similar scenario in the run-up to the 2018 elections – which were also widely documented as rigged to re-elect Hasina in a landslide – when he was found guilty in an allegedly politically motivated case and was prevented from running.

“Since June, I have had to present myself in different courts from morning to evening, in connection with the hearings of five to seven cases every day,” he said. “Many of my senior party colleagues are attending hearings and spending long hours in court every day.”

Others, such as Azizur Rahman Muchabbir, 41, a mid-level BNP leader, are stuck in a Kafkaesque cycle of arrest and release.

He was first arrested on 8 December 2022, after violence broke out in a rally. He was charged with violent activities and granted bail in February, but was rearrested by police outside the prison gates. He was released on bail again in March, and again was immediately rearrested, a cycle that continued again in April. He is now back in jail, facing 70 different charges.

“The government has detained him in jail simply to keep him away from political activities,” said his wife, Suraiya Begum. “We all are victims of harassment and torture.”

Since Hasina was first elected in 2008, she has been credited for overseeing an economic revival in Bangladesh that has seen the country rise to become one of the strongest economies in south Asia. But her four terms in office have also been defined by democratic backsliding and increasingly authoritarian measures against dissent or any form of political opposition.

According to the office of the BNP, since 2009 more than 138,000 cases have been filed against more than 5 million leaders, activists and supporters of the BNP and its member organisations.

Mohammad Ashrafuzzaman of the Capital Punishment Justice Project, who has been documenting human rights abuses in Bangladesh for over a decade, said that “gross human right violations” had systematically been used against the opposition “including enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, maiming, torture, ill-treatment, and massive arbitrary detention of the opposition activists in fake criminal cases to crush the opposition whenever the elections ensued in Bangladesh.”

The previous election in 2018 was marred with allegations of opposition harassment and widespread vote-rigging, and was widely decried as non-democratic. Most now assume that similar scenes will unfold in January.

The international community has been attempting to step in and pressure Hasina into holding free and fair elections. This week the British high commissioner met BNP leaders to call to “eschew violence … and hold free, fair and participatory elections”. The US government recently imposed visa restrictions on unnamed government officials “for undermining the election process” and last month the US ambassador to Bangladesh called for Hasina to have a dialogue with the BNP.

Hasina hit back, accusing the US administration of hypocrisy. “Is Biden having a dialogue with Trump? The day they have a dialogue, I will also have a dialogue with the opposition,” she said.

Analysts say that Hasina’s government now has the judiciary and the police fully under its control, and has weaponised them in her fight against the opposition. This week, a video clip captured police officers patrolling with a group of armed Awami activists chanting “capture BNP people, one by one, and slaughter them all”.

The government and police deny that the mass arrests of the BNP members are connected to the forthcoming elections. “These criminal cases have no connection with politics,” said the law and justice minister, Anisul Huq. Senior Awami League leadership figures did not respond to requests for comment from the Guardian.

Mohammad Faruk Hossain, spokesperson of Dhaka Metropolitan police, said that they had filed cases “only after it is found that they have been involved in criminal activities” and said that the arrests were of those responsible for the killing and injuring of police officers on the 28 October rally.

Yet Mubashar Hasan, a political analyst, said that Hasina’s oppressive methods were only fuelling momentum behind the BNP, which is experiencing a groundswell of grassroots support in the wake of the faltering economy and soaring inflation. As well as political activists, labourers and poorer workers turned out in droves at the 28 October rally.

“The BNP rallies have successfully tapped into the pulse of the common people,” he said. “The government’s heavy-handed crackdown appears to be a calculated move aimed at dissuading BNP’s burgeoning momentum from evolving into a full-blown mass movement against the existing administration.”

By Prof. Yakov M. Rabkin

A profound division exists between Zionist advocates of Israel on the one hand, and both secular and religious Jews, on the other, who reject Zionism and thus the very idea of a separate state for the Jews. Most Jews must be somewhere in between. For years, they have cringed at Israel’s actions without, however, questioning the ethnocratic nature of the Israeli state.  For them, “Israel’s right to exist” is sacred because they fear that the only alternative is a physical destruction of Israeli Jews. Even though most of them live in liberal democracies, it is hard for them to fathom that Israel may change its nature, like South Africa did a few decades ago, and become a liberal state with equal rights for everyone on the entire territory under Israeli control between the Mediterranean and the river Jordan.

Israel’s assault on Gaza has made many Jews worldwide, particularly the young, to recoil from any association with the state of Israel. But at least just as many refused to remain “Jews of silence” and came to denounce Israel’s vengeful response to Hamas’ attack on its territory on October 7, 2023.

Especially in the United States, Jews have prominently cried out against the violence in Gaza. Hundreds of protesters closed down New York’s Central Station asking for an immediate ceasefire.

A week earlier, Jews wrapped in prayer shawls staged a sit-in at the U.S. Congress in Washington. After demanding an end to the violence, they opened prayer books and began reciting the ancient words that have steadied Jews for generations. Just a few days ago, Jews unfurled banners reading “Palestinians should be free” at the base of the Statue of Liberty in New York.

Anti-Zionist Ultra-Orthodox Jews have burned Israeli flags at their protests around the world. They believe that the Zionist state is not simply an ‘appropriation’ of their Jewish symbols and identity, but the root cause of a bloody conflict in which innocent Jews and Palestinians suffer.

Indeed, Israel is a Zionist state. Calling it Jewish only creates a confusion because it is hard to define it. Israel embodies European ethnic nationalism shaped in late 19^th century, rather than Judaism that has developed for millennia. From the start, Zionists despised Jews and Judaism as they aimed at breeding a new species: the intrepid Hebrew warrior farmer. They have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Israel has built a mobilized society and a formidable high-tech war machine. As Israeli society has moved steadily to the right, it has consolidated the support of right-wing extremists and racists, including antisemites, around the world, such as white supremacists in the United States.

Israel is the most recent settler colony. Rhodesia and Algeria are now a distant memory. South Africa has freed itself from the official apartheid. While settlers in the Americas and Oceania perpetrated genocide against the aboriginals in the 19^th century, Israel initiated massive ethnic cleansing rather late, only in 1947. Some, like the Israeli historian Benny Morris, who documented it, regretted that the Zionists did not complete the job like the white Americans, Argentines or Australians, who wiped out most of the local populations. Indeed, Israel now has under its control approximately equal numbers of Palestinians and Jews, but most Palestinians don’t have political rights.

Many Jews, both in Israel and elsewhere, have been trying to come to terms with the contradictions between the Judaism they profess to adhere to and the Zionist ideology that has taken hold of them. A new variety of Judaism has taken root in Israel: National Judaism, dati-leumi in Hebrew. For some Jews, this new faith assuages these contradictions.

Among its most fervent followers one finds the assassin of prime minister Itzhak Rabin who had attempted to find an accommodation with the Palestinians, and prominent members of today’s Israeli government. National Judaism is also the ideology of many vigilante settlers who, since the onset of the war on Gaza, have intensified the harassment, dispossession, and murder of Palestinians on the West Bank. The vigilantes armed with rifles are proud to complement what the Israeli army is doing with tanks, bombs, and rockets in Gaza.

Quite a few Jews now wonder if this separate state for the Jews chronically generating violence is “good for the Jews.” The tardiness of this questioning reflects the success of Israel’s masquerading as “the Jewish and democratic state”, a theoretical and ideological oxymoron. The bombing of Gaza has punctured that propaganda balloon and exposed Israel’s character as a bellicose settler colony, victim of its own practice of exclusion and oppression.

Many Jews deplore this practice because it contradicts all that Judaism teaches, particularly the core values of humility, compassion, and kindness. They realize that those Jews – in truth, the vast majority of them – who rejected Zionism over a century ago, may have been right. Other Jews also find themselves in an emotional bind. Deeply saddened by Hamas’ attack on Israel and likewise devasted by Israel’s implacable response, they are also worried about the surge in anti-Jewish sentiment all around them.

The deadly Hamas attack of October 7, 2023 shows how Israel’s displacement and oppression of the Palestinians breeds their hatred.  Consequently, it physically endangers Jews in Israel. The subsequent killing of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza imperils Jews both in Israel and elsewhere. (Muslims do become targets too, as the tragic killing of a six-year-old American Palestinian shows.)

When Israel claims to be the state of all the Jews it turns them into hostages of its policies and actions. When Jewish community organizations declare “We stand with Israel!” they act as proxies for Israel rather than representatives of Jews. To be more precise, they represent those Jews whose identity has become mainly political: believers in Israel, right or wrong.

Israel and Zionism have long polarized the Jews. While Jews worldwide are largely split between these “Israel-firsters” and those who denounce Israel, neither camp influences Israel’s actions. They are akin to fans, rooting for one or the other side, watching from the outside as the situation unfolds. Blaming and attacking Jews for Israel’s actions is wrong and antisemitic. It also strengthens the core Zionist claim that Jews can be safe only in Israel.

It remains to be seen whether the fracture between those who hold fast to Jewish moral tradition and the converts to ethnic nationalism may one day be repaired. However fateful for Jews and Judaism, this fracture is less important for Israel, which nowadays counts many more evangelical Christians than Jews among its unconditional supporters.

Massive world-wide protests have so far affected neither Israelis’ vengeful violence in Gaza nor the supply of American weapons to support it. There is reason to despair. But Judaic tradition encourages Jews to continue, even in seemingly hopeless circumstances: “It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to desist from it…” (Pirke Avot 2:16) This is why many Jews remain at the forefront of the struggle against Israel’s wanton violence. But when the violence ends, many will realize that their protests have emancipated them from Israel’s emotional stranglehold.

This emancipation from the Zionist state has been observed in very different Jewish communities, Ashkenazi and Sephardi, strictly observant and more liberal. Thus, an ultra-Orthodox critic of Israel, usually antagonistic to Reform Judaism, commends a Reform rabbi for saying that “when Israel’s Jewish supporters abroad don’t speak out against disastrous policies that neither guarantee safety for her citizens nor produce the right climate in which to try and reach a just peace with the Palestinians … they are betraying millennial Jewish values.”

The nuclear armed Israel endangers not only the Palestinians and the Jews. It threatens an Armageddon for the region and the Samson option for the world. These apocalyptic scenarios may be triggered if an Israeli government decides that the country cannot cope with an existential threat. This may mean not only the threat of physical destruction but also the looming end of the institutionalized dominance of Israeli Jews over the Palestinians, the end of ethnocracy.

There is hope. England oppressed Ireland for centuries. France and Germany bitterly fought many wars. What will it take for Israelis and Palestinians to live peacefully side by side? Many Jews and many more Palestinians believe that the apartheid-like structure of the Zionist state, which explains why it has lived by the sword since its inception, must change. They know that only when all the inhabitants of the Holy Land enjoy equal rights and have a stake in whatever political arrangement is reached (one state, two states or something else) will the cycle of death stop.

*

Yakov M. Rabkin, author of “A Threat from Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism” and “What is Modern Israel?” is professor emeritus of history and associate of the Centre for International Studies at the University of Montreal (CERIUM).

9 November 2023

Source: globalresearch.ca

By Satya Sagar

For all those who think that Israel is run by the most despicable, racist and repressive regime in the world here is some very bad news indeed.

Not only are the Israeli state and its ruthless methods here to stay they are also, very frighteningly, a prototype of our collective global future.

Watching the unbelievable destruction wrought by the Israelis in Gaza a simple question very high on many minds must be ‘ How in hell does this illegitimate child of European guilt and American ambition get away with all this again and again and again?’

The answer is that, instead of being a strange historical aberration, Israel is a model state that global elites want to spread around the world in the days to come.

A world where a tiny, wealthy elite will be the ‘chosen people’ like the Israelis and the rest of the planet’s population become Palestinians – caged into unliveable spaces, crushed like dispensable arthropods.

A world where the ruling classes live off the stolen resources and labour of those they contemptuously deem ‘lesser human beings’, in a system of institutionalized apartheid.

A world where the forces of the militarized State can routinely shoot anybody, even entire populations and call them ‘terrorists’ with complete impunity.

A world where the process of nation building automatically involves smashing the sovereignty of every other nation, reducing their people to a faceless, nameless, helpless mass.

The question of why Israel’s brazen crimes against humanity have been tolerated by the so called ‘international community’ is not new at all, being one asked from the very day this nation was violently forged seven decades ago. The legacy of Zionist terrorism, the numerous pogroms against the Palestinians, the systematic usurpation of their land, the routine bombing of civilians, the murder of peace activists— any other fledgling nation even contemplating crimes on this scale would have been ostracized out of existence by now.

Many have attempted to answer this conundrum in different ways. Israel is the bulldog of the US in the Middle-East ‘ there to keep an eye on the region’s oil wealth, promote the sales of Western arms and intimidate Arab regimes into meek submission’. And in all its actions Israel merely imitates its mentors in the United States, whose own list of crimes against humanity make that of its protégé pale into nothing.

For some others it is Israel, run by Jewish supremacists, that is manipulating the West for its own devious purposes. They are abetted in all this by Christian fundamentalists in the US who believe in some complicated bull about the role of Zionists in bringing about rapture, the return of Jesus Christ and Armageddon. (An end of the world hastened deliberately by these strange bed fellows themselves)

In yet another version the formation of Israel, aided and encouraged by Western powers, was a historical fobbing off of Europe’s much abused Jewish masses onto the heads of the hapless Palestinian people- fulfilling the Nazi dream of a Europe ‘sanitised’ of the Jews. A cynical pitting of the victims of European racism against the victims of European colonialism.

There is no doubt of course that the history of Europe and post-Second World War geopolitics of the United States have a lot to do with the creation of Israel.

In many ways the State of Israel carries over into our era all the baggage of 19th century Europe, from its simplistic understanding of race and biology, the crude equation of national interest with conquest of territory, the brutal trappings of the colonial state and worst of all the tryst with fascism, of which Zionism has become a mirror image.

But all this focus on historical trends obscures the fact that contemporary Israel today has become the template of a terrible global future. Here is where the accumulated burdens of the past, stoked to the right temperatures in the crucible of the present, are shaping the contours of the  wider world emerging before our eyes.

Already, the aggressive Israeli ‘whatever the cost’ pursuit of self-interest – unfettered by any principles of civilized behaviour and contemptuous of all international law- has become the role model for governments in many other parts of the world. Every indicator points to this sordid trend. The way the ‘masters of the world’ have openly acquiesced in the Israeli assault on the Palestinians in recent days is testimony to the fact that elites everywhere find this violence a useful exercise, not just in the context of the Middle-East itself but on their own home turf too.

Just take your eyes off for a minute from Israel and look around the globe and you can see what I mean. Look at the mini-Israels that governments everywhere are operating within their own national boundaries against the poor, the ethnic or religious minorities, the historically marginalized or any population that can be enslaved at low cost. For the votaries of the hard state and the preservers of privilege everywhere Israel is the pioneering trendsetter in newer and more brazen ways of exercising illegitimate power.

That is why even as many governments condemn Israel in public, they are also slyly figuring out how best to incorporate elements of similar repression within the apparatus of their own states. This includes the Arab states, which pay lip service to the Palestinian cause and do secret deals to ‘normalize’ relations with the Israeli regime. There is so much to learn, it seems, while they earn!

In India, the discourse on ‘cross border terrorism’ repeatedly descends into clamour by neo-Nazi politicians to ‘do it like the Israelis’  and bomb all suspects, wherever, unmindful of the consequences. In Sri Lanka, when the country’s armed forces massacred over 40,000 Tamil civilians in the last few days of the civil war in 2009 it is the Israeli ‘best practice’ they cited – kill now, shill later.

Given the discontent produced by the forces of globalization throughout the world and the need of the elites for controlling the ‘rebellious masses’ Israel’s approach to law and order are also a ‘valuable’ contribution towards maintenance of the unjust status quo everywhere. While Israel certainly did not invent the concept of kidnapping, torture and assassination of its opponents it has done more than any other regime in the world to legitimize such behaviour internationally.

All you need to do is to close your eyes, shut your conscience out, pretend to be the Israeli government and imagine all your opponents ‘ workers, farmers, students anyone- as Palestinians. In that sense it is not just nation states but also corporations – the main shareholders of the Empire – that seek guidance from Israel for ideas on how to put down dissent and rule the world.

After all, at the core of global capitalism lies a fierce authoritarian urge that seeks to monopolise everything that exists but is unable to do so because the little people of the world have fought and established some basic norms of human and social behaviour. If Israel keeps demolishing these ‘barriers’ and advances the forces of lawlessness – it makes complete world domination by the moneyed that much easier.

It is a different matter that imitating Israel, in everything it does, is a recipe for perpetual World Wars. This may suit the designs of some countries and their rulers perhaps but not of a majority of this planet’s residents.

What emerges then is that, given the importance of Israel to global elites, a solution to the Palestinian question can never really be achieved through a struggle that focuses exclusively on the politics of the Middle-East itself.

Instead, a just peace is possible only when there is a Global Intifada against war mongers in powerful Western nations like the US, UK and France, who profit from death and destruction around the planet.

A just peace is possible only when the millions marching on the streets of world capitals calling for a ceasefire turn against the Israeli model represented by their own ruling classes.

A just peace is possible only through a global movement that takes on deeply entrenched vested interests, wherever they exist,  that are bent on making our entire world look like one large State of Israel.

Satya Sagar is a journalist and public health worker. He can be reached at sagarnama@gmail.com

Note: This article is based on a piece written originally by the same author in 2006 for ZNet, when Israel carried out the deadly bombing of Lebanon, under the pretext of ‘eliminating the Hezbollah’. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

8 November 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Chris Hedges

When Jewish extremists, fanatic Zionists, religious zealots, ultranationalists and crypto-fascists in the apartheid state of Israel say they want to wipe Gaza off the face of the earth, believe them.

I covered the birth of Jewish fascism in Israel. I reported on the extremist Meir Kahane, who was barred from running for office and whose Kach Party was outlawed in 1994 and declared a terrorist organization by Israel and the United States. I attended political rallies held by Benjamin Netanyahu, who received lavish funding from rightwing Americans, when he ran against Yitzhak Rabin, who was negotiating a peace settlement with the Palestinians. Netanyahu’s supporters chanted “Death to Rabin.” They burned an effigy of Rabin dressed in a Nazi uniform. Netanyahu marched in front of a mock funeral for Rabin.

Prime Minister Rabin was assassinated on Nov. 4, 1995 by a Jewish fanatic. Rabin’s widow, Lehea, blamed Netanyahu and his supporters for her husband’s murder.

Netanyahu, who first became prime minister in 1996, has spent his political career nurturing Jewish extremists, including Avigdor Lieberman, Gideon Sa’ar, Naftali Bennett, and Ayelet Shaked. His father, Benzion — who worked as an assistant to the Zionist pioneer Vladimir Jabotinsky, who Benito Mussolini referred to as “a good fascist” — was a leader in the Herut Party that called on the Jewish state to seize all the land of historic Palestine. Many of those who formed the Herut Party carried out terrorist attacks during the 1948 war that established the state of Israel. Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Sidney Hook and other Jewish intellectuals, described the Herut Party in a statement published in The New York Times as a “political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to Nazi and Fascist parties.”

There has always been a strain of Jewish fascism within the Zionist project. Now it has taken control of the Israeli state.

“The left is no longer capable of overcoming the toxic ultra-nationalism that has evolved here,” Zeev Sternhell, a Holocaust survivor and Israel’s foremost authority on fascism, warned in 2018, “the kind whose European strain almost wiped out a majority of the Jewish people.” Sternhell added, “[W]e see not just a growing Israeli fascism but racism akin to Nazism in its early stages.”

The decision to obliterate Gaza has long been the dream of Israel’s crypto-fascists, heirs of Kahane’s movement. These Jewish extremists, which make up the ruling coaltion government, are orchestrating the genocide in Gaza, where hundreds of Palestinians are dying daily. They champion the iconography and language of their homegrown fascism. Jewish identity and Jewish nationalism are the Zionist versions of blood and soil. Jewish supremacy is sanctified by God, as is the slaughter of the Palestinians, who Netanyahu compared to the Biblical Ammonites, massacred by the Israelites. Enemies — usually Muslims — slated for extinction are subhuman who embody evil. Violence and the threat of violence are the only forms of communication those outside the magical circle of Jewish nationalism understand. Millions of Muslims and Christians, including those with Israeli citizenship, are to be purged.

A leaked 10-page document from the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence dated Oct. 13, 2023 recommends the forcible and permanent transfer of the Gaza Strip’s 2.3 million Palestinian residents to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

It is a grave mistake not to take the blood curdling calls for the wholesale eradication and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians seriously. This rhetoric is not hyperbolic. It is a literal prescription. Netanyahu in a tweet, later removed, described the battle with Hamas as a “struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle.”

These Jewish fanatics have begun their version of the final solution to the Palestinian problem. They dropped 12,000 tons of explosives on Gaza in the first two weeks of assault to obliterate at least 45 percent of Gaza’s housing units, according to the U.N.’s humanitarian office. They have no intention of being detoured, even by Washington.

“It became evident to U.S. officials that Israeli leaders believed mass civilian casualties were an acceptable price in the military campaign,” The New York Times reported.

“In private conversations with American counterparts, Israeli officials referred to how the United States and other allied powers resorted to devastating bombings in Germany and Japan during World War II — including the dropping of the two atomic warheads in Hiroshima and Nagasaki — to try to defeat those countries,” the paper continued.

The goal is a “pure” Israel, cleansed of Palestinian contaminants. Gaza is to become a wasteland. The Palestinians in Gaza will be killed or forced into refugee camps over the border in Egypt. Messianic redemption will take place once the Palestinians are expelled. Jewish extremists call for the Al-Aqsa mosque – the third holiest shrine for Muslims, built on the ruins of the Jewish Second Temple, which was destroyed in 70 CE by the Roman army – to be demolished. The mosque is to be replaced by a “Third” Jewish temple, a move that would set the Muslim world alight. The West Bank, which the zealots call “Judea and Samaria,” will be formally annexed by Israel. Israel, governed by the religious laws imposed by the ultra-orthodox Shas and United Torah Judaism parties, will be a Jewish version of Iran.

It is a short step to total Israeli control over Palestinian land. Israel’s illegal Jewish settlements, restricted military zones, closed highways and army compounds have seized over 60 percent of the West Bank, turning Palestinian towns and villages into ringed ghettos. There are over 65 laws which discriminate directly or indirectly against Palestinian citizens of Israel and those living in the occupied territories. The campaign of indiscriminate killing of Palestinians in the West Bank, many by rogue Jewish militias, along with house and school demolitions and the seizure of remaining Palestinian land will explode. Over 133 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank by the Israeli army and Jewish settlers since the Oct. 7 incursion by Hamas and thousands of Palestinians have been rounded up by the Israeli military, beaten, humiliated and imprisoned.

Israel, at the same time, is turning on “Jewish traitors” who refuse to embrace the demented vision of the ruling Jewish fascists and who denounce the horrific violence of the state. The familiar enemies of fascism — journalists, human rights advocates, intellectuals, artists, feminists, liberals, the left, homosexuals and pacifists — are already being targeted. The judiciary, according to plans put forward by Netanyahu, will be neutered. Public debate will wither. Civil society and the rule of law will cease to exist. Those branded as “disloyal” will be deported.

Fascists do not respect the sanctity of life. Human beings, even from their own tribe, are expendable to build their deranged utopia. The zealots in power in Israel could have exchanged the hostages held by Hamas for the thousands of Palestinian hostages held in Israeli prisons, which is why the Israeli hostages were seized. And there is evidence that in the chaotic fighting that took place once Hamas militants entered Israel, the Israeli military decided to target not only Hamas fighters, but the Israeli captives with them.

“Several new testimonies by Israeli witnesses to the October 7 Hamas surprise attack on southern Israel adds to growing evidence that the Israeli military killed its own citizens as they fought to neutralize Palestinian gunmen,” Max Blumenthal writes in The Grayzone.

Tuval Escapa, a member of the security team for Kibbutz Be’eri, Blumenthal notes, set up a hotline to coordinate between kibbutz residents and the Israeli army.

Escapa told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that as desperation began to set in, “the commanders in the field made difficult decisions – including shelling houses on their occupants in order to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages.”

The newspaper reported that Israeli commanders were “compelled to request an aerial strike” against its own facility inside the Erez Crossing to Gaza “in order to repulse the terrorists” who had seized control. That base housed Israeli Civil Administration officers and soldiers.

Israel, in 1986, instituted a military policy called the Hannibal Directive, apparently named for the Carthaginian general who poisoned himself rather than be captured by the Romans, following the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah. The directive is designed to prevent Israeli troops from falling into enemy hands through the maximum use of force, even at the cost of killing the captured soldiers and civilians.

The directive was executed during the 2014 Israeli assault on Gaza known as Operation Protective Edge. Hamas fighters on Aug. 1, 2014 captured an Israeli officer, Lt. Hadar Goldin. In response, Israel dropped more than 2,000 bombs, missiles and shells on the area where he was being held. Goldin was killed along with over 100 Palestinian civilians. The directive was supposedly rescinded in 2016.

Gaza is the start. The West Bank is next.

Israelis who cheer on the Palestinian nightmare will soon endure a nightmare of their own.

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.

7 November 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Liz Theoharis

On September 19, 2001, eight days after 9/11, as the leaders of both parties were already pounding a frenzied drumbeat of war, a diverse group of concerned Americans released a warning about the long-term consequences of a military response. Among them were veteran civil rights activists, faith leaders, and public intellectuals, including Rosa Parks, Harry Belafonte, and Palestinian-American Edward Said. Rare public opponents of the drive to war at the time, they wrote with level-headed clarity:

“We foresee that a military response would not end the terror. Rather, it would spark a cycle of escalating violence, the loss of innocent lives, and new acts of terrorism… Our best chance for preventing such devastating acts of terror is to act decisively and cooperatively as part of a community of nations within the framework of international law… and work for justice at home and abroad.”

Twenty-three years and more than two wars later, this statement reads as a tragic footnote to America’s Global War on Terror that left an entire region of the planet immiserated. It contributed to the direct and indirect deaths of close to 4.5 million people, while costing Americans almost $9 trillion and counting.

The situation is certainly different today. Still, over the last few weeks, those prophetic words, now 22 years old, have been haunting me, as the U.S. war machine kicks into ever higher gear following the horrific Hamas massacre of Israeli civilians and the brutal intensification of the decades-long Israeli siege of civilians in Gaza. Sadly, the words and actions of our nation’s leaders have revealed a staggering, even willful, historical amnesia about the disastrous repercussions of America’s twenty-first-century war-mongering.

Case in point: recently, the United States was the only nation to veto the U.N. Security Council resolution calling for “humanitarian pauses” to deliver life-saving aid to Palestinians in Gaza. Instead, all but a few members of Congress are lining up to support billions more in military aid for Israel and the further mobilization of our armed forces in the Middle East. These moves, experts say, may only accelerate wider regional conflict (something we are already seeing glimmers of vis-à-vis Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen) at a time of increasingly profound global instability. In the last few weeks, the U.S. Navy has “assembled one of the greatest concentrations of power in the Eastern Mediterranean in 40 years,” while the Department of Defense is readying thousands of troops for possible deployment. Meanwhile, college administrators are suggesting student-reservists be prepared in case they get called up in the coming weeks.

Amid this frenzy of American bluster and brawn, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees reports that Gaza is “fast becoming a hell hole,” riddled with death, disease, starvation, thirst, and displacement. Hundreds of scholars of international law and conflict studies have warned that the Israeli military may already have launched a “potential genocide” of Gazans. At the same time, within Israel, citizen-militias, armed by the far-right minister of national security, have escalated violent attacks on Palestinians, only worsened by the acts of armed Israeli settlers on the West Bank protected by that very military.

Finally allowing a tiny amount of aid across the Egypt-Gaza border, after shutting down all food, water, and fuel for Gaza, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant made it clear just how much power the United States wields over this unfolding humanitarian crisis. “The Americans insisted,” he reported, “and we are not in a place where we can refuse them. We rely on them for planes and military equipment. What are we supposed to do? Tell them no?”

As Gallant implied, the U.S. could use its influence not only to demand far more aid for Gazans, but to compel quite a different course of action. There should, after all, be no contradiction between condemning Hamas for its heinous slaughter in the south of Israel and denouncing Israel for its decades-old dispossession and oppression of the Palestinian people and its now-indiscriminate killing and destruction in Gaza. There need be no contradiction between decrying terrorism and demanding diplomacy over violence. In truth, the Biden administration could use every non-military tool at its disposal to pressure both Hamas and Israel to pursue an immediate ceasefire, the full release of all hostages, and whatever humanitarian assistance is now needed.

If only, rather than further militarizing the region or questioning the death toll in Gaza, the Biden administration were to focus on making this most recent and ever more ominous crisis a final turning point, not for yet more brutality, but for a long-term political solution focused on achieving real peace, human rights, and equality for everyone in the region. In this moment of grief and rage, when tensions are at a fever pitch and the wheel of history is turning around us, it’s time to demand peace above all else.

The Cruel Manipulation of the Poor

While the U.S. government refuses to use its considerable power as leverage for peace, ordinary Americans seem to know better. Unlike the days after 9/11, recent polls suggest that a majority of Americans oppose sending more weapons to Israel and support delivering humanitarian aid to Gaza, including a majority of people under the age of 44, as well as a majority of Democrats and independents and a significant minority of Republicans. While Representative Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian-American in Congress, was made a pariah and is in the process of being censured by some of her colleagues after her plea for a ceasefire, she actually represents the popular will of a significant portion of the public.

And that, in turn, represents a generational shift from even a decade or two ago. In the wake of this country’s disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as dozens of other military conflicts globally, many Americans, especially Millennials and Gen Zers, see the U.S. military less as a defender of democracy than as a purveyor of death and chaos. Nearly second-by-second online coverage of the Israeli bombing campaign is offering Americans an unprecedented view into the collective punishment of more than two million Gazans, half of them 18 or younger. (Now, with limited Internet and communications, it’s unclear how word of what’s happening in Gaza will continue to get out.) Add to that the slow-burning pain that has marked life in the United States over the last 15 years — the Great Recession, the Covid-19 economic shock, the climate crisis, and the modern movement for racial justice — and the reasons for such a relatively widespread urge for peace become clearer.

Today, half of all Americans are either impoverished or one emergency away from economic ruin. As younger generations face what often feels like a dead-end future, there’s a growing sense among those I speak to (as well as older folks) that the government has abandoned them. At a moment when the Republicans (and some Democrats) argue that we can’t afford universal healthcare or genuine living wages, the military budget for 2023 is $858 billion and the Pentagon still maintains 750 military bases globally. Last week, without a touch of irony, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who claimed last year that student debt relief would hurt the economy, insisted that the U.S. can “certainly afford two wars.”

Millions of us tuned into President Biden’s Oval Office speech on his return from Israel, only the second of his presidency. There, he asked Congress to earmark yet another $100 billion mainly for American military aid to Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan (a boon to the war-profiteering weapons makers whose CEOs will grow even richer thanks to those new contracts). Just a year after Congress killed the Expanded Child Tax Credit, which had cut official child poverty in half, Biden’s speech represented a further pivot away from socially beneficial policymaking and toward further strengthening of the ravenous engine of our war economy. After the speech, the Nation‘s Katrina vanden Heuvel offered this compelling instant commentary: “Biden tonight rolled out a version of twenty-first-century military Keynesianism. Let’s call his policy just that. No more Bidenomics. And it consigns the U.S. to endless militarization of foreign policy.”

A decision to organize our economy yet more around war will also mean the further militarization of domestic policy, with dire consequences for poor and low-income people. Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., once called such steps the “cruel manipulation of the poor,” a phrase he coined as part of his denunciation of the Vietnam War in the late 1960s. King was then thinking about the American soldiers fighting and dying in Vietnam “on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.”

Today, a similar “cruel manipulation” is playing out. For years, our leaders have invoked the myth of scarcity to justify inaction when it comes to widespread poverty, growing debt, and rising inequality in the United States. Now, some of them are calling for the spending of billions of dollars to functionally fund the bombardment and occupation of impoverished Gaza and a violent Israeli clampdown in the West Bank, not to speak of the possibility of a wider set of Middle Eastern wars. However, polling numbers suggest that a surprising number of Americans have seen through the fog of war and are perhaps coming to believe that our nation’s abundance should be used not as a tool of death but as a lifeline for poor and struggling people at home and abroad.

Not in Our Name

In a time of stifling darkness, one bright light over the last weeks has been the eruption of non-violent, pro-peace protests across the world. In Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Europe, hundreds of thousands of people have hit the streets to demand a ceasefire, including possibly half a million people in London. Here in the U.S., tens of thousands of Americans have followed suit in dozens of cities, from New York to Washington, D.C., Chicago to San Francisco. No less important, those protest marches have been both multi-racial and multi-generational, much like the 2020 uprisings for Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and the countless other Black lives lost to police brutality.

Recently, close friends and colleagues sent me photos from a march in Washington where Jewish protesters demanded a ceasefire and held up signs with heartrending slogans like “Not in My Name,” “Ceasefire Now,” and “My Grief Is Not Your Weapon.” Ultimately, close to 400 people, including numerous rabbis, were arrested as they peacefully sang and prayed in a congressional office building, while David Friedman, ambassador to Israel under President Trump, hatefully tweeted: “Any American Jew attending this rally is not a Jew — yes I said it!” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia ludicrously claimed that they were leading an insurrection.

Two days later, my organization, the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice, cosponsored a pro-peace march that drew a large crowd of Palestinians and Muslim-American families. At noon, about 500 protesters, a gorgeous, multicolored sea of humanity participated in the Jumma call to prayer in front of the U.S. Capitol. The following week, folks co-organized a pray-in at New York Representative Hakeem Jeffries’s office, using the phrase “ceasefire is the moral choice.” Faith and movement leaders offered prayers from their various religious traditions and displayed the names of people killed so far.

On October 27th, as Israel expanded its ground invasion of Gaza, I joined thousands of people in Grand Central Station to call for a #CeasefireNow, one of the largest demonstrations in New York since this most recent conflict broke out. Protests continued all week. And on November 4th, there was a mass rally and march in Washington, D.C., to call for an end to war and support the rights of Palestinians, with hundreds of organizations bridging a diversity of views and voices to plead for peace.

Those marches were an inspiring indication of the broad coalition of Americans who desperately want to prevent genocide in Gaza and dream of lasting peace and freedom in Israel/Palestine. At the lead are Palestinians and Jews who refuse to be used as pawns and prop-pieces by military hawks. Alongside them are many Americans all too aware that, though they might not be directly affected by the nightmarish events now unfolding in the Middle East, they are still implicated in the growing violence there thanks to their tax dollars and the actions of our government. Together, we are collectively crying out: “Not in Our Name.”

Such marches undoubtedly represent the largest antiwar mobilization since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and are weaving together diverse communities — young and old, Black, Brown, and White, Muslim, Jewish, and Christian, poor and working-class — in a way that should prove encouraging indeed for a growing peace movement. Right now, there are new alliances and relationships being forged that will undoubtedly endure for years to come.

Yes, this remains a small victory in what’s likely to prove a terrifying global crisis, but it is a victory nonetheless.

Roses Dressed in Black

The last few weeks have resurrected traumatic memories for many Jews and Palestinians globally — of the Holocaust, the Nakba, and the long history of Islamophobia, anti-Arab hate, anti-Jewish violence, and antisemitism. For many of us who are not Palestinian or Jewish, the recent mass death and violence have also triggered our own painful reckonings with the past.

I’m a descendant of Armenian genocide survivors. When I was a child growing up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, I heard hushed tales of death marches, hunger, lack of water, barricaded roads, and harrowing escapes. Those stories remain etched into my consciousness, a mournful inheritance my dispossessed ancestors handed down.

My great-grandfather, Charles Ozun Artinian, fled his home in what is now Turkey’s Seyhan River valley after the 1909 Adana Massacre in which Ottoman militants killed 25,000 Armenian Christians. Part of his family escaped over the Caucasus Mountains into Western Europe. They then traveled halfway across the world to Argentina, because so many other nations, including the United States, had closed their borders to Armenian refugees and would only open them years later.

As he was fleeing Adana, Charles wrote a poem, one of the few surviving long-form poems from the region at the time. It begins:

“In the Seyhan valley there rises a smoke

Roses dressed in black, month of April cried

Cries of sadness and mourning were heard everywhere

Broken hearted and sad, everybody cried…”

My family taught my siblings and me that although the genocide against our people was carried out by the Ottoman Empire, it was made possible by the complicity and indifference of the international community, including the world’s richest and most powerful nations. Right now, the smoke rising over Gaza is suffocating and every additional hour the U.S. enables more bombs to fall and tanks to rumble, more roses will be, as my great-grandfather put it, dressed in black. Not only that, but with the detonation of each new American-made bomb, the conditions for the long-term freedom and safety of both Israelis and Palestinians are blasted ever more into rubble.

Let us honor the memories of our ancestors and finally learn the lesson of their many stolen lives: “Not In Our Name!,” “Peace and Justice for All!” and the pleas from Gaza, including “Ceasefire Now!,” “End the Siege,” “Protect Medical Facilities,” and “Gaza is Home!”

Liz Theoharis, a TomDispatch regular, is a theologian, ordained minister, and anti-poverty activist.

6 November 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Alex Lantier

This weekend, as mass protests escalated internationally against the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) war on Gaza, the IDF responded by stepping up bombing attacks on refugee camps and calls for the mass murder of Palestinians.

The IDF bombed the al-Maghazi refugee camp on Saturday, killing at least 51 people according to the Palestinian WAFA news agency, and injuring dozens more. Mohammed Alaloul, a journalist for Turkey’s Anadolu Agency, reported: “An Israeli air strike targeted my neighbors’ house in Al-Maghazi camp. The house next door partially collapsed.” He added that two of his sons—Ahmed, 13, and Qais, 4—had been killed and his wife, mother and two other children were injured.

The IDF bombed schools that were being used as shelters in refugee camps at Al Bureij, killing at least 15, and Jabaliya, killing six—in a camp that had already been bombed three times last week, killing hundreds. UN officials warned that this might be a sign that IDF forces could bomb more of the roughly 150 UN shelters in Gaza, which are housing around 700,000 of Gaza’s roughly 2.2 million population.

IDF forces are using genocidal methods to fight Hamas militias deep inside the Gaza strip, causing horrific casualties and unprecedented levels of suffering. Over 9,770 Palestinians have been killed, including 3,900 children and 2,509 women, with 2,200 missing while at least 70,000 Palestinians have been injured in the IDF war. Moreover, Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza threatens to unleash an unprecedented food and health crisis.

The blockade has cut off all fuel, food and water supplies to Gaza. Palestinians survive on an average of two pieces of bread per day. Moreover, the Israeli blockade has largely incapacitated five of Gaza’s six waste treatment plants and most of its water desalination plants, provoking a breakdown of the sewer system and a catastrophic shortage of drinking water. Gaza officials said that nearly 80 percent of Gaza’s wells have been destroyed.

At least 95 percent of Gazans do not have access to clean drinking water. UN Special Rapporteur Pedro Arrojo told the Spanish daily El Pais that they are drinking salty or brackish water extracted from surviving wells. “Drinking this water will make you vomit, but if you don’t, you’ll be dead in five or six days,” Arroyo said.

Eman Basher, a teacher in Gaza, wrote on X/Twitter: “My kids have been suffering from stomach flu with symptoms including abdominal cramps, vomiting and diarrhoea, which I always assumed is the normal result of sleeping on the floor or change of weather, just to learn that it is caused by contaminated water we drink daily and queue for hours to get. … We’ve been drinking this water for 15 days and fighting to get it.”

The seepage of wastewater into the ground water supply also poses the threat of deadly epidemics in Gaza. “We’re incredibly concerned that if there isn’t a greater level of access to water and sanitation, which requires electricity to enable the delivery of these services to people residing in densely populated urban areas, there will be an outbreak of infectious disease,” said Michael Talhami of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Talhami warned of the likely spread of “cholera, diarrhoea, hepatitis A and typhoid” fever.

A further public health danger comes from thousands of corpses that remain buried under the rubble of buildings bombed and leveled by the IDF.

In the meantime, IDF officials are escalating the bombing campaign targeting health facilities and medical professionals in Gaza. IDF spokesman Admiral Daniel Hagari claimed that “Hamas systematically exploits hospitals as part of its war machine,” and even that it “built the Indonesian Hospital to disguise its underground terror infrastructure.”

On Friday, UN officials confirmed that 135 health workers have been killed and 58 health care facilities hit by IDF bombings. Moreover, 16 hospitals and 51 primary health care centers have stopped functioning because of the fighting or lack of fuel due to the Israeli blockade of Gaza. Gaza’s main cancer hospital, the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship hospital, has also reportedly stopped due to IDF bombardments and fuel shortages.

UN officials also reported that 79 UN aid workers have been killed in less than a month of the Israel-Gaza war, the highest number ever in so relatively brief a conflict.

The IDF’s genocidal operations are proceeding with the full support of Washington, abetted by its NATO imperialist allies in Europe.

US officials have ruled out even a ceasefire in talks with their Middle Eastern counterparts. As he met Jordanian and Egyptian officials in Jordan’s capital Amman, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken ruled out any halting of the IDF onslaught against Gaza. A ceasefire, Blinken said, would “leave Hamas in place to regroup and repeat attacks.”

In a series of debased, politically-criminal statements, Israeli officials made it clear that they intend to annihilate Gaza’s Palestinian populations, except possibly for those who accept relocation to concentration camps outside Gaza. These statements came after Israeli Intelligence Ministry officials proposed last week to kill all Palestinians who did not accept deportation outside of Gaza, thus completely destroying the area’s Palestinian population.

On Sunday, Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu said he was dissatisfied with the current level of mass killing in Gaza and supported annihilating the zone with nuclear bombs. Asked on Kol Barama radio if he supported dropping “some kind of atomic bomb” on Gaza, Eliyahu replied: “That’s one option.” Israeli Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government issued a reprimand to Eliyahu for making this statement, claiming it was “disconnected from reality.”

Other Israeli ministers’ statements show, however, that Eliyahu’s genocidal statement was not an exaggeration or aberration, but faithfully reflect Netanyahu’s policies.

Galit Distel Atbaryan, a former Diplomacy Minister and now lawmaker of Netanyahu’s Likud Party, called on Israelis to use the energy they showed in protests earlier this year against Netanyahu’s government to carry out the mass murder of the Palestinians. On X/Twitter, she wrote: “Invest this energy in one thing; Erasing all of Gaza from the face of the earth. That the Gazan monsters will fly to the southern fence and try to enter Egyptian territory or they will die. And their death is evil. Gaza should be erased.”

A wave of murderous violence is also unfolding by far-right Israeli settlers in the West Bank, after Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir distributed 10,000 rifles and other military equipment to settlers after the outbreak of the Israel-Gaza war. At least 132 Palestinians, including 41 children, have been killed by Israeli troops or settlers in the past three weeks.

The horrific levels of violence and the impunity with which it it is carried out by far-right forces protected by the Israeli regime and its NATO imperialist allies make one point clear. There is nothing that can be negotiated with the Netanyahu government or with its NATO backers. Halting the slaughter requires unifying the growing international protest movement of workers and youth against the war in a movement against Israel’s war on Gaza and all the capitalist governments that support it.

Originally published in WSWS.org

6 November 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Gideon Polya

The Western World is saturated with false Zionist propaganda in support of genocidally racist, neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel, but horrendous mortality data reveal that after one month of the latest genocidal Gaza Massacre by Israel, and as averaged over the last 16 years for the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Israel is equal worst in the World with crime-wracked Honduras for annual killing of children per million of population, and is worst in the World by far for killing journalists.

As outlined below, I have made these quantitative estimates by including data from the Gaza Massacre over the last month. One can only hope that Western journalists who surely (a) love children and (b) feel an obligation towards fellow journalists will find the courage to expose the horrendous, World-leading  killing of  Occupied Palestinian  children and of journalists by out-of-control, neo-Nazi, genocidally racist, and serial war criminal  Apartheid Israel.

(A). Neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel is equal worst in the World with crime-wracked Honduras for killing children.

On 15 June 2022 I wrote: “Apartheid Israel in its illegal and war criminal occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories is among world leaders in “children killed per year per million of total occupied territory population” with a value of  25.8 as compared to 75.7 (Honduras), 53.6 (Ituri Province, Democratic Republic of the Congo), 7.6 (the World), and 2.6 (Kashmir, India). However while the killing in the Occupied Palestinian Territories is being done by the occupying  military forces of the neo-Nazi Apartheid State of Israel, that in Honduras is mostly being done by criminal gangs, and that in Ituri  Province (Democratic Republic of the Congo) is mostly being done by criminal rebel gangs” [1].

However the Apartheid Israel-permitted  Breakout of Occupied Palestinian fighters from the Gaza Concentration Camp on 7 October 2023 changed this horrifying statistic for the worse, as set out below.

The UK Guardian has reported that 859 Occupied Palestinian children were killed in the period 2008-September 2023. However it also reports that subsequent to the 7 October 2023 Breakout  and as of 5 November 2023, 3,900 Gaza children have been killed and another 1,250 have been buried in bomb-blasted rubble and presumed killed, for a total of 5,150 child deaths [2].

One can then calculate “children killed per year per million of population” by Apartheid Israel in the Gaza Concentration Camp over the last 30 days = ( 5,150 deaths / 30 days) x (365.25 days/ year) / 2.3 million Gazans =  27,261  “children killed per year per million of total territory population” . This horrifying number of 27,261 is 3,587 times greater than for the World (7.6) and  360 times greater than  for crime-wracked Honduras (75.7).

This awful number is set to increase because there are 50,000 pregnant women in the Gaza Concentration Camp, the killing is continuing at the same horrendous level, and neo-Nazi Apartheid  has only permitted a trickle of life-sustaining aid into Gaza that from 7 October was subject to a war criminal Israeli siege involving a near-total  ban on water, food, medicine, other medical requisites, electricity and fuel.

In order to be exquisitely  “fair” to  the child-killing Israelis one should estimate  the average from 2008 onwards of “children killed per year per million of the total Occupied Palestinian Territory population”. Children killed in this period totalled 859 + 5,150 = 6,009, this giving “children killed per year per million of total Occupied Palestinian Territory population” = 6,009 Children killed / 16 years)/ (average population of 5.15 million) = 72.9, about the same as for world’s worst Honduras (75.7) but set to rise enormously in coming days, weeks. and months in the deadly absence of water, food, medicine, medical services, electricity and fuel. Indeed neo-Nazi Israeli forces have targeted 58 health care facilities in Gaza, with 132 medics dead,  25 ambulances destroyed, and 58 hospitals and 32 primary care centres forced out of service due to bombing and fuel shortage. 1 million Gazans are homeless  [3].

Another way of seeing this carnage is as Gaza child deaths as reprisals for the killing of 35 Israeli children in the 7 October Breakout from the Gaza Concentration Camp. One can readily estimate from data provided by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that of the 1,400  Israeli dead,  84.2%  ( 1,179) were 18-39 year old military regulars, conscripts and reservists, 15.8% (221 ) were under 18 and 40 and over, 13.3% (186) were 40 and over (most with military service for the illegal 56-year Occupation), and 2.5% (35) were children. Thus in the last month the neo-Nazi Israelis have killed 5,150/ 35 = 147 Gaza children killedfor every Israeli child killed on 7 October [4] .

However this deadly ratio is probably much higher because it is not clear how many of these  35 Israeli children – and indeed how many of the 1,400 Israelis killed – were actually killed by  Israeli forces responding to the Breakout. Thus Jonathan Cook (eminent reporter on the Middle East and author of “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books)): “Given Hamas’ situation, effectively managing the Israeli-controlled concentration camp of Gaza, it has limited resistance strategies available to it. Capturing Israeli soldiers maximises its leverage. They can be traded for the release of many of the thousands of Palestinian political prisoners held in jails inside Israel, in breach of international law. In addition, in the negotiations, Hamas usually hopes to win an easing of Israel’s 16-year siege of Gaza. To avert this scenario, Israeli commanders reportedly called in the attack helicopters on the military bases overwhelmed by Hamas on October 7. The helicopters appear to have fired indiscriminately, despite the risk posed to the Israeli soldiers in the base who were still alive. Israel’s was a scorched-earth policy to stop Hamas achieving its aims. That may, in part, explain the very large proportion of Israeli soldiers among the 1,300 killed that day” [5].

(B). Neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is worst in the World for annual killing of journalists per million of  population.

On 6 June 2022 I wrote: “The World  was shocked by the recent deliberate killing by an Israeli sniper of veteran Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. However over 50 journalists have been killed by Apartheid Israel in the last 2 decades. Careful analysis reveals that Apartheid Israel leads the World  by far in terms of  “average number of journalists killed per 10 million of population per year”. Self-respecting journalists world-wide must report this shocking fact… Apartheid Israel tops the ranking by “average number of journalists killed per 10 million of population per year” that  yields the following order: Occupied Palestine, over 6.164; Syria, 4.733; Afghanistan, 2.563; Israel-Palestine, over 2.190; Somalia, 1.751; Yemen, 1.278; Iraq, 0.897;  Mexico, 0.750; Colombia, 0.366; Philippines, 0.283; Pakistan, 0.152; World, 0.084; India, 0.027. On a per capita basis, the killing of journalists by Apartheid Israel in  Occupied Palestine  leads the World, and is 73.4 times greater than for the World as a whole. In contrast,  India scores 3.1 times lower than the World. The present data shows that Apartheid Israel leads the World by far for killing journalists” [6].

I have updated the death toll of journalists killed by Apartheid Israel in the Occupied Palestinians Territories since 2001 as follows. The respected Irish Times reported (May 2022): “Israel has killed more than 50 Palestinian journalists since 2001, according to the Palestinian Journalism Syndicate, and Reporters Without Borders has recorded more than 144 journalists injured in just the last four years” [7]. The number of journalists killed in  the Occupied Palestinian Territories between 2001 and May 2022 averaged 50 deaths/ 21years = 2.4 per year. Accordingly the number of journalists killed in  the Occupied Palestinian Territories in the 1.3 years between mid-May 2022 and October  2023  totals about 2.4 per year x 1.3 years = 3.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists  (CPJ) (November 2023): “As of November 5, CPJ’s preliminary investigations showed at least 36 journalists and media workers were among an estimated 11,000 killed since the war began on October 7 – with more than 9,700 Palestinian deaths in Gaza and the West Bank, and 1,400 deaths in Israel” [8].

Thus the  number of journalists killed in  the Occupied Palestinians Territories in the circa 22 years from 2001 to 6 November 2023 = 50 (from 2001 to mid-2022) + 3 (from mid-2022 to 6 October 2023) + 36 (7 October 2023 – 5 November 2023) = 89/ 22 years = 4.05 deaths per year. The average Occupied Palestinian Territory population in this period was 4.4 million [9]. Accordingly in the Occupied Palestinian Territory the “average annual number of journalist killed per 10 million of population” since 2001=  4.05 deaths per year /4.4 million of population = 0.92 deaths per million of population = 9.2 journalist deaths per 10 million of population or nearly 2 times greater than for the next worst entity, US Alliance-devastated Syria (4.7 journalist deaths per 10 million of population) [6].

Final comments and conclusions

As set out above, (A) as averaged over the last 16 years for the Occupied Palestinian Territory, neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel is equal worst in the World with crime-wracked Honduras for “annual killing of children per million of population” (72.9 ad 75.7, respectively) , and (B) as averaged over the last 22 years is worst in the World by far for “annual killing of journalists per 10 million of population” (9.2 or nearly 2 times greater than for the next worst entity, US Alliance-devastated Syria (4.7 journalist deaths per 10 million of population).

Yet Zionist-subverted, Zionist-perverted and US-beholden Western Mainstream journalists resolutely ignore these horrendous realities that have been reported before the present genocidal Gaza Massacre [1, 6] and are apparent from applying first year High School mathematics to the latest data from authoritative sources as carefully documented here.

One naively makes the assumptions that Western Mainstream journalists (a) like other human beings love children, and (b) have human and collegiate loyalty to fellow journalists and especially to their colleagues reporting in dangerous conflict zones. However with some notable exceptions (e.g. the UK Guardian) the Silence is Deafening. The Silence is not through Stupidity (you have to be smart to land a job at the New York Times or the Washington Post) and not through Ignorance (Mainstream media have huge internal information resources as well as ready access to Google, ChatGPT, and ethical, humane and truth-telling Alternative media such as Countercurrents). One concludes that the Silence is due to a combination of unspoken entrenched racism towards non-Europeans and despicable cowardice in self-censoring to please Zionist-subverted media owners.

“Killing children” is such a fundamentally awful crime that it is not even among the Ten Commandments that inform the major historicist Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

However one notes that in the hopefully fictional Old Testament of the Holy Bible the “God” of the genocidal Biblical Israelites repeatedly orders them to totally exterminate their enemies, sparing no men, women, children or even livestock [10].  Indeed serial war criminal and mass murderer, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, in declaring ”war” on the imprisoned Occupied Palestinians in the Gaza Concentration Camp recently echoed the Old Testament and the genocidal Nazis in stating “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible” [11].  Brett Wilkins of Common Dreams: “Human rights defenders on Monday accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of an “explicit call to genocide” after he delivered a televised address calling Israel’s imminent invasion of Gaza a “holy mission” and invoked an ancient mythical foe whom the God of the Hebrew Bible commanded the Israelites to exterminate. Declaring the start of a “second stage” of Israel’s war on Gaza—which he described as a “holy mission”—Netanyahu said that “you must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible.” According to the Hebrew Bible, the nation of Amalek was an ancient archenemy of the Israelites whose extermination was commanded by God to Saul via the prophet Samuel” [11].

In stark contrast, the wonderful  Palestinian humanitarian Jesus stated: “And whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea”  [12]. Likewise in the New Testament, Matthew 18.21-23: “21. Then Peter came to Him and said, Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Until seven times? 22. And Jesus said unto him, I say not unto thee, until seven times, but until seventy times seven. 23. Therefore is the Kingdom of Heaven likened unto a certain king who would settle accounts with his servants” [13].

But sin one more time? Indeed a highly controversial and explicit 1964 Swedish movie called “491” was premised on the following: “It is written that 490 times you can sin and be forgiven. This motion picture is about the 491st” [14].

Neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel has sinned vastly more than 491 times and has so far killed about 5,150 Occupied Palestinian children in the Gaza Concentration Camp since 7 October 2023. The final death toll is likely to be unimaginably higher. This is an utterly unforgivable crime that is continuing  day after day while the World looks on.  On 27 October the UN General Assembly demanded an immediate  Ceasefire  via a Resolution  supported by 120 decent and mostly non-European countries, but opposed by 59 countries that included  a majority of European allies of pro-Apartheid America and hence of pro-Apartheid Israel [15]. Apartheid is among the worst of crimes as set out in the UN International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid.

In my own country, Australia, a nation with a shocking history of an ongoing, 235-year Australian Aboriginal  Genocide and Aboriginal Ethnocide and blind support for UK, US and Apartheid Israeli settler-colonialism and imperialism, the US lackey Labor Government, the Coalition Opposition, and the Mainstream media overwhelmingly support neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel and pro-Apartheid America, this involving  diplomatic support for Israel and military collaboration. The core human ethos is Kindness and Truth but this is rejected by pro-Apartheid Israel and hence pro-Apartheid  Australia that has instead substituted  support for genocidal racism and extraordinary, Orwellian Zionist lying and entrenched mendacity [16]. I fervently hope that a majority of decent  Australian are utterly revolted by the ongoing genocidal Gaza Massacre by neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel and will kick out the shamefully dirty Labor Government at the next election and consign both the racist Coalition and racist Labor to the sewer of history. One envisions a new Australian Government in 2025 composed of the decent Greens in coalition with socially progressive and pro-climate change action Independents.

There are 2 kinds of people in this world, those opposing the killing of innocents, and the others. Zionism is genocidal racism and Nazism without gas chambers but with 90 nuclear weapons, and one of the world’s biggest  high technology militaries and arms industries. Free Palestine! All human rights for all Palestinians! End the Occupation! From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free! Ideally there must be a secular and democratic state in Palestine as in post-apartheid South Africa and involving peace, equal rights for all, reconciliation, economic justice for all, secular democracy, security, freedom of movement for all, and return of all refugees [17].

Decent people around the World  must unite against neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel and its neo-Nazi pro-Apartheid supporters by (a) informing everyone they can, and (b) urging and applying Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Apartheid Israel and all people, politicians, parties, collectives, corporations and countries supporting this genocidally racist and  neo-Nazi Apartheid rogue state.

References.

[1]. Gideon Polya, “Apartheid Israel Among World Leaders For Killing Children”, Countercurrents, 15 June 2022: https://countercurrents.org/2022/06/apartheid-israel-among-world-leaders-for-killing-children/ .

[2]. Emma Graham-Harrison and Jason Burke, “Gaza’s children face catastrophe as death toll nears 4,000, UN warns”, Guardian, 5 November 2023: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/05/gazas-children-face-catastrophe-as-death-toll-nears-4000-un-warns .

[3]. Mohamed Majed, “Gaza’s death toll from Israeli assault climbs to 8,796”, AA, 1 November 2023: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/gaza-s-death-toll-from-israeli-assault-climbs-to-8-796/3040221 .

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

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

[6].Gideon Polya, “Remember Shireen Abu Akleh: Apartheid Israel Leads The World For Killing Journalists”, Countercurrents, 6 June 2022: https://countercurrents.org/2022/06/remember-shireen-abu-akleh-apartheid-israel-leads-the-world-for-killing-journalists/ .

[7]. Brendan Ciarán Browne, “Killing of Shireen Abu Akleh a fatal sign of Israel’s control. Pattern of Palestinian media bodies being attacked by Israeli policy is all too evident”, The Irish Times, 16 May 2022: https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/killing-of-shireen-abu-akleh-a-fatal-sign-of-israel-s-control-1.4878879 .

[8]. “Journalist casualties in the Israel-Gaza war”, CPJ, 5 November 2023: https://cpj.org/2023/11/journalist-casualties-in-the-israel-gaza-conflict/ .

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

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

[11]. Brett Wilkins, “Netanyahu Accused of ‘Genocidal Intentions’ in Gaza After ‘Holy Mission’ Speech”, Common Dreams, 30 October 2023: https://www.commondreams.org/news/netanyahu-genocide .

[12]. The New Testament of the Holy Bible, King James Version, Mark 9.42: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/k/kjv/kjv-idx?type=DIV2&byte=4562737 .

[13]. The New Testament of the Holy Bible, King James Version, Matthew 18.21-23: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2018:21-23&version=KJ21 .

[14]. “491”, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/491_(film) .

[15]. Gideon Polya, “59 Countries Invite Global Sanctions By Backing Apartheid Israel’s Genocidal Gaza Massacre”, Countercurrents, 3 November 2023: https://countercurrents.org/2023/11/59-countries-invite-global-sanctions-by-backing-apartheid-israels-genocidal-gaza-massacre/ .

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

[17]. “Secular, democratic, one state Palestine: https://sites.google.com/view/onestatepalestine/home .

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

6 November 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Abdelfattah Abusrour

I CONDEMN MYSELF

I would like to thank all those who
contacted me by any means to assure
their solidarity and ask about us,
I am grateful beyond limits for those who
are with us in such challenging times
Media Journalists, TV interviewers come to us, pointing fingers
and asking this endless question: Do you condemn Palestinian terrorism?
Do you condemn Hamas?
So, let’s deal with that.

I do condemn myself. I condemn my whole existence
I condemn my own birth in a refugee camp in my own country
I condemn my own birth for being a Palestinian,
while according to many, Palestine does not exist
I condemn my parents, who were uprooted from their destroyed villages
and brought me to life in a refugee camp

I condemn my own life: I had hopes and dreams to be a great biologist
and researcher who would save lives,
an amazing painter and a marvelous photographer,
a fantastic actor and talented writer who would inspire the whole world
I didn’t really search to be famous in anything I have done

I condemn myself for believing that human rights include us
How dare I think that we are even part of these values?
I condemn myself believing in international law and UN resolutions
that people under occupation have the legitimate right to resist by ALL MEANS.

How dare I consider that we are under occupation
I ask for your forgiveness
I believed that standing with the oppressed was the natural thing to do
What can I say… I am so ignorant

So, World!
I am really sorry
I didn’t realize I was misled and misinformed
Should I apologize?
Should I condemn?
I deeply apologize, World!
I apologize to you all
I condemn myself for being who I am
I apologize for not having blond hair and blue eyes
Even though some of my cousins have blond hair and green or blue eyes
I was taught that I should support the oppressed and prevent the oppressor from continuing the oppression
I was told that I should support the evil Black South Africans
against the kind white apartheid system
This was only designed to humanize them
I apologize

I was told to support the Spanish and Italians
Against the dictatorships and fascists
Germans and Europeans against the Nazis
Arabs, Africans, Irish, Scottish against British and European colonization’s
Vietnam, Latin America and Afghanistan against American invasions
I was taught to support Native Americans and Australian, Muslims in Myanmar, China and India… and so many others
Palestinians against British and Zionist occupation
I was taught to support the resistance of the oppressed against the oppressor

I apologize for not being able to forget that I am still a refugee in my own country
I condemn my stubborn reclamation of my right to return to my parents destroyed villages
How dare I do that? How dare all these stubborn Palestinian refugees claim that right of return?
I condemn my parents who raised me with, “If you are consumed with hatred,
you lose your humanity” How dare they not to teach me how to hate?
I apologize for not accepting the exile of my brother,
the imprisonment of my brothers, cousins, nephews, neighbors and so many others…
I couldn’t understand your human rights and international law.
I thought I was protected as a human being or even if considered as a human animal?
I apologize for my ignorance…

I apologize that I still couldn’t figure out how to co-exist with occupation,
oppression, dehumanization and be happy about it?
Do you have special training? I am happy to join….
Or should I just say, no thank you… I pass

We will not forget…. We will remember
We will not forget the silence, the hypocrisy, the blackmailing
We will not forget those who raised their voice and stood with what is just and right
We will not forget anything

You can continue to push for despair and we will continue to flourish with hope
You can continue to promote death and we will continue to promote life
You will continue to do your worst.  We will continue to do our best

A poem by Abdelfattah Abusrour PhD, a visionary arts educator, Winner of Stars Foundation Impact Award 2016, Ashoka Fellow – Social Entrepreneur 2006, Synergos Social Innovator 2011.

October 14th, 2023

Sourrce: forsea.co

By Tom Suarez

For 75 years, Israel has been terrorizing Gaza, attacking and bombing the very people it ethnically cleansed from their homes in 1948. When finally on 7 October the Gaza concentration camp blew wide open, the ‘West’ feigned outrage — and blamed Gaza. Herewith a crash-course for the media and US presidents…

What is Gaza?

● Gaza is an ancient region of Palestine. But the world now knows it as the Gaza strip, a specific area severed from the rest of Palestine by Israel’s acquisition of territory by force.

Who are its people?

● Although Gaza has been home to Palestinians since ancient times, most of Gaza’s people today are originally from land now under Israeli control, ethnically cleansed by Israel because they are not Jewish. Israel continues to block them from returning home for that singular reason, sealing the “strip” as a ghetto for non-Jews.

Certainly they can at least get to the West Bank to escape the carnage?

● No. Already in 1948, Israel began shooting Palestinians attempting to cross from Gaza to the West Bank. In 1967 Israel created bantustans out of the Palestinian land it seized in the Six Day War, and assigned all non-Jews ID cards for one bantustan or another.

But today this has to do with Hamas, a terrorist organization

● The word ‘terrorist’ has lost all meaning in political parlance. Terrorism is deliberate violence against civilians to achieve a political end — precisely the tactic Israel was born by, and continues to exist by. Palestinian violence, terror or not, justifiable in means or not, is in self-defense against Israeli terror.

● Israel uses terror to achieve its goals because those very goals constitute crimes against humanity. Palestinian goals are those of human rights, equality, and freedom, but we, the ‘international community’, have for 75 years denied them any conventional means of defense, while empowering their tormentors.

● Hamas’ breach of the Gaza ‘fence’ on October 7 was not in itself an act of terror — as the elected government responsible for the Palestinians’ security, it had the very obligation to breach the concentration camp walls.

But Hamas killed 1400 Israelis, took 200 hostages, and committed atrocities

● Hamas’ capturing or killing of Israeli soldiers enforcing the concentration camp is legitimate self-defense. Hamas’ killing of civilians is not. But if we are to be reduced to argument by body count, even just a single Israeli massacre against Gaza (2014) killed twice as many civilians, and the US Congress applauded it.

● The “1400” figure is repeated despite substantial evidence that the IDF, not Hamas, was responsible for many of those deaths, whether through indiscriminate fire or because of the so-called ‘Hannibal Directive’ in which Israel deliberately eliminates captives to avoid hostages.

● Hamas did indeed take civilian hostages. Yet Israel holds at any time five-to-ten thousand Palestinian kidnapped civilians, many of them children; but instead of calling them hostages, calls them ‘prisoners’, and we go along with it.

● As regards Hamas atrocities, surely Israel would have documented them? Forty beheaded babies and not even a photograph for war crimes trials? We have instead only words parroted by the media and US president. This is not to say that atrocities could not have occurred; yet the few survivors whose accounts have been made public speak instead of being well-treated, even respectfully treated, despite the inherently terrifying situation.

Antisemitism is through the roof

● It is an offense against common decency — and indeed against Jewish identity — that the cloud of antisemitism is raised to smokescreen genocide. Contrary to the spin of US politicians, Hamas did not attack Israel because it hated Jews. This exploitation of antisemitism to cover Israel’s ongoing crimes should be condemned, not obeyed.

● Ironically, those bigots who indeed blame ‘the Jews’ for the carnage against Gaza are merely taking Israel at its word — that Israel acts in the name of Jews, as Jews.

● The organizations supplying the ever-rising antisemitism figures repeated by the media use a fictitious definition of antisemitism (IHRA) that was specifically engineered to smear voices critical of Israel as antisemitic. Even my pointing this out adds another tick to their tally.

There is no answer to this ‘conflict’

● There has always been an answer: the end of apartheid, equal rights for everyone river-to-sea in a secular state. Israel blocked this in 1947, and continues to block it today, because the end of apartheid means the end of Israel. That is and always has been the cause of these decades of misery.

● Thus the end to this 75-year catastrophe lies entirely in the hands of Israel and its benefactors. There are no ‘two sides’ to this. No Palestinian has ever occupied Israeli land, placed Israelis under apartheid, ethnically cleansed Israelis, or blocked Israelis from going home or getting medical treatment or going to school or pursuing their dreams. The present horror is not the result of evolutionary events, but of the singular goal of the Zionist movement for well over a century: a messianic state based on racial supremacy and ‘purity’, achievable only through the dehumanization and elimination of another people.

Tom Suárez is a London-based historical researcher as well as a professional Juilliard-trained violinist and composer.

4 November 2023

Source: countercurrents.org