Archives: Articles

Unmasking the US/Israel rhetoric of war, human rights, and geopolitical strategy in Palestine.

By Marwan Bishara

Watching the United States deploy two aircraft carriers and a major naval strike force to the Middle East to threaten nemeses and help Israel sow death and destruction in Palestine, I am reminded of a story told by St Augustine about a pirate captured by Alexander the Great, who asked him how he dared to molest the sea. “How dare you molest the whole world,” the pirate replied. “Because I do it with a little ship only, I am called a thief. You, doing it with a great navy, are called an emperor.”

Indeed, after two decades of imperial US wars that molested the Middle East, President Joe Biden’s administration is at it again, issuing threats and ultimatums to Palestinian and other resistance groups while shielding its client state, Israel, as it bombs Gaza and reoccupies the rest of Palestine; history be damned. As if millions of US/Israel war casualties were not enough, the American administration is now an enthusiastic accomplice in Israel’s unravelling genocide against besieged Palestinian Arabs in Gaza.

Like other empires, old and new, America is careful to speak of human rights as it helps decimate human life. It claims to respect the laws of war but continues to provide justifications for the Israeli murder of thousands of Palestinians. The benevolent empire expresses sorrow at the sight of a single dead infant but provides the deadly weapons and the political rationale to slaughter thousands of women and children. Its diplomats preach peace while propagating war.

For decades, America and Israel have been waging asymmetrical wars in the Middle East, where they devastate countless communities and displace millions of people under the pretext of self-defence. They demonise their enemies and dehumanise their victims to justify massive and disproportionate use of firepower, causing as much harm and suffering as possible.

After decades of war, the US and Israel have developed a comprehensive lexicon of newspeak and media guides that highlight the “righteousness” of their cause and the “evilness” of their enemies. They claim, for example, that the Israeli armed forces are “trained, tasked and operate to ensure that Palestinian civilians remain safe”, never mind the countless Palestinian civilian casualties so far in Gaza.

Despite the huge difference between Hamas and al-Qaeda, the fearmongering that followed the 9/11 attacks on the US, which shut down debate and led to catastrophic failures in the following two decades, has been replicated as if nothing has changed. Soon Hamas, a native Islamist resistance movement born out of, and marked by, oppressive occupation, came to be seen as ISIL (ISIS) incarnate – evil, fanatic and brutal – that must be annihilated at any cost.

The American and Israeli narrative is the same; it is as consistent as it is deceptive. Their fight is “on behalf of civilisation against barbarity”, of “good against evil” and “with moral clarity against moral bankruptcy”. Their fight is always in self-defence, their wars always just, their intentions always noble, even altruistic. They fight for democracy and freedom against totalitarianism and terrorism. If their allies are terrorists and dictators, as is often the case, they are swiftly rebranded as freedom fighters and moderates.

Such righteousness would be worthy of respect if only it was honest or true.

The American-Israeli strategic liaison, born during the latter’s 1967 war and occupation, has been the main engine of instability and violence in the region ever since. As the US replaced Europeans as the leading imperial power in the region at the height of the Cold War and became Israel’s patron, it paved the way for an imperial colonial alliance that occupies and subjugates the peoples of the Middle East as well.

The United States designated Israel as a regional policeman in the 1960s, a regional influencer in the 1970s, a strategic asset in the 1980s, and it has since been viewed as being at the forefront of the US war on terrorism. Paradoxically, almost every time Israel rejected an American peace initiative, it was somehow rewarded by a new Pentagon deal and greater military assistance, latest of which topped $38 billion.

For decades now, the US and Israel have demanded that the Arabs choose between Good and Evil and told them they are “either with US or against us” as they wreaked havoc in the region. In 1958, the devil was Egypt’s pan-Arab leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser; in 1968, it became Palestinian guerrilla leader Yasser Arafat; in 1978, Iran’s ayatollah; and when all three were no longer threats, Saddam Hussein emerged as the new devil. Predictably, after Saddam was “contained”, Osama bin Laden became the devil of all devils, until Saddam emerged once again as the chief devil. And since 2008, Iran-supported Hamas and Hezbollah have become the new regional devils that must be defeated once and for all.

This came into full view in the latest Gaza war when the United States redeployed its armadas to the region last month to shield Israel from any potential regional retaliation from the likes of Lebanon’s Hezbollah to allow it to carry out its genocide against the Palestinians in response to Hamas’s October 7 attacks.

Before looking for their next “evil” enemy in the Middle East, and plunge the region into more chaos and violence, the United States and Israel may want to look inwards, for a change, and save us all another horrific war.

Ten thousand dead and tens of thousands of wounded Palestinians later, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is back in the Middle East in an attempt to turn Israel’s war crimes into a diplomatic and strategic successes. Expect the modern-day imperial emissary to coerce the Arab regimes into joining a new Pax Americana revolving around colonial Israel.

Marwan Bishara is an author who writes extensively on global politics and is widely regarded as a leading authority on US foreign policy, the Middle East and international strategic affairs.

3 November 2023

Source: aljazeera.com

By CONTRIBUTING AUTHORS

Guest contributor

Maung Zarni

I was barely four-years-old when the Six Day War broke out between Israel and a coalition of Arab states, namely Syria, Jordan and Egypt in June 1967.

The end of the war saw Israeli seizure – and what turned out to be permanent occupation of Syria’s Golan Heights, Jordan’s West Bank with East Jerusalem as a part of it, and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip. Egypt and Jordan agreed to a ceasefire on June 8, and Syria on June 9, and it was signed with Israel on June 11. The war resulted in more than 20,000 Arab casualties while Israel suffered 1,000 deaths.

Three decades after the war, on the ABC News with Ted Koppel, Nelson Mandela – a supporter of Palestinian liberation struggle and by then the iconic anti-apartheid leader – demanded that Israel return the occupied territories to the indigenous population of Palestine.

The war – known as the Six Day War (as it lasted only six days) – was too far away from my hometown of Mandalay, Burma. I was too young to take an interest in matters that did not involve sweets or plays or singing nursery rhymes. I knew absolutely nothing about the war, the context, the immediate trigger, nor the loss of lives from all sides or the territorial annexation.

But I was 10-years-old when the 1973 war (the fourth such war), between Israel and its Arab neighbors broke out on the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur on Oct. 6, 1973 (the tenth day of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan).

I already had a rudimentary knowledge of history and current affairs both through my elementary school textbooks, and my extended family with an interest in global affairs. I learned with a deep sense of horror about the Nazi genocide of the Jews, the Second World War, the Burmese liberation struggles against the British rule and the Japanese fascist occupation of my country for a combined total of 124 years. My mother was a trained historian, who picked history books for me to read for leisure, and my paternal step-grandfather was an avid newspaper reader.

During the Yom Kippur War in 1973, the Burmese state newspaper outlets, like the Working People’s Daily, would print the Arab-Israel war news and analyses, with pro-Israel spins.

I even remember the news reportage of the visit to Rangoon’s landmark Shwedagon Pagoda of Israeli war hero General Moshe Dayan. Decades later I learned that the celebrated visitor was our dictator’s good friend.

“Bogyoke, or general, and Moshe Dayan were quite close,” recalled the late June Rose Bellamy, the wife of General Ne Win, whom I called Aunty. When I was researching about the general and the military affairs, I would visit Aunty in Florence and we became close friends in the final decade of her life in Italy.

Back to 1973 

With newspapers lying around in our living room after my grandfather had read them, I would leaf through the pages, looking at the infographics filled with troop strengths, casualties, maps, and other usual war-related information.

With my nascent racial consciousness – I must hasten to add, with growing elements of anti-Arab, anti-Indian and anti-Muslim racisms – I would delight in the news of Israeli military victories over the “hooked-nose and deceptive” Arab invaders. My perception and attitude towards “the Arabs”, whom I presumed – obviously falsely – were all Muslims, was beginning to crystalize.

Based on my own country’s anti-British and anti-colonial history, at least among the Burmese Buddhist majority with deep family ties to our national armed forces – known as the Tatmadaw – I was opposed to any foreign invaders to any sovereign nation. As a 10-year-old beginning to experience nationalism, I thought that Israel, a sovereign state, was great at repelling the “crooked” Arab invaders. I cheered on quietly reading how Israeli troops and the air force had dealt the enemy blow by blow. Reading the war news then was like watching your favorite football team scoring multiple times against their opponents.

But 50 years had flown by since the Arab-Israel War – and the word Palestine – registered in my Burmese consciousness. I had un-learned a great many things – for better – including my Pavlovian Burmese patriotism, militarism, categorical racism towards Muslims and the Arabs, and, above all, my admiration for Israel and love of all things West.

And I also learned how to dissect imperialism in all its manifestations, historical, cultural, economic, psychological, military, political and ideological. Now age 60, my heart no longer beats with excitement when Israel is beating back what in the West is designated as Muslim terrorist organizations – namely Hamas (and Islamic Jihad) that effectively breached Israel border walls and launched surprise attacks on Israeli communities and slaughtered 1,400 Israelis and took over 200 hostages.

It bears pointing out that Israel is unconditionally supported by the U.S. and Europe, including Germany and the U.K., as well as virtually all sectors of the Western Establishment, from corporations and cultural institutions, high education industry, state and corporate media outlets, and so on.

Unlike the 10-year-old Burmese boy, with rabid anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiments half-of-a-century ago, I now see Israel as the Zionist implant by the British, and subsequently armed and financed by the U.S. “in the sea of (anti-imperialist?) Arabs” for their own geopolitical and economic interests.

In these ensuing decades I nod along reading the letters critically of the “terrorist organizations” – and “their misled and criminal people” – that founded the independent state of Israel, published in the year the Zionist state was founded, by the likes of Albert Einstein and other Jewish intellectual leaders and thinkers like Hannah Arendt.

With or without any “likes”, I use social media to break taboos about the Holocaust, where non-Jews are made to feel they must take extreme care before they say or write anything critical of Israel, its permanent and colonial annexation of the land, the homes, the orchards, the business, which originally belonged to the residents of Palestine.

I now feel extremely repulsed by both Israel’s all-too-obvious sinister manipulation of the memories and tales of the Holocaust, and equally, the systematic attempt to stigmatize and criminalize any critics and criticism of Israel’s Zionist policies of Palestinian displacement and group destruction as “anti-Semitism.”

Since I became fully occupied with my own concern, study and activism around the Burmese genocide of our own national minority, the Rohingya, in Myanmar over a decade ago, I have sought to deepen my understanding of genocide anywhere in the world.

My work has taken me to Cambodia multiple times, Bosnia’s Srebrenica and other sites of mass killings, including Nazi death and slave labor camps in Poland and Germany. I even led the study tour of Auschwitz, taking with me a group of 20 Burmese, Rohingya, British and American activists and genocide scholars on the eve of Poland’s COVID-19 lock-down in 2020.

This resulted in an educational film “Auschwitz: Lessons Never Learned,” directed by my Uzbek-Jewish director friend Shahida. Genocides are a crime against humanity, an affront to all of us, who take genocide seriously.   My stance on genocide is straightforward, uncomplicated and solely morally driven.

I hold the uncompromising view: genocidal destruction of one human community is the destruction of a piece of us. “An attack on one is an attack on all” so to speak. Like NATO’s strategic paradigm except it is not based on military or ideological or geopolitical self-interests. It is based on the love of and concern for fellow humans as a part of a single family, whatever the perpetrators’ names, or the victims’.

I visited Auschwitz four times in the last six years, for a variety of reasons, including educational discussion with the museum experts and officials and as a genocide-concerned “consumer” of “dark tourism.” I have heard tales of genocide victims, set foot on the soils they perished at the hands of their monstrous – and typically sadistic – executioners, seen the material remains of millions of victims, and read the curatorial lines in these killing field exhibits, and gravestones at Ravensbrück, Dachau, Sachsenhause, Neuengamme, Auschwitz, Srebrenica or Phnom Penh’s Choeung Ek Killing Fields.

My heart feels this piercing pain every time I step into these dark sites.

Touching the bunk beds covered in layers of dust at Auschwitz-Birkenau’s barracks where 1.5 million Jews and other victims of the Holocaust were mass-exterminated, or seeing the very visible marks on the tropical trees against which Khmer Rouge’s teenage executioners smashed the tender heads of their baby-victims whom they held by the latter’s feet, induces exactly the same humanly sensations of indescribable pain, sorrow, incredulity and disdain (towards the killers).

To my deep dismay, I see many of my fellow Myanmar cheer gleefully on in multiple social media sites – particularly Facebook – when Israel launched its vicious “revenge” attack on the residents of Gaza, killing over 3,600 Gaza children – at the rate of roughly one child every 10 minutes, in 25 days, dropping over 12,000 tons of U.S. manufactured bombs over densely populated Gaza, and subjecting the population to textbook genocide of creating conditions deliberately designed to destroy physical existence of the 2.3 Palestinians – half of whom are children.

I see on social media my fellow Myanmar invite others to pray for Israel.  All this genocide cheerleading makes my blood boil. Aren’t they capable of humanity? Or of hearing the cry of despair and pain coming from beneath the rubble of over nearly 4,000 Palestinian children?

Myanmar has several different ethnic groups, but most of this cheerleading comes from either Buddhist of Christian backgrounds, judging by their profiles. I also realize that this is the same Myanmar crowd who partook, as cheerleaders and supporters of Myanmar’s Rohingya genocide seven years ago. Their continual lack of knowledge, reflection, and their own anti-Muslim racism makes it even worse. For they continue to be misled by the pro-Israeli imperialist Western mass media which portrays Israel as the one defending its own people, existence, civilization.

And conversely, the same western media, with global influence, portrays Hamas militants – and by extension – all Palestinians – as “savages” “terrorists” “invaders.” As a people from a former British colony where our ancestors were terrorized – “pacified” – into submission and subjugation and subsequently lived as subject peoples for over 120 years, aren’t these Myanmar capable of seeing the parallel colonial British narrative of Myanmar resistors as “dacoits and robbers” and the colonizers as “civilizers”?  As George Orwell summarized it bluntly, the British rule in Burma was an act of theft, governed by the colonial officials sitting behind desks, armed with one million bayonets.

Little do they know all genocides are perpetrated on the logic – and pretext – of self-defense. All colonial narratives are anchored in the threat and acts of genocidal pacification. As such, they are inherently Orwellian. That’s what Israel is doing – except it has declared its genocidal intent, unequivocally, and most despicably in the year 2023.

When Hitler and Nazis were building death camps and gas chambers, and inducing the forced mass displacement and forced migration of the Jews in the 1930-40s,  they justified the heinous racial acts as defending the Aryan nation against “racial contamination” by inferior races, especially the Jews, which Kaiser Wilhelm II dubbed, in writing in 1919, “mushrooms (that is, parasites) which grew on the German Oaktree.”

When my own country Myanmar was carrying out its slow-burning genocide, with its final wave of genocidal destruction against the Rohingya in 2017, we were told that the military was conducting “security clearance operations” against Muslim terrorists supported by two million “illegal Bengali” who don’t belong in Myanmar, but belong across the border in Muslim Bangladesh.

As a Burmese, I for one will continue, out of a felt sense of universal fellowship of humans, to oppose the colonizer, occupier and genocidal killers, whatever their name is. When U.S. President Joe Biden told Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “Your country and ours share a set of principles” – unlike the terrorists of Palestine.

Biden was nothing short of Orwellian. Neither Israel nor the U.S. is in a position to tout any humanistic or civilizational values when both are in a genocidal symbiosis, breaching all international law, criminal and humanitarian. One is openly perpetrating genocide against the entire population of Gaza as a Nazi-esque “collective punishment”. Israel’s “moderate” President Isaac Herzog declared: “There is no one in Gaza that is innocent.”

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is touted as “the world’s most moral military.” It is slaughtering children, bombing refugee camps and hospitals.   For in the eyes of the genocidal regimes, no member of the population marked for wholesale destruction is “innocent.” From the Khmer Rouge and Nazi SS, from ethnonationalist Myanmar to Zionist Israel, these regimes don’t spare babies, pregnant women, children, the sick and the elderly.

Israel has exploited the Holocaust since the closure of Auschwitz in January 1945. Instead Israelis have proceeded to commit a full-blown genocide, while crying out loud “Never again! is now!” as Netanyahu did in his last press conference. There is little wonder that Albert Einstein refused to associate himself with “the misled and criminal people” who were building Israel with their “terrorist organizations.” For the great scientist and pacifist foresaw “the fascist character” of the state that was then in its foundational year.

This coming Saturday I am teaming up other fellow rights defenders and anti-genocide campaigners to host a marathon rally and concert for a Free Palestine on YouTube Live – entitled “A Warning to Humanity: A Twenty-Nation Solidarity Rally against Israel’s Gaza Genocide.”

It will be kicked off by Palestinians themselves in the occupied territories. We will be joined by our brothers and sisters from over 20 countries, including Myanmar and neighbors such as Bangladesh, India, Philippines, Indonesia, Japan, and Indonesia.

Maung Zarni is the co-author of Essays on Myanmar’s Genocide of Rohingyas (2012-18). He is a UK-based Burmese exile with over 30-years of first-hand involvement and scholarship in Burma affairs.

DVB publishes a diversity of opinions that does not reflect DVB editorial policy.

3 November 2023

Source: english.dvb.no

By Justin Podur

The genocide proceeds. In Jabaliya, Israel dropped six tons of bombs on a refugee camp a week after bombing a number of hospitals. Westerners are being conditioned gradually to accept higher and higher numbers of daily Palestinian deaths in more and more obviously genocidal ways – gathering sites, hospitals, schools, churches, mosques, refugee camps.

The US has placed naval assets where it safely could in the region and is deploying antimissile systems on the ground all to try to deter the military intervention of regional powers to stop Israel’s genocide. There is daily contact and exchanges of missiles and other fire on the Lebanon-Israel border, missile and drone attacks on US bases in Iraq and Syria, Yemen has declared war formally and fired missiles, and of course continuing fighting across the fence and now within Gaza.

Pointing out the criminality of what Israel is doing can have no effect when the enforcers of the law are the imperialists themselves. International law will play no role in stopping this genocide. So, this presentation of the facts is not done in the hope that facts can change the West’s position on this genocide or to lay the foundation for the war crimes trials of the future. Still, since the events of October 7 are the pretext for the ongoing genocide, they must be examined.

The feelings of October 7

Most of the discussion in Western media of what happened on October 7 is based on feelings, not facts, evidence, or the relevant laws of war that would apply, if Israel or the US were subject to such laws (they are not). Based on such feelings, progressive pro-Israel writers could assure their readers that it was a massacre; or that “animals isn’t even an appropriate term for the crimes committed by the Hamas invaders” oof October 7. Squeamish feelings indeed, the preciousness of life emphasized, and the barbarism of those who would kill the innocent.

For tough talk about the harsh realities of war, you need to look to the way Americans like John Kirby talk about Palestinian deaths – present at, at the time of his speech, future as well. “I wish that that wasn’t going to happen. But it is. It is going to happen. And that doesn’t make it right… But that’s that’s unfortunately the nature of conflict.” As one commentator noted about Kirby’s speech: “this is the kind of statement people in Serbia and Rwanda got played back at them while they were sitting in a glass box in the Netherlands.”

In the end, the West doesn’t really need the facts of what Hamas’s armed wing did on October 7. What the West needs for its genocide propaganda is to generate a feeling around what happened. That it was uniquely savage, uniquely atrocious. Armed with this feeling, there can be no minimizing these Israeli civilian deaths as “collateral damage” incidental to the objectives of the Palestinian Resistance (“Hamas”) operation, the way there would be if Israel had done it to the Palestinians.

In the West, what the Palestinian Resistance did on October 7 was not a crime – but worse than a crime. Pure evil. Counterproductive to the Palestinian cause. Bad enough that Palestine’s leadership is tarnished forever, forever illegitimate.

Bad enough that any antiwar movement that wants the genocide to stop is also illegitimate, for by their failure to condemn these uniquely savage crimes, they have turbocharged Israel, lost credibility.

Bad enough to justify everything Israel did since 1948.

Bad enough to justify genocide.

Through lurid descriptions of the events of October 7, the Palestinian Resistance is defined outside of humanity. Anyone who expresses support or solidarity is defined as a supporter of inhumanity, a committer of a criminal speech act, unprotected from libel and whatever penalties can be applied from there.

Genocide is justified, solidarity is criminalized, through such feelings. It is hard to imagine that Western countries could be moved away from this structure of feeling.

What happened on October 7?

Still. Even if the West will not use the facts in any future legal proceeding, even if the West ignores them, even if the West is morally and politically incapable of calling the genocide off, as fact-mongers, we still have for some reason to try to find out what actually happened. What are the facts? What can we put together about what happened on October 7?

In doing this we have a finite number of sources. The Haaretz list. The guided tour of Kfar Aza. Several eyewitness accounts. On the other side, we have Hamas’s statements. We have to analyze these carefully. Each piece has to be assessed according to the source, its previous record, its interest in releasing the information, and its biases.

US spokesman John Kirby assesses the Palestinian Ministry of Health as a source in this way: “The Gaza Ministry of Health is just a front for Hamas … a terrorist organization … We can’t take anything coming out of Hamas, including the so-called ‘Ministry of Health,’ at face value.”

The same could be said, from the reverse perspective, of all mainstream Western and Israeli sources, which are “just a front for [the Israeli military]”, which is currently committing genocide and whose utterances cannot be taken at face value.

But such are the sources we have. If we cannot depend on any of the given sources to tell the whole truth, we can perhaps depend on the Western sources to present Palestinians in the worst possible light, and on Hamas’s accounts of what happened to present themselves in the best possible light, and use the sources while keeping these biases in mind.

Quantitative Analysis of the October 7 attack: The Ha’aretz List

For a quantitative sense of the scale of deaths on October 7, we rely on the Israeli newspaper, Ha’aretz, where the death count is currently being updated and which has published 902 names as of October 26, 2023. The Ha’aretz list includes both civilians and military personnel and includes those killed after October 7 – the number rises as Israelis killed in the Gaza invasion are added to the same list. An earlier list with 308 names of Israelis killed was analyzed by one commentator, who counted 171 Israeli military personnel among them.

An article in The Cradle with a similar goal as the current one – of determining what is known about what happened October 7 – published an age distribution of those killed and concluded that 16 of the 683 on the list to that date were children, the rest adults; and around half of the 683 on the list were combatants.

The Cradle contrasts this with the 5,790 Palestinian civilians killed in Gaza by Israel since October 7, 2,360 of whom were children (at the time Cradle published; we are now over 9,000 Palestinians killed and around half children, with several huge massacres like the dropping of 6 1-ton bombs on Jabaliya camp on October 31). But the Cradle doesn’t understand that Israel and the West expect a far higher standard of Hamas than they do of themselves. It is impossible to imagine what a commentator like Gideon Levy would call Palestinians, what Guardian columnists would say to the antiwar left, if Palestinians were to kill 10,000 people and 4,000 children in indiscriminate bombing.

On October 26, the Ha’aretz list had 902 names (515 of whom had photos) and categorized 556 of these as civilians, 59 as police, 14 as rescue, and 273 as soldiers (10 Nepali students and 14 Thai workers are included as well).

For 635/902 of these, no detail is provided about where the deaths happened. The largest single death toll in this list is the Re’im music festival, where 195 Israelis were killed according to this list.

The proportion of adults killed was 498/540 of the dead who have an age indicated. The October 26 list includes 20 children in total: 8 children ages 4-9 and 12 children aged 11-16. Five of these children were killed in in Be’eri, 4 in Nir Oz, 4 in Kukhleh (last names Alkra’an and Abu Sabaakh), 2 in Dimona, 1 in Arara (last name Abu Jama). Four were 17 years old, and the other 498 were between 18-65 years old. Eighteen of the dead with age indicated were senior citizens over 65.

The Battle of Nir Am: The Economist

An episode of the Economist’s podcast, the Intelligence, called “The Day Hamas Came”, describes what a battle with the Qassam fighters looked like from the point of view of Adam, a dual-pistol wielding Kibbutz dweller from Nir Am who “knew how to fight”.

The same story was written up here for the magazine. In the story, Adam describes his kibbutz, Nir Am, as a militarized fortress with a gate strong enough that a truck could not be driven through it if closed.

The kibbutz has its own militia, the KK, and its own armory. When the attack started, Adam went to the KKK commander and then to the armory, and organized the defense of the kibbutz. He personally shot one of the Palestinian fighters three times in the body and delivered the coup de grace with a shot to the head. Some of the kibbutz’s agricultural laborers, Palestinians from Gaza, were killed in the crossfire. The kibbutz’s defenders held off the Palestinian fighters until the Israeli police and army arrived. According to Adam, while the kibbutz lost people, virtually all of the attackers were killed.

In summary: this account from a survivor describes an attack on a fortified community, a two-way battle between armed groups, concluding with the death of all the attackers.

The Battle on Kibbutz Be’eri, described in the NYT Daily

The New York Times’s podcast, the Daily, featured another kibbutz survivor of the October attack, this time from Kibbutz Be’eri. 44 year old Golan Abitbol who describes his community as one of 1,000 people. Like his dual-pistol wielding compatriot Adam, Mr. Abitbol heard the alarm in the morning and immediately got his 9mm pistol, locked his family in the shelter, took a firing position in the front of his home. Soon he was exchanging gunfire with a group of Palestinian fighters. “You don’t think,” Mr. Abitbol said. “You act like a warrior.” The enemy moved on to the next house, and Mr. Abitbol saw them a house on fire. As in kibbutz Nir Am, the Israeli military eventually came to the rescue with some heavy armor. When Mr. Abitbol came out of his house, he saw a tank parked on the street. “They told us to close the eyes of the young kids so they won’t see the dead bodies of the terrorists lying outside,” he said. His fortress, kibbutz Be’eri, had been burned he estimated that one hundred people had been killed: “I don’t know how many. I couldn’t count… 1 out of 10 is dead,” he said, in his community of 1,000.

Mr. Abitbol provided his assessment of what happened and of the attackers – they were “not human beings”, he said, but “vicious killers”, “evil”, “animals”, and the attack was a “second Holocaust”. What he described, however, was not a death camp but a battle between armed attackers and armed defenders during which civilians were killed and other civilians taken captive.

Friendly fire, crossfire in Israeli media

Mondoweiss published on October 22 a review of evidence available at that time of possible “friendly fire” deaths in which Israelis died as a result of Israeli military action. One major piece of evidence reviewed was an Israeli interview, republished by the Electronic Intifada, with Yasmin Porat, another survivor from Kibbutz Be’eri, who witnessed the Israeli retaking of the kibbutz. She said the Israeli army “eliminated everyone, including the hostages. There was very, very heavy crossfire.” Another article cited is from the Guardian by a journalist who went on an Israeli-Army guided tour of kibbutz Be’eri on October 11, who described the destruction: “Building after building has been destroyed, whether in the Hamas assault or in the fighting that followed, nearby trees splintered and walls reduced to concrete rubble from where Israeli tanks blasted the Hamas militants where they were hiding. Floors collapsed on floors. Roof beams were tangled and exposed like rib cages.” A military commander told Ha’aretz that his unit “fought inside the kibbutz, from house to house, with the tanks.” “We had no choice.”

Mondoweiss cites an October 20th Ha’aretz article going into more detail about the Israeli counterattack: “…only on Monday night and only after the commanders in the field made difficult decisions — including shelling houses with all their occupants inside in order to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages — did the IDF complete the takeover of  the kibbutz. The price was terrible: at least 112 Be’eri people were killed. Others were kidnapped. Yesterday, 11 days after the massacre, the bodies of a mother and her son were discovered in one of the destroyed houses. It is believed that more bodies are still lying in the rubble.”

A survivor’s account from the kibbutz of Nir Oz describes fighting, Palestinian attackers burning houses, followed by looting, and finally an attack by an Israeli attack helicopter when one woman died – possibly from Israeli fire. Some snippets of a WhatsApp group chat from residents of Nir Oz were published in an Israeli newspaper and and show residents chatting with one another awaiting the Israeli military, describing terrorists walking around outside speaking Arabic. Another video shows what appear to be crossfire incidents at the Re’im music festival.

Another inquiry into the deaths on October 7 was published by Max Blumenthal in the Grayzone. In addition to the damage at kibbutz Be’eri characteristic of high explosives fired from tanks, Max also shows how footage of charred remains of victims at the music festival were characteristic of Hellfire missiles fired by Israeli helicopters.

Military analyst Scott Ritter believes (discussed at 1:06 of this video) that most deaths were friendly fire:

“Israel’s lying to itself and the world because Israel doesn’t want the truth to come out about October 7, the absolute failure – political failure, military failure. And they definitely don’t want to talk about October 8. That’s the day they really don’t want to talk about. Because that’s the day that this undisciplined mob of Israeli Defense Force poured back into the settlements and slaughtered the settlers that were there… if they release the autopsies of all the bodies they picked up, you’ll find that the majority of them, more than the majority, were killed by 5.56mm rounds fired by Israel. There’s enough eyewitness testimony that supports this. And Israel doesn’t want to talk about this.”

Urban warfare and civilian casualties

For a comparison of the methods used by armed organizations and civilian casualties, the Palestinian attack on October 7 could be compared to the battle of Shuja’iya in 2014, described by Israeli participants in the battle in the report by Breaking the Silence, This is How We Fought in Gaza.

Scott Ritter, on the program DD Geopolitics, described how the various decisions by Hamas’s armed wing could have been made. He compares October 7, 2023 with the World War 2 Normandy campaign and the battle for Cannes. The British and Canadians had hoped to seize the city in a day, but the Germans moved three divisions into the city and it was a “bad battle” in which tens of thousands of French civilians lost their lives. The British and Canadians, Ritter said, would “go in, throw a hand grenade, oops, family of six, sorry, too bad so sad, wrong place wrong time, keep going. Because if you pause and cry, you get killed.” Like the allies in Cannes, the Palestinian fighters were “being actively resisted – Israeli forces were surging into the area, they were making contact with Hamas, they met Hamas in the kibbutzim. It’s an active war zone. A lot of people died. And a lot of them were civilians caught in the crossfire.”

On the question of the civilians captured by Hamas, Ritter elaborated. “Why did they remove the women and children?” Ritter described a mission, Operation Eagle Claw, when Delta Force attempted to rescue hostages held in Iran. As they were setting up, “a busload of religious pilgrims drove through the site after we had landed. We captured the bus. We couldn’t let them go. So we put them all on a C-130… we took them hostage for operational security reasons. Do you think it’s possible Hamas had these women and children and thought if we keep them alive they’re going to make a phone call, we’ve got to get them out with us. Do you think that could have happened? I don’t know… I’m not saying Hamas didn’t commit any atrocities. I’m not in a position to know. The Israelis have a lot of footage of Hamas fighters turning corners and shooting people. Is that terrorism? Is that terrorism or are they assaulting a military position, from their standpoint?”

Reports of atrocities all source back to the Israeli military

Reports of atrocities all trace back to the Israeli military and are rejected by Hamas categorically. The worst reports – of sexual violence, decapitated babies, burned babies – are all sourced back to the Israeli military and reported by the corps of pro-genocide Western reporters. These include a report in the Daily Mail based on testimony from a pseudonymous morgue worker named Shari who said it was “worse than the holocaust”, a visit by a journalist to a forensic pathology center showing photos of hands, plastic bags, and unidentifiable burned remains, a screening of Go Pro footage to 100 pro-genocide reporters, and the like. In all of these, specifics are removed, ostensibly out of either respect or simply because the horror is too great – the result is to maintain the mystique of acts that are beyond human comprehension. Acts that also, according to these sources, took place during active battles with the Israeli military.

As far as footage that does not trace back to the Israeli military: There is video footage – from cellphones, security cameras, etc. – of Palestinians looting and even engaging in undisciplined attacks on civilians. The men in these videos do not appear uniformed or equipped as Hamas’s armed wing or any of the other factions. There were men who left Gaza through the fence once it was destroyed and were caught on video engaging in crimes. It is possible that these individuals were responsible for the crimes that occurred, and not Hamas’s armed wing who were engaging with the Israeli army and police.

Conclusion: What is known about October 7

Gathering these Western and Israeli sources: there were a series of attacks on October 7 by Hamas’s armed wing on military bases and fortified kibbutzes that resulted in gun battles in which many armed personnel and many civilians died. Many Israeli military personnel and civilians were taken captive. Hamas has said the civilians will be released unconditionally (and some have been) and the military personnel will be traded for Palestinian political prisoners in a prisoner exchange.

The Israeli army also claims that Hamas’s armed wing committed atrocities, claims which Hamas rejects. There is footage from sources other than the Israeli military suggesting both that many Israelis died in crossfire and friendly fire incidents and that Palestinians who escaped from Gaza once the fence was breached committed looting and other crimes.

Meanwhile the Kirbys and Bidens deny Palestinian casualty numbers.

We are approaching complete polarization: soon no claims made by Palestinians will be believed by the pro-genocide Western bloc and no claims sourced to the Israeli military will be credible to the anti-genocide bloc. There will be no reason to talk to one another and no desire on either side to do so.

It is too obvious to say, but this bodes ill for solutions based on dialogue or negotiation.

The Israeli military’s claims of extraordinary and unfathomable atrocities on October 7 have become the principal justification for the current genocide, which is no exception to the historical rule that genocides are not built on facts, but on lies.

Justin Podur is a Toronto-based writer. You can find him on his website at podur.org and on Twitter @justinpodur.

2 November 2023

Source: counterpunch.org

By Countercurrents Collective

The Israeli government is willing to kill large numbers of civilians in order to defeat Hamas in Gaza, and told Americans this in “private conversations” reported  the New York Times.

U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration continues to support Israel but has become “more critical” of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s response to Hamas, due to the “humanitarian crisis in Gaza,” according to a news analysis the outlet published on Monday.

“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 claimed, adding that Israeli officials brought up the “devastating bombings” – including the use of atomic weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki – that the U.S. has employed against Germany and Japan during World War II.

The Times included the story in Tuesday’s print edition, where it caught the eye of lawyer and activist Steven Donziger.

“This might help explain the massive scale of civilian and child death currently taking place in Gaza,” Donziger noted on Instagram. “This mentality also might explain why Israel just dropped a huge bomb on the densely populated Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza and why it appears to be targeting civilians.”

Focusing on Washington, the New York Times article revealed how the Biden administration initially believed it could get support for Israel just as they had for Ukraine, given the level of Hamas atrocities on October 7, but soon realized this would be “impossible.”

“If anything, countries around the world, especially developing nations, are moving the other way as the Palestinian death toll grows. Even European allies of the United States are divided on Israel’s war,” according to the outlet.

U.S. officials also believe that Netanyahu has “no plans for what to do with Gaza” after Israel Defense Forces ground troops take “some or all of it.”

Last Wednesday, the Pentagon reportedly asked Israel to delay the ground attack, in order to give the U.S. more time to deploy air defenses in Iraq and Syria and buy time for negotiations to free some of the estimated 200 hostages held by Hamas.

The ground invasion began last Friday with a complete communications blackout of the Palestinian enclave. On Wednesday, the IDF said 15 of its soldiers have been killed in the ongoing operations.

Israeli Attack On Refugee Camp An Atrocity, Says UN

Israel’s bombing of the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza is just “the latest atrocity” to befall the Palestinian people living in the enclave, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Martin Griffiths has said.

Hamas reported on Tuesday that as many as 400 Palestinians had been killed or injured by an Israeli attack on the densely populated Jabalia camp. An Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson later confirmed the attack, stating the airstrikes had targeted a “very important” Hamas commander and his unit. The IDF representative called the civilian casualties a tragedy, but ultimately blamed their deaths on the Hamas leadership, saying it had “embedded itself among the civilian population.”

In a statement published on Wednesday, following his two-day visit to Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Griffiths surmised that the fighting in Gaza has entered “an even more terrifying phase, with increasingly dreadful humanitarian consequences.”

“October 7th and its aftermath will leave indelible scars on the lives of millions,” Griffiths said, referring to the initial attack by Hamas militants on Israeli territories near Gaza, which claimed the lives of 1,400 people, and Israel’s response which has so far seen as many as 8,600 Palestinians killed, according to Gaza health authorities.

“This cannot go on. We need a step change,” stressed the UN official. He further called for all hostages captured by Hamas to be released immediately and unconditionally, for both sides to respect their obligations under international humanitarian law and to stop targeting civilians.

Griffiths concluded by calling on “those with influence” to work towards a de-escalation of the conflict, warning that “failure to act now will have consequences far beyond the region.”

On Tuesday, the director of the UN’s human rights office (OHCHR) in New York, Craig Mokhiber, described Israel’s actions in Gaza as a “text-book case of genocide” and resigned from his position, stating that the UN had “surrendered to the power of the US” and failed in its duty to prevent the killing of Palestinian civilians.

The U.S. has so far shown little intention of pushing for a ceasefire in Gaza and has instead pledged its unending support for Israel and its right to “self-defense.” US Senator Lindsey Graham has even suggested that Washington would stand by Israel regardless of how many civilians are killed in its fight against Hamas.

Iran Calls For Oil And Food Embargo On Israel

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei has urged Muslim nations to impose an oil and food embargo on Israel to stop its military operation in Gaza.

Speaking to students in Tehran on Wednesday, Khamenei said, “What Islamic governments must insist on is the immediate cessation of crimes in Gaza,” suggesting that Muslim countries should “block the export of oil and food to the Zionist regime,” as quoted by the state-run IRNA media outlet.

He went on to claim that Israel is “now in a state of shock and desperation and does not know what to do,” while pointing out that the events in Gaza have prompted people to take to the streets and denounce Israel’s actions, not only in Muslim-majority states, but also in the US and Western Europe.

In mid-October, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, had made a similar call, asking Muslim nations to impose an “immediate and complete” oil embargo on Israel.

Last week, Libya’s House of Representatives (HoR, Majlis al-Nuwaab), which is located in the eastern city of Tobruk, controlled by General Khalifa Haftar, also demanded that the government halt oil and gas exports to countries supporting Israel if the “Israeli massacres” do not cease. The lawmakers also called for the expulsion from Libya of the ambassadors of the countries that back Israel.

It is worth noting that the Tobruk-based authorities do not control the whole of Libya, with a rival government operating from Tripoli.

Also last month, the Associated Press quoted Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani as warning that supplies of Middle Eastern oil to international markets could potentially be disrupted if other nations join the conflict between Israel and Hamas.

Iran, aside from being the world’s eighth-largest oil producer, could also potentially block the narrow Strait of Hormuz, which connects the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea. The route is used to transport approximately one-third of the world’s seaborne oil shipments.

Back in 1973, an oil embargo imposed on the US and Western countries by Arab nations in response to their support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War led to a severe deficit and an ensuing economic slump.

White House Rules Out Sending U.S. Troops To Gaza

U.S. soldiers will not be deployed to Gaza during or after the current conflict with Israel, the White House has said, dismissing reports suggesting US troops could be sent on a peacekeeping mission.

During a Wednesday press briefing, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby was asked whether U.S. forces would be used to “stabilize the situation” in Gaza.

“There is no plan or intention to put U.S. military troops on the ground in Gaza, now or in the future,” he said. “But we are talking to our partners about what post-conflict Gaza should look like.”

Kirby went on to say that officials were considering “some sort of international presence” after fighting winds down in Gaza, but noted that no decisions on the issue had been made.

The spokesman’s comments came after Bloomberg reported that Washington and Israel were discussing whether to grant “temporary oversight to Gaza to countries from the region, backed by troops from the U.S., UK, Germany and France.” The outlet stated that the plans were still in an early stage, however, and said at least two other options were also being considered, including involvement by the United Nations.

While Kirby rejected the idea of a U.S. peacekeeping mission, he echoed previous comments from the White House that Hamas “cannot be the future of governance in Gaza,” voicing support for Israel’s military operation to eliminate the militant group. Asked about what comes next for the Palestinian enclave, the spokesman said officials “do not have all the answers to that,” but insisted “Whatever it is – it cannot be Hamas.”

The latest bout of violence erupted following a deadly Hamas terrorist attack on October 7, which claimed the lives of some 1,400 Israelis. Israel has carried out heavy air strikes on Gaza in the weeks since, and subsequently launched ground incursions, killing more than 8,800 Palestinians, according to Gaza officials. The Israeli military has said its operation could go on for months, despite warnings of a dire humanitarian crisis from international aid groups.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that the country was “at war” and promised retaliation against Hamas that they “have never known before.” The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) responded by sending warplanes to strike targets in Gaza, ordering a blockade of the Palestinian enclave, and announcing plans for a ground invasion of the densely populated territory.

Israel Strikes Lebanon

The Israel Defense Forces said in the early hours of Thursday that it carried out air and artillery strikes on Lebanon after its drone came under a missile attack. It added that the UAV was unharmed.

According to the IDF, projectiles were also launched from the Lebanese territory towards the Mount Dov and Mount Hermon areas. The Israeli army responded by hitting the “source of the rocket fire” with artillery.

11 Bakeries Destroyed In Gaza

Eleven bakeries have been struck or destroyed in the Gaza Strip since 7 October, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in its daily update on Wednesday.

It added that only nine bakeries remain operational and are supplying bread to shelters, mainly in the southern and middle parts of the Palestinian enclave. “Hours-long queues are reported in front of bakeries, where people are exposed to airstrikes,” the agency warned.

Biden Heckled

U.S. President Joe Biden was heckled at a fundraiser in Minneapolis by an audience member who demanded that he “call for a ceasefire right now.”

“I think we need a pause. A pause means give time to get the prisoners out,” Biden responded, according to The Hill.

The White House previously argued that a ceasefire would only benefit Hamas, echoing the stance taken by the Israeli government.

Israel Publishes Intercepted Call Of Hamas

The Israeli army published what it said was an intercepted call involving a senior Hamas commander and the director of the Indonesian Hospital in Gaza. The IDF described the recording as evidence that the Palestinian militants were “stealing” fuel reserved for medical facilities.

“The representative from the ministry said so, in the night he told me to fill up 1,000 liters,” a person described as a hospital manager is heard saying in Arabic.

The UN previously warned that fuel shortages were impeding the efforts to bring humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip.

Tax Funds

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has said that the Jewish state’s government should transfer frozen tax funds to the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank, in comments that could be construed as a criticism of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s decision to freeze Palestinian tax revenues to the PA.

Smotrich had on Sunday announced the step to pause the payments, claiming that Ramallah had supported Hamas’ incursion into Israel on October 7. Israel collects tax revenue from the West Bank, which it then transfers to the PA monthly, with the payments making up nearly 65% of the Palestinian annual budget.

Gallant said that the outstanding funds should be transferred to the PA “immediately” and that they “will be used by its forces that help prevent terrorism.”

Crime Of Genocide, U.S. Complicit

The U.S. is complicit in the deaths of children in Gaza, according to rights group Defence for Children International-Palestine “constituting the crime of genocide,” it said.

“President Biden’s statements over the last few weeks suggest he is completely unconcerned by the scope and scale of Palestinian civil harm – including the killings of 3,650 children – as a result of Israeli military attacks in Gaza,” the children’s rights organization said in a statement.

It added that Biden is “actively becoming ever more complicit in an Israeli military campaign where Israeli forces are killing Palestinian children with impunity, constituting the crime of genocide.”

Telecommunication Blackout

Cybersecurity watchdog NetBlocks has confirmed a telecommunications blackout in Gaza after the Palestinians’ largest provider, Paltel, said earlier today that there had been “a complete interruption of all communications and internet services” in the enclave.

It is the second such blackout since the start of Israel’s ground offensive, meaning that much of the territory’s more than two million residents are experiencing “a total loss of telecommunications,” Paltel said.

Paltel also stated on social media that its services were offline “due to international routes that were previously reconnected being cut off again.”

Thousands Of Children Killed

The UN’s children’s rights committee has said that violations against children in Gaza are “mounting by the minute” amid Israel’s bombardment of the coastal enclave, and has called for an immediate cessation of hostilities.

“There are no winners in a war where thousands of children are killed,” it said in a statement.

The UN committee added that “there have been devastating reports of acts that are forbidden by international humanitarian law, including maiming, injury, abduction, forcible displacement, deprivation of medical care, food and water.”

Safe Passage Of Wounded Palestinian

U.S. President Joe Biden has commented on social media about the opening of the Rafah border to Gaza earlier today.
“Today, thanks to American leadership, we secured safe passage for wounded Palestinians and for foreign nationals to exit Gaza,” he wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “We expect American citizens to exit today, and we expect to see more depart over the coming days.”

Biden added that his administration “would not let up working to get Americans out of Gaza.”

Jordan Recalls Ambassador From Tel Aviv

Jordan has recalled its ambassador to Israel, its foreign minister Ayman Safadi has confirmed. In a statement, Safadi said the diplomatic measure was being taken “as an expression of Jordan’s position rejecting and condemning the Israeli war raging in Gaza.”

Safadi also stated that Israel’s ambassador to Jordan, who is not presently in the Middle Eastern country according to the statement, is not currently welcome to return.
Safadi added that the Israeli ambassador would be permitted back only “upon Israel ceasing its war in Gaza, halting the humanitarian disaster, and refraining from actions that deny Palestinians their basic rights, including access to food, water, and medicine, as well as as a secure and stable life on their national soil.”

Vienna Jewish Cemetery Torched

The Jewish section of a major cemetery in the Austrian capital was set ablaze and marred with swastikas, according to a religious leader in the city. The attack comes amid a surge of anti-Semitic incidents across Europe.

Oskar Deutsch, a leader in Vienna’s Jewish community, reported the vandalism and arson in a social media post on Wednesday, saying areas of the city’s central cemetery were severely damaged in the blaze.

“During the night a fire was set on the Jewish part of the central cemetery,” he wrote. “The anteroom of the ceremonial hall [was] burned out. Swastikas were sprayed on exterior walls. No people were injured. The fire department and police are investigating.”

Deutsch shared photos of the aftermath, showing firefighters inspecting a heavily charred and smoke-filled ceremony hall. What appear to be crude swastikas were also seen scrawled in fluorescent paint on a wall outside.

A spokesperson for the local fire service, Gerald Schimpf, told the Austria Press Agency that the fire seemed to have broken out sometime on Tuesday night, but had mostly died out on its own by the time firefighters arrived the next morning.

The Vienna State Police later confirmed that the episode was being “intensively investigated” by Austria’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution. While the authorities have stated that the exact circumstances of the fire “are not yet known,” local media reports said police suspected arson, noting that flames appeared to have ignited in more than one location.

Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer also “strongly” condemned the incident in a statement, declaring that “anti-Semitism has no place in our society and will be fought with all political and legal means.” He went on to voice hopes that perpetrators of the cemetery attack would be “identified quickly.”

The incident in Vienna follows a string of similar reports across Europe in recent weeks, amid renewed fighting between Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza. Fears of violent reprisals against Jews have prompted evacuations and closures at a number of religious institutions, with several Jewish schools in Paris reportedly forced to clear out following bomb threats earlier this week. Jewish organizations have also warned of a rise in anti-Semitism in the US, where the Anti-Defamation League has reported a nearly 400% spike in such incidents this month.

Jewish Schools In Paris Evacuated Over Bomb Scare

Several Jewish schools around Paris have been evacuated following a bomb threat, triggering “panic” among parents, according to sources cited by the Jerusalem Post.

Police launched a sweeping search of multiple schools on Monday after an anonymous suspect warned that “bombs would blow up in 20 different Jewish schools in the Paris area,” the outlet reported, citing “senior sources in the organized Jewish community.”

“There was a bomb threat towards many Jewish schools. Some of these schools have been evacuated. In most schools, parents were asked to take their children home,” one of the sources said.

They added that French security services had begun a search for bombs in the schools in question, but had yet to discover any explosives. “Even though everyone is okay, this event caused panic among parents. We’re going through a rough period and the situation in Israel has its effect on us as well,” the source continued.

French authorities have been on high alert amid the latest round of fighting between Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza. A surge in anti-Semitic actions has been seen across France in recent weeks, with the Interior Ministry stating that reports of such acts had quadrupled in that time.

Anti-Jewish graffiti on schools and other similar displays have stoked fears of violent reprisals, with some Jewish residents telling local media they are afraid to leave their homes.

The bomb threat against schools around Paris is the latest in a series of such incidents in France this month, with the historic Palace of Versailles forced to clear out on four separate occasions. While no bombs were found in each case, similar false threats have also resulted in evacuations at 15 airports and 130 canceled flights, according to the Associated Press.

On October 19, French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said a probe into the threats was well underway, and confirmed that 18 suspects had been detained as part of the investigation – most of them minors.

The minister added that “enormous means” were being deployed to find and arrest the pranksters, declaring “We tell those listening: We will find everyone.”

French Justice chief Eric Dupond-Moretti said the string of bomb threats were made by “little jokers” and “clowns,” and went on to warn of three-year prison terms and fines of up to €45,000 ($47,000) for those found guilty.

Netanyahu Ignored Warnings From Security Services, Says New York Times

Israeli security services warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for months that his domestic policies were fueling dangerous political turmoil, the New York Times (NYT) reported on Sunday. Officials reportedly stressed that internal discord was weakening the country’s security and strengthening Israel’s enemies.

The report was part of an examination of what led up to the latest hostilities between Israel and Gaza. At one point in July, the prime minister even allegedly refused to meet with a senior general who was trying to deliver a threat warning based on classified intelligence.

At the same time, the NYT assessed that Israeli security representatives themselves continuously misjudged the threat posed by Hamas, including in the weeks leading up to the October 7 attack on Israeli territory which resulted in the deaths of up to 1,400 people.

The newspaper reported that Israeli military intelligence had believed since May 2021 that the militant group was not interested in any large-scale attacks from Gaza, but was instead plotting an attack in the West Bank, controlled by the Palestinian Authority, a rival to Hamas.

The report also claimed that both Netanyahu and top Israeli security staff had underestimated the threat from Hamas and did not devote enough resources to countering it, because they believed that Iran and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah posed more of a danger to the Jewish state.

In September, top Israeli officials came to the conclusion that Israel could be attacked on several fronts in the coming weeks or months by Iran-backed militia groups. However, there was no mention of a possible attack from Gaza at that time.

Another reason for the success of the surprise assault earlier this month, according to the outlet, was the fact that U.S. intelligence agencies had largely stopped tracking the group, believing that Israel was managing the threat it posed.

While many senior Israeli officials have accepted responsibility for their lapse in judgment, Prime Minister Netanyahu has been reluctant to do so, instead repeatedly pointing the finger at his military and intelligence chiefs for failing to predict and warn him about Hamas’ plans.

On Sunday, he published yet another post on X (formerly Twitter) blaming his cabinet for failing to prevent the October 7 attack. However, after receiving backlash, Netanyahu deleted it and posted another message stating “I was wrong” and vowing to fully back the heads of Israel’s security agencies.

Civilian Casualties In Gaza Do Not Matter, Says Top U.S. Senator

The U.S. should stand by Israel in its campaign against Hamas no matter how heavy a toll it takes on the civilian population in Gaza, Senator Lindsey Graham has argued. He likened Israel’s military operation against the militants to the allies’ struggle against Nazi Germany and Japan during World War II.

In an interview with CNN on Tuesday, Graham was asked if there was a “threshold” for him, after which he would start questioning Israel’s tactics. The Republican replied in the negative, saying there is no limit as to “what Israel should do to the people who are trying to slaughter the Jews.”

“This idea that Israel has to apologize for attacking Hamas, who is embedded with their own population, needs to stop,” the senator insisted, adding that it is Hamas that is “creating these casualties – not Israel.”

Graham noted that Israel does need to “be smart” by trying to “limit civilian casualties.” The lawmaker also called for the delivery of humanitarian aid to “areas that protect the innocent.”

During his visit to Israel last month, U.S. President Joe Biden assured Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that “as long as the United States stands, and we will stand forever, we will not let you ever be alone.”

Soon after Hamas’ deadly attack on Israel last month, Washington scrambled to provide its long-standing ally with additional defense aid worth billions of dollars.

The U.S. has also deployed two aircraft carrier groups and other naval assets, a squadron of F-16 fighter jets, air-defense systems, and 900 troops to the Middle East, saying this increased military presence should serve as a deterrent to other states tempted to join the conflict.

On Tuesday in Geneva, a spokesman for the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), James Elder, claimed that “Gaza has become a graveyard for thousands of children,” and a “living hell for everyone else.” He called for a humanitarian ceasefire in the Palestinian enclave.

The conflict has so far left more than 1,400 Israelis and over 8,000 Palestinians dead, with thousands more injured.

Bolivia Breaks Diplomatic Ties With Israel

Bolivia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Freddy Mamani told a press conference broadcast by national television that “Within the framework of its principled position of respect for life, Bolivia has decided to break diplomatic relations with Israel, in repudiation and condemnation of the aggressive and disproportionate Israeli military offensive being carried out in the Gaza Strip.”

He called for a cease to the current attacks and of the blockade that prevents the entry of food, water and other elements essential for life, violating international law and international humanitarian law.

Mamani joined Minister of the Presidency María Nela Prada from Government House in La Paz to communicate the decision, which will be officially notified through established diplomatic channels between the two countries, they said.

The tweet reads, “Bolivia breaks diplomatic relations with Israel in rejection of the crimes against humanity it commits against the Palestinian people: María Nela Prada, Minister of the Presidency of Bolivia.”

For her part, Prada said that Israel’s actions are “crimes against humanity,” and demanded “an end to the attacks on the Gaza Strip, which have already claimed thousands of civilian lives.”

The day before, Bolivian President Luis Arce held a meeting with the Palestinian ambassador to the South American nation, Mahmoud Elalwani. The president expressed his rejection of the war crimes in the Gaza Strip, as well as his solidarity on behalf of the Bolivian people for the suffering of the Palestinians.

Regarding this meeting, the Minister of the Presidency said that Arce “called for a definitive solution and for Palestine to exercise its right to self-determination, to its territory without illegal occupations and to consolidate its own free and independent State, within the framework of its established borders with East Jerusalem as its capital.”

Prada also urged “dialogue and structural solutions” to avoid “a further escalation of the conflict around the world.” She called on “brotherly countries” and the integration processes in which Bolivia participates to “produce a collective action” to achieve pacification in the region and “avoid genocide.”

Furthermore, she said that Bolivia will send humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip and that the Bolivian Embassy in the Netherlands will assume the concurrent function with Palestine.

Venezuelan Prosecutor Criticizes Inaction Against Gaza Genocide

On Tuesday, the Venezuelan Attorney General Tarek William Saab criticized the inaction of international human rights organizations in the face of the ongoing genocide that Israel is committing against the people of Palestine.

Through the social media platform X, he lambasted the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), Volker Türk, and the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Karim Khan, for failing to take effective measures to halt the genocide.

“It deeply saddens me to observe how the international organizations you oversee have not made any significant efforts to put an end to this heinous slaughter, the most atrocious holocaust in recent human history, a systematic extermination of women, the elderly, and children carried out by Israeli Zionism for the past month,” Saab stated.

“As a man born into a home of Lebanese Arab immigrants who planted their roots in our Venezuelan homeland since the 1950s, I feel the spilled Palestinian blood deeply,” he added.

2 November 2023

Source: counterpunch.org

The current multilateral system provides an opportunity for middle powers to have an enhanced role in global diplomacy.

By ARARAT KOSTANIAN

 Unresolved conflicts such as that between Israel and Palestine have for decades turned the Middle East into an arena of constant tensions, clashes, and the involvement of superpowers directly or indirectly.

This has kept the conflict far from reaching a peaceful resolution and has complicated the notion of stability in the Middle East further.

This fierce competition was especially evident during the Cold War era, and with that coming to an end, the competition entered another phase, this time between the United States as the winning bloc and the opposing faction to US-enforced the liberal order.

Under such global tensions, it has been evident that reaching a just solution for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has become impossible, due to the above-mentioned perpetual superpower competitions.

Additionally, the situation is worsened by the continued failure of mediations orchestrated by the United States, where the priority has been given to Israel’s demands and the recognition of Palestine as a state ignored.

Multilateralism offers hope.

Interestingly, the current multilateral global system gives provides an opportunity for middle powers to have an enhanced role in orchestrating peaceful outcomes in global diplomacy.

Surprisingly, the role of the middle powers has been narrowed to either nations that demand independent foreign policy that is passive in global diplomacy (self-centered), or actors that guarantee the mega-projects of the superpowers by benefiting from the cooperation under the banner of “economic development.”

The recent Hamas offensive is an opportunity not only for the superpowers to orchestrate peace talks between Palestine and Israel as mediators, but for middle powers such as Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, India, and Iran to play an essential role in materializing the recognition of the Palestinian state in more constructive ways than simply announcing their positions officially.

Moreover, the middle powers mentioned above have the capability of establishing a coalition that invites all sides to participate in ending this long-lasting conflict, to have a just outcome in which the rights of all sides in the conflict are equally accepted.

Taking into consideration that all the above-mentioned countries have officially announced the urgency of recognizing Palestine as a necessary key to ending the conflict, the effective hedging strategy that most of the middle powers have been performing in balancing between the two competing poles (Western and anti-Western) should also be considered as a tactical opportunity to reach just solutions.

Furthermore, a coalition orchestrated by the middle powers could also turn into a broader movement with the aim of finding a just solution for the Palestine-Israel conflict.

Moreover, such inclusive international diplomacy put together by the middle powers would generate a space between the competing superpowers, through re-creating the non-alignment bloc in a broader sense.

In other words, the ability of effective diplomacy by all sides that the middle powers put forward with the hedging strategy raises its importance in international relations for the superpowers to keep the status quo and not to escalate their confrontations into full-scale war or launching other hybrid wars.

The Ukrainian war has indicated that the competing superpowers are not hesitating from opening new fronts that could transform regional wars into a global one.

Simply put, the current global situation implies that if the middle powers are benefiting from mega-projects proposed by the superpowers, at the same time the superpowers need the advanced role of the middle powers in working toward a just resolution that would work as a stability space between the competing bipolar superpowers.

Furthermore, such inclusive diplomacy on a global level performed by the coalition of middle powers would force the US and Israel to shift their uncompromising attitudes on recognizing Palestine, acknowledging that the rights of the Palestinians must be recognized as well to have lasting peace.

Such an American foreign policy would raise the chances for the Palestinians to reach a just solution, to halt the possibility of another regional hybrid war between the United States and its regional and global allies on the one side and the anti-Western bloc on the other.

 24 October 2023

Ararat Kostanian is a doctoral candidate at Indonesian International Islamic University and a scholar member of the International Movement for a Just World. He is also a former research fellow at the Institute of Oriental Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Armenia.

source: asiatimes.com

By The Chris Hedges

All settler colonial projects, including Israel, reach a point when they embrace wholesale slaughter and genocide to eradicate a native population that refuses to capitulate.

28 Oct 2023 – During the siege in Sarajevo, when I was reporting for The New York Times, we never endured the level of saturation bombing and near total blockage of food, water, fuel and medicine that Israel has imposed on Gaza. We never endured hundreds of dead and wounded a day. We never endured the complicity of the international community in the Serbian campaign of genocide. We never endured Washington intervening to block ceasefire resolutions. We never endured massive arms shipments from the U.S. and other Western countries to sustain the siege. We never endured press reports from Sarajevo that were routinely discredited and dismissed by the international community, although 25 journalists were killed in the war by the besieging Serbian forces. We never endured Western governments justifying the siege as the right of the Serbs to defend themselves, although the U.N. peacekeepers sent to Bosnia were largely a public relations gesture, ineffective in halting the slaughter until forced to respond following the massacres of 8,000 Bosniak men and boys at Srebrenica.

I don’t mean to minimize the horror of the siege of Sarajevo, which gives me nightmares nearly three decades later. But what we suffered – three to four hundred shells a day, four to five dead a day, and two dozen wounded a day – is a tiny fraction of the wholesale death and destruction in Gaza. The Israeli siege of Gaza more resembles the Wehrmacht’s assault on Stalingrad, where over 90 percent of the city’s buildings were destroyed, than Sarajevo.

On Friday the Gaza Strip had all its communications severed. No Internet. No phone service. No electricity. Israel’s goal is the murder of tens, probably hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and the ethnic cleansing of those who survive into refugee camps in Egypt. It is an attempt by Israel to erase not only a people, but the idea of Palestine. It is a carbon copy of the massive campaigns of racialized slaughter by other settler colonial projects who believed that indiscriminate and wholesale violence could make the aspirations of an oppressed people, whose land they stole, go away. And like other perpetrators of genocide, Israel intends to keep it hidden.

Israel’s bombing campaign, one of the heaviest of the 21st century, has killed more than 7,300 Palestinians, nearly half of them children, along with 26 journalists, medical workers, teachers and United Nations staff. Some 1.4 million Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced and an estimated 600,000 are homeless. Mosques, 120 health facilities, ambulances, schools, apartment blocks, supermarkets, water and sewage treatment plants and power plants have been blasted into rubble. Hospitals and clinics, lacking fuel, medicine and electricity, have been bombed or are shutting down. Clean water is running out. Gaza, by the end of Israel’s scorched earth campaign, will be uninhabitable, a tactic the Nazis regularly employed when facing armed resistance, including in the Warsaw Ghetto and later Warsaw itself. By the time Israel is done, Gaza, or at least Gaza as we knew it, will not exist.

Not only are the tactics the same, but so is the rhetoric. Palestinians are referred to as animals, beasts and Nazis. They have no right to exist. Their children have no right to exist. They must be cleansed from the earth.

The extermination of those whose land we steal, whose resources we plunder and whose labor we exploit is coded within our DNA. Ask Native Americans. Ask Indians. Ask the Congolese. Ask the Kikuyu in Kenya. Ask the Herero in Namibia who, like Palestinians in Gaza, were gunned down and driven into desert concentration camps where they died of starvation and disease. Eighty thousand of them. Ask Iraqis. Ask Afghans. Ask Syrians. Ask Kurds. Ask Libyans. Ask indigenous peoples across the globe. They know who we are.

Israel’s distorted, settler colonial visage is our own. We pretend otherwise. We ascribe to ourselves virtues and civilizing qualities that are, as in Israel, flimsy justifications for stripping an occupied and besieged people of their rights, seizing their land and using prolonged imprisonment, torture, humiliation, enforced poverty and murder to keep them subjugated.

Our past, including our recent past in the Middle East, is built on the idea of subduing or wiping out the “inferior” races of the earth. We give these “inferior” races names that embody evil. ISIS. Al Qaeda. Hezbollah. Hamas. We use racist slurs to dehumanize them. “Haji” “Sand Nigger” “Camel Jockey” “Ali Baba” “Dung Shoveler” And then, because they embody evil, because they are less than human, we feel licensed, as Nissim Vaturi, a member of the Israeli parliament for the ruling Likud party said, to erase “the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.”

Naftali Bennett, Israel’s former Prime Minister, in an interview on Sky News on Oct. 12 said, “We’re fighting Nazis,” in other words, absolute evil.

Not to be outdone, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described Hamas in a press conference with the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, as “the new Nazis”.

Think about that. A people, imprisoned in the world’s largest concentration camp for sixteen years, denied food, water, fuel and medicine, lacking an army, air force, navy, mechanized units, artillery, command and control and missile batteries, is being butchered and starved by one of the most advanced militaries on the planet, and they are the Nazis?

There is an historical analogy here. But it is not one that Bennett, Netanyahu or any other Israeli leader wants to acknowledge.

When those who are occupied refuse to submit, when they continue to resist, we drop all pretense of our “civilizing” mission and unleash, as in Gaza, an orgy of slaughter and destruction. We become drunk on violence. This violence makes us insane. We kill with reckless ferocity. We become the beasts we accuse the oppressed of being. We expose the lie of our vaunted moral superiority. We expose the fundamental truth about Western civilization — we are the most ruthless and efficient killers on the planet. This alone is why we dominate the “wretched of the earth.” It has nothing to do with democracy or freedom or liberty. These are rights we never intend to grant to the oppressed.

“Honor, justice, compassion and freedom are ideas that have no converts,” Joseph Conrad, who wrote “Heart of Darkness,” reminds us. “There are only people, without knowing, understanding or feelings, who intoxicate themselves with words, repeat words, shout them out, imagining they believe them without believing in anything else but profit, personal advantage and their own satisfaction.”

Genocide lies at the core of Western imperialism. It is not unique to Israel. It is not unique to the Nazis. It is the building block of Western domination. The humanitarian interventionists who insist we should bomb and occupy other nations because we embody goodness — although they promote military intervention only when it is perceived to be in our national interest — are useful idiots of the war machine and global imperialists. They live in an Alice-in-Wonderland fairytale where the rivers of blood we spawn make the world a happier and better place. They are the smiley faces of genocide. You can watch them on your screens. You can listen to them spout their pseudo-morality in the White House and in Congress. They are always wrong. And they never go away.

Maybe we are fooled by our own lies, but most of the world sees us, and Israel, clearly. They understand our genocidal proclivities, rank hypocrisy and self-righteousness. They see that Palestinians, largely friendless, without power, forced to live in squalid refugee camps or the diaspora, denied their homeland and eternally persecuted, suffer the kind of fate once reserved for Jews. This perhaps is the final tragic irony. Those who were once in need of protection from genocide now commit it.

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.

30 October 2023

Source: transcend.org

By Dr Binoy Kampmark

The main press stable was keen to see the scrappy benefits of the 31-hour visit to Israel by US President Joe Biden.  On National Public Radio (NPR), Scott Neuman expressed the view that the “largely symbolic” visit did yield a few “concrete accomplishments” including an announcement of $100 million in Palestinian aid, convincing Israel to permit humanitarian aid into Gaza and persuade Egypt’s strongman president Abdel-Fattah El-Sissi to open up an access route via land into southern Gaza.   If these were seen as achievements, one dare not look at the picture of bright success.

On an individual level, sharing the same stage with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was always going to be an awkward exercise.  A figure reviled and loathed for attacking the judicial system in his own country, and one self-touted as “Mr Security”, things looked rather shoddy.  Given that Israel’s own security was premised on a de facto encirclement and suffocation of Gaza, the occupation of the West Bank, and a virtual hibernation of talks about Palestinian sovereignty – the Israeli PM’s competence has been irreparably damaged.

To that, can be added the entire Israeli approach to Hamas, which was dubbed, in a research brief by the RAND Corporation from 2017 as “mowing the grass” – a less than grand strategy which accepted Israel’s “inability to permanently solve the problem and instead repeatedly targeting the leadership of Palestinian militant organizations to keep violence manageable.”

Biden was there to serve as prop and stay for a war that is moving into a phase of unceasing slaughter.   Slipping into hopeless locker room argot, he whispered his view that the “other team” (to be clear, not Team Israel) had been responsible for the attack on the al-Ahli Arab Hospital that killed hundreds.  This is from the same world leader who has made it a habit to use cue cards when conducting business. (That business is made particularly easier at press conferences, where Biden is seemingly receiving questions in advance from reporters.)

Things were also made that more interesting by a casual observation made at Ramstein Air Base en route back to Washington that, while he did not necessarily thumb Hamas as responsible for the intentional bombing of the hospital, “It’s that old thing: got to learn how to shoot straight.”

There was, however, a note of warning from the President, delivered while in Tel Aviv.  Remarking on comparisons of the Hamas attacks on Israel as the country’s own version of 9/11, Biden accepted that, “Justice must be done.  But I caution this: While you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it.  After 9/11 we were enraged in the United States.  While we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.”  Given that these mistakes involved a two-decade war in Afghanistan and a disastrous, destabilising invasion of Iraq that constituted a crime against peace while releasing the monster of sectarianism, the remark must surely win an award for understatement.

Biden’s Israel gambit also lends itself to the prospect for further mistakes.  To take the position that Israel is essentially above reproach, certainly publicly, is to flirt with a power potentially engaged in acts of genocide.  The line between rogue state and ennobled avenger becomes blurry.

While international law is exacting about the bar on what constitutes genocide (there can be no other inference, essentially, of an intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group), statements made by Israeli officials, the chilling dehumanising rhetoric towards Palestinians, the collective punishment of the siege, and the evacuation orders of over a million Gaza residents do not auger well for the historical record.

That record is already bulking, aided by suggestions that the Gaza Strip we emptied.  Calcalist, an Israeli business daily, was first to report on a plan from Israeli Intelligence Minister Gila Gamliel to forcibly transfer Gazans into the Sinai Peninsula.  Doing so would “yield positive and long-term strategic results”.  While the paper cautions readers about the influence Gamliel exerts in the government, the idea of relocating and ensuring a “final settlement of the entire Gaza population,” is something the Misgav institute for National Security & Zionist Strategy finds entirely palatable.

In an emergency briefing paper published this month, expert lawyers of the US-based Center for Constitutional Rights asserted that there was a “plausible and credible case, based on factual evidence, that Israel is attempting to commit, if not actively committing, the crime of genocide in the occupied Palestinian territory, and specifically against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip.”

The authors also warned that the US “is not only failing to uphold its obligation to prevent the commission of genocide, but there is a plausible and credible case to be made that the United States’ actions to further the Israeli military operation, closure and campaign against the Palestinian population in Gaza, rise to the level of complicity in the crime under international law.”

These policies have all been subsumed under the elastic netting of “self-defence”, a term that solidly binds Israel and the United States to an expansive use of retaliatory force.  It has assumed the standing of holy writ in US foreign policy, shielding Israel from its more exuberant uses of violence.  On October 18, for instance, the US rejected a Brazil-sponsored resolution calling for a “humanitarian pause” as it, in the words of US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield, “made no mention of Israel’s right of self-defence.”  Every nation of the world had “the inherent right to self-defence, as reflected in Article 51 of the UN Charter.”  If so inherent, why expressly mention it?

On October 25, sharing the podium with his Australian counterpart, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in the Rose Garden, Biden reiterated the position that Israel not only had the right but a “responsibility to respond to the slaughter of their people.  And we will ensure Israel has what it needs to defend itself against these terrorists. That’s a guarantee.”

Sophistically, he sought to separate Hamas from the Palestinian people, a chaff-from-wheat exercise that Israeli politicians and a number of security personnel have distinctly refused to do.  “Hamas is hiding behind Palestinian civilians, and it’s despicable and, not surprisingly, cowardly as well.”  The task for Israel, then, was positively Sisyphean: “to do everything in its power, as difficult as it is, to protect civilians.”

With such a gulf between rhetoric and reality, the world’s most powerful cue card reader also made sure he would partake in the finest traditions of the IDF public relations effort, disputing the casualty lists released by the Hamas-run health ministry.  “I have no notion that Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed.  I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s the price of waging a war.”  At a tag of over 7,000 dead and rising, that’s a considerable amount of expended innocence.

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

28 October 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Vijay Prashad

On October 24, it became clear to the United Nations (UN) that the sustained bombardment of Gaza—which had already killed 6,500 people (including at least 35 UN employees)—had made this part of Palestine unviable for human life. Over two million people live in this slim section of land on the Mediterranean Sea. Since 1948, the refugees who live here have relied on UN assistance, with the United Nations building an entire agency (UNRWA) in 1949 for that purpose. UN Secretary General António Guterres told the UN Security Council that within days the UN would run out of fuel for its trucks, which carry the minimal relief that crosses into Gaza from Egypt and supports the 660,000 Palestinians who have fled their homes to come to UN compounds across Gaza. The trucks carry “a drop of aid in an ocean of need,” Guterres said. “The people of Gaza need continuous aid delivery at a level that corresponds to the enormous needs. That aid must be delivered without restrictions.”

Guterres’s statement, delivered in a calm voice, did however depart from the sentiment of disregard that defines the statements of European and North American leaders—many of whom have rushed to Tel Aviv to stand beside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and pledge their full-throated support for Israel. History matters. Guterres said that the problems now befalling the Palestinians of Gaza did not begin on October 7, when Hamas and other Palestinian factions broke through the apartheid security barrier and attacked the settlements that border Gaza. His statement on the situation over the past decades is factual, based as it was on thousands of pages of UN reports and resolutions: “It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced, and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing.” The image of the “suffocating occupation” is utterly accurate.

After Guterres made these remarks, Israeli authorities—as if on cue—demanded the resignation of the UN Secretary-General. Israel’s permanent representative to the UN Gilad Erdan accused Guterres—absurdly—of “justifying terrorism.” Saying that Guterres “once again distorts and twists reality,” Erdan noted that his government would not permit the UN Humanitarian Aid chief Martin Griffiths from crossing the Rafah border into Gaza to oversee the distribution of relief. “In what world do you live?” asked Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen of Guterres. At the UN Security Council, meanwhile, the United States vetoed resolutions for a ceasefire, while China and Russia vetoed a U.S. resolution that said Israel had a right to defend itself and Iran must stop its export of arms. The United States has deeply politicized the atmosphere in the UN, using its own resolutions to rally support—unsuccessfully—for Israel, while attacking the Palestinians (and bizarrely Iran) in the process.

Nothing Neutral About the United States

The United States has never been an unbiased arbiter over the region, given its close linkage to Israel from at least the 1960s. Billions of dollars of weapons sold to Israel, billions of dollars of aid to Israel, and punctual statements in favor of Israel have defined the relationship between Washington and Tel Aviv. During all the negotiations between the Palestinians and Israelis, the United States has played a game of duplicity: pretending to be neutral, but in fact, using its immense power to neuter Palestinians and to strengthen Israel. The Oslo Accords, which led to the creation of a powerless Bantustan run by the Palestinian Authority, was negotiated with the United States with its hands on the pen. Oslo led to the creation of a process that has resulted in the attrition of Palestinian control over East Jerusalem and the West Bank as well as the garrotting of the Palestinians in Gaza—all of this combined being the “suffocating occupation” that Guterres talked about.

Since 2007, when Israeli troops left Gaza and then hemmed it in by land and sea walls that made Gaza the world’s largest open-air prison, Israel has routinely bombed the Palestinians who live there. Each time there is a bombardment, one worse than the next, the United States government has backed Israel fully and re-armed it during the bombardment. Calls for a ceasefire have been blocked by Washington in the UN Security Council since the destructive bombing of Gaza called Operation Cast Lead (2008-09). This time, on cue, the United States has provided Israel with diplomatic support, with U.S. President Joe Biden going to Tel Aviv and with the United States going as far as adopting a flagrant lie that Israel did not bomb al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City on October 17. Before Biden got to Israel, the United States sent two major naval battle groups into the eastern Mediterranean—two aircraft carriers, the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and the USS Gerald Ford, with their supporting naval vessels in two strike groups. Since then, the U.S. has moved missile defense systems into the region to strengthen the Israeli armed forces. The movement of these forces comes alongside billions of dollars spent annually by the U.S. to arm Israel, including $15 billion in extra military assistance over this recent period. These wars are not merely Israel’s wars. These are the wars of Israel and the United States, with its Western allies in tow.

Gaza Will Become Mosul

Meanwhile, the United States has sent senior military officials to work closely with the Israeli generals. One of these officials is a three-star Marine lieutenant general James Glynn, who has been sent to “help the Israelis with the challenges of fighting an urban war.” Glynn and others are in the Israeli military chain of command not to make decisions for Israel but to assist them. Glynn was part of the U.S. Operation Inherent Resolve against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in the years following 2014, when the United States bombed Mosul and Raqqa (Iraq) to eject ISIS from those cities. As if to underline Glynn’s Mosul and Raqqa experience, U.S. Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin told Israel’s Defence Minister Yoav Gallant that he had himself been involved in Operation Inherent Resolve in 2016-2017 when Austin headed U.S. Central Command. Austin’s comments and Glynn’s deployment to Israel are in anticipation of the ground war that is expected against Gaza. “The first thing that everyone should know,” Austin told ABC News, “and I think everyone does know, is that urban combat is extremely difficult.”

Indeed, Austin’s comment about the difficulty of urban combat, particularly with the Mosul and Raqqa experiences in mind, is appropriate. In 2017, the Associated Press (AP) reported that the U.S. attack on Mosul had resulted in between 9,000 and 11,000 civilian casualties. Very few people recall the brutality of that war and the numbers of civilian dead are barely noted. If Mosul is the example before the United States and Israel for the ground war to come in Gaza, there are some differences that should be borne in mind. ISIS had only two years to dig in its defenses, while the Palestinian factions have been preparing for such an eventuality since at least 2005 and are therefore better prepared to fight the Israeli army one ruined street after the next. It appears from all reports that the morale of the Palestinian factions is far greater than that of the Israeli army, which means that the Palestinian factions will fight with much more force and with much less to lose than ISIS (whose fighters slipped out of the city and vanished into the countryside).

In both Mosul and Raqqa, when the U.S. aerial bombardment began, tens of thousands of civilians fled the cities for the countryside alongside some ISIS fighters to wait for the destruction to commence and then end. If they had remained in Mosul and Raqqa, the civilian casualties would have been twice the number reported by AP. Mosul’s population was just 1.6 million, smaller than the 2.3 million residents of Gaza—so the numbers of civilian casualties would have to be adjusted upwards. Palestinians in Gaza are trapped and cannot escape to the countryside, unlike the residents of Mosul and Raqqa. They can go nowhere as Israeli tanks enter Gaza, guns blazing. The civilian deaths in Gaza, already outrageously high due to the uncontrolled bombing by Israel, will be unimaginable during this ground war that began on October 27. Gaza, already a ruin, will be left a cemetery.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter.

28 October 2023

Source: countercurrents.org