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By Countercurrents Collective

Nine weeks of war have left Gaza unfit for human habitation, the head of the UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees said on Thursday. With hunger rampant and UN shelters crammed to capacity, the organization demanded an immediate end to Israel’s siege of the enclave.

Speaking at a press conference in Geneva, the commissioner-general for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), Philippe Lazzarini, described how Israel’s ground operation in Gaza has pushed more than a million refugees south to the city of Rafah.

The head of the United Nations relief and works agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) said conditions in Gaza were “a living hell”.

“There is no more food to buy, even for those who can pay. In the shops, the shelves are empty,” he said.

“Rafah is the epicenter of the displacement,” Lazzarini said. “One [UN] warehouse that became a shelter is home to 30,000 people. The lucky ones have made it inside our premises. The others have absolutely nowhere to go. They live in the open, in the cold, in the mud, and under the rain. Everywhere you look is congested with makeshift shelters. Everywhere you go people are desperate, hungry, and are terrified.”

At the start of its bombing campaign in October, Israel urged residents of Gaza City – located in the north of the enclave – to migrate south for their own safety. Those who complied then had to push further south when Israeli planes began bombing the city of Khan Younis, and with Israeli ground troops now pushing into both cities, Rafah remains the only relatively safe area in the entire strip.

The influx into Rafah has quadrupled the city’s population and strained resources in what was already the poorest sector of Gaza, Lazzarini said. Israel’s near-total siege has caused shortages of food and water, and humanitarian agencies have complained that the convoys of aid trucks allowed through the Egypt-Rafah crossing cannot meet the needs of millions of people.

“Over the last few weeks we met more and more people who have not eaten in one, two, or three days,” Lazzarini noted, describing how trucks carrying food are often unable to make it to UN shelters and distribution points. “People are stopping aid trucks, taking the food, and eating it right away,” he added.

“Every time I go back [to Gaza], I always think it cannot get worse, but every time I see more misery, more grief, more sadness, and have the feeling that Gaza is not really a habitable place anymore,” the UN official told reporters.

“What is happening in Gaza should outrage anyone,” Lazzarini stated, insisting that only an immediate lifting of the Israeli siege followed by the “uninterrupted, unconditional flow of commodities” into the strip will reverse the declining humanitarian situation.

Lynn Hastings, the UN’s humanitarian coordinator in the Palestinian territories, said on Wednesday that the war threatened peace and security for Palestinians and Israelis for years or even decades to come

She said the hostilities had pushed almost half of Gaza’s population – or about a million people – into Rafah in the south, compounding the dire health and hunger crisis.

People seeking safety in overcrowded shelters in Gaza are facing the spread of infectious diseases as well as inadequate food, water and basic services.
Al-Nasser hospital in southern Gaza, close to heavy fighting and airstrikes in Khan Younis, gave the names of 45 people killed, CNN reported.

Medical staff at al-Kuwaiti hospital in Rafah, also in southern Gaza, said 19 bodies were recovered after two houses in the area were hit by airstrikes, the network said.

Earlier Wednesday, Gaza’s health ministry said at least 18,608 people have been killed and 50,594 injured in Israeli strikes on Gaza since 7 October.

There is rain in Gaza. Parts of Gaza were flooded on Wednesday, after a night of heavy rains and strong winds.

The rainwater soaked and damaged the tents of people already displaced by Israeli offensives, exacerbating Gaza’s humanitarian crisis.

At least 85% of Gaza’s population of 2 million have been displaced since fighting started in October, raising urgent concerns about the spread of disease, as well as scarce supplies of water, electricity and food.

Among those caught in the open was Ameen Edwan, camped with thousands of others in the grounds of al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital in central Gaza, who said his family had been unable to sleep.

“Rainwater seeped in. We could not sleep,” he told the AFP news agency. “We tried to find nylon covers but couldn’t find any so we resorted to stones and sand” to keep the rain out.

Hamas operatives attacked Israel on October 7, killing around 1,200 people and taking roughly 240 hostages. In the nine weeks since, Israeli strikes have killed 18,787 people in Gaza and injured more than 50,000, according to figures released on Thursday by the Gaza Health Ministry. Some 135 UNRWA staff have been killed, and Israeli strikes on the agency’s schools, clinics, and offices have killed 270 people and wounded more than 1,000, Lazzarini said on Thursday. According to a UN report released on Tuesday, almost a fifth of Gaza’s buildings have been damaged or destroyed during the Israeli campaign. Hospitals in Gaza reported an uptick in civilian casualties on Wednesday, Palestinian health officials said.

U.S. Pushes For ‘More Precise’ Military Operations In Gaza To Save Civilians

Media reports said:

U.S. President Joe Biden on Israel: “I want them to be focused on how to save civilian lives, not stop going after Hamas but be more careful.”

White House security envoy has talks with Netanyahu about military operations shifting to more precise, more targeted phase.

A Reuters report said:

A U.S. security envoy discussed with Israeli officials on Thursday how to better protect civilians during their war against Hamas in Gaza and President Joe Biden appealed for lives in the Palestinian territory to be saved.

Israel pounded the 25-mile (40-kilometer) length of Gaza, killing families in their homes as the more than two-month-old conflict raged across the entire enclave, causing a humanitarian catastrophe with little end in sight.

“It will last more than several months – but we will win and we will destroy them,” Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant told visiting White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan.

Sullivan said in an Israeli TV interview that he spoke to  Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about when Israel will shift from high-intensity military operations to a more precise, more targeted phase.

Sullivan did not provide a specific timeline or elaborate on what such operations would look like, although he said Israel was expected to continue its military campaign for some time.

“The issue really is, when does Israel shift from the high-intensity military operations that are under way today to a different phase of this conflict. One that’s more precise, more targeted,” Sullivan said on Israel’s Channel 12 television.

The occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip need to be connected under a “revamped and revitalized” Palestinian Authority government, Sullivan said.

On Friday, Sullivan would discuss revamping the Palestinian Authority and holding “extremist” Jewish settlers accountable for violence against Palestinians when he visits Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah, a U.S. official said.

U.S. President Joe Biden, asked whether he wanted Israel to scale back its assault on the Gaza Strip by the end of the year, said: “I want them to be focused on how to save civilian lives, not stop going after Hamas but be more careful.”

Washington has been pushing Israel for weeks to do more to protect civilians in Gaza’s population of 2.3 million.

Israel launched its campaign in retaliation for a rampage by Hamas, the Iran-backed group that rules Gaza, whose fighters killed 1,200 Israelis and seized 240 hostages in a cross-border raid on Oct. 7.

Since then, Israeli forces have besieged the coastal strip and laid much of it to waste, with nearly 19,000 people confirmed dead, according to Palestinian health officials, and thousands more feared buried under the rubble.

People Jammed In Makeshift Tents

In the Rafah area, jammed with people in makeshift tents on Gaza’s southern edge, people wept at a morgue near bodies wrapped in bloodied shrouds.

Residents picked forlornly through the rubble of the adjacent homes of the Abu Dhbaa and Ashour families where Gaza health authorities said 26 people had been killed.

Neighbour Fadel Shabaan rushed to the area after the bombing. “It was difficult because of the dust and people’s screams,” he said. “This is a safe camp, there is nothing here, the children play soccer in the street.”

With Europe on alert for Islamist threats linked to the war, authorities in Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands said seven people, including four suspected Hamas members, were arrested on suspicion of planning attacks on Jewish institutions.

Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri denied Hamas members were arrested, saying the reports were meant to erode support for Palestinians in Europe.

In further possible international fallout from the war, Danish company Maersk said a cargo ship was targeted by a missile off Yemen. A Maersk spokesperson said the vessel was not hit, denying a claim by Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthi movement that the militia made a drone strike on a Maersk vessel sailing towards Israel.

Maritime security company Ambrey said a Malta-flagged, Bulgarian-owned bulk carrier was reportedly boarded in the Arabian Sea near the Yemeni island of Socotra.

Yemen’s Houthi group, which has warned cargo ships in the Red Sea to avoid travel toward Israel, has attacked vessels and fired drones and missiles at Israel since the Gaza war began.

Nearly all of Gaza’s residents have been forced from their homes, many several times.

The U.N. Palestinian Refugee Agency said hungry people were stopping trucks and eating food aid immediately. “We meet more and more people who haven’t eaten for one, two or three days,” its head Philippe Lazzarini told reporters in Geneva.

People in Gaza described begging for bread, paying 50 times more than usual for a single can of beans and slaughtering a donkey to feed a large family.

‘Revenge’

Israel has extended its ground campaign from the north to the south this month.

In the main southern city Khan Younis, where advancing Israeli forces reached the centre this week, a whole city block was bombed overnight to dust. Though most people fled after Israeli warnings, neighbours digging with a hand shovel believed four people were inside. One body was recovered.

“May God take revenge on them,” said Nesmah al-Byouk, returning to the ruins of the home she had fled three days ago. “We came and saw everything destroyed … Where we can we go to now?”

In the north, fighting has escalated even after Israel announced its troops had largely completed their military objectives last month.

The Israeli military said its troops had dismantled a Hamas operating site in a school in the Shejaia area and destroyed two tunnel shafts, a rocket launch pit and a weapons storage facility in Khan Younis.

Elsewhere in the north in Jabalia, Gaza’s health ministry said Israeli forces had stormed a hospital, detaining and abusing medical staff and preventing them from treating wounded patients, at least two of whom had died.

Israel’s military said fighters had been operating inside the hospital, 70 of whom had surrendered.

The White House On The Defensive

Other media reports said:

The White House went on the defensive over President Joe Biden’s comments to Israel prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel was losing international support because of its “indiscriminate bombing” and that Netanyahu should change his hard-right dominated government. U.S. security spokesman John Kirby was evasive at a press briefing when asked if Biden’s comments were the official position of the US government.

Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant acknowledged the differences with the U.S. but said he was confident the two sides would find a way for Israel’s military operation to continue. Israeli foreign minister Eli Cohen said earlier that his country would continue its war in Gaza “with or without international support”.

U.S. Made Rifles Sale Delayed

The Biden administration is delaying the sale of more than 20,000 U.S.-made rifles to Israel over concerns about attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, two sources familiar with the matter have said. The state department sent an informal notification for the sale to Congress several weeks ago but the sale has not gone ahead, despite being cleared by Senate and House committees.

A former U.S. official familiar with the sale said on Wednesday:

Other members of Congress became aware of this case, and reached out to the administration to demand they obtain assurances from Israel that the firearms will not go to settlers.

The administration has been engaged with Israel in trying to get satisfactory assurances in that regard prior to formally notifying it. Under the license as drafted, these firearms can also go to Israeli police units about which the department has significant human rights concerns.

The state department did not have a comment on the sale. The Biden administration is specifically worried that some of the rifles could end up in the hands of Israeli settlers, the two sources said.

President Joe Biden and other senior US officials have warned repeatedly that Israel must act to stop settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.

The administration last week began imposing visa bans on people it said were involved in the violence, which this year has risen to its highest level in more than 15 years.

Israel’s Combat Loss

Israel has announced its worst combat losses in six weeks after an ambush in the ruins of Gaza, saying on Wednesday that 10 of its soldiers had been killed over the past 24 hours. Two senior Israeli commanders and seven other soldiers were killed by Hamas in a complex ambush in the Gaza City suburb of Shejaiya, in one of the most lethal incidents for Israeli soldiers during the two-month-long war.

Most of the deaths came in the Shejaia district of Gaza City in the north, where troops were ambushed trying to rescue another group of soldiers who had attacked Hamas fighters in a building, the military said.

Hamas said the episode showed that Israeli forces could never subdue Gaza.

In a televised address, Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh said any future arrangement in Gaza without Hamas was a “delusion”.

Polls in recent weeks show overwhelming backing for the war despite the rising human costs. Six Israelis who spoke to Reuters on Wednesday said now was not the time back down, regardless of fading global sympathy reflected in Tuesday’s UN resolution.

Israel’s army website was briefly hacked on Wednesday by a pro-Palestinian group that warned of more attacks against Israeli forces, including further cyber-attacks.

In a short letter that covered the main page of the Israeli army website, the group, calling itself “Anonymous Jo”, said the military’s “arrogance and injustice toward our people in Gaza will only harm you through terror, killing and war, whether by land, air or electronically”, Associated Press reports.

The letter went on to call for the “liberation of Palestine”.

The Israeli army confirmed the hack.

Little is known about Anonymous Jo, although the group or individual behind the attack indicated they were of Jordanian origin. One of the lines read:

From your brothers in Jordan to our people in Gaza and Palestine.

Family members of Israeli hostages held in Gaza say they are “shocked” by a report that Israel’s war cabinet has decided against sending the head of Mossad to Qatar for negotiations on a new hostage deal and are demanding an “immediate explanation” from Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Times of Israel is reporting.

The Times of Israel said Israel’s Channel 13 news reported that Mossad chief David Barnea, who helped negotiate last month’s hostage-release deal, had offered to go to Qatar again but the war cabinet decided against sending him amid cabinet disagreements over efforts being made on talks towards a new agreement.

Israel has said it believes nearly 140 people remain captive after being seized during Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel.

Ceasefire Discussion

Discussions over a possible ceasefire hit a dead end, according to a “senior US official” quoted by CNN. The news network said Qatar, which helped broker the previous week-long pause in hostilities that led to the release of more than 100 hostages, had been active in pursuing a new deal but Hamas had “not been responsive”.

Arab Neighbours’ Economic Cost Of War

A UN study said economic cost of the war on Arab neighbours Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan could rise to at least $10bn (£7.9bn) this year and push more than 230,000 people into poverty. The cost for the three states in terms of loss of GDP may amount to $10.3bn, or 2.3%, and could double if the conflict lasts another six months, the UN development program (UNDP) paper reveals.

Jordan, which borders the occupied West Bank, has a large Palestinian population and the public is very sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians.

Israel’s Existence

The sense of the people is that this is a threat to the very existence of Israel.

Hermann, of the Israel Democracy Institute, which conducts regular opinion polls on the war, said people were prepared for more deaths of soldiers.

Speaking in Jerusalem, retired former IT worker Ben Zion Levinger said Israel’s enemies would view any slowdown in fighting Hamas as a sign of weakness.

If we do not take this fight to the end, then tomorrow morning we will have battles in the north and in the east and the south and maybe Iran. Therefore, we have no choice.

Israeli Military Raid In Jenin

The Israeli military carried out a raid in Jenin in the occupied West Bank. The Palestinian news agency Wafa said seven Palestinians were killed and there were a “number of wounded civilians with various injuries”.

Pope Renews Call For Ceasefire

Pope Francis renewed his call for an immediate ceasefire, saying “may this great suffering for the Israelis and the Palestinians be over”.

Ceasefire Protest In Los Angeles

Police in Los Angeles arrested a group of protesters calling for a ceasefire in Gaza after they shut down a busy stretch of freeway in the city’s downtown.

The U.S. has seen a slew of major protests about the war since the conflict began in October. At least 50 people were arrested in Washington DC on Monday at a protest calling for the US to push for a permanent ceasefire.

In California, hundreds of people assembled outside the office of the US senator Alex Padilla on Tuesday to demand an immediate ceasefire. Last month, a demonstration in Los Angeles shut down a portion of Hollywood Boulevard, while in San Francisco dozens of protesters calling for a ceasefire were arrested after blocking traffic on the Bay Bridge.

Video posted by IfNotNow, the group behind Wednesday’s protest in LA, showed people singing as they linked arms in front of stopped cars while wearing shirts that read “not in our name” and “Jews say ceasefire now”.

15 December 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Thomas Scripps

Following the United Nations General Assembly vote Tuesday for a ceasefire in Gaza, the Israeli government has not only pledged to continue the war but made clear its plan for an onslaught against the Palestinians across the whole region. Its leaders know they have full license to do so, whatever cynical votes are cast at the UN or statements made to the press by its imperialist backers.

On Wednesday, Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen declared, “Israel will continue the war against Hamas, with or without international support.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told military commanders the war would “continue until the end, until the victory, until the elimination of Hamas” and that “nothing will stop us.”

Around 18,800 people have already been killed in Gaza—over 300 in the last day—with thousands more still trapped, dead or alive, under rubble.

As the World Socialist Web Site explained this week, “When the fascist Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu speaks of ‘Hamas’, he is speaking not of a political organization but of any will to resist on the part of the Palestinian population.”

The implications of this objective for Palestinians everywhere were spelled out by Israeli Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi, who commented Wednesday, “There will be no Palestinian state here. We will never allow another state to be established between Jordan and the [Mediterranean] sea.” This was, he said, “our country; the historical property of our ancestors.”

Israel’s ambassador to the UK Tzipi Hotovely reiterated the point in an interview with Sky News Thursday morning. Asked about the prospect of a future Palestinian state she replied, “Absolutely no. Israel knows today, and the world should know now that the Palestinians never wanted to have a state next to Israel.”

She added snidely, “They want to have a state from the river to the sea. They are saying it loud and clear.” Hotovely detailed the single Israeli state “from the river to the sea” she and the Zionists want to create in a 2013 essay, “The Five Stage Plan for the Greater Land of Israel”.

She argues that discussion of a two-state solution has “obstructed the most basic desire harboured by a majority of Israeli citizens—not to give up territory that was conquered through blood.”

Her five steps involve declaring full Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank, adopting as a Basic Law the principle of the State of Israel being a Jewish nation state (achieved in 2018), making full Israeli citizenship conditional on service in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), and encouraging the migration of a further two million Jews to Israel to ensure a Jewish majority as Palestinian areas are annexed.

This would necessarily involve an eruption of violence from the IDF and its far-right vigilante allies. It is because the United States knows and supports this strategy that it has delayed the sale of 20,000 assault rifles to Israel—where they are set to be handed out among fascist settler groups—in an attempt to distance the White House from the worst of the crimes it authors.

What the Israeli state is preparing is a permanent state of war against the entire Palestinian population of the Occupied Territories and Israel itself in pursuit of their expulsion.

On Thursday, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant told visiting US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan the war “will require a long period of time—it will last more than several months”. Earlier in the day the Knesset passed a wartime budget adding an additional $7 billion, formally to cover the costs of the Gaza war, though opposition members alleged the funds would be directed to the Settlements and National Projects Ministry.

The IDF has already massively stepped up its aggression in the West Bank. An operation has been ongoing in the city of Jenin since Tuesday, with 12 Palestinians, including children, reported killed, 10 wounded and over 500 rounded up, with some needing medical treatment after “questioning”—roughly 100 are still detained. Raids and bulldozers have destroyed people’s homes and vehicles, and many families are now struggling to access food.

IDF soldiers have provocatively delivered Jewish prayers from mosque loudspeakers, forcing their suspension from operations for giving the game away.

As in Gaza, denying access to healthcare is a clear military objective. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) International announced Wednesday, “Yesterday, a man had to carry his 13-year-old son to Khalil Suleiman hospital because Israeli armoured cars blocked ambulances. The boy died soon after.

“Yesterday and today, Israeli forces tear gassed the hospital in response to children throwing stones at armoured cars…

“Today, after a patient was discharged from hospital and an ambulance attempted to take her home, the ambulance was fired upon, and the same patient was re-admitted with a gunshot wound.”

In another post, the organisation recounted the shooting and killing of an unarmed teenager, Musa Ahmed Musa Khatib, inside the hospital. It described how “Israeli forces stopped ambulances taking discharged patients home outside Khalil Suleiman hospital. Paramedics and ambulance drivers were ordered out of the ambulances, stripped and made to kneel in the street.”

The Jenin operation is now being expanded to local villages, while other raids have been carried out in Ramallah, Qalqilya, Nablus, Jericho, Ramallah, Bethlehem and Hebron. More than 280 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since October 7, among them 69 children, and at least 4,400 detained.

Attacks in the West Bank replicate the programme being carried out with unrestrained savagery in Gaza, once again under the cover of a telecommunications blackout.

The Gaza Health Ministry reported Thursday that IDF forces occupying the Kamal Adwan Hospital in the north of the strip prevented medical staff from providing emergency care, leading to the deaths of two people. Soldiers reportedly stopped medical staff from moving between departments, and cut off food, electricity and water, including to 12 infants in the neonatal department. Staff and patients were later forcibly evacuated to the hospital yard.

Across Gaza, just 11 out of 36 hospitals are still functioning at all, according to the World Health Organization, and nine out of 28 primary health clinics. The UN has recorded 364 attacks on healthcare facilities in the Strip since October 7, and 300 health ministry staff killed.

The destruction of healthcare infrastructure prepares the way for a catastrophic spread of disease over winter, with flooding that brings with it water borne diseases and hypothermia already a major problem. “The perfect storm for disease has begun,” said UNICEF chief spokesperson James Elder.

Viruses and bacteria will spread like wildfire amid the overcrowded, squalid and starved conditions Israel has forced the population of Gaza into. According to the UN, over half of its people are now sheltering in the Rafah governate in the far south, in a tent mega-slum which has now been inundated with floodwater. In the city of Deir al-Balah further north, images show ambulance workers wading up to their waist in water trying to rescue the injured.

UN Palestinian refugee chief Philippe Lazzarini described the situation in Rafah: “It lacks infrastructure and all the basics. It is not a place to hold more than one million people. One warehouse is home to 30,000 people. Families live in tiny spaces only separated by blankets and plastic sheeting.”

Like the rest of the Strip, Rafah is under regular bombardment, despite the IDF declaring it a safe zone. On Wednesday night, an enormous airstrike obliterated two houses in the city, killing 26 people at a stroke.

Referring to the lack of aid entering Gaza and the increasingly difficulty in distributing it, Lazzarini said people were “desperate and hungry.” He added, “Gaza is not habitable as a place anymore.”

While continuing its genocidal assault, Israel and its allies are mounting provocations against Lebanon, Syria and Iran in the hope of a wider war in which every Palestinian can be treated as an enemy combatant.

Iranian Defence Minister Mohammad Reza Ashtiani warned Thursday of “extraordinary problems” if plans go ahead for a US-led military task force in the Red Sea, on the pretext of Houthi rebel attacks on shipping. NBC reported of the “worries grow[ing]” in Lebanon “that Netanyahu won’t stop with Gaza.”

Originally published in WSWS.ORG

15 December 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Ramzy Baroud

What is taking place in Gaza is meant for the history books: an epic tale of a small nation under a long, brutal siege for many years, facing one of the greatest military powers in the world. And yet, it refuses to be defeated.

Not even the legendary tenacity of Leo Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’ characters can be compared to the heroism of Gazans, living over a tiny stretch of land while subsisting on the precipice of calamity, even long before the Israeli genocide.

But if Gaza has already been declared uninhabitable by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) as early as 2020, how is it able to cope with everything that took place since then, particularly the grueling and unprecedented Israeli war, starting on October 7?

“I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” said Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on October 9. In fact, Israel carried out far greater war crimes than the choking of 2.3 million people.

“No place is safe, not even hospitals and schools,” the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said on X on November 11. Things have become far worse since that statement was made.

And, because Gazans refused to leave their homeland, the 365 sq kilometers – approx. 141 sq miles – turned into a hunting ground of human beings, who were killed in every way imaginable. Those who did not die under the rubble of their homes or were gunned down by attack helicopters while attempting to escape from one region to another, are now dying from disease and hunger.

Not a single category of Palestinians has been spared this horrible fate: the children, the women, the educators, the doctors and medics, the rescuers, even the artists and the poets. Each one of these groups has an ever-growing list of names, updated daily.

Fully aware of the extent of its war crimes in Gaza, Israel has systematically targeted Gaza’s storytellers – its journalists and their families, the bloggers, the intellectuals and even the social media influencers.

While Palestinians insist that their collective pain – and resistance – must be televised, Israel is doing everything in its power to eliminate the storytellers.

The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate said in a statement on December 6 that 75 Palestinian Journalists and media workers have been killed by Israel since the beginning of the war.

The above number does not include many citizen journalists and writers who do not necessarily operate in an official capacity. It also does not include members of their families, like the family of journalist Wael al-Dahdouh or the family of Moamen Al Sharafi.

Aware that their intellectuals are targets for Israel, Gazans have, for years, attempted to produce yet more storytellers. In 2015, a group of young journalists and students formed a group they called ‘We Are Not Numbers’. “We Are Not Numbers tells the stories behind the numbers of Palestinians in the news and advocates for their human rights”, WANN described itself.

A co-founder of the group, Professor Refaat Alareer, is a beloved Palestinian educator from Gaza. A young intellectual, whose brilliance is only matched by his kindness, Alareer believed that the story of Palestine, Gaza in particular, should be told by the Palestinians themselves, whose relationship to the Palestinian discourse cannot be marginal.

“As Gaza keeps gasping for life, we struggle for it to pass, we have no choice but to fight back and tell her stories. For Palestine,” Alareer wrote in his contribution in the volume ‘Light in Gaza: Writing Born of Fire’.

He edited several books, including ‘Gaza Writes Back’ and ‘Gaza Unsilenced’, which also allowed him to take the message of other Palestinian intellectuals in Gaza to the rest of the world.

“Sometimes a homeland becomes a tale. We love the story because it is about our homeland and we love our homeland even more because of the story,” he wrote in ‘Gaza Writes Back’.

Alareer reportedly refused to leave northern Gaza, even after Israel had managed to isolate it from the rest of the Strip, subjecting it to countless massacres.

As if aware of the fate awaiting him, Alareer tweeted this line, along with a poem he had penned: “If I must die, let it be a tale.”

On December 7, the writers’ collective, We Are Not Numbers, declared that their beloved founder, Refaat Alareer, was killed in an Israeli airstrike in northern Gaza.

Alareer was not the only member of the collective who was killed by Israel. On October 14, Yousef Dawas and on November 24, Mohammed Zaher Hammo, were killed, with members of their families, in Israeli strikes on various parts of the Gaza Strip.

In one of the workshops I did with the group, prior to the war, Yousef Dawas stood out, and not only because of his unusually long hair, but because of his clever and pointed questions.

He wanted to tell the stories of ordinary Gazans, so that other ordinary people around the world can appreciate the everyday struggle of the Palestinian people, their righteous quest for justice and their hope for a better future.

These storytellers were all killed by Israel, with the hope that the stories will die with them. But Israel will fail because the collective story is bigger than all of us. A nation that has produced the likes of Ghassan Kanafani, Basil al-Araj and Refaat Alareer will always produce great intellectuals, who will serve the historic role of telling the story of Palestine and her liberation.

This is the last poem shared by Alareer.

“If I must die,

you must live

to tell my story

to sell my things

to buy a piece of cloth

and some strings,

(make it white with a long tail)

so that a child, somewhere in Gaza

while looking heaven in the eye

awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—

and bid no one farewell

not even to his flesh

not even to himself—

sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up

above

and thinks for a moment an angel is there

bringing back love

If I must die

let it bring hope

let it be a tale.”  

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

14 December 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies

On Friday, December 8, the UN Security Council met under Article 99 for only the fourth time in the UN’s history. Article 99 is an emergency provision that allows the Secretary General to summon the Council to respond to a crisis that “threatens the maintenance of international peace and security.” The previous occasions were the Belgian invasion of the Congo in 1960, the hostage crisis at the U.S. Embassy in Iran in 1979 and Lebanon’s Civil War in 1989.

Secretary General Antonio Guterres told the Security Council that he invoked Article 99 to demand an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza because “we are at a breaking point,” with a “high risk of the total collapse of the humanitarian support system in Gaza.” The United Arab Emirates drafted a ceasefire resolution that quickly garnered 97 cosponsors.

The World Food Program has reported that Gaza is on the brink of mass starvation, with 9 out of 10 people spending entire days with no food. In the two days before Guterres invoked Article 99, Rafah was the only one of Gaza’s five districts to which the UN could deliver any aid at all.

The Secretary General stressed that “The brutality perpetrated by Hamas can never justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people… International humanitarian law cannot be applied selectively. It is binding on all parties equally at all times, and the obligation to observe it does not depend on reciprocity.”

Mr. Guterres concluded, “The people of Gaza are looking into the abyss… The eyes of the world – and the eyes of history – are watching. It’s time to act.”

UN members delivered eloquent, persuasive pleas for the immediate humanitarian ceasefire that the resolution called for, and the Council voted thirteen to one, with the U.K. abstaining, to approve the resolution. But the one vote against by the United States, one of the five veto-wielding permanent members of the Security Council, killed the resolution, leaving the Council impotent to act as the Secretary General warned that it must.

This was the sixteenth U.S. Security Council veto since 2000 – and fourteen of those vetoes have been to shield Israel and/or U.S. policy on Israel and Palestine from international action or accountability. While Russia and China have vetoed resolutions on a variety of issues around the world, from Myanmar to Venezuela, there is no parallel for the U.S.’s extraordinary use of its veto primarily to provide exceptional impunity under international law for one other country.

The consequences of this veto could hardly be more serious. As Brazil’s UN Ambassador Sérgio França Danese told the Council, if the U.S. hadn’t vetoed a previous resolution that Brazil drafted on October 18, “thousands of lives would have been saved.” And as the Indonesian representative asked, “How many more must die before this relentless assault is halted? 20,000? 50,000? 100,000?”

Following the previous U.S. veto of a ceasefire at the Security Council, the UN General Assembly took up the global call for a ceasefire, and the resolution, sponsored by Jordan, passed by 120 votes to 14, with 45 abstentions. The 12 small countries who voted with the United States and Israel represented less than 1% of the world’s population.

The isolated diplomatic position in which the United States found itself should have been a wake-up call, especially coming a week after a Data For Progress poll found that 66% of Americans supported a ceasefire, while a Mariiv poll found that only 29% of Israelis supported an imminent ground invasion of Gaza.

After the United States again slammed the Security Council door in Palestine’s face on December 8, the desperate need to end the massacre in Gaza returned to the UN General Assembly on December 12. An identical resolution to the one the U.S. vetoed in the Security Council was approved by a vote of 153 to 10, with 33 more yes votes than the one in October. While General Assembly resolutions are not binding, they do carry political weight, and this one sends a clear message that the international community is disgusted by the carnage in Gaza.

Another powerful instrument the world can use to try to compel an end to this massacre is the Genocide Convention, which both Israel and the United States have ratified. It only takes one country to bring a case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) under the Convention, and, while cases can drag on for years, the ICJ can take preliminary measures to protect the victims in the meantime.

On January 23, 2020, the Court did exactly that in a case brought by The Gambia against Myanmar, alleging genocide against its Rohingya minority. In a brutal military campaign in late 2017, Myanmar massacred tens of thousands of Rohingya and burnt down dozens of villages. 740,000 Rohingyas fled into Bangladesh, and a UN-backed fact-finding mission found that the 600,000 who remained in Myanmar “may face a greater threat of genocide than ever.”

China vetoed a referral to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Security Council, so The Gambia, itself recovering from 20 years of repression under a brutal dictatorship, submitted a case to the ICJ under the Genocide Convention.

That opened the door for a unanimous ruling by 17 judges at the ICJ that Myanmar must prevent genocide against the Rohingya, as the Genocide Convention required. The ICJ issued that ruling as a preventive measure, the equivalent of a preliminary injunction in a domestic court, even though its final ruling on the merits of the case might be many years away. It also ordered Myanmar to file a report with the Court every six months to detail how it is protecting the Rohingya, signaling serious ongoing scrutiny of Myanmar’s conduct.

So which country will step up to bring an ICJ case against Israel under the Genocide Convention? Activists are already discussing that with a number of countries. Roots Action and World Beyond War have created an action alert that you can use to send messages to 10 of the most likely candidates (South Africa, Chile, Colombia, Jordan, Ireland, Belize, Turkïye, Bolivia, Honduras and Brazil).

There has also been increasing pressure on the International Criminal Court to take up the case against Israel. The ICC has been quick to investigate Hamas for war crimes, but has been dragging its feet on investigating Israel. After a recent visit to the region, ICC prosecutor Karim Khan was not allowed by Israel to enter Gaza, and he was criticized by Palestinians for visiting areas attacked by Hamas on October 7, but not visiting the hundreds of illegal Israeli settlements, checkpoints and refugee camps in the occupied West Bank.

However, as long as the world is faced with the United States’ tragic and debilitating abuse of institutions the rest of the world depends on to enforce international law, the economic and diplomatic actions of individual countries may have more impact than their speeches in New York.

While historically there have been about two dozen countries that have not recognized Israel, in the past two months, Belize and Bolivia have severed ties with Israel, while others–Bahrain, Chad, Chile, Colombia, Honduras, Jordan and Turkey–have withdrawn their ambassadors.

Other countries are trying to have it both ways–condemning Israel publicly but maintaining their economic interests. At the UN Security Council, Egypt explicitly accused Israel of genocide and the U.S. of obstructing a ceasefire.

And yet Egypt’s long-standing partnership with Israel in the blockade of Gaza and its continuing role, even today, in restricting the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza through its own border crossings, make it complicit in the genocide it condemns. If it means what it says, it must open its border crossings to all the humanitarian aid that is needed, end its cooperation with the Israeli blockade and reevaluate its obsequious and compromised relationships with Israel and the United States.

Qatar, which has worked hard to negotiate an Israeli ceasefire in Gaza, was eloquent in its denunciation of Israeli genocide in the Security Council. But Qatar was speaking on behalf of the Gulf Cooperation Council, which includes Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Under the so-called Abraham accords, the sheikhs of Bahrain and the UAE have turned their backs on Palestine to sign on to a toxic brew of self-serving commercial relations and hundred million dollar arms deals with Israel.

In New York, the UAE sponsored the latest failed Security Council resolution, and its representative declared, “The international system is teetering on the brink. For this war signals that might makes right, that compliance with international humanitarian law depends on the identity of the victim and the perpetrator.”

And yet neither the UAE nor Bahrain has renounced their Abraham deals with Israel, nor their roles in U.S. “might makes right” policies that have wreaked havoc in the Middle East for decades. Over a thousand US Air Force personnel and dozens of U.S. warplanes are still based at the Al-Dhafra Airbase in Abu Dhabi, while Manama in Bahrain, which the U.S. Navy has used as a base since 1941, remains the headquarters of the U.S. Fifth Fleet.

Many experts compare apartheid Israel to apartheid South Africa. Speeches at the UN may have helped to bring down South Africa’s apartheid regime, but change didn’t come until countries around the world embraced a global campaign to economically and politically isolate it.

The reason Israel’s die-hard supporters in the United States have tried to ban, or even criminalize, the campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) is not that it is illegitimate or anti-semitic. It is precisely because boycotting, sanctioning and divesting from Israel may be an effective strategy to help bring down its genocidal, expansionist and unaccountable regime.

U.S. Alternate Representative to the U.N. Robert Wood told the Security Council that there is a “fundamental disconnect between the discussions that we have been having in this chamber and the realities on the ground” in Gaza, implying that only Israeli and U.S. views of the conflict deserve to be taken seriously.

But the real disconnect at the root of this crisis is the one between the isolated looking-glass world of U.S. and Israeli politics and the real world that is crying out for a ceasefire and justice for Palestinians.

While Israel, with U.S. bombs and howitzer shells, is killing and maiming thousands of innocent people, the rest of the world is appalled by these crimes against humanity. The grassroots clamor to end the massacre keeps building, but global leaders must move beyond non-binding votes and investigations to boycotting Israeli products, putting an embargo on weapons sales, breaking diplomatic relations and other measures that will make Israel a pariah state on the world stage.

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

14 December 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Vijay Prashad

In 1948, the Syrian historian Constantin Zurayk used the Arabic word Nakba (Catastrophe) to refer to the forced removal of Palestinians from their lands and homes by the newly formed Israeli state (in his August 1948 book, Ma’na al-Nakba or The Meaning of the Nakba). A decade ago, in Beirut, I met with the Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury—then editor of the Arabic-language Journal of Palestinian Studies, who told me that the Nakba of 1948 was not an event but part of a process. “What we have is a Permanent Nakba, which means that this catastrophe has been continuous for the Palestinians,” he said. Since 1948, Palestinian political movements and intellectuals have argued that the logic of the Israeli state has been to expel the Palestinians from the region between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. This policy of expulsion to create an ethno-religious Jewish State of Israel is what Khoury meant by the Permanent Nakba.

On November 11, 2023, Israel’s Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter said something startling to the press. “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba,” he said. “Gaza Nakba 2023. That’s how it’ll end,” said this former director of Israel’s internal security service Shin Bet. In the first week of November, Israel’s Heritage Minister Amihai Eliyahu was on Radio Kol BaRama, whose interviewer ruminated about dropping “some kind of nuclear bomb on all of Gaza, flattening them, eliminating everybody there.” Eliyahu replied, “That’s one way. The second way is to work out what’s important to them, what scares them, what deters them… They’re not scared of death.” Israel, the minister said, should retake all of Gaza. What about the Palestinians? “They can go to Ireland or deserts,” he said. “The monsters in Gaza should find a solution by themselves.” This language of annihilation and dehumanization has become normal among the cabinet of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu suspended Eliyahu from his cabinet, but he did not rebuke his Defense Minister Yoav Gallant who called Palestinians “human animals.” This is the broad attitude of the Israeli high officials, who are now on record with this kind of language.

Israel’s army has advanced its execution of the “Gaza Nakba.” In the early stage of the attack, Israel told Palestinian civilians to move south within the Strip, along Salah al-Din Road, the north-south axis in this 40-kilometer-long area of Palestine that holds 2.3 million Palestinians. The Israelis said that they would largely attack northern Gaza, particularly Gaza City. Around 1.5 million Palestinians moved from the northern part of Gaza to the south, the Israelis having told them repeatedly that this would be a safe zone. Those who stayed experienced a level of bombardment not seen in Gaza in the past, which has been pummeled by the Israelis on a punctual basis since 2006 (the current war including deadly air strikes against highly congested refugee camps, such as Jabalia). In late November, five weeks into their brutal bombing in the north, Israel aircraft intensified the bombing of Gaza’s second-largest city, Khan Younis, and began ground operations in the areas where they had told civilians to take shelter. By the first week of December, Israeli tanks surrounded Khan Younis, and Israeli aircraft began to bomb small towns in the southern part of Gaza. Having pushed 1.8 Palestinians into the south, the Israelis now began to bomb that part of Gaza. Meanwhile, Israel’s refusal to allow sufficient humanitarian aid to enter Gaza meant that nine out of 10 Palestinians are living without food for days on end (some told the UN World Food Program that they had not eaten in 10 days). This total war by Israel has pushed the majority of Palestinians in Gaza down toward the Egyptian border. Under cover of this war, the Israelis have also moved aggressively into the West Bank to deepen the Permanent Nakba in that part of the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

As early as October 18, long before the Israeli forces moved toward Khan Younis, the Israel military tweeted that it “orders Gaza residents to move to the humanitarian zone in the area of al-Mawasi.” Three days later, the Israeli military said that the Palestinians must move “south of Wadi Gaza” and go to the “humanitarian area in Mawasi.” Those who went to this small enclave (3.3 square miles) found it without any services—including no internet—and found that even here the Israelis were firing their weapons nearby. Mohammed Ghanem, who had lived near al-Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza, said that al-Mawasi was “neither humane nor safe.” Palestinians in southern Gaza now hope that they can get out before the Israeli bombs find them. The death toll is now in excess of 18,000 dead. As one Palestinian friend wrote in a text, “If we do not leave our homes and go into exile, we will get killed here.” He sent this text just when confirmation arrived that more Palestinians have been pushed out of their homes and killed since October 7 than in the Nakba of 1948. “This is the Second Nakba,” he said to me from near the border between Gaza and Egypt.

A Vote for Annihilation

The ghastly Israeli attack on the Palestinians of Gaza provoked a call for a ceasefire from the second week of October. Israel’s immense firepower—provided by Western countries (especially the United Kingdom and the United States)—was used indiscriminately against a people who live in congested areas of Gaza. Images of that violence flooded social media and even the broadcast news, which could not ignore what was happening. These images overcame all the attempts by the Israeli government and its Western backers to justify their actions. Tens of millions of people joined various forms of protests across the world, but significantly in the Western states that back Israel, bravely confronting governments that tried to portray their solidarity with the Palestinians—unsuccessfully—as antisemitism. This attack was a cynical attempt to use the actual and horrible existence of antisemitism to malign the protests. It did not work. The call for a full-scale ceasefire increased, putting pressure on governments around the world to act.

On December 8, 2023, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) put a “brief, simple, and crucial” resolution for a ceasefire (the words are from UAE ambassador to the UN Mohamed Issa Abushahab). UN Secretary-General António Guterres invoked Article 99 of the Charter, which allows him to underscore the importance of an event through “preventative diplomacy” (the article has only been used three times previously, over the conflicts in the Republic of Congo in 1960, Iran in 1979, and Lebanon in 1989). Almost a hundred member states of the UN backed the UAE resolution. “The people of Gaza are being told to move like human pinballs—ricocheting between ever-smaller slivers of the south, without any of the basics for survival,” Guterres told the UN Security Council. “Nowhere in Gaza is safe.” Thirteen members of the Security Council voted for it, including France, while the United Kingdom abstained. Only U.S. Deputy Ambassador Robert Wood raised his hand to veto the resolution.

Four days later, on December 12, the Egyptians tabled much the same resolution in the UN General Assembly, where Assembly President Dennis Francis (of Trinidad and Tobago) said, “We have one singular priority—only one—to save lives. Stop this violence now.” The vote was overwhelming: 153 countries voted for the resolution, 10 voted against it, and 23 abstained. It is instructive to see which countries voted against the ceasefire: Austria, Czechia, Guatemala, Israel, Liberia, Micronesia, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, and the United States. Many European countries—from Bulgaria to the United Kingdom—abstained. But matters are complex. Even Ukraine did not vote with Israel on this resolution. They abstained.

The U.S. veto in the Security Council and the votes against in the General Assembly are effectively votes for the Permanent Nakba of the Palestinian people, the No-State Solution. At least, that is how they will be read across the world, not only in al-Mawasi, as the bombs get closer, but also in the demonstrations from New York to Jakarta.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist.

14 December 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Marwan Asmar

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is “blindfolded” to what is in front of him. It would be better for him and his war cabinet to call for a ceasefire and get back to the negotiating table to get his 138 or so remaining hostages that are being held by Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

However, he clearly doesn’t want a political deal, having made that abundantly clear with the goal to eliminate Hamas and to free the hostages through Israeli-style combat. But these two goals remain elusive, as he is nowhere near to getting the hostages and is also losing badly in the field against what tantamounts to Palestinian militias facing a highly mechanized Israeli professional army.

Northern Gaza

Ever since, Israel started the ground war on Gaza in the second half of October – and it began from the north, northeast and latter on the east, Israeli soldiers, their tanks and artillery has been to say the least, bogged down in the Gaza Strip. They certainly didn’t expect to meet such tough fighting from the Palestinian resistance dominated by the Hamas Izz Al Din Al Qassam Brigade and Saraya Al Quds, which is also the armed wing of Islamic Jihad.

After weeks of remaining on the periphery, they have in some cases, managed to enter Gaza proper first in the north in Biet Lahia, Al Falouja, Jabalia, Shiekh Radwan, to the north east of Biet Hanoon, and downwards to the east Al Shujayia, Al Zaytoon, Johr Al Diek and encroached Gaza city.

It must be remembered also, especially in the east, these are mainly rural areas with thinly-spread populations, and this is how they managed to get into Gaza city and divide the north from the south, which had been their strategy from the beginning of the war.

This included as well, displacing masses of people from the north to the south.

Figures appear unreliable. At first it was said up to 1.1 million people were displaced, then 1.7 million and later 1.9 million but it turned out to be up to 700,000 remained in their places up north despite the destruction of their homes.

Today, these northern places as well as the places down the east, continue as battlegrounds and tough resistance. They have not been dominated as the Israeli army maintains, judging from the fact that Israeli warplanes keep bombing the different areas while its soldiers getting killed and their tanks and military hardware hit and destroyed by locally-made missiles and drones.

The Israeli army has not yet dominated the north and north east of Gaza as it keeps harping about. Bloody skirmishes continue in both the areas. But this is just one part of the military equation as the Israeli army and air force maybe stretching themselves too far.

Southern Gaza

Now Israeli ground forces are operating on the periphery of Khan Younis, the second largest city in the strip, trying to enter it from the west, through the sea and by parachutes from the air and from the east, alongside the border filled with Israeli settlements and military bases.

In the southeast, just off Khan Younis to the north, there is Beni Suhaila, Muraj, Al Qarara, Al Fukhari, Abbassan, Khuza’a and these have become places of fighting between the Israeli forces and the Palestinian resistances forces. On the face of it, it would seem the Israeli forces are in Gaza, they, together with their troop carriers and other artillery are fighting hard, but don’t be deceived!

Military experts, say despite their maneuvers into the 362-kilometer strip, and the fact they are being helped by the Israeli air force from the top and from the sea by warships, they are yet to dominate the areas they are fighting in with the Palestinian resistance forces. They have greater advantage over them because they know the terrain, different geographical areas and off course the deep underground tunnels that stretch around 500 kilometers and are as big as the London Underground.

Israeli deaths

In the war on Gaza, the Israeli army has been very careful about the number of deaths in their ranks. It was only days into the war, it was forced to admit about the number of soldiers killed, and then again, these published and/or uttered figures were strictly enforced by the Israeli censors.

But then the cat was out of the bag when Hamas fighters started to say how many soldiers they killed on that particular day, how many tanks that were destroyed, and the videos it started showing of battles of its fighters while aiming at Israeli tanks and firing on them in different parts of Gaza.

These videos were daily shown and analyzed by military experts on different Arab satellite channels and quickly picked up by the Israelis themselves, and their different media forms – television, press, social media. They couldn’t stay as “mouth pieces” for the Israeli politicians and military but published figures that later on, they were forced to retract, because they were under military censorship.

The Israeli daily newspaper Yeddioth Ahronoth said there are 5000 Israeli soldiers who were injured in the ground war on Gaza so far. However, the official figures would only admit to just 2000 injured. Deputy Director-General of the Rehabilitation Dept of the Israeli Defense Ministry Limor Luria says they never experienced anything like this with serious injuries being to the hands and feet and these include amputations.

However, she did also point out 12 percent of the injuries included ruptures to the spleen, kidneys and other internal organs.

This is not to say anything about the number of disabilities among the military personnel. Figures by the Israeli Disabled Veterans Association, up till 23 November, 2023, suggests 1,600 Israeli soldiers were left with permanent disabilities and no longer fit for active service. And these figures are likely to increase as the war goes on.

So the war is having its toll on the Israeli military despite the bombs and missiles its hurling down on Gaza civilians which amounted to 40,000 tons of explosives up till late November. The figure today is likely to be higher because of the continual bombing of the southern part of the Gaza Strip including Khan Younis, Dier Al Balah and Rafah with refugee camps such as Nuseirat and Al Maghazi, with Israeli missile strikes on different houses and/or often rows of houses and squares creating large creators of debris with sleeping people dying under the rubble in their thousands.

While Palestinians deaths now stands at over 18000 with 50,000 injured and likely to increase if there is no ceasefire – a fact Israel, once again maybe, interested in, at least temporarily, military analyst for Al Jazeera Dr Fayez Al Dowairi, says no matter how much the Israeli military tries to message the figures, the real numbers can be deduced from the amount of Israeli tanks that were destroyed up till now, 67 days into the war.

Relaying on Hamas figures, which they show in their daily videos, he says the Palestinian resistance have destroyed so far 500 Israeli tanks with an average of 11 personnel that makes around 5000 dead and this excludes the soldiers who die on the ground during to face-to-face fighting with different Palestinian fighters.

However Al Dowairi says this number is nearer to an earlier estimation made on video – mid-October – of the number of Israeli dead standing at 3000 with 11,000 injured and has since hit the social media and the google search engine.

Off course these are far less than the official figures which continue to be parroted every night on television as if it’s a sobering reality by the Israelis and a major achievement for Palestinians and the Arab population.

The Israeli army says 425 of its soldiers were killed since 7 October. Two days later, and as reported by the Times of Israel, it stated the number of those killed stands at 105 since 27 October when the land war restarted again and that 20 of them died through friendly fire.

An End to the Killing

Observers suggest the Biden administration has given Israel a few weeks to wrap up operations with many appear dreading the number of civilian deaths among the Palestinian population. But the US support to the Israelis have given Netanyahu a booster. He simply says the war on Gaza will continue till he eliminates Hamas and establishes an authority of his choosing regardless of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah.

We wait and see the outcome.

Marwan Asmar is a journalist from Jordan

14 December 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Andre Damon

The United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to call for a ceasefire in Gaza, with the United States, the leading global enabler of Israel’s genocide, voting against the resolution.

The vote totals saw 153 member states vote in favor of a ceasefire, while 10, including the United States, Israel and a handful of smaller countries—Austria, Czechia, Guatemala, Liberia, Micronesia, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay—vote against it. The United Kingdom, Germany and Italy abstained.

Speaking in support of the resolution, UN General Assembly President Dennis Francis of Trinidad and Tobago said, “Right now, what we are seeing is an onslaught on civilians, the breakdown of humanitarian assistance, and profound disrespect for international law.” He added, “Even war has rules, and it is imperative we prevent any deviation from these principles and values.”

He noted that thousands of women and children have been killed, and “even more have been forcibly displaced by the incessant violence, with nowhere—I repeat, nowhere—safe to go.”

In a statement on the vote, Avril Benoît, executive director of Doctors Without Borders, said, “Today the majority of the world stood together to demand an end to this bloodshed and suffering in Gaza. The United States has once again voted to allow the carnage against civilians in Gaza to continue.” She added, “The US is increasingly isolated in its steadfast support of a war that seems to have no rules and no limits.”

The resolution, however, is non-binding, enabling Israel to continue to murder hundreds of Palestinians each day, and the United States to fund, arm and logistically support the genocide. In a show of open defiance, Israel added to its war crimes on Monday, blowing up a United Nations UNRWA school in Northern Gaza.

With potentially even more catastrophic effects, Israel has begun pumping seawater into Gaza with the stated aim of flooding underground tunnels and structures. The Netanyahu government has said the hostages are being held in underground tunnels, but President Joe Biden said on Tuesday he has been told Israel is not flooding tunnels where hostages are being kept.

Besides potentially drowning its own citizens being held hostage, Israel’s pumping of vast quantities of salt water into Gaza will have catastrophic health and economic consequences for the enclave and its inhabitants.

A substantial portion of the water is likely to make its way into Gaza’s underground aquifer, potentially poisoning the water supply. The salt water could also have a massive impact on Gaza’s agriculture, as a high salt content in soil is poisonous to plant life.

In a meeting with families of the Israeli hostages held in Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said of the hostages, “currently it’s not possible to bring all of them back.” In response, the families told Netanyahu they believed flooding the tunnels would lead to the hostages’ deaths.

On Tuesday, when he was asked to comment on reports that the tunnels were being flooded, Biden replied that “assertions [are] being made that … there’s no hostages in any of these tunnels. But I don’t know that for a fact.” In his remarks, Biden referred to “the indiscriminate bombing that takes place” on the part of Israel, contradicting the repeated false assertions of his administration that Israel is taking measures to protect the lives of civilians in Gaza.

Biden also for the first time admitted that elements within Israel’s government are calling for the deliberate targeting of the entire civilian population of Gaza. He said, “Ben-Gvir and company and the new folks, they… They not only want to have re—retribution, which they should for what the Palestinian—Hamas did, but against all Palestinians.”

Despite these admissions, Biden was categorical that the United States would support Israel regardless, declaring that “in the meantime, none of it is going to walk away from providing Israel what they need to defend themselves and to finish the job.”

In announcing that the US would vote against a ceasefire in Gaza, US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield said, “Any ceasefire right now would be temporary at best and dangerous at worst.” She added, “Israel, like every single country on earth, has the right and the responsibility to defend its people from acts of terrorism.”

On Monday, the death toll in Gaza surged to 18,205, Gaza’s Ministry of Health said, with another 7,000 people missing. Some 70 percent of the dead are reported to be women and children.

The United Nations warned that disease is running rampant:

The spread of diseases in Gaza has reportedly intensified, especially due to overcrowded living conditions; which adds to the strain on an increasingly overwhelmed health system and an increased risk of people dying. On 12 December, the [Ministry of Health] spokesperson in Gaza said that the ministry had documented 360,000 cases of infectious diseases in shelters, noting that the actual number is believed to be higher.

The UN added that “cases of meningitis, jaundice, impetigo, chickenpox and other upper respiratory tract infections had been recorded.” It continued: “Additionally, the director of the Abu Youssef An Najjar Hospital in Rafah announced that… diarrhea and influenza were spreading amongst internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Rafah.”

On Tuesday, footage emerged on social media showing Israeli troops using Gazan civilians—stripped to their underwear—as human shields as they advanced into urban areas.

Meanwhile, Israel’s minister of communications wrote in a statement on Twitter that “we will never allow another state to be established between the Jordan and the sea,” making it clear that Israel is seeking the total annexation of Palestinian lands, with the unstated premise that its current inhabitants will either be killed or expelled.

Despite the overwhelming vote in the United Nations, Israel and the United States are bent on continuing their genocide in Gaza. All of the imperialist powers, including France, Germany and the UK, have declared their support for Israel’s “right to defend itself,” providing critical military, logistical and political support for Israel.

Stopping the massacre requires the deepening and expansion of the mass protest movement that has emerged against the genocide by turning to the working class and fighting for a socialist perspective. As the World Socialist Web Site wrote in its most recent editorial board statement:

Stopping the genocide in Gaza is the task of the working class. Workers should support the call by the Palestinian trade unions not to handle war materiel destined for Israel. The global demonstrations by millions of people against the genocide must be expanded and armed with a socialist perspective.

The struggle to put an end to Israel’s genocide in Gaza must be waged as a struggle against the imperialist governments that are responsible for it and the capitalist system whose barbarism is being put on hideous display before the world.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN WSWS.ORG

13 December 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Maung Zarni

“Israel cannot build peace on genocide. We have got to find more humane ways to solve our problems.”

As the host of FORSEA Dialogue Series on Democratic Struggles established to educate grassroots activists keen to learn about contemporary struggles for peace, justice and liberty, the exiled Burmese dissident and genocide scholar Dr Maung Zarni interviewed the 1976 Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire. She is renowned worldwide for her grassroots campaign to build “peace by peace” in her native Northern Irish city of Belfast.

In the 30-minutes interview, the Northern Irish activist shared her grounded perspectives on a wide raging subject of historical and contemporary importance.

Her views are grounded because she has done her homework very well and because she has personal knowledge of things in which she has publicly weighed in on, with her impeccable moral voice rooted in her Christian upbringing whereby devotees are taught “God is love”.

She talked passionately about the devastating US-led sanctions against Iraq where she witnessed children lying in hospital beds waiting to die because of the lack of medicine.

Importantly, she recounted her conversation with Saddam Hussein’s Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, who told her, “Iraq was doing everything to make peace with the United States.” The US Secretary of State James Baker openly threatened Saddam’s representative to the world, “we will bomb Iraq if you don’t do what we tell you to do.”

The then US President George W. Bush was quoted in USA Today as having characterized Aziz, Number 12 on US’s Wanted List, someone who “doesn’t know how to tell truth”. Aziz was Number 12 on US’s Wanted List drawn up before the second and illegal invasion of Iraq in 2002, and he was captured in Bagdad and questioned in captivity by US interrogators.

For Aziz was unable to tell his American captors whereabouts of Saddam’s non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).

Here is USA Today reportage on 3 May 2003: “President Bush expressed unshakable confidence Saturday about finding banned weapons in Iraq and complained that Tariq Aziz, one of Saddam Hussein’s closest deputies, is not cooperating with U.S. forces who have him in custody. Bush said the deputy prime minister, the most visible face of the former Iraqi government other than Hussein, ‘still doesn’t know how to tell the truth.”

In Palestine, she witnessed the horrific human conditions of Gazans who have been subjected to Israel’s 16-years-long blockade of Gaza, which former of Israel’s internal security agency Shin Bet and retired admiral Ami Ayalon, “an open-air prison”.

Israeli security forces deported her from the Occupied Palestine three times as she and her team of international peace activists attempted to break the Israeli blockade by, setting sail on Freedom Flotilla.

Maguire displayed a razor-sharp moral clarity when she said, “Zionism is just evil,” with her spot-on analysis of what the Zionist project of creating the Jewish Homeland by seizing, with relentless and sustained violence, the land that belongs to the Arabs indigenous to Palestine, or the Palestinian people. She added, “Israel only wants the land, but not the Palestinian people.”

Many “Jews with conscience” would agree with Maguire’s blunt take on political Zionism, the founding ideology of Israel. Robert Lemkin, an Oxford-based acclaimed filmmaker, who contributed a solo piano performance in support of Free Palestine on FORSEA’s 5-hour YouTube LIVE event  stated that his late mother who was in charge of Britain’s WWII-era Kindertransport initiative for West London Synagogue, was “a lifelong opponent of political Zionism”. Her uncle and entire family in the Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia were “liquidated” at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

More recently, in her no-hold-barred analysis entitled “A Jewish Plea: Stand Up to Israel’s Act of Genocide” (Boston Review, 13 October, 2023), Stephanie Fox, Executive Director of the Jewish Voice for Peace, which is the world’s largest organization of “Jews with conscience” opposing the Zionist Israel as the apartheid colonizer, elaborated on the Zionism and its deadly project for the Palestinians. In Fox’s own words:

“Since the founding of the state of Israel, the Zionist movement has positioned the domination and oppression of Palestinians and the colonization of Palestinian land as the answer to the very real question of Jewish safety. They have taken the very real pain and trauma that we as Jews carry and sharpened it into a deadly weapon. We desperately must understand that what is happening is not a cycle of violence. It is a system of violence. Everyone is caught in its teeth.

It is the system of settler colonial apartheid that the Israeli government has built and maintained over the past seventy-five years—with billions upon billions of dollars from the United States. Settler colonialism is a structure, a language, a culture, an ideology—an interlocking, totalizing, system of violence. It is a machine of war and dehumanization against Palestinians. It is this system that imperils the lives and safety of everyone.”

In his latest essay “All that remains” (Prospect, Jan/Feb. 2024), the Baghdad-born Israeli Jewish historian at Oxford University offered a new history of Israel’s founding in 1948, and what it entails for the native Palestinians:

From whatever perspective one chooses to view it, the establishment of the state of Israel in May 1948 involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians. Three quarters of a million Palestinians became refugees, and the name Palestine was wiped off the map. Israelis calls it “The War of Independence”; Palestinians call it the Nakba, or the catastrophe. The most horrific event in the suffering-soaked history of the Jews was the Holocaust. In the history of the Palestinian people, the most traumatic event is the Nakba, which is not in fact a one-off event but the ongoing process of the dispossession and displacement of Palestinian people from their homeland that continues to this day, in the unspeakable horrors being visited by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) on Gaza.

Maguire’s passions for peace and justice have also taken her to Bangladesh in February 2018 where she and two other members of the Nobel Women’s Initiatives – met with Rohingya survivors of Myanmar genocide in one of the world’s largest refugee camps in Cox’s Bazaar, and listened to their tales of mass rape and slaughter at the hands of Myanmar security forces. The trio of distinguished activist visitors – Iran’s Shirin Ebadi, Yemen’s Tawakkol Karman, and Maguire – met with the Prime Minister Sheik Hasina and pressed the latter to take Myanmar to the International Court of Justice, the United Nation’s court of member states, for breaching the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, of which both Myanmar and Bangladesh are “state parties”, or signatory states.

A few years later in 2020, Gambia invoked the above-mentioned binding inter-state treaty against Myanmar. Infamously, Aung San Suu Kyi, Maguire’s sister Nobel Peace laureate, showed up at the world’s court “on the side of genocide perpetrators”.

Maguire said, “I knew her husband (the late Michael Aris) very well. On many occasions, I campaigned with him for his wife’s release during her house arrests.” Maguire found Aung San Suu Kyi’s stance “desperately disappointing”.

The trip to Cox’s Bazaar was not her first attempts to support the wretched of Myanmar, or the Burmese dissidents opposing through non-violence the country’s genocidal military dictatorship. Two decades earlier Maguire joined a group of Nobel Peace laureates including the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Rigoberta Menchu in Thailand. They wanted to shine a spotlight on Myanmar military’s egregious rights violation and violent repression against different ethnic communities of Myanmar, besides a political persecution of a fellow Nobel laureate. They travelled from Bangkok to the Thai-Burmese borders which was home to 250,000 Karen war refugees forcibly displaced by Myanmar military’s scorch-earth operations.

The Northern Irish peace campaigner is not naively preaching peace in a world run by deeply immoral forces and actors. Her activism is anchored in a structural analysis that connects political states, governments and corporations. She sees how politicians and government officials “sell their own people” down the river to multinational corporations. Undaunted, she talked about how a small group of dedicated grassroots campaigners could permanently shut down a US arms manufacturer Raytheon in Derry, 90-minutes’ drive from Belfast.

To fully understand Maguire’s faith in the power of people working together for common good, a close look at her own personal background.

Born in 1944, Maguire grew up as an ordinary citizen in the working-class Catholic neighbourhood in West Belfast which had long suffered the sectarian violence between the Protestant loyalists to the UK and the Catholic Irish.

One big tragic event turned her into a relentless campaigner for peace and reconciliation.

Belfast in those days was, effectively, a British army garrison town, trying to keep order on the streets where the Irish Republican Army and the armed Unionist organization Ulster Defence Association battled each other. [According to a BBC documentary series, London was hardly a neutral party; but rather, it infiltrated both organizations, which it gave a list of targets from respective movements to, well, eliminate one another.]

In August 1976, Maguire lost three family members; niece Joanne (8), and nephews Andrew (6 weeks) and John (2½) – in a roadside accident in Belfast caused by an out-of-control car driven by a Provisional Irish Republican Army member. Andrew was in a pram when the car hit the family.

A British trooper sniped the man behind the wheel, whom they suspected to be an IRA. The driver was instantly killed by the sniper fire, and the driver-less car consequently swerved, hit and killed the three children on the spot, while their mother Anne, Maguire’s sister, was left “dangerously ill” and subsequently succumbed to death.

Maguire subsequently teamed up with two fellow local residents – Betty Williams, an eyewitness to the fatal accident, and Ciaran McKeown, a young journalist – to start organizing rallies and marches demanding peace under the banner of Peace People. The Norwegian Nobel Committee had recognized Peace People’s movement, and two of the co-founders Maguire and Williams, with the Nobel Peace Prize for 1976.

Since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, peace has been established in Ireland. The days of “the Troubles,” as the sectarian strife between the Catholic Irish and the pro-British Protestants in the state was referred to, are over. But Mairead has since remained a tireless and principled champion of peace, justice and freedom in national communities similarly marred by decades of violent conflicts, repression, and genocides.

Her passions for “resolving our problems through more humane ways” have led her to embrace a more global outlook which connects her to the wretched of the earth, whatever their names or geography.

No interview with this truly remarkable peace activist would be complete without a mention about Maguire, the person. Guided by her Christian faith, she exudes warmth, humility, and belief in the universal fellowship of humans. At 79, she looked more physically fail than when the FORSEA interview host met her at the bi-annual conference of the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA for the first time in October 2015.

But her mind remains razor sharp, and her speech coherent and her arguments for peace as cogent and inspiring as ever. Since Hamas’ attacks of 7 October, one often hears the phrase “Judaeo-Christian Civilization” (presumably vis-à-vis Islamic militancy or “savagery”), from the lips of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Israel’s high profile supporters including the likes of Alan Dershowitz. In the most perverted way, Western supporters of Israel have hoisted the flag of “(Western) Civilization” while arming, financing and protecting the “one and only Jewish state”, as it has institutionalized the policy of genocidal displacement and destruction of the native population of Palestinian over the last 70-years.

Mairead Maguire sets a high bar for other activists, Nobel Prize winners or not, to “speak truths to power,” no matter the price. Long before Amnesty International advocated for the freedom of the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Maguire has championed the cause of Julian Assange twice whom she met at the Ecuadorian Embassy when he was holed up there. Going against the currents, she nominated Assange twice for the Nobel Peace Prize. She said, “Julian Assange is a very brave man.”

And so is Mairead Maguire for typically going against the prevailing elite opinion, as misguided and morally warped it is, about the man who knowingly risked his life to tell the world the evil deeds which the most powerful state on earth has been carrying out, globally, while maintaining its soft power, with a façade of it as “a beacon of freedom, democracy and human rights”.

Unlike the political class and the corporate elite, that reign in the Global North, Maguire was sober, self-reflective and brutally honest when she said, “I feel deeply ashamed that I came from a Western place where we have allowed our governments to kill so many people (around the world).”

… For oil. For Land. For corporate profits. For imperialists’ economic security.

Today’s deeply troubled and violent world desperately needs to hear from anti-imperialist citizens of the world who refuse to be divided along these “civilizational” lines or geopolitical and corporate interests and who dare speak truth to power. Mairead Maguire is one of these voices whose grounded and wise words need to be heeded.

Maung Zarni

“Israel Cannot Build Peace on Genocide” Mairead Maguire

Dr Maung Zarni is a scholar, educator and human rights activist with 30-years of involvement in Burmese political affairs, Zarni has been denounced as an “enemy of the State” for his opposition to the Myanmar genocide.

17 December 2023

Source: forsea.co

By Avi Shlaim

On 7th January 2009, while Operation Cast Lead was in full swing, I wrote an article in the Guardian. “How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe”. This was Israel’s first major assault on the Gaza Strip after its unilateral withdrawal in 2005. Further major military offensives followed in 2012, 2014, 2021 and 2022, not counting minor flare-ups and nearly 200 dead during the border protests in 2018 known as the March of Return. By my count, the current war is the sixth serious Israeli assault on Gaza since, and by far the most lethal and destructive. And it also raises the ominous spectre of a second Palestinian Nakba.

The only way to make sense of Israel’s cruel and self-defeating wars in Gaza is through understanding the historical context. From whatever perspective one chooses to view it, the establishment of the state of Israel in May 1948 involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians. Three quarters of a million Palestinians became refugees, and the name Palestine was wiped off the map. Israelis call it “The War of Independence”; Palestinians call it the Nakba, or the catastrophe. The most horrific event in the suffering-soaked history of the Jews was the Holocaust. In the history of the Palestinian people, the most traumatic event is the Nakba, which is not in fact a one-off event but the ongoing process of the dispossession and displacement of Palestinian people from their homeland that continues to this day, in the unspeakable horrors being visited by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) on Gaza.

The United Kingdom was the original sponsor of the Jewish state, going back to the Balfour declaration of 1917. But by 1948, the United States had replaced the UK as the principal backer. British officials bitterly resented American partisanship on behalf of the infant state, although they themselves had enabled and empowered the Zionist takeover of Palestine. The conditions that gave rise to the Nakba were made in Britain. Yet no British government has ever accepted any responsibility for the loss and suffering it brought upon the people of Palestine.

In the period since 1948 the western powers, led by the US, have given Israel massive moral, economic and military support, as well as diplomatic protection. The US has used its veto power in the UN Security Council 46 times to defeat resolutions that were not to Israel’s liking. America also gives Israel around $3.8bn in military aid each year, with more this year to enable Israel to sustain its military offensive in Gaza. The trouble with American support for Israel is that it is not conditional on Israeli respect for Palestinian human rights or international law. As a result, Israel gets away, literally, with murder.

In August 2005, a Likud-led government headed by Ariel Sharon staged a unilateral Israeli pull-out from Gaza, withdrawing all 8,500 settlers and destroying the houses and farms they had left behind. Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement, conducted an effective campaign to drive the Israelis out of Gaza. To the world, Sharon presented the withdrawal from Gaza as a contribution to peace. But in the year that followed, more than 12,000 settlers moved into the West Bank, consolidating Israeli control, and further reducing the scope for an independent Palestinian state.

The real purpose behind the move was to redraw the borders of Greater Israel by incorporating the main settlement blocs on the West Bank to the state of Israel. Withdrawal from Gaza was thus not a prelude to a peace deal with the Palestinian Authority, but a prelude to further Zionist expansion on the West Bank. It was a unilateral Israeli move undertaken in what was seen as the Israeli national interest. Anchored in a fundamental rejection of Palestinian national identity, the withdrawal from Gaza was part of a long-term effort to deny the Palestinian people any independent political existence on their land. This did not stop Israeli spokespersons from making the preposterous claim that by quitting they gave the Gazans a chance to turn the strip into the Singapore of the Middle East.

In December 2008, Israel launched Operation Cast Lead, in breach of a six-month ceasefire that Egypt had brokered. This was not a war in the usual sense of the word but a one-sided massacre. For 22 days, the IDF shot, shelled and bombed Hamas targets and at the same time rained death and destruction on the defenceless civilian population. In all 1,417 Gazans were killed, including 313 children, and more than 5,500 wounded. Eighty-three per cent of the casualties were civilians.

War crimes were investigated by an independent fact-finding mission appointed by the UN Human Rights Council and headed by Richard Goldstone, a distinguished South African judge who happened to be both a Jew and a Zionist. Goldstone and his team found that Hamas and the IDF had both committed violations of the laws of war. The IDF received much more severe strictures than Hamas, on account of the scale and seriousness of its violations. Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups were found guilty of launching rocket and mortar attacks with the deliberate aim of harming Israeli civilians. The Goldstone team investigated 36 incidents involving the IDF. It found 11 incidents in which Israeli soldiers launched direct attacks against civilians with lethal outcomes (in only one cause was there a possible “justifiable military objective”); seven incidents where civilians were shot leaving their homes “waving white flags and, in some of the cases, following an injunction from the Israeli forces to do so”; an attack, executed “directly and intentionally” on a hospital; numerous incidents where ambulances were prevented from attending to the severely injured; several attacks on civilian infrastructure with no military significance, such as flour mills, chicken farms, sewage works and water wells—all part of a campaign to deprive civilians of basic necessities. In the words of the report, much of this extensive damage was “not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly”.

In conclusion, the 452-page report noted that while the Israeli government sought to portray its operations as essentially a response to rocket attacks in the exercise of the right to self-defence, “the Mission itself considers the plan to have been directed, at least in part, at a different target: the people of Gaza as a whole.”

Under the circumstances, the mission concluded that what occurred in just over three weeks at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 was “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever-increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability.” Goldstone later published an op-ed in the Washington Post, saying that while Hamas had committed war crimes (its rockets were “purposefully and indiscriminately aimed at civilian targets”), “civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy” by Israel. The other three members of the fact-finding mission said that they stood by the conclusions, which were “made after diligent, independent and objective consideration of the information related to the events within our mandate, and careful assessment of its reliability and credibility.”

Neither Israel nor Hamas was held to account nor made to pay any price for its war crimes. The Israelis resorted to a character assassination of the report’s author rather than engaging with any of its findings. Although it did not lead to any action, the Goldstone report offers a deep insight into the pattern of Israeli behaviour in Gaza in this and all subsequent operations. The absence of sanctions also explains why Israel was able to continue to act with utter impunity and, yet again, to get away literally with murder.

While committing war crimes, Israel claims to be exercising its inherent right to self-defence, and its western cheerleaders repeat this claim parrot-fashion. In this most recent and most devastating attack on Gaza, Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour party, outdid even Joe Biden and Rishi Sunak by stating that Israel’s right to defend itself justified the denial of water, food and fuel to the civilian population. All three leaders persisted for eight weeks in their refusal to call for an immediate ceasefire, contenting themselves with feeble pleas to Israel for pauses in the fighting to allow humanitarian aid to reach the besieged civilian population.

Like most of its claims in this savage war, Israel’s claim that it is simply exercising its right of self-defence is baseless—or at least hotly disputed. Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, has noted that under international law this right is only relevant in the case of an armed attack by one state against another state, or if the threat comes from outside. The attack by Hamas, however, was not by a state, nor did it come from outside. It came from an area for which, under international law, Israel is still the occupying power because after its withdrawal it continued to control access to Gaza by land, sea and air. Put simply, one does not have the right to self-defence against a territory that one occupies. In this case, therefore, the self-defence clause, Article 51 of the UN Charter, has no relevance. It is the people under occupation who have under international law the right to resist, including the right to armed resistance. And the Palestinian people are in a unique position: they are the only people living under military occupation who are expected to ensure the security of their occupier.

Taken together Israel’s attacks on Gaza reflect a profoundly militaristic outlook, a stubborn refusal to explore avenues for peaceful coexistence, habitual disregard for the laws of war and international humanitarian law, and utter callousness towards enemy civilians. Israeli generals talk about their recurrent military incursions into Gaza as “mowing the grass”. By this they mean weakening Hamas, degrading its military capability and impairing its capacity to govern. This dehumanising metaphor implies a task that must be performed regularly and mechanically and with no end. It also alludes to indiscriminate slaughter of civilians and inflicting the kind of damage on civilian infrastructure that takes several years to repair.

Under this grim rubric, there is no lasting political solution: the next war is always just a matter of time. “Mowing the grass” is a chilling metaphor but it provides another clue to the deeper purpose behind Israel’s steadfast shunning of diplomacy and repeated resort to brute military force on its southern border.

The current Israeli bombardment of Gaza is a response to the Hamas attack on Saturday 7th October, or Black Saturday. This was a game changer. In the past, Hamas has fired rockets on Israel or engaged with Israeli forces inside its territory. On 7th October, Hamas and the more radical group Islamic Jihad used bulldozers to break down the fence round Gaza and went on a killing spree in the neighbouring kibbutzim and settlements, murdering about 300 soldiers and massacring more than 800 civilians, 250 of whom were at a music festival. They also captured 240 hostages, including some military personnel. The brutal, murderous attack on civilians was a war crime, and it was rightly denounced as such by international political leaders.

Whether the Hamas attack was totally unprovoked, as Israel and its friends claim, is another matter. The attack did not happen in a vacuum. The backdrop was 56 years of Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories—the most prolonged and brutal military occupation of modern times. It constitutes daily violence against the residents of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and a daily violation of their basic human rights.

Hamas is not a terrorist organisation pure and simple, as Israel and its western allies keep insisting. It is a political party with a military wing whose attacks on civilians constitute terrorist acts. Indeed, Hamas is more than a political party with a military wing. It is a mass social movement, a prominent part of the fabric of Palestinian society which reflects its aspiration to freedom and independence. It is the failure of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to achieve freedom and statehood that largely explains Hamas’s growing influence.

In 1993 the PLO signed the first Oslo Accord with Israel. Mutual recognition replaced mutual rejection. For the Palestinian national movement this was a historic compromise: it gave up its claim to 78 per cent of Palestine as it existed between 1920 and 1948 under the League of Nations Mandate, in the hope of gaining an independent state in the remaining 22 per cent, in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with a capital city in east Jerusalem. But it was not to be. The Oslo Accord turned out to be not a pathway to independence but a trap.

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Put simply, one does not have the right to self-defence against a territory that one occupies

Following the assassination of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, the hardline nationalist party Likud came back to power under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu has spent the rest of his political career in a relentless and so far successful effort to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state. He has never been a partner for peace with any Palestinian faction. His game is to play them off against one another in order to frustrate the Palestinian national struggle. “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” he told his Likud colleagues in March 2019. “This is part of our strategy—to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.” By weakening and discrediting the moderates in the West Bank, Netanyahu inadvertently assisted the rise of Hamas.

The 1988 Hamas Charter is antisemitic, denies Israel’s right to exist and calls for a unitary Muslim state in the whole of historic Palestine, “from the river to the sea” as the slogan goes. But like the PLO before it, Hamas gradually moderated its political programme. Perhaps realising that the suicide bombings it carried out during the Second Intifada were both morally wrong and politically counter-productive, it opted for the parliamentary road to power. In January 2006, Hamas won an absolute majority in an all-Palestine election, in both Gaza and the West Bank, and proceeded to form a government. This was a more moderate, pragmatic government and it offered to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with Israel for 20, 30 or 40 years. Although the Charter was not revised until 2017, in a long series of speeches Hamas leaders indicated that they would accept a Palestinian state based on 1967 borders.

Israel refused to recognise the democratically elected Hamas government and turned down its offer of negotiations. The US and EU followed Israel’s lead and joined it in measures of economic warfare designed to undermine it. The western powers claim to believe in democracy but evidently not when the Palestinian people vote for the “wrong” party. To paraphrase Bertolt Brecht, if the Israeli and western governments are dissatisfied with the Palestinian people, they should dissolve the people and elect another.

With Saudi help, the rival Palestinian factions managed to reconcile their differences. On 8th February 2007, Fatah and Hamas signed an agreement in Mecca to stop the clashes between their forces in Gaza and to form a government of national unity. They agreed to a system of power-sharing, with independents taking the key posts of foreign affairs, finance and the interior. And they declared their readiness to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with Israel.

Israel did not like this government either and again refused to negotiate. Worse was to follow. Israel and the US secretly plotted with Fatah officials and Egyptian intelligence to undermine the national unity government. They hoped to reverse the results of the parliamentary election by encouraging Fatah to stage a coup to recapture power.

In 2008, a leak of memos from the Israel-Palestinian Authority negotiations showed that Israel and the US armed and trained the security forces of President Mahmoud Abbas with the aim of overthrowing the Hamas government. (Later, the “Palestine Papers”, a cache of 1,600 diplomatic documents leaked to Al Jazeera, would reveal more.) American neoconservatives participated in the sinister plot to instigate a Palestinian civil war. Hamas pre-empted a Fatah coup with a violent seizure of power in Gaza in June 2007. At this point the Palestinian national movement became fractured, with Fatah ruling the West Bank and Hamas ruling the Gaza Strip.

Israel responded to the Hamas move by declaring the Gaza Strip a “hostile territory”. It also enacted a series of social, economic and military measures designed to isolate and undermine Hamas. By far the most significant of these measures was the imposition of a blockade. The stated purpose of the blockade was to stop the transfer of weapons and military equipment to Hamas, but it also restricted the flow of food, fuel and medical supplies to the civilian population. One American senator was outraged to discover that pasta was on the list of proscribed items. The boycott applied not only to imports but, perversely, also to some exports from Gaza. Why prevent the export of agricultural products, fish and other non-lethal goods? It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the hidden motive was to cripple Gaza’s economy and to inflict poverty, misery, and unemployment on its inhabitants.

In its non-military aspects, the blockade constituted a form of collective punishment that is clearly proscribed by international law. Given the scale of the suffering inflicted by the blockade on the inhabitants of the strip, if Israel were a person it could be considered guilty of “depraved indifference”, a concept in American law (its equivalent under English common law is “depraved heart”) that refers to conduct that is so wanton, so callous, so deficient in a moral sense of concern, so lacking in regard for the lives of others and so blameworthy as to warrant criminal liability.

The Israeli bombardment of Gaza since 7th October may undoubtedly be described as “depraved indifference” on account of the indescribable suffering it is inflicting on civilians. While the main enemy is Hamas, Israel keeps targeting civilian infrastructure, residential buildings, schools, mosques, hospitals, ambulances and UNRWA food depots. By the end of November, the death toll has risen to more than 15,000 dead and more than 30,000 injured—more than the total of the previous military offensives combined. An estimated 6,150 of the dead are children and 4,000 are women. Slaughter of civilians on such an industrial scale may well have taken Israel to the verge of committing genocide, “the crime of all crimes”.

There is one other aspect of this campaign that was not present in previous ones: the danger of ethnic cleansing. In previous campaigns Israel brought death and destruction to the people of Gaza but kept them cooped up in the enclave, “generously” allowing them to stay in their homes. This time Israel ordered the residents of the northern part of Gaza, nearly half the total population, to move to the southern part of the enclave. Some of those who obeyed the order were subsequently killed in Israeli air strkes. At the time of writing more than 1.8m, out of a total of 2.3m, have been internally displaced. As the Israeli military offensive moved into southern Gaza, the refugees were ordered to move out of the area to which they had fled. This amounts to a forced transfer of civilians: a war crime.

The upshot is that nowhere in Gaza is safe. Stretching the laws of war beyond credulity, Israel argues that civilians who disobey its orders and stay put in their homes in the north become legitimate military targets. In addition, Israel seems to be working on a plan to transfer people permanently from Gaza into northern Sinai. In a leaked document dated 13th October, the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence drafted a proposal for the transfer of the entire population of Gaza to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. The Egyptian government has expressed strong objection to the plan as well as its determination to keep the Rafah crossing firmly closed—apart from to allow some aid into Gaza during the ceasefire. But the combined pressures of the massive bombardment by the IDF and its medieval-style siege on Gaza may result in a human avalanche across the border. One thing is certain: any civilians who leave Gaza will not be allowed to return to their homes. More than half of the houses in Gaza have already been destroyed or damaged in indiscriminate Israeli bombing. So nearly half the population do not have homes to return to. No wonder that the bleak legacy of 1948 haunts the Palestinian community.

While the martyrdom of over two million innocent Palestinian civilians continues, despite the temporary ceasefire and the exchange of hostages for Palestinian prisoners, a bigger question looms: who will run what remains of the Gaza Strip after the guns fall silent? Netanyahu has declared that he wants the IDF to keep indefinite security control of the strip but no one in Israel wants to assume all the responsibilities of an occupying power again. Meanwhile, his own grip on power at home is weakening. He faces strong popular opposition for his failure to prevent the horrendous Hamas attack and, more generally, for making Israel the most dangerous place in the world for Jews to live. He is also embroiled in a corruption trial on charges—all of which he denies—including fraud, breaching public trust and accepting bribes. Politically speaking, he is a dead man walking. His days in power are numbered and there is a chance that he will end up in prison. But he is still the prime minister, and his clearly stated aim is to eradicate Hamas and to prevent it from returning to power ever again. So, who will govern the Gaza Strip after the Israeli army leaves?

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This is not a conflict between two equal sides but between an occupying power and a subjugated population

Early signs suggest that the Americans and the EU’s foreign affairs chief, Josep Borrell, favour the return of the Palestinian Authority to Gaza. This is a totally preposterous proposition. The problem is not Hamas—which did not exist until 1987—but the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. Moreover, the Hamas that committed the massacre of 7th October is far more extreme than the Hamas that won the 2006 elections and formed a national unity government. By blocking the path to peaceful political change, Israel and its western supporters are largely responsible for this regression to fundamentalist positions. Hamas may not be to their liking, but it still commands broad popular support. If an election were held today, Hamas would almost certainly beat its Fatah rival again.

And what about the sclerotic Fatah-led Palestinian Authority? It is docile, weak, corrupt and incompetent, and can barely govern the West Bank. It receives funding from the EU and to a lesser extent from the US, essentially to serve as a subcontractor for Israeli security in the area. It has shown itself to be utterly incapable of resisting the expansion of Israeli settlements, the escalation of settler violence, the slow but steady takeover of the West Bank and East Jerusalem and the flagrant encroachment by fanatical religious Zionists on the Muslim holy places in Jerusalem. Fatah also lacks legitimacy because no parliamentary elections have been held since January 2006. It has stalled on holding another parliamentary election precisely because it realises that Hamas would win.

The idea that this discredited Palestinian Authority can be imposed on the proud and long-suffering people of Gaza on the back of Israeli tanks is completely detached from reality. But it is mildly interesting, in as much as it exposes the moral and political bankruptcy of the people who espouse it. It is not for Israel or its imperialist backers to tell the people of Gaza who should govern them. If the events of the last few weeks have demonstrated anything, it is that the old narrative of Israel having a right and a duty to defend itself against a terrorist organisation, no matter the human, civilian cost, can no longer be sustained. What is happening in Gaza today is the cruel manifestation of Israeli state terrorism. Terrorism is the use of force against civilians for political ends. The cap fits and Israel must wear it. The Israeli politicians and generals who orchestrate the criminal assaults on the people of Gaza are no better than riffraff.

This ghastly war has also exposed the ruthless hypocrisy of the western leaders, their blatant double standards, their indifference to Palestinian rights and their complicity in Israel’s war crimes. Israel is an aggressive settler-colonial state and increasingly a Jewish-supremacist state intent on keeping the Palestinians in a permanent state of subordination. As long as Israel has western support, it will continue to act unilaterally, in violation of international law, in breach of a raft of UN resolutions and in defiance of the most basic norms of civilised international behaviour.

This is not a conflict between two equal sides but between an occupying power and a subjugated population. And there is absolutely no military solution to this conflict. Israel cannot have security without peace with its neighbours. A negotiated political compromise, as in Northern Ireland, is the only way forward. That settlement required external intervention, as does this one. Here, however, the US cannot serve as the sole broker because its pronounced bias in favour of Israel would make it a dishonest one. Ever since 1967, it has arrogated to itself a monopoly over the Israeli-Palestinian peace process but failed to put pressure on Israel to compromise. What is needed now is a new international coalition led by the UN which includes the US and EU but also Arab states and members of the global south. The priorities of such a coalition would be humanitarian relief, reconstruction and a long-term political plan that includes an independent Palestinian state on the Gaza Strip and the West Bank with a capital city in East Jerusalem.

Such a plan is eminently practical. All it would take to realise it is for Israel to shed its settler-colonial and Jewish-supremacist ambitions, for America to end its unconditional support for Israel, for the EU to morph from a payer to an active player, for the United Nations to overcome its self-imposed impotence, and a few similar trifles.

Correction: This article initially attributed the ironic suggestion that a government might dissolve the people and elect another to the German novelist Günther Grass. It was, in fact, made by the playwright Bertolt Brecht in his poem Die Lösung (The Solution) following the 1953 East Berlin uprising.

Avi Shlaim is a professor of international relations at Oxford University.

8 December 2023

Source: prospectmagazine.co.uk