Just International

Murder

By Craig John Murray

Why the Genocide Convention has not been activated at the ICJ? It is not that people are worried that a claim of genocide will not be successful, but that it will succeed. It follows that not only Benjamin Netanyahu but also “Genocide Joe” Biden and Rishi Sunak will be criminally liable for complicity.

13 Dec 2023 – Al Jazeera are leading their news with the execution of Palestinian civilians, including women and toddlers, inside the school in Jabalia where they were sheltering. They were all shot at point blank range, with no signs of a bomb or missile strike.

On the BBC, the Daily Politics show – which consists of discussion between senior British MPs – does not discuss Palestine at all, because the British political class supports the genocide, so for them there is nothing to discuss.

Also in Jabalia, the Israelis today destroyed the last remaining bakery.

It is worth stating why this is plainly a genocide in Gaza:

1) Deliberate destruction of the infrastructure which supports the civilian population, including water treatment, electricity, sewerage systems, bakeries and fishing boats;

2)  Deliberate destruction of almost all medical facilities;

3) Deliberate destruction of educational facilities, from universities to primary schools;

4) Deliberate destruction of the infrastructure of civil society, including Supreme Court, Parliament, Ministries and Council buildings and deliberate destruction of administrative records;

5) Deliberate blocking of food aid inducing mass starvation;

6) Massive and indiscriminate bombardment. In wars the general percentage of children among those killed varies from 6 to 8 percent. In Ukraine it is 6 percent. In Gaza it is 42 percent. This is indiscriminate destruction of an ethnic group;

7) Mass executions of civilians;

8) Acts of dehumanisation of the Palestinians, including parading prisoners naked for public and media show and humiliation, beating and sexually abusing them;

9) Forced mass movement of population;

10) Deliberate targeting of religious and cultural heritage buildings;

11) Deliberate targeting of intellectual leadership, including journalists, doctors, poets, university lecturers and senior administrators;

12) Numerous declarations of open genocidal intent from the President and Prime Minister down through almost the entire fabric of both civilian and military establishment.

This is the official definition of Genocide in international law, from the

Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide:

Article II
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

On Tuesday [12 Dec] I attended a session called by Palestine at the United Nations in Geneva. Over 120 states attended. While the formal session consisted of statements of national position with few surprises, I was able to discuss with a large number of delegates in the corridors why the Genocide Convention has not been activated triggering a reference to the International Court of Justice.

The answer is now clear to me. It is not that people are worried that a claim of genocide will not be successful at the International Court of Justice. It is that everybody is quite sure it will succeed. There is no respectable argument that this is not a genocide in the terms outlined above.

The problem is that once the ICJ has determined that this is a genocide, it follows that not only are Benjamin Netanyahu and hundreds of senior Israeli officials and military personally liable, but it is absolutely plain that “Genocide Joe” Biden, Rishi Sunak and members of their administrations are also criminally liable for complicity, having provided military support for the genocide.

The International Criminal Court cannot ignore a judgment of genocide from the International Court of Justice and will have no choice but to issue arrest warrants.

A genocide is the worst of crimes. Just how appalling this one is has been shown to the world like never before, through the power of social media.

But to the global 1 percent whose interests rule the world, no number of dead Palestinians makes any real difference to their interests. On the other hand, the ramifications for the international system of wealth concentration, if western political elites start to be held accountable for their crimes, are uncertain and therefore carry more risk.

This is particularly the concern of ruling classes of both Western and Arab states.

It may sound astonishing, but to the world’s diplomats the enormity of a genocide appears less troubling than the enormity of doing something about it.

Craig John Murray (born 17 Oct 1958) is a Scottish author, human rights campaigner, journalist, and former diplomat for the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

18 December 2023

Source: www.transcend.org

United Nations Honor, United States Shame in Gaza

By Jeffrey D. Sachs

11 Dec 2023 – The nearly unanimous vote in the UN Security Council on Friday [8 Dec] calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza is a moment of honor for the United Nations and shame for the United States. By voting to stop Israel’s war on Gaza by a vote of 13 yes, 1 no (US), and 1 abstention (UK), the vast majority put itself on the side of international law. The US stood alone against international law, with its sidekick and tutor in imperial brutality, the United Kingdom, dutifully abstaining.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres honored the UN and human decency by invoking Article 99 of the UN Charter, calling for the UN Security Council to stop the killing in Gaza as a basic responsibility under the UN Charter. Each day, UN officials on the ground in Gaza heroically struggle to feed, shelter, and protect the population from Israeli bombs. More than 100 UN staff have been killed in the Israeli assault.

The situation in Gaza is as clear as it is brutal. The State of Palestine, recognized by 139 nations, has long suffered from the brutalities of Israeli occupation in Gaza and the West Bank. Gaza has been called the world’s largest open-air prison by Human Rights Watch. After the Hamas-led horrific terrorist attack on October 7, in which 1,200 Israelis died, Israel began to ethnically cleanse Gaza. Legal specialists at the Center for Constitutional Rights regard Israel’s actions as a genocide.

To date, more than 17,400 Gazans have been killed, and an unfathomable 1.8 million Gazans have been displaced. Tens of thousands are at risk of imminent death. Last month, Guterres warned that “Gaza is becoming a graveyard for children.” Israel pushed the population from northern Gaza to the south, and then invaded the south. Israeli authorities told Gazans to flee for their life to zones within the south, and then bombed the places to which the Gazans had been directed.

The US is more than a protector of Israel. It is an accomplice. The US supplies, in real-time, the munitions Israel uses for mass murder, even as US authorities pay lip-service to Gazan civilian lives.

The President of Israel Isaac Herzog justifies the slaughter by declaring that there are no innocent civilian Gazans: “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible.” The Israeli government’s biggest lie is that Israel has no options other than the mass killing of Gazans, supposedly to defeat Hamas.

The fact that Israel was lulled by its arrogance into letting its guard down on October 7 does not make Hamas an existential threat. Hamas has only a tiny fraction of Israel’s military might. October 7, like 9/11 in the US, was a colossal security blunder that should be immediately corrected by stepped-up border security, not an existential threat that in any remote manner justifies the killing of thousands or tens of thousands of innocent civilians, with women and children constituting 70% of the victims. The killing frenzy is being led by the very same politicians who were responsible for the October 7 security failure and who now manipulate the deepest anxieties of the Israeli population.

There is a larger and far more important point. Hamas can be demobilized through diplomacy, and only through diplomacy. Israel and the United States need finally to abide by international law, accept a sovereign state of Palestine alongside Israel, and welcome Palestine as the 194th member state of the UN. The US needs to stop arming the Israeli operation of ethnic cleansing in Gaza and stop protecting Israel’s rampant violations of basic human rights in the West Bank. Fifty-six years after its illegal occupation of Palestinian lands, and after decades of illegal settlements in the occupied territories, Israel needs finally to withdraw from the occupied Palestinian lands.

With such steps, peace between Israel and the neighboring countries could and would be secured. On that basis, UN peacekeepers, including both Arab and Western troops, would in turn secure the Israel-Palestine border for a needed transition period. At the same time, all international flows of financing to anti-Israel militants would be choked off by joint and coordinated actions of the US, Europe, and Israel’s Arab and Islamic neighbors.

The diplomatic route is open because the Arab and Islamic countries (including Iran) have once again reiterated their long-standing desire for peace with Israel as part of a peace agreement that establishes Palestine along the 1967 borders and its capital in East Jerusalem.

The real reason for Israel’s war in Gaza is that the Government of Israel rejects the two-state solution, and points to extremists on the other side rather than to the Arab and Islamic states, which want peace based on the two-state solution.

Israeli zealots, including several in the cabinet, believe that God promised them all of the lands from the Euphrates to the Mediterranean. This belief is fatuous. As Jewish history should make clear to religious Jews, and as all human history should make clear generally, no group, whether Jewish or otherwise, has an unconditional “right” to any land. For rights to be secured and internationally respected in our day, governments need to abide by the international rule of law. In the case of Israel and Palestine, international law, as expressed repeatedly by the UN Security Council, holds that two sovereign states, Israel and Palestine, have both the right and responsibility to live side by side in peace according to the 1967 borders.

Not only Israel, but even perhaps more so the United States, has lost its way. The deep reason was clear to Senator J. William Fulbright sixty years ago, when Fulbright was Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and wrote the magnificent book, The Arrogance of Power. Fulbright pointed to arrogance as the deep cause of America’s reckless war in Vietnam in the 1960s. In its ongoing arrogance, the US military-security state repeatedly ignores the will of the international community and international law because it believes that weapons and power enable it to do so. US foreign policy is based heavily on covert, illegal regime-change operations and on perpetual warfare that caters to the US military-industrial complex.

We must not become cynical about the UN. It is currently blocked by the US, the country that led its creation under America’s greatest president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The UN is doing its job, building international law, sustainable development, and universal human rights, step by step, with advances and reverses, over the opposition of powerful forces, but with the arc of history on its side. International law is a relatively new human creation, still in the works. It is difficult to achieve in the face of obstreperous imperial power, but we must pursue it.

It is important to note that opposing Israel’s war crimes has absolutely nothing to do with antisemitism. This point has been made eloquently in an open letter by dozens of Jewish writers. Netanyahu doesn’t speak for Judaism. The Israeli Government violates the most sacred of all Jewish injunctions, to protect life (Pikuach Nefesh) and to love your neighbor as yourself (Leviticus 19:18). The message of Jewish ethics is found in the words of the Prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 2:4) inscribed on a wall directly facing the United Nations: “They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”

Jeffrey D. Sachs, Professor of Sustainable Development and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University, is Director of Columbia’s Center for Sustainable Development and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

18 December 2023

Source: www.transcend.org

The Death of Israel

By Chris Hedges

Settler colonial states have a terminal shelf life. Israel is no exception.

17 Dec 2023 – Israel will appear triumphant after it finishes its genocidal campaign in Gaza and the West Bank. Backed by the United States, it will achieve its demented goal. Its murderous rampages and genocidal violence will exterminate or ethnically cleanse Palestinians. Its dream of a state exclusively for Jews, with any Palestinians who remain stripped of basic rights, will be realized. It will revel in its blood-soaked victory. It will celebrate its war criminals. Its genocide will be erased from public consciousness and tossed into Israel’s huge black hole of historical amnesia. Those with a conscience in Israel will be silenced and persecuted.

But by the time Israel achieves its decimation of Gaza — Israel is talking about months of warfare — it will have signed its own death sentence. Its facade of civility, its supposed vaunted respect for the rule of law and democracy, its mythical story of the courageous Israeli military and miraculous birth of the Jewish nation, will lie in ash heaps. Israel’s social capital will be spent. It will be revealed as an ugly, repressive, hate-filled apartheid regime, alienating younger generations of American Jews. Its patron, the United States, as new generations come into power, will distance itself from Israel the way it is distancing itself from Ukraine. Its popular support, already eroded in the U.S., will come from America’s Christianized fascists who see Israel’s domination of ancient Biblical land as a harbinger of the Second Coming and in its subjugation of Arabs a kindred racism and white supremacy.

Palestinian blood and suffering — 10 times the number of children have been killed in Gaza as in two years of war in Ukraine — will pave the road to Israel’s oblivion. The tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of ghosts will have their revenge. Israel will become synonymous with its victims the way Turks are synonymous with the Armenians, Germans are with the Namibians and later the Jews, and Serbs are with the Bosniaks. Israel’s cultural, artistic, journalistic and intellectual life will be exterminated. Israel will be a stagnant nation where the religious fanatics, bigots and Jewish extremists who have seized power will dominate public discourse. It will find its allies among other despotic regimes. Israel’s repugnant racial and religious supremacy will be its defining attribute, which is why the most retrograde white supremacists in the U.S. and Europe, including philo-semites such as John HageePaul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene, fervently back Israel. The vaunted fight against antisemitism is a thinly disguised celebration of White Power.

Despotisms can exist long after their past due date. But they are terminal. You don’t have to be a Biblical scholar to see that Israel’s lust for rivers of blood is antithetical to the core values of Judaism. The cynical weaponization of the Holocaust, including branding Palestinians as Nazis, has little efficacy when you carry out a live streamed genocide against 2.3 million people trapped in a concentration camp.

Nations need more than force to survive. They need a mystique. This mystique provides purpose, civility and even nobility to inspire citizens to sacrifice for the nation. The mystique offers hope for the future. It provides meaning. It provides national identity.

When mystiques implode, when they are exposed as lies, a central foundation of state power collapses. I reported on the death of the communist mystiques in 1989 during the revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania. The police and the military decided there was nothing left to defend. Israel’s decay will engender the same lassitude and apathy. It will not be able to recruit indigenous collaborators, such as Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority — reviled by most Palestinians — to do the bidding of the colonizers. The historian Ronald Robinson cites the inability to recruit indigenous allies by the British Empire as the point at which collaboration inverted into noncooperation, a defining moment for the start of decolonization. Once noncooperation by native elites morphs into active opposition, Robinson explains, the Empire’s “rapid retreat” is assured.

All Israel has left is escalating violence, including torture, which accelerates the decline. This wholesale violence works in the short term, as it did in the war waged by the French in Algeria, the Dirty War waged by Argentina’s military dictatorship and during Britain’s conflict in Northern Ireland. But in the long term it is suicidal.

“You might say that the battle of Algiers was won through the use of torture,” the British historian Alistair Horne observed, “but that the war, the Algerian war, was lost.”

The genocide in Gaza has turned Hamas fighters into heroes in the Muslim world and the Global South. Israel may wipe out the Hamas leadership. But the past — and current — assassinations of scores of Palestinian leaders has done little to blunt resistance. The siege and genocide in Gaza has produced a new generation of deeply traumatized and enraged young men and women whose families have been killed and whose communities have been obliterated. They are prepared to take the place of martyred leaders. Israel has sent the stock of its adversary into the stratosphere.

Israel was at war with itself before Oct. 7. Israelis were protesting to prevent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s abolition of judicial independence. Its religious bigots and fanatics, currently in power, had mounted a determined attack on Israeli secularism. Israel’s unity since the attacks is precarious. It is a negative unity. It is held together by hatred. And even this hatred is not enough to keep protestors from decrying the government’s abandonment of Israeli hostages in Gaza.

Hatred is a dangerous political commodity. Once finished with one enemy, those who stoke hatred go in search of another. The Palestinian “human animals,” when eradicated or subdued, will be replaced by Jewish apostates and traitors. The demonized group can never be redeemed or cured. A politics of hatred creates a permanent instability that is exploited by those seeking the destruction of civil society.

Israel was far down this road on Oct. 7 when it promulgated a series of discriminatory laws against non-Jews that resemble the racist Nuremberg Laws that disenfranchised Jews in Nazi Germany. The Communities Acceptance Law permits exclusively Jewish settlements to bar applicants for residency on the basis of “suitability to the community’s fundamental outlook.”

Many of Israel’s best educated and young have left the country to places like Canada, Australia and the U.K., with as many as one million moving to the United States. Even Germany has seen an influx of around 20,000 Israelis in the first two decades of this century. Around 470,000 Israelis have left the country since Oct. 7. Within Israel, human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists — Israeli and Palestinian — are attacked as traitors in government-sponsored smear campaigns, placed under state surveillance and subjected to arbitrary arrests. The Israeli educational system is an indoctrination machine for the military.

The Israeli scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz warned that if Israel did not separate church and state and end its occupation of the Palestinians, it would give rise to a corrupt Rabbinate that would warp Judaism into a fascistic cult. “Israel,” he said, “would not deserve to exist, and it will not be worthwhile to preserve it.”

The global mystique of the U.S., after two decades of disastrous wars in the Middle East and the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, is as contaminated as its Israeli ally. The Biden administration, in its fervor to unconditionally support Israel and appease the powerful Israel lobby, has bypassed the congressional review process with the Department of State to approve the transfer of 14,000 rounds of tank ammunition to Israel. Secretary of State Antony Blinken argued that “an emergency exists that requires the immediate sale.” At the same time he has cynically called on Israel to minimize civilian casualties.

Israel has no intention of minimizing civilian casualties. It has already killed 18,800 Palestinians, 0.82 percent of the Gazan population — the equivalent of around 2.7 million Americans. Another 51,000 have been wounded. Half of Gaza’s population is starving, according to the U.N. All Palestinian institutions and services that sustain life — hospitals (only 11 out of 36 hospitals in Gaza are still “partially functioning”), water treatment plantspower gridssewer systemshousingschoolsgovernment buildings, cultural centerstelecommunications systemsmosqueschurches, U.N. food distribution points — have been destroyed. Israel has assassinated at least 80 Palestinian journalists alongside dozens of their family members and over 130 U.N. aid workers along with members of their families. Civilian casualties are the point. This is not a war against Hamas. It is a war against the Palestinians. The objective is to kill or remove 2.3 million Palestinians from Gaza.

The shooting dead of three Israeli hostages who apparently escaped their captors and approached Israeli forces with their shirts off, waving a white flag and calling out for help in Hebrew is not only tragic, but a glimpse of Israel’s rules of engagement in Gaza. These rules are — kill anything that moves.

As the retired Israeli Major General Giora Eiland, who formerly headed the Israeli National Security Council, wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth, “[T]he State of Israel has no choice but to turn Gaza into a place that is temporarily or permanently impossible to live in…Creating a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza is a necessary means to achieve the goal.” “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist,” he wrote. Major General Ghassan Alian declared that in Gaza, “there will be no electricity and no water, there will only be destruction. You wanted hell; you will get hell.”

Settler colonial states that endure, including the United States, exterminate through diseases and violence nearly the entirety of their indigenous populations. Old World plagues brought by the colonizers to the Americas, such as smallpox, killed an estimated 56 million indigenous people over about 100 years in South, Central and North America. By 1600 less than a tenth of the original population remained. Israel cannot kill on this scale, with nearly 5.5 million Palestinians living under occupation and another 9 million in the diaspora.

The Biden presidency, which ironically may have signed its own political death certificate, is tethered to Israel’s genocide. It will try to distance itself rhetorically, but at the same time it will funnel the billions of dollars of weapons demanded by Israel — including $14.3 billion in supplemental military aid to augment the $3.8 billion in annual aid — to “finish the job.” It is a full partner in Israel’s genocide project.

Israel is a pariah state. This was publicly on display on Dec. 12 when 153 member states at the U.N. General Assembly voted for a ceasefire, with only 10 — including the U.S. and Israel — opposed and 23 abstaining. Israel’s scorched earth campaign in Gaza means there will be no peace. There will be no two state solution. Apartheid and genocide will define Israel. This presages a long, long conflict, one the Jewish State cannot ultimately win.

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

18 December 2023

Source: www.transcend.org

Big Oil Wins Big at COP28 in Dubai

By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

14 Dec 2023 – Ain Dubai, in English, The Eye of Dubai, is touted as the world’s largest Ferris wheel. The 820-foot tall wheel dominates the man-made island on which it rests. The massive, unblinking Eye permanently stares upon Dubai’s beachfront, its thicket of high rise luxury hotels and its marina, brimming with foreign-owned yachts. The Eye operated for only a few months before being abruptly shuttered in 2022. People can only speculate why, as the United Arab Emirates, the autocratic petrostate that governs Dubai, won’t say. One theory posits the wheel is slowly sinking into the sand, and that the structure, 25% heavier than the Eiffel Tower, will eventually topple, crushing the luxury residential high rises that surround it. The Eye thus stands as a glaring metaphor for humankind’s folly, trying to bend Nature to our will, and failing.

Across Dubai, Expo City is the sprawling facility where the UAE hosted COP28, this year’s annual summit of the three-decades-long global effort to tackle climate change, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). All-night negotiations heated up as the two-week event neared its scheduled conclusion. Led by this year’s COP president, Dr. Sultan Al Jaber, the CEO of the UAE’s state-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, the gathered diplomats missed their Tuesday deadline, arguing over whether or not the final document would encourage a total “phase out” of fossil fuels or only the more mildly worded “phase down.”

In the end, the bleary-eyed negotiators used neither phrase, perhaps overwhelmed by the assembled army of petrostate representatives and 2,400 or more fossil fuel lobbyists. The final text promised, instead, the “[t]ransitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner.” Activists praised the first-time use of “fossil fuels” in a UNFCCC document. The climate activist group 350.org called it a “weak but welcome nod” in an otherwise “loophole-ridden text.”

As COP28 started, climate scientist Kevin Anderson predicted on social media, “This is a Cabal of Oil Producers not a climate COP. The outcome is known.”

Anderson didn’t attend COP28, in part because he won’t fly due to aviation’s global greenhouse gas emissions, but also because of his growing skepticism with the process.

“At every single level, the tendrils of Big Oil are changing our society and fundamentally changing our climate,” Anderson said on the Democracy Now! news hour, halfway through COP28. “These COPs have become little more than a scam under which the oil and other fossil fuel companies are hiding that nothing is being done.”

The outcome of COP28 includes a Global Stocktake, an assessment of how the world’s 200+ nations are doing eight years after the UNFCCC’s Paris Agreement was hammered out in 2015, with its aspirational goal of limiting global warming over pre-industrial levels to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).

The loopholes mentioned by 350.org allow continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels. “Phasing out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies” is encouraged, which suggests that “efficient” fossil fuel subsidies exist, a point the climate divestment movement refutes. The document also claims that “transitional fuels can play a role in facilitating the energy transition.” This clearly refers to methane, marketed by the industry as “natural gas,” which is many times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

Then there is the issue of who is going to pay to move the global economy off of its dependence on fossil fuels.

“None of the transition is funded,” Asad Rehman, lead spokesperson for the Climate Justice Coalition, said from COP28 after the deal was finalized. “The idea of providing climate finance, public climate finance, that is really desperately needed, is being frittered away. Instead, the only mentions of finance are about private capital.” To attract the vast sums needed, Rehman says, “you’re lowering environmental standards. You’re lowering workers’ rights standards. You make your economy much more attractive to private capital…so now the responsibility has fallen on developing countries to guarantee profit. It’s utter madness.”

COP29, next year’s summit, will be in Baku, Azerbaijan, another repressive petrostate. Human Rights Watch reported on December 5th, “A new wave of repression in Azerbaijan is targeting foreign-funded independent media as well as journalists who criticize the government and expose high-level corruption.” Six journalists were arrested.

Petrostates like the UAE and Azerbaijan play predictable roles in protecting the status quo, but it’s the world’s biggest petrostate that brandishes the most power inside the COPs: the United States. As the largest producer and exporter of fossil fuels, and as the world’s largest historical emitter of greenhouse gasses, the US bears the most responsibility for the climate crisis. While negotiations move from the shifting sands of Dubai with its sinking Eye to Azerbaijan, what people demand of their elected leaders, here in the United States, matters around the world.

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 900 stations in North America.

Denis Moynihan is the co-founder of Democracy Now! Since 2002, he has participated in the organization’s worldwide distribution, infrastructure development, and the coordination of complex live broadcasts from many continents.

18 December 2023

Source: www.transcend.org

The Ben Gurion Canal to Replace the Suez Canal: ‘Israel’ Destroys Gaza to Control World’s Most Important Shipping Lane

Read Part I:

The Hidden Reasons Behind the War on Gaza. Netanyahu’s Plan for “A New Middle East”

By Richard Medhurst, December 04, 2023

“Israel” and the United States have been planning for decades to build the so-called “Ben Gurion Canal,” a rival to the infamous Suez Canal in Egypt. This Ben Gurion Canal would begin at “Eilat”, and finish right next to, if not directly through, Gaza.

The Suez Canal is one of the most important construction and irrigation projects in history, connecting the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea. So vital to trade is the Suez Canal that a war was even fought over it in 1956: “Israel”, Britain, and France attacked Egypt for daring to nationalize the Suez Canal – its own land.

A document declassified in the 1990s showed that just a few years after the Suez Crisis, the Americans hatched a secret plan in 1963 to detonate 520 nuclear bombs in al-Naqab desert to help “Israel” construct the “Ben Gurion Canal.”

US classified document from 1963 proposing the use of nuclear bombs to clear a path for the “Ben Gurion Canal” in al-Naqab Desert, Palestine

The Suez Canal is a geostrategic asset in every sense of the word: it sits at the intersection of three continents and two bodies of water.

It cuts shipping times and costs by so much that today 12% of global trade and 30% of global container traffic pass through the Suez Canal.

Egyptian President el-Sisi was told in the last weeks that if he accepts “Israel’s” plan to take Palestinians in Gaza and put them in the Sinai desert, which “Israel” would pay for, then the United States would wipe Egypt’s national debt.

This is why “Israel” is absolutely obliterating Gaza – they want to seize Gaza for themselves and kill off all Palestinians and the Resistance.

Nile River

In addition to offering debt relief, the United States and “Israel” have another incentive for Egypt lined up.

Egypt has been suffering from acute water shortages since its neighbor Ethiopia built the so-called Renaissance Dam in 2011, cutting much-needed water from the Nile to both Sudan and Egypt. It has caused a huge dispute ever since that has yet to be resolved.

Ethiopia’s Renaissance Dam, built in 2011

Ethiopia has a significant Jewish population. The United States and “Israel” could theoretically lean on Ethiopia, as they have done before, and pressure it not to fill up its reservoirs, which would be detrimental to Egypt and incentivize el-Sisi to take in Palestinians from Gaza.

While it is a natural human response to flee war, Palestinians have refused to abandon their homes in Gaza for a very good reason: they know that if they leave, they will never see their homes again. Most people in Gaza originally came from other parts of Palestine. They already lost their homes once to Israeli settlers from 1948 onward, and they are not willing to lose their homes again.

So despite the appeal of having Gazans move to supposed “safety” in the Sinai, this would be a betrayal of the Palestinian cause and the surrender of even more land to the Zionist occupation. The Israelis would then build their “Ben Gurion Canal,” cementing Washington and “Tel Aviv’s” control over the world’s most important shipping lane and global maritime trade.

The “Ben Gurion Canal” is the last piece of the puzzle in “Israel” and the United States attempts to control all strategic shipping lanes

1. The Red Sea

The Red Sea, which would feed into the “Ben Gurion Canal,” already has a huge presence of American and Israeli troops. Did you know that “Israel’s” biggest military base is located in the Red Sea, on the Island of Dahlak, in Eritrea?

This base was hit by Yemen in the last few weeks, in support of Gaza, as Yemen is an integral part of the Resistance Axis.

2. The Gulf of Aden and Bab el-Mandab Strait

Yemen is located near Eritrea, in a crucial area: the Gulf of Aden and Bab al-Mandab Strait. Tens of thousands of ships pass this area every year, including a large percentage of the world’s petroleum vessels.

The US has been trying for decades to control this important shipping lane by putting troops right opposite Yemen, inside Djibouti, Somalia, and the region known as the Horn of Africa.

The United States has also tried to control this area by attacking Yemen from the rear, using Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries, and carrying out its own drone strikes. This war has been ongoing for 8 years; it devastated Yemen, and the media barely covered it.

3. Socotra Island

We come then to the Yemeni island of Socotra. To remind you how strategic this area is, it is located between the Horn of Africa, the Gulf of Aden, the Arabian Sea, and the Indian Ocean.

The UAE, after normalizing ties with “Israel”, helped “Israel” to establish a military presence and spy bases on Socotra.

The importance of the Bab al-Mandab Strait is that both Iran and China need to use this shipping lane, for Iran to export fuel and for China as the world’s largest economy and largest trading partner of most countries.

4. The Strait of Hormuz

Continue up the Arabian coast, and you get to another vital strait: the Strait of Hormuz.

There is an entire de facto Cold War taking place here: a tanker war.

The US and “Israel” constantly try to sink Iranian fuel ships, and Iran responds in kind by hitting Israeli-owned ships. Britain also tried playing this game in the Strait of Gibraltar by hijacking an Iranian ship. Only when Iran gave Britain a taste of its own medicine did Britain get the message and let the Iranian ship go.

The US has gone so far as to even steal Iranian fuel tankers and sell off the cargo – a practice commonly referred to as piracy.

The US and “Israel” want to control this vital part of the world, so they can attack Iranian and Chinese ships in Bab al-Mandab Strait, up into the Red Sea, and of course by replacing the Suez Canal with the “Ben Gurion Canal.”

This final piece of the puzzle will allow the US and “Israel” to dominate world maritime trade.

They can use this not only to the benefit of their own economies but also to damage and attack other countries’ economies, such as those of China, Iran, Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon. It is literally a robbery highway on the high seas.

And the “Ben Gurion Canal” is the key to all of this.

Where Are the Arabs and Muslims?

Egypt could stop this war in Gaza right now by shutting down the Suez Canal. Were late Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser still here, he wouldn’t have even thought twice.

It’s bewildering that Egypt doesn’t shut the Suez– if not for Gaza’s sake, then for its own sake. It is Egypt’s economy and the Suez Canal that will suffer if “Israel” gets away with genocide in Gaza and building its “Ben Gurion Canal.”

Why doesn’t Saudi Arabia threaten to cut oil production for one week – even just for a day to try and stop the war? Or is there something in it for them, were Gaza to be replaced with a canal?

Where are the Arabs? Where are the Muslims? Why don’t the kingdoms in the Gulf use their wealth and resources to help Gaza?

If you look at the European Union, they have nothing in common except geography. They speak over 24 languages. Whereas the Arab world today, from Morocco to Oman, has a common tongue, common geography, common religion, common history, and common culture.

This automatically makes the Arabs a global superpower – not to mention the enormous wealth of natural resources, the geographical landmass, and the population, which are all essential criteria of “hard power”.

It is not only the size of the Arab world, but look at the straits: all the vital straits and shipping lanes are located in Arab countries: The strait of Gibraltar, (originally Jabal Ṭāriq), the Suez Canal, the Bab al-Mandob Strait, and the Strait of Hormuz between Iran and Oman.

All vital straits are located in Arab countries

European colonial powers understood how powerful Arab countries were a long time ago, so they planted “Israel” right in the middle to create chaos. And then they worked on bringing the Arab kingdoms over to their side and to make them normalize ties with “Israel”.

All these borders in the Middle East didn’t even exist until Britain and France – the same European powers that created and back “Israel” today – drew them.

Europe’s foreign policy toward the Middle East is a divide-and-conquer strategy. It is all about colonialism and theft. It is about dividing up the Arab world, creating instability, and controlling the resources and straits.

European colonial powers always play the sectarian card to achieve this: they pitted Sunni against Shia in Iraq and Lebanon. Now they try to do it between Arabs and Iran. In Palestine, they lie again and say the struggle is “between Jews and Muslims”. It has never been about that. This war has nothing to do with Hamas or religion. It has always been about colonialism because the West is afraid of unity between Arabs and Muslim countries.

The entire world can’t believe how “Israel” is allowed to slaughter Palestinians like this in broad daylight and get away with it. How is it that the so-called “civilized West” supports this behavior? Why won’t Western leaders even call for a ceasefire? The answer is that this genocide in Gaza is their project too. “Israel” itself is a European and American imperialist project, and these “leaders” are all complicit.

The theft of Arab resources and control over the straits and canals will ultimately impact everybody in the Middle East negatively – not to mention all the suffering Palestinians have had to endure. And that is precisely why the whole Axis of Resistance – Palestine, Yemen, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon – is involved in this fight on multiple fronts. It is about time for other Arab and Muslim countries to do their part for Gaza too: cut all ties with “Israel”, impose an oil embargo on the West, and shut down the Suez Canal. The entire world is watching you.

*

5 December 2023

Source: www.globalresearch.ca

What Hamas said: “Any bets on arrangements in Gaza without Hamas and the resistance factions are illusions and mirages”

By Rima Najjar

Ismail Haniyeh’s statement yesterday (Dec 13, 2023) was eloquent and powerful. Haniyeh is the senior Hamas leader and former prime minister of the Palestinian Authority (2006–07) and of the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip (2007–14). His statement was carried on many Arabic news channels.

I listened to the speech carefully as it was being broadcast live on Al Jazeera Arabic during its coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza, and then had a hard time finding it again on Al Jazeera’s website, likely because Israel and the U.S. continue to disfigure the reality of Hamas and Palestinian resistance generally (whether violent or non-violent) as terrorism, instead of what it is, which is a national movement of resistance to occupation and for liberation and self-determination.

You may be surprised to learn that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the organization with whom Israel negotiated the Oslo Accords in 1993, was designated as a “foreign terrorist organization” by the U.S. in 1997 and still holds that designation. Bafflingly, rather than dropping the designation, the US uses a “presidential waiver” that allows US diplomatic engagement with the PLO (such as it is today), as the “sole representative of the Palestinian people,” to take place.

But Biden is not about to waive the US designation of Hamas as a “terrorist organization” to engage diplomatically with the Palestinian Islamic armed resistance. On the contrary, it continues to hurl invective and dehumanizing language at this side of what it perversely describes as a defensive war by the occupier against “terrorists,” exhibiting callous, shocking and inhumane disregard to a humanitarian situation that practically the whole world now recognizes as a series of continuing massacres by Israel against civilians, mostly women and children, and a scorched-earth tactic on vast areas of a densely populated strip of Palestinian occupied land under blockade for 17 years (See “What was Hamas Thinking?”).  Moreover, as Jonathan Cook points out, the BBC and other media keep revisiting Hamas crimes that day, but fail to report on growing evidence that Israel killed its own citizens, often in grotesque fashion.

Biden continues to call for the eradication of Hamas, long after every rational and informed political analyst has declared that to be an impossible task.

What resonated most for me in Ismail Haniyeh’s speech is his reassurance that Palestinian sacrifice, blood and suffering shall not be in vain, God willing; Palestine will be free.

Ismail Haniyeh: “Every life lost, whether of a boy or girl, man or woman, young or old, every tear shed by a mother, father, or child, is precious. Every home or dream destroyed by zionist attacks, and all suffering from hunger, thirst, lack of money, lives, and crops, will remain etched in our memory, never to be forgotten or forgiven. The enemy will pay the price for all of it, no matter how long it takes.”

That price is the liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea, the freedom and self-determination of the Palestinian people.

To my ears, Haniyeh was echoing the sentiments Abraham Lincoln described so eloquently in his Gettysburg address as he commemorated the dead on the battlefield by saying they gave their lives so that the nation could live.

Abraham Lincoln: “… from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish on this earth.”

Palestinian government of the Palestinian people, by the Palestinian people, for the Palestinian people is not in Joe Biden’s calculations, let alone Netanyahu’s. But they most certainly are in the calculations of Hamas:

Ismail Haniyeh: “Any bets on arrangements in Gaza without Hamas and the resistance factions are illusions and mirages, illusions and mirages, illusions and mirages… We are certain that the brutal aggression will end, and the resistance will remain a faithful guardian of the rights and legitimate aspirations of our people…”

Abraham Lincoln: “It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.”

Ismail Haniyeh: “I affirm that we are steadfast, our resistance is capable, our people are patient and firmly struggling, and we are confident that the occupation will disappear, God willing.”

Palestinians everywhere are similarly steadfast and confident. A new poll conducted across the West Bank and Gaza shows skyrocketing support for Palestinian resistance and dissatisfaction with the Palestinian Authority.

The above comparison of rhetoric between Haniyeh and Lincoln is meant to juxtapose US virtuous national rhetoric against what it designates as terror and so highlight US hypocrisy. To Abraham Lincoln “the nation” was a settler-colonial entity that had massacred much of the indigenous population on the land. Haniyeh is a leader of a real liberation effort for indigenous freedom, currently defending against both genocide and ecocide.

And because you are unlikely to come across what Hamas has to say on the 36th anniversary of the movement, here is a translation of the Arabic text of that statement as provided by Resistance News Network on Telegram:

In the Name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful

On the occasion of the 36th anniversary of the launch of the Hamas movement and amidst the blessed Al-Aqsa Flood battle, we renew our commitment to continue the resistance until the occupation is removed and to achieve our people’s aspirations for liberation, return, and the establishment of the Palestinian state with Al-Quds as its capital.

 O patient and steadfast masses of our Palestinian people, both in proud Palestine and abroad, today marks the 36th anniversary of the launch of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), and we live in days of glory and pride, under the shadows of the glorious Al-Aqsa Flood battle. This battle inaugurated a new phase in our struggle with the brutal zionist occupier, who indulges in the blood of our people, denies our national rights, steals our land, and Judaizes our Islamic and Christian sanctities, including Al-Quds and Al-Aqsa Mosque. The Al-Aqsa Flood battle is a title of steadfastness and resistance on the path to freedom and liberation from occupation and the establishment of the Palestinian state with Al-Quds as its capital, God willing.

Since its inception, the movement has kept the covenant of the righteous martyrs, carrying the banner of jihad and resistance to complete our people’s journey towards liberation and independence. It has offered its leaders and soldiers alongside the martyrs of our people to create a free and dignified future for our patient and steadfast people. Al-Aqsa Flood is a continuation of this approach, which we will not abandon until the zionist Nazi occupation is ended.

We live the pain and suffering with our people everywhere, especially in proud Gaza, which faces a savage zionist aggression and a genocidal war targeting its existence on its land by destroying all elements of life. Yet, we will never succumb to humiliation and defeat, and this brutal enemy will not succeed in its malicious schemes. Our great people and our valiant resistance in Gaza and the West Bank remain steadfast on the land, and we will not leave it except to return to Al-Quds as the capital of our independent Palestinian state.

We mourn the righteous martyrs of our people, pray for the speedy recovery of our wounded, and freedom for our heroic prisoners.
We affirm the following:

First: Our promise to our great Palestinian people is to remain faithful to their sacrifices, pains, and hopes. We will not abandon our duty to defend them, our land, and our sanctities. Hamas and its victorious Al-Qassam Brigades will continue to be the protective shield for the Palestinian national project and our people’s aspirations for liberation, return, and independence. The Al-Aqsa Flood battle is a page of glory and pride in the history of our people’s struggle against the zionist Nazi colonizer, and our resistance will continue to escalate until the occupation is gone and the Palestinian state with Al-Quds as its capital is established, God willing.

Second: The Hamas movement is an integral part of this great people, expressing their will for freedom and independence. The movement will remain a fortress defending our people’s national rights. We will accept no guardianship and will not allow the passing of any suspicious plans to circumvent our people’s right to self-determination and the establishment of their fully sovereign state.

Third: The zionist occupation and President Biden’s administration, with their obstinacy and arrogance, refusing all efforts and UN resolutions calling for an end to aggression, bear full responsibility for the ongoing massacres against our people and the destruction in Gaza. This historical responsibility will not expire with time, and the day will come when they will be held accountable.

Fourth: We are open to all efforts leading to stopping the aggression against our people in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, to the release of our prisoners in the occupation’s prisons, and to forming a national reference on the path to restoring our people’s national rights and establishing their independent Palestinian state with Al-Quds as its capital.

Fifth: We salute the steadfast and resistant Palestinian masses in proud Gaza, the West Bank, throughout Palestine, and the diaspora. We call on them to further steadfastness, solidarity, and escalation of resistance against the occupation everywhere. The occupation will be eradicated by the determination of the revolutionaries and the bravery of the heroic resistance fighters.

Sixth: We salute all the forces and parties that have stood in solidarity with our people, championed Al-Quds and Al-Aqsa, and committed to standing by the right, in the face of the occupation and the zionist project threatening Palestine and the region.

Seventh: We salute the nations of our Arab and Islamic nation and all the free people of the world who have come out in solidarity with the just cause of the Palestinian people, rejecting the massacres and aggression of the occupation in the Gaza Strip, and rejecting President Biden’s administration’s bias towards the new Nazis. We call on them to increase their escalating activism in support of the Palestinian people and their right to freedom and self-determination, like all peoples.

Eighth: We appreciate all Arab, Islamic, and international efforts that have sought and are seeking to stop the aggression, to aid our people in the Gaza Strip. We call on them and the international community for more political action to stop the double standards policy pursued by President Biden’s administration and some Western countries biased towards the occupation, to work to end the zionist occupation threatening international peace and security, and to enable our people to exercise their inalienable national rights, no matter how long it takes.

Indeed, it is a jihad of victory or martyrdom.
Islamic Resistance Movement — Hamas

Thursday: 01 Jumada al-Akhirah 1445H
Corresponding to: December 14, 2023

In short, as the commander-in-chief of the Martyr Izz El-Din Al-Qassam Brigades (the armed branch of Hamas) Mohammad Deif said in his historic speech announcing Al-Aqsa Flood: “The era of bets has ended, and the occupation must be expelled.”

Related: Barakat: US and Israel heading towards strategic defeat

Note: First published on Medium
_________________
Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa.

16 December 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

Appeal to 153 Countries Which Voted for Ceasefire – Unitedly Hold Peaceful Sit-in at Egypt-Gaza Border

By P S Sahni

Extraordinary situations call for unusual forms of resistance and protests. Efforts of the majority of member countries at the UN for a ceasefire are being scuttled by brute veto power of one or two countries. The puffed-up bullies who have catapulted themselves to power through electoral maneuverings in imperialist-capitalist USA; former colonizers UK and France; Zionist Israel and erstwhile Nazi Germany are holding not just the brave and valiant Palestinians to ransom, but also cocking a snook at the international community. This mafia-raj of the five dons enumerated above must be uprooted and booted out of power. Rather than using the public financial resources to create jobs for an increasing unemployment amongst the working class, the exchequer is being emptied by directing money to war industry for providing arms and ammunition to the IDF to slaughter Palestinians.

Each of the 153 countries (including India) which voted for a ceasefire in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) could send one representative each for a collective action at the Egypt-Gaza Border (Rafah Crossing Point). The form of protest should be an indefinite peaceful sit-in. Let the Israeli army bombard just right up to the Gaza border but within Gaza itself. The protesters should continue with their peaceful action till the Israeli army is forced into a ceasefire. The protesters should be guided by the philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi; Nelson Mandela; Martin Luther King. The 153 countries which have been sending representatives to UN meetings have learnt that their efforts are being thwarted. Peaceful sit-in at the Egypt-Gaza Border could be the first step in a renewed effort to stop the war on Palestinians by the Israeli army.

P.S. Sahni is a qualified orthopaedic surgeon.

16 December 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

May Peace Prevail

By Jim Miles

I can see the photos:  the faces of children haunted by chaos beyond their control; their faces of pain, the silent cries and screams of injuries and fear; parents’ faces, torn with grief and more silent cries of pain and injustice; blood washed across staircases and floors in hospitals, blood caked on faces of innocent people – clotted with the powder and grit of demolished concrete and plaster from homes, hospitals, and schools;

I can see the photos: neighbourhoods crumpled and flattened by thousands of bombs; craters where buildings and streets used to be; people, small by comparison to the deluge of destruction, digging with bare hands through the tangled rubble of steel and mortar; people, frozen in time, calling for help, beseeching the world, damning the world, nowhere to turn, no escape from the whistle and rumble of bombs and missiles;

I cannot hear that:  nor the screams of the wounded, the cries of the injured, the cries for lost parents, lost children, lost lives; the cries of those trapped under the wreckage of their homes;

I cannot smell that: the sickly metallic sweet smell of blood; the acrid sulfurous smoke of explosions; the dustings of powder and chemicals drifting around the ruins; the heart and gut-wrenching smells of bodies decomposing under the rubble; the smoke of a small fire somehow scavenged to boil water for a meager meal of…some unknown provenance;

I cannot touch that: the heat, the cold, the grit, the twist of iron bars under calloused and bloody hands searching for victims; the warm damp of bloodied clothing and bandages.

…and I understand: this is not a war, but a genocide committed against an imprisoned people; a genocide that has endured slowly over many decades; an ethnic cleansing long understood by the perpetrators to be an underlying feature of their conquest; as long as the very origins of the concept of the settler state started over a century ago.

There is no morality in U.S. governance

I listen to the politicians:  the members of the U.S. congress and their fawning obsequiousness towards Israel; the same coming from the EU, Britain, Canada and other members of the ‘western’ (and diminishing) world.  I listen to news commentaries:  knowing that “balance” and “fairness” do not apply in a situation where one side has vastly superior military power (although not the touted prowess of such), controls most of the media, and has its mystique inculcated into its own population:  exceptionalism, freedom, indispensability ring hollow in a world of violence they themselves have created.

The United States, as the largest purveyor of violence in the world, could easily put a stop to all this.  The feeble words and excuses of the U.S. government only emphasize how the politicians, the military-industrial-financial complex, and the corporate “persons” – all of whom reap large financial rewards for this carnage – do not want the savagery to end.  The military corporations – Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Northop Grumman, an almost endless list – and those supplying them, are providing as per President Biden a financial boost for the U.S. economy.  Lives and deaths are not important; the dollar reigns supreme, both for profits and global hegemony.

A big if, a gigantic if:  if the U.S. simply stopped sending military support to Israel, the bombs and missiles and tanks would soon become silent.  So simple; so not going to happen.

The U.S. is the least moral country in the world today.  It has created and facilitated more wars, more deaths, more damages, more humanitarian disasters than any other country.  The U.S. sees everything as a win or lose situation, a zero sum game in which only they can be the winners, at all costs – the costs of millions of lives around the world.  Now it is the costs of tens of thousands of lives in Gaza/Palestine, the costs of all civic functions, of hospitals, doctors, schools, teachers, bakeries, electrical and sewage systems, all to support the Israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

The future is unknown, but obviously major changes of some kind are in process, violently so.  There are solutions, none of which the U.S. or Israel will even consider for a moment, until and unless some unforeseen event forces them to.  As both are nuclear armed violent societies, the world needs to hope above all hopes for a peaceful resolution to current events, beyond a pause, beyond a ceasefire, well into the creation of a democratic state for all citizens, well into the creation of a global democracy where politicians and their militaries do not rule.

In the meantime sumud in the face of a genocidal threat has served along with the resistance to ethnic tyranny.  May peace eventually prevail.

Jim Miles is a Canadian educationist

15 December 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

Gaza Not Fit For Human Life, Says UNRWA Chief

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

Israeli officials spell out plans for ethnic cleansing of all Palestinians, as Gaza massacres continue

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 Israelwhere 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