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

By ARARAT KOSTANIAN

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

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

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

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

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

Multilateralism offers hope.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 24 October 2023

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

source: asiatimes.com

By The Chris Hedges

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

30 October 2023

Source: transcend.org

By Dr Binoy Kampmark

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

28 October 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Vijay Prashad

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

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

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

Nothing Neutral About the United States

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

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

Gaza Will Become Mosul

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

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

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

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

28 October 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Vijay Prashad

Driving along the Jordan River Valley in the Occupied Palestine Territory (OPT) of the West Bank is a stunning experience. The road is officially called Highway 90. The arable and irrigated land along this road is held militarily and illegally by Israeli settlers, many of whom are not actually Israeli citizens, but residents from the Jewish diaspora. A United Nations Commission report published in 2022 showed that this settlement activity is a crime against international human rights law (transfer of population into an occupied territory). Israeli settlers and the Israeli military that defend them call Highway 90 Derekh Gandhi or Gandhi’s Road. When I first drove along that road over a decade ago, I was puzzled by Gandhi’s name there. Mahatma Gandhi was a leader of the Indian freedom struggle, and had on many occasions—such as in his 1938 article, “The Jews”—offered his sympathy and solidarity with the Palestinian people. In fact, the road that slices through the West Bank—a crucial part of a proposed Palestinian state—is named after Rehavam Ze’evi, who was ironically given the nickname Gandhi.

Ze’evi led the National Union party, which brought together all the most dangerous currents of Israeli far-right politics. As the leader of this party, and, before that, of Moledet, Ze’evi advocated the removal of Palestinians from what he considered to be Israel’s land (East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank). He supported the creation of Eretz Yisrael that would stretch from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. In March 2001, Ze’evi—who would later be accused of sexual harassment and of being involved in organized crime—told The Guardian that “it’s not murder to get rid of potential terrorists, or those who have blood on their hands. Each one eliminated is one less terrorist for us to fight.” A few months later, Ze’evi showed that he did not distinguish among Palestinians, calling all of them a “cancer” and saying, “I believe there is no place for two peoples in our country. Palestinians are like lice. You have to take them out like lice.” He was shot to death by fighters of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in October 2001. The name of the road that cuts across the West Bank—promised to a Palestinian state in the Oslo Accords of 1993—still bears Ze’evi’s name.

Ze’evi was assassinated by PFLP fighters because the Israeli army had killed their leader Mustafa Ali Zibri by firing two cruise missiles at his home in Al-Bireh (Palestine). The assassination of Zibri was not an isolated incident. It was part of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan to “cause the collapse” of the Palestinian Authority—created to manage the Oslo Accords—and “send them all to hell.” Apart from the murder of civilians on a punctual basis, from July 2001 the Israeli government killed four political leaders (Islamic Jihad leader Salah Darwazeh and Hamas leader Jamal Mansour in July, and then Hamas leader Amer Mansour Habiri and Fatah leader Emad Abu Sneineh in August). After the killing of Zibri, the Israelis assassinated Hamas’s Mahmoud Abu Hanoud in November. “Whoever gave a green light to this act of liquidation,” wrote military correspondent Alex Fishman in Yediot Ahronot, “knew full well that he is thereby shattering in one blow the gentleman’s agreement between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority; under that agreement, Hamas was to avoid in the near future suicide bombings inside the Green Line [Israel’s pre-1967 borders].”

Hot Violence, Cold Violence

For centuries, Palestinian Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived side-by-side in the lands that would eventually be Israel and the OPT, including along the Jordan River Valley. Since the expulsion of the Palestinian Christians and Muslims and the arrival of European Jews, the legal apparatus—or the “cold violence,” as the writer Teju Cole calls it—worked alongside paramilitary and military violence against the Palestinians to create a fantasy of an ethno-nationalist state project (the Jewish State, as it was then called). The erasure of the non-Jewish Palestinians was key to this project, either by massacres (Deir Yassin in 1948) or the wholesale removal of the Palestinian population from their land (the Nakba of 1948). The massacres and the population transfers came alongside the denial of the reality of Palestine and the Palestinian people. The heir to Ze’evi, current finance minister Bezalel Smotrich said this March, “There’s no such thing as Palestinians because there’s no such thing as a Palestinian people.” This is not an opinion that can be dismissed as a far-right rant. Likud member Ofir Akunis, minister of science and technology, said three years ago, “There’s no place for any formula to establish a Palestinian state in Western Israel.” The phrase “Western Israel” is a chilling statement about the Israeli consensus on full annexation of the West Bank with disregard for international law.

A focus on Gaza is essential. The Israeli “hot violence” is extreme, with the death toll of Palestinians—almost half of them in Gaza of children—over 5,000. The Israeli land invasion has been blocked, for now, by the recognition of high morale among the Palestinian resistance. The latter will fight every Israeli soldier that goes into the ruins of Gaza. Before this Israeli incursion, 450 trucks crossed into Gaza with supplies for the 2.3 million residents; it was taken as a victory when nine United Nations trucks and 11 trucks of the Egyptian Red Crescent crossed into Gaza on October 21. Amnesty International looked at only five bombings of the Israelis and found evidence of war crimes, which should alert the International Criminal Court to re-open its file on Israeli atrocities. This should include the crime of collective punishment by cutting water and electricity to Gaza, and bombing access roads to the Rafah crossing into Egypt, and by bombing the Rafah crossing itself.

Large demonstrations across the world demand a ceasefire (at a minimum) and an end to the occupation. Israel is not interested. Its defense minister Yoav Gallant told parliament that his forces have a three-point plan—to destroy Hamas, to destroy the other Palestinian factions, and to create a new “security regime” in Gaza. The Palestinian people—not just the armed factions—are resolute in their resistance to Israeli occupation. The only way for Gallant’s new “security regime” to work would be to erase this resistance, which means to remove all Palestinians from Gaza either by massacres or by dispossession. The United States is following along with this extermination plan: a U.S. State Department memorandum says that its diplomats must not use phrases such as “de-escalation,” “ceasefire,” “end to violence,” “end to bloodshed,” and “restoring calm.”

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

25 October 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Countercurrents Collective

Israeli Economy Minister Nir Barkat said on Sunday that the Israeli forces would “eliminate” Hezbollah and target Iran if the Palestinian militants open up a “northern front.”

“The plan of Iran is to attack Israel on all fronts. If we find they intend to target Israel, we will not just retaliate to those fronts, but we will go to the head of the snake, which is Iran,” Barkat told The Mail on Sunday. He added, “the ayatollahs in Iran are not going to sleep good at night” if they move against Israel.

Barkat warned that Lebanon and the pro-Palestinian militant group Hezbollah “are going to pay a heavy price, similar to what Hamas is going to pay.”

Israel would go “after the heads of Iran” if necessary, the minister said. “Israel has a very clear message to our enemies. We are saying to them, look what is happening in Gaza – you are going to get the same treatment if you attack us. We are going to wipe you off the face of the Earth.”

The statement came after Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said on Monday that the security situation for Israel may worsen very quickly. “If the war crimes against the Palestinians are not immediately stopped, other multiple fronts will open and this is inevitable,” he said.

The Iranian diplomat later doubled down, warning the U.S. and Israel that, if they do not stop mistreating the Palestinians, “anything is possible at any moment and the region will go out of control.” Amir-Abdollahian added that further escalation would have “far-reaching repercussions.”

The IDF and Hezbollah have repeatedly exchanged fire since the fighting erupted between the Israeli forces and Hamas earlier this month. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated on Sunday that Hezbollah would suffer “unprecedented destruction” if it officially joins the war against the Jewish state.

The Israeli army made several large-scale incursions in Lebanon to fight the militants there in the past. The most recent invasion took place in 2006.

On October 7, Hamas and allied groups including Islamic jihad attacked multiple Israeli settlements, prompting Israel to begin airstrikes on the Gaza Strip. More than 1,400 Israelis and over 4,300 Palestinians have been killed, according to officials from both sides.

Pentagon Warns Iran Against Escalating Israel Crisis

U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has warned that American forces in the Middle East face increased risk of being attacked as Iran and its allies in the region look to exploit the turmoil created by the Israel-Hamas war.

Bases housing U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria have already been targeted in rocket and drone attacks in recent days, and the Pentagon is concerned about further escalation of the Israel crisis, Austin said on Sunday in an ABC News interview. “In fact, what we are seeing is the prospect of a significant escalation of attacks on our troops and our people throughout the region, and because of that, we are going to do what is necessary to make sure that our troops are in a good position, they are protected, and that we have the ability to respond.”

Shortly after Hamas launched surprise attacks against Israel on October 7, the Pentagon dispatched two aircraft carriers, five guided missile destroyers and other ships to the eastern Mediterranean Sea. One of the strike groups, led by the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower aircraft carrier, was redirected to the Persian Gulf on Saturday, and the Pentagon said it activated additional missile batteries in several undisclosed locations to help protect U.S. forces in the region.

“The additional deployment sends another message to those who seek to widen this conflict,” Austin said. He added, “If any group or any country is looking to widen this conflict and take advantage of this very unfortunate situation that we see, our advice is: Do not. We maintain the right to defend ourselves, and we would not hesitate to take the appropriate action.”

The USS Carney destroyer, located in the Red Sea, shot down three missiles and several drones that were launched from the region of Yemen controlled by Iranian-backed Houthi rebels on Thursday. The missiles were traveling north, potentially toward targets in Israel, a Pentagon spokesman said.

Antony Blinken

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken echoed Austin’s concerns, saying Washington expects additional attacks on American troops by Iranian-backed groups. “We are taking steps to make sure that we can effectively defend our people and respond decisively if we need to,” he said on Sunday in an NBC News interview. “This is not what we want, not what we are looking for. We do not want escalation. We do not want to see a second or third front develop. We do not want to see our forces or our personnel come under fire, but if that happens, we are ready for it.”

The U.S. State Department ordered the departure of all non-emergency government staffers and their families from Iraq on Sunday. The department issued a similar order for its embassy in Baghdad and its consulate in Erbil on Friday, citing increased security threats. The department’s updated travel advisory warned Americans against going to Iraq, citing security risks and the limited capacity of U.S. diplomatic installations in the country to provide support to US citizens.

Gaza Conflict May Spin Out Of Control, Says Iranian Foreign Minister

Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian has accused the U.S. of waging a “proxy war against Palestinians” and warned that the situation will get out of hand if the bombardment of Gaza is not stopped and Israel launches the ground assault it is preparing for.

Speaking at the joint press conference with his South African counterpart Naledi Pandor in Tehran on Sunday, the Iranian top diplomat said that it was a “bitter and unfortunate reality” that U.S. President Joe Biden made an “extraordinary wartime visit” to Tel Aviv this week to show support for the Benjamin Netanyahu government amid the bombardment of the Palestinian enclave and lack of humanitarian aid.

“It is a great shame that the American president announced that the U.S. would dispatch hundreds of planes, ships and trucks filled with military equipment to the occupied territories to support the mass murder that coordinate plans for only 20 trucks carrying humanitarian aid to enter the besieged enclave,” he noted.

Amir-Abdollahian called the situation in the region a “powder keg” and warned of “heavy and bitter consequences.”

“If he U.S. and the Israeli regime do not stop their crimes against humanity immediately, there will be a possibility of anything at any moment and the region may spin out of control,” Amir-Abdollahian argued.

Hezbollah And Israel Exchange Fire And Warnings Of A Widened War

An earlier AP report said:

Hezbollah announced the deaths of five more militants as clashes along the Lebanon-Israel border intensified and the Israeli prime minister warned Lebanon on Sunday not to let itself get dragged into a new war.

The tiny Mediterranean country is home to Hezbollah, a Shiite Muslim political party with an armed wing of the same name. Israeli soldiers and militants have traded fire across the border since Israel’s war with the Palestinian group Hamas began, but the launches so far have targeted limited areas.

Hezbollah has reported the deaths of 24 of its militants since Hamas’ bloody Oct. 7 rampage in southern Israel. At least six militants from Hamas and another militant group, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and at least four civilians have died in the near-daily hostilities.

Hezbollah has vowed to escalate if Israel begins a ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, which is likely, and Israel said it would aggressively retaliate.

“If Hezbollah decides to enter the war, it will miss the Second Lebanon War. It will make the mistake of its life,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday as he visited troops stationed near the border with Lebanon. “We will cripple it with a force it cannot even imagine, and the consequences for it and the Lebanese state are devastating.”

Hezbollah and Israel fought a month long war in 2006 that ended in a tense stalemate.

Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency reported that small arms fire was heard along the tense border coming from near the Lebanese village of Aitaroun toward the northern Israeli town of Avivim where key military barracks are located. Meanwhile, Israel shelled areas near the southeastern Lebanese town of Blida.

Israel sees Iran-backed Hezbollah as its most serious threat, estimating it has some 150,000 rockets and missiles aimed at Israel.

Israeli military spokesman Jonathan Conricus accused the group early Sunday of “escalating the situation steadily.” He said the recent cross-border skirmishes had produced both Israeli troop and civilian casualties but did not provide additional details.

Hezbollah on Sunday posted a video of what it said was a Friday attack targeting the Biranit barracks near the Lebanon-Israel border, the command center of the Israeli military’s northern division. Footage shared by the group showed an overhead view of a strike on what it described as a gathering of soldiers.

During a video briefing, Conricus said the group has especially attacked military positions in Mount Dov in recent days, a disputed territory known as Shebaa Farms in Lebanon, where the borders of Lebanon, Syria, and Israel meet.

“Bottom line is … Hezbollah is playing a very, very dangerous game,” he said. “(It is) extremely important for everybody in Lebanon to ask themselves the question of the price. Is the Lebanese state really willing to jeopardize what is left of Lebanese prosperity and Lebanese sovereignty for the sake of terrorists in Gaza?”

The international community and Lebanese authorities have been scrambling to ensure the cash-strapped country does not find itself in a new war.

Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has yet to comment on the latest Hamas-Israel war, though other officials have. Hezbollah legislator Hassan Fadlallah said Sunday said Nasrallah’s silence was part of a strategy to deter Israel from Lebanon and to “prevent the enemy from reaching its goal in Gaza.”

“When the time comes for his His Eminence (Hassan Nasrallah) to appear in the media, should managing this battle require so, everyone will see that he will reflect public opinion,” Fadlallah said.

Hezbollah Is Already In The Heart Of Israel-Hamas War, Says Hezbollah Deputy Leader

Another AP report said:

A top official with Hezbollah vowed that Israel will pay a high price whenever it starts a ground offensive in the Gaza Strip and said Saturday that his militant group based in Lebanon already is “in the heart of the battle.”

The comments by Hezbollah’s deputy leader, Sheikh Naim Kassem, came as Israel shelled and made drone strikes in southern Lebanon and Hezbollah fired rockets and missiles toward Israel. Hezbollah said six of its fighters were killed Saturday, the highest daily toll since the violence began two weeks ago.

For Hezbollah, heating up the Lebanon-Israel border has a clear purpose, Kassem said: “We are trying to weaken the Israeli enemy and let them know that we are ready.” Hamas officials have said that if Israel starts a ground offensive in Gaza, Hezbollah will join the fighting.

Exchanges of fire along the Lebanon-Israel border have picked up in the two weeks since the attack by the Palestinian militant group Hamas that killed over 1,400 civilians and soldiers in southern Israel. Retaliatory Israeli airstrikes on Gaza have killed more than 4,000 Palestinians.

There are concerns that Iran-backed Hezbollah, which has a weapons arsenal consisting of tens of thousands of rockets and missiles as well as different types of drones, might try to open a new front in the Israel-Hamas war with a large-scale attack on northern Israel.

Kassem said his group, which is allied with Hamas, already was affecting the course of the conflict by heating up the Lebanon-Israel border and keeping three Israeli army divisions tied up in the north instead of preparing to fight in Gaza.

“Do you believe that if you try to crush the Palestinian resistance, other resistance fighters in the region will not act?” Kassem said in a speech Saturday during the funeral of a Hezbollah fighter. “We are in the heart of the battle today. We are making achievements through this battle.”

On Friday, the Israeli military announced the evacuation of a border city where three residents were wounded in the crossfire a day earlier.

Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency reported that an Israeli drone fired a missile on a valley in the Sejoud area, about 20 kilometers north of the Israeli border. Hezbollah did not immediately confirm the attack, but if true it would mark a major escalation as it is deep inside Lebanon and far from the border.

An Associated Press journalist in south Lebanon reported hearing loud explosions Saturday along the border, close to the Mediterranean coast.

Hezbollah said its fighters attacked several Israeli positions and also targeted an Israeli infantry force, “scoring direct hits.”

Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency reported Israeli shelling of several villages and said a car took a direct hit in the village of Houla. On Saturday evening, shelling intensified around an Israeli army post across from the Lebanese village of Yaroun.

Hezbollah said six of its fighters were killed Saturday, raising the total of Lebanese militants killed to 19 since Oct. 7.

Israeli army spokesman Avichay Adraee said a group of gunmen fired a shell into Israel and an Israeli drone was launched back toward them. A drone also was dispatched after another group of gunmen fired toward the Israeli town of Margaliot, Adraee said.

“Direct hits were scored in both strikes,” Adraee posted on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Hezbollah’s Kassem spoke about foreign dignitaries who visited Lebanon over the past two weeks asking Lebanese officials to convince the group not to take part in the latest Hamas-Israel battle. He said Hezbollah’s response to Lebanese officials was, “We are part of the battle.”

“We tell those who are contacting us, ‘Stop the (Israeli) aggression so that its (conflict) repercussions and possibility of expansion stops,’” Kassem said, referring to the officials who recently visited Beirut, including the foreign ministers of France and Germany.

Speaking about an expected Israeli ground invasion of Gaza, Kassem, said: “Our information are that the preparedness in Gaza by Hamas and resistance fighters will make (the) Israeli ground invasion their graveyard.”

Hezbollah Is Dragging Lebanon Toward War, Says Israel

A Bloomberg report said:

Israel said Hezbollah risks dragging Lebanon into a wider regional war after another night of intense cross-border fire with the Iran-backed militant group.

As Israel’s military battles Gaza-based Hamas, following the group’s deadly attacks on southern Israel on Oct. 7, it has also been facing the threat to the north posed by Hezbollah, which last fought a war with its neighbor in 2006.

Israel reported that anti-tank missiles were fired again from Lebanon Sunday and that it had intercepted a drone. In one of its most serious warnings yet, the military said Hezbollah was “playing a very, very dangerous game” and “dragging Lebanon into a war that it will gain nothing from but stands to lose a lot.”

More than 60,000 people in Israel have been evacuated along the border with Lebanon including Kiryat Shmona, the area’s largest city, and residents of an additional 14 communities are set to leave, according to the Israeli Ministry of Defense.

Israel shelled border villages late Saturday, reaching areas deep into southern Lebanon primarily Jezzine, Tyre and Bint Jbeil. About 1,500 Lebanese and Syrian families took refuge in schools in Tyre that the municipality had set up in anticipation of worsening violence, Lebanese state-run National News Agency reported.

One of the Middle East’s most powerful militias, Hezbollah is funded by Iran and is also represented by a political party in Lebanon with an extensive network of schools, hospitals, social services and even local lenders. Along with its allies, Hezbollah is one of the most influential parties in the country and has the majority and military might to block any government or parliament decision.

Lebanon’s government, which exerts little to no influence over Hezbollah’s armed wing, has said it was preparing an emergency plan in the case of a war. Lebanon’s national carrier Middle East Airlines has parked some of its fleet in Turkey and authorities have discussed ways to secure its infrastructure and trade routes.

At a televised news conference Sunday a Hezbollah lawmaker said the group’s goal was to prevent Israel from achieving its goals in Gaza. Speaking in southern Lebanon, Hassan Fadlallah also praised the residents for offering “the best of their sons” to face Israel.

Hezbollah has been attacking Israeli army posts and border towns on a daily basis for the past two weeks and has attempted to send drones into Israeli airspace. The series of attacks started a day after Hamas, which is designated a terrorist group by the U.S. and European Union, launched an unprecedented incursion into Israel on Oct. 7, killing more than 1,400 people and abducting dozens more.

Israel responded with an intense bombing campaign on the blockaded Hamas-run Gaza Strip, killing thousands of people. Israel is widely expected to launch a ground invasion, something Iran has said would further escalate tensions.

Caretaker Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati said the government was holding talks with Arab and international parties to stop Israel’s attacks on the southern region and prevent the war spilling over further into Lebanon.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke with Mikati late Saturday and “noted growing concern over rising tensions along Lebanon’s southern border,” according to the State Department.

Israel’s military spokesperson Daniel Hagari said the fighting with Hezbollah “is mainly in the contact line.” Hezbollah has adopted similar rhetoric, saying the clashes remain within the so-called “rules of engagement,” which limits the battle to Lebanese areas Hezbollah considers occupied.

Hezbollah has so far not entered real combat with Israel probably because it is sensitive to public opinion in Lebanon where people are worried what a war of that kind would cause according to Giora Eiland, a former national security adviser in Israel.

“Hezbollah is aware that if a full scale war emerges in Lebanon, it will bring devastation to the city of Beirut. Beirut will look like Gaza,” Eiland, a retired general and now a media commentator, told journalists at a briefing late Saturday.

Hezbollah has said it has 100,000 fighters and a stockpile of missiles that could reach all of Israel. Its involvement in the Syrian war alongside President Bashar Al-Assad’s forces has given its fighters more experience in guerrilla warfare, experts say.

Hezbollah’s last war with Israel in 2006 left more than 1,000 dead in Lebanon, and more than 100 in Israel, as well as triggering mass displacement and damage. While the group claimed victory back then and enjoyed popular support in the Arab world, some of that landscape is different today.

The group’s fighting against Syria’s popular uprising dented its image in parts of the Middle East. In Lebanon its critics blame the group for the country’s financial crisis and say Hezbollah is to blame for Arab benefactors like Saudi Arabia withholding much-needed funding for Lebanon.

23 October 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By  Chris Hedges

Made in Israel – by Mr. Fish

Israel, with the backing of its U.S. and European allies, is preparing to launch not only a scorched earth campaign in Gaza but the worst ethnic cleansing since the wars in the former Yugoslavia. The goal is to drive tens, most probably hundreds of thousands of Palestinians over the southern border at Rafah into refugee camps in Egypt. The reverberations will be catastrophic, not only for the Palestinians, but throughout the region, almost certainly triggering armed clashes to the north of Israel with Hezbollah in Lebanon and perhaps with Syria and Iran.

The Biden administration, slavishly doing Israel’s bidding, is fueling the madness. The U.S. was the only country to veto the U.N. Security Council resolution calling for humanitarian pauses to deliver food, medicine, water and fuel to Gaza. It has blocked proposals for a ceasefire. It has proposed a draft U.N. Security Council resolution that says Israel has a right to defend itself. The resolution also demands Iran stop exporting arms to “militias and terrorist groups threatening peace and security across the region.”

The U.S. and its Western allies are as morally bankrupt and as complicit in genocide as those who witnessed the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews and did nothing.

The conflict, which has taken the lives of 1,400 Israelis and at least 4,600 Palestinians in Gaza, is widening. Israel carried out a second airstrike on two airports in Syria. It daily trades rocket barrages with Hezbollah militias. U.S. military bases in Iraq and Syria have been attacked by Shia militias. The USS Carney, a guided missile destroyer, shot down three cruise missiles on Thursday, apparently launched by the Houthis in Yemen and heading towards Israel.

Israel is also struggling to quell daily violent clashes in the occupied West Bank. It carried out an airstrike on Sunday on a mosque in the Jenin refugee camp – the first air strike in the West Bank for two decades – that killed at least 2 people. Armed Jewish settlers have been rampaging through Palestinian towns in the West Bank. At least 90 Palestinians in the West Bank have been killed by armed settlers or the Israeli military since the Oct. 7 incursion into Israel by Hamas and other resistance fighters, according to the U.N.’s humanitarian office. Some 4,000 workers from Gaza and 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank have been arrested in the past two weeks, doubling the number of Palestinian prisoners to 10,000 held by Israel, over half of whom are political prisoners

“Many of the prisoners have had their limbs, hands and legs broken … degrading and insulting expressions, insults, cursing, tying them with handcuffs to the back and tightening them at the end to the point of causing severe pain … naked, humiliating and group search of the prisoners,” the Palestinian Authority’s Commission for Detainees’ Affairs, Qadura Fares, said at a press conference.

B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, told the BBC that since the Oct. 7 attack, it had documented “a concerted and organized effort by settlers to use the fact that the entire international and local attention is focused on Gaza and the north of Israel to try to seize land in the West Bank.”

Inside Israel, Palestinians with Israeli citizenship and Jerusalem IDs are being harassed, detained, arrested and expelled from jobs and universities in what is described as a “witch hunt.” More than 152,000 Israelis have been evacuated from towns and villages near the borders of Gaza and Lebanon.

The U.S., in an effort to thwart a military response by Iran that could trigger a regional war, is deploying an additional 2,000 troops to the Middle East. It will redeploy one of its strike groups to the Persian Gulf and send additional air defense systems to the region. The USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and its strike group — which last weekend was being deployed to the eastern Mediterranean Sea to join the USS Gerald R. Ford — has been redirected to the Persian Gulf. A Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-missile battery, and Patriot missile defense system battalions, have also been sent to the Persian Gulf.

Israel has unleashed its Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – Death, Famine, War and Conquest.

It has given Gazans two choices. Leave Gaza or die.

Palestinians will be killed not only from the bombs and shells, and eventually, with the ground invasion, bullets and tank shells, but from hunger and epidemics such as cholera. Without water, fuel and medicine and with the breakdown of sanitation, diseases will spread swiftly. The U.N. states that hospitals in Gaza “are on the brink of collapse.” Thousands of patients will die once fuel runs out for hospital generators.

A doctor from al-Shifa hospital in Gaza reported in an interview Saturday, “We are collapsing.” He spoke of a lack of oxygen, light and medical supplies, no water in some departments, concerns about cholera and the loss of doctors killed by Israeli airstrikes, including a dentist killed in Israel’s bombing of an Orthodox church that left at least 18 dead, including several children.

The handful of trucks, 37 so far, of aid into Gaza is a cynical public relations gimmick demanded by the Biden administration. It will do little to alleviate the Israeli-engineered humanitarian crisis. The U.N. says it needs at least 100 aid tracks a day. Gaza’s last functioning seawater desalination plant shut down on Sunday because of a lack of fuel.

Israel has no intention of lifting the total siege on Gaza. It announced it will increase its airstrikes. It will continue, as it has for the past two weeks, to extinguish the lives of Palestinians and terrorize and starve them into leaving Gaza.

The ground assault on Gaza will not be quick. It will involve weeks, perhaps months, of street fighting. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin compared the looming battle in Gaza to the U.S. assault on the Iraqi city of Mosul, held by ISIS, in 2014. It took the U.S. nine months to recapture Mosul.

When Israel says this will be a “long war” they are, for once, telling the truth.

Israel has requested more military aid from Washington, $14.3 billion including $10.6 billion for air and missile defense. It will get it. Israel is rapidly depleting its stocks as it pounds Gaza, including in the south of Gaza where hundreds of thousands of displaced families from the north have fled.

Israel will not permit the distribution of the $100 million in U.S. aid pledged for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, at least not until their scorched earth campaign is finished. But by then, Gaza will be unrecognizable. Israel will have annexed part or all of it. Maybe the money can go to building more illegal Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. And pledging aid is not the same as appropriating it. So perhaps that, too, is part of the illusion.

Egyptian officials are acutely aware of what comes next. Up to half, maybe more, of the 2.3 million Palestinians will be pushed by Israel into Egypt on Gaza’s southern border and never be allowed to return.

“What is happening now in Gaza is an attempt to force civilian residents to take refuge and migrate to Egypt, which should not be accepted,” Egyptian president Abdulfattah al-Sisi warned.

Reports out of Egypt contend that Washington has promised to forgive much of Egypt’s massive $162.9 billion debt, as well as offer other economic incentives in exchange for Egypt’s acquiescence to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. The refugees, once they cross the border into Egypt, will be left to rot in the Sinai.

“There is a grave danger that what we are witnessing may be a repeat of the 1948 Nakba, and the 1967 Naksa, yet on a larger scale. The international community must do everything to stop this from happening again,” said Francesca Albanese, U.N. Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967.

Israel has long used war to justify the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Government officials have openly called for another Nakba, or “catastrophe,” the term for the events of 1947-1949 when over 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from historic Palestine and driven into refugee camps to create the state of Israel. During the 1967 war, which led to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israel ethnically cleansed another 300,000 Palestinians during the Naksa, or “day of the setback,” which is commemorated every year by Palestinians.

Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, however, is not limited to wars. There has been an ongoing slow motion ethnic cleansing as Israel has steadily built more Jewish-only colonies and incrementally seized Palestinian land. Palestinians, denied basic civil liberties in Israel’s apartheid state, have been robbed of assets, including, often, their homes. They have faced mounting restrictions on their physical movements. They have been blocked from trading and business, especially the selling of produce. They have found themselves increasingly impoverished and trapped behind walls and security fences erected around Gaza and the West Bank. At the same time, they have endured periodic Israeli airstrikes, targeted assassinations and near daily attacks by armed Jewish settlers and the Israeli army.

Israel prevented Palestinians who left the West Bank and Gaza Strip from returning at the rate of about 9,000 Palestinians per year following the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, until the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1994, according to the Israel human rights group HaMoked. Israel has also revoked the residency permits for some 14,000 Palestinians who lived in East Jerusalem since 1967 according to B’Tselem.

Israel demolished 9,880 structures, including over 2,600 inhabited residential buildings, displacing over 14,000 people and affecting 233,681 in the West Bank alone between Jan. 1, 2009 and 7 Oct. 7, 2023, according to data from the  U.N Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Since the Oct. 7 attack, a further 38 homes and other structures were demolished in the West Bank affecting an additional 13,613 people and displacing at least 73.

Less than 2.2 percent of Palestinian requests for construction permits made between 2009 and 2020 were approved, according to data from Peace Now and the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

The number of Israeli colonists in the occupied territories, however, has gone from zero before the June 1967 war, to between 600,000 to 750,000 spread out across at least 250 settlements and outposts throughout the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, all of them in violation of international law.

Israel makes no secret about its intentions.

Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, told troops preparing to enter Gaza, “I have released all the restraints.”

Knesset member Ariel Kallner, part of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, called on X, formerly known as Twitter, for “a Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48.”

The Israeli army mobilized Ezra Yachin, a 95-year-old army veteran, to “motivate” the troops. Yachin was a member of the Lehi Zionist militia that carried out numerous massacres of Palestinian civilians, including the Deir Yassin massacre on April 9, 1948, where over 100 Palestinian civilians, many women and children, were slaughtered.

“Be triumphant and finish them off and don’t leave anyone behind. Erase the memory of them,” Yachin said addressing Israeli troops.

“Erase them, their families, mothers and children,” he went on. “These animals can no longer live.”

“Every Jew with a weapon should go out and kill them,” he said. “If you have an Arab neighbor, don’t wait, go to his home and shoot him.”

Where are our humanitarian interventionists? The ones who wept crocodile tears about the human rights of Ukranians, Iraqis, Syrians, Libyans and Afghans, to justify massive arms shipments and war? Where is the old anti-war wing of the Democratic Party and the liberal class? What has happened to the public intellectuals who used to decry the slaughter of innocents and the U.S. war machine? Where are the jurists who uphold the rule of international law? Why are the few lonely voices speaking out about Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians attacked, censored and doxxed?

“The previous president wanted to ban us and probably put us in concentration camps,” said Michigan Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who is of Palestinian descent, at a rally in support of a ceasefire on Oct. 20 in Washington in front of the U.S. Capitol. “This one wants us just to die. That’s how it feels. Shame on them.”

Israel will not halt its genocidal campaign in Gaza against the Palestinians until there is a U.S. arms embargo on Israel. Our weapons systems, munitions and attack aircraft sustain the slaughter. We must terminate the $3.8 billion in military aid that the U.S. gives to Israel each year. We must support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and demand suspension of all free trade and other agreements between the U.S. and Israel. Only when these props are knocked out from under Israel will the Israeli leadership be forced, as was the apartheid regime in South Africa, to integrate Palestinians into one state with equal rights. As long as these props remain, the Palestinians are doomed.

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

23 October 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Ramzy Baroud

Israel had the perfect plan for Gaza – in fact, for all Palestinians, when it decided to redeploy its forces around the Occupied Gaza Strip in 2005.

Despite statements made, back then, by Israeli officials that the ‘disengagement’ plan aimed at severing Israel’s legal and other responsibilities from its role as an Occupier, the actual story was different.

Dov Weisglass, a top adviser to the late Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, conveyed the real reasons behind the redeployment.

Weisglass knew exactly what he was saying; after all, he was one of the architects of the plan.

But how much of the Israeli plan, as described by Weisglass, was, in fact, implemented? And did the current war in the Strip change those outcomes, as pronounced nearly two decades ago?

“The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process,” Weisglass told Haaretz in 2004.

That part has, indeed, been achieved in full. Not only was the so-called peace process frozen, but Israel has, since then, carried out numerous steps to make sure that there is nothing worth negotiating over.

The exponential growth of illegal Jewish settlements, the killing of Palestinians, the desecration of holy sites and the annexation plans made it unrealistic to even suggest that a two state solution is still practically possible.

But why was Israel keen on freezing a ‘process’ that was futile to begin with?

It was not the peace process that mattered to Israel, but the fact that, so long as such political conversations were still taking place,  the Palestinian political agenda remained relevant.

This logic, long argued by Palestinians, was supported by Weisglass himself, when he said that “When you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem.”

“Effectively,” he added, “this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a (US) presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress.”

This explains much of what has happened since the senior Israeli officials made those revelations and predictions.

First, is that all Israeli governments, regardless of their ideological or political orientations, remained faithful to the plan, and never engaged in any genuine political conversations on the future of a Palestinian State, the rights of the Palestinians, let alone a just peace.

This indicates that Israel’s intentions were not open for debate within the country’s political establishment. For Tel Aviv, it was the end of peace efforts, and the start of a new phase, that of entrenching the Occupation.

Second, every US administration since then has either invested in the overall Israeli agenda or disowned the very ‘peace process’ that the Americans had, themselves, invented and sustained.

This, too, did not happen by chance. Israel had invested much lobbying efforts and diplomacy in dissuading the Americans from continuing to pursue their own agenda.

Not only did the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu get what he wanted, he even managed to convince the Trump Administration in 2017 to follow Israel’s own agenda on Jerusalem, on the refugees, on settlements and even on annexation.

The Biden administration did not alter that new grim political reality established by President Donald Trump, even if some of its language appeared to suggest otherwise.

Third, although unwittingly, Weisglass indicated that Israel does not see Palestinians and their struggle as fragments, but as a unified whole. By blocking one aspect of that struggle, the political process, all others are meant to fall apart like pieces of dominos.

The division of Palestinians, along with the ability of Mahmoud Abbas to sustain his Palestinian Authority for all these years despite its failure to achieve anything of substance, allowed Israel to advance its original plan unhindered.

Frustrated by the insistence of many countries, including the US, that Israel must engage in a political process, Israel, instead, decided to ‘disengage’ from Gaza.

“The disengagement is actually formaldehyde,” Weisglass said. “It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.”

The Israeli plan, however, was not a complete success. Palestinians continued to lead a massive campaign of resistance, involving all aspects of society in Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem.

And, as was always the case, Israel responded with a massive show of force whenever Palestinians seemed ready to challenge their Israeli jailors.

From the frequent raids on Jenin, Nablus, Jericho to the massive and deadly wars on Gaza, Israel has done everything in its power, not only to crush Palestinians but also to send them a message: no resistance of any kind will be tolerated, and no form of resistance will ever be enough to place Palestine back on Israel’s political agenda, or those of its allies.

A feeling of ‘we won, and you lost’ has pervaded official Israeli institutions and society. Israeli election campaigns seemed entirely disinterested in even discussing the settlements, a Palestinian State, the status of Jerusalem and so on.

Palestinians were still useful, however. The PA served as a line of defense for the ever-growing settlements. And every Palestinian attack against Israeli targets was utilized as  further proof that Israel has no peace partner, thus solidifying the anti-peace position of every Israeli government.

The discussion in the media following the Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7 focused on the attack itself, on Hamas as a group and, later, although selectively, on the bloodbath created by Israel in Gaza.

But that date was not the start of the war; it is a horrific episode of a war that has already started and is sustained by a very violent Israeli military Occupation and apartheid.

Equally important, regardless of Israeli propaganda and distorted western media coverage, there is no question that Israel has failed.

That failure was initiated by Sharon’s wishful thinking in 2005, and maintained through the illusions and arrogance of every Israeli government ever since.

The truth is that Netanyahu is only a cog in a massive Israeli political machine which aims at dismissing the Palestinian cause, forever.

Even those who insist on supporting Israel at any cost, cannot now genuinely pretend that Palestine is not back on the agenda as the Middle East’s most vital issue. Without a free Palestine, there can never be true peace, security or stability.

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

19 October 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Press Release

We, the People of India, stand utterly shocked at the depravity & barbarism of the Israeli regime. The missile attack by the Israeli forces on the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza, which has killed more than a thousand innocent civilians, is more evidence of the genocidal intent of the fascist Neo-Nazi Zionist Netanyahu regime. Moreover, Israel has threatened the 1.1 Gazan population in the North with dire consequences if they do not move towards the South, even as they prepare to invade Gaza yet again. Sections of the Jewish Zionist radical leadership have further threatened the entire population if they do not move out to the Sinai desert in Egypt. The Palestinians know that once they leave their land, they will never be allowed to return back to their homeland and will be reduced to refugees.

This clearly constitutes a war crime by international law. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,1948 states:

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.

Clearly, the Israeli political & military leadership is guilty of all of the above.

The agenda is to ethnically cleanse the entire Palestinian population from the Occupied territories of Gaza, the West Bank & East Jerusalem. This is a continuation of “The Nakba” in 1948, “The Catastrophe” that befell the Palestinian nation, when Israel ethnically cleansed 7,50,000 Palestinians, constituting half of the population and reduced them to refugees.

Israel, a creation of British & US imperialism, was imposed upon historic Palestine as a European Settler Colonial Apartheid state, built on the ideology of Zionism, racism & supremacism, a supposed Chosen People, a highly racist & supremacist belief system, which the other nations would have to be subservient to. The entire ethno-religious radical extremist and violent character is there for all the world to see.

At the root cause of the current phase of the violence is the continuous series of genocidal wars over a period of 106 years, ever since the British, in 1917, issued the Balfour Declaration and decided to give away Palestine to create a Jewish homeland, at the human cost of the original people of the land. Thus the root cause is the “Occupation of Palestine by Israel”.  This burning issue, right at the very centre of global geopolitics, needs to be addressed and resolved on the basis of all UN Resolutions 181(11) (1947), 242 (1967) & 338 (1973) and others, as well as other relevant dictums of International Law.

Gaza, which lies at the very epicenter of this crisis, continues to be an Open-Air-Prison-Cum-Concentration-Camp. Just as 4 lakh Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto rose up against the German Nazis in 1944, so have the 25 lakh Palestinian Gazan population against the Israeli Neo-Nazis in 2023. The Israeli siege of Gaza is also being compared to the German Nazi siege of Leningrad during WWII. The lessons of history are exceedingly clear.

The Palestinian Gazan population imprisoned for over 16 years have finally broken out of the Israeli prison. Thus, the powderkeg finally erupted on the 7th of October 2023, when the Palestinian resistance & the population said, enough is enough.

Clearly, Israel is an Apartheid State based on racial and ethno-religious inequality, affirmed by B’Tselem, the leading Israeli human rights organization, as well as Amnesty International in detailed well documented reports.

We indeed condemn any civilian loss of life, be it Palestinian or Israeli. We also condemn the killing of civilians both by the Israeli regime or by Hamas. It must be noted here that the mass murders of Palestinian civilians are on an industrial scale, especially that of women and children, and are far greater in number than that of Israeli civilians. Only since 2008 the Israelis have either killed or injured more than 1,50,000 Palestinians, of which 33,000 are children. This asymmetry must be noted, as the facts are stark and obvious.

The world sits on a precipice, even as we witness Jewish radical fanatics that are committed to destroying the Al Aqsa Masjid & the rebuilding of the Third Temple of Solomon. This is a time bomb waiting to erupt, with grave consequences for all the nations and people’s of the world.

On a daily basis, the Palestinians are subjected to, the destruction of their farms and homes, the growing Jewish Settlements that takeaway their land, the total control over their water, with their wells destroyed, the Check-Points, the Apartheid Wall all across the West Bank, the siege & inhumane blockade of Gaza, the regular murder & brutalisation of Palestinian civilians, the long history of violent provocations – all the decades of frustration and anger erupted on the 7th of October.

Certainly, war is not the solution, ending the occupation is. Thus the international community must immediately step in and call for and establish a cease fire, create a humanitarian corridor to ensure the safety of the Gazan population, and supplies of all essentials, food, water, medicines and electricity to be immediately reinstated. Shamefully, this, too, the US has vetoed in the UNSC. One of the reasons for Israeli brazeness is the political protection of the US veto, the blind support of the Western corporate media, the annual sum of $3.3 Billion & the advanced weaponary that the US provides to Israel. Thus, the US & other Western nations are clearly culpable & complicit in the Israeli war crimes.

In the context of India and our rich anti-colonial history, our rich legacy of our freedom movement from British colonialism & occupation, it was shocking to witness the outright support that PM Modi offered to Israel. This position is both ahistoric, as well as a betrayal of the ideals & principles of our Independence movement led by Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar, Bhagat Singh, Maulana Azad, Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, Capt. Laxmi Sehgal, Yusuf Meherally, Aruna Asaf Ali, Ashfaqullah, among many other legendary leaders. We continued to stand with all the anti-colonial freedom movements, but support for the Israeli colonial settler state, is clearly in conflict with those principles.

Later, the Ministry of External Affairs corrected the gross strategic error and issued a statement in favour of a Two-State Solution, based on UN resolutions and international consensus.

All that PM Modi required to do was issue a statement along the lines that of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. But he has grievously erred. Even as we witness many nations engaging in serious dialogue and discussions, PM Modi stands sidelined, as the majority of the nations that constitute the Global South see him as a pro-Western US/UK/Israeli ally, with no further role to play. PM Modi has indeed gravely damaged India’s international standing and respect.

We are also perturbed at the Hindutva troll factories, which have now begun to export their hatred and fake news to target the Palestinian nation. The Godi media is now embedded with the Israeli army & promoting a one-sided narrative based on Israeli propaganda, but that again is their dubious role in our country as well. This is the precise reason that the Godi media lacks any sense of credibility.

This meeting demands the following:

1. An immediate ceasefire & an end to the war.

2. End the Israeli siege of Gaza where 2.5 million people reside  of which 40% are children.

3. Ensure humanitarian aid, food, water, medicines, electricity, and the rebuilding of houses, hospitals, universities, schools, colleges, roads, all the civilian infrastructure that has been devastated in the indiscriminate Israeli bombings.

4. Dismantle the Apartheid Wall that imprisons 3 million Palestinians in Bantustans in the West Bank.

5. Dismantle all the Illegal Israeli Settlements across the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza District.

6. Immediately move towards a political solution based on all relevant UN resolutions and international law, thereby constituting Two States, namely Palestine with East Jerusalem as its capital and Israel, peacefully co-existing side by side.

7. Set up a war crimes tribunal in the International Criminal Court (ICC),  and investigate and try all those political & military leaders responsible for the deaths of civilians and other war crimes.

This is also an appeal to all Indian democratic forces to come together  & unite in support of Palestine and strengthen the global solidarity movement by taking to the streets and raising our voices against this barbaric genocidal Israeli occupation.

It is only then that peace shall be achieved, a peace based on equality, justice, respect for human dignity and freedom.

Com. Prakash Reddy presided over the meeting, and the speakers included, Kumar Ketkar, MP, Rajya Sabha, Congress Party, Veteran Editor, Feroze Mithiborwala, Expert on West Asian Affairs, IPSF, Prof. K Theckedath, AIPSO, Com. Dr. Rege, Mumbai Secretary, CPM, Meraj Siddiqui, SP, State Secretary, Com. Milind Ranade, Mumbai Secretary, CPI, Com. Ajit Patil, CPI-ML (Liberation), Dr. Salim Khan, Veteran Journalist, Sayeed Khan, Educationist, Compered by Com. Shraddha Mehta.

The public meeting was held at Mumbai Marathi Patrakar Sangh on 18th of October 2023.

ALL INDIA PEACE AND SOLIDARITY ORGANISATION (AIPSO, Mumbai) &
INDIA PALESTINE SOLIDARITY FORUM (IPSF)

For further information contact:
feroze.moses777@gmail.com

19 October 2023

Source: countercurrents.org