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By Francis A. Boyle

This is a public lecture I gave at the request of the Campus Chapter of the Students for Justice in Palestine at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on March 1, 2018 as part of their Israeli Apartheid Week:

Palestinians have been victims of genocide as defined by the 1948 Genocide Convention since the founding of the State of Israel. I say that because of my practical experience. I single-handedly won two World Court Orders for the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina against Yugoslavia to cease and desist from committing all acts of genocide against the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1993. This was the first time ever that any lawyer let alone government had won two such World Court Orders in one case since the World Court was founded in 1921.

If you are interested all of my oral and written submissions to the World Court on genocide for winning those two World Court Orders overwhelmingly in favor of Bosnia can be found in my book The Bosnian People Charge Genocide! (1996).

Article II of the Genocide Convention defines the international crime of genocide in relevant part as follows: “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 destruction its physical destruction in whole or in part…”

That is exactly what Israel is doing today to the 1.8 million people of Gaza: Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction in whole or in part. The Zionists have been doing this since they imposed their siege on Gaza starting in 2007. I have been all up and down and back and forth over Gaza. Gaza is just like the Dachau concentration camp that I have also visited myself.

As documented by Israeli historian Ilan Pappe in his seminal book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006), Israel’s genocidal policy against the Palestinians has been unremitting, extending from before the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948 and is ongoing even now and especially intensifying against the 1.8 million Palestinians living in Gaza. As Pappe’s analysis established, Zionism’s final solution to Israel’s much-touted and racist and genocidal demographic “threat” allegedly posed by the very existence of the Palestinians has always been genocide, whether slow-motion or in blood-thirsty spurts of violence as we have seen more recently in Operation Cast Lead and Operation Protective Edge – both euphemisms for Zionist genocide against the Palestinians and the people of Gaza.

Indeed, the very essence of Zionism requires ethnic cleansing and acts of genocide against the Palestinians. Concerning Operation Cast Lead in 2008-2009, U.N. General Assembly President Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, who had been the Foreign Minister of Nicaragua during Reagan’s contra-terror war against them, condemned it as genocide. At that earlier time, I was down in Nicaragua myself and for many years helped the Nicaraguan people against the Reagan contra-terror war against them that was soundly condemned by the International Court of Justice. You can read about this in my book Defending Civil Resistance Under International Law (1987).

Israel and its predecessors-in-law the Zionist agencies, forces, and terrorist gangs have committed genocide against the Palestinian people that started on or about 15 May 1948 – Nakba Day. You will note that President Trump has decided to stick it to the Palestinian people by illegally moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem on Nakba Day 2018 and has already illegally recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel for the first time ever. In my book Palestine, Palestinians, and International Law (2003), I have an entire chapter on the legal status of Jerusalem under international law. It is quite interesting that the last time we had an official statement on Jerusalem by the United States government was by George Bush Senior when he was the United Nations Ambassador. He correctly pointed out the reasons why the United States government had not previously recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and kept the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv. Prior to President Trump!

I have been to that U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv in order to complain vigorously about the war crimes that Israel has inflicted against the Palestinians. You know what they told me? That this was an “internal affair” of Israel! In other words, the United States government was not going to get involved, was not going to do anything at all about it, and if I didn’t agree with that decision I could take it up with the State Department in Washington D.C. Well of course I knew that would be a waste of time and so I did not.

Israel and its predecessors-in-law the Zionist agencies, forces, and terrorist gangs certainly committed genocide against the Palestinians that started on Nakba Day 1948 and continues apace until today in violation of Genocide Convention Articles II(a) and (b) and (c) that I quoted to you already. For over the past seven decades the Israeli government and its predecessors-in-law the Zionist agencies, forces, and terrorist gangs have ruthlessly implemented a systematic and comprehensive military, political, religious, economic, and cultural campaign with intent to destroy in substantial part the national, ethnical, racial, and different religious group (Jews versus Muslims and Christians) constituting the Palestinian people. Just last week we saw that the Christian denominations in charge of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher had to shut it down because the Zionists are trying to tax it out of existence in violation of the Hague Convention of 1907, the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, and other rules of customary international law binding upon Israel.

The Zionists could not give diddly-squat about international law! I have been up against them for decades, both in Israel and here and all over the world. I’ve debated them, I’ve argued with them, I’ve opposed them. They all lie! Every one of them that I have ever dealt with personally lies and that includes the American Zionists at the U.S. State Department.

It was so bad that when I was the Lawyer for the Palestinians at the Middle East Peace Negotiations, the State Department would lie to them, literally lie to them, about documents that they had drawn up for the Palestinians to sign in English. The Palestinians would bring them back to me with the notes as to what the State Department said these documents meant. I said well that’s a lie, this is a lie, the other thing is a lie, etc. Just bald-faced lies by the U.S. State Department to the Palestinians.

The United States has never been an “honest broker” when it comes to the Palestinians. I have been there from the outset of the Middle East Peace Negotiations in 1991 with my client and friend the late great Dr. Haider Abdul Shaffi from Gaza itself, Head of the Palestinian Delegation and of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society there. It’s a shocking disgrace what the U.S. government has done to the Palestinians from the very outset of these negotiations in 1991 and still continuing today under Kushner, Greenblatt and Friedman. Do you really think we are going to get peace between Israel and the Palestinians from three Orthodox Jews? Of course not!

And to show you how bad it was back in 1991 at the beginning of these peace negotiations, Bush Senior put three American Jews in charge of the process: Ross, Miller, and Kurzer. They even later admitted they served as Israel’s lawyer. That is true, I was there up against them. Notice nothing has changed from 1991 until today. It’s still three American Jews in charge of these so-called peace negotiations serving as lawyers for Israel. I remember telling my client and friend at these peace negotiations Hanan Ashrawi that this was un-American. She smiled very politely looking at me and I could tell what was on her mind: No, this is typically American! Typically American when it comes to the Palestinians. I can tell you that because I’ve been there for a long time dealing with these American Zionists and opposing them for the Palestinians ever since I entered Harvard in 1971.

This Zionist-Israeli campaign has consisted of killing members of the Palestinian people in violation of Genocide Convention Article II(a). This Zionist-Israeli campaign has caused serious bodily and mental harm to the Palestinian people in violation of Genocide Convention Article II(b). This Zionist-Israeli campaign has deliberately inflicted on the Palestinian people conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction in substantial part in violation of Article II(c) of the Genocide Convention. Particularly in Gaza today as we speak, 1.8 million Palestinians are being treated almost as if they were Jews at Dachau.

Apologists for Israel have argued that since these mass atrocities are not tantamount to the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews, therefore they do not qualify as genocide. Previously I had encountered and refuted this completely disingenuous, deceptive, and bogus argument against labeling genocide for what it really is when I was the Lawyer for the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina arguing their genocide case against Yugoslavia before the International Court of Justice. There the genocidal Yugoslavia was represented by Shabtai Rosenne from Israel. Think about that! Israel’s top international lawyer was representing the Yugoslav genociders against the Bosnians. Indeed in these proceedings Rosenne listed himself as Ambassador-at-Large from Israel. Why? Israel was supporting the Yugoslav war of extermination against the Bosnians, including against the Bosnian Jews who were my clients as well. I acted to protect them all at the World Court: the Bosnian Jews, Bosnian Muslims, Bosnian Croats, and others.

Rosenne from Israel proceeded to argue to the World Court that since he was an Israeli Jew, what Yugoslavia had done to the Bosnians was not the equivalent of the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews and therefore did not qualify as genocide within the meaning of the 1948 Genocide Convention. You can see the live transcript of the oral arguments and debates between Rosenne and me in my book The Bosnian People Charge Genocide! (1996). I rebutted Rosenne by arguing to the World Court that you do not need the equivalent to the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews in order to find that wholesale atrocities against a civilian population constitute genocide in violation of the 1948 Convention. Indeed the entire purpose of the Genocide Convention was “to prevent” another Nazi Holocaust against the Jews. That is why Article I of the Genocide Convention clearly provided: “The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.” Let me repeat that: “to prevent.” That’s what the Palestinian BDS Campaign is all about. That is why we are here tonight: “to prevent” the Zionist genocide against the Palestinians that is still going on today, including and especially in Gaza.

In support of my successful 1993 genocide arguments to the International Court of Justice for Bosnia, I submitted to the World Court that Article II of the Genocide Convention expressly provided: “In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such.” Let me repeat: “or in part.” In other words that to be guilty of genocide a state did not have to intend to destroy the whole group as the Nazis intended to do with the Jews. Rather a state can be guilty of genocide even if it intends to destroy a mere part of the group: “in whole or in part.”

Yugoslavia certainly intended to exterminate all the Bosnian Muslims if they could have gotten away with it as proven by their subsequent mass extermination of 7,000+ Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in July of 1995. I would later become the Attorney of Record for the Mothers of Srebrenica and Podrinja as well as for the Women of Srebrenica at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (I.C.T.Y.). In that capacity I convinced the I.C.T.Y. Prosecutor Carla del Ponte to indict Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic for almost every crime in the I.C.T.Y. Statute for atrocities he inflicted upon the Bosnians, including two counts of genocide: One count of genocide for Bosnia in general and the second count of genocide for Srebrenica in particular. Notice 7,000+ was enough to constitute genocide as far as the I.C.T.Y. Prosecutor was concerned. Milosevic died while on trial in The Hague after the I.C.T.Y. itself denied his Motion to Dismiss these charges after the close of the Prosecution’s case and sustained all of the charges against him including and especially the two counts of genocide: genocide in general in Bosnia, and genocide in particular against the 7,000+ Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica.^[i]

I argued to the World Court that at that point in time the best estimate we had was that Yugoslavia had exterminated about 250,000 Bosnians out of a population of about 4 million Bosnians including therein about 2.5 million Bosnian Muslims. Therefore, I argued to the World Court that these dead victims constituted a “substantial part of the group” and the appropriate interpretation of the words “in part” set forth in Article II of the Genocide Convention should be interpreted to mean a “substantial part.”

The World Court agreed with me overwhelmingly and emphatically rejected Rosenne’s specious, reprehensible, and deplorable arguments. So they issued their first Order to me on 8 April 1993 that Yugoslavia must cease and desist from committing all acts of genocide against the Bosnians, both directly and indirectly by means of their Serb surrogates. This was the international equivalent of the U.S. domestic temporary restraining order and injunction combined. The same was true for the second World Court Order with three additional measures of protection that I won for Bosnia and Herzegovina against Yugoslavia on 13 September 1993. The same was true for an Article 74, paragraph 4 Order I won for Bosnia against Yugoslavia from the World Court on 5 August 1993.

In its final Judgment on the merits in the Bosnia case issued in 2007, the World Court definitively agreed with me once and for all time that in order to constitute genocide a state must only intend to destroy a “substantial part” of the group as such. The state did not have to intend to destroy the entire group as Rosenne had argued, but only a “substantial part” as I had argued in 1993. So in other words based on these World Court rulings and also rulings by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, to find Israel guilty of genocide against the Palestinians it is not required to prove that Israel has the intention to exterminate all Palestinians. Rather all that is necessary is to establish that Israel intends to destroy a substantial part of the Palestinians. The Zionists have certainly done that: more recently, the first Intifada, the Al-Aqsa Intifada, Operation Cast Lead, Operation Protective Edge, etc. Furthermore, in paragraphs 293 and 294 of its 2007 Bosnian Judgment the World Court found that you did not even need 250,000 exterminated Bosnians to constitute genocide, let alone six million dead Jews. Rather even the 7,000+ exterminated Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica were enough to constitute genocide.

Starting in 1948 Israel obliterated 500 Palestinian villages from off the face of the earth, literally reducing them to rubble now scattered across the Palestinian countryside in order to prevent their ethnically cleansed inhabitants from ever again returning to their homes because their homes no longer exist. I have been all up and down Palestine and Israel myself. I have seen the ruins of these villages with my own eyes.

I protested such atrocities to the highest-ranking legal officer in charge of the military occupation of Palestine on the West Bank in his own office. When I said these are Nuremberg crimes that you are inflicting on the Palestinians, he pleaded the so-called defense of “necessity.” I responded that the “necessity” defense was rejected at the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1946 when the lawyers for the Nazis made those arguments at that time. Do you know what he told me? His words were: We have public relations people in the United States and they take care of these matters for us! So in other words he didn’t disagree with anything I was saying. He basically conceded it, but that it was all a matter of public relations here in the United States. Then I met with the Legal Adviser to the Foreign Ministry of Israel in his office. He gave me the exact same answer! Finally, I met with the relevant lawyer for the Ministry of Injustice in Israel in his office and he gave me this exact same answer too. They didn’t refute my arguments. Basically, they conceded them: What Israel is doing to the Palestinians are Nazi crimes! But all the Zionists care about is public opinion here in the United States. That is where you people come in. You must change public opinion here in the United States and BDS is the most effective way to do this!

The list of Zionist genocidal massacres of Palestinians is quite extensive. I won’t go through them all here today. To just name a few of Israel’s most notorious acts of genocide against the Palestinians: Deir Yassin, Tantura, Sabra and Shatila. I was the Attorney for several women who were next-of-kin of the 3,500 Palestinian old men, women, and children who were exterminated at Sabra and Shatila surrounded by the Israeli army and acting under the command of Israeli General Yaron whom I later sued for them.^[ii] Even the U.N. General Assembly determined that the massacre at Sabra and Shatilla was genocide.

To continue this Zionist list of genocide: Jenin, Nablus, and again repeatedly and continuously in Gaza. The Zionists are now threatening another series of acts of genocide against the people of Gaza as we speak today. To repeat: Israel is now deliberately inflicting on the 1.8 million Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction in whole or in part in gross and flagrant violation of Genocide Convention Article II(c) and the United States government supports this. Even the great Obama who was behind me at Harvard Law School supported it and did nothing to stop it. Of course, the word Trump speaks for itself!

Article I of the Genocide Convention requires: “The contracting parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.” And that is why we are here tonight: “to prevent” Zionist genocide against the Palestinians. It is clear that Netanyahu and his gang of criminals are trying to provoke yet another Intifada by the Palestinians so that they can slaughter them again just like the Zionists did in the Al-Aqsa Intifada.

Now that being said let me briefly review the history of the BDS Campaign. The Al-Aqsa Intifada was deliberately provoked by that war criminal and genocider Ariel Sharon at the Al-Aqsa Mosque. I have been on the Haram al-Sharif with Holy Al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock where Mohammed ascended to heaven. Sharon went up there with the approval of Prime Minister Barak and provoked the Palestinians and deliberately shot dead many of them trying to save and rescue Al-Aqsa.

As we speak here today the Palestinians at the Haram are trying to defend Al-Aqsa day in and day out from these fanatical Zionist Jewish settlers and religious fanatics who want to go in there and destroy Al-Aqsa and build their so-called Third Temple. This is a very dangerous situation. I kid you not! Now that Trump is President anything could happen. We could lose Al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock and the Haram to these fanatical religious Zionist Jews. That would have the full support of President Trump. I know of no restraint on this administration when it comes to the Palestinians!

So it seemed to me that with the provocation of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, even as determined and condemned by a U.N. Security Council Resolution, that the so-called peace process was over that I had started out with in 1991 with Dr. Haidar Abdul Shaffi. I can assure all of you that Dr. Abdul Shaffi was tough as nails at these peace negotiations. He would not compromise with the Zionists in terms of selling out the basic rights of the Palestinians under international law. Yes, we were prepared to make compromises but not at the expense of the basic rights of the Palestinians under international law. That story is told in my book Palestine, Palestinians, and International Law (2003). Dr. Abdul Shaffi kindly gave me permission to write about it. That analysis has been updated in my book Breaking All the Rules (2008). In addition, in my book The Palestinian Right of Return under International Law (2011) you will see press conferences by both Dr. Abdul Shaffi and Hanan Ashrawi that I moderated in Washington D.C. on the Palestinian Right of Return under Resolution 194, which Trump has said we’re going to take that off the table just as we’ve now taken Jerusalem off the table. Well if you read the Oslo Accords you will see that they state quite clearly that all “final status” issues remain open for negotiation including the Right of Return and Jerusalem. It is not for Trump to take any of these issues off the table. Even Israel signed the Oslo Accords under Rabin.

So it was clear to me that for both Labor and Likud – Tweedledum versus Tweedledee, I’ve dealt with lawyers and officials on both sides, and there’s no difference between the two – the peace negotiations were dead as a doornail. The second Al-Aqsa Intifada was on. My friend Professor Jamal Nassar, who at that time was Chair of the Political Science Department at Illinois State University, asked me to give a public lecture on this whole series of events, which I did do. In that lecture on 30 November 2000, I publicly issued an appeal for the establishment of an international campaign of divestment and disinvestment against Israel on the grounds and for the same reasons that we had a campaign of divestment and disinvestment against the criminal apartheid regime in South Africa. I was involved in large numbers of cases in this Campaign against South Africa defending anti-apartheid resisters. You can read about it in my book Defending Civil Resistance under International Law (1987), including obtaining the first acquittal ever of anti-apartheid protesters up in Chicago at the South African Consulate, Chicago v. Streeter (1985). We even made the New York Times on that one. I know apartheid when I see it. I’ve litigated it all over this country!

I issued this appeal for divestment and disinvestment against Israel for the same reasons we had against the criminal apartheid regime in South Africa, and what was going on by Israel was far worse than that. Now I won’t go through all the history here except to say the next major development was that the President of Harvard University – where I have three degrees – the die-hard Zionist Larry Summers publicly condemned those of us involved in the Harvard divestment/disinvestment campaign as anti-Semitic. What a coward and hypocrite!

Of course Summers is a die-hard Neo-Con Zionist and tried to impose his Neo-Con Zionist agenda on Harvard. Indeed, Harvard is so bad that my friend Edward Said was offered Harvard’s top honcho Chair in Comparative Literature and was not going to take it. So the Palestinians asked me to meet with Edward and convince him to take Harvard’s top honcho Chair in Comparative Literature. Edward had gotten his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard. I spent an entire evening at a Chinese restaurant on the campus of Columbia University trying to convince Edward to take Harvard’s top honcho Chair in Comparative Literature. Most professors would give their right arm for any Chair at Harvard. I spent a whole evening arguing with Edward. I can be quite persuasive. I got nowhere. Finally, Edward said to me that based on his personal experience at Harvard, that Harvard is so anti-Palestinian that it would thwart his intellectual creativity to go to Harvard! Now think about that! Edward Said, one of the great intellectuals in the world saying Harvard was so anti-Palestinian that it would thwart his intellectual creativity to go there. Of course Edward was right! And Harvard has become even more anti-Palestinian since Edward and I were students there decades ago.

So after Summers condemned me and the rest of us as anti-Semitic, WBUR Radio station in Boston, which is the NPR affiliate in Boston, called me up and asked me would you be willing to debate Summers for one hour live on the radio with call-ins? I said sure, I’d be happy to. They then called up Summers. He refused to debate me! He did not have the courage and the integrity and the principles to debate me. Well later Harvard fired Larry Summers for imposing his Zionist Neo-Con agenda even further on Harvard and his other scurrilous charge that women are dumber than men when it comes to math and science. Well as a triple Harvard alumnus I say good riddance to Larry Summers!

Then WBUR asked me would you debate Dershowitz? I said sure, I’m happy to debate Dershowitz. So Dershowitz and I had this debate. It was 25 September 2002.There is still a link on there on WBUR dealing with this scurrilous charge that those of us involved in the Harvard divestment/disinvestment campaign were anti-Semitic. Dershowitz is supposed to be the best lawyer the Zionists have to offer. I clobbered him. It was so bad that during the debate Dershowitz admitted that I was the expert on international law and human rights. Well at least Summers was smart enough not to debate me – unlike Dershowitz! By the way, Dershowitz is a war criminal. Yes, he admitted in an interview he gave to Law Professor Ali Khan that he was a member of an Israeli Committee that approves the murder and assassination of Palestinians. The murder and assassination of Palestinians violates the Geneva Conventions. It is a war crime. So the next time you see Dershowitz up there on TV just remember: One, I clobbered him; and two, he is a war criminal. Our WBUR debate on 25 September 2002 is the best debate out there refuting scurrilous charges that people involved in the BDS Campaign are anti-Semitic.

Now I won’t go through the rest of this history here except to say that in 2005 Palestinian Civil Society leaders contacted me and said they wanted to setup a Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) Campaign along the lines of the successful Campaign against apartheid South Africa. Would I go in with them? I said I would. So today we have the BDS Campaign: Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions. I am D in BDS and I’m happy to be here speaking with you this evening. As you know two weeks ago the BDS Campaign was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by a Norwegian Parliamentarian and the Nobel Peace Prize is given out in Norway. I think the BDS Campaign has at least an inside track perhaps on winning that Nobel Peace Prize. It’s always a crap shoot who wins those things. Maybe they will come through for the BDS Campaign. I don’t know.

But that brings us here today and tonight. What can you do here on the BDS Campaign for the University of Illinois and this surrounding community? We had a very active Campaign against the criminal apartheid regime in South Africa when I arrived here in 1978 and I immediately joined it. Again, I won’t go through the whole history of that here, including three of our students who were maliciously prosecuted by the University of Illinois simply for holding up signs in the Illini Union saying: “Divest Now!” Then they were subjected to a kangaroo court criminal prosecution over here in Champaign County by Judge Townshend. But that was it. Only three of them. They declined our offer to appeal. I thought we had a good chance to win on appeal. Instead they did some community service, were graduating seniors, and moved on with their lives. Indeed there was a law student also involved in the protests and the fascist Dean of our law school instituted disciplinary proceedings against him. I had to go in there and help defend him so that he could continue on with his legal career.

But in 1987 the University of Illinois Board of Trustees divested from the criminal apartheid regime in South Africa. Now think about that: 1987! There was a campaign. There was a struggle. But eventually we got the University of Illinois Board of Trustees to divest from the criminal apartheid regime in South Africa. And divestment took place all over the country. Northwestern University – I was involved in helping defend those students up there. Harvard partially, selectively divested. I was involved in helping defend the Harvard alumni there. The University of Chicago – my disAlma Mater where I got my undergraduate degree – a gang of die-hard racist bigoted Zionists for sure: they refused to divest and were proud of it. Certainly don’t go to the University of Chicago for any reason. Believe me!

But we divested here because of the student struggle. Well we did it before, we can do it again! My advice to you all then: set up a Committee. Go out! Read the back pages of the Daily Illini that covered our struggle against the criminal apartheid regime in South Africa here at the University of Illinois starting at least when I showed up in 1978 until 1987. Study the strategy and tactics that were used by the students for that struggle. It’s all there in the Daily Illini. And then come up with your own strategy and tactics to apply here, and those of you who graduate from here who go elsewhere use it there.

This is not a case of anyone reinventing the wheel here. We already have the wheel. Indeed, the legal arguments against the criminal apartheid regime in South Africa are all here in my book Defending Civil Resistance under International Law (1987), including the brief we filed in Chicago v. Streeter. And all the arguments against the genocidal apartheid regime in Israel are in my three books here: Palestine, Palestinians, and International Law (2003); Breaking All the Rules (2008); The Palestinian Right of Return under International Law (2011). So the legal arguments are all there. But we need you. We need organization. We need a strategy. We need action. Remember the 1.8 million Palestinians living in Gaza today are at risk. They are counting on us to come through for them! Thank you.

Answers to Questions

Refuting Charges of Anti-Semitism

During my career, Zionists have accused me of being everything but a child molester. It just comes with the territory. My response is that Zionists are more loyal to Israel than they are to the United States of America. That has been my experience since I entered the die-hard Neo-Con Zionist University of Chicago in 1968. So that is my usual response. Except if you wish you can hear this debate between Dershowitz and me. You know Dershowitz is Israel’s go-to-guy here in the United States. Whenever they want dirty work done they ask Dershowitz to do it. So you can hear that debate if you want. You’re going to have to develop the hide of the rhinoceros. Don’t let anyone intimidate you because of what’s at stake. If Zionists attack you, you say: You people are more loyal to Israel than you are to the United States! I’m a loyal American citizen. I’m exercising my First Amendment Rights. If you don’t like it, you can stuff it! Go to Israel!

Zionist Opposition to BDS

It’s too little and too late. I let this genie out of the bottle in 2000. I knew at that time it was going to spread like wildfire all over the United States and the world. So after many years of just ignoring the BDS Campaign, finally they’ve decided to set up a Ministry over there in Israel and launch this lawfare campaign. But they’re not winning. They’re losing across the board. So I think that you just need to keep soldiering on. Yes, you will be threatened. Indeed a group of Zionist members of the U.S. Congress filed a formal complaint with the Department of Commerce demanding that I be investigated and prosecuted just for exercising my First Amendment rights here as a U.S. citizen to set up that divestment/disinvestment Campaign. Nothing came of it.

You just have to be comfortable with who you are and move forward. Because right now I’m afraid that BDS is all the Palestinians have with Trump weighing in against them. It does not look good at all. The reports I have read of whatever his so-called Peace Plan is, it’s basically going to be a Surrender Plan. It’s sort of like the Godfather making an offer you can’t refuse with Luca Brazzi pointing a gun at your head and saying either your name will be on that paper or your brains will be on the table. I’m afraid that’s what they’re going to do to President Abbas. As we all know, that’s not going to work. I don’t think it’s going to work.

End of the Middle East Peace Process

I do want to say that based on my work at the Middle East Peace Negotiations from 1991 to 1993, we could have had peace. I was advising both the Palestinians and the Syrians. The Jordanians – everyone knew they wanted peace with Israel but they couldn’t go first and eventually there was a peace treaty with Jordan. Fine. At that time regretfully Lebanon was occupied by Syria courtesy of President Bush Senior, so the Lebanese did what the Syrians told them to do. But I knew both the Palestinian and the Syrian positions. Indeed I was drafting their papers. We could have had peace!

When Prime Minister Rabin came in, he signed the Oslo Accords and then he moved to negotiating a comprehensive peace treaty with Syria. That peace treaty was modeled on the peace treaty with Egypt: that is, full peace for full withdrawal from the territories Israel stole in 1967. That peace treaty was ready to go at the end of 1995, but Rabin held it back from the Knesset because an election was coming up. He did not want to make it part of an election issue. As you know he was murdered and assassinated by a religious fanatic with the support of Netanyahu and others of his ilk at that time. That was the end of the peace process. There has been no further development to speak of since Rabin’s murder and assassination. President Arafat said he lost his partner for peace when Rabin was murdered.

We Have Truth and Justice on Our Side!

As I see the BDS Campaign, we have Truth and Justice on our side! We just need to keep arguing Truth and Justice and bring it out to the American People. That’s what we did in the Campaign against the criminal apartheid regime in South Africa. We brought our arguments and our activities out to the American People.

As we all know Congress has been completely bought off by the Zionist Lobby, and the White House too these days as we now see it. So there’s no hope there either. We have to take our Campaign out to the American People and educate them. It’s hard work. That’s true. And not just education but also organization, action, protest, demonstrations.

Just look at how the students here at the University of Illinois accomplished this to get the University of Illinois Board of Trustees to divest. I can assure you that that criminal apartheid regime in South Africa that I was up against for all those years, they hired some of the top law firms and lobbying firms in this country to oppose what we were doing. But eventually they lost because we had Truth and Justice on our side. Today there is no apartheid regime in South Africa. Sure, they have their problems — we have a lot of problems here — but apartheid isn’t one of them. But it still is going to take a lot of hard work for us to get to that point for Israelis and Palestinians.

FAB

D in BDS.

************************************

sent by Francis Boyle – Jul 30, 2007

The Cowardice of Harvard’s Larry Summers

I’m not going to go through the subsequent history of the divestment/disinvestment movement, except to say that in the late summer of 2002 the President of Harvard, Larry Summers accused those of us Harvard alumni involved in the Harvard divestment campaign of being anti-Semitic.

After he made these charges, WBUR Radio Station in Boston, which is a National Public Radio affiliate, called me up and said: “We would like you to debate Summers for one hour on these charges, live.” And I said, “I’d be happy to do so.” They then called up Summers and he refused to debate me.

Summers did not have the courage, the integrity, or the principles to back up his scurrilous charges. Eventually Harvard fired Summers because of his attempt to impose his Neo-Conservative agenda on Harvard, and in particular his other scurrilous charge that women are dumber than men when it comes to math and science. Well as a triple Harvard alumnus I say: Good riddance to Larry Summers! (laughter).

Debating Dershowitz

WBUR then called me back and said, “Well, since Summers won’t debate you, would you debate Alan Dershowitz?” And I said, “Sure.” So we had a debate for one hour, live on the radio. And there is a link that you can hear this debate if you want to. I still think it’s the best debate out there on this whole issue of Israeli apartheid. Again that would be WBUR Radio Station, Boston, 25 September 2002.

The problem with the debate, of course, is that Dershowitz knows nothing about international law and human rights. So he immediately started out by saying “well, there’s nothing similar to the apartheid regime in South Africa and what Israel is doing to the Palestinians.”

Well the problem with that is that Dershowitz did not know anything at all about even the existence of the Apartheid Convention. That is our second Handout for tonight. [See Handout 2 reprinted below.]

The definition of apartheid is set out in the Apartheid Convention of 1973.

And this is taken from my book Defending Civil Resistance Under International Law, Trial Materials on South Africa, published in 1987, that we used successfully to defend anti-apartheid resistors in the United States. If you take a look at the definition of apartheid here found in Article 2, you will see that Israel has inflicted each and every act of apartheid set out in Article 2 on the Palestinians, except an outright ban on marriages between Israelis and Palestinians. But even there they have barred Palestinians living in occupied Palestine who marry Israeli citizens from moving into Israel, and thus defeat the right of family reunification that of course the world supported when Jews were emigrating from the Soviet Union.

Israel: An Apartheid State

Again you don’t have to take my word for it. There’s an excellent essay today on Counterpunch.org by the leading Israeli human rights advocate Shulamit Aloni saying basically: “Yes we have an apartheid state in Israel.” Indeed, there are roads in the West Bank for Jews only.

Palestinians can’t ride there and now they’re introducing new legislation that Jews cannot even ride Palestinians in their cars.

This lead my colleague and friend Professor John Duguard who is the U.N. Special rapporteur for human rights in Palestine to write an essay earlier this fall that you can get on Google, saying that in fact Israeli apartheid against the Palestinians is worse than the apartheid that the Afrikaners inflicted on the Blacks in South Africa. Professor Duguard should know.

He was one of a handful of courageous, white, international lawyers living in South Africa at the time who publicly and internationally condemned apartheid against Blacks at risk to his own life. Indeed, when I was litigating anti-apartheid cases on South Africa, we used Professor Duguard’s book on Human Rights and the South African Legal Order as the definitive work explaining what apartheid is all about.

So Professor Duguard has recently made this statement. Of course President Carter has recently made this statement in his book that Israel is an apartheid state. And certainly if you look at that definition of the Apartheid Convention, right there in front of you, it’s clear – there are objective criteria. Indeed if you read my Palestinian book I have a Bibliography at the end with the facts right there based on reputable human rights reports, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, etc. Many of them were also compiled and discussed by my friend Professor Norman Finklestein in his book Beyond Chutzpah, which I’d encourage you to read.

Francis A. Boyle

**********************************

On Point Radio – Sep 25, 2007 broadcast

Across the country, the push for divestment has spread to more than 40 campuses. The movement condemns Israel for human rights abuses against the Palestinians. Hundreds of big-name academics have signed on, but so far no university has moved to divest.

The current debate isn’t the first time divestment has been used on college campuses as a means to effect social and political change. In the 1980s, the South African divestment campaign helped end apartheid.

Do you see parallels with the apartheid debate? Has Israel become a trendy target?

Guests:

Francis Boyle, professor of international law at The University of Illinois College of Law

Alan Dershowitz, professor at Harvard Law School

Taufiq Rahim, student at Princeton University

9 October 2023

By Al Jazeera Staff

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has claimed tens of thousands of lives and displaced many millions of people and has its roots in a colonial act carried out more than a century ago.

With Israel declaring war on the Gaza Strip after an unprecedented attack by the armed Palestinian group Hamas on Saturday, the world’s eyes are again sharply focused on what might come next.

Hamas fighters have killed more than 800 Israelis in assaults on multiple towns in southern Israel. In response, Israel has launched a bombing campaign in the Gaza Strip, killing more than 500 Palestinians. It has mobilised troops along the Gaza border, apparently in preparation for a ground attack. And on Monday, it announced a “total blockade” of the Gaza Strip, stopping the supply of food, fuel and other essential commodities to the already besieged enclave in an act that under international law amounts to a war crime.

But what unfolds in the coming days and weeks has its seed in history.

For decades, Western media outlets, academics, military experts and world leaders have described the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as intractable, complicated and deadlocked.

Here’s a simple guide to break down one of the world’s longest-running conflicts:

What was the Balfour Declaration?

• More than 100 years ago, on November 2, 1917, Britain’s then-foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, wrote a letter addressed to Lionel Walter Rothschild, a figurehead of the British Jewish community.
• The letter was short – just 67 words – but its contents had a seismic effect on Palestine that is still felt to this day.
• It committed the British government to “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” and to facilitating “the achievement of this object”. The letter is known as the Balfour Declaration.
• In essence, a European power promised the Zionist movement a country where Palestinian Arab natives made up more than 90 percent of the population.
• A British Mandate was created in 1923 and lasted until 1948. During that period, the British facilitated mass Jewish immigration – many of the new residents were fleeing Nazism in Europe – and they also faced protests and strikes. Palestinians were alarmed by their country’s changing demographics and British confiscation of their lands to be handed over to Jewish settlers.

How Israel Was Created

What happened during the 1930s?

• Escalating tensions eventually led to the Arab Revolt, which lasted from 1936 to 1939.
• In April 1936, the newly formed Arab National Committee called on Palestinians to launch a general strike, withhold tax payments and boycott Jewish products to protest British colonialism and growing Jewish immigration.
• The six-month strike was brutally repressed by the British, who launched a mass arrest campaign and carried out punitive home demolitions, a practice that Israel continues to implement against Palestinians today.
• The second phase of the revolt began in late 1937 and was led by the Palestinian peasant resistance movement, which targeted British forces and colonialism.
• By the second half of 1939, Britain had massed 30,000 troops in Palestine. Villages were bombed by air, curfews imposed, homes demolished, and administrative detentions and summary killings were widespread.
• In tandem, the British collaborated with the Jewish settler community and formed armed groups and a British-led “counterinsurgency force” of Jewish fighters named the Special Night Squads.
• Within the Yishuv, the pre-state settler community, arms were secretly imported and weapons factories established to expand the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary that later became the core of the Israeli army.
• In those three years of revolt, 5,000 Palestinians were killed, 15,000 to 20,000 were wounded and 5,600 were imprisoned.

What was the UN partition plan?

• By 1947, the Jewish population had ballooned to 33 percent of Palestine, but they owned only 6 percent of the land.
• The United Nations adopted Resolution 181, which called for the partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states.
• The Palestinians rejected the plan because it allotted about 56 percent of Palestine to the Jewish state, including most of the fertile coastal region.
• At the time, the Palestinians owned 94 percent of historic Palestine and comprised 67 percent of its population.

The 1948 Nakba, or the ethnic cleansing of Palestine

• Even before the British Mandate expired on May 14, 1948, Zionist paramilitaries were already embarking on a military operation to destroy Palestinian towns and villages to expand the borders of the Zionist state that was to be born.
• In April 1948, more than 100 Palestinian men, women and children were killed in the village of Deir Yassin on the outskirts of Jerusalem.
• That set the tone for the rest of the operation, and from 1947 to 1949, more than 500 Palestinian villages, towns and cities were destroyed in what Palestinians refer to as the Nakba, or “catastrophe” in Arabic.
• An estimated 15,000 Palestinians were killed, including in dozens of massacres.
• The Zionist movement captured 78 percent of historic Palestine. The remaining 22 percent was divided into what are now the occupied West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip.
• An estimated 750,000 Palestinians were forced out of their homes.
• Today their descendants live as six million refugees in 58 squalid camps throughout Palestine and in the neighbouring countries of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt.
• On May 15, 1948, Israel announced its establishment.
• The following day, the first Arab-Israeli war began and fighting ended in January 1949 after an armistice between Israel and Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.
• In December 1948, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 194, which calls for the right of return for Palestinian refugees.

The years after the Nakba

• At least 150,000 Palestinians remained in the newly created state of Israel and lived under a tightly controlled military occupation for almost 20 years before they were eventually granted Israeli citizenship.
• Egypt took over the Gaza Strip, and in 1950, Jordan began its administrative rule over the West Bank.
• In 1964, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) was formed, and a year later, the Fatah political party was established.

The Naksa, or the Six-Day War and the settlements

• On June 5, 1967, Israel occupied the rest of historic Palestine, including the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Syrian Golan Heights and the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula during the Six-Day War against a coalition of Arab armies.
• For some Palestinians, this led to a second forced displacement, or Naksa, which means “setback” in Arabic.
• In December 1967, the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine was formed. Over the next decade, a series of attacks and plane hijackings by leftist groups drew the world’s attention to the plight of the Palestinians.
• Settlement construction began in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. A two-tier system was created with Jewish settlers afforded all the rights and privileges of being Israeli citizens whereas Palestinians had to live under a military occupation that discriminated against them and barred any form of political or civic expression.

The first Intifada 1987-1993

• The first Palestinian Intifada erupted in the Gaza Strip in December 1987 after four Palestinians were killed when an Israeli truck collided with two vans carrying Palestinian workers.
• Protests spread rapidly to the West Bank with young Palestinians throwing stones at Israeli army tanks and soldiers.
• It also led to the establishment of the Hamas movement, an off-shoot of the Muslim Brotherhood that engaged in armed resistance against the Israeli occupation.
• The Israeli army’s heavy-handed response was encapsulated by the “Break their Bones” policy advocated by then-Defence Minister Yitzhak Rabin. It included summary killings, closures of universities, deportations of activists and destruction of homes.
• The Intifada was primarily carried out by young people and was directed by the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising, a coalition of Palestinian political factions committed to ending the Israeli occupation and establishing Palestinian independence.
• In 1988, the Arab League recognised the PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinian people.
• The Intifada was characterised by popular mobilisations, mass protests, civil disobedience, well-organised strikes and communal cooperatives.
• According to the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem, 1,070 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces during the Intifada, including 237 children. More than 175,000 Palestinians were arrested.
• The Intifada also prompted the international community to search for a solution to the conflict.

The Oslo years and the Palestinian Authority

• The Intifada ended with the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 and the formation of the Palestinian Authority (PA), an interim government that was granted limited self-rule in pockets of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.
• The PLO recognised Israel on the basis of a two-state solution and effectively signed agreements that gave Israel control of 60 percent of the West Bank, and much of the territory’s land and water resources.
• The PA was supposed to make way for the first elected Palestinian government running an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip with its capital in East Jerusalem, but that has never happened.
• Critics of the PA view it as a corrupt subcontractor to the Israeli occupation that collaborates closely with the Israeli military in clamping down on dissent and political activism against Israel.
• In 1995, Israel built an electronic fence and concrete wall around the Gaza Strip, snapping interactions between the split Palestinian territories.

The second Intifada

• The second Intifada began on September 28, 2000, when Likud opposition leader Ariel Sharon made a provocative visit to the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound with thousands of security forces deployed in and around the Old City of Jerusalem.
• Clashes between Palestinian protesters and Israeli forces killed five Palestinians and injured 200 over two days.
• The incident sparked a widespread armed uprising. During the Intifada, Israel caused unprecedented damage to the Palestinian economy and infrastructure.
• Israel reoccupied areas governed by the Palestinian Authority and began construction of a separation wall that along with rampant settlement construction, destroyed Palestinian livelihoods and communities.
• Settlements are illegal under international law, but over the years, hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers have moved to colonies built on stolen Palestinian land. The space for Palestinians is shrinking as settler-only roads and infrastructure slice up the occupied West Bank, forcing Palestinian cities and towns into bantustans, the isolated enclaves for Black South Africans that the country’s former apartheid regime created.
• At the time the Oslo Accords were signed, just over 110,000 Jewish settlers lived in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Today, the figure is more than 700,000 living on more than 100,000 hectares (390sq miles) of land expropriated from the Palestinians.

The Palestinian division and the Gaza blockade

• PLO leader Yasser Arafat died in 2004, and a year later, the second Intifada ended, Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip were dismantled, and Israeli soldiers and 9,000 settlers left the enclave.
• A year later, Palestinians voted in a general election for the first time.
• Hamas won a majority. However, a Fatah-Hamas civil war broke out, lasting for months, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of Palestinians.
• Hamas expelled Fatah from the Gaza Strip, and Fatah – the main party of the Palestinian Authority – resumed control of parts of the West Bank.
• In June 2007, Israel imposed a land, air and naval blockade on the Gaza Strip, accusing Hamas of “terrorism”.

The wars on the Gaza Strip

• Israel has launched four protracted military assaults on Gaza: in 2008, 2012, 2014 and 2021. Thousands of Palestinians have been killed, including many children, and tens of thousands of homes, schools and office buildings have been destroyed.
• Rebuilding has been next to impossible because the siege prevents construction materials, such as steel and cement, from reaching Gaza.
• The 2008 assault involved the use of internationally banned weaponry, such as phosphorus gas.
• In 2014, over a span of 50 days, Israel killed more than 2,100 Palestinians, including 1,462 civilians and close to 500 children.
• During the assault, called Operation Protective Edge by the Israelis, about 11,000 Palestinians were wounded, 20,000 homes were destroyed and half a million people displaced .

9 October 2023

Source: aljazeera.com

By Israel Shahak and Prof Michel Chossudovsky

Update and Analysis
.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched “Operation Al-Aqsa Storm.” which was led by its Military Chief Mohammed Deif.  On that same day, Netanyahu confirmed a so-called “State of Readiness For War”. Israel has now (October 7, 2023) officially declared a new stage of its long war against the people of Palestine.

Military operations are invariably planned well in advance (See Netanyahu’s January 2023 statement below). Was “Operation Al-Aqsa Storm” a “surprise attack” ?

U.S. intelligence say they weren’t aware of an impending Hamas attack.

Did Netanyahu and his vast military and intelligence apparatus (Mossad et al) have foreknowledge of the Hamas attack which has resulted in countless deaths of Israelis and Palestinians.

Was a carefully formulated Israeli plan to wage an all out war against Palestinians envisaged prior to the launching by Hamas of  “Operation Al-Aqsa Storm”? This was not a failure of Israeli Intelligence, as conveyed by the media. Quite the opposite.

Evidence and testimonies suggest that the Netanyahu government had foreknowledge of the actions of Hamas which have resulted in hundreds of Israeli and Palestinian deaths. And “They Let it Happen”:

“Hamas fired between 2-5 thousand rockets at Israel and hundreds of Israeli are dead, while dozens of Israelis were captured as prisoners of war. In the ensuing air response by Israel, hundreds of Palestinians were killed in Gaza.” (Stephen Sahiounie)

Following the Al Aqsa Storm Operation on October 7, Israel‘s defence minister described Palestinians as “human animals” and vowed to “act accordingly,” as fighter jets unleashed a massive bombing of the Gaza Strip” (Middle East Eye).

A complete blockade of the Gaza Strip was initiated on October 9, 2023 consisting in  preventing and obstructing the importation of food, water, fuel, and essential commodities to 2.3 Million Palestinians. It’s an outright crime against humanity.

Was “Operation Al-Aqsa Storm” a “surprise attack”? Did Netanyahu and his vast military and intelligence apparatus (Mossad et al) have foreknowledge of the Hamas attack? Was it a false flag?

Netanyahu’s “New Stage” of “The Long War” against Palestine

Netanyahu’s stated objective, which constitutes a new stage in the 75 year old war (since Nakba, 1948, see below) against the people of Palestine is no longer predicated on “Apartheid” or “Separation”. This new stage –which is also directed against Israelis who want peace– consists in “total appropriation” as well as the outright exclusion of the Palestinian people from their homeland.

The current Netanyahu government is committed to the “Greater Israel” and the “Promised Land”, namely the biblical homeland of the Jews.

Benjamin Netanyahu is pressing ahead to formalize “Israel’s colonial project”, namely the appropriation of all Palestinian Lands.

His position defined below several months prior to the October 7, 2023 “State of Readiness For War” consists in total appropriation as well as the outright exclusion of the Palestinian people from their homeland:

“These are the basic lines of the national government headed by me: The Jewish people have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas of the Land of Israel. The government will promote and develop settlement in all parts of the Land of Israel — in the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan, Judea and Samaria.” (January 2023)

History: The Relationship between Mossad and Hamas

“Operation Al Acqsa Storm” (OAAS): Was Hamas acting on behalf of the People of Palestine?

What is the relationship between Mossad and Hamas? Is Hamas an “intelligence asset”? There is a long history.

Hamas (Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya) (Islamic Resistance Movement), was founded in 1987 by Sheik Ahmed Yassin. It was supported at the outset by Israeli intelligence as a means to weaken the Palestinian Authority:

“Thanks to Mossad, (Israel’s “Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks”), Hamas was allowed to reinforce its presence in the occupied territories. Meanwhile, Arafat’s Fatah Movement for National Liberation as well as the Palestinian Left were subjected to the most brutal form of repression and intimidation.

Let us not forget that it was Israel, which in fact created Hamas. According to Zeev Sternell, historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, “Israel thought that it was a smart ploy to push the Islamists against the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO)”. (L’Humanité, translated from French)

The links of Hamas to Mossad and US intelligence have been acknowledged by Rep. Ron Paul in a statement to the U.S Congress: “Hamas Was Started by Israel”?

“You know Hamas, if you look at the history, you’ll find out that Hamas was encouraged and really started by Israel because they wanted Hamas to counteract Yasser Arafat… (Rep. Ron Paul, 2011)

What this statement entails is that Hamas is and remains “an intelligence asset”, namely “an “asset” which serves the interests of intelligence agencies.

See also the WSJ (January 24, 2009) “How Israel helped to Spawn Hamas”.

Instead of trying to curb Gaza’s Islamists from the outset, says Mr. Cohen, Israel for years tolerated and, in some cases, encouraged them as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah. (WSJ, emphasis added)

The Nakba

Commemoration on May 13, 2023: The Nakba. 75 years ago on May 13, 1948. The Palestinian Catastrophe prevails. In a 2018 report, the United Nations stated that Gaza had become “unliveable”:

With an economy in free fall, 70 per cent youth unemployment, widely contaminated drinking water and a collapsed health care system, Gaza has become “unliveable”,[in 2018] according to the Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian Territories”

The above UN assessment dates back to 2018. Under Netanyahu, Israel is currently proceeding with the plan to annex large chunks of Palestinian territory “while keeping the Palestinian inhabitants in conditions of severe deprivation and isolation.“

Creating conditions of extreme poverty and economic collapse constitute the means for triggering the expulsion and exodus of Palestinians from their homeland. It is part of the process of annexation.

“If the manoeuvre is successful, Israel will end up with all of the territories it conquered during the 1967 war, including all of the Golan Heights and Jerusalem and most of the Palestinian Territories, including the best sources of water and agricultural land.

The West Bank will find itself in the same situation as the Gaza strip, cut off from the outside world and surrounded by hostile Israeli military forces and Israeli settlements.” (South Front)

Human rights ended at the Palestinian border. The bought and paid for US Congress couldn’t genuflect enough:

“On July 19, 2023 the US Congress convened a special joint session for Israeli President Isaac Herzog. Both Democrats and Republicans bobbed up and down to applaud him 29 times.”

” Watching Palestine Disappear”, Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, September 12, 2023

“Greater Israel would create a number of proxy states. It would include parts of Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, the Sinai, as well as parts of  Iraq and Saudi Arabia.”

“Palestine Is Gone! Gone! راحت فلسطين . The Palestinian plight is savagely painful and the pain is compounded by the bafflingly off-hand dismissal and erasure by Western powers of that pain, Rima Najjar, Global Research, June, 7, 2020 

Michel Chossudovsky,  June 10, 2021, July 19, 2023, September 19, 2023, October 11, 2023

Michel Chossudovsky is an award-winning author, Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa, Founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal, Editor of Global Research. He is also one of JUST’s International Advisory Panel Members.

Source: globalresearch.ca

By Caitlin Johnstone

To accept the persecution of Julian Assange is to accept the idea that all media everywhere must function as propaganda organs of the US government.

5 Oct 2023 – As the 17th anniversary of the creation of WikiLeaks passes us by, it’s probably worth taking a moment to reflect on Julian Assange and what his persecution means for us and our society.

Because in a very real sense, it’s not just a man locked up in Belmarsh Prison for the crime of good journalism — it’s journalism itself. It’s the idea that anyone should be permitted to expose the criminality of the world’s most powerful and tyrannical people. It’s the idea that the public should be allowed to know what abuses the US empire is committing around the world.

Julian Assange is the world’s greatest journalist. By revolutionizing source protection for the digital age with the creation of WikiLeaks 17 years ago and then going on to break some of the biggest stories of the 21st century, Assange set himself head and shoulders above any other living reporter anywhere on earth. And by showing the world that they can lock up the world’s greatest journalist for revealing inconvenient truths, they are showing the world that they can lock up anyone.

That’s what this case has always been about. It’s not about whether Assange crossed some arbitrary procedural line when working with Chelsea Manning to expose US war crimes. It’s not about the US protecting its national security. It’s not about any of the other justifications people have put forward to excuse their sycophantic support for the persecution of a journalist for doing journalism. It’s about setting a legal precedent that will allow the US empire to extradite anyone anywhere in the world who reveals inconvenient facts about it. It’s about showing all journalists everywhere that if they can do it to the greatest among them, they can do it to any of them. And, like so much else in the world today, it’s about narrative control.

To accept the persecution of Julian Assange is to accept the idea that all media everywhere must function as propaganda organs of the US government. It’s to take it as a given that any journalist anywhere in the world who decides to do real journalism and expose inconvenient facts about the powerful in the public interest should be jailed until they can be extradited to the United States for a show trial, and then left to rot in one of the most draconian prison systems on the planet. It’s to accept that we will never live in a truth-based society guided by facts and information, and must forever resign ourselves to living in a society dominated by the whims of the powerful.

Your position on the Assange case is therefore your position on what kind of society we should hope to live in, and what kind of future we should hope to have. In a very real way, it’s your position on humanity itself.

Should humanity try to create a better world, or should we keep plunging into dystopia until we are driven into nuclear war or environmental catastrophe by rulers we are forbidden to question? Do we want to move into the light, or into the darkness? Your position on Assange shows your answer to these questions, and shows which course you want us to take.

Caitlin Johnstone is a rogue journalist, poet, and utopia prepper who publishes regularly at Medium.

9 October 2023

Source: transcend.org

By Caitlin Johnstone

Skillful manipulators make frequent use of a cognitive bias known as the illusory truth effect, a glitch in the way human minds tend to operate which makes it hard for us to differentiate between the experience of hearing a well-evidenced fact and the experience of hearing something that we’ve heard repeated multiple times.

8 Oct 2023 – We’re seeing the western political/media class bleating the word “unprovoked” in unison again, this time in reference to the massive multi-pronged operation launched by Hamas against Israel on Saturday [7 Oct] morning which reportedly killed hundreds of Israelis.

“The United States unequivocally condemns the unprovoked attacks by Hamas terrorists against Israeli civilians,” reads a statement from the White House.

“The loss of life in Israel as a result of the violent, calculated and unprovoked attack by Hamas is heartbreaking,” reads a statement by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

“The unprovoked terror attack today and the murders of innocent Israeli citizens are a stark reminder of the brutality of Hamas and Iran-backed extremists,” reads a statement by congressman and house speaker contender Jim Jordan.

“This ignominious, unprovoked, and barbaric attack on Israel must be met with world condemnation and unequivocal support for the Jewish state’s right to self-defense,” tweeted presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr.

“This is an ‘unprovoked attack on civilians’: Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg,” reads a recent Fox News report.

“Unprovoked aggression by Hamas terrorists,” reads a tweet by former secretary of state Mike Pompeo.

“I forcefully condemn these cowardly, horrifying, unprovoked attacks on Israel by Hamas,” tweeted congressman John Fetterman.

“These attacks by Hamas against Israel were heinous and unprovoked,” tweeted Senator Mark Kelly.

“As a steadfast supporter and ally of Israel, I unequivocally condemn the unprovoked and unprecedented terrorist attack launched by Hamas and stand with the people of Israel as it rightly defends itself,” tweeted congressman Richie Torres.

“The unprovoked attacks on Israel by Hamas through Gaza and via air and sea, are absolutely a terrorist attack,” tweeted Democratic Party pundit Ed Krassenstein.

“I unequivocally condemn Hamas’ horrific, unprovoked attacks and call on all parties to take steps to prevent civilian harm,” tweeted congresswoman Sara Jacobs.

I could cite many, many more examples, but I think that’s enough to make the point I’m trying to make. Isn’t it strange seeing the same oddly specific word choice inserted over and over and over again about the same event in statements by politicians and pundits, regardless of their political affiliation? When you lay them all out together it starts to sound highly suspicious, like someone always referring to his car as “my car, which I did not steal,” or always introducing his spouse as “my wife, whom I do not beat.”

It’s clear by now that whenever you see the word “unprovoked” being forcefully repeated in a uniform way across the entire political/media class, whatever they’re talking about was definitely massively provoked.

We saw this exact same thing when Russia invaded Ukraine; from the very beginning western politics and media were saturated with the word “unprovoked”, bashing the western public in the face with that message over and over and over again despite the obvious and undeniable fact that the war in Ukraine was most definitely provoked.

As Noam Chomsky quipped last year, “Of course, it was provoked. Otherwise, they wouldn’t refer to it all the time as an unprovoked invasion.”

And the same is of course true of the latest Hamas offensive. There are all kinds of arguments you could legitimately make about it, but one argument you definitely cannot defend is that it was unprovoked. As Palestinian-American writer and comedian Amer Zahr put it on Twitter, “75 years of ethnic cleansing. 15 years of blockade. Confiscation of Palestinian lands. Pogroms on Palestinian towns. Desecration of Palestinian sacred sites. Daily raids into Palestinian homes. Constant humiliation of a entire people. Nothing about today is ‘unprovoked.’”

Calling Palestinian violence against Israel “unprovoked” is easily even more ridiculous than calling the Russian invasion unprovoked, because the abuses of Israeli apartheid are so well-known by the general public at this point. Multiple mainstream human rights organizations have accused Israel of administering an abusive apartheid regime which treats Palestinians as lesser people. Palestinians who live in the open-air prison known as Gaza are deliberately subjected to undrinkable water, food shortages, energy shortages and bombing campaigns. Those outside Gaza are subjected to racist, violent policing and land seizure and live under a different set of laws than Jewish Israelis. The entire people were forced out of their homes to make way for a new state for reasons that had nothing to do with them, and any attempt to resist this has seen them killed as “terrorists”.

Of course the attack was provoked.

The Illusion of Truth

Isn’t it odd that the western political/media class would begin uniformly asserting something so easily disprovable? So transparently false? Why would they keep choosing over and over and over again in each instance to make use of that specific word “unprovoked” in their condemnations of the attacks by Hamas?

The answer is that this choice is not so much something they are saying as something they are doing. They’re not attempting to communicate with their audiences, they’re attempting to circumvent the critical thinking of their audience and trick them into accepting a blatant falsehood as true.

Skillful manipulators make frequent use of a cognitive bias known as the illusory truth effect, a glitch in the way human minds tend to operate which makes it hard for us to differentiate between the experience of hearing a well-evidenced fact and the experience of hearing something that they’ve heard repeated multiple times. If you want the public to believe something false you won’t be able to use facts and evidence to make your case to them, so what you can do is just repeat something over and over again until it starts sounding like the truth. Repeat the lie enough times and boom, you’ve perception-managed westerners into viewing the world from an understanding that Israel did nothing to provoke Palestinians into their actions.

After the news broke about the Hamas offensive I tweeted,

“Here come days and days of western news media slyly reversing the aggressor-defender relationship and reporting as though the violence began with the Hamas offensive, spontaneously out of nowhere.”

But even I wasn’t expecting the perception management to be this brazen.

Caitlin Johnstone is a rogue journalist, poet, and utopia prepper who publishes regularly at Medium.

9 October 2023

Source: transcend.org

By Oren Ziv

In mere months, entire Palestinian communities between Ramallah and Jericho have been chased out by settler violence and state policies — paving the way for a total Israeli takeover of thousands of acres of land.

3 Sep 2023 – There are almost no Palestinians remaining in a vast area stretching east from Ramallah to the outskirts of Jericho. Most of the communities who lived in the area — which covers around 150,000 dunams, or 150 square kilometers, of the occupied West Bank — have fled for their lives in recent months as a result of intensifying Israeli settler violence and land seizures, backed by the Israeli army and state institutions. The near-total emptying of the region’s Palestinian population shows how Israel’s slow but gradual process of ethnic cleansing is continuing apace, effectively annexing large swathes of the occupied territory for exclusive Jewish settlement.

By Brett Wilkins

“Netanyahu made clear with his little map what normalization really seeks: eliminating Palestine… from the region and legitimizing greater Israel, all with the blessing of Arab regimes,” one critic said.

22 Sep 2023 – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu angered Palestinians and their defenders today after presenting a map of “The New Middle East” without Palestine during his speech to the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

Speaking to a largely empty chamber, Netanyahu—whose far-right government is widely considered the most extreme in Israeli history—showed a series of maps, including one that did not show the West Bank, East Jerusalem, or Gaza. These Palestinian territories have been illegally occupied by Israel since 1967, with the exception of Gaza—from which Israeli forces withdrew in 2005, while maintaining an economic stranglehold over the densely populated coastal strip.

Middle East Eye reported Netanyahu also held up a map of “Israel in 1948″—the year the modern Jewish state was established, largely through the ethnic cleansing of more than 750,000 Arabs—that erroneously included the Palestinian territories as part of Israel.

Palestinian Ambassador to Germany Laith Arafeh said on social media that there is “no greater insult to every foundational principle of the United Nations than seeing Netanyahu display before the UNGA a ‘map of Israel’ that straddles the entire land from the river to the sea, negating Palestine and its people, then attempting to spin the audience with rhetoric about ‘peace’ in the region, all the while entrenching the longest ongoing belligerent occupation in today’s world.”

As Middle East Eye noted:

The inclusion of Palestinian lands (and sometimes land belonging to Syria and Lebanon) in Israeli maps is common among believers of the concept of Eretz Yisrael—Greater Israel—a key part of ultra-nationalist Zionism that claims all of these lands belong to a Zionist state.

Earlier this year, Netanyahu’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, spoke from a podium adorned with a map that also included Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria as part of Greater Israel. In the same event, he said there was “no such thing as Palestinians.”

The use of such maps by Israeli officials comes at a time when Netanyahu’s ultra-nationalist government has taken steps that experts say amount to the “de jure annexation” of the occupied West Bank.

Netanyahu used the maps in an attempt to illustrate the increasing number of Arab countries normalizing relations with Israel under the Abraham Accords brokered by the administration of former U.S. President Donald Trump.

“There’s no question the Abraham Accords heralded the dawn of a new age of peace,” the Israeli prime minister said. “But I believe that we are at the cusp of an even more dramatic breakthrough, an historic peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia will truly create a new Middle East.”

Critics have countered that peace between apartheid Israel and Arab dictatorships has come at the cost of advancing Palestinian rights. In the case of Morocco, the United States recognized the North African nation’s illegal annexation and brutal occupation of Western Sahara in exchange for normalization with Israel.

Netanyahu’s props on Friday reminded numerous observers of the time during his 2012 General Assembly speech when he used a cartoon drawing of a bomb to illustrate Iran’s progress on advancing a nuclear weapons program that both U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies said did not exist.

Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

9 October 2023

Source: transcend.org

By Mansoor Durrani

7 Oct 2023 – After 70 years of Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands; after 50 years of Arab-Israeli Yom Kuppar War; and after 9 months of “low intensity” Israeli violence that killed over 250 Palestinian civilians in the Israeli occupied lands in the first 9 months of 2023 alone, something unprecedented happened around 6:00am local time today!

By Matthew Ehret

The recent dissolution of Nagorno Karabakh and the Armenia embrace of a US-led world order represent something much larger than either small country and have everything to do with destabilizing the largest, and arguably most strategic, mega-project in Eurasia connecting the Russian Arctic to Iran and India.

4 Oct 2023 – Efforts to light geopolitical fires across Russia’s underbelly have been relentless in recent years (with a failed color revolution in Kazakhstan in January 2022, a renewed color revolution effort in Georgia in March of this year, clashes between neighboring Kyrgyzstan-Tajikistan in 2022, ongoing threats of color revolution in Serbia, threats to blow up Transnistria in Moldova, and the obvious fire in Ukraine).

Amidst all of these arson attempts, one thing is certain, the technocrats managing the collapsing western death cult are obsessed with kicking over the chess board using every dirty trick in the book.

Introducing The International North South Transportation Corridor

Until recently, the primary trade route for goods passing from India to Europe has been the maritime shipping corridor passing through the Bab El-Mandeb Strait linking the Gulf of Aden to the Red Sea, via the highly bottlenecked Suez Canal, through the Mediterranean and onward to Europe via ports and rail/road corridors.

Following this western-dominated route, average transit times take about 40 days to reach ports of Northern Europe or Russia. Geopolitical realities of the western technocratic obsession with global governance have made this NATO-controlled route more than a little unreliable.

On top of that, Russia remains one of the most important global suppliers of oil, natural gas, fertilizers and grain – but with the NATO/EU clown show increasingly sabotaging access to Russian goods, new connections are desperately needed to avoid plunging the world into a chain reaction collapse.

Despite being far from complete, goods moving across the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC) from India to Russia have already finished their journey 14 days sooner then their Suez-bound counterparts while also seeing a whopping 30 percent reduction in total shipping costs.

These figures are expected to fall further as the project progresses. Most importantly, the INSTC would also provide a new basis for international win-win cooperation much more in harmony with the spirit of geo-economics unveiled by China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013.

Doing Business Without Killing Your Customers

Originally agreed upon by Russia, Iran, and India in September 2000, the INSTC only began moving in earnest in 2002 – albeit much more slowly than its architects had hoped.

This 7,200 km multimodal megaproject involves integrating several Eurasian nations directly or indirectly with rail, roads, and shipping corridors into a united and tight-knit web of interdependency. Along each artery, opportunities to build energy projects, mining, and high tech special economic zones (SEZs) will abound giving each participating nation the economic power to lift their people out of poverty, increase their stability and their national power to chart their own destinies.

Beyond the founding three nations, the other 10 states who have signed onto this project over the years include Armenia, Georgia, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Oman, Syria and even Ukraine (although this last member may not remain on board for long). In recent months, India has officially invited Afghanistan and Uzbekistan to join too.

While western think tanks and geopolitical analysts attempt to frame the INSTC as an opponent to China’s BRI, the reality is that both systems are extremely synergistic on multiple levels.

Unlike the West’s speculation-driven bubble economy, both the BRI and INSTC define economic value and self-interest around improving the productivity and living standards of the real economy. While short term thinking predominates in the myopic London-Wall Street paradigm, the BRI and INSTC investment strategies are driven by long-term thinking and mutual self-interest.

It is no small irony that such policies once animated the best traditions of the West before the rot of unipolar thinking took over and the West lost its moral compass.

An Integrated Alternative

The INSTC’s two major bookends are the productive zone of Mumbai, in India’s Southeast region of Gujarat, and the northern-most Arctic port of Lavna in Russia’s Kola Peninsula of Murmansk.

This is not only the first port constructed by Russia in decades, but when completed, will be one of the world’s largest commercial ports with an expected capacity to process 80 million tons of goods by 2030.

The Lavna Port is an integral part of Russia’s Arctic and Far East Development vision and is a central piece to Russia’s current Comprehensive Plan for Modernization and Expansion of Main Infrastructure and its Northern Sea Route which is expected to see a five-fold increase of Arctic freight traffic over the coming years. These projects are integrally linked to China’s Polar Silk Road.

Between these bookends, the INSTC moves freight from India into Iran’s Port of Bandar Abbas where it is loaded onto double-tracked rail to the Iranian city of Bafq and then to Tehran before coming to the Anzali Port on the southern Caspian Sea.

Because the INSTC is based on a flexible design concept capable of adapting to a changing geopolitical environment (very much like the BRI), there are a multitude of connecting lines that branch off the main North-South artery before goods make it to the Caspian Sea.

These include an eastern and western corridor branching off from the city of Bafq towards Turkey and thence Europe via the Bosporus and also eastward from Tehran to Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and thereafter into Urumqi in China.

The Strategic Importance Of Railways

From the Anzali Port in the north of Iran, goods may travel by the Caspian Sea towards Russia’s Astrakhan Port where it is then loaded onto trains and trucks for transport to Moscow, St. Petersburg and Murmansk. Inversely, goods may also travel over land to Azerbaijan where the 35 km Iran Rasht-Caspian railway is currently under construction with 11 km completed as of this writing.

Once completed, the line will connect the Port of Anzali with Azerbaijan’s Baku, offering goods a chance to either continue onwards to Russia or westward toward Europe. A Tehran-Baku rail route already exists.

Additionally, Azerbaijan and Iran are currently collaborating on a vast $2 billion rail line connecting the 175 km Qazvin-Rasht railway which began operations in 2019 with a strategic rail line connecting Iran’s Rasht port on the Caspian to the Bandar Abbas Complex in the south (to be completed in 2025). Sergey Pavlov, First Deputy Managing Director of Russian Railways stated in March 2023: “The Ministry of Transport is preparing two intergovernmental agreements: Iran-Russia and trilateral Azerbaijan-Russia-Iran.”

In recent months, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has lobbied to incorporate the joint Iran-India built Chabahar Port into the INSTC which will likely occur since another 628 km rail line from the port to the Iranian city of Zahedan is currently under construction.

Since 2014, a vast rail and transportation complex has grown around the co-signers of the Ashkabat Agreement (launched in 2011 and upgraded several times over the past decade). These rail networks include the 917.5 km Iran-Turkmenistan-Kazakhstan route launched in 2014, and Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Tajikistan rail/energy project launched in 2016 which is currently seeing extensions that could easily go into Pakistan.

In December 2021, the 6540 km Islamabad to Istanbul rail line (via Iran) recommenced operations after a decade of inaction. This route cuts the conventional sea transit route time of 21 days by half. Discussions are already underway to extend the line from Pakistan into China’s Xinjiang Province linking the INSTC ever more closely into the BRI on yet another front.

Finally, June 2022 saw the long-awaited unveiling of the 6108 km Kazakhstan-Iran-Turkey rail line which provides an alternative route to the under-developed Middle Corridor. Celebrating the inaugural 12 day voyage of cargo, Kazakhstan’s President Kasym-Jomart Tokayev stated:

“Today, we welcomed the container train, which left Kazakhstan a week ago. Then it will go to Turkey. This is a significant event, given the difficult geopolitical conditions.”

Under these dynamics the long overdue Southern Armenian Railway could be built providing the missing 316 km link of the North-South Transport Corridor between the Black Sea and Persian Gulf. This project involves an incredible 84 bridges (19.6 km) and 60 tunnels (102.3 km) through the mountainous terrain ultimately connecting the Persian Gulf’s main artery to Europe with vast benefits for all nations and people involved.

The INSTC, BRI, and other great infrastructure projects would not only create new relationships and open up new markets over the course of many years, but would also provide the basis for new industries, increased productive potential and incredible investment potentials for all interests regardless of religious, ethnic, or other differences which imperialists have sought to exploit for eons.

Unfortunately if the Soros puppet president of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan (installed during a color revolution in 2018) is successful at sabotaging the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union and Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO), while embracing NATO, then these prospects for Eurasian integration might go up in flames.

Matthew Ehret is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, a  journalist, and co-founder of the Rising Tide Foundation.

9 October 2023

Source: transcend.org

By Maung Zarni,

Dear Friends,

I know no rational discussion is conceivable between the Colonized and the Colonizer. There is no shared humanity, nor moral foundations between these two sets of populations.
That much we know from history. Situations of categorical and absolute bondage are no dialogic matters.

As the freedman Federic Douglas pointedly wrote, “power never concedes. It never has, and it never will.”

What is most outrageous and morally most repugnant – far more than another Global Powers are including the brutish Russia and China- is the United States as the most imperialist rogue power has for decades given Israel – now officially The Jewish State – a blanket impunity.

When the Wretched of Palestine fight back their occupying Colonizers, they are “terrorists”, or worse.

I may have lost several close Jewish friends over the last few days, including some genocide scholars and fellow leftists

Friendship (or career or even my life) has never been as important to me as my Conscience.

So, it’s not my loss. I am nobody, in the grand scheme of things, without Power, Influence or Status to shape global public opinion.

But I feel this deep existential need to raise my tiny voice. Whether it’s heard or heeded by any other human is not my concern.

I speak – and live – my conscience. I hope you do too.

Not a good time for the 2-million Palestinians.

11 October 2023

Maung Zarni is a Burmese educator, academic, and human rights activist. He is noted for his opposition to the violence in Rakhine State and Rohingya refugee crisis.