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By Mazin Qumsiyeh

11 Nov 2023 – The Israeli government just downgraded the number of those killed in October 7 attack to 1200 from 1400. Haaretz Newspaper was able to name less than 980 (some yet to be identified). George Galloway wrote: “The foul allegations of rape have been dropped by the Israeli government. The forty beheaded babies has been downscaled to one dead baby, not beheaded, and killed by persons unknown.” Does the truth of what happened on October 7 matter? Yes it does because it is used to justify an ongoing genocide (of course nothing justifies genocide even exaggerated and fabricated stories). But why do many western leaders and western media parrot Israeli lies and not just about 7 October but for the past 75 years of committing atrocities against a largely defenseless Palestinian population? DOES THE TRUTH MATTER? The links below are a glimpse of the overwhelming body of evidence about Israeli/Zionist lies. You be the judge. In the end I will say why this is important if not CRITICAL to achieve peace.

The Zionist movement literally threw Palestinians into the sea (loading boats in Haifa and Jaffa) in 1948 to sent them to Lebanon and Gaza, Only AFTER this ethnic cleansing, they came up with the lie that Palestinians were going to throw Jews into the sea (see http://qumsiyeh.org/sharingthelandofcanaan/).

From these early lies sprung many others over the past 75 years. A book should be written about this as it is the most remarkable set of orchestrated lies in the history of global colonization. Here are some information and links from ongaza.org about lies and then I add a comment on why these lies will contribute to the end of the Israeli apartheid regime. Since western media puppets always start with the events of October 7, ignore history, ignore lies, and ignore preplanned and executed genocide, we can start with 7 October.lies about Hamas atrocities (beheading 40 babies, raping women, burning people alive etc.):
https://thegrayzone.com/2023/10/27/israels-military-shelled-burning-tanks-helicopters/
https://new.thecradle.co/articles/what-really-happened-on-7th-october
see also Why is Israel trying to HIDE this hostage interview?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HugMS0k0kB4
https://www.jta.org/2023/10/16/israel/i-decided-to-play-dead-my-son-is-still-missing-a-survivors-account-from-kibbutz-nir-oz
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20231030-report-7-october-testimonies-strikes-major-blow-to-israeli-narrative/
https://electronicintifada.net/content/israeli-forces-shot-their-own-civilians-kibbutz-survivor-says/38861
https://mondoweiss.net/2023/10/hostages-how-the-u-s-media-is-distorting-the-news-from-palestine/
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/no-proof-of-beheaded-israeli-babies-white-house-backtracks-on-bidens-comments-breaking
https://fair.org/home/unconfirmed-beheaded-babies-report-helped-justify-israeli-slaughter/

Fabricating a picture of a burnt baby https://www.facebook.com/mazin.qumsiyeh.9/posts/pfbid0471gNBRhrK4iySTFbvt5qNvet6GMgywH7TdUnRsqVw7G1UWgdAA6y9SjsFjGHBnol

Israeli forces shot at their own civilians
https://electronicintifada.net/content/israeli-forces-shot-their-own-civilians-kibbutz-survivor-says/38861
also look up Hannibal doctrine.There were false flag operations like the Lavon Affair, or the bombing of Jewish community centers in Iraq to blame it on locals and scare Iraqi Jews to leave their country. Hasbara (propaganda) is a very common Zionist tactic to advance their project of colonization. During the October 2023 incidents Israeli leaders lied about Hamas killing and beheading babies, about Israeli soldiers killing Israeli citizens, or even about wanting peace and set the stage for ongoing genocide.

The Lavon Affair: Israel and Terror in Egypt http://www.mideastweb.org/lavon.htm
Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew (about Israel’s false flag operations targeting Jews to drive them out of Iraq) https://books.google.ps/books?id=XTWUEAAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/avi-shlaim-proof-israel-zionist-involvement-iraq-jews-attacks
Israel killed an American citizen and lied about it https://edition.cnn.com/2022/05/24/middleeast/shireen-abu-akleh-jenin-killing-investigation-cmd-intl/index.html
This UN report on the shelling of a UN Compound that killed civilians (Qana massacre 1996 that contradict Israeli lies).https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N96/117/52/IMG/N9611752.pdf
https://youtu.be/ergrmLKmv7IThe current prime Minister Netanyahu is well known for lying to foreigners. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz (7/15/01) reported that: “… giving his audience (Likud leaders) a bit of advice on how to deal with foreign interviewers (Benjamin Netanyahu said): ‘Always, irrespective of whether you’re right or not, you must always present your side as right’”.
In private and thinking he is not taped, he gives a more candid assessment of where he stands: https://www.facebook.com/mazin.qumsiyeh.9/posts/10160919216451181
https://twitter.com/trtworld/status/1711750682733355146

Israel’s history of lies
https://imeu.org/article/fact-sheet-israels-history-of-spreading-disinformation
Israel lies to manufacture a case for genocide

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/10/12/israel-is-manufacturing-a-case-for-genocide

By Richard Falk

Published in Middle East Eye on 3 Nov 2023 with the title “Israel-Palestine war: Israel’s endgame is much more sinister than restoring ‘security.’”

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3 Nov 2023 – UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres was recently pilloried by Israel because he stated a truism, observing that the 7 October Hamas attack “did not happen in a vacuum”.

Guterres was calling the world’s attention to Israel’s long record of severe criminal provocations in occupied Palestine, which have been occurring ever since it became the occupying power after the 1967 war.

The occupier, a role expected to be temporary, is entrusted in such circumstances with upholding international humanitarian law by ensuring the security and safety of the occupied civilian population, as spelled out in the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Israel reacted so angrily to Guterres’ entirely appropriate and accurate remarks because they could be interpreted as implying that Israel “had it coming” in view of its severe and varied abuses against people in the occupied Palestinian territories, most flagrantly in Gaza, but also in the West Bank and Jerusalem.

After all, if Israel could present itself to the world as an innocent victim of the 7 October attack – an incident that was itself replete with war crimes – it could reasonably hope to gain carte blanche from its patrons in the West to retaliate as it pleased, without being bothered by the restraints of international law, UN authority, or common morality.

Indeed, Israel responded to the 7 October attack with its typical skill in manipulating the global discourse that shapes public opinion and guides the foreign policies of many important countries. Such tactics seem almost superfluous here, as the US and EU swiftly issued blanket approval for whatever Israel did in response, however vengeful, cruel or unrelated to restoring Israeli border security.

Guterres’s UN speech had such a dramatic impact because it punctured Israel’s balloon of artfully constructed innocence, in which the terror attack came out of the blue. This exclusion of context diverted attention from the devastation of Gaza and the genocidal assault on its overwhelmingly innocent, and long-victimised, population of 2.3 million.

Extraordinary lapses

What I find strange and disturbing is that, despite the consensus that the Palestinian fighters’ attack became feasible only because of extraordinary lapses in Israel’s supposedly second-to-none intelligence capabilities and tight border security, this factor has rarely been discussed since that day.

Instead of the morning after being filled with vengeful fury, why wasn’t the focus within Israel and elsewhere on taking emergency action to restore Israeli security by correcting these costly lapses, which would seem to be the most effective way to assure that nothing comparable to 7 October could happen again?

I can understand Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s reluctance to stress this explanation or advocate this form of response, as it would be tantamount to a confession of his personal co-responsibility for the tragedy traumatically experienced by Israel at its supposedly impenetrable border.

But what of others in Israel, and among its supporting governments? Undoubtedly, Israel is in all likelihood devoting all means at its disposal, with a sense of urgency, to close these incredible gaps in its intelligence system, and to beef up its military capabilities along Gaza’s comparatively short borders.

It is not necessary to be a security wonk to conclude that dealing reliably with these security issues would do more to prevent and deter future Palestinian fighters attacks, than this ongoing saga of inflicting devastating punishment on the Palestinian population of Gaza, very few of whom are involved with the military wing of Hamas.

Genocidal fury

Netanyahu has lent further plausibility to such speculation by presenting a map of the Middle East without Palestine included, effectively erasing Palestinians from their own homeland, during a September UN speech, where he spoke of a new peace in the Middle East amid the prospect of Israel-Saudi Arabia normalisation. His presentation amounted to an implicit denial of the UN consensus on the two-state formula as a roadmap for peace.

Meanwhile, the genocidal fury of Israel’s response to the Hamas attack is enraging people across the Arab world, and indeed the world over, even in western countries. But after more than three weeks of merciless bombardment, total siege and mass forced displacement, Israel’s discretion to unleash this torrent of violence on Gaza has yet to be challenged by its western supporters.

The US in particular is backing Israel at the UN, using its veto as needed in the Security Council, and voting with almost no solidarity from major countries against a ceasefire at the General Assembly. Even France voted for the General Assembly resolution, and the UK had the minimal decency to abstain, both likely reacting pragmatically to the populist pressures mounted by large and angry street demonstrations at home.

It has also been forgotten in reacting to Israel’s tactics in Gaza that from day one, the extremist government has initiated a shocking series of violent provocations across the occupied West Bank. Many have interpreted this undisguised unleashing of settler violence as part of the endgame of the Zionist project, aimed at achieving victory over the remnants of Palestinian resistance.

There is little reason to doubt that Israel deliberately overreacted to 7 October by immediately engaging in a genocidal response, particularly if its purpose was to divert attention from the escalation of West Bank settler violence, exacerbated by the government’s distribution of guns to “civilian security teams”.

The Israeli government’s ultimate plan seems to be to end once and for all UN partition fantasies, lending authority to the Zionist maximalist goal of annexation or total subjugation of West Bank Palestinians. In effect, as morbid as it seems, the Israeli leadership seized the occasion of 7 October to “finish the job” by committing genocide in Gaza, under the guise that Hamas was such a danger as to justify not only its destruction, but this indiscriminate onslaught against the whole population.

My analysis leads me to conclude that this ongoing war is not primarily about security in Gaza or security threats posed by Hamas, but rather about something much more sinister and absurdly cynical.

Israel has seized this opportunity to fulfill Zionist territorial ambitions amid “the fog of war” by inducing one last surge of Palestinian catastrophic dispossession. Whether it is called “ethnic cleansing” or “genocide” is of secondary importance, although it already qualifies as the predominant humanitarian catastrophe of the 21stcentury.

In effect, the Palestinian people are being victimised by two convergent catastrophes: one political, the other humanitarian.

Richard Falk is a member of the TRANSCEND Network, Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, Chair of Global Law, Faculty of Law, at Queen Mary University London, Research Associate the Orfalea Center of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Fellow of the Tellus Institute.

13 November 2023

Source: transcend.org

By Jeremy Corbyn

We need a ceasefire. The existence of the Palestinian people is at stake.

 6 Nov 2023 – My last visit to Al-Shati refugee camp was early 2013. Located on the Mediterranean coast in the north of Gaza, Al-Shati was otherwise known as “Beach Camp”. Vendors sold fruit under multi-coloured parasols. Cats slept in the middle of narrow alleys. Children jostled over skipping rope in the shade.

Beach Camp was established in 1948 after 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced in the Nakba. Initially, the camp accommodated around 23,000 refugees. In the following seven decades, that number grew to 90,000, cramped inside 0.5 square kilometres (0.2 square miles) of land – 70 times more populated than London’s city centre.

People in Gaza have been living under a blockade for the past 16 years and the Israeli occupation controls most of what goes in and out of Gaza. Beach Camp was no different – and people there largely relied on aid and services from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) to survive, including a health centre, a food distribution centre and several school buildings.

Beach Camp Primary School was beautifully maintained. I was allowed up onto the roof, where I could see the fence with Israel on one side. Out to sea were several Israeli patrol boats keeping Palestinian fishermen from sailing more than six nautical miles out.

The school was run by inspiring and hard-working teachers, whose philosophy was to create a calm atmosphere for discovery, music, theatre and art. Some of the students showed me their work. Many were drawings of planes, fences and bombs. But there were other drawings too: of their parents, their brothers, their sisters and their friends. All of the children, obviously, had underlying trauma, but they also had a desire to learn, share and play.

On October 9, two days after the deplorable attack by Hamas in southern Israel, there were reports of an Israeli air strike on Beach Camp. This wasn’t the first strike on the camp. In May 2021, at least 10 Palestinians, eight of whom were children, were killed in an air strike. Nor was it the last. Beach Camp has been repeatedly targeted in the past three weeks.

When I hear news of bombardment in Gaza, I think about that school at Beach Camp. I don’t know if it is still there. I don’t know if those children and teachers are still alive. I don’t know.

The Israeli army has dropped 25,000 tonnes of bombs onto a tiny strip of land, populated by 2.3 million people. There is no meaningful sense whatsoever that they are trying to avoid civilian deaths. More than 9,900 people in Gaza have been killed, including more than 4,800 children.

Survivors still under siege are running out of the basic means of survival: water, fuel, food and medical supplies. Doctors are performing surgery without anaesthesia. Mothers are watching their babies fight for survival in incubators running out of electricity. People are being forced to drink seawater. More than 1 million people have been displaced from their homes.

The attack by Hamas, which killed 1,400 Israelis and took 200 hostages, was utterly appalling and must be condemned. The victims and hostages are young people who wanted to listen to music. They are nieces and nephews. They are jewellery designers. They are factory workers. They are peace campaigners. The pain and anguish that their families feel will last forever.

This cannot justify the indiscriminate bombing and starvation of the Palestinian people, who are being punished for a heinous crime they did not commit. In the aftermath of horror, we need voices for de-escalation and peace. Instead, politicians around the world continue to give the Israeli government the green light to starve and slaughter the Palestinian people in the name of self-defence.

Every person in Gaza has a name and a face; we grieve for babies in incubators just as deeply as we grieve for middle-aged men killed crossing the road. In any case, we are mourning the theft of beautiful, creative lives. Artists whose paintings we will never see. Singers whose songs we will never sing. Authors whose books we will never read. Chefs whose kunafa we will never eat. Teachers whose lessons we will never learn.

For as long as I can remember, Gaza has been reduced on our TV screens to a site of debris and despair, but underneath the rubble are the quiet, unremarkable foundations of our shared humanity. Morning coffee rounds, hot showers, shopping trips, card games and bedtime stories. Friendship, heartbreak, love, disappointment, boredom and suspense. Schools, mosques, theatres, universities, libraries, playgrounds and hospitals. Hopes, dreams, fears, cares and joys. We are not just witnessing mass death. We are witnessing the erasure of an entire culture, an identity and a people.

The International Criminal Court defines genocide according to several criteria. Genocide can be committed by killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction, imposing measures intended to prevent births, or by forcibly transferring children. In each case, there must be an intention to destroy, in whole or in part, a particular national, ethnic, racial or religious group.

On November 2, seven UN Special Rapporteurs said they “remain convinced that the Palestinian people are at grave risk of genocide”. This followed the resignation of Craig Mokhiber, the Director of the UN’s office in New York, who characterised the horrors in Gaza as a “textbook case of genocide” aimed toward “the expedited destruction of the last remnants of indigenous life in Palestine”.

In his resignation letter, he referenced the “wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people…based entirely upon their status as Arabs”, as well as the continuing seizure of homes in the West Bank. He highlighted the “explicit statements of intent by leaders in the Israeli government and military”.

He did not cite a specific statement, perhaps because there are too many to fit in one letter. He could have been referring to Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir who posted that “as long as Hamas does not release the hostages in its hands – the only thing that needs to enter Gaza are hundreds of tons of explosives from the Air Force, not an ounce of humanitarian aid”. Or perhaps he was referring to Galit Distel Atbaryan, an MP from Israel’s ruling Likud party, who called for Gaza to be “erased from the face of the earth”.

Genocide is a term that should be used carefully. There are many horrors in history that are hideous enough on their own terms without warranting that label. The term has a legal definition, a legal basis and legal implications. That is why, when international experts in this field warn us about genocide, we should sit up and listen. And that is why we need an immediate ceasefire, followed by an urgent investigation by the International Criminal Court.

The ICC should not just investigate the crime of genocide, but every single war crime committed by all parties over the past month. The UK government has the authority and responsibility to call for this investigation. So far, it has refused to call out the atrocities unfolding before our very eyes. Blackouts in Gaza may be temporary, but impunity is permanent and our government continues to give the Israeli army the cover it needs to commit its crimes in darkness.

We will carry on demonstrating as long as it takes to bring about a ceasefire. To secure the release of hostages. To stop the siege of Gaza. And to end the occupation. We make these demands because we know what is at stake: the curiosity, creativity and kindness of the Palestinian people.

I remember, on our way home from the school, we passed a food-growing project. The project had purchased 50 hectares of a former Israeli settlement. All the buildings had been destroyed by those who had since departed – and Palestinians had turned the debris into a cooperative farm. Soon, I was told, olives and fruits would grow.

I will never give up hope that these olives and fruits will grow. The people of Gaza have lent me their joy, empathy and humanity. One day, I hope I can give it back to them – in a free and independent Palestine.

Jeremy Corbyn – Member of UK Parliament for Islington North. He is the former leader of the UK Labour Party and a human rights advocate.

13 November 2023

Source: transcend.org

By Vijay Prashad

On September 9, 2023, during the G20 meeting in New Delhi, the governments of seven countries and the European Union signed a memorandum of understanding to create an India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor. Only three of the countries (India, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates or the UAE) would be directly part of this corridor, which was to begin in India, go through the Gulf, and terminate in Greece. The European countries (France, Germany, and Italy) as well as the European Union joined this endeavor because they expected the IMEC to be a trade route for their goods to go to India and for them to access Indian goods at, what they hoped would be, a reduced cost.

The United States, which was one of the initiators of the IMEC, pushed it as a means to both isolate China and Iran as well as to hasten the normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. It seemed like a perfect instrument for Washington: sequester China and Iran, bring Israel and Saudi Arabia together, and deepen ties with India that seemed to have been weakened by India’s reluctance to join the United States in its policy regarding Russia.

Israel’s war on the Palestinians in Gaza has changed the entire equation and stalled the IMEC. It is now inconceivable for Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to enter such a project with the Israelis. Public opinion in the Arab world is red-hot, with inflamed anger at the indiscriminate bombardment by Israel and the catastrophic loss of civilian life. Regional countries with close relations with Israel—such as Jordan and Turkey—have had to harden their rhetoric against Israel. In the short term, at least, it is impossible to imagine the implementation of the IMEC.

Pivot to Asia

Two years before China inaugurated its “One Belt, One Road” or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the United States had already planned a private-sector-funded trade route to link India to Europe and to tighten the links between Washington and New Delhi. In 2011, then U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a speech in Chennai, India, where she spoke of the creation of a New Silk Road that would run from India through Pakistan and into Central Asia. This new “international web and network of economic and transit connections” would be an instrument for the United States to create a new intergovernmental forum and a “free trade zone” in which the United States would be a member (in much the same way as the United States is part of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation or APEC).

The New Silk Road was part of a wider “pivot to Asia,” as U.S. President Barack Obama put it. This “pivot” was designed to check the rise of China and to prevent its influence in Asia. Clinton’s article in Foreign Policy (“America’s Pacific Century,” October 11, 2011) suggested that this New Silk Road was not antagonistic to China. However, this rhetoric of the “pivot” came alongside the U.S. military’s new AirSea Battle concept that was designed around direct conflict between the United States and China (the concept built on a 1999 Pentagon study called “Asia 2025” which noted that “the threats are in Asia”).

Two years later, the Chinese government said that it would build a massive infrastructure and trade project called “One Belt, One Road,” which would later be called the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Over the next ten years, from 2013 to 2023, the BRI investments totaled $1.04 trillion spread out over 148 countries (three-quarters of the countries in the world). In this short period, the BRI project has made a considerable mark on the world, particularly on the poorer nations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where the BRI has made investments to build infrastructure and industry.

Chastened by the growth of the BRI, the United States attempted to block it through various instruments: the América Crece for Latin America and the Millennium Challenge Corporation for South Asia. The weakness in these attempts was that both relied upon funding from an unenthusiastic private sector.

Complications of the IMEC

Even before the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, IMEC faced several serious challenges.

First, the attempt to isolate China appeared illusory, given that the main Greek port in the corridor—at Piraeus—is managed by the China Ocean Shipping Corporation, and that the Dubai Ports have considerable investment from China’s Ningbo-Zhoushan port and the Zhejiang Seaport. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are now members of the BRICS+, and both countries are participants in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

Second, the entire IMEC process is reliant upon private-sector funding. The Adani Group—which has close ties to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and has come under the spotlight for fraudulent practices—already owns the Mundra port (Gujarat, India) and the Haifa port (Israel), and seeks to take a share in the port at Piraeus. In other words, the IMEC corridor is providing geopolitical cover for Adani’s investments from Greece to Gujarat.

Third, the sea lane between Haifa and Piraeus would go through waters contested between Turkey and Greece. This “Aegean Dispute” has provoked the Turkish government to threaten war if Greece goes through with its designs.

Fourth, the entire project relied upon the “normalization” between Saudi Arabia and Israel, an extension of the Abraham Accords that drew Bahrain, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates to recognize Israel in August 2020. In July 2022, India, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States formed the I2U2 Group, with the intention, among other things, to “modernize infrastructure” and to “advance low-carbon development pathways” through “private enterprise partnerships.” This was the precursor of IMEC. Neither “normalization” with Saudi Arabia nor advancement of the I2U2 process between the UAE and Israel seem possible in this climate. Israel’s bombardment of the Palestinians in Gaza has frozen this process.

Previous Indian trade route projects, such as the International North-South Trade Corridor (with India, Iran, and Russia) and the Asia-Africa Growth Corridor (led by India and Japan), have not gone from paper to port for a host of reasons. These, at least, had the merit of being viable. IMEC will suffer the same fate as these corridors, to some extent due to Israel’s bombing of Gaza but also due to Washington’s fantasy that it can “defeat” China in an economic war.

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

10 November 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Kathy Kelly

The Biden Administration must demand a full ceasefire, not a temporary pause, to stop the violence.

Operation Cast Lead, an Israeli aerial assault and massacre of  Gazans begun on December 27, 2008, lasted for 22 days. The Israeli military deployed its navy, air force and army against the people living in Gaza, using U.S.-supplied weapons and killing 1,383 Palestinians, of whom 333 were children.

I remember a doctor at the Al Shifa hospital, after a ceasefire was declared, shaking with anger and remorse as he told me that for 22 days the world watched while the incalculable affliction of Gaza went on and on. Most of his patients, he said, were women, children, grandparents.

Carrying our press passes from Counterpunch,  I and Audrey Stewart, a human rights worker, walked into Gaza at the Rafah border crossing, which at the time was the only Gazan border crossing not controlled by Israel. We were sandwiched between correspondents working for the New York Times and the LA Times. A human rights activist in Cairo had arranged for Audrey and me to stay with a family in Rafah, the residential area the crossing opened into. Overnight, bombs could explode like clockwork, once every eleven minutes, from 11 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. and then again from 3:00 a.m. – 6:00 a.m. Yusuf, a bright child and the family’s oldest, explained to Audrey and me the difference between explosions caused when an Apache Helicopter fired a Hellfire missile and the sounds of 500 lb. bombs dropped by F-16 fighter jets. Yusuf at the time was seven years old.

When the ceasefire was declared, Yusuf’s mother sank into a chair and murmured, “Can you imagine? This is the first time I breathe in all these 22 days, – I was so frightened for my children.”  Yusuf lost no time in going out to organize neighborhood children who were soon dragging a large tarp through alleys and along roadways, seeking twigs and branches they could bring to their families for fuel.

Meanwhile, Mohammad, his younger brother, playfully imitated an airplane flying in circles, after which he would dive into his father’s lap as, seated in a circle, we all shared breakfast.

Four years later, following another Israeli aerial attack against Gaza, I had a chance to again visit the family in Rafah. The children were proud of how their father organized relief work to help children traumatized by the bombings and siege. Gaza’s access to food, fuel, basic medicines, even clean water for washing or drinking, would continue to constrict under Israeli pressure over those years in which Yusuf and Mohammad would, eventually, become husbands and fathers themselves, still assisting the family efforts to share resources and care for increasingly desperate neighbors.

This month, Mohammad is dead. On October 12, while he was sleeping, his building was attacked by an Israeli warplane so that it collapsed, crushing him to death. I don’t know if his own children were with him, but countless others took hours or days to die in the rubble, as the region starved for fuel with which a rescue effort might have been undertaken.  An estimated 10,000 people have been killed. 4,104 Gazan children, utterly innocent, have suffered tortuous deaths in just the recent month of atrocity.

Calling for a “pause” in the bombing rather than a full ceasefire is hideously cruel and unmistakably futile. Allow some relief to go in, a few of the maimed and wounded to go out, and then resume the bombing and the starvation blockade?  President Joe Biden must call for a cease-fire, writes Professor Emeritus Mel Gurtov, “in order to save lives, including those of the hostages and Gaza’s population.” Who will benefit if the slaughter, instead, continues? Certainly, the weapon manufacturers’ profits will soar, assured of a sustained intensification of violence across the region and perhaps across the world.

On November 12, launching at 8pm Central time, the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal, which  multiple activists have spent the last year preparing, will officially convene.  It will aim to hold four major military contractors – Boeing, Lockheed Martin, RTX (Raytheon) and General Atomics – accountable for any war crimes and crimes against humanity they may be found to have committed.

I hold myself accountable for not having done more to stop the ongoing, and now horrifically intensified, carnage enacting monumental collective punishment on innocent Palestinians, including the children who make up half of Gaza’s population.

Recently, former U.S. President Barack Obama admitted that “nobody’s hands are clean … all of us are complicit to some degree.” We all, and not just the leaders we’ve failed to restrain, have unforgivable blood on our hands, but I’m mindful of young Afghans who repeatedly told us, over the past decade, that “blood doesn’t wash away blood.”

We’ve no excuse, none whatsoever, for not raising our voices resoundingly, thunderously, clamoring for a Ceasefire, Now.

Kathy Kelly (kathy.vcnv@gmail.com) is the board president of World BEYOND War (worldbeyondwar.org)and a co-coordinator of the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal. (merchantsofdeath.org)

10 November 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By P.S. Sahni & Shobha Aggarwal

The Zionist state of Israel; Imperialist America; erstwhile colonial rulers UK,   France; and former Nazi Germany are collectively responsible for the ongoing 24×7 slaughtering of children in Gaza Strip in full view of the public; TV channels; international aid agencies – UN, UNICEF, WHO.

These five heads of states have been seen near the site of the crime Gaza-Israel territories post October 7 assault and four of them have provided arms and ammunition to Israel as a part of the plan viz final solution for the Palestinians. All of these butchers are history-sheeters as their track record of the past few centuries would reveal. The sheer audacity of these butchers turning a deaf ear to the collective voice of the UN and the international community demanding a ceasefire; lifting of siege; and a permanent solution to the Palestine-Israel dispute lead to the following conclusions:

1. The heads of these five butcher states masquerading around as elected representatives of western democracies – should be examined by an independent panel of medical experts including psychiatrists regarding their state of mental health and their ability to take correct, just and balanced decisions affecting humanity.In the interest of justice & fair-play they should be offered institutional treatment. It is obvious they would not voluntarily come for examination or treatment.
2. If these five heads of the states are found to be medically fit, they deserve to be facing Nuremberg-II trials now or even 100 years later. There is no limitation prescribed to try crimes of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity in international laws.

True the power these butcher states enjoy presently comes to their rescue; but power equations change with time and cases could be pursued even a century later. Article 1 of the “Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity” adopted by the United Nations General Assembly resolution 2391 (XXIII) of 26 November 1968 states:

“No statutory limitation shall apply to the following crimes, irrespective of the date of their commission:

(a) War crimes as they are defined in the Charter of the International Military Tribunal, Nürnberg, of 8 August 1945 and confirmed by resolutions 3 (I) of 13 February 1946 and 95 (I) of 11 December 1946 of the General Assembly of the United Nations, particularly the “grave breaches” enumerated in the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949 for the protection of war victims;

(b) Crimes against humanity whether committed in time of war or in time of peace as they are defined in the Charter of the International Military Tribunal, Nürnberg, of 8 August 1945 and confirmed by resolutions 3 (I) of 13 February 1946 and 95 (I) of 11 December 1946 of the General Assembly of the United Nations, eviction by armed attack or occupation and inhuman acts resulting from the policy of apartheid, and the crime of genocide as defined in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, even if such acts do not constitute a violation of the domestic law of the country in which they were committed.”

The International Criminal Court (ICC) set up in this century has jurisdiction over the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole, namely genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, when committed after 1 July 2002. Article 5 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court states:

“Crimes within the jurisdiction of the Court

The jurisdiction of the Court shall be limited to the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole. The Court has jurisdiction in accordance with this Statute with respect to the following crimes:

(a) The crime of genocide;

(b) Crimes against humanity;

(c) War crimes;

(d) The crime of aggression.”

Further Article 29 of the Rome Statute states:

“Non-applicability of statute of limitations

The crimes within the jurisdiction of the Court shall not be subject to any statute of limitations.”

Media reports indicate that the ICC has begun investigating war crimes perpetrated in the Gaza Strip by Israel since 7 October 2023. The UK, France and Germany have ratified the Rome Statute. The ICC recognised Palestine as its member in 2015. Even though the USA and Israel are signatories to the Rome Statute they have not ratified it yet! Anyways an International Criminal Tribunal on the lines of the ‘International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda’ and the ‘International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia’ can be established.

[P.S. Sahni is a qualified orthopaedic surgeon.

Shobha Aggarwal is an independent legal researcher and lawyer.

10 November 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Gideon Polya

Genocidally racist Zionists from Zionism’s psychopathic founder Theodor Herzl to present war criminal Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu have explicitly stated that they want all the land of Palestine but not its Indigenous Palestinian inhabitants. Below is a convenient Summary for peace and human rights activists of  the century-long Palestinian Genocide from British-ruled Palestine to neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel’s present US Alliance-backed and genocidal Gaza Massacre.

By a macabre coincidence 2023 marks the 100th anniversary of the League of Nations grant of a Palestine Mandate to Britain in 1923, and the 75th anniversary of the 1948 Nakba (or Catastrophe) in which 800,000 Palestinians (60% of the Indigenous Palestinian inhabitants) were forcibly expelled from the land continuously inhabited by their forebears for over 3 millennia [1-4]. Now in 2023 the 2.3 million utterly impoverished, besieged and bombed inmates of the Gaza Concentration Camp and mostly descending from refugees in the 1948 Nakba are facing and indeed undergoing a genocidal second mass population expulsion by neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel. Unfortunately the World did not listen to Gandhi when he stated (1938): “Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct. The mandates have no sanction but that of the last war. Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home. The nobler course would be to insist on a just treatment of the Jews wherever they are born and bred” [5].

 (1). Palestinian Genocide start: 1880, Palestinian population 500,000 Arabs (90% Muslim, 10% Christians) and 25,000 Jews (half immigrants); 1914, Britain invaded the 400-year Ottoman Turkish Caliphate in 1914 for oil and hegemony; 1916, Sykes-Picot Anglo-French Agreement to carve up the Middle East for themselves; mid-WW1, Palestinian Famine (100,000 dead); 31 October 1917, Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC)  defeated Turks at Beersheba, Palestine;  2 November 1917, British Balfour Declaration to Zionist Lord Rothschild granting Palestine as a Jewish Homeland (actually devised to get Zionist Russian Communists to keep Russia in the war); 1917, Britain conquered Palestine, ending 400 years of peaceful Turkish rule; 10 December 1918, ANZAC Surafend Massacre of 100 Palestinian men and boys (100 killed); 1923, League of Nations grant of Palestine Mandate to Britain that encouraged European Jewish settler-colonialist immigration.

(2). Palestinian Genocide under British rule (1917-1948). 1920s, 1930s, Arab tenant farmers and labourers displaced, Arab resistance to Zionist immigration and the resultant Arab Revolt; the British and British-trained and British-armed Zionist terrorists killed 10% of the adult male Palestinian population; 1939 White Paper stopped Jewish immigration  to placate British Empire Arabs and Muslims during WW2; 1944, British War Cabinet secretly decided to Partition Palestine (causing the John Curtin Labor Government to veto a plan for Jewish settlement of NW Australia; 1945, Jewish immigration resumed, Zionist terrorists targeted Palestinians and British; 1947, UN Partition Plan, population 1,970,000 comprising 630,000 Jews (32.0%), 143,000 Christians (7.3%) and 1,181,000 Muslims (59.9%) i.e. two thirds were Indigenous Palestinians.

(3). 1948 Nakba (Catastrophe) and mass Indigenous population expulsion: 1948, British  withdrew and  Zionists declared State of Israel, seizing 78% of Mandated Palestine; 1947-1948, 800,000 Palestinians (60% of the Indigenous Palestinian population) were violently expelled  by British-trained and British-armed Zionist terrorists (76 massacres, 15,000 Palestinians killed, 530 villages ethnically cleansed, 120 mosques eventually destroyed); the racist US-dominated World,  including genocidally racist White Australia from Australian Dr H.V. Evatt (UN President, 1948-1949) onwards, recognized the State of Israel but not a State of Palestine; UK- and US-involved mass immigration of Yemeni, Iraqi and Moroccan Jews from convert communities that had co-existed peacefully with the Muslim World for 1400 years; 1956, Israel showed its raisond’être by joining the UK and France invasion of Egypt that was stopped by a not yet Zionist-dominated America; 1960, impoverished Palestinians inside Israel “granted” citizenship albeit under Nazi-style, race-based discriminatory laws.

(4).  1967 Naksa (Setback), Zionist seizure of all of Palestine plus territory of all its neighbours with further mass Indigenous population expulsions. By mid-1967 Israel had developed nuclear weapons with French, UK, US and Apartheid South African help; 1967, Israel attacked all its neighbours, seized all of Palestine plus territory of all its neighbours, Egypt, Palestine, Jordan and Syria; 400,000 Arabs expelled from the West Bank and Syria’s Golan Heights.

(5). US-backed Palestinian Genocide, Arab Genocide and population expulsions in 1967-2005.  1967, increasing Zionist-domination of the US dates from Israeli acquisition of nuclear weapons by mid-1967; 1973, Egypt attempted to regain its Sinai territory (part of Egypt for over 5,000 years but seized by 19 years old neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel in 1967 ); 1974, Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat addressed the UN General Assembly; 1979, return of Sinai to Egypt and enforced peace  with Egypt; 1982-2000, Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon; 1982, Sabra and Shatila refugee camp massacre of 3,000 Palestinians by Christian Falangist militia in Israeli-occupied Beirut, and 7,000 Palestinians forced to leave; large emigration of Lebanese during the  Lebanon civil war (1970s-1990s); 1987, First Palestinian Intifada (Uprising); 1988, PLO recognized Israel; 1993, Oslo Agreement  for Palestinian self-government under Israeli Occupation; 1967 onwards, highly abusive subjugation of Occupied Palestinians under violent Israeli military rule, with continued  expulsion from land, and large-scale home demolitions; 2,000-2005, Second Intifada (Al-Aqsa Intifada); 2004, Yasser Arafat died (likely murdered by the Israelis using polonium poisoning ).

(6). US-backed Palestinian Genocide, 2005 from -September 2023. 2006, Hamas won the Occupied Palestinian elections but was declared a terrorist organization by the serial war criminal US Alliance and Israel and fled to rule the Gaza Concentration Camp from 2007, leaving Fatah to rule the Occupied Palestinian West Bank; Apartheid Israel imposed a savage blockade on the Gaza Concentration Camp from 2005, allowing for bare survival and some day labourers allowed to work in Israel. Exercising  the legal right of self-defence of  subjugated people as acknowledged by the Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN Charter, over 20 years Gazans fired about 30,000 ineffective rockets into Israel that were mostly stopped by the US-supplied Iron Dome defence  system and killed about 50 people. However the Israelis responded with sniper fire and unstoppable high explosive missiles from air, land and sea that killed about 6,407 Gaza Palestinians in some  5 major deadly episodes in 2006, 2008-2009, 2014, 2018-2019, and 2021 [6]. Thus in the Gaza Great March of Return following the Israeli  annexation of East Jerusalem in 2017 about 180 Gaza Palestinians  were killed and 9,200 wounded by Israeli snipers.

(7). Palestinian subjugation and Palestinian Genocide prior to October 2023. Prior to the present ghastly and ongoing Gaza Massacre by neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel, the century-long Palestinian Genocide was associated with 0.1 million deaths from violence and 2 million deaths from imposed deprivation [1-4]. Of about 15 million mostly impoverished Indigenous Palestinians, there are 7 million Exiled Palestinians (deriving from prior mass population expulsions and illegally  prevented by the Zionazis from returning to the land continuously inhabited by their forebears for over 3 millennia); presently 5.7 million Occupied Palestinians (unable to vote for the government ruling them, and denied all human rights specified in the 30 Articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [7] and highly abusively confined  under brutal Israeli military rule to ever-diminishing West Bank ghettoes (3.4 million) or to the blockaded and bombed Gaza Concentration Camp (2.3 million)); and 2 million Israeli Palestinians  (able to vote for the government ruling them, albeit as Third Class citizens under 60 Nazi-style, race-based discriminatory laws).

Some shocking indicators: (a) poverty kills and the GDP per capita is $1,000 (Gaza), $3,500 (Occupied Palestinian Territory), and $55,500 (Apartheid Israel); (b) according to the Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions (ICAHD) more than 131,000 Palestinian homes have been demolished in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) since 1947 with huge numbers threatened by “lack of permits” and “collective punishment by home demolition”; (c). before WW2 Palestine exported nearly 40 million oranges annually and was also famed for olive oil, but since 1948 about 3 million citrus and olive trees have been destroyed by the Zionazis; (d) the life expectancy gap between Apartheid Israel and the OPT is 10 years; (e) on average in the 21st century Israelis have violently killed about 500 Occupied Palestinians per year with a further 4,000  killed annually by imposed deprivation [3], and in the 21st century prior to October 2023 this carnage totalled about 11,500 violent Palestinian deaths and about 90,000 deaths from imposed deprivation (contrast the average domestic Israeli homicide rate for Israelis killing fellow Israelis that has been about 20 per million per year i.e. about 190 per year and 4,300 in the 21st century).

(8). The genocidal killing continues with an ongoing Third Nakba from northern Gaza and a Fourth Nakba and even a Final Nakba looming.

(a). Apartheid Israel has promised to “annihilate” Hamas (16,000 fighters) and Islamic Jihad (1,000 fighters) and this promises an Occupied/Occupier reprisals Death Ratio of (17,000 /1,400 = 12.1, already greater than that of 10 ordered by Nazi mass murder Adolph Hitler in 1944 and immediately carried out in the Ardeatine Cave Massacre [8-10].

(b). As of 8 November  2023, just over 4 weeks after the commencement of the Israeli Palestinian Genocide in Gaza on 7 October, confirmed  Palestinian casualties in Gaza total 10, 468 deaths with 27,000 wounded. A further 1,500 Palestinians were killed in Israel as compared to the 1,400 Israelis killed in the 7 October Gaza Breakout The Occupied  Palestinian /Occupier Israel reprisals Death Ratio is presently (10,468 + 1,500)/1,400 = 11,968/1400 = 8.5 as compared to the Hitler-ordered Occupied/Occupier Reprisals Death Ratio of 10.

(c). Respected journalist Jonathan Cook: “Given Hamas’ situation, effectively managing the Israeli-controlled concentration camp of Gaza, it has limited resistance strategies available to it. Capturing Israeli soldiers maximises its leverage. They can be traded for the release of many of the thousands of Palestinian political prisoners held in jails inside Israel, in breach of international law. In addition, in the negotiations, Hamas usually hopes to win an easing of Israel’s 16-year siege of Gaza. To avert this scenario, Israeli commanders reportedly called in the attack helicopters on the military bases overwhelmed by Hamas on October 7. The helicopters appear to have fired indiscriminately, despite the risk posed to the Israeli soldiers in the base who were still alive. Israel’s was a scorched-earth policy to stop Hamas achieving its aims. That may, in part, explain the very large proportion of Israeli soldiers among the 1,300 killed that day” [11]. Indeed it appears that no Israeli troops were killed in the killing of 1,500 Palestinian fighters in Israel after the Breakout from Gaza. If we assume that three quarters of the 1,400 Israelis killed on 7 October were killed in the Israeli response as described by Jonathan Cook then the present Death Ratio would be 11,968/1,050 = 11.4.

(d). The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has provided  year-by-year statistics for the Occupied Palestinian/Occupier Israeli  reprisals Death Ratios from  2008, the worst years being2008/2009: 1,965/44 = 44.7, : 2,329/68 = 34.3,  2018: 300/13 = 23.1, and 2021: 349/11 = 31.7 [6]. The average Occupied Palestinian/Occupier Israeli  reprisals Death Ratio for 1 January 2008 – 19 September 2023 was  6,407/308 = 20.8, which predicts 20.8 x 1,400 = 29,000 Palestinian deaths in the present atrocity.

(e). Humans can survive only 3 days without water and 4 weeks ago neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel  immediately cut water, food, fuel, and electricity (needed for hospitals and water desalination) to impoverished Gaza. Half the population are already homeless. Only a trickle of aid has been allowed in from Egypt for only a few  days so far, and the World is watching an ongoing Palestinian Genocide in Gaza that will worsen with Israel’s horrendous land invasion. If half the population of  Gaza perishes the Death Ratio will be 1,150,000/ 1,400 =  821 i.e. neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel would be valuing Palestinian lives as 821 times less than Israeli lives, and would be applying a reprisals Death Ratio 82 times bigger than the 10 ordered by Nazi mass murderer Adolph Hitler.

(f). Zionist leaders from its proto-Nazi founder Theodor Herzl (unfortunately related to my esteemed Jewish Hungarian  great-great grandmother) to the present genocidal psychopaths running neo-Nazi  Apartheid Israel have been explicit in advocating removal of the Indigenous Palestinians from Palestine. Indeed in the present Gaza Massacre Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu recently invoked the demand by the Israelite “God” in the Old Testament  for the total extermination of the Amalekites: “They [IDF soldiers] are committed to completely eliminating this evil from the world. You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember” (the Holy Bible: “I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys” [12].  Tom Pickering (a former US Ambassador to Apartheid Israel and the UN) (2021): “The Palestinians who clearly suffered a 20 to 1 death rate and who clearly are vastly overwhelmed by the Israelis in terms of military power… I think it is an extremely high mountain to cross… It doesn’t appear there is a 1 state solution to this problem and there is no multiple state outcome to this problem… Israel for a very long period of time under Netanyahu has kind of narrowed down the goal for the Palestinians to something like 20% of what is currently believed to have been the Palestinian state under the 2 state solution [i.e. to 4.4% of Palestine] … And if in fact there is no agreement and the status quo is continued with interruptions for violence as we have seen, it is quite possible that over years – and I am talking about a long time – you will see a removal of Palestinians from the West Bank and quite possibly Gaza to other parts of the world and a no-state solution if I can put it that way. Israel triumphant covering it all”. Indeed an Israeli report favouring an expulsion of all Gaza Palestinians to the Sinai (the 2014 Greater Gaza Plan) was exposed last week (for an alphabetical compendium of this and other  horrendous genocidal Zionist quotes see [12]).

(g). Neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel has been explicit in word and in sustained genocidal deeds in wanting all the land of Palestine but not the Indigenous Palestinian inhabitants [12]. Impelled by genocidally racist Zionists, for 75 years  neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel has grossly violated numerous International laws and conventions, notably the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination [13], the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid [14], the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War” (an Occupier must try to keep its Occupied Subject alive “to the fullest extent of the means available to it”[15], and the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (“any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part, 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” [16].

(h). As of 10 November 4,200 Palestinian children have been killed by the Israelis in reprisals for the Gaza Breakout in which 35 Israeli children died. About 1,300 Palestinian children are buried under rubble and presumed dead. This gives  a Palestinian/ Israeli Child Death Ratio of 5,500/35 = 157 (with an unknown  number of Israeli children killed by Israelis in the Israeli armed response that killed 1,500 Palestinians fighters).

(9). The core ethos of Humanity is Kindness and Truth but both are comprehensively violated by neo-Nazi  Apartheid Israel and its complicit Western Mainstream politician and media supporters. The worst of crimes is the killing of children as measured by “children killed per year per million of population” and one can calculate this by Apartheid Israel in the Gaza Concentration Camp over the last 34 days = (5,500 deaths / 34 days) x (365.25 days/ year) / 2.3 million Gazans =  25,689  “children killed per year per million of total territory population” . This horrifying number of 25,689 is 3,380 times greater than for the World (7.6) and  339 times greater than  for crime-wracked Honduras (75.7).  In order to be exquisitely  “fair” to  the child-killing Israelis one should estimate  the average from 2008 onwards of “children killed per year per million of the total Occupied Palestinian Territory population”. Children killed in this period totalled 859 + 5,500 = 6,359, this giving “children killed per year per million of total Occupied Palestinian Territory population” = 6,359 Children killed / 16 years)/ (average population of 5.15 million) = 77.2, bigger than that  Honduras (75.7), worst in the world and  set to rise enormously in coming days, weeks. and months in the deadly absence of water, food, medicine, medical services, fuel and electricity [9, 17]. Indeed neo-Nazi Israeli forces have targeted 58 health care facilities in Gaza, with 132 medics dead,  25 ambulances destroyed, and 58 hospitals and 32 primary care centres forced out of service due to bombing and fuel shortage. 1 million Gazans are homeless [18].  The number of Gaza children killed to date totals 5,500 i.e. 157 times more than the 35 Israeli children killed on 7 October 2023.

As for Zionist perversion of  truth  one only has to turn to the all-European, US Alliance-backed and  Zionist-promoted  International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) that promulgates a definition of anti-Semitism that has been used to falsely defame anti-racist Jewish and non-Jewish critics of Apartheid Israeli crimes, and has been condemned by over 40 anti-racist Jewish organizations [19, 20]. In horrible reality the IHRA is anti-Jewish anti-Semitic and anti-Arab anti-Semitic (by falsely defaming anti-racist Jewish, Palestinian, Arab and Muslim critics of Apartheid Israel, and holocaust denying by ignoring all WW2 Holocausts other than the WW2 Jewish Holocaust and indeed ignoring about 70 genocide and holocaust atrocities [19, 21]. Zionism is genocidal racism in awful theory and appalling  practice. Indeed Zionism is Nazism without gas chambers but with a huge high technology war  machine,  huge war and subjugation industries, and with 100 nuclear weapons  plus delivery systems including Germany-supplied submarines. Indeed there is a shocking list of 52 Zionist- and  Apartheid Israeli-Nazi Germany comparisons [22], and I have made a detailed and documented  Submission to the Australian National Anti-Corruption Commission over the Australian Labor Government extensively lying for Apartheid Israel [23].

Final comments and conclusions.

The genocidal Gaza Massacre of innocents continues. 47% of the inmates of the Gaza Concentration Camp are children and over 72% are women and children. The World contains 2 kinds of people, those who condemn the killing of innocents, and the others.

Those complicit in the Gaza Massacre include not just the Israeli perpetrators  but also the Western Mainstream politicians  and  media who overwhelmingly fervently support neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel. Thus 120 mainly non-European nations supported the UNGA Resolution for a Ceasefire in Gaza but this was opposed by 59 countries, mostly European US Alliance countries with a minority of poor and easily “bought”  non-European countries [24]. The big BRICS countries of Brazil, Russia, China and South Africa voted Yes but Modi’s India  disgraced India’s fine record of leading the World in the fight against Apartheid by opposing the Ceasefire Resolution (ideological reasons for this betrayal of Humanity by pro-Apartheid Israel and hence pro-Apartheid Modi India become apparent when one reads Arundhati Roy’s book “Azadi. Fascism, Fiction and Freedom in the Time of the Virus” [25].

What can decent people do to stop the war criminal carnage inflicted by neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel on the besieged, bombed and devastated Gaza Concentration Camp? Unfortunately my own country, Australia, like most Western countries is a craven US lackey. Australia, is second only to the US as a fervent supporter of Apartheid Israel and hence of the utterly evil crime of Apartheid. Australia has an excellent compulsory and  preferential voting system and is presently ruled by a Rightist Labor Government with a much worse, Right to extreme Right  Liberal Party-National Party Coalition Opposition, Until  this latest Gaza Massacre progressive  people like me would say “Vote 1 Green, put the Coalition last and put Labor second last”. However Labor is in government and, like the unspeakably awful Coalition, is a fervent supporter of genocidal and neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel, opposes a Gaza Ceasefire and via diplomacy, military deals and  global electronic spying (from the US-Australian Pine Gap base in Central Australia) supports the ongoing Israeli Gaza Massacre. The Zionist-subverted Australian Labor Government should be massively defeated at the next election and replaced by a civilized Green Government or a Greens-led coalition opposed to Apartheid and the mass murder of women and children. Ditto other US Alliance and Western countries.

Decent people around the World must (a) inform everyone they  can of these ongoing atrocities, and (b) urge and apply Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against child-killing,  neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel and all people, politicians, parties, collectives, corporations, and countries supporting this genocidally racist and child-killing Apartheid rogue state.

References.

[1]. Gideon Polya, “Australia must stop Zionist subversion and join the World in comprehensive Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Apartheid Israel and all its supporters”, Subversion of Australia, 15 April 2021: https://sites.google.com/site/subversionofaustralia/2021-04-15 .

[2]. Palestinian Genocide: https://sites.google.com/site/palestiniangenocide/home .

[3]. Gideon Polya, “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950”, 2nd edition, Korsgaard Publishing, 2021 (that contains a succinct history of every country from ancient times).

[4].  2023, 75th Nakba Anniversary: Nakba (Catastrophe) & Palestinian Genocide: https://sites.google.com/site/palestiniangenocide/1948-nakba-catastrophe-palestinian-genocide .

[5]. “Non-Jews Against Racist Zionism”: https://sites.google.com/site/nonjewsagainstracistzionism/ .

[6]. UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) , “Data on casualties”:  https://www.ochaopt.org/data/casualties .

[7]. Gideon Polya, “Universal Declaration of Human Rights & Palestinians. Apartheid Israel violates ALL Palestinian Human Rights”, Palestine Genocide Essays, 24 January 2009: https://sites.google.com/site/palestinegenocideessays/universal-declaration-of-human-rights-palestinians .

[8]. Gideon Polya, “Stop Apartheid Israel’s Palestinian genocide in Gaza”, Green Left, 18 October 2023: https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/stop-apartheid-israels-palestinian-genocide-gaza .

[9]. Gideon Polya, “Horrendous Death Ratios, Child Deaths & Palestinian Genocide Demand Immediate Cessation Of Gaza Massacre, Countercurrents, 30 October 2023: https://countercurrents.org/2023/10/horrendous-death-ratios-child-deaths-palestinian-genocide-demand-immediate-cessation-of-gaza-massacre/ .”

[10].  “Ardeatine massacre”, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ardeatine_massacre .

[11]. Jonathan Cook, “What our Media fails to tell you about October 7”, Pearls & Irritations, 6 November 2023: https://johnmenadue.com/what-the-bbc-fails-to-tell-you-about-october-7/ .

[12]. “Zionist quotes re racism and Palestinian Genocide”, Palestinian Genocide :  https://sites.google.com/site/palestiniangenocide/zionist-quotes .

[13]. International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination: https://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/cerd.aspx .

[14]. “International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid”, UN, 1976: https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.10_International%20Convention%20on%20the%20Suppression%20and%20Punishment%20of%20the%20Crime%20of%20Apartheid.pdf .

[15]. “Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War”, 12 August 1949: https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.33_GC-IV-EN.pdf .

[16]. UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: https://treaties.un.org/doc/publication/unts/volume%2078/volume-78-i-1021-english.pdf .

[17]. Gideon Polya, “Apartheid Israel Among World Leaders For Killing Children”, Countercurrents, 15 June 2022: https://countercurrents.org/2022/06/apartheid-israel-among-world-leaders-for-killing-children/ .

[18]. Mohamed Majed, “Gaza’s death toll from Israeli assault climbs to 8,796”, AA, 1 November 2023: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/gaza-s-death-toll-from-israeli-assault-climbs-to-8-796/3040221 .

[19].  Gideon Polya, “US-backed IHRA Definition Of Antisemitism Is Anti-Arab Anti-Semitic & Anti-Jewish Anti-Semitic”, Boycott Apartheid Israel, 9 March 2021: https://sites.google.com/site/boycottapartheidisrael/2021-03-09 .

[20]. Jewish Voices for Peace, “First ever: 40+ Jewish groups worldwide oppose equating antisemitism with criticism of Israel”, 17 July 2018: https://jewishvoiceforpeace.org/first-ever-40-jewish-groups-worldwide-oppose-equating-antisemitism-with-criticism-of-israel/#english .

[21]. Gideon Polya, “Melbourne University Adopts Anti-Semitic & Holocaust-Ignoring IHRA Definition Of Anti-Semitism”, Countercurrents, 5 February 2023: https://countercurrents.org/2023/02/melbourne-university-adopts-anti-semitic-holocaust-ignoring-ihra-definition-of-anti-semitism/ .

[22]. Gideon Polya, “A Shocking List of 52 Zionist- & Apartheid Israeli-Nazi Germany Comparisons”, Countercurrents, 7 August 2021: https://countercurrents.org/2021/08/a-shocking-list-of-52-zionist-apartheid-israeli-nazi-germany-comparisons/ .

[23]. Gideon Polya, “Submission To National Anti-Corruption Commission: Australian Labor Government’s Lying For Apartheid Israel”, Countercurrents, 22 July 2023: https://countercurrents.org/2023/07/submission-to-national-anti-corruption-commission-australian-labor-governments-lying-for-apartheid-israel/ .

[24]. Gideon Polya, “491 Sins & Gaza Genocide: Neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel Leads World In Killing Children & Journalists”, Countercurrents, 6 November 2023:  https://countercurrents.org/2023/11/491-sins-gaza-genocide-neo-nazi-apartheid-israel-leads-world-in-killing-children-journalists/ .

[25].Arundhati Roy’s book “Azadi. Fascism, Fiction and Freedom in the Time of the Virus”, Penguin, 2022.

Dr Gideon Polya taught science students at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia over 4 decades.

10 November 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Michael K Smith

“We are witnessing the sick relationship between the United States and Israel.”
—–Egyptian podcaster Rahma Zain

The outpouring of support for Palestine around the world in recent weeks has been a very encouraging sight. Dotted with signs calling for “Freedom For Palestine,” “Ceasefire Now,” and “We Are All Palestinians,” protests burst forth in London, Berlin, Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Ankara, Istanbul, Tokyo, New York City, Toronto, Washington D.C., Rome, Beirut, Baghdad, Cairo, Seoul, Kuala Lumpur, Karachi, Stockholm, Oslo, and Wellington New Zealand. While they have no direct power to change government behavior, governments cannot afford to ignore the threat they pose to their legitimacy. The “Great Beast,” as Alexander Hamilton called the public, is at last stirring, this time on behalf of a colonized people whose suffering has for far too long been rendered invisible.

And for once social media has proven itself a positive force, spreading videos of Israel carpet-bombing a concentration camp full of children to all corners of the earth. The steady flow of images from this Truth Superhighway instantly shattered rationalizations of the barbarity, leaving in their wake only a stark and haunting picture of USraelis as remorseless killers.

Though it’s impossible to reconcile with the American self-image, we can hardly claim to be surprised at this. After all, the latest round of  “humanitarian” butchery is merely one in a long line of betrayals of all that is allegedly most sacred to Americans – human rights, self-determination, the rule of law – blah, blah, blah. The latest bloodletting is supposedly justified now more than ever because – wait for it – the enemy is irredeemably evil and irrevocably committed to the rape of women, the decapitation of babies, and the massacre of old people, among other uniquely diabolical horrors. What else can we-as-decent-people do but bury them in blood-spattered rubble?

In other words, the closest thing we can actually claim as a “sacred” value is hypocrisy. We preach peace, but are forever at war. We praise diplomacy, but spit out “obey-or-die” ultimatums like machine-gun fire. We recommend self-determination, but enthusiastically guarantee Israeli apartheid with an avalanche of lethal weaponry.

The prompt international protest against this two-faced lunacy has been a welcome demonstration that much of the world will no longer tolerate the gratuitous contempt with which USrael treats Palestinian Arabs.* It is this, not international human rights law, that is forcing governments to confront their complicity in apartheid, and it is only a great deal more of it that stands any chance of bringing about peace.

Obviously, Hamas could not possibly have initiated this conflict a mere one month ago. In fact, it dates back more than a century, to when the British, themselves lacking any legitimate right to the land, promised Palestine to both Zionist Jews and Palestinian Arabs. As we know, the Zionist Jews won out based on strength of evidence – a Bronze Age land deed carved by God on a tablet, helpfully carried down the mountain by Uncle Moses. Even Jimmy Carter, the reputedly neutral broker of the Camp David Accords, found this evidence convincing, saying in his memoirs that Israel was “ordained by God.”

With neutrals like that, who needs partisans? Though the appearance of Biblical mythology in historical discussion ought to evoke alarm bells in any mind claiming a speck of rationality, the peculiar justifications offered up for Jewish sovereignty over Palestine have long passed muster in the United States. In a nutshell, this is the story that is quite uncritically accepted: a largely irreligious people re-claimed land after an absence of two thousand years based on Biblical texts few of them believed in. An ethno-theocratic state bent on conquest and expansion was hailed as a model of democratic socialism with unique sensitivity to morality and human rights. Its leaders embarked on an “in-gathering” of Jews from lands they had lived in for centuries while intoning the words Hitler had used in carrying out the Holocaust: “You are not a German, you are a Jew – you are not a Frenchman, you are a Jew – you are not a Belgian, you are a Jew.”

The heart of the matter was a serious and deliberate confusion of nationalism and religion. Organized Jewry, an unequivocal supporter of separation of Church and State outside the Holy Land, condoned their union in Israel, demanding the loyalty of Jews everywhere, whether or not they considered themselves as such. Diasporan Jews supported Israel out of religious duty, though they may or may not have realized what Zionist ideology actually entailed.

Though twenty percent of Israelis were Arabs from the start, Israeli citizenship** was anchored in Jewish identity, and the state announced its independence in “the name of the Jewish people.” In that context, public debate naturally centered on the question, “What is a Jew?” Since Jews, like most people, had a mixed ancestry, Israeli myth-makers eager to buttress territorial claims with evidence of historical continuity quickly blurred distinctions between Hebrew, Israelite, Judean, Jewish, Judaism, and Zionism, forestalling recognition that these referred to different people at different points in history with different ways of life. Neither the Jews or these various forebears ever constituted a race or even a distinctive pure ethnic grouping, and since Judaism had been of declining significance for most Jews for some time, it was not at all clear what the basis of Jewish statehood actually amounted to – apart from subjugating Palestinian Arabs, which quickly became the national pastime.

Seventy-five years of dispossession and two fake peace agreements later, and the overwhelming majority of today’s Gazan population – “human animals” according to Israel – are indeed living like such in the Gaza concentration camp, after having survived a whole series of violent land grabs inspired by the quest for a Greater Israel, another concept derived from Biblical fantasy. Counterposed to that fanciful notion has been the all-too-real dreadfulness of Gaza, which was the world’s most wretched colonial outpost long before Hamas appeared on the scene.

Refusing to accept their assigned fate, Gazans rose in rebellion in December 1987. Children threw rocks at tanks and soldiers carrying automatic rifles. Old people, too feeble to hurl their defiance, filled sacks with rocks for their grandchildren to throw. Young and old alike went on strike, established liberated zones, directed an underground economy, and shut their shops at noon in honor of imprisoned compatriots.

Shooting and cursing, Israeli soldiers chased the insolent children through the unpaved, pothole-ridden streets, where open sewers reeked with a stomach-turning odor. With a violent banging they announced their presence, ransacking homes and raiding hospitals in pursuit of child “terrorists.” Whenever they winged their prey or left a corpse lying in the road, they, laughed, whistled, or clapped their hands with glee.

The Palestinian Arabs, then ninety-eight percent of the West Bank and Gaza, were called the minorities. The two percent who resided in religious settlements – replete with green lawns and swimming pools – were their designated masters.

Anyone caught using the word “Palestine,” or displaying a map of its territory, was subject to immediate arrest and torture. But for reasons Israel still can’t understand, hooded interrogations didn’t make Gazans sing, while their outlawed Palestine national anthem did.

This was the language of the occupiers: confiscation, demolition, surveillance, arrest, prison, torture, humiliation, deportation, death. These were the results: hunger, disease, mutilation, death, pride, defiance, insurrection.

All this was so sixteen years before Hebrew University sociology professor Baruch Kimmerling pronounced Gaza the largest concentration camp in the world, and nineteen years before Hamas was elected, quickly followed by the siege of Gaza. Though few people seem to remember, those fateful elections were certified as eminently fair by Jimmy Carter. And once in power, Hamas quickly put out peace feelers. By 2008 they had negotiated a cease-fire, which Hamas honored for months and Israel ultimately violated.

Keep all this in mind when you are asked, “Do you support Hamas?” The reasonable answer is “yes,” when they act constructively, as they frequently do. Israel, on the other hand, never misses an opportunity to indulge an infantile spasm of murderous rage that shocks the world and worsens Jewish security. This is what we are seeing yet again in the rubble of Gaza, and it will not end until the ideology of Jewish supremacy is dealt a stinging defeat.

But what about the hostages, and don’t we have to “condemn Hamas?” Hopefully, these are naive, but not consciously diversionary questions. The answer is “no,” we do not have to condemn Hamas, at least not until Israel responds constructively to the countless daily acts of non-violent Palestinian resistance, which are by far the most numerous and common response to Israeli apartheid by its victims. Until that happens,“condemning Hamas” will continue to be an exercise in sheer hypocrisy, i.e., justifying apartheid for Israel, but not national liberation for Palestinians.

As for “the hostages,” the current campaign of saturation bombing stands a good chance of getting them killed before a negotiated exchange can get them released. But even more fundamentally, hand-wringing about Hamas’s hostages overlooks the fact that all Gazans were already hostages on October 7, and had been for decades as a consequence of their colonial subjugation. When is their release date?

Furthermore, one does not have to wish Hamas’s hostages any harm to point out that it doesn’t really make much sense to build one’s home on a volcano and then wax indignant at having lava in the living room. As a measure of the moral bankruptcy that prevails in Israel, consider the fact that the music festival dedicated to peace and love that Hamas savagely attacked – was just two kilometers from a concentration camp full of children.

The truth is that Hamas “terror” has never been the problem, as Israel reflexively dismisses any Palestinian nationalist impulse as terrorism, quite apart from any associated violence. The real problem, therefore, is not terrorism, but the 1948 declaration of Jewish sovereignty over Arab lands, which instantly made every act of Palestinian resistance into “terrorism.” Asserting a right to Jewish supremacy in Palestine was a very predictable – and predicted – disaster, even for Jews, who claim to be “redeeming” the land by taking it from indigenous Arabs. Any notion that this robbery is wrong is unthinkable in Israel, which is why prior to October 7 the only discussion of apartheid in the Holy State was about what form it should take: messianic, religious, and theocratic, or secular, Western, and democratic. Palestinians had been completely forgotten.

And not only in Israel. To our everlasting shame, it took a hideous act of mass killing to put them back on the world’s agenda. One can only hope that the “Great Beast” will keep up the pressure until Holy Apartheid is no more.

*Nevertheless, much of the rhetoric of denunciation aimed at Israel has exceeded rational bounds. Gazans are not being subjected to genocide, for example, as is rather commonly suggested by human rights experts, independent media outlets, and pro-Palestine activists, with no reflection on just how difficult it would be for Israel, itself born as the alleged solution to genocide, to get away with its own genocide. Tedious legal debates aside, mathematics argues against the claim that genocide is occurring. Right now, ten thousand plus Gazans are said to have been killed since October 7. Even if we assume another ten thousand are buried beneath the rubble, that is still less than one percent of the population of Gaza (2.3 million), an appalling total, but nevertheless well short of genocide. Furthermore, the intent is to make them flee, not kill them to the last man, woman, and child. This de-population effort, known as “transfer” in Zionist commentary, has been present from the beginning. A June 12, 1895 diary entry by Theodore Herzl, the “Founding Father” of Zionism, predicted that his dream of a Jewish homeland would require the expulsion of the indigenous Arab population.

**Actually, “Israeli” citizenship is codified as either “Jew” or “Arab.” Allegedly possessed of equal civil rights, the two groups belong to separate nations.

Michael K. Smith is the author of Portraits of Empire
www.legalienate.blogspot.com

10 November 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Andre Damon

On Thursday, as he was leaving for a campaign event in Illinois, US President Joe Biden again categorically reiterated his opposition to a ceasefire in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Asked, “What are the prospects of a Gaza ceasefire?” Biden replied, “None. No possibility.”

Biden’s comments made clear that the United States is actively instigating Israel’s genocide in Gaza and working to inflame a wider war in the Middle East. They came just two days after White House National Security spokesman John Kirby stated again that the United States has no “red lines” on the number of civilian casualties it will accept.

Biden’s remarks sparked worldwide outrage, with clips of his statement viewed or shared by millions of people on all social media platforms. He was met in Chicago by thousands of people demonstrating against US support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The crowd chanted, “Genocide Joe” and “Biden, Biden, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide.”

While Biden was speaking in Illinois, he was interrupted by a protester who yelled, “10,000 Palestinians have been killed. Half of them are children.”

Before Biden left for Chicago, he was asked whether Israel’s “retaliatory airstrikes” were working, he replied, “Yes,” adding, “they’re hitting the targets they’re seeking.”

Just hours after these remarks, the Israel Defense Forces made clear the targets they were “seeking” by bombing three hospitals. Israel bombed the al-Shifa Hospital complex, where tens of thousands are sheltering, with an experimental bladed missile, whose horrifying aftermath was shown in a widely shared video. The missile, believed to be an American Hellfire R9X, carried no explosives but dispersed blades throughout the area, slashing and amputating limbs and leaving pools of blood.

Gaza’s al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital was also attacked, with Dr. Mostafa al-Kahlout telling Al Jazeera of a “massive fire” at the hospital, which is sheltering 1,000 refugees. The area surrounding the Indonesian Hospital was struck by 11 missiles, damaging its buildings, the hospital director said.

“Israel is now undertaking these dangerous steps against the hospitals to put them completely out of commission and subsequently displace the people sheltering in them, as well as the patients and medics,” said Ashraf al-Qudra, the spokesman of the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza.

This is the context in which National Security spokesman John Kirby, who is also a retired admiral, announced what he called “humanitarian pauses” in Israel’s non-stop bombing of Gaza. Kirby said, “Israel will begin to implement four-hour pauses in areas of northern Gaza each day, with an announcement to be made three hours beforehand” and create “humanitarian corridors allowing people to flee the areas of hostilities in the northern part of Gaza.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made clear to other world leaders that his plan is to displace the population of Gaza into Egypt’s Sinai Desert. His plans, reported in the Financial Times, are consistent with a paper published by Israel’s Intelligence Ministry proposing to expel the population of Gaza.

Under these conditions, what the United States and the entire media are referring to as “humanitarian pauses” and “humanitarian corridors” are simply the means by which the Netanyahu government, with US support, is carrying out the ethnic cleansing of northern Gaza.

In line with this plan, Israel said that 80,000 people have left northern Gaza on Thursday, the largest number yet. According to the United Nations, over 557,000 people are sheltering at UN facilities in southern Gaza, and the hospitals cannot accommodate any new arrivals. There is one toilet for every 160 people.

At least 10,812 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed in Israeli attacks since October 7, according to the Health Ministry. Over 4,000 of the dead are children. In a statement Thursday, Human Rights Watch wrote, “Israeli ground forces are encircling and moving deeper into Gaza City, within 2 km of Gaza’s largest medical facility, al-Shifa Hospital, where staff are overwhelmed by the number of patients amid a month-long blockade & heavy bombardment.”

The statement continued, “With ongoing strikes and fighting nearby, we are gravely concerned about the well-being of thousands of civilians there, many children among them, seeking medical care and shelter, including people on life support, those who lost limbs in air strikes, and burn victims. … Hospitals have special protection under the laws of war, which they only lose if they are being used to commit ‘acts harmful to the enemy’ and after due warning. Evacuation of hospital patients and staff should only be a last resort.”

Meanwhile the US continues to expand the scope of the war raging in the Middle East. For the second time in almost two weeks, the US carried out airstrikes against what it claimed were forces of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Syria on Thursday. The strikes were carried out by two Air Force F-15E jets against a weapons warehouse in Deir al Zour Province, Syria. “The United States is fully prepared to take further necessary measures to protect our people and our facilities,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said.

The United States has surged two aircraft carrier battle groups and an Ohio-class nuclear submarine to the Middle East, in what USNI (United States Naval Institute) news called the “largest mass of U.S. ships in the region in decades.”

Originally published in WSWS.ORG

10 November 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By David Boyajian

Oddly, few Western writers on the South Caucasus have ever grasped Christian Armenia’s significance as Russia’s only ally and military outpost among the region’s three countries.

Simply put: Were Russia to lose Armenia, the U.S./NATO/EU and pan-Turkism would inevitably dominate the Caucasus/Caspian and, perhaps, beyond.  Putin understands this.

Georgia and Azerbaijan are, after all, headed away from Russia.

Though always under Russian pressure, Georgia’s an unofficial NATO candidate with sizeable Western investments.  NATO countries and Israel have been modernizing its military.  Tbilisi’s also the middleman for Baku’s gas/oil pipelines extending to Turkey and elsewhere.

Azerbaijan’s fossil fuel deposits, pipelines, and U.S./European commercial/economic ties are well-known.

Less talked about are the Aliyev autocracy’s pan-Turkic ideology; formal alliance with NATO’s Turkey; deployment of international terrorists; dependence on Israeli weapons/military prowess; and longtime backing by America’s Jewish lobby.

Elected ostensibly as a democratic reformist in 2018, Armenian PM Nikol Pashinyan grew friendlier with the West than had Yerevan’s previous leaders.

This enraged Putin.  That’s problematic: Armenia’s dependent on its ally for gas, oil, the nuclear power plant, weapons, remittances from Armenians in Russia, and more.  However, Pashinyan didn’t break with Moscow.

Nevertheless, Putin resolved to punish and humiliate Armenia to force it totally and irrevocably under Russian domination.

Punish and Humiliate

In 2020, Putin silently but indisputably greenlighted Azerbaijan, Turkey, international terrorists, and Israel to sledgehammer Christian Armenia and Armenian-populated Artsakh/Karabagh into submitting to Russia.

We know that near its borders Russia’s extremely NATO-and-terrorist-phobic.

And yet:

In Azerbaijan’s 44-day war in 2020 (Sept. 27-Nov. 9) against Artsakh’s Armenians, Turkey openly deliveredAmerican-supplied F-16s, Bayraktar drones containing NATO parts, additional weapons, generals, troops, andseveral thousand jihadist terrorists to Azerbaijan.

Tellingly, the Kremlin was unruffled.

Moreover, Tel Aviv — the West’s friend, not Moscow’s — overtly resupplied Baku with hi-tech weapons.

The Kremlin, again, voiced no particular alarm.

Post-war, however, Russia revealed that it’d been in charge all along.  During the fighting, for instance, it was Moscow — not Baku — that had offered Yerevan a “peace” deal (which Pashinyan declined).

Artsakh — gifted to Azerbaijan by Stalin but indigenously Armenian for millennia — lost the war, as did Armenia.  Buffer zones around Artsakh gained by it in the early 1990s were also forfeited.

Putin’s fingerprints were, not surprisingly, all over the Nov. 9, 2020 agreement among Moscow, Yerevan, and Baku.

In what remained of Armenian-populated Artsakh,the pact awarded Russia:

• An armed, 2000-troop “peacekeeping” mission plus guardianship over the only road — the Lachin corridor — between Artsakh and Armenia proper (Points 3/4/6).

• Militarycontrol over future routes through Armenia between Azerbaijan and its Nakhichevan exclave (Point 9).

That Russia greenlighted a war against Armenia/Artsakh isn’t a total surprise.

Moscow’s always sought to keep Yerevan apprehensive and dependent.  The Kremlin has for decadespermitted repeated Azerbaijani attacks on Armenia despite Yerevan’s defense pacts with Moscow and the Russian-led CSTO alliance.

None of this is intended to defend PM Pashinyan.  He has failed and should resign.

And please ignore the nonsense that Russia, shaken by setbacks in Ukraine, couldn’t prevent the 2020 war.  Putin’s invasion of Ukraine came much later: February of 2022.

Punishment Without End

Throughout 2021-2023, Azerbaijan invaded, occupied, and fortified over 80 sq. miles of Armenia’s internationally recognized southeast.

Hurling the Azeri attacks in Armenia’s face, the Kremlin sarcastically termed them mere “border demarcations.”  The Azeris are still there.

Russia/CSTO had again willfully violated their defense treaties with Armenia.

Meanwhile, despite Russia’s 2020 pledge, its “peacekeepers” permitted incessant Azeri assaults on Artsakh from 2021 on.

Then, in December of 2022, Azerbaijan sent military and other officials disguised as “eco-activists” to block the Lachin corridor.

The armed “peacekeepers” could’ve moved the Azeris off the road in 5 minutes.  Instead, the Russians feigned helplessness as food and medical supplies to Artsakh were blocked.  Meanwhile, the well-fed Russian soldiers offered to sell food to the starving Armenians at inflated prices.

Baku also cut off gas, electricity, and communications to Artsakh.  Yet again, despite its signed agreement, Moscow said little and did nothing.

The blockade, declared former International Criminal Court prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo, fit the UN definition of genocide: “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction.”

Thus, “Christian” Russia and its half-Turkic Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu blatantly violatedNov. 9, 2020’s accord while Artsakh was attacked and starved.

On September 14, 2023, Acting U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Yuri Kim testified that the Biden administration “will not countenance any effort — short-term or long-term — to ethnically cleanse Artsakh.”

Then came September 19’s genocidal cleansing.

Genocidal Cleansing

Azerbaijan launched a genocidal military assault on Artsakh.  120,000 Armenians fled their democracy of 30+ years lest they be murdered if they stayed.  Some were, in fact, killed, tortured, and murdered.

Russian “peacekeepers” let it happen. No surprise.

Artsakh’s millennia-long nationhood — gone in a flash.

The White House clearly “countenanced” the cleansing, as did Europe and the UN.  America often prioritizes authoritarian regimes over human rights and common decency.

The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention recently issued a Red Flag Alert “due to the alarming potential for an invasion of Armenia by Azerbaijan in the coming days and weeks.”

The Geopolitical Future

Russia has certainly not finished punishing Armenia and PM Pashinyan.

Invasions by Azerbaijan and even Turkey are quite possible.

In that case, Russia would likely “save” Armenia, which would sign over its sovereignty to Moscow.  Armenia might even become a Russian Union State, like Belarus.

Assuming near total Russian control of Armenia, the U.S./NATO/EU would find it very difficult to totally penetrate the Caucasus even if Armenia’s borders with Turkey/Azerbaijan eventually open.

Putin’s been trying for years to entice Turkey and Azerbaijan into his web.  The Turkic twins have played along but aren’t fooled.

But as Russia rightly fears pan-Turkism, it would probably permit only limited penetration through Armenia by Ankara and Baku.  Thus, a Russian-controlled Armenia would become a buffer, not a U.S./NATO/EU pathway.  But nothing is certain.

To keep the West totally at bay, Russia could invade Georgia and control the pipelines originating from Azerbaijan.

Another danger to Russia would be an extraterritorial corridor (not just the existing roads) from Turkey through northwest Iran — occupied by masses of Azeri speakers — to Azerbaijan.

That’s one reason why Turkey, Azerbaijan, and probably the U.S. and Israel wish to dismember Iran, attach its northwest to Azerbaijan, and cut off Armenia’s access to Iran.  Moscow and Tehran know this well.

Will Russia’s punishment of Armenia ultimately benefit the Kremlin?

Or will Russia receive its just desserts for the vile, unwarranted punishment of its ally?

David Boyajian’s primary foreign policy focus is the Caucasus.

9 November 2023

Source: countercurrents.org