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By Shamsul Islam

The shameless support of India’s PM Modi to Zionist Israel in its current genocidal aggression of Palestinians should not surprise anyone as ideologically Hindutva and Zionism are natural partners.

Those who believe in a world free of hegemonic ethno-nationalism, Racism, religious bigotry and hatred have rightly taken note of Zionism and its ally Christian Zionism, major perpetrators of ethnic cleansing of ‘Others’.  However, the civilized world with its core belief in multi-culturalism and peaceful co-existence is oblivious to a no less dangerous threat to the present human civilization; the Hindutva Zionism. As the term reads it is part of the Hindutva world-view which stands for an exclusive Hindu India minus Muslims and Christians. The other religions like Sikhism, Buddhism, and Jainism will have no independent status but treated as part of Hinduism. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS; National Volunteer Organization) is the most prominent flag-bearer of the Hindutva politics whose cadres presently rule India, the largest democracy in the world.

RSS was founded by Keshav Baliram Hedgewar (1889-1940) in 1925 who was disillusioned with the Indian freedom struggle led by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948) against the British rule for believing that Indian nation was a composite entity consisting of Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians and followers of other religions living in India. Hedgewar and his associates aggressively claimed that India was an exclusive nation of Hindus. For RSS the real enemies were not the British rulers but Muslims and Christians as they belonged to foreign religions. Thus RSS represented the militant Hindu nationalism, termed as Hindutva opposed to Gandhi’s all-inclusive Indian nationalism.

According to the most prominent ideologues of Hindutva, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883-1966) and Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar (1906-73), the Hindutva is true ‘Hinduness’ which should not be reduced to what is understood as Hinduism. Hindutva is aggressive commitment to the belief that India is the Father-land and Holy Land of Hindus who are Aryans, speak Sanskrit language and believe in Casteism. All others are foreign races who,

“must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion, must entertain no idea but those of the glorification of the Hindu race and culture…must lose their separate existence to merge in the Hindu race, or may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment not even citizen’s rights.”[1]

Golwalkar’s another ‘Holy’ book for the RSS cadres Bunch of Thoughts, has a long chapter titled as ‘Internal Threats’ in which Muslims and Christians have been described as threat number 1 and 2, respectively.[2]

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Importantly, RSS and its leading cadres presently ruling India are the most vocal supporters of Zionism and the Zionist Israel after the West. The renowned Indian author, Khushwant Singh noted that RSS “supported Zionism and the Jewish state of Israel for no other reason but that it was forever waging wars against its Arab neighbours who were Muslims”.[3]  The current RSS chief, Mohan Bhagwat like his predecessors has been calling upon the RSS cadres to emulate Israel to tread “the path of Israel while serving the cause of nationalism.”[4]  A leading English daily of Israel, the Jerusalem Post too underlined the fact that “whenever a BJP (Bhartiya Janata Party; a political appendage of the RSS) government comes to power, the vibrancy in India-Israel relations reaches new heights.[5]

At the government level Narendra Modi [Prime Minister of India since 2014] who is also a leading ideologue of the RSS was the first Prime Minister of India to visit Israel in mid-2017 [almost 70 years after founding of the Indian Republic] with the then Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visiting India in early 2018. Both continue to enjoy close friendship despite Netanyahu no more being the prime minister of Israel. India is one of the largest importers of Israeli arms but the largest consumer of the surveillance and intelligence-related equipment. The latest disclosures about the Israel made Pegasus spyware make it clear how India made large purchases of it for use against lawyers, journalists, politicians and activists who were suspected to be opposed to the Hindutva politics. On the surveillance front the ganging up of Zionist Israel and India is proved by the fact that India remains the only democracy not to share any information about the purchase of Pegasus spyware which has been described as the ‘world’s most powerful cyber weapon’.[6] Concerned by the abstruseness of Modi government Supreme Court, the highest court of justice of India had to constitute a committee to find out the truth in October 2021. The report was submitted in a sealed cover on August 25, 2022. The Bench comprising Chief Justice of India N V Ramana and Justices Surya Kant and Hima Kohli while accepting the report informed that the Government of India did not cooperate with the committee.[7] It was a sad scenario for Indian democracy that rulers of India even refused to respond to a committee appointed by the highest court of justice whose deliberations were confidential. For reasons known to the Court only it did not pass any judgment.

In the meantime, two renowned investigate journalists; Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazetti relying on official papers of Israel confirmed that India did buy the Pegasus courtesy Netanyahu. According to the report,

INDIA UNDER HINDUTVA RULE FOLLOWS ZIONIST ISRAEL IN DEALING WITH MUSLIM KASHMIRIS

“In July 2017, Narendra Modi, who won office on a platform of Hindu nationalism, became the first Indian prime minister to visit Israel. For decades, India had maintained a policy of what it called ‘commitment to the Palestinian cause,’ and relations with Israel were frosty. The Modi visit, however, was notably cordial, complete with a carefully staged moment of him and Prime Minister Netanyahu walking together barefoot on a local beach. They had reason for the warm feelings. Their countries had agreed on the sale of a package of sophisticated weapons and intelligence gear worth roughly $2 billion — with Pegasus and a missile system as the centerpieces. Months later, Netanyahu made a rare state visit to India. And in June 2019, India voted in support of Israel at the U.N.’s Economic and Social Council to deny observer status to a Palestinian human rights organization, a first for the nation.”

With the beginning of the 2^nd term of Modi [2019] India witnessed brazen execution of the old anti-Muslim agenda of the RSS. Article 370 which provided special provisions to guarantee its distinct character to Jammu & Kashmir State [the only Muslim majority State in India] was abrogated [August 5, 2019]. A day later, renowned political thinker, Pratap Bhanu Mehta could not help writing:

“There are times in the history of a republic when it reduces itself to jackboot. Nothing more and nothing less. We are witnessing that moment in Kashmir. But this moment is also a dry run for the political desecration that may follow in the rest of India. The manner in which the BJP government has changed the status of Jammu and Kashmir by rendering Article 370 ineffective and bifurcating the state is revealing its true character. This is a state for whom the only currency that matters is raw power. This is a state that recognises no constraints of law, liberty and morality. This is a state that will make a mockery of democracy and deliberation. This is a state whose psychological principle is fear. This is a state that will make ordinary citizens cannon fodder for its warped nationalist pretensions.

“For, fundamentally, what this change signals is that Indian democracy is failing. It is descending into majoritarianism, the brute power of the vote; it will no longer have the safety valves that allowed inclusion…Not a single one of us can take any constitutional protections for granted. Parliament is a notice board, not a debating forum.”[8]

The Indian State under Modi has been religiously following the Zionist Israel in persecuting Muslims and human rights’ defenders of the region. According to Fernand de Varennes, Special Rapporteur on minority issues, and Ahmed Shaheed, Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief, in a statement said:

‘“The loss of autonomy and the imposition of direct rule by the Government in New Delhi suggests the people of Jammu and Kashmir no longer have their own government and have lost power to legislate or amend laws in the region to ensure the protection of their rights as minorities”[9]

The following report carried by UNO new site proved once again that Kashmir looked like Palestine under Zionism:

Amnesty International released many reports of the impunity with which Indian State was following the Zionists in persecuting Kashmiris. In one of these released in July 2015 titled, ‘“DENIED: Failures in accountability for human rights violations by security force personnel in Jammu and Kashmir’[11] described in details how Kashmir had turned into killing fields.

AFFINITIES BETWEEN ZIONISM AND HINDUTVA

1) God’s ‘Chosen People’: According to Zionism the Jewish people were chosen by God as His true worshippers and to fulfill the mission of proclaiming his truth among all the nations of the world. The Hindutva flag-bearers proclaim the same status. According to them Hindu Race,

“professes its illustrious Hindu Religion, the only Religion in the world worthy of being so denominated, which in its variety is still an organic whole, capable of feeding the noble aspirations of all men…enriched by the noblest philosophy of life in all its functions, and hallowed by an unbroken, interminable succession of divine spiritual geniuses, a religion of which any sane man may be justly proud. Guided by this Religion…the [Hindu] Race evolved a culture, which despite the degenerating contact with the debased ‘civilizations’ of the Mussalman and the Europeans, for the last ten centuries, is still the noblest in the world.”[12]

Speaking a language similar to the Zionists, Golwalkar went on to declare that the world soon will “tremble with fear”[13] before the ‘Chosen People’; upholders of the Hindutva.

It is to be noted that MK Gandhi described as Father of Indian nation without mincing word stated as early as 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… 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”[14]

2. Religion as basis of nationality: Both believe that religion is the determining factor for nationality. Both are against inclusive nationalities.

3. Religious scriptures as authentic history: For Zionists and Hindutva protagonists, religious scriptures narrate actual history and any other narrative is unacceptable. Myths are truths.

4. Genocidal: Zionist organizations and Zionist Israel have been widely condemned for the genocide of Palestinians and other opponents. Israel is the only state which has been condemned both by the General Assembly and the Security Council of the United Nations through more than 200 resolutions since its founding in 1948.

In India we have witnessed a major genocide of minorities almost every decade in which Hindutva cadres have been found involved. In these genocides victims have not been only minorities but lower Castes of Hindus also. It is important to know that RSS which claims to be a cultural organization is fond of worshipping arms. It celebrates its foundation day as ”shastr pooja” (worship of the arms) in which RSS leaders/cadres participate in large numbers.[15] Recently following into the foot-steps of Zionist Israel RSS-BJP rulers have made bulldozers as a symbol of punishing Muslims.[16]

5. Demonization of opponents: An important commonality between the two is the demonization and persecution of anti-Zionists as Anti-Semitic and anti-Hindutva as anti-Hindu. The renowned researcher of Zionism, Yoav Litvin wrote:

“In fact, anti-Zionists were targeted from before the foundation of the state of Israel. Today, Jewish pro-Palestinian activists who support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement are detained, punished and even deported.”[17]

In India MK Gandhi (Father of the Nation), anti-Hindutva intellectuals/journalists namely Govind Pansare, MM Kalburgi, Narender Dabholkar and Gouri Lankesh were assassinated by the Hindutva zealots for being anti-Hindu. Arrest of anti-Hindutva intellectuals like Anand Teltumbde, Fr. Stany (who died during incarceration), Gautam Navlakha, Varavara Rao, lawyer Sudha Bharadwaj, activists Arun Ferreira, Vernon Gonsalves, Hany Babu, Umar Khalid and hundreds others under terror laws.

6)Blatantly Racist: Zionists ruling Israel may harp on the divine unity of the Jews of the world but in reality Israel is ruled by and for superior Ashkenazi [European] Jews.  In Israel hatred for dark-skinned African Jews and Sephardi [Spanish speaking Jews] and Mizrahi Jews [Jews from Central and West Asian countries, many of them Arabic-speaking] is too glaring to be missed.

In India RSS demands abrogation of the democratic-secular-egalitarian Constitution and promulgation of Manu Code [Manusmriti] as law of the land. Manusmriti is declared to be most worship-able after Vedas. It decrees sub-human status to women and Sudras [lowest Caste in the Brahmanical Caste system].[18] Moreover, RSS treats dark-skinned South Indians as inferior.[19]

RSS LINKAGES WITH INTERNATIONAL NEO-FASCIST ORGANIZATIONS

RSS building a deadly alliance against Muslims & Christians in South Asia: Editorial in the New York Times 

The world has not bothered to take any notice of a terrorist network developing fast in India and its neighbourhood between RSS and the two terrorist ultra nationalist Buddhist groups of Myanmar and Sri Lanka against minorities; specially Muslims in the region. According to an editorial in The International New York Times [‘Deadly alliances against Muslims’, October 16, 2014] it was announced by Galagodaththe Gnanasara, the leader of the radical Sri Lankan Buddhist group Bodu Bala Sena [Buddhist Power Force] at an international convention in Colombo in September 2014.  The editorial disclosed that at the convention:

“The guest of honor was Ashin Wirathu, a Buddhist radical whose picture Time magazine put on its July 1 [2013] covers as ‘The Face of Buddhist Terror’…Mr. Gnanasara claimed he was in discussions ‘at a high level’ with the right-wing Indian Hindu group Rashtriya Swayam Sevak to form what he called a ‘Hindu-Buddhist peace zone’ in South Asia.”[20]

The NYT editorial also carried Facebook and Twitter congratulatory messages of Ram Madhav (who kept on shuffling as spokes-person of RSS and general secretary of BJP) to Bodu Bala Sena. These must be read to know the depth of linkages between Buddhist terrorist organizations and RSS.

Neo-Nazi mass murderer of Norway, Anders Behring Breivik’s linkages with the RSS

On 22 JULY 2011 Breivik massacred 77 youth belonging to the Norway’s ruling Labour Party at a youth training camp on the island of Utøya. It was no sudden carnage by some mad person. Breivik had planned it for years. Just before the attack he had released on line ‘A European Declaration of Independence’ which declared war against the devils; cultural Marxism, Multi-culturalism, feminism, emotionalism, humanism, and egalitarianism.[21]

In this case, too, the world took almost no notice of the critical fact that Breivik’s manifesto laid down a plan of co-operation between Neo-Nazi movements of Europe and “Hindu Nationalist” organizations of India. Out of 1515 pages of Breivik’s manifesto 102 pages dealt with the glorification of Hindutva movement of India.

It emphasized that it was essential that these two “learn from each other and cooperate as much as possible” as “Our goals are more or less identical.” This manifesto specially mentioned the name of the fountain head of the Hindutva politics, RSS and its appendages like BJP, ABVP (Akhil Bhartiya Vidyarthi Parishad; student appendage of the RSS) and VHP (Vishwa Hindu Parishad; RSS appendage to bring the world under Hindutva hegemony) as partners.[22] Importantly, the manifesto pledged military support “to the nationalists in the Indian civil war and in the deportation of all Muslims from India” as part of a larger campaign to “overthrow of all western European multi-culturalist governments”.

How critical is the danger of RSS becoming a rallying point of all the neo-Fascists of the world can be gauged by the fact that the former according to its own admission was active in 39 countries with the nomenclature, Hindu Seva Sangh.[23] The RSS has not uploaded data after 2015 in this regard. There must be many more countries where it could be functioning covertly. The civilized world can risk overlooking this most lethal danger on its own peril.

Shamsul Islam is a retired professor of Delhi University

13 October 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Brett Wilkins

Human Rights Watch on Thursday said it has confirmed reports that Israeli military forces unleashed white phosphorus munitions during artillery attacks on targets in Lebanon and Gaza this week, including over a heavily populated civilian area of the besieged Palestinian strip—an apparent war crime.

HRW said it has interviewed witnesses and verified video footage shot in Lebanon and Gaza on Tuesday and Wednesday “showing multiple airbursts of artillery-fired white phosphorus over the Gaza City port and two rural locations along the Israel-Lebanon border.”

The HRW announcement came as Israeli forces continue to bombard Gaza from air, land, and sea in an assault that has killed more than 1,500 Palestinians, including at least 500 children, in retaliation for Hamas’ surprise infiltration of Israel and killing of over 1,300 Israeli soldiers and civilians.

As HRW explained Thursday:

“Upon contact, white phosphorus can burn people, thermally and chemically, down to the bone as it is highly soluble in fat and therefore in human flesh. White phosphorus fragments can exacerbate wounds even after treatment and can enter the bloodstream and cause multiple organ failure. Already dressed wounds can reignite when dressings are removed and the wounds are reexposed to oxygen. Even relatively minor burns are often fatal. For survivors, extensive scarring tightens muscle tissue and creates physical disabilities.

WP burns as hot as 1,500°F. Water does not extinguish it.

“Any time that white phosphorus is used in crowded civilian areas, it poses a high risk of excruciating burns and lifelong suffering,” HRW Middle East and North Africa director Lama Fakih said in a statement. “White phosphorous is unlawfully indiscriminate when airburst in populated urban areas, where it can burn down houses and cause egregious harm to civilians.”

“To avoid civilian harm, Israel should stop using white phosphorus in populated areas,” Fakih added. “Parties to the conflict should be doing everything they can to spare civilians from further suffering.”

HRW previously accused Israel of war crimes for using WP munitions in densely populated areas—including over a United Nations school—during the 2008-09 Operation Cast Lead invasion of Gaza. In response to a 2013 petition to Israel’s High Court of Justice filed by human rights groups including HRW, the Israel Defense Forces said it would no longer use WP in populated areas, with “very narrow exceptions” that it would not disclose.

Other countries’ militaries also use WP, most notably the United States, which fired the incendiary rounds during the 2004 battle for Fallujah and elsewhere in the so-called War on Terror.

In 2016, Saudi Arabia was condemned for allegedly firing U.S.-supplied WP munitions against Houthi rebels in Yemen. WP and other incendiary weapons have also been used by Syrian government and Russian forces fighting Islamic State and other militants during the Syrian civil war. Turkey has also been accused of firing WP rounds at Kurdish civilians in Syria.

Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

13 October 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By CIVICUS

CIVICUS, a global civil society alliance, calls on the Indian authorities to end the crackdown against NewsClick and release its editor and staff held under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA). The UAPA, a draconian anti-terror law that has been increasingly used against human rights activists is now being used to target journalists and independent media.

On 3 October 2023, Delhi Police conducted simultaneous raids in nearly 40 locations including the office of NewsClick and homes of its journalists, staff and contributors including activists. Later, the police arrested and detained the founder and editor of NewsClick Prabir Purkayastha and head of Human Resources Amit Chakraborthy under charges of terrorism and criminal conspiracy.

Yesterday, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) registered a case against NewsClick for alleged violations of the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act – a law that has been used to impose discriminatory restrictions on civil society.

NewsClick has been targeted by the Indian authorities since 2021, when the Enforcement Directorate in February 2021 searched their office to investigate an alleged money-laundering probe. Later in September 2021, the Income Tax Department conducted ‘surveys’, at the office of NewsClick.

In August 2023, the New York Times published an investigative article that alleged NewsClick has received funds from a US businessman, and it had “sprinkled its coverage with Chinese government talking points”. Days after this article was published, the Delhi police registered a case based on this article against NewsClick and carried out these raids.

During the raids, journalists were forced to hand over their laptops and mobile phones without any due process. This action raises concerns because of the reports of  ‘incriminating evidence’ been planted onto UAPA case implicated activists’ devices. After a day long search, the office of NewsClick was sealed by the police. At least 46 journalists associated with NewsClick were reportedly questioned with some being asked if they hand covered the protests against discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act and Farm laws.

“This is a complete assault on press freedom in India and an act of reprisal against the critical and independent journalism of NewsClick. Charging a news outlet under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, is a brazen attempt to silence and harass independent media, activists and citizens. We call for the immediate release of Prabir Purkayastha and Amit Chakraborthy. All charges against NewsClick must be dropped,” said David Kode, Advocacy and Campaigns Lead at CIVICUS.

The First Information Report (FIR) registered against NewsClick, levels a range of accusations  including conspiring “to disrupt the sovereignty and territorial integrity of India” by accepting illegal foreign funds over five years, actively spreading false information to discredit the government, ‘causing disaffection against India’, providing legal defence for Chinese companies and peddling “paid news” to criticise domestic policies and development project.

NewsClick has refuted all these accusations outrightly and said that it doesn’t publish any news or information “at the behest of any Chinese entity or authority, directly or indirectly”. It says all funding is received legitimately and reported to relevant authorities as per the legal requirements.

The CIVICUS Monitor has documented how India’s UAPA law has been used to target activists and stifle dissent. Over the years, it has been invoked against human rights activists as an act of reprisal for their human rights work.  UN experts have raised concerns about UAPA’s negative impact on India’s international human rights obligations and called for its review. During India’s Universal Periodic Review at the UN Human Rights Council in November 2022, several states also raised concerns about the use of UAPA against activists.

“This crackdown against independent media is further testimony of the deterioration of civic space in India. The authorities stop misusing repressive laws like the UAPA against activists, civil society and journalists. They must comply with India’s obligations under international human rights laws and standards”, added Kode.

Civic space in India is rated as “Repressed” by the CIVICUS Monitor. 

CIVICUS is a global alliance of over 10,000 civil society organisations and activists dedicated to strengthening citizen action and civil society throughout the world.

12 October 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Ramzy Baroud

Regardless of the precise strategy of the Palestinian group Hamas, or any other Palestinian movement for that matter, the daring Palestinian military campaign, deep inside Israel, on Saturday, October 7, was only possible because Palestinians are simply fed up.

17 years ago, Israel imposed a hermetic siege on the Gaza Strip. The story of the siege is often presented in two starkly different interpretations. For some, it is an inhumane act of ‘collective punishment’; for others, it is a necessary evil so that Israel may protect itself from so-called Palestinian terrorism.

Largely missing from the story, however, is that 17 years are long enough for a whole generation to grow up under siege, to enlist in the Resistance and to fight for its freedom.

According to Save The Children, nearly half of the 2.3 million Palestinians living in Gaza today are children.

This fact is often infused to delineate the suffering of a population that has never stepped outside the tiny, impoverished Strip of 365 square km, approximately 141 square miles.

But again, numbers, though may seem precise, are often employed to tell a small part of a complex story.

This Gaza generation, which either grew up or was born after the imposition of the siege, experienced at least five major, devastating wars, of which children, like them, along with their mothers, fathers, and siblings, were the main targets, victims.

“If you surround your enemy completely, give them no chance to escape, offer them no quarter, then they will fight to the last,” wrote Sun Tzu in The Art of War.

Yet, year after year, this is precisely what Israel has done. This strategy proved to be a major strategic miscalculation.

Even the mere attempt at protesting the injustice of the siege, by gathering in large numbers at the Gaza fence, separating besieged Gaza from Israel, was not permitted.

The mass protests, known as the Great March of Return, were answered with Israeli sniper bullets. Scenes of youngsters, carrying other bleeding youth, shouting ‘God is Great,’ became a regular scene at the fence.

As the casualty count increased, the media interest in the story simply faded with time.

The hundreds of fighters who crossed into Israel through four different entry points at dawn, on October 7, were these same young Palestinians who knew nothing but war, siege, and the need to protect one another.

They also learned how to survive, despite the lack of everything in Gaza, including clean water and proper medical care.

This is where the story of this generation intersects with that of Hamas, or the Islamic Jihad and any other Palestinian group.

Yes, Hamas chose the timing and the nature of its military campaign to fit into a very precise strategy. This strategy, however, would have not been possible if Israel did not leave these young Palestinians with no other option but to fight back.

Videos circulating on social media showed Palestinian fighters yelling in Arabic, with that distinct, often harsh sounding Gaza accent, “this is for my brother,” “this is for my son.”

They shouted these and many other angry statements as they fired, among panic-stricken Israeli settlers and soldiers. The latter, on many occasions, had abandoned their positions and run away.

The psychological impact of this war will most certainly exceed that of October 1973, when Arab armies made quick gains against Israel, also following a surprise attack.

This time, the devastating impact on the collective Israeli thinking will prove to be a game-changer, since the ‘war’ involves a single Palestinian group, not a whole army, or three.

The October 2023 surprise attack, however, is directly linked to the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war.

By choosing the 50th anniversary of what Arabs consider a great triumph against Israel, Palestinian Resistance wanted to send a clear message: the cause of Palestine remains still the cause of all Arabs.

In fact, all statements made by top Hamas military commanders and political leaders were loaded with such symbolism and other references to Arab countries and peoples.

This pan-Arab discourse was not haphazard and was delineated in statements made by the Commander of Al-Qassam Brigades, Mohammed Deif, founding commander of Al-Qassam, Saleh al-Arouri, Head of Hamas Political Bureau, Ismail Haniyeh, and Abu Obeida, the Brigades’ famous masked spokesman.

They all urged unity and insisted that Palestine is but a component of a larger Arab, Islamic struggle for justice, dignity and collective honor.

The group called its campaign ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’, thus, again, recentering Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim unity around Al-Quds, Jerusalem, and all its holy places.

Everyone seemed shocked, including Israel itself, not by the Hamas attack per se, but by the great coordination and daringness of the massive, never-seen-before, operation.

So, instead of attacking at night, the Resistance attacked at dawn. Instead of striking at Israel using the many tunnels under Gaza, they simply drove there, parachuted, arrived by sea, and in many cases, walked across the border.

The element of surprise became even more baffling when Palestinian fighters challenged the very fundamentals of guerrilla warfare: Instead of fighting a ‘war of maneuver’, they, however temporarily, fought a ‘war of position’, thus holding for many hours on the areas they gained inside Israel.

Indeed, for the Gaza groups, the psychological warfare was as critical as the physical fighting. Hundreds of videos and images beamed through every social media channel, as if hoping to redefine the relationship between Palestinians, the usual victim, and Israel, the military occupier.

The insistence on not killing the elderly and children, as emphasized by various field commanders, was not just intended for Palestinians. It was also a message for an international audience, that Palestinian Resistance will play by the accepted universal rules.

Regardless of how many Palestinians Israel kills, and will kill, in retaliation, although tragic, it will hardly salvage the tattered image of an undisciplined army, a divided society, and a political leadership that is solely focused on its own survival.

It is too early to reach sweeping conclusions regarding the outcomes of this unprecedented war.  But what is crystal clear is that the fundamental relationship between the Israeli occupation and occupied Palestinians after October 7, 2023, is likely to be altered, and permanently so.

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

12 October 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Irwin Jerome

Enough is Enough! The world and Human Race have now reached another one of those critical moments of mass in their brief tragic, pathetic evolution together upon this earth. There is no turning back now to the way it once was between Israel, Palestine and Gaza.

The Palestinian people finally have reached that critical breaking point in their existence that all Humans reach, as they inevitably must, once they’ve reached that fatal tipping point where they have absolutely nothing to loose besides their lives and those of their loved ones, except try to regain something of the last remaining vestiges of their basic human dignity, and resist, this time, at all costs, the outrageously-heinous actions of Israel and their Western allies. What continues to yet unfold amounts to another historic Nazi Holocaust moment in the Warsaw Ghetto. This time it isn’t in occupied Poland. It’s in occupied Palestine.

But not really just for the Palestinians, but for the Jews and everyone of us, because it represents a basic, defiant, last cry of human hope for help that continues to be emitted everywhere on earth by all those other oppressed ones who find their necks hopelessly-caught under the same jackboots of whatever oppressor.

Just as when Nazi Germany invaded Poland that kicked off the onslaught of WWII, that led to the Jewish Warsaw Ghetto and massacre of brave, defiant Jewish Freedom Fighters of all ages in Warsaw and millions more throughout the world. There was no other answer then for any of them in Warsaw in 1943, just as there are no answers for the Palestinians and all the rest of us in 2023, but to throw all caution to the wind and strike out, strike back, as futile as it may be, at the new Holocaust about to be perpetrated against us all in Gaza, Palestine and Israel.

Coming, as it is, on the heels of the equally dismal war in Ukraine, it now seems sadly likely that, ultimately, it can only but lead to yet another WWIII with even more disastrous consequences yet to eventually be brought about; like so many world wars that have come before have been brought about, without ever any real resolution.

Jerome Irwin is a Canadian-American writer who, in previous lives, has been involved in a wide range of diverse and varied worlds, including the Criminology profession with an American police department, and later for a brief-time in the capacity of clandestine communications with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

10 October 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

ByJonathan Cook

The current outpouring of sympathy for Israel should make anyone with half a heart retch.

Not because it is not awful that Israeli civilians are dying and suffering in such large numbers. But because Palestinian civilians in Gaza have faced repeated rampages from Israel decade after decade, producing far more suffering, but have never elicited a fraction of the concern currently being expressed by Western politicians or the public.

The West’s hypocrisy over Palestinian fighters killing and wounding hundreds of Israelis and holding dozens more hostage in communities surrounding and inside besieged Gaza is stark indeed.

This is the first time Palestinians, caged in the coastal enclave, have managed to inflict a significant strike against Israel vaguely comparable to the savagery Palestinians in Gaza have faced repeatedly since they were entombed in a cage more than 15 years ago, when Israel began its blockade by land, sea, and air in 2007.

Western media are calling the jailbreak and attack by Palestinians from Gaza “unprecedented”—and the most dismal intelligence failing by Israel since it was caught off-guard during the Yom Kippur War exactly 50 years ago.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has accused Hamas, which nominally runs the open-air prison of Gaza, of starting “a cruel and evil war.” But the truth is that the Palestinians have “started” nothing. They have managed, after so much struggle, to find a way to hurt their tormentor.

Inevitably for the Palestinians, as Netanyahu also observed, “the price will be heavy” – especially for civilians. Israel will inflict on the prisoners the severest punishment for their impudence.

Watch how little sympathy and concern there will be from the West for the many Palestinian men, women, and children who are killed once again by Israel. Their immense suffering will be obscured, and justified, by the term “Israeli retaliation.”

The real lessons

All the current analysis focusing on Israel’s intelligence “blunders” distracts from the real lesson of these rapidly evolving events.

No one really cared while Gaza’s Palestinians were subjected to a blockade imposed by Israel that denied them the essentials of life. The few dozen Israelis being held hostage by Hamas fighters pale in comparison with the two million Palestinians held hostage by Israel in an open-air prison for nearly two decades.

No one really cared when it emerged that Gaza’s Palestinians had been put on a “starvation diet” by Israel – only limited food was allowed in, calculated to keep the population barely fed.

No one really cared when Israel bombed the coastal enclave every few years, killing many hundreds of Palestinian civilians each time. Israel simply called it “mowing the lawn”. The destruction of vast areas of Gaza, what Israeli generals boasted of as returning the enclave to the Stone Age, was formalized as a military strategy known as the “Dahiya doctrine“.

No one really cared when Israeli snipers targeted nurses, youngsters, and people in wheelchairs who came out to protest against their imprisonment by Israel. Many thousands were left as amputees after those snipers received orders to shoot the protesters indiscriminately in the legs or ankles.

Western concern at the deaths of Israeli civilians at the hands of Palestinian fighters is hard to stomach. Have not many hundreds of Palestinian children died over the past 15 years in Israel’s repeated bombing campaigns on Gaza? Did their lives not count as much as Israeli lives – and if not, why not?

After so much indifference for so long, it is difficult to hear the sudden horror from western governments and media because Palestinians have finally found a way – mirroring Israel’s inhumane, decades-long policy – to fight back effectively.

This moment rips off the mask and lays bare the undisguised racism that masquerades as moral concern in western capitals.

Hypocrisy distilled

Distilling that hypocrisy is Volodymr Zelenskiy, Ukraine‘s president. At the weekend, he issued a lengthy tweet condemning Palestinians as “terrorists” and offering Israel his unwavering support.

He averred that “Israel’s right to self-defense is unquestionable”, adding: “The world must stand united and in solidarity so that terror does not attempt to break or subjugate life anywhere and at any moment.”

Not all forms of ‘terrorism’, it seems, are equal in the eyes of Zelenskiy, or his patrons in western capitals. Certainly, not the state terrorism of Israel that has made Palestinian lives a misery for decades

The inversion of reality is breathtaking. The Palestinians cannot “subjugate life” in Israel. They have no such power, even if a few briefly managed to break out of their cage. It is Israel that has been subjugating Palestinian life for decades.

Not all forms of “terrorism,” it seems, are equal in the eyes of Zelenskiy, or his patrons in Western capitals. Certainly, it is not the state terrorism of Israel that has made Palestinian lives a misery for decades.

How does Israel have an “unquestionable right” to “defend itself” from the Palestinians whose territory it occupies and controls? How does Russia then not have an equal claim to be “defending itself” when it hits Ukrainian cities in “retaliation” for Ukrainian strikes intended to liberate its territory from Russian occupation?

Israel, the much stronger, belligerent party, is now laying waste to Gaza “in retaliation,” as the BBCputs it, for the latest Palestinian attack.

So on what grounds will Zelenskiy or his officials be able to condemn Moscow when it fires missiles “in retaliation” for Ukraine’s strikes on Russian territory? How, if Palestinian resistance to Israel’s occupation of Gaza is terrorism, as Zelenskiy asserts, is Ukrainian resistance to Russian occupation not equally terrorism?

No hiding place

By indulging Israel in its deceptions, Israel’s allies have allowed it to perpetrate ever more outrageous lies. At the weekend, Netanyahu warned Palestinians in Gaza to “leave now” because Israeli forces were preparing to “act with all force”.

But Netanyahu knows, as do his Western enablers, that Gaza’s population has nowhere to flee. There is no hiding place. Palestinians have been sealed into Gaza since Israel besieged it by land, sea, and air.

The only Palestinians able to “leave Gaza” are the armed factions who broke out of their Israeli-imposed jail and are being denounced as “terrorists” by Western politicians and media.

Western governments so horrified by the Palestinian attack on Israel are also the governments that are remaining silent as Israel turns off the electricity to the prison that is Gaza—again in supposed “retaliation.”

The collective punishment of two million Palestinians in Gaza, dependent on Israel for power because Israel surrounds and controls every aspect of their lives in the enclave, is a war crime.

Strangely, western officials understand it is a war crime when Russia bombs power stations in Ukraine, turning off the lights. They scream for Russian President Vladimir Putin to be dragged to the International Criminal Court in the Hague. So why is it so difficult for them to understand the parallels of what Israel is doing to Gaza?

Daring escape

There are two immediate, and contrasting, lessons to be learned from what has happened this weekend.

The first is that the human spirit cannot be caged indefinitely. Palestinians in Gaza have been constantly devising new ways to break free from their chains.

By Michel Chossudovsky

Author’s Note and Update

Early Saturday October 7, 2023, Hamas launched “Operation Al-Aqsa Storm” which was led by its Military Chief Mohammed Deif. On that same day, Netanyahu confirmed a so-called “State of Readiness For War.”

Israel has now (October 7, 2023) officially declared an illegal war on Palestine.

Military operations are invariably planned well in advance. Was “Operation Al-Aqsa Storm” a “surprise attack”? Did Netanyahu and his vast military-intelligence apparatus have foreknowledge of the Hamas attack?

Was a carefully formulated plan to wage an all out war against Palestine envisaged prior to the launching of “Operation Al-Aqsa Storm”?

According to Dr. Philip Giraldi,

“As a former intelligence officer, I find it impossible to believe that Israel did not have multiple informants inside Gaza as well as electronic listening devices all along the border wall which would have picked up movements of groups and vehicles.”

[Did Netanyahu have foreknowledge] about developments in Gaza and chose to let it happen so they can wipe Gaza off the map… in retaliation” (Philip Giraldi, October 8, 2023)

It should also be understood that Netanyahu’s October 7, 2023 illegal declaration of war against Gaza is a continuation of its 2008-2009 invasion of Gaza under “Operation Cast Lead.” The underlying objective is the outright military occupation of Gaza by Israel’s IDF forces and the expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland.

Flash Back: Operation Cast Lead (2008-2009)

Gaza belongs to Palestine. In December 2008, Israeli forces invaded the Gaza Strip under Operation Cast Lead. The justification for this invasion was “persistent terrorist activities and a constant missile threat from the Gaza Strip directed at Israeli civilians.”

What was the hidden agenda?

The purpose of Operation Cast Led was to confiscate Palestine’s maritime natural gas reserves.

In the wake of the invasion, Palestinian gas fields were de facto confiscated by Israel in derogation of international law.

A year following “Operation Cast Lead,” Tel Aviv announced the discovery of the Leviathan natural gas field in the Eastern Mediterranean “off the coast of Israel.”

At the time the gas field was: “ … the most prominent field ever found in the sub-explored area of the Levantine Basin, which covers about 83,000 square kilometres of the eastern Mediterranean region.” (i)

Coupled with Tamar field, in the same location, discovered in 2009, the prospects are for an energy bonanza for Israel, for Houston, Texas based Noble Energy and partners Delek Drilling, Avner Oil Exploration and Ratio Oil Exploration. (See Felicity Arbuthnot, Israel: Gas, Oil and Trouble in the Levant, Global Research, December 30, 2013

The Gazan gas fields are part of the broader Levant assessment area.

What has been unfolding is the integration of these adjoining gas fields including those belonging to Palestine into the orbit of Israel. (See map below)

It should be noted that the entire Eastern Mediterranean coastline extending from Egypt’s Sinai to Syria constitutes an area encompassing large gas as well as oil reserves.

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, October 8, 2023

________________________

War and Natural Gas:
The Israeli Invasion and Gaza’s Offshore Gas Fields

January 8, 2009

The December 2008 military invasion of the Gaza Strip by Israeli Forces bears a direct relation to the control and ownership of strategic offshore gas reserves.

This is a war of conquest. Discovered in 2000, there are extensive gas reserves off the Gaza coastline.

British Gas (BG Group) and its partner, the Athens based Consolidated Contractors International Company (CCC) owned by Lebanon’s Sabbagh and Koury families, were granted oil and gas exploration rights in a 25 year agreement signed in November 1999 with the Palestinian Authority.

The rights to the offshore gas field are respectively British Gas (60 percent); Consolidated Contractors (CCC) (30 percent); and the Investment Fund of the Palestinian Authority (10 percent). (Haaretz, October 21, 2007)

The PA-BG-CCC agreement includes field development and the construction of a gas pipeline. (Middle East Economic Digest, Jan 5, 2001)

The BG licence covers the entire Gazan offshore marine area, which is contiguous to several Israeli offshore gas facilities (see Map below). It should be noted that 60 percent of the gas reserves along the Gaza-Israel coastline belong to Palestine.

The BG Group drilled two wells in 2000: Gaza Marine-1 and Gaza Marine-2. Reserves are estimated by British Gas to be of the order of 1.4 trillion cubic feet, valued at approximately 4 billion dollars. These are the figures made public by British Gas. The size of Palestine’s gas reserves could be much larger.

Who Owns the Gas Fields

The issue of sovereignty over Gaza’s gas fields is crucial. From a legal standpoint, the gas reserves belong to Palestine.

The death of Yasser Arafat, the election of the Hamas government and the ruin of the Palestinian Authority have enabled Israel to establish de facto control over Gaza’s offshore gas reserves.

British Gas (BG Group) has been dealing with the Tel Aviv government. In turn, the Hamas government has been bypassed in regards to exploration and development rights over the gas fields.

The election of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2001 was a major turning point. Palestine’s sovereignty over the offshore gas fields was challenged in the Israeli Supreme Court. Sharon stated unequivocally that “Israel would never buy gas from Palestine” intimating that Gaza’s offshore gas reserves belong to Israel.

In 2003, Ariel Sharon, vetoed an initial deal, which would allow British Gas to supply Israel with natural gas from Gaza’s offshore wells. (The Independent, August 19, 2003)

The election victory of Hamas in 2006 was conducive to the demise of the Palestinian Authority, which became confined to the West Bank, under the proxy regime of Mahmoud Abbas.

In 2006, British Gas “was close to signing a deal to pump the gas to Egypt.” (Times, May, 23, 2007). According to reports, British Prime Minister Tony Blair intervened on behalf of Israel with a view to shunting the agreement with Egypt.

The following year, in May 2007, the Israeli Cabinet approved a proposal by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert  “to buy gas from the Palestinian Authority.” The proposed contract was for $4 billion, with profits of the order of $2 billion of which one billion was to go the Palestinians.

Tel Aviv, however, had no intention on sharing the revenues with Palestine. An Israeli team of negotiators was set up by the Israeli Cabinet to thrash out a deal with the BG Group, bypassing both the Hamas government and the Palestinian Authority:

“Israeli defence authorities want the Palestinians to be paid in goods and services and insist that no money go to the Hamas-controlled Government.” (Ibid, emphasis added)

The objective was essentially to nullify the contract signed in 1999 between the BG Group and the Palestinian Authority under Yasser Arafat.

Under the proposed 2007 agreement with BG, Palestinian gas from Gaza’s offshore wells was to be channeled by an undersea pipeline to the Israeli seaport of Ashkelon, thereby transferring control over the sale of the natural gas to Israel.

The deal fell through. The negotiations were suspended:

“Mossad Chief Meir Dagan opposed the transaction on security grounds, that the proceeds would fund terror”. (Member of Knesset Gilad Erdan, Address to the Knesset on “The Intention of Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to Purchase Gas from the Palestinians When Payment Will Serve Hamas,” March 1, 2006, quoted in Lt. Gen. (ret.) Moshe Yaalon, Does the Prospective Purchase of British Gas from Gaza’s Coastal Waters Threaten Israel’s National Security?  Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, October 2007)

Israel’s intent was to foreclose the possibility that royalties be paid to the Palestinians. In December 2007, The BG Group withdrew from the negotiations with Israel and in January 2008 they closed their office in Israel. (BG website)

Invasion Plan on The Drawing Board

The invasion plan of the Gaza Strip under “Operation Cast Lead” was set in motion in June 2008, according to Israeli military sources:

“Sources in the defense establishment said Defense Minister Ehud Barak instructed the Israel Defense Forces to prepare for the operation over six months ago [June or before June] , even as Israel was beginning to negotiate a ceasefire agreement with Hamas.”(Barak Ravid, Operation “Cast Lead”: Israeli Air Force strike followed months of planning, Haaretz, December 27, 2008)

That very same month, the Israeli authorities contacted British Gas, with a view to resuming crucial negotiations pertaining to the purchase of Gaza’s natural gas:

“Both Ministry of Finance director general Yarom Ariav and Ministry of National Infrastructures director general Hezi Kugler agreed to inform BG of Israel’s wish to renew the talks.

The sources added that BG has not yet officially responded to Israel’s request, but that company executives would probably come to Israel in a few weeks to hold talks with government officials.” (Globes online- Israel’s Business Arena, June 23, 2008)

The decision to speed up negotiations with British Gas (BG Group) coincided, chronologically, with the planning of the invasion of Gaza initiated in June. It would appear that Israel was anxious to reach an agreement with the BG Group prior to the invasion, which was already in an advanced planning stage.

Moreover, these negotiations with British Gas were conducted by the Ehud Olmert government with the knowledge that a military invasion was on the drawing board. In all likelihood, a new “post war” political-territorial arrangement for the Gaza strip was also being contemplated by the Israeli government.

In fact, negotiations between British Gas and Israeli officials were ongoing in October 2008, 2-3 months prior to the commencement of the bombings on December 27th.

In November 2008, the Israeli Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of National Infrastructures instructed Israel Electric Corporation (IEC) to enter into negotiations with British Gas, on the purchase of natural gas from the BG’s offshore concession in Gaza. (Globes, November 13, 2008)

“Ministry of Finance director general Yarom Ariav and Ministry of National Infrastructures director general Hezi Kugler wrote to IEC CEO Amos Lasker recently, informing him of the government’s decision to allow negotiations to go forward, in line with the framework proposal it approved earlier this year.

The IEC board, headed by chairman Moti Friedman, approved the principles of the framework proposal a few weeks ago. The talks with BG Group will begin once the board approves the exemption from a tender.” (Globes Nov. 13, 2008)

Gaza and Energy Geopolitics

The military occupation of Gaza is intent upon transferring the sovereignty of the gas fields to Israel in violation of international law.

What can we expect in the wake of the invasion?

What is the intent of Israel with regard to Palestine’s Natural Gas reserves?

A new territorial arrangement, with the stationing of Israeli and/or “peacekeeping” troops?

The militarization of the entire Gaza coastline, which is strategic for Israel?

The outright confiscation of Palestinian gas fields and the unilateral declaration of Israeli sovereignty over Gaza’s maritime areas?

If this were to occur, the Gaza gas fields would be integrated into Israel’s offshore installations, which are contiguous to those of the Gaza Strip. (See Map 1 above)

These various offshore installations are also linked up to Israel’s energy transport corridor, extending from the port of Eilat, which is an oil pipeline terminal, on the Red Sea to the seaport – pipeline terminal at Ashkelon, and northwards to Haifa, and eventually linking up through a proposed Israeli-Turkish pipeline with the Turkish port of Ceyhan.

Ceyhan is the terminal of the Baku, Tblisi Ceyhan Trans Caspian pipeline.

“What is envisaged is to link the BTC pipeline to the Trans-Israel Eilat-Ashkelon pipeline, also known as Israel’s Tipline.” (See Michel Chossudovsky, The War on Lebanon and the Battle for Oil, Global Research, July 23, 2006)

Michel Chossudovsky is an award-winning author, Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa, Founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal, Editor of Global Research.

10 October 2023

Source: michelchossudovsky.substack.com

Burma Human Rights Network offers our sincere condolences and sympathy to the victims and their families impacted by the heinous bombardment that took place on October 9, 2023, at approximately 11:30 PM on the Mone Lai Khat IDP (Internally Displaced People) camp in Kachin State, Myanmar. According to Reuters and BBC, the attack was an artillery shelling.

The Burmese junta’s assault on the IDP camp killed 29 innocent people. Eleven of the victims were children under the age of 16. Fifty-seven more people have suffered severe injuries.

“The Junta continues to utilize cruelty against civilians as its weapon of choice. The regime’s desire to maintain its illegitimate power forced these innocent people into camps, and now they have murdered them when they were most vulnerable. The international community must stand for the innocent lives lost in Burma and make every effort to protect them,” Said BHRN’s Executive Director, Kyaw Win.

Such brutality against innocent individuals, especially towards children, is abhorrent and inexcusable. BHRN vehemently denounces the misery inflicted upon the Mone Lai Khat refugee camp residents and the regime’s egregious disregard for human life.

When such atrocities occur, the international community must not remain silent. BHRN calls on the international community, governments, and humanitarian organisations to act immediately to investigate this incident, hold those accountable for their conduct, and give the survivors and their families the support they desperately need.

During this difficult period, our thoughts are with the victims and their loved ones. BHRN  calls on the international community to stand in solidarity with the people of Myanmar as they continue to face hardships brought on by the military regime.

Organisation’s Background

BHRN is based in London and operates across Burma/Myanmar working for human rights, minority rights and religious freedom in the country. BHRN has played a crucial role in advocating for human rights and religious freedom with politicians and world leaders.

11 October 2023

Media Enquiries
Please contact:

Kyaw Win
Executive Director
Burma Human Rights Network (BHRN)
E: kyawwin@bhrn.org.uk
T: +44(0) 740 345 2378

Source: bhrn.org.uk

By Francis A. Boyle

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

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

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

Article II of the Genocide Convention defines the international crime of genocide in relevant part as follows: “In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such: (a) killing members of the group;(b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;(c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its destruction its physical destruction in whole or in part…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Answers to Questions

Refuting Charges of Anti-Semitism

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

Zionist Opposition to BDS

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

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

End of the Middle East Peace Process

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

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

We Have Truth and Justice on Our Side!

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

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

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

FAB

D in BDS.

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sent by Francis Boyle – Jul 30, 2007

The Cowardice of Harvard’s Larry Summers

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

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

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

Debating Dershowitz

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

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

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

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

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

Israel: An Apartheid State

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

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

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

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

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

Francis A. Boyle

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On Point Radio – Sep 25, 2007 broadcast

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

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

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

Guests:

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

Alan Dershowitz, professor at Harvard Law School

Taufiq Rahim, student at Princeton University

9 October 2023

By Al Jazeera Staff

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

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

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

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

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

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

What was the Balfour Declaration?

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

How Israel Was Created

What happened during the 1930s?

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

What was the UN partition plan?

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

The 1948 Nakba, or the ethnic cleansing of Palestine

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

The years after the Nakba

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

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

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

The first Intifada 1987-1993

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

The Oslo years and the Palestinian Authority

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

The second Intifada

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

The Palestinian division and the Gaza blockade

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

The wars on the Gaza Strip

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

9 October 2023

Source: aljazeera.com