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By Jordan Shilton

The World Health Organisation (WHO) and the United Nations began the second stage of a polio vaccine campaign in southern Gaza Thursday, as the far-right Israeli regime continued with its genocidal onslaught against the Palestinians.

Having decimated Gaza’s health care system and destroyed virtually all water treatment and sewage processing facilities during 11 months of continuous bombardment with US-supplied weapons, Israel has created the conditions in which the potentially deadly polio virus, which can cause paralysis in the limbs, could surge across Gaza and beyond.

The Palestinian Health Ministry reported Thursday that Israel is refusing to coordinate access for the teams of healthcare workers, numbering some 2,700, involved in the vaccine drive. “We appeal to all concerned institutions and authorities to intervene urgently to ensure the success of the vaccination campaign by reaching all children wherever they are,” the ministry said in a statement.

The WHO announced the successful conclusion of the vaccination campaign in central Gaza, where its coverage target was surpassed between 1 and 4 September, which may be in part due to the rapid shifts of displaced people to the area. The ongoing phase in the south, which runs until Sunday, aims to reach 340,000 children, while a phase in the north will begin Monday and conclude Wednesday for some 150,000 children.

Although reports claim Israel has agreed to ceasefires in local areas for a few hours each day to facilitate the vaccination campaign, the reality is that attacks on Gaza’s few remaining healthcare facilities are continuing. The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) struck al-Aqsa hospital in Deir el-Balah in central Gaza just hours after its three vaccination points closed at the completion of the vaccine drive in the enclave’s central region. Al Jazeera reporter Hani Mahmoud noted that the roads to most vaccination points have been destroyed, making it difficult if not impossible for many Palestinians to reach them.

According to the WHO, 90 percent coverage is required among children aged between one day and 10 years in order to prevent the spread of polio throughout the region. The virus was first detected last month in a 10-month-old baby 25 years after the virus was officially eliminated from Gaza.

The return of polio to Gaza underscores the barbarism of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s fascist government set out to destroy any basis for modern life in Gaza. The systematic obliteration of hospitals, schools and other critical infrastructure, the use of humanitarian aid as a weapon of war, and the indiscriminate massacring of men, women and children have turned Gaza into a massive graveyard. Even if the polio vaccination campaign succeeds in suppressing the resurgence of the deadly disease, which appears highly questionable given the horrendous conditions on the ground, other diseases and starvation will continue to flourish and claim thousands of lives.

BBC Arabic noted late last month that the water off Gaza’s Mediterranean coast is turning brown due to the direct discharge of raw sewage into the sea in the absence of treatment facilities. Israel has destroyed all of Gaza’s water treatment plants and sewage management systems. Contact with infected feces is the principal means by which polio is transmitted.

Oxfam has reported that already one-quarter of Gaza’s more than 2 million residents have been sickened by waterborne diseases. “Polio is a waterborne disease and it is directly linked to the sanitation situation,” commented Lama Abdul Samad, a water and sanitation expert at Oxfam. “The sanitation infrastructure has been damaged severely to the point that it is flooding the streets and the neighbourhoods, and people are basically living adjacent to puddles of sewage.”

Earlier in August, the United Nations Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) reported 40,000 cases of hepatitis A, another disease transmitted through contaminated water, since the beginning of Israel’s genocide, compared to just 85 for the same period prior to October 7. Rampant skin diseases, especially among children, and the threat of a cholera outbreak are also ringing alarm bells among medical professionals.

“The waste management system in Gaza has collapsed. Piles of trash are accumulating in the scorching summer heat. Sewage discharges on the streets while people queue for hours just to go to the toilets,” commented UNRWA head Philippe Lazzarini. This is “a dangerous recipe for diseases to spread.”

This is the desired outcome for the Israeli regime, whose leading representatives have described the Palestinians as “human animals” and openly discussed the use of disease to exterminate Gaza’s population. As Giora Eiland, the former head of Israel’s National Security Council, infamously wrote in an article last November:

The international community warns us of a humanitarian disaster in Gaza and of severe epidemics. We must not shy away from this, as difficult as that may be. After all, severe epidemics in the south of the Gaza Strip will bring victory closer and reduce casualties among IDF soldiers.

With the official death toll fast approaching 41,000 Palestinians and the real number of fatalities over 186,000 according to an estimate published in The Lancet, Israel has carried out, with the backing of the imperialist powers, war crimes comparable with those perpetrated by the Nazi regime.

As it continues daily bombardments across Gaza, including a strike Thursday in the north near the Kamal Adwan hospital that killed three, Israel has over recent days intensified its violent assault on Palestinians in the West Bank.

The UN’s latest update on the humanitarian situation in Gaza paints a terrible picture. Speaking at a press conference Thursday, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric described conditions as “beyond catastrophic.” More than 1 million Palestinians received no food parcels in August, due to a combination of declining food supplies and the inability of aid organisations to access the enclave. The number of Palestinians obtaining daily cooked meals fell by 35 percent, with Dujarric explaining that the reduction was mainly due to the forcible closure or relocation of 70 out of 130 kitchens following Israeli evacuation orders.

Israel could not have killed hundreds of thousands and laid waste to Gaza’s infrastructure, creating the perfect conditions for thousands more deaths from disease, without the unstinting support of the imperialist powers. The Biden administration’s supplying of at least 14,000 2,000-pound bombs equipped the IDF with the necessary firepower to turn the enclave into a wasteland.

US imperialism and its European allies back this act of barbarism to the hilt because they view it as a necessary component of advanced plans for a region-wide war aimed at Iran. The only social force capable of putting an end to the Gaza genocide and all of its horrific consequences is the international working class, fighting on the basis of a socialist and internationalist programme.

6 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Nicolas J. S. Davies

The Associated Press reports that many of the recruits drafted under Ukraine’s new conscription law lack the motivation and military indoctrination required to actually aim their weapons and fire at Russian soldiers.

“Some people don’t want to shoot. They see the enemy in the firing position in trenches but don’t open fire. … That is why our men are dying,” said a frustrated battalion commander in Ukraine’s 47th Brigade. “When they don’t use the weapon, they are ineffective.”

This is familiar territory to anyone who has studied the work of U.S. Brigadier General Samuel “Slam” Marshall, a First World War veteran and the chief combat historian of the U.S. Army in the Second World War. Marshall conducted hundreds of post-combat small group sessions with U.S. troops in the Pacific and Europe, and documented his findings in his book, Men Against Fire: the Problem of Battle Command.

One of Slam Marshall’s most startling and controversial findings was that only about 15% of U.S. troops in combat actually fired their weapons at the enemy. In no case did that ever rise above 25%, even when failing to fire placed the soldiers’ own lives in greater danger.

Marshall concluded that most human beings have a natural aversion to killing other human beings, often reinforced by our upbringing and religious beliefs, and that turning civilians into effective combat soldiers therefore requires training and indoctrination expressly designed to override our natural respect for fellow human life. This dichotomy between human nature and killing in war is now understood to lie at the root of much of the PTSD suffered by combat veterans.

Marshall’s conclusions were incorporated into U.S. military training, with the introduction of firing range targets that looked like enemy soldiers and deliberate indoctrination to dehumanize the enemy in soldiers’ minds. When he conducted similar research in the Korean War, Marshall found that changes in infantry training based on his work in World War II had already led to higher firing ratios.

That trend continued in Vietnam and more recent U.S. wars. Part of the shocking brutality of the U.S. hostile military occupation of Iraq stemmed directly from the dehumanizing indoctrination of the U.S. occupation forces, which included falsely linking Iraq to the September 11th terrorist crimes in the U.S. and labeling Iraqis who resisted the U.S. invasion and occupation of their country as “terrorists.”

A Zogby poll of U.S. forces in Iraq in February 2006 found that 85% of U.S. troops believed their mission was to “retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9/11 attacks,” and 77% believed that the primary reason for the war was to “stop Saddam from protecting Al Qaeda in Iraq.” This was all pure fiction, cut from whole cloth by propagandists in Washington, and yet, three years into the U.S. occupation, the Pentagon was still misleading U.S. troops to falsely link Iraq with 9/11.

The impact of this dehumanization was also borne out by court martial testimony in the rare cases when U.S. troops were prosecuted for killing Iraqi civilians. In a court martial at Camp Pendleton in California in July 2007, a corporal testifying for the defense told the court he did not see the cold-blooded killing of an innocent civilian as a summary execution. “I see it as killing the enemy,” he told the court, adding, “Marines consider all Iraqi men part of the insurgency.”

U.S. combat deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan (6,257 killed) were only a fraction of the U.S. combat death toll in Vietnam (47,434) or Korea (33,686), and an even smaller fraction of the nearly 300,000 Americans killed in the Second World War. In every case, other countries suffered much heavier death tolls.

And yet, U.S. casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan provoked waves of political blowback in the U.S., leading to military recruitment problems that persist today. The U.S. government responded by shifting away from wars involving large deployments of U.S. ground troops to a greater reliance on proxy wars and aerial bombardment.

After the end of the Cold War, the U.S. military-industrial complex and political class thought they had “kicked the Vietnam syndrome,” and that, freed from the danger of provoking World War III with the Soviet Union, they could now use military force without restraint to consolidate and expand U.S. global power. These ambitions crossed party lines, from Republican “neoconservatives” to Democratic hawks like Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.

In a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in October 2000, a month before winning a seat in the U.S. Senate, Hillary Clinton echoed her mentor Madeleine Albright’s infamous rejection of the “Powell Doctrine” of limited war.

“There is a refrain…,” Clinton declared, “that we should intervene with force only when we face splendid little wars that we surely can win, preferably by overwhelming force in a relatively short period of time. To those who believe we should become involved only if it is easy to do, I think we have to say that America has never and should not ever shy away from the hard task if it is the right one.”

During the question-and-answer session, a banking executive in the audience challenged Clinton on that statement. “I wonder if you think that every foreign country– the majority of countries–would actually welcome this new assertiveness, including the one billion Muslims that are out there,” he asked, “and whether or not there isn’t some grave risk to the United States in this–what I would say, not new internationalism, but new imperialism?”

When the aggressive war policy promoted by the neocons and Democratic hawks crashed and burned in Iraq and Afghanistan, this should have prompted a serious rethink of their wrongheaded assumptions about the impact of aggressive and illegal uses of U.S. military force.

Instead, the response of the U.S. political class to the blowback from its catastrophic wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was simply to avoid large deployments of U.S. ground forces or “boots on the ground.” They instead embraced the use of devastating bombing and artillery campaigns in Afghanistan, Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria, and wars fought by proxies, with full, “ironclad” U.S. support, in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and now Ukraine and Palestine.

The absence of large numbers of U.S. casualties in these wars kept them off the front pages back home and avoided the kind of political blowback generated by the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. The lack of media coverage and public debate meant that most Americans knew very little about these more recent wars, until the shocking atrocity of the genocide in Gaza finally started to crack the wall of silence and indifference.

The results of these U.S. proxy wars are, predictably, no less catastrophic than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. domestic political impacts have been mitigated, but the real-world impacts in the countries and regions involved are as deadly, destructive and destabilizing as ever, undermining U.S. “soft power” and pretensions to global leadership in the eyes of much of the world.

In fact, these policies have widened the yawning gulf between the worldview of ill-informed Americans who cling to the view of their country as a country at peace and a force for good in the world, and people in other countries, especially in the Global South, who are ever more outraged by the violence, chaos and poverty caused by the aggressive projection of U.S. military and economic power, whether by U.S. wars, proxy wars, bombing campaigns, coups or economic sanctions.

Now the U.S.-backed wars in Palestine and Ukraine are provoking growing public dissent among America’s partners in these wars. Israel’s recovery of six more dead hostages in Rafah led Israeli labor unions to call widespread strikes, insisting that the Netanyahu government must prioritize the lives of the Israeli hostages over its desire to keep killing Palestinians and destroying Gaza.

In Ukraine, an expanded military draft has failed to overcome the reality that most young Ukrainians do not want to kill and die in an endless, unwinnable war. Hardened veterans see new recruits much as Siegfried Sassoon described the British conscripts he was training in November 1916 in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer: “The raw material to be trained was growing steadily worse. Most of those who came in now had joined the Army unwillingly, and there was no reason why they should find military service tolerable.”

Several months later, with the help of Bertrand Russell, Sassoon wrote Finished With War: a Soldier’s Declaration, an open letter accusing the political leaders who had the power to end the war of deliberately prolonging it, which was published in newspapers and read aloud in Parliament. The letter ended,

“On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practiced upon them; also I believe it may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share and which they have not enough imagination to realize.”

As Israeli and Ukrainian leaders see their political support crumbling, Netanyahu and Zelenskyy are taking increasingly desperate risks, all the while insisting that the U.S. must come to their rescue. By “leading from behind,” our leaders have surrendered the initiative to these foreign leaders, who will keep pushing the United States to make good on its promises of unconditional support, which will sooner or later include sending young American troops to kill and die alongside their own.

Proxy war has failed to resolve the problem it was intended to solve. Instead of acting as an alternative to ground wars involving U.S. forces, U.S. proxy wars have spawned ever-escalating crises that are now making U.S. wars with Iran and Russia increasingly likely.

Neither the changes to U.S. military training since the Second World War nor the current U.S. strategy of proxy war have resolved the age-old contradiction that Slam Marshall described in Men Against Fire, between killing in war and our natural respect for human life. We have come full circle, back to this same historic crossroads, where we must once again make the fateful, unambiguous choice between the path of war and the path of peace.

If we choose war, or allow our leaders and their foreign friends to choose it for us, we must be ready, as military experts tell us, to once more send tens of thousands of young Americans to their deaths, while also risking escalation to a nuclear war that would kill us all.

If we truly choose peace, we must actively resist our political leaders’ schemes to repeatedly manipulate us into war. We must refuse to volunteer our bodies and those of our children and grandchildren as their cannon fodder, or allow them to shift that fate onto our neighbors, friends and “allies” in other countries.

We must insist that our mis-leaders instead recommit to diplomacy, negotiation and other peaceful means of resolving disputes with other countries, as the UN Charter, the real “rules based order,” in fact requires.

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author ofBlood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq, and War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, co-authored with Medea Benjamin.

5 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr. Ramzy Baroud

The Israeli war on Gaza has become a war on Palestinian children. This was as true on October 7 as it is today.

On August 17, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for a seven-day ceasefire to allow children in Gaza to be vaccinated against polio. “I am appealing to all parties to provide concrete assurances right away, guaranteeing humanitarian pauses for the campaign,” he said.

The first such case of the devastating epidemic was discovered in the town of Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip.

“It is scientifically known that for every 200 virus infections, only one will show the full symptoms of polio, while the remaining cases may present mild symptoms such as a cold or a slight fever,” Palestinian Health Minister Majed Abu Ramadan said on that same day.

This means that the virus may have spread to all parts of Gaza Strip, where the entire healthcare system has been largely destroyed.

The ten-month-old Palestinian baby who was first to contract the poliovirus, like many more, never received a vaccination dose against the disease.

To prevent an even greater disaster in war-stricken Gaza, the World Health Organization (WHO), along with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), said that they have to vaccinate 640,000 children throughout Gaza within a short period of time.

The task, however, is a difficult one, as the vast majority of Gazans are crammed into unsafe refugee camps – massive tent encampments, mostly in central Gaza with no access to clean water or electricity.

They are surrounded by over 330,000 tons of waste, which has further contaminated already undrinkable water which, according to experts, may have been the cause of the poliovirus.

The challenge of saving Gaza’s children is complicated by the fact that Israeli bombs continue to be dropped on every part of Gaza, including the so-called ‘safe zones’, which were declared by Israel soon after the start of the war.

The other problem is that Gaza has, for months, subsisted without electricity. Without an efficient cooling system, the majority of the vaccines could become unusable.

But there is more to the suffering of Gaza’s children than the lack of vaccination.

As of August 19, at least 16,480 children have been killed as a direct result of the war, in addition to thousands more who remain missing, presumed dead. The number, according to the Palestinian Minister of Health in Gaza, includes 115 babies.

Many children have starved to death, and “at least 3,500 children in Gaza are facing (the same fate) amid a lack of food and malnutrition under Israeli restrictions on the delivery of food,” a ministry spokesman said.

Additionally, so far, more than 17,000 children in Gaza have either lost one or both parents since the start of the war on October 7.

One of the main reasons as to why Gaza’s children account for the majority of victims of the war is that homes, schools and displacement shelters have been the main targets of the relentless bombardment.

According to a statement by the UN Experts last April, “more than 80% of schools in Gaza (have been) damaged or destroyed.”

“It may be reasonable to ask if there is an intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system, an action known as ‘scholasticide’,” they wrote.

The trend of targeting schools continues. On August 18, Palestine’s Education Minister, Amjad Barham said that over 90 percent of all Gaza schools have been destroyed, the official Palestinian news agency, WAFA reported.

Of the 309 schools, 290 have been destroyed as a result of Israeli bombing. This has left 630,000 students with no access to education.

While homes and schools can be rebuilt, the precious lives of killed children cannot be restored.

According to the Palestinian Ministry of Education, as of July 2, 8,572 students in Gaza and 100 in the occupied West Bank have been killed at the hands of the Israeli army. 14,089 students in Gaza and 494 in the West Bank have also been injured.

These are the worst losses suffered by Palestinian children within a relatively brief period of time since the Nakba, the destruction of the Palestinian homeland in 1948. The tragedy worsens by the day.

No child, let alone a whole generation of children, should endure this much suffering, regardless of the political reasoning or context.

International and humanitarian law has designated a “special respect and protection” for children during times of armed conflict, the international humanitarian law databases of the Red Cross resolve.  These laws may apply to Palestinian children in theory, but certainly not in practice.

The betrayal of these children by the international community shall stain the collective consciousness of humankind for decades to come.

Indeed, this is a war on Palestinian children – a war that must stop before a whole generation of Palestinian children is completely erased.

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

5 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark

The government of Sir Keir Starmer, despite remaining glued to a foreign policy friendly and accommodating to Israel, has found the strain a bit much of late.  While galloping to victory in the July elections, leaving the British Labour Party a heaving majority, a certain ill-temper could be found among the ranks on his attitudes regarding Israel’s war in Gaza.

Mish Rahman, a member of the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee, summed up the mood by professing embarrassment “about my affiliation with Labour” in light of the party’s response to the killings in Gaza.  “It was hard even to tell members of my own extended family to go and knock on doors to tell people to vote for a party that originally gave Israel carte blanche in its response to the horrific 7 October attacks.”

The election itself saw Labour suffer losses among British Muslims, which has dropped as a share between 2019 and 2024.  The loss of Leicester South, held by Shadow Paymaster Jon Ashworth, to independent Shockat Adam, was emblematic.  (The seat has a Muslim population close to 30%.)  The trend was also evident in such otherwise safe Labour strongholds as the seats of Dewsbury and Batley and Birmingham Perry Barr, both with a prominent bloc of Muslim voters.  Combing through the Starmer landslide, one could still find instances of Labour’s electoral bruising.

To offer some mild reassurance to the disgruntled, notably regarding arms sales to Israel, the UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy promised to revisit the policy, editing it, as it were, to see if it stood the test of international humanitarian law.

On September 2, Lammy told fellow parliamentarians “with regret” that the assessment he had received left him “unable to conclude anything other than that for certain UK arms exports to Israel, there does exist a clear risk that they might be used to commit or facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law.”

In doing so, he announced that Britain would be suspending 30 of its 350 arms export licenses with Israel. “We recognise, of course, Israel’s need to defend itself against security threats, but we are deeply worried by the methods that Israel’s employed, and by reports of civilian casualties and the destruction of civilian infrastructure particularly.”

The measure was one of the weakest imaginable, an example of hightide gesture politics, paltry in effort, and paltry in effect.  Few gains will be noticed from this change in policy, not least because 30 out of 350 is fractionally embarrassing.  Furthermore, UK arms exports to Israel account for less than 1% of the total arms Israel received.  As a point of comparison, UK arms sales to Israel in 2022 totalled £42 million.  The offering from the United States dwarfs that contribution, annually totalling $US3.8 billion (£2.9 billion).

This very lack of effect was explicitly noted by the minister, begging the question as to what any genuine change might have entailed.  The government, he assured the House, still supported Israel’s right to self-defence.  Had the share of UK weapons to Israel been much larger, would such self-defence still have been justifiably prosecuted with such viciousness?

It is certainly telling what the suspension policy on exports spared.  While the new policy covers various components for military aircraft and vehicles, the F-35 fighters, which have been used with especially murderous effect by the Israeli Air Force, are exempted.  This, explained Defence Secretary John Healey on BBC Breakfast, was “a deliberate and important carve out for these modern fighter jets.”

The rationale is thick with splendid hypocrisy.  Because the support of the F-35 is a global program spanning multiple partners, the UK’s role in it had to be preserved, irrespective of what the fighters were actually used for.  “These are not just jets that the UK or Israel use,” reasoned Healey, “it’s 20 countries and around 1,000 of these jets around the world and the UK makes important, critical components for all those jets that go into a global pool.”

Like an undergraduate student failing to master an all too challenging paper, Healey offers the exoneration that cowardice supplies in readiness.  It was “hard to distinguish those [parts] that may go into Israeli jets and secondly this is a global supply chain with the UK a vital part of that supply chain”.  To disrupt the supply of such parts would, essentially, “risk the operation of fighter jets that are central to our own UK security, that of our allies and of NATO.”

Another knotty point was the legal or ethical value one could ultimately attribute to the decision.  Lammy was adamant that the policy revision was not intended, in any way, to cast aspersions against Israel’s conduct of the war, despite an assessment suggesting otherwise.  “This is a forward looking evaluation, not a determination of guilt, and it does not prejudge any future determinations by the competent courts.”  This routine garbling ignored the assessment’s references to the inordinate number of civilian deaths, the sheer extent of the destruction in Gaza, and “credible claims” that Palestinian detainees had been mistreated.

This latest gesture of tokenistic principle on the part of the UK government elevates impotence to the level of doctrine.  Lammy and Healey was merely taking a line Starmer has courted with numbing consistency: that of the craven, the insignificantly disruptive and the painfully cautious.

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

5 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Peter Symonds

As the Israeli military continued its murderous operations in the occupied West Bank into an eighth day, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant yesterday foreshadowed a massive escalation that would inflict death and destruction on the scale being witnessed in Gaza.

Speaking after meeting with senior officers, Gallant described the current military attacks on Jenin, Tulkarm and the Far’a refugee camp near Tubas as “mowing the lawn” of Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants. While supposedly to destroy “terror networks,” the operations have killed men, women and children, old and young, with the aim of terrorising the population.

However, in an unmistakeable sign that it is preparing a full-scale invasion of the West Bank, Gallant declared that eventually the military will need to “pull out the roots.” The only way that the Zionist regime can destroy the social roots of the armed opposition to its occupation and repression is the type of genocidal operation that has taken place in Gaza.

Gallant added that “the rise of terror in Judea and Samaria is an issue that we need to be focused on at every moment.” The reference to the West Bank by its biblical names—Judea and Samaria—only underscores that the occupied Palestinian territory is already regarded as part of a greater Israel.

The current West Bank operation—known internally by the Israeli army as “Summer Camps”—is far from being a limited incursion. Gallant declared that the “terrorist organisations” had to be “wiped out,” adding: “Every such terrorist should be eliminated, [or] if they surrender, arrest them. There is no other option, use all the forces, everyone who is needed, with full strength.”

Gallant also revealed he had ordered the military to carry out airstrikes “wherever necessary,” supposedly to “avoid endangering soldiers.” In reality, indiscriminate Israeli airstrikes will rain death and destruction in the West Bank as in Gaza where the death toll, according to health authorities, is now at least 40,000 men, women and children.

A situation update released yesterday by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) declared that Israeli forces had been using “lethal, war-like tactics across the northern West Bank, deepening people’s humanitarian needs and raising concerns over excessive use of force.”

OCHA reported that the Israeli military had killed 30 Palestinians in the West Bank between August 27 and September 2, including seven children—the highest weekly death toll since November 2023. Ten of the fatalities were the result of airstrikes, which increased sharply in August. Of the 95 Palestinian deaths from airstrikes in the West Bank in 2024, between 41 and 44 percent took place last month.

In Jenin City and Jenin refugee camp, the report catalogued deaths from Israeli airstrikes and ground operations on a daily basis, including children and the elderly. Over the week covered by the report, the Israeli military attacked health workers and those seeking to buy or distribute food. On Monday, troops killed a detained Palestinian man whose body when released showed tell-tale signs of torture. On Tuesday, an assessment mission to Jenin organised by OCHA was denied access by Israeli security forces.

While the Israeli military has focused on Jenin, its attacks have extended throughout the West Bank in the governates of Tubas, Tulkarm and Hebron. While some deaths were the result of clashes between Israeli troops and Palestinian militants, others including children have died in strikes or simply been shot by Israeli troops.

On Monday in Tulkarm, for instance, Israeli forces shot and killed a 14-year-old boy and injured six Palestinians, including a 12-year-old girl. The boy was killed when he and his father, believing that Israeli troops had left, opened the door to their home. During an operation in Tulkarm Refugee Camp, an airstrike injured three, including a female paramedic.

According to the OCHA report, 652 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank from October 7 last year to September 2. Over the same period, OCHA has recorded around 1,300 attacks by armed Israeli settlers, of which over 120 led to Palestinian deaths and injuries, and 1,050 to damage to Palestinian properties. Over the week to September 2, another 16 settler attacks took place resulting in 11 injuries to Palestinians.

The demolition of Palestinian homes and businesses also continues apace. Over the week to September 2, Israeli authorities demolished, destroyed or forced the demolition of 26 Palestinian-owned structures—23 in Tulkarm and the remaining three in East Jerusalem. One demolition in the Al Bustan area of East Jerusalem, where a family of four was displaced, was part of a plan to build and expand an Israeli settlement project with public spaces predominantly for tourists and Israelis.

Since October 7, Israeli authorities have demolished or confiscated 1,478 Palestinian structures across the West Bank, displacing more than 3,477 Palestinians, including about 1,485 children. “The demolitions after 7 October include over 500 inhabited structures, more than 300 agricultural structures, more than 100 water, sanitation and hygiene structures, and 200 livelihood structures,” the report stated.

Israeli military operations continued over the past two days. As reported by the WAFA news agency, Israel’s military assault in Jenin is in its eighth day, and the third day in Tulkarm city and refugee camp, where “widespread destruction” has been inflicted. Its correspondent said that Israeli massive armoured bulldozers tore up tarmac streets and alleyways in the camp and ravaged through public and private properties.

“The heavy machineries blocked the alleyways of the camp with earth mounds, making it impossible for residents to navigate them, even on foot and compounding their suffering,” the agency reported.

“This came as the occupation forces blew up several houses in the camp, setting them on fire, destroying them and displacing the occupants.

“The occupation forces continue to deploy more military vehicles and bulldozers into the camp and the city, simultaneously while patrolling streets, intercepting vehicles and ambulances, inspecting them and interrogating passengers. The gun-toting soldiers impeded the distribution of relief aid by the Red Crescent crews.”

Al Jazeera correspondents reported an ongoing Israeli raid in the Jalazone refugee camp, north of Ramallah, in which dozens of Palestinians have been detained and questioned in local community centres. At least 20 Palestinians were rounded up from Beit Surik. Other raids took place in Qalqilya, Nablus with a focus on Balata and Askar refugee camps, as well as Al-Khader town south of Bethlehem and Al-Azza refugee camp north of the city.

CNN reported that Palestinian journalists were fired on by Israeli troops during a raid in the West Bank town of Kafr Dan. Mohammed Mansour, a journalist for the Palestinian news agency WAFA, was injured when the car he was driving was struck by gunfire. The four journalists in the vehicle were all wearing flak jackets with “press” labels, and the car was marked “press” on its hood.

The Israeli genocide in Gaza continues unabated, with health officials yesterday reporting another 42 Palestinian deaths in the previous 24 hours, bringing the deaths since October 7 last year to at least 40,861 Palestinians with another 94,398 injured. If such barbarity is waged in the West Bank, home to nearly 3 million, the death toll will be even higher.

5 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Ranjan Solomon

What is culturicide
‘Culturicide’ involves the eradication and destruction of cultural artifacts, such as books, artworks, and structures. The issue is addressed in multiple international treaties, including the Geneva Conventions and the Rome Statute, which define war crimes associated with the destruction of culture.

The term cultural genocide is not enshrined in international law, but it’s often discussed in relation to genocide. Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term genocide, described cultural genocide in 1944 as a central part of the concept of genocide. However, early drafts of the Genocide Convention were opposed by some settler countries and former European colonial powers, and cultural destruction was not included in the final version.

The United Nations defines genocide as the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. The UN says that cultural destruction alone is not enough to constitute genocide, nor is the intent to disperse a group.  In June 2021, the International Criminal Court issued guidelines that cultural destruction can be corroborating evidence of genocide if it occurs alongside other recognized acts of genocide. Israel’s oppression of Palestinians has targeted all aspects of their life, both present and past. International organisations and rights watchdogs documented the theft of Palestinian land and resources, along all sorts of deadly violence by Israeli forces and settlers. Another Israeli target over the years has been Palestinian cultural heritage, and the attacks on it have only intensified during the ongoing war on Gaza. Gaza’s archaeological sites and their thousands of years of history have been deliberately targeted, according to experts, many of whom view it as part of a “cultural genocide.”

Since its genocide against Palestinians in Gaza began, the Israeli military has destroyed hundreds of historical and religious sites, and centers of culture and learning like libraries, archives, and museums. Here’s a brief guide to Israel’s cultural genocide in Gaza:

.Great Omari Mosque: Gaza’s oldest mosque and the second-oldest mosque in all of Palestine, the Great Omari Mosque dates back 1,400 years. It was destroyed in an Israeli airstrike in December. In an instant, a place representing centuries of history — and housing dozens of rare books and priceless manuscripts — was reduced to rubble.
Church of Saint Porphyrius: Considered to be one of the oldest churches in the world…
Since its genocide against Palestinians in Gaza began, the Israeli military has destroyed hundreds of historical and religious sites, and centers of culture and learning like libraries, archives, and museums. Below you will find a brief guide to Israel’s cultural genocide in Gaza:

Great Omari Mosque: Gaza’s oldest mosque and the second-oldest mosque in all of Palestine, the Great Omari Mosque dates back 1,400 years. It was destroyed in an Israeli airstrike in December. In an instant, a place representing centuries of history — and housing dozens of rare books and priceless manuscripts — was reduced to rubble.

Church of Saint Porphyrius: This Greek Orthodox church was originally constructed in the 5th century, and its current structure was built in the 12th century. It is the oldest church in Gaza and is considered to be one of the oldest churches in the world. In the early weeks of the genocide, Israel bombed the compound where the church is located, causing a roof to collapse and killing over a dozen people sheltering inside.

Qasr el-Basha: Constructed in the 13th century, Pasha’s Palace was converted into a museum in 2010, housing precious antiquities like ceramics that dated back hundreds of years. It was all but reduced to rubble in an Israeli airstrike in December.

Rashad al-Shawa Cultural Center: A hub for artistic life in Gaza, the center housed a library and theater and hosted art exhibitions and film screenings. It was destroyed in an Israeli airstrike in November.

Central Archives of Gaza: Left in ruins after an Israeli airstrike in December, the archives housed historical documents dating back more than a century.

What is cultural genocide?
The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was drafted in the aftermath of the Nazi Holocaust. It defines genocide as “physical acts,” such as killings or measures intended to prevent births, which are carried out with “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”

When Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin first coined the term “genocide” in 1944, he described it as a “synchronized attack on different aspects of life.” Because genocide was aimed at the destruction of an entire people, it naturally includes attempts to destroy the targeted group’s cultural heritage, thereby erasing their very existence: from the destruction of national monuments like museums and libraries to laws banning the use of indigenous languages.

And yet, the U.N Genocide Convention that was adopted in 1951 does not address cultural genocide. The United States, with its mind on its own cultural genocide being carried out against the indigenous peoples of America, joined former empires like the U.K. and France in opposing any references to cultural genocide in the Convention.

Is Israel committing cultural genocide in Gaza?
We know that Israel’s assault on Gaza is textbook genocide. From the beginning, Israeli officials made their genocidal intent abundantly clear, and the Israeli government has carried out “physical acts” to put that intent into action: indiscriminately slaughtering tens of thousands of Palestinians, reducing entire cities to rubble and razing farms and orchards, and systematically destroying hospitals and other critical infrastructure essential for life.

At the same time that it has made Gaza unlivable, the Israeli government has intentionally targeted historical, religious, and archaeological sites, archives, libraries, museums, and centers for art and culture — in addition to destroying every single one of Gaza’s universities. We should understand these attacks on Palestinian heritage as evidence of Israel’s intent to completely annihilate Palestinian life in Gaza. In South Africa’s genocide case against Israel, they make note of Israel’s attacks on  “centres of Palestinian learning and culture,” and call on the International Court of Justice (ICJ) “to protect against further, severe and irreparable harm to the rights including the heritage of the Palestinian people under the genocide convention.”

A land without a people?
Israel’s genocide in Gaza is the latest in what is a century-old war against Palestinians and Palestinian life — a war of annihilation in which attacks on Palestinian culture, heritage, and national identity have played a central role. Successive Israeli governments have attempted to erase Palestinian existence and oppress expressions of Palestinian identity, from building Israeli universities on the ruins of ethnically-cleaned Palestinian towns and villages to criminalizing the Palestinian flag. This is textbook cultural genocide, and it’s a core component of Israeli settler colonialism. Erasing Palestinian culture and history makes it that much easier for the Israeli government to lay claim to Palestinians’ homes and land and deny Palestinians’ historical connection and rights to that land.

Supporters of Israel have long denied the mass displacement and slaughter of Palestinians by claiming that Palestine never existed — that it was a “land without a people for a people without a land,” and that only after it was colonized did settlers “make the desert bloom.” The destruction and erasure of Palestinian culture and history is key to how Israel has carried out and justified its colonization of Palestinian land.

Read more @ Jewish Voice for Peace

2 September 2024

By Norman Solomon

In CNN interview, the Democratic nominee stuck to echoing Biden’s rhetoric—calling for a ceasefire while dodging the reality that the U.S. government could force one by implementing an arms embargo on Israel.

Time is running out for Kamala Harris to distance herself from U.S. policies that enable Israel to continue with mass murder and genocide in Gaza. Polling shows that a pivot toward moral decency would improve her chances of defeating Donald Trump. But during her CNN interview Thursday night, Harris remained in lockstep with President Biden’s unconditional arming of Israel.

Two weeks ago, YouGov pollsters released findings in Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania, three swing states now on a razor’s edge between Harris and Trump. “In Pennsylvania, 34 percent of respondents said they would be more likely to vote for the Democratic nominee if the nominee vowed to withhold weapons to Israel, compared to 7 percent who said they would be less likely. The rest said it would make no difference,” the new journalism site Zeteo reported.

Results in the two other states were similar. “In Arizona, 35 percent said they’d be more likely, while 5 percent would be less likely. And in Georgia, 39 percent said they’d be more likely, also compared to 5 percent who would be less likely.”

But on CNN, Harris stuck to echoing Biden’s rhetoric—calling for a ceasefire while dodging the reality that the U.S. government could force one by implementing an arms embargo on Israel.

Huge U.S. shipments of weapons and bombs to Israel keep allowing it to massacre and starve civilians of all ages while violating federal statutes as well as international law. Days ago, Biden approved sending arms to Israel worth upwards of $20 billion. The transfers were called “sales,” but as policy analyst Stephen Semler pointed out, “most if not all of this matériel is paid for by U.S. taxpayers—Israel uses much of the military aid Congress approves for it effectively as a gift card to buy U.S.-made weapons.”

Just listening to Harris during her CNN interview, you’d be clueless about the realities that the UN high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, spelled out in a statement midway through August: “The people of Gaza are now grieving 40,000 Palestinian lives lost, according to Gaza’s health ministry. Most of the dead are women and children. This unimaginable situation is overwhelmingly due to recurring failures by the Israeli Defense Forces to comply with the rules of war. On average, about 130 people have been killed every day in Gaza over the past 10 months. The scale of the Israeli military’s destruction of homes, hospitals, schools and places of worship is deeply shocking.”

Notably, Harris gave no indication of the number of Palestinian lives lost—while she did say that 1,200 Israelis, including “many young people,” lost their lives on October 7. That most of the Palestinians who died were children and women went unmentioned.

While the vice president said that Israelis were “massacred,” she relied on passive voice to say only that too many Palestinians “have been killed.”

After recording the interview, I transcribed it in full:

CNN’S Dana Bash: “President Biden has tried unsuccessfully to end the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. He’s been doing it for months and months along with you. Would you do anything differently, for example would you withhold some U.S. weapons shipments to Israel? That’s what a lot of people on the progressive left want you to do.”

Harris: “Let me be very clear. I am unequivocal and unwavering in my commitment to Israel’s defense and its ability to defend itself, and that’s not gonna change. But let’s take a step back. October 7. Twelve hundred people are massacred, many young people who are simply attending a music festival. Women were horribly raped. As I said then I say today, Israel had a right, has a right to defend itself. We would. And how it does so matters. Far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed, and we have got to get a deal done. We were in Doha, we have to get a deal done, this war must end –”

Bash: “And in the meantime –“

Harris: “And we must get a deal that is about getting the hostages out. I’ve met with the families of the American hostages. Let’s get the hostages out. Let’s get the ceasefire done.”

Bash: “But no change in policy? In terms of arms and so forth.”

Harris: “No. We have to get a deal done. Dana, we have to get a deal done. When you look at the significance of this to the families, to the people who are living in that region, a deal is not only the right thing to do to end this war, but will unlock so much of what must happen next. I remain committed, since I’ve been on October 8, to what we must do to work toward a two-state solution, where Israel is secure and in equal measure the Palestinians have security and self-determination and dignity.”

When I heard Harris say “I remain committed,” I felt sure that the phrase “two-state solution” could not be far behind. For U.S. politicians and pundits, it has become a handy slogan to assert virtuous intent—rendered more and more absurd as Israel’s terroristic ethnic cleansing persists in Gaza and escalates in the occupied West Bank. And as genocide continues to gain momentum.

There is every reason to believe that Donald Trump—who said this summer that the president should let Israel “finish the job”—would be even worse than Biden as an accomplice to Israel’s slaughter of Palestinian people. But that’s no reason to evade the unconscionable complicity of President Biden in the daily mass atrocities.

A suction tube of euphemisms and evasion has captured many a partisan mind. And so it was from the podium of the Democratic National Convention, when the usually admirable Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez descended into making the groundless claim that Harris “is working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and bringing the hostages home.”

In sharp contrast, with horrors in Gaza continuing, fellow Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib has never taken the easy way out. As she has done countless times since last fall, on Thursday she sent out a truthful and disturbing message.

“Palestinian Americans feel invisible, with our trauma and pain unseen and ignored by both Democrats and Republicans,” Tlaib wrote. “We want action to stop the horrific massacres of our families and polling shows that, regardless of political party, the majority of Americans are with us. . . . Yet, even after over 600 weapons shipments since October, including fighter jets, high explosive mortars, and more, the Biden administration has approved another $20 billion in weapons for the Israeli military to commit well-documented war crimes and continue to murder Palestinian children and civilians.”

And Tlaib wrote: “An arms embargo to stop the genocide is not just the moral, just, and right thing to do. It is also good politics.”

Whether Kamala Harris will ever really get the message is unclear.

Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.

31 August 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Kevin Reed

The Israeli military fired a missile into the lead vehicle of an aid convoy in southern Gaza on Friday, killing four Palestinians.

The convoy was organized by the Washington, DC-based nonprofit American Near East Refugee Aid (Anera) and was delivering medical supplies and fuel to a hospital in Rafah, the besieged southern Gaza city on the border with Egypt.

A press release from Anera said, “An Israeli airstrike yesterday killed four Palestinians at the front of an Anera aid convoy carrying food and fuel to the Emirati Red Crescent Hospital.” The statement also said the transport plan had been “coordinated and cleared” with the Israeli military, including the presence of “unarmed security guards” in the convoy.

In a report in the Washington Post, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) claimed that the missile strike was carried out “after identifying weapons aboard one of the trucks, adding that the four Palestinians were armed and hadn’t been included in the coordinated travel plan.”

The Anera statement said that initial reports from Move One, the transport company contracted to move the food, fuel and medical supplies, showed that “four community members with experience in previous missions and engagement in community security with Move One stepped forward and took control of the leading vehicle, citing concern that the route was unsafe and at risk of being looted.”

Anera said the four Palestinians had not been vetted or coordinated in advance. However, contrary to the assertions of the IDF, initial reports after the missile strike at the scene show that no weapons were present. “The four individuals were not perceived by the convoy as a hostile threat. The Israeli airstrike was carried out without any prior warning or communication.”

Anera said that none of its staff members were injured, and the convoy was able to continue on its way and complete the successful delivery of aid to the hospital in Rafah.

The missile strike in southern Gaza took place two days after a United Nations World Food Program (WFP) vehicle was fired upon as it approached an IDF checkpoint. In a similar setup by the IDF, the two armored vehicles had received “multiple clearances by Israeli authorities to approach” the Wadi Gaza bridge checkpoint, yet at least 10 bullets struck one of its clearly marked vehicles. No one was injured.

In March, an Anera logistics coordinator in Gaza, Mousa Shawwa, was killed by an Israeli airstrike while he was in a shelter. The relief worker’s 6-year-old son, Karim, died 10 days later from injuries suffered during the attack. In April, three Israeli air strikes hit an aid convoy traveling through Gaza, killing seven World Central Kitchen workers.

According to the UN, more than 280 humanitarian workers have been killed by Israel during the onslaught on Gaza that began in October. The UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said on Friday that the number of planned missions in August that had been denied by Israel had doubled since July.

The IDF strategy of approving aid workers to bring assistance to Palestinians and then targeting their vehicles with precision missile strikes is of a piece with the genocidal onslaught on the entire population in Gaza. Every criminal act carried out by Israel in Gaza has been carried out with lies about the presence of terrorists.

Terrorizing aid workers providing desperately needed assistance amidst the catastrophic conditions in Gaza is part of the system of forced evacuation and ethnic cleansing pursued by the Zionist state with the support and approval of its imperialist partners.

Palestinian families have been forced to relocate multiple times over the past ten months to so-called “safe zones” which now comprise approximately ten percent of the total land area of Gaza. Palestinians have been fired upon and murdered in the streets after leaving their homes or blown to bits with US-made 2,000 lb. bombs before they have time to evacuate.

Meanwhile, the war to uproot and kill Palestinians has been expanded by Israel from Gaza to the West Bank. The IDF reported Friday that Israeli forces have killed 20 people in the West Bank, claiming they were “terrorists,” in airstrikes and “exchanges of fire” since an incursion began Tuesday in the West Bank locations of Jenin, Tulkarm and the al-Fara’a refugee camp.

In what is described as the largest actions in the West Bank since the siege of Gaza began in October, hundreds of Israeli troops have moved into the areas, sometimes with air cover. The Israeli government claims the attacks are needed “to root out militant cells and destroy their infrastructure and weapons,” according the Washington Post.

The Post report continued, “Thousands of civilians have been affected, with families trapped in battle-shaken neighborhoods, often without water, electricity or internet,” and Israeli combat bulldozers have “plowed many of the area’s streets to rubble.”

31 August 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Jay Janson

There is a universal principle of humanity that transcends religious and sociopolitical boundaries, emphasising the protection and care of children as a fundamental responsibility shared by all of humanity. This principle is rooted in the recognition of children’s vulnerability and their inherent right to safety, security, and the opportunity to grow and thrive.

Universal Empathy: The instinct to protect children is deeply embedded in human empathy. People across the world, regardless of their background, tend to respond with concern and a desire to help when they see children in danger or distress.

Israelis have become too numb and dumb in the thralls of their great power to kill to realise they are killing thousands of what amounts to their own children.

Israelis Have Forgotten that Children, by Universally Held Humanitarian Principles, Are Considered to Be Under the Protection of All of Us – That is, of Entire Humanity.

Israelis have as their leader a criminally insane unrepentant serial genocider of women and children

Israelis have come to believe their own propaganda about the Palestinian ‘Terrorists’ and October 7, 2023?

Of course, by the same reasoning, On October 7, 2023, Hamas invading freedom fighter guerrillas must also have been guilty of killing at least a few of what would amount to be their own children.

But for eleven months Israel has rained death. maiming and terror down upon a more than a million of God’s children in Gaza. As of mid-August 2024, UN reported that over 12,300 Palestinian children have been killed in Gaza,

Moral and Ethical Responsibility: Across various cultures and ethical systems, there is a common moral imperative to protect children. This responsibility is often seen as inherent to our humanity — a duty to safeguard those who cannot protect themselves. The well-being of children is often considered a reflection of the moral health of a society.

The principle of protecting children is often highlighted in discussions about the laws of war, where there are specific prohibitions against targeting or involving children in hostilities.

However, Israelis have heard rabbis point out be better to kill the Arab children before they become adult warriors.

Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, the head of the Od Yosef Chai Yeshiva in the West Bank settlement of Yitzhar, for one, co-authored a book titled “Torat HaMelech” (The King’s Torah) in 2009. In this book, he and Rabbi Yosef Elitzur argue that it is permissible under certain circumstances to kill non-Jews, including children, if they pose a threat to Israel or Jews. The book suggests that even innocent children of the enemy may be killed to prevent them from growing up to become threats in the future.

The book and its ideas were met with significant controversy and condemnation, both within Israel and internationally, as many saw it as incitement to violence and a justification for acts that would constitute war crimes. Rabbi Shapira’s views are considered extreme, and they do not represent mainstream Jewish thought or the opinions of most rabbis…

…however, the influence of the Torah, often referred to as the Law of Moses, as the foundational text of Judaism cannot be denied, especially on attitudes regarding the daily death toll of children from the bombing of civilian structures throughout Gaza.

… and the Holy Hebrew Torah (first five books of the Bible) SEEMS TO BE IN DIRECT CONTRADICTION TO The BASIC PRINCIPAL OF THE SANCTITY OF THE LIVES OF CHILDREN

but let the reader judge for his/herself

Firstly, in the Book of Genesis, specifically in Genesis 15:18-21, God describes the boundaries of the land He is giving to the descendants of Abraham. This land is often referred to as the Promised Land and as being the land of other peoples at the time. Here is the passage:

“On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, ‘To your offspring I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.’”

The boundaries mentioned here are generally understood to extend from the Nile River (referred to as the “river of Egypt”) to the Euphrates River. This region encompasses a vast area that includes parts of modern-day Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq.

Secondly,The fourth book of the Torah or Bible, Deuteronomy 20:16–18 reads:

“Only in the cities of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you shall not leave alive anything that breathes. But you shall utterly destroy them: the Hittite and the Amorite, the Canaanite and the Perizzite, the Hivite and the Jebusite, as the Lord your God has commanded you –15 “And Moses said to them, 17 “Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man intimately. 18 “But all the girls who have not known man intimately, spare for yourselves.”

So one wonders about worshipers and children in church shaking tambourines and singing “Joshua ‘Fit the Battle of Jericho!” It is hard to imagine those singing so joyously the words “and the wall(s) come a’ tumblen’ down,” know what happened after the wall was down (shudder), as described in chapter six of the Book of Joshua 6:20-21

” … and the people shouted with a great shout, that the wall fell down flat, so that the people went up into the city,

every man straight before him, and they took the city.

6:21 And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.”

The Book of Joshua continues with:

“11:11. They struck every person who was in it with the edge of the sword, utterly destroying them; there was no one left who breathed… 12 Joshua captured all the cities of these kings, and all their kings, and he struck them with the edge of the sword, and utterly destroyed them; just as Moses the servant of the Lord had commanded. 14 … They left no one who breathed. 15 Just as the Lord had commanded Moses his servant, so Moses commanded Joshua, and so Joshua did;” [from the New Standard American Bible]

Whew! but wait, this is only one of many quotes from the Old Testament or Jewish Bible that call for the slaying of ‘everything that breathes.’ The First Book of Samuel reads:

“Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.” 3 Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.”

As to scripture concerning human behaviour during a century B.C., barbarous behaviour and the terrorist execution of whole populations as a military tactic was common to that age. What is striking is that such inhumanity be worshipped as having been ordered and justly ordained by God.

Excepting the one above cited biblical contradiction, whether one works it out politically, religiously or anthropologically, ethically, it comes out the same. Children are most precious and belong to all of us.

Even zoologically, for in most species of animals, a stray offspring will be cared for by whichever adult is aware of a young one in need.

If you are dropping a bomb on someone’s residence aware of the presence of children, you are guilty of a crime against humanity.

Israeli ‘Defence Forces’ airmen, who release bombs to fall on children’s homes, schools and playgrounds, are they not dolts without brains enough to know what they are doing. In what kind of perverted society were they brought up? Taught not an “eye for an eye” but a ‘thousand or ten thousand eyes for an eye?’

This criticism applies to citizens of the United States of America, whose government knowingly, willingly and even proudly provides the bombs, missiles, artillery shells and war planes the Israelis use to kill, to maim and to terrify the million plus children of Gaza. The American military did the same to the children of Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Iraq and other countries. Albert Einstein cautioned that

“The world is in greater peril from those who tolerate or encourage evil than from those who actually commit it.” “The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.”

“October 7, 2023!” cries hegemonic Western media over and over and over again, as justification for what has been called genocide!  Genocide of an illegally militarily captive population no less! – 70% of which be children.

How many worse atrocities can the militarily occupied and bombed Palestinians recall of Israeli massacres of Arabs over the years. Already back In 1948, Albert Einstein condemned the horrific and terror producing massacre at Deir Yassin village by the terrorist gang Irgun and warned of the fascism of its leader President to be of Israel, Menachem Begin in a letter to the New York Times.

Will Americans ever be aware and ashamed that it’s government forced a ridiculous partition resolution through a fledgling United Nations, as a stratagem whose sole purpose and expectation was to torch British Mandate Palestine into a civil war the Jewish armed groups were well prepared for and with U.S. help would win. A single democratic state was blocked by the U.S.

What is the truth of Israel, which presently, with American and European complicity, currently slaughters at will defenceless captive Palestinian citizens and their children while refusing to even consider freeing Palestine?

Popular Former Israeli Minister of Defence Moshe Dayan Spoke the Truth at the Funeral of Roi Rotberg, April 19, 1956!

“Let us not today cast blame on the murderers. What can we say against their terrible hatred of us? For eight years, they have been sitting in the refugee camps of Gaza, and before their eyes, we have been turning the land and villages where they and their forefathers once lived into our own inheritance.”

Why Is Dayan’s Truthful and Compassionate Description of the Situation Not Accepted and Promoted in Israel and Beyond.

Instead, Israelis seem to freakily bask in the genocidal terrorism the U.S.A. has wreaked upon Israel’s Arab neighbours with wars in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Somalia, Yemen and Libya, as if these wars have brought apartheid Israel security. The harm or death of each child and the desperation of its families and friends, brings about whole nations mourning the loss of and harm to their children.

This writer mourns any child murdered anywhere, by any means, as his own precious child and seeks in his mind’s eye to imagine how each child appeared when alive, while lamenting the suffering of the child’s family and friends.

Post Script:

In the previous war in Gaza of 2014, more than 500 Palestinian children were killed and one Israeli child.

As with the ongoing scale of destruction: that previous conflict caused extensive damage to Gaza’s infrastructure, with thousands of homes, schools, and hospitals destroyed or severely damaged. The United Nations reported that over 100,000 Palestinians were displaced as a result of the fighting. The present genocidal and obliterating cataclysm is already more than ten times as great and growing.

The 2023-2024 cataclysm by comparison is an intensive extermination of Palestinians especially their children.

Jay Janson is an archival research peoples historian activist,  musician and writer; has lived and worked on all continents; articles on media published in China, Italy, UK, India, in Germany & Sweden Einartysken,and in the US by Greanville Post, Dissident Voice; Global Research; Information Clearing House; Counter Currents; Minority Perspective, UK,and others; now resides in NYC; First effort was a series of articles on deadly cultural pollution endangering seven areas of life emanating from Western corporate owned commercial media published in Hong Kong’s Window Magazine 1993; Howard Zinn lent his name to various projects of his; Weekly column, South China Morning Post, 1986-87; reviews for Ta Kung Bao; article China Daily, 1989. Is coordinator of the Howard Zinn co-founded King Condemned US Wars International Awareness Campaign, and website historian of the Ramsey Clark co-founded Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity Now Campaign, https://prosecuteuscrimesagainsthumanitynow.blogspot.com/which contains a history of US crimes in 19 nations from 1945 thru 2012.

2 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Kevin Reed

The US political establishment responded to the deaths of six Israeli hostages in Gaza on Saturday with demands for an intensification of the genocide against Palestinians and expansion of war in the Middle East. After the Israeli military confirmed the six bodies retrieved from a tunnel in Rafah were  hostages, President Biden issued a statement saying, “Make no mistake. Hamas leaders will pay for these crimes.”

Vice President and Democratic Party nominee for President Kamala Harris issued her own statement from the White House. She said, “Hamas is an evil terrorist organization” that has “even more American blood on its hands.” Harris continued, “The threat Hamas poses … must be eliminated and Hamas cannot control Gaza.”

The killing of the six hostages dominated US news media coverage all day on Sunday, the same media that largely ignores the far greater daily death toll from Israeli war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank. These reports uncritically echoed the statements of the Israeli military about the details of the deaths, although such statements have repeatedly been proven false in the past.

Speaking to Jonathan Karl on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday morning, Republican Senator from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham, called for an extension of the war into Iran. “If you want the hostages home, which we all do, you have to increase the cost to Iran. Iran is the great Satan here,” Graham said.

The senator continued to say that specific acts of war to “hold Iran responsible” were required, including a target list of “oil refineries in Iran.”

A mass protest of more than 500,000 people erupted in Tel Aviv on Sunday evening demanding that the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu end the war in Gaza. News organizations reported that this is the largest demonstration in Israel since the genocide began eleven months ago.

Chanting “Now, Now,” the protesters called for an immediate ceasefire that would enable release of the remaining hostages. Israel’s trade union federation Histradrut has called for a general strike on Monday that will shut down major sectors of the economy including banking, health care and transportation.

While Netanyahu accused Hamas of stalling ceasefire negotiations, the US-backed Israeli military operation has maintained its blockade of Gaza and continued to carry out targeted air strikes against Palestinians in pursuit of its barbaric goal of “total victory.”

Through Friday, the Gaza Health Ministry that the death toll has reached 40,602 since October 7 of last year and another 93,855 have been wounded. Israel’s ethnic cleansing operation has displaced the majority of Gaza’s 2.3 million people and plunged the 141 square mile strip into a humanitarian catastrophe.

In northern Gaza, two Palestinians were killed and others were injured after Israel’s military attacked a house in the al-Tawbah area of the Jabalia refugee camp. Earlier, an Israeli air strike hit the al-Ahli Arab Hospital in northern Gaza City, killing at least three people and wounding dozens. Israeli forces also targeted the Tuffah area, east of Gaza City.

Combing through the rubble after an attack on a hospital complex in northern Gaza City, a civil defense agency worker condemned the latest medical facility attack by Israel’s army, in an interview with Al Jazeera.

“This constitutes yet another war crime, added to the many crimes committed by the military in the Gaza Strip,” the unidentified man said. “The Israeli warplanes targeted and destroyed the building end-to-end at the al-Alhi Arab Hospital. It remains the only medical facility catering to patients and the wounded in Gaza City since al-Shifa Hospital was flattened by the army.”

In southern Gaza, dozens of people were reported killed in Israeli raids, including 27 Palestinians who were taken to Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis.

Meanwhile, Israel has expanded its bloody military operations in the West Bank that began on Wednesday.

Since Friday, soldiers have concentrated raids on the city of Jenin and its refugee camp, long a bastion of Palestinian resistance to Israel’s decades-old illegal occupation of the territory.

Bashir Matahen, director of public relations and media in the municipality of Jenin, said Israeli forces have bulldozed more than 70 percent of the city’s streets. News reports say that 80 percent of Jenin and the entire refugee camp is cut off from water supplies because of the destruction of distribution networks, and repair crews are unable to access the affected areas.

A statement from the UN Human Rights Office on Saturday condemned the “use of unlawful force during militarized operations in the occupied West Bank and calls for an immediate end to the current attack on Jenin refugee camp. The ongoing … operation in Jenin refugee camp and adjacent parts of the city has led apparently to unlawful killings, insecurity for Palestinian residents and enormous destruction of the camp, home to about 11,000 Palestinians.”

Kenneth Roth, former head of Human Rights Watch and long aligned with US foreign policy interests, called Israel’s attacks the West Bank a “flat-out war” with far-right members of the government aiming to expel all Palestinians from the territory.

“Even though there’s extensive combat between Israeli forces and militants in the Jenin refugee camp, that doesn’t mean there are no rules—the Geneva Conventions still apply,” Roth told Al Jazeera.

“One of the basic rules is Israel has to allow access to humanitarian aid. So it can’t just cut off food, water, electricity and medical care—as we’ve heard it’s doing. It has a duty to allow those for the civilian population. It can’t use the excuse of the fighters to starve civilians, and that’s what it did in Gaza.”

2 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org