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By Dr. Ramzy Baroud

Two historical events regarding the Israeli occupation of Palestine have taken place on July 19 and September 18.

The first was a most comprehensive ‘advisory opinion’ by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which reiterated that the Israeli occupation of Palestine is illegal and must come to an immediate end.

The second, by the United Nations General Assembly, two months later, set, for the first time in history, an exact time frame of when the Israeli occupation of Palestine must end.

Many Palestinians welcomed the international consensus that essentially declared, as null and void, any Israeli attempt at making what is meant to be a temporary military occupation a permanent one.

However, many understandably were not impressed, simply because the international community has proven ineffectual in bringing the catastrophic Israeli war on Gaza to an end, or in enforcing its previous resolutions on the matter.

Israeli media largely ignored both events, while mainstream western media repeatedly emphasized that both the advisory opinion and the resolution are ‘non-binding’.

Though it is true that international law without enforcement is largely useless, one must not be rash to conclude that the latest actions by the ICJ and the UNGA deserve no pause.

To appreciate the importance of both dates, we must place them within proper context.

First, the ICJ’s legal opinion. Unlike the ICJ’s advisory opinion of 2004, the latest opinion does not focus on a specific issue, for example, the illegality of the Israeli so-called Separation Wall in the West Bank.

Indeed, the latest decision by the world’s highest Court was the outcome of a specific request by the UNGA on January 20, 2023 to opine “on Israeli practices affecting the human rights of the Palestinian people in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem.”

Second, the ICJ reached its conclusions after listening to the testimonies of representatives of 52 countries and three international organizations, which fully sided with the Palestinians in their historic quest for freedom, justice and respect for international law.

Third, the ICJ’s opinion touched on numerous issues, leaving no space for any misinterpretation on the part of Israel and the United States.

For example, it called on Israel to end its “unlawful presence” in occupied Palestine,  and for it to “withdraw its military forces; halt the expansion of settlements and evacuate all settlers from occupied land; and demolish parts of a separation wall constructed inside the occupied West Bank.”

Fourth, the ICJ’s opinion follows years of supposed Israeli achievements in marginalizing the Palestinian cause, and exacting American support, which effectively recognized Israeli sovereignty over occupied Palestinian and Arab land.

If the ICJ pressed the reset button on the illegality of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the UNGA pressed the political button.

Indeed, UN Resolution A/ES-10/L.31/Rev.1 on September 18 has ended any Israeli illusions that it will be able, through pressure, threats or the passage of time, to end the conversation on its military occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza.

The resolution “calls for Israel to comply with international law and withdraw its military forces, immediately cease all new settlement activity, evacuate all settlers from occupied land, and dismantle parts of the separation wall it constructed inside the occupied West Bank.”

124 countries voted in favor of the resolution, while 14 voted against it, thus, once again, separating between those who believe in the primacy of international law in conflict resolution and those who don’t.

Also significant is that the UN has, for the first time, set a time frame of when the Israeli occupation must come to an end: “no later than 12 months from the adoption of the resolution”.

In international law, military occupations are meant to be a temporary process, regulated through numerous treaties and legal understandings including the Fourth Geneva Conventions, among others.

Israel, however, has turned that temporary process into a permanent one.

If the Israeli military occupation does not end within the resolution’s specified time frame, Israel would then be in violation of two sets of laws: previous UN resolutions on the matter, including the ICJ’s advisory opinions, and the latest resolution as well.

The emphasis by western media on the ‘non-binding’ element of these resolutions does not, in any way, alter the illegality of the Israeli occupation, or undermine the unanimity of the international community regarding the righteousness of the Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation and all other injustices.

Ultimately, Palestine will not be liberated by a UN resolution. UN resolutions are merely an expression of the balances of power that exist on the international stage. Therefore, Palestinians and their supporters should not expect that a UN resolution, binding or otherwise, will drive the Israeli military out of the West Bank and Gaza.

Indeed, the Palestinians will liberate themselves. But the position of the international community remains significant as it re-emphasizes the legitimacy of the Palestinian struggle, creates space for solidarity and helps further marginalize Israel for its continued violations of international law and the rights of the Palestinian people.

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

30 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Marwan Asmar

With the bombing of Wafa al-Udaini’s house, the number of Palestinian journalists killed in this Israeli genocide shoots up to 174 in under a year.

The Israeli occupation forces assassinated this prominent media following a treacherous Israeli bombardment of her home in Deir Al-Balah.

Wafa al-Udaini, her husband Munir Attia Darwish Al-Adini, and their two children Tamim and Balsam, were killed after the bombing of their home in central Gaza.

In a statement, the Palestinian Media Forum (PMF) pointed out Israeli warplanes killed a media activist who was in the forefront of conveying the Palestinian narrative and story to the foreign media, adding the family were killed as a result of a treacherous Israeli bombardment according to the Palestine Information Center.

The forum stated journalist Wafa al-Udaini devoted her life and efforts through working with the international media via writing articles, dialogue and interaction with foreign activists, online conferences, photo exhibitions, and short film competitions to explain the Palestinian story.

The PFM continued with the martyrdom of this prominent media figure, the national media has lost a free voice for Palestine and its people struggling for freedom and self-determination.

Wafa al-Udaini joins the caravan of media martyrs whose number swelled to 174 journalists since the beginning of the Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip soon after 7 October, 2023 and which resulted in over 41,000 martyrs being killed and over 96,000 injured.

The Palestinian Media Forum renewed its call to protect journalists and enable them to perform their professional duty in accordance with international laws and humanitarian charters, and called for holding the Israeli occupation accountable for its ongoing crimes.

The Palestinian Media Forum stressed the continuation of the message and media coverage, no matter how great the sacrifices and challenges, indicating that the deliberate Israeli targeting of Palestinian journalists will not weaken their resolve or divert their compass from Palestine.

The PMF renewed its call for the protection of journalists in Gaza whilst allowing them to perform their professional duties in accordance with international laws and humanitarian charters, and called for holding the Israeli occupation accountable for its ongoing crimes against Palestinian journalists.

Dr Marwan Asmar writes from Amman, serving as an editor of the https://crossfrirearabia.com website

30 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark

The ongoing Israeli operation against Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia group so dominant in Lebanon, is following a standard pattern.  Ignore base causes.  Ignore context.  Target leaders, and target personnel.  See matters in conventional terms of civilisational warrior against barbarian despot.  Israel, the valiant and bold, fighting the forces of darkness.

The entire blood woven tapestry of the Middle East offers uncomfortable explanations.  The region has seen false political boundaries sketched and pronounced by foreign powers, fictional countries proclaimed, and entities brought into being on the pure interests of powers in Europe.  These empires produced shoddy cartography in the name of the nation state and plundering self-interest, leaving aside the complexities of ethnic belonging and tribal dispositions.  Tragically, such cartographic fictions tended to keep company with crime, dispossession, displacement, ethnic cleansing and enthusiastic hatreds.

Since October 7, when Hamas flipped the table on Israel’s heralded security apparatus to kill over 1,200 of its citizens and smuggle over 200 hostages into Gaza, historical realities became present with a nasty resonance.  While Israel falsely sported its credentials as a peaceful state with dry cleaned democratic credentials ravaged by Islamic barbarians, Hamas had tapped into a vein of history stretching back to 1948.  Dispossession, racial segregation, suppression, were all going to be addressed, if only for a moment of vanguardist and cruel violence.

To the north, where Lebanon and Israel share yet another nonsense of a border, October 7 presented a change.  Both the Israeli Defence Forces and Hezbollah took to every bloodier jousting.  It was a serious affair: 70,000 Israelis displaced to the south; tens of thousands of Lebanese likewise to the north. (The latter are almost never mentioned in the huffed commentaries of the West.)

The Israeli strategy in this latest phase was made all too apparent by the number of military commanders and high-ranking operatives in Hezbollah the IDF has targeted.  Added to this the pager-walkie talkie killings as a prelude to a likely ground invasion of Lebanon, it was clear that Hezbollah’s leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, figured as an exemplary target.

Hezbollah confirmed the death of its leader in a September 27 strike on Beirut’s southern suburb of Dahiyeh and promised “to continue its jihad in confronting the enemy, supporting Gaza and Palestine, and defending Lebanon and its steadfast and honourable people.”  Others killed included Ali Karki, commander of the organisation’s southern front, and various other commanders who had gathered.

Israeli officials have been prematurely thrilled.  Like deluded scientists obsessed with eliminating a symptom, they ignore the disease with habitual obsession.  “Most of the senior leaders of Hezbollah have been eliminated,” claimed a triumphant Israeli military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani.

Defence Minister Yoav Gallant called the measure “the most significant strike since the founding of the State of Israel.”  Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated with simplicity that killing Nasrallah was necessary to “changing the balance of power in the region for years to come” and enable displaced Israelis to return to their homes in the north.

Various reports swallowed the Israeli narrative.  Reuters, for instance, called the killing “a heavy blow to the Iran-backed group as it reels from an escalating campaign of Israeli attacks.”  Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr opined that this “will be a major setback for the organisation.”  But the death of a being is never any guarantee for the death of an idea. The body merely offers a period of occupancy.  Ideas will be transferred, grow, and proliferate, taking residence in other organisations or entities. The assassinating missile is a poor substitute to addressing the reasons why such an idea came into being.

A dead or mutilated body merely offers assurance that power might have won the day for a moment, a situation offering only brief delight to military strategists and the journalists keeping tabs on the morgue’s latest additions.  It is easy, then, to ignore why Hezbollah became a haunting consequence of Israel’s bungling invasion and occupation of Lebanon in 1982.  Easy to also ignore the 1985 manifesto, with its reference to the organisation’s determination to combat Israel and those it backed, such as the Christian Phalangist allies in the Lebanese Civil War, and to remove the Israeli occupying force.

Such oblique notions as “degrading” the capacity of an ideological, religious group hardly addresses the broader problem.  The subsequent shoots from a savage pruning can prove ever more vigorous.  The 1992 killing of Hezbollah’s secretary-general Abbas al-Musawi, along with his wife and son, merely saw the elevation of Nasrallah.  Nasrallah turned out to be a more formidable, resourceful and eloquent proposition.  He also pushed other figures to the fore, such as the recently assassinated Fuad Shukr, who became an important figure in obtaining the group’s vast array of long-range rockets and precision-guided missiles.

Ibrahim Al-Marashi of California State University, San Marcos, summarises the efforts of Israel’s high-profile killing strategy as shortsighted feats of miscalculation.  “History shows every single Israeli assassination of a high-profile political or military operator, even after being initially hailed as a game-changing victory, eventually led to the killed leader being replaced by someone more determined, adept and hawkish.”  Another Nasrallah is bound to be in tow, with several others in incubation.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.

29 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Ali Abunimah

Israel’s assassination of Hasan Nasrallah, the secretary general of Hizballah, in an apocalyptic bombing attack on Beirut’s southern suburb on Friday is likely, at least in the short term, to cause enormous shock, despair and demoralization among supporters of the resistance to Zionism in Lebanon and across the region.

That is exactly what it is intended to do.

Confirmed by Hizballah on Saturday, Nasrallah’s killing comes after a series of tactical successes in the early stages of Israel’s unfolding full-scale attack on Lebanon, an open-ended assault that may well equal in barbarity Tel Aviv’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.

These are terrible and difficult thoughts to absorb after almost a year of genocide.

First there were the pager and walkie-talkie attacks, followed by a series of assassinations of Hizballah’s senior leaders, and now the head of the organization itself.

As Nasrallah himself admitted in his final speech, the organization suffered a severe blow with the pager attacks. Even worse was to come. Clearly there were serious breaches in security.

Nasrallah’s stature as a tactical and strategic thinker, as the most prominent and trusted leader of the Axis of Resistance, and as a personality capable of inspiring and reassuring supporters even in the worst of times, cannot be overstated.

The euphoria in Israel, Washington and some Arab capitals, will be exceeded only by the grief of Nasrallah’s supporters, who are far more numerous.

And there is no doubt that the loss is real and great from the perspective of a resistance that faces not only Israel’s formidable arsenal, but all the resources of the United States and the collective West.

Israel’s ability to carry out this series of attacks in quick succession will shake the confidence of many in Hizballah’s legendary prowess and operational security.

The attacks will go some way to restoring the prestige Tel Aviv has lost among its Western and Arab backers after a year of military failure in Gaza, and its failure to prevent the Hamas military offensive that wiped out the Gaza division of Israel’s army on 7 October 2023.

And although Hizballah has been hammering Israeli military assets and settlements in the north of historic Palestine with rockets, many in the region are asking why the resistance group’s response to Israel’s escalating aggression has not been harder and harsher – even as Israel intensifies its bombardment of civilians across Lebanon and within its capital.

Another question on many lips is why Iran, which vowed retaliation after Israel’s murder of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July, has acted with such restraint. There is a growing perception that its lack of response only encouraged Israel’s ever more brazen violence.

“Shock and awe” is not victory

Amid the rapidly changing situation and the torrent of emotions after a year of livestreamed genocide in Gaza, now being extended by Israel to Lebanon, it is hard to maintain a long view. But doing so is essential for sound analysis.

It is worth remembering this: In almost any asymmetrical war, when the strongest side – the invader or colonizer – goes on the offensive, it often appears to achieve quick and stunning success.

Indeed “shock and awe” is the name of a Western, specifically American, military doctrine, developed in the 1990s and explicitly touted when the US invaded Iraq in 2003.

Also called “rapid dominance,” its aim is to demoralize and paralyze the adversary with the use of overwhelming and spectacular displays of violence.

The goal according to the doctrine’s authors, is to so “overload an adversary’s perceptions and understanding of events that the enemy would be incapable of resistance at the tactical and strategic levels.”

We’ve seen this time and again in recent decades and we’re witnessing it now.

Just weeks after the 11 September 2001 attacks, the United States attacked Afghanistan, quickly toppling the Taliban government under the pretext that it had sheltered Osama bin Laden.

American confidence following this swift apparent success undoubtedly spurred Washington to go on to its next project: the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.

With the government of Saddam Hussein quickly overthrown and American tanks in control of Baghdad, President George W. Bush gave his infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech on 1 May of that year – words that came to haunt him as the United States became bogged down in a war of attrition against resistance in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

These rapid victories, or so they appeared, sparked real fears at the time that the American forces would roll onwards towards Damascus and Tehran, or perhaps other “rogue states” on America’s hit list.

We know now, from the so-called Afghanistan Papers, that the warmongers in Washington recognized all along that they had lost the war, but lied to the American public for almost two decades that they were winning.

And when the American withdrawal from Afghanistan came in August 2021, the humiliating departure from Kabul airport was widely compared to the chaotic scenes of the defeated Americans evacuating in helicopters from the roof of the US embassy in Saigon, Vietnam.

With respect to Israel too, this pattern has been evident. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 – an assault it dubbed “Operation Peace for Galilee” – its forces quickly swept north to Beirut, besieging and occupying an Arab capital for the first time in the Zionist settler state’s history.

Israel murdered tens of thousands of Lebanese and Palestinian civilians and expelled the Palestine Liberation Organization. But success, from Tel Aviv’s perspective, quickly turned to failure.

During a long occupation, resistance to Israel grew, especially from Hizballah, which did not even exist at the time of the Israeli invasion.

Hizballah and other resistance groups bled Israeli occupation forces for two decades in a grueling war of attrition, until Israel withdrew from occupied southern Lebanon in defeat in May 2000.

Even in the context of the American-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza, Israel’s constant professions that it has placed this or that part of Gaza under its total control, quickly crumble. The fact is that the resistance continues to fight in every part of Gaza.

So far every Israeli-American “day after” plan, in which a defeated Hamas would be replaced by an Arab-backed Palestinian collaborator force, has collapsed.

Distracting from an exhausted Israel’s ongoing failure in Gaza, is perhaps one of the factors spurring Israel to seek spectacular “success” in Lebanon.

Turning point

This sobering moment is a turning point in the long regional war for liberation from racist, Western-backed settler-colonial Zionism. But after a century of Zionism’s depredations and horrors, neither the people of Lebanon nor Palestine have surrendered, and there’s no reason to believe they will now.

On the contrary, after the initial shock, the determination of the resistance will only increase, and its circle will expand, as it has in every phase of the liberation struggle.

Nor does the assassination of Nasrallah, with American bombs and American warplanes, and perhaps other assistance from Washington, change the trajectory of the downward decline of US global power – the power on which Israel relies for its survival.

Let’s recall too that the Zionists have always used assassination as a primary tactic. However, their war is not against individual leaders, but against entire peoples whose determination cannot be so easily snuffed out.

Nasrallah himself assumed the leadership of Hizballah after Israel murdered his predecessor Abbas al-Musawi in 1992. Nasrallah grew the organization to unprecedented strength.

That strength is not based on the will of one individual, but on a base of support deeply committed to the cause and willing – as Nasrallah himself never failed to point out – to make enormous sacrifices on the road to liberation.

If the Israeli army has admitted Hamas cannot be destroyed because “Hamas is an idea, Hamas is a party,” then what about Hizballah?

What is most sobering is that the war to liberate Palestine and the region from Zionism will be no less brutal on the people of the region than the wars to liberate Algeria, Vietnam, South Africa and so many other places targeted by the Euro-American empire.

After all, the occupiers and colonizers are the same countries, and the genocidal hatred their ruling classes bear towards the people whose land and rights they seek to usurp has never dimmed.

Like others before him, Nasrallah gave his life on the road to liberate Palestine, and that struggle did not end today.

Ali Abunimah is executive director of The Electronic Intifada.

29 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Max Lane

September 15 marked the third anniversary of the announcement of the AUKUS (Australia, the UK, the U.S.) agreement. The purpose of this agreement is for Australia to buy nuclear-powered submarines from the UK and the U.S. This increases interoperability with U.S. forces that are projecting their power in the region along the Chinese coast. Furthermore, Australia is participating in the QUAD and SQUAD, “[i]nformal Alliances in the Indo-Pacific.” The city of Darwin in northern Australia has been opened up for the U.S. forces, including planes carrying nuclear weapons. In addition, Australia has long housed bases for U.S. spy satellite systems. (For details of all these agreements, visit antiaukuscoalition.)

All this is consistent with history. The Australian capitalist class shares the understanding of the Global North versus Global South relationship and realizes that the ruling class’s best interest is in the Global North’s continued domination. The increased capacity of China to resist the U.S. hegemony, even if it is unable to defeat it, is seen as a threat. The hegemonic discourse in the media always refers to China as an adversary. In Australia, this is accentuated when talking about Australian imperialism’s “own backyard.”

Member of the Global Imperialist Club

For at least 150 years, Australia has been integrated into the network of rich industrialized countries much of whose wealth comes from colonial and modern imperialist exploitation of what is now called the Global South. Although a small imperialist economy, some of its biggest capitalists have investments in Global South countries, as far apart as Indonesia and Chile.

Australia has one of the highest GDP per capita in the world. Its wealth stems from this exploitation and from sharing in the exploitation of the Global South by the imperialist bloc. Its initial wealth, accumulated in the 18th and 19th centuries, was based on and boosted by a genocidal invasion. The latter enabled the theft of the continent’s land from its original inhabitants.

In foreign and security policies, the Australian state and the majority of the capitalist class have always believed that they shared the same strategic interests of the imperialist bloc. Since World War II, they have also shared the strategic interests of the United States.

In relation to Asia, the Australian state has shared the understanding with the United States that a socialist revolution in Asia is a threat to all imperialist interests. Since 1945, the Australian ruling class has waged a massive propaganda campaign among the Australian people on the “yellow peril” of communist China and the left-wing movements in southeast Asia. In addition, Australian troops were involved in South Korea, Malaya, and Indonesia before Vietnam. Even before the United States committed to the war in Vietnam, the Australian government was urging the United States to get involved.

Contradictions for Australia’s Capitalist Class

There is a contradiction for the Australian capital as a whole. “Over the past five years, the exports of Australia to China have increased at an annualized rate of 7.76 percent, from $84.8 billion in 2017 to $123 billion in 2022,” according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity. China usually tops the list of countries that Australia exports to. The current Australian government is doing all it can to improve business ties with China, including recently feting the Chinese Premier and other delegations. Commercial relations have also improved. At the same time, in the political sphere, anti-Chinese propaganda continues strongly. Open public dissent against AUKUS or similar policies from within the capitalist class or pro-capitalist politicians is minimal. The one outspoken critic is former Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating who argues: that China is no security threat to Australia; that Taiwan belongs to China; and that the Australian economy needs the best possible economic relations with China.

Opposition to AUKUS

The opposition is weak and comes from the left and some center-left Greens parliamentarians. There are two main elements to the Australian left. The Greens party is a moderate left-of-center party with a small representation in the Senate and House of Representatives. They oppose AUKUS, emphasizing the waste of money, erosion of defense sovereignty to the United States, and the environmental impacts of storing nuclear waste. While it publishes progressive statements on China not being a threat, it does not seem to stress the same. The Greens do not initiate or lead mass campaigns or protests.

The peace movement and the far left include the Independent and Peaceful Australia Network and the Australian Anti-AUKUS Coalition. While active, these organizations are small and weak, with minimal public profile or impact. This reflects the 20-year decline of radical left organizations in Australia, especially those whose political perspective makes the Global North versus Global South struggle (imperialism) a major or basic framework.

These groups’ statements are therefore often slightly more radically worded versions of the Greens’. Nobody campaigns around the slogan: “China is not an enemy” nor links U.S. containment of China to imperialism.

Solutions

There is no magic solution to this weakness. The only way to undo the damage is by patiently explaining and helping build actions and a movement against imperialism.

One factor that may help this process is increasing the voices of the peoples’ movements of Asia on these questions among the Australian public, and especially among Australian youth who are beginning to raise questions on this issue. More visits to Australia by Asian friends would educate people with an imperialist perspective on the destabilizing impact of U.S. and Australian policies. This is urgent and very useful, and we must figure out how to overcome the infrastructural and financial challenges involved in achieving this goal.

Max Lane is a writer and commentator on Asian and southeast Asian affairs and Australia’s relations with Asia.

28 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Maureen Clare Murphy

All of humanity is less secure after a year of genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank and as Israel now unleashes its wrath on Lebanon.

“The region is on the brink of a catastrophe,” the spokesperson for the UN secretary-general warned last Friday after Israel escalated attacks in Lebanon in previous days.

But Israel’s unchecked aggression – leaving some 500 people dead, the overwhelming majority of them civilians, and forcibly displacing tens of thousands in Lebanon on Monday alone, and the apparent use of bunker buster bombs in Beirut’s southern suburbs on Friday, bringing entire apartment blocks to the ground without warning – will have profound repercussions felt far beyond western Asia as Tel Aviv drags Washington into a regional war.

[https://twitter.com/kaiss_ramzi/status/1839694779636240432]

The failure of states to meet their legal and moral obligations to end the genocide against the Palestinian people “jeopardizes the entire edifice of international law and rule of law in world affairs,” dozens of independent UN experts recently warned.

They added that the world stands on a knife’s edge and “either we travel collectively towards a future of just peace and lawfulness – or hurtle towards anarchy and dystopia, and a world where might makes right.”

Israel’s actions over the past days and months amount to a full assault on the fundamental precepts of international humanitarian law – the rules governing the conduct of belligerents during war.

Modern international humanitarian law is based in large part on the Geneva Conventions, the first of which was signed by 16 European nations in 1864.

Today, nearly 200 states are party to the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which build on earlier treaties to protect war victims. The broad endorsement of the conventions demonstrates the universality of the principle that civilians, including health and aid workers, and civilian objects such as hospitals and schools, must be protected during war.

The laws of war represent “the very minimum rules to preserve humanity in some of the worst situations known to mankind,” according to Eric Mongelard, an official at the UN human rights office.

Litany of war crimes

Respect for international humanitarian law has never been absolute and victims of war the world over have yet to receive justice for violations of those rules.

But in the case of Israel, blatant disregard for international law is at the core of its military doctrine and the normalization of its crimes degrades the security of all humanity, with terrible precedents now set in Gaza.

Nearly 300 humanitarian aid workers, most of them UN staff, are among the nearly 42,000 Palestinians confirmed to have been killed in Gaza over the past year amid “the total absence of an effective protection of civilians,” according to António Guterres, the UN secretary-general.

Israel has systematically attacked Gaza’s hospitals and other medical facilities, categorizing them as military objects in a total affront to the laws of war and more than 500 health workers have been killed since last October.

Hundreds of health workers have been detained and disappeared, many of them during raids on hospitals, including hospital directors. Prominent Palestinian doctors, including Adnan al-Bursh and Iyad al-Rantisi, have died in Israeli detention after being subjected to torture and ill-treatment.

[https://twitter.com/RamAbdu/status/1839649650313183537]

Israel has increasingly targeted UN facilities used to shelter displaced civilians in order to pressure Hamas during ceasefire and prisoner swap negotiations, with more than 1,100 Palestinians killed in such attacks.

Israel has conferred de facto combatant status on all Palestinian men of “military age” in Gaza, stripping teens and men not participating in hostilities of their status as protected civilians.

International doctors who volunteered in Gaza report that children are being deliberately shot in the head and stomach by Israeli troops.

Videos from Gaza show Israeli troops gunning down grandmothers and other civilians carrying white flags or while they otherwise pose no conceivable threat (three Israeli citizens held captive in Gaza were also executed by Israeli troops in similar circumstances).

More than 170 Palestinian journalists have been killed in Gaza, according to the government media office in the territory, alleging in some cases that the targeted media workers were operatives of armed groups.

Irene Khan, the UN special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, said after the killing of an Al Jazeera reporter and cameraman in early August that “the Israeli military seems to be making accusations without any substantive evidence as a license to kill journalists, which is in total contravention of international humanitarian law.”

Dahiyeh Doctrine

This is an utterly incomplete list of ways that Israel has shredded the protection of civilians sanctified under international humanitarian law during its nearly year-long campaign in Gaza.

And now it is doing the same in Lebanon.

During a briefing to the UN Security Council last Friday, Volker Türk, the UN high commissioner for human rights, said that the explosion of thousands of communication devices in Lebanon days earlier represented “a new development in warfare.”

Those attacks – which reportedly killed at least 37 people, including two children, and injured more than 3,400, many of them permanently – have been widely attributed to Israel, though it has not officially claimed responsibility.

“Law exists to defend values central to our societies, and to our world,” Türk told the Security Council.

He said that the “simultaneous targeting of thousands of individuals, whether civilians or members of armed groups, without knowledge as to who was in possession of the targeted devices, their location and their surroundings at the time of the attack” violates international law.

Türk said it was “difficult to conceive how … such attacks could possibly conform” with the principles of distinction, proportionality and precaution – the fundamental principles of international humanitarian law.

He called the attack “a war crime to commit violence intended to spread terror among civilians” – in other words, terrorism.

Although unprecedented in its scale and manner, the communication device attack is hardly the first time that Lebanon – which was invaded by Israel in 1978, 1982 and in 2006, and occupied by its troops for 15 years – has been subjected to wholesale violations of the laws of war.

The use of overwhelming force against civilians is known as the “Dahiyeh Doctrine” – named for the southern Beirut suburb heavily bombarded by Israel in 2006.

By using indiscriminate and disproportionate force and by deliberately inflicting suffering on noncombatants – an inherently criminal strategy – Israel aims to restore deterrence and turn the targeted civilian population against the armed resistance, whether it be Hizballah in Lebanon or Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza.

Mowing the grass

The Dahiyeh Doctrine has never succeeded in turning the people against the resistance, despite the increasingly high cost paid by Palestinians in Gaza since the term was coined nearly 20 years ago, around the same time that Israel imposed a devastating blockade of collective punishment on the territory.

This failure has compelled Israel to periodically “mow the grass” in Gaza – in the horrifying term used by Efraim Inbar and Eitan Shamir, who prescribed the strategy in a 2013 paper – to degrade the capabilities of the resistance and achieve temporary deterrence in a longer low-intensity war of attrition against Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Those episodes of intensive attacks on Gaza by air, land and sea ever since Israel redeployed to the territory’s periphery in 2005 have invariably involved the targeting of civilian infrastructure, including residential and mixed-use high-rise buildings.

In the days leading up to a ceasefire ending the 51-day war in the summer of 2014, Israel ordered the evacuation and then bombed four residential and mixed-use towers in Gaza, leveling three of them to the ground and causing significant damage to a fourth tower that was eventually demolished. No one was killed in the attacks on those four buildings.

The attacks on the landmark buildings – described by Amnesty International as “extensive, wanton and unjustified” – were aimed at pressuring Palestinians to accept a ceasefire deal “on Israel’s terms,” according to Al Mezan, a human rights group based in Gaza.

That tactic is being used in Gaza today at a horrifically distorted scale in the repeated massacres of displaced civilians sheltering at schools to increase pressure on Hamas during now moribund indirect negotiations with Israel.

Strategic failure

But amid all the death and destruction, Israel has not won any obvious decisive victories in Gaza while it transfers an elite brigade from that territory to the Lebanese front.

It is often said that in asymmetrical warfare, all a guerrilla or resistance organization needs to do to win is to not lose. In the case of Gaza, that calculus is confirmed by Israeli and American insistence from the outset that any permanent ceasefire before Hamas is completely destroyed would amount to a defeat for Israel.

After almost a year of Israel’s merciless onslaught, Hamas’ persistence, ability to regroup and sustain the fight, denying Israel effective control over any part of Gaza, represents a strategic failure for Israel.

That failure is not mitigated by Israel’s mass murder, wanton destruction or the assassination of senior Hamas figures, any more than Washington’s killing of millions of people in Southeast Asia changes the fact that it lost the war in Vietnam.

Eitan Shamir, one of the Israeli professors who coined “mowing the grass,” stated that the strategy had “completely collapsed” following Hamas’ surprise attack on 7 October 2023.

According to Shamir, writing that same month, the only way to reverse the “severe defeat” suffered by Israel that day would be to “dismantle the Hamas regime in Gaza and destroy its military capabilities.”

“If the threat in Gaza is not removed when the war ends,” Shamir warned, Israelis living in communities near the boundary with Gaza “will not return to their homes.” People may not return to Israeli settlements evacuated along the Lebanese border either, he added – “an unprecedented achievement for Israel’s enemies.”

Israel has not succeeded in eliminating Hamas as a military force in Gaza, despite what some of its defense figures are telling the press in an apparent effort to curry public favor for a deal to release the Israeli captives still held in the territory.

Netanyahu’s cabinet is meanwhile considering a proposal to forcibly transfer civilians from the north of the territory before laying siege on it. The logic is that this would reverse the severe strategic defeat of 7 October by de facto annexing more occupied Palestinian territory.

But at present, the Israeli military is turning its attention to its more formidable foe in the north, Hizballah, with the stated aim of “bringing the residents of the north back to their homes safely,” according to defense minister Yoav Gallant.

Israel also seeks to delink the battle with Hizballah in Lebanon from the fight with Hamas in Gaza, thereby breaking the unity of fronts maintained over the past year and fragmenting the regional resistance.

Hasan Nasrallah, the secretary-general of the Lebanese resistance group, reportedly the target of Israel’s massive strikes in the southern suburbs of Beirut on Friday, has consistently reiterated over the past year that Hizballah’s rocket fire from the north will not stop without a ceasefire in Gaza in the south.

“Displacement and paralysis”

A prevailing analysis in the Israeli press holds that Nasrallah, who has said that Hizballah is ready for a high-intensity war with Israel, but does not seek one, had recently found himself isolated and in a bind.

According to this analysis, as Israel climbs ever higher up the escalation ladder, eliminating Hizballah’s top commanders, Nasrallah was left with few options for retaliation that won’t lead to an all-out war that would presumably leave Lebanon destroyed.

But what this analysis doesn’t account for is that time is on the side of Hizballah, which “is aiming for longer term strategic objectives despite some tactical losses it has endured over the past week,” analyst Amal Saad said on Tuesday.

“While Israel’s approach has been one of displacement and massacre, Hizballah’s strategy has focused on displacement and paralysis,” Saad added.

“Its resistance forces aim to weaken the [Israel military’s] resolve and erode the resilience of Israel’s home front through a strategy of combined military and economic attrition.”

Justin Podur, another close observer, said in a situation report on his YouTube channel on Thursday that “Hizballah is doing operations that they believe will lead to winning the war.”

“What I think is the calculation is this: On the Israel side, terrorize civilians, and eventually victory follows, or commit genocide and victory will follow,” Podur said.

“The resistance calculation and Hizballah’s calculation is that we are going to demilitarize northern Israel or what the resistance calls northern occupied Palestine,” he added.

Israel’s escalated attacks on Lebanon by its already tired and demoralized military will only prolong the evacuation of residents and has actually increased the number of people displaced from the northern settlements.

Meanwhile, some family members of Israelis being held captive in Gaza say that the offensive in Lebanon will also delay a deal to release their loved ones – whose return Netanyahu claimed to be a “sacred mission” during his speech at the UN General Assembly on Friday

Having already initiated a de facto war, Israel has no more rungs on the escalation to climb, and a ground invasion of Lebanon seems ever more likely. This would not be advantageous to Israel, to say the least, as it would leave its troops “sitting ducks for the resistance’s advanced hybrid warfare tactics,” as analyst Amal Saad put it.

In the event of a ground invasion, the euphoria experienced by Israel’s military establishment after several days of major blows against Hizballah will in all likelihood become a distant memory and memories of the humiliation and retreat of 2006 will soon come flooding back.

From tactical success to strategic defeat

Tactical achievements aside, in neither Lebanon or Gaza will Israel find a clear victory or surrender by the resistance. In any event, no matter the fate of Hamas or Hizballah, there will always be resistance to the settler-colonial state violently implanted and maintained in the region.

Israel’s pre-state forces used military force and terrorism to conquer and hold on to Arab land, and that violence has been a through line throughout the state’s history.

“There is no room in the Middle East for weakness,” according to Eitan Shamir of “mowing the grass” infamy, reflecting a mentality that has informed Israeli decision-making since the state’s inception.

“This war might not be existential in the immediate sense of a threat to conquer all of Israel’s territory,” Shamir wrote back in October, “but it is certainly existential in the long-term sense of proving Israel’s ability to continue to exist in this region.”

The increasingly high cost being paid in human lives to maintain a Jewish state in Palestine is also coming at a dear price to Israel in terms of international legitimacy.

The UN General Assembly overwhelmingly voted in favor of the dismantlement of the occupation this month following a watershed World Court advisory opinion asserting the illegality of Israel’s presence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Meanwhile, Israeli leaders anticipate that the International Criminal Court will issue arrest warrants against them any day now.

It may not seem like decisions made in international fora have any bearing on what happens on the ground. But Israel has cemented itself as an international pariah, leaving itself isolated on the world stage and enabled by and dependent on the US – a situation that will eventually prove unsustainable.

Existential war

Any security achieved by Israel through force will prove temporary and illusory at a time when Israel’s existence is as fragile as ever.

Both Hamas and Hizballah were formed in response to Israeli occupation and the brutal oppression of any and all attempts to liberate their land.

[https://twitter.com/HadiNasrallah/status/1839671013363036343]

Israel’s existential wars against the two resistance organizations stem from its precarity as a colony populated by foreign settlers that was founded after the mass expulsion of the indigenous Palestinian population – a reality that will never be accepted by people in the region, no matter how many normalization deals Israel reaches with Washington’s regional allies.

“Israel’s war is not with you, it’s with Hizballah,” Netanyahu told Lebanese citizens in a video message on Tuesday.

“Don’t let Hizballah endanger Lebanon,” he added in a thinly veiled threat implying that civilians and the state itself would bear the brunt of war.

After rejecting a truce proposed by the US, Netanyahu said that Israel was “fighting for its life,” with the “curse” of Iran behind the “savage enemies” at its doorstep during his speech at the UN General Assembly on Friday.

Netanyahu made the preposterous claim that Hizballah fires “rockets and missiles after they place them in schools, in hospitals, in apartment buildings and in the private homes of the citizens of Lebanon.”

The Israeli prime minister thereby made it clear that Tel Aviv’s target bank in Lebanon would primarily be civilians and civilian objects, causing the same levels of death and destruction as it wrought in Gaza over the past year – “effectively a call to genocide,” according to Amal Saad.

Underlining the existential nature of its wars with Hamas and Hizballah, Netanyahu said that “Israel will win this battle. We will win this battle because we don’t have a choice.”

[https://twitter.com/alijla2021/status/1839709932704137217]

The Israeli prime minister reiterated that Israel’s war was with Hizballah, not against the Lebanese people. But as Saad stated, Netanyahu’s “declaration that Israel must defeat Hizballah and that it can’t accept a ‘terrorist army’ on its doorstep is a declaration of forever war on Lebanon.”

She added that “unable to destroy Hizballah directly, Israel strives to eradicate the ‘resistance community’ and social fabric which supports and sustains it.”

There is no separation between people and the resistance, with the former giving rise to the latter, whether in Gaza or Lebanon. And that is why Israel puts the weight of its military on the necks of civilians in both places.

The inherent human reaction to resist brutal subjugation by any means necessary, now organized and sharpened with decades of experience in both Palestine and Lebanon and elsewhere in the region, is why Israel has not and will not find any decisive victory in either.

If the US doesn’t force Israel to choose diplomacy over warfare, and there is little reason to believe Washington will, “we may witness the onset of a ‘Great War’ that could consume the entire region and pose an existential threat to Israel itself,” Saad stated.

Israel is destroying any semblance of international law, but it is also destroying itself. Only once it goes the way of other pariah colonial regimes, like Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa, will it be possible to build anew from the ashes and ruin the Zionist project will leave behind in Palestine.

Maureen Clare Murphy is senior editor of The Electronic Intifada.

Ali Abunimah contributed analysis.

28 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Veterans For Peace & Move to Amend

Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza has produced increasing calls for an immediate ceasefire, while a pro-Israel, U.S.-based group has waged an increasing war on democracy with little public scrutiny and no end in sight.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is one of the most politically and electorally influential groups in this country. They have bombarded our “democratic” system spending over $100 million just in 2024 to punish opponents of Israeli policies, including the military assault on Gaza that’s claimed over 40,000 deaths and displaced 2.3 million people.

Our democracy has always been incomplete at best, but peoples’ movements have won voting and political rights for those without property, people of color, women and young people.

But the political and electoral influence of the super rich and their corporations, including non-profit ones like AIPAC, frustrate and preempt We the People who try to have human needs addressed.

AIPAC lobbies for U.S. support of Israel. Its related entities include a regular Political Action Committee (AIPAC PAC), and a Super PAC, (United Democracy Project, UDP).

Regular PACs are limited to contributing $3,300 per candidate per election. Super PACs can spend unlimited sums on elections, but must be spent “independently” from any candidate or candidate campaign.

AIPAC has spent $19.6 million for lobbying in the 2023-24 election cycle (through July, 2024). The AIPAC PAC has spent over $44.8 million while UDP has spent $55.4 million. AIPAC exceeded its 2024 goal to raise $100 million.

AIPAC entities threaten our elections and our limited democracy in multiple ways.

1. AIPAC’s PACs have spent millions of dollars supporting conservative Democratic challengers running against incumbent progressives in Congressional primaries, especially candidates of color – who are the strongest supporters of VFP’s calls to stop the war on Gaza and of Move to Amend’s We the People Amendment, HJR54 that will end the insane doctrines of corporate “personhood” and money is the same as speech. In the recent primaries, Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, members of  the progressive “Squad,” were the latest victims and there will be more. UDP targeted $14.5 million to defeat Bowman in July and another $8.6 million to take down Bush in August. Bowman and Bush are HJR54 cosponsors and two of Congress’s most vocal critics of the Israeli war on Gaza.

2. Such massive corruption of elections includes paying for Congressional delegations to Israel and an army of lobbyists who peddle a peace and democracy narrative for Israel while pressing for massive arms shipments, including the recent U.S. decision to provide $20 billion more in weaponry. AIPAC lobbyists are joined by U.S. weapons makers as a “force multiplier” with no Palestinian counterweight. The Arab American PAC spent $36,200 in the 2021-22 election cycle and 0 in the 2023-24 cycle.

3. AIPAC-entity donors include super rich Republicans, some of whom are billionaires, such as Paul Singer, who bankrolled a free luxury vacation trip for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and later had cases before the High Court.

AIPAC’s clear goal is to defeat every progressive Democrat it can this year. AIPAC also supports many Republican Congressional candidates, including many who voted against certifying the 2020 election. How exactly does all this further democracy?

4. The enormous sum of expected AIPAC spending, especially in the primaries, has been too much to overcome for many progressive incumbents. J Street, a progressive pro-Israel group that defended candidates against AIPAC in the 2022 primaries, can’t compete with AIPAC and has sat out the 2024 primaries. AIPAC often  doesn’t mention Israel in their targeted ads, but rather attacks incumbents on personal issues or on their progressive voting record.

It’s not just AIPAC that has invaded and is occupying our elections and democratic spaces. Corporate entities and the super rich have waged war on our elections and in Congress, causing injustices, mass violence and environmental carnage.

Simply passing laws calling for greater financial disclosure or campaign finance “reform” isn’t enough to end the war on democracy by AIPAC and other corporate entities.

Enacting the We the People Amendment to abolish the constitutional doctrines that “money equals speech” and “a corporation is a person” is essential to create authentic democracy and to reduce the military industrial complex drive for perpetual wars and occupations. The latter is not only applicable in elections, but across the board as corporate entities have hijacked multiple constitutional amendments permitting them to preempt democratic efforts to protect people. communities and the natural world.

AIPAC, like so many other corporate-funded groups, will no doubt continue its assault on the election process in 2026.

It’s ultimately up to us to go beyond merely resisting the violence and harm they cause, and take appropriate actions that can stop the corrupting, anti-democratic and violent impact of the super rich and their corporations that have captured  elections and public policy.

27 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Grace Siegelman

The state of Missouri murdered Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams on Tuesday, September 24th, at 6 pm central time. His last meal was chicken wings and tater tots; his last words were, “All praise be to Allah in every situation!” His execution was the third execution in Missouri this year and the 100th since Missouri reinstated capital punishment in 1989.

Khaliifiah had hundreds of thousands of supporters behind him worldwide for decades. Millions making calls online and signing his petitions, hundreds in person bringing their grievances to the Missouri Supreme Court, and the prosecution lawyers AND family of Lisha Gayle, the social worker and former newspaper reporter who was murdered during a burglary of her home, whom this case revolves around, calling for the death penalty to be dismissed during this case.

Khaliifiah has also held his innocence since the beginning of this trial in 1998, with no forensic evidence supporting Khaliifah as the offender. Each time he was set to be executed, his murder was halted due to further DNA and forensic research, which never got to conclude before his death, nor did the impending Supreme Court case.

Khaliifah never had a fair trial. When first tried in 2001, he was not granted his constitutional rights to a fair jury. Instead, Black jurors were barred from entering the jury because they “looked like Williams.” In his reasoning for going forward with Williams’ execution, Gov. Parsons said that Williams had “exhausted due process and every judicial avenue.” However, Parsons denied Khaliifah’s clemency request to change his sentence to life in prison and also rejected a request to cancel the execution so that a lower court could make a new determination about the discriminatory circumstances of his 2001 jury. Gov. Parsons has never granted clemency for a death penalty case.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), 16 prisoners have been executed in 8 states in the United States this year, and 48 more executions are scheduled throughout 2024.

The death penalty and the cruelty of cases like Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams exemplify the systemic racism and throughlines of enslavement that are still housed within the U.S. Criminal Justice System today. Capital Punishment has been around since enslavement, with states like North Carolina using it as a way to squash rebellions and those working to free enslaved individuals. The Jim Crow Era continued with lynchings and public executions seemingly becoming interchangeable, with almost all cases of the death penalty being against Black men. And with the 1990s era of mass incarceration, the war on drugs, and a renewed surge of the death penalty – The United took the reins of the highest incarceration population in the world. Today, despite making up 13% of the U.S. population, Black folks make up 42% of those on death row (according to a 2020 Prison Policy Initiative Report).

Robert Dunham, the DPIC Executive Director, writes,

“What is broken or intentionally discriminatory in the criminal legal system is visibly worse in death-penalty cases. Exposing how the system discriminates in capital cases can shine an important light on law enforcement and judicial practices in vital need of abolition.”

The disparities found in Khaliifah’s case are ones systemically embedded in the groundwork of death penalty trials and throughout the entire criminal justice system in the U.S., with many other past cases resurfacing because of Khaliifah’s murder.

Like many others, I recount these facts about Khaliifah with tears running down my face and anger in my heart – and all I can think about is time. Khaliifah spent two decades in prison for a crime he did not commit. President Biden sits in a long line of masterminds that got us to the prison industrial complex that we have today, with many who were sentenced to death while Biden was gunning for the 1994 Crime Bill, still awaiting their fate. A prison industrial complex that has not only murdered and harmed millions of Black and Brown people in the U.S. for centuries but has weaved its web throughout the world, implementing torture, starvation, and capital punishment of its own sort throughout places like Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Sudan, the Congo.

And as we run into a new election cycle fueled by feminism and a new wave of young organizers ready to believe in the system at large because of who is heading it, I must ask, where is feminism in this? Where is feminism when we have so many women as elected officials in the U.S. who could not even utter his name, not the name of any individual who the heinous system has touched? Where is feminism as we look out onto almost a year of genocide and nearly 76 years of occupation in Palestine? Where is feminism when our tax dollars go towards the public execution of innocent mothers, fathers, and children who got no jury, no trial, and no time?

From Missouri to Palestine, not even time is a human right.

(Below, The Perplexing Smiles of the Children of Palestine by: Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams)

The Perplexing Smiles of the Children of Palestine

Grace Siegelman is CODEPINK’s Digital Engagement Manager and Feminist Foreign Policy Project Coordinator. Grace holds a Master’s in Women and Gender Studies and a Bachelor’s in Peace, Justice, and Conflict Studies from DePaul University.

26 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Bharat Dogra

The fact that some of the top Western diplomats and leaders and the overwhelming majority of people of Ukraine had opposed NATO membership should be better known

As the Ukraine crisis continues to escalate and the possibility of a direct confrontation between Russia and USA/NATO also increase, it is important that some facts not generally raised in western mass media should be more widely known in the west and also internationally.

The controversy over Ukraine’s membership of NATO has been perhaps the most important issue leading up to the present crisis. Hence it should be better known that an important understanding reached between Gorbachev and Bush around 1990 was that the USA will not expand NATO membership eastwards close to Russian borders. Jack F. Matlock, then US ambassador to the Soviet Union and a leading expert on Soviet policy for years, had a ringside view of crucial talks. He has stated (February 15 2022 , Responsible Statecraft),“ Gorbachev was assured, though not in a formal treaty, that if a unified Germany was allowed to remain in NATO, there would be no movement of NATO’s jurisdiction to the east, not one inch.”

However the USA soon started moving away from such assurances. 1997 was a landmark year in this context. On June 26 1997 as many as 50 prominent foreign policy experts, including former senators, retired military officers, diplomats and academicians sent an open letter to President Clinton, outlining their opposition to NATO expansion (See full statement at Arms Control Association, Opposition to NATO Expansion).They wrote, “We, the undersigned, believe that the current US led effort to expand NATO, … is a policy error of historic proportions. In Russia NATO expansion, which continues to be opposed across the entire political spectrum, will strengthen the non-democratic opposition, undercut those who favor reform and cooperation with the West, bring the Russians to question the entire post- cold war settlement, and galvanize resistance in the Duma to the START II and III treaties.”

This letter of 50 experts concluded—“We strongly urge that the NATO expansion process be suspended while alternative actions are explored.” The alternatives suggested by these experts included “supporting a NATO-Russia relationship.”

Around the same time in 1997 Ambassador Matlock was asked to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He stated that NATO expansion would be the most strategic blunder since the end of the Cold War.

Ignoring such sage advice of ensuring peace, the US government went ahead with several waves of adding new NATO members. At the same time, the USA was also withdrawing from important arms control treaties. During Yeltsin leadership years of Russia, the USA used its strong position to push economic policies which impoverished a large number of Russians, leading even to a steep fall in life expectancy. The hopes of many Russians for economic help and accommodation of essential security concerns were neglected.  In 2014 the USA intervened decisively in Ukraine, playing an important role in instigating a coup installing an anti-Russian regime.

In 2019 the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published a study titled ‘30 Years of US Policy Toward Russia—Can the Vicious Circle be Broken’ which expressed regret at the many problems created by hostile US policy. To break the impasse, the study concluded, the USA will have to–for its part—make several key adjustments to its Russia policy, including halting NATO expansion eastward, clarifying to Ukraine and Georgia that they should not base their foreign policy on the assumption that they will be joining NATO ( while establishing robust security cooperation in other ways), reviewing and restraining sanctions policy towards Russia and leaving Russia’s internal affairs to itself ( not interfering in them).

Such suggestions were ignored by US policy makers who continued to indulge in provocations. Just before war broke out, Matlock posed a question (see Responsible Statecraft, 15 February 2022—I was there—NATO and the origins of the Ukraine Crisis)—Was the crisis avoidable? His answer was –Yes. He explained, “Since Putin’s major demand is an assurance that NATO will take no further members, and specifically not Ukraine or Georgia, obviously there could have been no basis for the present crisis if there had been no expansion of the alliance following the end of the Cold War, or if the expansion had occurred in harmony with building a security structure in Europe that included Russia.”

In 2008 when the USA promoted the issue of Ukraine’s membership of NATO at the NATO summit at Bucharest, the leaders of two leading European countries present there, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Sarkozy of France had opposed this but they were pressurized to accept the USA position.

In Ukraine several opinion polls during 1991 to 2014 had revealed that the overwhelming majority of the people of Ukraine did not support the membership of NATO. This was admitted even in NATO documents.

Before the coup in 2014, there was a broad agreement among the leaders of the ruling party and most opposition leaders of Ukraine that a policy of neutrality is much better and NATO membership should be avoided.

These facts should be widely known so that more people realize that the agenda of NATO membership was imposed by some aggressive leaders of the USA against the advice of leaders and senior experts and diplomats who value peace.

Another question is why this agenda of NATO membership for Ukraine was pushed so much by aggressive leaders of the USA. Initially it was to encircle Russia with hostile countries and place highly destructive weapons very close to its borders. However eventually this led to engaging Ukraine in a proxy war with Russia, with all the destructive results.

If these facts are more widely realized, hopefully this can help to get more support for a policy of de-escalation and peace which gives up the insistence on NATO membership of Ukraine and thereby one of the main hurdles in the path of peace is removed.

Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include Planet in Peril, A Day in 2071 and Protecting Earth for Children.

27 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor

Palestinian Territory – Israel has destroyed hundreds of dunams of agricultural land, depriving Palestinians in the northern Gaza Strip of agricultural land and resources vital to survival, all in support of its illegal blockade of the Strip and tight restrictions on the entry of food supplies for almost a full year. This is an expression of Israel’s insistence on committing genocide against Palestinians in the enclave.

This destruction is part of a larger Israeli plan that dates back to last October. Under this plan, Israeli forces have worked to eliminate almost 80% of the agricultural land in the Gaza Strip from use by Palestinians. Israel has done this either by isolating it in preparation for its forcible annexation to the so-called “buffer zone” or by bulldozing or destroying it by other means, such as bombardment—all of which are in violation of international law.

According to the Euro-Med Monitor field team, Israeli forces stormed the area of Al-Shimaa in Beit Lahia, northern Gaza, early on Tuesday morning (25 September 2024). Accompanied by military bulldozers, the forces began their bulldozing operations, destroying more than 500 dunums of newly replanted agricultural land, which was supposed to sustain the needs of the people living in northern Gaza, who are subject to an arbitrary siege and systematic starvation by Israel.

The Israeli destruction of these agricultural lands, the majority of which were filled with eggplants, reflects Israel’s insistence on preventing the Palestinian people from depending on the region’s agricultural food basket during a period when sufficient supplies of vegetables and other foods are being kept out of the northern Gaza Strip. This has led to a severe famine, to the point where a significant portion of the people in the north have been forced to eat tree leaves and bake ground-up animal feed instead of flour.

Twenty-four-year-old farmer Yousef Saqr Abu Rabie of Beit Lahia told Euro-Med Monitor about the significant losses he incurred on Monday and Tuesday, 23-24 September, as a result of the bulldozing of dozens of dunams north of the town. Abu Rabie stated that although his land is outside of the “security zone” established by Israel at the start of the war, the bulldozing operations still occurred, and that the now-bulldozed crops had been bearing fruit that the people of northern Gaza were depending on given Israel’s restrictions on the entry of fruits and vegetables into the northern Gazan markets.

As part of its crime of genocide, ongoing since 7 October 2023, Israel has worked over the past year to systematically and extensively destroy the Gaza Strip’s food basket of fruits, vegetables, and meat, along with all other components of local food production, in addition to blocking the entry of food and humanitarian aid. This has resulted in famine in the Gaza Strip.

Israeli forces have bulldozed or otherwise destroyed all agricultural lands along the “security fence” separating the eastern and northern Gaza Strip at a depth of nearly two kilometres, removing approximately 96 square kilometres in a clear attempt to annex them to its “buffer zone”, in violation of international law. An Israeli “buffer” road and zone splitting Gaza City through its centre, meanwhile, and the creation of Israel’s Netzarim axis to keep sections of the Strip separate, have resulted in the destruction of approximately three square kilometres of agricultural lands. Thus, the agricultural lands destroyed by Israel to enable the creation of its “buffer” areas, specifically, represent about 27.5% of the Gaza Strip.

The Israeli occupation army has worked to destroy almost all buildings and facilities on the vast majority of these lands, which are now within the “buffer zone” and are off-limits to residents and farmers. These lands represented the majority of agricultural land in the Gaza Strip and included hundreds of farms built on hundreds of dunams that were planted with vegetables and fruits, as well as hundreds of farms raising poultry and livestock.

Outside of this “buffer zone”, additional land has been destroyed by Israeli incursions or aerial and artillery bombardment, resulting in the destruction of at least 34 square kilometres of agricultural land and the streets that service it. This brings the total percentage of destroyed land in the Gaza Strip to 36.9%, or more than 75% of the Strip’s area designated for agriculture.

Of the very few remaining areas set aside for agriculture, the majority are in the region of Al-Mawasi in the southern Gaza Strip, west of Khan Yunis, which is now home to hundreds of thousands of people who have been forcibly displaced.

In addition to Israel’s destruction of thousands of farms, greenhouses, water wells, tanks, and stores housing agricultural equipment, Euro-Med Monitor field teams recorded the intentional killing of numerous farmers while these individuals were working or attempting to access their lands. Since the start of the genocide, the Israeli army has also killed several fishermen and destroyed the majority of fishing boats and fishing ports in the Gaza Strip. These actions have negatively impacted the availability of healthy food for over 2.2 million Palestinians living in the Strip, and the repercussions of this are expected to last for years after the withdrawal of the Israeli military.

Farmers are finding it difficult or impossible to access areas that have been spared from the Israeli bombing, due to the ongoing bombardment and ground incursions into numerous areas. Additionally, the lack of electricity, destruction of water wells, and scarcity of fuel all make it difficult to cultivate new areas and irrigate them with water. This occurs while aid supplies are being blocked from reaching residents and displaced people in the Strip by Israeli army forces.

The ongoing Israeli military assaults have detrimental effects on soil, air, water quality, agricultural land, public health, and the environment. These effects compound over time, and at some point, may result in startling increases in the death rate.

The internationally recognised human right to food, water, and sanitation is a basic right that protects population health and dignity. It can only be realised if the international community puts an end to Israel’s crime of genocide; removes the illegal blockade on the Gaza Strip; and salvages what remains of the besieged enclave, which is currently uninhabitable on all fronts. Delays will cause the Strip to deteriorate further, cost more civilian lives, and heavily affect people’s health outcomes.

The international community must act swiftly and forcefully to end to Israel’s crime of genocide in the Gaza Strip, which involves both the direct killing of, and the imposition of unbearable living conditions on, the Palestinian people there. Israel is attempting to rob Palestinians of all hope of survival by turning the Strip into a place without any of the basic necessities of life.

The international community should make sure that humanitarian aid—particularly the basic food and non-food supplies required to respond to the humanitarian crisis safely and effectively—reaches the Gaza Strip swiftly, particularly the northern part of the Strip.

In order to save the civilian population in the Gaza Strip from the threat of further health disasters, pressure must also be applied to Israel to permit the entry of materials required for infrastructure rehabilitation and repair. This includes ensuring that there is enough fuel entering the Occupied Palestinian Territory to run desalination plants and wells, among other water and sanitation facilities.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor is a Geneva-based independent organization with regional offices across the MENA region and Europe

27 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org