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By Dr Suresh Khairnar

Today marks 24 years since the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in America. And to take revenge for these attacks, America has forced war on eight countries, including Afghanistan and Iraq, and in return for the deaths of its own 37,000 people, it has attacked Afghanistan and Iraq, killing more than 2.5 million people. And more than half of them are from Iraq alone. Of these, 1.5 million lives have been lost. And more than three-fourths of them are children under the age of 15. And due to economic sanctions, most of the lives of children have been lost due to lack of food and medicines. This is more than the number of children who died due to the atom bombs dropped by America on two Japanese cities, Nagasaki and Hiroshima, on 6-9 August 1945, during the last phase of the Second World War.

After the 9/11 attacks, in the name of eliminating Al-Qaeda, America attacked Afghanistan as well as Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Egypt in the name of terrorism! And 9-29 lakh people were killed by spending Rs 585 lakh crore! Among them were a total of 84 terrorists!

After the US action, instead of Al-Qaeda ending, more than ten terrorist organizations with different names were born! ISIS, Boko-Haram spread to 17 countries from Iraq to Nigeria! 35 groups including Jaish-e-Muhammad, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Haqqani are associated with it!

In 24 years, these groups have carried out 34 thousand attacks! In which more than one lakh people have lost their lives! And it has been less than a month since the US attacked the Afghan terrorist organization Taliban for handing over Osama bin Laden and kept Afghanistan under its control for twenty years! The same Afghanistan has been captured by the Taliban immediately after the US withdrew its troops! Doesn’t this look like WWF wrestling? The world’s most powerful army was busy having fun in the Bagaram area of ​​Afghanistan for twenty years? And under the nose of three and a half lakh Afghan soldiers and the US army itself, only seventy thousand Talibanis, who were claimed to have been removed twenty years ago! Then they come to power again? After looking at the historical background of this, you will know what is the reason behind it? That is why I have titled my article as ‘If you sow the seeds of acacia, where will you get mangoes?’

In 1985, on the White House lawn, President Ronald Reagan presented a group of Afghans, all Mujahideen leaders, to the media and praised them, saying, “These gentlemen are on a moral level with the founding fathers of our country!” It was a moment when America tried to present a new form of political Islam to continue its struggle against the Soviet Union.

Half a decade after the Vietnam debacle, American foreign policy was on a second losing streak. This trend was most dramatically illustrated in 1979, when popular revolutions toppled two US-backed dictatorships: one in Nicaragua and the other in Iran. Later that year, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Who would have guessed that the Soviet Union would collapse just a decade later?

If the 9/11 incident dampened America’s happiness for a while, then this incident also raised the question, “At what cost was the Cold War won?” To answer this question, you have to look at the reign of President Reagan. Ronald Reagan claimed that “the defeat of pro-American dictators in the Third World was clearly due to the Soviet Union!” After this, Reagan called for, “We should put all our strength to push back the Soviet Union, whatever measures we have to take for this!” Afghanistan was the high point of the Cold War compared to other countries.

The Afghan war relatively weakened the counter-revolutionary campaign in Nicaragua. The methods used to win both wars were seriously considered for their subsequent effects. The Soviet Union had about one lakh ground troops fighting in the war. The Afghanistan war gave America the opportunity to hand over Vietnam to the Soviet Union. Reagan turned it into a strategic objective, because his view towards the Afghan war was more global than regional. The Reagan administration dragged this war for ten years. Thus the Afghan war turned into the most dangerous regional war in the world. This was also the largest paramilitary operation of the CIA since the Vietnam war. Which turned into the longest war in Soviet history.

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 had a major impact on the policy of the Afghan war. The Iranian Revolution brought about a new form of relations between America and political Islam. Prior to this, America had understood the world very simply – on one side was the Soviet Union and the militant third world nationalism, which America called Soviet tools, and on the other side was political Islam, which America supported through Sarikat-e-Islam against Sukarno in Indonesia.

Similarly, in Pakistan, it supported Jamaat-e-Islami against Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and in Egypt, it supported Society of Muslim Brotherhood against Nasser. The hope was that political Islam would create a local resistance against secular nationalism. This idea appealed to other American friends in the region, from Israel to conservative Arab governments. But this plan failed completely.

Israel hoped to foster an Islamic political movement in the occupied territory and use it against the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Israeli intelligence gave Hamas full freedom of movement during the first intifada, allowing it to open a university and a bank account, and even supported it financially, so that it could counter a strengthened Hamas as a component of the second intifada.

In Egypt, after the death of Nasser, Anwar Sadat emerged as a liberator of political Islam. Between 1971 and 1975, Anwar Sadat released supporters of Islam from jail, who had been in jail for years. Not only this, for the first time they got the freedom to express their views openly in front of the people, and organize themselves. It is a different matter that they were supported by Israeli and American intelligence agencies. And what kind of trouble can the unexpected result of such crazy and selfish actions be?
Secret American assistance to opponents of the pro-Soviet government in Kabul began before Soviet forces had even invaded Afghanistan. CIA and State Department documents seized during the hostage-taking of the American embassy in Tehran revealed that “the US had begun secret meetings with Afghan rebel leaders in Pakistan in April 1979.” This incident took place eight months before Soviet forces entered Afghanistan. This was confirmed by Zbigniew Brzenczyk, who was President Carter’s national security adviser. He revealed this in an interview given to a Paris newspaper ‘Le Nouvel Observateur’ (January 15-20, 1998). The question and answer of the interview was something like this.

Question-Former CIA Director Robert Gates has written in his memoirs (From the Shadows) that “American intelligence agencies had started providing assistance to the Mujahideen six months before the Soviet forces entered Afghanistan.” During this time you were President Carter’s National Security Advisor. Thus you played an important role in this matter. Is this correct?

Brenzenskey- According to the official statement recorded in history, the assistance given by the CIA to the Mujahideen started in 1980! That is, much after the Soviet forces attacked Afghanistan on 24 December 1979! But the reality is just the opposite! In fact, on 3 July 1979, President Carter signed the first order! Under which there was a provision to provide assistance to the opponents of the communist government in Kabul! And on the same day I wrote to President Carter and made it clear “that our assistance will make the path of military intervention difficult!”

From Carter to Reagan, American foreign policy had changed a lot. Now it was turning from cantonment to roll-back. In Afghanistan, as in Nicaragua, the Carter administration thought it appropriate to adopt two paths. Liberal level covert support should be given to anti-communists. Be it a government or a group. Along with this, efforts should continue to find a solution through dialogue.

Cantonment, in this sense, was meant to be a search for coexistence. The Reagan administration, by contrast, had no interest in finding a way out through compromise. Instead of coexistence, the central focus of Reagan policy was pay-bank: everything that would make the Afghan war a Vietnam for the Soviet Union. The goal was one: “to defeat the Soviet Union at all costs.” The CIA was determined to do so. “Nothing would stand in the way of the real objective in Afghanistan.” That is, to kill the Russians was their main goal. Richard Pearl, Reagan’s assistant secretary of defense, was one of Washington’s most high-profile assassins. He was given greater responsibility under George W. Bush, especially after the 9/11 incident.

If the Reagan administration was initially allied with groups with strong anti-Soviet ideology and had no interest in a negotiated solution, Afghan nationalism was a matter of mistrust for successive Pakistani governments. This became more evident when the Afghan king, Zahir Shah, was forced to leave the country in July 1973 by his nephew and former prime minister, Mohammed Daud. Daud had allied the military’s Republican Alliance with a wing of the Communist Party, which he had named after his newspaper, Parcham. The new nationalist government took up the popular cause of Pashtunistan, half of Afghanistan’s population, and millions of Pashtuns living in Pakistan’s North East Frontier region, and hence gave a free hand to the Pakistani government. “That it should help the non-nationalist forces of Afghanistan! And in this matter Zia-ul-Haq also got a great opportunity. Due to the growing public opposition against Dawood’s rule, another military coup took place. Which is known as Saur Revolution. Which brought both the wings of the Communist Party, Parcham and Khalq, to ​​power together. With this revolution of April 17, 1978, the internationalization of the communists became officially respectable. And the internationalization of Islamists was declared subversive. Liberal and radical Islamic reactionaries left Kabul University and went to Pakistan. Where they were given a warm welcome.

The communist collapse of 1978 marked a decisive change in US policy towards Pakistan. The Carter administration reduced economic aid to Pakistan in 1977. The reason given was that Pakistan had a “poor human rights record!” On one hand, the military had plotted the unconstitutional assassination of an elected prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and on the other hand, its growing nuclear program had become increasingly influential globally.

But the coup and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan changed everything. In fact, just a few days after the Soviet invasion, Carter had made this offer to Zian over the phone that “if he helps the rebels against the communists, America will give him economic and military aid worth ten million dollars.” But Zian’s demands were higher. Therefore, the Zian-Carter friendship could not flourish. The relations between the two countries became warmer during the Reagan administration, when Pakistan was offered a huge economic and military aid. And thus, Pakistan became the third country to receive American aid, after Israel and Egypt.

It was during Reagan’s presidency that a close relationship developed between the American intelligence agency CIA and the Pakistani intelligence agency. And both the agencies jointly worked to deal with the Soviet powers. To supply as many weapons as possible to the Mujahideen and to recruit Islamic terrorists against the communist opponents. And from here, in an organized manner, to create fertile ground for the terrorist organization. Not only from Muslim countries, but also from countries like America, France, Britain, Islamic terrorists came to various madrassas of Pakistan and took training. A very famous example of this is Sheikh Abdullah Azzam. Whom a journalist named Lawrence Wright had given the title of the watchman of Jihad in The New Yorker in the eighties. He was a Palestinian theologian. And he had done his PhD in Islamic law from Al-Azhar University. After that, he was appointed to teach at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah. And Osama bin Laden was also among his disciples. Azzam has toured the whole world under the protection of the CIA. He has appeared as a speaker on Saudi television and in rallies held in America. And as a crusader, he was the asset of the CIA. And he kept travelling to every part of America in the eighties to recruit crusaders. And he kept recruiting fighters for the war in Afghanistan. Azzam was one of the founders of Hamas.

Azzam’s message was clear: “Participating in Jihad is not only a global responsibility today, but it is also a religious duty! This Jihad does not only mean killing the enemies i.e. the Russians, but also a journey to heaven after attaining martyrdom! Where 72 extremely beautiful virgin girls are standing ready to welcome you!” Azzam’s formula for Jihad was very simple: “No talks, no conferences, no discussions, only the gun was the answer!” And this formula effectively reflected the common objective of the IAS and the CIA.

It was against this backdrop that the US organized the Afghan Jihad and outlined its primary objective as: “To unite a billion Muslims through a crusade.” Crusade highlights the intellectual framework within which these actions were conducted, more than the Christian crusades on Afghan soil against the Soviet Union. Another objective was to further divide the two Islamic sects (Shia and Sunni). The Afghan Jihad was essentially an American Jihad, but it reached its climax when Reagan returned to power in March 1985. Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 166, which authorized “to increase covert aid to the Mujahideen.”

The entire responsibility of the newly defined war was handed over to CIA chief William Casey, who took three important steps in 1986. First, to get Congress to agree that American high-speed anti-aircraft missiles would be made available, and to expand guerrilla warfare beyond Afghanistan to Muslim-populated Soviet republics like Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and third, to recruit reactionary Islamists from all over the world and bring them to Pakistan, and after giving them military training, intensify them as a crusade against the Kafirs of the second and third world. And this formula took a more serious form in Afghanistan than in Nicaragua. The entire world’s Islamic people were in the dock of the war. So ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Taliban, Boko Haram are his creations.

Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan has said that the Taliban will return to power in Afghanistan. That those who liberated them from slavery are calling them freedom fighters!” This is the same Pakistan! Whose all eastern rulers have, to a greater or lesser extent, given the opportunity to flourish to all kinds of terrorist organizations! And Imran Khan is also no exception! From Zia to Musharraf, and from Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to Imran Khan! They may claim to have been elected! But because no election in the seventy-five year history of Pakistan has been free and fair! All the Prime Ministers cannot have the confidence to do anything in front of ISI and Pakistan’s army! And that is why none of their decisions are independent! And to give birth to Taliban, ISI has played all the roles under the protection of CIA! Musharraf himself has published this in his autobiography ‘In the Line of Fire: A Memoir’ from Free Press America! And in 350 pages, in the fifth chapter, from 199 to 275 stanzas i.e. approx. 76 pages, written only in the name of “The War on Terror”! What has been Pakistan’s role in terrorist activities? This is clearly written! And he himself has narrowly escaped terrorist attacks three times! Terrorist attacks in his own country!

To organize the Afghan Jihad, they tried to meet the shortage of money through the drug trade. And this was organized and centralized under the CIA. As the Mujahideen began to take over the land of Afghanistan, they called on the peasants to grow opium as a revolutionary tax. As a result, “the price of opium rose five times that of wheat.” In addition, there was no shortage of factories to produce drugs. Across the border in Pakistan, hundreds of laboratories were being run by Afghan leaders and local businessmen under the protection of the ISI. In 1988, Lawrence Lifshuls pointed out in The Nation that “the heroin factories located in the North-West Frontier Province were being run under the protection of General Fazal Haq, a close associate of General Zia-ul-Haq.”

And most importantly, the transport of these drugs was being done by the National Logistics Cell of the Pakistani Army! Weapons supplied by the CIA were transported to Karachi in these trucks! And heroin too! Due to the ISI documents, the police did not check these trucks!

Pakistan’s newspaper ‘The Herald’ published a report in September 1985 that “the drugs are transported by the National Logistics Cell (NLC) in sealed trucks and they are not searched by the police. And this work has been going on unhindered for the last three-three and a half years. Finally the CIA gave it legal protection. Otherwise such a growth in this illegal trade could not have been imagined.”

During this decade, during the height of the open drug trade in Islamabad, the US Drug Enforcement Administration failed to seize any major shipments or arrest any traffickers. US officials dismissed allegations of drug trafficking by Afghans so that they could “be of use in the war against the Soviet Union.”

Before the Afghan Jihad, heroin was not produced in Afghanistan. Opium was cultivated there. Which was sold in small and regional markets of the villages there. By the time the Afghan Jihad ended, the picture had changed dramatically. The Pakistan-Afghanistan border area became a major center for the production of opium and heroin. 75% of the world’s opium began to be produced there. The value of which reached several billion dollars. A report released in early 2001 stated that “the United Nations International Drug Control Program recorded the highest increase in Afghan opium production around 1979.” This was the year the American-sponsored jihad began. The illegal drug trade that began in 1979 continues even today. And in the area where only 5% opium was produced in 1980, it reached 71% within ten years. Afghanistan’s future bears similarities to Burma. This was another mountainous region which was the victim of CIA intervention at the start of the Cold War. The CIA promoted opium production in Burma in the 1950s to aid the Nationalist Chinese troops in the Shan State.

Alfred MacKoy concludes that such CIA activities expanded opium production in Afghanistan in the 1980s to arm mujahideen guerrillas and linked heroin laboratories inside Pakistan to the world market.

The heroin-based economy that has corrupted Afghanistan and Pakistan has given it even more prestige, said President Reagan, adding that the mujahideen are morally equal to the founding fathers of America.

The worst example was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who received half of the secret sources provided by the CIA, worth a total of two billion dollars over ten years, and quickly began to dominate the Afghan mujahideen.

Although after 9/11, America took a turn and threatened Pakistan (the then Pakistan chief General Musharraf himself has written this in his autobiography ‘In the Line of Fire – A Memoir’, “How the then US Secretary of State Colin Powell had said on the phone in a threatening tone, ‘Are you with us or not?’, immediately after the 9/11 incident!)

Whatever statement Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan has given today regarding the Taliban of Afghanistan, let’s see how long he will stick to it. Because it has been 75 years since Pakistan separated from India. And because of the sole agenda of Pakistan’s ISI and Pakistan’s army to hate India, Pakistan’s progress is negligible. And Pakistan’s economy runs on American puppets. This kind of rhetoric, or this too is likely to be a part of a well thought out strategy, at the behest of ISI. Because American soldiers had to leave Afghanistan one day or the other. And in my entire article on Taliban, I have explained what role America has played in preparing Al Qaeda to Taliban due to its anti-communism. And for this, this monster has been created by spending 83 thousand billion dollars with the help of Pakistan. So will America just hand over Afghanistan to the Taliban and sit quietly? And I don’t think there is any possibility of leaving Afghanistan at the mercy of China and Russia! Maybe they are using Pakistan for this purpose! Because there is never any such thing as an enemy or friendship established at the international level!

This article is mainly based on my personal experiences and I have used some books in it. First of all (1) Mahmood Mamdani, A Good Muslim Bad Muslim . Permanent Black, (2) Ahmed Rashid, Descent in to Chaos, published by Penguin books, (3), Inside Global Network of Terror Al Qaeda, Rohan Gunaratna published by Roli Books, (4), Parvez Musharraf’s, In the Line of Fire A Memoir published by, Free Press, (5) Mohammed Hanif, A case of Exploding Mangoes published by Random house India
Dr. Suresh Khairnar, 11 September 2023, Nagpur. If you sow acacia seeds, where will you get mangoes?

Dr Suresh Khairnar is Ex. President of Rashtra Sewa Dal

11 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Vijay Prashad

You must drive up a hill to get to Birzeit University, which is just outside Ramallah (West Bank, Occupied Palestine Territory or OPT). It is a beautiful campus, established in 1924 as a school for girls by the remarkable Nabiha Nasir, 1891-1951, and then converted in 1975 into a university. I spent an afternoon talking with students there about their classes and their ambitions, most of them fiercely committed to both their academic work and their political hope for a free Palestine.

Politics is not far from the minds of the students. Israel had occupied and shut down Birzeit University between 1988 and 1992, and since 2002 has raided the campus over 30 times. The most recent raid was on September 3, 2024, when Israeli forces focused their attention on the Student Council and the offices of the student organizations. The Israeli soldiers “[confiscated] flags, flyers, and materials belonging to the student movement,” complained Birzeit’s Right to Education Campaign. This invasion of the campus, illegal by the agreements made between the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli government, follows a pattern set by the Israeli occupation forces: to come onto the campus with a great display of force and then target the student leaders of political organizations either through arrest or intimidation. This is precisely what happened on the campus in early September.

It is clear to the students that what happened to them is part of a broad policy pushed by the Israeli government to inflict immense pain on the Palestinian population, cause Palestinians to flee their land, and then annex all of East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank. Indeed, in one of his recent presentations, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu displayed a map of the region with Israel encompassing these areas. Netanyahu later demurred and said that the West Bank was not demarcated because the presentation was about Gaza, seemingly designed to mollify the United States government.

Part of this immense pain has been to attack the basis of Palestinian life in the OPT, with the destruction of homes, hospitals, and educational institutions a feature of the attacks on the Palestinians for decades. This is why the Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury calls Israeli policy the “permanent Nakba,” the Arabic word referring to the “catastrophe” of 1948 when at least 700,000 Palestinians were cleansed to make way for the new Israeli state.

Following the 2008-09 Israeli bombing of the Ministry of Education in Gaza and then the bombing of a range of educational institutions (including the prestigious American International School), Oxford University Professor Karma Nabulsi coined the term “scholasticide.” The term refers to the systematic destruction of educational institutions and an educated population. In 2009, Nabulsi said that the Israelis conducted scholasticide because “deep down they know how important education is to the Palestinian tradition and the Palestinian revolution. They cannot abide it and have to destroy it.” When I asked Nabulsi what she now thinks of the genocidal war in Gaza, she responded: “Today’s vicious and unconscionable destruction of our beloved universities, schools, museums, libraries, ancient churches and mosques, along with other cultural landmarks in Gaza all form part of scholasticide. It is a clear intent to remove our capacities and abilities to study, to learn, to read and think, to stay united. Of course, it will not succeed.”

In April 2024, a group of UN special rapporteurs and other experts known as the Special Procedures of the UN Human Rights Council accused the Israelis of “scholasticide.” They reported that the destruction of most of Gaza’s schools and universities constituted “persistent, callous attacks on educational infrastructure in Gaza.” “These attacks are not isolated incidents,” they wrote, “[t]hey present a systematic pattern of violence aimed at dismantling the very foundation of Palestinian society.” “When schools are destroyed,” the experts noted, “so too are hopes and dreams.” Two respected professors at Birzeit University—Ibrahim Rabaia (assistant professor of Political Science) and Lourdes Habash (Director of the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Institute of International Studies)—went through the same evidence and suggested that what is happening is “educide.” Whether scholasticide or educide, the phenomenon is ghastly; it is nothing less than the attempt to erase the culture of Palestinians, “to erase the collective memory, cultural heritage, intellectual growth of the Palestinian people.”

Sundos Hammad, the coordinator of the Right to Education Campaign at Birzeit University, reflects on her commitment to education. When she was nine years old in Al-Bireh (north of Jerusalem in the occupied West Bank), she “came to understand the profound connection between education and survival under occupation.” This was in 2000, during the Second Intifada. Getting to her primary school was not easy since there were Israeli tanks near the school gate and little children would be harassed by the Israeli soldiers. Inspired by the uprising, children like Sundos would throw stones at the tanks. The Israelis shot at them with live fire. Sundos would run back home and tell her mother what had happened and wondered aloud if she should continue to go to school. Her mother was firm. “Education is not an option,” she recounts her mother having said. “It’s your future and the future of your generation.”

Since October 2023, Israel has been trying to erase that future. It has killed two university presidents in Gaza—Professor Sufian Tayeh (Islamic University of Gaza) and Professor Said Alzebda (University College of Applied Sciences)—and several deans and over 100 professors. Many of these teachers were under the age of 50, such as Professor Nesma Abu Shaira (age 36). Professor Abu Sharia was from Gaza and taught visual arts at Al-Aqsa University. I met Professor Abu Sharia a few years after she won a prize at the Gaza Contemporary Art Festival in 2011. A common friend told me that she was interested in illustrations and design and wanted to do a project that she later called “Documenting Palestine.” All that I remember of our meeting is that she was very happy about teaching her students, particularly the young women who came to learn how to draw. “We must tell Palestinian stories,” she told me. On October 28, 2023, an Israeli aircraft bombed her home. She died along with her family. Her Instagram account is her gallery. After her death, one of her students, Zeinab, remembered her teacher for the “sparkle in her eyes and her pride in her [students].”

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter.

11 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Ranjan Solomon

In 2023, Hamid Dabashi, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in the City of New York wrote, and very sharply, that  “{the reason Zionists have the full support of European and US leaders is because the genocidal drive to ‘exterminate all the brutes’ is embedded deep in their psyches.” As millions of Palestinians trapped in Gaza were facing starvation and mass murder, Israel’s invading army made sure to film themselves enjoying “rejuvenation complexes”, where they were lavished with “concerts, massage chairs, buffet, and more. It is surreal to watch Israelis being pampered while slaughtering Palestinians in their own homeland. Dabashi makes a comparative note:

In North and South America, Australia, Asia and Africa, European settler-colonialists have left behind the evidence of their psychotic genocidal practice. The European transatlantic slave trade may have halved the population of Africa, some historians believe. The US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and many African colonies were all built on the systematic extermination, displacement and internment of the original inhabitants.

What the Israelis are doing in Palestine is what the French did in Algeria, the British did in India, the Belgians in the Congo, the Americans in Vietnam, the Spaniards in Latin America, the Italians in Africa and the Germans in Namibia, another chapter of European genocidal history. Zionism is the Jewish version of the racist US doctrine of manifest destiny, a belief in the racial superiority of white people and definitive to the American colonial conquest of the Native Americans and other groups they exterminated.

Zionists believe Palestine was their promised land, that it was destined and promised to them by their God, and that the native inhabitants were a nuisance that must be brutally eliminated.

Palestinians are up against a formidable enemy right across the West whose racist pretensions are ones they much prefer to conceal. What the Israeli army is doing in Gaza is the Zionist version of “the great replacement theory” which holds that people of colour are replacing white people and that the process must be reversed.

Everything about the occupation, apartheid, settler violence is about legitimising this theory on-the-ground. This political domination when one considers how French knew just how their colonies were captured and administered, Likewise in Vietnam and Algeria. Or, how the Russians carried out their crimes in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The West knows that Israel’s war(s) are blatantly outrageous  and are committed in the modern capitalist phenomenon of progress, civilization, democracy and the market. Nonsensical claims- each of these. The barbarians were the conquerors – in the most recent instance, the Zionists.

Ranjan Solomon is a political commentator

10 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Andre Damon

Michael Fakhri, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, has published a report accusing Israel of carrying out the “deliberate starvation” of the Palestinians in Gaza as a means of exterminating them and annexing their land.

“Israel has engaged in an intentional starvation campaign against the Palestinian people, which evidences genocide and extermination,” Fakhri said in his report.

[https://twitter.com/MichaelFakhri/status/1832874565762240731]

“Never in post-war history has a population been made to go hungry so quickly and so completely as was the case for the 2.3 million Palestinians living in Gaza.” The report continues, “On October 9, 2023, Israel announced its starvation campaign against Gaza. By December, Palestinians in Gaza made up 80 percent of the people in the world experiencing famine or catastrophic hunger.”

The UN rapporteur’s report stands as an indictment not only of Israel but also of the imperialist powers, including the United States, UK, France, Germany and Canada, that have funded, armed and politically defended the genocide.

Fakhri was appointed by the UN Human Rights Council as the lead investigator, also known as special rapporteur, on the right to food in 2020. He is a professor at the University of Oregon School of Law.

Since Israel launched its genocidal onslaught last year, 34 Palestinians have been confirmed to have starved to death, while the entire population lacks sufficient food, and 90 percent report going hungry for 24 hours or more.

In a post on X, Fakhri noted, “In Gaza, malnutrition, famine, and disease are killing more people than bombs and bullets.”

Fakhri asks, “Why is this happening? This is about land. In 2023, Israel seized more Palestinian land than in any given year in the past 30 years. Israel wants to erase the Palestinians from their homeland and territory and deny them their right to return to Palestine.”

Fakhri’s report asserts that famine is always deliberate because humanity produces more than enough food necessary to feed everyone. It declares, “The world produces enough food to feed 1.5 times the current population, and yet the prevalence of hunger, malnutrition, and famine is on the rise. Hunger and famine are not production problems; they are always caused by acts and omissions that deny people access to food.”

Israel’s deliberate promotion of famine was announced by Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on October 9, who declared, “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” because “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.”

Current and former government officials have repeatedly stated that mass starvation and the promotion of disease are the goals, not the byproducts of Israeli policy. In November, Giora Eiland, the former head of the Israeli National Security Council, declared that “severe epidemics in the south of the Gaza Strip will bring victory closer and reduce casualties among IDF soldiers,” adding that Israel’s aim is “not the mere killing of more Hamas fighters” but “irreversible harm to their families.”

Commenting on these and other statements, Fakhri’s report declares:

Israel made its intentions to starve everyone in Gaza explicit, implemented its plans, and predictably created a famine throughout Gaza. Tracking the geography of Israel’s starvation tactics alongside Israeli officials’ statements confirms its intent. Israel opened with a total siege that weakened all Palestinians in Gaza. Then, Israel used starvation to induce forcible transfer, harm, and death against people in the north, pushing people into the south, only to starve, bombard, and kill people in newly created refugee camps in the south.

Fakhri’s report makes clear that the purpose of the famine is the depopulation and annexation of the entire Gaza Strip. “What is at stake is nothing less than Israel’s attempt to annex Gaza, as the current government has indicated on multiple occasions,” it asserted.

The report notes, “Israel has not only denied and restricted the delivery of humanitarian aid and violated its obligations to ensure that the aid that is let through reaches the population, but it has also created a climate of horror by targeting humanitarian workers and civilians seeking humanitarian aid.”

According to official statistics, 40,435 Palestinians have been killed and 93,534 injured since October last year. But this figure does not include 10,000 people thought to be killed and buried under the rubble. According to official figures, the death toll includes 17,000 children, meaning that 2.6 percent of all of Gaza’s children have been killed, with an average of 53 children killed every day since October 7.

Once the victims of Israel’s deliberate famine and promotion of disease are added, the real death toll could be 186,000 or more, according to an estimate published in The Lancet medical journal.

In July, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave an address to a joint session of the US Congress, in which he vowed to expand Israel’s war against the Palestinian population into a conflict throughout the Middle East, centrally targeting Iran.

Netanyahu received a standing ovation from Democratic and Republican members of both houses of Congress, followed by separate meetings with US President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. After her meeting with Netanyahu, Harris declared, “I will always ensure that Israel is able to defend itself, including from Iran and Iran-backed militias such as Hamas and Hezbollah.”

Last month, the US approved a $20 billion arms sale to Israel, including 50 F-15 fighter jets, Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missiles, or AMRAAMs, 120 mm tank ammunition, high-explosive mortars and tactical vehicles.

10 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Jonathan Cook

Material and rhetorical support for the genocide of the Palestinian people is everywhere. It’s time to ask why

Nearly a year into the world’s first live-streamed genocide – which began in Gaza, and is rapidly expanding into the occupied West Bank – the establishment western media still avoid using the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s rampage of destruction.

The worse the genocide gets, the longer Israel’s starvation-blockade of the enclave continues, the harder it gets to obscure the horrors – and the less coverage Gaza receives.

The worst offender has been the BBC, given that it is Britain’s only publicly funded broadcaster. Ultimately, it is supposed to be accountable to the British public, who are required by law to pay its licence fee.

This is why it has been beyond ludicrous to witness the billionaire-owned media froth at the mouth in recent days about “BBC bias” – not against Palestinians, but against Israel. Yes, you heard that right.

We are talking about the same “anti-Israel” BBC that just ran yet another headline – this time after an Israeli sniper shot an American citizen in the head – that managed somehow, once again, to fail to mention who killed her. Any casual reader risked inferring from the headline “American activist shot dead in occupied West Bank” that the culprit was a Palestinian gunman.

After all, Palestinians, not Israel, are represented by Hamas, a group “designated as a terrorist organisation” by the British government, as the BBC helpfully keeps reminding us.

And it is the supposedly “anti-Israel” BBC that last week sought to stymie efforts by 15 aid agencies known as the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) to run a major fundraiser through the nation’s broadcasters.

No one is under any illusions about why the BBC is so unwilling to get involved. The DEC has chosen Gaza as the beneficiary of its latest aid drive.

The committee faced the very same problem with the BBC back in 2009, when the corporation refused to take part in a Gaza fundraiser on the extraordinary pretext that doing so would compromise its rules on “impartiality”.

Presumably, in the BBC’s eyes, saving the lives of Palestinian children reveals a prejudice that saving Ukrainian children’s lives does not.

In its 2009 attack, Israel killed “only” 1,300 or so Palestinians in Gaza, not the many tens of thousands – or possibly hundreds of thousands, no one truly knows – it has this time around.

Famously, the late, independent-minded Labour politician Tony Benn broke ranks and defied the BBC’s DEC ban by reading out details of how to donate money live on air, over the protests of the show’s presenter. As he pointed out then, and it is even truer today: “People will die because of the BBC’s decision.”

According to sources within both the committee and the BBC, the corporation’s executives are terrified – as they were previously – of the “backlash” from Israel and its powerful lobbyists in the UK if it promotes the Gaza appeal.

A spokesperson for the BBC told Middle East Eye that the fundraiser did not meet all the established criteria for a national appeal, despite the DEC’s expert opinion that it does, but noted the possibility of broadcasting an appeal was “under review”.

Pulling punches

The reason Israel is able to carry out a genocide, and western leaders are able to actively support it, is precisely because the establishment media constantly pulls its punches – very much in Israel’s favour.

Readers and viewers are given no sense that Israel is carrying out systematic war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, let alone a genocide.

Journalists prefer to frame events as a “humanitarian crisis” because this strips away Israel’s responsibility for creating the crisis. It looks at the effects, the suffering, rather than the cause: Israel.

Worse, these same journalists constantly throw sand in our eyes with nonsensical counter-claims to suggest that Israel is actually the victim, not the perpetrator.

Take, for example, the new “study” into supposed BBC anti-Israel bias, led by a British lawyer based in Israel. A faux-horrified Daily Mail warned over the weekend that the “BBC is FOURTEEN times more likely to accuse Israel of genocide than Hamas … amid growing calls for inquiry”.

But read the text, and what’s truly stunning is that over the selected four-month period, the BBC associated Israel with the term “genocide” only 283 times – in its massive output across many television and radio channels, its website, podcasts and various social media platforms, which serve myriad populations at home and abroad.

What the Mail and other right-wing attack-dog media don’t mention is the fact that none of those references would have been the BBC’s own editorialising. Even Palestinian guests who try to use the word on its shows are quickly shut down.

Many of the references would have been BBC News reporting on a case filed by South Africa at the International Court of Justice, which is investigating Israel for what the world’s top court termed in January to be a “plausible” risk of genocide in Gaza.

Regrettably for the BBC, it has been impossible to report that story without mentioning the word “genocide”, because it lies at the heart of the legal case.

What should, in fact, astound us far more is that an active genocide, in which the West is fully complicit, was mentioned by the BBC’s globe-spanning media empire a total of only 283 times in the four months following 7 October.

Campaign of intimidation

The World Court’s preliminary ruling on Israel’s genocide is vital context that should be front and centre of every media story on Gaza. Instead, it is usually unmentioned, or hidden at the end of reports, where few will read about it.

The BBC infamously gave barely any coverage to the genocide case presented in January to the World Court by South Africa, which the panel of judges found to be “plausible”. On the other hand, it broadcast the entirety of Israel’s defence to the same court.

Now, after this latest campaign of intimidation by the billionaire-owned media, the BBC will likely be even less willing to mention the genocide – which is precisely the aim.

What should have stunned the Mail and the rest of the establishment media far more is that the BBC broadcast 19 references to a Hamas “genocide” in the same four-month period.

The idea that Hamas is capable of a “genocide” against Israel, or Jews, is as divorced from reality as the fiction that it “beheaded babies” on 7 October or the claims, still lacking any evidence, that it committed “mass rape” on that day.

British media favours the Israeli narrative

Hamas, an armed group numbering thousand of fighters, currently pinned down in Gaza by one of the strongest armies in the world, is quite incapable of committing a “genocide” of Israelis.

This is, of course, why the World Court is not investigating Hamas for genocide, and why only Israel’s most fanatic apologists run with fake news either that Hamas is committing a genocide, or that it is conceivable it may try to do so.

No one really takes seriously claims of a Hamas genocide. The tell was the world’s stunned reaction when the group managed to escape from the concentration camp that is Gaza for a single day on 7 October and wreak so much death and havoc.

The idea that Hamas could do anything worse than that – or even repeat the attack – is simply delusional. The best Hamas can do is wage a guerrilla war of attrition against the Israeli military from its underground tunnels, which is precisely what it is doing.

Here’s another statistic worth highlighting from the recent “study”: in the same four-month period, the BBC used the term “crimes against humanity” 22 times to describe the atrocities committed by Hamas on one day last October, compared with only 15 times to describe Israel’s even worse atrocities committed continuously over the past year.

Allowable thought

The ultimate effect of the latest media furore is to increase pressure on the BBC to make even larger concessions to the self-serving, right-wing political agenda of the billionaire-owned media and the corporate interests of the war machine it represents.

The state broadcaster’s job is to set limits on allowable thought for the British public – not on the right, where that role falls to papers such as the Mail and the Telegraph, but on the other side of the political spectrum, on what is misleadingly referred to as “the left”.

The BBC’s task is to define what is acceptable speech and action – meaning acceptable to the British establishment – by those seeking to challenge its domestic and foreign policy.

Twice in living memory, progressive left-wing opposition leaders have emerged: Michael Foot in the early 1980s, and Jeremy Corbyn in the late 2010s. On both occasions, the media have united as one to vilify them.

That should surprise no one. Making the BBC a whipping boy – denouncing it as “left-wing” – is a form of permanent gaslighting designed both to make Britain’s extreme right-wing media seem centrist, and to normalise the drive to push the BBC ever further rightwards.

Over decades, the billionaire-owned media have crafted in the public’s mind the idea that the BBC defines the extreme end of supposedly “left-wing” thought. The more the corporation can be pushed to the right, the more the left faces an unwelcome choice: either follow the BBC rightwards, or become universally reviled as the loony left, the woke left, the Trot left, the militant left.

Bolstering this self-fulfilling argument, any protests by BBC staff can be deduced by the journalist-servants of Rupert Murdoch and other press tycoons as further proof of the corporation’s left-wing or Marxist bias.

The media system is rigged, and the BBC is the perfect vehicle for keeping it this way.

Pressing the button

What the BBC and the rest of the mainstream media are downplaying are not just the facts of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, but also the obvious genocidal intent of Israeli leaders, the country’s wider society, and its apologists in the UK and elsewhere.

It should not be up for debate that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, when everyone from its prime minister down has told us that this is very much their intent.

The examples of such genocidal statements by Israeli leaders filled pages of South Africa’s case to the World Court. Just one example: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced the Palestinians as “Amalek” – a reference to a biblical story well known to every Israeli schoolchild, in which the Israelites are ordered by God to wipe an entire people, including their children and livestock, off the face of the earth.

Anyone engaged on social media will have faced a battery of similarly genocidal statements from mostly anonymous supporters of Israel.

Those genocide cheerleaders recently gained a face – two, in fact. Video clips of two Israelis, podcasting in English under the name “Two Nice Jewish Boys”, have gone viral, showing the pair calling for the extermination of every last Palestinian man, woman and child.

One of the podcasters said that “zero people in Israel” care whether a polio outbreak caused by Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s water, sewage and heath facilities ends up killing babies, noting that Israel’s agreement to a vaccination campaign is driven purely by public relations needs.

In another clip, the podcasters agree that Palestinian hostages in Israeli prisons deserve to be “executed by shoving too large of an object up their butts”.

They also make clear that they would not hesitate to press a genocide button to wipe out the Palestinian people: “If you gave me a button to just erase Gaza – every single living being in Gaza would no longer be living tomorrow – I would press it in a second … And I think most Israelis would. They wouldn’t talk about it like I am, they wouldn’t say ‘I pressed it’, but they would press it.”

Relentless depravity

It is easy to get alarmed over such inhuman comments, but the furore generated by this pair is likely to deflect from a more important point: that they are utterly representative of where Israeli society is right now. They are not on some depraved fringe. They are not outliers. They are firmly in the mainstream.

The evidence is not just in the fact that Israel’s citizen army is systematically beating and sodomising Palestinian prisoners, sniping Palestinian children in Gaza with shots to the head, cheering the detonation of universities and mosques, desecrating Palestinian bodies, and enforcing a starvation-blockade on Gaza.

It is in the welcoming of all this relentless depravity by wider Israeli society.

After a video emerged of a group of soldiers sodomising a Palestinian prisoner at Israel’s Sde Teiman torture camp, Israelis rallied to their side. The extent of the prisoner’s internal injuries required him to be hospitalised.

In the aftermath, Israeli pundits – educated “liberals” – sat in TV studios discussing whether soldiers should be allowed to make their own decisions about whether to rape Palestinians in detention, or whether such abuses should be organised by the state as part of an official torture programme.

Former Palestinian detainee recounts torture methods at Israel’s Sde Teiman detention camp

One of the soldiers accused in the gang rape case chose to cast off his anonymity after being championed by journalists who interviewed him. He’s now treated as a minor celebrity on Israeli TV shows.

Polls show that the vast majority of Jewish Israelis either approve of the razing of Gaza, or want even more of it. Some 70 percent want to ban from social media platforms any expressions of sympathy for civilians in Gaza.

None of this is really new. It all just got a lot more ostentatious after Hamas’s attack on 7 October.

After all, some of the most shocking violence that day occurred when Hamas fighters stumbled onto a dance festival close to Gaza.

The brutal imprisonment of 2.3 million Palestinians, and the 17-year blockade denying them the essentials of life and any meaningful freedoms, had become so normal to Israelis that hip, freedom-loving Israeli youngsters could happily hold a rave so close to that mass of human suffering.

Or as one of the Two Nice Jewish Boys observed of his feelings about life in Israel: “It’s nice to know that you’re dancing in a concert while hundreds of thousands of Gazans are homeless, sitting in a tent.” His partner interrupted: “Makes it even better … People enjoy knowing they [Palestinians in Gaza] are suffering.”

‘Heroic soldiers’

This monstrous indifference to, or even pleasure in, the torture of others isn’t restricted to Israelis. There’s a whole army of prominent supporters of Israel in the West who confidently act as apologists for Israel’s genocidal actions.

What unites them all is the Jewish supremacist ideology of Zionism.

In Britain, Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis has not spoken out against the mass slaughter of Palestinian children in Gaza, nor has he kept quiet about it. Instead, he has given Israel’s war crimes his blessing.

Back in mid-January, as South Africa began making public its case against Israel for genocide that the World Court found “plausible”, Mirvis spoke at a public meeting, where he referred to Israel’s operations in Gaza as “the most outstanding possible thing”.

He described the troops clearly documented committing war crimes as “our heroic soldiers” – inexplicably conflating the actions of a foreign, Israeli army with the British army.

Even if we imagine he was truly ignorant of the war crimes in Gaza eight months ago, there can be no excuses now.

Yet, last week, Mirvis spoke out again, this time to berate the British government for imposing a very partial limit on arms sales to Israel after it received legal advice that such weapons were likely being used by Israel to commit war crimes.

In other words, Mirvis openly called for his own government to ignore international law and arm a state committing war crimes, according to UK government lawyers, and a “plausible genocide”, according to the World Court.

There are apologists like Mirvis in influential posts across the West.

Appearing on TV late last month, his counterpart in France, Haim Korsia, urged Israel to “finish the job” in Gaza, and backed Netanyahu, who the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor is pursuing for war crimes.

Korsia refused to condemn Israel’s killing of at least 41,000 Palestinians in Gaza, arguing that those deaths were “not of the same order” as the 1,150 deaths of Israelis on 7 October.

It was hard not to conclude that he meant Palestinian lives were not as important as Israeli lives.

Inner fascist

Nearly 30 years ago, Israeli sociologist Dan Rabinowitz published a book, Overlooking Nazareth, that argued Israel was a far more profoundly racist society than was widely understood.

His work has taken on a new relevance – and not just for Israelis – since 7 October.

Back in the 1990s, as now, outsiders assumed that Israel was divided between the religious and secular, the traditional and modern; between vulgar recent immigrants and more enlightened “veterans”.

Israelis often see their society split geographically too: between peripheral communities where popular racism flourishes, and a metropolitan centre around Tel Aviv where a sensitive, cultured liberalism predominates.

Rabinowitz tore this thesis to shreds. He took as his case study the small Jewish city of Nazareth Illit in northern Israel, renowned for its extreme right-wing politics, including support for the fascist movement of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane.

Rabinowitz ascribed the city’s politics chiefly to the fact that it had been built by the state on top of Nazareth, the largest community of Palestinians in Israel, specifically to contain, control and oppress its historic neighbour.

His argument was that the Jews of Nazareth Illit were not more racist than the Jews of Tel Aviv. They were simply far more exposed to an “Arab” presence. In fact, given the fact that few Jews chose to live there, they were heavily outnumbered by their “Arab” neighbours. The state had placed them in a direct, confrontational competition with Nazareth for land and resources.

The Jews of Tel Aviv, by contrast, almost never came across an “Arab” unless it was in a servant’s role: as a waiter or a worker on a building site.

The difference, noted Rabinowitz, was that the Jews of Nazareth Illit were confronted with their own racism on a daily basis. They had rationalised and become easy with it. Jews in Tel Aviv, meanwhile, could pretend they were open-minded because their bigotry was never meaningfully tested.

Well, 7 October changed all that. The “liberals” of Tel Aviv were suddenly confronted by an unwelcome, avenging Palestinian presence inside their state. The “Arab” was no longer the oppressed, tame, servile one they were used to.

Unexpectedly, the Jews of Tel Aviv felt a space they believed to be theirs exclusively being invaded, just as the Jews of Nazareth Illit had felt for decades. And they responded in exactly the same way. They rationalised their inner fascist. Overnight, they became comfortable with genocide.

The genocide party

That sense of invasion extends beyond Israel, of course.

On 7 October, Hamas’s surprise assault wasn’t just an attack on Israel. The breakout by a small group of armed fighters from one of the largest and most heavily fortified prisons ever built was also a shocking assault on western elites’ complacency – their belief that the world order they had built by force to enrich themselves was permanent and inviolable.

7 October severely shook their confidence that the non-western world could be contained forever; that it must continue to do the West’s bidding, and that it would remain enslaved indefinitely.

Just as it has with Israelis, the Hamas attack quickly exposed the little fascist within the West’s political, media and religious elite, who had spent a lifetime pretending to be the guardians of a western civilising mission – one that was enlightened, humanitarian and liberal.

The act worked, because the world was ordered in such a way that they could easily pretend to themselves and others that they stood against the barbarism of the Other.

The West’s colonialism was largely out of sight, devolved to globe-spanning, exploitative, environmentally destructive western corporations and a network of some 800 US overseas military bases, which were there to kick ass if this new arms-length economic imperialism encountered difficulties.

Whether intentionally or not, Hamas tore off the mask of that deception on 7 October. The pretence of an ideological rift between western leaders on the right and a supposed “left” evaporated overnight. They all belonged to the same war party; they all became devotees of the genocide party.

All have clamoured for Israel’s supposed “right to defend itself” – in truth, its right to continue decades of oppression of the Palestinian people – by imposing a blockade on food, water and power to Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants.

All actively approve arming Israel’s slaughter and maiming of tens of thousands of Palestinians. All have done nothing to impose a ceasefire apart from paying lip service to the notion.

All seem readier to tear up international law and its supporting institutions than to enforce it against Israel. All denounce as antisemitism the mass protests against genocide, rather than denouncing the genocide itself.

7 October was a defining moment. It exposed a monstrous barbarity with which it is hard to come to terms. And we won’t, until we face a difficult truth: that the source of such depravity is far closer to home than we ever imagined.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

13 September 2024

Source: middleeasteye.net

GENEVA

Gaza’s economy has shrunk to less than a sixth of its size when the Israel-Hamas war began nearly a year ago, while unemployment in the occupied West Bank has nearly tripled, a UN report said on Thursday, underscoring the challenges of reconstruction.

The report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) described Gaza’s economy as “in ruins” more than 11 months after Israel launched a military campaign there that has reduced much of the Strip to rubble in response to the deadly October 7 attacks on southern Israel by Hamas militants.

The UN trade body said the Palestinian Authority (PA), which exercises limited self-rule under Israeli occupation in the West Bank, is under “immense pressure” that is jeopardising its ability to function.

“The Palestinian economy is in free fall,” UNCTAD Deputy Secretary General Pedro Manuel Moreno told reporters in Geneva.

“The report calls for the international community to halt this economic free fall, address the humanitarian crisis and lay the groundwork for lasting peace and development,” he said, calling for a comprehensive recovery plan.

Declining international aid and revenue deductions and withholdings by Israel, which UNCTAD estimated at more than $1.4 billion since 2019, are adding to the strain on the Palestinians, the report said.

Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who ordered the funds to be withheld, accuses the PA of supporting the October 7 attack on Israel. The PA denies promoting violence. Israel also routinely deducts so-called “martyr payments” paid by the PA to families of militants and civilians killed by Israeli forces.

The document described “a rapid and alarming economic decline” in the occupied West Bank, which has suffered a surge in violence since the Gaza war.

A total of more than 300,000 jobs have been lost in the West Bank since the war began, UNCTAD said, driving up the unemployment rate there from 12.9 percent to 32 percent.

UNCTAD blamed the decline on the unrest, which the UN says has resulted in the deaths of more than 650 Palestinians since October 7 as well as new Israeli trade restrictions such as checkpoints.

Israel, which does not give Palestinian death tolls, says around 40 Israelis have been killed in attacks by Palestinians outside Gaza since war erupted. It says its actions in the West Bank have been necessary to counter Iranian-backed militant groups and prevent harm to Israeli civilians. But many of its attacks have been unprovoked and it is accused of doing very little to stop settler assaults on Palestinians.

13 September 2024

Source: thearabweekly.com

Ramallah / PNN/

With the complete suspension of education in Gaza for nearly a year, schools and facilities of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) have been increasingly targeted by the Israeli military. These attacks are part of a wider assault during the ongoing war, which has affected more than 70% of UNRWA’s schools and centres that serve as shelters for displaced people.

The latest attack struck the Ja’ouni School in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, resulting in the death of six UNRWA staff members, raising the total number of UNRWA personnel killed since the war began to approximately 220. These assaults represent a grave violation of international humanitarian law, according to the Palestinian Liberation Organisation’s (PLO) Refugee Affairs Department.

Call for an International Investigation

The Refugee Affairs Department has called on the UNRWA Commissioner-General to urgently request the UN Secretary-General to form an independent inquiry committee to investigate the violations against the agency in Gaza. These attacks have led to the deaths of numerous staff members, their families, and displaced individuals, along with the systematic destruction of UNRWA’s educational, health, and service facilities. The department also condemned the continued targeting of UNRWA’s headquarters in Sheikh Jarrah, Jerusalem, and Israeli actions that obstruct the agency’s work.

Appeals for International Protection

In its statement, the Refugee Affairs Department emphasised the need for international protection for the Palestinian people, who, it said, are facing a “genocide.” The department called on the international community to take a firm stance against the deliberate targeting of UNRWA and the refugee community, asserting that Israel aims to undermine the agency’s operations and spread misinformation about it, with the ultimate goal of passing laws to designate UNRWA as a terrorist organisation. Such a move would undermine the authority of the United Nations and its member states.

Education: The Struggle for Survival in Gaza

The department highlighted the importance of resuming education in Gaza, stressing that UNRWA must develop a strategy to reopen schools and ensure the continuity of education for Palestinian refugees. Education, it said, is an integral part of the struggle for survival and resilience on Palestinian land. The department commended UNRWA’s efforts to continue its “Return to Education” initiative, which aims to preserve education as a vital element in the Palestinian people’s daily fight to sustain life.

12 September 2024

Source: english.pnn.ps

By Muhammed Enes Calli

ISTANBUL

A ministerial meeting involving the Arab-Islamic Contact Group on Gaza and several EU members expressed concern over the increasing violations of international law on Palestinian territories and emphasized the need for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza, the Turkish Foreign Ministry said.

Together with other members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and Arab League Contact Group on Gaza, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan attended the meeting that also saw the participation of EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, Arab League Secretary-General Ahmed Aboul Gheit, and foreign ministers from Spain, Norway, Slovenia, Nigeria and Ireland.

During the meeting, steps to be taken to halt Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its crimes in the West Bank were discussed, a Turkish Foreign Ministry statement said.

The ongoing cease-fire negotiations for Gaza and humanitarian aid efforts were reviewed, and measures needed for the recognition of Palestine and reaching a two-state solution were discussed, it added.

A joint statement issued at the end of the meeting called on the international community to recognize Palestine as soon as possible and to support a two-state solution, the ministry statement said.

It highlighted the need for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza and an end to attacks targeting Palestinians in the West Bank.

The joint statement also emphasized the need for urgent and uninterrupted humanitarian aid to Gaza and expressed support for the work of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), according to the ministry.

It was decided to hold a new meeting in New York at the end of September during the UN General Assembly High-Level Week.

Fidan stressed in the meetings that joint efforts should be increased for Palestine’s full membership in the UN and for its recognition by more countries, the ministry said.

He highlighted the importance of putting pressure on countries that oppose these steps, it added.

Fidan called for more countries to become involved in the genocide case against Israel filed at the International Court of Justice, according to the ministry statement.

“Türkiye will continue to work toward the establishment of an immediate and permanent cease-fire in Palestine, the uninterrupted delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza, the recognition of Palestine and the taking of the necessary steps toward a two-state solution,” it added.

13 September 2024

Source: aa.com.tr

Pope Francis has decried the killing of Palestinian children in Israeli military strikes in besieged Gaza, calling bombings of schools, on the “presumption” of striking Hamas resistance fighters, “ugly”.

Aboard the flight back to Rome from Singapore on Friday, the pontiff expressed doubt about an end to Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

“I am sorry to have to say this,” the pope said. “But I do not think that they are taking steps to make peace.”

Francis was speaking in a press conference with journalists after a demanding 12-day tour across Southeast Asia and Oceania.

He said he speaks on the phone with members of a Catholic parish in Gaza “every day” and “they tell me ugly things, difficult things”.

“Please, when you see the bodies of killed children, when you see that, under the presumption that some guerrillas are there, a school is bombed, this is ugly,” the 87-year-old pontiff said.

“It is ugly.”

By Palestine Chronicle Staff

South Africa filed a case against Israel in late December arguing that it had violated its obligations under the 1948 Genocide Convention.

South Africa is to press ahead with its case of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and will file its memorial next month, the presidency has said.

“South Africa intends to provide facts and evidence to prove that Israel is committing the crime of genocide in Palestine,” it said in a statement on Tuesday. “This case will continue until the court makes a finding.”

The presidency stressed that while the case is in progress, “we hope that Israel will abide by the court’s provisional orders issued to date.”

South Africa filed a case against Israel in late December arguing that it had violated its obligations under the 1948 Genocide Convention. The country has until October 28 to provide the UN court with its arguments for the case.

[https://twitter.com/PresidencyZA/status/1833514711809511744]

“The case presents a growing global effort towards ensuring peace in the Middle-East,” said the statement, adding that several countries, namely, Nicaragua, Palestine, Turkiye, Spain, Mexico, Libya and Colombia have all joined the South African case against Israel.

The statement comes amid a report by the US-based news website Axios that Israeli diplomats were being instructed to lobby members of the US Congress to pressure South Africa into dropping the case.

Leaked Cable

Citing a leaked cable obtained by Axios, the report said that according to Israeli officials, the Israeli foreign ministry “started a diplomatic campaign in recent weeks to press South Africa not to push forward with the case at the ICJ.”

“The U.S. Congress is a main tool in the effort,” it stated.

Israel Lobbying US Congress to Pressure South Africa to Drop ICJ Genocide Case – Report

“We are asking you to immediately work with lawmakers on the federal and state level, with governors and Jewish organizations to put pressure on South Africa to change its policy towards Israel and to make clear that continuing their current actions like supporting Hamas and pushing anti-Israeli moves in international courts will come with a heavy price,” the cable read.

The diplomats were, amongst others, instructed “to ask members of Congress and Jewish organizations in the U.S. to reach out directly to South African diplomats in the U.S. and make clear South Africa would pay a heavy price if it doesn’t change its policy.”

In the recent national elections in May, the ruling ANC party lost the majority it had held in government since the first democratic elections held in 1994.

Commitment to International Law

In July, the country’s newly appointed Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola however said that the country will continue to leverage global institutions to defend Palestinian rights and ensure the equitable application of international law for all.

‘Our History of Solidarity’ – South Africa to Continue Advocating for Palestine

“South Africa will continue to act within global institutions to protect the rights of Palestinians in Gaza and ensure the fair application of international law for all,” he said.

“Notably, South Africa will continue to do everything within its power to preserve the existence of the Palestinian people as a group, to end all acts of apartheid and genocide against the Palestinian people and to walk with them towards the realisation of their collective right to self-determination and this informed our application to the International Court of Justice,” Lamola added.

In January, the ICJ ordered Israel to take measures to prevent and punish direct incitement of genocide in its ongoing war in Gaza.

Over 41,000 Killed

Flouting a UN Security Council resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire, Israel has faced international condemnation amid its continued brutal offensive on Gaza.

Currently on trial before the International Court of Justice for genocide against Palestinians, Israel has been waging a devastating war on Gaza since October 7.

According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, 41,020 Palestinians have, to date, been killed, and 94,925 wounded. Moreover, at least 11,000 people are unaccounted for, presumed dead under the rubble of their homes throughout the Strip.

‘Partner in This Crime’ – Euro-Med Says Israel Dropped US-Made Bombs on Tented Gaza Camp

Israel says that 1,200 soldiers and civilians were killed during the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation on October 7. Israeli media published reports suggesting that many Israelis were killed on that day by ‘friendly fire’.

Millions Displaced

Palestinian and international organizations say that the majority of those killed and wounded are women and children.

The Israeli war has resulted in an acute famine, mostly in northern Gaza, resulting in the death of many Palestinians, mostly children.

The Israeli aggression has also resulted in the forceful displacement of nearly two million people from all over the Gaza Strip, with the vast majority of the displaced forced into the densely crowded southern city of Rafah near the border with Egypt – in what has become Palestine’s largest mass exodus since the 1948 Nakba.

Later in the war, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians began moving from the south to central Gaza in a constant search for safety.

(The Palestine Chronicle)

11 September 2024

Source: palestinechronicle.com