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By Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor

Palestinian Territory – Israel has continued its military attacks on the Gaza Strip during its polio vaccination campaign, ignoring all calls to implement a humanitarian truce or a temporary halt to attacks during the vaccination hours.

Israeli aircraft and tanks continue to bomb the central Gaza Strip, the area where the polio vaccination campaign has begun. The campaign is a joint effort between the Palestinian Ministry of Health and the United Nations, including UNICEF, and non-governmental organisations, aiming to vaccinate about 640,000 Palestinian children under the age of 10. The campaign was launched in response to the confirmation of the first case of polio in Gaza in 25 years, contracted by a 10-month-old infant in Deir al-Balah, in the central part of the Strip. The virus was found in water samples taken in Khan Yunis and Deir al-Balah in late June.

Despite the World Health Organisation’s announcement last Thursday that Israel had consented to a series of “humanitarian truces” lasting three days each in the central, southern, and northern sections of the Strip in order to carry out a polio vaccination campaign that would benefit 640,000 children, Israel has continued its attacks.

Palestinian Rami Rashad Nofal has been killed, and several other Palestinians injured, during an Israeli air strike on Al-Bureij camp in the central Gaza Strip, which was also the target of artillery shelling and at least three raids. The injured survivors were transferred to the Shuhada Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah.

Together with shooting from Israeli vehicles that broke through the northwest of Nuseirat and from quadcopter aircraft, Israeli artillery also shelled the west of the new camp in Nuseirat, in the central Gaza Strip.

Along with the ongoing shelling in various parts of the Strip, these Israeli military attacks have coincided with the peak of families’ movement with their children towards the designated vaccination centres. Some of these attacks have even targeted locations near the vaccination centres, endangering the progress of the vaccination process that is required to stop the poliovirus from spreading among Palestinian children in the besieged enclave.

Following its initial attacks, Israel is still targeting Palestinian clinics and hospitals where Palestinians are supposed to go for children’s vaccinations. The most recent incident took place at the Baptist Hospital in Gaza City on Saturday 31 August, leaving three Palestinians killed and numerous others injured.

Deliberately initiating heavy military assaults during the vaccination campaign will undoubtedly make it more difficult for Palestinian families to get to health facilities and raise their anxiety, which might lead them to refrain entirely from going to these centres. This indicates that Israel has a clear and deliberate intention to thwart efforts to combat the virus and undermine the vaccination campaign. Additionally, these attacks are part of a larger plan aimed at exacerbating the man-made humanitarian crisis currently plaguing the Gaza Strip, preventing the alleviation of Palestinian suffering there, increasing the risk to the lives of Palestinian children and society at large, and intensifying the comprehensive crime of genocide that Israel is committing there.

The international community must pressure Israel to immediately cease its military assaults in order to guarantee that the polio vaccination campaign is carried out as quickly and thoroughly as possible. Israel bears full responsibility for protecting the lives and safety of Palestinian children from the virus, as this crisis is primarily the result of the crime of genocide it has been committing against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip since 7 October 2023, which includes the destruction of basic infrastructure and the health sector, repeated forced displacement, and deprivation of all elements of human life, in addition to the ongoing arbitrary and comprehensive blockade

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

2 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

Since its genocide against Palestinians in Gaza began, the Israeli military has destroyed hundreds of historical and religious sites, and centers of culture and learning like libraries, archives, and museums.

Here’s a brief guide to Israel’s cultural genocide in Gaza:

1. Great Omari Mosque: Gaza’s oldest mosque and the second-oldest mosque in all of Palestine, the Great Omari Mosque dates back 1,400 years. It was destroyed in an Israeli airstrike in December. In an instant, a place representing centuries of history — and housing dozens of rare books and priceless manuscripts — was reduced to rubble.
2. Church of Saint Porphyrius: This Greek Orthodox church was originally constructed in the 5th century, and its current structure was built in the 12th century. It is the oldest church in Gaza and is considered to be one of the oldest churches in the world. In the early weeks of the genocide, Israel bombed the compound where the church is located, causing a roof to collapse and killing over a dozen people sheltering inside.
3. Qasr el-Basha: Constructed in the 13th century, Pasha’s Palace was converted into a museum in 2010, housing precious antiquities like ceramics that dated back hundreds of years. It was all but reduced to rubble in an Israeli airstrike in December.
4. Rashad al-Shawa Cultural Center: A hub for artistic life in Gaza, the center housed a library and theater and hosted art exhibitions and film screenings. It was destroyed in an Israeli airstrike in November.
5. Central Archives of Gaza: Left in ruins after an Israeli airstrike in December, the archives housed historical documents dating back more than a century.

What is cultural genocide?

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

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

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

Is Israel committing cultural genocide in Gaza?

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

At the same time that it has made Gaza unlivable, the Israeli government has intentionally targeted historical, religious, and archaeological sites, archives, libraries, museums, and centers for art and culture — in addition to destroying every single one of Gaza’s universities.

[https://twitter.com/JehadAbusalim/status/1740193112319029577]

We should understand these attacks on Palestinian heritage as evidence of Israel’s intent to completely annihilate Palestinian life in Gaza.

In South Africa’s genocide case against Israel, they make note of Israel’s attacks on  “centres of Palestinian learning and culture,” and call on the International Court of Justice (ICJ) “to protect against further, severe and irreparable harm to the rights including the heritage of the Palestinian people under the genocide convention.”

A land without a people?

Israel’s genocide in Gaza is the latest in what is a century-old war against Palestinians and Palestinian life — a war of annihilation in which attacks on Palestinian culture, heritage, and national identity have played a central role.

Successive Israeli governments have attempted to erase Palestinian existence and oppress expressions of Palestinian identity, from building Israeli universities on the ruins of ethnically-cleansed Palestinian towns and villages to criminalizing the Palestinian flag.

This is textbook cultural genocide, and it’s a core component of Israeli settler colonialism. Erasing Palestinian culture and history makes it that much easier for the Israeli government to lay claim to Palestinians’ homes and land and deny Palestinians’ historical connection and rights to that land.

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

28 August 2024

Source: jewishvoiceforpeace.org

By Mazin Qumsiyeh

1)  Palestine was a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multi-religious, &
multi-lingual country targeted to be transformed it to a “Jewish state”.
The core of this project (Zionism) is thus ethnic cleansing which started under British Rule (to fulfil the illegal Balfour declaration) and
accelerated under more direct Zionism control. That is why we have 8
million Palestinian refugees and displaced people and 530 villages and
towns wiped out and 250,000 native Palestinians killed (ongoing genocide).

2)  International law is very clear: Palestinian Refugees have a right to
return to their homes and lands, Israeli colonial settlements built since
1967 including in Jerusalem are illegal, and Israel has engaged in
processes that amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity

3) Israel has never been a democracy. It is an apartheid racist regime that even after expelling most Palestinians, have instituted 65 laws that
discriminate against the remaining native Palestinians.

4) Zionist propaganda is easy to refute with logical explanations based on facts (and the three principles above). For example, it is easy to answer the nonsense like Israel is “defending itself”.  Someone comes and shoots your brother, points a gun at your head and tells you to get out of your house and claim their religion tells them to do so. Then you are pushed down the street and they besiege you and stop you from getting food and medicine and test new guns on you every few years. You are not the aggressor if you resist. International law is clear on this point: colonized/occupied people have a right (and even duty) of resistance. Anyway colonization is itself violence: ask native Americans and Blacks in South Africa or any other country that went through the experience. Colonization kills 15 native civilians for every 1 colonizer. The answer is simple, end apartheid ends the violence (exhibit A: South Africa).

5) No colonial – anti-colonial struggle has ever ended in a “two-state
solution”. It is fictional and the TALK about it from the time that Ben
Gurion proposed it over 100 years ago is merely (as Ben Gurion himself stated on more than one occasion) intended for PR efforts (he even cited colonial treaties with native Americans which could be broken after consolidating powers).  Colonial-Native struggles end in one of three scenarios: a) Algerian model (nearly 2 million killed, 1 million colonizers and their descendants left the country), b) genocide of natives (USA, Australia), c) coexistence in one country of descendants of colonizers and of native people (the rest of the world >140 countries). There is no fourth scenario. Palestine will not be an exception. It is the last struggle and prolonged only because of the resourcefulness and wealth of Zionistsm western and Arab collusion, and the weakness of their victims.

6) If we want a roadmap to real sustainable peace (not pacification), all
we have to do is insist that we implement the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights. It has all the needed elements (no discrimination, rights of refugees to return etc).

7) Palestine is important to 2.5 billion Christians, 1.8 billion Muslims,
15 million Jews. It is also at a pivotal land bridge between Africa and
Eurasia. It is also important becausev the Zionist lobbies decapitated
international law and made western countries support a
horrific genocide/holocaust of our people (complicity). Thus, people around this planet developed joint struggle (including via a push for boycotts, divestment and sanctions) which could help end the nightmare just like it did with Apartheid South Africa.  But unlike there, if we do not succeed, then a catastrophic global war is coming.

It is really not that satisfying when one’s own predictions come true. In a chapter in a book titled “Moment of Truth: Tackling Israel-Palestine’s
Toughest Questions” published in 2018 (https://www.palestinenature.org/ar/research/B40.-Qumsiyeh-MomentofTruth.pdf),
I argued that another (15th) intifada is inevitable and hoped it would be
the last. But much earlier in my 2004 book “Sharing the Land of Canaan” (available free here http://qumsiyeh.org/sharingthelandofcanaan/ ) I expressed the certainty that Zionist colonization will end one way or another. I explained that this can happen violently in very unpleasant way (like in Algeria) or will happen a bit less traumatically (though still violent) like happened in South Africa. This is merely a reading of history and is irrespective of one’s own emotional desires. I have been politically active for over 40 years now and in those decades have seen and argued with many Zionists. Few of them became post-Zionist or even anti-Zionist. I only
feel sad that I did not manage to convince too many of them who remained tribalistic (with that classic superiority-inferiority complex found in all colonial oppressors). A rather tectonic shift in awareness is happening to humanity as we collectively watch the utter depravity and insane behavior of the colonizers (demolishing high rise building, pogroms against non-Jews, children massacred, ethnic cleansing) facing heroic resistance from the indigenous people. Yet, it is still not clear that this sumud is enough to coerce the oppressors to abandon oppression or that the machinations of the oppressors that created the Oslo (Vichy) government would not succeed. Perhaps I was too optimistic to assume that popular resistance can succeed to end Zionism in a half-decent way. Perhaps the deep-rooted brain-washing of generations of colonizers and colonized makes it too hard to turn back. I hope I am wrong. But we Palestinians must face up to the reality that we have far more challenges than a well financed and
powerful Zionist movement that corrupted many governments to support oppression. We must acknowledge that the Zionist movement greatest success was facilitating the empowerment of a political elite group of Palestinians who hijacked a political faction (Fatah) and claiming representation of Palestine and do not want to pay the (financial) cost of repentance and return to sanity. Instead they continue to live in their delusions of importance and ignoring corruption all around them not even realizing that the end of such a road for them will be far more ruinous than the alternative. They need to learn the lesson of history of encounter with Zionism and its Arab facilitators. It is urgent. It is existential to them and to all of us (and indeed the whole of humanity). Zionism does not merely aim to control Palestine and ethnically cleanse it (when strong even of its own collaborators). Like previous colonial movements (see US as an
example) it is expansionist and aims for empire. No one will be safe even the collaborators and the facilitators as far as the Arab Gulf (and
certainly not Jews themselves yearning for normality).

Mazin Butros Qumsiyeh is a Palestinian scientist and author, founder and director of the Palestine Museum of Natural History and the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability at Bethlehem University where he teaches

4 September 2024

By Julian Borger and Sufian Taha

Israel accused of using a 10-year-old girl as a human shield as it carried out its devastating attack on the occupied Palestinian territory.

31 Aug 2024 – When Israeli soldiers arrived at the modest house along an alleyway in Nur Shams camp on Wednesday night, they sent the women and four of the children out into the street, but kept hold of Malak Shihab.

They took the muzzle off their dog and it went straight up to the slight 10-year-old girl and sniffed her. Terrified, she pleaded to be with her mother, but the soldiers seemed to have just one phrase in accented Arabic: “Open the doors.”

The platoon pushed her up to each of the doors in her aunt’s house, according to Malak’s account, while they remained braced behind her ready to fire at whoever might be inside. One door wouldn’t open, and in her desperation to obey, the girl remembers hammering on it with her head.

“I don’t know why. I just wanted it to open,” she said on Saturday, accompanied by her parents as she retraced her actions on the first night of the Israeli incursion.

The door was finally forced open with a rifle butt which left a hole above the handle, but there was no one on the other side and the soldiers moved on.

The IDF rejected the allegations of the Shihab family.

“Such events are inconsistent with the IDF’s code of conduct, and according to a preliminary inquiry this story is fabricated and did not occur,” a spokesperson said.

Similar allegations were made during an earlier incursion in Nur Shams in April, and were also denied by the army.

This was her most terrifying experience of an Israeli raid, but far from the first in Malak’s short life. The Nur Shams camp on the eastern edge of the West Bank city of Tulkarm, is known for its militancy. It has its own armed force, the Nur Shams brigade, a mix of followers of Islamic Jihad, Hamas and other radical groups.

The raids on the camp, and two other militant strongholds on the West Bank, Jenin and el Far’a camp, were a particularly ferocious iteration of a pattern that has repeated itself through the decades.

Each time, the soldiers come looking for militants and usually kill a few, leaving devastation and traumatised civilians in their wake before withdrawing. The mess is cleared up, and the fallen fighters are quickly replaced by younger militants.

“Mowing the grass” it is called, by certain Israeli generals and pundits, and the cynical phrase is repeated on the West Bank by Palestinians with added irony as they are well aware they are the “grass”.

In the course of last week’s incursion, the IDF cornered and killed the Nur Shams brigade’s 26-year-old leader, Mohamed Jaber, better known as Abu Shujaa, along with four of his fighters, who Israel said would otherwise have mounted attacks on Israelis. The five men died in a gunfight at a mosque 50 metres from the Shihabs’ house.

Abu Shujaa’s death represented a significant success for the IDF, in need of positive news after 10 months of bombing Gaza without finishing off Hamas. The force had learned the lessons of the 7 October attack by striking first, the military briefers said.

The damage done to Nur Shams was also dramatic. The camp was first established in 1952 for those displaced by Israel’s independence war, Palestine’s original Nakba, or disaster. In the al-Manshiya district at the heart of the camp most houses showed signs of damage, and the roads had been turned into rutted rubble-strewn tracks by IDF bulldozers, sent in first to eliminate any lurking roadside bombs.

Each time the troops have moved in, more children in Nur Shams have been exposed to violence. In the last raid, nine months ago, Malak fainted from the smoke from a blast outside the family home. So this time, her father, Mohammed, sent her, her mother and siblings to his sister’s house. But she was no safer there.

Asked how she felt three days later, Malak said: “Scared but also angry. I don’t know why I feel angry, but I just do.”

By Friday, the soldiers had ended the latest raid and withdrawn and by Saturday the clear-up was well under way. The local bakery had reopened and was selling plastic bags of pitas or bread rolls.

The baker, who wanted to be referred to as Abu Jihad, recalled how the males from his family, young and old, had been rounded up in the early hours of Wednesday morning, and were taken with tied hands to a warehouse at one end of the camp. There they were interrogated about the whereabouts of the brigade and their arms caches, and kicked and punched in the process.

“There was no mercy, even on children. Why take a 13- or 14-year-old boy from his house and beat the shit out of him and break his phone?” the baker said, referring to his own son.

On the road outside, the camp’s main thoroughfare, bulldozers were clearing the torn asphalt and other wreckage, while cement lorries and sewage trucks crawled along in both directions. The phone company had set up a kiosk under a parasol to oversee repairs to the lines.

The small alleys leading up the hill, the capillaries of Nur Shams, remained clotted by decades of damage and the immediate trauma of this latest, most destructive attack. Black tarpaulins suspended along their length, a shield from the electronic eyes of Israeli drones, reinforced the overall sense of gloom.

“I have lived through the six-day war (in 1967) and two intifadas but I never saw anything like this,” said Um Raed, a 72-year-old woman sitting outside on a street of wrecked and burnt houses. “What can we do? We are patient, but we are also so very tired.”

In an open doorway nearby, neighbours stared at a mat of dried blood, the start of a broad rust-red stripe leading into the interior of a house.

It was the blood of Ayed Abu al-Haija, a 63-year-old man with mental health problems who had trouble understanding the gravity of the threat around him. His granddaughter had seen him standing in his doorway from an upstairs window on Wednesday afternoon and urged him inside.

But then she heard a “weird noise” and when she went downstairs, Ayed was lying on his back with part of his skull missing. His nephew Haytham believed he had been hit by an Israeli sniper firing from a high window up the street. The Palestinian health ministry estimates that 20 Palestinians were killed in last week’s raids, but did not distinguish between civilians and militiamen.

In his life and death, Ayed Abu al-Haija had embodied a cycle of violence which has, in every turn, taken the region further from a peaceful settlement. He had been imprisoned and brutalised as a youth in the 1970s, and his mind never recovered. That left him vulnerable to a sniper’s bullet half a century later.

As far as Haytham was concerned, the blame travelled much further back, to the British, who had promised land to the Jews that was not theirs to give, and whose rule over Palestine from 1920 to 1948 ushered in the state of Israel.

“Our tragedy is your responsibility. This blood is on the hands of the Britons,” he warned.

Nur Shams shows its recurrent trauma like rings on a tree. The route from the Abu al-Haija house down to the main road was lined with pictures of martyred members of the Nur Shams Brigade, each brandishing a rifle. Photos of Abu Shujaa and the four other fighters killed last week are likely to be stuck up alongside them in the coming days.

At the end of the alley sat the camp’s most likely future. In a semi-circle of plastic chairs, surrounded by admiring men and boys, was a young member of the brigade, in cap and black T-shirt, his black M-16 assault rifle casually balanced on his lap. He could not have been older than 20 and was pale from sleeplessness and lack of sun, his white skin marred by bruising on his right side – left by debris from a grenade blast, he said. He was brimming with confidence.

“The resistance is stronger than ever,” he insisted. “Every time they do an incursion it gets stronger. That’s why every incursion is worse than the one before. Abu Shujaa is gone, mercy on his soul, but 100 fighters will take his place. How do you think the children here will grow up? They will take a gun and go to the battlefield.”

2 September 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja

Monsters of History Defy Truth, Justice and Humanitarian Values

28 Aug 2024 – The Israeli-U.S. fraudulent scenario of a ceasefire ended at Cairo without any agreeable outcome. There was nothing new but to kill the time and opportunities for the return of normalcy and humanitarian necessities to have allowed the people of Gaza to breathe oxygen while the bombing and killing of civilians continues unabated. The so-called Arab leaders – the authoritarian “puppets” of the US never had the capacity to think outside the decadent box and question the Master about this stigma of war and its ultimate purposes to dominate the Arab world. The US and Israel are moving around all quagmires and forging it to ensure continued killing of the people of Gaza under false pretext of terrorism and allowing new settlements by settlers to strengthen Israeli command over the West Bank and to put a finished answer to Palestine freedom movement. Should Israel and the US be allowed to continue to commit crimes against humanity and genocide without any accountability? All monsters of history claimed good intentions and righteous ambitions but inflicted horrors, deaths and destruction on fellow human beings to achieve individualistic ambitions of power and glory. The US Congress bestowed undue political honor to PM Netanyahu who is alleged by the ICC -ICJ to have committed crimes against humanity and genocide across Gaza. Does the US Congress have a manifesto of human moral and political values?

Philip Giraldi (“War Criminal Benjamin Netanyahu Addresses the US Congress” Global Research: 7/26/24), Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest explains:  “Benjamin Netanyahu’s presentation in the House Chamber today was by far the worst presentation of any foreign dignitary invited and honored with the privilege of addressing the Congress of the United States…….Netanyahu cliams ‘Hamas raped women and burnt babies alive’ but Dr. Giraldi views it a false propaganda stunt to win the US support for continued war against Palestinian people and clarifies:

The reality is, of course, it is the Jews who are killing Palestinians in large numbers using American supplied weapons. The highly respectable British medical journal The Lancet estimates that Israel has already killed more than 186,000 Palestinians since last October most of whom are still buried under the rubble of their homes, but for Netanyahu only Jewish lives matter. And the unrelenting savagery of the Israeli soldiers has also been confirmed by multiple independent sources. Bibi would also do well to read the new Knesset law passed last week that completely rejects the idea of a unilaterally declared sovereign Palestinian state side-by-side with Israel, confirming that Israel’s intentions do not include living at peace with its neighbors. https://www.globalresearch.ca/war-criminal-netanyahu-us-congress/5863708

Israel and US will not Stop at Gaza and Arab Leaders are Just Waiting for the Unknown

Gaza and West Bank are obliterated by Israeli insanity over ten months of continued war and bombardments of civilian infrastructures. The Arab-Muslim leaders had no mind, wisdom and courage to challenge Israel for its planned onslaught of Palestinian masses.They profess friendship with Netanyahu against Israeli animosity.The Arab leaders appear morally, intellectually and politically bankrupt as a scum floating on a torrent of naive puppets and discredited leaders. The American-Israeli collaborative war on Gaza and its immediate consequences made the Western world and all of its institutions shamefully redundant and void in the 21^stcentury global norms of civility, human rights, freedom, justice and safety of civilians- whereas crimes against humanity are captured in obscure impulses and indecision and deliberate inaction by the UN Security Council. Is the global community heading towards unthinkable man-made disasters as no international law, no humanitarian value or Geneva Conventions apply to Israel and the US for accountability? If Israel is not stopped, soon the leading oil exporting Arab states could fly Israeli-American flags for a change. Please see: “Israel Lost the War and America Betrayed Humanity in Gaza.” https://www.uncommonthought.com/mtblog/archives/2024/05/15/israel-lost-the-war-and-america-betrayed-humanity-in-gaza.php

Those Bombing the Earth are the Enemies of Humanity and Peace

Israel so far, has dropped more than 70,000 ton of bombs on Gaza- more insane than what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War 2. Perhaps, the Israeli and American leaders do not believe in life and death and accountability to God for all of their actions. The Torah and Bible fully reflect on this core human responsibility and punishment to those who violate the Divine Covenants. The Earth is not a property of the US or Israel but a  Divine hub of human Life, Survival and a Trust, Those Bombing and Destroying it are mentally sick and defy the Divine Truth. It looks as if the US and Israeli leaders do not believe in life and death and accountability. The earth is living and spins at 1670 km per hour and orbits the Sun at 107,000 km per hour. Imagine, if this spinning fails, what consequences could occur to the living beings on Earth. Think again, about the average distance of earth from moon is 93 million miles -the distance of Moon from Earth is currently 384,821 km equivalent to 0.002572 Astronomical Units. Earth is a “trust” to mankind for its existence, sustenance of life, survival, progress and future-making. The Earth exists and floats without any pillars in a capsule by the Will of God, so, ”Fear God Who created life and death.” Is human intelligence still intact to understand this reality? Wherever there is trust, there is accountability. All human beings are accountable for their actions. The Divine warning (Chapter 7: 56: The Quran), warns: Do no mischief on the Earth after it hath been set in order, but call on God with fear and longing in hearts; For the Mercy of God is always near to those who do good. (44:38-39).The Divine Message (Quran:40:64), clarifies:

It is God Who made for you the Earth as a resting place and the sky as a canopy; And has given you shape and made your shapes beautiful, And has provided for your Sustenance, of things pure and good; Such is God your Lord. So Glory to God, The Lord of the Worlds.

And killing of innocent people is prohibited in the Ten Commandments (Torah):

‘Thou shalt not kill’ (Exod. 20:13; also Deut. 5:17). Jewish law views the shedding of innocent blood very seriously, and lists murder as one of three sins (along with idolatry and sexual immorality), that fall under the category of yehareg ve’al ya’avor – meaning “One should let himself be killed rather than violate it.

“Phase One of Israel’s genocidal campaign on Gaza has ended. Phase Two has begun. It will result in even higher levels of death and destruction” reports Chris Hedges.

Chris Hedges “Israel Reopens the Gaza Slaughterhouse.” Chris Hedges Report: 12/05/23:

https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/israel-reopens-the-gaza-slaughterhouse?utm_source=post-email title&publication_id=778851&post_id=139349128&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=b7lbz&utm_medium=email

This is not a war against Hamas. It is a war against Palestinians.

Israeli strikes are generated at a dizzying rate, many of them from a system called “Habsora” — The Gospel — which is built on artificial intelligence that selects 100 targets a day. The AI-system is described by seven current and former Israeli intelligence officials in an article by Yuval Abraham on the Israeli sites +972 Magazine and Local Call, as facilitating a “mass assassination factory.” Israel, once it locates what it assumes to be a Hamas operative from a cell phone, for example, bombs and shells a wide area around the target, killing and wounding tens, and at times hundreds of Palestinians, the article states.

Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja specializes in international affairs-global security, peace and conflict resolution and has spent several academic years across the Russian-Ukrainian and Central Asian regions knowing the people, diverse cultures of thinking and political governance and a keen interest in Islamic-Western comparative cultures and civilizations, and author of several publications including the latest: One Humanity and the Remaking of Global Peace, Security and Conflict Resolution,  Dec 2019.

2 September 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Dave DeCamp

According to flight data, there’s been a spike in US arms deliveries to Israel since the end of July 2024.

29 Aug 2024 – The US has been rushing weapons shipments to Israel since the end of July, Haaretz reported today, citing open-sourced aviation data.

The report said that the spike in arms shipments made August the second busiest month at Israel’s Nevatim Airbase for US deliveries since Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza began back in October 2023 following the Hamas attack on southern Israel.

Dozens of US military transport flights, as well as Israeli civilian and military and cargo planes, have landed at the base, mainly traveling from Qatar and the Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.

The Haaretz report appeared to attribute the rush in arms shipments to US preparations for a potential Iranian attack. The US has deployed additional fighter jets and warships to the region and is vowing to defend Israel from Iran’s response to the Israeli assassination of Hamas’s political chief, Ismail Haniyeh, on Iranian territory. Following a major exchange of fire between Israel and Hezbollah on Sunday, the US is still expecting a reprisal attack from Iran.

Besides helping Israel prepare for a potential attack from Iran, the US weapons shipments also help fuel the slaughter in Gaza and Israel’s operations in the West Bank, which significantly escalated on Wednesday. Israeli forces launched their largest attack on the Israeli-occupied West Bank since the Second Intifada in the early 2000s.

The rush in arms shipments also shows strong support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been working to prevent a ceasefire deal with Hamas, and shows President Biden and Vice President Harris are not serious about ending the slaughter in Gaza.

The Israeli Defense Ministry said on Monday that the US had delivered over 50,000 tons of weapons and other military equipment since October 7. The ministry said the US support was “crucial for sustaining the IDF’s operational capabilities during the ongoing war.”

Dave DeCamp is the news editor of antiwar.com.

2 September 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Emanuel Fabian

26 Aug 2024 – Five hundred transport planes and 107 ships have delivered more than 50,000 tons of armaments and military equipment from the United States to Israel since the start of the war [genocide], the Defense Ministry says.

The military equipment delivered to Israel since the beginning of the atrocities includes “armored vehicles, munitions, ammunition, personal protection gear, and medical equipment,” according to the ministry.

The deliveries are “crucial for sustaining the IDF’s operational capabilities during the ongoing war [genocide].”

The “large-scale logistical effort” has been carried out by the ministry’s Directorate of Production and Procurement, the ministry’s mission to the US, the IDF’s Planning Directorate, and the Israeli Air Force.

2 September 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Jeffrey D. Sachs

26 Aug 2024 – With the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, the US assumed that it would dominate the world as the unrivaled hegemon. Yet the US “unipolar” moment proved to be short-lived.  US geopolitical dominance ended with the rise of China, the recovery of Russia from the period of Soviet collapse, and the rapid development of India.  We have arrived at a new multipolar age.

The US still fights to remain world hegemon, but this is delusional and doomed to fail. The US is in no position to lead the world, even if the rest of the world were to want it, which is not the case. The US share of world output (at international prices) is 16% and declining, down from around 27% in 1950, and 21% in 1980.  China’s share is 19%.  China’s manufacturing output is roughly twice that of the US, and China rivals the US in cutting-edge technologies.

The US is also militarily overextended, with some 750 overseas military bases in 80 countries. The US is engaged in protracted wars in Yemen, Israel-Palestine, Ukraine, Syria, Libya, and elsewhere.  The US wars and quest for hegemony are financed through debt, including debt owed to rival powers such as China.

Moreover, America’s budget politics is paralyzed. The rich, who fund the political campaigns, want lower taxes, while the poor want more social outlays.  The result is a standoff, with chronic budget deficits (now above 5% of GDP).  The public debt has swelled from around 35% of GDP in 2000 to 100% of GDP today.

The US sustains technological dynamism in areas such as artificial intelligence and microchip design, yet US breakthroughs are quickly matched in China through the spread of knowhow and advances pioneered by China.  Most of the world’s green and digital hardware — including advanced solar modules, wind turbines, nuclear power plants, batteries, chips, electric vehicles, 5G systems, and long-distance power transmission – is manufactured in Asia, with a large share in China or Chinese-dominated supply chains.

In view of its budget deficits, the US shirks the financial burdens of global leadership. The US demands that NATO allies pay their own way for military defense, while the US is increasingly stingy in its contributions to UN system for climate and development finance.

In short, while US deludes itself that it remains the world’s hegemon, we are already in a multipolar world.  This raises the question of what the new multipolarity should mean.  There are three possibilities.

The first, our current trajectory, is a continued struggle for dominance among the major powers, pitting the US against China, Russia, and others.  The leading US foreign policy scholar, Professor John Mearsheimer, has put forward the theory of “offensive realism,” according to which the great powers inevitably struggle for dominance, yet the consequences can be tragic, in the form of devastating wars.  Surely our task is to avoid such tragic outcomes, not accept them as a matter of fate.

The second possibility is a precarious peace through a balance of power among the great powers, sometimes called “defensive realism.”  Since the US cannot defeat China or Russia, and vice versa, the great powers should keep the peace by avoiding direct conflicts amongst themselves.  The US should not try to push NATO into Ukraine, against Russia’s strenuous objections, nor should the US arm Taiwan over China’s vociferous opposition.

In short, the great powers should act with prudence, avoiding each other’s red lines.  This is surely good advice, but not enough.  Balances of power turn into imbalances, threatening the peace.  The Concert of Europe, the balance of power among the major European powers in the 19^th century, eventually succumbed to shifts in the power balance at the end of the 19^th century, which led onward to World War I.

The third possibility, scorned in the past 30 years by US leaders, but our greatest hope, is true peace among the major powers.  This peace would be based on the shared recognition that there can be no global hegemon and that the common good requires active cooperation among the major powers.  There are several bases of this approach, including idealism (a world based on ethics), and institutionalism (a world based on international law and multilateral institutions).

Sustained peace is possible.  We can learn much from the long peace that prevailed in East Asia before the arrival of Western powers in the 19^th century.  In her book Chinese Cosmopolitanism, philosopher Shuchen Xiang cites historian David Kang, who noted that “from the founding of the Ming dynasty to the opium wars – that is, from 1368 to 1841 – there were only two wars between China, Korea, Vietnam, and Japan. These were the China’s invasion of Vietnam (1407-1428) and Japan’s invasion of Korea (1592-1598).” East Asia’s long peace was shattered by Britain’s attack on China in the First Opium War, 1839-1842, and the East-West (and later Sino-Japanese) conflicts that followed.

Prof. Xiang attributes the half-millennium of East Asian peace to Confucian norms of harmony that underpinned the statecraft among China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, in contrast to the struggle for hegemony that characterized Europe’s statecraft. China, during this long period, was the region’s uncontested hegemon, but did not use its predominant power to threaten or harm Korea, Vietnam, or Japan.

Dr. Jean Dong, an expert in China’s foreign policymaking, makes similar points about the differences between Chinese and European statecraft in her book Chinese Statecraft in a Changing World: Demystifying Enduring Traditions and Dynamic Constraints.

I have recently proposed 10 Principles for Perpetual Peace in the 21^st Century, building on China’s five principles for peaceful co-existence, plus five practical further steps, hence, a mixture of Confucian ethics and institutionalism.  My idea is to harness the ethics of cooperation and the practical benefits of international law and the UN Charter.

As the world assembles in September at the UN Summit of the Future, the key message is this.  We don’t want or need a hegemon.  We don’t need a balance of power, which can too easily become an imbalance of force.  We need a lasting peace built on ethics, common interests, and international law and institutions.

Jeffrey D. Sachs, Professor of Sustainable Development and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University, is Director of Columbia’s Center for Sustainable Development and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

2 September 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Maung Zarni

The US secretary of state’s genocide memorial tweet is a Zombie-esque, self-unaware act of supreme hypocrisy.

27 Aug 2024 – On 24 Aug, in the midst of the US-financed genocide in Gaza by Israel, and on the eve of the seventh anniversary of Myanmar’s genocide of Rohingya people, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken tweeted:

“Today marks the seventh anniversary of the Burma military’s genocide and crimes against humanity targeting Rohingya. The United States continues to honour the victims and stand with the survivors as they seek justice and accountability for these atrocities.”

His tweet received 1 million views on X though it is impossible to see how many viewers take the American diplomat seriously. But, most certainly, students of “hypocrisy” will find Blinken’s genocide memorial tweet a Zombie-esque, self-unaware act of “supreme hypocrisy”, to borrow Noam Chomsky’s characterisation of a quintessentially American feature of Pax Americana.

In fact, such acts of supreme hypocrisy are an exclusive and special characteristic of all colonisers that hailed from the old Europe (and its white settler colonial offshoots). More so in the case of the United States, whose Declaration of Independence thundered as a self-evident truth that “all men are created equal” while in the same breath, the same venerable statement openly dehumanise as “Savages”  the native peoples from whom America’s “founding fathers” stole vast swathes of lands to build a permanent settler colonial state.

On August 25, the Rohingyas commemorated the seventh anniversary of their own “Never again!”.  Nearly eight decades after the total defeat of the Nazi regime in 1945, and the end of the Nazis’ genocidal colonial project, everyone in their right mind is painfully cognisant of the moral emptiness of this post-Holocaust promise.

There have been dozens of recurring cases of genocide during the 79 years since the closure of the Nazi’s main site of the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Question’. Recurring, because the leading nations of the world with veto or dictatorial power at the United Nations have either been incapable of preventing crimes against humanity, including the crime of genocide, or, worse still, have been directly and indirectly involved in these organised horror shows worldwide.

As a matter of historical record, Blinken’s own United States has played an instrumental role in several genocides and other crimes against humanity in my own Asian neighbourhoods, as well as throughout Latin America.  Enter Indonesia under Suharto, the American War in Vietnam, the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia, Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, and Ecuador, to name just some of the well-documented cases of US-enabled, financed or patronised atrocity crimes.

When I was a young academic in a teacher education university in Chicago some 25 years ago, I became friends with an African-American gentleman, a generation older than me, who was in charge of the university’s postal services. With a detectable air of pained bitterness, he recounted his experience as a US veteran of the Vietnam War. In his words, which came to be etched in my memory after so many years,  “You know we (black men) were sent to Vietnam (by the US government) and told that we were there to defend democracy and freedom. Then we came home, and we were told, ‘you can’t eat sandwich at this counter or drink coffee at that table.”

He wryly laughed at what he painfully experienced as stomach-turning American hypocrisy.

Likewise, a decade ago in Phnom Penh, I heard live from the public gallery an angry complaint about official American hypocrisy from a radically different type of character.

Sitting inside the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, with its bullet-proof glass wall, in his closing statement, the Pol Pot regime’s Brother Number Two, Noun Chea asked, in effect, why American policymakers (for instance, Henry Kissinger who was considered a key architect of the carpet bombing of Indochina, specifically Northern Cambodia along the Vietnamese-Khmer borders) were not in the defendant’s dock, along with him.

By throwing millions of US taxpayer money into establishing a genocide documentation post facto, a UN-Cambodia hybrid criminal court, and running it for over 10 years, the United States had by then washed its official blood-stained hands in Cambodia’s bloody civil war of which the emergence of the genocidal Pol Pot regime was a devastating outcome.

To belabour the obvious, Blinken is not responsible for what the early crop of European genocidal settlers – euphemistically framed as “founding fathers” –  did to the Indigenous populations of the United States, nor the carpet-bombing of Indochina (Laos, Northern Cambodia and Vietnam) during the undeclared war fought in the name of “the defence of freedom”.  That last American “big war” in Asia claimed the lives of millions of humans on both sides of the conflict: nearly 3 million Vietnamese and 86,000 American troops, and left many more millions, deeply wounded, psychologically and physically.

But, in his capacity as US Secretary of State, running the “Israel, right or wrong” policy, Blinken certainly is amongst a sizeable pool of genocide enablers, including US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, British PM Sir Keir Starmer, EU External Affairs Chief Ursula von der Leyen who have been aiding and abetting Israel’s ongoing genocide of 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, under Tel Aviv’s openly announced “total siege”.

Against US President Joe Biden’s apparent mental incapacity to lead or manage US foreign policy, specifically, the US policy towards Israel and its ongoing genocide in Gaza and the blatantly illegal and expansionist land grab in the Occupied Territories in West Bank, Blinken is not merely executing orders to supply the state of Israel with additional two dozen billion dollars worth of weapons  such as 1,000 to 2,000-ton bombs, advanced killing machines such as fighter-bombers, drones, etc., but rather as a self-proclaimed Zionist, Blinken is personally and officially involved in Israel’s “physical destruction” of the Palestinian people, in the name of the settler coloniser-occupier’s “self-defence”.

Like the Rohingya, the Palestinians in Gaza (and all the Occupied Territories) have been declared by the UN’s highest court and principal judicial organ – the International Court of Justice –  “a protected group” under the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

So, for Blinken as the official who is calling the shots on US policy towards Israel, to publicly declare that “the United States continues to honour the [Rohingya] victims and stand with the survivors as they seek justice and accountability for these atrocities”, is, in my view, more than an act of hypocrisy.

Ordinary citizens and individuals often act in ways that qualify as hypocritical. But men like Blinken with an extraordinary amount of institutional power – to ship, or not to ship, billions of dollars worth of weapons to a state, which by all indications, is engaged in the “physical destruction” of a human population under occupation – cannot be considered simply  “hypocritical”. The words hypocrisy and hypocritical just won’t do.

As a matter of fact, our network of Asian scholar activists – the Forces of Renewal SouthEast Asia – has recently published former Malaysian PM Mahathir Mohammad’s 10-point statement, which he titled “hypocrisy”.  In it, the world’s oldest statesman listed key US crimes and pointed out Washington’s complicity in global crimes, past and present while focusing on the present American financing and direct involvement in Israel’s genocide.

Mahathir is not alone in seeing through the American fog of liberal propaganda framed in the discourses of “rule of law”, “accountability”, “rule-based world order”, and other grandiose statements. From his deathbed, the late Harold Pinter, the renowned British playwright, devoted half of his acceptance lecture for the Nobel Prize for Literature, urging the world to begin taking stock of the worldwide crimes of the United States.

Professor Noam Chomsky, one of the greatest thinkers and activists alive today – albeit sadly in a state of paralysis – has publicly characterised his own native country as “Number One Rogue State”. The tweet Blinken sent out on the eve of the Rohingya genocide anniversary is beyond hypocrisy. It reflects the quintessentially American disease, which the psychologically inclined among us might call schizophrenia.

The legally informed, on the other hand, would see Blinken’s tweet as Kafkaesquely criminal.  For one can’t be involved in one case of genocide (Israel) while at the same time demanding accountability and justice for victims in another (Myanmar).

A Buddhist humanist from Burma (Myanmar), Maung Zarni, nominated for the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, former Visiting Lecturer with Harvard Medical School, specializing in racism and violence in Burma and Sri Lanka, and Non-resident Scholar in Genocide Studies with Documentation Center – Cambodia.

2 September 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Richard Falk

31 Aug 2024 – Modified responses to questions posed by Rodrigo Craveiro, a journalist with the Brazilian newspaper, Correio Braziliense, on 29 Aug 2024, addressing the concerted Israeli military operation, extending the tactics and devastation of its attack on the Gaza Strip since last October, to the occupied West Bank. Again, Washington’s silence is almost as dismaying as Israel blatant disregard of law and standards of decency.

• I would like to quote you on this military operation in West Bank. How do you see that? What was the purpose?

From the outset of Israel’s response to the October 7 attack, I believed that it was being used as a pretext for ‘ethnic cleansing’ to induce massive departures of the resident Palestinian populations from the three Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), with a long undisclosed priority being systemic expulsion coupled with massive devastation of the West Bank. It should not be forgotten that when the Netanyahu coalition at the start of 2023, that is, months before the Hamas attack, took over occupation and administration of the OPT it was viewed even in Western circles as the ‘most extreme’ in Israel’s history. What made it extreme from Day One were two characteristics: the appointment of Itmar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, leaders of the far right religious Zionist parties in the Netanyahu coalition insistent on an ethnic cleansing agenda, as the chief administrators of Occupied Palestine, and the closely associated greenlighting of West Bank widespread settler violence in West Bank villages while the political leadership in Israel smiled obligingly.

What could be clearer than that the Zionist Religious Right was persuaded to join the Netanyahu coalition because it was given unconditional assurances that a Jewish supremist state would be pursued to complete the Zionist Project of establishing Greater Israel in all of the Promised Land. The prominence given Ben Gvir and Smotrich and the intensity of settler violence could not have been a clearer signal that two-staters were pursuing a Zombie solution, and yet the somewhat sullen silence of Diaspora liberal Zionism in the face of these developments exposed both liberal delusions and its self-righteous superficiality. The liberal approach was always more about us in the Diaspora than about ‘them’ (including even Israeli Jews but certainly the Palestinians long recruited against their will to make the major sacrifices to allay the guilt feelings of the Western democracies for hardly lifting a finger in opposition to the grotesque excesses of European antisemitism).

The Israeli response in Gaza over the last 11 months has horrified most peoples of the world, especially of the Global South, while enjoying the active complicity of the liberal democracies of most elites in the Global West. It has now reached a stage where it has undermined Israel’s reputation as a legitimate political actor, creating a vital decision point, signaled by these lethal attacks on the West Bank cities of Jenin, Tulkarm, and Juber. The IDF commander of this latest military operation, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, was quick to point out to the media that this was not an isolated incident to discourage Palestinian militancy but the beginning of a sustained military operation in the West Bank. This represents both a military and political escalation motivated by a commitment ‘to finish the job’ while regional and global anti-Israeli sentiments are already at fever pitch, but now ‘the job’ is revealed to the more attentive public to be what it has always secretly been, a campaign to achieve the coercive incorporation of the West Bank into Israel. This enlarged view of ‘the job’ that American pro-Israelis were earlier tricked into believing they were supporting, which was supposedly limited to the destruction of Hamas as a terrorist political actor and the elimination of its leaders, effectively propagandized as dehumanized  ‘terrorists.’

The Israeli leadership as ever master of shaping the public discourse, still seeks to pull wool over eyes by describing this escalation of the scope of their post-October 7 rampage, insist on justifying their West Bank behavior as directed at West Bank Palestinian militancy. Any fool knows that the most effective way to achieve such a result would be to rein West Bank settler violence, but that is not even part of the conversation. It should not be forgotten that from the perspective of international law the West Bank remains an Occupied Territory subject the 4^th Geneva Convention that prohibits Jewish settlements, collective punishment, and imposes legal duties on the Occupier to uphold the safety, security, and material health and wellbeing of an Occupied People. This reading of international law as it pertains to the West Bank was given an authoritative confirmation in the July 19^th Advisory Opinion of a nearly unanimous International Court of Justice, which was met in Tel Aviv with a show of condescending scorn and in Washington by looking away altogether.

Even the brave, knowledgeable, and perceptive current UN Special Rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, who rarely takes a false step bought into the core of the Israeli public narrative when she described this surge of official Israeli violence as “a serious pattern parallel with what is happening in the Gaza Strip” in the course of an interview with Drop Site News. I believe it is not parallel but integral to the politics underlying Israel’s response to October 7, which from the outset set up its campaign to induce a new nakba in the West Bank, preceded by this genocidal sideshow in Gaza. In effect, Gaza was Act 1 in a political theater piece of at least two acts.

From this follows my judgment that virtually the entire Israeli response since October 7 has been about land and only incidentally, if at all, about security, except in the secondary sense of warning (or deterring) regional enemy attacks, which means mainly Iran . If security had been the primary concern there were much less bloody and more effective and legally acceptable ways to go about a response: tightening border security, using sophisticated intelligence/surveillance skills to control opposition and resistance in Gaza, and even seeking a normalization of relations based on mutual respect for international law. Relevant here is the near unanimous July 19 Advisory Opinion of the International Court that clearly set forth multiple reasons for regarding Israel’s continued occupation of Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank as unlawful, calling on the UN and UN member states to implement its rulings, and on Israel to comply.

If my conjectures are even only partly a corrective of the official version of the Hamas attack, it makes essential an official, trustworthy international investigation of what  really happened on October 7 and how it was decontextualized to serve Israel’s need for a self-serving rationale of the violence that was unleashed for reasons other than the attack. In retrospect, it seems clears that the events themselves were hyped in ways that invalidated criticism of Israel’s behavior and did not contextualize the attack in relation to pre-October 7 recent and structural provocations, the validity of resistance against settler colonialism, and the prolonged nature and severity of Israeli collective punishment of Gazans, the denial not only of rights of self-determination but of rights of return.

A final observation in the form of a conjecture. US diplomacy used its leverage to discourage further Israeli provocations of Iran to lessen risks of being drawn into a regional war. In exchange, Israel was quietly assured that if it extended the Gaza military operation to the West Bank it would not meet with significant governmental resistance from the US or Europe. In other words, it could get away with completing its master plan of extinguishing the territorial existence of Palestine as well burying the prospect of Palestinian statehood in any viable form once and for all.

• Do you see the risk of a third intifada after what is happening in Gaza and West Bank?

I believe the greater threat as of now is of a second nakba (catastrophe) involving confronting Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank with a choice between enduring genocide or fleeing across borders to neighboring Arab countries; so far, Gazan have withstood the pressure to leave, and enduring the unspeakable alternatives of genocide or a permanent refugee status. Such an outcome would be a further stage in a process that goes back to pre-Israel Zionism, which is to make Palestinians so persecuted in their own country that many are compelled to flee for safety across international borders as happened in 1948, and under international law unlawfully denied any right of return.

Such an exclusionary second nakba is not necessarily inconsistent with a third intifada, which would be more like the second than the first, that is it would include armed resistance. What probably prevents a new intifada, which would undoubtedly enjoy more sympathy and gain greater support than the earlier two, is the absence of Palestinian political will to expose themselves to an even more extensive genocidal response.

Beyond this, the resolution of East Jerusalem still awaits further action. Almost off camera have been exhortations and symbolic encroachment on the Al Aqsa compound by settler extremists. Even a wider religious war cannot be ruled out if the Netanyahu coalition continues to call the shots when it comes to the Palestinian future.

• The Israeli leader, Benny Gantz claimed it´s necessary to repeat in West Bank the military strategy for Gaza. How do you see that?

As with other Israeli leaders, Gantz is using a security rationale for what is better understood as a land-grabbing and people-emptying undertaking. As argued above the overriding purpose of Israel’s behavior since October 7 is to take advantage of the attack (as its propaganda specialists have portrayed it) to address the primary Zionist agenda item of establishing Greater Israel as a Jewish supremist state stretching from at least the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, a pre-Netanyahu image of Israeli sovereign territory explicitly embedded in a 2018 Basic Law adopted by the Knesset.

The difference between the Israeli mainstream and the Netanyahu-led extremists is best interpreted as one of style and patience, not substance. The dominant expectations of opposed Israeli establishment groupings raise questions of religion and Jewish tradition, but more fundamentally about power in controlling state/society and international relations of Israel’s government.

Prof. Richard Falk is a member of the TRANSCEND Network, Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, Chair of Global Law, Faculty of Law, at Queen Mary University London, Research Associate the Orfalea Center of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Fellow of the Tellus Institute. He directed the project on Global Climate Change, Human Security, and Democracy at UCSB and formerly served as director the North American group in the World Order Models Project. Between 2008 and 2014, Falk served as UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Occupied Palestine.

2 September 2024

Source: transcend.org