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By Chris Hedges

CAIRO, Egypt: The Palestinians are human laboratory rats to the Israeli military, intelligence services and arms and technology industries. Israel’s drones, surveillance technology — including spyware, facial recognition software and biometric gathering infrastructure — along with smart fences, experimental bombs and AI-controlled machine guns, are tried out on the captive population in Gaza, often with lethal results. These weapons and technologies are then certified as “battle tested” and sold around the world.

Israel is the 10th biggest arms dealer on the planet and sells its technology and weapons to an estimated 130 nations, including military dictatorships in Asia and Latin America. Israeli weapons sales totalled $12.5 billion last year. Its close relationship with these military, internal security, surveillance, intelligence-gathering and law enforcement agencies, explains the fulsome support Israel’s allies give to its genocidal campaign in Gaza. When Colombian President Gustavo Petro refused to condemn the Oct. 7 attack by Palestinian resistance groups as a “terrorist attack” and said “terrorism is killing innocent children in Palestine,” Israel immediately halted all sales of defense and security equipment to Colombia. This global cabal, dedicated to permanent war and keeping its populations monitored and controlled, has hundreds of billions of dollars a year in sales. These technologies are cementing into place a supranational corporate totalitarianism, a world where populations are enslaved in ways that past totalitarian regimes could only imagine.

The genocidal assault on Gaza is another chapter in the century-long ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians by the Israeli settler colonial project. It is accompanied, as is true for all settler colonial projects, by the theft of natural resources, land, water and the natural gas in the Gaza Marine fields, 20 nautical miles off the coast of Gaza, which could contain up to 1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. In a world of diminishing resources, especially water in the Middle East, and the dislocations caused by the climate crisis, Gaza is the prelude to a frightening new world order. As democracies wither and die, as economic inequality expands, as poverty and desperation mounts, the global ruling class will increasingly do to us – once we become restive and attempt to rebel – what they are doing to the Palestinians.

It is not a far cry from Gaza to the camps and detention centers set up for migrants fleeing to Europe from Africa and the Middle East. It is not a far cry from the carpet bombing in Gaza to the endless wars in the Middle East and the global south. It is not a far cry from the anti-terrorism laws used to criminalize dissent in Israel to the anti-terrorism laws introduced in Europe and the U.S.

On Oct. 7, Palestinians in Gaza escaped from their laboratory cage. They went on a killing spree against their sadistic masters. Almost 12,000 Palestinians have been killed and some 30,000 wounded, including 4,700 children, since Oct. 7 in the hurricane of shells, bullets, bombs and missiles that are turning Gaza into a wasteland. Nearly 3,000 Palestinians are missing or buried under the rubble. Soon Palestinians will be convulsed by infectious diseases and starvation. Those who survive, if Israel succeeds in its ethnic cleansing, will become refugees, yet again, over the border in Egypt. There remain plenty of Palestinian test subjects in the West Bank. Gaza will be closed for business.

Israel, which is not a signatory of the Arms Trade Treaty, has long supplied some of the most heinous regimes on the planet with weaponry, including the apartheid government of South Africa and Myanmar. India is Israel’s largest purchaser of military drones. Israel provided UAVs, missiles and mortars to Azerbaijan for its invasion and occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh, which displaced 100,000 people, more than 80 percent of the enclave’s ethnic Armenians. Israel sold napalm and weapons to the Salvadoran military, as well as the murderous regime of General José Efraín Ríos Montt in Guatemala, when I covered the wars in the 1980s in Central America. Israeli-made Uzi submachine guns were the weapons of choice for Central American death squads. Israel also sold weapons to the Bosnian Serbs, despite international sanctions, when I covered the war in Bosnia in the 1990s, a conflict that took the lives of 100,000 people.

“Israel is a key player in the EU battle to both militarize its borders and deter new arrivals, a policy that hugely accelerated after the massive influx of migrants in 2015, principally due to the wars in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan,” writes Anthony Loewenstein in “The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World,” “The EU has partnered with leading Israeli defense companies to use its drones, and of course years of experience in Palestine is a key selling point.”

“The similarities between the US–Mexico border and Israel’s wall through the occupied territories are growing by the year,” he writes. “One informs and inspires the other, with tech companies always looking for new ways to target and capture perceived enemies. The use of high-tech surveillance tools to monitor the border was backed by both Republicans and Democrats. One company during the Trump years, the billionaire Peter Theil–backed Brinc, tested the possibility of deploying armed drones that would taser migrants with a stun gun along the US–Mexico border.”

Heron TP “Eitan” drones, manufactured by Israel Aerospace Industries – Israel’s largest aerospace and defense company and the country’s largest arms exporter – are used by Frontex, the European Union’s external border and coastal agency, to monitor and deter migrant and refugee boats in the Mediterranean. The drones, which fly up to 40 hours continuously, can be modified to carry four Spike rockets with fragmentation sleeves of thousands of 3mm tungsten cubes that puncture metal and “cause tissue to be torn from flesh,” in essence shredding the victim. They are routinely used on Palestinians.

“It’s almost impossible to cross the Mediterranean [as a migrant],” Felix Weiss, of the German NGO Sea-Watch, told Loewenstein. “Frontex has become a militarized actor, its equipment coming from war zones,” he added.

Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest private weapons firm, supplies U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) with hi-tech surveillance towers which it uses along the border with Mexico. It also supplied the CBP with its Hermes drone in 2004 in order to test the feasibility of using UAVs on the border.

Pegasus, a phone-hacking tool produced by the Israeli NSO Group, a cyber intelligence agency, was used by Mexican drug cartels to target the journalist Griselda Triana, after her husband Javier Valdez Cárdenas, also an investigative reporter, was assassinated in 2017. The Mexican government is directly implicated in targeting journalists and civil society members with Pegasus spyware, according to research and analysis by Canada’s Citizen Lab. After the reporter Jamal Khashoggi was killed and dismembered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in Oct. 2018, it was discovered that an NSO client targeted the phone of his fiancé, Hanan Elatr. Pegasus transforms a cellular phone into a mobile surveillance device, with microphones and cameras activated without the user’s knowledge.

Skunk water, a putrid smelling liquid, was tested and perfected on Palestinians, often with Israeli film crews recording the attacks to show potential clients the effectiveness of the chemical.

“Israeli forces routinely douse entire Palestinian neighborhoods in skunk water, deliberately spraying it into private homes, businesses, schools and funerals in what the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem calls ‘a collective punitive measure’ against Palestinian villages that engage in protest against Israel’s colonial violence,” The Electronic Intifada reported in 2015. That same year, the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department purchased 14 canisters of skunk to use against protesters following demonstrations that erupted after the police killing of unarmed African American teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri.

Israel created a sophisticated facial recognition system, Red Wolf, to document every Palestinian in the occupied territories. The technology “is used extensively” to “consolidate existing practices of discriminatory policing, segregation, and curbing freedom of movement, violating Palestinians’ basic rights,” Amnesty International explains in its recent report titled “Automated Apartheid.” The French investigative outlet Disclose revealed that French police have been unlawfully using facial recognition software provided by the Israeli tech firm BriefCam for eight years. BriefCam’s technology allows users to “detect, track, extract, classify [and] catalog” people “appearing in video surveillance footage in real-time.”

AI-machine guns, manufactured by the Israeli company SMARTSHOOTER, can fire stun grenades and sponge-tipped bullets as well as tear gas. They were perfected in trials on the Palestinians in the West Bank. SMARTSHOOTER was recently awarded a contract to supply the British Army with its SMASH “automatic targeting and firing system” which can be attached to small arms such as automatic rifles.

Israel, according to Jeff Halper in his book “War Against the People,” has done cutting edge work on cyborg soldiers. It developed a radar system that sees through walls, he writes. As The Electronic Intifada explains, Israel’s military-industrial complex has built “a tank named Cruelty, a 20-gram drone in the shape of a butterfly, a stealth ‘wonder boat’ called the Death Shark, a series of weapons named after insects or natural phenomena (bionic hornets, smart dust, dragonfly drones and smart dew robots), cybernetic insects, a 600-building ‘urban warfare’ training center nicknamed Chicago and a one-megaton bomb containing electromagnetic pulse capability.”

Harper notes that during the occupation of Iraq, the U.S. military replicated the tactics used by Israel against the Palestinians. It constructed a security barrier around the Baghdad Green Zone, imposed closures on towns and villages, carried out targeted assassinations, copied Israeli torture techniques and used checkpoints and roadblocks to isolate towns and villages.

Israel trains and equips U.S. police forces, teaching aggressive tactics, backed up by heavy military hardware and vehicles, which were used in Ferguson and Atlanta during the police confrontations with activists who were protesting Cop City.

Halper calls this the “Palestinianization” of global conflicts.

“With so many Israeli companies involved in maintaining the infrastructure around the occupation, these firms found innovative ways to sell their services to the state, test the latest technology on Palestinians, and then promote them around the world,” Loewenstein explains. And while “the defense industries are increasingly in private hands,” following decades of neoliberal privatization, “they continue to act as an extension of Israel’s foreign policy agenda, supporting its goals and pro-occupation ideology.”

The global ruling class will counter the destabilizing forces of inequality, curtailment of civil liberties, collapsing infrastructure, failing health systems and increasing shortages caused by an accelerating climate crisis, by branding all who resist as “human animals.” This new world order began in Gaza. It ends at home.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper.

18 November 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Jay Janson

(On May 14, 1948, the Provisional Government of Israel had proclaimed a new State of Israel comprising 77% of the land in Palestine.)

On December 11, 1948, exactly one week after Albert Einstein condemned the macabre Israeli massacre at the Arab village of Deir Yassin and warned against supporting Fascism in Israel in a letter to the New York Times signed by other prominent Jews, [1]

The United Nations General Assembly adopted resolution #194, resolving that

“refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.” 

75 Years of grieving millions and massive bloodshed is the result of Israel ignoring this UN directive,and instead bringing in Jews from Arab nations to settle largely on confiscated Palestinian homes and lands of that subsequently impoverished 700,000+ Arab Palestinians, by now having grown in population to millions, most of whom having remained relatively destitute long under Israeli military occupation and further seizure of their West Bank land by roughly half a million Jewish settlers,other millions living as refugees in nearby countries.

Regarding the attack by Hamas on October 7 referred to by Israelis as a terrorist atrocity in which 1,200 Israelis civilians were murdered (down from 1,400), however Israeli Hebrew newspaper Harretz has provided evidence that up to half the Israelis killed were soldiers; that Israeli forces were responsible for some of their own civilian deaths.

Outrageous allegations, such as the story of Hamas “beheading 40 babies‘ made headlines and the front pages of countless western news outlets. President Biden claimed to have seen “confirmed photos of terrorists beheading babies,” and that Israeli women were “raped, assaulted, paraded as trophies” The New York Jewish newspaper Forward’s article on 11 October reported that the Israeli military acknowledged they had no evidence of such allegations. (The White House spokesperson’s retraction received minimal media coverage.)

A Hebrew-language Haaretz newspaper article published on 20 October quotes a kibbutz resident survivor trembling as he spoke of Israeli Defense Force shelling houses with all their occupants inside in order to eliminate the terrorists. Photos show that only the heavy munitions of the Israeli army could have destroyed residential homes in this manner. Yasmin Porat, another survivor from Kibbutz Be’eri, said in an interview for an Israeli radio-show, hosted by state-broadcaster Kan, that Israeli forces “eliminated everyone, including the hostages,” going on to state that “there was very, very heavy crossfire” and even noted tank shelling.

All the above Israeli reports noted does not mean to imply that there is no evidence of atrocious murders of  Israeli civilians by Hamas invaders. Just haven’t found them yet.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres addressing the UN General Assembly on October 24 pointed out again: [2]

“…The October 7 Hamas attack didn’t happen in a vacuum, The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. “

Amnesty International on its website reports: [3]

For half a century, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip has resulted in systematic human rights violations against Palestinians living there.

Israel maintains an illegal air, sea and land blockade on Gaza and maintains a so-called “access-restricted area” or buffer zone within Gaza. These have cut off more than 2 million Palestinians from other parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the outside world.

Since the occupation first began, Israel’s ruthless policies of land confiscation, illegal settlement and dispossession, coupled with rampant discrimination, have inflicted immense suffering on Palestinians, depriving them of their basic rights.

Israel’s military rule disrupts every aspect of daily life in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. It continues to affect whether, when and how Palestinians can travel to work or school, go abroad, visit their relatives, earn a living, attend a protest, access their farmland, or even access electricity or a clean water supply. It means daily humiliation, fear and oppression. People’s entire lives are effectively held hostage by Israel.

Israel has also adopted a complex web of military laws to crush dissent against its policies, and senior government officials have branded Israelis advocating for Palestinian rights as “traitors”.

As well as controlling where Palestinians can go and who they see, Israel also controls and arbitrarily restricts their access to safe, clean water. Water consumption by Israelis is at least four times that of Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories.

Israel’s restrictive allocation of water to Palestinians neither meets the Palestinian population’s basic needs nor constitutes a fair distribution of shared water resources. Swimming pools, well-watered lawns and large irrigated farms in Israeli settlements on occupied land – lush green even at the height of the dry season – stand in stark contrast next to the parched and arid Palestinian villages on their doorstep, where residents struggle to have enough water to wash, take a shower, cook, clean or drink, let alone to water their crops.

Israel is under an obligation to return the land, orchards, olive groves and other immovable property seized for purposes of construction of the wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. All States are under an obligation not to recognize the illegal situation resulting from the construction of the wall

International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion, 2004

Regarding Israeli bombing having taken the lives of 11,200 Palestinians in Gaza as of November 14th including well over 4,000 children, and Israel is claiming a right to defend itself.  A  right to kill 4000+ kids?

Israel, as an occupying power, does not have “the right for self-defense” – UN International Court, 2004.  Arab Palestinians are fighting to be freed from their open air concentration prison.

Below: a serious pertinent observation from someone whose neighboring country and people have been decimated with indescribable suffering, destruction and a near million violent deaths from years of a barbaric invasion by the U.S. CIA created ISIS [4]

“Talking about Gaza individually misses the point, as it is part of a whole, and the recent aggression against it is just an event in a series of events dating back to seventy-five years of Zionist crime, with thirty-two years of a failed peace, the only absolute, irrefutable result of which is that the entity has increased its aggression, and the Palestinian situation has become more unjust, and miserable.” President Bashar al-Assad of Syria

How many $billions worth of bombs have been dropped on Palestinian Arabs since that United Nations directive 75 years ago calling for the return the Arab Palestinian homes and land and to compensate? The yearly $USBillions in military aid to Israel by the American government (since 2019 raised to US$3.8 billion), could have been used to compensate Palestinians for their seized homes, lands and property and to facilitate the repatriation of those willing to be citizens of Israel.

Is it too too late for that and obviously too late any reasonable two state solution?

Mitri Raheb is a Palestinian Christian minister who runs schools, cultural centers and health clinics. He told the CBS TV channel show 60 Minutes: “… the West Bank is becoming more and more like a piece of Swiss cheese where Israel gets the cheese that is the land, the water resources, the archaeological sites. And the Palestinian are pushed in the holes behind the walls.”

Is the apartheid Israeli exclusively Jewish state seeking to spread out and envelope all the land of the ancient Kingdom of David still viable given its abominable record of mass murderous injustice toward its Palestinian neighbors and the hatred this has engendered in various fellow Arab nations and the general condemnation of much of the Third World population?

In his speech before the Israeli Knesset upon accepting Israel’s prestigious Wolf Prize (1991), violinist Yehudi Menuhin bitterly criticized Israel’s continued presence in the West Bank, characterizing it as

 “contempt for the basic dignities of life, this steady asphyxiation of a dependent people.”The only solution is keep intact the territory and create a democratic federated union, allow people to live where they were, together, apart, schools apart or together – what ever they want – with Jerusalem capital of both like Bern is the capital of German Switzerland and French Switzerland and each president is there for a year and no one knows his name – that is the only solution, otherwise there’ll always be war.” Yehudi Menuhin

These are not the words and sentiments of an accusing Iranian President Ahmadinejad, or of a defiant Hezbollah, Hamas or other Palestinian spokesperson, but the words of a sensitive, soft spoken, internationally beloved and Israeli prize awarded musician whose very given name, Yehudi, means “the Jew” in Hebrew, his first language.

In the past Christians used the Bible to condone racism, intolerance, slavery, witch hunts, Inquisitions, Crusades, torture, “holy wars,” and the burning of “heretics” at the stake. Millions of people have been tortured, enslaved and killed in the name of Jesus Christ.

Israel’s Religious Justification for Mass Murderous Overkill

Since 1948, various Israeli leaders and rabbis have used the Bible’s Old Testament in which God gives the land of other races to Israelis to conquer to promote and excuse genocidal ethnic cleansing, racism and murderous injustice toward the thousand year long Arab inhabitants of what is often referred to as ‘the Holy Land.’

Better and Safer to just Give The Land & Homes Back and Compensate Palestinians!

Observation and Cautionary:

Hegemonists’ Criminal Media Lock Our Attention on the Status-Quo and Away from the Horrific Past Origen of Present Suffering

End Notes

1. TO THE EDITORS OF THE NEW YORK TIMES:

Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the “Freedom Party” (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine.The current visit of Menachem Begin, leader of this party, to the United States is obviously calculated to give the impression of American support for his party in the coming Israeli elections, and to cement political ties with conservative Zionist elements in the United States. Several Americans of national repute have lent their names to welcome his visit. It is inconceivable that those who oppose fascism throughout the world, if correctly informed as to Mr. Begin’s political record and perspectives, could add their names and support to the movement he represents. Before irreparable damage is done by way of financial contributions, public manifestations in Begin’s behalf, and the creation in Palestine of the impression that a large segment of America supports Fascist elements in Israel, the American public must be informed as to the record and objectives of Mr. Begin and his movement.

The public avowals of Begin’s party are no guide whatever to its actual character. Today they speak of freedom, democracy and anti-imperialism, whereas until recently they openly preached the doctrine of the Fascist state. It is in its actions that the terrorist party betrays its real character; from its past actions we can judge what it may be expected to do in the future. Attack on Arab Village

A shocking example was their behavior in the Arab village of Deir Yassin. This village, off the main roads and surrounded by Jewish lands, had taken no part in the war, and had even fought off Arab bands who wanted to use the village as their base. On April 9 (THE NEW YORK TIMES), terrorist bands attacked this peaceful village, which was not a military objective in the fighting, killed most of its inhabitants “240 men, women, and children” and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem. Most of the Jewish community was horrified at the deed, and the Jewish Agency sent a telegram of apology to King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan. But the terrorists, far from being ashamed of their act, were proud of this massacre, publicized it widely, and invited all the foreign correspondents present in the country to view the heaped corpses and the general havoc at Deir Yassin.

The Deir Yassin incident exemplifies the character and actions of the Freedom Party.

Within the Jewish community they have preached an admixture of ultranationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority. Like other Fascist parties they have been used to break strikes, and have themselves pressed for the destruction of free trade unions. In their stead they have proposed corporate unions on the Italian Fascist model.

During the last years of sporadic anti-British violence, the IZL and Stern groups inaugurated a reign of terror in the Palestine Jewish community. Teachers were beaten up for speaking against them, adults were shot for not letting their children join them. By gangster methods, beatings, window-smashing, and wide-spread robberies, the terrorists intimidated the population and exacted a heavy tribute

The people of the Freedom Party have had no part in the constructive achievements in Palestine. They have reclaimed no land, built no settlements, and only detracted from the Jewish defense activity. Their much-publicized immigration endeavors were minute, and devoted mainly to bringing in Fascist compatriots.

Discrepancies Seen

The discrepancies between the bold claims now being made by Begin and his party, and their record of past performance in Palestine bear the imprint of no ordinary political party. This is the unmistakable stamp of a Fascist party for whom terrorism (against Jews, Arabs, and British alike), and misrepresentation are means, and a “Leader State” is the goal.

In the light of the foregoing considerations, it is imperative that the truth about Mr. Begin and his movement be made known in this country. It is all the more tragic that the top leadership of American Zionism has refused to campaign against Begin’s efforts, or even to expose to its own constituents the dangers to Israel from support to Begin.

The undersigned therefore take this means of publicly presenting a few salient facts concerning Begin and his party; and of urging all concerned not to support this latest manifestation of fascism.

(signed)

ISIDORE ABRAMOWITZ, HANNAH ARENDT, ABRAHAM BRICK, RABBI JESSURUN CARDOZO, ALBERT EINSTEIN, HERMAN EISEN, M.D., HAYIM FINEMAN, M. GALLEN, M.D., H.H. HARRIS, ZELIG S. HARRIS, SIDNEY HOOK, FRED KARUSH, BRURIA KAUFMAN, IRMA L. LINDHEIM, NACHMAN MAISEL, SYMOUR MELMAN, MYER D. MENDELSON, M.D., HARRY M. ORLINSKY, SAMUEL PITLICK, FRITZ ROHRLICH, LOUIS P. ROCKER, RUTH SAGER, ITZHAK SANKOWSKY, I.J. SCHOENBERG, SAMUEL SHUMAN, M. ZNGER, IRMA WOLPE, STEFAN WOLPE

Readers of Einstein’s letter might note that Menachem Begin, discussed in the letter, was a future prime minister of Israel. Begin was a racist, a fascist and the preeminent terrorist in the Middle East, murdering Arabs, Jews and Englishmen. What sort of nation elects a fascist terrorist to its highest office?

2. https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/speeches/2023-10-24/secretary-generals-remarks-the-security-council-the-middle-east%C2%A0

3. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2017/06/israel-occupation-50-years-of-dispossession/

4. Wayne Madsen, John-Paul Leonard, Washington’s Blog, Syrian Girl Partisan. ISIS IS US: The Shocking Truth: Behind the Army of Terror, Progressive Press, October, 2016, a panel of cutting-edge researchers tell what ISIS really is, Paperback – https://www.amazon.com/ISIS-US-Shocking-Behind-Terror/dp/1615771522

An American Senator Writes of ISIS “Hellish Filth We’ve Recruited, Armed and Trained for 8 Years!” https://countercurrents.org/2019/01/an-american-senator-writes-of-isis-hellish-filth-weve-recruited-armed-and-trained-for-8-years/

“Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A,” December 26, 1977, New York Times

Jay Janson is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer; has lived and worked on all continents; articles on media published in China, Italy, UK, India and in the US by Dissident Voice, Global Research; Information Clearing House; Counter Currents and others; now resides in NYC; First effort was a series of articles on deadly cultural pollution endangering seven areas of life emanating from Western corporate owned commercial media published in Hong Kong’s Window Magazine 1993; Howard Zinn lent his name to various projects of his; Weekly column, South China Morning Post, 1986-87; reviews for Ta Kung Bao; article China Daily, 1989.

16 November 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Andre Damon

On Tuesday night, after two weeks of constant bombardment that killed dozens of doctors, patients and refugees, Israeli forces entered Al-Shifa hospital and raised the Israeli flag over it.

Just hours before, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre asserted that “Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad use some hospitals in the Gaza Strip, including Al-Shifa, and tunnels underneath them to conceal and to support their military operations and to hold hostages.”

The US media went even further, with Fox News describing Al-Shifa as a “hospital used as Hamas underground terror HQ.”

These claims proved to be a complete lie. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) produced no hostages, no underground bunker. After searching a sprawling hospital complex that at one point housed 60,000 people in the middle of an active war zone, the IDF could only show a few assault rifles and two flak jackets as “evidence.”

The real reason Al-Shifa was attacked was symbolic. The hospital’s medical workers, subject to continuous bombardment and sniper fire, defied orders by the IDF to leave, saying they would rather die than abandon their patients. Their courage and defiance in the face of Israel’s genocide won the solidarity and support of millions of people all over the world.

The First and Second Geneva Conventions of 1949 stipulate that hospitals and other medical units must not be attacked and should be protected at all times. This includes civilian and military hospitals. Attacking hospitals and medical personnel is a war crime under international criminal law.

In the face of emphatic declarations by the United Nations, the World Health Organization (WHO), and countless human rights organizations that hospitals are “not a target,” Israel and its imperialist backers are sending a different message: Yes, they are.

While the US repeatedly attacked hospitals during the “war on terror,” it sought to present these actions as accidents. In October 2015, a US airstrike killed at least 22 people in a Doctors Without Borders (MSF) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. At the time, US President Barack Obama issued an apology, claiming the strike was a “mistake.”

Now, however, the United States is upholding attacks on hospitals and other war crimes as legitimate acts of “self defense.” As US officials have repeatedly declared, in response to Israeli massacres at hospitals in Gaza, that there are no “red lines.”

Since the start of Israel’s assault on Gaza, the WHO recorded at least 137 attacks on healthcare facilities, resulting in 521 deaths and 686 injuries, including 16 deaths and 38 injuries of health workers.

These statistics do not include the most horrific attack on a hospital, the October 17, 2023 Al-Ahli Arab Hospital bombing that killed between 250 and 471 people, but which Israel and the United States, citing evidence that was quickly disproven, claimed was the result of a rocket fired from Gaza.

Israel’s war on hospitals is part of a systematic campaign of genocide. The deliberate targeting of civilian populations, children, medical workers and aid workers has been elevated to a governing principle.

These war crimes have been carried out within the framework of public declarations of genocidal intent, with Israel’s agriculture minister proclaiming “Nakba 2023” and its interior minister proposing the expulsion of the Palestinian people from the enclave.

Israel’s actions in Gaza are a “textbook case of genocide,” wrote Craig Mokhiber, former director of the New York office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, in an October 28 resignation letter. “Explicit statements of intent by leaders in the Israeli government and military, leaves no room for doubt or debate,” he wrote.

While the United States has for decades systematically violated international law, its open embrace of Israel’s actions against the people of Gaza under conditions in which Israeli officials are bluntly stating their intention to commit war crimes and genocide marks a significant new stage in the normalization of war crimes.

Throughout the past 50 years, actions by the state of Israel have been used to set a precedent for US policy. The most significant example is the doctrine of “targeted killing,” that is, state-sanctioned assassination. “Israel has used assassination and targeted-killing more than any other country in the West,” noted Israeli investigative journalist Ronen Bergman in 2018.

On September 17, 1948, a group of Zionist terrorists ambushed and killed the Swedish mediator for the United Nations, Count Folke Bernadotte, in Jerusalem. Yitzhak Shamir, who later became Prime Minister of Israel, played a role in the approval and planning of Bernadotte’s assassination.

In November 2000, Israel became the first state in the world to “openly acknowledge that it operated a policy of targeted killing,” wrote Nils Meltzer, who served as United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, in 2009. Soon after, the United States moved “to openly adopt the method of targeted killing.”

“The term ‘targeted killing,’” writes Meltzer, “denotes the use of lethal force attributable to a subject of international law with the intent, premeditation and deliberation to kill individually selected persons who are not in the physical custody of those targeting them.”

The US conducted its first known drone strike outside a war zone in Yemen in 2002. In 2011, US-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and his son, both US citizens, were killed in separate drone strikes in Yemen. In 2020, a US drone strike in Iraq killed Qasem Soleimani, a high-ranking Iranian military official, while on an official visit to Iraq.

As with the adoption of “targeted killing,” the war crimes now being committed by Israel will become the new baseline for even greater crimes by the United States and other imperialist powers. This is the significance of their open acceptance of Israel’s genocide and war crimes.

The US is engaged in escalating global warfare—an intensifying war against Russia, preparations for war with Iran and China—which will require violence on an unprecedented scale. The crimes Israel is perpetrating, including the mass murder and forced displacement of an entire population, are setting a precedent for the use of homicidal violence, including the use of nuclear weapons. The ruling classes aim to desensitize the population to the prospect of hundreds of thousands, or even millions, being killed.

But the war abroad is a war at home. Facing a mounting strike movement and mass protests against the slaughter in Gaza, the American ruling class will increasingly use the tools of mass terror against urban populations, being pioneered in Gaza, against mounting internal opposition.

The events in Gaza are a warning: The imperialist ruling classes, desperate and cornered, will stop at nothing to secure their global interests, including mass murder. The future of humanity requires breaking the stranglehold of the financial oligarchy over society, which requires the building of a mass socialist movement of the working class.

Originally published in WSWS.ORG

16 November 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Rupa Marya and Vijay Prashad

On November 11, 2023, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) stated that Israeli tanks were within twenty meters of the al-Quds hospital, the second-largest hospital in Gaza City. They reported that there was “direct shooting at the hospital, creating a state of extreme panic and fear among 14,000 displaced people.” Many of those killed have been medical personnel. A group called Healthcare Workers Watch-Palestine, formed in November 2023, has been keeping a list of healthcare workers in Gaza killed by Israeli attacks (226 are known to have been killed from October 7 till November 13).

The day before, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) reported that the PRCS is “caring for hundreds of injured people and bed-ridden, long-term patients” at al-Quds. “Evacuating patients, including those in intensive care, on life-support, and babies in incubators, is close to, if not impossible in the current situation,” said the IFRC. This and other hospitals as well as medical missions and medical workers “are protected under international humanitarian law,” noted the IFRC. The legal framework they referred to is straightforward:

1. Article 19 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions (Protection of medical units and establishments). “Fixed establishments and mobile medical units of the Medical Service may in no circumstances be attacked, but shall at all times be respected and protected by the Parties to the conflict.”

2. Rule 25 of the International Humanitarian Law (Medical Personnel). “Medical personnel exclusively assigned to medical duties must be respected and protected in all circumstances.”

Two similar phrases in both the Article and the Rule stand out: “in no circumstances” must the protection be withdrawn, and medical workers must be protected “in all circumstances.” Humanitarian law applies to all parts of the world and all conflicts. This is now established by the Treaty of Rome (2002), which is the legal basis for the International Criminal Court. The Treaty of Rome says that it is a war crime if an army is “intentionally directing attacks against buildings,” including “hospitals and places where the sick and wounded are collected.” There is one exception: “provided they are not military objectives.” By claiming that the hospitals are above Hamas tunnels, the Israelis are claiming that the entire medical infrastructure in Gaza is a military target. This is a convenient way to skirt the absoluteness of international humanitarian law.

In the coming days, we can expect the Israeli propaganda machine to pump out images of IDF soldiers in the tunnels under decimated hospitals holding up guns and copies of Mein Kampf to counter the horrific real-time images of premature babies dying. While these are attempts to justify murdering healthcare workers and the patients they were caring for, they won’t hold up against International Humanitarian Law. Israel has a documented history of bombing hospitals and other healthcare facilities in Gaza, and any doctor versed in patient care quality and safety would insist that underground spaces were constructed to conduct patient care far from the shrapnel of these air strikes.

‘At All Costs’

Across the world on November 11, the American Medical Association (AMA) held a meeting of its House of Delegates while these terrible acts took place. When over 135 medical students and doctors in training in the AMA tried to hold a discussion about a resolution that would call for a ceasefire in Gaza, the AMA leadership shut them down. Those who supported the effort said that there was a “coordinated effort at the national meeting to shut the resolution down, with the Speaker not allowing delegates their allotted 90 seconds to speak about the resolution.” The AMA said that this resolution was “not relevant to advocacy.” “The AMA,” wrote the medical personnel who framed the resolution, “has a responsibility to uphold the wellbeing of healthcare workers and minimize human suffering, and it is clear that these values are not being upheld by some of the most influential physicians in the country, nor is the democratic process being respected.”

This stands in stark contrast to the AMA’s official position on Ukraine in 2022, when they threw their institutional weight behind a call for an immediate ceasefire and an end to Russian attacks on healthcare workers and facilities, emphasizing that international humanitarian and human rights laws must be and civilian and medical personnel lives must be protected “at all costs.”

Every Life Is Sacred

A few days before the House of Delegates meeting, the flagship journal of the AMA, the Journal of the AMA (JAMA), published an article by Dr. Matthew Wynia from the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado and the co-chair of the AMA’s Taskforce on Truth, Reconciliation, Healing, and Transformation. His article “Health Professionals and War in the Middle East” makes three unimpeachable points:

– First, health professionals should condemn dehumanization and acts of genocide.

– Second, health professionals should vigorously oppose both antisemitism and anti-Muslim hatred.

– Third, health professionals have special responsibilities to speak out against certain war crimes.

We concur with all three of these points, including the final sentiment by Dr. Wynia: “In wartime, our profession must remain the living embodiment of religious injunctions to treat every life as sacred, because to save a single life is to save an entire world.”

Dr. Wynia’s article in JAMA, published a few days before the AMA meeting, suggests that it would have been uncontroversial for the AMA to pass a resolution asking for a ceasefire. After all, a ceasefire would allow fellow medical workers to do their work without fear of bombardment, it would stop the killing of civilians, and it would allow for investigation into the attacks on medical facilities and medical workers. If “every life is sacred,” then a medical body must join in the call to prevent any further loss of innocent life. But this is not what happened at the AMA meeting, whose refusal to open the floor for discussion about a ceasefire resolution suggests the opposite approach.

A closer reading of Dr. Wynia’s article shows why medical professionals decided not to allow even a discussion of a ceasefire in Gaza. “Health professionals of goodwill and equally strong commitments to human rights have differing questions on these questions, which reflects the nature of the questions,” Dr. Wynia writes. Introducing moral relativism to the discussion, Dr. Wynia allows for ambiguity where there is none—none in legal terms and none in moral terms. How can “health professionals of goodwill” have a disagreement about the targeting of medical workers and medical institutions or indeed how can they disagree about the killing of civilians, including those who are injured and sick in hospitals? There is room for debate over what must be done when confronted by the evidence of attacks on medical workers and medical workers, but there is no ambiguity about their illegality and immorality.

Dying One by One

Israel has been spreading propaganda over the past several weeks about the presence of Hamas headquarters under one of Gaza’s hospitals—Al-Shifa—to inject a space of moral confusion around protecting healthcare workers and healthcare facilities. On November 5, a group of almost 100 doctors in Israel circulated a letter calling for the annihilation of all hospitals in Gaza, as if to sanction the IDF’s direct attack on the most sacred spaces of our profession. On November 11, Israel also bombarded the Al-Shifa Hospital complex with 1,700 sick and injured patients inside and about 50,000 displaced people sheltering in its courtyard according to Dr Ghassan Abu Sitta, a surgeon who was stationed there at the time. Israeli attacks have completely destroyed the hospital. With the power now out in Al-Shifa, 39 newborns in incubators are now wrapped in blankets, dying one by one. Perhaps this is whom Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu referred to when he said the “children of darkness.”

Israel’s attack on Gaza’s healthcare is an attack on the soul of the medical profession, for which JAMA has provided cover and the AMA supports through enforced silence. Why the American Medical Association can make such a blunt statement about Ukraine but want to remain silent about Palestine raises an important question: does the AMA advocate only for the issues outlined by the U.S. State Department or are these the opinions of the doctors who make up its membership?

Rupa Marya, MD, is a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, co-founder of the Do No Harm Coalition, and co-author with Raj Patel of Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice.

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

16 November 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

(by Prof. Mazin Qumsiyeh – Bethlehem)

11800 murdered civilians: men, women, 4600 children
But the victim we are told is the villain
Many a death certificate written before birth certificate
Yet, rotten governments western and arab procrastinate
No point to count the thousands rotting under the rubble
For no one has tools or equipment to go to the trouble
No counting of “unknowns” burried in mass graves
For there are still living injured after each of the shockwaves
The 27,000 living dead are injured many cannot be treated
For hospitals were bombed, medicine denied, and they can’t even be shielded
Hungry and thirsty they envy the dead
Children merely want to die having last meal fed
Or go to heaven where they can play
They hate the counting and feebly pray
To live to tell a story, realize dreams, maybe safety arrive
silence the bombs and keep hope alive

Tears stop

Facilities of medical service
Rendered out of practice
Al-Shifa (The cure) hospital was framed
With lies so it can be maimed
A pyrrhic “victory” for the offensive occupiers
Hapless patients, displaced people, doctors, nurses: all murders
Denied electricity, water, food, medicines, no place to go
Western hypocrites to a simple ceasefire, they say no
Many newborns off incubators die with feeble cries
Dialysis patients in agonies perish while humanity’s conscience dies

Breathing stops

Cancer patients with no treatment and even no morphine to ease their pain
thousands of pounds of amputated legs
But the injured will not be saved
All watch others die and then their turns come
Sickening is the smell of death and rotting corpses
Streets filled with dust and pieces of flesh

Heartbeats stop

45,000 tons of bombs (2 nuclear bomb equivalents) are dropped
An Israeli picture of a scene pathetically photoshopped
10 kg per person in Gaza… every few minutes a US supplied JDAM
Politicians in shiny suits paid by lobbies talk a sham
US bombs kill one every four minutes, a child every ten minutes
Are there red lines. No we are told there are no limits
Homes, schools, water tanks, restaurants, streets destroyed
Hospitals, universities, office buildings, bakeries leveled
No contending armies – this is genocide
Even animals and plants not spared – this is ecoside
And there is the endless “depleted” uranium shells
New incendiary on baby flesh for revenge and war bells

Is God silent?

A girl begs God for martyrdom to join her family – I am alone she scream
Another child is asked what he would do when he grows up.. he says we don’t dare dream
A burnt child trembles in shock voice quivering- her one eye to a doctor pleads
But the old Zionists watching stock prices care none but their greeds
Abducted men tortured naked and deprived of food, sleep, and water
Matter not to leaders interested in protecting the illegal squatter
Will the screams of mothers who lost their babies
Make men in 5-star hotels and conventions hesitate when they dip their pastries?
Make more than a statement of “concern”
For an ongoing holocaust to discern?
Let alone the drums of war on civilians stop?

Western media parrot endless lies
Pathetic talking points disproven yet fuel the slaughter as time flies
Massacres need a cover… Hamas will suffice
The truth we are told can be a sacrifice
For there are gas fields of Gaza to take
A new Middle East to make
Where there is no space for truth, justice, or even basic humanity
Where hubris replaces humility
Only space for greed, hegemony, and endless suffering
And the perpetuation of unipolar world worth ushering
Elbit systems worth more than the death of 13000
McDonnell Douglas worth the tiny death bags of 6000
When will the voice of jets scream
and the clank of money stream
get a ceasefire and make a child’s hurt stop? Lack of mercy stop?

Children of a lesser God must endure racism
A sacrifice at the feet of the Golden calf of Zionism
One more holocaust added to dozens before it for chauvinism
Crush the aspirations of 15 million Palestinians for the sake of imperialism
Remind me: Did the Nazis deny water and food to occupied cities?
Did the Americans besiege any Iraqi hospitals to make them cemeteries?
Is the new agent orange and napalm ‘white phosphorous’?
Does history repeat itself once as tragedy once as farce?

Will oppression stop?

Will genocide satisfy the injured pride of the “chosen”
Will it satisfy the guilty feelings of those in colonial times frozen
Comfortable on top of the world with an 5th strongest military
Or is it a terror organized army with a fake state, WMD and artilleries
Deir Yassin, Tantura, Jabalia and hundreds of other massacres since 1948
State terror from a state built on terror of Irgun, Hagana and Stern since 1921
To facilitate ethnic cleansing with eight million refugees considered not enough
Having established a “Jewish state” by trying to destroy Palestine is tough
How dare us call for return to a pluralistic society
How dare us show extreme anxiety

Will we dare stop Jewish supremacy?

The West Bank already started to be destroyed
Jenin streets and homes and another hospital besieged
Our fate will be like Gaza, the terrorist army warned
Beirut too soon and other cities will also be damned
for our “new Middle East” with Starbucks
Grow General Electric and all war stocks
The USA has got Israel’s back and gives the weapons to kill
American Taxpayers foot the bill

Will anyone signal stop?

Of the carnage, there will be survivors alive
They are also those who also watched it live
They will not be forgiving
They will not be forgetting
Keeping the hope alive for peace
They promise to work harder for the nightmare to cease

Who can make them stop?

Thank you Gaza for teaching us to care
Thank you Gaza for teaching us to dare
Thank you for awakening hearts and minds
Thank you for removing the blinds
Dropping the masks
Clarifying the tasks
Letting the sun shine through

Millions go out on streets, blocking roads and the US den of (Congress) thieves
For how can one stop anyone who believes
Some lose jobs and many get arrested
A small price to pay to get connected
Haunted by the pain of living
Feeling guilty when we are eating or drinking
As 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza denied such
And all they ask from us is not much
Stop your governments from supporting criminals
Who dare to call us human animals
(Actually animals are much kinder than many humans)

Genocide must stop

Until justice prevails
And the boat in Gaza sails
Until refugees return
And humanity gets a turn
Until apartheid is dismantled
And our olive trees get replanted
Until the Palestine Phoenix rises
Triumphant from the ashes
Keep the hope alive every day
We shall overcome someday

From the River to the Sea Palestine will be free

17 November 2023

Source: popular-resistance.blogspot.com

By Seyed Hossein Mousavian

After the 7 October Palestinian fighters’ attack, which killed around 1,200 people and led to hundreds of hostages being taken to Gaza, Israel responded ferociously.

It has dropped more than 18,000 tonnes of bombs on Gaza so far, killing more than 11,000 Palestinians – mostly women, children and elderly people – in a month of relentless air strikes.

A top UN official in New York recently resigned his post, calling the events in Gaza a “textbook case of genocide” in which western governments have been “wholly complicit”. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed that his country will not surrender until Hamas is eliminated.

As the horrific onslaught enters its sixth week, the issue of energy resources could add another layer of complexity to the ongoing war.

According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), significant reservoirs of oil and natural gas have been found off the Gaza Strip and elsewhere under the occupied West Bank.

“The Occupied Palestinian Territory lies above sizeable reservoirs of oil and natural gas wealth, in Area C of the occupied West Bank and the Mediterranean coast off the Gaza Strip. However, occupation continues to prevent Palestinians from developing their energy fields so as to exploit and benefit from such assets,” said the study conducted by UNCTAD in 2019.

In this context, the issue of sovereignty over Gaza’s gas fields is vital for Israel.

The Oslo II Accord signed in 1995 gave the Palestinian Authorities (PA) maritime jurisdiction over its waters up to 20 nautical miles from the coast, therefore, the PA signed a 25-year contract for gas exploration with the British Gas Group (BGG) in November 1999.

In 2000, two wells drilled by British Gas off the coast of Gaza revealed gas reserves estimated at 1.4 trillion cubic feet. Sixty percent of those reserves belong to Palestinians.

In July 2000, the Israeli prime minister granted BGG security authorisation to drill the first well, Marine 1, as part of political recognition by Israel that the well was under PA jurisdiction.

Opportunity for collaboration

After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Europe tried to secure alternatives to Russian energy supplies, and revived a Palestinian initiative to extract natural gas off the coast of Gaza. It was hoped that the $1.4bn project – involving the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, Israel and Hamas – could launch gas production by March 2024.

Such a project could have laid the groundwork for a win-win collaboration between the Palestinians and Israel.

But as the Israel-Palestine conflict has dramatically escalated in recent weeks, that no longer appears to be on the horizon, with the project frozen for the foreseeable future.

Instead, on 29 October, as the war continued with no ceasefire in sight, Netanyahu’s government awarded 12 licences to six companies, including BP and Italy’s ENI, for natural gas exploration off the country’s Mediterranean Basin area.

The new resources of oil and natural gas finds in the Eastern Mediterranean are valued at an astounding $524bn. However, according to the UN report, a significant portion of the those assets will have to be sourced from within the occupied territory of Palestine.

In addition, during the G20 summit in New Delhi this September, the US and EU announced their backing for a plan to build an economic corridor linking India with the Middle East and Europe – a massive project to rival China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Netanyahu described it as “a cooperation project that is the greatest in our history”, adding: “Our country Israel will be a central junction in this economic corridor; our railways and our ports will open a new gateway from India through the Middle East to Europe, and back.”

Israel plan is to become a major exporter of gas and some oil. In the past 20 years, the country has been transformed from a net importer of fossil fuels to an exporter of natural gas.

Netanyahu’s October 2023 declaration of war on Gaza is a continuation of Israel’s previous invasion of Gaza in 2014 when at least 2,104 Palestinian were killed, including 1,462 civilians. The underlying military objective of the occupation of Gaza is the expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland.

Israeli defence minister, Yoav Gallant, has said the plan is to “eliminate everything” and another minister, Gideon Sa’ar, said Gaza “must be smaller at the end of the war”. Moreover, an Israeli government “concept paper” proposed to transfer the Gaza Strip’s 2.3 million people to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

However, the ultimate objective is not only to demolish Hamas and/or exclude Palestinians from their homeland, but to confiscate Gaza’s multi-billion-dollar gas resources.

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

This article is available in French on Middle East Eye French edition.

Seyed Hossein Mousavian is Middle East Security and Nuclear Policy Specialist at Princeton University, and a former Chief of Iran’s National Security Foreign Relations Committee.

15 November 2023

Source: middleeasteye.net

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky

Incisive and carefully documented geopolitical analysis by Richard Medhurst pertaining to the building of the Ben Gurion Canal linking the Eastern Mediterranean to the Gulf of Aqaba.

The Ben Gurion Canal Project was initially a “secret” (classified) U.S. project formulated in 1963 by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory LLNG, a strategic think tank (focussing on nuclear radiation) on contract with the U.S Department of Energy. The LLNG project was formulated in response to the nationalization of the Suez Canal in July 1956 by President Gamal Abdel Nasser (1956-1970). Its intent was to bypass the Suez Canal.

According to the “classified” document prepared by the LLNG (1963) quoted by Business Insider, July 2023, a strategic plan was envisaged:

“to blast an alternative Suez Canal through Israel using 520 nuclear bombs”.

The plan consisted in using 520 buried nuclear explosions “to help in the excavation process through the hills in the Negev Desert. The document was declassified in 1993”.  I have not been able to consult the “declassified” LLNG document.

The declassified document is acknowledged in Richard Medhurst’s video.

This U.S. plan, first negotiated with Israel in the 1960s is of utmost relevance to unfolding events in Palestine.

Its objective is to achieve US-Israeli Maritime Dominance against the people of the Middle East. In the context of a broader US-led Middle East War, the Ben Gurion Canal Project is part of America’s hegemonic military agenda. It is consistent with Netanyahu’s “Plan to Wipe Palestine Off the Map”: 

The Ben Gurion Canal will give Israel in particular and other friendly nations the freedom from blackmail arising out of access to the Suez Canal.

Arab states have been leveraging the Red Sea to pressure Israel and in response, Israel has decided to gain more control of the Red Sea. These African countries have cultural and economic affinities with the Arab states. One of the main military benefits for Israel is that it gives Israel the strategic options as the Ben Gurion Canal will totally take away the importance of Suez for the US military if needed in the aid for Israel.

Israel aims to push Egypt further into a corner by eliminating Suez in the global trade and energy corridor and becoming a global trade and energy logistics center.

Experts are of the opinion that this situation will shake the strategic-energy balance of China’s Belt and Road Project initiative in the Mediterranean, along with the Strait of Hormuz, which is the transfer point of 30 percent of the world’s energy. The Ben Gurion Canal would have the solid backing of the West. (Eurasia Review, November 7, 2023, emphasis added)

President Biden is broadly supportive of the Israeli led genocide. Visibly what is at stake is a U.S. hegemonic project which seeks the expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland and the appropriation of all Palestinian lands.

According to Yvonne Ridley:

“The only thing stopping the newly-revised [Ben Gurion Canal] project from being revived and rubber-stamped is the presence of the Palestinians in Gaza. As far as Netanyahu is concerned they are standing in the way of the project” (Yvonne Ridley, November 10, 2023, emphasis added)

While the project is contemplated by US-Israel as outlined by Richard Medhurst, the validity of the LLNG 1963 plan is doubtful to say the least.

What is revealed in Medhurst’s video is the U.S. military-intelligence strategy to use Israel as a “hub” in the Middle East with a view to securing the hegemonic control over strategic international waterways. 

In solidarity with the People of Palestine

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, November 10, 2023

***

According the Richard Medhurst:

“It will begin at the port city of Eilat and finish right next through, if not directly through, Gaza.”

Watch the video below.

Israel Destroys Gaza to Control World’s Most Important Shipping Lane

Richard Medhurst and Prof Michel Chossudovsky, source Richard Medhurst and Global Research

13 November 2023

Source: michelchossudovsky.substack.com

By Julia Conley

“Israeli doctors who signed a letter promoting [the] bombing of hospitals with patients inside have committed a betrayal to their noble profession and bear responsibility,” said a group of doctors in Gaza.

6 Nov 2023 – Physicians who have been working for four weeks to save as many lives as possible from Israel’s “complete siege” of Gaza, even as the healthcare system collapses around them, responded on Monday to a statement by a group of Israeli doctors who over the weekend called for the bombing of a hospital in the besieged territory.

“We as doctors are ambassadors of peace. We save lives,” said the doctors, led by Dr. Marwan Shafiq Al-Ham, director of Muhammad Yusuf Al-Najjar Hospital, in a statement. “Israeli doctors who signed a letter promoting [the] bombing of hospitals with patients inside have committed a betrayal to their noble profession and bear responsibility.”

The medical providers called on the World Health Organization and human rights groups that work in the healthcare field to help hold the signers of the letter accountable.

The weekend letter was signed by about 100 members of a group called Doctors for the Rights of Israeli Soldiers and was first reported Sunday by the Israeli outlet HaMedash.

The doctors claimed the bombing of al-Shifa Hospital, the largest medical facility in Gaza, was a “legitimate right” of Israel because it serves as a base for “Palestinian armed groups.”

“The residents of Gaza saw fit to turn hospitals into terrorist nests to take advantage of western morality, they are the ones who brought destruction upon themselves; terrorism must be eliminated everywhere,” reads the letter. “Attacking terrorist headquarters is the right and the duty of the Israeli army.”

An ambulance convoy outside the hospital was bombed last Friday, with Israel claiming an ambulance was carrying Hamas fighters. Officials at al-Shifa said the convoy was carrying wounded civilians to Egypt via the Rafah crossing for treatment, as medical supplies are running extremely low in Gaza.

At least 15 Palestinians were killed and 60 were injured in the bombing.

The signatories of the Israeli letter, said the doctors in Gaza, are “fully responsible if, God forbid, something happens to the hospitals.”

Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), which has led protests against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza and has long called for an end to the country’s apartheid policies in the occupied Palestinian territories, said the doctors who signed the letter are “derelict in their duty” to protect human lives.

“We want to build a world that upholds the sanctity of life—equally, for everyone—not one that promotes the extermination of Palestinians,” said JVP. “And we won’t stop fighting until we get justice, for Palestinians and for all people.”

Al Jazeera journalist Sana Saeed said Israel’s bombing of hospitals and claims that they are terrorist targets has aimed to “dehumanize” medical workers as they’ve “put their lives on the line” for the more than 2 million people—about half of them children—who live in Gaza.

“We have sworn to protect human lives,” said the doctors in Gaza. “Therefore, it is not permissible to betray the oath and the profession.”

Julia Conley is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

13 November 2023

Source: transcend.org

By Jonathan Cook

It is journalistic malpractice for the media to still be repeating so credulously the Israeli military’s account of that day.

2 Nov 2023 – The BBC’s Lucy Williamson was taken once again this week to view the terrible destruction at a kibbutz community just outside Gaza attacked on October 7. As we have been shown so many times before, the Israeli homes were riddled with automatic fire, both inside and out. Sections of concrete wall had holes in them, or had collapsed entirely. And parts of the buildings that were still standing were deeply charred. It looked like a small snapshot of the current horrors in Gaza.

There is a possible reason for those similarities – one that the BBC is studiously failing to report, despite mounting evidence from a variety of sources, including the Israeli media. Instead the BBC is sticking resolutely to a narrative crafted for them, and the rest of the western media, by the Israeli military: that Hamas alone caused all this destruction.

Simply repeating that narrative without any caveats has by now reached the level of journalistic malpractice. And yet that is precisely what the BBC does night after night.

Just a cursory look at the wreckage in the various kibbutz communities that were attacked that day should raise questions in the mind of any good reporter. Were Palestinian militants in a position to actually inflict physical damage to that degree and extent with the kind of light weapons they carried?

And if not, who else was in a position to wreak such havoc other than Israel?

A separate question that good journalists ought to be asking is this: What was the purpose of such damage? What did the Palestinian militants hope to achieve by it?

The implicit answer the media is supplying is also the answer the Israeli military wants western publics to hear: that Hamas engaged in an orgy of gratuitious killing and savagery because … well, let’s say the quiet part out loud: because Palestinians are inherently savage.

With that as the implicit narrative, western politicians have been handed a licence to cheerlead Israel as it murders a Palestinian child in Gaza every few minutes. Savages only understand the language of savagery, after all.

Brutal tango

For this reason alone, any journalist who wishes to avoid colluding in the genocide unfolding in Gaza ought to be increasingly wary of simply repeating the Israeli military’s claims about what happened on October 7. Certainly, they should not credulously regurgitate the latest agitprop from the IDF press office, as the BBC is so evidently doing.

What we know from a growing body of evidence gleaned from the Israeli media and Israeli eyewitnesses – carefully laid out, for example, in this report from Max Blumenthal – is that the Israeli military was completely blindsided by that day’s events. Heavy artillery, including tanks and attack helicopters, was called in to deal with Hamas. That appears to have been a straightforward decision in regard to the military bases Hamas had overrun.

Israel has a long-standing policy of seeking to prevent Israeli soldiers from being taken captive – chiefly, because of the high price Israeli society insists on paying to ensure soldiers are returned. For decades, the military’s so-called “Hannibal procedure” has directed Israeli troops to kill fellow soldiers rather than allow them to be taken captive. For the same reason, Hamas expends a great deal of energy in trying to find innovative ways to seize soldiers.

The two sides are essentially engaged in a brutal tango in which each understands the other’s dance moves.

Given Hamas’ situation, effectively managing the Israeli-controlled concentration camp of Gaza, it has limited resistance strategies available to it. Capturing Israeli soldiers maximises its leverage. They can be traded for the release of many of the thousands of Palestinian political prisoners held in jails inside Israel, in breach of international law. In addition, in the negotiations, Hamas usually hopes to win an easing of Israel’s 16-year siege of Gaza.

To avert this scenario, Israeli commanders reportedly called in the attack helicopters on the military bases overwhelmed by Hamas on October 7. The helicopters appear to have fired indiscriminately, despite the risk posed to the Israeli soldiers in the base who were still alive. Israel’s was a scorched-earth policy to stop Hamas achieving its aims. That may, in part, explain the very large proportion of Israeli soldiers among the 1,300 killed that day.

Charred bodies

But what about the situation in the kibbutz communities? By the time the army arrived and was in position, Hamas was well dug in. It had taken the inhabitants as hostages inside their own homes. Israeli eyewitness testimony and media reports suggest Hamas was almost certainly trying to negotiate safe passage back into Gaza, using the Israeli civilians as human shields. The civilians were the Hamas fighters’ only ticket out, and they could be converted later into bargaining chips for the release of Palestinian prisoners.

Watch the video about 7 October YouTube would rather you didn’t see

The evidence – from Israeli meda reports and eyewitnesses, as well as a host of visual clues from the crime scene itself – tell a far more complex story than the one presented nightly on the BBC.

Did the Israeli military fire into the Hamas-controlled civilian homes in the same fashion as it had fired into its own military bases, and with the same disregard for the safety of Israelis inside? Was the goal in each case to prevent at all costs Hamas taking hostages whose release would require a very high price from Israel?

Kibbutz Be’eri has been a favoured destination for BBC reporters keen to illustrate Hamas’ barbarity. It is where Lucy Williamson headed again this week. And yet none of her reporting highlighted comments made to the Israeli Haaretz newspaper by Tuval Escapa, the kibbutz’s security coordinator. He said Israeli military commanders had ordered the “shelling [of] houses on their occupants in order to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages”.

That echoed the testimony of Yasmin Porat, who sought shelter in Be’eri from the nearby Nova music festival. She told Israeli Radio that once Israeli special forces arrived: “They eliminated everyone, including the hostages because there was very, very heavy crossfire.”

Survivor Speaks: Israeli forces shot their own civilians

Are the images of charred bodies presented by Williamson, accompanied by a warning of their graphic, upsetting nature, incontrovertible proof that Hamas behaved like monsters, bent on the most twisted kind of vengeance? Or might those blackened remains be evidence that Israeli civilians and Hamas fighters burned alongside each other, after they were engulfed in flames caused by Israeli shelling of the houses?

Israel will not agree to an independent investigation so a definitive answer will never be forthcoming. But that does not absolve the media of their professional and moral duty to be cautious.

‘Hamas as savages’

Consider for a moment the stark contrast in the western media’s treatment of events on October 7 and its treatment of the strike on the car park at Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in northern Gaza on October 17, in which hundreds of Palestinians were reported killed.

In telling contrast, the western media have not been willing to raise even a single question about what happened on October 7. They have enthusiastically attributed every horror that day to Hamas. They have ignored the reality of utter chaos that reigned for many hours and the potential for poor, desperate and morally dubious decision-making by the Israeli military.

In fact, the media have gone much further. In advancing the narrative of “Hamas as savages”, they have promoted obvious fictions, such as the story that “Hamas beheaded 40 babies”. That piece of fake news was even taken up briefly by US President Joe Biden, before it was quietly walked back by his officials.

Similarly, it is still a popular throwaway line among the western commentariat that “Hamas carried out rapes”, though once again the allegation is evidence-free so far.

We should be clear. If Israel had serious evidence for either of these claims, it would be aggressively promoting it. Instead, it is doing the next best thing: letting innuendo gently sink into the audience’s subconscious, settling there as a prejudice that cannot be interrogated.

Hamas undoubtedly committed war crimes on October 7 – not least, by taking civilians as human shields. But that kind of crime is one we are familiar with, one “ordinary” enough that the Israel military has been regularly documented carrying it out too. The practice of Israeli soldiers taking Palestinians as human shields goes under various names, such as the “neighbour procedure” and the “early warning procedure”.

Worse atrocities may have happened too, especially given the unexpected scale of Hamas’ success in breaking out of Gaza. Large numbers of Palestinians escaped the enclave, some of them doubtless armed civilians with no connection to the operation. In such circumstances, it would be surprising if there were no examples of the headline-grabbing atrocities being committed.

The issue is whether such atrocities were planned and systematic, as Israel claims and the western media repeats, or examples of rogue actions by individuals or groups. If the latter, Israel would be in no position to judge. Israel’s own history is littered with examples of such crimes, including the documented case of an Israeli army unit taking captive a Bedouin girl in 1949 and repeatedly gang-raping her.

Savagery would certainly not be a uniquely Hamas trait. Following the October 7 attack, videos have been emerging of systematic abuses of any Hamas fighters captured, whether alive or dead. Images show them being beaten and tortured in public for the gratification of onlookers, when there is clearly not even the pretence of information gathering. Others show the bodies of Hamas fighters being defiled and mutilated.

No one can claim the moral high ground here.

What the media’s uncritical promotion of Israel’s “Hamas as savages” narrative has achieved is something sinister – and all too familiar from the West’s long colonial history. It has been used to demonise a whole people, presenting them either as barbarians or as the willing protectors and enablers of barbarism.

The “savages” narrative is being weaponised by Israel to justify its mounting campaign of atrocities in Gaza. Which is why it is so important that journalists don’t simply allow themselves to be spoonfed. Far too much is at stake.

Hamas committed war crimes on October 7 on a scale that is unprecedented for any Palestinian group. But there is little more than Israeli narrative spin so far to suggest that there was an unparalleled depravity to Hamas’ actions. Certainly from what we know, it is hard to see that anything Hamas did that day was worse, or more savage, than what Israel has been doing daily in Gaza for weeks.

And Israel’s actions – from bombing Palestinian families to starving them of food and water – has the blessing of every major western politician.

Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, since 2001.

13 November 2023

Source: transcend.org