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By teleSUR

In Gaza and the West Bank, 11,517 Palestinians have been killed and 32,000 injured in Israeli attacks since October 7.

16 Nov 2023 – South African President Cyril Ramaphosa today called on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to launch an investigation into Israel’s war crimes in the Gaza Strip.

“We join many other countries and organizations in asking the ICC to investigate what is happening and, in fact, we can see with our own eyes in Israel,” the president said in statements to the press.

Ramaphosa said that “war crimes are being committed” and brought up the case of the Al Shifa hospital, completely blockaded by Israeli forces, without water, electricity or food.

In Gaza and the West Bank, 11,517 Palestinians have been killed and 32,000 injured in Israeli attacks since October 7. In this regard, Ramaphosa said that there is no precedent in the history of a war that has claimed the lives of so many innocent children in such a short time.

The president also denounced Israel’s flagrant violation of international law. “We abhor what is happening in Gaza, which has become a concentration camp and a genocide,” Ramaphosa said.

The South African president called on the international community to join forces for an immediate ceasefire and ensure the protection of civilians.

The South African government announced last week that it would withdraw all its diplomats from Israel for consultations in rejection of Israel’s unbridled aggression against the Palestinian population of Gaza.

South Africa and China strengthen political and trade relations

20 November 2023

Source: transcend.org

By Mairead Maguire

13 Nov 2023 – Talk World Radio
Making peace instead of wars in Gaza and Ukraine.

Talk World Radio: Mairead Maguire on Ending the Current Wars

Mairead Corrigan Maguire, co-founder of Peace People, is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment. She won the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize for her work for peace in Northern Ireland.

20 November 2023

Source: transcend.org

By Maha Nassar

What does the call “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” mean to Palestinians who say it? And why do they keep using the slogan despite the controversy that surrounds its use?

As both a scholar of Palestinian history and someone from the Palestinian diaspora, I have observed the decades-old phrase gain new life—and scrutiny—in the massive pro-Palestinian marches in the U.S. and around the world that have occurred during the Israeli bombing campaign in the Gaza Strip in retaliation for Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel.

Pro-Israel groups, including the U.S.-based Anti-Defamation League, have labeled the phrase “antisemitic.” It has even led to a rare censure of House Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian-American member of Congress, for using the phrase.

But to Tlaib, and countless others, the phrase isn’t antisemitic at all. Rather, it is, in Tlaib’s words, “an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence.”

I cannot speak to what is in the heart of every person who uses the phrase. But I can speak to what the phrase has meant to various groups of Palestinians throughout history, and the intent behind most people who use it today.

Simply put, the majority of Palestinians who use this phrase do so because they believe that, in 10 short words, it sums up their personal ties, their national rights, and their vision for the land they call Palestine. And while attempts to police the slogan’s use may come from a place of genuine concern, there is a risk that tarring the slogan as antisemitic—and therefore beyond the pale—taps into a longer history of attempts to silence Palestinian voices.

An Expression of Personal Ties

One reason for the phrase’s appeal is that it speaks to Palestinians’ deep personal ties to the land. They have long identified themselves—and one another—by the town or village in Palestine from which they came.

And those places stretched across the land, from Jericho and Safed near the Jordan River in the east, to Jaffa and Haifa on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea in the west.

These deeply personal ties were passed down over generations through clothing, cuisine, and subtle differences in Arabic dialects that are specific to locations within Palestine.

And those ties continue today. Children and grandchildren of Palestinian refugees often feel a personal connection to the specific places their ancestors hailed from.

A Demand for National Rights 

But the phrase is not simply a reference to geography. It’s political.

“From the river to the sea” also seeks to reaffirm Palestinians’ national rights over their homeland and a desire for a unified Palestine to form the basis of an independent state.

When Palestine was under British colonial rule from 1917 to 1948, its Arab inhabitants objected strongly to partition proposals advocated by British and Zionist interests. That’s because, buried deep in the proposals, were stipulations that would have forced hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs off their ancestral lands.

In 1946, the Delegation of Arab Governments proposed instead a “unitary state” with a “democratic constitution” that would guarantee “freedom of religious practice” for all and would recognize “the right of Jews to employ the Hebrew language as a second official language.”

The following year, the United Nations instead approved a partition plan for Palestine, which would have forced 500,000 Palestinian Arabs living in the proposed Jewish state to choose between living as a minority in their own country or leaving.

It’s in this context that the call for a unified, independent Palestine emerges, according to Arabic scholar Elliott Colla.

During the 1948 war that led to the formation of the state of Israel, around 750,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their villages and towns. By the end of the war, Palestine was split into three: 78% of the land became part of the Jewish state of Israel, while the remainder fell under Jordanian or Egyptian rule.

Palestinian refugees believed they had a right to return to their homes in the new state of Israel. Israeli leaders, seeking to maintain the state’s Jewish majority, sought to have the refugees resettled far away. Meanwhile, a narrative emerged in the West in the 1950s claiming that Palestinians’ political claims were invalid.

Future Vision

Palestinians had to find a way to both assert their national rights and lay out an alternative vision for peace. After Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the call for a free Palestine “from the river to the sea” started to gain traction among those who believed that all the land should be returned to the Palestinians.

But it soon also came to represent the vision of a secular democratic state with equality for all.

In 1969, the Palestinian National Council, the highest decision-making body of the Palestinians in exile, formally called for a “Palestinian democratic state” that would be “free of all forms of religious and social discrimination.”

This remained a popular vision among Palestinians, even as some of their leaders inched toward the idea of establishing a truncated Palestinian state alongside Israel in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem.

Many Palestinians were skeptical of this two-state solution. For refugees exiled since 1948, a two-state solution would not allow them to return to their towns and villages in Israel. Some Palestinian citizens of Israel feared that a two-state solution would leave them even more isolated as an Arab minority in a Jewish state.

Even Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip—those who stood the most to gain from a two-state solution—were lukewarm to the idea. A 1986 poll found that 78% of respondents “supported the establishment of a democratic-secular Palestinian state encompassing all of Palestine,” while only 17% supported two states.

That helps explains why the call for a free Palestine “from the river to the sea” became popular in the protest chants of the First Intifada, or Palestinian uprising, from 1987 to 1992.

Notably, Hamas, an Islamist party founded in 1987, did not initially use “from the river to the sea,” likely due to the phrase’s long-standing ties to Palestinian secular nationalism.

Two States or One?

The 1993 signing of the Oslo Accords led many to believe that a two-state solution was just around the corner.

But as hopes for a two-state solution dimmed, some Palestinians returned to the idea of a single, democratic state from the river to the sea.

Meanwhile, Hamas picked up the slogan, adding the phrase “from the river to the sea” to its 2017 revised charter. The language was part of Hamas’ broader efforts to gain legitimacy at the expense of its secular rival, Fatah, which was seen by many as having failed the Palestinian people.

Today, broad swaths of Palestinians still favor the idea of equality. A 2022 poll found strong support among Palestinians for the idea of a single state with equal rights for all.

Offensive Phrase?

Perhaps colored by Hamas’ use of the phrase, some have claimed it is a genocidal call—the implication being that the slogan’s end is calling for Palestine to be “free from Jews.” It’s understandable where such fears come from, given the Hamas attacks on October 7 that killed 1,200 people, according to the Israeli foreign ministry.

But the Arabic original, “Filastin hurra,” means liberated Palestine. “Free from” would be a different Arabic word altogether.

Other critics of the slogan insist that by denying Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, the phrase itself is antisemitic. Under such thinking, protesters should instead be calling for a Palestinian state that exists alongside Israel—and not one that replaces it.

But this would seemingly ignore the current reality. There is strong scholarly consensus that a two-state solution is no longer viable. They argue that the extent of settlement building in the West Bank and the economic conditions in Gaza have eaten away at the cohesion and viability of any envisioned Palestinian state

Further Demonization 

There is another argument against the slogan’s use: That while not antisemitic in itself, the fact that some Jewish people see it that way—and as such see it as a threat—is enough for people to abandon its use.

But such an argument would, I contend, privilege the feelings of one group over that of another. And it risks further demonizing and silencing Palestinian voices in the West.

Over the last month, Europe has seen what pro-Palestine advocates describe as an “unprecedented crackdown” on their activism. Meanwhile, people across the U.S. are reporting widespread discrimination, retaliation, and punishment for their pro-Palestinian views.

On November 14, George Washington University suspended the student group Students for Justice in Palestine, in part because the group projected the slogan “Free Palestine From the River to the Sea” on the campus library.

Principle, Not Platform 

None of this is to say that the phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” doesn’t have multiple interpretations.

Palestinians themselves are divided over the specific political outcome they wish to see in their homeland.

But that misses the point. Most Palestinians using this chant do not see it as advocating for a specific political platform or as belonging to a specific political group. Rather, the majority of people using the phrase see it as a principled vision of freedom and coexistence.

Maha Nassar is an associate professor in the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Arizona and the author of Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World.

19 November 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Countercurrents Collective

A Hamas health official said more than 80 people were killed Saturday in twin strikes on a northern Gaza refugee camp, including a UN school used as a shelter for people displaced by the Israel-Hamas war.

Social media videos — verified by AFP — showed bodies covered in blood and dust on the floor of a building, where mattresses had been wedged under school tables in Jabalia, the Palestinian territory’s biggest refugee camp.

“At least 50 people” were killed in a dawn strike on the UN-run Al-Fakhura school in the camp, which has been converted into a shelter for displaced Palestinians, a health ministry official in Hamas-controlled Gaza told AFP.

The army’s relentless air and ground campaign has since killed 12,300 people, more than 5,000 of them children, according to the Hamas government which has ruled Gaza since 2007.

According to UN figures, some 1.6 million people have been displaced inside the Gaza Strip by six weeks of fighting.

UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths denounced the “tragic news of the children, women and men killed”.

“Shelters are a place for safety,” he posted on X, formerly Twitter. “Schools are a place for learning.

“Civilians cannot and should not have to bear this any longer.”

A separate strike Saturday on another building in Jabalia camp killed 32 people from the same family, 19 of them children, the Hamas official said.

Israel has told Palestinians to move from north Gaza for their safety, but deadly air strikes continued to hit central and southern areas of the narrow coastal territory.

On Saturday, hundreds of people fled on foot after the director of Gaza’s main hospital said the Israeli army ordered the evacuation of the facility where some 2,000 people were trapped.

Columns of sick and injured — some of them amputees — were seen making their way out of Al-Shifa hospital towards the seafront without ambulances along with displaced people, doctors and nurses, as loud explosions were heard around the complex.

On the way, an AFP journalist saw at least 15 bodies, some in advanced stages of decomposition, along a road lined by heavily damaged shops and overturned vehicles.

The health ministry said 120 wounded, along with an unspecified number of premature babies, were still at Al-Shifa hospital.

Israel has been pressing military operations inside the hospital, searching for the Hamas operations centre it says lies under the sprawling complex — a charge Hamas denies.

In Gaza City, Israeli troops had called over loudspeakers to evacuate Al-Shifa “in the next hour”, an AFP journalist at the hospital reported.

They also called the hospital’s director, Mohammed Abu Salmiya, telling him to ensure “the evacuation of patients, wounded, the displaced and medical staff, and that they should move on foot towards the seafront”, he said.

According to Ahmed El Mokhallalati, a doctor at the hospital, “most of the medical staff and patients had left” but he was staying at Al-Shifa along with five other doctors.

Despite the evacuation order, “many patients cannot leave the hospital as they are in the ICU beds or the baby incubators,” Mokhallalati said on X.

19 November 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Phil Pasquini

In support of invoking an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, members from the American Palestinian Women’s Association, CODEPINK: Women for Peace, and members of Doctors Against Genocide descended on the Hart Senate Office Building November 16. The groups called on ten women senators — six of whom have received substantial campaign donations from American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) — to do everything they can to bring about a ceasefire in Gaza in ending the senseless slaughter there.

At each office, several activists spoke to attentive staff members imploring them to convey their messages, asking that the member vote in favor of an immediate ceasefire. They also provided a binder with photographs of victims in Gaza especially children, along with the names of 5,000 children killed to show compelling evidence of the horrific and brutal carnage the Israeli invasion has imposed upon so many innocent people.

Only Senator, Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) whose staff who was contacted by telephone refused to meet with the activists.

Outside of Senator Maria Cantwell’s (D-WA) office, speaking with a staff member, CODE Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin asked why the senator had not called for a ceasefire to which he responded: “She has not called for a ceasefire yet because that is not her position right now.” When asked why it was not her position, he said: “She has a different view, you know although she has not made a public statement, she is certainly talking to her colleagues and accessing what the options are. I have nothing else I can say about her position.”

That answer was challenged by a doctor who asked if her position was that “Israel has a right to defend itself” and if so to make it clear to Senator Cantwell that “under international law, Israel has committed a number of war crimes and right now as we speak, the ICC (International Criminal Court) is going to sue Biden and the Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense. The doctor reminded the staff member that under the Leahy Law “We (the U.S. by law) cannot not supply weapons to those who can possibly commit genocide and war crimes. So, all of the senators and all of the congressmen are under warning now that they can get sued. And they will be held accountable.”

“She should be on the right side of history and if she or you or any of you have ever questioned what you would have done during the Holocaust or during the Civil Rights movement, you’re doing it right now.”

Another doctor reflected that she likened the war in Gaza to a “genocide televised” with international media and online access. “If we can’t end this genocide with all this information, I don’t know what has become of us. Netanyahu cannot use this war for his own personal gain, these are people, they are human. Our hearts go out to the people and especially to the doctors in Gaza. They are our heroes and our angels.”

A member of the American Palestinian Women’s Association made the urgent plea to the senators’ staff members that she could not believe that “We are here pleading for your humanity,” that seeing images of injured and dead children on TV and babies dying “We have to speak up, we cannot stand silent for this. We have to stop the bombing of the kids, our babies (paid for) with our tax money. Noting that every five minutes a child is being killed, it is in our politicians’ hands to stop the war now!”

Another doctor described Israeli fliers being dropped on residents’ homes in Northern Gaza warning them to leave or they could be considered as “colluding” with Hamas and subject to attacks and bombing. “There are many of us who know people who do not have that ability to move. They have family who are disabled, they have family who are elderly, they have newborn children.”

“I don’t understand the concept of providing aid to allow for our tax dollars to provide bombs to create the victims…and then we are going to ask people to stich them up to try and save them. This is idiotic. It is insanity.”

Another activist conveyed a message from a Gaza resident to staff members in telling of cooking on open wood fires, that having canned food or vegetables were now a luxury and that having drinkable water now “…is like a dream. I see many people now on the roads holding their packs, their eyes tearing up at the memories they are leaving behind at the destruction of all their efforts over the years. I see children injured with muddy feet. Mothers running bare feet with their babies.”

The writer went on to say “Now I am on a roof when I look up at the night sky and see all the stars, I am enjoying them when I realize there is something abnormal about them. Normal stars don’t move around or turn off. I’m puzzled until I realize that my sky is full of unmanned war planes and drones. I wish that one day I will be able to stare at real stars in the sky without being bombed any second.”

The senators who were visited during the direct action are listed below. Those who have received campaign donations from AIPAC are shown with their total career donations reported in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs as of September 2022.

Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) $422,490

Maria Cantwell (D-WA)

Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) $573,073

Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) $742,311

Maggie Hassan (D-NH) $710,936

Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) $463,499

Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) $572,075

Kristen Sinema (A-I)

Tina Smith (D-MN)

Elizabeth Warren (D-MA)

https://doctorsagainstgenocide.org/

(This article has appeared in Nuzeink)

Phil Pasquini is a freelance journalist and photographer.

18 November 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Sonali Kolhatkar

Americans are funding a genocide and no one asked our permission.

We are being dragged, unwillingly, into a war that is decimating a people. We are being forced to become involuntary accomplices to mass slaughter.

Palestinians, on the basis of their legal right against being wiped out, have filed a major lawsuit against President Joe Biden’s administration for funding Israel’s ongoing pogrom in Gaza, one that has killed more than 11,000 people, including 4,700 children. Represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the plaintiffs include Palestinians who have collectively lost at least 116 family members to U.S.-funded Israeli military attacks.

The U.S. has sent Israel a total of about $317 billion in inflation-adjusted tax-payer money, which amounts to more than $4 billion annually. Almost all that funding has gone toward the Israeli military. Israel is the largest recipient of American foreign aid, receiving more money than what we give to far larger, far poorer nations, ones that have a far greater post-colonial claim to Western aid.

Now, the U.S. Congress and the Biden administration want to give even more of our tax dollars to Israel, specifically to continue bankrolling the unfolding genocide. They are quibbling over the political strings attached to the aid but are united in their desire to send the supplemental funds.

But, according to CCR, “The United States has a duty under Article 1 of the Genocide Convention to prevent and punish acts of genocide, an obligation the U.S. Congress made law in 1988.” It’s not just the number of dead Palestinians that ought to result in a withholding of U.S. aid but the fact that Israeli officials have been overt about their genocidal aspirations.

The lawsuit offers evidence of how various Israeli politicians have referred to Palestinians with dehumanizing language such as Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who promised that the “human animals” in Gaza would suffer the consequences of his order for “a complete siege on the Gaza Strip,” resulting in “no electricity, no food, no fuel.”

Days into Israel’s bombing campaign, United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese warned on October 14, 2023, of a grave danger of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, saying, “The international community has the responsibility to prevent and protect populations from atrocity crimes.” Referring to the first great displacement that Palestinians suffered, Albanese added, “There is a grave danger that what we are witnessing may be a repeat of the 1948 Nakba, and the 1967 Naksa, yet on a larger scale.”

At the time Albanese made the warning, Israel had killed 1,900 Palestinians.

A month later, on November 13, Israel’s Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter described his nation’s bombing campaign with a concise phrase, worthy of an operational name for planned genocide: “Gaza Nakba 2023. That’s how it’ll end.”

By then the official death toll of Palestinians was more than 11,000. United Nations experts warned that “the Palestinian people are at grave risk of genocide,” and, added, “Israel’s allies also bear responsibility and must act now to prevent its disastrous course of action.”

One journalist named Chris McGreal, wrote in The Guardian, “I covered the Rwandan genocide as a reporter. The language spilling out of Israel after the butchery of the Hamas attacks is eerily familiar.” McGreal also correctly called out U.S. elected officials such as Senator Lindsey Graham for picking up the pitchfork and joining the violent mob. “We are in a religious war here. I’m with Israel. Do whatever the hell you have to do to defend yourself. Level the place,” said Graham.

It’s a simple calculus: Israeli officials promise to wipe out people who they view as less than human, with the full blessing and financial might of the U.S. The predictable outcome is a fulfillment of their promises, one that is happening in real-time. Not only are politicians responsible for Palestinian genocide, but so too is the media for uncritically reporting on the explicit goals and desires of genocidal maniacs.

Why shouldn’t we believe leaders when they tell us exactly who they are and what they intend to do? History is replete with naïve denials of stated intentions to violate human decency even as crimes unfold in plain sight. Recall that when Donald Trump told the nation in 2015 that he would launch a white supremacist presidential bid. Media outlets refused to call him a racist until several years later after the damage was done and he was in the White House. Hate crimes surged against Black people, Latinos, Muslims, and Jews. It wasn’t until the summer of 2019 that media outlets finally decided it was okay to label him a racist—that too after much hand-wringing. About a year and a half later, Trump mobilized an attack on the U.S. Capitol in January 2021 in what legal experts describe as an “insurrection” by a majority white mob. Trump told us who he was. Mainstream media outlets refused to believe him until it was too late.

We’re seeing a familiar hand-wringing today. Take the New York Times’s insistence on using euphemisms like “extremist,” “incendiary,” and “inflammatory” to avoid describing Israeli officials’ language and the Israeli military’s actions as genocidal.

This type of discussion dilutes an understanding of Israel’s stated goal by attempting to grapple with the technical definition of genocide. For example, Omer Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University wrote in a November 10 New York Times op-ed that, “I believe that there is no proof that genocide is currently taking place in Gaza.” Still, Bartov admits that his “greatest concern watching the Israel-Gaza war unfold is that there is genocidal intent, which can easily tip into genocidal action.” (Notice how he doesn’t say “Israel has genocidal intent”—a common use of the passive voice to dilute blame.)

Countering this concern in comments to Vox, Raz Segal, an associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University asked, “How many Palestinians need to die for these statements [by Israeli officials] to be recognized as what they are?”

It is the job of journalists to warn against abuse, exploitation, and corruption, and to shine a light on power so that an informed citizenry can decide on the course of its government. Many journalists are indeed speaking out against sidestepping the responsibility to report on genocide. More than a thousand have signed on to a letter saying they “hold Western newsrooms accountable for dehumanizing rhetoric that has served to justify ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.”

That ethnic cleansing is in full force. CCR’s lawsuit is seeking an injunction to immediately block U.S. tax dollars from supporting Israel’s war in a concrete effort to block the genocide, or at least wash the stain of Palestinian blood off American hands. Meanwhile, public support for U.S. aid to Israel has dropped, with more Americans now opposed to the military assistance than supporting it according to a Reuters-Ipsos poll. Nearly 70 percent support a ceasefire.

International leaders, government offices, and media institutions, often ignore or deny genocides as they are unfolding, express regret after it’s too late, and then make promises of “Never again.” When warning signs of the next genocide arise, the cycle repeats. It’s up to us to stop it and we have that chance right now.

Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations.

18 November 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

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