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By Chris Hedges

Israel plays a cynical game. It makes phased agreements with the Palestinians that ensure it immediately gets what it wants. It then violates every subsequent phase and reignites its military assault.

16 Jan 2025 – Israel, going back decades, has played a duplicitous game. It signs a deal with the Palestinians that is to be implemented in phases. The first phase gives Israel what it wants — in this case the release of the Israeli hostages in Gaza — but Israel habitually fails to implement subsequent phases that would lead to a just and equitable peace. It eventually provokes the Palestinians with indiscriminate armed assaults to retaliate, defines a Palestinian response as a provocation and abrogates the ceasefire deal to reignite the slaughter.

If this latest three-phase ceasefire deal is ratified — and there is no certainty that it will be by Israel — it will, I expect, be little more than a presidential inauguration bombing pause. Israel has no intention of halting its merry-go-round of death.

The Israeli cabinet has delayed a vote on the ceasefire proposal while it continues to pound Gaza. At least 81 Palestinians have been killed in the last 24 hours.

The morning after a ceasefire agreement was announced, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Hamas of reneging on part of the deal “in an effort to extort last minute concessions.” He warned that his cabinet will not meet “until the mediators notify Israel that Hamas has accepted all elements of the agreement.”

Hamas dismissed Netanyahu’s claims and repeated their commitment to the ceasefire as agreed with the mediators.

The deal includes three phases. The first phase, lasting 42 days, will see a cessation of hostilities. Hamas will release some Israeli hostages – 33 Israelis who were captured on Oct. 7, 2023, including all of the remaining five women, those aged above 50, and those with illnesses – in exchange for up to 1,000 Palestinians imprisoned by Israel.

The Israeli army will pull back from the populated areas of the Gaza Strip on the first day of the ceasefire. On the 7th day, displaced Palestinians will be permitted to return to northern Gaza. Israel will allow 600 aid trucks with food and medical supplies to enter Gaza daily.

The second phase, which begins on the 16th day of the ceasefire, will see the release of the remaining Israeli hostages. Israel will complete its withdrawal from Gaza during the second phase, maintaining a presence in some parts of the Philadelphi corridor, which stretches along the eight-mile border between Gaza and Egypt. It will surrender its control of the Rafah border crossing into Egypt.

The third phase will see negotiations for a permanent end of the war.

But it is Netanyahu’s office that appears to have already reneged on the agreement. It released a statement rejecting Israeli troop withdrawal from the Philadelphi Corridor during the first 42-day phase of the ceasefire. “In practical terms, Israel will remain in the Philadelphi Corridor until further notice,” while claiming the Palestinians are attempting to violate the agreement. Palestinians throughout the numerous ceasefire negotiations have demanded Israeli troops withdraw from Gaza. Egypt has condemned the seizure of its border crossings by Israel.

The deep fissures between Israel and Hamas, even if the Israelis finally accept the agreement, threaten to implode it. Hamas is seeking a permanent ceasefire. But Israeli policy is unequivocal about its “right” to re-engage militarily. There is no consensus about who will govern Gaza. Israel has made it clear the continuance of Hamas in power is unacceptable. There is no mention of the status of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), the U.N. agency that Israel has outlawed and that provides the bulk of the humanitarian aid given to the Palestinians, 95 percent of whom have been displaced. There is no agreement on the reconstruction of Gaza, which lies in rubble. And, of course, there is no route in the agreement to an independent and sovereign Palestinian state.

Israeli mendacity and manipulation is pitifully predictable.

The Camp David Accords, signed in 1979 by Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, without the participation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and Egypt. But the subsequent phases, which included a promise by Israel to resolve the Palestinian question along with Jordan and Egypt, permit Palestinian self-governance in the West Bank and Gaza within five years, and end the building of Israeli colonies in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, were never honored.

Or take the 1993 Oslo Accords. The agreement, signed in 1993, which saw the PLO recognize Israel’s right to exist and Israel recognize the PLO as the legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people, and Oslo II, signed in 1995, which detailed the process towards peace and a Palestinian state, was stillborn. It stipulated that any discussion of illegal Jewish “settlements” was to be delayed until “final’ status talks, by which time Israeli military withdrawals from the occupied West Bank were to have been completed. Governing authority was to be transferred from Israel to the supposedly temporary Palestinian Authority. The West Bank was carved up into Areas A, B and C. The Palestinian Authority has limited authority in Areas A and B. Israel controls all of Area C, over 60 percent of the West Bank.

The right of Palestinian refugees to return to the historic lands seized from them in 1948 when Israel was created — a right enshrined in international law — was given up by the PLO leader Yasser Arafat, instantly alienating many Palestinians, especially those in Gaza where 75 percent are refugees or the descendants of refugees. Edward Said called the Oslo agreement “an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles” and lambasted Arafat as “the Pétain of the Palestinians.”

The scheduled Israeli military withdrawals under Oslo never took place. There was no provision in the interim agreement to end Jewish colonization, only a prohibition of “unilateral steps.” There were around 250,000 Jewish colonists in the West Bank at the time of the Oslo agreement. They have increased to at least 700,000. No final treaty was ever concluded.

The journalist Robert Fisk called Oslo “a sham, a lie, a trick to entangle Arafat and the PLO into abandonment of all that they had sought and struggled for over a quarter of a century, a method of creating false hope in order to emasculate the aspiration of statehood.”

Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, who signed the Oslo agreement, was assassinated on Nov. 4, 1995 following a rally in support of the agreement, by Yigal Amir, a far-right Jewish law student. Itamar Ben-Gvir, now Israel’s National Security Minister, was one of many rightwing politicians who issued threats against Rabin. Rabin’s widow, Leah, blamed Netanyahu and his supporters — who distributed leaflets at political rallies depicting Rabin in a Nazi uniform — for her husband’s murder.

Israel has carried out a series of murderous assaults on Gaza ever since, cynically calling the bombardment “mowing the lawn.” These attacks, which leave scores of dead and wounded and further degrade Gaza’s fragile infrastructure, have names such as Operation Rainbow (2004), Operation Days of Penitence (2004), Operation Summer Rains (2006), Operation Autumn Clouds (2006) and Operation Hot Winter (2008).

Israel violated the June 2008 ceasefire agreement with Hamas, brokered by Egypt, by launching a border raid that killed six Hamas members. The raid provoked, as Israel intended, a retaliatory strike by Hamas, which fired crude rockets and mortar shells into Israel. The Hamas barrage provided the pretext for a massive Israeli attack. Israel, as it always does, justified its military strike on the right to defend itself.

Operation Cast Lead (2008-2009), which saw Israel carry out a ground and aerial assault over 22 days, with the Israeli air force dropping over 1,000 tons of explosives on Gaza, killed 1,385 — according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem — of whom at least 762 were civilians, including 300 children. Four Israelis were killed over the same period by Hamas rockets and nine Israeli soldiers died in Gaza, four of whom were victims of “friendly fire.” The Israeli newspaper Haaretz would later report that “Operation Cast Lead” had been prepared over the previous six months.

Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, who served in the Israeli military, wrote that:

the brutality of Israel’s soldiers is fully matched by the mendacity of its spokesman…their propaganda is a pack of lies…It was not Hamas but the IDF that broke the ceasefire. It did so by a raid into Gaza on 4 November that killed six Hamas men. Israel’s objective is not just the defense of its population, but the eventual overthrow of the Hamas government in Gaza by turning the people against their rulers.

These series of attacks on Gaza were followed by Israeli assaults in November 2012, known as Operation Pillar of Defense and in July and August 2014 in Operation Protective Edge, a seven week campaign that left 2,251 Palestinians dead, along with 73 Israelis, including 67 soldiers.

These assaults by the Israeli military were followed in 2018 by largely peaceful protests by Palestinians, known as The Great March of Return, along Gaza’s fenced-in barrier. Over 266 Palestinians were gunned down by Israeli soldiers and 30,000 more were injured. In May 2021, Israel killed over 256 Palestinians in Gaza following attacks by Israeli police on Palestinian worshippers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem. Further attacks on worshippers at Al-Aqsa mosque took place in April 2023.

And then the breaching of the security barriers on Oct. 7, 2023 that enclose Gaza, where Palestinians had languished under a blockade for over 16 years in an open air prison. The attacks by Palestinian gunmen left some 1,200 Israeli dead — including hundreds killed by Israel itself — and gave Israel the excuse it had long sought to lay waste to Gaza, in its Swords of Iron War.

This horrific saga is not over. Israel’s goals remain unchanged – the erasure of Palestinians from their land. This proposed ceasefire is one more cynical chapter. There are many ways it can and, I suspect, will fall apart.

But let us pray, at least for the moment, that the mass slaughter will stop.

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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.

20 January 2025

Source: transcend.org

By Benjamin Norton

BRICS added as a new partner Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, with the 6th-biggest population on Earth. BRICS+ now has 10 members and 9 partners, which make up 54.6% of the world population and 42.2% of global GDP (PPP).

19 Jan 2025 – BRICS continues to grow. On 17 January, it officially admitted Nigeria as a new partner country.

Nigeria has the world’s sixth-largest population, with the biggest population on the African continent.

In addition to being Africa’s second-largest economy, Nigeria is the number one oil producer on the continent.

BRICS expands to 55% of world population by adding Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country

With the addition of Nigeria, BRICS now has 10 full members and nine partners.

Together, the extended BRICS+ group represents 54.6% of the world population.

The 10 members are:

• Brazil
• Russia
• India
• China
• South Africa
• Egypt
• Ethiopia
• Indonesia
• Iran
• United Arab Emirates

The nine BRICS partners, which are on the path to full membership, include:

• Belarus
• Bolivia
• Cuba
• Kazakhstan
• Malaysia
• Nigeria
• Thailand
• Uganda
• Uzbekistan

Brazil, which is the chair of BRICS in 2025, announced Nigeria’s admission on 17 January. Brasilia emphasized that BRICS has two main goals: “strengthening South-South cooperation” and “reforming global governance”.

Indonesia, the world’s fourth-most populous country with the seventh-largest economy, was also accepted as a BRICS member in early January.

At the BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia in 2024, the organization adopted a comprehensive plan to transform the international monetary and financial system, by challenging the dominance of the US dollar and promoting trade and settlement in local currencies.

A map of BRICS membership, as of 19 January 2025, looks as follows:

BRICS KEEPS GROWING

BRICS+ is nearly 55% of the global population

Ten of the 20 most populous countries on Earth are part of BRICS, including seven of the 10 most populous nations.

Nigeria is expected to have the second-largest growth in population in the upcoming decade, after BRICS co-founder India.

Nigeria’s population is estimated to increase by 65 million from 2024 to 2037, and the country’s biggest city, Lagos, has been described as a candidate for “the world’s top megacity by the end of the century”.

The three most populous countries in Africa are now part of BRICS: Nigeria, in first, is a partner; while Ethiopia, in second, and Egypt, in third, became full members in 2024.

The extended BRICS+ family, with 19 members and partners, together comprise 54.6% of the global population.

This is according to IMF data from October 2024, which reported the total world population as 7.92 billion, and BRICS countries with a combined population of 4.32 billion. (Cuba is excluded from IMF data, so the actual figure is slightly higher.)

Africa will make up 38% of world population by 2100

Africa’s share of the global population is going to grow significantly in the 21st century. As Our World in Data reported:

In 2023, Africa is home to around 18% of the global population; by 2100 this is projected to rise to 38%. Asia will see a significant fall from almost 60% today to around 45% in 2100.

By the end of the century, more than 8 out of every 10 people in the world will live in Asia or Africa.

BRICS+ is 42.2% of global GDP (PPP)

Accompanying BRICS’ increasing population is its growing share of the global economy.

With Nigeria added, BRICS members and partners now make up 42.2% of world GDP, when measured at purchasing power parity (PPP), based on October 2024 IMF data.

Africa’s largest economies

Nigeria has the second-largest economy in Africa, after Egypt, which became a BRICS member in 2024.

The third-biggest economy on the continent is South Africa, which joined BRICS in 2010, just a year after it was initially founded as “BRIC”, by Brazil, Russia, India, and China.

Africa’s fourth-largest economy, Algeria, was invited to become a BRICS partner at the 2024 summit in Kazan, Russia.

The continent’s fifth-biggest economy, Ethiopia, also became a BRICS member in 2024.

Nigeria’s economy is larger than that of the Netherlands, when GDP is measured at purchasing power parity.

The economy of BRICS member Egypt is bigger than that of Australia.

BRICS is growing especially influential in global commodities markets.

Nigeria is the top oil producer on the African continent, and the 15th-biggest crude producer on Earth.

Five of the world’s top 10 oil-producing countries are members of BRICS. Together, they represent more than 30% of global oil production, and BRICS+ has significant overlap with OPEC+.

If BRICS can de-dollarize part of the global oil market, it can take a big step toward challenging the dominance of the US dollar.

_____________________________________

Benjamin Norton is an investigative journalist, analyst, writer and filmmaker.

20 January 2025

Source: transcend.org

By Palestine Chronicle

The ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel, set to unfold in three stages, establishes steps for military cessation, detainee exchanges, and humanitarian relief, ultimately aiming for Gaza’s reconstruction and lasting peace.

16 Jan 2025 – Below are the confirmed details of the Gaza ceasefire agreement.

The agreement includes provisions for improving the conditions of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, although Israel has refused to release senior Palestinian prisoners.

An Egyptian-Qatari committee will oversee the return of displaced persons from the southern Gaza Strip to the north.

Below are the key points of the ceasefire agreement, which both Hamas, as a representative of the Palestinian Resistance, and Israel have agreed to implement in three stages, starting Sunday, January 19, 2025:

Stage 1

This phase will last 42 days, with the following conditions agreed upon:

A temporary cessation of military operations by both sides, with Israeli forces withdrawing eastward, away from populated areas, to a zone along the border in all areas of Gaza, including Wadi Gaza (The Gaza Valley – PC). The withdrawal will be to a distance of 700 meters from the border, based on maps from before October 7, 2023.

A temporary suspension of Israeli air activity for military and reconnaissance purposes in Gaza, for 10 hours per day, and 12 hours on days when prisoners and detainees are released.

During the first phase, Israel will release approximately 2,000 prisoners, including 250 serving life sentences, and around 1,000 prisoners detained after October 7, 2023.

Return of displaced persons to their homes and withdrawal from Wadi Gaza, as follows:

After the release of 7 Israeli detainees, Israeli forces will fully withdraw by the seventh day of the agreement, from Rashid Street east to Salah al-Din Street, dismantling all military positions in this area. The return of displaced persons will begin, and freedom of movement for civilians will be guaranteed across all of Gaza. Humanitarian aid will enter through Rashid Street from day one without obstacles.

On the 22nd day of the agreement, Israeli forces will withdraw from central Gaza, particularly from the Netzarim Axis and Kuwait Roundabout, to an area near the border, dismantling all military installations. The return of displaced persons will continue, and freedom of movement will be granted across Gaza.

The Rafah Crossing will open seven days after the start of Stage 1, with the entry of sufficient humanitarian aid, relief supplies, and fuel through 600 trucks daily, 50 of which will carry fuel, with 300 trucks heading to northern Gaza.

Exchange of detainees and prisoners, as follows:

Hamas will release 33 Israeli detainees (alive or dead), including civilian women, soldiers, children under 19, elderly individuals over 50, and wounded or ill civilians, in exchange for the release of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails. For every Israeli detainee released, Israel will release 30 Palestinian children and women from prison.

In exchange for the release of 30 elderly and ill Palestinian prisoners, Hamas will release all living Israeli detainees who are elderly, ill, or wounded civilians.

Israel will release 50 Palestinian prisoners for each Israeli soldier released by Hamas.

The detainee exchange schedule in Stage 1 is as follows:

On the first day of the agreement, Hamas will release 3 Israeli civilian detainees. On the seventh day, it will release 4 more.

Afterward, Hamas will release 3 Israeli detainees every seven days, and all living detainees will be released before any bodies are returned.

In the sixth week of the agreement, Israel will release 47 prisoners from the “Shalit Deal,” who were re-arrested after their release in 2011.

If the number of living Israeli detainees released does not reach 33, the remaining number will be made up of bodies. In return, Israel will release all women and children detained after October 7, 2023, by the sixth week.

The detainee exchange process is linked to the adherence to the terms of the agreement, which include the cessation of military operations by both sides, the withdrawal of Israeli forces, the return of displaced persons, and the entry of humanitarian aid.

Palestinian prisoners released under the agreement will not be re-arrested for the same charges for which they were previously detained. They will not be re-arrested to complete the remainder of their sentences. Palestinian prisoners will not be required to sign any documents as a condition for their release.

The criteria established for the detainee exchange in Stage 1 will not serve as a basis for exchange in Stage 2.

Indirect negotiations will begin between both sides on the conditions for implementing Stage 2, no later than the 16th day of the agreement’s implementation. An agreement must be reached before the end of the fifth week of Stage 1.

The United Nations and its agencies, along with other international organizations, will continue their humanitarian operations across Gaza, and these operations will continue throughout all stages of the agreement.

The rehabilitation of Gaza’s infrastructure will begin, with the entry of necessary equipment for civil defense teams, and the removal of rubble and debris, continuing throughout all stages of the agreement.

The entry of supplies to build shelters for displaced persons who lost their homes in the war will be allowed, including the construction of at least 60,000 temporary housing units and 200,000 tents.

A larger number of wounded military personnel will be allowed to reach the Rafah Crossing for medical treatment, and the number of people allowed to pass through the crossing will be increased. Restrictions on travelers and goods movement will also be lifted.

Stage 2 (42 days)

Declaration of sustained calm, including the permanent cessation of military operations and hostile activities, and the resumption of detainee exchanges, including the release of all remaining living Israeli men in exchange for an agreed number of Palestinian prisoners.

Israeli forces will completely withdraw from Gaza.

Stage 3 (42 days)

Exchange of the bodies of deceased individuals from both sides after identification.

The implementation of Gaza’s reconstruction plan over the course of 3 to 5 years, including homes, civilian buildings, and infrastructure, with compensation for all affected individuals, under the supervision of multiple countries and organizations.

Opening all crossings and allowing free movement of people and goods.

_______________________________________

News Agencies, via Al-Jazeera – Translated and prepared by Palestine Chronicle Staff.

20 January 2025

Source: transcend.org

By George Lakey

The Global Nonviolent Action Database details some 40 cases of mass movements overcoming tyrants through strategic nonviolent campaigns.

8 Jan 2025 – With Donald Trump set to take office after a fear-mongering campaign that reignited concerns about his desire to become a dictator, a reasonable question comes up: Can nonviolent struggle defeat a tyrant?

There are many great resources that answer this question, but the one that’s been on my mind lately is the Global Nonviolent Action Database, or GNAD, built by the Peace Studies department at Swarthmore College. Freely accessible to the public, this database — which launched under my direction in 2011 — contains over 1,400 cases of nonviolent struggle from over a hundred countries, with more cases continually being added by student researchers.

At quick glance, the database details at least 40 cases of dictators who were overthrown by the use of nonviolent struggle, dating back to 1920. These cases — which include some of the largest nations in the world, spanning Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America — contradict the widespread assumption that a dictator can only be overcome by violence. What’s more, in each of these cases, the dictator had the desire to stay, and possessed violent means for defense. Ultimately, though, they just couldn’t overcome the power of mass nonviolent struggle.

In a number of countries, the dictator had been embedded for years at the time they were pushed out. Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, for example, had ruled for over 29 years. In the 1990s, citizens usually whispered his name for fear of reprisal. Mubarak legalized a “state of emergency,” which meant censorship, expanded police powers and limits on the news media. Later, he “loosened” his rule, putting only 10 times as many police as the number of protesters at each demonstration.

The GNAD case study describes how Egyptians grew their democracy movement  despite repression, and finally won in 2011. However, gaining a measure of freedom doesn’t guarantee keeping it. As Egypt has shown in the years since, continued vigilance is needed, as is pro-active campaigning to deepen the degree of freedom won.

Some countries repeated the feat of nonviolently deposing a ruler: In Chile, the people nonviolently threw out a dictator in 1931 and then deposed a new dictator in 1988. South Koreans also did it twice, once in 1960 and again in 1987. (They also just stopped their current president from seizing dictatorial powers, but that’s not yet in the database.)

In each case people had to act without knowing what the reprisals would be.

East Germany’s peaceful revolution

When East Germans began their revolt against the German Democratic Republic in 1988, they knew that their dictatorship of 43 years was backed by the Soviet Union, which might stage a deadly invasion. They nevertheless acted for freedom, which they gained and kept.

Researcher Hanna King tells us that East Germans began their successful campaign in January 1988 by taking a traditional annual memorial march and turning it into a full-scale demonstration for human rights and democracy. They followed up by taking advantage of a weekly prayer for peace at a church in Leipzig to organize rallies and protests. Lutheran pastors helped protect the organizers from retaliation and groups in other cities began to stage their own “Monday night demonstrations.”

The few hundred initial protesters quickly became 70,000, then 120,000, then 320,000, all participating in the weekly demonstrations. Organizers published a pamphlet outlining their vision for a unified German democracy and turned it into a petition. Prisoners of conscience began hunger strikes in solidarity.

By November 1988, a million people gathered in East Berlin, chanting, singing and waving banners calling for the dictatorship’s end. The government, hoping to ease the pressure, announced the opening of the border to West Germany. Citizens took sledgehammers to the hated Berlin Wall and broke it down. Political officials resigned to protest the continued rigidity of the ruling party and the party itself disintegrated. By March 1990 — a bit over two years after the campaign was launched — the first multi-party, democratic elections were held.

Students lead the way in Pakistan

In Pakistan, it was university students (rather than religious clerics) who launched the 1968-69 uprising that forced Ayub Khan out of office after his decade as a dictator. Case researcher Aileen Eisenberg tells us that the campaign later required multiple sectors of society to join together to achieve critical mass, especially workers.

It was the students, though, who took the initiative — and the initial risks. In 1968, they declared that the government’s declaration of a “decade of development” was a fraud, protesting nonviolently in major cities. They sang and marched to their own song called “The Decade of Sadness.”

Police opened fire on one of the demonstrations, killing several students. In reaction the movement expanded, in numbers and demands. Boycotts grew, with masses of people refusing to pay the bus and railway fares on the government-run transportation system. Industrial workers joined the movement and practiced encirclement of factories and mills. An escalation of government repression followed, including more killings.

As the campaign expanded from urban to rural parts of Pakistan the movement’s songs and political theater thrived. Khan responded with more violence, which intensified the determination among a critical mass of Pakistanis that it was time for him to go.

After months of growing direct action met by repressive violence, the army decided its own reputation was being degraded by their orders from the president, and they demanded his resignation. He complied and an election was scheduled for 1970 — the first since Pakistan’s independence in 1947.

Why use nonviolent struggle?

The campaigns in East Germany and Pakistan are typical of all 40 cases in their lack of a pacifist ideology, although some individuals active in the movements had that foundation. What the cases do seem to have in common is that the organizers saw the strategic value of nonviolent action, since they were up against an opponent likely to use violent repression. Their commitment to nonviolence would then rally the masses to their side.

That encourages me. There’s hardly time in the U.S. during Trump’s regime to convert enough people to an ideological commitment to nonviolence, but there is time to persuade people of the strategic value of a nonviolent discipline.

It’s striking that in many of the cases I looked at, the movement avoided merely symbolic marches and rallies and instead focused on tactics that impose a cost on the regime. As Donald Trump wrestles to bring the armed forces under his control, for example, I can imagine picketing army recruiting offices with signs, “Don’t join a dictator’s army.”

Another important takeaway: Occasional actions that simply protest a particular policy or egregious action aren’t enough. They may relieve an individual’s conscience for a moment, but, ultimately, episodic actions, even large ones, don’t assert enough power. Over and over, the Global Nonviolent Action Database shows that positive results come from a series of escalating, connected actions called a campaign — the importance of which is also outlined in my book “How We Win.”

As research seminar students at Swarthmore continue to wade through history finding new cases, they are digging up details on struggles that go beyond democracy. The 1,400 already-published cases include campaigns for furthering environmental justice, racial and economic justice, and more. They are a resource for tactical ideas and strategy considerations, encouraging us to remember that even long-established dictators have been stopped by the power of nonviolent campaigns.

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George Lakey has been active in direct action campaigns for over six decades. Recently retired from Swarthmore College, he was first arrested in the civil rights movement and most recently in the climate justice movement.

20 January 2025

Source: transcend.org

By David Hearst

Video: Gaza ceasefire: After 15 months of brutality, Israel has failed on every front

When push came to shove, it was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who blinked first.

For months, Netanyahu had become the main obstacle to a Gaza ceasefire, to the considerable frustration of his own negotiators.

That much was made explicit more than two months ago by the departure of his defence minister, Yoav Gallant. The chief architect of the 15-month war, Gallant said plainly that there was nothing left for the army to do in Gaza.

Still Netanyahu persisted. Last spring, he rejected a deal signed by Hamas in the presence of CIA director William Burns, in favour of an offensive on Rafah.

In the autumn, Netanyahu turned for salvation to the Generals’ Plan, aiming to empty northern Gaza in preparation for resettlement by Israelis. The plan was to starve and bomb the population out of northern Gaza by declaring that anyone who did not leave voluntarily would be treated as a terrorist.

It was so extreme, and so contrary to the international rules of war, that it was condemned by former Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon as a war crime and ethnic cleansing.

Key to this plan was a corridor forged by a military road and a string of outposts cutting through the centre of the Gaza Strip, from the Israeli border to the sea. The Netzarim Corridor would have effectively reduced the territory’s land mass by almost one third and become its new northern border. No Palestinian pushed out of northern Gaza would have been allowed to return.

Red lines erased

No-one from the Biden administration forced Netanyahu to rethink this plan. Not US President Joe Biden himself, an instinctive Zionist who, for all his speeches, kept on supplying Israel with the means to commit genocide in Gaza; nor Antony Blinken, his secretary of state, who earned the dubious distinction of being the least-trusted diplomat in the region.

Even as the final touches were being put on the ceasefire agreement, Blinken gave a departing news conference in which he blamed Hamas for rejecting previous offers. As is par for the course, the opposite is the truth.

Every Israeli journalist who covered the negotiations has reported that Netanyahu rejected all previous deals and was responsible for the delay in coming to this one.

It fell to one short meeting with US President-elect Donald Trump’s special Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, to call time on Netanyahu’s 15-month war.

After one meeting, the red lines that Netanyahu had so vigorously painted and repainted in the course of 15 months were erased.

As Israeli pundit Erel Segal said: “We’re the first to pay a price for Trump’s election. [The deal] is being forced upon us … We thought we’d take control of northern Gaza, that they’d let us impede humanitarian aid.”

This is emerging as a consensus. The mood in Israel is sceptical of claims of victory. “There’s no need to sugarcoat the reality: the emerging cease-fire and hostage release deal is bad for Israel, but it has no choice but to accept it,” columnist Yossi Yehoshua wrote in Ynet.

The circulating draft of the ceasefire agreement is clear in stating that Israel will pull back from both the Philadelphi Corridor and the Netzarim Corridor by the end of the process, stipulations Netanyahu had previously rejected.

Even without this, the draft agreement clearly notes that Palestinians can return to their homes, including in northern Gaza. The attempt to clear it of its inhabitants has failed. This is the biggest single failure of Israel’s ground invasion.

Fighting back

There is a long list of others. But before we list them, the Witkoff debacle underscores how dependent Israel has been on Washington for every day of the horrendous slaughter in Gaza. A senior Israeli Air Force official has admitted that planes would have run out of bombs within a few months had they not been resupplied by the US.

It is sinking into Israeli public opinion that the war is ending without any of Israel’s major aims being achieved.

Netanyahu and the Israeli army set out to “collapse” Hamas after the humiliation and shock of its surprise attack on southern Israel in October 2023. They demonstrably haven’t achieved this goal.

Take Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza as a microcosm of the battle Hamas waged against invading forces. Fifteen months ago, it was the first city in Gaza to be occupied by Israeli forces, who judged it to have the weakest Hamas battalion.

Israeli minister Ben Gvir calls developing ceasefire deal ‘surrender to Hamas’

But after wave upon wave of military operations, each of which was supposed to have “cleansed” the city of Hamas fighters, Beit Hanoun turned out to have inflicted one of the heaviest concentrations of Israeli military casualties.

Hamas kept on emerging from the rubble to fight back, turning Beit Hanoun into a minefield for Israeli soldiers. Since the launch of the most recent military operation in northern Gaza, 55 Israeli officers and soldiers have perished in this sector, 15 of them in Beit Hanoun in the past week alone.

If any army is bleeding and exhausted today, it is Israel’s. The plain military fact of life in Gaza is that, 15 months on, Hamas can recruit and regenerate faster than Israel can kill its leaders or its fighters.

“We are in a situation where the pace at which Hamas is rebuilding itself is higher than the pace that the [Israeli army] is eradicating them,” Amir Avivi, a retired Israeli brigadier general, told the Wall Street Journal. He added that Mohammed Sinwar, the younger brother of slain Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, “is managing everything”.

If anything demonstrates the futility of measuring military success solely by the number of leaders killed, or missiles destroyed, it is this.

Against the odds

In a war of liberation, the weak and vastly outgunned can succeed against overwhelming military odds. These wars are battles of will. It is not the battle that matters, but the ability to keep on fighting.

In Algeria and Vietnam, the French and US armies had overwhelming military advantage. Both forces withdrew in ignominy and failure many years later. In Vietnam, it was more than six years after the Tet Offensive, which like the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023 was perceived at the time to be a military failure. But the symbol of a fightback after so many years of siege proved decisive in the war.

In France, the scars of Algeria last to this day. In each war of liberation, the determination of the weak to resist has proved more decisive than the firepower of the strong.

In Gaza, it was the determination of the Palestinian people to stay on their land – even as it was being reduced to rubble – that proved to be the decisive factor in this war. And this is an astonishing feat, considering that the 360-square-kilometre territory was entirely cut off from the world, with no allies to break the siege and no natural terrain for cover.

Hezbollah fought in the north, but little of this was any succour to Palestinians in Gaza on the ground, subjected to nightly bombing raids and drone attacks shredding their tents.

Neither enforced starvation, nor hypothermia, nor disease, nor brutalisation and mass rape at the hands of their invaders, could break their will to stay on their land.

Never before have Palestinian fighters and civilians shown this level of resistance in the history of the conflict – and it could prove to be transformative.

Because what Israel has lost in its campaign to crush Gaza is incalculable. It has squandered decades of sustained economic, military and diplomatic efforts to establish the country as a liberal democratic western nation in the eyes of global opinion.

Generational memory

Israel has not only lost the Global South, in which it invested such efforts in Africa and South America. It has also lost the support of a generation in the West, whose memories do not go back as far as Biden’s.

The point is not mine. It is well made by Jack Lew, the man Biden nominated as his ambassador to Israel a month before the Hamas attack.

In his departing interview, Lew, an Orthodox Jew, told the Times of Israel that public opinion in the US was still largely pro-Israel, but that was changing.

“What I’ve told people here that they have to worry about when this war is over is that the generational memory doesn’t go back to the founding of the state, or the Six Day War, or the Yom Kippur War, or to the intifada even.

“It starts with this war, and you can’t ignore the impact of this war on future policymakers – not the people making the decisions today, but the people who are 25, 35, 45 today and who will be the leaders for the next 30 years, 40 years.”

Biden, Lew said, was the last president of his generation whose memories and knowledge go back to Israel’s “founding story”.

Lew’s parting shot at Netanyahu is amply documented in recent polls. More than one-third of American Jewish teenagers sympathise with Hamas, 42 per cent believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, and 66 percent sympathise with the Palestinian people as a whole.

This is not a new phenomenon. Polling two years before the war showed that a quarter of American Jews agreed that “Israel is an apartheid state”, and a plurality of respondents did not find that statement to be antisemitic.

Deep damage

The war in Gaza has become the prism through which a new generation of future world leaders sees the Israel-Palestine conflict. This is a major strategic loss for a country that on 6 October 2023 thought that it had closed down the issue of Palestine, and that world opinion was in its pocket.

But the damage goes further and deeper than this.

The antiwar protests, condemned by western governments first as antisemitism and then legislated against as terrorism, have created a global front for the liberation of Palestine. The movement to boycott Israel is stronger than ever before.

Israel is in the dock of international justice as never before. Not only are there arrest warrants out for Netanyahu and Gallant on war crimes, and a continuing genocide case at the International Court of Justice, but a myriad of other cases are about to flood the courts in every major western democracy.

A court action has been launched in the UK against BP for supplying crude oil to Israel, which is then allegedly used by the Israeli army, from its pipeline from Azerbaijan to Turkey.

In addition, the Israeli army recently decided to conceal the identities of all troops who have participated in the campaign in Gaza, for fear that they could be pursued when travelling abroad.

This major move was sparked by a tiny activist group named after Hind Rajab, a six-year-old killed by Israeli troops in Gaza in January 2024. The Belgium-based group has filed evidence of war crimes with the International Criminal Court against 1,000 Israelis, including video, audio, forensic reports and other documents.

A ceasefire in Gaza is thus not the end of Palestine’s nightmare, but the start of Israel’s. These legal moves will only gather momentum as the truth of what happened in Gaza is uncovered and documented after the war has ended.

Internal divisions

At home, Netanyahu will return from war to a country more divided internally than ever before. There is a battle between the army and the Haredim who refuse to serve. There is a battle between secular and national religious Zionists. With Netanyahu’s retreat on Gaza, the settler far right are sensing that the opportunity to establish Greater Israel has been snatched from the jaws of military victory. All the while, there has been an unprecedented exodus of Jews from Israel.

Regionally, Israel is left with troops still in Lebanon and Syria. It would be foolish to think of these ongoing operations as restoring the deterrence Israel lost when Hamas struck on 7 October 2023.

Iran’s axis of resistance might have received some sustained blows after the leadership of Hezbollah was wiped out, and after finding itself vastly overextended in Syria. But like Hamas, Hezbollah has not been knocked out as a fighting force.

And the Sunni Arab world has been riled by Gaza and the ongoing crackdown in the occupied West Bank as rarely before.

Israel’s undisguised bid to divide Syria into cantons is as provocative to Syrians of all denominations and ethnicities, as its plans to annex Areas B and C of the West Bank are an existential threat to Jordan. Annexation would be treated in Amman as an act of war.

Deconfliction will be the patient work of decades of reconstruction, and Trump is not a patient man.

Hamas and Gaza will now take a backseat. With the enormous cost in lives, every family has been touched by loss. But what Gaza has achieved in the last 15 months could well transform the conflict.

Gaza has shown all Palestinians – and the world – that it can withstand total war, and not budge from the ground upon which it stands. It tells the world, with justifiable pride, that the occupiers threw everything they had at us, and there was not another Nakba.

Gaza tells Israel that Palestinians exist, and that they will not be pacified until and unless Israelis talk to them on equal terms about equal rights.

It may take many more years for that realisation to sink in, but for some it already has: “Even if we conquer the entire Middle East, and even if everyone surrenders to us, we won’t win this war,” columnist Yair Assulin wrote in Haaretz.

But what everyone in Gaza who stayed put has achieved is of historic significance.

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

David Hearst is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye. He is a commentator and speaker on the region and analyst on Saudi Arabia.

15 January 2025

Source: middleeasteye.net

By Quds News Network

Occupied Palestine (Quds News Network)- Around 200 Israeli soldiers have signed a letter stating they’d stop serving in Gaza if the government didn’t secure a ceasefire. The soldiers acknowledged their involvement in war crimes, including the indiscriminate killing of Palestinians and the destruction of homes.

According to The Associated Press ( AP), while the movement is small, the soldiers say it’s the tip of the iceberg and they want others to come forward.

The move comes amid increasing pressure on both Israel and Hamas to reach a ceasefire agreement. Ceasefire talks are currently underway, with both President Joe Biden and President-elect Donald Trump calling for a deal to be in place by the January 20 inauguration.

Trump and Biden said on Monday that a ceasefire deal is “very close” and on the “brink.”

Israeli and Hamas officials also reported progress in talks ongoing in Doha, the Qatari capital, mediated by Qatar, Egypt, and the United States.

On Monday, Qatar handed Israel and Hamas a “final” draft of a ceasefire and prisoner release agreement designed to end the war in Gaza, an official briefed on the negotiations told Reuters.

A breakthrough was reached in Doha after midnight following talks between Israel’s spy chiefs, President-elect Trump’s Middle East envoy an

The Israeli military told AP it condemns the refusal to serve and takes any call for refusal seriously, with each case examined individually. Soldiers can go to jail for refusing to serve, but none who signed the letter has been detained, according to Soldiers for the Hostages, the group that organized the letter.

Crossing Ethical Lines

Seven soldiers who’ve refused to continue serving in Gaza spoke with AP, describing how Palestinians were indiscriminately killed and houses destroyed. Several said they were ordered to burn or demolish homes that posed no threat, and they saw soldiers loot and vandalize residences.

Yotam Vilk, an officer in the armored corps, told the AP that the image of Israeli soldiers killing an unarmed Palestinian teenager in Gaza is seared in his mind.

He said the instructions were to shoot any unauthorized person who entered an Israeli-controlled buffer zone in Gaza. He saw at least 12 people killed, he said, but it is the shooting of the teen that he can’t shake.

“He died as part of a bigger story. As part of the policy of staying there and not seeing Palestinians as people,” Vilk, 28, told the AP.

Vilk is among a growing number of Israeli soldiers speaking out against the 15-month assault in Gaza and refusing to serve anymore, saying they saw or did things that crossed ethical lines.

When Vilk entered Gaza in November 2023, he said, he thought the initial use of force might bring both sides to the table. But as the war dragged on, he said he saw the value of human life disintegrate.

On the day the Palestinian teenager was killed last August, he said, Israeli troops shouted at him to stop and fired warning shots at his feet, but he kept moving. He said others were also killed walking into the buffer zone — the Netzarim Corridor, a road dividing northern and southern Gaza.

Vilk acknowledged it was hard to determine whether people were armed, but said he believes soldiers acted too quickly.

Some soldiers told AP it took time to digest what they saw in Gaza. Others said they became so enraged they decided they’d stop serving almost immediately.

Yuval Green, a 27-year-old medic, described abandoning his post last January after spending nearly two months in Gaza, unable to live with what he’d seen.

He said soldiers desecrated homes, using black markers meant for medical emergencies to scribble graffiti, and looted homes, looking for prayer beads to collect as souvenirs.

The final straw, he said, was his commander ordering troops to burn down a house, saying he didn’t want Hamas to be able to use it. Green said he sat in a military vehicle, choking on fumes amid the smell of burning plastic. He found the fire vindictive — he said he saw no reason to take more from Palestinians than they’d already lost. He left his unit before their mission was complete.

“Moral Injury”

Some of the soldiers who spoke to AP said they feel “conflicted and regretful.”

Many soldiers suffer from “moral injury,” said Tuly Flint, a trauma therapy specialist who’s counseled hundreds of them during the war. It’s a response when people see or do something that goes against their beliefs, he said, and it can result in a lack of sleep, flashbacks, and feelings of unworthiness.

Talking about it and trying to spark change can help, Flint said.

One former infantry soldier told AP about his feelings of guilt — he said he saw about 15 buildings burned down unnecessarily during a two-week stint in late 2023. He said that if he could do it all over again, he wouldn’t have fought.

“I didn’t light the match, but I stood guard outside the house. I participated in war crimes,” said the soldier, speaking on condition of anonymity over fears of retaliation. “I’m so sorry for what we’ve done.”

15 January 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Aaron Kirshenbaum

Earlier on Wednesday, January 8th, I saw a prominent Zionist commentator and Twitter/X User post, “Has Greta Thunberg taken her keffiyeh off to address the fires in LA yet or are there too many Jews living here for her to be concerned?” The weird implications about a mythical antisemitic malice that climate activist Greta Thunberg has to supposedly fuel her anti-genocide and ecocide beliefs aside, the post is equally embarrassing in its lack of understanding about the exacerbators of Los Angeles’ most destructive fires in the metropolitan area’s history. Sadly, the disconnect that this post showcases is representative of many people and institutions, not only in explicitly pro-Israel spaces but also in the environmental movement. The US military is the #1 institutional polluter in the world. Cities across the country have been sacrificed by the local and federal prioritization of militarism and policing. Our endless wars have pushed forward the climate crisis, and now its catastrophic results are once again terrifyingly visible inside the belly of the beast.

For decades, the military-industrial complex has been destroying ecosystems, cities, and nations across the SWANA region for the sake of dominance in the oil industry. For 15 months, the US-Israeli bombing unleashed on Gaza has released insane amounts of fossil fuel into the atmosphere while poisoning the soil with each shell. Israel recently detonated an “earthquake bomb,” which some reports have suggested could have been possibly nuclear. The genocide in Gaza has devastated the ecosystem and will make agricultural survival in any eventual rebuilding effort extremely difficult. The war in Ukraine has resulted in explosions of the  Nordstream pipeline. Bases around the world, expanded for meaningless escalation with China, have resulted in soil contaminated with toxic PFAS chemicals, harming the soil. Biodiversity is at risk globally.

Forest fires are a natural part of California’s ecosystem. They are needed to survive. The long-time development in inevitable natural burn zones, combined with the suppression of these natural cycles for the sake of billionaire Malibu homes, has not helped this situation at all. This disregard for a balanced ecosystem has historically and continuously come at the expense of middle and working-class neighborhoods in LA vulnerable to preventable fires. The threat to LA is only further magnified by the extra dry air and almost 100mph wind speeds created by the war economy’s climate crisis.

This local neglect of the natural environment comes from a similar place as the Jewish National Fund’s planting of non-native pine trees across Palestine, often above bulldozed Palestinian villages, at the expense of crucial biodiversity. In both instances, the interests of the war economy that prioritizes those in power are what remain above respect for Indigenous caretaking practices and life. And the results in both cases are catastrophic. Amidst a world that has gone through imperialist ecocidal war for decades, the world’s biodiversity, much of which is in sovereign Indigenous land, has been decimated.

This climate-sacrificial militarism isn’t just on the international stage either. In Atlanta, the proposed “Cop City” police training facility is supposed to be built on the Weelaunee Forest:  sacred indigenous land also described as the “lungs” of the city. Not only does the forest provide crucial air quality, but it also acts as flooding protection. Recently, Appalachia and Atlanta suffered extreme flooding. Cop City will only make this worse as the forest is destroyed. Those prioritizing these military training facilities and exchange programs with Israeli Occupation Forces are doing so at the expense of the city itself. LA’s Mayor, Karen Bass, recently proposed allocating an extra $123 million to the police while cutting the budget of the fire department by $23 million. Now, the city is burning uncontrollably, and the fire department can only attempt to save residents.

This was avoidable. The flooding in Appalachia is avoidable. Future devastating flooding in a post-cop city Atlanta, NYC, and the entire coastal region is avoidable. Did anyone really think that we could continue to wage ecocide across the world without it coming back to us? Or prioritize militarism at home that trains with our genocidal proxy above human services? The fires in Gaza are the fires in LA. They are brought about by the same institutions and are fixable through overlapping measures. The former was intentional, and the latter is a ricochet. Both are devastating, heartbreaking, terrifying, and infuriating.

Climate organizations are warning about what the fires in LA represent. Some amount of federal funding left over from our shiny new nearly $1 trillion military budget will be allocated to helping the people of L.A. But the same organizations releasing these statements and the same politicians allocating emergency funds are the ones fanning the flames. Either by the silence that deliberately or neglectfully hides the crisis or warmongering that actively drives it further.

So no, Greta Thunberg should not “take off her keffiyeh” to talk about the fires. The only way to fight the fires is through the understanding that should come with wearing one.

_______________________________________________________

Aaron Kirshenbaum is CODEPINK’s War is Not Green campaigner and East Coast regional organizer.

11 January 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Quds News Network

Gaza (Quds News Network)- 203 Palestinian journalists have been killed in Israeli attacks since the start of the ongoing Israeli genocidal war in Gaza, according to Gaza’s Government Media Office.

The last victim was journalist Sa’ed al-Nabhan who was killed after being shot directly by an Israeli sniper while covering Israeli attacks in the Al-Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip on Friday.

Palestinian journalist Sa’ed al-Nabhan was shot and killed by an Israeli sniper while covering Israeli attacks in central Gaza on Friday, making him the 203rd Palestinian journalist to be killed in Israeli assaults since the start of the ongoing genocide.

Gaza’s Government Media Office confirmed Sa’ed’s killing, stating that he is the 203rd Palestinian journalist killed in Israeli attacks since the start of the ongoing Israeli offensive.

The office also condemned Israel’s killings of journalists, calling on the international community and rights groups to condemn Israeli crimes and prosecute them in international courts.

[https://twitter.com/QudsNen/status/1877785267211227572]

What Happened?

The Israeli forces first surrounded an area in the Al-Jadeed Refugee Camp, located in al-Nuseirat camp in central Gaza, where many journalists were present, before targeting those in the area.

Footage from the scene shows a wounded individual being rushed out of a house on a stretcher with the help of aid workers.

Nearby, Sa’ed is seen trying to run while covering the attack with his equipment. At that moment, he is targeted by what appears to be a shot fired from a long-range rifle.

He then falls to the ground and lies motionless. People nearby struggle fearfully to approach him due to the threat of being targeted by Israeli bullets.

Anadolu Agency recognized him as its freelance cameraman.

Last month, Sa’ed performed the funeral prayer for his uncle, Khaled al-Nabhan, the Palestinian man who became widely known after a video showed him kissing the eyes of his slain granddaughter and calling her “soul of my soul”.

[https://twitter.com/QudsNen/status/1878003060233949473]

[https://twitter.com/QudsNen/status/1878006672959971643]

[https://twitter.com/QudsNen/status/1878013695495680251]

[https://twitter.com/QudsNen/status/1878021923365409222]

[https://twitter.com/QudsNen/status/1877758131498786986]

The office condemned Israel’s killings of journalists, calling on the international community and rights groups to condemn Israeli crimes and prosecute them in international courts.

“Bloody Year”

Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has been considered the deadliest for journalists and media workers in the world in 30 years.

Critics accuse Israel – which banned foreign reporters from entering Gaza – of targeting journalists in the Palestinian territory to obscure the truth about its war crimes there.

“Deliberately targeting journalists is a war crime under international law. This attack must be independently investigated and the perpetrators must be held to account,” Programme Director at Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Carlos Martinez de la, said.

In a recent report, the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) described 2024 as a “particularly bloody year.”

According to the IFJ’s annual report, as of December 10, 2024, 104 journalists have been killed worldwide since January 1, with more than half of them in Gaza.

Seventy-five percent of all reporters killed in the world in 2023 were killed between October 7 and the end of last year.

IFJ Secretary General Anthony Bellanger described 2024 as “one of the worst years” for media professionals. He condemned the “massacre taking place in Palestine before the eyes of the entire world.”

In a separate report, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said Palestine is the most “dangerous country for journalists, recording a higher death toll than any other country over the past five years.” The report covers data up to December 1.

11 January 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Seymour Hersh

Gaza has become a killing field—that is the view of a well-informed Israeli veteran who was an enthusiastic supporter of the initial Israeli response to the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023. He believes that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the mastermind of the all-out retaliatory bombing and ground attack there, is now a contemporary Colonel Kurtz, the psychotic killer of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, the famed Vietnam War movie of 1979 based on Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness.

What began as a retaliatory war by the internationally revered Israel Defense Forces against a disciplined Hamas guerilla force turned into the systematic starvation of a society whose civilian survivors—men, women, and children—are the victims of an Israeli military whose combat units are often led by the second generation of Israeli settlers. These officers, increasingly prominent as the war in Gaza goes on, are religious zealot majors and lieutenant colonels who believe it is their calling to shoot and kill any Palestinian who moves, whether combatant or civilian.

There are more than 120 Israeli settlements in the West Bank, including fifteen in East Jerusalem. There are also more than two hundred illegal outposts that are supplied with weapons by the increasingly radical Israeli government while not officially sanctioned by that government. Violence against Palestinians in the West Bank has grown steadily, including Israeli Air Force bombing missions.

The IDF recruiting pattern explains the growing violence against Palestinian men, women, and children in the war. I was told that 40 to 45 percent of today’s higher officers in the IDF come from settler families in the West Bank who combine “deep religiosity with Netanyahu’s political fervor.’’ The Israeli veteran told me of watching in horror, with colleagues, as Israeli bombings and earth-moving machinery were continuing to, as he put it, “level” north Gaza and turn it into a dead zone. He said that there “have been more and more reports of colonels and even generals issuing orders to kill every Palestinian you see and destroy every building still standing. Israel’s war in Gaza has become fanatical. It’s apocalypse now. Killing for killing’s sake. It is corruption like never before.”

10 January 2025

Source: seymourhersh.substack.com

By Joseph Camilleri

Over the last fifteen months the world has watched in disbelief Israel’s horrifying military assault on the people of Gaza and its escalating use of force in the West Bank, Lebanon, and now Syria.

The inescapable question is: how do we explain this descent into barbarism? To begin to answer it, we must first put together several key pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, dreary and distasteful though the exercise may be.

The mounting human toll is indescribable. The latest figures released by the Health Ministry in Gaza indicate at least 45,129 people killed (including 17,492 children) and 107,338 wounded. Many thousands more are believed buried under the rubble.

UNRWA reports some 1.9 million displaced out of a population of 2.2 million, with some 380,000 displaced people currently sheltering in over 100 UNRWA school buildings across the Gaza strip. Shelter, however, remains illusory, as schools, hospitals and refugee camps come under relentless fire. And now we see the rising prospect of death through starvation and disease.

According to a report just published by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) “the signs of ethnic cleansing and the ongoing devastation – including mass killings, severe physical and mental health injuries, forced displacement, and impossible conditions of life for Palestinians under siege and bombardment – are undeniable.” All of which leads MSF to conclude that “genocide is taking place in Gaza.”

Nor has the West Bank been spared Israel’s unrelenting use of force. Between January 2023 and November 2024, Israeli attacks have resulted in close to 1,000 Palestinian fatalities and 16,000 injuries.

Following the escalation of hostilities with Hezbollah in September, Lebanon has been subjected to intensive bombardment and land incursions. As of early December, the death toll reached 4,000 Lebanese, with those injured numbering well over 16,600. With this has come mass displacement, destruction of entire villages, farmland and livestock and disruption of essential services, including healthcare facilities, water systems, and schools.

The fall of the Assad regime has provided the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) with the opportunity to launch hundreds of military strikes aimed at Syria’s strategic military assets. In violation of existing agreements, Israeli forces have moved into the demilitarized buffer zone between the Israel-occupied Golan Heights and the rest of Syria, occupying several villages.

It is, however, the exchange of fire with Iran that has brought the present conflict to new heights. On April 1, 2024, the IDF struck an Iranian consulate in Damascus, killing an Iranian commander and his deputy. Two weeks later, Iran retaliated by launching 300 missiles and drones towards Israel, many of which, but by no means all, were foiled by a US-led regional coalition.

Military hostilities continued with an explosion in Tehran which killed visiting Hamas leader Ismail Haniyyah. Weeks later Israel launched an air offensive into Lebanon killing Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Iran responded by firing some 180 ballistic missiles towards Israel. Then came a series of precise and targeted Israeli airstrikes on Iran’s air defence batteries and radar, missile and drone factories, and military launching sites.

How is this mayhem to be explained? What is it that has driven the State of Israel to unleash such a catastrophic use of firepower?

The official explanation offered by the Israeli political-military establishment is simple enough. Israel is exercising its right to defend itself in the wake of the Hamas attack on 7 October.

The actions of Hamas that led to the deaths of many Israelis and the taking of over 200 hostages were abominable, and those responsible had to be brought to account. But the events of 7 October offer no justification and certainly no explanation for what has ensued.

Why is it that Israel’s response has been so brutal, so lacking in humanity, seemingly incapable of distinguishing between civilian and military targets? Why has it lasted so long, spread far beyond the Palestinian territories to engulf Lebanon, Syria, and even Yemen and Iraq?

Another explanation on offer is that the Netanyahu government, dependent as it is on a precarious coalition that includes extremist elements with strong fascist tendencies, has been consumed by a lust for blood, a desire to wipe out the Palestinian adversary once and for all, and so bring the Zionist project to its final and irreversible conclusion.

There is something to be said for this explanation. Zionism was born historically as a reaction to the longstanding oppression and persecution endured by Jewish minorities in Europe. In this sense, Christian antisemitism has much to answer for.

But once it was given the all-clear by the imperial power, Britain, the Zionist project soon assumed a profile which, notwithstanding subtle variations over time, is best characterised as settler colonialism.

A report published by Amnesty International in February 2022 sets out how the State of Israel has over several decades built an Apartheid system of oppression and domination involving massive seizures of Palestinian land and property, unlawful killings, forcible transfer, drastic movement restrictions, and the denial of nationality and citizenship to Palestinians.

Perhaps, the Hamas attack generated a fear that this system of oppression was now under serious threat. Alternatively, the governing elite may have concluded that this was a never to be repeated opportunity not just to eliminate the Hamas virus once and for all, but to extinguish any prospect of Palestinian self-determination and the creation of a Palestinian state.

The historical context no doubt offers useful insights, but of itself is not an adequate or comprehensive explanation. There is a missing link, and that link is Iran.

The Israeli establishment has developed an obsessive fear of Iran, precisely because of its perceived capacity to support in military, political and other ways the many groups that are deeply hostile to the Zionist project, not least Hamas and Hezbollah.

It was therefore critically important to counter the Iranian threat, first by administering a crippling blow on Hamas and Hezbollah, which explains the savage forays into Gaza and Lebanon, but also on Syria’s military assets, given its longstanding connection with Iran. Much the same can be said for Israel’s hostility to Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen.

This said, Israel would not have been able to move as ferociously as it has without US support, which it has had in full measure throughout.

Why has the United States refused to apply any meaningful brakes on Israel’s military fury? Why has it continued to provide vital economic support and military protection, in the face of war crimes and plausibly the crime of genocide?

Because successive US administrations have regarded Israel as an irreplaceable asset in their determined effort to maintain geopolitical dominance in the Middle East, a region they consider to be of paramount economic and strategic importance. Iran stands as the principal threat to that objective, especially as it develops closer links with Russia, China and other members of the rapidly expanding BRICS bloc.

Here then was an unparallelled opportunity to use Israel as the proxy that would deliver the coup de grâce to Iran’s geopolitical ambitions and to the effectiveness of the axis of resistance.

At face value, it would appear that the imperial power and its sub-imperial protégé have triumphed. But not all is at it seems. In the course of the last fifteen months Israel has become a pariah state.

UN General Assembly resolutions, driven by an increasingly assertive Global South, have sharpened their denunciation of Israel’s conduct and by ever larger majorities. The UN Secretary-General and every relevant UN agency have condemned with unusual vigour Israel’s flouting of international law and the basic standards of civilised conduct.

To this must be added the adverse judgments of the International Court of Justice and the recent decision of the International Criminal Court to issue warrants of arrest for Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant.

Many US allies in Europe and elsewhere, including Australia, are increasingly uneasy with America’s unquestioning support of Israel and are now prepared to break ranks with the US when voting on UN Security Council and General Assembly resolutions.

Especially telling has been the shift in public opinion in much of the Western world, where support for the Palestinian cause has gathered pace, and is steadily gaining prominence in university campuses and in the electoral arena.

The fluidity of Middle East and global politics is now on full display. So is the uncertainty that pervades the future of US politics.

Nothing that has happened since October 2023 is likely to enhance Israeli security. The State of Israel remains imprisoned in a decidedly hostile neighbourhood. As for Israel’s economy, it is already paying a high price for its skyrocketing defence expenditure.

The goal of Palestinian self-determination may seem distant, but the Zionist project is more fragile than many would care to think.

Joseph Camilleri is Emeritus Professor at La Trobe University in Melbourne, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences, Convener of Conversation at the Crossroads, and Co-Convener of SHAPE (Saving Humanity and Planet Earth). He is also a member of the JUST International Advisory Panel (IAP).

22 December 2024

Source: countercurrents.org