Just International

Yanis Varoufakis Blasts Europe’s Complicity in Genocide

By Yanis Varoufakis

“In Germany today you can only talk about Genocide if you support it.”

Yanis Varoufakis BLASTS Europe’s Complicity in Genocide

Yanis Varoufakis, a member of the Greek Parliament and a former finance minister of Greece, is leader of the MeRA25 Party, professor of economics at the University of Athens, and co-founder of DiEM25 (Democracy in Europe Movement). He is the author of ‘And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe’s Crisis and America’s Economic Future’; ‘Adults in the Room: My Battle with the European and American Deep Establishment’; and, most recently, the novel ‘Another Now’.

11 March 2024

Source: transcend.org

Canada and Sweden Restore UNRWA Funds as Report Accuses Israel of Torturing Agency Staff

By Jon Queally

“The work that UNWRA does cannot be overstated,” said Canadian lawmaker Salma Zahid. “It will save lives as we have seen the visuals of children dying of hunger in Gaza. The need for immediate aid is non-negotiable.”

9 Mar 2024 – The governments of Canada and Sweden have announced they will resume funding for the United Nation’s agency that provides humanitarian aide and protection to Palestinians living in Gaza and elsewhere—a move that other powerful nations, including Israel’s most powerful ally the United States, continue to refuse.

Calling the lack of humanitarian relief inside Gaza “catastrophic,” Canadian Minister of International Development Ahmed Hussen said Friday his nation would restore funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) in order to help address the “dire” situation on the ground living.

Sweden made its announcement Saturday and said a $20 million disbursement would be made to help UNRWA regain its financial footing.

The restoration of funds follows weeks of global criticism and protest for the decision by many Western nations to withhold UNRWA funds after Israel claimed, without presenting evidence, that a few members of the agency—the largest employer in the Gaza Strip—had participated in the Hamas-led attacks of October 7.

As a result, UNRWA has said its ability to provide aid and services to Gaza—where over 100,000 people have been killed or wounded in five months of constant bombardment and blockade by the Israeli military—has been pushed to the “breaking point” as malnutrition and starvation has been documented among the displaced population of over 2 million people.

“Canada is resuming its funding to UNRWA so more can be done to respond to the urgent needs of Palestinian civilians,” Hussen said. “Canada will continue to take the allegations against some of UNRWA’s staff extremely seriously and we will remain closely engaged with UNRWA and the UN to pursue accountability and reforms.”

“I welcome Canada lifting the pause on funding for UNWRA,” said Canadian MP Salma Zahid, a member of the Liberal party representing Scarborough Centre in the House of Commons. “The work that UNWRA does cannot be overstated. It will save lives as we have seen the visuals of children dying of hunger in Gaza. The need for immediate aid is non-negotiable.”

Earlier this week, UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini told a special meeting of the U.N. General Assembly the agency was “facing a deliberate and concerted campaign” by Israel “to undermine its operations, and ultimately end them.”

On Friday, Reuters reported on an internal UNRWA report that included testimony of employees who said they were tortured by Israeli officers while in detention to make false admissions about involvement in the October 7 attack.

According to the reporting:

UNRWA communications director Juliette Touma said the agency planned to hand the information in the 11-page, unpublished report to agencies inside and outside the U.N. specialised in documenting potential human rights abuses.

“When the war comes to an end there needs to be a series of inquiries to look into all violations of human rights,” she said.

The document said several UNRWA Palestinian staffers had been detained by the Israeli army, and added that the ill-treatment and abuse they said they had experienced included severe physical beatings, waterboarding, and threats of harm to family members.

Michael Bueckert vice president of Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, said the new report was “more evidence that Canada’s political decision to suspend UNRWA funding was based on false allegations obtained through torture.”

“While the resumption of UNRWA aid is certainly welcome,” said Bueckert, “there needs to be accountability for the harm that Canada’s actions have caused.”

Jon Queally is managing editor of Common Dreams.

11 March 2024

Source: transcend.org

South Africa Requests ICJ Emergency Orders to Halt “Unspeakable” Gazan Genocide

By John Menadue

7 Mar 2024 – “Israel is now massacring desperate, starving Palestinians seeking to obtain food for their slowly-dying children.” The situation in Gaza is now so terrifying as to be unspeakable, writes South Africa in an urgent request for the International Court of Justice to issue additional provisional measures to stop Israel’s genocide.

South Africa today filed an urgent request with the International Court of Justice for the indication of additional provisional measures and the modification of the Court’s Order of 26 January 2024 and decision of 16 February 2024 in the case concerning Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel), according to the ICJ in a press release dated 6 March.

In its request, South Africa states that it is “compelled to return to the Court in light of the new facts and changes in the situation in Gaza — particularly the situation of widespread starvation — brought about by the continuing egregious breaches of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide . . . by the State of Israel . . . and its ongoing manifest violations of the provisional measures indicated by this Court on 26 January 2024”.

It requests the Court to indicate further provisional measures and/or to modify the provisional measures indicated it its Order of 26 January 2024, pursuant to Article 41 of the Statute of the Court and Article 75, paragraphs 1 and 3, and Article 76, paragraph 1, of the Rules of Court, respectively, “in order urgently to ensure the safety and security of 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, including over a million children”. It urges the Court to do so without holding a hearing, in light of the “extreme urgency of the situation”.

The situation in Gaza described by the ICJ as “perilous” on 16 February, “is now so terrifying as to be unspeakable… justifying — and indeed demanding — the indication of further provisional measures of protection,” argued South Africa.

South Africa’s has requested that the ICJ make the following additional provisional measures and modification to existing measures:

  1. “All participants in the conflict must ensure that all fighting and hostilities come to an immediate halt, and that all hostages and detainees are released immediately.
  2. “All Parties to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide must, forthwith, take all measures necessary to comply with all of their obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
  3. “All Parties to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide must, forthwith, refrain from any action, and in particular any armed action or support thereof, which might prejudice the right of the Palestinians in Gaza to be protected from acts of genocide and related prohibited acts, or any other rights in respect of whatever judgment the Court may render in the case, or which might aggravate or extend the dispute before the Court or make it more difficult to resolve.
  4. “The State of Israel shall take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address famine and starvation and the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in Gaza, by: (a) immediately suspending its military operations in Gaza; (b) lifting its blockade of Gaza; (c) rescinding all other existing measures and practices that directly or indirectly have the effect of obstructing the access of Palestinians in Gaza to humanitarian assistance and basic services; and (d) ensuring the provision of adequate and sufficient food, water, fuel, shelter, clothing, hygiene and sanitation requirements, alongside medical assistance, including medical supplies and support.
  5. “The State of Israel shall submit an open report to the Court on all measures taken to give effect to all provisional measures ordered by the Court to date, within one month as from the date of this Order.”

“Palestinian children are starving to death as a direct result of the deliberate acts and omissions of Israel — in violation of the Genocide Convention and of the Court’s Order. This includes Israel’s deliberate attempts to cripple the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (‘UNRWA’), on whom the vast majority of besieged, displaced and starving Palestinian men, women, children and babies depend for their survival,” write South Africa.

The latest death toll from Israel’s assault on Gaza stands at 30,717 people killed, including more than 12,300 children and 8,400 women. More than 72,156 Palestinians have been injured.

Read the full text of South Africa’s submission to the International Court of Justice here:

APPLICATION OF THE CONVENTION ON THE PREVENTION AND PUNISHMENT OF THE CRIME OF GENOCIDE IN THE GAZA STRIP (SOUTH AFRICA V. ISRAEL)

John Menadue has had a senior professional career in the media, public service and airlines.

11 March 2024

Source: transcend.org

How the ‘Fight against Antisemitism’ Became a Shield for Israel’s Genocide

By Jonathan Cook

Western capitals no longer treat Israel like a state, a political actor capable of slaughtering children, but rather as a sacred cause. So any opposition has to be a blasphemy.

7 Mar 2024 – If you read the establishment media, you might conclude that a serious battle is being waged by Israel and its most ardent supporters to tackle an apparent new wave of antisemitism in the West.

In article after article, we are told how Israel and western Jewish leadership bodies are demanding our concern, and outrage, at a rise in anti-Jewish hate incidents. Organisations such as the Community Security Trust in the UK and the Anti-Defamation League in the US produce lengthy reports on the relentless increase in antisemitism, especially since 7 October, and warn that action is urgently required.

Undoubtedly, there is a real threat of antisemitism and, as ever, it comes largely from the far right. Israel’s actions – and its false claim to be representing all Jews – only help to stoke it.

This moral panic is transparently self-serving. It directs our attention away from the pressing, all-too-concrete evidence that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza – one that has slaughtered and maimed many tens of thousands of innocents.

It redirects our attention instead towards tenuous claims of a deepening antisemitism crisis, one whose tangible effects appear limited and for which the evidence is all too clearly exaggerated.

After all, a rise in “Jew hatred” is all but inevitable if you redefine antisemitism, as western officials have recently done via the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s new definition, to include antipathy towards Israel – and at the moment when Israel appears, even to the World Court, to be carrying out a genocide.

The logic of Israel and its supporters runs something like this:

Many more people than usual are expressing hatred of Israel, the self-declared state of the Jewish people. There is no reason to hate Israel unless you hate what it represents, which is Jews. Therefore, antisemitism is on the rise.

This argument makes sense to most Israelis, to its partisans, and to the overwhelming majority of western politicians and career-minded establishment journalists. That is: the very same people who interpret calls for equality in historic Palestine – “from the river to the sea” – as a demand for a genocide against Jews.

The singer Charlotte Church, for example, found herself accused of antisemitism by the entire establishment media after a “pro-Palestinian chant” to raise money for Gaza’s children being starved by an Israeli aid blockade. The offending song had included the lyric “From the river to the sea”, calling for the liberation of Palestinians from decades of Israeli oppression.

At the weekend, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt once again suggested marches calling for a ceasefire were antisemitic because they supposedly “intimidated” Jews. In fact, Jews are prominent at those marches. He was referring to Zionists who excuse the slaughter in Gaza.

Similarly, in the wake of George Galloway’s overwhelming byelection win “for Gaza” in Rochdale last week, a BBC reporter berated former Labour MP Chris Williamson for using the word “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions.

The reporter was worried that the term “might offend some people”, despite the World Court finding the accusation of genocide plausible.

A ghoulish phenomenon

But the ambition of these Israel zealots runs much deeper than mere deflection. Israel’s leaders and most of its citizens are not ashamed of their genocide, it seems, and neither are their overseas backers.

If my social media feeds are any guide, the slaughter in Gaza is not discomfiting these apologists, or even giving them pause for thought. They appear to revel in their support for Israel as the world looks on in horror.

Every Palestinian child’s bloodied body, and the outrage it provokes from onlookers, fuels their self-righteousness. They entrench, they do not retreat.

They appear to be finding a strange reassurance – comfort even – in the wider public’s anger and indignation at the extinguishing of so many young lives.

It mirrors very precisely Israeli officials’ own reaction to the International Court of Justice’s verdict that there is a plausible case Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

Many observers assumed that Israel would seek to placate the judges and world opinion by toning down its atrocities. They could not have been more wrong. In defying the court, Israel became even more brazen, as attested to by its horrifying assault on the Nasser hospital last month and its lethal attack on Palestinians scrambling to reach an aid convoy last week.

Israel’s war crimes – broadcast on every social media platform, including by its own soldiers – are even more in our faces than before the World Court ruling.

Video shows Israeli military stripping naked Palestinians in northern Gaza

This phenomenon needs explaining. It looks ghoulish. But it has an internal logic that shines a light on why Israel has become an emotional crutch for many Jewish people, both inside the country and abroad, as well as for others.

It is not just that Jews and non-Jews who strongly subscribe to the ideology of Zionism identify with Israel. It runs deeper still. They are utterly dependent on a worldview – long cultivated in them by Israel and by their own community leaders, as well as by oil-grabbing western establishments – that places Israel at the centre of the moral universe.

They have been drawn into what looks more like a cult – and a very dangerous one at that, as the horrors of Gaza are revealing.

Albatross, not sanctuary

The claim they have internalised – that Israel is a necessary sanctuary in a future time of trouble from the supposedly innate, genocidal impulses of non-Jews – should have come crashing down on their heads over the past five months.

If the price of reassurance – of having a “just-in-case” bolthole – is the slaughter and maiming of many tens of thousands of Palestinian children, and the slow starvation of hundreds of thousands more, then that bolthole is not worth preserving.

It is not a sanctuary; it is an albatross. It is a stain. It must go, to be replaced by something better for Jews and Palestinians in the region – “from the river to the sea”.

So why have these Israel partisans not been able to reach a conclusion so morally self-evident to everyone else – or at least those not suborned to the interests of western establishments?

Because like all cult members, hardcore Zionists are immune to self-reflection. Not only that, but their reasoning is inherently circular.

Israel, Zionism’s creation, is not in the least concerned with providing a solution to antisemitism, as it professes. Quite the reverse. It feeds on antisemitism and needs it.

Antisemitism is its lifeblood, the very reason for Israel’s existence. Without antisemitism, Israel would be redundant, there would be no need for it as a sanctuary.

The cult would be over, and so would the endless military aid, the special trading status with the West, the jobs, the land grabs, the privileges and the sense of importance and ultimate victimhood that allows for the dehumanisation of others, not least the Palestinians.

Like all true believers, Israel’s partisans overseas – who proudly call themselves “Zionists” but are now pressuring social media platforms to ban the term as antisemitic, as the movement’s goals become more transparent – have too much to lose from self- and communal doubt.

The fight against antisemitism means nothing else can take priority – not even genocide. Which, in turn, means no greater evil can be acknowledged, not even the mass murder of children. No bigger threat, however pressing, however urgent, can be allowed to come to the fore.

And to keep the doubt at bay, more antisemitism – more supposed existential threats – must be generated.

Racism in new garb

In recent years, the biggest difficulty facing Zionism has been that the true racists – on the right, often in power in western capitals – have also served as Israel’s strongest allies. They have dressed up their traditional racist ideologies – that once fed antisemitism, and could again – in new garb: as Islamophobia.

In Europe and the United States, Muslims are the new Jews.

Which is ideal for Israel and its partisans. A supposed “global, civilisational war” – ideological cover to justify continuing western domination of the oil-rich Middle East – always places Israel, the regional attack dog, on the side of the angels, firmly alongside the white nationalists.

Because Israel and its apologists cannot expose the true racists and antisemites in power, they must create new ones. And that has required changing antisemitism’s definition beyond recognition, to refer to those who oppose the colonial domination project into which Israel is profoundly integrated.

In this upside-down worldview, one that prevails not only among Israel partisans but in western capitals, we have arrived at a nonsense: to reject Israel’s oppression of Palestinians – and now even its genocide of them – is supposedly to reveal oneself as antisemitic.

Palestinians dehumanised

This was precisely the position in which Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, found herself last month after she criticised French President Emmanuel Macron.

Israel has, as a consequence, declared it is banning her from entry to the occupied territories to record its human rights abuses.

But notably, as Albanese pointed out, nothing has changed in practice. Israel has excluded all UN rapporteurs from the occupied territories for the past 16 years, during its siege of Gaza, so they cannot witness the crimes that foregrounded the attack on 7 October.

Last month, Macron made a patently preposterous statement, though one promoted by Israel and treated seriously by the western media. He described Hamas’ attack on Israel as the “biggest antisemitic massacre of our century” – that is, he claimed it was driven by hatred of Jews.

One can criticise Hamas for how it carried out its attack, as Albanese has done: undoubtedly, its fighters committed many violations of international law that day in killing civilians and taking them hostage.

Exactly the same kind of violations, we should note in the interests of balance, that Israel has committed day in, day out for decades against the Palestinians forced to live under its military occupation.

Palestinian prisoners, seized by an occupying Israeli army in the middle of the night, held in military jails and denied proper trials, are no less hostages.

But to ascribe antisemitism as Hamas’ motivation is intended to scrub out those many decades of oppression. It airbrushes out the very abuses faced by the Palestinians that Hamas and the other Palestinian militant factions were established to resist.

That right of resistance to belligerent military occupation is enshrined in international law, even if the West rarely acknowledges the fact.

Or as Albanese put it: “The victims in the October 7 massacre were not killed because of their Judaism, but in response to Israeli oppression.”

Macron’s ridiculous remark also wiped out the past 17 years of the siege of Gaza – a slow-motion genocide that Israel has now put on steroids.

And he did so precisely because western colonial interests – just like Israel’s interests – must rationalise the dehumanisation of Palestinians and their supporters as racists and barbarians, in the West’s pursuit of domination and old-fashioned resource control in the Middle East.

But it is Albanese, not Macron, now fighting to save her reputation. She is the one being smeared as a racist and antisemite. By whom? By Israel and the genocide-supporting leaders of Europe.

Sacred cause

Israel needs antisemitism. And armed with a ludicrous redefinition adopted by western allies that classifies as Jew hatred any opposition to its crimes – any rejection of its bogus claims of “self-defence” as it crushes resistance to its occupation and its oppression of Palestinians – Israel has every incentive to commit more crimes.

Every atrocity produces more outrage, more resentment, more “antisemitism”. And the more resentment, the more outrage, the more “antisemitism”, the more Israel and its supporters can present the self-declared Jewish state as a sanctuary from that “antisemitism”.

Israel is no longer treated as a state, as a political actor capable of committing crimes and slaughtering children, but as an article of faith. It is transformed into a belief system, one immune to criticism or scrutiny. It transcends politics to become a sacred cause. And any opposition must be damned as wicked, as blasphemy.

Which is precisely the state to which western politics has devolved.

This battle against “antisemitism” – or rather, the battle being waged by Israel and its partisans – is to turn the meaning of words, and the values they represent, on their head. It is a fight to crush solidarity with the Palestinian people, and leave them friendless and naked before Israel’s campaign of genocide.

It is a moral duty to defeat these “antisemitism” warriors and assert our shared humanity – and the right of all to live in peace and dignity – before Israel and its apologists pave the way to an even greater slaughter.

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

11 March 2024

Source: transcend.org

The World Must Calculate the Real Gaza Death Toll

By Ralph Nader

With virtually no healthcare left, no medications, and infectious diseases spreading especially among infants, children, the infirm, and the elderly, can anybody believe that the fatalities have just gone over 30,000?

6 Mar 2024 – Since the Hamas raid penetrated the multi-tiered Israeli border security on October 7, 2023 (an unexplained collapse of Israel’s defensive capabilities), 2.3 million utterly defenseless Palestinians in the tiny crowded Gaza enclave have been on the receiving end of over 65,000 bombs and missiles plus non-stop tank shelling and snipers.

The extreme right-wing Netanyahu regime has enforced its declared siege of, in its genocidal words, “no food, no water, no electricity, no fuel, no medicine.”

The relentless bombing has destroyed apartment buildings, marketplaces, refugee camps, hospitals, clinics, ambulances, bakeries, schools, mosques, churches, roads, electricity networks, critical water mains—just about everything.

It matters greatly whether the aggregate toll so far, and counting, is three, four, five, six times more than the Health Ministry’s undercount.

The U.S.-equipped Israeli war machine has even uprooted agricultural fields, including thousands of olive trees on one farm; bulldozed many cemeteries; and bombed civilians fleeing on Israeli orders, while obstructing the few trucks carrying humanitarian aid from Egypt.

With virtually no healthcare left, no medications, and infectious diseases spreading especially among infants, children, the infirm, and the elderly, can anybody believe that the fatalities have just gone over 30,000? With 5,000 babies born every month into the rubble, their mothers wounded and without food, healthcare, medicine, and clean water for any of their children, severe skepticism about the Hamas Health Ministry’s official count is warranted.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas, which he helped over the years, have a common interest in lowballing the death and injury toll. But for different reasons. Hamas keeps the figures low to reduce being accused by its own people of not protecting them, and not building shelters. Hamas grossly underestimated the savage war crimes by the vengeful, occupying Israeli military superpower fully and unconditionally backed by the U.S. military superpower.

The Health Ministry is intentionally conservative, citing that its death toll came from reports only of named deceased by hospitals and morgues. But as the weeks turned into months, blasted, disabled hospitals and morgues cannot keep up with the bodies, or cannot count those slain laying on roadsides in allies and beneath building debris. Yet the Health Ministry remains conservative and the “official” rising civilian fatality and injury count continues to be uncritically reported by both friend and foe of this devastating Israeli state terrorism.

It was especially astonishing to see the most progressive groups and writers routinely use the same Hamas Health Ministry figures as did the governments and outside groups backing the one-sided war on Gaza. All this despite predictions of a human catastrophe in the Gaza Strip almost every day since October 7, 2023 by arms of the United Nations, other besieged international relief agencies on the ground, eyewitness accounts by medical personnel, and many Israeli human rights groups and brave local journalists in that strip, the geographic size of Philadelphia. (Unguided Western and Israeli reporters and journalists are not allowed to enter Gaza by the Israeli government.) (See the open letter, titled “Stop the Humanitarian Catastrophe,” to President Joe Biden on December 13, 2023 by 16 Israeli human rights groups that also appeared as a paid notice in TheNew York Times.)

Then came the December 29, 2023 opinion piece in The Guardian by the chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, Devi Sridhar. She predicted half a million deaths in 2024 if conditions continue unabated.

In recent days, the situation has become more dire. In the March 2, 2024 Washington Post, reporter, Ishaan Tharoor writes:

The bulk of Gaza’s more than 2 million people face the prospect of famine—a state of affairs that constitutes the fastest decline in a population’s nutrition status ever recorded, according to aid workers. Children are starving at the fastest rate the world has ever known. Aid groups have been pointing to Israel restricting the flow of assistance into the territory as a major driver of the crisis. Some prominent Israeli officials openly champion stymying these transfers of aid.

Tharoor quotes Jan Egeland, chief of the Norwegian Refugee Council: “We must be clear: civilians in Gaza are falling sick from hunger and thirst because of Israel’s entry restrictions,” and “Life-saving supplies are being intentionally blocked, and women and children are paying the price.”

Martin Griffiths, the United Nations lead humanitarian officer, said “Life is draining out of Gaza at terrifying speed.”

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, according to the Post, warned of an “‘unknown number of people’—believed to be in the tens of thousands—lying under the rubble of buildings brought down by Israeli strikes.”

Volker Turk, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said, “All people in Gaza are at imminent risk of famine. Almost all are drinking salty and contaminated water. Healthcare across the territory is barely functioning,” and “Just imagine what this means for the wounded, and people suffering infectious-disease outbreaks… many are already believed to be starving.”

UNICEF, the International Rescue Committee, the Palestinian Red Crescent, and Doctors Without Borders are all relating that the same catastrophic conditions are getting worse fast.

Yet, and get this, in this article, the Post still stuck with the “more than 30,000 people in Gaza have been killed since the ongoing war began.”

Just like the entire mass media, many governments, even the independent media and critics of the war would have us accept that between 98% and 99% of Gaza’s entire population has survived—albeit the sick, injured, and more Palestinians about to die. This is lethally improbable!

From accounts of people on the ground, videos and photographs of deadly episode after episode, plus the resultant mortalities from blocking or smashing the crucial necessities of life, a more likely estimate, in my appraisal, is that at least 200,000 Palestinians must have perished by now and the toll is accelerating by the hour.

Imagine Americans, if this powerful U.S.-made weaponry was fired on the besieged, homeless, trapped people of Philadelphia, do you think that only 30,000 of that city’s 1.5 million people would have been killed?

Daily circumstantial evidence of the deliberate Israeli targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructures requires more reliable epidemiological estimates of casualties.

It matters greatly whether the aggregate toll so far, and counting, is three, four, five, six times more than the Health Ministry’s undercount. It matters for elevating the urgency for a permanent cease-fire, and direct and massive humanitarian aid by the U.S. and other countries, bypassing the sadistic cruelty against innocent families of the Israeli siege. It matters for the columnists and editorial writers who have been self-censoring themselves, with some, like the Post’s Charles Lane, fictionally claiming that Israel’s military doesn’t “intentionally target civilians.” It matters for accountability under international law.

Above all, it lets weak Secretary of State Antony Blinken and duplicitous President Biden be less servile when Netanyahu dismisses the low death toll by taunting them: What about Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki?

As a percentage of the total population being killed, Gaza can expose the Israeli ruling racist extremists to a stronger rebuttal for ending U.S. co-belligerent complicity in this never-to-be-forgotten slaughter of mostly children and women. (The terrifying PTSD on civilians, especially children, will continue for years.)

Respecting the more accurate casualty toll of Palestinian children, mothers, and fathers presses harder for permanent cease-fires and the process of recovery and reparations for the survivors of their holocaust.

Ralph Nader is a US political activist, author, lecturer, and attorney noted for his involvement in consumer protection, environmentalism, and government reform causes.

11 March 2024

Source: transcend.org

Achieving the Two-State Solution in the Wake of Gaza War

By Jeffrey D. Sachs and Sybil Fares

5 Mar 2024 – Peace can come through the immediate implementation of the two-state solution, making the admission of Palestine to the United Nations the starting point, not the ending point.

The two-state solution is enshrined in international law and is the only viable path to a long-lasting peace. All other solutions—a continuation of Israel’s apartheid regime, one bi-national state, or one unitary state—would guarantee a continuation of war by one side or the other or both. Yet the two-state solution seems irretrievably blocked. It is not. Here is a pathway.

The Israeli government strongly opposes a two-state solution, as does a significant proportion of the Israeli population, some on religious grounds (“God gave us the land”) and some on security grounds (“We can never be safe with a State of Palestine”). A significant proportion of Palestinians regard Israel as an illegitimate settler-colonial entity, and in any event distrust any peace process.

How then to proceed?

The usual recommendation is the following six-step sequence of events: (1) ceasefire; (2) release of hostages; (3) humanitarian assistance; (4) reconstruction; (5) peace conference for negotiations between Israel and Palestine; and finally (6) establishment of two states on agreed boundaries. This path is impossible. There is a perpetual deadlock on steps 5 and 6, and this sequence has failed for 57 years since the 1967 war.

The failure of Oslo is the paradigmatic case in point. There are irreconcilable differences, such as the status of East Jerusalem. Israeli zealots would force from power any Israeli politician who dares to give up East Jerusalem to Palestinian sovereignty and Palestinian zealots would do the same with any Palestinian leader who gave up sovereignty over East Jerusalem. We should relinquish the continuing illusion that Israel will ever reach agreement, or that Palestine would ever have the negotiating power to engage meaningfully with Israel, especially when the Palestinian Authority is highly dependent on the US and other funders.

The correct approach is therefore the opposite, starting with the establishment of two states on globally agreed boundaries, notably the boundaries of June 4, 1967 as enshrined in UN Security Council and UN General Assembly resolutions. The UN member states will have to impose the two-state solution, instead of waiting for yet another Palestinian-Israeli failed negotiation.

Thus, the settlement should follow this order: (1) establishment of Palestine as 194th member state within two-state solution framework on June 4, 1967 borders; (2) immediate ceasefire; (3) release of hostages; (4) humanitarian assistance; (5) peacekeepers, disarmament and mutual security; and (6) negotiation on modalities (settlements, return of refugees, mutually agreed land-swaps, and others; but not boundaries).

In 2011, the State of Palestine (now recognized by 140 UN member states but not yet as a UN member state itself) applied for full UN member status. The UN Security Council Committee on New Members (constituted by the UN Security Council) recognized the legitimacy of Palestine’s application, but as is utterly typical in the “peace process,” the US government prevailed on the Palestinian Authority to accept “observer status,” promising that full UN membership would soon follow. Of course, it did not.

The Security Council, backed by the UN General Assembly, has the power under the UN Charter to impose the two-state settlement. It can do so as a matter of international law, following decades of relevant resolutions. It can then enforce the solution through a combination of carrots (economic inducements, reconstruction funding, UNSC-backed peacekeepers, disarmament, border security, etc.) and sticks (sanctions for violations by either party).

The only conceivable border for creating the two-state solution is that of June 4, 1967. Starting from that border, the two sides might indeed negotiate a mutually agreed swap of land for mutual benefit, but they would do so knowing that the “best alternative to a negotiated agreement” (BATNA) is the June 4, 1967 border.

It is quite possible, indeed likely, that the US would initially veto the proposed pathway. After all, the US has already used its veto multiple times to block merely a ceasefire. Yet, the process of eliciting the US veto and then securing a large majority vote in the UN General Assembly will be salutary for three reasons.

First, US politics is shifting rapidly against Israeli policies given the US public’s growing understanding of Israel’s war crimes and Israel’s political extremism. This shift in public opinion makes it far more likely that the US leaders will sooner rather than later accept the basic approach outlined here because of US domestic political dynamics. Second, the increasing US isolation in the UN Security Council and UN General Assembly is also weighing heavily on US leaders, and forcing the US leadership to reconsider its policy positions in view of geopolitical considerations. Third, a strong vote in the UNSC and UNGA for the two-state solution on June 4, 1967 borders will help to strengthen international law and the terms of the eventual settlement as soon as the US veto is lifted.

For these reasons, there is a realistic prospect that the UN will finally exercise its international legal and political authority to create the conditions for peace.

Twenty-two years ago, Arab and Islamic leaders affirmed in the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative that that the only pathway to peace is through the two-state solution. On February 7, 2024, the Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs reasserted that a comprehensive peace will only be achieved by recognizing an independent Palestinian state on the 1967 borders and East Jerusalem as the capital. The Arab states and the world community generally shouldn’t buy into another vague peace process that is likely doomed to fail, especially given the urgency caused by the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the bad-will accumulated over the past 57 years of a fruitless “Peace Process.”

Peace can come through the immediate implementation of the two-state solution, making the admission of Palestine to the UN the starting point, not the ending point. Two sovereign states, on the boundaries of June 4, 1967, protected initially by UN-backed peacekeepers and other guarantees, will be the starting point for a comprehensive and just peace not only between Israel and Palestine—and also a regional peace that would secure diplomatic relations across the Middle East and end this conflict that has burdened the inhabitants, the region, and the world, for more than a century.

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

11 March 2024

Source: transcend.org

The Horrors a Rafah Invasion Would Bring

By Ramzy Baroud

An Israeli invasion of Rafah will not alter the battlefield in favor of the Israeli army, but it will be horrific for the displaced Palestinians.

5 Mar 2024 – The Palestinian city of Rafah is not just older than Israel, it is as old as civilization itself.

It has existed for thousands of years. The Canaanites referred to it as Rafia, and Rafia has been almost always there, guarding the southern frontiers of Palestine, ancient and modern.

As the gateway between two continents and two worlds, Rafah has been at the forefront of many wars and foreign invasions, from ancient Egyptians to the Romans, to Napoleon and his eventually vanquished army.

Now, it is Benjamin Netanyahu’s turn. The Israeli prime minister has made Rafah the jewel of his crown of shame, the battle that would determine the fate of his genocidal war in Gaza — in fact the very future of his country.

“Those who want to prevent us from operating in Rafah are essentially telling us: ‘Lose the war,’” he said at a press conference on Feb. 17.

Currently, there are anywhere between 1.3 to 1.5 million people in Rafah, an area that, before the war started, had a population of merely 200,000 people.

Even before the start of this genocidal war, Rafah was still considered crowded. We can only imagine what the situation is right now, where hundreds of thousands of people are scattered in muddy refugee camps, subsisting in makeshift tents that are unable to withstand the elements of a harsh winter.

The mayor of Rafah says that only 10 percent of the needed food and water is reaching the population in the camps, where the people are suffering from extreme hunger, if not outright starvation.

These families are beyond traumatized as they have lost loved ones, homes, and have no access to any medical care. They are trapped between high walls, the sea, and a murderous military.

An Israeli invasion of Rafah will not alter the battlefield in favor of the Israeli army, but it will be horrific for the displaced Palestinians. The slaughter will go beyond everything we have seen, so far, anywhere in Gaza.

Where will up to 1.5 million people go when the Israel tanks arrive? The closest so-called safe area is al-Mawasi, which is already overcrowded and too small, to begin with. The displaced refugees there are also experiencing starvation due to Israel’s prevention of aid and constant bombing of convoys.

Then, there is northern Gaza, which is mostly in ruins; it has no food to the extent that, in some areas, even animal feed, which is now being consumed by humans, is no longer accessible.

If the international community does not finally develop the will to stop Israel, this horrific crime will, by far, prove worse than all the crimes that have already been committed, resulting in the death and wounding of over 100,000 people.

Even with the invasion of Rafah, Israel would achieve no military or strategic victory. Netanyahu simply wants to satisfy the calls for blood emanating from throughout Israel. After all of this, they are still seeking revenge.

“I am personally proud of the ruins of Gaza,” Israel’s Minister of Social Equality and Women’s Advancement May Golan, said at a Knesset session on Feb. 21.

But, still, there will be no victory in Rafah, either.

At the start of the war, Israel said Hamas was concentrated mostly in the north. The north was duly destroyed, though the resistance carried on unabated.

Then they claimed that the resistance headquarters was under al-Shifa Hospital, which was bombed, raided, and destroyed. Then they claimed Bureij, Maghazi, and central Gaza were the main prize of the war.

Then, Khan Younis was declared the “capital of Hamas.” And on and on…

Aside from the mass destruction and the killing of hundreds of civilians daily, Israel has won nothing; the resistance has not been defeated, and the alleged “Hamas capital” has conveniently shifted from one city to another, even from one neighborhood to another.

Now, the same ridiculous claims and unsubstantiated allegations are being made and leveled against Rafah, where most of Gaza’s population ran to, in total despair, to survive the onslaught.

Israel had initially hoped that Gazans would rush in their hundreds of thousands to the Sinai Desert. They did not. Then Israeli leaders, like far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, began speaking of “voluntary migration” as the “right humanitarian solution.”

Still, the Palestinians stayed. Now, they have all agreed on the invasion of Rafah, a last-ditch effort to orchestrate another Palestinian Nakba.

But another Nakba will not happen. Palestinians will not allow for it to happen.

Ultimately, Netanyahu and Israel’s political madness must come to an end.

The world cannot persist in this cowardly inaction.

The lives of millions of Palestinians are dependent on our collective push to bring this genocide to an immediate end.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and editor of The Palestine Chronicle.

11 March 2024

Source: transcend.org

European Parliament Finally Calls for a Gaza Ceasefire but Rejects Arms Embargo against Israel

By Global News Service

8 Mar 2024 – The major sponsors of Israel in the U.S. and Europe continue to support the slaughter and the escalation of the conflict in the entire West Asia region.

The European Parliament was able to call for a permanent, immediate, and unconditional ceasefire in Gaza only on 28 Feb, more than 140 days after the genocidal war began.

On that day, at the initiative of the Left, the European Parliament’s plenary in Strasbourg, France, called for an “immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza, allowing uninterrupted access to food and water for its inhabitants.”

The change in policy was supported by 265 Members of the European Parliament (MEPs). 253 MEPs voted against it while 10 MEPs abstained from voting. But the plenary overwhelmingly voted down the Left’s call to impose an arms embargo on Israel.

Following the vote, the Left bloc stated, “Four months of constant bombing, 30,000 deaths, famine, no access to basic needs, and an ongoing genocide… For this reason, we demanded an arms embargo, but almost 400 MEPs voted against it.”

Marc Botenga, MEP from the Workers’ Party of Belgium (PTB/PVDA), hailed the call for an unconditional ceasefire as a win. “Let’s not give up,” he said. “Let’s force Israel into a ceasefire. Let’s impose an embargo on arms. Let’s end the privileged partnership between Europe and Israel.”

Source: Peoples Dispatch / Globetrotter News Service

Join the BDS-BOYCOTT, DIVESTMENT, SANCTIONS campaign to protest the Israeli barbaric siege of Gaza, illegal occupation of the Palestine nation’s territory, the apartheid wall, its inhuman and degrading treatment of the Palestinian people, and the more than 7,000 Palestinian men, women, elderly and children arbitrarily locked up in Israeli prisons.

DON’T BUY PRODUCTS WHOSE BARCODE STARTS WITH 729, which indicates that it is produced in Israel. DO YOUR PART! MAKE A DIFFERENCE!

7 2 9: BOYCOTT FOR JUSTICE!

11 March 2024

Source: transcend.org

 

The Biden Doctrine in Gaza: Bomb, Starve, Deceive

By Aaron Maté

The White House unveils a new PR stunt for Gaza aid while hiding US arms transfers to Israel.

8 Mar 2024 – At his State of the Union address yesterday, President Biden announced that the US military will install a temporary pier off the coast of Gaza to deliver emergency aid to the besieged enclave, where more than 2.2 million Palestinians face a humanitarian crisis, including starvation. The pier, which will take weeks if not months to complete, will be built by US soldiers.

The US, Biden claimed, “has been leading international efforts to get more humanitarian assistance into Gaza” and believes that “protecting and saving innocent lives has to be a priority.”

In reality, the emergency project underscores Biden’s real priority: to prolong Israel’s rampage in Gaza, the US is even willing to deploy its own military for face-saving public relations stunts.

With criticism of Biden’s Gaza complicity increasing inside the Democratic Party, and threatening him at the ballot box, the pier is the latest in a series of token gestures aimed at feigning concern for Gazans while providing unfettered support to the Israeli government that is indiscriminately attacking them.

The White House has carried out air drops over Gaza that amount to a few trucks’ worth of aid – compared to the thousands of trucks that Israel is blocking with US support. “The food, water, and medical supplies so desperately needed by people in Gaza are sitting just across the border,” Doctors Without Border said Friday. “Israel needs to facilitate rather than block the flow of supplies.”

Even those trucks that can enter Gaza have been unable to make safe deliveries after Israel attacked their Hamas police escorts and crowds of desperate civilians lining up to receive aid. One air drop has even killed five Palestinian civilians and wounded others when a parachute failed to open.

The US military pier, Biden claimed, “will enable a massive increase in the amount of humanitarian assistance getting into Gaza every day.” His own aides acknowledge that this is a ruse. According to the Washington Post, administration officials quietly concede that “only by securing the opening of additional land crossings would there be enough aid to prevent famine.” And given that the pier will take at minimum 30 days to complete, that “[raises] questions about how famine in Gaza will be staved off in the critical days ahead,” the New York Times notes.

The White House has given the answer: rather than compel Israel to open those land crossings and prevent famine, it is instead adopting the Israeli position that the land crossings can be used as a tool of leverage against Hamas — and that Israel can control everything that gets in. In ceasefire talks, Israel has demanded that Hamas release hostages in exchange for, at best, a six-week pause to the massacre.

As one US official told the Post, such a deal would allow for a “significant surge” in aid delivery. The choice of words is striking: for months, US officials have been promising to “surge” aid into Gaza. The fact that such a “surge” is now explicitly conditional underscores that those prior vows were a lie, and a cynical cover for the actual policy of helping Israel block aid to the people of Gaza.

In a Selma, Alabama speech that was widely mischaracterized as a call for a ceasefire, Vice President Kamala Harris explained the White House stance. “Given the immense scale of suffering in Gaza, there must be an immediate ceasefire,” Harris told a crowd, drawing effusive applause. But after a pause, she added the qualifier: “– for at least the next six weeks, which is what is currently on the table.” The onus, she added, is entirely on Hamas, which “needs to agree to that deal.” If they do, then the agreement “will get the hostages out and get a significant amount of aid in.”

The very fact that the delivery of “a significant amount” of aid is conditional on Hamas accepting Israeli demands underscores that Israel, with US backing, is using that aid as a tool of coercion. This directly contradicts Biden’s claim, in his State of the Union address, that such assistance cannot be “a bargaining chip.”

While backing Israel’s blockade, the White House continues to expedite weapons transfers to Israel while hiding them from the public footing the bill.

According to the Washington Post, the US has made more than 100 sales of weaponry to Israel since Oct. 7th. Only two of those transfers were made public – and in both of those cases, the White House invoked emergency powers to bypass Congressional review.

To avoid standard disclosures, the administration sent the weapons “in smaller batches that fall below a dollar threshold that requires the administration to notify Congress,” the Wall Street Journal reports, a method that comes as part of “a broader pattern in which the Biden administration has sought to avoid scrutiny from Congress.” And there are far more sales to come: according to the Journal, the US has “600 active cases of potential military transfer or sales worth more than $23 billion between the U.S. and Israel.”

“There’s nothing that Israel can say that it has not gotten,” an Israeli military official noted. “Israel got basically what it needed.” And Biden is committed to meeting Israel’s needs. Asked about his critics on Gaza, Biden told the New Yorker: “I think they have to give this just a little bit of time.”

Biden is devoted to ensuring more “time” for Israeli mass murder even though it directly threatens his re-election chances, as illustrated by the more than 140,000 “uncommitted” votes in the Michigan and Minnesota primaries.

In a bid to save his chances in Michigan, the White House deployed top aides to meet with Arab-American voters ahead of the vote. According to a recording of one such meeting,  Deputy National Security Jon Finer relayed his regrets as follows: “We have left a very damaging impression based on what has been a wholly inadequate public accounting for how much the president, the administration and the country values the lives of Palestinians.” Therefore, according to the White House, the problem is not that Biden is helping Israel exterminate Palestinian lives, the problem is that voters are unaware how much he secretly “values” the people he’s helping to exterminate.

Finer went on to demonstrate the limitations on that valuation. Yes, he acknowledged, Israeli leaders have compared “residents of Gaza to animals.” But rather than condemn this genocidal rhetoric and stop arming the government spouting it, the White House had no choice but to continue arming them. “Out of a desire to sort of focus on solving the problem and not engaging in a rhetorical back-and-forth with people who, in many cases, I think we all find somewhat abhorrent,” Finer explained, “we did not sufficiently indicate that we totally rejected and disagreed with those sorts of sentiments.”

Indeed, it would be incongruent for the Biden administrating to publicly rebuke the Israeli government while privately rushing it weapons to help exterminate the Gazan “animals.”

Which explains why, five months into Israel’s genocidal campaign, the White House’s empty gestures have extended beyond mere empty words to costly, empty stunts by sea and air.

Aaron Maté is a journalist with The Grayzone, where he hosts “Pushback.” He is also a contributor to Real Clear Investigations and the temporary co-host of “Useful Idiots.” In 2019, Maté won the Izzy Award for outstanding achievement in independent media for Russiagate coverage in The Nation.

11 March 2024

Source: transcend.org

The Campaign to Free Assange: Reflections on Night Falls

By Dr Binoy Kampmark

The town hall meeting is the last throbbing reminder of the authentic demos.  People gather; debates held.  Views converge; others diverge.  Speakers are invited to stir the invitees, provoke the grey cells.  Till artificial intelligence banishes such gatherings, and the digital cosmos swallows us whole, cherish these events.

And there was much to cherish about Night Falls in the Evening Lands: The Assange Epic, part of a global movement to publicise the importance of freeing WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, who remains in the forbidding confines of Belmarsh Prison in London.  Held on March 9 in Melbourne’s Storey Hall, it was a salutatory minder that the publisher’s plight has become one of immediate concern.  Worn down by judicial process and jailed by a US surrogate power, he faces a vicious political indictment of 17 charges focused on the Espionage Act of 1917 and one on computer intrusion.  A UK High Court appeal on the matter of extradition hangs in the balance.

The thematic nature of such events can be challenging.  One should never be too gloomy – and in Assange’s case, be it in terms of health, torture, injustice and pondered attempts by US intelligence officials to take his life or kidnap him – there is much to be gloomy about.  Bleakness should be allowed, but only in modest, stiff doses.  Try, as far as you can, to inject a note of encouraging humour into proceedings.  Humour unsettles the tyrannically inclined, punctures the ideologue’s confidence.  Then reflect, broadly, on the astonishing legacy on the subject and ask that vital question: Where to now?

The sessions, superbly steered through by Mary Kostakidis (“Try to avoid lengthy preambles to your questions, please”), covered a fanned out universe: the nature of “imperial law” and extra-territorial jurisdiction; the stirring role of WikiLeaks in exposing state atrocities; the regenerative tonic Assange had given to an ungrateful, envious Fourth Estate; the healthy emergence of non-mainstream media; and the tactics necessary to convince politicians that the publisher’s release was urgently warranted.

Two speakers were spear-sharp on both the legacy of Assange and what had to be done to secure his release.  The Greek former finance minister and rabble-rousing economist, Yanis Varoufakis, was encouraging on both scores.  A picture of pugilistic health, Varoufakis pondered “what Julian had taught” him.  People forget, Varoufakis reminded his audience, Assange’s genius as one of the original cypherpunks, able to build a website that has managed to weather hacking storms and stay afloat in treacherous digital waters.  Whistleblowers and leakers could be assured of anonymous contributions to the WikiLeaks website.

He was also impressed by the man’s towering, almost holy integrity.  As much as they disagreed, he recalled, “and as much as I wanted to throttle the man”, he brimmed with intellectual self-worth and value.  On the subject of revealing his sources, quite contrary to the spirit and substance of the US indictment, Assange was scrupulous to a fault.  To betray any would endanger them.

Most movingly, Varoufakis reflected on his own intellectual awakening when reading Assange’s meditations on the internet; how it might, just might, fracture the imperium of information guarded so closely by powerful interests.  Finally, the common citizenry would have at their disposal the means of returning the serve on spying and surveillance.  The digital mirror would enable us to see what they – the state operatives, their goons and their lickspittle adjutants – could see about us.  This was as significant to Varoufakis as George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, books he read with some anxiety during the days of Greece’s military junta.

On the nature of power – in this case, the menace posed by the US imperium – Australia had to be break free and embrace non-alignment.  With characteristic flavour, Varoufakis characterised Washington’s exertion of influence over its satellite states as that of a mafia gang: “They manufacture insecurity in order to sell protection.”  It was a brilliant formulation and goes to the centre of that infantile desire of Australian policy makers to endorse AUKUS, a dangerous military compact with the US and the UK that will mortgage the country to the sum of A$368 billion.

Even assuming that this arrangement would remain in place, those in the nation’s capital, including Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, had to ask the fundamental question on Assange.  “Make it a condition of AUKUS that Assange returns to Australia,” insisted Varoufakis.  “And the powerful will respect you even if you disagree with them.”  To date, the PM had been a sore disappointment and hardly likely to be respected, even by the near comatose US President Joe Biden.

Virility, however, may be returning.  That theme was evidenced in the sharp address from Greg Barns, a seasoned barrister and campaign strategist who has been involved in the WikiLeaks journey since 2012.  While drawing attention to the outrageous assertion of extra-territorial jurisdiction by Washington to target Assange, he saw much promise in the political dawn in Canberra.  A few years ago, he would never have envisaged being in a room where the Australian Greens leader, Adam Bandt, would be seated next to a fossil fuel advocate and Nationals senator, Matthew Cannavan.  “Beside Mr Green sat Mr Coal.”  Their common purpose: Assange’s release and the termination of a state of affairs so unacceptable it is no longer the talk of academic common rooms and specialist fora.

For the audience and budding activists, Barns had sound advice.  Pester local political representatives.  Arrange meetings, preferably in groups, with the local member.  Remind them of the significance of the issue.  “Make it an alliance issue.”  There is nothing more worrying to a backbencher than concerned “traffic” through the electoral office that suggests a shift in voter sentiment.  “I will bet good odds that the treatment of Assange has made it into party room discussions,” declared Barns with certitude.

In closing, Assange’s tireless father, John Shipton, washed his audience with gentle, meditative thoughts.  Much like a calming shaman, he journeyed through some of the day’s themes, prodding with questions.  Was AUKUS a bribe?  A tribute?  A payment for knowledge?  But with optimism, Shipton could feel hope about his son: “Specks of gold” had formed to stir consciousness in the executive.  Those in power were at long last listening.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.

10 March 2024

Source: countercurrents.org