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By Ranjan Solomon

There is so much conflict around the world accompanied by brutal killings and destruction. Often these conflicts are simplistically dismissed as religious rivalries, competing ethnic claims, caste-based oppression and racism, Some of these conflicts make the headlines; others are frozen wars/conflicts in which those who die, and what is destroyed is a mere statistic. At the root of war and conflict is the uneven competition for resources where the powerful manage to steal land, rich minerals and precious resources below the land – as in the case of African countries and indigenous lands everywhere in the so-called Global South. Those who would acquire riches that do not belong to them are the butchers of war. Colonial and imperial powers are filled with greed and do not ever stop craving for more.

The world is in need of Movements for Justice which will defy the war mongers and thieves. There is a narrative in the Bible where Jesus put together a whip out of strips of leather and chased them out of the Temple, stampeding the sheep and cattle, upending the tables of the loan sharks, spilling coins left and right. He told the dove merchants “Get your things out of here!  A common interpretation is that Jesus was reacting to the practice of money changers routinely cheating the people. Marvin L. Krier Mich, a renowned proponent of social justice in both the Catholic Church and civil society, avers that a good deal of money was stored at the temple, where it could be loaned by the wealthy to the poor who often fell deep into debt for profits. Jesus did not preach a sermon and counsel these bigots. Instead, he used the whip to scare them away.

This is not to advocate or propose violence. But to remind the oppressor’s that their ways are wrong and they must transform their lives from one of greed and oppression.

Gaza is clearly not about Hamas and its fight back after 18 years of being forced to live in a concentration camp. October 7th was the day they chose to resist which was the legal right to do against an occupying power who ruled lethally and illegally over their lives. By comparison to Israel, Hamas’ victims are a mere drop in the ocean.

Piers Morgan persists in all his interviews with the question: Did not Israel have the right to fight back? The answer is an emphatic NO. Israel must end the occupation and pay reparations for their wild animal-like treatment of Palestinians. They must return all the land and other resources to those they stole it from. This is the only possible peaceful solution.

The time for that is NOW.

Ranjan Solomon is a political commentator

25 December 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Lawrence S. Wittner

In today’s world of widespread poverty and unprecedented wealth, how about raising the wages of the most poorly-paid workers?

This October, the World Bank reported that “8.5 percent of the global population―almost 700 million people―live today on less than $2.15 per day,” while “44 percent of the global population―around 3.5 billion people―live today on less than $6.85 per day.”  Meanwhile, “global poverty reduction has slowed to a near standstill.”

In early 2024, the charity group Oxfam International noted that, since 2020, “148 top corporations made $1.8 trillion in profit, 52 percent up on 3-year average, and dished out huge payouts to rich shareholders.”  During this same period, the world’s five wealthiest men “more than doubled their fortunes from $405 billion to $869 billion,” an increase of $14 million per hour.  As corporate elites gathered in Davos for a chat about the world economy, ten corporations alone were worth $10.2 trillion, more than the GDPs of all the countries in Africa and Latin America combined.

The world’s vast economic inequality “is no accident,” concluded a top Oxfam official.  “The billionaire class is ensuring corporations deliver more wealth to them at the expense of everyone else.”

Although inequalities in income and wealth have existed throughout much of human history, they have been softened somewhat by a variety of factors, including labor unions and―in modern times―minimum wage laws.  Designed to provide workers with a basic standard of living, these laws create a floor below which wages are not allowed to sink.  In 1894, New Zealand became the first nation to enact a minimum wage law, and―pressured by the labor movement and public opinion―other countries (including the United States in 1938) followed its lead.  Today, more than 90 percent of the world’s nations have some kind of minimum wage law in effect.

These minimum wage laws have had very positive effects upon the lives of workers.  Most notably, they lifted large numbers of wage earners out of poverty.  In addition, they undermined the business practice of slashing wages (and thus reducing production costs) to increase profit margins or to cut prices and grab a larger share of the market.

Even so, the growth of multinational corporations provided businesses with opportunities to slip past these national laws and dramatically reduce their labor costs by moving production of goods and services to low-wage nations.  This corporate offshoring of jobs and infrastructure gathered steam in the mid-20th century.  Initially, multinational corporations focused on outsourcing low-skilled or unskilled manufacturing jobs, which had a negative impact on employment and wages in advanced industrial nations.  In the 21st century, however, the outsourcing of skilled jobs, particularly in financial management and IT operations, rose dramatically.  After all, from the standpoint of enhancing corporate profits, it made good sense to replace an American IT worker with an Indian IT worker at 13 percent the cost.  The result was an accelerating race to the bottom.

In the United States, this export of formerly good-paying jobs to low-wage, impoverished countries―combined with “free trade” agreements, a corporate and government assault on unions, and conservative obstruction of any raise in the pathetically low federal minimum wage ($7.25 per hour)―produced a disaster.  The share of private sector goods-producing jobs at high wages shrank, since the 1960s, from 42 to 17 percent.  Increasingly, U.S. jobs were located in the low-paid service sector.  Not surprisingly, by 2023 an estimated 43 million Americans lived in poverty, while another 49 million lived just above the official poverty line.  Little wonder that, in this nation and many others caught up in corporate globalization, there was an alarming rise of rightwing demagogues playing on economic grievances, popular hatreds, and fears.

If, therefore, wages in underdeveloped nations and in advanced industrial nations are not keeping pace with the vast accumulation of capital by the world’s wealthiest people and their corporations, one way to counter this situation is to move beyond the disintegrating patchwork of wage floor efforts by individual nations and develop a global minimum wage.

Such a wage could take a variety of forms.  The most egalitarian involves a minimum wage level that would be the same in all nations.  Unfortunately, though, given the vast variation among countries in wealth and current wages, this does not seem practical.  In Luxembourg, for example, the average yearly per capita purchasing power is 316 times that of South Sudan.  But other options are more viable, including basing the minimum wage on a percentage of the national median wage or on a more complex measurement accounting for the cost of living and national living standards.

Over the past decade and more, prominent economists and other specialists have made the case for a global minimum wage, as have a variety of organizations.  For an appropriate entity to establish it, they have usually pointed to the International Labour Organization, a UN agency that has long worked to set international labor standards.

The advantages of a global minimum wage are clear.

It would lift billions of people out of poverty, thus enabling them to lead far better lives.

It would reduce the corporate incentive for offshoring by limiting the ability of multinational corporations to obtain cheap labor abroad.

By keeping jobs in the home country, it would aid unions in wealthy nations to retain their memberships and provide protection against “corporate blackmail”―the management demand that unions either accept contract concessions or get ready for the shift of corporate jobs and production overseas.

By raising wages in impoverished countries, it would reduce the poverty-driven mass migration from these nations and, thereby, deprive rightwing demagogues in wealthier countries of one of their most potent issues.

Of course, higher labor costs at home and abroad would reduce corporate profits and limit the growth of billionaires’ wealth and power.  But wouldn’t these also be positive developments?

Lawrence S. Wittner (https://www.lawrenceswittner.com/ ) is Professor of History Emeritus at SUNY/Albany and the author of Confronting the Bomb (Stanford University Press).

25 December 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr. Ramzy Baroud

Following a ten-day siege, the Palestinian Authority began, on December 14, a violent raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank.

The PA security forces used similar tactics as used by the Israeli occupation forces in their routine attacks on the area.

The camp, which is a mere half a square kilometer in size, hosts an ever-growing population of 24 thousand refugees, mostly the descendants of Palestinians ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias during the great catastrophe, or Nakba, of 1948.

The raid began with a tight siege, followed by an attack from multiple directions that resulted in the killing of an unarmed youth, Rebhi al-Shalabi, 19, then a 13-year-old child, Muhammad al-Amer.

The PA forces also killed Yazid Ja’ayseh, the commander of the Jenin Brigades, who had evaded Israeli assassination attempts for his leadership role in unifying all Palestinian Resistance fighters under the umbrella of a single group.

Expectedly, Israel is largely pleased with the PA’s action against the Palestinian Resistance, though it expects more. “The Palestinian Authority has been acting resolutely against the Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters over the past several weeks, army and Shin Bet sources said, but the Israeli officials expressed the hope that their effectiveness could be enhanced,” Haaretz reported.

Indeed, Israel had attempted to subdue Jenin 80 times in the last year alone, killing more than 220 people, Al Jazeera reported, citing Palestinian Ministry of Health sources.

By attacking Jenin, the PA is helping the Israeli army in more than one way: it is killing and detaining anti-Israeli occupation Resistance fighters, consuming the energy and resources of the Resistance, allowing Israel to spare thousands of soldiers so that they may carry on with the genocide in Gaza, and more.

For many, especially supporters of Palestine around the world, the PA’s action is confusing, to say the least. Those surprised by the anti-Resistance policies of Mahmoud Abbas and his Authority, however, are driven by the erroneous assumption that the PA is a legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and that it behaves in ways consistent with the collective aspirations of all Palestinians.

Nothing could be further from the truth. For many years, the PA has ceased playing any role that deviates from the interests of a small clique of pro-US and pro-Israeli wealthy elite who have enriched themselves, while millions of Palestinians continue to suffer an Israeli genocide in Gaza, and a violent system of apartheid and military occupation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

The most telling and recent example is that, a short distance away from Jenin, illegal and violent Israeli Jewish settlers have burned the Bir Al-Walidin Mosque in the town of Murda, near Salfit – less than 70 kilometers from Jenin. Neither in this case, nor in any of the hundreds of settlers’ pogroms carried out against Palestinians in the West Bank in the last year – or before – did the PA security carry out any action to confront the armed Jewish militias, nor, of course, the occupation army.

But how did the PA turn from a supposed national project – at least in theory – to another branch of the Israeli occupation?

It could be argued that the PA was structured since its establishment in 1994 as a body whose existence catered to benefit the Israeli occupation. There is much evidence that substantiates this claim, including the arrests, torture and killing of dissenting Palestinians soon after the creation of the PA.

The CIA became directly involved in supporting the PA from the very start, expanding its role as early as 1996 following a series of Palestinian retaliatory attacks on Israeli targets in major cities. It was then that CIA director George Tenet became an important player in shaping the policies of the PA security forces, preparing it for massive crackdowns on Palestinian Resistance groups.

This involvement was a direct condition for US financial support under the Bill Clinton Administration – the kind of support that sowed the seeds of the Fatah-Hamas conflict, which reached its zenith in the summer of 2007.

The involvement of the US – and other armed forces of US client regimes in the region – became even more apparent under the leadership of US Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton, who helped train, prepare and equip the Palestinian Authority Security Forces (NSF), producing several battalions of young recruits (between 20 and 22 years old) to fight fellow Palestinians in the name of restoring law and order.

That supposed restoration of the law began in earnest as early as 2005 and continues until this day. Interestingly, this is the same language that the PA is currently using to justify its war on the Jenin refugee camp.

A spokesman for the PA security forces, Anwar Rajab recently told Al Jazeera that the objective of the raid on Jenin is to “pursue criminals” and lawbreakers, and to “prevent the camp from becoming a battleground like Gaza.”

Equating Resistance fighters with criminals and linking that supposed criminality to the Gaza Resistance is the typical PA discourse on resistance, a discourse that took the US and Israel years to craft and perfect – making the PA arguably the greatest achievement of Israel and the US in recent decades.

This behavior and language can be traced to a famous statement by General Dayton himself, who in a 2009 speech celebrated the US’s greatest creation in Palestine:

“And what we have created – and I say this in humility – what we have created are new men … upon the return of these new men of Palestine, they have shown motivation, discipline and professionalism, and they have made such a difference.”

Indeed, the ‘new men of Palestine’ are making all the difference required by the US and Israel: they are fighting the very Palestinian Resistance that is defending Jenin against the Israeli onslaught, Nablus against the pogroms of armed settlers and Gaza against genocide.

None of these ‘new men’ – whose numbers are counted in the tens of thousands – have lifted a finger to help their brethren as they continue to starve to death in the Gaza Strip, tortured and raped en masse, burned alive in Jabaliya and Khan Yunis, and yet continue to fight and die in their thousands – alone.

To say that the PA has betrayed Palestinians, however, is an inaccurate statement. The PA was never set up, financed and armed by the US and Israel as a force of liberation, but as an obstacle to Palestinian freedom. We are witnessing the final proof of this claim. It is taking place in Jenin now; in fact, throughout the West Bank.

Of course, the PA will not be able to crush the Palestinian Resistance, which the supposedly mighty Israeli army has failed to subdue over the course of years. But the question remains: how long will the PA be allowed to serve the role of the enforcers of the Israeli occupation and the protector of settlers, while still promoting itself as the guardian of Palestinian rights, freedom and statehood?

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

25 December 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Quds News Network

Occupied Palestine (Quds News Network)- Hundreds gathered at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem on Tuesday to mark Christmas in a somber atmosphere. For the second year in a row, the celebrations reflected the grief caused by Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. No decorations adorned the church or its surroundings, and the absence of tourists and pilgrims underscored the sadness.

In Manger Square, where Christians believe Jesus was born, a scout group broke the morning silence. One scout held a banner reading, “We want life, not death” and “Peace for Gaza.”

A large Christmas tree, usually lit in the square, remained dark. Local authorities chose to avoid major festivities again this year. However, prayers and Midnight Mass, led by Latin Patriarch Pierbattista Pizzaballa, continued as planned, with a strictly religious focus instead of the joyful celebrations of the past.

Christmas Prayers Amid Genocide

Despite the gloom, Palestinian Christians, numbering about 185,000 in the 1948-occupied territories and 47,000 in Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza, turned to prayer for solace. Israeli authorities banned Christmas ceremonies in Gaza churches, but Pope Francis successfully pressured them to allow Patriarch Pizzaballa to enter Gaza and lead Midnight Mass at the Holy Family Church.

[https://twitter.com/LPJerusalem/status/1871139613311648012]

Prayers filled the church as worshipers mourned the ongoing genocide in Gaza, now in its 15th month. The Christmas celebrations were limited to church services.

After the Mass, Pope Francis spoke to Gaza’s Christians via Skype, offering his blessings and Christmas wishes.

Honoring the Fallen

While in Gaza, Patriarch Pizzaballa visited the graves of Nahida Anton and her daughter Samar, who were killed by an Israeli sniper on December 16, 2023. Their graves, located at the Holy Family Catholic Church, became a poignant reminder of the suffering endured by Gaza’s Christians as Israel continues to target them.

[https://twitter.com/QudsNen/status/1871639472414298349]

[https://twitter.com/QudsNen/status/1871683932426494190]

25 December 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor

Geneva – Achieving civil peace and ensuring sustainable security in Syria after the fall of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime requires adopting a transitional justice approach, strengthening the rule of law, and organising free and fair elections that lead to the formation of a legitimate government. These steps are essential for recovery and for preventing chaos or acts of revenge, particularly in light of the governance vacuum and fragility resulting from years of war and internal conflicts, alongside the widespread impunity.

Syria is at a critical juncture that demands collective efforts to ensure the rule of law, enhance security, and deliver justice for victims who have endured decades of systematic repression and severe human rights violations. These measures represent the cornerstone for building a sustainable future for the country, grounded in justice, accountability, and respect for fundamental rights and freedoms.

Recent developments in Syria have seen some villages and towns experience violations and practices targeting residents and their properties. These transgressions prompted dignitaries from cities and rural areas along the coast to issue an appeal to the new leadership on 17 December, calling for an immediate end to such actions, which risk inciting sectarian tensions and threatening civil peace.

Respect for human rights and the protection of civilians across Syria are imperative. Any violations or abuses, whether individual or systematic and regardless of the perpetrator, constitute breaches of international laws that remain applicable at all times and under all circumstances. Such actions fuel tensions and undermine stability.

A comprehensive review of Syria’s laws, particularly the Penal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure, is essential, with amendments needed to align them with international human rights standards. Judicial and security system reforms are also necessary, alongside measures to enhance citizens’ rights by lifting restrictions on association, freedom of opinion and expression, and ensuring the right to peaceful assembly in accordance with international standards.

Transitional justice must be established in Syria, with the transitional government bearing responsibility for promoting stability and preventing chaos. This requires urgent measures to strengthen internal security, protect civilians, and safeguard public and private properties until free and fair elections are conducted nationwide. These elections are critical to paving the way for the formation of an elected government tasked with completing the transitional justice process by implementing accountability mechanisms and addressing the consequences of past violations.

Coordination between the transitional government and the elected government is crucial to ensuring justice and protecting victims’ rights, thereby building a stable and fair future for Syria.

The transitional government holds the responsibility of laying the initial groundwork for justice by strengthening the rule of law and stability. Subsequently, the elected government plays a vital role in completing this process over the long term by enhancing accountability for past violations, regardless of the perpetrator, protecting victims’ rights, rebuilding judicial and security institutions, and developing effective mechanisms for national reconciliation, all while adhering to international human rights standards.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor calls for strengthening the independence of judicial bodies to prosecute those responsible for crimes and violations committed in past years. It stresses the importance of preventing impunity and avoiding the recurrence of such violations in the future. Efforts must focus on building a democratic state based on equality, respect for human rights, and fundamental freedoms, particularly the right to justice and fair trial.

Euro-Med Monitor further urges the establishment of a national transitional justice committee to document violations, provide psychological and social support to victims, and foster social reconciliation. It emphasises the need for this committee to include broad representation from all segments of Syrian society to ensure comprehensive justice, create a healing environment for all parties involved, and promote national unity.

Achieving transitional justice in Syria is both a legal and moral imperative to ensure the peaceful transfer of power to a legitimate, elected government and to rebuild trust between the state and all segments of society. All national and international parties must provide the necessary support to achieve these goals and build a better future for all Syrians.

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

23 December 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Bharat Dogra

There are nearly 14 million children in the USA who suffer from food insecurity and hunger, or about one in five. During the peak of the COVID crisis this had come close to about 18 million (see The Conversation discussion by four experts titled ‘18 million US children are at risk of hunger’, January 21, 2021).

This is part of a wider and serious problem of hunger and food insecurity in all age-groups.

According to the US Department of Agriculture’s report ‘Household Food Security in the USA in 2022’, in 2022 17 million US households ( or 12.8% of the total number of households) were food insecure or suffered from hunger to a lesser or greater extent. This number had increased from 10.2% in 2021. Within this number of 17 million households, 6.8 million had very low food security, or suffered even more from hunger. This number of households suffering from very high food insecurity also went up from 3.8% to 5.1% from 2021 to 2022, when seen as a percentage of total households.

The number of households where children suffered from food insecurity is recorded at lower levels as the number of households with children is only 39% of total households in the USA, and also because elders generally try to protect children from hunger. Nevertheless it is disturbing to learn from this official report that the number of households with child food insecurity and hunger was 2.3 million in 2021 and went up very rapidly to 3.3 million in 2022, a 44% increase in just one year. Similarly households with high child food insecurity (which includes children skipping meals or altogether going without food for a day) increased from 274,000 in 2021 to 381,000 in 2022 in just one year, a 40% rise in just one year.

In addition there are hungry children (age-group up to 18) living outside households who face high food insecurity, including those who are homeless.

Food insecurity and hunger among certain sections of population like blacks and Latinos are significantly higher than the national average.

Hence a question arises that a country which has very high GNP and the topmost number of billionaires, which has very high natural resource base, which was favored by history to emerge at the top, which has extraordinary power to create currency and trade systems to suit its interests, is unable to feed its people properly and has very high rates of hunger and food insecurity among its people and most glaringly among its children.

What is more, while the country could make available hundreds of billions of dollars for the most destructive wars and proxy wars, it could not make available tens of billions of dollars which could have ensured that (almost) no one was hungry in the USA, as per the estimates given by various groups fighting hunger in USA.

In fact the available data shows that while the USA was getting deeply involved in such proxy conflicts which have been extremely costly in terms of loss of life, the number of those affected by hunger and food insecurity in the USA was rising at a very high rate.

In many parts of USA the expected decrease in hunger following the end of COVID crisis did not take place as some of the special programs to keep away hunger and other deprivation during the COVID days were rolled back too hurriedly.

In fact recently the Food Research and Action Center issued a warning that as about 12 states in the USA are poised to move away from a combined 1.4 billion dollar spending on food and nutrition (EBT) program, this can lead to an increase in food insecurity for about 10 million children during the summer next year (2025).

All this draws attention to how far removed capitalism, particularly in its more aggressive forms, is from meeting the most priority needs of its own people, let alone being sensitive to the needs and safety of the people of other countries.

Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now.

23 December 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Kevin Reed

The murderous Israeli onslaught on Gaza continued Friday, as dozens of Palestinians were killed by airstrikes that targeted homes in refugee camps over a 24-hour period.

The Washington Post reported that Palestinian health officials said 77 people were killed in missile strikes in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza and the Jabalya refugee camp in the north. Other media have reported more than 100 were killed in two days.

Staff at the two hospitals near Nuseirat where bodies were brought reported eight people killed. At the Jabalya camp, Gaza civil defense force spokesman Mahmoud Bassal said 10 people were killed, including seven children, and 15 others were injured.

The Post reported, “In a civil defense force video sent out after the Jabalya strike, Bassal holds up the lifeless body of a small child. ‘Why do they kill? Why are these children killed?’ he asks, his voice full of grief and anger. ‘Imagine this little girl is your daughter, imagine she is your child.’”

The Associated Press said an Israeli missile struck the Jaffa residential tower in the Nuseirat refugee camp.

Speaking from Nuseirat, United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) emergency officer Louise Wateridge said aid was needed in Gaza to support people who have been uprooted multiple times by Israeli attacks and have little to protect themselves from the cold and rain.

Wateridge said, “The world is not seeing what’s going on with these people—it’s impossible for families to shelter in these conditions,” as more heavy rain was expected to hit Gaza on Friday evening.

“Most people are living under fabric. They don’t even have waterproof structures, and 69 percent of the buildings here have been damaged or destroyed. There’s absolutely nowhere for people to shelter from these elements.” She said that the horrific conditions across Gaza show, “An entire society here is now a graveyard.

“Over 2 million people are trapped. They cannot escape. And people continue to have basic needs deprived, and it just feels like every path here that you could possibly take is leading to death,” Wateridge said.

Late Friday, Palestinian media reported an Israeli aircraft had launched a raid on Sabra, southwest of Gaza City, and there are also reports of Israeli artillery shelling that targeted Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip.

The Gaza Health Ministry has confirmed at least 45,206 Palestinians have been killed by Israel since the genocide began in October 2023. The ministry also reported 107,512 injured. The death and injury toll are likely many multiples higher than these numbers due to the numbers of dead and injured not being accounted for or adequately counted.

In July, a report published in the medical journal The Lancet estimated that the actual number of Palestinians killed in the Gaza genocide could be as high as 186,000 or more. This figure has no doubt grown significantly higher in the last five months.

Al Jazeera also reported that an Israeli drone was launched against Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza. The Palestinian Information Center also reported that Israeli artillery targeted the hospital’s gate.

Kamal Adwan Hospital, which is in the town of Beit Lahiya, has been the target of repeated brutal attacks by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) going back to December 2023, including the arrest and disappearance of medical staff, the bulldozing of tents of displaced Palestinians outside the facility, the arrest and torture of the hospital director and, most recently, tank artillery and air strikes.

On Friday, a report published by Haaretz quoted Israeli soldiers describing the blatant murder of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Unnamed soldiers, including career officers and reservists, told the Israeli daily that commanders were given unprecedented authority to operate in Gaza.

According to Al Jazeera, the soldiers said commanders had “ordered or allowed the killing of unarmed women, children and men in the Netzarim Corridor, a seven-kilometer-wide (4.3-mile-wide) strip of land that cuts across Gaza from Israel to the Mediterranean, and which has been turned into a military zone.”

The Haaretz report quoted an officer who recounted an incident, where a commander had announced that 200 fighters were killed, when actually “only 10 were confirmed as known Hamas operatives.” The soldiers told Haaretz they received questionable orders to open fire on “anyone who enters” Netzarim.

The report also quoted a soldier, who said his battalion commander told them, “Anyone crossing the line is a terrorist—no exceptions, no civilians. Everyone’s a terrorist.”

The Haaretz report confirms allegations made against Israel since last October that the Zionist regime of Benjamin Netanyahu is engaged in a campaign of ethnic cleansing and extermination of Palestinians in Gaza.

The IDF justified its war crimes by claiming that the barbaric measures in the Netzarim Corridor “are carried out in accordance with structured combat procedures, plans and operational orders approved by the highest ranks in the (army).”

On Friday, Communication Specialist Rosalia Bollen of the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) gave a press briefing at the Palais des Nations in Geneva in which she said:

Children in Gaza are cold, sick and traumatized. Hunger and malnutrition, and the dire living conditions more broadly, continue to put the lives of children at risk. Right now, over 96 percent of women and children in Gaza cannot meet their basic nutritional needs. Most are surviving on rationed flour, lentils, pasta and canned food—a diet that slowly compromises their health.

As winter sets in, Bollen said the conditions of Gaza’s children has “drastically diminished.”

In the West Bank, fascist Israeli settlers set fire to a mosque and vandalized property in the north on Friday, according to the head of the Palestinian village council.

Associated Press reported, “Nasfat al-Khafash, the head of the council in Marda where the attack occurred, said a group of settlers arrived early in the morning, setting the mosque on fire and scrawling hateful messages on it.”

Associated Press video showed spray-painted stars of David and the words in Hebrew, “the mosque will burn, the temple will be built,” an apparent reference to the ultranationalist desire to establish a Third Temple for Jews in Jerusalem at the holiest and most contested site in the Holy Land.

“These slogans reflect their upbringing and hatred towards Palestinians and Arabs,” said al-Khafash, adding that the settlers received “full support” from the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — the furthest-right government in Israel’s history.”

21 December 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Marwan Asmar

About 30 Israeli settlers were injured by a supersonic missile fired from Yemen that landed in Tel Aviv, early Saturday morning.

Israel’s Hebrew Radio said 30 Israelis were injured by a rocket fired from Yemen on Tel Aviv, while dozens panicked as they fled to underground shelters.

[https://twitter.com/alon_mizrahi/status/1870299484502274297]

The missile is being described as a direct hit which the Israeli air defences such as David’s Sling and the Cardboard Dome failed to intercept as admitted by the Israeli army in much commentary on the  social media

Israeli army spokesman Avichay Adraee confirmed that attempts  failed to stop the incoming ballistic missile and the impact activated the alarm bells across central Israel.

Meanwhile the Israeli Haaretz newspaper reported that ambulance teams transferred more than 20 injured settlers to the Wolfson and Ichilov hospitals after a rocket from Yemen fell in Tel Aviv as reported in Quds Press.

The Israeli police confirmed as well that “damage” occurred to a number of homes as a result of the rocket explosion in the Bnei Brak area to the east of Tel Aviv.

Houthi military spokesperson Yahya Saree announced, in a statement, that their fighters carried out “a military operation targeting a military site of the Israeli enemy in the occupied Jaffa area with a hypersonic ballistic missile.”

[https://twitter.com/SprinterFamily/status/1870363551065403809]

The announcement was made after the Houthis struck central and southern Israel with multiple drones on Friday and Thursday in response to the Israeli airstrikes on Sana’a and Al Hudaydah in Yemen.

Since the war on Gaza was launched soon after 7 October, 2023, the Houthis struck Israel with 200 missiles and more than 170 explosive drones.

https://twitter.com/RT_com/status/1870293156102554082

Dr Marwan Asmar is an editor of the www.crossfirearabia.com website

21 December 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr. Ramzy Baroud

Social media censorship is a global phenomenon, but the war on pro-Palestinian views on social media represents a different kind of censorship, with consequences that can only be described as dire.

Long before the current devastating war on Gaza and the escalation of Israeli violence and repression in the occupied West Bank, Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voices have been censored.

Some date the censorship to an agreement in 2016 that, according to the Israeli government, sought to “force social networks to remove content that Israel considers to be incitement.”

This was translated, almost immediately, to the shutting down of thousands of accounts and the barring of many social media influencers, with the hope of slowing down the vastly growing pro-Palestinian tendencies in all Meta-linked platforms.

The war on Gaza, however, has escalated the censorship. In a report submitted to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression, Human Rights Watch noted that the documented restrictions on freedom of speech “undermine the fundamental human rights to freedom of expression and assembly.”

The censorship became so sophisticated and increasingly involved a direct Israeli role. To ensure that ‘offenders’ to Israeli sensibilities were eliminated in large numbers, Meta began censoring specific words, thus deeming entire contents offensive, racist, and antisemitic.

But Meta was not the only social media network involved in this practice. On November 17, 2023, the X platform (previously known as Twitter) declared that users who write terms like “decolonization”, “from the river to the sea”, or similar expressions would be suspended.

One year later, the social media platform Twitch followed suit by revising its ‘Hateful Content Policy’ to include “Zionist” as a potential slur.

Not only do these decisions, and many others, directly impair the freedom of speech and press, but they also confuse rational conversations with anti-Jewish sentiments.

The word ‘genocide’, for example, is not a swear word, but a common term, embraced by numerous countries around the world, accusing Israel of carrying out acts of genocide, meaning the “systematic destruction of a group of people because of their ethnicity, nationality, religion, or race”.

Under pressure from many countries, and after presenting a powerful case at the Hague, South Africa managed to compel the International Court of Justice to investigate Israel’s acts of genocide in the Gaza Strip in violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention.

In other words, this is not a matter for Mark Zuckerberg or any other social media company to decide, based on direct consultations with those carrying out the mass killings in Gaza.

The same applies to Zionism, an ideologically situated political movement, that traces its history to 19th-century Europe, thus, neither to a specific race nor a religious text.

While many are, rightly, outraged by the fact that this kind of widespread, and growing, censorship directly challenges the main tenants of democracy, the actual harm for Palestinians is much bigger.

According to a November 2024 report by the Sada Social Center for Digital Rights, the surge in digital violations targeting Palestinian content could not come at a worse time.

According to the organization, “Meta platforms accounted for the largest share of violations at 57%, followed by TikTok at 23%.” YouTube and X follow at 13 and 7% respectively.

This censorship, according to Sada, includes the shutting down of WhatsApp accounts, another Meta-owned platform that is also tightly controlled.

Unlike most of us, Palestinians in Gaza use these platforms to communicate with one another, to know who is dead and who is alive, and to raise awareness of certain massacres, often taking place in isolation, especially in the northern Gaza Strip.

Regarding northern Gaza, Sada Social spoke of a ‘digital blackout’, which has compounded the horror of that region – famine, mass killing, destruction of all hospitals, etc.

In the specific case of social media censorship in Gaza, lives are literally being lost as a result of politically motivated decisions.

HRW was one of many rights groups that have routinely spoken about the ‘systematic censorship’ by Meta. A December 2023 HRW report identified the following recurring patterns of censorship: removal of content, suspension of pro-Palestinian accounts, the reduction of visibility, known as ‘shadow-banning’, the restrictions on engagement, and the deliberate misuse of policies on hate speech and graphic content.

The danger of this kind of censorship is multilayered. It is a direct threat to one of the most basic freedoms guaranteed under the law in any democratic society. In the case of Gaza, the censorship takes a dark, deadly turn as it could make the difference between people dying under the rubble of their homes or receiving assistance.

Additionally, censorship of this magnitude often creates precedents and often leads to other forms of censorship that, in fact, are already taking place against other vulnerable communities, whether on a national stage or globally.

While the international community is yet to translate its verbal solidarity with Palestinians into any meaningful action, the least we could do is to give Palestinians their full rights to express their views, share their pain, and raise awareness of their collective plight. The world owes them that much, and no social media company should be permitted to hinder such a simple and reasonable demand.

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

21 December 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Ida Audeh

One year into the Israel-U.S. genocidal war on Gaza, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was killed in combat in Tal al-Sultan in Rafah. For Palestinians (and Arabs generally), he was a man of principle, who spoke clearly and defiantly as he affirmed the right of Palestinians to live free of Israeli domination. Unlike other leaders on a national scale—most recently Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, among many others—he was not assassinated but rather died in combat, an end for which he had expressed a preference. He commanded the militias that roared out of Gaza on Oct. 7, broke through the structure meant to encage them, neutralized Israel’s southern command, captured prisoners of war and took them to Gaza, to use them as bargaining chips to end the siege on Gaza and to release Palestinians in Israeli prisons. That turned out to be the opening salvo in the Palestinian war of liberation.

I read Sinwar’s two-part novel, The Thorn and the Carnation, because I hoped that the text might provide some insight into this remarkable man from Gaza whose movement has defied the Israeli-U.S. genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza, now underway for more than 14 months. Sinwar wrote his novel in prison while serving four life sentences, charged in 1989 with killing two Israeli soldiers and some Palestinian collaborators with Israel. He was 27. He had no way of knowing if or when he would be released (although he might have retained hope that he would be, knowing that the Palestinian resistance never turns its back on its imprisoned cadres), and so he was using the novel to communicate with his countrymen. (As it turned out, he was released in a prisoner exchange in 2011 after serving 22 years of his sentence, an exchange he helped to negotiate.) The novel was completed in 2004, the year Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, founder of Hamas and a wheelchair-bound quadriplegic, was assassinated. For readers today, the ongoing genocide in Gaza provides what amounts to a sequel to the novel; we see a clear trajectory from the events described in the book to the moment we find ourselves in now and that knowledge gives the novel added depth and poignancy.

The novel begins in 1967, when Sinwar’s main character, 5-year-old Ahmad, finds himself living under Israeli occupation; it ends in 2001 or so, during the second intifada. Through the events affecting Ahmad and his impoverished family, Sinwar explores several topics, only a few of which will be mentioned here: direct Israeli occupation and the establishment of the Palestinian Authority (PA); the prison experience; the rise of Islamist activism; the character of the freedom fighter; and the scourge of collaborators.

One senses that Sinwar is attempting to provide a historical record for Gaza’s young population about the brutality of the Israeli occupation: what it was like to live through the Israeli night patrols, the rounding up of men, the extended curfews and the mass destruction of homes in the early 1970s. Gaza was home to a refugee population that needed UNRWA services to survive, but it was also a site of resistance, and neighborhoods developed a system of shouting harmless phrases when Israeli patrols entered their areas without warning, by way of alerting militants to the threat. He describes the discussions that took place when Israel opened its labor market to Gaza. People weighed their need for income against their rejection of interacting with the occupation in any way; practical needs won out, and soon working in Israel was normalized. Sinwar relays this without moral judgment. Years later, the PLO signed the Oslo Accords, and Sinwar portrays the heated arguments between the PA supporter and Islamists within Ahmad’s family. Today the battles raging in Gaza and in the West Bank are the inevitable outcome of that shameful sellout.

The Israeli prison system hovers over the lives of the occupied Palestinians. (It has been estimated that about 40 percent of the male population of the occupied territories has spent time in an Israeli prison between 1967 and 2012.) Sinwar describes the torture methods used in the prisons as well as the practice of using other detainees as informants to extract information in more relaxed conversations in prison spaces. He recounts that by way of explaining the need to remain alert and not let one’s guard down, almost like delivering survival tactics to (young) readers who might find themselves in such situations. The prisons are also sites of political education, organization and resistance, a place where leaders are formed.

Sinwar himself did much more than merely survive in prison—he studied Hebrew and learned it well enough to read biographies of Israeli leaders and to translate text into Arabic. His immersion into the world of Israeli history and biographies made him a match for any Israeli he had to deal with. (Seven months into the current genocide, an Israeli analyst would say, “Sinwar squeezes us like a lemon; he reads the political and military map of Israel better than we do.”)

Today, Israel mass arrests Palestinians and takes them to torture centers, where the extraction of resistance information is of lesser significance than the thrill of torturing Palestinian bodies. In the past, the Israeli population could remain ignorant of the occupation regime’s prisons; but now, Israeli torturers live stream their brutality against Palestinian bodies to sadistic Israeli viewers who clamor for more.

Sinwar’s discussion of student activism offers a fascinating insider’s view of young men charting a political course under conditions of constant threat. Palestinians developed the first university in Gaza when Egypt closed its doors to Palestinian students in the wake of President Anwar Sadat’s normalizing of relations with Israel. Ahmad and his cousin would attend that university, which resembled a high school with a skeletal staff. Several decades later, Gaza could boast 17 higher education institutions, and by mid-April 2024, all of them had been either completely or partially destroyed, and at least 95 professors had been killed, generally with their families. As Israel’s crimes against Palestinians are tallied, add scholasticide to the crimes of genocide and ecocide.

In the novel, Ahmad’s brother Mahmoud is aligned with Fatah; another brother, Mohammad, is an Islamist; and so is Ahmad’s favorite cousin, Ibrahim. Sinwar does not shy away from depicting the criticism of Islamists in the 1970s: that they did not accept the Palestine Liberation Organization as the representative of the Palestinian people (recognition of which had been a hard-fought struggle) and were slow to take up armed struggle. Israel tolerated their early organizing, seeing the Islamist movement as a tool to splinter the Palestinian population into two antagonistic camps. In Part 2, the Islamists are beginning to make their own weapons and attack Israelis wherever they can—mostly soldiers and settlers, but noncombatants as well. Reading the novel in 2024, as the beleaguered Palestinian resistance led by Hamas forges ahead in year two of a battle against Israel financed by the United States—14 months during which it has prevented Israel from achieving a single war objective—one has to marvel at the evolution of the organization. Today it fights with a range of home-made weapons, and its fighters are creating legends. No other liberation struggle—not Algeria or Vietnam or South Africa—has had to struggle against such staggering odds.

While describing the evolution of the Islamist movement, Sinwar depicts the personal characteristics of the ideal revolutionary in the characters of Ahmad’s role models: his brothers and his cousin Ibrahim. Piety is a key ingredient; so are self-sacrifice, discipline and asceticism. Being a good listener and negotiator are necessary for anyone who aspires to lead. Integrity and having an unwavering moral compass are essential qualities. This depiction initially struck me as somewhat idealized. Upon further reflection, I realized that today’s fighters are providing the evidence not only of skill and determination on the battlefield but also of a code of conduct unknown to their enemies.

Western leaders, pundits and the corporate media demonize or dismiss the Palestinian resistance fighters, but many details in the official narrative of “Hamas terrorism” are contradicted by statements of Israelis or the videos taken by the fighters themselves. For example, some Israeli prisoners released in the initial exchange have had positive things to say about their captors—how they were protected by them during times of intense shelling, treated humanely and fed whatever was available to their captors. When they were released to the custody of the Red Cross, they looked relatively relaxed—at least when compared to traumatized Palestinians released from jail who had clearly lost weight and expressed concern for their comrades in prison because of the sadistic torture they were subjected to.

A recent item published on Resistance News Network purports to be a letter from Israeli captive Alexander Trufanov to the Israeli public, in which he expresses fear that his government will kill him or at best, write him off; he says that “the fighters of Islamic Jihad have saved my life several times to keep me from dying. Some of them were wounded, and others lost their lives while trying to protect me.” And this after the fighters’ own family members have been targeted for extermination.

Another example of the principled resistance of the fighters: in the videos released by the resistance groups, we see what they see, including medical evacuations of wounded and dead Israeli soldiers. (Resistance video clips are shown and discussed during the Electronic Intifada’s weekly webcast.) Never do the fighters attempt to impede the evacuations even though they have the Israelis in line of sight. It is truly remarkable, especially when compared with the depraved conduct of Israeli soldiers, executing patients, shooting children in the head, shelling hospitals and raping men and women snatched from the street.

Contending with Palestinian collaborators with Israel is a recurring theme in the novel. As depicted, when evidence of collaboration with the Israeli authorities is confirmed, a social crisis presents itself: the collaborator cannot be allowed to live freely because of the threat he poses to the resistance and to the society at large. In the novel, collaborators were hapless Palestinians who either need movement permits or had committed some moral transgression that made them open to blackmail; today the threat to militants comes from an institution installed to serve the Israeli occupation. Palestinians seethe when learning that PA forces raid refugee camps in search of militants wanted by Israel after these same militants had successfully warded off an Israeli military assault on the camps. Reading the novel as militants in West Bank camps are contending with both Israeli and PA attacks, one understands why Sinwar depicts collaboration with the enemy as a threat that colonized people cannot tolerate.

Yahya Sinwar will be remembered not only for the way he lived his life and the resistance movement he led, but also for the manner in which he met his end: in combat, his head wrapped in a kuffiyeh to hide his identity (he most likely did not want to be captured alive), defiant until the end. Killed by an Israeli soldier who did not recognize him, his body was taken for an autopsy, and the Israelis announced that he hadn’t eaten in three days. That detail, as much as anything he wrote about in his novel, is so characteristic of the man who endured the same hardships as the fighters he led, who described in his novel the lived experience of a nation at the mercy of Israeli-U.S. colonization and who gave his life to the struggle against that brutal regime.

Ida Audeh is senior editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs magazine.

20 December 2024

Source: countercurrents.org