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By Nick Turse

“War is not healthy for children and other living things,” reads a poster titled “Primer” created by the late artist Lorraine Schneider for an art show at New York’s Pratt Institute in 1965. Printed in childlike lowercase letters, the words interspersed between the leaves of a simply rendered sunflower, it was an early response to America’s war in Vietnam. “She just wanted to make something that nobody could argue with,” recalled Schneider’s youngest daughter, Elisa Kleven, in an article published earlier this year. Six decades later, Schneider’s hypothesis has consistently been borne out.

According to Save the Children, about 468 million children — about one of every six young people on this planet — live in areas affected by armed conflict. Verified attacks on children have tripled since 2010. Last year, global conflicts killed three times as many children as in 2022. “Killings and injuries of civilians have become a daily occurrence,” U.N. human rights chief Volker Türk commented in June when he announced the 2023 figures. “Children shot at. Hospitals bombed. Heavy artillery launched on entire communities.”

It took four decades for the United Nations Security Council to catch up to Schneider. In 2005, that global body identified — and condemned — six grave violations against children in times of war: killing or maiming; recruitment into or use by armed forces and armed groups; attacks on schools or hospitals; rape or other grave acts of sexual violence; abduction; and the denial of humanitarian access to them. Naming and shaming, however, has its limits. Between 2005 and 2023, more than 347,000 grave violations against youngsters were verified across more than 30 conflict zones in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, according to UNICEF, the U.N. agency for children. The actual number is undoubtedly far higher.

From the extreme damage explosive weapons do to tiny bodies to the lasting effects of acute deprivation on developing brains, children are particularly vulnerable in times of conflict. And once subjected to war, they carry its scars, physical and mental, for a lifetime. A recent study by Italian researchers emphasized what Schneider intuitively knew — that “war inflicts severe violations on the fundamental human rights of children.” The complex trauma of war, they found, “poses a grave threat to the emotional and cognitive development of children, increasing the risk of physical and mental illnesses, disabilities, social problems, and intergenerational consequences.”

Despite such knowledge, the world continues to fail children in times of conflict. The United States was, for instance, one of the members of the U.N. Security Council that condemned those six grave wartime violations against children. Yet the Biden administration has greenlit tens of billions of dollars in weapons sales to Israel, while U.S. munitions have repeatedly been used in attacks on schools, that have become shelters, predominantly for women and children, in the Gaza Strip. “Make no mistake, the United States is fully, fully, fully supportive of Israel,” President Joe Biden said recently, even though his administration acknowledged the likelihood that Israel had used American weaponry in Gaza in violation of international law.

And Gaza is just one conflict zone where, at this very moment, children are suffering mightily. Let TomDispatch offer you a hellscape tour of this planet, a few stops in a world of war to glimpse just what today’s conflicts are doing to the children trapped by them.

Gaza

The Gaza Strip is the most dangerous place on Earth to be a child, according to UNICEF. Israel has killed around 17,000 children there since the current Gaza War began in October 2023, according to local authorities. And almost as horrific, about 26,000 kids have reportedly lost one or both parents. At least 19,000 of them are now orphans or are otherwise without a caregiver. One million children in Gaza have also been displaced from their homes since October 2023.

In addition, Israel is committing “scholasticide,” the deliberate and systematic destruction of the Palestinian education system in Gaza, according to a recent report by the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, a Palestinian advocacy group. More than 659,000 children there have been out of school since the beginning of the war. The conflict in Gaza will set children’s education back by years and risks creating a generation of permanently traumatized Palestinians, according to a new study by the University of Cambridge, the Centre for Lebanese Studies, and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East.

Even before the current war, an estimated 800,000 children in Gaza — about 75% of the kids there — were in need of mental health and psychosocial support. Now, UNICEF estimates that more than one million of them — in effect, every kid in the Gaza Strip — needs such services. In short, you can no longer be a healthy child there.

Lebanon

Over four days in late September, as Israel ramped up its war in Lebanon, about 140,000 children in that Mediterranean nation were displaced. Many arrived at shelters showing signs of deep distress, according to Save the Children staff. “Children are telling us that it feels like danger is everywhere, and they can never be safe. Every loud sound makes them jump now,” said Jennifer Moorehead, Save the Children’s country director in Lebanon. “Many children’s lives, rights and futures have already been turned upside down and now their capacity to cope with this escalating crisis has been eroded.”

All schools in that country have been closed, adversely affecting every one of its 1.5 million children. More than 890 children have also been injured in Israeli strikes over the last year, the vast majority — more than 690 — since August 20th, according to the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health. Given that Israel has recently extended attacks from the south of the country to the Lebanese capital, Beirut, they will undoubtedly be joined by all too many others.

Sudan

Children have suffered mightily since heavy fighting erupted in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. More than 18,000 people have reportedly been killed and close to 10 million have been forced to flee their homes since the civil war there began. Almost half of the displaced Sudanese are — yes! — children, more than 4.6 million of them, making the conflict there the largest child displacement crisis in the world.

More than 16 million Sudanese children are also facing severe food shortages. In the small town of Tawila in that country’s North Darfur state, at least 10 children die of hunger every day, according to a report last month in the Guardian. The population of the town has ballooned as tens of thousands fled El Fasher, North Darfur’s besieged capital. “We anticipate that the exact number of children dying of hunger is much higher,” Aisha Hussien Yagoub, the head of the health authority for the local government in Tawila told the Guardian. “Many of those displaced from El Fasher are living far from our clinic and are unable to reach it.”

More than 10 million Sudanese children, or 50% of that country’s kids, have been within about three miles of the frontlines of the conflict at some point over the past year. According to Save the Children, this marks the highest rate of exposure in the world. In addition, last year, there was a five-fold increase in grave violations of Sudanese children’s rights compared to 2022.

Syria

More than 30,200 children have been killed since the Syrian Civil War began in 2011, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights. Another 5,200 children were forcibly disappeared or are under arrest.

However little noticed, Syria remains the world’s largest refugee crisis. More than 14 million Syrians have been forced from their homes. More than 7.2 million of them are now estimated to be internally displaced in a country where nine in 10 people exist below the poverty line. An entire generation of children has lived under the constant threat of violence and emotional trauma since 2011. It’s been the only life they’ve ever known.

“Services have already collapsed after 14 years of conflict,” Rasha Muhrez, Save the Children’s Response Director in Syria, said last month. “The humanitarian crisis in Syria is at a record level.” More than two-thirds of the population of Syria, including about 7.5 million children, require humanitarian assistance. Nearly half of the 5.5 million school-aged children — 2.4 million between the ages of five and 17 — remain out of school, according to UNICEF. About 7,000 schools have been destroyed or damaged.

Recently, Human Rights Watch sounded the alarm about the recruitment of children, “apparently for eventual transfer to armed groups,” by a youth organization affiliated with the Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration for North and East Syria and the U.S.-backed Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, its military wing.

Ukraine

Child casualties in Ukraine jumped nearly 40% in the first half of this year, bringing the total number of children killed or injured in nearly 900 days of war there to about 2,200, according to Save the Children. “This year, violence has escalated with a new intensity, with missiles, drones, and bombs causing an alarming rise in children being injured or killed in daylight blasts,” said Stephane Moissaing, Deputy Country Director for Save the Children in Ukraine. “The suffering for families will not stop as long as explosive weapons are sweeping through populated towns and villages across Ukraine.”

There are already 2.9 million Ukrainian children in need of assistance — and the situation is poised to grow worse in the months ahead. Repeated Russian attacks on the country’s infrastructure could result in power outages of up to 18 hours a day this winter, leaving many of Ukraine’s children freezing and without access to critical services. “The lack of power and all its knock-on effects this winter could have a devastating impact not only on children’s physical health but on their mental well-being and education,” said Munir Mammadzade, UNICEF representative to Ukraine. “Children’s lives are consumed by thoughts of survival, not childhood.”

Ukraine also estimates that Russian authorities have forcibly removed almost 20,000 children from occupied territories there since the February 2022 invasion. A Financial Times investigation found that Ukrainian children who were abducted and taken to Russia early in the war were put up for adoption on a Russian government-linked website. One of them was shown with a false Russian identity. Another was listed using a Russian version of their Ukrainian name. There was no mention of the children’s Ukrainian backgrounds.

West and Central Africa

Conflicts have been raging in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for decades. World Vision has called the long-running violence there “one of the worst child protection crises in the world.” A 2023 U.N. report on children and armed conflict documented 3,377 grave violations against children in the DRC. Of these, 46% involved the recruitment of children — some as young as five — by armed groups.

Violence and intercommunity tensions in the DRC have forced 1,457 schools to close this year alone, affecting more than 500,000 children. And sadly, that country is no anomaly. In May, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA, reported that more than 5,700 schools in Burkina Faso had been closed due to insecurity, depriving more than 800,000 children of their educations. And by mid-2024, conflicts had shuttered more than 14,300 schools in 24 African countries, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council. That marks an increase of 1,100 closures compared to 2023. The 2024 closures were clustered in West and Central Africa, mainly in Burkina Faso, the DRC, Cameroon, Chad, Nigeria, and Niger. They have affected an estimated 2.8 million children.

“Education is under siege in West and Central Africa. The deliberate targeting of schools and the systemic denial of education because of conflict is nothing short of a catastrophe. Every day that a child is kept out of school is a day stolen from their future and from the future of their communities,” said Hassane Hamadou, the Norwegian Refugee Council’s Regional Director for West and Central Africa. “We urgently call on all parties to conflict to cease attacks on and occupation of schools and ensure that education is protected and prioritized.”

Feet of Clay

It’s been six decades since Lorraine Schneider unveiled her poster and her common-sense wisdom to the world. She’s been proven right at every turn, in every conflict across the entire planet. Everywhere that children (not to mention other living things) have been exposed to war, they have suffered. Children have been killed and maimed. They have been physically, psychologically, and educationally stunted, as well as emotionally wounded. They have been harmed, assaulted, and deprived. Their bodies have been torn apart. Their minds – the literal architecture of their brains – have been warped by war.

In the conflict zones mentioned above and so many others — from Myanmar to Yemen — the world is failing its children. What they have lost can never be “found” again. Survivors can go on, but there is no going back.

Schneider’s mother, Eva Art, was a self-taught sculptor who escaped pogroms in Ukraine by joining relatives in the United States as a child. She lost touch with her family during World War II, according to her daughter Kleven, and later discovered that her relatives had been killed, their entire shtetl (or small Jewish town) wiped out. To cope with her grief, Art made clay figurines of the dead of her hometown: a boy and his dog, an elderly woman knitting, a mother cradling a baby. And today, the better part of 100 years after the young Art was forced from her home by violence, children continue to suffer in the very same ways — and continue to turn to clay for solace.

Israa Al-Qahwaji, a mental health and psychosocial support coordinator for Save the Children in Gaza, shared the story of a young boy who survived an airstrike that resulted in the amputation of one of his hands, while also killing his father and destroying his home. In shock and emotionally withdrawn, the boy was unable to talk about the trauma. However, various therapeutic techniques allowed him to begin to open up, according to Al-Qahwaji. The child began to talk about games he could no longer play and how losing his hand had changed his relationship with his friends. In one therapy session, he was asked to mold something out of clay to represent a wish. With his remaining hand, he carefully shaped a house. After finishing the exercise, he turned to the counselor with a question that left Al-Qahwaji emotionally overwhelmed. “Now,” the boy asked, “will you bring my dad and give me my hand back?”

Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch and a fellow at the Type Media Center.

23 October 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor

Palestinian Territory – Israel is systematically and extensively working to drive out the Palestinian population and forcibly displace them from their residential areas in the northern Gaza Strip, using massacres, mass killings, bombings of hospitals and shelters, and the destruction of basic necessities of life. Euro-Med Monitor notes that the basic necessities of life across the Strip, particularly in the north, have already been deteriorating for 12 months.

The Israeli army’s on-the-ground massacres show that the plan to rid the land of its people and eradicate the Palestinian presence is moving forward at an unprecedented pace. Locals who are unable or unwilling to leave their homes are viewed as “terrorists” and are subject to direct targeting and killing.

Along with the Jabalia camp in the northern Gaza Strip, where Israeli aircraft dropped leaflets on Tuesday morning, October 22, urging residents of Beit Lahia, including those in shelters and hospitals, to forcibly evacuate and head towards the Indonesian Hospital in Jabalia, where the occupation forces set up a checkpoint before forcing the residents to leave northern Gaza, as happened over the past two days with thousands of people in the shelters surrounding the Indonesian Hospital, the Israeli occupation army also increased the scope and intensity of its military operations to include the Beit Lahia project.

The Israeli army ordered the evacuation of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in the Beit Lahia project, which houses the greatest number of victims of the Israeli aggression, after the medical staff refused to evacuate it during the initial days of the previous aggression. Israel’s latest forced displacement order includes the hospital.

The hospital’s operations are severely hampered by a shortage of medical supplies and blood units, ongoing shelling in the area, and the exhaustion of medical personnel from treating hundreds of dying and injured people over the course of 18 days.

The majority of the shelter centres in the Jabalia and Jabalia camps have been bombed by Israeli forces, who also targeted the displaced people while they were responding to the displacement orders and evacuation plans. This targeting was repeated yesterday (Monday 21 October), when the Al-Fawqa schools were targeted, resulting in the killing of 17 Palestinians and the injury of numerous others.

The Israeli occupation army tightened the noose around the Beit Lahia project after many Jabalia residents who were unwilling to leave the area sought refuge there. The occupation army enforced a siege on the Beit Lahia project with fire and demanded that its residents and the displaced people sheltering there leave.

The Israeli occupation army is also systematically destroying water stations, bakeries, streets, and agricultural lands—some of which were replanted to accommodate the population’s needs after the entry of any vegetables was prohibited in recent months—in the northern Gaza Strip.

In Beit Lahia’s Al-Shimaa neighbourhood, the Israeli occupation army killed three farmers, including agricultural engineer Youssef Saqr Abu Rabie. Months ago, Abu Rabie started an agricultural project in the northern Gaza Strip to combat the Israeli-imposed famine.

Over the course of the last 18 days, the Israeli army has destroyed and burned hundreds of homes in northern Gaza, particularly in the Jabalia camp. Nearly 700 people have been killed and over a thousand have been injured, and many more are still trapped under the debris of their homes and in shelters that have been targeted. Because of the Israeli siege and the imposition of a travel ban, it is impossible to recover these victims and evacuate them to safety.

Given that the Israeli army is carrying out systematic and widespread mass and individual killings; a deliberate starvation campaign; mass forced displacements; and the complete destruction of what remains of the most basic necessities of life, the United Nations must declare the northern Gaza Strip a disaster area that requires immediate interventions. It should also compel Israel to stop the genocide and protect civilians in the north and across the entire Gaza Strip. Euro-Med Monitor emphasises that the international community, including the UN, is complicit in the most heinous of crimes—genocide—because the vast majority of its members have not moved to actually put a stop to what is happening.

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

23 October 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Andre Damon

Two weeks after Israel began its ethnic cleansing operation in northern Gaza, aimed at violently displacing the 400,000 Palestinians who remain there, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) forced the population of Jabalia refugee camp out at gunpoint Monday amid daily massacres and deliberate starvation.

These scenes took place as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the representative of the country directing, arming, funding and overseeing the genocide, traveled to Israel to oversee the carnage in person.

The IDF published drone footage Monday of hundreds of people streaming from the rubble of the camp, with Israeli troops pointing weapons at them.

“The IDF allows civilians to safely evacuate from the area via organized routes,” boasted IDF spokesman Avichay Adraee upon sharing the video of the ethnic cleansing operation in a post on X. In reality, Reuters reported, tens of thousands of men were rounded up while women and children were forced to move south at gunpoint.

“We are facing death by bombs, by thirst and hunger,” Raed, a resident of Jabalia camp, told Reuters. “Jabalia is being wiped out, and there is no witness to the crime; the world is blinding its eyes.”

Israeli forces have killed 650 Palestinians in northern Gaza since the start of the assault 17 days ago, including 41 on Monday. “Genocide is unfolding in northern Gaza in its clearest form, in full view of the world,” the Palestinian Authority said in a statement Sunday.

In one of its most bluntly worded declarations yet, the UN Human Rights Office in the Occupied Palestinian Territories reported orders by the IDF are “leading to forced displacement” and “may be causing the destruction of the Palestinian population in Gaza’s northernmost governorate through death and displacement.” The statement added, “This is particularly the case around Jabalia, Beit Lahiya, and Beit Hanoun.”

The UN statement declared that “For two weeks since October 6, the Israeli military has taken measures that make life in north Gaza impossible for Palestinians while repeatedly ordering the displacement of the entire governorate,” adding, “Israeli authorities prevented the entry of all essential supplies to north Gaza.”

It noted further, “While the Israeli military has demanded that all civilians leave north Gaza, it has continued to relentlessly bomb and attack the area, especially in and around Jabalia Camp.”

The UN statement noted that “Palestinian men are being taken into custody by the IDF, raising fears that they may be subjected to arbitrary detention as well as torture.”

Philippe Lazzarini, the Commissioner-General of UNRWA, said, “Israeli authorities continue to deny humanitarian missions to reach the north with critical supplies including medicine and food for people under siege.” He added that “remaining shelters are so overcrowded, some displaced people are now forced to live in the toilets.”

Lazzarini accused Israel of “denying & weaponizing humanitarian assistance to achieve military purposes.” He added, “People attempting to flee are getting killed, their bodies left on the street.”

Hussam Abu Safiya, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, said the Israeli army had completely besieged the hospital and had ordered its staff to leave. “The hospital’s blood units have run out completely,” he said in a statement Monday. “We are implementing a priority treatment method for patients. This is the reality.”

One nurse near Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza told Reuters, “The army is burning the schools next to the hospital, and no one can enter or leave the hospital.”

According to the official death count, Israeli troops and bombs have killed at least 42,500 Palestinians, with another 10,000 uncounted. Once the effect of Israel’s deliberate infliction of starvation and the spread of communicable diseases is accounted for, the real death toll could exceed 186,000, The Lancet reported in July—meaning the real death toll could now be in the hundreds of thousands.

The implementation of the total starvation and complete ethnic cleansing of northern Gaza—referred to as the “generals’ plan,” coined by Giora Eiland, the former head of Israel’s National Security Council—comes as the United States is deepening its direct involvement in the genocide.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s arrival in Israel Monday marks his eleventh trip to the region since Israel started its war of annihilation against the Palestinian people in Gaza last October. His arrival coincided with the final deployment of 100 US combat troops in Israel, manning an advanced missile defense battery that will be used to support an imminent US-Israeli attack on Iran. “That system is in place,” US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin told reporters Monday.

As Israeli ground troops continued their ethnic cleansing operation in northern Gaza, Israeli jets leveled apartment buildings and other civilian infrastructure throughout Lebanon. Lebanon’s Health Ministry said 24 people were injured, and four people were killed Monday after 13 Israeli strikes throughout Beirut Monday.

The Sahel General Hospital was evacuated amid panic after Israel claimed that a Hezbollah bunker was located under the hospital, repeating claims made prior to the destruction of Shifa Hospital in Gaza amid reports of mass summary executions of civilians.

22 October 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Mazin Qumsiyeh

Dear friends and colleagues

The situation in North Gaza is beyond the word catastrophic: horror, massacres, extermination. People are shot on site as they even try to evacuate injured people, medical personnel are targeted, hospitals are targeted. No food or water allowed. Israel simply rejected UN and humanitarian organization access. People are dying by injuries and by thirst. It would be more merciful to drop a nuclear bomb on them. All to clear North Gaza for Zionist nefarious schemes to control its natural resources (e=and control the whole region). In some places they simply rounded people up, forced the women and girls to the south and took men and boys (we remember mass executions like this in 1948 ethnic cleansing). IN other cases they simly sent robot explosives to clear neighborhoods or bombed people (men, women, children) from the air. How could we tell our children and grandchildren that we had a chance to stop this and did not.Please see the below small examples of what is happening and write letters, stop the world to stop a genocide. Speak out, act now urgently. The horror is beyond description.

https://x.com/MosabAbuToha/status/1848365076295623022
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2024/10/22/live-scenes-of-terror-in-northern-gaza-as-israel-bombs-beirut
https://www.instagram.com/palestine.pixel/reel/DBIupdlIoJP/
https://www.instagram.com/hossam_shbat/reel/DA3PeYcRCCR/
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israeli-forces-raid-northern-gaza-schools-and-march-displaced-people-out-gunpoint
https://youtu.be/2EYjmGNn0Ws
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-strikes-beit-lahiya-kills-palestinians

Here are the scrolling names of some of the over 200,000 massacred in Gaza in one year
https://www.facebook.com/61564643332640/videos/1072692954342714

One of those massacred in north gaza this week is our friend Yosef Saqr Aburabie’ an agricultural engineer who insisted on trying to grow food in the midst of war https://t.me/msdrnews/391645

Shall I dare to ask you to say human and humane in the midst of unspeakable horror?

Mazin Qumsiyeh, Sleepless in occupied Bethlehem, Birthplace of Jesus whose message is still relevant, still ignored

22 October 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

This is the video link. Click here.

By Joseph Gerson

With the world, our species, facing the greatest danger of nuclear apocalypse since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, this year’s Peace Prize will refocus world attention on the urgency of renewing nuclear disarmament diplomacy.

The Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Nihon Hidankyo is long overdue and could not come at a more important time.

The Hibakusha (A-bomb witness/survivors) of Nihon Hidankyo have been among the world’s most courageous and steadfast advocates of nuclear disarmament. The organization has focused on three core demands: preventing nuclear war, eliminating nuclear weapons, and obtaining essential medical care for A-bomb victims.

Hidankyo was founded in 1956, in the wake of the Bravo H-Bomb test 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima A-bomb, which poisoned Japanese fishermen and Marshall Islanders.

As Wilfred Burchett, the first Western journalist to witness the ruins and suffering in Hiroshima in 1945, later reported, despite their excruciating physical and emotional suffering, the Hibakusha became the world’s most powerful and influential force for the abolition. With the award of the Nobel Peace Prize, the voices of the Hibakusha, their tortured testimonies, and their truth that human beings and nuclear weapons cannot coexist will now ring out more powerfully around the world.

Nihon Hidankyo was repeatedly nominated for its now well-earned Peace Prize, and the Nobel Committee is now to be celebrated for finally making this year’s decision. With the world, our species, facing the greatest danger of nuclear apocalypse since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, this year’s Peace Prize will refocus world attention on the urgency of renewing nuclear disarmament diplomacy. In addition to Russian nuclear threats related to the continuing Ukraine war, an accident, incident, or miscalculation growing out of provocative U.S., allied, and Chinese military operations in and around the Taiwan Strait and the South China/West could ignite escalation to a nuclear cataclysm.

With uncertainties about a possible Trump election victory, there are growing demands among Japanese and South Korean elites for their nations to become nuclear powers. The U.S. and Russia have lowered their official operational thresholds for launching their nuclear weapons. All of the nuclear weapons states are upgrading their nuclear arsenals and delivery systems, with the U.S. committing an estimated two trillion dollars to “modernize” its systems when that money could be spent to stanch and reverse the climate emergency and to address other urgent human needs.

Let us marvel and learn from the reality that Hibakusha, who were literally the last people on Earth, once seen by U.S. leaders and media as “vermin” to be eliminated, have awakened the conscience of the world after suffering what was probably the world’s worst war crime. And contrary to the myth propagated by President Truman, the A-bombs were not necessary to defeat Japan. Senior U.S. military officials from Eisenhower to LeMay and Leahy advised the president that “it wasn’t necessary to hit Japan with that awful thing” Secretary of War Stimson had already advised that Japan’s surrender on terms acceptable to the U.S. could be negotiated.”

Hibakusha’s friends, families, and neighbors were incinerated, irradiated, and physically ripped apart by the radiation’s heat and blast waves of the world’s first A-bombs. An entire city was destroyed and burned to the ground. Amidst their own agonies, many Hibakusha were unable to save their families in their shattered and burning homes. They witnessed ghostlike figures, no longer recognizable as human beings, some holding their eyeballs or intestines in their hands marching to their deaths, often in cisterns or the city’s rivers.

In the months and years that followed, many died from radiation-inflicted cancers and other diseases. Memories remain of the birthing of mutant babies and of other young children whose lives were cut short by radiation diseases. With initial fears that the radiation diseases might be contagious and about genetic damages, Hibakusha’s suffering was compounded by marginalization and discrimination.

As a result of the U.S. military occupation which continued until 1952 and subsequently with Japan functioning as the United States’ subservient ally, essential medical and other support services were long denied to Hibakusha. Among the achievements of Nihon Hidankyo and its allies are the collaborations they have built with other “global hibakusha.” These included forced laborers who were brought from Japanese-occupied Korea who also suffered the A-bombings. Compassionately and strategically they supported and joined with nuclear weapons test victims from the Marshall Islands, the United States, Russia, Kazakhstan, Tahiti, the Christmas Islands, and other Pacific Islands. Together with their testimonies in communities across the world and in the United Nations they forged the powerful but still inadequate taboo against the use of nuclear weapons. With their testimonies at the U.N. and elsewhere they have won the majority of the world’s governments to the understanding that for the human species to survive, priority must be given to the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons, not so-called “state security” interests.

Hibakusha testimonies were essential to the successful negotiation of the Treaty on Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which seeks to hold the nuclear weapons states accountable to their Article VI Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty obligation to engage in good faith negotiations for the complete abolition of nuclear weapons.

That nuclear weapons have not been used since the Nagasaki A-bombing was an unfortunate misstatement in the Nobel Peace Prize Committee’s award announcement. As Daniel Ellsberg, a principal author of the United States’ nuclear war planning in the Kennedy administration, taught during many international crises and wars, the U.S. has used its nuclear arsenal in the same way that an armed robber uses his gun when pointed at his victim’s head. Whether or not the trigger is pulled, the gun has been used.

Tragically, this is a playbook from which the Russian government has been working with its Ukraine-war nuclear threats. It is worth noting that in response to the announcement of the award, Hidankyo referenced the terrible assaults on the people of Gaza. The Hibakusha have identified with victims of other holocausts and massacres going back to Vietnam, when they identified with the people under the bombs.

They then warned of the danger that the U.S. might resort to a nuclear attack (which the U.S. prepared and threatened in 1954, 1957, and with President Nixon’s 1969 “madman” nuclear mobilization. Numerous popular initiatives are at work in the world which will be boosted by the Peace Prize award to Nihon Hibakusha.

In the U.S., the Back from the Brink campaign, initiated by Physicians for Social Responsibility, has been at the cutting edge. Its call for negotiation of a verifiable agreement to eliminate nuclear weapons, renunciation of first-use policies, ending the president’s sole authority to launch nuclear weapons, taking U.S. nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert, and canceling the plan to replace the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal with enhanced weapons has been endorsed by 43 members of Congress and numerous U.S. cities and states.

The Campaign for Peace, Disarmament, and Common Security works to prevent nuclear war and achieve a nuclear weapons-free world via its advocacy of Common Security. This is the ancient truth that no nation can achieve security at the expense of its rival. As with the INF Treaty that ended the Cold War before the fall of the Cold War, peaceful coexistence and security can be achieved only through mutual recognition and respectful, if difficult, win-win negotiations between rivals.

In the face of the horrors of nuclear weapons and drawing on the courage of Hibakusha, this is the paradigm on which the Hibakusha’s vision of a nuclear weapons-free world can be achieved.

Joseph Gerson is the president of the Campaign for Peace, Disarmament, and Common security, the co-chair of an Indo-Pacific working group preparing a Common Security Report, and author of Empire and the Bomb and With Hiroshima Eyes.

13 October 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Brett Wilkins

A Belgium-based advocacy group on Tuesday announced it “filed an unprecedented and historic complaint with the International Criminal Court against 1,000 Israeli occupation forces soldiers for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in Gaza,” where more than 150,000 Palestinians have been killed or wounded and millions more displaced, starved, and sickened by Israel’s yearlong onslaught.

The Hind Rajab Foundation—named after the 6-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed in January along with half a dozen relatives and rescue workers by Israeli troops invading Gaza in retaliation for the October 2023 Hamas-led attack—said that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) personnel identified by name in the International Criminal Court (ICC) complaint “are accused of participating in systematic attacks against civilians during the ongoing genocide in Gaza.”

“This complaint, supported by over 8,000 pieces of verifiable evidence—including videos, audio recordings, forensic reports, and social media documentation—demonstrates the soldiers’ direct involvement in these atrocities,” the group explained. “All of the named soldiers were located in Gaza during the genocidal assault, and the evidence reveals their participation in violations of international law.”

[https://twitter.com/prem_thakker/status/1843653184331624552]

The foundation accuses Israeli forces of:

• Destruction of civilian infrastructure: Targeted attacks on homes, hospitals, schools, markets, mosques, and other civilian infrastructure.
• Illegal occupation and looting: Soldiers were documented occupying civilian homes, looting personal belongings, and exploiting occupied properties.
• Participation in the Gaza blockade: The soldiers played an active role in enforcing a blockade that deprived civilians of essential goods such as food, water, and medical supplies.
• Targeting civilians: Audio and video evidence show soldiers deliberately attacking noncombatant individuals, including medical personnel and journalists.
• Use of inhumane warfare tactics: Indiscriminate bombing campaigns, starvation, and the systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure were all part of their actions.

The IDF soldiers identified in the complaint include at least 12 American, 12 French, four Canadian, three British, and two Dutch nationals.

“This complaint is not only the largest ever submitted to the ICC, but it is also a milestone in documenting Israeli war crimes for future generations,” the Hind Rajab Foundation said. “By meticulously identifying the perpetrators and detailing their crimes, we are establishing a historical record that will ensure the individuals responsible are remembered and held accountable.”

“The submission of this complaint represents a significant moment in the fight for justice,” the group continued. “We honor the memory of Hind Rajab and the countless victims who have perished in the ongoing genocide. Their stories will not be forgotten, and their voices will be heard through our persistent legal action.”

The foundation added that the complaint “supports the efforts” of International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan—who is seeking to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Hamas leaders—and “pushes for immediate action, including the issuance of arrest warrants for those responsible.”

“We believe this complaint marks a turning point in the global fight to bring justice to Palestine,” the group asserted.

The complaint’s filing came amid Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza, for which the U.S.-backed ally is on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice. In recent weeks, Israel has escalated attacks on Lebanon, Syria, and elsewhere, killing and injuring thousands of people and threatening to plunge the Middle East into a wider war.

The filing also came on the same day that Sky News published an investigation confirming that IDF officials lied when repeatedly claiming there were no Israeli troops near the site of Rajab’s killing at the time of the attack. The British network published satellite images showing numerous IDF vehicles nearby and interviewed military experts who identified damage done by bullets and tank rounds to the vehicle in which the family was traveling.

[https://twitter.com/SkyYaldaHakim/status/1843900645906010350]

The car was hit multiple times. Hind Rajab and her 15-year-old cousin Layan were the last survivors. In one recorded phone conversation with Rajab’s mother before the two children were killed Layan said, “The tanks are next to us.”

Hamas has no tanks.

The Sky News investigation was at least the second journalistic probe that concluded Israeli officials are not telling the truth about the attack.

In June, the U.K. research agency Forensic Architecture collaborated with Al Jazeera journalists and the advocacy group Earshot to publish an analysis that found Israeli tank fire likely fired the bullets that killed Rajab, her relatives, and two paramedics trying to rescue them in an ambulance that was blown to pieces despite receiving IDF permission to proceed with the rescue shortly before being attacked.

Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

10 October 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr. Ramzy Baroud

No one had expected that one year would be enough to recenter the Palestinian cause as the world’s most pressing issue, and that millions of people across the globe, would, once again rally for Palestinian freedom.

The last year witnessed an Israeli genocide in Gaza, unprecedented violence in the West Bank, but also legendary expressions of Palestinian sumud, or steadfastness.

It is not the enormity of the Israeli war, but the degree of the Palestinian sumud that has challenged what once seemed to be a foregone conclusion to the Palestinian struggle.

Yet, it turned out that the last chapter on Palestine was not yet ready to be written, and that it would not be Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who would write it.

The ongoing war has exposed the limits of Israel’s military machine. The typical trajectory of Israel’s relationship with the occupied Palestinians has been predicated on unhindered Israeli violence and deafening international silence. It was largely Israel that alone determined the timing and objectives of war. Its enemies, until recently, seemed to have no say over the matter.

Yet, this is no longer the case. Israeli war crimes are now met with Palestinian unity, Arab, Muslim and international solidarity, and early, albeit serious signs of legal accountability as well.

This is hardly what Netanyahu was hoping to achieve; just days before the start of the war, he stood in the United Nations General Assembly Hall carrying a map of a ‘New Middle East’, a map that had completely erased Palestine and the Palestinians.

“We must not give the Palestinians a veto over (..) peace,” he said, as “Palestinians are only 2% of the Arab world.” His arrogance didn’t last long, as that supposedly triumphant moment was short-lived.

Embattled Netanyahu is now mostly concerned about his own political survival. He is expanding the war front to escape his army’s humiliation in Gaza and is terrified by the prospect of an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court.

And as the International Court of Justice (ICJ) continues to look into an ever-expanding file, accusing Israel of deliberate genocide in the Strip, the UNGA, on September 18, resolved that Israel must end its illegal occupation of Palestine within a year from the passing of its resolution on the matter.

It must be utterly disappointing for Netanyahu – who has worked tirelessly to normalize his occupation of Palestine – to be met with total and thundering international rejection of his schemes. The advisory opinion of the ICJ, on July 19, declaring that “Israel’s presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (is) unlawful” was another blow to Tel Aviv, which despite unlimited US support, failed to change international consensus on the illegality of the occupation.

In addition to the relentless Israeli violence, the Palestinian people have been marginalized as political actors. Since the Oslo Accords in 1993, their fate has been largely entrusted to a mostly unelected Palestinian leadership, which, with time, monopolized the Palestinian cause for its own financial and political interests.

The sumud of the Palestinians in Gaza, who have endured a year of mass killing, deliberate starvation and total destruction of all aspects of life, is helping reassert the political significance of a long-marginalized nation.

This shift is fundamental as it runs opposite to everything that Netanyahu had tried to achieve. In the years prior to the war, Israel seemed to be writing the final chapter of its settler colonial project in Palestine. It had subdued or co-opted the Palestinian leadership, perfected its siege on Gaza and was ready to annex much of the West Bank.

Gaza became the least of Israel’s concerns, as any discussion around it was confined to the hermetic Israeli siege and the resulting humanitarian, though not political crisis.

While Palestinians in Gaza have tirelessly implored the world to pressure Israel to end the protracted siege, imposed in earnest in 2007, Tel Aviv continued to conduct its policies in the Strip according to the infamous logic of former top Israeli official, Dov Weissglas, who explained the rationale behind the blockade as “to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”

But a year into the war, Palestinians, due to their own steadfastness, have become the center of any serious discussion on a peaceful future in the Middle East. Their collective courage and steadfastness have neutralized the Israeli military machine’s ability to exact political outcomes through violence.

True, the number of dead, missing or wounded in Gaza has already exceeded 150,000. The Strip, impoverished and dilapidated to begin with, is in total ruins. Every mosque, church or hospital has been destroyed or seriously damaged. Most of the region’s educational infrastructure has been obliterated. Yet, Israel hasn’t achieved any of its strategic objectives, which are ultimately united by a single goal, that of silencing the Palestinian quest for freedom, forever.

Despite the unbelievable pain and loss, there is now a powerful energy that is unifying Palestinians around their cause, and the Arabs and the whole world around Palestine. This shall have consequences that will last for many years, long after Netanyahu and his ilk of extremists are gone.

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

10 October 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By M K Bhadrakumar

Israel has apparently shelved its planned attack on Iran. A combination of circumstances can be attributed to this retreat, which rubbishes Israel’s own high-pitched rhetoric that it was raring to go.

Despite Israel’s brilliant media management, reports have surfaced  that the Iranian missile attack on October 1 was a spectacular success. It was a display of Iran’s deterrence capability to crush Israel, if need arises. The failure of the US to intercept Iranian hypersonic missiles carried its own message. Iran claims that 90 percent of its missiles penetrated Israel’s air defence system.

Will Schryver, a technical engineer and security commentator, wrote on X: “I don’t understand how anyone who has seen the many video clips of the Iranian missile strikes on Israel cannot recognise and acknowledge that it was a stunningdemonstration of Iranian capabilities. Iran’s ballistic missiles smashed through US/Israeli air defences and delivered several large-warhead strikes to Israeli military targets.”

Evidently, in the ensuing panic situation in Israel, as the US president Joe Biden put it, as of October 4, there had been no decision yet on what type of response Israel should mount against Iran. “If I were in their [Israeli] shoes, I’d be thinking about other alternatives than striking oil fields,” Biden said in a rare appearance in the White House briefing room a day after Israeli officials were saying that a “significant retaliation” was imminent.

Biden added that Israelis “have not concluded how they’re — what they’re going to do” in retaliation. Biden also told reporters that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should remember US support for Israel when deciding on next steps. He claimed that he was trying to rally the world to avoid all-out war in West Asia.

In this pantomime, it is safer to believe Biden, as the honest truth is that without US inputs and practical help, and money — and direct intervention — Israel simply lacks the stamina to take on Iran. Israel’s regional dominance narrows down to executing assassination plots and attacking unarmed civilians.

But here too, it is debatable how self-sufficient Israel is vis-a-vis Iran. Reports have appeared that the US’ new technological intel  pinpointed Hezbollah leader Sayyed Nasrallah’s whereabouts, which were passed on to Israel, leading to his assassination.

Interestingly, CIA Director William Burns stepped in to refute the rumours that Iran conducted a nuclear test on Saturday. Speaking at a security conference on Monday, Burns stated that the US has closely monitored Iran’s nuclear activity for any sign of rushing toward a nuclear bomb.

“We don’t see evidence today that such a decision has been made. We watch it very carefully,” he said. Burns gently erased another alibi to attack Iran.

One critical factor that has compelled Israel / US to defer any attack on Iran is the stern warning by Tehran that any attack on its infrastructure by Israel will be met with an even harsher response. “In responding, we neither hesitate nor rush,” to quote Foreign Minister, Abbas Araghchi, who, by the way, made a trip to Lebanon and Syria over the weekend by way of giving Israel a defiant “message” — as he put it — that “Iran has strongly backed the resistance and will always support it.”

Earlier on October 4, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had used a rare public sermon to defend Iran’s missile attack against Israel, saying it was “legitimate and legal” and that “if needed,” Tehran will do it again. Speaking in both Persian and Arabic during Friday Prayers in Tehran, Khamenei said Iran and the Axis of Resistance won’t back down from Israel. Iran will not “procrastinate nor act hastily to carry out its duty” in confronting Israel, Khamenei declared.

However, what deters the Israelis and causes uneasiness in the American mind is something else — Russia’s lengthening shadows on the West Asian tapestry.

American military analysts have disclosed that certain highly advanced Russian weaponry have been transferred to Iran in the recent weeks backed up by the deployment of Russian military personnel to operate these systems, including S-400 missiles. There is speculation that the secretary of Russia’s Security Council (former Defence Minister) Sergei Shoigu paid two secret visits to Iran in the recent period.

Apparently, Moscow also responded to the Iranian request for satellite data on Israeli targets for its missile strike on October 1. Russia also supplied Iran with the long-range electronic warfare system “Murmansk-BN”.

The “Murmansk-BN” system is a powerful EW system, which can jam and intercept enemy radio signals, GPS, communications, satellites, and other electronic systems up to 5,000 kms away and  neutralise “smart” munitions and drone systems — and is capable of disrupting high-frequency satellite communication systems owned by the US and NATO.

To be sure, the Russian involvement in Iran’s standoff with Israel is potentially a game changer. From the US perspective, it raises the worrisome spectre of a direct confrontation with Russia, which it doesn’t want.

It is in this scenario that official Russian news agencies have quoted presidential aide Yury Ushakov on Sunday that Putin plans to meet with his Iranian counterpart, Masud Pezeshkian in the Turkmen capital, Ashgabat, on October 11.

Ushakov did not elaborate on the meeting. Indeed, this comes as a surprise since the two leaders are scheduled to meet again at the BRICS summit in the Russian city of Kazan that runs on October 22-24.

Of course, Iranians are also playing coy. Both Moscow and Tehran announced that their presidents were visiting Ashgabat on October 11 to attend a ceremony marking the 300th birth anniversary of the Turkmen poet and thinker Magtymguly Pyragy. Smoke and mirrors! (here and here)

It is entirely conceivable that amidst the cascading regional tensions, Moscow and Tehran may have thought of bringing forward the formal signing of the Russian-Iranian defence pact, which was originally scheduled to take place in Kazan.

If so, the event on Thursday will be reminiscent of the unscheduled visit by the then Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko to New Delhi for the signing of the historic Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation Between India and the USSR on 9th August 1971.

Interestingly, Ushakov added that Putin has no plans to meet Netanyahu. Putin is yet to respond to a request by Netanyahu for a phone conversation, made five days ago. A legend that Netanyahu created, typically, in the recent years to impress his domestic audience (and confuse the Arab street) — that he had a special relationship with Putin — is falling apart.

On the other hand, by chalking up an urgent meeting in Ashgabat — in fact, Turkmen president Serdar Berdimuhamedov was in Moscow only on Monday/Tuesday on a working visit — Kremlin is making it clear to Washington and Tel Aviv that Moscow is irrevocably aligned with Tehran and will help the latter no matter what it takes. (See my blog West Asian crisis prompts Biden to break ice with Putin, Indian Punchline, October 5, 2024)

Isn’t history repeating? The 1971 Indo-Soviet Treaty was the most consequential international treaty entered into by India since Independence. It was not a military alliance. But the Soviet Union boosted India’s military capability for an upcoming war and created space for India to strengthen the basis for its strategic autonomy, and its capacity for independent action.

Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar served the Indian Foreign Service for more than 29 years. He introduces about himself thus: “Roughly half of the 3 decades of my diplomatic career was devoted to assignments on the territories of the former Soviet Union and to Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan.

9 October 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Arundhati Roy

‘I refuse to play the condemnation game. Let me make myself clear. I do not tell oppressed people how to resist their oppression or who their allies should be.’

Writer and activist Arundhati Roy has been awarded the PEN Pinter Prize 2024. This is an annual award set up by English PEN in the memory of playwright Harold Pinter. Shortly after having been named for the prize, Roy announced that her share of the prize money will be donated to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund. She named Alaa Abd el-Fattah, British-Egyptian writer and activist, a ‘Writer of Courage’ who she would share her award with. The following is her acceptance speech for the prize, delivered on the evening of October 10, 2024, at the British Library.

I thank you, members of English PEN and members of the jury, for honouring me with the PEN Pinter Prize. I would like to begin by announcing the name of this year’s Writer of Courage who I have chosen to share this award with.

My greetings to you, Alaa Abd El-Fattah, writer of courage and my fellow awardee. We hoped and prayed that you would be released in September, but the Egyptian government decided that you were too beautiful a writer and too dangerous a thinker to be freed yet. But you are here in this room with us. You are the most important person here. From prison you wrote, “[M]y words lost any power and yet they continued to pour out of me. I still had a voice, even if only a handful would listen.” We are listening, Alaa. Closely.

Greetings to you, too, my beloved Naomi Klein, friend to both Alaa and me. Thank you for being here tonight. It means the world to me.

Greetings to all of you gathered here, as well to as those who are invisible perhaps to this wonderful audience but as visible to me as anybody else in this room. I am speaking of my friends and comrades in prison in India – lawyers, academics, students, journalists – Umar Khalid, Gulfisha Fatima, Khalid Saifi, Sharjeel Imam, Rona Wilson, Surendra Gadling, Mahesh Raut. I speak to you, my friend Khurram Parvaiz, one of the most remarkable people I know, you’ve been in prison for three years, and to you too Irfan Mehraj and to the thousands incarcerated in Kashmir and across the country whose lives have been devastated.

When Ruth Borthwick, Chair of English PEN and of the Pinter panel first wrote to me about this honour, she said the Pinter Prize is awarded to a writer who has sought to define ‘the real truth of our lives and our societies’ through ‘unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination’. That is a quote from Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

The word ‘unflinching’ made me pause for a moment, because I think of myself as someone who is almost permanently flinching.

I would like to dwell a little on the theme of ‘flinching’ and ‘unflinching’. Which may be best illustrated by Harold Pinter himself:

“I was present at a meeting at the US embassy in London in the late 1980s.

“The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money to the Contras in their campaign against the state of Nicaragua. I was a member of a delegation speaking on behalf of Nicaragua but the most important member of this delegation was a Father John Metcalf. The leader of the US body was Raymond Seitz (then number two to the ambassador, later ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said: ‘Sir, I am in charge of a parish in the north of Nicaragua. My parishioners built a school, a health centre, a cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A few months ago a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed everything: the school, the health centre, the cultural centre. They raped nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They behaved like savages. Please demand that the US government withdraw its support from this shocking terrorist activity.’

“Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity. ‘Father,’ he said, ‘let me tell you something. In war, innocent people always suffer.’ There was a frozen silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch.”

Remember that President Reagan called the Contras “the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.” A turn of phrase that he was clearly fond of. He also used it to describe the CIA-backed Afghan Mujahideen, who then morphed into the Taliban. And it is the Taliban who rule Afghanistan today after waging a twenty-year-long war against the US invasion and occupation. Before the Contras and the Mujahideen, there was the war in Vietnam and the unflinching US military doctrine that ordered its soldiers to ‘Kill Anything That Moves’. If you read the Pentagon Papers and other documents on US war aims in Vietnam, you can enjoy some lively unflinching discussions about how to commit genocide – is it better to kill people outright or to starve them slowly? Which would look better? The problem that the compassionate mandarins in the Pentagon faced was that, unlike Americans, who, according to them, want ‘life, happiness, wealth, power’, Asians ‘stoically accept…the destruction of wealth and the loss of lives’ – and force America to carry their ‘strategic logic to its conclusion, which is genocide.’ A terrible burden to be borne unflinchingly.

And here we are, all these years later, more than a year into yet another genocide. The US and Israel’s unflinching and ongoing televised genocide in Gaza and now Lebanon in defence of a colonial occupation and an Apartheid state. The death toll so far, is officially 42,000, a majority of them women and children. This does not include those who died screaming under the rubble of buildings, neighbourhoods, whole cities, and those whose bodies have not yet been recovered. A recent study by Oxfam says that more children have been killed by Israel in Gaza than in the equivalent period of any other war in the last twenty years.

To assuage their collective guilt for their early years of indifference towards one genocide – the Nazi extermination of millions of European Jews – the United States and Europe have prepared the grounds for another.

Like every state that has carried out ethnic cleansing and genocide in history, Zionists in Israel – who believe themselves to be “the chosen people” – began by dehumanising Palestinians before driving them off their land and murdering them.

Prime Minister Menachem Begin called Palestinians ‘two-legged beasts’, Yitzhak Rabin called them ‘grasshoppers’ who ‘could be crushed’ and Golda Meir said ‘There was no such thing as Palestinians’. Winston Churchill, that famous warrior against fascism, said, ‘I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time’ and then went on to declare that a ‘higher race’ had the final right to the manger. Once those two-legged beasts, grasshoppers, dogs and non-existent people were murdered, ethnically cleansed, and ghettoised, a new country was born. It was celebrated as a ‘land without people for people without a land’. The nuclear-armed state of Israel was to serve as a military outpost and gateway to the natural wealth and resources of the Middle East for US and Europe. A lovely coincidence of aims and objectives.

The new state was supported unhesitatingly and unflinchingly, armed and bankrolled, coddled and applauded, no matter what crimes it committed. It grew up like a protected child in a wealthy home whose parents smile proudly as it commits atrocity upon atrocity. No wonder today it feels free to boast openly about committing genocide. (At least The Pentagon Papers were secret. They had to be stolen. And leaked.) No wonder Israeli soldiers seem to have lost all sense of decency. No wonder they flood the social media with depraved videos of themselves wearing the lingerie of women they have killed or displaced, videos of themselves mimicking dying Palestinians and wounded children or raped and tortured prisoners, images of themselves blowing up buildings while they smoke cigarettes or jive to music on their headphones. Who are these people?

What can possibly justify what Israel is doing?

The answer, according to Israel and its allies, as well as the Western media, is the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7th last year. The killing of Israeli civilians and the taking of Israeli hostages. According to them, history only began a year ago.

So, this is the part in my speech where I am expected to equivocate to protect myself, my ‘neutrality’, my intellectual standing. This is the part where I am meant to lapse into moral equivalence and condemn Hamas, the other militant groups in Gaza and their ally Hezbollah, in Lebanon, for killing civilians and taking people hostage. And to condemn the people of Gaza who celebrated the Hamas attack. Once that’s done it all becomes easy, doesn’t it? Ah well. Everybody is terrible, what can one do? Let’s go shopping instead…

I refuse to play the condemnation game. Let me make myself clear. I do not tell oppressed people how to resist their oppression or who their allies should be.

When US President Joe Biden met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli war cabinet during a visit to Israel in October 2023, he said, ‘I don’t believe you have to be a Jew to be a Zionist, and I am a Zionist.’

Unlike President Joe Biden, who calls himself a non-Jewish Zionist and unflinchingly bankrolls and arms Israel while it commits its war crimes, I am not going to declare myself or define myself in any way that is narrower than my writing. I am what I write.

I am acutely aware that being the writer that I am, the non-Muslim that I am and the woman that I am, it would be very difficult, perhaps impossible for me to survive very long under the rule of Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Iranian regime. But that is not the point here. The point is to educate ourselves about the history and the circumstances under which they came to exist. The point is that right now they are fighting against an ongoing genocide. The point is to ask ourselves whether a liberal, secular fighting force can go up against a genocidal war machine. Because, when all the powers of the world are against them, who do they have to turn to but God? I am aware that Hezbollah and the Iranian regime have vocal detractors in their own countries, some who also languish in jails or have faced far worse outcomes. I am aware that some of their actions – the killing of civilians and the taking of hostages on October 7th by Hamas – constitute war crimes. However, there cannot be an equivalence between this and what Israel and the United States are doing in Gaza, in the West Bank and now in Lebanon. The root of all the violence, including the violence of October 7th, is Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land and its subjugation of the Palestinian people. History did not begin on 7 October 2023.

I ask you, which of us sitting in this hall would willingly submit to the indignity that Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have been subjected to for decades? What peaceful means have the Palestinian people not tried? What compromise have they not accepted—other than the one that requires them to crawl on their knees and eat dirt?

Israel is not fighting a war of self-defence. It is fighting a war of aggression. A war to occupy more territory, to strengthen its Apartheid apparatus and tighten its control on Palestinian people and the region.

Since October 7th 2023, apart from the tens of thousands of people it has killed, Israel has displaced the majority of Gaza’s population, many times over. It has bombed hospitals. It has deliberately targeted and killed doctors, aid workers and journalists. A whole population is being starved – their history is sought to be erased. All this is supported both morally and materially by the wealthiest, most powerful governments in the world. And their media. (Here I include my country, India, which supplies Israel with weapons, as well as thousands of workers.) There is no daylight between these countries and Israel. In the last year alone, the US has spent 17.9 billion dollars in military aid to Israel. So, let us once and for all dispense with the lie about the US being a mediator, a restraining influence, or as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (considered to be on the extreme Left of mainstream US politics) put it, ‘working tirelessly for a ceasefire’. A party to the genocide cannot be a mediator.

Not all the power and money, not all the weapons and propaganda on earth can any longer hide the wound that is Palestine. The wound through which the whole world, including Israel, bleeds.

Polls show that a majority of the citizens in the countries whose governments enable the Israeli genocide have made it clear that they do not agree with this. We have watched those marches of hundreds of thousands of people – including a young generation of Jews who are tired of being used, tired of being lied to. Who would have imagined that we would live to see the day when German police would arrest Jewish citizens for protesting against Israel and Zionism and accuse them of anti-Semitism? Who would have thought the US government would, in the service of the Israeli state, undermine its cardinal principle of Free Speech by banning pro-Palestine slogans? The so-called moral architecture of western democracies – with a few honourable exceptions – has become a grim laughingstock in the rest of the world.

When Benjamin Netanyahu holds up a map of the Middle East in which Palestine has been erased and Israel stretches from the river to the sea, he is applauded as a visionary who is working to realize the dream of a Jewish homeland.

But when Palestinians and their supporters chant ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’, they are accused of explicitly calling for the genocide of Jews.

Are they really? Or is that a sick imagination projecting its own darkness onto others? An imagination that cannot countenance diversity, cannot countenance the idea of living in a country alongside other people, equally, with equal rights. Like everybody else in the world does. An imagination that cannot afford to acknowledge that Palestinians want to be free, like South Africa is, like India is, like all countries that have thrown off the yoke of colonialism are. Countries that are diverse, deeply, maybe even fatally, flawed, but free. When South Africans were chanting their popular rallying cry, Amandla! Power to the people, were they calling for the genocide of white people? They were not. They were calling for the dismantling of the Apartheid state. Just as the Palestinians are.

The war that has now begun will be terrible. But it will eventually dismantle Israeli Apartheid. The whole world will be far safer for everyone – including for Jewish people – and far more just. It will be like pulling an arrow from our wounded heart.

If the US government withdrew its support of Israel, the war could stop today. Hostilities could end right this minute. Israeli hostages could be freed, Palestinian prisoners could be released. The negotiations with Hamas and the other Palestinian stakeholders that must inevitably follow the war could instead take place now and prevent the suffering of millions of people. How sad that most people would consider this a naïve, laughable proposition.

As I conclude, let me turn to your words, Alaa Abd El-Fatah, from your book of prison writing, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated. I have rarely read such beautiful words about the meaning of victory and defeat – and the political necessity of honestly looking despair in the eye. I have rarely seen writing in which a citizen separates himself from the state, from the generals and even from the slogans of the Square with such bell-like clarity.

As the horror we are witnessing in Gaza, and now Lebanon, quickly escalates into a regional war, its real heroes remain outside the frame. But they fight on because they know that one day—

From the river to the sea

Palestine will be Free.

It will.

Keep your eye on your calendar. Not on your clock.

That’s how the people – not the generals – the people fighting for their liberation measure time.

11 October 2024

Arundhati Roy is a writer.

Source: thewire.in