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By Ari Shivat, Haaretz

8 October 2024

Under this headline, the Hebrew newspaper “Haaretz” was published with an article by the famous Zionist writer Ari Shavit, in which he states:

It appears we have passed the point of no return, and it may be that “Israel” can no longer end the occupation, stop colonization, or achieve peace. It seems impossible to reform Zionism, save democracy, and divide the people of this land.

He added:

If the situation is as it is, then:

• There is no reason to live in this country.

• There is no reason to write in “Haaretz.”

• There is no reason to read “Haaretz.”

We must follow what Rogel Alpher suggested two years ago—leave the country…
If “Israelism” and Jewishness are no longer a vital part of one’s identity,
and if every Israeli citizen holds a foreign passport, not only technically but psychologically, then it’s over.
We should say goodbye to our friends and move to San Francisco, Berlin, or Paris.

From there, from the land of new German nationalism or new American nationalism,
we should calmly watch as the “State of Israel” takes its last breath.

We must take three steps back and watch the Jewish democratic state sink.

Perhaps the issue is not yet resolved. Perhaps we have not yet passed the point of no return.Perhaps it is still possible to end the occupation, stop colonization, reform Zionism, save democracy, and divide the land.

The writer continues:

I have pointed the finger at Netanyahu, Lieberman, and the neo-Nazis to wake them up from their Zionist delusion. Trump, Kushner, Biden, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton are not the ones who will end the occupation. The United Nations and the European Union will not stop the settlements. The only force in the world capable of saving Israel from itself is the Israelis themselves, by creating a new political language that recognizes reality and the fact that Palestinians are rooted in this land.

I urge you to seek a third way to survive here and not perish.

The writer from Haaretz confirms:

Since the Israelis arrived in Palestine, they have realized that they are the result of a lie created by the Zionist movement,
which used all sorts of deception regarding Jewish identity throughout history.

By exploiting and exaggerating what Hitler called the Holocaust, the movement succeeded in convincing the world that Palestine is the “Promised Land” And that the so-called Temple lies beneath the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Thus, the wolf was turned into a lamb, which was nurtured by American and European taxpayer money until it grew into a nuclear monster.

The writer sought help from Western and Jewish archaeologists, the most famous being Israel Finkelstein from Tel Aviv University,  who confirmed that “the Temple is a lie and a fairy tale that does not exist,”  and all excavations have proven that it disappeared thousands of years ago. This has been explicitly confirmed in many Jewish references, and numerous Western archaeologists have corroborated this. The last of these was in 1968 AD, when the British archaeologist Dr. Kathleen Kenyon, while she was the director of excavations at the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, carried out excavations in Jerusalem and was expelled from Palestine due to her revelation of “Israeli myths about the existence of traces of Solomon’s Temple beneath the Al-Aqsa Mosque.” She concluded that there is no trace of Solomon’s Temple and discovered that what the Israelis call “Solomon’s Stables” has nothing to do with Solomon or stables  It is an architectural model of palaces commonly built in various parts of Palestine. This is despite the fact that Kathleen Kenyon came from the Palestine Exploration Fund Society, with the purpose of clarifying the narratives in the Bible, as she showed great activity in Britain in the mid-19th century concerning the history of the “Near East.”

The Jewish writer emphasized that:

The curse of lies is what haunts the Israelis, and day after day it strikes them in the face in the form of a knife in the hand of a Jerusalemite, Hebronite, or Nabulsi, or with a stone or from a bus driver from Jaffa, Haifa, or Acre.

The Israelis realize they have no future in Palestine; this is not a land without a people as they falsely claimed. Another writer acknowledges not just the existence of the Palestinian people but rather their superiority over the Israelis. This is Gideon Levy, the leftist Zionist, who says:

It seems that the Palestinians are of a different nature from the rest of humanity… We occupied their land and treated their youth with drugs, prostitution, and depravity. We said that after a few years, they would forget their homeland and land, and then the younger generation would erupt in the 1987 Intifada.

We imprisoned them. We said, “We will raise them in prison.” Years later, after thinking they had learned their lesson,
they returned to us with the armed uprising in 2000, which consumed everything green and dry.

We said we would demolish their houses. We besieged them for many years, and then; they extracted missiles and managed to attack us despite the siege and destruction.

We started planning the separation wall and barbed wire… yet they came to us from underground and through tunnels, inflicting heavy losses on us. During the last war, we fought them with all our might, yet they took control of the Israeli satellite (Amos)?
They spread terror in every Israeli home by broadcasting threats and warnings, as happened when their youth managed to seize control of Israel’s Channel 2.

Ultimately, as the author says:

It seems that we are dealing with the most difficult people in history,
|and there is no other solution for them but to recognize their rights and end the occupation.

Writer

Ari Shavit*

Source: Hebrew newspaper Haaretz

Israel is turning, with alarming speed, into a country that lives on blood. The daily crimes of the occupation are already less relevant. Over the past year, a new reality of mass killing and crimes of an entirely different scale has emerged. We are in a genocidal reality…

By Chris Hedges

The fossil fuel industry, and the politician class they own, have no intention of halting the ecocide. As the climate crisis worsens, so do the laws and security measures to keep us in bondage.

Norfolk, U.K. — I am sitting with Roger Hallam, his gray hair pulled back in a ponytail, in the visitor’s room at HM Prison Wayland. On the walls are large photographs of families picnicking on lawns, verdant meadows and children playing. The juxtaposition of the photographs, no doubt hung to give the prison visiting room a homey feel, is jarring. There is no escaping, especially with prison guards circulating around us, where we are. Roger and I sit on squat upholstered chairs and face each other across from a low, white plastic table. Roger’s lanky frame tries to adjust to furniture designed to accommodate children.

Roger, one of the founders of Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain and Just Stop Oil, is serving a five-year prison sentence for “causing a public nuisance without reasonable excuse.”

He and his four co-defendants, who each received four-year sentences, were convicted for hosting a Zoom call in 2022 to organize activists to climb onto bridges over the M25, the main motorway that circles Greater London. The short-term aim was to stop traffic. The long-term aim was to force the government to stop new oil and gas licenses.

This was not a symbolic protest, exemplified by protesters hurling tomato soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, preserved by protective glass, in the National Gallery in London. It was a protest designed to disrupt, as it did, commerce and the machinery of state. Although even the protestors who tossed soup at the painting, which was not damaged, received harsh prison terms of nearly three years.

Global warming is expected to exceed 1.5 degree Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) in the 2020s and 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Farenheit) before 2050, according to a 2023 study published in the Oxford Open Climate Change journal. NASA scientists warn that “a 2-degree rise in global temperatures is considered a critical threshold above which dangerous and cascading effects of human-generated climate change will occur.”

The more the planet warms, the more extreme events such as severe droughts, heat waves, intense storms, and heavy rainfall intensify. The extinction of animal and plant life — one million plant and animal species are currently threatened with extinction — accelerates.

We are on the verge of tipping points, thresholds beyond which ice sheets, ocean circulation patterns, and other components of the climate system sustain and accelerate irreversible changes. There are also tipping points in ecosystems, which can become so degraded that no effort to save them can halt the effects of runaway climate change. At that point “feedback loops” see environmental catastrophes accelerate each other. The game will be up. Nothing will save us.

Mass death from climate disasters is becoming the norm. The official death toll from Hurricane Helene is at least 227, making it the deadliest in mainland U.S. since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In North Carolina, South Carolina and northern Georgia 1.1 million people remain without power. Mountain towns, without electricity and cell phone service, are cut off. Hundreds of people are missing with many of them feared dead. Anywhere from 5,000 to 15,000 people were killed last year in a single night by Cyclone Daniel in Libya.

These climate catastrophes, which occur routinely in the Global South, will soon characterize life for all of us.

“A billion refugees, the worst episode of suffering in human history,” Roger says of the 2 degrees Celsius mark, “and then human extinction.”

And yet with the devastation outside their doors, including the Southwest United States enduring the highest temperatures ever recorded in October — 117 degrees Fahrenheit in Palm Springs — the global oligarchs have no intention of risking their privilege and power by disrupting an economy driven by fossil fuel and animal agriculture, which is responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Livestock and their byproducts account for 32,000 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) released each year into the atmosphere and 51 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Instead of a rational response, we get more drilling and oil leases, more catastrophic storms, more wildfires, more droughts, toxic factory farms, the charade of the U.N. Conference of the Parties (COP) summits, the eradication of the rain forests and the false panacea of geoengineering, carbon capture and artificial intelligence.

Fossil fuel subsidies have increased worldwide — from  $2 trillion to $7 trillion according to the International Monetary Fund — as governments seek to protect consumers from rising energy prices. This is despite the fact that two years ago, at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, governments promised to phase out fossil fuel subsidies.

The governments that facilitate genocide in Gaza are, not surprisingly, the overlords of global genocide.

As the Swedish author and professor of human ecology Andreas Malm writes, “the destruction of Palestine is the destruction of the earth.”

“The destruction of Gaza is executed by tanks and fighter jets pouring out their projectiles over the land: the Merkavas and the F-16s sending their hellfire over the Palestinians, the rockets and bombs that turn everything into rubble — but only after the explosive force of fossil fuel combustion has put them on the right trajectory,” writes Malm who with Wim Carton wrote “Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown.” “All these military vehicles run on petroleum. So do the supply flights from the US, the Boeings that ferry the missiles over the permanent airbridge. An early, provisional, conservative analysis found that emissions caused during the first 60 days of the war equaled annual emissions of between 20 and 33 low-emitting countries: a sudden spike, a plume of CO2 rising over the debris of Gaza. If I repeat the point here, it is because the cycle is self-repeating, only growing in scale and size: Western forces pulverize the living quarters of Palestine by mobilizing the boundless capacity for destruction only fossil fuels can give.”

The genocide is tied to fossil fuels in other ways.

“One of the many frontiers of oil and gas extraction is the Levant basin along the coast running from Beirut via Akka to Gaza,” Malm writes. “Two of the major gas fields discovered here, called Karish and Leviathan, are in waters claimed by Lebanon. What does the West think of this dispute? In 2015, Germany sold four warships to Israel so it could better defend its gas platforms against any eventualities. Seven years later, in 2022, as the war in Ukraine caused a crisis on the gas market, the state of Israel was for the first time elevated into a fossil fuel exporter of note, supplying Germany and other EU states with gas as well as crude oil from Leviathan and Karish, which came online in October of that year. 2022 sealed the high status of Israel in this department.”

“A year later, Toufan al-Aqsa [the incursion into Israel from the Gaza by Palestinian fighters on Oct. 7, 2023] threw a spanner in the expansion,” Malm notes. “It posed a direct threat to the Tamar gas platform, which can be seen from northern Gaza on a clear day; in the range of rocket fire, the platform was shut down. A major player on the Tamar field is Chevron. On 9 October, the New York Times reported: ‘The fierce fighting could slow the pace of energy investment in the region, just as the eastern Mediterranean’s prospects as an energy center have gained momentum.”

Expanding Israeli production requires occupying Gaza’s coastline and the removal of the Palestinians.

“Five weeks after 7 October, however, when most of northern Gaza had been comfortably turned into rubble, Chevron resumed operations at the Tamar gas field,” Malm continues. “In February, it announced another round of investment to further bolster output. In late October, the day after the ground invasion of Gaza began, the state of Israel awarded 12 licenses for the exploration of new gas fields — one of the companies picking them up being BP, the very same company that first discovered oil in the Middle East and built the Kirkuk-Haifa pipeline.”

The connection between the genocide in Gaza and global mass death is not lost on the Global South, where climate refugees are dying on the open seas and in deserts as they attempt to flee north. UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency, calculates that weather-related “sudden onset hazards” — such as floods, storms, wildfires and extreme temperatures — forcibly displaced an annual average of 21.5 million people every year between 2008 and 2016. There are now 260 million people in coastal areas — an increase of 100 million from three decades ago — who are at “high risk” of being displaced by rising sea levels. Ninety percent of them live in poor developing countries and small island states.

As the ecocide and genocide in Gaza accelerates, we also get more draconian laws to criminalize protests.

Laws designed to protect the fossil fuel industry in the U.K. include “conspiracy to interfere with national infrastructure” or the new “lock on” offense that can see a protester who attaches him or herself to an object, land or another person with some form of adhesive or handcuffs, in a manner that is capable of causing serious disruption, go to prison for six months and receive an unlimited fine.

The trajectory is clear. Burn the planet. Lock up dissidents. Censorship. Crush those who resist, especially those in the Global South, with industrial weapons and indiscriminate violence. And, if you are part of the privileged class, retreat into gated compounds that provide food, water, medical care, electricity and security that will be denied to the rest of us.

In the end, everyone will go the way of the dinosaurs, who, at least, were not responsible for their own demise. The tragedy is that most of the ruling criminal class will probably survive a little longer than the rest of us.

Collective suicide will define what we call human progress.

The three-week trial for the Just Stop Oil activists, like the court hearings for Julian Assange, denied the accused the right to submit objective evidence. The defendants were not permitted to speak about climate change, the motive for their protest. Roger, defying the ban, attempted to address the jury about the climate crisis. The judge ordered him arrested for contempt of court. He was removed from the courtroom by six police officers. When the judge sentenced Roger and his co-defendants, Daniel Shaw, Louise Lancaster, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu and Cressida Gethin, he told them that they had “crossed the line from concerned campaigner to fanatic.”

The five activists were not convicted for taking part in the protests, but for its planning. The evidence used in court to convict them came from an online Zoom meeting that was captured by Scarlet Howes, a reporter posing as a supporter from the tabloid newspaper “The Sun.” No doubt some fossil fuel think tank is dreaming up a journalism prize for Howes now.

Sentences for those engaging in climate protests have steadily got harsher, longer than many of the sentences imposed on those who engaged in acts of violence during the racist riots in Southport, as Linda Lakhdhit, the legal director of Climate Rights International, points out.

I have long admired Roger, who has on the rust-colored vest all prisoners in the visiting room are required to wear, not only for his courage, but for his belief that resistance against radical evil is a moral imperative. It is not, ultimately, about what we can or cannot achieve. It is about defying, quite literally when we speak of the ecocide, the forces of death to protect and nurture life.

I addressed a crowd in London on Sept. 11 to raise money for the legal defense of the five imprisoned activists. The organizers at the Kairos Center played a recorded introduction Roger had sent from his prison cell before my talk.

“Change,” he said in the taped message, “comes about not through instrumental reason, that meaning, you do something in order to get something to happen, but rather because you cannot stand by, and so you act, in order to be what you are. The critical reason we’re failing, in my view, is because we buy into the idea that they can oppress us by sending us to prison. While in fact, power resides in our fear of going to prison, not the act of doing it in itself. Once we realize it’s all about fear, we have that lightbulb moment. It’s not what they do to us, it’s how we choose to react that determines their power.”

“You carry out the good, not to create good outcomes,” he says to me, “but because it is good, because it’s truthful, because it’s a beautiful thing to do, because it creates a metaphysical harmony, a balance.”

The tactics employed over the past few decades by environmentalists — marching, lobbying, voting and petitioning — have failed.

In 1900, the burning of fossil fuel — mostly coal — produced about 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide. That number rose threefold by 1950. Today the level is nearly 20 times higher than the 1900 figure. During the six decades the increase in CO₂ was 100 times faster than what the earth experienced during the transition from the last ice age, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

This is Roger’s seventh time incarcerated in the British prison system which is plagued by a lack of adequate funding, decaying infrastructure, reduced services, staff recruitment and retention issues and severe overcrowding.

“When I first went to prison the guards could be sadists, ex-military from our colonial wars,” he says. “Now they are usually polite, but nothing works.”

His shoes disintegrated, but his repeated requests for new shoes were ignored. Another prisoner, who had an extra pair, gave them to him.

I line up at the small canteen to buy us something to eat. I have been allowed to bring 40 British pounds into the prison. On the menu they have a vegan sausage sandwich. Roger and I are vegan. But when I get to the counter, I am curtly informed the vegan options are unavailable.

Roger argues that if 10,000 people are willing to engage in civil resistance, which means accepting prison terms for non-violent civil disobedience, carry out grassroots educational campaigns and mobilize public assemblies, they can ignite one to two percent of the population to embrace the militancy to rupture the existing order.

He draws on the research by Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard University, and Maria J. Stephan who examined 100 years of violent and nonviolent resistance movements in their book “Why Civil Resistance Works.” They concluded that nonviolent movements succeed twice as often as violent uprisings. Violent movements work primarily in civil wars or in ending foreign occupations, they found. Nonviolent movements that succeed appeal to those within the power structure, especially the police and civil servants, who are cognizant of the corruption and decadence of the power elite and are willing to abandon them. And we only need one to five percent of the population actively working for the overthrow of a system, history has shown, to bring down even the most ruthless totalitarian structures.

“It’s not only about changing the world,” Roger says. “It’s about seeing the world in a different way, one that rejects the narrative of the dominant ideology. It is a re-enchantment of the world. It is about our spirit taking center stage. This is where it belonged all the time. But the spirit only becomes real through action. The spirit is made flesh, to use some old language.”

“I am not calling for an individualistic journey to personal enlightenment, which is a contradiction in terms,” he says. “I am not calling for calmness that never leaves your head, that never gets you off the couch and into the streets. The spirit is in the street. The street is the spirit. The spirit is in the prison cell. The time for pretending is over. We are facing the end of the old world, and we are going to have to battle to create what comes next.”

And then it is time to leave. We embrace. I promise to mail him books. Those of us in the visiting room are lined up and escorted by the guards through a series of locked doors to the prison courtyard.

Roger is paying a steep price for resistance, for the moral life.

Henry David Thoreau refused to pay a poll tax to protest the U.S. invasion of Mexico, which he condemned as an effort to seize territory to expand slavery. He was arrested and jailed for tax evasion in 1846.

“I say, break the law,” Thoreau wrote in his essay “Civil Disobedience.” “Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Transcendentalist philosopher whose Divinity School address provoked outrage among the clergy and led Harvard University not to invite him back to speak for another thirty years, visited Thoreau in jail.

“Henry, what are you doing in here?” Emerson asked.

“What are you doing out there?” Thoreau responded.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper.

7 October 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Akbar E. Torbat

It appears that the recent chain of terrors intensified after the helicopter crash of President Ebrahim Raisi and his companions on May 19, 2024. The assassinations of Palestinian leaders and Iran’s military advisors have continued to this date. Israel wishes to wipe out the Palestinian resistance movement in the surroundings of its occupied lands, which has failed. Israel assassinated Hamas’ founder, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, in 2004, yet after two decades, Hamas not only has not been wiped out, but it has become stronger. The only way to end the conflict is for the Westerners to give back Palestine to its native citizens and leave the region.

Recent Chain of Terrors

While the killing of Palestinians in the occupied territories has continued, a new chain of Israel terrors has begun. On September 17, Israel simultaneously blew up Hezbollah’s pagers. The Israel’s terror operation led to the death of about 37 people and the wounding of nearly 3,000 members of Hezbollah and Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani, who was injured by the explosion of a pager. A day after the explosion of the pagers, the detonation of walkie-talkies and other electronic devices killed 14 people. Small amounts of explosives had been placed in the battery of each pager before reaching the hands of Hezbollah, and some of them had been given to their allies in Iran and Syria. The Pagers and walkie-talkies filled with concealed explosives were sold through a shell company that turned out to be owned by Israel’s Mossad.

This shows the importance of the role of intelligence and the influence of Israeli intelligence not only among Lebanon’s Hezbollah but also inside Iran. This once again proves the failure of the Islamic regime’s weak security apparatus, which is traditionally headed by a mullah.

As is seen, political assassinations have intensified since the crash of Raisi’s helicopter in May. Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas’s political office, was assassinated in Tehran on July 31, 2024. On September 27, 2024, Israel’s heavy bombardment of the Hezbollah headquarters using bunker-buster bombs led to the killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrollah and others with him. Since October 7, 2023, Israel has killed more than 42,000 Palestinians and wounded about 80,000, the most extensive genocide in recent history.

Iran claimed, according to Article 51 of the UN Charter, it has a legitimate right to attack Israel as its guest Ismael Haniya in Tehran, and Brigadier General Abbas Nilforoushan in Lebanon were assassinated by Israel, not to mention others who had been killed in many other circumstances.

Iran Responded

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard claimed that it targeted three important Israeli military bases. On October 1, 2024, the Revolutionary Guard Corps Aerospace Force fired about 200 ballistic missiles at targets deep in the occupied territories. According to Iran’s military officials, in operation, Truthful Promise 2 (Vadeh Sadegh 2), three major air bases of Nevatim, Hatzerim Airbase, and Tel Nof, the centers of Israel’s armored forces as well as the headquarters of the Mossad spy agency in Tel Aviv, were targeted by Iranian missiles. The missiles used, included hypersonic missiles that take about 12 minutes to reach Israel from Iran, about 1800 Km. The modern missiles used included Kheibar Shekan, a solid-fuel medium-range, and Fattah-1, a hypersonic ballistic missile. That was the largest attack that has ever been launched against Israel.

Israel’s F-15-I Ra’am ‘Thunder’ fighter jets used to target Hezbollah leaders in Lebanon operate from Hatzirim and Tel Nof airbases. Both bases were targeted by heavy attacks in the Truthful Promise 2 operation. The Nevatim military airbase in the heart of the Negev desert is the strategic headquarters of Israel’s air forces. This airbase is the central location of Israel’s fifth-generation F-35 stealth fighters. In Iran’s attack, the largest number of ballistic missiles were chosen to target Nevatim. In just one video recorded by the Zionist settlers, at least 25 ballistic missiles hit the Nevatim base area. The Wall Street Journal reported that satellite images showed 32 missiles had landed at Nevatim, and one was stuck in a hangar there. That shows Israel’s multilayered air defense system, called Iron Dome, David’s Sling, and Arrow, are very weak in preventing such attacks. Netanyahu has ordered censorship of any reports regarding the damages that Iran’s attack has caused.

Israel has threatened to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities as well as the military bases and oil infrastructure. No doubt, Iran’s military leaders are aware of such threats and are prepared to defend them. On October 4, in a speech at the Friday Prayer, Ali Khamenei said Iran would destroy Tel Aviv and Haifa if the Zionist regime dared to attack Iran.

_____________

Akbar E. Torbat is the author of “Politics of Oil and Nuclear Technology in Iran,” Palgrave Macmillan (2020). Farsi translation of the book is available here.

7 October 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Jay Janson

Genesis 15:18

“On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram and said, “To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates.”

Deuteronomy 2:16 2:17

“You must not let any living thing survive among the cities of these people the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance. 2:17 You must completely destroy them the Hethite, Amorite, Canaanite, Perizzite, Hivite, and Jebusite as the Lord your God has commanded you.” 

Joshua 6:21

“And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.”

Samuel 1 15:3

“Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.” (Christian Standard Bible)

‘Rabbi Dov Lior, a national- religious leader and the chief rabbi of Kiryat Arba and Hebron, published a letter on Monday saying that Jewish law permits destroying the entire Gaza Strip’ [Jerusalem Post, July 23, 2014]

A rabbi whose yeshivah is being funded by the government shamelessly calling for the murder of an entire population. Wiping them all out. This happened. And nothing is being done to stop him or silence him or even defund this guy yet to this historian’s knowledge. “Controversy Over Sephardi Chief Rabbi’s Comments on Gaza” (Israeli Hebrew newspaper Haaretz, March 15, 2024).

Israeli pilots know that they kill children when dropping massive amount bombs on city centers, the bombardment these pilots carry out resulting in the death of exponentially monstrously more civilians, including children, than died in the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack. Western media outlets portray the pilots as heroes who did not intend to kill non-combatants, but they have bombed homes, residential buildings, mosques, schools, universities, bakeries, shops, hospitals, U.N. facilities et al. As of October 13, 2024, the U.N. has reported over 41,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli airstrikes since October 7, 2023

Have the pilots been made to feel that God is on their side in any and all circumstance? during the 2014 bombing that took 2,200 lives? during Operation Cast Lead (2008–2009) when approximately 1,400 Palestinians were killed, including a large number of civilians, while Israel lost 13 soldiers? during Operation Pillar of Defense (2012) when over 160 Palestinians were killed, while only six Israelis died? during Operation Guardian of the Walls (2021) wherein over 250 Palestinians were killed, including women and children, and 13 people in Israel died? during the long merciless Israeli invasion 1982 war in Lebanon in which from 10,000 to 20,000 were killed and which led to the abominable bloody massacre at Sabra and Shatila?[statistics provided by AI ChatbotGTP]

All to seize the land ‘God gave their ancestors’ more than seventeen centuries ago.

Albert Einstein letter to Jewish philosopher Eric Gutkind dated January 1954

“For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people” I cannot see anything ‘chosen’ about them.”

Albert Einstein wrote a letter to the New York Times on December 4, 1948, co-signed by several prominent intellectuals and Jewish figures. The letter specifically referred to the Deir Yassin massacre (April 1948), in which over 100 Palestinian civilians were killed by the Irgun and other forces, calling it an example of the group’s brutality. It also warned against Menachem Begin’s politics of expansionism and aggression. The letter represented a moral appeal against the rise of extremist nationalist movements within Zionism (but Menachem Begin came to be Israel’s sixth prime minister).

In spite of Einstein’s efforts, the Palestinians Arabs, while still suffering British military occupation as a colony since the end of the First World War, became expelled and/or re-colonized after the Second World War by another group of armed Europeans through a genocidal civil war planned and provoked by Anglo-American machinations.

Subsequently the U.N. General Assembly told Israelis to Give the Land & Homes Back and Compensate Palestinians! Resolution #194 12/11/1948, ignored by Israel.

The State of Israel from its creation has been in bed with a US war investing business elite that once heavily invested in Hitler, was itself anti-Semitic in outlook, coldly indifferent and even complicit during the Holocaust its investments had made possible.

The billions of US dollars spent on munitions and weapons of mass destruction to kill Palestinians who keep on attacking fighting for rectification of the heartless injustice done them, could have been used to begin to compensate Arabs made destitute refugees by the criminal seizure of their lands, homes and properties.

But then where would faith in the Bible be? And U.S. support for Israel’s military with the latest high tech bombs and war planes? And Israeli support of the many U.S./NATO regime change wars in the oil rich nations of the Middle East? And the billions in profits for the investors in U.S. and European giant weapons manufacturing corporations like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon Technologies, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, and BAE Systems (UK), Airbus Defense and Space (EU), Leonardo (Italy), Thales Group (France) and Rheinmetall AG (Germany), whose CEO’s are most probably well educated and knowledgeable about the Bible.

Post Script

GREAT FUN?

As journalists in the West sought to portray the war on Gaza as complex and nuanced rather than the genocide it was accused of approaching by a U.N. court, a flood of social media posts from Israeli soldiers suggested they regarded it as anything but.

Apparently, for a considerable amount of Israeli soldiers war against defenceless Palestinian civilians can be great fun, and worth sharing with society at large.

An Al Jazeera feature length investigation exposes Israeli war crimes in the Gaza Strip through the medium of photos and videos posted online by Israeli soldiers themselves during the year-long conflict.

Israeli troops laugh as they blow up a mosque in Gaza. For the most part, soldiers posted material in their own names on publicly accessible platforms and often gave details of when and where the incidents depicted took place.

Al Jazeera began collecting these videos and photos, compiling a database of more than 2,500 social media accounts.

A soldier told a man being tortured: “Nothing prevents us from killing you. We could just kill you all. That’s normal. No one will deter us, and no one will call us to account.”

The behaviour displayed in the photos and videos ranges from crass jokes and soldiers rifling through women’s underwear drawers to what appears to be the murder of unarmed civilians.

It reveals a range of illegal activities, from wanton destruction and looting to demolitions of neighbourhoods and murder featuring wildly joyous grins and laughing while watching terrifyingly huge fiery explosions.

Could it possibly be Bible based ‘Schadenfreude’?         (Schadenfreude is a German word that means to take pleasure in someone else’s misfortune. It is a combination of the German words Schaden, which means “harm” or “damage,” and Freude, which means “joy”.)

=========END=========

ADDENDUM 1

“The Oppressed Will Rise!”  Eventual Rebellion of Those Who Have Been Subjugated 

Back in 1956, Moshe Dayan, Israeli military leader and politician, commander of the Jerusalem front in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War spoke thusly at a funeral.

“Let us not cast the blame on the murderers today. Why should we deplore their burning hatred for us? For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and villages, where they and their fathers dwelt, into our estate” a sea of hatred and desire for revenge is swelling”                     

OCTOBER 7, 2023!

          As Reported in Hegemonic Western Media

On Oct. 7, the militant Palestinian organisation Hamas based in Gaza led a brutal invasion of Israel. Israel accuses Hamas of killing 1,200 people, mainly civilians, however the major Hebrew newspapers have carried Israeli military admissions that firing from Israeli Apache Helicopters and tanks accounted for some of the Israeli civilian deaths. Hamas, which is also the democratically elected government of the Israeli open air prison of Gaza, claims most Israeli casualties were military.

By October 17, ten days later, the Israeli armed forces had bombed to death more than 5,000 Palestinians in Gaza, mostly women and children, at times dropping 2,000 pound bombs on apartment buildings, and had cut off all water, food and fuel to Gaza.

On that same 17th day of October 2023, Dr. Norman Finkelstein gave a talk at the University of Massachusetts labeled, “The Struggle for Justice in Palestine: Past, Present, and Future.”

“Palestinians have been trapped in a concentration camp for twenty years” as “the international community had abandoned them, and whatever tactic they attempted, including nonviolent resistance, had no impact on freeing them from that concentration camp.” [Dr. Norman Finkelstein]

China to International Court of Justice:

“Palestine has ‘inalienable right’ to armed resistance.  “Palestinian ‘use of force to resist oppression is an inalienable right’ and cannot be equated with terrorism.”

UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese, tweeted on X, April 8, 2023

“Israel can’t claim it has a right to defend itself from the people it oppresses and whose land it colonizes,”

Right away, on October 9, Israel’s defence minister announced a “complete siege” of Gaza, describing the Palestinian fighters who attacked Israel over the weekend as “human animals.” “We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza,” Gallant said. “There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything will be closed.”[Oct. 9, 2023 HuffPost]

Once Reported – Thereafter Made to be Forgotten

‘Erase Gaza’: War Unleashes Incendiary Rhetoric in Israel

WEBNov 15, 2023 – “Erase Gaza. Don’t leave a single person there,” Yair Golan an Israeli politician and senior military officer, said in an interview with Channel 14 on Oct. 15. New York Times Nov. 15, 2023

An Israeli rabbi urged the killing of women and children in the Gaza Strip and said he considered it a response to the teachings of halakha, or Jewish law.

It came from Eliyahu Mali in a video that was widely circulated Thursday on social media.

Mali heads the Shirat Moshe religious school in Jaffa in central Israel, where students serve in the army.

He claimed that those described as “vandals” in today’s war are “the children of the previous war whom we kept alive, and in reality, it is the women who produce terrorists.”

“Whoever comes to kill you with this concept does not only include the young man aged 16, 18, 20, or 30 who is now pointing a weapon at you, but also the future generation (the children of Gaza), and those who produce the future generation (women of Gaza), because there is really no difference,” he said.

Since October 7, 2023

A Reconstructed ‘Reality’ in Gaza, Reconstructed by Western Media’ Wars Enabling Journalists 

Portraying the Annihilation in Gaza as ‘Acceptable,’ ‘Excusable,’ and/or a ‘Reasonable and ‘Proportionate’ ‘Necessary’ Defensive Reaction,’ and Not Seen as Genocide.

(“,,wars can be started by lies, – then kept going by lies!“) Julius Assange 

Hamas “beheading 40 babies” 

– headlines and the front pages of countless western news outlets. U.S. President Biden claimed to have seen “confirmed photos of terrorists beheading babies,” and that “Israeli women were raped, assaulted, paraded as trophies”

This is journalism that projects thinking the wholesale destruction of Gaza to eliminate Hamas is morally justified.

Hamas is pictured as bloodthirsty savages.

‘Hamas beheaded 40 babies, baked another in an oven, carried out mass, systematic rapes, and cut a foetus from its mother’s womb.’

An Israeli first responder to the October 7 terror attack has claimed that Hamas terrorists roasted a baby in an oven in shocking video testimony. Asher Moskowitz, of the United Hatzalah first responder group, published a video of himself speaking to a camera, delivering his witness account.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken describing in graphic detail – an incredible Hamas attack on an Israeli family watched and heard by this writer on C-Span, but now blacked out of the Internet.

“The father’s eye gouged out in front of his kids. The mother’s breast cut off, the girl’s foot amputated, the boy’s fingers cut off before they were executed.Then their executioners sat down and had a meal.”

Efforts by the United Nations to investigate these claims being obstructed by Israel have gone unreported.

NEWS Le Monde April 3, 2024: “On October 10, official Israeli accounts relayed a sordid but unfounded allegation. Six months later, it continues to circulate, fuelling accusations of Israeli disinformation.”

Western Media Journalists Avoid Mention of IDF Videos Showing Israeli soldiers Laughing as Universities, Mosques, Hospitals, and Apartment Buildings Are Blown Up

As hegemonic news media makes sure this macabre inhuman slaughter in Gaza goes on and on, we can recall what hero publisher of Wikileaks,Julian Assange, cried out during the barbaric U.S.UK led war on Iraq. Assange suggested we ask ourselves:

“Of the complicit media, (which is the majority of the mainstream press), what is the average death child count that could be attributed to each journalist?”

“When we understand that wars come about and are continued as a result of lies peddled to the British public and the American public and the publics all over Europe and other countries then who are the war criminals?”

“Journalists Are War Criminals!”

“It is not just leaders, it is not just soldiers, it is journalists; journalists are war criminals. …the reality that is constructed around us is constructed by liars.”

Julian Assange spoke succinctly about those media journalists who read us selected, bent and twisted one-sided news to disinform, blind or subtly trick the public to support, accept or ignore ongoing atrocity wars even when massive amount of lives are being taken.

Julian Assange has brought to our attention the pleasant-looking evening news anchor who captivates TV audiences with alternating joviality and gravitas, asking whether they should be seen as insidiously evil as they generate support for horrific suffering, death, maiming and destruction.

Media Falsified ‘Search for Peace in the Holy Land

For seventy-five years, the powerful media of the ‘Colonial Powers renamed ‘Free World’ and finally ‘the International Community of Nations’ have kept up a murderously deceitful pretence of trying to bring peace to Palestine and the oil rich Middle East. A quick glance at the provisions of the 1946 proposed UN partition that were fully expected and obviously intended to incite violence and create deadly conflict, permanent hostilities, destabilisation and facilitate Western imperialist penetration, exposes this pretending to search for a peace which that financial element that rules the United States and Wall St. has never wanted.

75 years of pro-Israel journalism for the same U.S. war investing business elite that once heavily invested in Hitler, was itself anti-Semitic in outlook, coldly indifferent and even complicit during the Holocaust its investments had made possible.

Since October 7, Israel has blocked, food, water, electricity and fuel from entering Gaza, with the unholy desired effect of the present famine with children now dying of malnutrition. This has been rarely mentioned in pro-Israel journalism.

Commercial newscast time is almost entirely devoted to the hostages, with almost never a word regarding the thousands of Palestinians, many children, the hostages were taken to exchange.

Journalists of the U.S. Led Hegemonic West Are Responsible For Prolonging the Genocide of Their Fellow Human Beings – almost Half of Them Children! – by delaying the world from putting an end to Israel’s American provisioned and supported slaughter of Palestinians through air strikes and famine.

How many more children will soon die because Journalists working for the giant entertainment/news corporation conglomerates of the U.S.A. led hegemonic colonialist West have for twelve months been underreporting this inhumane blockage of life sustaining aid, focusing its audiences attention instead on Israeli propaganda of mostly lies of horrendous atrocities during the Palestinian freedom fighters guerrilla attack on October 7, 2023, which Western journalists never fail to label a terrorist attack by Hamas repeating ‘which the U.S. and other nations have cited as a terrorist organisation.’

This article is dedicated to the indescribably inhuman horror of death and destruction being brought down upon Palestinians, especially on thousands of their children.

For one whole year Israel has rained death. maiming and terror down upon a more than 2.2 million of God’s children in Gaza. As of early October 2024, the ongoing conflict in Gaza has resulted in the deaths of around 17,000 Palestinian children since October 2023, according to reports from local authorities and humanitarian organisations, with UNICEF warning of the unimaginable horrors faced by Gaza’s children during the relentless Israeli attacks. Many of these children are not only victims of the violence but also suffer from severe psychological trauma, physical injuries, and the loss of parents.

Today’s seemingly ubiquitous accessory to wars CIA overseen hegemonic international media must and will eventually be taken down by a growing alternate media and new media from powerful greatly populated countries like China, India and other prospering nations of the awakening South. Today’s twisted realities and their mass murderous history will soon be apparent even to Americans, who, along with the victims of its wars, will benefit from the truth.

Jay Janson is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer; has lived and worked on all continents; articles on media published in China, Italy, UK, India and in the US by Dissident Voice, Global Research; Information Clearing House; Counter Currents and others; now resides in NYC; First effort was a series of articles on deadly cultural pollution endangering seven areas of life emanating from Western corporate owned commercial media published in Hong Kong’s Window Magazine 1993; Howard Zinn lent his name to various projects of his; Weekly column, South China Morning Post, 1986-87; reviews for Ta Kung Bao; article China Daily, 1989. Is coordinator of the Howard Zinn co-founded King Condemned US Wars International Awareness Campaign, and website historian of the Ramsey Clark co-founded Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity Now Campaign, which contains a history of US crimes in 9 countries up to 2006  9 countries up to 2006

7 October 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Suresh Khairnar

More than sixteen thousand children were killed in one year and more than eighteen thousand children became orphans! Air strikes and military action by the Israeli army have been going on in Gaza Strip for the last one year! More than 41000 people have died so far in Gaza, which has a population of about 2.3 million ! 16,765 of them are children! People coming from different parts of Gaza are forced to live only in Al-Awasi humanitarian area which is only 10% of Gaza Strip! Children are bearing the brunt of Israel’s attacks! The United Nations estimates that more than 18000 children have become orphans in the last one year due to the war, there is no one left to raise them! Talin Al-Hinawi, who lost her father in the Israeli attack, has no one left in her family now, so she is living in Al Barka orphanage camp! She tells that her entire family has been destroyed in the war! Talin says that she wants to return to her home in Gaza City so that she can study like others! A similar story is of 10-year-old Nada al-Gharib who lives in Khan Younus refugee camp. She says that this war has taken away my father and my only brother from us! She says that our camp was attacked by the Israeli army and all the members of our family were killed! I had gone out to get food, so I survived!

The situation in Lebanon is almost the same! In Lebanon’s capital Beirut, refugees are seen everywhere from the roads to the parking lots! People affected by the war are sleeping on mattresses on the roadside, parking their vehicles in the parking lots and living in temporary tents! Some people are living in wooden or plastic camps in the beach area on the seashore!

The Lebanese government has arranged refugee camps in schools, colleges and other government buildings. These refugee camps are being run by social welfare organizations. In a refugee camp located in Beirut’s Omar Farooq School, Imad, an engineer by profession, used to work abroad but after the war he has returned to help the people. Ella is also helping with Imad. She studies in a college which is currently closed.

Noor Hassan, a Syrian, came to Lebanon as a refugee 25 years ago. Before the recent attacks, Noor’s husband used to work in a bakery, but now he himself is waiting in line at the refugee camp to be given bread. 52-year-old Saosan is sitting on a mattress near a church in Beirut. She is a resident of Der Jahain, 50 kilometers south of Beirut. She shows the picture of her house on her mobile phone and says that her entire house has been destroyed in the attack carried out by Israel.

Despite all this, the attitude of the world’s big countries America and England towards Israel in this war has been continuing for the last seventy-five years. The mistake of creating Israel on the land of Palestine of 10,000 square kilometers has been of these two countries. Where the total population of Palestine was 20 lakhs, in which the population of Jews was only six lakhs, 56% of the land was given to the Jews, 5,700 square kilometers of land was given to six lakh Jews. And 4,300 square kilometers of land was given to 14 lakh Arabs. And in that too, the most fertile land was given to the Jews and the Arabs were given the rugged hilly area. How unjust has this division been? And the matter did not stop here. Israel has taken over the land from the Arabs in the last seventy-five years after every fight and quarrel. In view of that, Israel has encroached upon 90% of the remaining land of Palestine instead of 56%! And has erected 25 to 30 feet high concrete walls at various places! And does America and England, who claim to be the champions of human rights, not see the need to maintain the world’s most densely populated areas, Gaza Strip and West Bank?

Mahatma Gandhi had said in 1938 itself, “Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home” saying that just as England belongs to the British and France belongs to the French, Palestine belongs to the Arabs. It is wrong and inhuman to impose Jews on Arabs. Mahatma Gandhi had warned about this ten years before Israel came into existence. And all of us who talk about Gandhiji’s legacy have a moral responsibility to stand with the people of Palestine in such a time of crisis.

Dr Suresh Khairnar is former president of Rashtra Sewa Dal (RSD)

7 October 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Marwan Asmar

Look Israel, you are not going to win the war so stop acting as if you are going on to win it! The sooner Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu realizes that the better it would be for everyone.

But will he? Netanyahu is on a rollercoaster. Unable to finish off Gaza and Hamas, he turns his army to Lebanon and Hezbollah but he is soon stuck in the ‘mud’ there despite the mass bombing, the destruction and the murder of innocent civilians.

The Israeli army has tried to cross the border into Lebanon at least seven times but has failed. It tried to enter a few hundred yards into southern Lebanon but soon pushed back every time by Hezbollah fighters. The Israeli army is finding out this party is no pushover despite the early pagers and the walkie talkie deathly-traps disasters.

Despite its air superiority and massive bombings that killed much of its top cadres including the dramatic killing of Secretary-General Hassan Nasarallah, Hezbollah fighters soon picked up and regained their strength.

On the ground, the Israeli soldiers were not going to cross into Lebanon and that was a promise kept up by the skirmishes, heavy fighting, engagement and combat. Israeli soldiers were being stopped at the door so to speak, they were being killed and injured as reported by Hezbollah and admitted to by the Israeli army.

In addition to that, Hezbollah has been launching missiles and rockets on northern and central Israel all week, reaching all the way to Haifa and Tel Aviv, Acca, Tiberias, Safad with settlements, military basis, Mossad headquarters, the Galilee and all way to the occupied West Bank.

What this meant is that sirens were going off all the time and people were going in and out of underground shelters because of the extent of the missiles that were mostly coming from southern Lebanon but occasionally from Yemen and from Islamic resistance groups in Iraq and even Syria.

Psychology Strain

So the psychology has been a strain on its people, military and even politicians for on average between 100 and 150 missiles were being launched on the Israeli interior and on a daily basis. The majority of these are falling on these areas all the time and wreaking havoc and nervousness.  Their deflection by the Israeli Iron Dome has  failed badly in this war with Israelis feeling the heat as 23 percent of the population polled are thinking of leaving the country.

Hezbollah is launching the different missiles despite the constant bombing being made by Israeli warplanes on the southern district of Beirut which is considered as the main Hezbollah stronghold. The Israelis are bombing intensely the Lebanese district, almost on the same level that was being practiced on the Gaza Strip, especially in the early months of the period following 7 October.

However, Hezbollah is stronger than Hamas and continuing its battering of the north of Israel – as can be seen – and will be maintained for a long time. Observers are saying Hezbollah seeks to send a clear message to Israel that ‘if you bomb our south district we will continue to strike places like Tel Aviv and Haifa’ which are the major economic and technological hubs and conurbations in Israel.

It is not an east ride for Israel after it killed Nasrallah which was seen as a brief moment of success and jubilation not least most of all from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who wanted to celebrate this act on the first anniversary of 7 October. But this wasn’t to be for soon, Israel was hit by 200 ballistic missiles launched all the way from Iran and increasing the psychology of fear among the Jewish population.

Israel has already tried to play down that affair by saying these missiles were not effective but they later admitted at least two of their military bases were hit. On the point of conjecture, everyone is expecting Israel to strike Iran and expand the regional war. But the Americans, whose generals and politicians are presently in Israel, they maybe trying to persuade the Israeli government not to because of the deadly consequences and slippery-slope scenarios.

Meanwhile, and feeling the pain again, Israel is going back to pound poor old Gaza in a most intense and obscene way and manner while seeking once again to drive the population of northern Gaza further down south and create a military zone and fill it with Jewish settlements through its so-called ‘Generals’ Plan’.

This was the idea put forward at the start of this war on the enclave last year. It failed then – despite talk of driving the Palestinians into the Sinai Peninsula – and no doubt it will fail now.

This is because after a whole year of destruction, Hamas and its fighters continue to be a force to be reckoned with. They have not been destroyed despite the mass bombs dropped on Gaza but they are regrouping throughout the enclave and dealing painful blows to the Israeli army.

Dr Asmar is a writer from Amman and editor of the crossfirearabia.com website

7 October 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Richard Falk

A commentary on October 7 stimulated by an interview with an independent Turkish journalist, Naman Bakac

Q: how do you briefly evaluate the last year regarding the October 7th operation in terms of HAMAS, Palestine and Israel?

Response: For the several months after October 7, Israel’s mastery of public discourse promoted an understanding that allowed Israel to carry out the early phases of its genocidal assault on Gaza with relatively little diplomatic friction in the West but growing discontent among progressive sectors of civil society. Throughout this early period the mainstream media relied on an Israeli optic to promote a one-dimensional misleading appreciation of October 7 as an unprovoked terrorist attack by Hamas terrorists on innocent Israeli civilians accompanied by barbaric atrocities. The atrocity dimension of the Hamas attack was gradually scaled back but without eroding governmental support for Israel in the West led by the US, but with the backing of UK, France, Germany, and most other Western states.

What was missing in this phase of basically unquestioning support for Israel was critical media treatment that did more than blandly report Israel’s version of the facts through endless TV time given over to Israeli government spokespersons, retired military and intelligence officials commenting on the progress of Israel’s supposed retaliatory campaign, and pro-Zionist opinion columnists writing for such established media platforms as the New York Times, Washington Post, The Economist. Except for rather obscure online platforms there was no space given to critics who pointed to the pre-October 7 extremism of the Netanyahu government focused on making the West Bank unlivable by unleashing settler violence and setting its sights expansively on a one-state Greater Israel solution.

The demonization of Hamas went completely unchallenged although it has been persuaded by the US Government to compete in the 2006 Gaza legislative elections in Gaza as a path if taken by Hamas would lead to political normalization, understood to include removal from the terrorist list. Yet neither Washington nor Tel Aviv expected Hamas to prevail in these internationally monitored elections, and when they did, and Hamas later displaced the corrupt Fatah presence in Gaza, Israel went to work reversing the reassurances given to Hamas prior to the elections, refusing to honor the results, imposing a comprehensive blockade on Gaza in 2007, which continues in effect and amounted to a cruel extended  form of collective punishment of the entire Palestinian population of the Gaza strip, 75% of whom were refugees from the 1948 War denied their right of return under international law. Only very recently has there been some attempt to present Hamas in a balanced manner, most notably in a book co-edited by Helena Cobban, Rami Khouri, and David Wildman, entitled Understanding Hamas and Why That Matters (OR Books, 2024).

My own views on Hamas were influenced by meetings ten years ago with Hamas leaders in Doha, Cairo, and Gaza City while I was acting as the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories.  I was impressed by the intelligence and moderation of these Hamas officials that I remain convinced that they were not putting on ‘a show’ to mislead a minor UN official. In these discussions two elements were stressed—first, the need for a political alternative to the resumption of armed struggle for the sake of both Palestine and Israel, and secondly, a long-term ceasefire coupled with an Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Palestinian Territories of Gaza, West Bank, and East Jerusalem as a formula for long-term stability. Turkey more than other countries at the time sought covertly to mediate between Hamas and Israel under the leadership of its star diplomat, Ahmet Davutoglu (later Turkey’s Foreign Minister and Prime Minister), with hopes that some accommodation could be agreed upon, bringing stability and hope to the region and a recovery of some limited sense of normalcy to the long oppressed Palestinian people, now to the people of Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and most of all, Iran. Yet, as events since 2006 have darkly demonstrated, this was not to be. Quite the contrary!

Undoubtedly, the worst distortion in these first months after October 7 was the insistence in the Western liberal democracies that the use of the word ‘genocide’ in connection with Israel’s military operation was defamatory, an instance of ‘hate speech’ that warranted punitive responses such as formal retractions, student dismissals, faculty suspensions, and forced administrative resignations. ‘Playing it safe’ in many corporate and governmental settings meant keeping silent about Israeli atrocities except in private conversations among trusted friends. Western governments accentuated this anti-democratic turn by exerting pressures on educational administrators and government employees.

Not mentioning genocide was to ignore the proverbial elephant in the room. Numerous statements by top Israeli political officials and military commanders made no secret of their genocidal intent. On October 9, Israel’s Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant, announced ‘a total siege’ of Gaza applicable to food, fuel, and electricity. He explained that when ‘fighting human animals’ it is necessary to treat the adversary accordingly. Prime Minister Netanyahu invoked the bloodiest chapter in the Bible justifying revenge against the Amalekites: “Do not spare them, put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.” Modern Torah teaching generally interprets this troublesome passage metaphorically or as a message intended to address the evil within Jews, but for the far right, including cabinet members of the Netanyahu coalition, the Amalek passage is taken literally and has long served as justification for killing all and any Palestinians.

When reinforced by tactics exhibiting disregard for Palestinian vulnerabilities, the inference of genocide was unmistakable, so much so that even the juridically cautious ICJ gave a preliminary nod in the direction of acknowledging genocide in their rulings of January 26 in response to the South African initiative seeking resolution of its contention that Israel was violating the Genocide Convention of 1951. Of course, Israel rejected these genocidal allegations by its usual tactic of castigating the motives of critics, insisting as always, that it was confronting worldwide antisemitism as well as Hamas terrorism, which it characterized as ‘genocide’ in a willful effort to reverse perceptions.

After this early period of mind control and public confusion, Israel gradually lost control of the discourse except in the Western elite circles where opinion bent somewhat, but in a manner coupled with irresponsible continuation of support. Israel shifted the focus to the plight of the hostages seized on October 7, and admittedly subjected to a harrowing experience of captivity and Israeli bombardments often ending in their death. Such a humanitarian concern about the fate of the hostage is fully justified although typically diluted by Western silence about the unspeakably abusive detention of

several thousand Palestinians on scant or no charges.

Even the European members of NATO were induced by popular protests in their own countries increasingly to abstain rather than openly side with Israel in UN ceasefire votes, leaving only the US and Israel firmly opposing any pronounced criticisms of Israel even if after the near unanimous Advisory Opinion of the ICJ on July 19 condemned Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories as unlawful for multiple reasons. This ICJ pronouncement was given a strong measure of approval in a resolution adopted by the General Assembly on September 17 by a vote of 124-14, with 43 abstentions. To be expected, the US and Israel were among the 14, while the European countries abstained.

Such a new objectivity was also evident in the gradual rise of civil society opposition to what Israel is doing in Gaza and throughout its region. It is not yet robust enough to penetrate the bipartisan support given to Israel by the US, although the media is slightly more willing to expose the daily cruelty of Israel’s tactics, but still habitually cushioned by Israel’s official accounts that whitewash Israel’s controversial tactics by raising their often unsupported claims of Hamas responsibility by way of their siting of tunnels and human shields. The media rarely invites spokespersons for the Palestinian side or strong civil society critics of Israel to its most prestigious platforms.

Perhaps, the most vivid demonstration of this Phase 2 of the Israeli genocide was the widespread protests on college campuses around the world, having the indirect effect of exposing the widening gap between what the governments of the West support and what a growing proportion of their citizenry believe and favor. Israel’s loss of control over the public discourse is unprecedented and coupled with the increasing weight of authoritative interpretations of international law within the UN framework that underscores both Israel’s unlawful behavior of the past year and its underlying unlawful occupation policies, and lingering presence since 1967, as the Occupying Power of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. The US has during the year over and over again given its endorsement to Israel’s strategic moves and occupation policies at the cost of disregarding international law. When coupled with its indignant insistence on international law compliance by Russia in the Ukraine context, the US made clear that it will not hesitate to use international law to attack adversaries while dismissing it when an international ally’s behavior is unlawful. This is clearly a glaring instance of double standards and moral hypocrisy, reducing international to a policy instrument rather than a regulative norm.

In conclusion, the more we learn about October 7, the more suspect becomes the official rationale for Israel’s ferocious response.  An independent international investigation is long overdue. How can the  ‘security lapse’ that let the attack happen acknowledged recently by Israel be reconciled with the warnings Israeli leaders received from Egypt and the US, undoubtedly confirmed by Israel’s surveillance and intelligence capabilities in Gaza. The inevitable skeptical views directed at the Israeli retaliation was given immediate credibility by the scale and intensity of the Israeli response that seemed to offer a pre-planned pretext to escalate pre-October 7 plans to establish Greater Israel from the river to the sea facilitated by the forced expulsion of as many Palestinians as possible.

At present, it seems almost foolish to anticipate that October 7, 2025 will be a time to look back on the despair of 2024 as a grotesque anomaly in human experience, but it is not foolish to pray that it might be so.

Richard Falk is an international law and international relations scholar who taught at Princeton University for forty years.

7 October 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Linda J. Bilmes, William D. Hartung and Stephen Semler

U.S. spending on Israel’s military operations and related U.S operations in the region total at least $22.76 billion and counting. This estimate is conservative; while it includes approved security assistance funding since October 7, 2023, supplemental funding for regional operations, and an estimated additional cost of operations, it does not include any other economic costs.

This figure includes the $17.9 billion the U.S. government has approved in security assistance for Israeli military operations in Gaza and elsewhere since October 7 – substantially more than in any other year since the U.S. began granting military aid to Israel in 1959. Yet the report describes how this is only a partial amount of the U.S. financial support provided during this war.

Related U.S. military operations in the broader region since October 7 are part of the fuller picture. In particular, the U.S. Navy has significantly scaled up its defensive and offensive operations against Houthi militants in Yemen, which the Houthis claim is related to Israel’s war in Gaza. Hostilities have escalated to become the most sustained military campaign by U.S. forces since the 2016-2019 air war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. U.S. operations in the region, including in Yemen, have already cost the U.S. government $4.86 billion (included in the overall figure, above, of $22.76 billion).

This Houthi-related conflict has also cost the maritime trade an additional $2.1 billion, because shippers have been forced to divert vessels or pay exorbitant insurance fees. U.S. consumers may experience paying higher prices for goods as a result.

This report touches on the relationship between U.S. weapons manufacturers and the Israeli government, which have maintained longstanding commercial relations. The U.S. government has cited these commercial ties as one of the reasons why the U.S. should continue to supply foreign militaries, including the Israeli military, with weapons and equipment.

7 October 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor

Palestinian Territory – Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has released a comprehensive report marking one year since Israel launched its genocidal campaign against civilians in the Gaza Strip on 7 October 2023. During this period, Israel has committed grave war crimes, with the explicit complicity of the international community.

Titled De-Gaza: A Year of Israel’s Genocide and the Collapse of World Order, the report details the most prominent crimes committed over the past 12 months, thoroughly documented by Euro-Med field teams. It traces the clear elements of genocide perpetrated by the Israeli army, explores the legal frameworks defining the crime of genocide, and scrutinises both the context and ongoing circumstances. The report also addresses the international judiciary’s response, and, significantly, the global community’s complicit role in allowing the genocide to continue.

The report sheds light on the appalling conditions and systematic atrocities Israel has inflicted upon the occupied Palestinian territory, with a particular focus on the Gaza Strip. These long-standing crimes include the illegal blockade, the deliberate isolation of Gaza from the rest of the Palestinian territory and the world, the systematic deprivation of basic human rights to the Strip’s residents, and the deliberate destruction of essential services.

Since the start of the genocide in Gaza, more than 50,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli army, including around 42,000 recorded by the Gaza Ministry of Health, the majority being women and children. In addition, approximately 100,000 have been injured, with thousands of bodies still lying under the rubble and in the streets, unreachable by rescue and medical teams.

An estimated 10 per cent of Gaza’s population has been killed, injured, reported missing, or detained as a result of Israeli military assaults. Of the 50,292 Palestinians killed—including those still buried under the debris—33 per cent were women, and 21 per cent were children. Thousands more have been forcibly detained, with 3,600 still languishing in various Israeli prisons and detention centres.

Around 3,500 families have suffered multiple losses since October 2023. Of these, 365 families have lost more than ten members, while over 2,750 families have lost at least three.

The report details the systematic acts of genocide committed in Gaza, such as the targeted killing of civilians in homes, shelters, displacement camps, and humanitarian-declared zones. Civilians were also killed by military vehicles and tanks, in field executions, through drone strikes, in crowded markets, and even while waiting for aid at relief trucks.

The report notes the Israeli military’s starvation tactics, the deliberate killing of prisoners and detainees, and the assassination of humanitarian workers, qualified professionals, and Palestinian elites.

The Israeli army employs explicit methods designed to inflict severe physical and psychological trauma on the population. These include launching thousands of systematic military assaults on civilians, dramatically increasing deaths among people of reproductive age, separating families, targeting the healthcare system, and imposing brutal living conditions marked by starvation and malnutrition.

The obstruction of humanitarian aid further exacerbates these atrocities, creating life-threatening situations for thousands.

The root cause of this persecution—the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory since 1967—has created conditions for the ongoing genocide, as confirmed by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in its advisory opinion of 19 July 2024, on the legal consequences arising from Israeli policies and practices in the occupied Palestinian territory.

Both the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip are internationally recognised as Palestinian territories that were occupied in 1967.

Up until 2005, the Israeli occupation army maintained internal and external control over Gaza by stationing military forces within and outside the Strip, establishing settlements on its land, a situation still seen in the West Bank today.

In 2005, Israel declared a unilateral “disengagement,” evacuating its settlers from Gaza and withdrawing its military forces. However, despite this declaration, Israel continued to exercise control over Gaza, maintaining real authority over critical aspects of governance. The ICJ upheld this position in a recent advisory opinion, reflecting the near-universal international consensus on Israel’s continued occupation.

Even after its military withdrawal, Israel retained control over the essential governing elements of Gaza, including its population registry, borders (land, sea, and air), and the regulation of movement for both people and goods. Israel also continued to collect taxes on imports and exports and maintained control over the buffer zone.

Following the 7 October 2023 attack, Israel declared a state of war, with its President, Prime Minister, and other political and military leaders at the forefront. The declared aim was to eliminate Hamas, secure the release of hostages, and restore security. Thus began Operation Iron Swords, a brutal military offensive that intensified the suffering of Gaza’s civilians.

Euro-Med Monitor concluded with a set of recommendations after a year of genocide in Gaza, emphasising that all states, both individually and collectively, are still obligated to work towards stopping the ongoing genocide by all available means. Preventing and punishing this crime is an international legal obligation incumbent upon all states without exception, and it is an obligation of absolute authority towards all.

Euro-Med Monitor calls for the imposition of a total arms embargo on Israel, the termination of all licences and agreements related to arms imports and exports (including dual-use materials and technology that could be used against Palestinians), and an end to all military and intelligence cooperation.

In addition to imposing travel restrictions and freezing Israeli government assets, Euro-Med Monitor calls for political and economic sanctions on Israel and its accomplice states. These measures are intended to pressure the responsible parties into upholding international law, ensuring non-recurrence of crimes against Palestinians, and compensating the victims of these atrocities.

The organisation further calls for the halting all forms of support to Israel in connection with its genocide and other crimes against Palestinians. This includes withholding investments, cancelling or suspending political, diplomatic, economic, commercial, and academic ties, and curtailing support from the media, legal, and other sectors that might contribute to the continuation of these crimes.

Key measures include ensuring the Israeli occupation army’s full withdrawal from Gaza, dismantling all military installations, barricades, and checkpoints, ending the imposed military and geographical divisions, restoring the Strip’s geographical unity, and guaranteeing the safe and swift return of forcibly displaced individuals to their homes. Furthermore, the recommendations call for the protection of freedom of movement, travel, and access for all citizens of Gaza.

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

7 October 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

It is difficult to predict what will happen in Israel, but history may give us a clue.

By Ilan Pappe

A year has passed since October 7, 2023, and it is time to explore if we have a better understanding of this monumental event and everything that followed it.

For historians like me, a year is usually not enough to draw any significant conclusions. However, what happened in the past 12 months falls within a much wider historical context, one that stretches back at least to 1948, and I would argue, even to the early Zionist settlement in Palestine in the late 19th century.

Therefore, what we can do as historians is place the past year within the long-term processes that have unfolded in historical Palestine since 1882. I will explore two of the most important ones.

Colonisation and decolonisation

The first process is colonisation and its opposite – decolonisation. Israeli actions both in the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank in the last year gave new credence to the use of these twin terms. They transited from the vocabulary of the activists and academics of the pro-Palestine movement to the work of international tribunals such as the International Court of Justice.

Mainstream academia and media still refuse to define the Zionist project as a colonial, or as it is referred to more accurately a settler-colonial project. However, as Israel intensifies the colonisation of Palestine in the next year, that might prod more individuals and institutions to frame the reality in Palestine as colonial and the Palestinian struggle as anticolonial and dispense with tropes about terrorism and peace negotiations.

Indeed, it is time to stop using misleading language peddled by US and Western media, like “Iran-backed terrorist group Hamas” or “peace process”, and instead talk about Palestinian resistance and decolonisation of Palestine from the river to the sea.