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By Maureen Clare Murphy

All of humanity is less secure after a year of genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank and as Israel now unleashes its wrath on Lebanon.

“The region is on the brink of a catastrophe,” the spokesperson for the UN secretary-general warned last Friday after Israel escalated attacks in Lebanon in previous days.

But Israel’s unchecked aggression – leaving some 500 people dead, the overwhelming majority of them civilians, and forcibly displacing tens of thousands in Lebanon on Monday alone, and the apparent use of bunker buster bombs in Beirut’s southern suburbs on Friday, bringing entire apartment blocks to the ground without warning – will have profound repercussions felt far beyond western Asia as Tel Aviv drags Washington into a regional war.

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The failure of states to meet their legal and moral obligations to end the genocide against the Palestinian people “jeopardizes the entire edifice of international law and rule of law in world affairs,” dozens of independent UN experts recently warned.

They added that the world stands on a knife’s edge and “either we travel collectively towards a future of just peace and lawfulness – or hurtle towards anarchy and dystopia, and a world where might makes right.”

Israel’s actions over the past days and months amount to a full assault on the fundamental precepts of international humanitarian law – the rules governing the conduct of belligerents during war.

Modern international humanitarian law is based in large part on the Geneva Conventions, the first of which was signed by 16 European nations in 1864.

Today, nearly 200 states are party to the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which build on earlier treaties to protect war victims. The broad endorsement of the conventions demonstrates the universality of the principle that civilians, including health and aid workers, and civilian objects such as hospitals and schools, must be protected during war.

The laws of war represent “the very minimum rules to preserve humanity in some of the worst situations known to mankind,” according to Eric Mongelard, an official at the UN human rights office.

Litany of war crimes

Respect for international humanitarian law has never been absolute and victims of war the world over have yet to receive justice for violations of those rules.

But in the case of Israel, blatant disregard for international law is at the core of its military doctrine and the normalization of its crimes degrades the security of all humanity, with terrible precedents now set in Gaza.

Nearly 300 humanitarian aid workers, most of them UN staff, are among the nearly 42,000 Palestinians confirmed to have been killed in Gaza over the past year amid “the total absence of an effective protection of civilians,” according to António Guterres, the UN secretary-general.

Israel has systematically attacked Gaza’s hospitals and other medical facilities, categorizing them as military objects in a total affront to the laws of war and more than 500 health workers have been killed since last October.

Hundreds of health workers have been detained and disappeared, many of them during raids on hospitals, including hospital directors. Prominent Palestinian doctors, including Adnan al-Bursh and Iyad al-Rantisi, have died in Israeli detention after being subjected to torture and ill-treatment.

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Israel has increasingly targeted UN facilities used to shelter displaced civilians in order to pressure Hamas during ceasefire and prisoner swap negotiations, with more than 1,100 Palestinians killed in such attacks.

Israel has conferred de facto combatant status on all Palestinian men of “military age” in Gaza, stripping teens and men not participating in hostilities of their status as protected civilians.

International doctors who volunteered in Gaza report that children are being deliberately shot in the head and stomach by Israeli troops.

Videos from Gaza show Israeli troops gunning down grandmothers and other civilians carrying white flags or while they otherwise pose no conceivable threat (three Israeli citizens held captive in Gaza were also executed by Israeli troops in similar circumstances).

More than 170 Palestinian journalists have been killed in Gaza, according to the government media office in the territory, alleging in some cases that the targeted media workers were operatives of armed groups.

Irene Khan, the UN special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, said after the killing of an Al Jazeera reporter and cameraman in early August that “the Israeli military seems to be making accusations without any substantive evidence as a license to kill journalists, which is in total contravention of international humanitarian law.”

Dahiyeh Doctrine

This is an utterly incomplete list of ways that Israel has shredded the protection of civilians sanctified under international humanitarian law during its nearly year-long campaign in Gaza.

And now it is doing the same in Lebanon.

During a briefing to the UN Security Council last Friday, Volker Türk, the UN high commissioner for human rights, said that the explosion of thousands of communication devices in Lebanon days earlier represented “a new development in warfare.”

Those attacks – which reportedly killed at least 37 people, including two children, and injured more than 3,400, many of them permanently – have been widely attributed to Israel, though it has not officially claimed responsibility.

“Law exists to defend values central to our societies, and to our world,” Türk told the Security Council.

He said that the “simultaneous targeting of thousands of individuals, whether civilians or members of armed groups, without knowledge as to who was in possession of the targeted devices, their location and their surroundings at the time of the attack” violates international law.

Türk said it was “difficult to conceive how … such attacks could possibly conform” with the principles of distinction, proportionality and precaution – the fundamental principles of international humanitarian law.

He called the attack “a war crime to commit violence intended to spread terror among civilians” – in other words, terrorism.

Although unprecedented in its scale and manner, the communication device attack is hardly the first time that Lebanon – which was invaded by Israel in 1978, 1982 and in 2006, and occupied by its troops for 15 years – has been subjected to wholesale violations of the laws of war.

The use of overwhelming force against civilians is known as the “Dahiyeh Doctrine” – named for the southern Beirut suburb heavily bombarded by Israel in 2006.

By using indiscriminate and disproportionate force and by deliberately inflicting suffering on noncombatants – an inherently criminal strategy – Israel aims to restore deterrence and turn the targeted civilian population against the armed resistance, whether it be Hizballah in Lebanon or Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza.

Mowing the grass

The Dahiyeh Doctrine has never succeeded in turning the people against the resistance, despite the increasingly high cost paid by Palestinians in Gaza since the term was coined nearly 20 years ago, around the same time that Israel imposed a devastating blockade of collective punishment on the territory.

This failure has compelled Israel to periodically “mow the grass” in Gaza – in the horrifying term used by Efraim Inbar and Eitan Shamir, who prescribed the strategy in a 2013 paper – to degrade the capabilities of the resistance and achieve temporary deterrence in a longer low-intensity war of attrition against Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Those episodes of intensive attacks on Gaza by air, land and sea ever since Israel redeployed to the territory’s periphery in 2005 have invariably involved the targeting of civilian infrastructure, including residential and mixed-use high-rise buildings.

In the days leading up to a ceasefire ending the 51-day war in the summer of 2014, Israel ordered the evacuation and then bombed four residential and mixed-use towers in Gaza, leveling three of them to the ground and causing significant damage to a fourth tower that was eventually demolished. No one was killed in the attacks on those four buildings.

The attacks on the landmark buildings – described by Amnesty International as “extensive, wanton and unjustified” – were aimed at pressuring Palestinians to accept a ceasefire deal “on Israel’s terms,” according to Al Mezan, a human rights group based in Gaza.

That tactic is being used in Gaza today at a horrifically distorted scale in the repeated massacres of displaced civilians sheltering at schools to increase pressure on Hamas during now moribund indirect negotiations with Israel.

Strategic failure

But amid all the death and destruction, Israel has not won any obvious decisive victories in Gaza while it transfers an elite brigade from that territory to the Lebanese front.

It is often said that in asymmetrical warfare, all a guerrilla or resistance organization needs to do to win is to not lose. In the case of Gaza, that calculus is confirmed by Israeli and American insistence from the outset that any permanent ceasefire before Hamas is completely destroyed would amount to a defeat for Israel.

After almost a year of Israel’s merciless onslaught, Hamas’ persistence, ability to regroup and sustain the fight, denying Israel effective control over any part of Gaza, represents a strategic failure for Israel.

That failure is not mitigated by Israel’s mass murder, wanton destruction or the assassination of senior Hamas figures, any more than Washington’s killing of millions of people in Southeast Asia changes the fact that it lost the war in Vietnam.

Eitan Shamir, one of the Israeli professors who coined “mowing the grass,” stated that the strategy had “completely collapsed” following Hamas’ surprise attack on 7 October 2023.

According to Shamir, writing that same month, the only way to reverse the “severe defeat” suffered by Israel that day would be to “dismantle the Hamas regime in Gaza and destroy its military capabilities.”

“If the threat in Gaza is not removed when the war ends,” Shamir warned, Israelis living in communities near the boundary with Gaza “will not return to their homes.” People may not return to Israeli settlements evacuated along the Lebanese border either, he added – “an unprecedented achievement for Israel’s enemies.”

Israel has not succeeded in eliminating Hamas as a military force in Gaza, despite what some of its defense figures are telling the press in an apparent effort to curry public favor for a deal to release the Israeli captives still held in the territory.

Netanyahu’s cabinet is meanwhile considering a proposal to forcibly transfer civilians from the north of the territory before laying siege on it. The logic is that this would reverse the severe strategic defeat of 7 October by de facto annexing more occupied Palestinian territory.

But at present, the Israeli military is turning its attention to its more formidable foe in the north, Hizballah, with the stated aim of “bringing the residents of the north back to their homes safely,” according to defense minister Yoav Gallant.

Israel also seeks to delink the battle with Hizballah in Lebanon from the fight with Hamas in Gaza, thereby breaking the unity of fronts maintained over the past year and fragmenting the regional resistance.

Hasan Nasrallah, the secretary-general of the Lebanese resistance group, reportedly the target of Israel’s massive strikes in the southern suburbs of Beirut on Friday, has consistently reiterated over the past year that Hizballah’s rocket fire from the north will not stop without a ceasefire in Gaza in the south.

“Displacement and paralysis”

A prevailing analysis in the Israeli press holds that Nasrallah, who has said that Hizballah is ready for a high-intensity war with Israel, but does not seek one, had recently found himself isolated and in a bind.

According to this analysis, as Israel climbs ever higher up the escalation ladder, eliminating Hizballah’s top commanders, Nasrallah was left with few options for retaliation that won’t lead to an all-out war that would presumably leave Lebanon destroyed.

But what this analysis doesn’t account for is that time is on the side of Hizballah, which “is aiming for longer term strategic objectives despite some tactical losses it has endured over the past week,” analyst Amal Saad said on Tuesday.

“While Israel’s approach has been one of displacement and massacre, Hizballah’s strategy has focused on displacement and paralysis,” Saad added.

“Its resistance forces aim to weaken the [Israel military’s] resolve and erode the resilience of Israel’s home front through a strategy of combined military and economic attrition.”

Justin Podur, another close observer, said in a situation report on his YouTube channel on Thursday that “Hizballah is doing operations that they believe will lead to winning the war.”

“What I think is the calculation is this: On the Israel side, terrorize civilians, and eventually victory follows, or commit genocide and victory will follow,” Podur said.

“The resistance calculation and Hizballah’s calculation is that we are going to demilitarize northern Israel or what the resistance calls northern occupied Palestine,” he added.

Israel’s escalated attacks on Lebanon by its already tired and demoralized military will only prolong the evacuation of residents and has actually increased the number of people displaced from the northern settlements.

Meanwhile, some family members of Israelis being held captive in Gaza say that the offensive in Lebanon will also delay a deal to release their loved ones – whose return Netanyahu claimed to be a “sacred mission” during his speech at the UN General Assembly on Friday

Having already initiated a de facto war, Israel has no more rungs on the escalation to climb, and a ground invasion of Lebanon seems ever more likely. This would not be advantageous to Israel, to say the least, as it would leave its troops “sitting ducks for the resistance’s advanced hybrid warfare tactics,” as analyst Amal Saad put it.

In the event of a ground invasion, the euphoria experienced by Israel’s military establishment after several days of major blows against Hizballah will in all likelihood become a distant memory and memories of the humiliation and retreat of 2006 will soon come flooding back.

From tactical success to strategic defeat

Tactical achievements aside, in neither Lebanon or Gaza will Israel find a clear victory or surrender by the resistance. In any event, no matter the fate of Hamas or Hizballah, there will always be resistance to the settler-colonial state violently implanted and maintained in the region.

Israel’s pre-state forces used military force and terrorism to conquer and hold on to Arab land, and that violence has been a through line throughout the state’s history.

“There is no room in the Middle East for weakness,” according to Eitan Shamir of “mowing the grass” infamy, reflecting a mentality that has informed Israeli decision-making since the state’s inception.

“This war might not be existential in the immediate sense of a threat to conquer all of Israel’s territory,” Shamir wrote back in October, “but it is certainly existential in the long-term sense of proving Israel’s ability to continue to exist in this region.”

The increasingly high cost being paid in human lives to maintain a Jewish state in Palestine is also coming at a dear price to Israel in terms of international legitimacy.

The UN General Assembly overwhelmingly voted in favor of the dismantlement of the occupation this month following a watershed World Court advisory opinion asserting the illegality of Israel’s presence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Meanwhile, Israeli leaders anticipate that the International Criminal Court will issue arrest warrants against them any day now.

It may not seem like decisions made in international fora have any bearing on what happens on the ground. But Israel has cemented itself as an international pariah, leaving itself isolated on the world stage and enabled by and dependent on the US – a situation that will eventually prove unsustainable.

Existential war

Any security achieved by Israel through force will prove temporary and illusory at a time when Israel’s existence is as fragile as ever.

Both Hamas and Hizballah were formed in response to Israeli occupation and the brutal oppression of any and all attempts to liberate their land.

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Israel’s existential wars against the two resistance organizations stem from its precarity as a colony populated by foreign settlers that was founded after the mass expulsion of the indigenous Palestinian population – a reality that will never be accepted by people in the region, no matter how many normalization deals Israel reaches with Washington’s regional allies.

“Israel’s war is not with you, it’s with Hizballah,” Netanyahu told Lebanese citizens in a video message on Tuesday.

“Don’t let Hizballah endanger Lebanon,” he added in a thinly veiled threat implying that civilians and the state itself would bear the brunt of war.

After rejecting a truce proposed by the US, Netanyahu said that Israel was “fighting for its life,” with the “curse” of Iran behind the “savage enemies” at its doorstep during his speech at the UN General Assembly on Friday.

Netanyahu made the preposterous claim that Hizballah fires “rockets and missiles after they place them in schools, in hospitals, in apartment buildings and in the private homes of the citizens of Lebanon.”

The Israeli prime minister thereby made it clear that Tel Aviv’s target bank in Lebanon would primarily be civilians and civilian objects, causing the same levels of death and destruction as it wrought in Gaza over the past year – “effectively a call to genocide,” according to Amal Saad.

Underlining the existential nature of its wars with Hamas and Hizballah, Netanyahu said that “Israel will win this battle. We will win this battle because we don’t have a choice.”

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The Israeli prime minister reiterated that Israel’s war was with Hizballah, not against the Lebanese people. But as Saad stated, Netanyahu’s “declaration that Israel must defeat Hizballah and that it can’t accept a ‘terrorist army’ on its doorstep is a declaration of forever war on Lebanon.”

She added that “unable to destroy Hizballah directly, Israel strives to eradicate the ‘resistance community’ and social fabric which supports and sustains it.”

There is no separation between people and the resistance, with the former giving rise to the latter, whether in Gaza or Lebanon. And that is why Israel puts the weight of its military on the necks of civilians in both places.

The inherent human reaction to resist brutal subjugation by any means necessary, now organized and sharpened with decades of experience in both Palestine and Lebanon and elsewhere in the region, is why Israel has not and will not find any decisive victory in either.

If the US doesn’t force Israel to choose diplomacy over warfare, and there is little reason to believe Washington will, “we may witness the onset of a ‘Great War’ that could consume the entire region and pose an existential threat to Israel itself,” Saad stated.

Israel is destroying any semblance of international law, but it is also destroying itself. Only once it goes the way of other pariah colonial regimes, like Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa, will it be possible to build anew from the ashes and ruin the Zionist project will leave behind in Palestine.

Maureen Clare Murphy is senior editor of The Electronic Intifada.

Ali Abunimah contributed analysis.

28 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Veterans For Peace & Move to Amend

Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza has produced increasing calls for an immediate ceasefire, while a pro-Israel, U.S.-based group has waged an increasing war on democracy with little public scrutiny and no end in sight.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is one of the most politically and electorally influential groups in this country. They have bombarded our “democratic” system spending over $100 million just in 2024 to punish opponents of Israeli policies, including the military assault on Gaza that’s claimed over 40,000 deaths and displaced 2.3 million people.

Our democracy has always been incomplete at best, but peoples’ movements have won voting and political rights for those without property, people of color, women and young people.

But the political and electoral influence of the super rich and their corporations, including non-profit ones like AIPAC, frustrate and preempt We the People who try to have human needs addressed.

AIPAC lobbies for U.S. support of Israel. Its related entities include a regular Political Action Committee (AIPAC PAC), and a Super PAC, (United Democracy Project, UDP).

Regular PACs are limited to contributing $3,300 per candidate per election. Super PACs can spend unlimited sums on elections, but must be spent “independently” from any candidate or candidate campaign.

AIPAC has spent $19.6 million for lobbying in the 2023-24 election cycle (through July, 2024). The AIPAC PAC has spent over $44.8 million while UDP has spent $55.4 million. AIPAC exceeded its 2024 goal to raise $100 million.

AIPAC entities threaten our elections and our limited democracy in multiple ways.

1. AIPAC’s PACs have spent millions of dollars supporting conservative Democratic challengers running against incumbent progressives in Congressional primaries, especially candidates of color – who are the strongest supporters of VFP’s calls to stop the war on Gaza and of Move to Amend’s We the People Amendment, HJR54 that will end the insane doctrines of corporate “personhood” and money is the same as speech. In the recent primaries, Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, members of  the progressive “Squad,” were the latest victims and there will be more. UDP targeted $14.5 million to defeat Bowman in July and another $8.6 million to take down Bush in August. Bowman and Bush are HJR54 cosponsors and two of Congress’s most vocal critics of the Israeli war on Gaza.

2. Such massive corruption of elections includes paying for Congressional delegations to Israel and an army of lobbyists who peddle a peace and democracy narrative for Israel while pressing for massive arms shipments, including the recent U.S. decision to provide $20 billion more in weaponry. AIPAC lobbyists are joined by U.S. weapons makers as a “force multiplier” with no Palestinian counterweight. The Arab American PAC spent $36,200 in the 2021-22 election cycle and 0 in the 2023-24 cycle.

3. AIPAC-entity donors include super rich Republicans, some of whom are billionaires, such as Paul Singer, who bankrolled a free luxury vacation trip for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and later had cases before the High Court.

AIPAC’s clear goal is to defeat every progressive Democrat it can this year. AIPAC also supports many Republican Congressional candidates, including many who voted against certifying the 2020 election. How exactly does all this further democracy?

4. The enormous sum of expected AIPAC spending, especially in the primaries, has been too much to overcome for many progressive incumbents. J Street, a progressive pro-Israel group that defended candidates against AIPAC in the 2022 primaries, can’t compete with AIPAC and has sat out the 2024 primaries. AIPAC often  doesn’t mention Israel in their targeted ads, but rather attacks incumbents on personal issues or on their progressive voting record.

It’s not just AIPAC that has invaded and is occupying our elections and democratic spaces. Corporate entities and the super rich have waged war on our elections and in Congress, causing injustices, mass violence and environmental carnage.

Simply passing laws calling for greater financial disclosure or campaign finance “reform” isn’t enough to end the war on democracy by AIPAC and other corporate entities.

Enacting the We the People Amendment to abolish the constitutional doctrines that “money equals speech” and “a corporation is a person” is essential to create authentic democracy and to reduce the military industrial complex drive for perpetual wars and occupations. The latter is not only applicable in elections, but across the board as corporate entities have hijacked multiple constitutional amendments permitting them to preempt democratic efforts to protect people. communities and the natural world.

AIPAC, like so many other corporate-funded groups, will no doubt continue its assault on the election process in 2026.

It’s ultimately up to us to go beyond merely resisting the violence and harm they cause, and take appropriate actions that can stop the corrupting, anti-democratic and violent impact of the super rich and their corporations that have captured  elections and public policy.

27 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Grace Siegelman

The state of Missouri murdered Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams on Tuesday, September 24th, at 6 pm central time. His last meal was chicken wings and tater tots; his last words were, “All praise be to Allah in every situation!” His execution was the third execution in Missouri this year and the 100th since Missouri reinstated capital punishment in 1989.

Khaliifiah had hundreds of thousands of supporters behind him worldwide for decades. Millions making calls online and signing his petitions, hundreds in person bringing their grievances to the Missouri Supreme Court, and the prosecution lawyers AND family of Lisha Gayle, the social worker and former newspaper reporter who was murdered during a burglary of her home, whom this case revolves around, calling for the death penalty to be dismissed during this case.

Khaliifiah has also held his innocence since the beginning of this trial in 1998, with no forensic evidence supporting Khaliifah as the offender. Each time he was set to be executed, his murder was halted due to further DNA and forensic research, which never got to conclude before his death, nor did the impending Supreme Court case.

Khaliifah never had a fair trial. When first tried in 2001, he was not granted his constitutional rights to a fair jury. Instead, Black jurors were barred from entering the jury because they “looked like Williams.” In his reasoning for going forward with Williams’ execution, Gov. Parsons said that Williams had “exhausted due process and every judicial avenue.” However, Parsons denied Khaliifah’s clemency request to change his sentence to life in prison and also rejected a request to cancel the execution so that a lower court could make a new determination about the discriminatory circumstances of his 2001 jury. Gov. Parsons has never granted clemency for a death penalty case.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), 16 prisoners have been executed in 8 states in the United States this year, and 48 more executions are scheduled throughout 2024.

The death penalty and the cruelty of cases like Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams exemplify the systemic racism and throughlines of enslavement that are still housed within the U.S. Criminal Justice System today. Capital Punishment has been around since enslavement, with states like North Carolina using it as a way to squash rebellions and those working to free enslaved individuals. The Jim Crow Era continued with lynchings and public executions seemingly becoming interchangeable, with almost all cases of the death penalty being against Black men. And with the 1990s era of mass incarceration, the war on drugs, and a renewed surge of the death penalty – The United took the reins of the highest incarceration population in the world. Today, despite making up 13% of the U.S. population, Black folks make up 42% of those on death row (according to a 2020 Prison Policy Initiative Report).

Robert Dunham, the DPIC Executive Director, writes,

“What is broken or intentionally discriminatory in the criminal legal system is visibly worse in death-penalty cases. Exposing how the system discriminates in capital cases can shine an important light on law enforcement and judicial practices in vital need of abolition.”

The disparities found in Khaliifah’s case are ones systemically embedded in the groundwork of death penalty trials and throughout the entire criminal justice system in the U.S., with many other past cases resurfacing because of Khaliifah’s murder.

Like many others, I recount these facts about Khaliifah with tears running down my face and anger in my heart – and all I can think about is time. Khaliifah spent two decades in prison for a crime he did not commit. President Biden sits in a long line of masterminds that got us to the prison industrial complex that we have today, with many who were sentenced to death while Biden was gunning for the 1994 Crime Bill, still awaiting their fate. A prison industrial complex that has not only murdered and harmed millions of Black and Brown people in the U.S. for centuries but has weaved its web throughout the world, implementing torture, starvation, and capital punishment of its own sort throughout places like Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Sudan, the Congo.

And as we run into a new election cycle fueled by feminism and a new wave of young organizers ready to believe in the system at large because of who is heading it, I must ask, where is feminism in this? Where is feminism when we have so many women as elected officials in the U.S. who could not even utter his name, not the name of any individual who the heinous system has touched? Where is feminism as we look out onto almost a year of genocide and nearly 76 years of occupation in Palestine? Where is feminism when our tax dollars go towards the public execution of innocent mothers, fathers, and children who got no jury, no trial, and no time?

From Missouri to Palestine, not even time is a human right.

(Below, The Perplexing Smiles of the Children of Palestine by: Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams)

The Perplexing Smiles of the Children of Palestine

Grace Siegelman is CODEPINK’s Digital Engagement Manager and Feminist Foreign Policy Project Coordinator. Grace holds a Master’s in Women and Gender Studies and a Bachelor’s in Peace, Justice, and Conflict Studies from DePaul University.

26 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Bharat Dogra

The fact that some of the top Western diplomats and leaders and the overwhelming majority of people of Ukraine had opposed NATO membership should be better known

As the Ukraine crisis continues to escalate and the possibility of a direct confrontation between Russia and USA/NATO also increase, it is important that some facts not generally raised in western mass media should be more widely known in the west and also internationally.

The controversy over Ukraine’s membership of NATO has been perhaps the most important issue leading up to the present crisis. Hence it should be better known that an important understanding reached between Gorbachev and Bush around 1990 was that the USA will not expand NATO membership eastwards close to Russian borders. Jack F. Matlock, then US ambassador to the Soviet Union and a leading expert on Soviet policy for years, had a ringside view of crucial talks. He has stated (February 15 2022 , Responsible Statecraft),“ Gorbachev was assured, though not in a formal treaty, that if a unified Germany was allowed to remain in NATO, there would be no movement of NATO’s jurisdiction to the east, not one inch.”

However the USA soon started moving away from such assurances. 1997 was a landmark year in this context. On June 26 1997 as many as 50 prominent foreign policy experts, including former senators, retired military officers, diplomats and academicians sent an open letter to President Clinton, outlining their opposition to NATO expansion (See full statement at Arms Control Association, Opposition to NATO Expansion).They wrote, “We, the undersigned, believe that the current US led effort to expand NATO, … is a policy error of historic proportions. In Russia NATO expansion, which continues to be opposed across the entire political spectrum, will strengthen the non-democratic opposition, undercut those who favor reform and cooperation with the West, bring the Russians to question the entire post- cold war settlement, and galvanize resistance in the Duma to the START II and III treaties.”

This letter of 50 experts concluded—“We strongly urge that the NATO expansion process be suspended while alternative actions are explored.” The alternatives suggested by these experts included “supporting a NATO-Russia relationship.”

Around the same time in 1997 Ambassador Matlock was asked to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He stated that NATO expansion would be the most strategic blunder since the end of the Cold War.

Ignoring such sage advice of ensuring peace, the US government went ahead with several waves of adding new NATO members. At the same time, the USA was also withdrawing from important arms control treaties. During Yeltsin leadership years of Russia, the USA used its strong position to push economic policies which impoverished a large number of Russians, leading even to a steep fall in life expectancy. The hopes of many Russians for economic help and accommodation of essential security concerns were neglected.  In 2014 the USA intervened decisively in Ukraine, playing an important role in instigating a coup installing an anti-Russian regime.

In 2019 the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published a study titled ‘30 Years of US Policy Toward Russia—Can the Vicious Circle be Broken’ which expressed regret at the many problems created by hostile US policy. To break the impasse, the study concluded, the USA will have to–for its part—make several key adjustments to its Russia policy, including halting NATO expansion eastward, clarifying to Ukraine and Georgia that they should not base their foreign policy on the assumption that they will be joining NATO ( while establishing robust security cooperation in other ways), reviewing and restraining sanctions policy towards Russia and leaving Russia’s internal affairs to itself ( not interfering in them).

Such suggestions were ignored by US policy makers who continued to indulge in provocations. Just before war broke out, Matlock posed a question (see Responsible Statecraft, 15 February 2022—I was there—NATO and the origins of the Ukraine Crisis)—Was the crisis avoidable? His answer was –Yes. He explained, “Since Putin’s major demand is an assurance that NATO will take no further members, and specifically not Ukraine or Georgia, obviously there could have been no basis for the present crisis if there had been no expansion of the alliance following the end of the Cold War, or if the expansion had occurred in harmony with building a security structure in Europe that included Russia.”

In 2008 when the USA promoted the issue of Ukraine’s membership of NATO at the NATO summit at Bucharest, the leaders of two leading European countries present there, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Sarkozy of France had opposed this but they were pressurized to accept the USA position.

In Ukraine several opinion polls during 1991 to 2014 had revealed that the overwhelming majority of the people of Ukraine did not support the membership of NATO. This was admitted even in NATO documents.

Before the coup in 2014, there was a broad agreement among the leaders of the ruling party and most opposition leaders of Ukraine that a policy of neutrality is much better and NATO membership should be avoided.

These facts should be widely known so that more people realize that the agenda of NATO membership was imposed by some aggressive leaders of the USA against the advice of leaders and senior experts and diplomats who value peace.

Another question is why this agenda of NATO membership for Ukraine was pushed so much by aggressive leaders of the USA. Initially it was to encircle Russia with hostile countries and place highly destructive weapons very close to its borders. However eventually this led to engaging Ukraine in a proxy war with Russia, with all the destructive results.

If these facts are more widely realized, hopefully this can help to get more support for a policy of de-escalation and peace which gives up the insistence on NATO membership of Ukraine and thereby one of the main hurdles in the path of peace is removed.

Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include Planet in Peril, A Day in 2071 and Protecting Earth for Children.

27 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor

Palestinian Territory – Israel has destroyed hundreds of dunams of agricultural land, depriving Palestinians in the northern Gaza Strip of agricultural land and resources vital to survival, all in support of its illegal blockade of the Strip and tight restrictions on the entry of food supplies for almost a full year. This is an expression of Israel’s insistence on committing genocide against Palestinians in the enclave.

This destruction is part of a larger Israeli plan that dates back to last October. Under this plan, Israeli forces have worked to eliminate almost 80% of the agricultural land in the Gaza Strip from use by Palestinians. Israel has done this either by isolating it in preparation for its forcible annexation to the so-called “buffer zone” or by bulldozing or destroying it by other means, such as bombardment—all of which are in violation of international law.

According to the Euro-Med Monitor field team, Israeli forces stormed the area of Al-Shimaa in Beit Lahia, northern Gaza, early on Tuesday morning (25 September 2024). Accompanied by military bulldozers, the forces began their bulldozing operations, destroying more than 500 dunums of newly replanted agricultural land, which was supposed to sustain the needs of the people living in northern Gaza, who are subject to an arbitrary siege and systematic starvation by Israel.

The Israeli destruction of these agricultural lands, the majority of which were filled with eggplants, reflects Israel’s insistence on preventing the Palestinian people from depending on the region’s agricultural food basket during a period when sufficient supplies of vegetables and other foods are being kept out of the northern Gaza Strip. This has led to a severe famine, to the point where a significant portion of the people in the north have been forced to eat tree leaves and bake ground-up animal feed instead of flour.

Twenty-four-year-old farmer Yousef Saqr Abu Rabie of Beit Lahia told Euro-Med Monitor about the significant losses he incurred on Monday and Tuesday, 23-24 September, as a result of the bulldozing of dozens of dunams north of the town. Abu Rabie stated that although his land is outside of the “security zone” established by Israel at the start of the war, the bulldozing operations still occurred, and that the now-bulldozed crops had been bearing fruit that the people of northern Gaza were depending on given Israel’s restrictions on the entry of fruits and vegetables into the northern Gazan markets.

As part of its crime of genocide, ongoing since 7 October 2023, Israel has worked over the past year to systematically and extensively destroy the Gaza Strip’s food basket of fruits, vegetables, and meat, along with all other components of local food production, in addition to blocking the entry of food and humanitarian aid. This has resulted in famine in the Gaza Strip.

Israeli forces have bulldozed or otherwise destroyed all agricultural lands along the “security fence” separating the eastern and northern Gaza Strip at a depth of nearly two kilometres, removing approximately 96 square kilometres in a clear attempt to annex them to its “buffer zone”, in violation of international law. An Israeli “buffer” road and zone splitting Gaza City through its centre, meanwhile, and the creation of Israel’s Netzarim axis to keep sections of the Strip separate, have resulted in the destruction of approximately three square kilometres of agricultural lands. Thus, the agricultural lands destroyed by Israel to enable the creation of its “buffer” areas, specifically, represent about 27.5% of the Gaza Strip.

The Israeli occupation army has worked to destroy almost all buildings and facilities on the vast majority of these lands, which are now within the “buffer zone” and are off-limits to residents and farmers. These lands represented the majority of agricultural land in the Gaza Strip and included hundreds of farms built on hundreds of dunams that were planted with vegetables and fruits, as well as hundreds of farms raising poultry and livestock.

Outside of this “buffer zone”, additional land has been destroyed by Israeli incursions or aerial and artillery bombardment, resulting in the destruction of at least 34 square kilometres of agricultural land and the streets that service it. This brings the total percentage of destroyed land in the Gaza Strip to 36.9%, or more than 75% of the Strip’s area designated for agriculture.

Of the very few remaining areas set aside for agriculture, the majority are in the region of Al-Mawasi in the southern Gaza Strip, west of Khan Yunis, which is now home to hundreds of thousands of people who have been forcibly displaced.

In addition to Israel’s destruction of thousands of farms, greenhouses, water wells, tanks, and stores housing agricultural equipment, Euro-Med Monitor field teams recorded the intentional killing of numerous farmers while these individuals were working or attempting to access their lands. Since the start of the genocide, the Israeli army has also killed several fishermen and destroyed the majority of fishing boats and fishing ports in the Gaza Strip. These actions have negatively impacted the availability of healthy food for over 2.2 million Palestinians living in the Strip, and the repercussions of this are expected to last for years after the withdrawal of the Israeli military.

Farmers are finding it difficult or impossible to access areas that have been spared from the Israeli bombing, due to the ongoing bombardment and ground incursions into numerous areas. Additionally, the lack of electricity, destruction of water wells, and scarcity of fuel all make it difficult to cultivate new areas and irrigate them with water. This occurs while aid supplies are being blocked from reaching residents and displaced people in the Strip by Israeli army forces.

The ongoing Israeli military assaults have detrimental effects on soil, air, water quality, agricultural land, public health, and the environment. These effects compound over time, and at some point, may result in startling increases in the death rate.

The internationally recognised human right to food, water, and sanitation is a basic right that protects population health and dignity. It can only be realised if the international community puts an end to Israel’s crime of genocide; removes the illegal blockade on the Gaza Strip; and salvages what remains of the besieged enclave, which is currently uninhabitable on all fronts. Delays will cause the Strip to deteriorate further, cost more civilian lives, and heavily affect people’s health outcomes.

The international community must act swiftly and forcefully to end to Israel’s crime of genocide in the Gaza Strip, which involves both the direct killing of, and the imposition of unbearable living conditions on, the Palestinian people there. Israel is attempting to rob Palestinians of all hope of survival by turning the Strip into a place without any of the basic necessities of life.

The international community should make sure that humanitarian aid—particularly the basic food and non-food supplies required to respond to the humanitarian crisis safely and effectively—reaches the Gaza Strip swiftly, particularly the northern part of the Strip.

In order to save the civilian population in the Gaza Strip from the threat of further health disasters, pressure must also be applied to Israel to permit the entry of materials required for infrastructure rehabilitation and repair. This includes ensuring that there is enough fuel entering the Occupied Palestinian Territory to run desalination plants and wells, among other water and sanitation facilities.

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

27 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Mazin B. Qumsiyeh–Pluto Press (London & Sterling, Virginia), 2004

There is no more compelling and dramatic unfolding story with more profound international ramifications than the conflict in the Middle East. Over five million Palestinian refugees were created and almost an equal number of new immigrants and settlers came under the banner of Zionism.  The unrest and injustices created have ramifications for all humanity as seen in recent events.  This book brings a critical documentation of these events and the core issues of the conflict with the view that human rights are key to any plans for a lasting peace.  There is a growing interest in a vision and a roadmap for peace based on Human Rights among Israelis, Palestinians, and human rights activists around the world.  A shared future is increasingly recognized as far more realistic than separation and continued injustice. This book examines facts on the ground and articulates future directions based on the logic of equality and human rights rather than apartheid.  The advocated solutions are not only moral, ethical, and humane but can actually achieve a lasting and just peace. People who now live in this land of Canaan and those dispossessed from it will find the roadmap presented here compelling. This book examines evolution of the conflict in Israel/Palestine and articulates future directions based on the logic of equality and human rights rather than apartheid.  The advocated moral, ethical, and humane solutions can achieve a lasting and just peace. People who now live in this land of Canaan and those dispossessed from it will find the text compelling. Another issue addressed in the book is such things as sustainable development and impossibility of separating resources for two countries in the same area.  Recent plans confirm this as shown in this report on Water in Palestine.

“An erudite work of extensive scholarship, enormous scope, searing honesty, and intellectual audacity. Mazin Qumsiyeh, once again, is challenging the prevailing misconceptions, facile generalizations, and downright ignorance that have long served to obscure Palestinian realities, and, consequently, to prevent the articulation of a just solution. Breathtaking!” Dr. Hanan Ashrawi, previous Palestinian Minister of Higher Education, Bir Zeit University and http://miftah.org

“Mazin Qumsiyeh brings to light many forgotten and willfully buried facts about the origins of the Israel-Palestinian conflict.” Dr. Norman Finkelstein

“A tour de force by a brilliant scientist who debunks  entrenched  myths standing in the way of the only logical and compassionate  peace based on sharing,integration, co-existence,and equality rather than separation and ghettoization.  It is a welcome addition to the growing literature on one of the most complex issues of our times.” Dr. Naseer Aruri, Professor Emeritus and author of “Dishonest Broker”

[http://qumsiyeh.org/sharingthelandofcanaan/onetoone.jpg]

Figure 2 from Book: This is the first depiction of the shrinking map of Palestine which was developed by Prof. Qumsiyeh and his son (based on shrinking map of USA) and then was adopted and used widely around the world.

Errata on the first edition

pg. 28 First full sentence: change “are not challenged” to “are now challenged”

pg. 53 Line 9: change “greater” to “lesser”

pg. 59, Line 20: “by the Maccabees.”  should read “by the Hasmoneans.”

pg.69 second paragraph, 4th line should read “after whom a town in Australia is named.)”

pg. 212 4th line: change “Romanian Christians” to “Armenian Christians”

Source: qumsiyeh.org

By Dr. Ramzy Baroud

If one is to visit the Mahal website, a pop-up reminder, reading ‘Apply online’, keeps appearing. It is as if the repeated beep is a reminder of the state of emergency, if not outright panic, in the Israeli military.

Mahal is one of several recruiting agencies that aim to entice mercenaries from all around the world to fight Israel’s dirty wars, in Gaza and on all fronts.

As soon as the Israeli war on Gaza was launched last October, rumors began circulating of a low turn-out among Israeli reserves. This was coupled with an unprecedented political crisis in Israel, where the military was insistent on the recruiting of Ultra-Orthodox Jews which, until recently, has been a taboo topic among Israeli politicians.

Even when the draft orders went out for thousands of Haredim in July, only a small fraction of the summoned men answered the call, according to Israeli media.

The crisis is yet to be resolved, and most likely will not be resolved as the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu continues to expand the war fronts. To understand the degree of Israel’s military crisis, compare the hyped statements of Israeli officials at the start of the war, where they promised a total victory, to the latest statements.

Last July, for example, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said that “the army needs 10,000 more soldiers immediately.” The number 10,000 is particularly interesting when we consider an Israeli army revelation that at least 10,000 of its soldiers have been seriously or moderately wounded since the start of the war.

The number is likely to be much higher, based on media leaks and information provided by Israeli hospitals. Additionally, thousands of Israeli soldiers have been declared ‘disabled’ due to psychological trauma suffered during the war, according to Israel’s defense ministry.

Thus the state of urgency in an army, which according to Israeli Major General Reserve Yitzhak Brik, has become “small and weak, with no surplus of forces”.

So, where does Israel go from here? Instead of ending its war-turned-genocide in Gaza, Israel has decided to turn to the very people who have been told that they are the most unwanted elements of Israeli society: African refugee asylum seekers.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on September 15 that Israeli recruiters have been quietly working to enlist as many African asylum seekers as possible in the Israeli military.

To entice them, the recruiters are promising permanent residencies though, according to the paper, not a single African soldier is yet to receive the coveted documents.

“Defense officials (..) say the project is conducted in an organized manner, with the guidance of defense establishment legal advisers,” the report said. The paper also confirmed that “the ethical considerations of recruiting asylum seekers have not been addressed”.

By ‘ethical considerations’, both Haaretz and the cited defense officials are not referring to the killing of unarmed Palestinian civilians in Gaza at the hands of poor, desperate refugees from Africa, but to the rights of the asylum seekers themselves.

Israel is known to mistreat not only African asylum seekers but its own dark-skinned population as well.

This racism has manifested itself in the clearest ways against African asylum seekers, whose number is estimated to be around 30,000.

Thousands of Africans have already been deported from the country, not to be repatriated to their original homes but to other African countries, where human rights violations are widespread.

In 2018, Amnesty International said that the Israeli government is forcefully returning the refugees “to persecution or indefinite detention”. The group chastised Israel’s “ill-thought-out policies” and “reckless abandonment of responsibility”.

Expectedly, Israel’s mistreatment of its asylum seekers and refugees received muted responses from western governments and rights groups that often react strongly to reports of mass abuse or unlawful deportations of refugees anywhere else in the world.

And, as is often the case, failure to hold Israel accountable to international and humanitarian laws emboldens the latter to continue with its “ill-thought-out policies”.

Imagine the cruelty of using desperate refugees, who have no political or historical affiliations with the war in Palestine, to kill other refugees in displacement camps across Gaza.

In doing so, Israel has crossed every moral, ethical and legal boundary that governs state and army behavior during times of war. This, however, cannot mean that the international community is incapable of deterring these Israeli practices, through concrete actions and direct sanctions.

Many countries throughout Africa have already raised their voice in solidarity with Gaza and the Palestinian people. The bond between Africa and Palestine should now be strengthened by Israel’s utter disregard, not only for the lives of the Palestinians but for that of Africans as well.

The African Union should take the leadership on this issue, dissuading its citizens from joining the Israeli military under any circumstances, and pursuing the matter of recruiting African asylum seekers at the highest legal institutions.

While the moral stance taken by many African countries regarding the Israeli genocide in Gaza deserves the utmost respect, it is also incumbent on African governments to take an equally strong stance so that Israel ceases its practice of using Africans to kill and die in Gaza.

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

26 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Kevin Reed

Top Israeli army officers have told soldiers to prepare for a ground invasion of Lebanon as the air assault on the country to the north continued for a third day. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said the aerial bombardment included attacks on more than 280 targets that it claimed were tied to Hezbollah.

Israeli air strikes killed 81 people across the country on Wednesday, according to the Lebanese health ministry. The strikes killed 38 people in southern Lebanon, 12 in the eastern Bekaa region, and 22 in three towns north and south of the capital, Beirut. Nearly 400 people were wounded.

The latest air assault expanded the zones in Lebanon that Israel has been targeting, including the beach resort of Jiyyeh, just south of Beirut. The total death toll in Lebanon is approaching 650 people from the relentless air assault of the past three days.

In Beirut, thousands of people displaced from southern Lebanon are sheltering in schools and other buildings.

Lebanon’s health minister, Dr. Firass Abiad, told Sky News that there will be “easily” half a million people displaced in Lebanon due to the bombings. Dr. Abiad said he expects the number to surpass that of the 2006 Lebanon war, during which between 600,000 and 800,000 people were displaced.

A report from the Associated Press included an eyewitness account of a strike in the Bekaa Valley:

“At Dar Al Amal hospital in the city of Baalbek in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, Soumaya Moussawi was lying in bed with her head bandaged and face bruised Wednesday. She had been sitting outside with family members when warplanes started striking in the distance,” she said.

“Then suddenly it hit next to us—we were all thrown in different directions,” she said. “My two cousins and my father were killed, and my other cousin is in a dangerous condition.”

Moussawi insisted that there was no military site near them. She said she is trying to “remain strong” in her father’s memory.

The United Nations reported that two of its staff members in Lebanon were killed during the ongoing air assault. The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) identified the individuals in a statement as Dina Darwiche and Ali Basma.

Darwiche was killed with her young son after their home was “hit by an Israeli missile.” She had worked for the UNHCR for 12 years in its Bekaa office. Basma worked as a cleaner in the organization’s Tyre office for seven years, but the statement did not specify how he was killed.

UNHCR said it was “outraged and deeply saddened” by the deaths and called for “urgent de-escalation” and the protection of “civilians, including aid workers, in line with obligations under international humanitarian law.”

Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi, chief of staff of the IDF, told soldiers on Wednesday to prepare for a possible ground invasion of Lebanon. He said they would “go in, destroy the enemy there and decisively destroy” Hezbollah’s infrastructure. Israel also called up two reservist brigades.

Addressing troops on Israel’s northern border, Halevi said, “You hear the jets overhead; we have been striking all day. This is both to prepare the ground for your possible entry and to continue degrading Hezbollah.”

The lieutenant general added, “Today, Hezbollah expanded its range of fire, and later today, they will receive a very strong response. Prepare yourselves.” He said, “we are preparing the process of a maneuver.”

During a visit to Israeli soldiers carrying out exercises near the Lebanese border, the head of Israel’s northern command also said the war has “entered a new phase.” Major General Ori Gordin said, “We need to change the security situation, and we must be fully prepared for maneuvers and action,” according to a statement released Wednesday.

The threat to invade Lebanon followed Hezbollah’s launching of a long-range missile toward Tel Aviv. Israel said its air defense system intercepted the missile before impact.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the IDF will continue “inflicting blows on Hezbollah” until displaced Israeli citizens can return to their homes. In a video statement released on Wednesday, Netanyahu said, “I cannot detail everything we are doing, but I can tell you one thing: We are determined to return our residents in the north safely to their homes,” adding, “we will not rest until they come home.”

The statement by Netanyahu echoes similar statements he has made throughout the genocide against Palestinians in Gaza regarding the pursuit of “total victory” and cynically using the Israeli hostages as justification.

Meanwhile, the murderous assault on Gaza continued on Wednesday with Israeli air strikes on Rafah. The Washington Post reported that Palestinian Civil Defense workers screamed into pockets of rubble, searching for survivors following an Israeli strike on a multi-story building in the southern-most city in Gaza.

According to Gaza’s Civil Defense spokesman Mahmoud Basal, at least three people were killed and several injured in the attack. Basal told the Post in a phone call that more than 50 people died on Tuesday in strikes across Gaza. He said that as Israeli forces turned their attention to Lebanon, the pace of Israeli attacks on Gaza has intensified.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken sought to disguise the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s assault on Lebanon by claiming that Tel Aviv and Hezbollah needed to pull back and avoid all-out war as disastrous for the region and its people.

During a visit to New York for the UN General Assembly, Blinken claimed on Wednesday that the US was working to “de-escalate tensions” and allow tens of thousands of Israelis and Lebanese to return to homes they have had to evacuate due to the intensifying assault.

However, in an appearance on NBC’s “Today” program, Blinken endorsed the Israeli terrorist pager attack on Lebanon that maimed thousands. When asked whether the pager bombs were “a form of terrorism and it went too far,” Blinken said, “It’s very legitimate that Israel do something about Hezbollah.”

When the CBS News reporter asked Blinken about a report by ProPublica that two US government agencies concluded that Israel is deliberately and illegally blocking aid to Gaza, that the Secretary of State ignored them and falsely told Congress otherwise, Blinken shrugged it off. He said it was a “pretty typical” episode where he had to “sort through” some “different assessments” and “draw some conclusions.”

26 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Hafiz Rashid

Earlier this year, two U.S. government authorities determined that Israel was deliberately blocking food and medicine deliveries into Gaza during its brutal massacre in the territory.

But even after the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department’s refugees bureau shared their findings with senior diplomats in late April, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Congress almost the exact opposite days later, ProPublica reported Tuesday, citing leaked reports.

In a statement to Congress on May 10, Blinken said, “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance.”

Before his statement to Congress, Blinken received a 17-page memo from USAID on Israel’s conduct, obtained by ProPublica, which described instances of Israel killing aid workers, bombing hospitals and ambulances, tearing down agricultural structures, regularly turning away trucks of food and medicine, and sitting on supply depots.

Food for Gaza, including flour that could have fed nearly 1.5 million Palestinians for five months, was stockpiled less than 30 miles from the Gazan border in an Israeli port, the memo stated. In February, however, Israel stopped allowing flour into the territory, accusing the recipient, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA, of having ties to Hamas. An independent investigation would find no evidence for Israel’s claims.

On its own, the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration also concluded that Israel was blocking humanitarian aid, recommending that nearly $830 million in weapons and bombs to Israel, paid by U.S. taxpayers, should be frozen under the Foreign Assistance Act. USAID echoed the recommendation, writing in its memo that the U.S. should pause additional arms sales to the country.

These findings appear to have been either overlooked or ignored by Blinken and other leading Biden administration officials. The United Nations has declared a famine in Gaza, saying that many Palestinians in the territory go days without food and that many children have starved to death. The war also has created a health emergency in Gaza, including the territory’s first confirmed case of polio in 25 years.

The State Department issued a statement in response to questions from ProPublica, claiming that it had pressured Israel to allow more aid into Gaza.

“As we made clear in May when [our] report was released, the US had deep concerns during the period since October 7 about action and inaction by Israel that contributed to a lack of sustained delivery of needed humanitarian assistance,” the statement read. “Israel subsequently took steps to facilitate increased humanitarian access and aid flow into Gaza.”

The U.S. government’s handling of USAID’s memo led to internal conflict, with one official in the State Department, Stacy Gilbert, resigning in May over Blinken’s statement to Congress.

“There is abundant evidence showing Israel is responsible for blocking aid,” Gilbert wrote in a statement at the time. “To deny this is absurd and shameful. That report and its flagrant untruths will haunt us.”

There are no signs that Blinken or the Biden administration plan to change their policies toward Israel or its war in Gaza, even as the war has killed more than 41,467 Palestinians, including 16,500 children, almost certainly undercounts and not including death tolls from Israel’s military attacks in the West Bank and southern Lebanon. Even in the face of evidence collected by U.S. agencies themselves, the Biden administration refuses to consider an arms embargo against Israel or acknowledge Israel’s many war crimes.

25 September 2024

Source: newrepublic.com

By Jordan Shilton

One day after its devastating bombardment of Lebanon that killed over 550 people, Israel struck the capital Beirut as the imperialist-backed onslaught in the Middle East continues to escalate. The third strike on the Lebanese capital since Friday, coming as the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) pledged to “accelerate” its attacks, claimed at least six lives and injured 15.

At a situation briefing Tuesday morning, IDF head Herzi Halevi emphasised that Monday’s bloody attack was the opening shot in an expanding war, declaring, “We must not give Hezbollah a break. We will continue to operate at full strength. We will accelerate offensive actions today and reinforce all units. The current situation requires continued intensive operations across all fronts.”

Subsequent hours saw “waves” of strikes on southern Lebanon and the Beqaa Valley, as well as the Beirut bombing. An airstrike on the southern suburbs killed Hezbollah rocket commander Ibrahim Muhammad Kabisi.

The death toll in Lebanon since Monday has risen to 569, with over 1,800 reported injured. Hezbollah responded by firing over 300 rockets into northern Israel Tuesday and launching drones targeting military sites.

A senior Israeli Air Force officer stated that the bombardment of Lebanon since Monday was the most extensive ever carried out in the air force’s history, according to the Times of Israel. Over 1,600 sites were struck using over 2,000 munitions.

The scale of Israel’s indiscriminate assault, which also targeted vehicles carrying fleeing residents, and rescue and emergency services teams, demonstrates that Israel has the full backing of the United States. The huge shipments of weaponry dispatched by the Biden administration to Israel since the onset of the genocide in Gaza have not only allowed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government to lay waste to the enclave, but bring the entire Middle East to the brink of a region-wide war. US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin spoke to his Israeli counterpart Yoav Gallant twice within 24 hours between Saturday and Sunday to make clear Washington’s backing for Israel to “defend itself.”

Nevertheless, the imperialist powers are seeking with sickening hypocrisy to present themselves as a stabilizing force in the region working for “deescalation” and “peace.” US President Joseph Biden asserted at the UN General Assembly that he was “determined to prevent a wider war that engulfs the entire region,” while German Foreign Minister Analena Bearbock commented, “We must not slide into another war, we must rather do everything to bring about deescalation, especially with regard to the situation in Lebanon.”

Coming from the two imperialist powers that have supplied Israel with the most weapons, while clamping down ruthlessly on all forms of domestic opposition to the Gaza genocide, such statements ring hollow. Their aim is to cover up the fact that American imperialism and its European allies backed the genocide, which has officially claimed the lives of more than 41,000 Palestinians, as a means to prepare for a region-wide war with Iran. This war has moved significantly closer to becoming reality following the events of the past week.

On September 17, Israel launched a criminal terror attack by blowing up sabotaged pagers and other electronic devices across Lebanon, killing 37 people and injuring thousands, including many children. Then on Friday, it used a high-powered bomb to strike a suburb in southern Beirut, killing over 50 people, including high-ranking Hezbollah commander Ibrahim Aqil. There followed the ongoing onslaught, which has in two days claimed more than half the number of lives lost during Israel’s month-long war on Lebanon in 2006. Some 27,000 people have fled their homes, with at least 500 fleeing across Lebanon’s eastern border into war-torn Syria.

The imminent danger of a further spread of the war throughout the region, drawing in regional powers like Iran and the imperialist powers together with their rivals Russia and China, cannot be overstated. In Syria, Russia maintains a large contingent of troops, air capabilities, and ships at its naval base in Tartus on the Mediterranean. Late Tuesday, Reuters reported that Syria’s air defence system was activated after Israeli missiles targeted locations in Tartus, with eye witnesses reporting loud explosions.

The US and Turkey also have a military presence in Syria. Additionally, thousands of American troops are located at bases in Iraq and throughout the Gulf sheikdoms, and a large armada of American warships are either already in the Gulf, or standing by in the eastern Mediterranean.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitri Peskov said of Israel’s attack on Lebanon at a press briefing Tuesday, “This is an event that is potentially extremely dangerous when it comes to the expansion of the conflict, to the complete destabilisation of the region. Of course, this is of extreme concern to us.”

China, which cut across US interests in the region by brokering a deal in early 2023 aimed at easing tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran, has clearly positioned itself alongside Lebanon in the face of Israel’s bombardment.

Foreign Minister Wang Yi, following a meeting with his Lebanese counterpart on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York, commented, “We pay close attention to developments in the region, especially the recent explosion of communications equipment in Lebanon, and firmly oppose indiscriminate attacks against civilians.”

Tensions were already high throughout the Middle East prior to this week’s onslaught. In April, Israel bombed Iran’s consulate in Syria, killing seven high-ranking Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps members. Iran responded by firing hundreds of missiles and drones at Israel, but provided advanced notice to avoid a major escalation. Israel intensified its provocations in July, when it carried out the targeted assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh while he was in Tehran attending the inauguration of Iranian President Mesoud Pezeshkian.

Israel is determined to intensify the war in Lebanon, even at the risk of a region-wide bloodbath. Netanyahu could well launch a ground invasion to enforce Israel’s demand that Hezbollah forces retreat north of the Litani River.

Speaking at a military drill Tuesday simulating a ground incursion into Lebanon, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said that the IDF has “additional blows already prepared” against Hezbollah. Referring to the troops’ experience exterminating Palestinians in Gaza, Gallant added, “Any Hezbollah force that encounters you will be destroyed, they are troubled by the experience you have gained in combat.”

National Unity leader Benny Gantz, who was part of Netanyahu’s war cabinet until his withdrawal in June, declared his support for the onslaught on Lebanon Tuesday and called for troops to be sent in if necessary. “If [Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah does not stop the fire, we will also have to enter [Lebanese] territory to allow the return of our residents.”

The Zionist regime is continuing its genocide in Gaza as the war in Lebanon intensifies. At least 37 people were killed in air raids across Gaza Tuesday, including a family of five in Rafah. The Guardian reported Monday that Netanyahu, who has delayed his departure to New York where he is due to address the General Assembly, is considering a plan proposed by members of his Likud party to forcibly expel civilians north of the Gaza River to create a “closed military zone” where the IDF can kill anyone who remains. If the plan is implemented, it would entail the expulsion of between 300,000 and 500,000 people, almost all of whom have already been displaced multiple times.

Israel’s unrestrained lawlessness also continues in the West Bank. On Sunday, IDF soldiers raided the Ramallah offices of Al Jazeera, seizing documents and ordering the Qatar-funded broadcaster to suspend its operations in the occupied West Bank for 45 days. The soldiers tore down a banner on a balcony displaying an image of Shireen Abu Akleh, the Palestinian-American journalist shot dead by Israeli soldiers in May 2022.

25 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org