As more members of the military and State Department resign over U.S. funding of the genocide in Gaza, a new campaign was launched this week to allow military personnel to directly contact their congressional representatives.
Initiated by active-duty military members, veterans and G.I. rights groups, “Appeal for Redress v2,” is modeled after the 2006 Appeal for Redress conducted during the highly unpopular occupation of Iraq, to allow G.I.s to tell their representatives they are opposed to U.S. policy.
Active duty service members are opposing U.S. funding of Israel’s genocide not only because it is immoral, but also because U.S. government employees violate several federal statutes every time weapons are shipped to Israel, as cited in this letter from Veterans For Peace to the U.S. State Department.
James M. Branum, an attorney with the Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild, said, “Too often lawmakers make war policies without hearing from the people who have to implement them. This is what makes the Appeal for Redress v2 so important.”
Senior Airman Juan Bettancourt, on active duty while seeking conscientious objector separation, said, “My proudest act of service has been championing Appeal for Redress v2, a campaign to empower fellow service members to securely voice their moral outrage about our government’s complicity in Israeli war crimes and genocidal onslaught in Gaza. Although our rights are limited by our oath, Appeal for Redress v2 allows service members to carve out a modicum of agency and dispel any apprehensions that may impede us from denouncing this unspeakable carnage. Our voice is a powerful instrument, and it is our responsibility to humanity and the principles we hold dear to speak up against these heinous acts and make it known to our elected officials that we will not stand by silently while genocide unfolds. We refuse to be complicit. These are my views, not those of the Department of Defense.”
Army Sergeant Johnson said, “Throughout my Army career it has been reiterated to me time and time again to live and uphold Army values. I have been taught that honor and integrity are pivotal to being a soldier. It hurts me to my core that the same country that instilled these values in me would proudly support a genocide. It is our duty as service members to uphold Geneva conventions and international law. That is why I am pleading for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and for humanitarian aid to be distributed throughout the entire Gaza Strip. To Ignore these crimes against humanity would be to turn my back on all the values I’ve cultivated as a soldier. It is against my personal beliefs as a man and my obligation as an active duty soldier to be complicit in this genocide. Fellow service members, please join me in calling for an immediate ceasefire and for Israel and the US to adhere to international law. These are my views, not those of the Department of Defense.”
Senior Airman Larry Hebert, also seeking conscientious objector status, said, “It is imperative that we uphold our personal and professional values and beliefs. There is no greater crime against humanity than genocide. No person, country, or institution should be supported unconditionally. This Appeal is within our rights as service members and we have a duty to exercise this right when our leaders commit violations of international and humanitarian law. You need to genuinely consider your actions now and reflect on how you’re contributing to the genocide. Are you helping or hurting the situation? There is no neutrality. By staying neutral, you hurt the oppressed. These are my views, not those of the Dept. of Defense.”
Bill Galvin, Counseling Coordinator at the Center on Conscience & War, said, “We’ve had an increase in calls from military personnel asking about getting discharged as conscientious objectors. Almost all of them cite the carnage in Gaza as something that their conscience would not allow them to ignore. Some have expressed feeling complicit in the violence.”
Kathleen Gilberd, executive director of the Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild, said, “Many service members have serious objections to the U.S. support for Israel’s carnage in Gaza. Though their rights are somewhat limited, military personnel can still speak out about their beliefs and protest the travesty of this war. The Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild stands in support of these military dissenters and resisters.”
Shiloh Emelein, USMC veteran and Operations Director of About Face: Veterans Against the War, said, “We know many young people join the military out of necessity to get their needs met. But they are not obligated to contribute to genocide and unjust, unlawful wars that go against their conscience. You do have rights, you do have options to object, and there’s a large community of post-9/11 veterans ready to welcome you.”
To increase the awareness of this campaign among members of the military, civilian supporters are encouraged to share it on social media and to ask peace and justice organizations to share it with their membership.
The active-duty members listed in this release are available for comment by calling Bill Galvin, Center on Conscience and War, at 202-446-1461.
The moral burden lies with us all to express solidarity with the people of Palestine. And let’s not forget the other ‘silent’ conflicts and famines that are mounting across the world, which also demands a massive international response in the face of political apathy and indifference.
— Share The World’s Resources (STWR)
Since Israel’s military response in Gaza to the 7 October attack by Hamas, hundreds of civil society organisations have supported the call for a ceasefire. Global humanitarian and human rights groups also demand that all UN member states immediately halt arms transfers to Israel and Palestinian armed groups in order to avert further humanitarian catastrophe and loss of life.
While sharing the outrage and condemnation for the horrific attacks by Hamas, it is important to acknowledge its causes in decades of state-sanctioned violence against Palestinians by Israel. Rights groups have long documented the shameful hallmarks of colonialism and apartheid in Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories. Gaza has endured unimaginable suffering as a result of the illegal blockades imposed since the 1990s, a form of collective punishment that has turned Gaza into an ‘open-air prison’. But over the past eight months, Israel has gravely violated international law with its unprecedented military assaults on the besieged territory, killing upwards of 35,000 people including over 15,000 children.
Strong evidence suggests that the Israeli government’s actions violate the Genocide Convention, meaning it has inflicted conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians. Up to 70 percent of homes in Gaza have been destroyed, and an entire civilian infrastructure decimated including hospitals, schools, universities, cultural sites and UN facilities.
The latest actions in Rafah—closing a critical border crossing and forcibly displacing an estimated 800,000 people with nowhere else to go—clearly flout a provisional ruling of the World Court, which ordered Israel to take ‘all measures within its power’ to prevent acts of genocide. Rather than upholding the order by immediately providing basic services and humanitarian assistance to Gazans, Israel is deliberately using hunger as a weapon of war and committing further grievous war crimes. Half of the population of Gaza are already facing catastrophic levels of hunger, with famine imminent in the north.
Complicity with genocide
What the Israel-Gaza war has painfully revealed is the complicity of North American and many European countries with Israel’s genocidal crimes. The major Western powers present themselves as the defenders of human rights and morality, yet give unwavering support to Israel as it defies international law with impunity. These governments have repeatedly vetoed or abstained from resolutions at the UN Security Council calling for a humanitarian ceasefire. They have thwarted diplomatic efforts to bring Israel’s offensive to an end. They have opposed South Africa’s genocide case at the World Court. They have shamelessly cut life-saving aid to the United Nations relief agency for Palestinians. And they continue to supply Israel with taxpayer-funded weapons transfers—particularly the United States that has worked with Congress to secure billions of dollars of additional military assistance.
The hypocrisy and duplicity of Western countries has been exposed like never before. The most powerful Western states treat the Palestinians as if they are not worthy of the universal human rights endorsed by the United Nations more than 70 years ago. Their support for genocide shames us all and risks fuelling an endless cycle of violence and hatred that may eventually endanger the whole of humanity.
In the absence of political leadership, the moral burden lies with ordinary citizens to speak out, march and express solidarity with the people of Palestine. It is up to us to take a stand and protest against a genocidal war and its systemic support from callous politicians and the mainstream media. Peaceful student protesters are showing us the way with Gaza solidarity encampments and hunger strikes, despite violent police crackdowns and their false portrayal in the media as being antisemitic. Their brave actions have already helped force the U.S. administration to take pause and tentatively oppose a major ground invasion in Rafah. Now it falls to the rest of us to enforce international law through citizen action, to support human rights for all and end this immoral and illegal war.
A wider crime against humanity
The Israel-Gaza war may be the gravest moral crisis of our time, the most visible genocide in history. But we mustn’t forget the other conflicts around the world that our governments are neglecting, in which millions of people also face violence and mass displacement. In Sudan, civil war risks triggering a severe famine, with half the population already requiring humanitarian assistance and protection. Human Rights Watch report that widespread war crimes and a genocide is likely to have been committed in the region, although it is seldom mentioned in the Western media.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, endemic violence has left nearly 7 million people internally displaced, and the country is suffering the world’s biggest child hunger crisis. In Yemen, more than half the population is dependent on food aid after years of war has destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure. Last year, Somalia was brought to the brink of famine as a result of unrelenting drought and flare-ups of conflict. Hunger is also skyrocketing in multiple other countries, including Burundi, Djibouti, Gambia, Haiti, Lebanon, Liberia, Senegal and Malawi.
Life-threatening levels of food insecurity affect a staggering 281 million people according to the latest global assessment, with those worst affected living in South Sudan, Burkina Faso, Somalia and Mali. Many of these hunger crises don’t make the news headlines. The majority are in conflict-affected areas that—similar to Gaza—leave vast numbers of people without shelter, medicine, food or clean water. At a time when humanitarian needs are soaring, all these crises are tragically underfunded. The humanitarian system is enduring the worst funding gap it has ever faced, described by UN officials as an obscene competition of suffering to receive emergency aid.
While speaking up for the neglected citizens of Palestine, we also need to hold our governments accountable for these wider crimes against humanity. The major Western powers must act to end the 16-year siege of Gaza, provide unlimited humanitarian support to the region and immediately broker a ceasefire. And they must act to mitigate the ‘silent’ conflicts and famines that are mounting across the world, which also demands a massive international response in the face of political apathy and indifference. So let’s extend the spirit of the Gaza protests into a global movement for abolishing the injustice of hunger, and call upon all governments to adequately fund our most basic human rights instead of fuelling more devastating wars.
Gulshan Khan, photojournalist in Johannesburg, reports: “What we are seeing in Palestine today is a hundred thousand times worse than what we experienced in South Africa.”
“Israel, the establishment of Israel is based on the erasure of historical Palestine, on the depopulation of Palestinian towns and villages, and the imposing of a new geography in a new urban system, a new transport system, a new meaning, a new set of names, new maps on top of that area. And that is a huge construction project.”
“When you grow up in Israel, the entire education system is priming you to become part of a national project of erasure and dispossession. There are things that you simply are not told, and you understand that state ideology requires a certain narrative and requires certain epistemic erasure, meaning the erasure of history, erasure of people, erasure of the truth that you actually see in front of your eyes.”
Imagine a woman knocking on your door in Bath, England, saying that your house is her house because the Romans occupied England in the 5th century, so anyone of Roman descent can make a historic claim to their land. Zionist Israeli Jews have made the same claims on the land in Palestine.
Narrow AI (Artificial Intelligence) is what we have now. AGI is when AI attains the ability to learn, understand, and perform. Technocrats believe this will be the achievement of Singularity–what they are ultimately trying to achieve.
We speak with Israeli American Jewish scholar Raz Segal about the University of Minnesota’s move to rescind a job offer over his comments early in the war on Gaza, when he characterized the Israeli assault as a “textbook case of genocide.” Segal was set to lead the university’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, but after two board members quit in opposition to Segal’s selection and a…
We speak with Israeli American Jewish scholar Raz Segal about the University of Minnesota’s move to rescind a job offer over his comments early in the war on Gaza, when he characterized the Israeli assault as a “textbook case of genocide.” Segal was set to lead the university’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, but after two board members quit in opposition to Segal’s selection and a smear campaign led by the pro-Israel group Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas (JCRC), the school revoked the offer. Segal says he has been “targeted because of my identity as a Jew who refuses the narrowing down of Jewish identity to Zionism” and calls the JCRC-led opposition a “hateful campaign of lies and distortions” and “crude political intervention.” “This was a completely legitimate hiring process,” states Segal. He says rescission of his offer “spells the end of this idea of free inquiry, of academic freedom, of research and teaching — and all in the service, of course, of supporting an extremely violent state.”
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
West Papuan pro-independence supporters are calling Indonesia’s condemnation of Israel hypocritical considering its occupation of Papua for 61 years.
The Indonesian government, through the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the President, has condemned the Israeli government’s handling of the conflict in Gaza.
In a statement, a United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) spokesperson said: “Indonesia’s stance on the international stage contrasts with its actions in Papua”.
“Indonesia mediates conflicts in several Asian countries but lacks a roadmap for resolving the conflict in Papua.”
The group is calling for the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) to immediately form a fact-finding mission to investigate alleged human rights violations. They have also asked for a review of Indonesia’s UN membership.
In November last year, the Pacific Islands Forum appointed the Fiji and Papua New Guinea prime ministers as special envoys to Indonesia to “address the West Papua issue“.
The ULMWP are asking for Indonesia to let the two leaders visit Papua.
Hard to compare with Gaza
Human Rights Watch researcher in Indonesia Andreas Harsono said the situation in West Papua was hard to compare to Gaza.
“Palestine, Gaza and the West Bank, of course, is recognised by more than 130 countries, members of the United Nations. Meanwhile, West Papua is being discussed mostly among seven or maybe 10 other countries, so this is difficult to compare.”
He said Indonesia — the most populous Muslim majority country — had religion in common with Palestine.
But Harsono said West Papua did need more international attention and there was little understanding of the conflict inside Indonesia because of propaganda.
ULMWP executive secretary Markus Haluk reiterated calls for a UN fact-finding mission.
“We want the UN to send their fact-finding mission to West Papua to witness and to prove that there is a slow-motion genocide, ethnocide and ecocide happening in West Papua,” Haluk said, speaking to RNZ Pacific through a translator.
It is an ongoing plea for the United Nations to visit. In 2019, the Indonesian government agreed in principle to a visit by the Human Rights Commissioner but that promise has not been fulfilled.
Haluk said the “big brothers” in the region — referring to New Zealand and Australia — could bring up the UN fact-finding mission when the nation’s leaders meet with their Indonesian counterparts.
“There has been several visits by the leaders but it seems like the issue of West Papua is not as important as the other issues such as trade,” he said.
‘Refusing to take responsibility’ Former New Zealand Greens MP Catherine Delahunty said she felt frustrated that West Papua had not got the attention it should, especially considering it was in “our own backyard”.
Nearly all foreign media has been banned from entering West Papua.
“Anyone that criticises the regime has great difficulty getting into that country to report and local journalists are subjected to sustained threats and so we’re in a very unhealthy situation in terms of public understanding of just how drastic the situation is,” she said.
Delahunty said Indonesia had been intimidating smaller nations, while larger ones like New Zealand and Australia were “refusing to act”.
“They are refusing to take responsibility for their own part in allowing this to continue.”
She said New Zealand and Australia could create consequences for Indonesia if it continued to not allow the fact-finding mission, by doing things like stopping military exchanges.
A spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade said New Zealand “follows human rights developments closely, and takes all allegations of human rights violations seriously”.
“New Zealand continues to register concerns about the human rights situation in Papua via appropriate fora. New Zealand encourages Indonesia to promote and protect the rights of all its citizens, and to be transparent in policy relating to Papua.
“New Zealand recognises Indonesia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, including in Papua.”
In a statement to RNZ Pacific, the Indonesian Embassy in Wellington said the government of Indonesia was committed to accelerate the development of all provinces, “including our brothers and sisters in Papua”, to lead and enjoy a prosperous way of life.
“Papua is highly respected as an honourable region and will continue to be maintained as such,” it said.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
You could almost sense the smacking of lips, accompanied by the rubbing of hands. The departure of Benny Gantz from the Israeli war cabinet, which had served as a checking forum against the conventional security cabinet, presented a perfect opportunity for those who felt his presence stifling. In these febrile times, Gantz, the leader of the opposition National Unity party, passes as a moderate centrist and had been one of its three voting members, alongside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant.
The resignation was prompted by Netanyahu’s tardy attitude towards formulating a plan to end the war in Gaza. Gantz had given him till June 8 to come up with something satisfactory, “a plan of action” that would include the normalisation of relations with Saudi Arabia and the creation of “an international civilian governance mechanism in Gaza”. “Unfortunately,” stated Gantz, “Netanyahu is preventing us from achieving real victory. So we are leaving the unity government. With a heavy but full heart.”
According to Gantz, he joined the emergency coalition “because we knew it was a bad government. The people of Israel, the fighters, the commanders, the families of the murdered, the casualties and the hostages needed unity and support like they needed air to breathe.”
In his resignation letter, Gantz musters praise for his own role and that of his party. “After the October 7 disaster, we set up together the emergency government. Our joining was not under question at that difficult time… Our entrance contributed several achievements to the government… national unity and conveying a clear message to the international community as well as to our enemies.”
If the message had been one of a savage campaign littered with Palestinian corpses, the infliction of conditions of famine, the crushing of the Gaza strip, not to mention ignoring political realities, then it was certainly conveyed. If any moderate influence had been exerted on the part of Gantz and his colleagues, it was a statue yet to escape its marble confines. Much of what he has proposed are distinctions without much difference. He envisages the return of Israeli hostages still held by Hamas, the destruction and substitution of the organisation in Gaza, the return of residents of the north displaced from their homes and fortifying the US-led effort against Iran.
Fellow National Unity minister Gadi Eisenkot, who also resigned, explained that the cabinet led by Netanyahu was prevented from “making key decisions, which were needed to realize the war’s goals and improve Israel’s strategic position.”
Israel watchers speculated on the significance of the move. The Gantz gambit could well stimulate an early conclusion to the conflict. On the other hand, his bluff could be called, enabling the hard right of the coalition to entrench themselves.
Shalom Lipner, non-resident senior fellow for Middle East Programs at the Atlantic Council, suggested that the resignation placed the PM “at the complete mercy of his right-wing and religious fellow travellers who – in the absence of Gantz’s fig leaf – will steer policy in a direction that is anathema to the Biden administration and puts Israel’s essential ties with the United States at risk.” A bitter Israel Harel, writing in Haaretz, wondered what improvements might be made by Gantz’s departure. Would it, for instance, encourage Netanyahu to behave more responsibly in the face of pressure from the likes of National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir? Or weaken Hezbollah’s will? Or “frighten Yahya Sinwar into giving up the life insurance the hostages are providing him?”
At first instance, Netanyahu urged Gantz to reconsider. “Israel is in an existential war on multiple fronts,” the Israeli PM wrote on X. “Benny, this is not the time to abandon the campaign – this is the time to join forces.”
On June 16, Netanyahu confirmed that the ship had sailed. The six-member war cabinet, described by opposition leader Yair Lapid as a “shameful arena for settling scores, fighting and discussions that lead nowhere”, had outlived its fractious usefulness. “The cabinet was in the coalition agreement with Gantz at his request,” the PM is said to have told the Security Cabinet. “As soon as Gantz left – there was no need for a cabinet anymore.” In its place, stated a spokesperson from the prime minister’s office, the security cabinet will simply meet with greater regularity, with Netanyahu holding ad hoc “security consultations” when needed.
Abolishing the war cabinet does serve one purpose. It prevents such nationalist demagogues as Ben-Gvir of Otzma Yehudit and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich of the Religious Zionist Party from adding their troubling names to the outfit. Ben-Gvir had insisted on his addition, arguing that it was time to bring in ministers who “warned in real-time against the conception and viewpoint that everyone today accepts was wrong.” He also argued against the secrecy of the war as prosecuted.
Both men, who have urged on even greater slaughter in Gaza and the eviction of Palestinians living there, remain members of the broader security cabinet. And they have made no secret about their mixture of delight and loathing at Gantz’s departure. “There is no less stately act than resigning from a government in time of war,” Smotrich haughtily declared.
For the moment, the scene is set for a war to go even more badly than it already has. As Gaza starves and continues to be levelled, Israel’s politicians will be circling in anticipation of an election date. Netanyahu’s primary goal till then, as it has been for some years: survive.
U.S. Marines and IDF soldiers in joint maneuver Intrepid Maven, Feb. 28, 2023. Photo: US Marines
On June 13, Hamas responded to persistent needling by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken over the U.S. proposal for a pause in the Israeli massacre in Gaza. The group said it has “dealt positively… with the latest proposal and all proposals to reach a cease-fire agreement.” Hamas added, by contrast, that, “while Blinken continues to talk about ‘Israel’s approval of the latest proposal, we have not heard any Israeli official voicing approval.”
The full details of the U.S. proposal have yet to be made public, but the pause in Israeli attacks and release of hostages in the first phase would reportedly lead to further negotiations for a more lasting cease-fire and the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in the second phase. But there is no guarantee that the second round of negotiations would succeed.
As former Israeli Labor Party prime minister Ehud Barak told Israel Radio on June 3rd, “How do you think [Gaza military commander] Sinwar will react when he is told: but be quick, because we still have to kill you, after you return all the hostages?”
Meanwhile, as Hamas pointed out, Israel has not publicly accepted the terms of the latest U.S. cease-fire proposal, so it has only the word of U.S. officials that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has privately agreed to it. In public, Netanyahu still insists that he is committed to the complete destruction of Hamas and its governing authority in Gaza, and has actually stepped up Israel’s vicious attacks in central and southern Gaza.
The basic disagreement that President Joe Biden and Secretary Blinken’s smoke and mirrors cannot hide is that Hamas, like every Palestinian, wants a real end to the genocide, while the Israeli and U.S. governments do not.
Biden or Netanyahu could end the slaughter very quickly if they wanted to—Netanyahu by agreeing to a permanent cease-fire, or Biden by ending or suspending U.S. weapons deliveries to Israel. Israel could not carry out this war without U.S. military and diplomatic support. But Biden refuses to use his leverage, even though he has admitted in an interview that it was “reasonable” to conclude that Netanyahu is prolonging the war for his own political benefit.
The U.S. is still sending weapons to Israel to continue the massacre in violation of a cease-fire order by the International Court of Justice. Bipartisan U.S. leaders have invited Netanyahu to address a joint session of the U.S. Congress on July 24, even as the International Criminal Court reviews a request by its chief prosecutor for an arrest warrant for Netanyahu for war crimes, crimes against humanity and murder.
The United States seems determined to share Israel’s self-inflicted isolation from voices calling for peace from all over the world, including large majorities of countries in the UN General Assembly and Security Council.
But perhaps this is appropriate, as the United States bears a great deal of responsibility for that isolation. By its decades of unconditional support for Israel, and by using its UN Security Council veto dozens of times to shield Israel from international accountability, the United States has enabled successive Israeli governments to pursue flagrantly criminal policies and to thumb their noses at the growing outrage of people and countries across the world.
This pattern of U.S. support for Israel goes all the way back to its founding, when Zionist leaders in Palestine unleashed a well-planned operation to seize much more territory than the UN allocated to their new state in its partition plan, which the Palestinians and neighboring countries already firmly opposed.
The massacres, the bulldozed villages and the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 to a million people in the Nakba have been meticulously documented, despite an extraordinary propaganda campaign to persuade two generations of Israelis, Americans and Europeans that they never happened.
The U.S. was the first country to grant Israel de facto recognition on May 14, 1948, and played a leading role in the 1949 UN votes to recognize the new state of Israel within its illegally seized borders. President Eisenhower had the wisdom to oppose Britain, France and Israel in their war to capture the Suez Canal in 1956, but Israel’s seizure of the Occupied Palestinian Territories in 1967 persuaded U.S. leaders that it could be a valuable military ally in the Middle East.
Unconditional U.S. support for Israel’s illegal occupation and annexation of more and more territory over the past 57 years has corrupted Israeli politics and encouraged increasingly extreme and racist Israeli governments to keep expanding their genocidal territorial ambitions. Netanyahu’s Likud party and government now fully embrace their Greater Israel plan to annex all of occupied Palestine and parts of other countries, wherever and whenever new opportunities for expansion present themselves.
Israel’s de facto expansion has been facilitated by the United States’ monopoly over mediation between Israel and Palestine, which it has aggressively staked out and defended against the UN and other countries. The irreconcilable contradiction between the U.S.’s conflicting roles as Israel’s most powerful military ally and the principal mediator between Israel and Palestine is obvious to the whole world.
But as we see even in the midst of the genocide in Gaza, the rest of the world and the UN have failed to break this U.S. monopoly and establish legitimate, impartial mediation by the UN or neutral countries that respect the lives of Palestinians and their human and civil rights.
Qatar mediated a temporary cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in November 2023, but it has since been upstaged by U.S. moves to prolong the massacre through deceptive proposals, cynical posturing and Security Council vetoes. The U.S. consistently vetoes all but its own proposals on Israel and Palestine in the UN Security Council, even when its own proposals are deliberately meaningless, ineffective or counterproductive.
The UN General Assembly is united in support of Palestine, voting almost unanimously year after year to demand an end to the Israeli occupation. A hundred and forty-four countries have recognized Palestine as a country, and only the U.S. veto denies it full UN membership. The Israeli genocide in Gaza has even shamed the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) into suspending their ingrained pro-Western bias and pursuing cases against Israel.
One way that the nations of the world could come together to apply greater pressure on Israel to end its assault on Gaza would be a “Uniting for Peace” resolution in the UN General Assembly. This is a measure the General Assembly can take when the Security Council is prevented from acting to restore peace and security by the veto of a permanent member.
Israel has demonstrated that it is prepared to ignore cease-fire resolutions by the General Assembly and the Security Council, and an order by the ICJ, but a Uniting for Peace resolution could impose penalties on Israel for its actions, such as an arms embargo or an economic boycott. If the United States still insists on continuing its complicity in Israel’s international crimes, the General Assembly could take action against the U.S. too.
A General Assembly resolution would change the terms of the international debate and shift the focus back from Biden and Blinken’s diversionary tactics to the urgency of enforcing the lasting cease-fire that the whole world is calling for.
It is time for the United Nations and neutral countries to push Israel’s U.S. partner in genocide to the side, and for legitimate international authorities and mediators to take responsibility for enforcing international law, ending the Israeli occupation of Palestine and bringing peace to the Middle East.
Surprising revelation at a picnic. Talking with a person I met; rambling on about his interest in history, he suddenly exclaimed, “Look at what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians, and getting away with it for years.” At neighborhood social events I have attended, if anybody talked about foreign policy, it was usually about helping the suffering Israelis defend themselves from terror attacks; nobody contradicted the erroneous statements. Hearing an average Joe American speak honestly about the genocide indicated a shift in American thinking. The next day at a Bridge game (I’m a good bridge player), a political consultant who had worked with Al Gore’s campaign mentioned that Joe Biden could not win the election. I concurred and added that it was due to Biden assisting Israel in attacks against the Palestinians. No rebuttal to my remark from a group that is normally pro-Israel. Never seen that before.
Originally perceived as a tragic mistake that might prove costly to Gaza’s existence, Hamas’ attack revealed the calculated and brutal manner in which Israel uses injury to its citizens as an excuse to destroy Palestinian life in the occupied territories. Netanyahu’s genocidal response to Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack has shocked the world. This revelation signals a turning point in the battle to save the Palestinians from Israel’s destructive tactics; international forces are emerging from the shadows and are willing to engage Israel’s vociferous warriors
Israel’s propaganda machinery used its access to Western media and convinced the world its military is fighting an entrenched terrorist force that it must destroy before that force destroys Israel and world Jewry. Whoever thinks otherwise is an anti-Semite, so don’t bother thinking about it. Those wanting veracity and justice seek to provide the public with a valid perspective of the happenings in Gaza and enable an intelligent and rational solution to a situation that is causing death and destruction. The contradictions and obvious mendacities exhibited by Israel’s legions go unnoticed by conventional media and government officials. The public clamors for truths that converge to peace. Finally, paths for reaching the public are now available.
Start with Hamas
Hamas firmly established itself in 1987, with an association to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, 38 years after a newly formed Israeli military seized territory awarded to the Palestinians in the Partition Plan 181, 37 years after Prime Minister David Ben Gurion approved the theft of lands from families that Hamas represents, and 36 years after the Israel government terrorized Palestinians to leave their ancestral homes. Israel’s military loaded Palestinians into trucks and transported them to Gaza with insufficient food, water, and shelter and ethnically cleansed the southwest zone of the British Mandate of Palestinians who just wanted to till their lands and showed no resistance to the Zionist intrusion. Hamas established itself long after the Zionists started the destruction of the Palestinians.
The nightmares for the residents from the ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages of Al-Majdahl, Beit Daras, Falujah, Isdud, Qastina, Hamameh, and other villages did not end with their arduous trips to Gaza; ethnic cleansing was an initial step before wholesale theft of property and valuables. Two hundred thousand Palestinians were pushed into Gaza to live in tents, sleep on bare ground, and exist from aid by Quaker organizations and wages from subservient labor. Internment in refugee camps, brutal occupation, military raids, destruction of facilities, destruction of crops and arable lands, prevention of fishing rights, denial of livelihood, and denial of access to the outside world continued to punish the Gazans without an end.
After the 1993-1995 Oslo accords, Israel constructed a 60-kilometer fence around the Gaza Strip and destroyed Gaza’s only airport. Removing illegal Israeli settlers from Gaza, who were mainly there to give Israel an excuse for its military presence, did not stop infiltration by Israeli forces into Gaza. Several wars caused thousands of Palestinian casualties and immense infrastructure destruction. The lives of the displaced Palestinians and their descendants evolved from being wards of the United Nations to virtual imprisonment in an overly crowded environment.
By responding to 38 decades of terrorism committed against the people they represent, Hamas cannot be considered a terrorist organization. They may have, on occasions, used terrorist methods, which is the primary method they have, but fighting a terrorist nation by existing means is resistance to terrorism and not terrorism. Israel is a democratic nation, whose population determines the nation’s leaders and activities; those citizens are involved in the terrorism and, by not changing their nation’s terrorist activities, they are open to aggressive actions toward them. The descendants of the European Jews, who forced the antecedents of the present-day Gazans out of the land they now occupy, should recognize their obligation to those who live only a few kilometers away and whose oppression they can observe; the Gazan s also observe and are taunted by the prosperity they see from those who reside in their stolen lands, chase through their cherished fields and deny them the right to a peaceful and decent existence.
Hamas has not harmed anyone outside of Israel and there is no reason for the United States and the European Union (EU) to label Hamas as a terrorist organization. Israel’s Mossad has murdered and injured scores of innocent people globally and is not labelled a terrorist organization. Don’t these anomalies need correction?
The October 7 attack was a coda to the counter terrorism that the militant Gaza organization has waged against Israel. It was unusually vicious and may have included atrocities that deserve condemnation. Not resolved is the identification of the culprits in the atrocities; were they operating in accord with Hamas orders or were they isolated individuals expressing rage and taking revenge for the atrocities committed upon their families? Because Israel insists the atrocities were a Hamas directive, the question will never be investigated or answered. If that is the case, then Hamas receives the benefit of doubt─ it would be insensible of Hamas to urge actions that drive world opinion from its support.
Israel’s worldwide propaganda machine (Hasbara) previously instructed Western media to precede Hamas with the word terrorist, as if the two words were one word. The Pavlovian response to the characterization assured that upon hearing the word Hamas the adjective terrorist flowed to the brain. The terrorism that Israel and its Mossad have inflicted upon the Palestinian, Lebanese, Syrian, and Iranian people, as well as hundreds of innocents from several nations throughout the world, is never discussed.
If Hamas did not exist, Israel would find another organization to provoke, accuse of terrorism, and be pressed to liquidate in an uncontrollable war that the state of Israel claims was forced upon it.
The brutal war against the Palestinians
Israel’s excuses for waging war in Gaza fail from day one. If Israel wants to eliminate militant Hamas then it only needs to stop oppressing the Palestinians. No oppression, no provocations, and no Hamas reaction. In 2008, the Palestinian militant group floated an offer — if Israel withdrew from the lands it seized in the 1967 Mideast war and remained behind the green line, Hamas would agree to a 10-year truce. Israel did not accept the offer, showed it wanted it all Palestinian land, and then accused Hamas of terrorism for defending the Palestinians against Israel’s aggression.
Reinforcing the Israel border and containing Hamas behind the border is not difficult and would have resolved one issue. Negotiating release of the captives was only a matter of numbers in a quid pro quo deal that may have irritated Israel’s leaders but would have satisfied Israel’s anguished population. That leaves combatting the mortars and rockets that cause havoc to Israel. That problem could be resolved if the larger problem of oppression was resolved.
Exact statistics on Israeli casualties due to rockets fired from Gaza in the last 10 years, after barrages became heavy, are difficult to confirm. Research and estimation have about 25 Israelis killed from rocket fire, an average of 2.5/year. As of June 10, about 300 Israeli soldiers have been killed in the invasion and 50 hostages have died in captivity. Israel has traded an average of 2.5 deaths/year during the next 140 years for 350 immediate deaths to its citizens and total destruction of Gaza for assuring that there is no Hamas to launch rockets. Why does Israel prefer to have its military youth immediately killed and all hostages severely endangered when another plan is less deadly to the Israel population? Does that sound plausible? Netanyahu says the only way to save the hostages is by the invasion, which contradicts the assertion that ferocious Hamas will kill the hostages. Does that sound plausible?
Reasons for other Israeli military actions have been implausible.
Israel destroyed a World Central Kitchen (WCK) convoy and killed seven aid workers. The IDF’s investigation concluded “that the army unit involved had believed the vehicles they were tracking from the sky had been taken over by Hamas gunmen, and that they were not aware of the coordination procedures put in place between the military and World Central Kitchen for that evening. After the aid convoy reached its warehouse destination, a car carrying what the IDF said were gunmen headed north, while the WCK aid workers began driving south in vehicles marked with the charity’s logo.”
The entire evidence presented by the Israeli military for believing Hamas fighters drove the trucks was seeing a bag that the military mistook for a gun. Other than the bag, the Israel investigation admitted the military did not have confirmation of any gunmen in any of the cars. One way of confirming — have troops establish a blockade on the road and then broadcast for the car occupants to leave the cars. That would have peacefully resolved the issue. Why wasn’t that done?
Conclusion: The World Central Kitchen convoy was deliberately targeted by Israeli military to intimidate food aid suppliers and have Israel obtain more control of food deliveries.
Israel attacked a U.N. school in central Gaza and reportedly killed at least 33 persons, including 12 women and children. Reason — Hamas militants were believed to be operating from within the school. Next day, the Israelis bombed another United Nations-run school in northern Gaza, and three people were killed. Reason — belief of a Hamas position inside the school.
Why hasn’t Israel occupied the institutions — schools, hospitals, community centers, mosques — to ensure Hamas militants would not be able to use them and innocent civilians could? Just pull up in armored vehicles to the institutions, broadcast for all occupants to temporarily leave, carefully enter and occupy the institutions. If there are Hamas militants, they will either flee into tunnels or be killed in the ensuing firefight. Preferable to know the institution constituency than kill innocent civilians because it is suspected that Hamas militants might reside on the premises.
One notable feature of all the hostages that have been released and rescued is that, regardless of the sensational headlines, none of the hostages appear to have been mistreated and all have emerged in good condition. There are no reports that Hamas has assassinated any hostage. NBC news reported on the June 8 rescue that, “ In the wake of the rescues, the bloodied and burned bodies of Palestinian adults and children were scattered on the town’s streets. Video showed bodies piled up near the doorway of one home.”
Operating in an environment of violent hostility, the June 8 rescue of four hostages had a greater probability that more hostages and rescuers would be killed than survived. Only one military personnel was killed and “Gaza’s Ministry of Health said 210 people were killed and another 400 were injured in the assault and rescue operation.” This occurred at the same time the US had prepared a proposal that would bring release of all hostages.
Another exposure of the brutality of the Israel military. They could have waited for the outcome of the US proposal before engaging in a dangerous and bloody rescue operation. The 210 Palestinians killed and 400 wounded did not counter the Israelis; they were just arbitrarily killed. Compare that to what Hamas could have been doing and has not done. Hamas has not kept the hostages in the same areas as Hamas fighters, which would act as a deterrence for Israel to attack or subject the hostages to death.
The Turning Point
A turning point in the long straight road along which Israel has driven the Palestinians has been achieved. Where that road will lead is indeterminate and precarious — this road has Zionist land mines that disturb and block passage.
In the campus protests, those who favored the Palestinian cause and were against the genocide greatly outnumbered the pro-Israelis who favored the genocide. Yet, the smaller number of the genocidal were able to stifle the protests and have a congressional committee label them as anti-Semitic. As usual, in American democracy the mass of people do not determine policy; it is the well-heeled and well-connected who determine the country’s direction.
Israel, which is committing genocide, calls itself a Jewish nation and a majority of worldwide Jewry supports Israel. This means worldwide Jewry supports the genocide. Those against the genocide are against those who support the genocide and, by default, are against Zionist Jews. Being against Zionist Jews automatically labels one as anti-Semitic. We have anti-genocide is anti-Semitic and pro-genocide is a good thing, contradictions that make a sham of the U.S. government who close their eyes to this circus trick that only the Zionists can perform.
The turning point is a difficult road, along which everyone must shout louder, act more forcibly, attract more audience, and beat the drum of insensitivity until an American President steps out of the White House, crosses Pennsylvania Avenue, and warmly embraces those who demonstrate for Palestinian freedom. Am I too naive?
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Laughing on the bus/Playing Games with the faces/She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy/I said, Be careful his bowtie is really a camera.
— America by Paul Simon, recorded by Simon and Garfunkel in their Bookends album, 1968
Only people who listen to the chorus of reliable alternative media voices warning of the quickly growing threat of nuclear war have any sense of the nightmare that is approaching. Even for them, however, and surely for most others, unreality reigns. Reality has a tough time countering illusions. For we are cataleptically slow-walking to WW III. If it is very hard or impossible to imagine our own deaths, how much harder is it to imagine the deaths of hundreds of millions of others or more.
In 1915, amid the insane slaughter of tens of millions during WW I that was a shocking embarrassment to the meliorist fantasy of the long-standing public consciousness, Freud wrote:
It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death, and whenever we attempt to do so, we can perceive that we are, in fact, still present as spectators. Hence the psychoanalytic school could venture on the assertion that, at bottom, no one believes in his own death, or to put the same thing another way, that, in the unconscious, every one of us is convinced of his own immortality.
The growing lunacy of the Biden administration’s provocations against Russia via Ukraine seem lost on so many. The long-running and deep-seated demonization of Russia and its President Vladimir Putin by U.S. propagandists has sunk so deep into the Western mind that facts can’t descend that deep to counteract it. It is one of the greatest triumphs of U.S. government propaganda.
A friend, a retired history professor at an elite university, recently told me that he can’t think of such matters as the growing threat of nuclear war if he wants to sleep at night, but anyway, he’s more concerned with the consequences of global warming. Readers at publications where my numerous articles about the nuclear war risk have appeared – the worst since the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 – have made many comments such as “nuclear weapons don’t exist,” that it’s all a hoax, that Putin is in cahoots with Biden in a game of fear mongering to promote a secret agenda, etc. How can one respond to such denials of reality?
The other day I met another friend who likes to talk about politics. He is an intelligent and a caring man. He was sporting a tee-shirt with a quote from George Washington and quickly started talking about his obsessive fear of Donald Trump and the possibility that he could be elected again. I told him that I despised Trump but that Biden was a far greater threat right now. He spoke highly of Biden, and when I responded that Biden has been a warmonger throughout his political career and, of course, in Ukraine, was instigating the use of nuclear weapons, and was in full support of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, he looked at me as if I were saying something he had never heard before. When I spoke of the 2014 U.S. engineered coup d’état in Ukraine, he, a man in his sixties at least, said he was unaware of it, but in any case Biden supported our military as he did and that was good. When I said Biden is mentally out of it and physically tottering, he emphatically denied it; said Biden was very sharp and fully engaged. He said Trump was fat and a great danger and George Washington would agree. I was at a loss for words. The conversation ended.
A third friend, just back from living overseas for a year, flew back east from California to visit old friends and relatives. He told me this sad tale:
There were experiences that troubled me very deeply during my visit that had nothing to do with all the death and final goodbyes I was immersed in. My family I would say is pretty typical working class Democrat. Liberal/progressive in social outlook. Most are devout Catholics. All are kind, generous very loving people. What was troubling was that it was pretty much impossible to carry on a rational reasonably sane political conversation with all but a couple of them, as the “Trump Derangement Syndrome” symptoms were absolutely off the charts. It was quite stunning actually. It is almost as if Dementia-Joe isn’t even in office as they had no interest in discussing his many failings, because their entire focus was the orange haired clown. If I had ten bucks for every time someone told me any one of the following NPR/PBS talking points I’d buy a nice meal for myself – (Trump will be a dictator if elected – Trump will prosecute his enemies if elected – Trump will destroy our democracy if he gets in – etc.) Any and all attempts to question these narratives and talking points by bringing the behavior of the current administration into the conversation were met with befuddlement – as if people couldn’t believe that “I” wasn’t as terrified as they were by the “Trump-Monster” lurking in the shadows.
So I guess I’m sharing these thoughts with you, Ed, because it feels like I’m dealing with several different kinds of loss right now. The more obvious “loss” associated with the physical death of loved ones – but I’m also mourning the intellectual and psychological death of living loved ones who have somehow become completely untethered from the “material realities” I observe on planet earth. They can repeat “talking points” but can’t explain the evidence or reason that needs to be attached to those talking points for them to be anything but propaganda. Physical death is a natural thing – something we will all face – but this intellectual and spiritual death I am witness to is perhaps even more painful and disconcerting for me. How do we find our way forward when reason, rational debate, evidence, and real-world events are replaced with fear – and rather irrational fears at that?
This intellectual and spiritual death that he describes is a widespread phenomenon. It is not new, but COVID 19 with its lockdowns, lies, and dangerous “vaccines” dramatically intensified it. It created vast gaps in interpersonal communication that were earlier exploited in the lead-up to the 2016 election and Trump’s surprising victory. Families and friends stopped talking to each other. The longstanding official propaganda apparatus went into overdrive. Then in 2020 the normal human fear of death and chaos was fully digitized during the lockdowns. Putin, Trump, the Chinese, sexual predators, viruses, space aliens, your next door neighbor, etc. – you name it – were all tossed into the mix that created fear and panic to replace the growing realization that the war on terror initiated by George W. Bush in 2001 was losing its power. New terrors were created, censorship was reinforced, and here we are in 2024 in a country supporting Israeli genocide in Gaza and with a population blind to the growing threat of WW III and the use of nuclear weapons.
The communication gap – what my friend aptly describes as “this intellectual and spiritual death” – is two-sided. On one hand there is simple ignorance of what is really going on in the world, greatly aided by vast government/media propaganda. On the other, there is chosen ignorance or the wish to be deceived to maintain illusions.
We are thinking reeds as Pascal called us, vulnerable feeling creatures afraid of death; we, who through the support of wars and violence of all sorts, care just enough to want to be deceived as to what we are doing by supporting wars that make so much blood that is inside other people get to the outside for the earth to drink since it is not our blood and we survive.
I could, of course, quote liberally from truth tellers down through history who have said the same thing about self-deception with all its shades and nuances. Those quotations are endless. Why bother? At some very deep level in the recesses of their hearts, people know it’s true. I could make a pretty essay here, be erudite and eloquent, and weave a web of wisdom from all those the world says were the great thinkers because they are now dead and can no longer detect hypocrisy.
For the desire to be deceived and hypocrisy (Greek hypokrites, stage actor, a pretender) are kissing cousins. Grasping the theatrical nature of social life, the need to pretend, to act, to feel oneself part of a “meaningful” play explains a lot. To stand outside consensus reality, outside the stage door, so to speak, is not very popular. Despite the mass idiocy of the media’s daily barrage of lies and stupidities that pass for news on the front pages and newscasts of the corporate media, people want to believe them to feel they belong.
Yet D. H. Lawrence’s point a century ago still applies: “The essential America soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”
But this killer soul must be hidden behind a wall of deceptions as the U.S. warfare state ceaselessly wages wars all around the world. It must be hidden behind feel good news stories about how Americans really care about others, but only others that they are officially allowed to care about. Not Syrians, Yemenis, Russian speakers of the Donbass, Palestinians, et al. The terrorist nature of decades upon decades of U.S. savagery and the indifference of so many Americans go hand-in-hand but escape notice in the corporate media that are propagandists. The major theme of these media is that the United States government is the great defender of freedom, peace, and democracy. Every once in a while, a scapegoat, one rotten apple in the barrel, is offered up to show that all is not perfect in paradise. Here or there a decent article appears to reinforce the illusion that the corporate media tell the truth. But essentially it is one massive deception that is leading many people to accept a slow walk toward WW III.
There’s a make-believe quality to this vast spectacle of violent power and false innocence that baffles the mind. To see and hear the corporate masked media magicians’ daily reports is to enter a world of pure illusion that deserves only sardonic laughter but sadly captivates so many adult children desperate to believe.
Here’s an anecdote about a very strange encounter, one I couldn’t make up. A communication of some sort that also has a make-believe quality to it. I’m not sure what the message is.
I was recently meeting with a writer and researcher who has interviewed scores of people about the famous 1960s assassinations and other sensitive matters. I only knew this person through internet communication, but he was passing my way and suggested that we meet, which we did at a local out-of-the-way cafe. We were the only customers and we took our drinks out the back to a small table and chairs under a tree in the café’s large garden that bordered open land down to a river. About 10 yards away a woman sat at a table, writing in a notebook that I took to be journaling of some sort. The researcher and I talked very openly for more than two hours about our mutual work and what he had learned from many of his interviewees about the assassinations. Neither of us paid any attention to the woman at the table – naively? – and our conversation naturally revolved around the parts played by intelligence agencies, the CIA, etc. in the assassinations of the Kennedys and MLK, Jr. The woman sat and wrote. Near the end of our two plus hours, my friend went inside the café, which had closed to new customers, to use the men’s room. The woman called to me and said I hope you don’t mind but I overheard some of your conversation and my father worked for U.S. intelligence. She then told us much more about him, where he went to college, etc. or at least what she said she knew because when growing up he didn’t tell her mother, her, or siblings any details about his decades of spying. But when she attended his memorial service in Washington D.C., the place was filled with intelligence operatives and she learned more about her father’s secretive life. Then, out of the blue, it burst out of her how he was obsessed with the high school he attended, one she assured us we probably never heard of (we were in Massachusetts) – Regis High School, a Jesuit scholarship prep school for boys in NYC. To say I was startled is an understatement, since I went to Regis myself, and the anomalous “coincidence” of this encounter in the back garden of an empty café spooked my friend as well. The woman told us more about her father until we had to leave.
I wondered if he wore a bowtie and if what just happened weren’t really so.
Mourners carry the body of Saqr Abed, an Islamic Jihad militant killed in a raid by Israeli forces in the village of Kafr Dan, near the West Bank city of Jenin, Wednesday, June 12, 2024. (Mohammed NasserAPA images)
A warning on 4 June from the UN human rights commissioner that “unprecedented bloodshed” in the occupied West Bank must come to an end has gone unheeded.
The Israeli military, at times in collaboration with Israel’s Border Police and Israel’s domestic secret police Shin Bet, has continued to conduct deadly raids into the occupied West Bank, wreaking havoc to private Palestinian property and civilian infrastructure in the process.
An Israeli military raid into Kafr Dan village west of Jenin in the northern West Bank killed six Palestinians earlier this week.
The invading Israeli forces used Energa anti-tank rifle grenades against a home belonging to the Abed family, killing three, Saqr Aref Abed, Mustafa Allam Mirie and Ahmad Muhammad Abu Obeid.
Others killed during the Israeli attack and confrontations in the village include Ayman Abu Fadalah, Muhammad Hazza Mirie and Ahmad Muhammad Samoudi, 17.
On 11 June, Ahmad was with another child, allegedly carrying homemade explosive devices as they waited for Israeli armored vehicles to pass by on a road in the center of Kafr Dan.
An Israeli sniper shot at the two children from a distance of 100 to 150 meters with six bullets, according to Defense for Children International – Palestine.
One bullet hit Ahmad in his leg, and he collapsed and started pleading for help. The other child was able to flee though he was injured in the thigh.
The Israeli sniper shot towards Ahmad again, striking him in his chest and head.
An Israeli military vehicle then approached Ahmad, and the Israeli driver stepped out and shot the child three more times.
The driver of the military vehicle remained near him for a few minutes as Israeli forces blocked a Palestinian ambulance from reaching Ahmad as he lay wounded on the ground.
“Israeli forces shot Ahmad, waited until he fell to the ground, then shot him several more times, then blocked paramedics from reaching him until they were confident he bled out,” said Ayed Abu Eqtaish, accountability program director at DCIP.
“The United States must stop sending weapons to the Israeli military that are used to kill Palestinian children without restraint, whether in Gaza or the West Bank.”
Ahmad is the older brother of a 12-year-old boy who was shot, and later succumbed to his wounds, during an Israeli raid in Jenin in September 2022.
Mahmoud Muhammad Samoudi had allegedly thrown stones at Israeli vehicles when Israeli forces opened fire at the group of youths he was a part of.
Elsewhere on 10 June, Israeli occupation forces raided the village of Kafr Nimeh, west of Ramallah, and shot and killed four Palestinian men and injured others.
Israeli armored vehicles invaded the Kafr Nimeh village, raided homes and commercial stores, confiscated surveillance cameras and set up a checkpoint at the village’s entrance.
Israeli authorities had been pursuing two Palestinians suspected of setting fire to a vehicle and its trailer in the Sde Ephraim settlement “outpost” in the occupied West Bank overnight on 9 June.
Sde Ephraim was established on a hilltop belonging to the nearby Palestinian village of Ras Karkar.
While all Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank are illegal under international law and building them is a war crime, what Israel refers to as “outposts” are often built without even Israel’s permission and are considered illegal under Israeli law.
The men killed were identified as Muhammad Raslan Abdo, Muhammad Jaber Abdo and Rashdi Samih Ataya, according to the Palestinian Authority civil affairs department, which did not name the fourth Palestinian who was killed.
Local news sources named him as Wasim Bisam Zidan.
Israeli forces had previously detained Muhammad Jaber Abdo for two decades, and he was released in 2022. He was a member of Hamas’ armed wing operating in the occupied West Bank.
Israeli forces claimed to have found a makeshift sub-machine gun and other weapons in the vehicle.
Israeli forces then barred Palestine Red Crescent Society medics from reaching and evacuating the injured for at least two hours.
When one ambulance tried to reach, Israeli forces fired at it with live ammunition, puncturing its tires.
Israeli forces also opened fire on Palestinians gathered in the area, injuring eight with live ammunition, including a child.
Israel is now withholding the bodies of all four Palestinians its forces killed in Kafr Nimeh, UN monitoring group OCHA said. Israel withholds the remains of Palestinians killed during what it claims were attacks, intending to use them as bargaining chips in negotiations.
A governorate-wide strike on Ramallah and al-Bireh was reportedly declared the next day, on 11 June, in mourning.
Wreaking havoc on a refugee camp
Israeli forces invaded the al-Faraa refugee camp in the foothills of the Jordan Valley in the occupied West Bank accompanied with military bulldozers in the late hours of 9 June. Israeli forces briefly withdrew from the camp at dawn the next day but stormed it later with large reinforcements.
Israeli forces also invaded several other neighborhoods in nearby Tubas, before withdrawing completely on the afternoon of 10 June after a 16-hour operation, which saw armed Palestinians defend the camp from the Israeli invaders.
Soldiers raided homes in the refugee camp and used them as sniper and observation points. Bulldozers partially damaged some homes.
A 16-year-old Palestinian child, Mahmoud Ibrahim Nabrisi, was walking out of an alley that led to the refugee camp’s main square when he saw Israeli soldiers stationed in a community center for disabled people in the camp, according to a field investigation by DCIP.
Mahmoud tried to warn people in the area of the presence of the Israeli forces. That’s when an Israeli sniper hiding behind a small hole in the building’s wall that the military created to observe and shoot from, fired at Mahmoud from a distance of 120 to 150 meters. Three bullets hit Mahmoud, one near his eye, one behind his ear and another in his leg.
Palestinian youth transferred Mahmoud to an ambulance, which took him to a nearby hospital where he was pronounced dead.
As has often been the case with Israeli military raids in the occupied West Bank, which include highly destructive attacks on infrastructure, Israeli bulldozers damaged sewage, electricity and water networks during their invasion of al-Faraa refugee camp. Israeli forces also destroyed and bulldozed the refugee camp’s main square and road.
The Israeli military’s widespread destruction of civilian and public infrastructures leads residents to believe that the Israeli army is taking revenge on the camp by destroying it, Wafa news agency reported.
The Israeli military has conducted four major raids into the al-Faraa refugee camp since 7 October, killing 17 Palestinians, the news agency reported.
“Unprecedented bloodshed”
Earlier this month, the UN high commissioner for human rights Volker Türk said Palestinians in the occupied West Bank were “being subjected to day after day of unprecedented bloodshed.”
More than 520 Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank since 7 October, including at least 504 by Israeli forces, according to OCHA.
Israeli settlers have killed at least 10 Palestinians, and another seven were killed by either Israeli army or settler fire.
Of those killed in the occupied West Bank since 7 October, 132 were children.
Israeli forces and settlers have injured over 5,200 Palestinians in the West Bank since 7 October, at least 800 of them children. One third of all injuries were by live ammunition.
Israeli forces and settlers have killed 51 Palestinian children since the beginning of the year, including two US citizens, according to documentation by DCIP.
Financing Jewish settlements in Palestine is financing the usurpation of Palestine, the oppression of Palestinians, allying with apartheid, and prioritizing profit over people.
Today is Father’s Day in the United States. Here in Gaza, I am one of about 15,000 fathers who have lost their children to this Zionist genocidal war. In the early morning of October 24, I was sitting with my children in my father’s house. My oldest child, Abdullah, who was 13, was hungry, as there was no bread. The night before I got a small piece of bread. I split it into two parts to give to…
We live in a world of make-believe politics, a world where strings pulled in the interests of the super-rich are ever more visible. And yet we are expected to pretend we cannot see those strings. More astonishing still, many people really do seem blind to the puppet show.
1. The “leader of the free world”, President Joe Biden, can barely maintain his attention for more than a few minutes without straying off topic, or wandering offstage. When he has to walk before the cameras, he does so like he is auditioning for the role of a geriatric robot. His whole body is gripped with the concentration he needs to walk in a straight line.
Anyone who denies this is extremely uncomfortable and embarrassing to watch at this point isn't being honest.
And I don't understand how Democrats and their pundits believe they can convince Americans it's not happening.
And yet we are supposed to believe he is carefully working the levers of the western empire, making critically difficult calculations to keep the West free and prosperous, while keeping in check its enemies – Russia, China, Iran – without provoking a nuclear war. Is he really capable of doing all that when he struggles to put one foot in front of the other?
2. Part of that tricky diplomatic balancing act Biden is supposedly conducting, along with other western leaders, relates to Israel’s military operation in Gaza. The West’s “diplomacy” – backed by weapons transfers – has resulted in the murder of tens of thousands of Palestinians, most of them women and children; the gradual starvation of 2.3 million Palestinians over many months; and the destruction of 70 per cent of the enclave’s housing stock and almost all of its major infrastructure and institutions, including schools, universities and hospitals.
And yet we are supposed to believe that Biden has no leverage over Israel, even though Israel is entirely dependent on the United States for the weapons it is using to destroy Gaza.
We are supposed to believe Israel is acting solely in “self-defence”, even when most of the people being killed are unarmed civilians; and that it is “eliminating” Hamas, even though Hamas doesn’t appear to have been weakened, and even though Israel’s starvation policies will take their toll on the young, elderly and vulnerable long before they kill a single Hamas fighter.
We are supposed to believe that Israel has a plan for the “day after” in Gaza that won’t look anything like the outcome these policies appear designed to achieve: making Gaza uninhabitable so that the Palestinian population is forced to leave.
And on top of all this, we are supposed to believe that, in ruling that a “plausible” case has been made that Israel is committing genocide, the judges of the world’s highest court, the International Court of Justice, have shown they do not understand the legal definition of the crime of genocide. Or possibly that they are driven by antisemitism.
3. Meanwhile, the same western leaders arming Israel’s slaughter of many tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, including more than 15,000 children, have been shipping hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of armaments to Ukraine to assist its armed forces. Ukraine must be helped, we are told, because it is the victim of an aggressive neighbouring power, Russia, determined on expansion and land theft.
And yet we are supposed to ignore the two decades of western military expansion eastwards, via Nato, that has finally coming knocking, in Ukraine, on Russia’s door – and the fact that the West’s best experts on Russia warned throughout that time that we were playing with fire in doing so and that Ukraine would prove a red line for Moscow.
We are supposed to make no comparison between Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and Israel’s aggression against the Palestinians. In the latter case, Israel is supposedly the victim, even though it has been violently occupying its Palestinian neighbours’ territory for three-quarters of a century while, in flagrant violation of international law, building Jewish settlements on the territory meant to form the basis of a Palestinian state.
Antony Blinken: "We can never let the crimes Russia's committing become our new normal… bombing schools and hospitals and apartment buildings to rubble is not normal" pic.twitter.com/W2rBYE8CVk
We are supposed to believe that the Palestinians of Gaza have no right to defend themselves comparable to Ukraine’s right – no right to defend against decades of Israeli belligerence, whether the ethnic cleansing operations of 1948 and 1967, the apartheid system imposed on the remnant Palestinian population afterwards, the 17-year blockade of Gaza that denied its inhabitants the essentials of life, or the “plausible genocide” the West is now arming and providing diplomatic cover for.
In fact, if the Palestinians do try to defend themselves, the West not only refuses to help them, as it has Ukraine, but considers them terrorists – even the children, it seems.
4. Julian Assange, the journalist and publisher who did most to expose the inner workings of western establishments, and their criminal schemes in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, has been behind bars for five years in Belmarsh high-security prison. Before that, he spent seven years arbitrarily detained – according to United Nations legal experts – in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, forced to seek asylum there from political persecution. In an interminable legal process, the US seeks his extradition so he can be locked away in near-isolation for up to 175 years.
And yet we are supposed to believe that his 12 years of effective detention – having been found guilty of no crime – is entirely unrelated to the fact that, in publishing secret cables, Assange revealed that, behind closed doors, the West and its leaders sound and act like gangsters and psychopaths, especially about foreign affairs, not like the stewards of a benign global order they claim to be overseeing.
The leaked documents Assange published show western leaders ready to destroy whole societies to further western resource domination and their own enrichment – and eager to wield the most outrageous lies to achieve their goals. They have no interest in upholding the supposedly cherished value of freedom of the press, except when that freedom is being weaponised against their enemies.
We are supposed to believe that western leaders genuinely want journalists to act as a watchdog, a restraint, on their power even when they are hounding to death the very journalist who created a whistleblowers’ platform, Wikileaks, to do precisely that. (Assange has already suffered a stroke from the more than a decade-long strain of fighting for his freedom.)
We are supposed to believe that the West will give Assange a fair trial, when the very states colluding in his incarceration – and in the CIA’s case, planned assassination – are the ones he exposed for engaging in war crimes and state terrorism. We are supposed to believe that they are pursuing a legal process, not persecution, in redefining as the crime of “espionage” his efforts to bring transparency and accountability to international affairs.
5. The media claim to represent the interests of western publics in all their diversity, and to act as a true window on the world.
We are supposed believe that this same media is free and pluralistic, even when it is owned by the super-rich as well as western states that were long ago hollowed out to serve the super-rich.
We are supposed to believe that a media completely dependent for its survival on revenues from big corporate advertisers can bring us news and analysis without fear or favour. We are supposed to believe that a media whose primary role is selling audiences to corporate advertisers can question whether, in doing so, it is playing a beneficial or harmful role.
We are supposed to believe that a media plugged firmly into the capitalist financial system that brought the global economy to its knees in 2008, and has been hurtling us towards ecological catastrophe, is in a position to evaluate and critique that capitalist model dispassionately, that media outlets could somehow turn on the billionaires who own them, or could forego the income from the billionaire-owned corporations that prop up the media’s finances through advertising.
We are supposed to believe that the media can objectively assess the merits of going to war. That is, wars waged serially by the West – from Afghanistan to Iraq, from Libya to Syria, from Ukraine to Gaza – when media corporations are embedded in corporate conglomerations whose other big interests include arms manufacturing and fossil-fuel extraction.
We are supposed to believe that the media uncritically promotes endless growth for reasons of economic necessity and common sense, even though the contradictions are glaring: that the forever growth model is impossible to sustain on a finite planet where resources are running out.
6. In western political systems, unlike those of its enemies, there is supposedly a meaningful democratic choice between candidates representing opposing worldviews and values.
We are supposed to believe in a western political model of openness, pluralism and accountability even when in the US and UK the public are offered an electoral scrap between two candidates and parties that, to stand a chance of winning, need to win favour with the corporate media representing the interests of its billionaire owners, need to keep happy billionaire donors who fund their campaigns, and need to win over Big Business by demonstrating their unwavering commitment to a model of endless growth that is completely unsustainable.
We are supposed to believe that these leaders serve the voting public – offering a choice between right and left, between capital and labour – when, in truth, the public is only ever presented with a choice between two parties prostrated before Big Money, when the parties’ policy programmes are nothing more than competitions in who can best appease the wealth-elite.
We are supposed to believe that the “democratic” West represents the epitome of political health, even though it repeatedly dredges up the very worst people imaginable to lead it.
In the US, the “choice” imposed on the electorate is between one candidate (Biden) who should be in pottering around his garden, or maybe preparing for his final, difficult years in a care home, and a competitor (Donald Trump) whose relentless search for adoration and self-enrichment should never have been indulged beyond hosting a TV reality show.
In the UK, the “choice” is no better: between a candidate (Rishi Sunak) richer than the British king and equally cosseted and a competitor (Sir Keir Starmer) who is so ideologically hollow that his public record is an exercise in decades of shape-shifting.
Compare Keir Starmer's statements on the siege of Gaza with his arguments at the International Court of Justice in 2014, where he argued that the Serb siege of Vukovar was a case of genocide. A thread on Starmer, international law and Gaza. pic.twitter.com/lu0X6sgXfB
All, let us note, are fully signed up to the continuing genocide in Gaza, all are unmoved by many months of the slaughter and starvation of Palestinian children, all are only too ready to defame as antisemites anyone who shows an ounce of the principle and humanity they all too obviously lack.
The super-rich may be just out of view, but the strings they pull are all too visible. Time to cut ourselves loose.
Ninety-three nations on Friday, all them state parties to the Rome Statute that created the International Criminal Court, reiterated their support for the ICC as it assesses an application for arrest warrants of high level Israeli government officials accused of perpetrating war crimes in Gaza. The 93 countries — including Canada, Bangladesh, Belgium, Ireland, Afghanistan, Costa Rica, Chile…
New Zealand activists Youssef Sammour and Rana Hamida have been selected to join the volunteer crew on the international Freedom Flotilla ship Handala, currently visiting European ports and heading to break Israel’s siege of Gaza.
Youssef Sammour at a recent Auckland rally for Palestine. Image: Kia Ora Gaza
They will be farewelled at 10:30am upstairs at the Auckland International Airport on Sunday, reports Kia Ora Gaza.
Trevor Hogan, a former Irish rugby champion and pro-Palestinian activist who participated in several flotillas that were water cannoned and pirated by the Israeli military in the past, has sent a special message to the volunteers and those supporting the freedom missions in “a time of great, unquantifiable grief”.
“While our Handala has just left the Irish port of Cobh and we continue to work on reflagging the flotilla ships stuck in Istanbul, the decades of solidarity from Ireland remains palpable, unwavering and tremendously significant for Palestinians and the wider diaspora,” said Kia Ora Gaza.
“This is a reminder to everyone watching: on those dark days, take time to regroup, regather, and come back again. Until Palestine is free.”
Trevor Hogan’s message to the world in support of Palestine. Video: Freedom Flotila Coalition
Concerns raised over US ‘floating pier’
Meanwhile, Ahmed Omar in Monoweiss reports that in March 2024, US President Joe Biden announced in his State of the Union address that the US would be building a temporary “floating pier” on the Gaza shoreline to deliver “humanitarian aid” to the starving population in Gaza.
“No US boots will be on the ground,” he promised.
Since then, however, critics have raised concerns that the pier is not only being used for “humanitarian” purposes but is being employed for military activities that aid in the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza.
An intelligence source from within the resistance in Gaza, who spoke to Mondoweiss under conditions of anonymity, said there were mounting signs the US pier could also be used to forcibly displace Palestinians.
This would provide an alternative to the original Israeli plan of forcing Palestinians into the Sinai, which was rejected by Egypt early on in the war.
“The floating pier project is an American solution to the displacement dilemma in Gaza,” the source said.
“It goes beyond both the Israeli solution of displacing Gazans into Sinai . . . and the Egyptian suggestion of displacing [Gazans] into the Naqab [desert].”
Instead, the source said, the US pier would be used to facilitate the displacement of Gazans to Cyprus, and then eventually to Lebanon or Europe.
The US pier was at the centre of coverage of the massacre, as multiple news sources, videos, and eyewitness accounts from Gaza indicated that US forces may have been involved in the operation and that humanitarian trucks entering Nuseirat were hiding the Israeli soldiers that carried out the massacre.
Israel used U.S.-made bombs in a brutal attack on a displacement camp in Rafah that killed 45 Palestinians in May, a new investigation reveals. According to The New York Times, on May 26, Israel deployed two 250-pound bombs — Boeing’s GBU-39 “small diameter” bombs that caused a blast that could kill and injure in a 570 foot radius — on sheds built for residential purposes in Kuwaiti Al-Salam Camp…
A lawsuit accusing U.S. President Joe Biden and some of his top officials of complicity in genocide had its latest hearing this week after being dismissed earlier in the year. On June 10, the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco heard arguments in the plaintiffs’ appeal in Defense for Children International – Palestine v. Biden. The lawsuit was filed on November 13, 2023…
Israel must be held accountable for the suffering it is inflicting on Gaza (Omar AshtawyAPA images)
Israel does not belong in the modern world. It is the child of European colonialism and Europe’s genocidal anti-Semitism, imposed by force and fire and Western guilt on a land already inhabited by an indigenous people.
Israel is a contemporary trespass of that old world’s colonial ethos that justified genocide, ethnic cleansing, wholesale plunder, endless theft and destruction of indigenous peoples in the name of settlement and divine entitlement of a superior group of humans.
But the modern world has moved on with incremental moral evolution. It long ago repudiated, at least in principle, the racist and violent impulses that powered the genocidal colonial engines of old.
One can hear Israel’s anachronistic nature in the rhetoric of its leaders and citizens. Benjamin Netanyahu points to America’s nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to justify Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Zionists, especially those in settler-colonial nations like the United States and Australia, love to remind us that these countries were founded on the genocide and ethnic cleansing of indigenous peoples.
And from these reminders come their accusations of double standards and hypocrisy. “You’re living on stolen land, why don’t you leave?” so their rhetoric goes.
Implicit in their accusations is an admission of sameness with the violent and racist settler-colonial force that created the United States.
In other words, while humanity has tried and continues to strive to prevent and right the wrongs of the past, Israel points to these base moments in human history, not in the context of “never again,” but as precedents it should be free to emulate.
As we still today uncover mass graves in “Indian schools” where Indigenous children were ripped from their families and tortured to death in boarding schools, Israel demands the right to create more mass graves of Palestinians in the name of “self-defense.”
While we engage in discourse to push for acknowledgement and reparations, much as the world did for European Jews, Israel demands an entitlement to ethnically cleanse indigenous Palestinians, steal their lands, plunder resources and raze their cities and farmlands.
While we imagine and endeavor to create a post-colonial reality of revolutionary universalism, inclusion, equity and understanding, Israel demands the right to Jewish exclusivity and Jewish entitlement at the expense of non-Jews.
Invoking American settler-colonialism to justify its own version of the same is no different than invoking America’s industrialized enslavement as a precedent to emulate.
Rules-based order?
Western governments have long touted their values as beacons of democracy and idealism toward which modernity must aim. How they love to lecture the world about law and rules-based order; about freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of this and that.
But look how quickly they denounce, veto and attack any courts, human rights organizations and UN protocols when the institutions they helped create do not serve their imperial interests. Look how quickly they shut down speech and sic their police on their own citizens trying to exercise those freedoms.
They do this because Israel is antithetical to democratic values. It is antithetical to human rights and the so-called rules-based order.
The West must therefore choose between Israel and the ideals it claims to uphold. And thus far, it is choosing Israel.
And in the process, it is dragging itself and the world into an abyss.
Already, Indian commentators are talking about an “Israel-like” solution in Kashmir. The world is silent as Arab dictatorships like the UAE are arming genocidal militias in Sudan to take control of the country’s vast gold and uranium treasures.
Israel is dragging the world into an infectious darkness that will spread across our planet unless it is stopped and held accountable for the holocaust it is committing in Gaza and now, it seems, in the West Bank as well.
The “solution” is not at all complicated, contrary to pervasive Zionist propaganda.
It is simply an adherence to accepted universal morality that rejects Jewish supremacy as it rejects all other forms of supremacy. This means equality of rights for all those who inhabit the land, a return of Palestinian refugees in a nation of its citizens founded on the principle of one-person-one-vote.
Israel’s recent massacres in Gaza killed over 800 Palestinians in less than two weeks — an extreme rate of brutal killing that has become normalized in western circles due to the “complete dehumanization” of Palestinians, a human rights group said this week. From June 1 to June 11, Israeli forces killed over 800 Palestinians and wounded over 2,400 as they carried out bombardments and raids across…
On June 4, a coalition of active-duty service members, veterans and G.I. rights groups launched a campaign called Appeal for Redress V2 to encourage military personnel to tell Congress to stop funding genocide in Gaza. Israel’s genocidal operation, now in its ninth month, has killed more than 37,000 Palestinians and wounded nearly 85,000. The campaign is sponsored by Veterans For Peace (VFP)…
The U.S. arms and supports Israel’s genocide and one of its largest banks, Citibank, plays a key role. Our latest visual in partnership with the Banking on Solidarity campaign illustrates how Citi helps arm Israel, finances weapons companies that make the weapons Israel uses in Gaza, and invests in the Israeli financial and tech sectors.
“HUNGER CATASTROPHE IN GAZA – DONATIONS NEEDED” cries Mercy Corps.
“URGENT: STARVATION IN GAZA: ALL GIFTS MATCHED FOR GAZA” shouts Rescue.org.
These and many other appeals from international relief organizations have motivated untold numbers of compassionate and generous souls to open their purses. You may be among them. If so, you may have thought that these organizations are delivering food, medicine and other relief supplies to Gaza. But they are not.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) confirms that not a single truck with relief aid has crossed the border from Egypt to Gaza since Israeli troops captured the Rafah border crossing on May 7, 2024, more than a month ago. Until then, the Rafah crossing was the only one open. Today, roughly 1800 mostly large 18-wheel trucks, each carrying up to 12 tons of supplies, are backed up into the Sinai Desert, waiting for Israeli permission to enter. Some have been there for months. And some of those trucks belong to the relief organizations. But they, like all the others, are not getting in.
Many of the organizations also announce that, thanks to your donations, they have provided hundreds of thousands or even millions of meals to starving Palestinians in Gaza. What they do not necessarily tell you is that they are doing this by purchasing food and medicine from the dwindling supplies inside Gaza.
The bottom line is that your money is reaching the relief organization’s operations in Gaza, but food, water and medical supplies are not. The amount of food in Gaza is dwindling, and Israel is allowing only a tiny trickle to enter by isolated air drops, a single delivery by sea and occasional vehicles through the Erez crossing between Gaza and Israel. For a pre-October 7th population of 2.3 million, this is nothing.
As the supplies shrink inside Gaza, the prices rise, and your donations increase the prices further. The same applies to all the needs of the population. More money chasing fewer goods. At some point, no amount of money will buy food or medicine in Gaza. Already, Palestinians are dying of starvation, malnutrition and diseases caused by reduced resistance. These are not often reported, because they are not victims of violent slaughter, and because the hospitals, clinics and mortuaries that would have reported them to the Ministry of Health – who would have tallied them – no longer exist. The Ministry of Health barely exists, while the weak die anonymously, buried by their families and communities. Some estimates of such casualties are already in the hundreds of thousands.
It’s not that the relief agencies are not performing a worthwhile service. They are enabling increasingly scarce supplies to reach larger numbers of destitute people while they last. But they will not last, and the relief organizations are unable to bring additional supplies. Furthermore, they are mostly failing to be forthright with you by reporting these facts. Instead, they are projecting an image of success, with the result that you might think that they are maintaining a lifeline when in fact Gaza is heading to complete depletion of the few resources that remain.
This is what Israel intends. If the food is distributed equitably, a large proportion of the population will survive until the day there is nothing left. Then everyone will starve at the same time, and the genocide will be accomplished quickly with the last loaves of bread costing $1000 apiece. And the humanitarian relief organizations will not have warned you.
I was arrested again inside of Congress for speaking out against US-backed genocide. Myself and others were brutally tackled and carried out of the room by Capitol Police. I was charged with “crowding, obstructing, or incommoding” for speaking out and holding a sign as the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense testified in Congress for more money for the endless US war machine.
While they are arresting peace activists for exercising first amendment rights they are making plans to host Netanyahu- a war criminal with an actual arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court.
For decades, people following CODEPINK’s lead have been protesting inside the halls of Congress. The year before October 7, there were a handful of us protesting the bloated military budgets and the US warmongering. I was arrested several times on my own, but since October, dozens of us have been arrested in Congress, hundreds in DC, and thousands across the US and the world for Palestine.
The sustained energy and activism are the result of the 40,000+ thousands of Palestinians murdered, millions being starved and displaced, their land, water, and air poisoned, and neighborhoods, hospitals, schools, and refugee camps demolished.
The real criminals are the ones we are protesting against–the ones literally sitting directly in front of us inside the hearing room–and should be the ones arrested, charged, and found guilty for the war criminals they are funding and supporting and the war crimes they are committing.
Any of us speaking and acting out on the side of justice know we are taking risks. We see it as our duty as people in the US in solidarity with and inspired by the Palestinian people facing and resisting this horror.
As I await my court date, I think of the people I spent the night with at the DC detention facility. Just this year, there have been 5 deaths inside the D.C. jail. The dozen or so women in there reminded me that poverty is a policy choice and our carceral, systemically racist state perpetuates harm and cycles of violence.
According to the US Center for Palestinian Rights in Washington DC, for this year alone (before our additional billions of aid weresent), $15,596,311 to Israel’s weapons could instead fund 451,735 households with public housing, 1,322,199 children receiving free or low-cost healthcare, 41,490 elementary school teachers, 10,818,505 households with solar electricity produce, and 100,563 students with their loan debt canceled.
The fight against US militarism is one where the climate, feminist, Indigenous, economic, and racial justice movements are all uniting around right now. And as it deepens and strengthens, we must become more organized as we escalate while we continue to make those in power uncomfortable.
A pair of bombshell UN reports have concluded that Israeli forces committed grave war crimes on and around October 7 and have committed a large number of crimes against humanity in the period of time since then in Gaza and the West Bank. These reports present the UN’s most thorough and damning accounts of atrocities committed by Israeli forces in their genocidal war against Palestinians so far.
The ashes had barely settled on a Rafah tent camp incinerated by an Israeli airstrike before the next, gorged massacre presented itself for posterity’s gloomy archive. It was intended as a golden operation and had been months in the making. The rescue of four Israeli hostages, the killing of three others (bound to happen for the expertly inclined), and the massacre of over 274 Palestinians at the Nuseirat refugee camp were the end result.
The logistics that led to the bloodbath had been rehearsed with detail verging on the manic. Many a vengeful mind was at play. Two buildings were constructed for training purposes. Participants involved the special counter-terrorism unit Yamam, Israel’s internal security agency Shin Bet, and members of the Israeli Defence Forces. An enormous casualty rate would have already been contemplated given the remarks of IDF spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari. “We understood that in those apartments with those guards, daytime will be the ultimate surprise.”
The lies barely have time to fledge. First, the numbers. Hagari could only count “dozens”, and “knew of less than 100”. He conceded to not knowing how many of such a reduced number were civilians. Israel’s Foreign Minister, Israel Katz, was happy to soften the carnage in attacking his country’s detractors. “Only Israel’s enemies complained about the casualties of Hamas terrorists and their accomplices.”
Then came the praise, manifold, effusive. The Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant cooed with satisfaction, calling the effort “one of the most extraordinary operations”. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu merely offered the following morsel: “Israel does not surrender to terrorism.”
Furthermore, no civilian trucks, claimed the IDF, were used in the operation. Yet undercover vehicles were apparently deployed, one very much resembling those used by Israel to traffic commercial goods into Gaza; another being a white Mercedes truck packed and stacked with furniture and miscellaneous belongings typical of the dislocated and dispossessed. Disgorged from the latter, Palestinian eye-witness accounts noted men in plainclothes and some 10 heavily armed soldiers ready for mischief. The commencement of firing signalled the start of the butchery.
The UN Special Rapporteur of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, was certain. The IDF, she stated with exasperation, had “perfidiously” hidden “in an aid truck”. This constituted “‘humanitarian camouflage’ at another level.” While expressing relief at the rescue of four hostages, the enterprise “should not have come at the expense of at least 200 Palestinians, including children, killed and over 400 injured by Israel and allegedly foreign soldiers”.
In time, it became clear that the mission, venerated for its secrecy and praised for its planning, had not caught the Hamas guards responsible for three male hostages by surprise. They duly engaged the Yamam operatives. “Immediately, it became a war zone,” reservist brigadier general Amir Avivi toldThe Washington Post. The Israeli air force commenced indulgent fire. Death reigned at Nuseirat for some 75 minutes, concealed by the now standard refrain by the IDF: “Aircraft struck dozens of military targets for the success of the operation.”
Other, more tormented descriptions seemed closer to the mark. The Interceptnoted the observations of a Palestinian witness by the name of Suhail Mutlaq Abu Nasser. “The area turned to ashes… I couldn’t find my wife and started calling out to those around me to ensure they were still alive.” The account goes on to document the use of armed quadcopter drones, the presence of tank tracks, the hovering of Apache attack helicopters, the targeting of homes by missiles. Camp resident Anas Alayyan was also convinced that the entire military operation by Israeli forces did not fall short of a mass execution.
There is a pattern here, a murderous ratio justified by that most elastic yet horrific of reasons: self-defence. The hostage rescue will go down a treat in Israel. The names of those captured by Hamas on October 7 will be anointed in Israeli mythology: Noa Argamani, Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov, Shlomi Ziv. But at what cost to those around them?
In addition to the slaughter, some indication of the aftermath is provided by Al Jazeera. “The wounded were taken to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah, an already overwhelmed facility.” Medics are found to be in utter despair.
The scale of killing on this score also raises troubling issues with Israel’s closest ally. Despite some political grumbling in the ranks, the Biden administration remains steadfast in support. The deaths in Rafah were still excusable because, in the words of US State Department spokesperson, Matthew Miller, Israel had not engaged in “a military operation on the scale of those previous operations [in Khan Younis and in Gaza City].”
The hefty death toll of Palestinian civilians in the Nuseirat operation was of lesser concern to President Joe Biden than the welfare of Israeli hostages. Speaking in Paris, Biden welcomed “the safe rescue of four hostages that were returned to their families in Israel. We won’t stop working until all the hostages come home and a ceasefire is reached.”
The sanguinary episode at Nuseirat is hard to stomach, even by Biden’s rubbery standards. It stands to reason. The entire operation had the buttressing of what the New York Timesreported to be “intelligence and other logistical support” from the United States. Two Israeli intelligence officials also confirmed that “American military officials in Israel provided some of the intelligence about the hostages rescued Saturday.” And let us not forget murderous military hardware, readily supplied from US defence companies. It follows that the lives of Israeli hostages, dubbed “diamonds” by their rescuers, are invaluable, the precious stones of Israeli-US policy. The Palestinians, on the other hand, are mere coal dust.
