The Green Party’s deputy leader Zack Polanski has been a fierce but righteous critic of Israel’s far-right government during its genocide in Gaza and now expanding assaults across the Middle East. However, he came out against several organisations, not least the UK Board of Deputies, over their stance on the BBC’s coverage of Israel’s atrocities.
BBC: biased AGAINST Israel, apparently
The Guardian posted that:
Many British Jews see BBC as hostile to Israel, community leaders say https://t.co/OQEJkNNzEu
The organisations were responding to a report authored by the former BBC executive Danny Cohen and the former governor of the BBC Ruth Deech.
The report said: “Whenever the corporation is faced with the choice of whose account or narrative to believe, it seldom points in Israel’s direction. For Hamas in this war, proof is rarely necessary. For the IDF and Israel, proof is rarely enough.”
The authors cited several cases where its authors said the BBC had erred in its reporting or used language that demonstrated an anti-Israel bias.
They wrote: “We recognise that reporting complex stories in a war zone and verifying claims and counter-claims can be difficult, but it is clear there is systematic bias against Israel across all BBC platforms, with the vast majority of that bias pointing in the same direction.
So, who were these Jewish organisations that were conflating the state of Israel with all Jewish people? (Something we thought was antisemitic, by the way). Moreover, just who were these organisations that agrees the BBC has been anti-Israel?
Right-wing Israel lobbyists
Predictably, they were right-wing Israel lobbyists The Board of Deputies, the Jewish Leadership Council, and the Community Security Trust. They opined that:
Inaccurate media reporting on the conflict contributes to the delegitimisation of Israel in the public sphere, which in turn fuels anti-Jewish hatred, and has made British Jews and Jews around the world less safe and secure in their communities. As a global media leader, the BBC carries extra responsibility in these regards.
This ignores the many studies that have been carried out, such as the one produced by the Centre for Media Monitoring, that concluded that Palestinian deaths were reported using ‘passive language which omits the perpetrator (Israel)’.
The CMM Report found that more than 70% of the use of terms like ‘atrocities’, ‘slaughter’ and ‘massacre’ referred to Israeli victims while ‘emotive language’ was deployed when speaking about Israeli, rather than Palestinian, victims.
A reminder many Jewish people – including myself – are saying loud & clear these organisations have utterly failed to represent us as British Jews.
Their focus could be creating a space for Jewish communities to navigate differences rather than co-opting us to justify genocide. https://t.co/R314oLy5PD
In short, the report that the Board of Deputies et al have jumped onto is demonstrable nonsense. Yet, the Guardian didn’t have the bottle to call it out. So, it took Polanski to do it – risking a personal backlash himself in doing so. That says it all about the state of the corporate media – and not just the BBC.
Palestine Action has targeted a major weapons factory run by Teledyne, that supplies parts for F-35 jets. These are, of course, the same aircraft the UK refused to stop exporting parts for to Israel. And, they’re the same jets the genocidal state is currently using to bomb Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen – and potentially soon Iran.
Palestine Action: shutting down Teledyne’s F-35 ops
Activists from Palestine Action climbed onto the roof of an American owned weapons factory, Teledyne CML Composites, in Wirral, on Tuesday 2 October. From the rooftop, they cut holes into the roof and sprayed blood red paint into the factory:
BREAKING: Palestine Action are on the roof of Teledyne's weapons factory, disrupting the producers of crucial components for Israel's F-35 fighter jets.
In solidarity with the Palestinian, Lebanese, and Yemeni people subjected to Israel’s daily massacres, activists have once again successfully shut down the site known to supply crucial parts for the murderous F-35 fighter jet programme.
As Palestine Action said on X, the group contaminated Teledyne’s clean room. This will “will cause severe disruption to the production of Israel’s F-35 fighter jet components”:
Contamination of this clean room will cause severe disruption to the production of Israel's F-35 fighter jet components.
When our government fails to abide by their legal duty to end complicity in genocide, it's up to ordinary people to take action.
Teledyne CML’s parent company, Teledyne Technologies, is the single-largest exporter of weaponry from Britain to Israel, while ‘CML Composites’ specialises in ‘Aircraft Structural Components’ for the F-35 fighter jet programme.
The ties between Teledyne CML and Israel’s genocide in Gaza run deep, with the Wirral factory also acting as a supplier to numerous other ‘Tier 1’ F-35 partners – including BAE Systems, Marand, and Magellan. To BAE Systems alone, Teledyne CML provides at least ten different “Special processes” for their F-35 programme contributions.
By maintaining approval for F-35 component export licenses for end-use in Israel, the British government remains an activist participant in Israel’s genocidal, criminal attacks on Gaza and Lebanon.
The F-35 fighter jet has been responsible for the delivery of thousands of 2,000lb and 4,000lb bombs on targets including tented refugee encampments in Gaza, and healthcare workers in Lebanon. Today’s action serves to demonstrate that, while the British state might be comfortable in facilitating these acts – Palestine Action cannot permit them.
Not the first time Palestine Action has acted
This action is not the first time that Palestine Action have struck at the Bromborough site, driving a van through the factory gates in July 2024, before drenching the premises in red paint as a symbol of the Palestinian bloodshed it facilitates.
Its sister site, Teledyne Defence and Space, Shipley, was targeted by an occupation in April 2024, preventing the manufacture of military electronics bound for Israel. Earlier this month, a jury at Bradford Crown Court refused to convict the activists, who stood accused of ‘criminal damage’ for their action.
For Palestinian farmers in the West Bank, land and livelihood are deeply intertwined concerns—and the only way to defend them is through organization. Faced with a hostile legal apparatus, a military occupation, and attacks from violent settlers, Palestinian farmers have banded together under the umbrella of the Palestinian Farmers’ Union. The union’s executive director, Abbas Milhem, joins The Marc Steiner Show for an explanation of the work of his organization and the land struggle in the West Bank.
Studio Production: Cameron Granadino Post-Production: Alina Nehlich
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Marc Steiner:
Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here in The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you all with us. And we continue looking at what came out of the movie Where Olive Trees Weep. Today, we’re going to talk with Abbas Milhem, who is the Palestinian Farmers Union Executive Director. He’s been so since 2014. We’ll talk a bit about what that means, and more about that, and what’s going on in the West Bank and Gaza with him today. Abbas, welcome. Good to have you with us.
Abbas Milhem:
Thank you Marc for having me. Good afternoon for everybody.
Marc Steiner:
I’ve been looking forward to this.
Abbas Milhem:
Or good morning maybe. It’s almost good afternoon in our language.
Marc Steiner:
Well, for you it’s good evening, right?
Abbas Milhem:
Yeah. In our side, good evening. But after evening, even.
Marc Steiner:
It’s almost hard to figure out where to begin. But let me take a step back before we jump into what’s happening at this moment, and what has happened over the last 40 years to the West Bank, to Palestinian land. But talk a bit about the Palestinian Farmers Union. For 17 years, you’ve been doing this work, and you’re a farmer.
Abbas Milhem:
Yes.
Marc Steiner:
Talk about that history a little bit so our listeners can understand who you are and where you come from.
Abbas Milhem:
Yes. Thank you, Marc. Palestinian Farmers Union is the umbrella of Palestinian farmers, and that union was established since 1993. Actually, few months before the Oslo Peace Agreement was signed between Israelis and the Palestinians, at that time in 1994.
And from the time of establishment, this union was dedicated first to act as the voice of farmers. And we call them the vulnerable farmers, the small-scale farmers in Palestine, acting as the umbrella of them, defending their rights, representing their voices, and trying to provide all the resources needed in order to enhance their agriculture and support the food security of all farmers across West Bank and Gaza Strip.
To do so, in terms of structure, Palestinian Farmers Union started by organizing farmers on district level first. Where in each district — for example, Jenin District, Tulkarm District, Nablus District, Ramallah District, Jericho, Gaza District, and so on — in each district, the Palestinian Farmers Union established Palestinian Farmers Association of each district.
For example, in Jenin, we have Palestinian Farmers Association of Jenin Governorate or Jenin District. And that association act on the district level as the umbrella of the smaller union of farmers in that district, where the special needs and rights of farmers in that district can be addressed and tackled by the Farmers Association.
This was repeated across all West Bank areas, from the north to the south, and then expanded to Gaza. We ended up now as a structure of the union, having 16 farmers associations in 16 different districts. We are a grass-rooted union, with almost 20 members of farmers joining the union through its Farmers Association.
The focus of our work is advocacy and lobby for the rights of farmers. We lobby the government to ensure that the policies, legislations and laws that regulate the agricultural sector are better responsive for farmers’ rights, and help our farmers encounter and face the challenges they are living through and going through because of the Israeli army invasions and the Israeli settlers increased violence against farmers. And these attacks are aiming at emptifying the Palestinian farmlands from farmers.
So, these lands can become easy hunt for settlement expansion, annexation and confiscation. To do so, we try to provide the minimum resilient interventions that enable farmers to stay in their farms.
Marc Steiner:
So, given the present situation, I mean, what I’ve read that you’ve written, and what I understand, is that the amount of land the Palestinians own on the West Bank, and in Gaza itself, but the West Bank, has diminished extensively. I mean, it exists, but barely.
So, talk about that. I mean, and how that has diminished, what happened to the land, and what’s happened to the people on the land.
Abbas Milhem:
Now, the current situation, Marc, is unprecedented. It’s speechless. It has never happened in the history of the Palestinian… what you call Israeli [inaudible 00:04:57]. From 1967 until 1993, there was a stage. And after 1994, when the Oslo Agreement was signed is a different stage. And October 7 until now is a totally completely terrifying and tragic stage.
Israel occupying power has shifted from the level of land grabbing, which means confiscating a small piece of land here and there to establish small settlements or settlement outpost, between 1967 until 1993.
After Palestinians signed the peace agreement with Israel, Israel felt relaxed because the international pressure weakened and almost disappeared. This gave the time for the Israeli government to expand settlement. Number of settlements that was established from the time when Palestinians and Israelis signed the peace agreement in 1994, until October 6th, one day before this aggression war against Gaza, has jumped from almost 150,000 settlers to 750,000 settlers.
And this expansion in settlers in West Bank was on the account of Palestinian farmers, by confiscating their land, imposing control on their access to their land, in order to allow more settlers to be deployed, and the expansions of the already-existing settlements, and the establishment of the new settlements from the south of West Bank in Hebron until the north part in Jenin.
And this, as I said, was on the account of the farmland area that is owned by Palestinian farmers, but now controlled and under the control of the Israeli army for the sake and for the benefit of serving Israeli settlers who were brought up from different parts of the world to this area.
Marc Steiner:
So, just so people listening to this understand, and we all understand, what was the process? How did Israel… We know after the ’67 war, Israel occupied the West Bank, it occupied Gaza, and went north as well. But what was the process? What was the process that happened? How did Palestinian farmers lose the land? What was the number of the percentage of farms, and where they are today?
Abbas Milhem:
Look, Israeli occupation is a very smart occupation, to be honest. They try to apply all the laws that were in Palestine from different mandates all over history, from the Ottoman Empire date, through British mandate time, through Jordanian era, until the military occupation of West Bank.
For example, if they want to confiscate a piece of land, they try to look into the Ottoman Empire era laws. If there is a law that would justify the military, the Israeli army control of that land, they apply that plan, that law, on Palestinians.
For example, during the Ottoman Empire period, there was a very great policy by Ottoman Empire stating that, to encourage people to cultivate their land, they did a special policy saying, if you as a farmer do not cultivate your land for continuously three years, your land will be taken and given to another farmer, maybe your neighbor, who will cultivate that land, and you will take a rent, a price for that rent.
This was a very good policy because the Ottoman people at that time, they want to encourage the expansion of the greens area in Palestine to ensure all lands are cultivated.
Now, Israel is benefiting. For example, one of the ways how they apply these techniques, they come to a land in Jordan Valley that is classified as Area C according to Oslo Agreement. Area C means the land is under the control of the Israeli military forces. And because they impose restrictions on farmers to access their farmland, and they control the water resources, large part of this land is not cultivated, because farmers are unable to go there, because the military would kick them out and force them to leave.
So, if a farmer does not use his land or cultivate the land for three years, they apply the Ottoman Empire period law on that land. But they take it from Abbas as a farmer, and they give it to Shlomo as a settler. They don’t give it to Abbas’ nephew or Abbas’ cousin as a Palestinian farmer. No, they take it, they give it to Shlomo as a settler.
Marc Steiner:
But you’re saying, they started this by using laws from the early 20th century, from the Ottoman Empire?
Abbas Milhem:
This is one, yeah. This is one. This is one mechanism. A second mechanism, if they don’t find an excuse from the Ottoman Empire period law, they try to find any laws or policies that were adopted and endorsed by the British government mandate era.
If they don’t find, they try the Jordanian era. If they don’t find, they issue a military order by saying, “For security reason, this piece of land is confiscated.”
Marc Steiner:
So, in brief, how much land did Palestinian farmers have, and how much have they lost?
Abbas Milhem:
Ah. Now, because the situation now is different, now 60%.
According to the Oslo Agreement, the land was categorized in into three different categories: Area A, which are the housing area in the cities under the full controlled by Palestinian government; Area B are the housing areas of villages and towns; Area C are the rest part of Palestinian land, which forms 60% of the entire Palestinian land is categorized as Area C, and under the control of the Israeli military occupation.
In that land, most of settlement had been established, and has been expanded and established. Now, Palestinians in Area C almost have no access to almost 85% of this land in Area C. Almost 85% had been under the full control of the Israeli army, who transferred that control to the settler leaders, and settlement in the different location.
This is what we have lost due to this military occupation of Palestine. They are a military occupation, and most of the land was confiscated or annexed based on military issuing military orders for this land.
Marc Steiner:
So now, your family have been farmers for generations, correct?
Abbas Milhem:
Yeah. Yes.
Marc Steiner:
And you said you’re living around the town of Ramallah?
Abbas Milhem:
Yes.
Marc Steiner:
All right. What has happened to your land, your olive groves, your trees, your farm? What’s happened to you?
Abbas Milhem:
Yeah. I told you I’m in Ramallah, but I’m not from Ramallah. I work in Ramallah. And because of my work, I’ve been living here, but I go in regularly to Jenin area. I’m from a small town in Jenin District called Kafr Ra’i. I am a farmer who is a son of a farmer who was a son of a farmer. And for the past 500 years, actually, we were farmers only.
And the main agriculture sector in my town are olive trees, because we have no water for irrigation, because the control over water resources are in the hands of the Israeli occupation, and we are not allowed to get access to our natural water resources. That’s why we depend on the rainfall.
Because of that, most of the trees we are planting in our areas with the absence of water is our olive trees. I have three olive farms in my town, in my village. All of them are located in the so-called Area B. It’s supposed to be safe, not risky area, under the control of Palestinian authority.
Since this aggression war against Gaza erupted in October 7 until now, settlers benefited from this emergency situation, and expanded their attacks and their violence against Palestinian farmers by attacking most of the lands around, including my farmland, categorized as Area B.
And for a year until now, I have been unable to visit or access my farmland. Even the families who tried to go to these lands were beaten by settlers, arrested by settlers, harassed by settlers, and all their agricultural tools and equipment were stolen. So, this is the case of my farm, and I’m only one example of hundreds of thousands of examples of other farmers in the West Bank.
Marc Steiner:
So, have the Israelis passed new rules or laws that say you cannot go to your farm, that you’re not allowed into your farm? Or is this part of settler attacks blocking you from your farm?
Abbas Milhem:
It’s the attacks that are blocking me. It’s the settler violence that is blocking me. And those settlers, when they conduct their attacks and their violence against us as farmers, they come with the full protection from the Israeli army. Where you can do nothing, and if you even shout or cry or protest, they accuse you of being violent and terrorist. They either shoot you, the Israeli army, or arrest you.
So, the Israeli army is providing full security, backing up for settlers attacks, preventing Palestinians from doing anything to resist the prisons or to defend their right of ownership of that land. And in many cases, in many occasions, the harassment was done jointly by settlers and the army against our farmers and against our land.
Now, number of olive trees that had been cut off or burned from October 7 until now, Marc, exceeded 10,000 olive trees so far. The number of trees that were uprooted from the time of occupation in 1967 until now, 2.5 million trees. Again, I repeat, it’s 2.5 million trees that have been uprooted, destroyed, cut off or burned, by the army and the settlers, from 1967 until now.
We at the union, along with other organizations working on supporting farmers to cultivate their land, have succeeded to plant 3 million trees. But 2.5 million of which were, of course, destroyed, and we still have another half million trees. Not only olive trees. Olive trees, almond and fruit trees, different types of trees, and the battle is still there.
So, the message of Palestinian farmers is, we are resisting the occupation by cultivating our land. We are resisting your harassment by insisting to cultivate our land, because it is a land that we own, and the land we inherited from our fathers, who inherited from their fathers and their grandfathers, and so on.
Now, to respond to these challenges, farmers are using Palestinian Farmers Union, in cooperation with Freedom Farm. Lately, recently, since a year until now, we have cooperated in launching this campaign that is called Freedom Farm, led by Freedom Farm Campaign in the US, and that is calling people to donate and support to help farmers cultivate their farmland with olive trees, providing them with internal irrigation networks that would help supplementary irrigation during dry season and summertime, and protect that land by providing steel fence that will protect the farmland from wild animals and from settlers’ attacks.
The first we call it Freedom Farm. The first Freedom Farm that was established in 2018 was Mu’taz Bisharat Farm in Jordan Valley. And he’s one of the very unique and special farmers there. He was the first one cooperated with us to establish a Freedom Farm in an area that had been never accessible in the past predicates, until now.
But because he was insisting, we supported him and established the first farm in that area. And luckily, we succeeded, and we were very proud to see that these trees we planted survived and were not cut off by settlers.
Although the farm is only 50 meters farm from a nearby settlement in that area, called Ru’ei Settlement, despite that, we succeeded to make that farm survival with the steel fence we provided to that farm, which helped minimize the settler attacks against that one.
And once this Where Olive Trees Weep movie was launched, and there were many viewers in the world viewing that movie… And I would like to seize the moment from your program and thank all the viewers who watched that, Where Olive Trees Weep, and thanks all who worked to produce that movie. These viewers, with the money they contributed, helped us to establish four Freedom Farms, two of them for two women farmers and two for male farmers in Palestine, from the money that came from the viewers who viewed this movie.
That’s why we’re calling upon more viewers to watch that video, and more contributions and funds to come, in order to be able to establish as many Freedom Farms as possible. Because by doing Freedom Farms, Marc, is very important here to notice that establishing a Freedom Farm has two goals, two objectives.
The first one, protect that land from being confiscated. As I said in the beginning, the cultivated land is protected, almost. And second, we help farmers generate income for their livelihoods. And those are the two main goals of doing that.
But to make it difficult for confiscation, or for settler violence, we provide the fencing and the internal irrigation network that support and help the trees to naturally growing and giving fruits faster.
Marc Steiner:
So, a couple of quick questions about that. I mean, A, how long does it take olive tree to grow before you can harvest?
Abbas Milhem:
Yes.
Marc Steiner:
How long?
Abbas Milhem:
Yeah. And without irrigation, it will need five years. With irrigation, in the second year of plantation, that tree will start fruiting. So, we are buying in almost two to three years of time to allow that tree to give fruits because of the irrigation system. That’s why we insisted with Freedom, together we agreed to allow natural and faster growth of the trees to fruit and generate income for farmers. We provide these Freedom Farms with internal irrigation system, and this irrigation system would be only used during dry season and a hot summer. So, we adapt what we call supplementary irrigation.
Because if the tree get thirsty because of this climate change in Palestine, water is scarcity in climate change, rain water is getting lower and lower, so we need to compensate the tree by irrigating that tree. If you irrigate a tree and perform environmentally friendly farming practices, that tree would fruit in two years from the time of plantation.
And by doing this, we are really buying in time for farmers. Instead of waiting five years, he waits only two years. And our system, our Freedom Farm, are smart in a way that even farmers do not need to wait two years to generate income. Because of the internal irrigation system we provide in these Freedom Farms, Marc, farmers can cultivate with what we call in-between farming, like vegetable production, like field crops that generate seasonal income every year. And from this income, farmers can use that income to look after their Freedom Farms and to secure some money for their livelihood, food security needs.
Marc Steiner:
So, a couple of questions here. And I know that we’ve been talking to Cyrus Copeland, who you’re talking about, who helped create this in Palestine, but it raises some questions. The first one is, so what is to stop the Israeli government, and/or settlers, from tearing down the fences? From destroying the farms that Freedom Farms build, to put Palestinian farmers back to work? I mean, because I can see just listening to you and seeing your ebullience, your joy in what the work is, in kind of resisting, and also being a farmer creating these farms. But what’s the stop the Israelis from tearing them down?
Abbas Milhem:
There is nothing guaranteed as long as the occupation is there. 100% there is no guarantee. But we, out of experience, for the past 30 years, from [inaudible 00:22:29] until now, we know which areas are risky than other areas.
Although, Area C, that 60% of entire Palestinian land categorized as Area C, but the level of risk is different even within that area.
There is what we call… And maybe Cyrus, I told him about this. There is a red area. Red area for us means that accessibility is almost 90% risky. If you cultivate there, most likely what you cultivate will be destroyed by a percentage of almost more than 80%.
Another area is categorized, in our experience, as yellow areas. It is risky, 50-50. But if you do something on the ground, it might stay with a percentage of 50-50. It’s risky, but doable.
And there are areas within Area C that are far enough from settlement, and less risky, and categorized or colored as light yellow areas. We in Freedom Farm, Treedom and PFU, started with the light yellow colored and less-risky areas.
Why? Because we want to build a successful model where all these olive farms can stay. And once they stay, survive, and they are surviving until now. We have so far planted 10 Freedom Farms in Palestine, four of which were, as I told you, from Where Olive Trees Weep video and the viewers of that video.
So far, we established 10 farms from them, and we are, inshallah, eager, and looking for another set of Freedom Farms to be established from the Where Olive Trees Weep near to Mu’taz Psharat Farm in Jordan Valley, which is less-risky area.
Once these Freedom Farms survive, and they are surviving, and they will continue to survive, inshallah, because they are in less risky area, this will create a pact on the ground, and even the army and the settlers will see that there are trees surrounded and cultivated in that area. So, if you expand with another set of farms there, that will not be noticed that much.
Marc Steiner:
So, to conclude here with this, given the political situation at the moment, with the war of Gaza, which is also the war in the West Bank, that Palestinians are being killed and jailed in the West Bank as well, in the midst of this, there’s these Freedom Farms growing, and you’re trying to push back by building a community and building agriculture and building work.
I’m curious politically, what do you think happens next, then? Because you’re building, and other farmers are trying to build a world out of the rubble that Israel created by destroying the farms in the beginning, and now there’s this war going on where close to 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza alone.
So, talk to us about where you think the next steps are for you, and everybody else in the West Bank. Where do you see how the war will affect all the work you’re doing and where it goes next?
Abbas Milhem:
For Palestinian farmers, it’s different from the outside world vision and view.
For us, we have no option except to continue going to our farms every day, despite the harassment we are subject to.
In my farm, the one I told you before, for example, all my family members and farmers, they go there every day. They get harassed, they get beaten, they get out, they come back in the second day, and so on.
There are farmers who lost their lives in their farm. Like what happened with Bilal Saleh, for example, from a Saudi town last year. Olive harvest season, while he was harvesting his crops, he was shot to death by settlers in front of his wife and children.
But none of the farmers of that town stopped going back to their farms. This is the way we are resisting. And maybe it looks like a Hollywood movie? It is a Hollywood movie. It is a Hollywood. Farmers are going there. And this is… For a farmer, it’s very difficult to lose your olive farm.
Marc Steiner:
Yes.
Abbas Milhem:
Olive farm, and olives in general, and the olive tree, symbolizes identity. Symbolizes life and the source of life for the largest farming community in Palestine. It is religious. Olive tree is mentioned in the Holy Quran. For most of Palestinians who are Muslims, there is a special verse in the Holy Quran about the olive tree and the symbols, what that olive tree symbolizes. It’s religious, it’s peaceful, it is patriotic, it is identity, it is a source of life.
So, for Palestinians, an olive tree is their life. The way they sacrifice their life, would sacrifice their life to defend that olive tree. And we are succeeding. Despite all the attacks, we are still going to our land.
Now, with the Freedom Farms, as I said from the beginning, the mechanism we are using is way different because of the October 7 until now. We are in the level of going to the less-risky areas that are at least 300 meters in the radar far from settlements, and Palestinians can access and can protect it.
It’s not that easy for settlers to come that far to attack these farms, unless they come in groups, and with the Israeli army all the time. But they don’t come on daily basis. It’s tiring, even for the army, because there are so many settlements, and so many Palestinian citizen villages. I mean, they need triple the number of the Israeli army to provide security for all settlers attacking these farms.
But all communities, local villages and towns are there to protect the land, and they go and they cultivate and they practice their farming.
And the slogan we have in the union, we have a list where you can read that slogan, “If you uproot one tree, we will cultivate ten.” This is the slogan across Farmers Union, and the members across West Bank and Gaza. And now in Gaza, Marc, the situation is different. The entire agriculture sector had been-
Marc Steiner:
Destroyed.
Abbas Milhem:
… completely, entirely destroyed. All animals, livestock sector in Gaza, is 100% demolished and destroyed, while in vegetable production is 85% destroyed. There are still some number of greenhouses that are still producing vegetables there.
And we purchase this produce from farmers, our farmers in Gaza, and we make food parcels that are distributed for internally displaced people in Gaza. But of course, the amount of production, it’s only 15%. And the need there for food aid in Gaza is at its maximum.
So, we are trying to do something, building models here and there, and inshallah, this war will be over one day hopefully, and we will build back again the agriculture sector in Gaza, and Gaza will be nicer and prettier than before.
Marc Steiner:
I want to say one thing as we close here. Abbas Milhem, this has been a pleasure to talk with you, and to see somebody who is a farmer who is fighting for the future, fighting for the freedom of Palestinian people as well, to build a future, and you do it with such joy and effervescence. It is a pleasure to see and a pleasure to experience. So, I thank you so much for taking your time with us today.
Abbas Milhem:
Thank you, Marc. And just to end up here by saying, we have belief deep in our hearts as farmers, the future is ours. Occupiers and settlers will be part of the past. Believe me, this will happen. And we will serve together. If not us, then our children, and maybe sons, and so on in the future.
Marc Steiner:
The long view. Thank you so much.
Abbas Milhem:
Thank you. Thank you, Marc. Thank you. Bye-bye.
Marc Steiner:
Once again, let me thank Abbas Milhem for joining us today from Ramallah in Palestine, and Cyrus Copeland, who produced the film Where Olive Trees Weep, for introducing us to Abbas Milhem.
And thanks to Cameron Grandino for running the program today, Audio Editor Alina Nehlich, Producer Rosette Sawali, and the tireless Kayla Rivara for making it all work behind the scenes, and everyone here at The Real News for making this show possible.
Please, let me know what you thought about what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therrealnews.com, and I’ll get right back to you.
Once again, thank you Abbas Milhem for joining us today and for the joy he brings to his work. And as he said, if settlers tear down an olive tree, they will grow 10. So, for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, and take care.
Conservative Party leadership candidate Robert Jenrick seems to have put his foot in it with his latest scaremongering video.
Jenrick: we kill suspects to avoid the ECHR
Declassified journalist Matt Kennard said Jenrick was “casually revealing a UK extra-judicial assassination program designed to evade ECHR jurisdiction”. In his video, the apparent frontrunner in the Tory leadership race admitted:
Our special forces are killing, rather than capturing, terrorists because our lawyers tell us that, if they’re caught, the European court will set them free.
Fellow candidate James Cleverly said he wasn’t “comfortable repeating”. He added that “our military do not murder people”.
Jenrick claimed to be quoting fellow Tory Ben Wallace, though. Wallace had claimed in 2023 that “we are more often than not forced into taking lethal action than actually raiding and detaining”. He added that “we’ve been able to use drones and aircraft to make kinetic strikes against terror suspects”.
"Our special forces are killing rather than capturing terrorists because our lawyers tell us if they're caught, the European Court will set them free.”
Former Home Office minister casually revealing a UK extra-judicial assassination program designed to evade ECHR jurisdictionhttps://t.co/i3o485xuRR
The big question is who gets to decide when an extra-judicial murder will happen? And who determines which groups or people should receive the ‘terrorist’ label? In Britain, explains the Crown Prosecution Service:
The Terrorism Act 2000 defines terrorism, both in and outside of the UK, as the use or threat of one or more of the actions listed below, and where they are designed to influence the government, or an international governmental organisation or to intimidate the public. The use or threat must also be for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause.
The specific actions included are:
serious violence against a person;
serious damage to property;
endangering a person’s life (other than that of the person committing the action);
creating a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or a section of the public; and
action designed to seriously interfere with or seriously to disrupt an electronic system.
But this definition would seem implicate the state of Israel, a close UK ally. The colonial power has massacred thousands of children and other civilians in occupied Gaza and beyond. It has also destroyed or damaged “more than half of Gaza’s homes”, “85 percent of school buildings”, healthcare facilities, businesses, roads, and farmland.
Britain’s government still considers the terrorists in the Israeli occupation forces to be friends, though. That’s why the UK military is reportedly training Israeli occupation forces.
And Britain has not only allowed arms to enter Israel via UK airspace, but greenlit arms deals and supplied parts for Israeli jets, like the one responsible for bombing “the residential compound of a British medical charity in Gaza”. UK authorities, however, have arrested campaigners trying to stop factories complicit in war crimes under counter-terrorism laws.
Covert US flights, meanwhile, have left from RAF Akrotiri on Cyprus throughout Israel’s genocide in Gaza. And dozens of British warplanes have flown to both Israel and Lebanon. British spy flights have also been passing intelligence to Israel.
Terrorism, then, seems to be subjective. The official position seems to be that you can murder some, but you need to support others. And that’s not a position that Jenrick, or anyone else, should be proud of.
Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip has been the deadliest year of conflict for women and children anywhere in the world over the past two decades, according to an analysis released Tuesday as Israeli forces continued to bombard the Palestinian enclave and launched a ground invasion of Lebanon. The global humanitarian group Oxfam noted in its new report that Israel’s U.S.-backed assault on Gaza…
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Oct. 1, 2024. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
Israeli forces invaded southern Lebanon early Tuesday with the open support of the United States, which endorsed what it called “limited operations to destroy Hezbollah infrastructure” despite warnings that a ground assault could spark a wider conflict and intensify the humanitarian disaster facing Lebanese civilians.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) described its ground invasion with the same terms it has used to characterize its bombing campaigns in Lebanon and Gaza, which—despite being called “targeted” at Hezbollah and Hamas—have frequently killed scores of civilians and obliterated schools, hospitals, shops, and residential buildings. Since mid-September, Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon have killed more than a thousand people and displaced roughly a million.
The IDF launched its ground invasion with the backing of the Biden administration. In a statement, the White House said that the invasion of Lebanon is “in line with Israel’s right to defend its citizens and safely return civilians to their homes.”
A spokesperson for the White House National Security Council acknowledged the risk of “mission creep” only to effectively wave it away, saying that “we will keep discussing that with the Israelis.”
Analysts likened Israel’s movement of troops into Lebanon to its invasion of the southern Gaza city of Rafah earlier this year—an operation that was initially described as limited but ultimately left the area in ruins.
“Gaza was a testing ground for Israel to see what they could get away with and, it turns out, the answer is absolutely anything it wants,” said historian and analyst Assal Rad. “It did not stop at Gaza or the West Bank and it may not stop at Lebanon, because war was [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s objective all along and his prize is Iran.”
“Make no mistake: The Biden administration is providing cover for Israel as it invades a neighboring, sovereign nation.”
The invasion comes after the Netanyahu government rejected a three-week cease-fire proposal put forth by the U.S., France, and other nations and intensified its bombing of Lebanon, hammering Beirut with airstrikes that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and many civilians. The attack that killed Nasrallah was reportedly carried out with 2,000-pound bombs supplied by the U.S.
Coverage of the invasion in the Western corporate media painted the U.S. as “increasingly powerless,” with “limited” influence to forestall a massive ground assault on Lebanon. But the Biden administration has yet to seriously leverage American military aid to prevent a war that could envelop the entire region.
On the contrary, billions of dollars of aid and American weapons have continued to flow to Israel, enabling its war on Gaza and Lebanon. The Washington Postobserved that “the events of recent weeks appear to fit a pattern in which the administration urges against specific Israeli actions only to later backtrack so it can avoid imposing conditions on military aid.”
The U.S. has also engaged in what’s been described as “unprecedented” intelligence-sharing with Israel, further deepening its complicity in the devastating wars.
Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), said in a statement late Monday that “Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, following its devastating attacks on Lebanon over the past two weeks, is the entirely predictable consequence of the Biden administration’s ceaseless coddling and resupply of weapons to Israel, whatever public bleats for cease-fires the administration has otherwise made.”
“The Biden administration has acted recklessly in giving Israel a blank check to light the entire region on fire, all while disregarding our own legal obligations under both U.S. and international law to halt the weapons flow to them,” Whitson added.
The U.S.-based anti-war group CodePink said that “Israel claims its operation in Lebanon is ‘targeted,’ but like in Gaza, civilians are the real victims.”
“Make no mistake: The Biden administration is providing cover for Israel as it invades a neighboring, sovereign nation,” the group said. “U.S. taxpayers fund Israel’s military, providing billions annually and supplying weapons used to kill innocent people.”
“The Biden administration and Congress could halt this escalation by cutting military aid, demanding a cease-fire, and holding Israel accountable,” CodePink continued, “but instead, they allow continued aggression across the Middle East.”
Former Tory chair Sayeeda Warsi has called for Britain to stop all of its arms sales to Israel. This comes as Conservative Party leadership candidates compete to show their absolute, unwavering commitment to Israel’s genocidal regime.
Warsi: consistently calling out Israel
Warsi was co-chair of the Conservative Party from 2010 to 2012. But she feels her party has gone too far to the right in recent years. And one area where this is particularly true is on the issue of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Warsi has consistently called out the UK government’s unconditional support for Israel despite its crimes in occupied Palestine. During the genocidal assault of 2014, she resigned from a foreign office position, stressing that:
our approach and language during the current crisis in Gaza is morally indefensible, is not in Britain’s national interest and will have a long term detrimental impact on our reputation internationally and domestically.
This cyclical violence will not stop until the occupation stops
And in January 2024, during the current genocide, she lamented:
We will look back at this and be ashamed of how we stood by as a genocide unfolded before our eyes in real time and a regional conflict escalates because we lacked the moral courage to say stop the killing
‘Stop all UK arms sales’
On 30 September 2024, as Israel prepared to invade Lebanon, she tweeted:
There has been no partner for peace in Israel with Netanyahu at the helm and our appeasement of him and his far right extremist Cabinet has emboldened him to destabilise the region and everyone’s security including the UKs
And she continued by insisting:
It is morally right, legally right and in UK interest to stop their support for Netanyahu and that starts by stopping all UK arms sales
She made these comments as she shared a frank, clear, and apparently impromptu speech from Jordan’s foreign minister Ayman Safadi. Speaking at the United Nations, the diplomat highlighted that:
The Israeli prime minister came here today and said that Israel is surrounded by those who want to destroy it – an enemy. We’re here – members of a Muslim-Arab committee mandated by 57 Arab and Muslim countries. And I can tell you here, very unequivocally – all of us are willing to, right now, guarantee the security of Israel in the context of Israel ending the occupation [of Palestine] and allowing for the emergence of a Palestinian state
But he lamented that Israel’s focus appears to be to continue escalating hostilities as long as possible: [1:46]
And after that, they have no plan. We have a plan.
We have no partner for peace in Israel. There is a partner for peace in the Arab world.
This For years it has been obvious that if Israel was prepared to end occupation and recognise a Palestinian State on “67 borders which is official UK policy (in theory not practice ) then Israel’s neighbours / the region/ Muslim world all stood ready to defend Israel and it’s… https://t.co/hYybX1kfzl
“A reflection of how far right my party has moved”
Warsi finally resigned from the Conservative Party in recent days over attempts to silence her support for Marieha Hussain, the teacher who held up a satirical placard suggesting Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman were ‘coconuts’.
The legal system, mainstream media outlets, and people on social media launched a campaign against Hussain. But a district judge cleared her of wrongdoing on 13 September.
Warsi explained that her party had asked her “to delete my public support for Marieha – I refused to do so”. She continued by saying “I felt it appropriate in the circumstances to resign my whip and look forward to dealing with these issues openly and transparently in the coming weeks and months”. Upon her resignation, she tweeted:
My decision is a reflection of how far right my Party has moved and the hypocrisy and double standards in its treatment of different communities.
Addressing the Tories who attacked her firm stand, she thanked them for:
providing me with an opportunity to revisit the last ten years of inaction, acquiescence, tolerance and promotion of racism that poisoned the public discourse leading to violence on our streets. Damaged our country and destroyed our party.
The Conservative party has long had a problem with Islamophobia. And as she insisted, “anti Muslim racism is significantly worse” after over a decade of Tory rule. Indeed, she stressed, “the dog whistle , demonising , stigmatising, smearing and stereotyping of British Muslims as a campaign tool continues”.
Tory leadership candidates Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick, for instance, have already faced accusations of Islamophobia. And their fervent support for Israel may well be driving their attacks on the Muslim community.
Jenrick has insisted that he wants an Israeli flag “at every airport and point of entry” and to move Britain’s embassy to Jerusalem. Badenoch, meanwhile, has argued that ‘not all cultures are equally valid’, highlighting in particular those that are critical of Israel.
The following article is a comment piece from Stop The War Coalition about the next national march for Palestine on Saturday 5 October – just as Israel increases its regional aggression.
Israel’s assassination of Hassan Nasrullah and its brutal attacks on Lebanese civilians have appalled people around the world. Using its unlimited supply of US weapons, Israel is writing in the blood of Palestinians, Lebanese, Yemenis and others that it seeks total war in the Middle East.
Israel’s onslaught continues, so Britain continues to march
This Saturday’s demonstration to mark a year of Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians was always going to be crucial. Now more than ever we need to turn it into a massive display of anger against the slaughter, against the spread of war and our government’s collusion.
We are asking all our members and supporters to do the following as a matter of urgency.
If you are outside London please organise coaches or other transport from every corner of the country and rush details to us so that we can publicise them on the website – here. Even if you are simply meeting up at your local station or planning a car pool to the demo let us know and we can spread the word.
Wherever you are, please organise leafleting sessions or stalls at your local station, high street, or town centres. We have specified Wednesday as a day of action to do this. Again, send in details.
Put up posters in your windows and local shops to spread the word. Contact us and we will send you posters.
You can order leaflets and posters by emailing office@stopwar.org.uk – please do send us reports of all arrangements.
An organization representing anti-war U.S. veterans urged the Justice Department on Monday to immediately impanel a grand jury to investigate — and, if necessary, indict — Secretary of State Antony Blinken for lying to Congress, unlawfully refusing to cut off American military aid to Israel, and “conspiring to cause genocide of Palestinians.” The call from Veterans for Peace (VFP) comes days…
Video footage analyzed by weapons experts indicates that Israeli forces used U.S.-supplied 2,000-pound bombs in their massive attack on Beirut that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and flattened several residential buildings. The Friday night attacks, which killed dozens of people and wounded hundreds, included more than 80 bombs dropped over a period of several minutes…
In 2017, Donald Trump controversially announced the US embassy in Israel would move to Jerusalem. Most of the world opposed it. Dodgy US allies supported it. You know the drill. But the UK decided not to back the move. Now, however, Conservative Party leadership candidate Robert Jenrick has insisted he would follow Trump’s lead if he gets a whiff of power.
In fact, he said at the Conservative conference “If the Foreign Office or the civil servants don’t want to do it, I will build it myself”. It it safe to say Jenrick is now an illegal colonialist settler, too?
Robert Jenrick: siding with racist extremists
His love of the state responsible for genocide in Gaza doesn’t stop there either. As the Independentreported, Robert Jenrick revealed that:
a small thing that I fought for when I was the immigration minister was to ensure that every Israeli citizen could enter our country through the e-gate, through the easy access.
So that at every airport and point of entry to our great country there is the Star of David there as a symbol that we support Israel, we stand with Israel.
Robert Jenrick pledges he would move British embassy to Jerusalem at Conservative Friends of Israel meeting pic.twitter.com/jRPVl7ErHI
Jerusalem is a source of great controversy. When the UN prepared for the creation of the state of Israel, while ignoring strong local opposition to the idea, it planned for the highly important city to come under international sovereignty and control. But as the Canary previously reported, Israel:
seized western Jerusalem in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. And it then occupied East Jerusalem during the 1967 war. Around 423,000 Palestinians live in Jerusalem. Nearly two thirds of them live in the areas seized by Israel in 1967.
Peace in the Middle East hinges largely on the status of Jerusalem, so making unilateral decisions as Trump did definitely don’t help.
Robert Jenrick is apparently a Trump fan, though (despite being shy about it recently). He was one of the only UK MPs who attended Trump’s inauguration in 2017. And he’s got big donors behind him.
So we shouldn’t be surprised. But we should be worried.
In the first attack on Lebanon’s capital Beirut since the recent increase in Israeli attacks on Lebanon, Israelkilled three members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). But as political analyst Omar Baddar insisted, the target wasn’t what mattered; it’s what the attack represented. And that is Israel crossing all the red lines it can to provoke a response from Lebanon, and possibly Iran, which could justify “an all-out war” in the region.
The point of Israel striking downtown Beirut isn’t really to assassinate PFLP leaders no one cares about, the point is actually to strike downtown Beirut.
The point is to cross all redlines, to terrorize all of a Lebanon & show them who’s in charge, & to force Hezbollah & Iran…
As Baddar added, Israel can’t turn Lebanon into Gaza yet, because it knows that would increase internal pressure on its Western allies to withdraw their essentially unconditional support.
If they started turning Lebanon into Gaza now, there would be greater international opposition. But if they provoke a reaction they can milk as justification for a campaign of all-out ethnic cleansing & obliteration, they’ll do it with greater impunity.
The West backs Netanyahu, but is using up its excuses
Unsurprisingly, given its genocidal behaviour in Gaza, the Israeli attacks on Lebanon have shown little interest in protecting civilians. And that is because the West’s support has emboldened war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu.
Hezbollah would have made concessions if Israel had accepted a ceasefire in Gaza. But because its leaders knew the US government wouldn’t react negatively to an escalation in hostilities, it preferred to make war instead of peace.
And of course, the US proved Israel right, continuing to gaslight people by saying Israel’s actions are about ‘defence’ and that it’s Iran that’s pushing for more conflict. Any brief look at the West’s history of meddling in Iran would highlight the absurdity of that position.
As Quincy Institute Iran expert Trita Parsi has insisted, “thanks to Biden’s blank check to Netanyahu, it seems irrelevant to Israel what Iran’s red lines are”. Iran, meanwhile, is losing patience regarding Western promises.
President Masoud Pezeshkian, for example, has slammed the US and European failure to provide a ceasefire in Gaza in exchange for Iran holding back after Israel’s July assassination in Tehran of Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas political bureau chief. He asserted that these claims “were all lies”.
Up to this point, Parsi toldCNN, Iran has “shown a tremendous amount of restraint”. The Iranian government has good reasons to avoid conflict, including attempts to make peace with the West and improve the domestic economy. However:
Hezbollah, in many different ways, has been Iran’s first line of defence against Israel. If Hezbollah truly is degraded… then it would leave Iran tremendously vulnerable. And the question is, if they believe that that is the direction we are heading, they may calculate that they are better off reacting sooner rather than later. This is why so many of the other entities in the region – US allies – for so long have been pressuring the United States to put pressure on Israel to actually have a ceasefire in Gaza. Because that is the key to avoiding this escalation.
“A profound moral collapse” as Democrats shun diplomacy
Parsi criticised the US approach to Israel, saying:
Diplomacy is not what has been pursued in the last 11 months. The Biden administration cannot say that they’re working tirelessly around the clock to secure a ceasefire if they are simultaneously providing the Israelis with the weapons, the intelligence, and other means in order to be able to continue the fight that the Biden administration says they don’t want to see.
He added:
One cannot say that this is a failure of diplomacy. Because diplomacy was never truly tried.
The silence in Western media about the massive civilian casualties in Israel’s bombardment of Lebanon reflects a profound moral collapse. When Israel assassinated the head of Hamas in 2004 and killed seven civilians, the GW Bush admin (!) condemned it. Biden-Harris, however, did not say a word about the hundreds of civilians who were killed alongside Nasrallah.
Israel may just get the war with Iran that it’s looking for
“Trump whisperer“, dodgy business lowlife, and ethnic cleansing fanboy Jared Kushner, meanwhile, has given us a look at how a Donald Trump presidency could make things even worse. He tweeted gleefully that “Iran is now fully exposed”. He also praised Israel’s “brilliant, rapid-fire tactical successes of the pagers, radios, and targeting of leadership”.
And in a comment that conjured up an image of him rubbing his hands together like a Bond villain, he said:
The Middle East is too often a solid where little changes. Today, it is a liquid and the ability to reshape is unlimited. Do not squander this moment.
Just think of the resources the West could gain access to if Israel was able to spread death and destruction a little bit further afield.
The cringeworthy bootlicking doublespeak saw Kushner praise “the peace-seeking nation of Israel” and add:
There is no going back for Israel. They cannot afford now to not finish the job and completely dismantle the arsenal that has been aimed at them. …
The right move now for America would be to tell Israel to finish the job. It’s long overdue. And it’s not only Israel’s fight.
So whether it’s the Democrats or the Republicans, Israel is likely to get its war with Iran. And only an unprecedented mass mobilisation of anti-war voices could help to bring us back from the brink.
The documents detail two separate meetings between government ministers and Elbit Systems UK, the British arm of Israel’s biggest weapons firm, Elbit Systems Ltd. Both meetings focused on how the UK’s judicial system deals with Palestine Action activists who carry out direct action against the arms manufacturer.
The objectives of both meetings were to reassure Elbit Systems that the government cares about the harm Palestine Action is causing to the Israeli weapons maker and the wider private sector.
The first of these documented meetings took place on 2 March 2022 between Elbit Systems UK’s CEO Martin Fausset and the then-home secretary, Priti Patel.
Patel formerly resigned from her position as secretary of state, after holding twelve undisclosed meetings in Israel with officials, businessmen, Netanyahu and the country’s security minister – immediately raising questions around her own impartiality.
The meeting between the two parties focused on protests and security at Elbit Systems. Key points raised by the private secretary in the meeting acknowledged that:
Palestine Action’s criminal activity is for the police to investigate and though they are operationally independent of government, meaning [the Government] cannot direct their response… officials have been in contact with the police about PA.
However, they also said:
the Government is working, where appropriate, to ensure that those who engage in criminal activity progress through the Criminal Justice System.
“Threats to Elbit” discussed with government minister
According to the second documented meeting, held on 19 April 2023, “threats to manufacturing at Elbit Systems from protest groups” were discussed between Elbit Systems and Chris Philp, the then-minister of state for crime, policing, and fire.
The document also noted that:
A Director from the Attorney General’s Office will be attending to represent the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). The CPS declined to participate in this meeting to preserve their operational independence.
This contradictory statement appears to be included to obfuscate the violation of General Principle 2.1 of the CPS code of conduct which bars prosecutors from any political interference and improper influence. A violation of the code should amount to an abuse of process and dismissals of prosecutions against Palestine Action activists.
The documents also noted that:
although there have been successful prosecutions of Palestine Action members, there have been multiple instances of charges being dropped and defendants acquitted by juries and magistrates.
Previously, the Israeli embassy interfered in Palestine Action trials by lobbying the former Attorney General in May 2022. During this meeting, the Israeli government discussed the availability of legal defences for British activists, which coincided with the courts increasingly disallowing activists to argue that their actions were proportional to the crimes of the weapons factories they disrupted.
One section of the documents – which were heavily redacted – was the section on ‘past lobbying’.
Elbit and Israel’s collusion over Palestine Action with the Tories
Palestine Action said in a statement:
These documents highlight collusion between government ministers, the CPS, the Attorney General’s office, and a foreign private arms manufacturer. The presence of such collusion highlights a clear abuse of power, with the Government prioritising its relationship with the genocidal Israeli state over the democratic rights of its citizens.
Both parties are evidently unhappy with the fact that charges against Palestine Action’s activists are sometimes dropped, and our defendants fairly acquitted by juries and magistrates.
Our judicial system should act as an impartial body distinctly separate from government, and yet, these documents reveal that in the case of Palestine Action, the Government is working on behalf of Elbit Systems UK to ensure this is not so — with their political interference in the prosecution of our cases having a direct impact on the civil liberties of our activists.
The group noted that:
The first of Palestine Action’s activists to receive a conviction did so on the 29th of March, 2022—shortly after Patel and Fausset’s meeting—and it’s likely that political interference has shaped the outcomes of cases against us. Furthermore, the police have escalated their use — and subsequent abuse — of counter-terrorism powers to indefinitely keep activists in detention, though Palestine Action simply does not fit the definition of a terrorist organisation.
When asked by the Guardian to comment on these documents, the current Home Office responded as follows:
We fully respect the operational independence of the police and the independent judiciary, which remains the bedrock of our policing model. These meetings took place under the previous government.
This is not over
The Home Office acknowledged that the previous government did not respect the operational independence of the judiciary and are trying to absolve themselves of any responsibility. However, there are over 100 activists from Palestine Action who were charged before the new government came into power.
Palestine Action concluded:
We demand full transparency and a public review of all charging decisions made against Palestine Action, as there is clear evidence that such prosecutions were wrongfully influenced by Elbit Systems, the Israeli or/and the UK government. We also call for the immediate release of our sixteen political prisoners.
President Joe Biden and Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib on Saturday had notably different responses to Israel’s intense bombing campaign in Lebanon over the past 24 hours, which killed hundreds of people including key Hezbollah leaders. “Our country is funding this bloodbath,” Tlaib (D-Mich.) said on social media Saturday morning, sharing a post from Zeteo’s Prem Thakker with videos of the…
The ongoing Israeli operation against Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia group so dominant in Lebanon, is following a standard pattern. Ignore base causes. Ignore context. Target leaders, and target personnel. See matters in conventional terms of civilisational warrior against barbarian despot. Israel, the valiant and bold, fighting the forces of darkness.
The entire blood woven tapestry of the Middle East offers uncomfortable explanations. The region has seen false political boundaries sketched and pronounced by foreign powers, fictional countries proclaimed, and entities brought into being on the pure interests of powers in Europe. These empires produced shoddy cartography in the name of the nation state and plundering self-interest, leaving aside the complexities of ethnic belonging and tribal dispositions. Tragically, such cartographic fictions tended to keep company with crime, dispossession, displacement, ethnic cleansing and enthusiastic hatreds.
Since October 7, when Hamas flipped the table on Israel’s heralded security apparatus to kill over 1,200 of its citizens and smuggle over 200 hostages into Gaza, historical realities became present with a nasty resonance. While Israel falsely sported its credentials as a peaceful state with dry cleaned democratic credentials ravaged by Islamic barbarians, Hamas had tapped into a vein of history stretching back to 1948. Dispossession, racial segregation, suppression, were all going to be addressed, if only for a moment of vanguardist and cruel violence.
To the north, where Lebanon and Israel share yet another nonsense of a border, October 7 presented a change. Both the Israeli Defence Forces and Hezbollah took to every bloodier jousting. It was a serious affair: 70,000 Israelis displaced to the south; tens of thousands of Lebanese likewise to the north. (The latter are almost never mentioned in the huffed commentaries of the West.)
The Israeli strategy in this latest phase was made all too apparent by the number of military commanders and high-ranking operatives in Hezbollah the IDF has targeted. Added to this the pager-walkie talkie killings as a prelude to a likely ground invasion of Lebanon, it was clear that Hezbollah’s leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, figured as an exemplary target.
Hezbollah confirmed the death of its leader in a September 27 strike on Beirut’s southern suburb of Dahiyeh and promised “to continue its jihad in confronting the enemy, supporting Gaza and Palestine, and defending Lebanon and its steadfast and honourable people.” Others killed included Ali Karki, commander of the organisation’s southern front, and various other commanders who had gathered.
Israeli officials have been prematurely thrilled. Like deluded scientists obsessed with eliminating a symptom, they ignore the disease with habitual obsession. “Most of the senior leaders of Hezbollah have been eliminated,” claimed a triumphant Israeli military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani.
Defence Minister Yoav Gallant called the measure “the most significant strike since the founding of the State of Israel.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated with simplicity that killing Nasrallah was necessary to “changing the balance of power in the region for years to come” and enable displaced Israelis to return to their homes in the north.
Various reports swallowed the Israeli narrative. Reuters, for instance, called the killing “a heavy blow to the Iran-backed group as it reels from an escalating campaign of Israeli attacks.” Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr opined that this “will be a major setback for the organisation.” But the death of a being is never any guarantee for the death of an idea. The body merely offers a period of occupancy. Ideas will be transferred, grow, and proliferate, taking residence in other organisations or entities. The assassinating missile is a poor substitute to addressing the reasons why such an idea came into being.
A dead or mutilated body merely offers assurance that power might have won the day for a moment, a situation offering only brief delight to military strategists and the journalists keeping tabs on the morgue’s latest additions. It is easy, then, to ignore why Hezbollah became a haunting consequence of Israel’s bungling invasion and occupation of Lebanon in 1982. Easy to also ignore the 1985 manifesto, with its reference to the organisation’s determination to combat Israel and those it backed, such as the Christian Phalangist allies in the Lebanese Civil War, and to remove the Israeli occupying force.
Such oblique notions as “degrading” the capacity of an ideological, religious group hardly addresses the broader problem. The subsequent shoots from a savage pruning can prove ever more vigorous. The 1992 killing of Hezbollah’s secretary-general Abbas al-Musawi, along with his wife and son, merely saw the elevation of Nasrallah. Nasrallah turned out to be a more formidable, resourceful and eloquent proposition. He also pushed other figures to the fore, such as the recently assassinated Fuad Shukr, who became an important figure in obtaining the group’s vast array of long-range rockets and precision-guided missiles.
Ibrahim Al-Marashi of California State University, San Marcos, summarises the efforts of Israel’s high-profile killing strategy as shortsighted feats of miscalculation. “History shows every single Israeli assassination of a high-profile political or military operator, even after being initially hailed as a game-changing victory, eventually led to the killed leader being replaced by someone more determined, adept and hawkish.” Another Nasrallah is bound to be in tow, with several others in incubation.
The ongoing Israeli operation against Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia group so dominant in Lebanon, is following a standard pattern. Ignore base causes. Ignore context. Target leaders, and target personnel. See matters in conventional terms of civilisational warrior against barbarian despot. Israel, the valiant and bold, fighting the forces of darkness.
The entire blood woven tapestry of the Middle East offers uncomfortable explanations. The region has seen false political boundaries sketched and pronounced by foreign powers, fictional countries proclaimed, and entities brought into being on the pure interests of powers in Europe. These empires produced shoddy cartography in the name of the nation state and plundering self-interest, leaving aside the complexities of ethnic belonging and tribal dispositions. Tragically, such cartographic fictions tended to keep company with crime, dispossession, displacement, ethnic cleansing and enthusiastic hatreds.
Since October 7, when Hamas flipped the table on Israel’s heralded security apparatus to kill over 1,200 of its citizens and smuggle over 200 hostages into Gaza, historical realities became present with a nasty resonance. While Israel falsely sported its credentials as a peaceful state with dry cleaned democratic credentials ravaged by Islamic barbarians, Hamas had tapped into a vein of history stretching back to 1948. Dispossession, racial segregation, suppression, were all going to be addressed, if only for a moment of vanguardist and cruel violence.
To the north, where Lebanon and Israel share yet another nonsense of a border, October 7 presented a change. Both the Israeli Defence Forces and Hezbollah took to every bloodier jousting. It was a serious affair: 70,000 Israelis displaced to the south; tens of thousands of Lebanese likewise to the north. (The latter are almost never mentioned in the huffed commentaries of the West.)
The Israeli strategy in this latest phase was made all too apparent by the number of military commanders and high-ranking operatives in Hezbollah the IDF has targeted. Added to this the pager-walkie talkie killings as a prelude to a likely ground invasion of Lebanon, it was clear that Hezbollah’s leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, figured as an exemplary target.
Hezbollah confirmed the death of its leader in a September 27 strike on Beirut’s southern suburb of Dahiyeh and promised “to continue its jihad in confronting the enemy, supporting Gaza and Palestine, and defending Lebanon and its steadfast and honourable people.” Others killed included Ali Karki, commander of the organisation’s southern front, and various other commanders who had gathered.
Israeli officials have been prematurely thrilled. Like deluded scientists obsessed with eliminating a symptom, they ignore the disease with habitual obsession. “Most of the senior leaders of Hezbollah have been eliminated,” claimed a triumphant Israeli military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani.
Defence Minister Yoav Gallant called the measure “the most significant strike since the founding of the State of Israel.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated with simplicity that killing Nasrallah was necessary to “changing the balance of power in the region for years to come” and enable displaced Israelis to return to their homes in the north.
Various reports swallowed the Israeli narrative. Reuters, for instance, called the killing “a heavy blow to the Iran-backed group as it reels from an escalating campaign of Israeli attacks.” Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr opined that this “will be a major setback for the organisation.” But the death of a being is never any guarantee for the death of an idea. The body merely offers a period of occupancy. Ideas will be transferred, grow, and proliferate, taking residence in other organisations or entities. The assassinating missile is a poor substitute to addressing the reasons why such an idea came into being.
A dead or mutilated body merely offers assurance that power might have won the day for a moment, a situation offering only brief delight to military strategists and the journalists keeping tabs on the morgue’s latest additions. It is easy, then, to ignore why Hezbollah became a haunting consequence of Israel’s bungling invasion and occupation of Lebanon in 1982. Easy to also ignore the 1985 manifesto, with its reference to the organisation’s determination to combat Israel and those it backed, such as the Christian Phalangist allies in the Lebanese Civil War, and to remove the Israeli occupying force.
Such oblique notions as “degrading” the capacity of an ideological, religious group hardly addresses the broader problem. The subsequent shoots from a savage pruning can prove ever more vigorous. The 1992 killing of Hezbollah’s secretary-general Abbas al-Musawi, along with his wife and son, merely saw the elevation of Nasrallah. Nasrallah turned out to be a more formidable, resourceful and eloquent proposition. He also pushed other figures to the fore, such as the recently assassinated Fuad Shukr, who became an important figure in obtaining the group’s vast array of long-range rockets and precision-guided missiles.
Ibrahim Al-Marashi of California State University, San Marcos, summarises the efforts of Israel’s high-profile killing strategy as shortsighted feats of miscalculation. “History shows every single Israeli assassination of a high-profile political or military operator, even after being initially hailed as a game-changing victory, eventually led to the killed leader being replaced by someone more determined, adept and hawkish.” Another Nasrallah is bound to be in tow, with several others in incubation.
Israel is genociding the Palestinians one neighborhood at the time, one hospital at the time, one school at the time, one refugee camp at the time, one ‘safe zone’ at the time – Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt, 10 August 2024
One would expect that human rights organisations would spring into action during an impending or unfolding genocide – the ultimate violation of human rights. Maybe human rights NGOs actions should be proportional to the level of the crimes they are concerned with. Thus, the more killing, torture, arbitrary imprisonment, bombing…, etc., that is plainly evident, the more action one would expect. So, what is the output of some of the leading human rights organisations in the face of the genocide in Gaza? Below is an analysis of Amnesty International’s press releases and announced actions [1].
Will they come clean?
First things first. To assess the credibility of any organisation, one should know their relationship with Israel and the United States – both participants in the unfolding genocide. On this account, Amnesty International has never come clean about its relationship with the Israeli government. Uri Blau, a Haaretz investigative journalist, recently revealed that Amnesty_Intl.-Israel was taken over and run by Israeli operatives paid for by the Foreign Ministry. [2] They ran interference in reporting on the situation in the occupied territories, participated in conferences, and even set up a "human rights" institute at Tel Aviv university. This was a nice way to co-opt the human rights industry. The principal who ran AI-Israel even gave an interview boasting of his exploits.
And did AI-Israel have a hand editing any Amnesty reports about the situation in the occupied territories or its many wars in the region? Some Palestinian lawyers reported having problematic encounters with AI-Israel officials, to the extent that they refused to have any dealings with it thereafter. One could well imagine AI-Israel officials reporting on Palestinians who reached out to them. So how ethical is it for Amnesty International to expose Palestinians contacting AI-Israel to imminent danger? When will Amnesty International acknowledge this dirty relationship and ensure that it maintains the requisite distance from the Israeli government in the future?
The genocide will be televised
Next, one must establish if what we witness amounts to a genocide. Craig Mokhiber, the former UN official in the High Commission for Human Rights, resigned because his agency was not reacting given the unfolding situation in Gaza, and stated in his resignation letter; "this is a textbook case of genocide". NB: the letter was submitted on 28 October 2023. Mokhiber stated that it is usually difficult to establish whether a genocide is taking place because one doesn’t know the motivation of the leading military and political leadership. [3] In the current context, there is no doubt about the motivation; one only has to listen to Netanyahu, Gallant, Ganz, Smotrich, Ben Gvir… And also most of the parliamentarians – they made genocidal statements in the Knesset; they were competing with each other to see who would be most truculent.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) statement on the case brought in front of the court by South Africa also suggests that we are witnessing a genocide – at least most of the justices urged Israeli action to forestall a genocide.
Gaza is one of the most densely populated areas in the world, and in particular, the refugee camps exhibit a high population density. The Israeli military is bombing these locations using huge bombs recently delivered by 500+ of American military cargo planes. [4] There is no doubt about this, one can even witness the bombing realtime on Al Jazeera. Civilians are directed to evacuate areas only to be bombed in locations that had been putatively named "safe areas," hospitals, schools, UN compounds, etc. Fleeing civilians were targeted; all bakeries were destroyed; hundreds of wells destroyed; scores of chicken farms ravaged; entire families wiped out…. Thus it is not only the level of killing, but also the destruction of life-sustaining infrastructure that is happening now. The weaponry is very accurate, thus the targeting was done intentionally; so it is not an issue of "collateral damage," but it is intentional and indiscriminate targeting. A principle of International humanitarian law is that actions should be proportionate, but Israeli military and politicians revel at the disproportionate nature of the destruction; it is the Dahiya doctrine applied to Gaza. [5] This doctrine refers to the disproportionate violence perpetrated against the Lebanese population in the Dahiya neighbourhood in Beirut in 2006; the neighbourhood was entirely flattened with huge bombs. Alastair Crooke, the former British diplomat, summarises the situation succinctly: "Gaza is already a monument to callous inhumanity and suffering. It will get worse…" [6]
One thing is certain: if it quacks like a duck, waddles like a duck, then it is genocide. [7] Under these circumstances, one would expect all human rights organisations to spring into action and demand court actions, UN Security Council resolutions, calls for key officials to be held accountable for crimes against humanity, and for the US, UK, Germany… and others to stop enabling Israel’s genocidal actions.
Nature of coverage
A few things are evident when reviewing AI’s press releases: one is struck by the paucity of coverage, the trite and generic form of statements, the unwillingness to call out the nature of some crimes, and unwillingness to debunk some of the crass Israeli propaganda meant to further de-humanise the Palestinians, and to justify Israel’s crimes.
Since 7 October 2023, there have only been 60 press releases – none of any substance. One is struck also that there are a number of press releases about Israel/OPT that don’t mention the ongoing genocide at all! [8] Or the commentary is part of a discussion of human rights in general.
Ahistorical
Gaza has been subject to numerous massacres – several not even registering in the media accounts in the so-called West. There were several of the post-2006 attacks (aka "mowing the lawn" operations) usually referred to by their Israeli sugar-coated operation names. After each such operation AI dutifully produced its trite reports, but was rather circumspect in calling out Israeli crimes; and whenever it did issue a statement about a particular crime, it was immediately offset by references to Palestinian crimes.
A good historical starting point to assess the current violations of international humanitarian law would be the Goldstone report (2008) – which documented and established serious Israeli crimes during "Operation Cast Lead". [9] Alas, one is struck by the ahistorical nature of AI’s press releases and reports. It is as if history started yesterday, but then this is the nature of the "rights-based reporting," where there is virtually no reference to history. When it suits Amnesty it will ignore history. [10] Would one’s assessment of a criminal be altered by the fact that he was a serial criminal? If so, then it behooves AI to emphasise Israel’s long history of mass crimes against the Palestinian population. But acknowledging the long history of dispossession and brutality against the native population would suggest that "we" should be in solidarity with the Palestinians. Alas, that is not a position Amnesty is willing to take. It prefers to utter its clucking sounds, and admonish "both sides" as if there were a moral equivalence between the violence perpetrated by oppressor and oppressed.
False balance
Amnesty wants to appear impartial, and clamours for both Palestinian and Israeli rights. Thus AI will issue a report outlining some of the Israeli crimes, but will then issue a report on the "Palestinian war crimes". In general, according to AI, most of the actions perpetrated by the Palestinians are ipso facto war crimes; there is no need for further investigation or discussion. A disgraceful example is an article discussing Palestinian war crimes published on 12 July 2024. Thus after more than nine months of bombings, maybe 186,000+ dead [11], calculated starvation, summary executions and evidence of rampant mistreatment of Palestinian prisoners… Amnesty chose to demand the release of the Israeli hostages! According to Erika Guevara Rosas, AI’s "Senior Director for Research, Advocacy, Policy and Campaigns," holding Israeli civilian hostages is a war crime. [12] Lost in this narrative is an explanation as to why the hostages are held – they are the only means to obtain the release of some of the thousands of Palestinian prisoners. And true to form, a few days later AI released a longish press release critical of the Israeli brutal treatment of prisoners. Producing reports critical of "both sides" are attempts to claim impartiality.
It is rather odd that when Palestinians take hostages, Amnesty considers this a war crime. Yet when Israel imprisons thousands without charges, routinely kidnaps and keeps prisoners in deplorable conditions, then this is not a war crime. In the West Bank, Israeli military take the parents of “wanted” Palestinians hostage, but Amnesty doesn’t condemn this practice to the same extent.
Amnesty ignores the 1960 UNGA resolution acknowledging the right for an oppressed/colonised population to defend themselves – this includes armed struggle; and that Israel has an obligation to protect the oppressed population. The nature of the violence suggests that it is not possible to assume a “neutral” position. Thus, Amnesty’s proclivity to admonish “both sides” is ethically suspect.
Not countering Israeli propaganda
One useful function AI could play would be to debunk Israeli propaganda meant to dehumanise Palestinians to serve as a pretext for its genocidal campaign. The day after the Palestinian incursion, the Israeli propaganda machine was ready to push stories about rapes, babies cooked in microwave ovens, brutal murders, and so on. However, Amnesty has not countered these fabricated stories; in fact it has helped propagate the Israeli narrative. For example, it repeatedly referred to the 7 October attack as "horrific" – a term almost exclusively used to describe Palestinian actions. It doesn’t account for the fact that it was the Israeli military who killed more than half the Israeli civilians on that day. [13] There were no babies cooked to death or impaled on bayonets. Alas, even with a pompous sounding "Evidence Investigation Unit," Amnesty doesn’t seem to care to separate facts from hateful slander. If the latter is meant to dehumanise the Palestinians, then exposing this propaganda would go some way to humanise the victim. It seems that that is not in Amnesty’s purview.
In the press release demanding the release of Israeli hostages, Erika Guevara Rosas stated: "Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza that has resulted in the death of over 38,000 Palestinians". This is factually correct, but contextually challenged. Guevara is using the Palestinian Health ministry’s figures that are based on the actual recovery of bodies; it misses all the victims under the rubble. The Lancet study estimates that about 8% of the Gazan population has been killed – that is in the order of 186,000 dead. Furthermore, the deaths attributable to epidemics, starvation, etc., are also missed in the Health Ministry’s statistics. The London School of Hygiene and Johns Hopkins University have attempted to estimate this mortality rate. [14]. Their estimates and methodology are complex, and it is best to read it directly from their reports. Suffice it to say that the mortality rate has increased dramatically.
Maybe a clearer explanation of the available statistics would be in order.
Lets investigate!
There are plenty of daily criminal attacks, but it is only the particularly outrageous ones when AI feels compelled to utter some comment. The discovery of mass burial sites near hospitals that had recently been invaded by the Israeli military elicited some commentary [15]. Instead of pointing a finger at Israel, and suggesting serious crimes had been perpetrated, it calls for an "independent investigation". If only AI’s sanctimonious investigators could enter the scene, then one could establish what really happened. The other implication of AI’s call for investigation is that it doesn’t value the voice of the victims of Israeli crimes. Thus it is not up to Palestinians to call out their oppressor, but some "independent" body has to take its jolly good time determining whether a crime was committed; a report will follow a few years later. In the meantime, all Israeli crimes are merely "alleged" crimes.
There is a more problematic aspect to AI’s call for investigations, namely, that it is giving credence to Israeli exculpatory claims and justifications for its attacks. Thus bombing the Al Shifa hospital was justified on the spurious grounds that there was an Al Qassam bunker in the vicinity. Or, bombing a location with many refugees in tents by stating that some of the resistance commanders were in the area. Given the history of Israeli lies about all the massacres that it has perpetrated, one would think that Amnesty would be more sceptical of Israeli claims, and to challenge them outright. Instead it calls for investigations. Furthermore, when is it justified to kill 100+ civilians in order to kill two fighters? It is curious that a human rights organisation doesn't reject this outright – there is no need for an investigation. Maybe an analogy could clarify the objection. Imagine that a rapist justified his crime by stating that the victim wore provocative clothing. Amnesty’s actions are akin to investigating if the victim’s clothing was actually sexy.
On 26 August 2024, AI issued a press release on two of the bombings of camps of displaced people killing hundreds. [16] A priori, one would say that it is a welcome report, but one is struck by the fact that these incidents "need to be investigated as war crimes". Amnesty even reviewed the statements made by the Israeli military to justify the bombing. And to add a comic element, Amnesty sent a note to "Ministry of Justice officials," i.e., Hamas, to determine if its fighters were sheltering in the bombed locations. In other words, it is asking the Palestinians whether the Israeli bombings were justified! And to top things off, Amnesty regurgitated its accusation that the Palestinian actions, e.g., taking hostages amounted to clear war crimes. On the one hand, AI asks that Israeli actions be investigated, yet for the Palestinians the accusation is clear: these are war crimes.
Amnesty usefully states that using civilians as human shields is "prohibited under international law." Suggesting that if any fighter mingles with the civilian population, this amounts to a crime. The Palestinian fighters have little choice about where they can operate given that the population is constantly forced to move – the fighters included. But there is a difference between fighters being in close proximity to civilians, and the Israeli practice of placing Palestinian civilians on top of military vehicles or forcing them to enter houses ahead of Israeli soldiers. The difference is the coercion involved, and the fact that the fighters are in the midst of their own people. Thus in the press release, Amnesty wags its finger about fighters finding themselves together with civilians. However, Amnesty has yet to issue one of it missives about the civilians Israeli military forces to act as human shields. We await another press release.
Losing the forest for the trees
The crimes perpetrated against the Palestinians, i.e., genocide, crimes against humanity, and so on, must be described as mass crimes – referent to the population at large. However, Amnesty’s favourite technique to avoid mentioning the mass crimes is to dwell on individual stories to the exclusion of the totality of the crimes. On 19 August 2024, Amnesty issued a press release about the flouting of the Arms Trade Treaty. Thus: "Amnesty International has long been calling for a comprehensive arms embargo on both Israel and Palestinian armed groups because of longstanding patterns of serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law, including war crimes…". True to form Amnesty bleats about an embargo on "both sides," as if there were hundreds of military cargo airplanes delivering weapons to the Palestinians. But instead of mentioning the total tonnage of bombs dropped on Gaza, it provides two examples [17]:
Amnesty has documented the use of US-manufactured weapons in a number of unlawful airstrikes, including US-made Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM) in two deadly, unlawful air strikes on homes in the occupied Gaza Strip, which killed 43 civilians – 19 children, 14 women and 10 men – on 10 and 22 October 2023.
A GBU-39 Small Diameter Bomb, made in the US by Boeing, was used in an Israeli strike in January 2024 which hit a family home in the Tal al-Sultan area of Rafah, killing 18 civilians, including 10 children, four men, and four women.
According to Euromed Human Rights: "Israel dropped 70,000 tons of bombs on Gaza Strip since last October, exceeding World War II bombings in Dresden, Hamburg, London combined." [18] Maybe providing such statistics would be more effective.
Similarly, on 18 July 2024, AI released a rather lengthy report on prison conditions. [19] To its credit, the press release was better than most AI output, but again, after a cursory mention of the total number of cases, it emphasises a few examples of prisoner’s conditions. It is dwelling on a few items to the exclusion of the mass injustice condition.
Long list of neglect
Ever since 7 October 2023, there have been many incidents that didn't elicit a single comment by Amnesty International. Here are a few items:
Israel bombed Palestinians waiting to obtain food from a humanitarian aid delivery truck; there were about 210 killed.
Triple-tap bombings. Israelis bomb an area killing civilians, and then those who come to rescue them, and those who seek to rescue the rescuers.
Al Jazeera showed a video of airplanes dropping supplies in Gaza. A few minutes later Israelis bombed the locations where the parachutes landed.
Several hundred medical and emergency rescue staff have been killed; 170+ journalists, and in some cases the journalists’ families were also killed.
Destruction of universities, schools and hospitals. Israeli soldiers themselves posted videos of rejoicing soldiers when hospitals and universities were blown up.
There is a serious shortage of potable water for most Gazans. The quality and quantity of water available in Gaza was already a serious issue prior to October 2023. Groundwater had saline seepage, and thus the sodium level was above safe limits. With the destruction of wells, and the inoperability of desalination plants, the access to safe water became a serious challenge. Furthermore, the Israeli military are flooding tunnels with sea water, further contaminating groundwater.
Israeli military declared a large garbage dump site to be a "safe zone".
The Israeli military forced relocations of population from North to South, and later on South to North. And of course more houses were destroyed in the meantime. There are no places where civilians can escape to safety.
The condition of prisoners held in Israeli jails is appalling: brutality, neglect, meagre access to food and water. Al Jazeera featured the case of Moazez Abayat [20] A man who suffered torture, brutal treatment, meagre access to food and water. It was clear that Abayat had lost his mind in prison, and this is certainly not an isolated case. In August, soldiers sodomised prisoners… and +972 magazine published an article about the conditions at a military prison with a jarring statement: "The situation there [Sde Teiman detention center] is more horrific than anything we’ve heard about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo."
The Hannibal killings, i.e., Israeli military killed Israelis to avoid having them taken as hostages. Haaretz reported that more than half the Israeli civilians killed on 7 October were killed by the military.
Israeli propagandists were ready to make allegations of widespread rape and murder of children. Most of those claims were false.
The grand larceny and theft of Palestinian land in the West Bank continues, and in the process hundreds have been killed.
Israeli drones broadcast recordings of children in distress to entice people to investigate, and consequently kill them.
The day after rulings by international courts (ICJ or ICC), the Israelis engaged in massive bombardments and other destructive actions. It is their means to send a "FU" message. On the eve of Netanyahu’s trip to the US, the Israeli military bombed a refugee camp killing dozens. On the day Netanyahu addressed the US Congress, 100+ Palestinians were killed.The point of this: Israel can do whatever it wants, and it has the US’s backing.
On the eve of negotiations, Israel perpetrates particularly serious mass crimes. Early in August the US announced "negotiations," but with meagre Israeli interest. On 10 August, Israel bombed a school killing 100+. Furthermore, Israelis murdered two of the Palestinian negotiators. Who will want to negotiate with Israel now?
The lack of medicines is causing the certain deaths of those with chronic diseases. The protracted war is a death sentence to diabetics, renal patients, cancer victims….
Impotence and futility
Amnesty issues a few press releases and maybe a report thereafter, but there is no meaningful action. Thus far Amnesty has organised a petition calling for a ceasefire! One can fill the petition form with gibberish, and press the button however many times, and it will register in this preposterous exercise. [21] Liberal souls will be assuaged.
There have been three instances where AI urged its members to write very polite letters to Israeli officials. Thus mass crimes are happening at present, and these "urgent actions" merely plead for the fate of three individuals. All sample letters start with "Dear General…"; that is the way Amnesty likes its members to address the genocidal creeps. These letter writing campaigns are a means to get young idealistic activists to engage in "actions" that are of virtually no consequence.
Every year Amnesty claims to have more members – in the millions. Appealing to this membership base to do something meaningful could possibly be more effective. Palestinian civil society groups have long clamoured for BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions). Why can’t AI urge its members to boycott Israeli products? The answer is evident: the mega donors (e.g., Harvey Weinstein, Hollywood’s notorious sex predator and Israel cheerleader; the Sackler Foundation) funding Amnesty’s activities would revolt. [22]
Manifest double standards
Amnesty has produced several press releases advocating intervention in Syria, even using holocaust memes ("never again") to emphasise its point. It even produced a melodramatic multimedia production on the "horrors" at a notorious prison. [23] When it comes to Israel, Amnesty doesn’t call for intervention; it certainly doesn’t refer to holocaust memes as "never again" seems not to apply to the Palestinians. Amnesty also doesn’t produce melodramatic videos on the most notorious Israeli prisons where inmates are tortured, brutalised and killed.
Regarding the situation in Venezuela, Amnesty demands "urgent actions from ICC prosecutor”. [24] When it comes to Israel doesn’t call upon the international courts to prosecute Israel for war crimes or worse. According to Donatella Rovera, a senior AI investigator, Amnesty doesn’t issue such calls. [25] Another standard applies.
On 21 May 2024, Amnesty issued a press release urging the ICC to issue arrest warrants against Netanyahu, Gallant and three Palestinian resistance leaders. What Agnes Callamard, AI’s Secretary General, doesn’t explain is the fact that whereas an arrest warrant was issued for Putin, when it comes to Netanyahu, the prosecutor merely petitioned the court to consider issuing a warrant. Given the uproar and threats issued by US politicians, the ICC quietly dropped the matter – thus there are no warrants issued against Netanyahu and Gallant at present. There is scant evidence of a moral backbone at the ICC. But the ICC statements allows Amnesty to posture by wagging its finger at “both sides”.
On 2 September 2024, Amnesty issued a demand for Mongolia to arrest President Putin, and did so in a rather hectoring tone. [26] And although the ICC no longer seeks to prosecute Netanyahu, this doesn’t stop other organisations to call on governments hosting Netanyahu for his arrest. Alas, Amnesty didn’t send a similar demand to the US. Maybe such a call would have tarnished Netanyahu’s reputation during his recent address to the US Congress.
On the eve of the Gulf War against Iraq, Amnesty produced a report on the purported case of Iraqi soldiers “throwing babies out of incubators”. President Bush appeared on TV showing this report and using it as a justification for war. After the hoax was exposed Amnesty didn’t issue any apology or explanation. But now we face a real situation in Gaza where the Israeli military ordered the evacuation of Gaza’s largest hospital and consequently dozens of newborns had to be taken off incubators or other equipment. The doctor attending the children noted that most of them would die. One would say that this would provide emotive material to campaign to obtain a ceasefire; the plight of babies might resonate with Western liberal souls. Alas, Amnesty was silent in this instance.
And there are blind spots
One must marvel at the long list of press releases and reports Amnesty produces on a regular basis. No corner of the planet is exempt of an Amnesty commentary or reprimand. From commenting on transexual rights in Mongolia, sex workers rights, climate change, migrant rights and discrimination, etc. And many of its missives wag a finger at the offending state with titles including "… must do this". Amnesty frequently waves its human rights magic wand. Somehow they think they have the standing of a UN-like organisation to pontificate on any topic anywhere in the world.
But one encounters blind spots in AI’s coverage. There are very few admonishing press releases regarding US, UK, or Israeli atrocious behaviour. When offending actions are mentioned at all, one finds them couched with terms such as "alleged"; and certainly not calling for a tribunal to hold criminals to account. The war in Ukraine has elicited minor critical commentary except chastising Russia; the US role in causing and fuelling the war are not mentioned. In general, AI’s position on issues aligns with US, UK and Israeli state policy. There is no criticism or even mention of the US’s penchant for forever wars; for waging violent actions in many places in the world. These seem to be just fine by Amnesty’s standards.
The United Nations Security Council has become a joke – where one finds the US and its acolytes brazenly lying, and exhibiting monumental hypocrisy and cynicism. Any relevant resolution delivering a modicum of justice is routinely vetoed. This is plainly evident regarding calls for a ceasefire in Gaza with such resolutions vetoed. On 21 December 2023, the US put forth a "compromise" resolution regarding a ceasefire and humanitarian aid. The curious thing is that on the same day the diplomats acknowledged that Israel would not be bound by the resolution – it was merely an exercise of hypocrisy on steroids. Yet the next day, Agnes Callamard, AI’s Secretary General, stated that: "This is a much-needed resolution…”!
[27]. To her credit, she also stated: "It is disgraceful that the US was able to stall and use the threat of its veto power to force the UN Security Council to weaken a much-needed call for an immediate end to attacks by all parties.”
There is no pushback
An important role any organisation could play would be to confront local supporters of regimes involved in mass crimes. There are notorious cases:
Nikki Haley, the failed presidential candidate, went to Israel to express her support to the extent that she wrote “kill them all” on an Israel artillery shell.
At the August 2024 Democratic National Convention attendees were active cheerleaders for the Israeli actions.
The US Congress welcomed Netanyahu and gave him 57 standing ovations.
Maybe these outrageous statements and actions would elicit critical commentary. It is not only a generic trite statement about what is happening “over there,” but what is also necessary is to challenge the local enablers of mass crimes. Alas, Amnesty would rather consort with US politicians rather than to confront them.
The bane of HR NGOs
In Europe, various governments and NGOs provide scholarships for students to specialise in Human Rights. The courses are offered in several countries, and hundreds of students attend Human Rights centres each year. Italians get to study in Finland for a year…. And we find the grotesque situation of Dutch students studying human rights in Israel; it is a bit like going for education on animal rights to a slaughterhouse. This is all courtesy of EU largesse. The graduates then work for hundreds of NGOs or government agencies. Each of them will then wave their human rights wand over a topic that may be fashionable, invariably gay/trans rights, women’s reproductive rights, sex worker’s rights, etc. Further fuelling the human rights industry is the lavish funding obtained from various lottery funds – much of the profits from such institutions are disbursed to NGOs. The human rights industry experiences subsidised growth. Thus each NGO with its own warped agenda receives funds directly or indirectly. The directors of some NGOs command six figure salaries – a favourite for out-of-office politicians seeking a sinecure. [28]
In the Netherlands where this process has been in place for decades, the human rights lobby has mushroomed in size and now manifests a dysfunctional dynamic, i.e., the NGOs bring incessant lawsuits against the government tying it down in court.
Do NGOs advocating Palestinian human rights get to play in this merry-go-round? Fat chance!
Human rights are for the birds
When confronted with mass crimes what is needed is justice, and not one of its bastardised, neutered, malleable and ineffective substitutes. If one wants justice then it behooves one to speak in terms of justice, and to avoid the human rights mumbo jumbo. This is specially the case when human rights have been cynically exploited and weaponised by the US and UK. [29] A framework that can be used to justify wars, the so-called humanitarian interventions, cannot be a framework that advances justice or motivates people to act against mass crimes. The criminals react accordingly, i.e., they aren’t bothered if they are called transgressors of human rights, but may fear being accused of mass crimes.
The mask comes off
The current wars in Gaza, Ukraine, etc., and the reactions surrounding them has torn off the mask of the American empire revealing its hypocrisy, cynicism and sadism. Many of the "values" so dear to the neoliberals have been shown to be a sham. "Democracy," "International law," "freedom of speech,"…., and of course "human rights” have fallen off their pedestals. The collateral damage of the collapse also tears into the United Nations, the ICC, ICJ, and also the human rights industry because they also have been shown to be so ineffective and compromised. Amnesty International is demonstrably a conflicted organisation steeped in hypocrisy. It is a tool used by the UK and US governments to weaponise “human rights” to suit its own ends: the justification of wars, and the demonisation of "regimes," i.e., the governments that the empire doesn’t like. It has been a conduit for pro-war propaganda in the past, and even calling for so-called humanitarian military interventions.
What is needed are critical voices that highlight the daily massacres, that call for the criminals and their enablers to be held to account, and to sue for a modicum of justice. Calling for a ceasefire is the bare minimum. Alas, most human rights NGOs don’t even fulfil this task. When Amnesty International postures about all sorts of trendy human rights everywhere in the world, but then doesn’t cover genocide and spring into effective action, then let it shut up entirely.
One thing is certain: Amnesty International is not part of the solution, it is part of the problem.
Notes
[1] This is an analysis of Amnesty’s press releases and reports. These can be found here: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/ Amnesty’s position are also available on Twitter, but these are not covered here. The press releases and reports by other HR organisations are very similar and exhibit the same bias.
[2] Uri Blau, Documents reveal how Israel made Amnesty’s local branch a front for the Foreign Ministry in the 70s; The Israeli government funded the establishment and activity of the Amnesty International branch in Israel in the 1960s and 70s. Official documents reveal that the chairman of the organization was in constant contact with the Foreign Ministry and received instructions from it; Haaretz, 18 March 2017.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2017/3/22/israels-human-rights-spies-manipulating-the-discourse
Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini, "Israel’s human rights spies": Manipulating the discourse Revelations about Israel’s infiltration of NGOs in the 1970s shocked many, but human rights ‘spies’ are still out there, 22 Mar 2017.
[3] Craig Mokhiber (Director of the New York Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights), The resignation letter.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2023/11/a-textbook-case-of-genocide/
[4] Avi Scharf, Weapons shipments to Israel: A Dizzying Pace, Then a Drop: How U.S. Arms Shipments to Israel Slowed Down subtitle: Publicly available flight tracking data shows how many U.S. arms shipments have arrived in Israel each month since the Gaza war started, revealing a sharp rise and then gradual tapering off in the pace of deliveries, Haaretz, 27 June 2024.
[5] Israel wants to be feared to maintain its morally bankrupt deterrence policy. Thus any resistance must be smashed with disproportionate power. The Dahiya neighbourhood in Beirut was brutally bombed, and the politicians ordering the bombing were very pleased with the level of destruction. Thus the Dahiya doctrine.
[6] Alastair Crooke, Trickery, Humiliation, Death – and the Timeless Hunger for ‘Honour and Glory’, Strategic Culture, 30 December 2023.
[7] Ilan Pappe, the great Israeli historian, once replied to a question of whether Israel was an apartheid state by stating: "if it quacks like a duck, and waddles like a duck, then it is apartheid".
[8] Some examples of AI Press releases about OPT that don’t mention Gaza at all. AI, Dutch Investor pushes for human rights safeguards to stop use of surveillance technology against Palestinians, 4 July 2024. Refers to the intrusive video spying. AI, Israel’s attempt to sway WhatsApp case casts doubt on its ability to deal with NSO spyware cases, 25 July 2024.
[9] Operation "Cast Lead" is a curious name for a military operation. It actually refers to a passage in Deuteronomy where the Hebrews exterminate their opponents to the extent that they pour molten lead down their throats.
[10]Contrast AI’s ahistorical reporting on the situation in Gaza with that of Syria. When it comes to Syria, the history of the “regime” is suddenly an issue.
[11] Rasha Khatib, Martin McKee and Salim Yusuf, “Counting the dead in Gaza: difficult but essential”, The Lancet, Volume 404, Issue 10449, pp237-238, 20 July 2024.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01169-3/fulltext
[12] AI, Israel/ OPT: Hamas and other armed groups must immediately release civilians held hostage in Gaza,12 July 2024
[13] By Yaniv Kubovich • Haaretz 7 July 2024 IDF Ordered Hannibal Directive on October 7 to Prevent Hamas Taking Soldiers Captive Subtitle: “there was crazy hysteria, and decisions started being made without verified information: Documents and testimonies obtained by Haaretz reveal the Hannibal operational order, which directs the use of force to prevent soldiers being taken into captivity, was employed at three army facilities infiltrated by Hamas, potentially endangering civilians as well”
[14] Crisis in Gaza: Scenario-based Health Impact Projections
https://gaza-projections.org/gaza_projections_report.pdf
[15] AI, Gaza: Discovery of mass graves highlights urgent need to grant access to independent human
rights investigators, 24 April 2024.
[16] AI, Israel/OPT: Israeli attacks targeting Hamas and other armed group fighters that killed
scores of displaced civilians in Rafah should be investigated as war crimes, 26 August 2024.
[17] AI, Global: Governments’ brazen flouting of Arms Trade Treaty rules leading to devastating loss of life, 19 August 2024.
[19] AI, “Israel must end mass incommunicado detention and torture of Palestinians from Gaza”, 18 July 2024.
[20] https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2024/7/10/freed-former-palestinian-bodybuilder-alleges-abuse-by-israeli-jailers
and https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/palestine-west-bank-muazzaz-abayat-prison-interview
[22] Thomas Frank, Hypocrite at the good cause parties, Le Monde Diplomatique, February 2018. Frank reports that Harvey Weinstein made "AI-USA possible”.
[23] Paul de Rooij, Amnesty International trumpets for another "Humanitarian" war… this time in Syria, MintPress, 23 March 2018.
[24] Amnesty, Venezuela: Scale and gravity of ongoing crimes demand urgent actions from ICC prosecutor, 9 August 2024
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/08/venezuela-crimes-demand-urgent-action-icc-prosecutor/
[25] Personal communication with Donatella Rovera, January 2003.
[26] AI, “Mongolia: Putin must be arrested and surrendered to the International Criminal Court”, 2 September 2024.
[27] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/12/israel-opt-adoption-of-un-resolution-to-expedite-humanitarian-aid-to-gaza-an-important-but-insufficient-step/
Israel/OPT: Adoption of UN resolution to expedite humanitarian aid to Gaza an important but insufficient step, 22 Decemeber 2024.
[28] Irene Khan, the former Amnesty general secretary, received a £533,000 "golden handshake" when she departed.
[29] For some of the background history of Amnesty International, see: Kirsten Sellars, The Rise and Rise of Human Rights, Sutton Publications, 2002. Also, Alfred de Zayas, The Human Rights Industry, Clarity Press, 2023.
Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza has produced increasing calls for an immediate ceasefire, while a pro-Israel, U.S.-based group has waged an increasing war on democracy with little public scrutiny and no end in sight.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is one of the most politically and electorally influential groups in this country. They have bombarded our “democratic” system spending over $100 million just in 2024 to punish opponents of Israeli policies, including the military assault on Gaza that’s claimed over 40,000 deaths and displaced 2.3 million people.
Our democracy has always been incomplete at best, but peoples’ movements have won voting and political rights for those without property, people of color, women and young people.
But the political and electoral influence of the super rich and their corporations, including non-profit ones like AIPAC, frustrate and preempt We the People who try to have human needs addressed.
AIPAC lobbies for U.S. support of Israel. Its related entities include a regular Political Action Committee (AIPAC PAC), and a Super PAC, (United Democracy Project, UDP).
Regular PACs are limited to contributing $3,300 per candidate per election. Super PACs can spend unlimited sums on elections, but must be spent “independently” from any candidate or candidate campaign.
AIPAC has spent $19.6 million for lobbying in the 2023-24 election cycle (through July, 2024). The AIPAC PAC has spent over $44.8 million while UDP has spent $55.4 million. AIPAC exceeded its 2024 goal to raise $100 million.
AIPAC entities threaten our elections and our limited democracy in multiple ways.
1. AIPAC’s PACs have spent millions of dollars supporting conservative Democratic challengers running against incumbent progressives in Congressional primaries, especially candidates of color – who are the strongest supporters of VFP’s calls to stop the war on Gaza and of Move to Amend’s We the People Amendment, HJR54 that will end the insane doctrines of corporate “personhood” and money is the same as speech. In the recent primaries, Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, members of the progressive “Squad,” were the latest victims and there will be more. UDP targeted $14.5 million to defeat Bowman in July and another $8.6 million to take down Bush in August. Bowman and Bush are HJR54 cosponsors and two of Congress’s most vocal critics of the Israeli war on Gaza.
2. Such massive corruption of elections includes paying for Congressional delegations to Israel and an army of lobbyists who peddle a peace and democracy narrative for Israel while pressing for massive arms shipments, including the recent U.S. decision to provide $20 billion more in weaponry. AIPAC lobbyists are joined by U.S. weapons makers as a “force multiplier” with no Palestinian counterweight. The Arab American PAC spent $36,200 in the 2021-22 election cycle and 0 in the 2023-24 cycle.
3. AIPAC-entity donors include super rich Republicans, some of whom are billionaires, such as Paul Singer, who bankrolled a free luxury vacation trip for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and later had cases before the High Court.
4. The enormous sum of expected AIPAC spending, especially in the primaries, has been too much to overcome for many progressive incumbents. J Street, a progressive pro-Israel group that defended candidates against AIPAC in the 2022 primaries, can’t compete with AIPAC and has sat out the 2024 primaries. AIPAC often doesn’t mention Israel in their targeted ads, but rather attacks incumbents on personal issues or on their progressive voting record.
It’s not just AIPAC that has invaded and is occupying our elections and democratic spaces. Corporate entities and the super rich have waged war on our elections and in Congress, causing injustices, mass violence and environmental carnage.
Simply passing laws calling for greater financial disclosure or campaign finance “reform” isn’t enough to end the war on democracy by AIPAC and other corporate entities.
Enacting the We the People Amendment to abolish the constitutional doctrines that “money equals speech” and “a corporation is a person” is essential to create authentic democracy and to reduce the military industrial complex drive for perpetual wars and occupations. The latter is not only applicable in elections, but across the board as corporate entities have hijacked multiple constitutional amendments permitting them to preempt democratic efforts to protect people. communities and the natural world.
AIPAC, like so many other corporate-funded groups, will no doubt continue its assault on the election process in 2026.
It’s ultimately up to us to go beyond merely resisting the violence and harm they cause, and take appropriate actions that can stop the corrupting, anti-democratic and violent impact of the super rich and their corporations that have captured elections and public policy.
Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza has produced increasing calls for an immediate ceasefire, while a pro-Israel, U.S.-based group has waged an increasing war on democracy with little public scrutiny and no end in sight.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is one of the most politically and electorally influential groups in this country. They have bombarded our “democratic” system spending over $100 million just in 2024 to punish opponents of Israeli policies, including the military assault on Gaza that’s claimed over 40,000 deaths and displaced 2.3 million people.
Our democracy has always been incomplete at best, but peoples’ movements have won voting and political rights for those without property, people of color, women and young people.
But the political and electoral influence of the super rich and their corporations, including non-profit ones like AIPAC, frustrate and preempt We the People who try to have human needs addressed.
AIPAC lobbies for U.S. support of Israel. Its related entities include a regular Political Action Committee (AIPAC PAC), and a Super PAC, (United Democracy Project, UDP).
Regular PACs are limited to contributing $3,300 per candidate per election. Super PACs can spend unlimited sums on elections, but must be spent “independently” from any candidate or candidate campaign.
AIPAC has spent $19.6 million for lobbying in the 2023-24 election cycle (through July, 2024). The AIPAC PAC has spent over $44.8 million while UDP has spent $55.4 million. AIPAC exceeded its 2024 goal to raise $100 million.
AIPAC entities threaten our elections and our limited democracy in multiple ways.
1. AIPAC’s PACs have spent millions of dollars supporting conservative Democratic challengers running against incumbent progressives in Congressional primaries, especially candidates of color – who are the strongest supporters of VFP’s calls to stop the war on Gaza and of Move to Amend’s We the People Amendment, HJR54 that will end the insane doctrines of corporate “personhood” and money is the same as speech. In the recent primaries, Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, members of the progressive “Squad,” were the latest victims and there will be more. UDP targeted $14.5 million to defeat Bowman in July and another $8.6 million to take down Bush in August. Bowman and Bush are HJR54 cosponsors and two of Congress’s most vocal critics of the Israeli war on Gaza.
2. Such massive corruption of elections includes paying for Congressional delegations to Israel and an army of lobbyists who peddle a peace and democracy narrative for Israel while pressing for massive arms shipments, including the recent U.S. decision to provide $20 billion more in weaponry. AIPAC lobbyists are joined by U.S. weapons makers as a “force multiplier” with no Palestinian counterweight. The Arab American PAC spent $36,200 in the 2021-22 election cycle and 0 in the 2023-24 cycle.
3. AIPAC-entity donors include super rich Republicans, some of whom are billionaires, such as Paul Singer, who bankrolled a free luxury vacation trip for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and later had cases before the High Court.
4. The enormous sum of expected AIPAC spending, especially in the primaries, has been too much to overcome for many progressive incumbents. J Street, a progressive pro-Israel group that defended candidates against AIPAC in the 2022 primaries, can’t compete with AIPAC and has sat out the 2024 primaries. AIPAC often doesn’t mention Israel in their targeted ads, but rather attacks incumbents on personal issues or on their progressive voting record.
It’s not just AIPAC that has invaded and is occupying our elections and democratic spaces. Corporate entities and the super rich have waged war on our elections and in Congress, causing injustices, mass violence and environmental carnage.
Simply passing laws calling for greater financial disclosure or campaign finance “reform” isn’t enough to end the war on democracy by AIPAC and other corporate entities.
Enacting the We the People Amendment to abolish the constitutional doctrines that “money equals speech” and “a corporation is a person” is essential to create authentic democracy and to reduce the military industrial complex drive for perpetual wars and occupations. The latter is not only applicable in elections, but across the board as corporate entities have hijacked multiple constitutional amendments permitting them to preempt democratic efforts to protect people. communities and the natural world.
AIPAC, like so many other corporate-funded groups, will no doubt continue its assault on the election process in 2026.
It’s ultimately up to us to go beyond merely resisting the violence and harm they cause, and take appropriate actions that can stop the corrupting, anti-democratic and violent impact of the super rich and their corporations that have captured elections and public policy.
Palestinians from Beita, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, have been gathering every week since October for demonstrations against the ongoing Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip and Israeli occupation of Palestine more broadly. The villagers gather to pray, then march to the Israeli soldiers stationed at a nearby Israeli settlement — one of 300 throughout the West Bank…
The Secretary General of Hezbollah, Hasan Nasrallah, was killed by the latest Israeli carpet-bombing of Beirut’s southern Dahiya district on Friday, according to an official announcement by the Lebanese resistance group on Saturday afternoon. Israel had bombed a residential block in the Haret Hraik area in the Dahiya district with several 2000-pound bunker-buster bombs.
But, rest assured—influentital Western media outlets tell us—Israel was only dropping bombs on Lebanese people and exploding their devices in a coordinated terrorist attack in order to bring about peace. The escalated violence, we’re told, is actually a means of de-escalating the conflict. In the wake of the attacks, without a whiff of skepticism, both The New York Times and The Guardian were quick to parrot the Israeli government and military’s self-serving justification; that is, that they are massively ramping up their war on Lebanon not because they want to kill and humiliate a designated enemy, but because they want to compel the militant group Hezbollah into a “ceasefire” or to “withdraw” its forces.
Rest assured—influentital Western media outlets tell us—Israel was only dropping bombs on Lebanese people and exploding their devices in a coordinated terrorist attack in order to bring about peace.
Israeli officials had hoped that by scaling up their attacks over the past week — striking Hezbollah’s communications tools, and killing several key commanders as well as Lebanese civilians — they would unnerve the group and persuade it to withdraw from the Israel-Lebanon border. The officials believed that if they increased the cost of Hezbollah’s campaign, it would be easier for foreign diplomats, like Amos Hochstein, a senior United States envoy, to get the group to stand down.
Kingsley takes for granted that Israel’s goal with these acts of war is not to encourage more war but to simply push Hezbollah into a ceasefire at their Northern border—nothing more. Such a premise is so squishy and nebulous as to be meaningless, yet still hard to falsify. It also defies the basic tenets of military strategy and historical precedent. What we saw this week were not “defensive” actions taken with the objective of peace and getting Hezbollah to step back and stand down. The objective is surrender and calling it peace, which is tantamount to saying, “We’ll have peace after I kill you and control large parts of your territory.”
Israel is bombing Lebanon to achieve a military goal. It is not bombing for peace, it is bombing to control the terms of capitulation.
Israel is most likely attempting to militarily occupy Lebanese territory, as it did from 1985 to 2000. So yes, if Hezbollah simply hands over Lebanese territory—just like if Hamas unilaterally surrenders and allows Israel to occupy Gaza uncontested—then indeed there would be “peace” in the sense that Israel will have used extreme violence and human suffering to achieve domination. Again, this is a feature of winning a war, and it has been a feature since there’s been war, but Western commentators today are trying to rebrand the long-established terms of war with the vocabulary of peace.
Israel is bombing Lebanon to achieve a military goal. It is not bombing for peace, it is bombing to control the terms of capitulation.
If Hezbollah or Palestinian militants attacked Israel in the same fashion right now, killing 558 people, including 34 children, in one day, one wonders if Kinglsey would have taken at face value that they only did so reluctantly with the hopes of forcing a peace deal, compelling Israel to grant them a Palestinian state, or securing an agreement from Israel to never bomb Lebanon. The answer is mostly likely not. There is a subtle but effective mode of propaganda at work here: It’s just taken for granted that the US and Israel only engage in wide-scale violence as self-defense, as a tool to achieve peace, as a last resort. US and Israel’s enemies, on the other hand, whether they be Palestinian militants or Hezbollah, are assumed to be violent for the sake of violence. They are assumed to be ontologically sadistic, with no strategy beyond mindless death.
This isn’t to deny that Hezbollah has fired rockets into Israel—rockets that, according to Hezbollah, were fired in solidarity with those being bombed and starved in Gaza, and that still constitute a fraction of the attacks Israel has launched on Lebanon since October 7. Yet the former is always painted as the aggressor—and Israel is perennially, by definition, a purely defensive rational actor.
NPR’s report from September 22 allowed Israeli officials to run with the “bomb to de-escalate” line with zero pushback. The report gave Israeli officials the last word, paraphrasing Amir Avivi, a “retired Israeli brigadier general,” and telling listeners that “Israel was seeking to force Hezbollah to withdraw with these ever intensifying aerial attacks… Israel is basically putting in front of Hezbollah a very clear message, either you withdraw or it’s a full-scale war.” Maiming thousands and killing over 600 people in one week is apparently not an act of a “full scale war,” just penny ante messages from Israel, truly a reasonable and measured actor simply looking to de-escalate, signaling they want peace.
“Escalation suggests Israel gambling on bombing Hezbollah into ceasefire,” Dan Sabbagh, Defence and Security Editor at The Guardian, headlined his equally credulous piece published on September 24. “What is now unfolding is an Israeli strategy of military escalation against Hezbollah,” Sabbagh writes, “premised on the risky belief that the militant group can be bombed into a ceasefire before fighting in Gaza ends.”
Maiming thousands and killing over 600 people in one week is apparently not an act of a “full scale war,” just penny ante messages from Israel, truly a reasonable and measured actor simply looking to de-escalate, signaling they want peace.
“Bombed into a ceasefire,” again, is a concept so vague as to be meaningless. In principle, all war is pursuant to some eventual “ceasefire” in the sense that one side will capitulate once the other party achieves its military goal, thus ceasing fire. But this is not how the concept of launching large-scale attacks killing hundreds and maiming thousands is typically framed. It is only put in “peace” terms when done by a US/UK ally.
Pearl Harbor was designed to compel a “ceasefire” from the US and allow oil to flow back into Japan, but framing it this way would have been considered bizarre, insensitive, credulous, and—above all—extremely fatuous. A similarly Orwellian framing, of course, has dominated the fake “ceasefire” coverage with respect to Gaza. For months, Israel has successfully branded its repeated demand for unconditional surrender of Hamas and other militant groups as a “ceasefire offer.” The term has lost all meaning, and now, demands of total capitulation on pain of continued bombing by Israel and the slaughter of hundreds a day are presented to confused liberal readers in the West as magnanimous olive branches.
“War is peace” is a popular cliche in reference to Orwell used to mock deceptive language like this. So when The New York Times and Guardian adopt, more or less, this exact phrasing unironically, it doesn’t bode well for Western media’s ability to accurately capture how extreme, dangerous, and wanton Israel’s latest escalation in violence is.
Note: Update of my previous article from March 2008.
Except for a brief interlude during the Eisenhower administration, United States’ support for Israel, in its genocide of the Palestinian people, has been an ongoing process since the Truman administration recognized the state. Contemporary events prompt a review of the post-World War II history that resulted in the formation of a nation that had no visible name until David Ben Gurion proclaimed, on May 14, 1948, the state as Israel.
Books, articles, documents, memoirs and letters from past generations detail how a small group of insiders prevailed over recommendations from an experienced and famous U.S. State Department of “wise men.” It is the story of the Zionist mission. It is the story of apartheid Israel.
The impact, legacy and relevance of the 1946-1948 events to today’s occurrences have not been sufficiently explored. Under the surface are the hidden messages and obscure drives that shaped the past and extended into the future. A more complete analysis of the legacy from Truman’s rapid recognition of the state of Israel explains the past and clarifies the present.
In the initiation of a trend, supporters of those who derailed State Department Near East policy were able to integrate themselves into Middle East policy and subsequently shape global policies. Turmoil from initial events provoked a continuous turmoil in the Middle East. Almost all administrations framed Middle East polices to favor the Zionist cause.
The Truman State Department consisted of leading luminaries of U.S. State Department history. George C. Marshall, United States military chief of staff during World War II, first military leader to become Secretary of State and later a Nobel Prize recipient, had Loy Henderson, Robert A. Lovett, Dean Rusk, Warren Austin and other known figures in his department. Many of them were not entirely supportive of the UN partition plan; their State Department followed Truman’s directives until sensing the partition plan would be counterproductive and cause more violence than it intended to resolve. The record indicates the State Department attempted to modify Truman’s policy that favored partition. They sought a temporary UN trusteeship.
President Truman postured himself as motivated by a conviction — the displaced Jews who had survived the World War II Holocaust needed and deserved an immediate home. The U.S. president vacillated in his arguments and contradicted himself in statements. He railed vehemently against the steady stream of advocates for a Jewish state and retained several presidential advisors who pursed one purpose; promoting a new Jewish state. A suspicion remains that his humanitarian motives had a political content; the Democratic Party craved the financial and voting support of Zionist organizations and their allies.
Clark Clifford, Truman’s chief consul and ardent promoter for a Jewish state, quickly became one of the president’s closest assistants. He was not Truman’s principal assistant, a post held by John Roy Steelman, and behaved as if he were titular chief of staff by acting unilaterally and somewhat dubious in actions that proved decisive. The evidence points to Clifford favoring election expediencies in developing policies that led to the creation of the state of Israel.
The story begins at the closing shots of World War II and with the refugees in displaced persons camps.
The plight of the displaced persons could not be easily resolved. The United States was involved in returning millions of its armed forces to their homes, in the repatriation of captured enemy soldiers, and in preventing mass starvation in Europe. A possibility of a post-war depression and mass unemployment guided America’s political thinkers. In addition, the U.S. immigration laws did not permit the immediate admittance of the displaced persons, nor could it show favoritism. Unable to find a legal mechanism that would bring them to America, Truman petitioned Great Britain to allow them to immigrate to Palestine. British Prime Minister Clement Attlee cited the 1939 White Paper, which specified a definite number of applicants, as a limiting factor. He also suspected new immigrants would burden Britain’s over-stressed mandate and add troubles to the existing emergency.
Truman could not prevail over Attlee. What to do? After presentations by an Anglo-American inquiry commission and a joint cabinet committee (Morrison-Grady) failed to achieve welcoming peace proposals, a tired and irked British government requested the UN General Assembly to consider the Palestine problem. On May 15, 1947, the UN created the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP). The committee outlined a partition plan with the city of Jerusalem under a UN trusteeship. Truman instructed the State Department to support the partition plan. UN Ambassador Warren Austin and the state department’s Near East Division, led by Loy Henderson, doubted that partition could resolve the situation.
During the months of UNSCOP’s efforts, Truman complained of pressure by pro-Zionist groups. In Volume II of his Memoirs, p.158, the former president relates:
The facts were that not only were there pressure movements around the United Nations unlike anything that had been there before but that the White house too, was subjected to a constant barrage. I do not think I ever had as much pressure and propaganda aimed at the White House as I had in this instance. The persistence of a few of the extreme Zionist leaders — actuated by political motives and engaging in political threats — disturbed and annoyed. Some were even suggesting that we pressure sovereign nations into favorable votes in the General Assembly.
This harsh rhetoric was mild compared to other Truman’s statements concerning the Zionists and its American leaders, especially Cleveland’s Rabbi Silver. In a memorandum to advisor David K. Niles, the president wrote, “We could have settled this whole Palestine thing if U.S. politics had been kept out of it. Terror and Silver are the contributing cause of some, if not all of our troubles.”
On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly approved the UNSCOP Partition plan. Approval only meant agreement in principle. No effective means for transferring the principle into an operational result had been determined. The lack of enforcement provoked more conflict in Palestine. Each side strived to gain territory and advantage. The uncontrolled mayhem steered the U.S. State Department to adopt the concept of a temporary trusteeship for the area. Believing it had President Truman’s approval, the State Department instructed the U.S. delegation to the United States to petition for a special session of the General Assembly and reconsider the Palestinian issue. In his presentation, UN Ambassador Warren Austin proposed the establishment of a temporary trusteeship for Palestine.
Truman denied giving a green light for the presentation and wrote in his diary, which has been quoted in “The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman, P.127. “This morning I find that the State dept. has reversed my Palestine policy. The first I knew about it is what I see in the papers. Isn’t that hell!” His infuriation arose from embarrassment of having assured Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, whom he highly regarded, that the U.S. would not depart from the Partition Plan and would not entertain a temporary trusteeship. George McKee Elsey, in his memoir, An Unplanned Life, p.161, supplied evidence of Truman’s awareness and permission for the speech. White House staff member Elsey writes:
In fact, as I quickly learned in delving into the record and querying White House and State Staff, Truman had personally read and approved some days earlier the Austin speech, which outlined a plan for U.N. trusteeship of Palestine when the British Mandate ended in May in lieu of partitioning the area into separate Jewish and Arab territories.
The May 15 date for the British exit neared, and the Zionists prepared to declare their state and present their credentials for recognition. Contradictions in U.S. Near East policy led to policies that became completely confusing.
In a speech to the UN General Assembly, March 25, 1948, President Truman clarified his nation’s temporary endorsement of a UN Trusteeship for Palestine that did not prejudice partition. The pleased State Department instructed Ambassador Austin to proceed with deliberations of the Trusteeship proposal. As if not cognizant of the UN trusteeship discussion, Truman prepared to recognize the soon to be formed state. On May 12, two days before an expected announcement by the Jewish Agency in Palestine, an angered George C. Marshall and his assistant Robert Lovett confronted Truman and demanded reasons for the haste in wanting to grant recognition. The president selected his counsel Clark Clifford, who was not involved in foreign policy, to clarify the reasons for the intended recognition.
Clifford’s principal reasons for instant recognition: The UN Security Council could not obtain a truce in hostilities; partition would happen in fact; the U.S. would eventually have to recognize a new state, and it was preferable to get the jump on the Soviet Union.
Clifford’s arguments are easily rebutted. (1) More significant than whether or not the Security Council could obtain a truce was that the UN council was engaged in discussions hoping to achieve a truce. Recognition would close the discussions and prevent the truce. (2) If the Trusteeship was approved and implemented, an entity unilaterally invoking a partition scheme would violate the UN dictates. (3) Clifford’s simple explanation that the U.S. must recognize the new state quickly because the U.S. must recognize the new state was a statement and not a clarification. (4) As for the Soviet Union, Clifford echoed the alarm of Phillip C. Jessup, a member of the U.S. delegation to the UN, who, according to Robert J. Donovan in his book Conflict and Crisis, The Presidency of Harry S. Truman, p.380, cabled UN affairs officer Dean Rusk that the Soviet Union wanted recognition to use Article 51 of the UN charter to protect the new state and thus gain a foothold in the Middle East. This view is specious — Article 51 pertains to defense of member states and the new nation did not become a UN member until one year later. Besides, wasn’t it advantageous for the U.S. to have the Soviet Union recognize the new state before it did? The State Department could then claim it had no choice and would lose less favor with the Arab states.
Marshall questioned why a domestic affairs advisor was determining foreign policy. Truman replied that he had invited Clifford to make a presentation. Obviously, Truman did not want history to record his words and asked his campaign manager to speak for him. Sensing that politics and the forthcoming presidential election had become overriding factors in a significant foreign policy decision, the dedicated George C. Marshall uttered one of the most insulting words ever directed by a cabinet official to a president, “If you follow Clifford’s advice, and if I were to vote in the next election, I would vote against you.” Clark Clifford’s Memoir, Council to the President, P.13, mentions that the Secretary also insisted that these personal remarks be included in the official state department record of the meeting. Whew! (Vice President Harris take note.)
Fearing that the transfer of advice on Near East affairs from the state and defense departments to inexperienced advisors and non-professional lobbyists would continue, Assistant Secretary of State Robert Lovett determined to change Truman’s intentions. For some unknown reason, rather than calling the president directly, he channeled his inquiries through Counselor Clark Clifford. The president’s counselor didn’t speak to the president about Lovett’s urgencies, but assumed a new role ─ he spoke for the president. In response to Lovett’s request to ask Truman to delay recognition, Clifford confesses in his memoir, P.22,
Saying (to Lovett) I would check with the President, I waited about three minutes and called Lovett back to say that delay was out of the question. It was about 5:40 and the State Department has run out of time and ideas.
Within a few minutes, one of the most bizarre sequence of events that had ever occurred in U.S. diplomacy unfolded.
Clifford states he called Dean Rusk and asked the UN affairs officer to inform Warren Austin, chief of the U.S. delegation to the UN, that the president intended to recognize the new Near East state within fifteen minutes. His called bypassed protocol; usually the assistant secretary of state should be informed and that person has the obligation to inform other staff members of decisions. Clifford quotes a surprised Rusk as retaliating with the remark, “This cuts directly across what our delegation had been trying to accomplish in the General Assembly, and we have a large majority for it.” Rusk supposedly called Warren Austin who went home without bothering to inform the U.S. delegation of the news.
Truman’s rapid signing (within 11 minutes) of the document that gave de facto recognition to the ‘new state of Israel’ angered members at a United Nations meeting on the Trusteeship. After learning the new state would be called Israel, the words ‘Jewish state’ were crossed out and the words ‘state of Israel’ were inserted.
May 14 was an enviable day for the new state of Israel, but an unpleasant day for the 160 year old American republic. The diplomatic solution to the Near East crisis had been settled, but the conflict has not been resolved.
What does history show?
History supports the conviction that the Partition Plan would not resolve the hostilities. The State Department concern for rapidly recognizing a new state, without knowledge of its constitution or composition, was diplomatically correct and prescient. The quick recognition of a state for the Jewish population prevented the UN from finishing a discussion of providing mechanisms to prevent more bloodshed and providing proper protection for the state’s large Palestinian population. George Marshall’s State Department acted honestly, with knowledge, and with the conviction it served the interests of the United States
President Harry S. Truman correctly perceived the tenacity of the Zionists. He erred in his judgment that the Partition Plan would resolve the conflict. The unusual rapid response for recognition of the new state, without awareness of its composition, signified a pardon of the excesses committed by Irgun and Haganah against civilian populations and certified the exclusion of any Palestinian voice in the new government. Truman never asked what would happen to the 400,000 Palestinians who had no representation in the new state. Evidently, he didn’t consider that the placing of 100,000 displaced Jews into Palestine would also mean the placing of weapons in the hands of many of these persons and, together with instant recognition, would reinforce the eventual displacement of 900,000 Palestinians. The European DP camps were temporary shelter for those who would undoubtedly find permanent homes and citizenship; the UNWRA refugee camps became permanent homes for several million Palestinian displaced persons who languish with stateless identification.
The post-election provided Truman with an opportunity to show he was not captive to the Zionist enterprise. What did he do? He only half-heartedly pressured Israel in 1949 to resettle displaced Palestinians. This token maneuver is verified by Joshua Landis. In a paper published in The Palestinian Refugees: Old Problems – New Solutions, University of Oklahoma Press: Norman, OK, 2001, p. 77-87, Landis writes,
McGee threatened the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. that if Israel did not accept 200,000 refugees, the US would withhold $49 million worth of Export-Import Bank loans to Israel. The Israeli Ambassador was unimpressed with McGhee’s threat and responded that McGhee “wouldn’t get by with this move.” The Israeli Ambassador boasted that “he would stop it.”
True to his word, the Ambassador was able to nip McGhee’s threat in the bud. That same afternoon, the White house phoned McGhee to say that the President would have nothing to do with withholding loans to Israel. Never again would a State Department official under President Truman attempt to intimidate Israel on the issue of refugees.
Landis claims the U.S. President tried to resolve the Palestinian DP problem by offering the Syrian government $400,000,000 dollars in exchange for settling up to 500,000 Palestinians in the fertile plains between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. A president of a nation was willing to burden his own nation in order to relieve Israel of its obligation to the Palestinian refugees. In retrospect, he behaved circumspect and his compassion for victims depended on their value to the Democratic Party.
A humanitarian light brightened the parade of lobbyists for partition and this light managed to convince many of the validity of their cause. Later U.S. government Middle East policies repeated the intense lobbying that guided Truman’s 1948 decisions and subdued the power and recommendations of government agencies.
The darkened perspective, due to Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians, has not deterred the forces who continue to obtain a U.S. foreign policy that favors their direction. The memory of Truman’s electoral victory, which defied all predictions, continues to make prospective candidates for national office sense that winning elections depends upon support from those who also support Israel.
The legacy of the 1946-1948 events is well described. Control of discussions pushed a previous U.S. administration to provide a legal frame for creation of the state of Israel. Control of discussions continued and impelled contemporary administrations to provide the support for that frame. Without U.S. support, Israel’s authentic moral, political, economic and military character would have been exposed and its structure weakened. The Israeli state might have collapsed.
The genocide started in 1947, from an improbable ‘there’ and has continued until the impossible ‘here.’ By supporting Israel, the democratic and freedom loving United States has made the improbable a sickening and frightful reality.
