Israel and the Palestinian Authority are each convinced that the long reach of history is on their side; the Israelis believe that future generations throughout the world will be detached from the illegal and oppressive acts committed against the Palestinians and only be aware of their present situations; the Palestinians believe that a Jewish Israel has no place in an Arab world, will constantly face enemies and hostility from Arab and Muslim nations, and these nations will one day achieve sufficient power to force their dictates on the Zionist regime.
With its historical view, Israel proceeds to ignore Palestinian and international pleas to halt its oppression and continues with plans to fulfill the mission proposed by the Zionist Organization at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference — gain control of the land, obtain the aquifers, and create a greater Israel from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, and maybe further.
The Palestinian Authority proceeds with continuous compromises, with hope that an Israeli government will recognize the Authority’s efforts to achieve an arrangement that satisfies Israel’s wants and preserves the Palestinian community within the former British Mandate. The stoic nature of the Palestinian people, after decades of violent aggression against them, is remarkable. Observing the Palestinians enduring the daily criminal, scheming, vicious, brutal, and violent attacks and still maintaining their presence is a tribute to human resourcefulness, a remarkable achievement that deserves praise from the entire world.
Stoicism and commendable behavior do not move oppressive regimes that have the tools and forces to control the agenda. Israel remains recalcitrant. Nothing left for the Palestinians but to prove that Israel’s recalcitrance will work against its goals; with several millions of Palestinians within its borders, Israel will be a de facto binational state. Why not make it official and in accord with an agreeable plan?
With that in mind, Jonathan Kuttab, co-founder of Nonviolence International, offers a thoughtful, provocative, and commendable proposal, outlined in a book, Beyond The Two-State Solution. A brief summary of Jonathan Kuttab’s propositions:
Essential Elements of the New Order
1. Right of Return
The availability of this right is a serious requirement for Zionists, which Palestinians must accept. On the other hand, Palestinians, who have been forcibly denied access to their homeland, also must have a recognized right of return.
2. Equality and Non-discrimination
Public institutions, lands, funds, and resources must be utilized in the interest of all citizens, and discrimination must not be tolerated. Arabic, which is currently formally recognized as an official language in Israel, will need to be deliberately incorporated into public life, on a par with Hebrew.
3. Freedom of Movement
Restrictions of travel between the West Bank, Gaza, the settlements, Jerusalem and pre ’67 Israel must be removed, as well as the Wall and the checkpoints
4. Relations with the Arab world
Palestinians need to reevaluate their pan-Arab identity, and adjust it to reflect the reality that their state now is both Jewish and Arab to its very core.
5. Defense
The new State may require that the Minister of Defense, as well as a majority of the top brass in the army be Jewish as a matter of permanent constitutional law. Palestinians, however, must be free to join the army on the basis of equality, while all citizens who wish, must be free to demand exemption from military service for reasons of conscience.
6. Legal Protections In addition to a constitution that embodies strict guarantees that safeguard the interest of either group, the “Protection Clauses” must be safeguarded from alteration by requiring that they can only be altered by high majorities “Protection Clauses” will remove the ‘demographic threat’ and ensure that a group which has numerical majority will not be able to oppress a numerical minority, or that a future change in the numerical balance between the two communities will not make the minority vulnerable to oppression by the majority.
7. Ministry of Cooperation and Coexistence.
This ministry will promote understanding of the history, culture, and language of each community by the other. It will also promote joint activities and programs intended to heal the hurts of the past and build understanding and tolerance between the two communities.
8. Civil Law
New civil laws must be promulgated that will ensure the rights of secular individuals, mixed couples, and religious communities that are not currently recognized. These include Reform and Conservative Jews, as well as Evangelicals. Without derogation from the existing rights of religious courts, individuals who choose not to be so governed should be allowed to follow their conscience and not be forced to submit to religious courts of their particular religious community.
9. Name, Character, Public Holidays, Symbols and Flags
Careful thought and creativity with input from both sides are required to have these elements of national identity reflect the desires of both communities without exclusivity or discrimination against the others.
Aware that the One-state is a contentious issue and no plan will satisfy a majority of contenders, Jonathan Kuttab solicited comments to his book’s proposals. Here they are:
Only an Israel government that believes in political, economic and social equality for all persons, regardless of religion or ethnicity, that is guided by principles of peaceful coexistence, human rights, inclusion, and social awareness can implement Jonathan Kuttab’s design. That Israel does not exist, has never existed, and is unlikely to come into existence in the future.
Jonathan Kuttab has been idealistic and careless in expecting that this Israel will give attention to his well-formulated plan. Idealism is excusable. He has been careless by agreeing with nonsensical, spurious, and ahistorical statements consistently made by Israel’s promoters as a deceptive and supportive mechanism for the Zionist incursion. Jonathan Kuttab may not believe these deceptive narratives and felt it wise to appease those who could react angrily and scuttle the entire plan if the narratives were contradicted. Big mistake. It is dangerous to agree to anything with Israel, when agreement is not warranted. Affirm a narrative and Zionist supporters cite the acceptance as a valid appraisal of their mission. It is important to highlight these disagreements in detail, and have my responses serve as thoughtful retorts to others who express similar beliefs. Jonathan Kuttab writes:
The whole purpose of creating the Zionist movement and the state of Israel was the perceived need to create a country that can act as a safe haven where any Jew, anywhere and at any time, can feel free to go and live there, as of right in a state of his/her own.
During Herzl’s time, Jews were being emancipated, becoming integrated citizens of western nations, acquiring educational benefits, and achieving economic success in many countries. The principal reason for Zionism was not as Jonathan Kuttab suggests – just the opposite – due to their rapid advancements, Zionists felt that Jews would lose their attachment to Judaism and the Jewish community would wither. Few Jews at that time expressed sympathy with Zionism and most viewed Zionism as convincing their native nations that Jews had divided loyalties .
No questions asked. Israel currently has such an ironclad law (Right of Return), which it considers to be a Basic Law of constitutional stature. It also has a publicly supported network of institutions supporting this right. This seems to be one irreducible requirement for Zionists and Israeli Jews.
Nations that have a Right of Return give that right to previous nationals and usually their children. The Israeli Right of Return permits Jews from any nation to immigrate freely to a state that has no borders and from which neither they nor ancestors had any previous citizenship. Arabs who were previous Israeli nationals in the last decades, and whose children can claim direct descendant from an Israeli, have no right of return.
Immigration quotas that favor entry from certain nations and restrict entry from other nations are considered discriminatory. Israel goes full length, not allowing anyone from any country to immigrate, except a Jewish person. Israel’s self-absorbed and patronizing attitude of being the official protector of world Jewry imposes problems for Jews in other nations and violates the sovereignty of their home countries.
Given the experience of the Holocaust as well as millennia of antisemitic behavior in Christian Europe, including periodic pogroms and the Inquisition, security is an overriding consideration.
This is an exaggeration used by the Israeli government to convince the world that its oppressive attitude has a defensive reason. The inquisition, which affected other non-Catholics more grievously than it affected Jews, occurred 600 years ago in a primitive Europe. Why relate those ancient happenings to today? Anti-Semitic Christianity and pogroms were also happenings of the past. These specially originated words could apply to hundreds of other minorities, many of who have been treated magnitudes more viciously. I never met or ever knew any Jewish person who felt insecure because of the Holocaust or other occurrences. Do African-Americans fear being returned to slavery? Do British Catholics fear the United Kingdom and American South will return to persecute Catholics again? Security is Israel’s excuse for rationalizing every oppressive and offensive action.
Even secular Jews who resent restrictions imposed by the ultra-Orthodox, nonetheless have expressed a desire to live in a country where Saturday is the official Shabbat, life comes to a standstill on Yom Kippur, and where religious holidays are recognized and respected. They want a place where their tribal identity is recognized and where they can experience and develop Jewish communal life. To them, Zionism means a Jewish state, and a Jewish state reflects in some fashion a Jewish calendar, Jewish culture and a Jewish rhythm to public life.
Jonathan Kuttab is talking about a small segment of the Jewish community. Half of world Jewry lives in nations that do not have an official Shabbat, and more than half of Israeli Jews do not need or want to have their weekend activities restricted.
In addition to culture, tribe, and rhythm of life, the Hebrew language is of vital importance. This has taken on much more importance than a hundred years ago when Hebrew was more of a liturgical language, and very few spoke it as a first language.
Linguists debate if Israeli Hebrew is a continuation of an ancient language or is a new language called Modern Hebrew that contains some Hebrew syntax. Because there was not extensive literature, poetry, philosophy, and history in a Hebrew language, the necessity for mass knowledge of the Hebrew language did not exist. English, which had become the international language, sufficed and was preferable. Creating a new language, Modern Hebrew, suits nationalist, chauvinist, and propaganda mechanisms.
Many Israelis have publicly expressed willingness, within the framework of a genuine peace along the lines of a two-state solution, to abandon some or all of the Jewish settlements in areas occupied in 1967. At the same time, the reality on the ground, with over 700,000 settlers living in those areas, as well as the historic and religious connection to such places as Hebron and Jerusalem indicate that no major displacement of settlers can take place. An unspoken requirement therefore is to permit Jews to have the same right to live in all parts of Eretz Yisrael as Palestinian Arabs.
Although Jews lived in the Levant and controlled a portion of the area during the short reigns of the Hasmonean kings, ancient Hebrew contributions to civilization and verifiable history are sparse and biblically contrived. For contemporary Jews, a proven relation to an Eretz Israel is “zero.” Some remains of Jewish dwellings, burial grounds and ritual baths can be found, but few, if any, major Jewish monuments, buildings or institutions from the Biblical era exist within the “Old City” of today’s Jerusalem. The oft-cited Western Wall is the supporting wall for Herod’s platform and is not directly related to the Second Temple. No remains of that Temple have been located. Archaeologist William G Dever, in his book, What Did the Biblical Writers Know, and when Did They Know It?:What Archaeology Can Tell Us about the Reality of Ancient Israel, writes, “By the beginning of the 21st century, archaeologists had given up hope of recovering any context that would make Abraham, Isaac or Jacob credible historical figures.” Jewish connection to Hebron remains a mythical story.
The Zionist movement and the State of Israel was formulated as a response to worldwide antisemitism. It was promoted as a refuge and potential champion and rescuer for Jews worldwide. It also fully depended on support of all forms from this diaspora. Jews insist that they are full and loyal citizens of whatever country they reside in, and correctly reject as antisemitic charges of dual loyalty.
Despite extensive recitations , no evidence exists of world wide anti-Semitism in the late 19th century, during the era of incipient Zionism. A few isolated groups in France and Germany accused Jews of attempting to dominate the economy and culture. Some attacks, organized to halt Jewish emancipation and combat Jewish competition, occurred early in the century in Germany (Hep-Hep riots) and others, related to exaggeration of acts by Jews and the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881, happened later in Russia. The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, an English-language reference work on the history and culture of Eastern Europe Jewry, prepared by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and published by Yale University Press in 2008, is an objective and authoritative source. Excerpts from their work, which can be found at https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Pogroms, show that “anti-Jewish violence in the Russian Empire before 1881 was a rare event, confined largely to the rapidly expanding Black Sea entrepot of Odessa,” and were “linked to the outbreak of the Greek War for Independence, during which the Jews were accused of sympathizing with the Ottoman authorities.” A later 1871 attack on the Jewish community was due “in part by a rumor that Jews had vandalized the Greek community’s church.”
The pogroms of 1881 and 1882, which occurred in waves throughout the southwestern provinces of the Russian Empire, were the first to assume the nature of a mass movement. Violence was largely directed against the property of Jews rather than their persons The total number of fatalities is disputed but may have been as few as 50, half of them pogromshchiki who were killed when troops opened fire on rioting mobs.
In all of Europe, from what I have been able to confirm, less than 100 Jews were killed and possibly a few thousand were injured in anti-Jewish riots during the 100 years of the 19th century that witnessed the establishment of political Zionism. For context, compare those figures to other atrocities during that time, all of which are rarely mentioned.
California, United States: During 1846-1873, 9,492 – 120,000 perished or deported.
Amerindian population in California declined by 80% during the period.
Queensland, Australia: During 1840-1897, 10,000-65,180 perished.
3.3% to over 50% of the aboriginal population was killed.
Circassia, Caucasus: During 1864-1867, 400,000-1,500,000 perished or deported.
90% to 97% of total Circassian population perished or deported by Russian forces.
Ottoman Empire: During 1894 –1896, 100,000 killed.
Massacre of Armenians in Ottoman Empire.
Statistics on casualties to Israeli Jews in the Zionist/Palestinian conflict from 1920 to 2022, compared to casualties to 19th European Jews at the time of the Zionist movement, demonstrate that the gathering of the Jews has not made them more secure or safe in Israel.
From the start of the British mandate in 1919 until the year 2022, 74 years after the founding of Israel, 24,060 Jews have been killed and 36,260 have been wounded in the Levant. Due to identification of the Jews with Israel, attacks on Jews in the western world are increasing. Sheltered by high walls and a strong military, Israeli Jews have been able to defend themselves against embittered enemies.
Safety from persecution.
Extensive reports demonstrate prejudices by Israeli authorities and citizens against the Middle East and North African Jews, Yemenite Jews, and Ethiopian Jews.
In the year 2013, 60 years after the Middle East and North African Jews came to Israel, government studies conducted in conjunction with The Hebrew University of Jerusalem found that “a job applicant with an Ashkenazi-sounding name has a 34 percent higher chance of being hired by an employer than a person with a Sephardi-sounding name applying for the same position, [and also that] over 22% of employers openly stated that they actively discriminate against applicants with Arab-sounding names.”
The Middle East and North African Jews who came to Israel were Arabs; the Ashkenazi were European; the Beta Israel were Ethiopians; and the Yemenites were from the Arabian Peninsula. Israel replaced the differing languages, dialects, music, cultures, and heritage of these ethnicities with unique and uniform characteristics, and created a new people, the Israeli Jews. Destruction of centuries old Jewish history and life in Tunisia, Iraq, Libya, and Egypt. accompanied the creation of a new people. The Zionists, who complained about persecution of Jews, wiped out Jewish history, determined who was Jewish, and required all Jews to shed much of their ancestral characteristics before they could integrate into the Israel community.
A variety of Jewish groups, considered religious terrorist organizations in Israel, have committed disturbing and violent acts against Jews, more in Israel than the rest of the world combined, including the murder of Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin,
Brit HaKanaim was a radical religious Jewish underground organization, which operated in Israel between 1950 and 1953.The movement’s ultimate goal – establish a state run by Jewish religious law. The Kingdom of Israel group was active in Israel in the 1950s. Members of the group were caught trying to bomb the Israeli Ministry of Education in May 1953, because they saw the secularization of Jewish North African immigrants as a direct assault on the religious Jews way of life and a threat to the ultra-Orthodox community. Keshet (1981-1989), an anti-Zionist Haredi group, focused on bombing property without loss of life. Sicarii, an Israeli terrorist group founded in 1989, plotted arson and graffiti attacks on leftist Jewish politicians who proposed rapprochement with the Palestine Liberation Organization. Lehava, an extreme religious minority, used terror to implement their views of how the society should look. Former Justice Minister Tzipi Livni stated, “This organization works from hatred, racism, and nationalism, and its goal is to bring an escalation of violence within us.” Sikrikim, an anti-Zionist group of ultra-Orthodox Jews, committed acts of violence against Orthodox Jewish institutions and individuals who would not comply with their demands. The Revolt terror group claimed the secular State of Israel has no right to existence; they hope to create a Jewish Kingdom in Israel. Arabs will be killed if they refuse to leave.
Today, Israel has its orthodox settlers daily committing crimes against the Palestinian population, continuous pogroms that the Israeli government and media treat as happenings that are part of daily life.
Conclusion One-state for all is a correct concept, but not a strategy. Until there is an effective strategy, the proposition is dubious. Transferring the dubious two-states to a dubious one-state occupies time and energy in futility, of which the Israeli government heartily approves, especially because its own strategy is to have a “no-state” – an assemblage of people in a land without borders, without a constitution, without a fixed set of laws, and without a nationality that is described by the state. Easy to expand and incorporate Jews from other nations when the land of Israel is a “no-state.”
Having one-state returns the area to the British Mandate and to what would have been the eventual outcome of the Partition Plan. To achieve that arrangement, either the Israeli legal and administrative systems will have to be changed, or the characteristics that defined the Zionist mission will have to be deposed. The one-state is a proper goal; overcoming the reality of the Zionist vision of a “no-state” is the principal priority.
On April 17, US airstrikes on Yemen killed 74 people and injured 171 in a dangerous escalation of US President Donald Trump’s war against the poorest country in the Middle East. A resident of the area around Yemen’s Ras Issa fuel port told Chinese media that “among the victims were employees, truck drivers, contracted workers, and civilian trainees of the port,” and “rescue teams recovering bodies and extinguishing fires were also targeted in [US] subsequent strikes.”
Trump’s attack targeted Ras Issa a vital lifeline connecting the isolated, bombarded country to outside supply shipments. For its part, the US administration claimed that the bombing intended to prevent Iranian fuel from reaching “the Iran-backed Houthi terrorists” in order to “deprive them of illegal revenue that has funded Houthi efforts to terrorize the entire region for over 10 years.”
While it is US policy to delegitimize Ansar Allah (also known as “the Houthis”) as “Iran-backed terrorists,” in fact, 80 percent of Yemenis live under the Sanaa-based Supreme Political Council led by Ansar Allah, making them Yemen’s de facto government. They have a huge degree of public support, as evidenced by the regular protests of tens of even hundreds of thousands of Yemenis opposing US aggression and supporting Ansar Allah’s armed support for Palestinian liberation.
Ansar Allah survived eight years of Saudi-led attacks on Yemen, a war of aggression (backed militarily and diplomatically by governments of the US, Canada, and Europe) that levelled civilian infrastructure and killed almost 400,000 Yemenis. Trump’s bombings will not destroy the vilified “Houthi rebels,” but that is not their goal. What Washington wants is to force Yemen to withdraw its armed support for Palestinians resisting Israel’s genocide.
After Israel launched its onslaught against Gaza in October 2023, Yemen imposed a blockade on Red Sea shipping to Israel. As Israel’s assault on Palestinians in Gaza reached genocidal proportions, Yemen launched drone and missile attacks against Israeli targets. From the beginning, Ansar Allah was very forthright: they stated that the attacks on Red Sea ships and Israeli targets would stop once Israel ceased its genocidal assault on Gaza. During the Gaza ceasefire of January 19 to March 18, 2025, Ansar Allah did cease its military actions in the Red Sea (even as Israel violated the ceasefire 962 times), clearly demonstrating the connection between Israel’s genocide and Yemeni military activity.
US efforts to paint the Yemenis as puppets of Iran, mindless terrorists, and maritime pirates are part of a concerted effort by Washington to obfuscate the just, defensive, and humanitarian motivations behind Ansar Allah’s actions. The recent phase of US attacks on Yemen began in January 2024 under former president Joe Biden, and these bombings received logistical support from, among other countries, Canada and the United Kingdom. After coming to office, Trump intensified the US war on Yemen. Since March, his attacks have killed more than 50 Yemenis, not counting the recent bombardment of civilians at the Ras Issa port. Reportedly, his administration is mulling a ground invasion of Yemen.
One must always keep in mind why America is upping its attacks on the Yemeni people. It is because Yemen is trying to prevent Israel, an outpost of US power in the Middle East, from carrying out a genocide. That’s it. International and humanitarian law mean nothing to Washington. US efforts to paint Ansar Allah as illegitimate, criminal, or aggressors are transparent attempts to rhetorically discredit a regional resistance movement in order to make the massacre of Yemenis palatable to Western audiences.
In the US empire’s eyes, the reason Yemenis need to be massacred is obvious: they are opponents of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Trump is massacring Yemenis so that Israel can continue massacring Palestinians. It really is that simple.
The bombed remains of automobiles with the bombed Federal Building in the background, April 19, 1995.
Sometimes we see pictures of ourselves from a decade or three back and think, what was going through their head?
In other circumstances, we don’t have to wonder. We know.
It happens to writers a lot. It’s often our and stock-in-trade.
I know exactly what I was thinking after the Oklahoma City bombing thirty years ago today, and it was not popular. But I recorded it in the April 25, 1995 edition of The Shorthorn at the University of Texas-Arlington. And the math sucks. It’s aged much better than the author.
In the Aftermath
To terrorize is to dominate or coerce by intimidation, the threat of violence, or the calculated perpetration of destruction, catastrophe, assassination, murder, etc. In the popular mind, terrorism is qualified by additional connotations. People recognize it as a vicious, cold-blooded attack on defenseless civilians or bystanding innocents. Few crimes are judged with such an unchallenged sense of vehement righteousness. Perpetrators of terrorism are hounded with unparalleled sanctimony and fanatic zeal. I read President Clinton’s pledge in the newspaper: “Nobody can hide any place in this country; nobody can hide any place in this world from the terrible consequences of what has been done.”
Indeed, I think . . . unless they are American.
Reports of the Oklahoma City bombing shock, enrage, and sadden me, but an ancient adage haunts my conscience: Those who live by the sword, die by the sword.
For the last four decades, the United States has perpetrated terrorist activities around the world. Our remorseless work in Vietnam, before and during the war, provided a chilling catalogue of American terrorism. The CIA-planned and CIA-executed assassination of the democratically-elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, evidenced a harrowing propensity for terrorist realpolitik. And the United States has repeatedly installed and/or subsidized puppet dictators around the world who perform terrorist acts on their own constituencies.
On a subtler level, in cases such as Israel and, until recently, South Africa, we support governments that permit, if not directly sanction, terrorist enterprises against their own indigenous populations, ranging from summary executions to simple violations of the most basic human rights.
I see tattered infant-victims of the bombing in Oklahoma City and cringe, rueful and angry.
But my jaw also stiffens as I recall the Guatemalan and El Salvadoran “Death Squads,” the genocidal military wings of regimes we encouraged and assisted in rises to power in Central America.
In Guatemala, we supported the coup against and eventual overthrow of democratically elected president Jacob Arbenz. The faction we bet on—and invested in—began an incomprehensible reign of terror, decimating over 440 indigenous villages, conducting an estimated 100,000 political killings (more than 40,000 termed “disappearances”), and leaving over 200,000 children orphaned. And our man in Chile, General Augusto Pinochet, upstaged his Guatemalan counterparts, employing tortures that included inserting sabers in vaginas and disemboweling female victims while their families watched.
And who can forget the “fraidy-Eighties” under Ronnie Reagan?
No one in Nicaragua can.
Men, women and children no different than the citizens of Oklahoma City were afraid all the time, and not just over one incident, but several every week. Besides funding and arming the Contras, we also published and distributed a terrorist handbook for their training. The CIA called it a “Freedom Fighters Manual,” but it included, among other things, detailed instructions (with illustrations) for making and utilizing Molotov cocktails.
And these are just are just a few of the examples where U.S. involvement in terrorist activities actually became public. There were no doubt countless others. In fact, by popular definition, the largest single terrorist atrocity in human history was the allied firebombing of Dresden, Germany in World War II. Although it occurred during wartime, it was a vicious, calculated attack on a virtually defenseless civilian community.
The second and third largest terrorist atrocities in world history were probably our nuclear strikes in Japan. These incidents pale in comparison to the widespread pogroms of Hitler, Belgium’s King Leopold, and the Catholic Church, but genocide is not a single act or terrorism—it constitutes a regimen of terrorism (of which our nation could be accused of domestically regarding indigenous people and Blacks and also in much of the Third World in general).
As Americans, we are largely and more recently unaccustomed to displays of first-hand terrorist bloodshed, but, for much of the rest of the world, it’s nothing out of the ordinary. They live with it every day.
I shudder at the scenes from Oklahoma City; but I also quake at our bloody ignorance. Did we think our acts of terror would never be reciprocated? Or that our fellow citizens were incapable of them?
Did we really think we could be immune from terrorism after having so long been one of its chief contagions?!
American terrorism has, however, evolved. Now, it’s openly encouraged and sanctioned by our commander-and-chief.
The post-WW2 ‘international rules-based order’ that supposedly underpins global affairs in the interests of peace, democracy and prosperity has always been largely a charade. But Israel’s continuing Gaza genocide, carried out with seeming impunity and with the complicity and even active participation of the US and its allies, has exposed the charade like never before.
Twenty years ago, at the 2005 World Summit, the United Nations General Assembly endorsed the doctrine of the ‘responsibility to protect’ or ‘R2P’. The key concerns were to prevent genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. Whenever populations are at risk of such crimes, the international community is supposed to take collective action ‘in a timely and decisive manner’ to prevent mass atrocities from taking place.
In practice, only some massacres matter, whether threatened or actual: namely, those that can be exploited by Western powers to further their own geostrategic interests (for example, see our media alerts here and here). The Nato-led attack on Libya in 2011 is a textbook example. Western politicians and their cheerleaders across the media ‘spectrum’ declared that the world had to act to prevent a ‘bloodbath’ in Benghazi when Gaddafi’s forces there were allegedly threatening to massacre civilians.
In fact, the public were subjected to a propaganda blitz to promote the Perpetual War that had already wreaked havoc in Iraq, resulting in the deaths of over one million people, the virtual destruction of the Iraqi state and the proliferation of Al-Qaeda and other militia groups.
In 2016, a report from the UK House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee summarised the destructive consequences of Nato’s 2011 intervention in Libya:
‘The result was political and economic collapse, inter-militia and inter-tribal warfare, humanitarian and migrant crises, widespread human rights violations, the spread of Gaddafi regime weapons across the region and the growth of ISIL [Islamic State] in North Africa.’
As for the supposed threat of a massacre by Gaddafi’s forces in Benghazi, the alleged motivation for Nato’s ‘humanitarian intervention’, the report concluded that this ‘was not supported by the available evidence’. Likewise, claims that Gaddafi used African mercenaries and employed Viagra-fuelled mass rape as a weapon of war were invented.
Nato’s actual goals were regime change and Libya’s oil, long pursued by the UK. After years of the West cosying up to Gaddafi, including by Tony Blair, the Libyan leader had become a hindrance to Western interests.
‘three weeks after [then UK prime minister David] Cameron assured parliament in March 2011 that the object of the intervention was not regime change, he signed a joint letter with President Obama and French President Sarkozy committing to “a future without Gaddafi”.’
Curtis added:
‘That these policies were illegal is confirmed by Cameron himself. He told Parliament on 21 March 2011 that the UN resolution “explicitly does not provide legal authority for action to bring about Gaddafi’s removal from power by military means”.’
Like Blair, Cameron should have ended up in The Hague facing charges of war crimes.
‘Unapologetic Genocide’
If the doctrine of ‘R2P’ was authentic, then there would have been massive international action to prevent Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, as well as Israeli terror acts committed in the occupied West Bank, including the routine killing of Palestinian children.
It took Amnesty International 14 months after the attacks of 7 October 2023 to publish a finding of genocide against Israel on 5 December 2024. A further four months have passed. In March, Israel shattered the ceasefire it never intended to keep, killing almost 1,600 Palestinians since then. According to the Health Ministry in Gaza, around 51,000 people have been killed by Israel since October 2023. The actual death toll is likely much higher. Israel has also halted all supplies of food, fuel and humanitarian aid into Gaza.
The killing of 15 medics and emergency workers last month by Israeli soldiers, and the attempted Israeli cover-up, with bodies and vehicles buried in a shallow mass grave, provoked not a single public condemnation of Israel from Western leaders, as far as we are aware.
BBC News, no doubt aware of public scrutiny and perhaps also under internal pressure from some of their own journalists, set its ‘BBC Verify’ team to work. This followed the publication of harrowing video footage of Israel’s attack found on the mobile phone of Rifaat Radwan, one of the victims. Heartbreakingly, he could be heard saying moments before his killing:
‘Forgive me mother because I chose this way, the way of helping people. Accept my martyrdom, God, and forgive me.’
The 19-minute clip revealed that the vehicles in the convoy of the Palestinian Red Crescent had their headlights and emergency lights on, with high-vis jackets being worn, flatly contradicting Israel’s dishonest statements of the convoy behaving ‘suspiciously’ and constituting a ‘threat’.
Early BBC reports carried the headline: ‘Israel admits mistakes over medic killings in Gaza.’
This was the BBC once again bending over backwards to minimise Israel’s crimes.
The headline was later updated to a more accurate, but still soft-pedalling:
‘Israel changes account of Gaza medic killings after video showed deadly attack’
Notably, BBC News did not use the word ‘massacre’ in its reports, which it plainly was. Nor did they spell out that Israel’s spokespeople had been deceitful in their statements. In fact, Israel has a long history of spreading disinformation and even outright lies: a crucial fact that is routinely missing from ‘mainstream’ news reports.
Instead, the BBC said that Israel had merely ‘changed its account’ of what had happened. Likewise, the Guardianwent with:
‘Israeli military changes account of Gaza paramedics’ killing after video of attack’
The 15 victims were but statistics, with little or no attempt to name or humanise them; no interviews with grieving relatives or account of their lives, their hopes, their ambitions.
Owen Jones put it well via X and, at greater length, in a video:
‘Imagine Russia executed 15 Red Cross medics and first responders, burying them in a mass grave.
‘Imagine it lied about this grave war crime. Imagine footage then proved this.
‘Would the BBC frame that as “Russia admits mistakes over medic killings in Ukraine”?
‘No it would not.’
On BBC News at Six on 7 April, international editor Jeremy Bowen concluded his account of Israel’s massacre of the 15 medics and emergency workers with a shameful piece of bothsidesism:
‘Israel now admits that its soldiers made mistakes when they attacked the convoy. It consistently denies it commits war crimes in Gaza. The evidence indicates that all the warring parties have done so.’ [Bowen’s own emphasis]
The egregious false balance, the failure to point out Israel’s long and disreputable record of lying, and the BBC’s refusal to use words such as ‘massacre’ and ‘genocide’ are all glaringly obvious to the public.
Historian and political commentator Assal Rad observed via X that Western media have no compunction giving headline coverage whenever ‘Russia lies’. But, in the case of Israel, the headlines use the weasel phrase: ‘Israel changes account’.
As mentioned, it is possible that both public and internal pressure on BBC News are occasionally having an impact on the broadcaster. As trade unionist Howard Beckett pointed out, the BBC initially reported the appalling Israeli attack on 13 April on the al Ahli Arab Hospital, the last fully functional hospital in Gaza City, with the headline:
‘Gaza hospital hit by Israeli strike, Hamas-run healthy ministry says’
BBC News systematically includes the phrase ‘Hamas-run healthy ministry says’ in its headlines, implying that the source may not be trustworthy. The headline was later updated to:
‘Israeli air strike destroys part of last functioning hospital in Gaza City’
As ever with BBC News, Israel’s excuse for the attack appeared near the top of the article:
‘The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it targeted the hospital because it contained a “command and control centre used by Hamas”.’
Richard Sanders, an experienced journalist and filmmaker, noted via X:
‘BBC again reports the Israeli claim the Al-Ahli Baptist hospital was a “command and control centre used by Hamas” without caveats – despite the fact such claims in the past have proved to be entirely untrue again and again. Bad, bad journalism.’
‘Bad, bad journalism’; namely, propaganda. But entirely standard for BBC News and much of what passes for ‘mainstream’ news.
Readers may recall that this is the same hospital where a devastating explosion occurred on 17 October 2023, killing 471 people, according to Gaza’s health ministry. Israel mounted a huge propaganda operation to try to convince the world that the cause was a ‘misfiring’ Palestinian rocket. However, detailed analysis by Forensic Architecture, a multidisciplinary research group based at Goldsmiths, University of London, which investigates human rights violations, revealed that a more likely conclusion is that the cause was an exploding Israeli interceptor rocket.
In the hours after the explosion, doctors who treated the wounded held a news conference at nearby al-Shifa Hospital. There, the British-Palestinian surgeon Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, currently Rector of the University of Glasgow, said that: ‘This is a massacre’, predicting that ‘more hospitals will be targeted’.
Dr Abu-Sittah would later say that the blast at al Ahli hospital was the moment when it seemed clear to him that Israel’s military campaign ‘stopped being a war, and became a genocide’.
Sky News correspondent Alex Crawford pointed out that this was the fifth time the hospital had been bombed by Israeli military forces since October 2023.
As investigative journalist Dan Cohen noted of the latest attack:
‘This is the same hospital Israel bombed in October 2023 and waged a massive media disinformation campaign to blame a Palestinian rocket. Now they don’t even pretend. Unapologetic genocide.’
Does Italy Have A Right To Exist?
Last November, perhaps seeking a viral ‘gotcha’ moment, a journalist challenged Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, with the clichéd question, ‘Does Israel have a right to exist?’
‘Israel doesexist. Israel is a recognised member of the United Nations. Besides this, there is not such a thing in international law like a right of a state to exist. Does Italy have a right to exist? Italy exists. Now, if tomorrow, Italy and France want to merge and become Ita-France, fine, this is not up to us. What is enshrined in international law is the right ofa people to exist. So, the state is there. The state of Israel is there. It’s protected as a member of the United Nations. Does this justify the erasure of another people? Hell, no. Not 75 years ago. Not 57 years ago. Surely not today. Where is the protection of the Palestinian people from erasure, from annexation, from illegal occupation and apartheid? This is what we need to discuss.’
A powerful reply indeed. Where is the much-vaunted ‘R2P’ when it comes to Palestine? Instead of discussing how best to protect the Palestinian people and, more importantly, taking immediate decisive action to do so, the West continues to support the apartheid and genocidal state of Israel: arming it, providing diplomatic cover, colluding with the Israeli air forces with RAF spy flights over Gaza and war operations, including the secret supply of weapons to Israel, being conducted from the RAF base in Cyprus.
As is well known by now, the International Court of Justice in The Hague is currently deliberating over a case of genocide against Israel. Last year, the ICJ declared that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories – Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem – is illegal. And the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant. And yet, Netanyahu was recently welcomed with open arms in Washington, DC, having flown through airspace in France and other European countries which, under their ICC obligations, should have denied him that privilege.
Palestinian journalist Lubna Masarwa, Middle East Eye’s Palestine and Israel bureau chief, observed that:
‘To western leaders, there are no red lines for Israel’s slaughter. Emboldened by the US and other western powers, Israel feels it can get away with unleashing hell on all Palestinians.’
She added: ‘The inhumanity of these times scares me, as a journalist and as a person.’
Last Friday, Mirjana Spoljaric, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said that Gaza has become ‘hell on earth’. Israel was ‘threatening the viability of Palestinians continuing to live in Gaza at all’. What is happening in Gaza is, she said, an ‘extreme hollowing out’ of international law.
As Andrew Feinstein, the author, activist and former South African MP, stated in a recent powerful video for Double Down News:
‘The West has a choice: stop supporting genocide or mutate their own democracies and destroy international law forever. The West has chosen the latter.’
When they shelled us with the second missile, I woke up and was surrounded by rubble. I realized that my leg had been cut off…. My father and mother were martyred. My brother Mohammad and my sister Dalia, too. I only want one thing: for the war to end.
The ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinians has made Gaza “the world’s most dangerous place to be a child.” For every child Israel kills, many more are wounded or maimed, causing mass amputations and disablement that amount to a direct assault on the collective Palestinian body. Our latest visual, created in partnership with Defense for Children International – Palestine (DCIP), tells the stories of children whose lives and limbs have been stolen by Israel, and how Israel’s targeted destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system makes it impossible for them to access much-needed medical supplies and rehabilitation services.
From forced starvation, to scholasticide, to mass displacement, to mass disablement, to mass killing, to separation from caregivers and loved ones, children in Gaza are facing conditions that no child should ever face anywhere in the world.
It was a massacre. Fifteen emergency workers, butchered in cold blood by personnel from the Israeli Defense Forces in southern Gaza on March 23. It all came to light from a video that the IDF did not intend anyone to see, filmed by Red Crescent paramedic Rifaat Radwan in the last minutes of his life. Caught red handed, the wires and levers of justification, mendacity and qualification began to move.
The pattern of institutional response is a well-rehearsed one. First came the official claim that the troops only opened fire because the convoy approached them “suspiciously”, enshrouded in darkness, with no headlights or evidence of flashing lights. The movement of the convoy had not, it was said, been cleared and coordinated with the IDF, which had been alerted by operators of an overhead UAV. Soldiers had previously fired on a car containing, according to the Israeli account, three Hamas members. When that vehicle was approached by the ambulances, IDF personnel assumed they were threatened, despite lacking any evidence that the emergency workers were armed. On exiting the vehicles, gunfire ensues. Radwan’s final words: “The Israelis are coming, the Israeli soldiers are coming.”
Then comes the qualification, the “hand in the cookie jar” retort. With the video now very public, the IDF was forced to admit that they had been mistaken in the initial assessment that the lights of the ambulance convoy had been switched off, blaming it on the sketchy testimony of soldiers. Also evident are clear markings on the vehicles, with the paramedics wearing hi-vis uniforms.
After being shot, the bodies of the 15 dead workers were unceremoniously buried in sand (“in a brutal and disregarding manner that violates human dignity,” according to the Red Crescent) – supposedly to protect them from the ravages of wildlife – with the vehicles crushed by an armoured D9 bulldozer to clear the road. Allegations have been made that some of the bodies had their hands tied and were shot at close range, suggesting a willingness on the part of the military to conceal their misdeeds. The IDF has countered by claiming that the UN was informed on the location of the bodies.
The Palestinian Red Crescent society is adamant: the paramedics were shot with the clear intention of slaying them. “We cannot disclose everything we know,” stated Dr. Younis Al-Khatib, president of the Red Crescent in the West Bank, “but I will say that all the martyrs were shot in the upper part of their bodies, with the intent to kill.”
The IDF, after a breezy inquiry, claimed that it “revealed that the force opened fire due to a sense of threat following a previous exchange of fire in the area. Also, six Hamas terrorists were identified among those killed in the incident.” This hardly dispels the reality that those shot were unarmed and showed no hostile intent. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and Palestinian rescuers have offered a breakdown of those killed: eight staff members from the Red Crescent, six from the Palestinian Civil Defence, and one employee from the UN agency for Palestinian refugees UNRWA.
The OCHA insists that the first team comprised rescuers rather than Hamas operatives. On being sought by additional paramedic and emergency personnel, they, too, were attacked by the IDF.
The findings of the probe into the killings were presented on April 7 to the IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir by the chief of the Southern Command, Maj. Gen. Yaniv Asor. On doing so, Zamir then ordered that the General Staff Fact-Finding Assessment Mechanism be used to “deepen and complete” the effort. That particular fact-finding body is risibly described as independent, despite being an extension of the IDF. Self-investigation remains a standard norm for allegations of impropriety.
Since October 7, 2023, the death toll of health workers in the Gaza Strip has been impressively grim, reaching 1,060. Health facilities have been destroyed, with hundreds of attacks launched on health services. The World Health Organization update in February found that a mere 50% of hospitals were partially functional. Primary health care facilities were found to be 41% functional. Medical personnel have been harassed, arbitrarily detained and subjected to mistreatment. A report from Healthcare Workers Watch published in February identified 384 cases of unlawful detention since October 7, 2023, with 339 coming from the Gaza Strip and 45 from the West Bank.
In the opinion of the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories since 1967, Francesca Albanese, “This is part of a pattern by Israel to continuously bombard, destroy and fully annihilate the realisation of the right to health in Gaza.”
The IDF, which claims to be fastidious in observing the canons of international law, continues to dispel such notions in killing civilians and health workers. It also continues to insist that its soldiers could never be guilty of a conscious massacre, culpable for a blatant crime. The bodies of fifteen health workers suggest otherwise.
One thing October 7 did accomplish was getting Israel and its allies to show the world their true face. Getting them to stand before all of humanity to say, “If you resist us, we’ll kill your babies. We’ll deliberately shoot your kids in the head. We’ll massacre medical workers. We’ll systematically destroy all your hospitals. We’ll rape you and torture you as a matter of policy. We’ll lay siege to the entire civilian population. We’ll make your entire land uninhabitable and then we’ll kick you all out and take it for ourselves. We’ll assassinate all your journalists and block foreign journalists from entry so that nobody can see what we’re doing to you. We’ll lie about all of these things the entire time, and you’ll know we’re lying, and we’ll know you know we’re lying, and you’ll know we know you know we’re lying. And we’ll get away with it anyway, because we hold all the cards.”
Sometimes I’ll run into people who say “What did Hamas expect to happen? They had to know Israel would do this!” They say this in an effort to lay the blame for Israel’s genocidal atrocities at the feet of Hamas, as though Israel is some kind of wild animal who can’t be held accountable for its actions if someone gets too close to its mouth.
But of course Hamas knew Israel and its allies would react this way. Of course they did. They knew they were dealing with a murderous and tyrannical civilization who is capable of limitless evil and doesn’t see Palestinians as human beings. They knew it because they’d lived under it all their lives. That is the problem they were trying to address with their actions on October 7.
You can disagree with the decisions Hamas made on that day. You can say they should have used other means to pursue justice. You can denounce them, hate them, do the whole public ritual necessary for mainstream acceptance in western society. But one thing you can’t do is deny that Israel and its allies have been revealing their true face to the world every day since, at levels they previously were not.
It’s all fully visible now. It’s all right there on the surface. We can try to continue pretending we live in a free society that believes in truth and justice and regards all people as equal, but we’ll all know it’s a lie. What we are, first and foremost, is a civilization that will actively support history’s first live-streamed genocide. That’s the single most relevant fact about the western world at this point in history. It’s staring us right in the face every day.
October 7 certainly didn’t make life any easier for the Palestinians, but one thing it did do was take away our ability to hide from ourselves. Hamas reached thousands of miles around the world and permanently destroyed our ability to avoid the truth about the kind of dystopia we are really living in. Our rulers may succeed in eliminating the Palestinians as a people, but one thing they will never be able to do is put those blinders back on our eyes.
When they shelled us with the second missile, I woke up and was surrounded by rubble. I realized that my leg had been cut off…. My father and mother were martyred. My brother Mohammad and my sister Dalia, too. I only want one thing: for the war to end.
The ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinians has made Gaza “the world’s most dangerous place to be a child.” For every child Israel kills, many more are wounded or maimed, causing mass amputations and disablement that amount to a direct assault on the collective Palestinian body. Our latest visual, created in partnership with Defense for Children International – Palestine (DCIP), tells the stories of children whose lives and limbs have been stolen by Israel, and how Israel’s targeted destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system makes it impossible for them to access much-needed medical supplies and rehabilitation services.
From forced starvation, to scholasticide, to mass displacement, to mass disablement, to mass killing, to separation from caregivers and loved ones, children in Gaza are facing conditions that no child should ever face anywhere in the world.
The court condemned Ukrainian authorities for failing to prevent a fiery 2014 massacre in which dozens of anti-Nazi activists were burned alive – but the judges’ political bias meant victims were implicitly blamed for their fate, and their families received a paltry 15,000 euro payout.
The European Court of Human Rights has found the Ukrainian government guilty of committing human rights violations during the May 2, 2014 Odessa massacre, in which dozens of Russian-speaking demonstrators were forced into the city’s Trade Unions House and burned alive by ultranationalist thugs.
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Citing the “relevant authorities’ failure to do everything that could reasonably be expected of them to prevent the violence in Odessa,” the court ruled unanimously that Ukraine violated Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the right to life. The judges also condemned the Ukrainian government’s failure “to stop that violence after its outbreak, to ensure timely rescue measures for people trapped in the fire, and to institute and conduct an effective investigation into the events.”
42 people were killed as a result of the fire, a bloody bookend to the so-called “Maidan revolution” that saw Ukraine’s democratically-elected president deposed in a Western-backed coup in 2014. Ukrainian officials and legacy media outlets have consistently framed the deaths as a tragic accident, with some figures even blaming anti-Maidan protesters themselves for starting the blaze. That notion is thoroughly discredited by the verdict, which was delivered by a team of seven judges including a Ukrainian justice.
As dozens of anti-Maidan activists burned to death, the ECHR found deployment of fire engines to the site was “deliberately delayed for 40 minutes,” even though the local fire station was just one kilometer away.
In the end, the judicial body determined there was nothing which indicated Ukrainian authorities “had done everything that could reasonably be expected of them to avert” the violence. Officials in Kiev, they said, made “no efforts whatsoever” to prevent skirmishes between pro- and anti-Maidan activists that led to the deadly inferno, despite knowing in advance such clashes were likely to break out. Their “negligence… went beyond an error of judgment or carelessness.”
The case was brought by 25 people who lost family members in the Neo-Nazi arson attack and clashes that preceded it, and three who survived the fire with various injuries. Though the ECHR found Ukraine violated their human rights, the court demanded Ukraine pay them just 15,000 euros each in damages.
The ruling also stopped short of acknowledging the full reality of the Odessa slaughter, as it largely overlooked the role played by Western-supported neo-Nazi elements and their intimate ties to the sniper massacre in February 2014 in Maidan Square which has been conclusively determined to have been a false flag. In the judges’ decision, they downplayed or justified violence by the violent Ukrainian football fans and skinheads, charitably describing them as “pro-unity activists.”
Russians burned alive while Ukrainian officials looked away
Ukraine’s Maidan protests commenced in November 2013 after President Yanukovych declined to form a trade agreement with Europe and renewed dialogue with Russia, and tensions quickly began to escalate between Odessa’s sizable Russian-speaking population and Ukrainian nationalists. As the ECHR ruling noted, “while violent incidents had overall remained rare… the situation was volatile and implied a constant risk of escalation.” In March 2014, anti-Maidan activists set up a tent camp in Kulykove Pole Square, and began calling for a referendum on the establishment of an “Odessa Autonomous Republic.”
The next month, supporters of Odesa Chornomorets and Kharkiv Metalist football clubs announced a rally “For a United Ukraine” on May 2. According to the ECHR, that’s when “anti-Maidan posts began to appear on social media describing the event as a Nazi march and calling for people to prevent it.” Though the European court branded the description Russian “disinformation,” there’s extensive evidence that hooligans associated with both clubs had overt Neo-Nazi sympathies and associations, and well-established reputations for violence. The football clubs involved later went on to form the notorious Azov Battalion.
Fearing their tent encampment would be attacked, anti-Maidan activists resolved to disrupt the “pro-unity” march before it reached them. The ECHR revealed Ukraine’s security services and cybercrime unit had substantive intelligence indicating “violence, clashes and disorder” were certain on the day. However, authorities “ignored the available intelligence and the relevant warning signs,” and failed to take the “proper measures” to “stamp out any provocation.”
On May 2, 2014, anti-Nazi activists confronted the demonstrators as the march began, and violent clashes immediately erupted. At roughly 5:45 PM, in the precise manner of the Maidan Square sniper false flag massacre three months earlier, multiple anti-Maidan activists were fatally shot “by someone standing on a nearby balcony” using “a hunting gun,” the ruling states. Subsequently, “pro-unity protesters… gained the upper hand in the clashes,” and charged towards Kulykove Pole square.
Anti-Maidan activists took refuge in the Trade Unions House, a five-story building overlooking the square, while their ultranationalist adversaries “started setting fire to the tents,” according to the ruling. Gunfire and Molotov cocktails were exchanged by both sides, and before long, the building was ablaze. “Numerous calls” were made to the local fire brigade, including by police, “to no avail.” The court noted that the fire chief had “instructed his staff not to send any fire engines to Kulykove Pole without his explicit order,” so none were dispatched.
Many of those trapped in the building died when attempting to escape by jumping from its upper windows, and those that survived were treated to more ‘unity’ by the violent demonstrators outside. “Video footage shows pro-unity protesters attacking people who had jumped or had fallen,” the ECHR notes. It was not until 8:30 PM that firefighters finally entered the building and extinguished the blaze. Police then arrested 63 surviving activists they found remaining in the building or on the roof. Those detained weren’t released until two days later, when a several hundred-strong group of anti-Maidan protesters stormed the police station holding them.
The litany of security failures and industrial scale negligence by authorities that day was greatly aggravated by “local prosecutors, law enforcement, and military officers” not being “contactable for a large part or all of [the] time,” as they were coincidentally attending a meeting with Ukraine’s Deputy Prosecutor General. The ECHR “found the attitude and passivity of those officials inexplicable” – apparently unwilling to consider the obvious possibility that Ukrainian authorities purposefully made themselves incommunicado to ensure maximum mayhem and bloodshed, while insulating themselves from legal repercussions.
Because Ukrainian authorities “had not done everything they reasonably could to prevent the violence,” nor even “what could reasonably be expected of them to save people’s lives,” the ECHR found Kiev violated Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The Court also concluded authorities “failed to institute and conduct an effective investigation into the events in Odessa,” a violation of the “procedural aspect” of Article 2.
Anatomy of a Kiev coverup
Though left unstated, the ECHR’s appraisal of the Odessa massacre, and the officials who failed in their most basic duties points to a deliberate state-level coverup.
For example, no effort was made to seal off “affected areas of the city centre” in the event’s aftermath. Instead, “the first thing” local authorities did “was to send cleaning and maintenance services to those areas,” meaning invaluable evidence was almost inevitably eradicated.
Unsurprisingly, when on-site inspections were finally carried out two weeks later, the probes “produced no meaningful results,” the ECHR noted. The Trade Unions House likewise “remained freely accessible to the public for 17 days after the events,” giving malicious actors plentiful time to manipulate, remove, or plant incriminating evidence at the site. Meanwhile, “many of the suspects absconded,” the court noted. Several criminal investigations were opened, only to go nowhere, left to expire under Ukraine’s statute of limitations.
Other cases that reached trial “remained pending for years,” before being dropped, despite “extensive photographic and video evidence regarding both the clashes in the city centre and the fire,” from which culprits’ identities could be easily discerned. The ECHR expressed no confidence that Ukrainian authorities “made genuine efforts to identify all the perpetrators,” and several forensic reports weren’t released for many years, in breach of basic protocols. Elsewhere, the Court noted a criminal investigation of an individual suspected of having shot at anti-Maidan activists was inexplicably discontinued on four separate occasions, on identical grounds.
The court also noted “serious defects” in investigations into Ukrainian officials’ role in the massacre. Primarily, this took the form of “prohibitive delays” and “significant periods of unexplained inactivity and stagnation” in opening cases. For instance, “although it had never been disputed that the fire service regional head had been responsible for the delayed deployment of fire engines to Kulykove Pole,” it took nearly two years for the Ukrainian government to officially investigate.
Similarly, Odessa’s regional police chief not only failed to implement any “contingency plan in the event of mass disorder,” as required, but internal documents claiming that security measures had in fact been undertaken were found to have been forged. A criminal investigation into the chief took nearly a year to materialize, then remained pending “for about eight years,” when it was closed after the statute of limitations expired.
The Georgian connection
The notion that the incineration of anti-Maidan activists in May 2014 was an intentional and premeditated act of mass murder, conceived and directed by Kiev’s US-installed far-right government, was apparently not considered by the ECHR. But testimonies from a Ukrainian parliamentary commission which was instituted in the massacre’s immediate aftermath indicate the violence was not a freak twist of fate spontaneously produced by two hostile factions clashing in Odessa, as the ruling suggests.
That parliamentary commission found Ukrainian national and regional officials explicitly planned to use far-right activists drawn from the fascist Maidan Self-Defence to violently suppress Odessa’s would-be separatists, and disperse all those camped by the Trade Unions House. Moreover, the notorious ultra-nationalist Ukrainian politician Andriy Parubiy and 500 of its armed members of Maidan Self-Defense were dispatched to the city from Kiev on the eve of the massacre.
From 1998 – 2004, Parubiy served as founder and leader of Neo-Nazi paramilitary faction Patriot of Ukraine. He also headed Kiev’s National Security and Defence Council at the time of the Odessa massacre. Ukraine’s State Bureau of Investigations immediately began scrutinizing Parubiy’s role in the May 2014 events after he was replaced as lead parliamentary speaker, following the country’s 2019 general election. This probe has seemingly come to nothing since, although a year prior a Georgian militant testified to Israeli documentarians that he engaged in “provocations” in the Odessa massacre under the command of Parubiy, who told him to attack anti-Maidan activists and “burn everything.”
That militant was one of several Georgian fighters who has admitted they were personally responsible for the February 2014 Maidan Square false flag sniper massacre, under the command of ultranationalist Ukrainian figures like Parubiy, and Mikhael Saakashvili, the founder of infamous mercenary brigade Georgian Legion. The slaughter in Maidan brought about the end of Viktor Yanukovych’s government, and sent Ukraine hurtling towards war with Russia.
The Odessa massacre was another chapter in that morbid saga – and Europe’s foremost human rights court has now formally laid responsibility for the horror at Kiev’s feet.
Thousands of Syrian Alawites continue to seek sanctuary at a Russian air base, fearing for their lives in the wake of a series of horrific sectarian massacres carried out by Syrian government-affiliated extremist armed groups.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Thursday that about 9,000 people were seeking refuge at Hmeimim, an air base established by Russia as part of its 2015 intervention in the US-backed war that began in 2011 to topple the Syrian government of former president Bashar al-Assad.
Thousands of people have been sheltering at the Hmeimim Air Base near the coastal city of Jablah since 7 March, when extremist militants went from house to house in predominantly Alawite towns and villages, killing residents and looting and burning their homes.
Amid its beautiful and quite vales of Parachinar lying between the two neighbouring countries, Pakistan, the echoing of muffled screams can be heard far too often as families lose their dear ones to sectarian terrorism. Once surrounded by the natural beauty and orderly with friendly neighbours and kin folk, this town can now boast about appearing to be hell on earth—the manifestation of an entrenched conflict that has taken so many lives. It is not a story of just a small town named Parachinar but also a testimony of hatred between two sects of a religion that has not come to its lowest even today in Pakistan and so in the world.
Hence, Parachinar is perhaps the habitual site of this systematic genocide of the Shia community, which is not just shocking but has become normal in the region. The last act of violence happened on November 21, 2024, when armed men targeted and attacked two convoys of Shia pilgrims in Kurram district; at least 42 people were killed, including women and children. Such attacks, which occurred while under police escort, are proof that insecurity remains a major problem in the region. The violence is however new in the region since July this year, and most recurrent conflicts are due to land issues between the Shia and Sunni militias. The retaliatory violence that followed led to over 80 fatalities within days. That is Shane’s argument, and he blamed most of the carnage on the Sunni insurgents: all but 28 of the dead were Shia. This cycle of violence, fanned by ethnic and tribal animosities as well as historical enmities, highlights longstanding social tension in Kurram that makes the region rather sensitive because of the mixed population.
This incidence of violence is not an isolated event but is part and parcel of a sectarian problem in Pakistan. That such violence cannot be controlled by the Pakistani government shows that the problem is a failure of governance. Conflict and fighting between different Shia and Sunni groups in Kurram has become almost an annual event over the years; in the period between 2007 and 2011, more than 2,000 peopledied in Kurram. At a governmental and societal level, the recent increase in deaths and tears of families is a clear indication that intervention is required.
The tragedy in Parachinar occurred in November 2024, in particular on November 21, a brutal attack on Shia pilgrims. Gunmen pumped bullets on two convoys accompanied by the police, in which 42 persons lost their lives, including women and children. What happened is not unique, but it fits into a dark trend—a growing cycle of violence that has only amplified since the summer. This conflict arose basically from land disagreement between the Shia and Sunni; this led to acts of revenge killing over eighty persons, of which sixty-six were from Shia. These occurrences cannot be just viewed as skirmishes but point to the incessant bitter ethnic enmity and past resentments that still exist in Kurram.
The government response has been quite poor. Although Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif also expressed his anger against the violence in the country, this was done very late and with insufficient actions and words of the victims’ families mourning in Pakistan. Demonstrations across Pakistan have protested about inaction against what is regarded as the genocide of Shia Muslims. However, unsurprisingly, the government is yet to suggest clear courses of action. This passivity is symptomatic of a larger social and governmental negligence in shielding its people from sectarian militant aggression.
This violence in Kurram has deeper seeds, compounded by regional and political factors and perhaps bad governance. More than 2,000 people have died due to sectarian clashes in this region between the periods of 2007 and 2011. The recent steps were provoked by local concerns and the Shia-Sunni strife that emerged during the Syrian civil war, which was used by radicals. This unfortunate phenomenon of sectarian violence in Pakistan, especially against Shai Muslims, has led to several critical questions concerning security and relationships within and between groups in a country that has well-rooted sectarian tension.
Inability to address these problems continues to perpetrate violence in Pakistan and brings discredit to the government at the international level. It is symptomatic of a broader problem of governance in which policing or security does not suffice. There is another important factor of the situation: violence against women, which during the conflict intensified due to the constant impunity of the actions of those who use violence and general disregard for the rights of minorities.
Opposition parties in Pakistan have joined people in the streets to make their condemnation of the attack in Parachinar very loud and clear. The protesters have demanded that the government provide security for its people against cultists’ aggression. Such attacks need to be condemned by the government, and such condemnation, as laudable as it is, falls short of what is required. Increased security measures, identification, arrest, and prosecution of those persons responsible for such attacks, and sustainable solutions to looking into the grievances of these sects are called for.
While the Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has rightly condemned the violence, it is extremely necessary to move towards practical politics and take strong actions against the culprits. The establishment should define the type of security it has in store for everyone, including non-Muslims. Thus, international pressure is important in compelling the government to implement mechanisms that would ensure such incidences are not repeated. It is high time global society stood up and demanded that Pakistan should do something to address the unenviable situation of vulnerable groups in the country.
For this reason, it is now the responsibility of the international community to bring the plight of Parachinar to the limelight so as to apply pressure to Pakistan to perform its primary function of protecting its citizens. Various stakeholders should continue putting pressure on governments to enhance law enforcement, implement security measures, and promote entities that vigorously respect religious and ethnic diversity. Fatima and other victims’ voices must be escalated to create empathy towards the terrible acts witnessed happening in Parachinar and areas like this.
It is important to support organisations that are actively combating extremism and building healing and unity as a result. These organisations are at the centre of the problem, helping the victims, fighting for their rights, and seeking reconciliation. In this respect, NGOs are of immense help to women because, through providing assistance of various kinds, increasing the public’s visibility towards such issues, as well as initiating and supporting changes in the law, they help to halt the violence. It is not only for the reason to save lives of Shia Muslims under attack in Parachinar but to enhance the status of any minority across Pakistan and other countries as well.
This pain of Parachinar needs to go to remind the world how much it requires the values of empathy and togetherness. This is evidenced by the constant fear experienced or persecution, suffering that pervades the lives of its people, therefore the need to pay attention and act. Let us not forget the lives lost, and let us try to make the valleys of Parachinar do not ring with pains instead with the animation of tomorrow’s smile. Parachinar catastrophe is a test for humanity; it is the struggle between right and wrong, good and evil—violation of human rights. It becomes possible only when we recognise these conflicts and work to eradicate them in order to have a society where sectarian violence has no room.
South Africa’s legal team has submitted hundreds of documents containing what it calls “undeniable evidence” as part of its ongoing genocide case against the state of Israel, with the South African representative to The Hague telling Al Jazeera that “The problem we have is that we have too much evidence.”
The Israeli outlet Haaretzreports that IDF soldiers are actively blocking the return of Palestinians they have driven out of northern Gaza as part of the so-called “General’s Plan” — a land grab of Palestinian territory using ethnic cleansing by violent force.
Haaretz has been far more critical of Israel’s actions than western media outlets have been. It recently published an editorial titled “If It Looks Like Ethnic Cleansing, It Probably Is.” Haaretz publisher Amos Schocken is now publicly advocating international sanctions on the Israeli government for its apartheid abuses and opposition to a Palestinian state, drawing an outraged response from the Netanyahu regime.
Last week there was a two-day rally attended by multiple Israeli government officials called the “Preparing to Resettle Gaza Conference,” which was exactly what it sounds like: high-profile Israelis gathering to discuss the agenda to drive Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip and replace their territory with Jewish settlements.
Humanitarian aid in Gaza has reportedly fallen to its lowest level since Israel’s genocidal onslaught began, with just a few hundred truckloads entering the enclave from October 1 to October 22 and nothing getting through to the north. The UN’s Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs recently warned that “The entire population of North Gaza is at risk of dying,” a warning that was issued shortly before the Israeli Knesset voted to cut off UNRWA aid throughout all the territories it controls.
According to a new report from the Washington Post, the US State Department has been inundated with hundreds of reports of US-supplied weapons being used to needlessly kill and harm civilians in Gaza, but in violation of its own rules it has failed to take any action on a single one of them. According to one WaPo source, investigations of these reports have tended to stall out at the “verification” stage, which consists of asking the Israeli government for its side of the story.
Israeli forces reportedly killed 109 Palestinians in a single massacre on Tuesday — including dozens of children — when Israel blew up an apartment building where hundreds of civilians were sleeping.
The IDF killed five journalists in a single day last Sunday, bringing the total number of journalists murdered in Israel’s genocidal assault to at least 180. This occurred shortly after Israel published a kill list of six Al Jazeera journalists who it claims are secret Hamas fighters, although no Al Jazeera reporters were among the five killed.
And this is just in Gaza. Israel has already killed some 164 healthcare workers in its ongoing assault on Lebanon, where the Netanyahu government is sabotaging ceasefire negotiations by inserting ridiculous non-starter demands like Israeli planes being allowed to enter Lebanese airspace and Israeli forces being allowed to police the ceasefire deal with military operations in southern Lebanon as they see fit.
Every day there’s more and more ugly news in the middle east, perpetrated by Israel and its powerful western backers who make its abuses possible. It’s getting harder and harder to stay on top of. There really is “too much evidence” to keep up with.
After a full year of unbridled genocide in Gaza, escalating slaughter in the West Bank, and now similar crimes inflicted on the Lebanese, Britain’s brand-new prime minister Keir Starmer made this astounding announcement the other day: “We stand with Israel.”
He also has the UK military helping to protect Israel from Iran’s rockets while doing nothing to defend unarmed Palestinian women and children from the daily carnage inflicted by Israel’s “most moral” military.
He refers to Hamas’s murderous breakout last October 7 but never mentions Israel’s massacres and other atrocities against Palestinians in the decades leading up to October 7. Yet he practised as a human rights lawyer and was Director of Public Prosecutions. Would you believe it?
So what makes Western leaders abandon all sense of justice, all common sense and all norms of human decency in order to support, protect and supply a rogue regime in its lust to dominate, oppress, steal and butcher? Why such adoration for Israel in our corridors of power? Nobody I’ve spoken to can understand it.
But it looks like the culprit could be America’s QME doctrine. In 2008 Congress enacted legislation requiring that US arms sales to any country in the Middle East other than Israel must not adversely affect Israel’s “qualitative military edge” (QME).
Ensuring the apartheid state always has the upper hand over it neighbours
Legislation defines QME as “the ability to counter and defeat any credible conventional military threat from any individual state or possible coalition of states or from nonstate actors, while sustaining minimal damages and casualties, through the use of superior military means, possessed in sufficient quantity, including weapons, command, control, communication, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities that in their technical characteristics are superior in capability to those of such other individual or possible coalition of states or nonstate actors.”
In a speech to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy on 4 November 2011, Andrew Shapiro (Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs at the State Department), enlarged on QME saying: “As a result of the Obama Administration’s commitment, our security relationship with Israel is broader, deeper and more intense than ever before. One of my primary responsibilities is to preserve Israel’s Qualitative Military Edge, or QME. This is not just a top priority for me, it is a top priority for the Secretary and for the President.
“It is widely known that our two countries share a special bond that is rooted in our common values and interwoven cultures…. We are committed to that special bond, and we are going to do what’s required to back that up, not just with words but with actions.’
“The cornerstone of America’s security commitment to Israel has been an assurance that the United States would help Israel uphold its qualitative military edge. This commitment was written into law in 2008 and each and every security assistance request from the Israeli Government is evaluated in light of our policy to uphold Israel’s Qualitative Military Edge.”
‘Strongly in sync’
Shapiro explained how, for three decades, Israel had been the leading beneficiary of US security assistance through the Foreign Military Financing programme (FMF) which was providing $3 billion per year for training and equipment. A 2007 memorandum of understanding provided for $30 billion in security assistance over 10 years, allowing Israel to purchase the sophisticated defence equipment it needs to maintain its qualitative military edge. 60 percent of US security assistance funding to some 70 countries went to Israel.
And here’s the funny bit. Shapiro claimed: “Our support for Israel’s security helps preserve peace and stability in the region. If Israel were weaker, its enemies would be bolder. This would make broader conflict more likely, which would be catastrophic to American interests in the region. It is the very strength of Israel’s military which deters potential aggressors and helps foster peace and stability. Ensuring Israel’s military strength and its superiority in the region, is therefore critical to regional stability and as a result is fundamentally a core interest of the United States.”
That’s worked well, hasn’t it?
“The United States also experiences a number of tangible benefits from our close partnership with Israel. For instance, joint exercises allow us to learn from Israel’s experience in urban warfare and counterterrorism.” Yes, gained from decades of assaults, bombardments and brutal persecution of the captive Palestinian people under Israeli military occupation.
“Israeli technology is proving critical to improving our Homeland Security and protecting our troops. One only has to look at Afghanistan and Iraq…..
“Israel is a vital ally and serves as a cornerstone of our regional security commitments. From confronting Iranian aggression, to working together to combat transnational terrorist networks, to stopping nuclear proliferation and supporting democratic change and economic development in the region – it is clear that both our strategic outlook, as well as our national interests are strongly in sync…. Our security assistance to Israel also helps support American jobs, since the vast majority of security assistance to Israel is spent on American-made goods and services.”
It was then time for him to demonise Iran. “The Iranian regime continues to be committed to upsetting peace and stability in the region and beyond. Iran’s nuclear program is a serious concern, particularly in light of Iran’s expansion of the program over the past several years in defiance of its international obligations.”
Speaking of international obligations, how safe is the region under the threat of Israel’s nukes? Why is Israel the only state in the region not to have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty? Are we all supposed to believe that Israel’s 200 (or is it 400?) nuclear warheads pose no threat? Why hasn’t Israel signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, and why has it signed but not ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, similarly the Chemical Weapons Convention?
Shapiro went on: “Iran’s support for Hezbollah and Hamas enables these groups to fire rockets indiscriminately at Israeli population centers.” A bit like America’s support for the Israeli Offence Force then. “Iran’s extensive arms smuggling operations, many of which originate in Tehran and Damascus, weaken regional security and disrupt efforts to establish lasting peace between Israel and its neighbors. As change sweeps the region, Iran has and should be expected to continue its attempts to exploit much positive change for its own cynical ambitions.”
And are we to believe that Israel’s long-term illegal occupation of its neighbours’ territories such as Gaza, the West Bank, the Golan Heights and Shebaa Farms has nothing whatsoever to do with the Zionists’ “cynical ambitions”? Has it never occurred to the Americans that Israel’s QME — all that power in the hands of an abusive regime — makes peace impossible? It is deeply worrying that successive US administration don’t seem to realise that Israel doesn’t want peace and never has — that peace gets in the way of its territorial ambitions. Or has America indeed realised this and made it part of the US’s “cynical ambition”.
Shapiro complained that despite its instability Syria was still providing Hezbollah with critical military and logistical support and that Syria might be supplying sophisticated missile technology. Perhaps he forgets that Hezbollah was set up in 1982 by Muslim clerics to fight the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
“For six decades, Israelis have guarded their borders vigilantly,” he said. But he surely knows that Israel has never declared its borders for the simple reason it intends to constantly expand them.
“We are taking steps to help Israel better defend itself from the threat of rockets from Hezbollah and Hamas. This is a very real daily concern for ordinary Israelis living in border towns such as Sderot, who know that a rocket fired from Gaza may come crashing down at any moment.” Funny he should mention Sderot, now home to Israeli land-grabbers. It is built on the lands of a Palestinian village called Najd, which was ethnically cleansed by Jewish terrorists in May 1948 before Israel declared itself a state. The 600+ villagers, all Muslim, were forced to flee for their lives.
Najd was not allocated to the Jews in the 1947 UN Partition Plan, they stole it using armed force. Britain, the mandated government, was in charge while this and many other atrocities were committed by rampaging Jewish militia, Najd being one of 418 Palestinian villages and towns they wiped off the map. Its 82 homes were bulldozed and their inhabitants, presumably, became refugees in nearby Gaza. Their families are probably still living in camps there. The sweet irony is that some of them are quite likely manning the rocket launchers.
Being a target for Gaza’s rockets and only a mile from the prison camp fence, Sderot has become known as ‘the bomb shelter capital of the world’, residents having little time to take cover. It is now a major propaganda asset of the Israeli regime and a compulsory stop on the brainwash tour for gullible politicians and journalists. When Barak Obama visited in 2008 he said: “If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I would do everything to stop that, and would expect Israel to do the same thing.” Yes, Mr Obama. But hopefully you wouldn’t be such a plonker as to live on land stolen from your neighbour at gun-point.
Shapiro revealed that the funding for Iron Dome was above and beyond the $3 billion from FMF. He also remarked that “many Israeli officers and enlisted personnel attend US military schools such as the National War College. These personnel exchanges allow Israel’s future military leaders to acquire essential professional skills, as well as build life-long relationships with their U.S. military counterparts.”
So it really is a cosy setup.
Additionally, “Israel benefits from a War Reserve Stockpile that is maintained in Israel by US European Command. This can be used to boost Israeli defenses in the case of a significant military emergency…. Israel is also able to access millions of dollars in free or discounted military equipment each year through the Department of Defense’s Excess Defense Articles program.”
Sheer bribery
Shapiro also touched on how the US keeps other nearby nations sweet. “Our longstanding friendship and our extraordinary relationship of cooperation is reflected in the more than $300 million in security assistance that we provide Jordan annually…. For the past 30 years, the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt has served as the basis for the $1.3 billion in annual Foreign Military Financing (FMF) that we provide Egypt. This assistance helps Egypt maintain a strong and disciplined professional defense force that is able to act as a regional leader and a moderating influence. Our assistance helps build ties between militaries, ensures that foreign militaries conduct themselves in restrained and professional ways, and creates strong incentives for recipient countries to maintain good ties with the United States.
“We have continued to rely on Egypt to support and advance US interests in the region, including peace with Israel, confronting Iranian ambitions, interdicting smugglers, and supporting Iraq.”
Shapiro was also aware of diplomatic efforts from some quarters to question Israel’s legitimacy. “As the President has said, Israel’s legitimacy is not a matter for debate. We have consistently opposed efforts to isolate Israel. We have stood up strongly for Israel and its right to defend itself…. We have refused to attend events that endorse or commemorate the flawed 2001 World Conference Against Racism, which outrageously singled out Israel for criticism. This Administration has also made clear that a lasting and sustainable peace can only come though negotiations and remains firmly opposed to one-sided efforts to seek recognition of statehood outside the framework of negotiations, whether in the UN Security Council or other international fora.”
QME’s collision with international law
He was referring, presumably, to those same old lopsided negotiations that have led nowhere. Israel has no claim to self-defence against a threat emanating from a territory it belligerently occupies. That has been made perfectly clear by the UN and other authorities. It’s the Palestinians who have a cast-iron right to self-defence, using “armed struggle” if necessary, against Israel’s illegal military occupation and murderous oppression (UN Resolutions 37/43 and 3246). UN Resolution 3246 also calls for all States to recognize the right to self-determination and independence for all peoples subjected to colonial and foreign domination and to assist them in their struggle.
Furthermore Palestinians should not have to negotiate their freedom and self-determination – it’s theirs by right and doesn’t depend on anyone else, such as Israel or the US, agreeing to it. The US, UK and Israel (the latter stating repeatedly that it will not allow a Palestinian state to be created) arrogantly ignore the rights of others. But legal opinion (Wilde) has it that when 138 of the world’s states at the UN General Assembly voted in 2012 to re-designate Palestine’s status from ‘non-member Entity’ to ‘non-member State’, this had the effect of establishing statehood.
Seriously, could no-one see that America’s crooked QME doctine would clash with justice and international law?
A further boost to this US-Israel love affair came in July 2012 with an Act called the United States-Israel Enhanced Security Cooperation Act of 2012. It included the following policy statement:
(1) To reaffirm our unwavering commitment to the security of the State of Israel as a Jewish state. As President Barack Obama stated on December 16, 2011, ‘‘America’s commitment and my commitment to Israel and Israel’s security is unshakeable.’’ And as President George W. Bush stated before the Israeli Knesset on May 15, 2008, on the 60th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel, ‘‘The alliance between our governments is unbreakable, yet the source of our friend ship runs deeper than any treaty.’’.
(2) To help the Government of Israel preserve its qualitative military edge amid rapid and uncertain regional political trans-formation.
(3) To veto any one-sided anti-Israel resolutions at the United Nations Security Council.
(4) To support Israel’s inherent right to self-defense.
(5) To pursue avenues to expand cooperation with the Government of Israel both in defense and across the spectrum of civilian sectors, including high technology, agriculture, medicine, health, pharmaceuticals, and energy.
(6) To assist the Government of Israel with its ongoing efforts to forge a peaceful, negotiated settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that results in two states living side-by-side in peace and security, and to encourage Israel’s neighbors to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.
(7) To encourage further development of advanced technology programs between the United States and Israel given current trends and instability in the region.
Policy (6) is nonsensical given the Israelis’ continuing refusal to recognize Palestine’s right to statehood, the recent passing of nation state laws reinforcing Israel’s apartheid, and the sidelining of international law and justice in seeking instead to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by arm-twisting negotiation.
Need to eliminate the Zionist Tendency
As Shapiro reminded his audience, President Truman famously took just 11 minutes to extend official, diplomatic recognition to the State of Israel when it was founded in 1948. He didn’t even have the sense to sleep on it, and the US’s unwavering commitment to Israel’s security has been one of the fundamental tenets of America’s national security ever since. While Truman, a self-declared Zionist, felt sorry for “the victims of Hitler’s madness” his hasty decision created millions of victims of Israel’s evil intent, which was so obvious from the start and is now laid bare for all to see.
It seems as if the UK has been roped in and superglued to America’s ridiculous infatuation with the apartheid regime and its genocidal maniacs. Here it’s a criminal offence to show support for Hamas or Hezbollah, but it’s business as usual with the loathsome regime in Israel. Clubs supporting Israel are still allowed to flourish at Westminster.
Our new trade secretary Jonathan Reynolds is reported to be in talks with a minister in Tel Aviv, Nir Barkat, who is one of the more extreme proponents of Israel’s brutal war in Gaza. The department says: “Our teams will be entering negotiating rooms as soon as possible, laser-focused on creating new opportunities for UK firms”, while British embassy officials in Israel talk about the “tremendous opportunity for collaboration between Israeli and British companies”.
Reynolds was responsible for the decision to end a mere 30 out of the 350 arms export licences to Israel, which was widely considered insufficient for sending the right message. Unsurprisingly Reynolds is a vice-chair of Labour Friends of Israel. As such he appears to be in breach of the Government’s Ministerial Code and Principles of Public Life which state that “holders of public office must avoid placing themselves under any obligation to people or organisations that might try inappropriately to influence them in their work….. They must declare and resolve any interests and relationships.” But people with such dangerous affiliation are allowed to occupy many senior Government positions.
The influence of the Israel lobby is so strong, and its enforcers so enmeshed in the fabric of Westminster politics, that politicians feel they must join their party’s Friends of Israel group and undergo indoctrination to qualify for a senior position.
With American presidents and senior politicians “either side of the aisle” so firmly shackled to Israel’s nauseating ambitions, it’s no surprise that their poodle, the UK, is similarly compromised. Successive prime ministers and their foreign secretaries have been amazingly keen to endorse Israel’s sense of impunity and grovel to its stooges inside and outside Westminster. How are we to rid ourselves of this malign influence?
One of the first tasks in securing peace is to purge the ‘Zionist tendency’ from all corridors of power in the West. This is where the problem lies. These are Israel’s pimps and stooges who identify with Zionism and promote its sinister and unlawful ambitions inside the UK and other Western parliaments. They are the root cause of strife in the Middle East. Time they were removed.
Tanya Haj-Hassan is a pediatric intensive care physician who has volunteered in Gaza multiple times over the past 10 months. She joins us to recount what she witnessed there and to explain why she is calling for an end to U.S. support for the Israeli military and the resumption of comprehensive humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip. Over the course of Israel’s assault, Haj-Hassan has treated victims of “massacre after massacre,” with injuries and casualties “enabled by American bombs.” She joins demands for Palestinian voices to be allowed to address the convention onstage and argues that Democratic Party leadership’s refusal is part of a systematic “process of dehumanization” targeting Palestinians.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Tanya Haj-Hassan is a pediatric intensive care physician who has volunteered in Gaza multiple times over the past 10 months. She joins us to recount what she witnessed there and to explain why she is calling for an end to U.S. support for the Israeli military and the resumption of comprehensive humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip. Over the course of Israel’s assault, Haj-Hassan has treated victims of “massacre after massacre,” with injuries and casualties “enabled by American bombs.” She joins demands for Palestinian voices to be allowed to address the convention onstage and argues that Democratic Party leadership’s refusal is part of a systematic “process of dehumanization” targeting Palestinians.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Ever since October 7, 2023, NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX, CNN, PBS, along with BBC, DW, NHK other Western-aligned entertainment/news conglomerates and wire services like AP, UPI, Reuters and Israeli media have sought to keep their viewers, readers, and listeners attention on the hostages and away from any explanation, reason, or justification of Palestinians seeking to exchange the hostages for some of the thousands of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.
This is of course consistent with the under-reporting of the Palestinians suffering the illegal military occupation, subjugation, and often murderous treatment from the Israeli military which operates largely with impunity within Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and elsewhere.
Western media focus on the hostages is even more important in justifying Israel’s wholesale annihilation of much of the population of Hamas governed Gaza, homes, apartment buildings, mosques, schools, stores, bakeries, playgrounds all claimed by Israel to be in defence of the Palestinian guerrilla attack of Israel on October 7, 2023.
However, since the U.S. has built up the Israel military to be one of the most powerful in the world and perfectly capable of defending itself against any subsequent Hamas resistance attack, the Israeli obliteration of Gaza’s cities and its people is obviously not defensive, and after Israel’s generations of crimes against Palestinians, the October 7 invasion was hardly unexpected. UN Secretary General António Guterres said as much right after the October 7, 2023 event. Guterres noted that “these attacks did not happen in a vacuum”—highlighting the impact of 56 years of occupation on the Palestinian people. (United Nations Press).
Israel’s Responsibilities as an Occupying Power Under International Humanitarian Law
Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur for the Palestinian Territories, regarding Israel’s right to self-defense in the context of Israel’s (illegal) military occupation of Palestinian lands and people:
“Israel has the right to defend itself, but it cannot invoke this right to perpetrate acts that violate international law against a people it is occupying.”
In her report to the UN General Assembly in October 2022, Rapporteur Albanese noted,
“An occupying power has a duty to protect the occupied population and cannot invoke self-defense to justify the use of force against its own protected persons.”
Western news outlets refer to Palestinian freedom fighters as “terrorists” constantly reporting that some Western governments list Hamas and other armed groups fighting the Israeli occupation as terrorist organisations; however, China, as a permanent member of the Security Council, has backed the right of the Palestinian people to use arms. Zhang Jun, China’s UN ambassador, stated in an address to the International Court of Justice concerning Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestinian land, February 22, 2024:
The struggle waged by peoples for their liberation, right to self-determination, including armed struggle against colonialism, occupation, aggression, domination against foreign forces should not be considered terror acts.
Beijing’s envoy said there were “various people (who) freed themselves from colonial rule” and they could use “all available means, including armed struggle.” (This seemed an indirect reference to the American War of Independence from Britain.)
As a conscientious peoples historian activist, I have allowed myself to be subjected to anti-Chinese, anti-UN, anti-Hamas, pro-Israeli news slants in the interest of knowing just how the average mainstream media addict comes to accept genocide as an inevitable condition of modern warfare and wars as an unpreventable source of financial gain.
Therefore NBC’s very poignant, even painful to look at and read, coverage of the Israeli Defence Force killing of 64 children during its freeing of 4 hostages on June 8, 2024, came as a surprise to this writer and life long sympathiser of the Palestinian inhuman predicament. This sorrowful coverage of the horrendous head wound and death of a lovely, four-year-old boy and the sight of a seven-year-old girl alive but with more than half her face gone, is perhaps one indication that just perhaps even the CIA overseen media of the hegemonic Western nations can no longer tolerate Israeli genocide in its ever more outrageously gruesome aspects.
Readers are invited to share some grief with Arab Palestinian families suffering soul crushing amount of anguish for the sheer numbers of the dead and dying children and the catatonic state of surviving kids. Just click on the hyperlink below:
NBC News June 8, 2024
Gazan families mourn children killed during IDF’s hostage rescue
WEB Gaza’s Health Ministry says at least 64 children were killed by Israeli fire during the June 8 raid to rescue four hostages being held by Hamas.
The four hostages — Noa Argamani, Almog Meir Jan, Shlomi Ziv and Andrey Kozlov — were safely extracted from the Gaza Strip and cameras captured their emotional reunions with their families after eight months of captivity.
The joy experienced by both Palestinians and Israelis during the first hostage exchange as they fell into the loving arms of waiting family and friends could have been repeated instead of this horrific bloodbath of some 270 Palestinians, among them 64 precious children on June 8, 2024
Noa Argamani, Almog Meir Jan, Shlomi Ziv and Andrey Kozlov will most likely never forget that their homecoming was one sided. No Palestinian got to welcome home family members long imprisoned with or without having been charged as seems to the case for so many incarcerated and more being seized every day.
Actually, how shall any of us ever forget that Americans have been backing and supplying these abominations of using weapons of mass destruction upon fellow human beings and their children in full knowledge of the profits being made by U.S. corporations.
In his very last article, ‘We are Spartacus’, published just a month before his death in December, John Pilger included a quote that exactly captured the truth of our time:
‘“This is a sharp time, now, a precise time …” wrote Arthur Miller in The Crucible, “We live no longer in the dusky afternoon when evil mixed itself with good and befuddled the world.”’
No-one saw more clearly than Pilger that the West’s use of ultra-violence to impose its brutal, zero-sum version of ‘international order’ is now completely out in the open. Even the blurred obfuscations of the state-corporate media lens are no longer able to hide the reality of who ‘we’ are.
Consider US Senator Lindsey Graham last month. With tens of thousands of civilians dead in Gaza, Graham dug down to some dark place and said on NBC:
‘Can I say this? Why is it OK for America to drop two nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end their existential threat war? Why was it OK for us to do that? I thought it was OK.’
Graham was mistaken; it wasn’t ‘OK’ at all. But anyway, his point:
‘So, Israel, do whatever you have to do to survive as a Jewish state. Whateveryou have to do.’ (Original emphasis)
The implication was clear. Past and future massacres of civilians – notably of women and children – were declared, not just ‘OK’, but unavoidable:
‘I think it’s impossible to mitigate civilian deaths in Gaza as long as Hamas uses their own population as human shields. I’ve never seen in the history of warfare such blatant efforts by an enemy – Hamas – to put civilians at risk.’
Graham concluded:
‘The last thing you want to do is reward this behavior.’
Israel reining in its US-supplied firepower to kill fewer civilians would be a ‘reward’ for bad behaviour.
Perhaps you remember Western politicians expressing such unapologetic savagery in the face of genocidal killing. We do not.
And Graham is not alone. Also in May, US Congressman Brian Mast called on Israel to devastate Rafah, where 600,000 children were then sheltering from Israeli bombs:
‘I think Israel should go in there and kick the shit out of them, just absolutely destroy them, their infrastructure, level anything that they touch.’
Three weeks later, on 27 May, media reported that at least eight Israeli missiles had slammed into Rafah’s camp of plastic tents. Refugees, mostly women and children, were burned alive. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting described the carnage many of us saw for ourselves on social media:
‘A boy cries in horror and fear as he watches his father’s tent burn with him inside. A man holds up the body of his charred, now-headless baby, wandering around, not knowing what to do or where to go. An injured, starving child convulses in pain as a medic struggles to find a vein for an IV in her emaciated arm.’
Worse was to come on 8 June when Israeli forces launched a raid to rescue four hostages from the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza. At least 274 Palestinians were killed with 698 wounded. The EU’s top diplomat Josep Borrell described the assault as a ‘massacre’, while the UN’s aid chief Martin Griffiths spoke of ‘shredded bodies on the ground’. Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, posted on X:
‘The #Nuseirat massacre will go down in history as one of the most appalling examples of disdain for Palestinian life in one of the most well-documented and boasted about genocides in history.’
The BBC headline reporting this massacre read merely:
‘Four hostages rescued in Gaza as hospitals say scores killed in Israeli strikes’
It was not at all surprising that the BBC mentioned the four hostages rescued ahead of the ‘scores’ – in fact, nearly 300 – Palestinians killed. News of the 274 Palestinian victims quickly dropped down the news page. Former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook commented:
‘BBC News’ main report on Saturday night breathlessly focused on the celebrations of the families of the freed captives, treating the massacre of Palestinians as an afterthought.’
Compare the BBC’s headline with one supplied by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights:
‘UN experts condemn outrageous disregard for Palestinian civilians during Israel’s military operation in Nuseirat’
Conditioned as we are by the ‘mainstream’ habit of normalising the unthinkable, we might not find the BBC headline all that biased – they just reported the facts. But just imagine if the identities of the civilians killed and the hostages rescued were reversed. While the deaths of 274 Israelis would have been a seismic event for the BBC for days and weeks, the liberation of four Palestinian hostages would hardly have been mentioned and certainly not celebrated. Journalists would have dreaded giving the impression that the release of four Palestinian hostages in any way justified the killing of so many Israelis. This New York Timesheadline would be unthinkable:
‘Hostages Reunited with Family After Israel Military Operation
‘Scores of Palestinians were killed, hospital officials said, as Israel carried out an intense military campaign to free four hostages’
Is it not clear how the value of one group of human beings is relentlessly raised above the other? The Washington Post even commented:
‘For Israel, a rare day of joy amid bloodshed as 4 hostages rescued alive.’
If the identities were reversed, the idea that a day on which 274 Israelis had been killed might be declared ‘a rare day of joy’ would be deemed unthinkable, obscene.
Despite the many hundreds of dead and wounded civilians, and so many massacres of civilians over so many months, headlines in The Sunday Times described the massacre as a ‘daring raid’, a ‘surgical strike’ that resulted in ‘celebrations’.
Although the Nuseirat massacre clearly trashed President Biden’s supposed ‘red lines’, US national security adviser Jake Sullivan also described the attack as a ‘daring operation’. The German Chancellor Olaf Scholz called it an ‘important sign of hope’. With hundreds of ‘shredded bodies on the ground’, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak expressed his ‘huge relief’.
How Many Gazans ‘Support Their Murdering, Raping Masters’?
For seven months, all political writers using social media have been relentlessly assailed by footage of tiny Palestinian children (often orphans) burned, bleeding, crushed, shaking in pain and terror, bits of broken skull protruding from their heads. We know we are living ‘in a sharp time’ when the Telegraph’s Associate Editor Camilla Tominey can respond to all of this on 18 May with a piece titled:
‘Admitting Gazan refugees would be proof that Britain has a death wish
‘We have no idea how many Palestinians support their murdering, raping masters’
Tominey wrote with utmost brutality:
‘We took in Ukrainians in part because we have a security agreement with Ukraine and can be fairly certain that none of those fleeing the Russian invasion are terrorists.
‘Sadly the same cannot be said for occupants of a country run by Hamas. Regardless of their medical – or other – qualifications, we have no idea how many Gazans support their murdering, raping masters, or how many have been further radicalised by war.
‘It would surely be better if these Labour MPs focused on our own problems, without burdening Britain yet further with someone else’s.’
Britain should not assume the ‘burden’ of helping injured babies and tiny, traumatised infants, when we have no way of knowing how many might ‘support their murdering, raping masters’.
Regarding rape, The Timesdiscussed (7 June) a United Nations report submitted earlier this year by Pramilla Patten, the UN secretary-general’s special representative on sexual violence during and since the Hamas attacks of 7 October:
‘Patten made it clear there was sufficient evidence of acts of sexual violence to merit full and proper investigation and expressed her shock at the brutality of the violence. The report also confirmed Israeli authorities were unable to provide much of the evidence that political leaders had insisted existed. In all the Hamas video footage Patten’s team had watched and all the photographs they had seen, there were no depictions of rape. We hired a leading Israeli dark-web researcher to look for evidence of those images, including footage deleted from public sources. None could be found.
‘The report would prove confusing to the Israeli political establishment. On the one hand, it gives substantial and substantiated credence to the sexual assault claims; on the other it does not show them to be systematic and specifically says Israel has been unable to produce evidence it has claimed to possess of Hamas’s written orders to rape. Patten also asked that Israel investigate “credible allegations” of rape and sexual violence against Palestinian women and girls gathered by the UN’s legal mandate mission in the Palestinian territories.’
The Times also cited Orit Sulitzeanu, the executive director of Israel’s Association of Rape Crisis Centres:
‘The first letter that I received from the government of Israel talked about hundreds or thousands of cases of brutal sexual violence perpetrated against men, women and children. I have not found anything like that.’
Tominey smeared the entire Palestinian population with this comment:
‘It is also worth noting that a Palestinian student has already had her visa revoked after saying she was “full of joy” after the October 7 attacks. Dana Abuqamar, 19, a law student at the University of Manchester, said that she was “proud that Palestinian resistance has come to this point” after the atrocities. It would be naive to believe that the average Palestinian wishing to come to the UK thinks much differently.’
Tominey linked to an earlier Telegrapharticle by Isabel Oakeshott from October 2023, which sympathised with the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza, but added:
‘To usher in an additional cohort of traumatised people, many, if not most, of whom will not share our values; will not speak our language; and will not find it easy to build new lives here, would be insane. With the right support, most would probably integrate – but we must face up to the uncomfortable truth that a very small number will not wish us well, and may repay our generosity by fomenting division and hatred in our communities – or worse.’
Oakeshott offered the warning of protesters who ‘appear convinced that the plight of the people of Gaza is the fault of the Israelis, as opposed to the cruel Iranian-sponsored militia that controls the territory’. This, she said, ‘has grave implications for community cohesion. How much more dangerous will this already febrile situation become, if we naively import thousands more people brutalised by war and confused about who is to blame for their plight?’
Oakeshott’s brutal sign-off: ‘the UK does not have a duty to take a single one of those escaping the fall-out’. (Our emphasis)
Media brutality feeds party political brutality, which feeds further media brutality… and down we go. Peter Oborne, former chief political commentator of The Daily Telegraph, commented recently:
‘One of the historical roles of the Conservative Party has been to act as a prophylactic against fascist and far-right forces which, history shows us, have always lurked not far under the surface in British society.
‘It is no longer playing that role. The Conservative Party is falling into the hands of the far right before our eyes.’
In his conclusion to a separate piece, Oborne posts an ominous warning on the emerging political culture of this ‘sharp time’:
‘For the first time in my life it is possible to look forward and envisage a sequence of events that might turn Britain fascist.’ (‘Peter Oborne’s Diary – The Dark Shadow of Fascism,’ Byline Times, July 2024)
Surprising revelation at a picnic. Talking with a person I met; rambling on about his interest in history, he suddenly exclaimed, “Look at what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians, and getting away with it for years.” At neighborhood social events I have attended, if anybody talked about foreign policy, it was usually about helping the suffering Israelis defend themselves from terror attacks; nobody contradicted the erroneous statements. Hearing an average Joe American speak honestly about the genocide indicated a shift in American thinking. The next day at a Bridge game (I’m a good bridge player), a political consultant who had worked with Al Gore’s campaign mentioned that Joe Biden could not win the election. I concurred and added that it was due to Biden assisting Israel in attacks against the Palestinians. No rebuttal to my remark from a group that is normally pro-Israel. Never seen that before.
Originally perceived as a tragic mistake that might prove costly to Gaza’s existence, Hamas’ attack revealed the calculated and brutal manner in which Israel uses injury to its citizens as an excuse to destroy Palestinian life in the occupied territories. Netanyahu’s genocidal response to Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack has shocked the world. This revelation signals a turning point in the battle to save the Palestinians from Israel’s destructive tactics; international forces are emerging from the shadows and are willing to engage Israel’s vociferous warriors
Israel’s propaganda machinery used its access to Western media and convinced the world its military is fighting an entrenched terrorist force that it must destroy before that force destroys Israel and world Jewry. Whoever thinks otherwise is an anti-Semite, so don’t bother thinking about it. Those wanting veracity and justice seek to provide the public with a valid perspective of the happenings in Gaza and enable an intelligent and rational solution to a situation that is causing death and destruction. The contradictions and obvious mendacities exhibited by Israel’s legions go unnoticed by conventional media and government officials. The public clamors for truths that converge to peace. Finally, paths for reaching the public are now available.
Start with Hamas
Hamas firmly established itself in 1987, with an association to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, 38 years after a newly formed Israeli military seized territory awarded to the Palestinians in the Partition Plan 181, 37 years after Prime Minister David Ben Gurion approved the theft of lands from families that Hamas represents, and 36 years after the Israel government terrorized Palestinians to leave their ancestral homes. Israel’s military loaded Palestinians into trucks and transported them to Gaza with insufficient food, water, and shelter and ethnically cleansed the southwest zone of the British Mandate of Palestinians who just wanted to till their lands and showed no resistance to the Zionist intrusion. Hamas established itself long after the Zionists started the destruction of the Palestinians.
The nightmares for the residents from the ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages of Al-Majdahl, Beit Daras, Falujah, Isdud, Qastina, Hamameh, and other villages did not end with their arduous trips to Gaza; ethnic cleansing was an initial step before wholesale theft of property and valuables. Two hundred thousand Palestinians were pushed into Gaza to live in tents, sleep on bare ground, and exist from aid by Quaker organizations and wages from subservient labor. Internment in refugee camps, brutal occupation, military raids, destruction of facilities, destruction of crops and arable lands, prevention of fishing rights, denial of livelihood, and denial of access to the outside world continued to punish the Gazans without an end.
After the 1993-1995 Oslo accords, Israel constructed a 60-kilometer fence around the Gaza Strip and destroyed Gaza’s only airport. Removing illegal Israeli settlers from Gaza, who were mainly there to give Israel an excuse for its military presence, did not stop infiltration by Israeli forces into Gaza. Several wars caused thousands of Palestinian casualties and immense infrastructure destruction. The lives of the displaced Palestinians and their descendants evolved from being wards of the United Nations to virtual imprisonment in an overly crowded environment.
By responding to 38 decades of terrorism committed against the people they represent, Hamas cannot be considered a terrorist organization. They may have, on occasions, used terrorist methods, which is the primary method they have, but fighting a terrorist nation by existing means is resistance to terrorism and not terrorism. Israel is a democratic nation, whose population determines the nation’s leaders and activities; those citizens are involved in the terrorism and, by not changing their nation’s terrorist activities, they are open to aggressive actions toward them. The descendants of the European Jews, who forced the antecedents of the present-day Gazans out of the land they now occupy, should recognize their obligation to those who live only a few kilometers away and whose oppression they can observe; the Gazan s also observe and are taunted by the prosperity they see from those who reside in their stolen lands, chase through their cherished fields and deny them the right to a peaceful and decent existence.
Hamas has not harmed anyone outside of Israel and there is no reason for the United States and the European Union (EU) to label Hamas as a terrorist organization. Israel’s Mossad has murdered and injured scores of innocent people globally and is not labelled a terrorist organization. Don’t these anomalies need correction?
The October 7 attack was a coda to the counter terrorism that the militant Gaza organization has waged against Israel. It was unusually vicious and may have included atrocities that deserve condemnation. Not resolved is the identification of the culprits in the atrocities; were they operating in accord with Hamas orders or were they isolated individuals expressing rage and taking revenge for the atrocities committed upon their families? Because Israel insists the atrocities were a Hamas directive, the question will never be investigated or answered. If that is the case, then Hamas receives the benefit of doubt─ it would be insensible of Hamas to urge actions that drive world opinion from its support.
Israel’s worldwide propaganda machine (Hasbara) previously instructed Western media to precede Hamas with the word terrorist, as if the two words were one word. The Pavlovian response to the characterization assured that upon hearing the word Hamas the adjective terrorist flowed to the brain. The terrorism that Israel and its Mossad have inflicted upon the Palestinian, Lebanese, Syrian, and Iranian people, as well as hundreds of innocents from several nations throughout the world, is never discussed.
If Hamas did not exist, Israel would find another organization to provoke, accuse of terrorism, and be pressed to liquidate in an uncontrollable war that the state of Israel claims was forced upon it.
The brutal war against the Palestinians
Israel’s excuses for waging war in Gaza fail from day one. If Israel wants to eliminate militant Hamas then it only needs to stop oppressing the Palestinians. No oppression, no provocations, and no Hamas reaction. In 2008, the Palestinian militant group floated an offer — if Israel withdrew from the lands it seized in the 1967 Mideast war and remained behind the green line, Hamas would agree to a 10-year truce. Israel did not accept the offer, showed it wanted it all Palestinian land, and then accused Hamas of terrorism for defending the Palestinians against Israel’s aggression.
Reinforcing the Israel border and containing Hamas behind the border is not difficult and would have resolved one issue. Negotiating release of the captives was only a matter of numbers in a quid pro quo deal that may have irritated Israel’s leaders but would have satisfied Israel’s anguished population. That leaves combatting the mortars and rockets that cause havoc to Israel. That problem could be resolved if the larger problem of oppression was resolved.
Exact statistics on Israeli casualties due to rockets fired from Gaza in the last 10 years, after barrages became heavy, are difficult to confirm. Research and estimation have about 25 Israelis killed from rocket fire, an average of 2.5/year. As of June 10, about 300 Israeli soldiers have been killed in the invasion and 50 hostages have died in captivity. Israel has traded an average of 2.5 deaths/year during the next 140 years for 350 immediate deaths to its citizens and total destruction of Gaza for assuring that there is no Hamas to launch rockets. Why does Israel prefer to have its military youth immediately killed and all hostages severely endangered when another plan is less deadly to the Israel population? Does that sound plausible? Netanyahu says the only way to save the hostages is by the invasion, which contradicts the assertion that ferocious Hamas will kill the hostages. Does that sound plausible?
Reasons for other Israeli military actions have been implausible.
Israel destroyed a World Central Kitchen (WCK) convoy and killed seven aid workers. The IDF’s investigation concluded “that the army unit involved had believed the vehicles they were tracking from the sky had been taken over by Hamas gunmen, and that they were not aware of the coordination procedures put in place between the military and World Central Kitchen for that evening. After the aid convoy reached its warehouse destination, a car carrying what the IDF said were gunmen headed north, while the WCK aid workers began driving south in vehicles marked with the charity’s logo.”
The entire evidence presented by the Israeli military for believing Hamas fighters drove the trucks was seeing a bag that the military mistook for a gun. Other than the bag, the Israel investigation admitted the military did not have confirmation of any gunmen in any of the cars. One way of confirming — have troops establish a blockade on the road and then broadcast for the car occupants to leave the cars. That would have peacefully resolved the issue. Why wasn’t that done?
Conclusion: The World Central Kitchen convoy was deliberately targeted by Israeli military to intimidate food aid suppliers and have Israel obtain more control of food deliveries.
Israel attacked a U.N. school in central Gaza and reportedly killed at least 33 persons, including 12 women and children. Reason — Hamas militants were believed to be operating from within the school. Next day, the Israelis bombed another United Nations-run school in northern Gaza, and three people were killed. Reason — belief of a Hamas position inside the school.
Why hasn’t Israel occupied the institutions — schools, hospitals, community centers, mosques — to ensure Hamas militants would not be able to use them and innocent civilians could? Just pull up in armored vehicles to the institutions, broadcast for all occupants to temporarily leave, carefully enter and occupy the institutions. If there are Hamas militants, they will either flee into tunnels or be killed in the ensuing firefight. Preferable to know the institution constituency than kill innocent civilians because it is suspected that Hamas militants might reside on the premises.
One notable feature of all the hostages that have been released and rescued is that, regardless of the sensational headlines, none of the hostages appear to have been mistreated and all have emerged in good condition. There are no reports that Hamas has assassinated any hostage. NBC news reported on the June 8 rescue that, “ In the wake of the rescues, the bloodied and burned bodies of Palestinian adults and children were scattered on the town’s streets. Video showed bodies piled up near the doorway of one home.”
Operating in an environment of violent hostility, the June 8 rescue of four hostages had a greater probability that more hostages and rescuers would be killed than survived. Only one military personnel was killed and “Gaza’s Ministry of Health said 210 people were killed and another 400 were injured in the assault and rescue operation.” This occurred at the same time the US had prepared a proposal that would bring release of all hostages.
Another exposure of the brutality of the Israel military. They could have waited for the outcome of the US proposal before engaging in a dangerous and bloody rescue operation. The 210 Palestinians killed and 400 wounded did not counter the Israelis; they were just arbitrarily killed. Compare that to what Hamas could have been doing and has not done. Hamas has not kept the hostages in the same areas as Hamas fighters, which would act as a deterrence for Israel to attack or subject the hostages to death.
The Turning Point
A turning point in the long straight road along which Israel has driven the Palestinians has been achieved. Where that road will lead is indeterminate and precarious — this road has Zionist land mines that disturb and block passage.
In the campus protests, those who favored the Palestinian cause and were against the genocide greatly outnumbered the pro-Israelis who favored the genocide. Yet, the smaller number of the genocidal were able to stifle the protests and have a congressional committee label them as anti-Semitic. As usual, in American democracy the mass of people do not determine policy; it is the well-heeled and well-connected who determine the country’s direction.
Israel, which is committing genocide, calls itself a Jewish nation and a majority of worldwide Jewry supports Israel. This means worldwide Jewry supports the genocide. Those against the genocide are against those who support the genocide and, by default, are against Zionist Jews. Being against Zionist Jews automatically labels one as anti-Semitic. We have anti-genocide is anti-Semitic and pro-genocide is a good thing, contradictions that make a sham of the U.S. government who close their eyes to this circus trick that only the Zionists can perform.
The turning point is a difficult road, along which everyone must shout louder, act more forcibly, attract more audience, and beat the drum of insensitivity until an American President steps out of the White House, crosses Pennsylvania Avenue, and warmly embraces those who demonstrate for Palestinian freedom. Am I too naive?
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Israel hasn’t just crossed the Biden administration’s pretend “red lines” in Gaza. With its massacre at Nuseirat refugee camp at the weekend, Israel drove a bulldozer through them.
On Saturday, an Israeli military operation to free four Israelis held captive by Hamas since its 7 October attack on Israel resulted in the killing of more than 270 Palestinians, many of them women and children.
The true death toll may never be known. Untold numbers of men, women and children are still under rubble from the bombardment, crushed to death, or trapped and suffocating, or expiring slowly from dehydration if they cannot be dug out in time.
Many hundreds more are suffering agonising injuries – should their wounds not kill them – in a situation where there are almost no medical facilities left after Israel’s destruction of hospitals and its mass kidnap of Palestinian medical personnel. Further, there are no drugs to treat the victims, given Israel’s months-long imposition of an aid blockade.
Israelis and American Jewish organisations – so ready to judge Palestinians for cheering attacks on Israel – celebrated the carnage caused in freeing the Israeli captives, who could have returned home months ago had Israel been ready to agree on a ceasefire.
According to reports, the bloody Israeli operation in central Gaza may have killed three other captives, one of them possibly an American citizen.
In comments to the Haaretz newspaper published on Sunday, Louis Har, a hostage freed back in February, observed of his own captivity: “Our greatest fear was the IDF’s planes and the concern that they would bomb the building we were in.”
He added: “We weren’t worried that they’d [referring to Hamas] do something to us all of a sudden. We didn’t object to anything. So I wasn’t afraid they’d kill me.”
The Israeli media reported Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant describing Saturday’s operation as “one of the most heroic and extraordinary operations I have witnessed over the course of 47 years serving in Israel’s defence establishment”.
The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court is currently seeking an arrest warrant for Gallant, as well as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The charges include efforts to exterminate the people of Gaza through planned starvation.
State terrorism
Israel has been wrecking the established laws of war with abandon for more than eight months.
At least 37,000 Palestinians are known to have been killed so far in Gaza, though Palestinian officials lost the ability to properly count the dead many weeks ago following Israel’s relentless destruction of the enclave’s institutions and infrastructure.
Israel has additionally engineered a famine that, mostly out of view, is gradually starving Gaza’s population to death.
The International Court of Justice put Israel on trial for genocide back in January. Last month, it ordered an immediate halt to Israel’s attack on Gaza’s southern city of Rafah. Israel has responded to both judgments by intensifying its killing spree.
In a further indication of Israel’s sense of impunity, the rescue operation on Saturday involved yet another flagrant war crime.
Israel used a humanitarian aid truck – supposedly bringing relief to Gaza’s desperate population – as cover for its military operation. In international law, that is known as the crime of perfidy.
For months, Israel has been blocking aid to Gaza – part of its efforts to starve the population. It has also targeted aid workers, killing more than 250 of them since October.
But more specifically, Israel is waging a war on Unrwa, claiming without evidence that the UN’s main aid agency in Gaza is implicated in Hamas “terror” operations. It wants the UN, the international community’s last lifeline in Gaza against Israel’s wanton savagery, permanently gone.
By hiding its own soldiers in an aid truck, Israel made a mockery of its supposed “terrorism concerns” by doing exactly what it accuses Hamas of.
But Israel’s military action also dragged the aid effort – the only way to end Gaza’s famine – into the centre of the battlefield. Now Hamas has every reason to fear that aid workers are not what they seem; that they are really instruments of Israeli state terrorism.
Nefarious motive
In the circumstances, one might have assumed the Biden administration would be quick to condemn Israel’s actions and distance itself from the massacre.
Instead, Jake Sullivan, President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, was keen to take credit for the mass carnage – or what he termed a “daring operation”.
He admitted in an interview on Sunday that the US had offered assistance in the rescue operation, though he refused to clarify how. Other reports noted a supporting British role, too.
“The United States has been providing support to Israel for several months in its efforts to help identify the locations of hostages in Gaza and to support efforts to try to secure their rescue or recovery,” Sullivan told CNN.
Sullivan’s comments fuelled existing suspicions that such assistance extends far beyond providing intelligence and a steady supply of the bombs Israel has dropped on the tiny Gaza enclave over the past few months – more than the total that hit London, Dresden and Hamburg combined during the Second World War.
A Biden official disclosed to the Axios website that US soldiers belonging to a so-called American hostages unit had participated in the rescue operation that massacred Palestinian civilians.
Additionally, footage shows Washington’s floating pier as the backdrop for helicopters involved in the attack.
According to Axios, citing a U.S. administration official, the American hostages unit in Israel assisted in the release of the four Israeli captives in Gaza.
Footage published by an Israeli occupation soldier confirms Israel's use of the American temporary pier in central Gaza… pic.twitter.com/GJJp1ZSA7T
The pier was ostensibly built off Gaza’s coast at huge cost – some $320m – and over two months to bypass Israel’s blocking of aid by land.
Observers argued at the time that it was not only an extraordinarily impractical and inefficient way to deliver aid but that there were likely to be hidden, nefarious motives behind its construction.
Its location, at the midpoint of Gaza’s coast, has bolstered Israel’s severing of the enclave into two, creating a land corridor that has effectively become a new border and from which Israel can launch raids into central Gaza like Saturday’s.
Those critics appear to have been proven right. The pier has barely functioned as an aid route since the first deliveries arrived in mid-May.
The pier soon broke apart, and its repair and return to operation was only announced on Friday.
Now the fact that it appears to have been pressed into immediate use as a beachhead for an operation that killed at least 270 Palestinians drags Washington even deeper into complicity with what the World Court has called a “plausible genocide”.
But like the use of the aid truck, it also means the Biden administration is joining Israel once again – after pulling its funding to Unrwa – in directly discrediting the aid operation in Gaza when it is needed most urgently.
That was the context for understanding the World Food Programme’s announcement on Sunday that it was halting the use of the pier for aid deliveries, citing “safety” concerns.
‘Successful’ massacre
As ever, for western media and politicians – who have stood firmly against a ceasefire that could have brought the suffering of the Israeli captives and their families to an end months ago – Palestinian lives are quite literally worthless.
The German Chancellor Olaf Scholz thought it appropriate to describe the killing of 270-plus Palestinians in the freeing of the four Israelis as an “important sign of hope”, while the British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak expressed his “huge relief”. The appalling death toll went unmentioned.
Imagine describing in similarly positive terms an operation by Hamas that killed 270 Israelis to liberate a handful of the many hundreds of medical personnel kidnapped from Gaza by Israel in recent months and known to be held in a torture facility.
The London Times, meanwhile, breezily erased Saturday’s massacre of Palestinians by characterising the operation as a “surgical strike”.
Media outlets uniformly hailed the operation as a “success” and “daring”, as though the killing and maiming of around 1,000 Palestinians – and the serial war crimes Israel committed in the process – need not be factored in.
BBC News’ main report on Saturday night breathlessly focused on the celebrations of the families of the freed captives, treating the massacre of Palestinians as an afterthought. The programme stressed that the death toll was “disputed” – though not mentioning that, as ever, it was Israel doing the disputing.
The reality is that the savage “rescue” operation would have been entirely unnecessary had Netanyahu not been so determined to drag his feet on negotiating the captives’ release, and thereby avoid jail on corruption charges, and the US so fully indulgent of his procrastination.
It will also be very difficult to repeat such an operation, as Haaretz’s military correspondent Amos Harel noted at the weekend. Hamas will learn lessons, guarding the remaining captives even more closely, most likely underground in its tunnels.
The remaining captives’ return will “probably occur only as part of a deal that will require significant concessions”, he concluded.
Leveraging murder
Benny Gantz, the politician-general who helped oversee Israel’s eight-month slaughter in Gaza inside Netanyahu’s war cabinet and is widely described as a “moderate” in the West, resigned from the government on Sunday.
Although ostensibly the dispute is over how Israel will extricate itself from Gaza over the coming months, the more likely explanation is that Gantz wishes both to distance himself from Netanyahu as the Israeli prime minister faces possible arrest for crimes against humanity and to prepare for elections to take his place.
The Pentagon and the Biden administration see Gantz as their man. Having him out of the government may give them additional leverage over Netanyahu in the run-up to a US presidential election in November in which Donald Trump will be actively trying to cosy up to the Israeli prime minister.
The focus on Israeli politicking – rather than US complicity in the Nuseirat massacre – will doubtless provide a welcome distraction, too, as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken tours the region. He will once again wish to be seen rallying support for a ceasefire plan that is supposed to see the Israeli captives released – a plan Netanyahu will be determined, once again, to stymie.
Blinken’s efforts are likely to be even more hopeless in the immediate wake of the Biden administration’s all-too-visible involvement in the killing of hundreds of Palestinians.
Washington’s claim to be an “honest broker” looks to everyone – apart from the reliably obedient western political and media class – as even more derisory than usual.
The real question is whether Blinken’s serial diplomatic failures in ending the slaughter in Gaza are a bug or a feature.
The stark contradiction in Washington’s position towards Gaza was exposed last week during a press conference with State Department spokesman Matthew Miller.
He suggested that the aim of Israel and the US was to persuade Hamas to dissolve itself – presumably by some form of surrender – in return for a ceasefire. The group had an incentive to do so, said Miller, “because they don’t want to see continued conflict, continued Palestinian people dying. They don’t want to see war in Gaza.”
Even the usually compliant western press corps were taken aback by Miller’s implication that a crime against humanity – the mass killing of Palestinians, such as took place at Nuseirat camp on Saturday – was viewed in Washington as leverage to be exercised over Hamas.
But more likely, the seeming contradiction was simply symptomatic of the logical entanglements resulting from Washington’s efforts to deflect from the real goal: buying Israel more time to do what it is so well advanced doing already.
Israel needs to finish pulverising Gaza, making it permanently uninhabitable, so that the population will be faced with a stark dilemma: remain and die, or leave by any means possible.
The same US “humanitarian pier” that was pressed into service for Saturday’s massacre may soon be the “humanitarian pier” that serves as the exit through which Gaza’s Palestinians are ethnically cleansed, shipped out of a death zone engineered by Israel.
This morning I did something I seldom do, I looked at the Twitter newsfeed.
Normally I take the approach of something that I’m not sure is an American urban legend, or genuinely something kids do over there. The infamous bag of dog poo on the front porch, set it on fire then ring the doorbell so the occupier will answer and seeing the flaming bag stamp it out.
In doing so they obviously disrupt the contents of the bag, quite forcefully, distributing it’s contents to the surprise, and annoyance, of said stamper.
So that’s normally what I do. Deposit a tweet on that platform, then duck for cover. In the scenario above the kid doesn’t hang around afterwards to see what the resident made of their prank.
I’m the same with Twitter. Get in, do what you’ve got to do, then get the heck out of there and enjoy the carnage from a distance.
But this morning I clicked on the Home button and the first tweet that came up in my feed was about an article in The Daily Blog:
Surely not?
I know our government hasn’t exactly been outspoken in condemning the massacre of Palestinians that has been taking place since last October — but we’re not going to take part in training exercises with them, are we? Surely not.
A massacre — not a rescue
A couple of days ago I was thinking about the situation in Gaza, and the recent so-called rescue of hostages that is being celebrated.
Look, I get it that every life is precious, that to the families of those hostages all that matters is getting them back alive. But four hostages freed and 274 Palestinians killed in the process — that isn’t a rescue — that’s a massacre.
Another one.
It reminds me of the “rescues” of the 1970s where they got the bad guys, but all the good guys ended up dead as well. According to some sources, and there are no really reliable sources here, the rescue also resulted in the deaths of three hostages.
While looking at reports on this training exercise, one statistic jumped out at me:
Israel has dropped more bombs on Gaza in eight months than were dropped on London, Hamburg and Dresden during the full six years of the Second World War. Israel is dropping these bombs on one of the most densely populated communities in the world.
It’s beyond comprehension. Think of how the Blitz in London is seared into our consciousness as being a terrible time — and how much worse this is.
Firestorm of destruction
As for Dresden, what a beautiful city. I remember when Fi and I were there back in 2001, arriving at the train station, walking along the river. Such a fabulous funky place. Going to museums — there was an incredible exhibition on Papua New Guinea when we were there, it seemed so incongruous to be on the other side of the world looking at exhibits of a Pacific people.
Most of all though I remember the rebuilt cathedral and the historical information about the bombing of that city at the end of the war. A firestorm of utter destruction. Painstakingly rebuilt, over decades, to its former beauty. Although you can still see the scars.
The ruins of Dresden following the Allied bombing in February 1945 . . . about 25,000 people were killed. Image: www.military-history.org
Nobody will be rebuilding Gaza into a beautiful place when this is done.
The best case for the Palestinians at this point would be some sort of peacekeeping force on the ground and then decades of rebuilding. Everything. Schools, hospitals, their entire infrastructure has been destroyed — in scenes that we associate with the most destructive war in human history.
And we’re going to take part in training exercises with the people who are causing all of that destruction, who are massacring tens of thousands of civilians as if their lives don’t matter. Surely not.
It is outrageous in the extreme that the NZ Defence Force will train with the Israeli Defence Force on June 26th as part of the US-led (RIMPAC) naval drills!
Our military’s honour and mana is stained by rubbing shoulders with an Army that is currently accused of genocide and conducting a real time ethnic cleansing war crime.
It’s like playing paintball with the Russian Army while they are invading the Ukraine.
RIMPAC, the world’s largest international maritime warfare exercise, is held in Hawai’i every second year. The name indicates a focus on the Pacific Rim, although many countries attend.
In 2024 there will be ships and personnel attending from 29 countries. The usual suspects you’d expect in the region — like the US, the Aussies, Canada, and some of our Pacific neighbours. But also countries from further abroad like France and Germany. As well of course as the Royal NZ Navy and the Israeli Navy.
Which is pretty weird. I know Israel have to pretend they’re in Europe for things like sporting competitions or Eurovision, with their neighbours unwilling to include them. But what on earth does Israel have to do with the Pacific Rim?
Needless to say those who oppose events in Gaza are not overly excited about us working together with the military force that’s doing almost all of the killing.
“We are calling on our government to withdraw from the exercise because of Israel’s ongoing industrial-scale slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza”, said Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) national chair, John Minto.
“Why would we want to join with a lawless, rogue state which has demonstrated the complete suite of war crimes over the past eight months?”
Whatever you might think of John Minto, he has a point.
Trade and travel embargo
Personally I think we, and others, should be undertaking a complete trade and travel embargo with Israel until the killing stops. The least we can do is not rub shoulders with them as allies. That’s pretty repugnant. I can’t imagine many young Kiwis signed up to serve their country like that.
The PSNA press release said, “Taking part in a military event alongside Israel will leave an indelible stain on this country. It will be a powerful symbol of New Zealand complicity with Israeli war crimes. It’s not on!”
Aotearoa is not the only country in which such participation is being questioned. In Malaysia, for example, a group of NGOs are urging the government there to withdraw:
“On May 24, the ICJ explicitly called for a halt in Israel’s Rafah onslaught. The Israeli government and opposition leaders, in line with the behaviour of a rogue lawless state, have scornfully dismissed the ICJ ruling,” it said.
“The world should stop treating it like a normal, law-abiding state if it wants Israeli criminality in Gaza and the West Bank to stop.
“We reiterate our call on the Malaysian government to immediately withdraw from Rimpac 2024 to drive home that message,” it said.
What do you think about our country taking part in this event, alongside Israel Military Forces, at this time?
Complicit as allies
To me it feels that in doing so we are in a small way complicit. By coming together as allies, in our region of the world, we’re condoning their actions with our own.
Valerie Morse of Peace Action Wellington had the following to say about New Zealand’s involvement in the military exercises:
“The depth and breadth of suffering in Palestine is beyond imagination. The brutality of the Israeli military knows no boundaries. This is who [Prime Minister] Christopher Luxon and Defence Minister Judith Collins have signed the NZ military up to train alongside.
“New Zealand must immediately halt its participation in RIMPAC. The HMNZS Aotearoa must be re-routed back home to Taranaki.
“This is not the first time that Israel has been a participant in RIMPAC so it would not have been a surprise to the NZ government. It would have been quite easy to take the decision to stay out of RIMPAC given what is happening in Palestine. That Luxon and Collins have not done so shows that they lack even a basic moral compass.”
The world desperately needs strong moral leadership at this time, it needs countries to take a stand against Israel and speak up for what is right.
There’s only so much that a small country like ours can do, but we can hold our heads high and refuse to have anything to do with Israel until they stop the killing.
Justin Trudeau’s Liberals now say they oppose Israel’s onslaught on Rafah, want a ceasefire in Gaza and that they are no longer offering permits for new arms shipments to Israel. But this rhetorical shift doesn’t reflect a commitment to peace and justice for Palestinians. If the Trudeau government truly believed in international law and fair treatment of Palestinians, here’s 45 easy moves Ottawa could make to stop enabling Israel’s holocaust in Gaza:
Use the word “slaughter”, “crime”, “massacre”, “butchery”, “carnage”, “ecocide”, “genocide” or “holocaust” to describe Israel’s operations in Gaza.
Announce that Ottawa will enforce its obligations as party to the International Criminal Court by arresting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defence minister Yaov Gallant if a warrant is issued.
Task the Department of Justice and RCMP Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Program to investigate Canadians currently fighting in the Israeli military. Considering the wanton destruction in Gaza, it’s hard to imagine that someone fighting there hasn’t committed war crimes.
Issue a notice to exporters declarating that arm permits for Israel are paused.
Follow the recent recommendation of UN experts and over 140 countries — including Spain, Ireland, Slovenia and Norway recently — recognizing Palestine.
Add Israel to the list of countries investigated in the ongoing Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference in Federal Electoral Processes and Democratic Institutions.
Stop providing millions of dollars in grants to Canada’s Jewish federations, which have formal ties to the para-statal Jewish Agency for Israel and sponsor the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs.
Direct the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) to investigate registered Canadian charities that may be contravening CRA regulations by supporting illegal West Bank settlements.
Announce that Canada won’t buy any arms “field tested” on Palestinians.
Pause all direct arm sales to Israel irrespective if the permits were requested before January.
Denounce Israel’s killing of 140 journalists over the past eight months.
Restrict Canadian firms that sell components or full weapons systems to the US from subsequently being sent on to the Israeli military.
Announce that the Israeli military is no longer welcome to train in Cold Lake Alberta or elsewhere in Canada.
Criticize any US vetoing of UN Security Council resolutions defending Palestians.
Denounce Israel’s poisoning of the air and water in Gaza.
End the Department of National Defence’s Defence Research and Development Canada financing and collaboration with Israeli partners and initiatives.
Direct the CRA to investigate registered charities contravening the CRA rule against “supporting the armed forces of another country” by assisting Israel’s military.
Join Spain, Ireland, Mexico, Chile, Egypt, Turkey and other countries that have announced that they will participate in South Africa’s International Court of Justice case against Israel’s genocide.
End the military’s Operation Proteus training and assistance initiative of the Palestinian force overseeing Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.
Pause Canadian military intelligence sharing with Israel.
Ask the CRA to conduct enhanced reviews of all foreign income for property or businesses owned in Israel and its occupied territories.
Announce a finance committee hearing into taxpayers subsidizing over a quarter billion dollars a year in donations to Israel. Is it right for all Canadians to pay a share of some individuals’ donations to a country with a GDP equal to Canada’s?
Bar Israeli military suppliers from Canadian military testing exercises.
Impose sanctions on Israel’s settlement economy through Canada’s Special Economic Measures Act, particularly on individuals and entities involved in Israel’s illegal occupation of East Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank.
Instruct the Canadian Border Services Agency to deny entry to any foreign national owning property in an illegal Israeli settlement or outpost.
Direct the CRA to investigate registered Canadian charities that may be contravening existing CRA regulations by supporting explicitly racist Israeli organizations.
Mention Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and B’tselem conclusion that Israel has long committed the crime of apartheid.
Remove the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine from Canada’s list of terrorist entities.
Denounce Israel’s destruction of nearly half of Gaza’s agricultural land and tree crops.
Remove from the terrorist list the Canadian-based International Relief Fund for the Afflicted and Needy, which was listed because it supported orphans and a hospital in Gaza through official (Hamas controlled) channels.
Launch a review of Canada’s criminalization of Palestinian political life, particularly why over 10 percent of Canada’s terrorism list is made up of organizations headquartered in a long-occupied land representing one-tenth of one percent of the world’s population.
Denounce Israel’s killing of 190 UN workers over the past eight months.
Apologize to Palestinians for Canada’s sizeable contribution to the unjust UN Partition Plan, which called for the division of Palestine into ethnically segregated states and gave most of the land to the newly arrived minority. As Global Affairs officials warned privately in 1947, the Canadian-shaped roadmap would lead to decades of conflict.
Rescind adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which is designed to undermine free speech and legitimate expressions of opposition to Israeli colonial violence.
Apologize for supporting the colonial Balfour Declaration and sending Canadians to help the British conquer Palestine.
Allow the Canadian Food Inspection Agency to accurately label wines produced in the occupied West Bank.
Eliminate the Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism, which was created to deflect criticism from Israeli apartheid and is acting as a tool to promote genocide.
Support all UN resolutions backed by most nations that uphold Palestinian rights.
Most of the above demands are not radical. They aren’t, for instance, as bold as Türkiye’s recent ban on trade with Israel, Colombia cutting off coal exports or the Maldives blocking Israeli passport holders from entering their country. In many cases it’s simply a matter of upholding Canadian and international law.
Ana Segovia (Mexico), Huapango Torero (‘Huapango Bullfighter’), 2019.
The skin is the largest organ of the human body. It covers our entire surface, at some points only as thin as a piece of paper and at other points about half as thick as a credit card. The skin, which protects us from all manner of germs and other harmful elements, is fragile and unable to defend humans from the dangerous weapons we have made over time. The ancient blunt axe will break the skin with a heavy blow, while a 2000-pound MK-84 ‘dumb bomb’ made by General Dynamics will not only obliterate the skin, but the entire human body.
Despite a 24 May order from the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the Israeli military continues to bomb the southern part of Gaza, particularly the city of Rafah. In blatant disregard of the ICJ’s order, on 27 May Israel struck a tent city in Rafah and murdered forty-five civilians. US President Joe Biden said on 9 March that an Israeli attack on Rafah would be his ‘red line’, but – even after this tent massacre – the Biden administration has insisted that no such line has been violated.
At a press conference on 28 May, communications advisor to the US National Security Agency John Kirby was asked how the US would respond if a strike by the US armed forces killed forty-five civilians and injured two hundred others. Kirby responded: ‘We have conducted airstrikes in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, where tragically we caused civilian casualties. We did the same thing’. To defend Israel’s latest massacre, Washington has chosen to make a startling admission. Given that the ICJ has ruled that it is ‘plausible’ that Israel is conducting a genocide in Gaza, could it be said that the US is guilty of the same in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Ficre Ghebreyesus (Eritrea), Map/Quilt, 1999.
In 2006, the International Criminal Court (ICC) began to assess the possibility of war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then, in 2014 and 2017, respectively, opened formal investigations into crimes committed in both countries. However, neither Israel nor the United States are signatories to the 2002 Rome Statute, which established the ICC. Rather than sign the statute, the US Congress passed the American Service-Members’ Protection Act – known informally as the ‘Hague Invasion Act’ – which legally authorises the US government to ‘use all means necessary’ to protect its troops from ICC prosecutors. Since Article 98 of the Rome Statute does not require states to turn over wanted personnel to a third party if they have signed an immunity agreement with that party, the US government has encouraged states to sign ‘Article 98 agreements’ to give its troops immunity from prosecution. Still, this did not deter ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda (who held the post from 2012–2021) from studying evidence and issuing a preliminary report in 2016 on war crimes in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan joined the ICC in 2003, giving the ICC and Bensouda jurisdiction to conduct their investigation. Even though it signed an Article 98 agreement with Afghanistan in 2002, the US government fervently attacked the ICC’s investigation and warned Bensouda and her family that they would face personal repercussions if she continued with the investigation. In April 2019, the US revoked Bensouda’s entry visa. Days later, a panel of ICC judges ruled against Bensouda’s request to proceed with a war crimes investigation in Afghanistan, stating that such an investigation would ‘not serve the interests of justice’.
Staff at the ICC were dismayed by the court’s decision and eager to challenge it but could not get support from the justices. In June 2019, Bensouda filed a request to appeal the ICC’s decision not to pursue the investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan. Bensouda’s appeal was joined by various groups from Afghanistan, including the Afghan Victims’ Families Association and the Afghanistan Forensic Science Organisation. In September 2019, the Pre-Trial Chamber of the ICC ruled that the appeal could go forward.
Dawn Okoro (Nigeria), Doing It, 2017.
The US government was enraged. On 11 June 2020, US President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 13928, which authorised his government to freeze ICC officials’ assets and ban them and their families from entering the United States. In September 2020, the US imposed sanctions on Bensouda, a national of Gambia, and senior ICC diplomat Phakiso Mochochoko, a national of Lesotho. The American Bar Association condemned these sanctions, but they were not revoked.
The US government eventually repealed the sanctions in April 2021, after Bensouda left her post and was replaced by the British lawyer Karim Khan in February 2021. In September 2021, ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan said that while his office would continue to investigate war crimes by the Taliban and the Islamic State in Afghanistan, it would ‘deprioritise other aspects of this investigation’. This awkward phrasing simply meant that the ICC would no longer investigate war crimes committed by the United States and its allies from the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. The ICC had been sufficiently brought to heel.
Alexander Nikolaev, also known as Usto Mumin (Soviet Union), Friendship, Love, Eternity, 1928.
Prosecutor Khan again demonstrated his partial application of justice and fealty to the Global North ruling elites when he rushed into the conflict in Ukraine and began an investigation into war crimes by Russia just four days after its invasion in February 2022. Within a year, Khan would apply for warrants for the arrest of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Lvova-Belova, which were issued in March 2023. Specifically, they were charged with colluding to abduct children from Ukrainian orphanages and children’s care homes and take them to Russia, where – it was alleged – these children were ‘given for adoption’. Ukraine, Khan said, ‘is a crime scene’.
Khan would use no such words when it came to Israel’s murderous assault on Palestinians in Gaza. Even after more than 15,000 Palestinian children had been killed (rather than ‘adopted’ from a war zone), Khan failed to pursue warrants for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his military subordinates. When Khan visited Israel in November–December 2023, he warned about ‘excesses’ but suggested that since ‘Israel has trained lawyers who advise commanders’, they could prevent any horrendous violations of international humanitarian law.
Ayoub Emdadian (Iran), The Sapling of Liberty, 1973.
By May 2024, the sheer scale of Israel’s brutality in Gaza finally forced the ICC to take up the issue. The orders from the ICJ, the outrage expressed by numerous governments of the Global South, and the cascading protests in country after country together motivated the ICC to act. On 20 May, Khan held a press conference where he said that he filed applications for the arrest of Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Diab Ibrahim al-Masri, and Ismail Haniyeh and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and his head of military, Yoav Gallant. Israel’s Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara said that the ICC accusations against Netanyahu and Gallant are ‘baseless’ and that Israel will not comply with any ICC warrant. For decades now, Israel – like the United States – has rejected any attempt to apply international humanitarian law to its actions. The ‘rules-based international order’ has always provided immunity for the United States and its close allies, an immunity whose hypocrisy has increasingly been revealed. It is this double-standard that has provoked the collapse of the US-driven world order.
Buried within Khan’s press statement is an interesting fragment: ‘I insist that all attempts to impede, intimidate, or improperly influence the officials of this Court must cease immediately’. Eight days later, on 20 May, The Guardian – in collaboration with other periodicals – published an investigation that revealed Israel’s use of ‘intelligence agencies to surveil, hack, pressure, smear, and allegedly threaten senior ICC staff in an effort to derail the court’s inquiries’. Yossi Cohen, the former head of Israel’s spy agency, Mossad, personally harassed and threatened Bensouda (Khan’s predecessor), warning her, ‘You don’t want to be getting into things that could compromise your security or that of your family’. Furthermore, TheGuardian noted that ‘Between 2019 and 2020, the Mossad had been actively seeking compromising information on the prosecutor and took an interest in her family members’. ‘Took an interest’ is a euphemistic way of saying gathered information on her family – including through a sting operation against her husband Philip Bensouda – to blackmail and frighten her. These are clichéd mafia tactics.
Hamed Abdalla (Egypt), Conscience du sol (‘The Consciousness of the Earth’), 1956.
As I followed these stories of the blood and law, I read the poems of Chechnya-born Jazra Khaleed, writing in Greek in Athens. His poem ‘Black Lips’ stopped me in my tracks, the last stanzas powerful and bleak:
Come let me make you human,
you, Your Honor, who wipe guilt from your beard
you, esteemed journalist, who tout death
you, philanthropic lady, who pat children’s heads without bending down
and you who read this poem, licking your finger—
To all of you I offer my body for genuflection
Believe me
one day you will adore me like Christ
But I’m sorry for you sir—
I do not negotiate with chartered accountants of words
with art critics who eat from my hand
You may, if you desire, wash my feet
Don’t take it personally
Why do I need bullets if there are so many words
prepared to die for me?
Which words are slowly dying? Justice, perhaps, or even humanitarianism? So many words are thrown about to assuage the guilty and to confuse the innocent. But these words cannot muffle other words, words that describe horrors and that demand redress.
Words are important. So are people, such as Gustavo Cortiñas, who was arrested by the Argentinian military dictatorship on 15 April 1977, never to be seen again. He became one of the 30,000 people whom the military killed between 1976 and 1983. On April 30, two weeks after Gustavo was arrested, his mother, Nora Cortiñas (or Norita, as she was lovingly known), joined other mothers of the disappeared to protest in front of the government house Casa Rosada, at the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, the first in what became a regular feature.
Norita was a co-founder of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, which courageously shattered the wall of misleading words that tumbled out of the mouths of the military Junta. Though her son was never found, Norita found her voice looking for him – a voice that was heard at every protest for justice and spoke with great feeling about the pain in the world until the weeks leading up to her death on 31 May. ‘We say no to the annexation of Palestine’, she said in a video message in 2020. ‘We oppose any measure that tends to erase the identity and existence of the Palestinian people’.
Many years from now, I would like to be remembered as a woman who gave her all so that we could have a more dignified life… I would like to be remembered with that cry that I always say and that means everything I feel inside me, that means the hope that someday that other possible world will exist. A world for everyone. So, I would like to be remembered with a smile and for shouting loudly: venceremos, venceremos, venceremos! We will win, we will win, we will win!
On May 15, we will commemorate the 76th anniversary of the Nakba amid another catastrophe. Since 1948, Palestinians have suffered a profound and enduring trauma, as families were forcibly uprooted from their ancestral lands by Zionist militias, villages were destroyed, and communities were torn apart to create the settler colonial state of Israel. The Nakba represents not only a historical event but an ongoing reality, as it laid the foundation for the continued colonization and occupation of Palestinian land and violent dispossession of the Palestinian people. This series captures how the genocide and mass displacement of Palestinians in Gaza is an extension of the 1948 Nakba.
The bodies of Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes are buried in a mass grave in Khan Younis.
Photo credit: Al-Jazeera
The Israeli online magazine +972 has published a detailed report on Israel’s use of an artificial intelligence (AI) system called “Lavender” to target thousands of Palestinian men in its bombing campaign in Gaza. When Israel attacked Gaza after October 7, the Lavender system had a database of 37,000 Palestinian men with suspected links to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).
Lavender assigns a numerical score, from one to a hundred, to every man in Gaza, based mainly on cellphone and social media data, and automatically adds those with high scores to its kill list of suspected militants. Israel uses another automated system, known as “Where’s Daddy?”, to call in airstrikes to kill these men and their families in their homes.
The report is based on interviews with six Israeli intelligence officers who have worked with these systems. As one of the officers explained to +972, by adding a name from a Lavender-generated list to the Where’s Daddy home tracking system, he can place the man’s home under constant drone surveillance, and an airstrike will be launched once he comes home.
The officers said the “collateral” killing of the men’s extended families was of little consequence to Israel. “Let’s say you calculate [that there is one] Hamas [operative] plus 10 [civilians in the house],” the officer said. “Usually, these 10 will be women and children. So absurdly, it turns out that most of the people you killed were women and children.”
The officers explained that the decision to target thousands of these men in their homes is just a question of expediency. It is simply easier to wait for them to come home to the address on file in the system, and then bomb that house or apartment building, than to search for them in the chaos of the war-torn Gaza Strip.
The officers who spoke to 972+ explained that in previous Israeli massacres in Gaza, they could not generate targets quickly enough to satisfy their political and military bosses, and so these AI systems were designed to solve that problem for them. The speed with which Lavender can generate new targets only gives its human minders an average of 20 seconds to review and rbber-stamp each name, even though they know from tests of the Lavender system that at least 10% of the men chosen for assassination and familicide have only an insignificant or a mistaken connection with Hamas or PIJ.
The Lavender AI system is a new weapon, developed by Israel. But the kind of kill lists that it generates have a long pedigree in U.S. wars, occupations and CIA regime change operations. Since the birth of the CIA after the Second World War, the technology used to create kill lists has evolved from the CIA’s earliest coups in Iran and Guatemala, to Indonesia and the Phoenix program in Vietnam in the 1960s, to Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s and to the U.S. occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Just as U.S. weapons development aims to be at the cutting edge, or the killing edge, of new technology, the CIA and U.S. military intelligence have always tried to use the latest data processing technology to identify and kill their enemies.
The CIA learned some of these methods from German intelligence officers captured at the end of the Second World War. Many of the names on Nazi kill lists were generated by an intelligence unit called Fremde Heere Ost (Foreign Armies East), under the command of Major General Reinhard Gehlen, Germany’s spy chief on the eastern front (see David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard, p. 268).
Gehlen and the FHO had no computers, but they did have access to four million Soviet POWs from all over the USSR, and no compunction about torturing them to learn the names of Jews and communist officials in their hometowns to compile kill lists for the Gestapo and Einsatzgruppen.
After the war, like the 1,600 German scientists spirited out of Germany in Operation Paperclip, the United States flew Gehlen and his senior staff to Fort Hunt in Virginia. They were welcomed by Allen Dulles, soon to be the first and still the longest-serving director of the CIA. Dulles sent them back to Pullach in occupied Germany to resume their anti-Soviet operations as CIA agents. The Gehlen Organization formed the nucleus of what became the BND, the new West German intelligence service, with Reinhard Gehlen as its director until he retired in 1968.
After a CIA coup removed Iran’s popular, democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, a CIA team led by U.S. Major General Norman Schwarzkopf trained a new intelligence service, known as SAVAK, in the use of kill lists and torture. SAVAK used these skills to purge Iran’s government and military of suspected communists and later to hunt down anyone who dared to oppose the Shah.
By 1975, Amnesty International estimated that Iran was holding between 25,000 and 100,000 political prisoners, and had “the highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture that is beyond belief.”
In Guatemala, a CIA coup in 1954 replaced the democratic government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman with a brutal dictatorship. As resistance grew in the 1960s, U.S. special forces joined the Guatemalan army in a scorched earth campaign in Zacapa, which killed 15,000 people to defeat a few hundred armed rebels. Meanwhile, CIA-trained urban death squads abducted, tortured and killed PGT (Guatemalan Labor Party) members in Guatemala City, notably 28 prominent labor leaders who were abducted and disappeared in March 1966.
Once this first wave of resistance was suppressed, the CIA set up a new telecommunications center and intelligence agency, based in the presidential palace. It compiled a database of “subversives” across the country that included leaders of farming co-ops and labor, student and indigenous activists, to provide ever-growing lists for the death squads. The resulting civil war became a genocide against indigenous people in Ixil and the western highlands that killed or disappeared at least 200,000 people.
This pattern was repeated across the world, wherever popular, progressive leaders offered hope to their people in ways that challenged U.S. interests. As historian Gabriel Kolko wrote in 1988, “The irony of U.S. policy in the Third World is that, while it has always justified its larger objectives and efforts in the name of anticommunism, its own goals have made it unable to tolerate change from any quarter that impinged significantly on its own interests.”
When General Suharto seized power in Indonesia in 1965, the U.S. Embassy compiled a list of 5,000 communists for his death squads to hunt down and kill. The CIA estimated that they eventually killed 250,000 people, while other estimates run as high as a million.
Twenty-five years later, journalist Kathy Kadane investigated the U.S. role in the massacre in Indonesia, and spoke to Robert Martens, the political officer who led the State-CIA team that compiled the kill list. “It really was a big help to the army,” Martens told Kadane. “They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands. But that’s not all bad – there’s a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment.”
Kathy Kadane also spoke to former CIA director William Colby, who was the head of the CIA’s Far East division in the 1960s. Colby compared the U.S. role in Indonesia to the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, which was launched two years later, claiming that they were both successful programs to identify and eliminate the organizational structure of America’s communist enemies.
The Phoenix program was designed to uncover and dismantle the National Liberation Front’s (NLF) shadow government across South Vietnam. Phoenix’s Combined Intelligence Center in Saigon fed thousands of names into an IBM 1401 computer, along with their locations and their alleged roles in the NLF. The CIA credited the Phoenix program with killing 26,369 NLF officials, while another 55,000 were imprisoned or persuaded to defect. Seymour Hersh reviewed South Vietnamese government documents that put the death toll at 41,000.
How many of the dead were correctly identified as NLF officials may be impossible to know, but Americans who took part in Phoenix operations reported killing the wrong people in many cases. Navy SEAL Elton Manzione told author Douglas Valentine (The Phoenix Program) how he killed two young girls in a night raid on a village, and then sat down on a stack of ammunition crates with a hand grenade and an M-16, threatening to blow himself up, until he got a ticket home.
“The whole aura of the Vietnam War was influenced by what went on in the “hunter-killer” teams of Phoenix, Delta, etc,” Manzione told Valentine. “That was the point at which many of us realized we were no longer the good guys in the white hats defending freedom – that we were assassins, pure and simple. That disillusionment carried over to all other aspects of the war and was eventually responsible for it becoming America’s most unpopular war.”
Even as the U.S. defeat in Vietnam and the “war fatigue” in the United States led to a more peaceful next decade, the CIA continued to engineer and support coups around the world, and to provide post-coup governments with increasingly computerized kill lists to consolidate their rule.
After supporting General Pinochet’s coup in Chile in 1973, the CIA played a central role in Operation Condor, an alliance between right-wing military governments in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia, to hunt down tens of thousands of their and each other’s political opponents and dissidents, killing and disappearing at least 60,000 people.
The CIA’s role in Operation Condor is still shrouded in secrecy, but Patrice McSherry, a political scientist at Long Island University, has investigated the U.S. role and concluded, “Operation Condor also had the covert support of the US government. Washington provided Condor with military intelligence and training, financial assistance, advanced computers, sophisticated tracking technology, and access to the continental telecommunications system housed in the Panama Canal Zone.”
McSherry’s research revealed how the CIA supported the intelligence services of the Condor states with computerized links, a telex system, and purpose-built encoding and decoding machines made by the CIA Logistics Department. As she wrote in her book, Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America:
“The Condor system’s secure communications system, Condortel,… allowed Condor operations centers in member countries to communicate with one another and with the parent station in a U.S. facility in the Panama Canal Zone. This link to the U.S. military-intelligence complex in Panama is a key piece of evidence regarding secret U.S. sponsorship of Condor…”
Operation Condor ultimately failed, but the U.S. provided similar support and training to right-wing governments in Colombia and Central America throughout the 1980s in what senior military officers have called a “quiet, disguised, media-free approach” to repression and kill lists.
The U.S. School of the Americas (SOA) trained thousands of Latin American officers in the use of torture and death squads, as Major Joseph Blair, the SOA’s former chief of instruction described to John Pilger for his film, The War You Don’t See:
“The doctrine that was taught was that, if you want information, you use physical abuse, false imprisonment, threats to family members, and killing. If you can’t get the information you want, if you can’t get the person to shut up or stop what they’re doing, you assassinate them – and you assassinate them with one of your death squads.”
When the same methods were transferred to the U.S. hostile military occupation of Iraq after 2003, Newsweek headlined it “The Salvador Option.” A U.S. officer explained to Newsweek that U.S. and Iraqi death squads were targeting Iraqi civilians as well as resistance fighters. “The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists,” he said. “From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation.”
The United States sent two veterans of its dirty wars in Latin America to Iraq to play key roles in that campaign. Colonel James Steele led the U.S. Military Advisor Group in El Salvador from 1984 to 1986, training and supervising Salvadoran forces who killed tens of thousands of civilians. He was also deeply involved in the Iran-Contra scandal, narrowly escaping a prison sentence for his role supervising shipments from Ilopango air base in El Salvador to the U.S.-backed Contras in Honduras and Nicaragua.
In Iraq, Steele oversaw the training of the Interior Ministry’s Special Police Commandos – rebranded as “National” and later “Federal” Police after the discovery of their al-Jadiriyah torture center and other atrocities.
Bayan al-Jabr, a commander in the Iranian-trained Badr Brigade militia, was appointed Interior Minister in 2005, and Badr militiamen were integrated into the Wolf Brigade death squad and other Special Police units. Jabr’s chief adviser was Steven Casteel, the former intelligence chief for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in Latin America.
The Interior Ministry death squads waged a dirty war in Baghdad and other cities, filling the Baghdad morgue with up to 1,800 corpses per month, while Casteel fed the western media absurd cover stories, such as that the death squads were all “insurgents” in stolen police uniforms.
Meanwhile U.S. special operations forces conducted “kill-or-capture” night raids in search of Resistance leaders. General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of Joint Special Operations Command from 2003-2008, oversaw the development of a database system, used in Iraq and Afghanistan, that compiled cellphone numbers mined from captured cellphones to generate an ever-expanding target list for night raids and air strikes.
The targeting of cellphones instead of actual people enabled the automation of the targeting system, and explicitly excluded using human intelligence to confirm identities. Two senior U.S. commanders told the Washington Post that only half the night raids attacked the right house or person.
In Afghanistan, President Obama put McChrystal in charge of U.S. and NATO forces in 2009, and his cellphone-based “social network analysis” enabled an exponential increase in night raids, from 20 raids per month in May 2009 to up to 40 per night by April 2011.
As with the Lavender system in Gaza, this huge increase in targets was achieved by taking a system originally designed to identify and track a small number of senior enemy commanders and applying it to anyone suspected of having links with the Taliban, based on their cellphone data.
This led to the capture of an endless flood of innocent civilians, so that most civilian detainees had to be quickly released to make room for new ones. The increased killing of innocent civilians in night raids and airstrikes fueled already fierce resistance to the U.S. and NATO occupation and ultimately led to its defeat.
President Obama’s drone campaign to kill suspected enemies in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia was just as indiscriminate, with reports suggesting that 90% of the people it killed in Pakistan were innocent civilians.
And yet Obama and his national security team kept meeting in the White House every “Terror Tuesday” to select who the drones would target that week, using an Orwellian, computerized “disposition matrix” to provide technological cover for their life and death decisions.
Looking at this evolution of ever-more automated systems for killing and capturing enemies, we can see how, as the information technology used has advanced from telexes to cellphones and from early IBM computers to artificial intelligence, the human intelligence and sensibility that could spot mistakes, prioritize human life and prevent the killing of innocent civilians has been progressively marginalized and excluded, making these operations more brutal and horrifying than ever.
Nicolas has at least two good friends who survived the dirty wars in Latin America because someone who worked in the police or military got word to them that their names were on a death list, one in Argentina, the other in Guatemala. If their fates had been decided by an AI machine like Lavender, they would both be long dead.
As with supposed advances in other types of weapons technology, like drones and “precision” bombs and missiles, innovations that claim to make targeting more precise and eliminate human error have instead led to the automated mass murder of innocent people, especially women and children, bringing us full circle from one holocaust to the next.
The area around al-Shifa, Gaza’s largest hospital, following an Israeli massacre. (Omar IshaqDPA via ZUMA Press)
Ramadan in Gaza is unlike any we have previously seen.
We don’t have the traditional suhoor to brace us for the day ahead.
There are no feasts here.
No invitations extended for people to come and visit.
We can barely feed ourselves, let alone guests – even if they are members of our own extended families.
It is impossible to have sweets and juice after the iftar.
Sugar is a luxury beyond our reach.
All we have to drink is polluted water.
Chicken and red meat were once staples. They have been replaced by canned and processed food.
Fruit is practically non-existent.
My son is a carrier of thalassemia. So he needs to eat food rich in iron.
The food he needs is not available and he has begun to show the signs of anemia.
This Ramadan is the first one during which my son is fasting. When the sun sets, he eats a humble tin of beans.
He has grown thin. I can’t bring myself to tell him that I am insisting he fasts because we have hardly any food.
Missing our loved ones
In the evening, we gather for tarawih prayers amid the rubble of mosques that have been destroyed or badly damaged.
There are so many people missing at our tables. Everyone has lost someone they loved in this war.
With massive displacement, people have to share meals in tents. Our surroundings provide a constant reminder of the devastation Israel has inflicted on us.
For almost six months, we have been deprived of electricity. We have to eat our iftar meals in the dim glow of the lights on our cellphones.
There is no special series we can watch on TV this Ramadan. There is nothing to distract us from reality.
Our internet connections falter, leaving us cut off from the outside world.
We go to bed early, seeking refuge from all the noises that haunt us in the hours of darkness. The drones can always be heard overhead.
In our exhaustion, we yearn for sleep to claim us, to offer respite from the pain gripping our hearts.
In past years, we would give to the needy at Ramadan, ensuring they could break their fasts with hearty and nutritious meals. Now, we are among those reliant on donations and aid packages.
The transformation has been profound.
All of this has been dictated by how we were born in a troubled land. Something that is out of our control.
Israel is continuing to commit atrocities during this holy month.
Gaza’s largest hospital – al-Shifa – has been the scene of a massacre that is among the worst in Palestine’s history.
Homes are still being bombed.
People are still being trapped under the rubble.
These horrors are happening during a time meant for reflection and spiritual growth.
We wish the world would see us not as statistics and headlines but as human beings deserving of justice.
Joe Biden and other Democrat politicians portray the upcoming Presidential election as a choice between fascism and democracy. But Genocide Joe and most Congressional Democrats, like most Congressional Republicans, operate with an unadmitted mindset: that democratic rights are only for some people, and that oppressive fascistic rule is appropriate for certain others.
Biden et al evade the facts of Israeli persecution of Palestinians. For them: Israeli lives (seen as white) matter, Palestinian lives (seen as other) don’t. In fact, the Zionist state entitles Jewish Israelis to liberal civil rights such that they generally cannot be jailed without a fair hearing in a court of law. Meanwhile, although Biden et al will not acknowledge it, any Palestinian in the West Bank or Gaza can be imprisoned and routinely tortured by Israel (nearly 10,000 at last report): for any, or no, reason with no court hearing whatsoever; or, if they do receive a hearing, it is in a military court where the conviction rate is over 99%. Israelis elect their government; Palestinians are not permitted to do likewise. Zionist Israelis can and do rob Palestinians of their homes and properties and/or murder them with impunity. The Zionist state expels Palestinians from their homeland and bars their return. Biden, notwithstanding his lip-service concern for suffering Palestinians, vetoes UN Security Council resolutions condemning Israeli crimes against Palestinian humanity, crimes which include the current genocidal mass murder in Gaza. As a staunch defender of the Jewish-supremacist state, Biden (along with most Congress people of both Parties) obviously believes that democracy and rule of law are good for some people and that fascist-like apartheid and genocidal mass murder (until it becomes an electoral liability) are acceptable for others. (For relevant background facts regarding Zionism, Hamas, and the current war in Gaza, see here!)
Whereas Trump panders to xenophobic racism, “humanitarian” Biden pretends to oppose it. But Biden summarily deported some 20,000 Haitians in his first year despite the horrific conditions in Haiti and his authority to grant “temporary protective status”. That 20,000 is more than Trump and his 2 predecessors deported in their cumulative 20 years. More recently, Biden has agreed to proposed immigration and asylum restrictions nearly as onerous as those demanded by MAGA Republicans, restrictions which violate international humanitarian law, notwithstanding that the migrants are fleeing the economic and political havoc wreaked by Western imperialism upon the countries from which they come. Biden also continues Trump’s economic sieges which are designed to starve and otherwise punish the peoples of Cuba and Venezuela, actions which also violate international humanitarian law (as well as driving even more international migration). Evidently, Biden’s humanitarian sympathies are no more than minimally, if at all, better than Trump’s when it comes to Cubans, Venezuelans, Haitians, and desperate immigrant people of color.
Trump panders openly to xenophobic racism and every other form of bigotry which will appeal to his MAGA base. But let us not forget: that Biden, pandering to racist white constituents, joined with segregationists in opposition to court ordered bussing for school desegregation; and that he, finding that Reagan’s tough-on-crime policies were popular with many of his white voters, spent a decade pressing for legislation culminating in the 1994 crime bill which has given the US the world’s largest per capita prison population (which is disproportionately racial minority).
Biden pretends to be pro-environment, but he prioritizes those projects which create jobs with income for capitalists. Meanwhile, he defied the environmental community by acquiesced to pressure from the fossil fuel industry with his approval of drilling on the Willow Project in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve. Biden also demands massive military spending plus weapons deliveries to fuel ongoing wars, both of which add considerably to global warming as well as being extremely wasteful and destructive.
Trump and his MAGA Republicans oppose (for their partisan and ideological reasons) more billions for Biden’s proxy war (using Ukrainians as cannon fodder) against Russia. Trump lacks any firm commitment to the imperial NATO alliance, whereas Biden acts to consolidate its hold upon Europe and to expand its purview to the Asia-Pacific. But for overwhelming opposition within the bipartisan US foreign policy establishment, then-President Trump may well have negotiated a long overdue peace treaty with North Korea; Biden clearly would never do so. For thoroughgoing imperialist militarist Biden, the US’ 38% share of all of the world’s military spending, compared to Russia’s 3.1%, is not enough. Trump pursued a trade war with China, and so has Biden; but Biden (despite the longstanding US commitment to the one-China principle) threatens a real war, if the independence faction in Taiwan secedes (which Biden and many Congressional Democrats are actually encouraging), and if China then responds with military action to stop it.
If returned to the Presidency, Trump can be expected to openly abuse (within practical limits) the powers of that Office; whereas Biden’s abuses are mostly with Congressional acquiescence. Trump may be an aspiring autocrat; but, narcissist and opportunist demagogue that he is, Trump is no Hitlerian fanatic. In pursuit of voters, he panders to Zionist Jews and also to Judeophobe racists. He panders to bigotry for political gain, not to create a thousand-year Reich. Trump wants another 4 years in the Presidency so that he can: personally profit from it, boost his ego, and escape accountability for his many partisan political crimes. Meanwhile, red-state Republicans have been imposing marginal infringements of democratic liberties in their states; while Biden and Congressional Democrats, even when they had both houses of Congress, lacked the will to take decisive action on crucial rights legislation (police accountability, gun regulation, abortion rights, labor rights, voting rights, removal of rogue Supreme Court Justices, et cetera). If Biden and his centrist Democrats deliver some limited progressive reforms (when under sufficient pressure and they can obtain bipartisan agreement); it is, out of necessity, in order to get the usual Democratic Party constituencies to vote for them. Essentially, both Biden and Trump are agents of the rule of capital.
Liberal Democrat assertion, that a Trump Presidency will impose full-blown fascism, is a dubious proposition, which they are using as a campaign scare tactic. Their assertion, that Democrat control of Congress and the Oval Office will preserve civil and human rights in the US, is belied by their records. Moreover, what Americans would experience under another 4 years of Trump in the Oval Office is nowhere nearly comparable to what Palestinians are experiencing under Biden-backed Israel.
What of Trump’s fascist-minded associates who would retain some political influence beyond a second Trump Presidential term? Whether Trump again or another 4 years of Biden, the real answer is the same. Reliance upon politicians of the centrist-dominated Democratic Party is a recipe for failure, one which enables said Dems to mislead and use social-justice voters while persisting with their policies of militarism, imperialism, supremacy of capital, and political perfidy, and yet remain largely ineffective against MAGA-Republican abuses and obstructions. Our real need is to build a social-justice activist movement which is truly independent of both major US Parties:
one which does not give its allegiance to the Democrats;
one which backs their election only selectively and for sound tactical reasons (such as to deny Trump a Congressional Republican majority in the House);
one which allies with them only when and insofar as they actually act for social justice, one which backs actual pro-social-justice challengers in primary elections;
one which does not abandon anti-imperialism and international solidarity with the victims of Western imperialism in order to pursue limited domestic reforms;
one with grassroots people-power capable of seriously challenging the abuses perpetrated by capital and its agents (whether business firms, neoliberal ideologues, populist demagogues, fascistic MAGA Republicans, or perfidious and unreliable Democrats).
Both Trump and Biden are racist promoters of mass murder. Neither is capable of earning the votes of activists for comprehensive social justice. Unless we (like Biden and most Congressional Democrats) devalue the humanity and lives of Palestinians, Haitians, et cetera; how can we accept liberal “left” assertions, that Biden is any savior of humanity and democracy and must therefore be reelected?
The UN Security Council presents one of the great contradictions of power in the international system. On the one hand vested with enormous latitude in order to preserve international peace and security, it remains checked, limited and, it can be argued, crippled by an all too regular use of the veto by members of the permanent five powers (US, Russia, China, the United Kingdom and France).
When it comes to the bleeding and crushing of human life in Gaza by the Israeli Defence Forces (32,300 dead Palestinians and rising), resolutions demanding a cease fire of a conflict that began with the attack on Israeli soil by Hamas militants have tended to pass into voting oblivion. The United States, Israel’s great power patron and defender, has been consistent in using its veto power to ensure it, exercising it on no less than three occasions since October 7.
On March 25, a change of heart was registered. Washington, reputationally battered for its unconditional support for Israel, haughtily defied by its own ally in being reduced to airdrops of aid for the expiring residents of Gaza, and resoundingly ignored by the Netanyahu government in moderating the savagery of its operations in the strip, abstained. In terms of resolution protocol, it meant that 14 out of 15 Council members favoured the vote.
Resolution 2728 calls for an immediate ceasefire for the month of Ramadan “leading to a lasting sustainable” halt to hostilities, the “immediate and unconditional release of all hostages”, “ensuring humanitarian access to address their medical and other humanitarian needs” and “demands that the parties comply with their obligations under international law in relation to all persons they detain”. The resolution further emphasises “the urgent need to expand the flow of humanitarian assistance to and reinforce the protection of civilians in the entire Gaza Strip”. All barriers regarding the provision of humanitarian assistance, in accordance with international humanitarian law” are also to be lifted.
The wording of the resolution has a degree of lexical ambiguity only tolerable to oily diplomats and paper mad bureaucrats. Neither Hamas nor Israeli hostages are mentioned, ghosts unacknowledged at the chattering feast. Does the latter, for instance, cover Palestinian prisoners?
The justification from the US delegation was uneven and skewed. The abstention, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken explained, “reaffirms the US position that a ceasefire of any duration come as part of an agreement to release hostages in Gaza.” While some provisions of the text had caused disagreement in Washington, the sponsors of the resolution had made sufficient changes “consistent with our principled position that any ceasefire text must be paired with the release of the hostages.”
Mild mannered approval for this sloppy, weak position (the apologetics of abstentions are rarely principled, suggesting a lack of moral timbre) followed. Hadar Susskind, President and CEO of Americans for Peace Now, even praised the stance in Newsweek. “By allowing the resolution to pass the US has staked out a position in favor of ending this horrible war, and in opposition to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s prioritization of his political well-being over the current and future good of Israelis and Palestinians alike.”
For his part, Netanyahu cancelled a planned Washington visit of two of his ministers, Ron Dermer and Tzachi Hanegbi, to specifically discuss the impending attack on Rafah, though much of this is bound to be studiously ceremonial, given the language of inevitability associated with the planned operation. Besides, neither are versed in anything related to military matters. But just as one pays attention to a wealthy, doddering relative who keeps funding your bad habits in the hope that you might, one day, see sense, it pays to feign courtesy and interest from time to time to your benefactor.
As if to prove this point, John F. Kirby, spokesman for the National Security Council, reminded journalists that various other meetings would still be taking place between the US and Israel, notably those between President Joe Biden’s national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, and with Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III.
In a gruff statement, the Israeli PM rebuked the abstention as “a retreat from the consistent American position since the beginning of the war”. In taking that stance, Washington had given “Hamas hope that international pressure will enable them to achieve a cease-fire without freeing the hostages.”
Netanyahu’s approach to Hamas, Gaza and the Palestinians has become one with his obsession with political survival and rekindling the fires of the Israeli electorate. As far back as December, a Likud official was already making the observation that the PM had adopted the posture of a vote getting electioneer even as the war was being prosecuted. “Netanyahu is in full campaign mode. While the external political threats are gradually increasing, Netanyahu knows that over time the attacks and the calls to remove him will also increase. He has been acting first to win back his base.”
For the UN Secretary General, António Guterres, the resolution had to be implemented. “Failure would be unforgivable.” But failure to do so, certainly in the context of the planned assault on Rafah so solemnly denounced by the international community, is most likely.
