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 Haaretz reports 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.
The post “Too Much Evidence” of Genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
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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!.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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!.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
This content originally appeared on The Grayzone and was authored by The Grayzone.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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.
The post IDF Killed 64 Children While Freeing 4 Hostages first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jay Janson.
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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. Whatever you 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 Times headline 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’
Likewise, this Washington Post headline:
‘Four Israeli hostages rescued alive; at least
‘210 people killed in Gaza, officials say’
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 Times discussed (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 Telegraph article 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’:
The post “This Is A Sharp Time”: Israel’s “Day Of Joy” first appeared on Dissident Voice.‘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)
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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?
The post A Turning Point in the Oppression of the Palestinians first appeared on Dissident Voice.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.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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.
Videos even show Israelis dancing in the street.
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.
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.
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
— Quds News Network (@QudsNen) June 8, 2024
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.
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.
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.
• First published in Middle East Eye
The post The Day the West Defined “Success” as a Massacre of 270 Palestinians first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
COMMENTARY: By Nick Rockel in Tāmaki Makaurau
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.
- READ MORE: NZDF will train with Israeli Defence Force in 2 weeks time! Our mana will be stained with dishonour!
- Gaza ‘devastated’ as mediators review Hamas response to ceasefire proposal
- Other War on Gaza reports
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.
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.
NZ ‘honour and mana stained’
From Martyn Bradbury’s article in The Daily Blog:
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.
Is that so hard Mr Luxon?
Nick Rockel is a “Westie Leftie with five children, two dogs, and a wonderful wife”. He is the publisher of Nick’s Kōrero where this article was first published. It is republished here with permission. Read on to subscribe to Nick’s substack articles.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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.
- Mention the 9,000 Palestinians Israel’s taken hostages since October 7.
- 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.
- Pause any CSIS spying on Palestinians for Israel.
- End government grants for bilateral industrial-military research
- 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.
- End any border security arrangement Ottawa has with Israel.
- 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.
- Pause any Communications Security Establishment spying on Palestinians for Israel.
- 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.
- Cancel the Canada-Israel Free Trade Agreement or, at minimum, exclude products from the occupied West Bank.
- 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.
- State publicly that any inducement or recruitment for the Israeli military in Canada contravenes the Foreign Enlistment Act and must be investigated.
- 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.
The post 45 Ways Ottawa Could Push Peace, Justice for Palestinians first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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, The Guardian 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 ChristBut 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 personallyWhy 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’.
Norita leaves us with her precious words:
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!
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Visualizing Palestine.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
This content originally appeared on Human Rights Watch and was authored by Human Rights Watch.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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 post A Brief History of Kill Lists, From Langley to Lavender first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The area around al-Shifa, Gaza’s largest hospital, following an Israeli massacre. ( DPA 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.
The genocide must be stopped.
• First published in The Electronic Intifada
The post Ramadan amid the rubble first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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.
Biden pretends to be pro-labor, but he stopped the rail workers from exercising their right to strike over oppressive attendance requirements and safety violations.
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 post Biden in November? first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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.
The post Distinctions Without Difference: The Security Council on Gaza Passes first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Photo Credit: Roger D. Harris
The book Gaza Writes Back is a collection of short stories from twenty young Gazans. Although published in 2013, the book is highly relevant today. The stories reveal how the last five months is the culmination of a process which has been going on for decades.
The title is curious: Gaza Writes Back. Perhaps it is an alternative to “Gaza Fights Back”. Certainly in the context of Gaza, writing is an important form of resistance to Israeli repression, occupation and massacres. The oppressor recognizes this as well. At least ninety five journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza since October 7.
The editor of Gaza Writes Back was an English literature and creative writing professor at Gaza’s Islamic University named Refaat Alareer. Many of the contributors to this collection of short stories were Alareer’s students.
There are many references in the book to Israel’s attacks on Gaza in 2008-9 named “Operation Cast Lead”. As the anthology was being printed and first distributed, Israel launched the massacre named “Operation Protective Edge”. In six weeks, Israel killed 2,191 Palestinians and injured 11,231 while 71 Israelis were killed. Thirty Palestinians for every single Israeli. As editor Alareer says, “This book shows the world that despite Israel’s continuous attempts to kill steadfastness in us, Palestinians keep going on , never surrendering to pain or death, and always seeing and seeking liberty and hope in the darkest of times.”
The editor Alareer says, writing is “an act of resistance and an obligation to humanity to raise awareness among people blinded by the multi-million dollar Israeli campaign of ‘hasbara’ (‘persuasion’, or more accurately, disinformation.)”
Most of the stories recount difficult moments and experiences. That is natural because the oppression in Gaza has been relentless for decades. Here is a concise summary of the conditions in 2014 when this book came out: “If you lived in Gaza, how would YOU feel?”
It is impressive that Gazans continue to resist and maintain their humanity despite the efforts to dehumanize them.
The story “L is for Life” is about a young woman writing a letter to her father who died eleven years earlier. She speaks of her mother’s “bitter loneliness”. It reminds us that for every Palestinian killed there is pain and suffering caused to each of their friends and family. How many women and men share that “bitter loneliness” because their partners or children were killed? How many lives have been irreparably harmed by the injuries and amputations? The author travels to an orphanage that her late father spoke of and sees hope in the midst of destruction.
The story “One War Day” describes a mother who opens all the windows at night to avoid windows exploding inwards if there is an Israeli bombing. When the roof collapses the author’s brother is buried under the rubble with his hands still on the book he was reading.
The story “Spared” describes a girl whose mother insists she stay inside for lunch rather than go out where kids are playing soccer in the street. That saves her from death or injury when a bomb is dropped. Kids died and there were amputated limbs and scarred faces. “Our neighborhood was blown to smithereens in a split second. No more games played. No more goals. No more cheering. And my friends grew up in a second.“
In the story “A Wish for Insomnia” the writer imagines she is an Israeli soldier with post traumatic stress disorder. As the young writer imagines, there must be Israeli soldiers who take home the nightmare of what they have done just as there are US soldiers with the same mental and emotional disorder. The Palestinian author writes, “The past few weeks were agonizing for the family. Their father (the Israeli soldier) did not leave the bedroom. All they saw and heard of him was his screaming in the middle of the night, the noise of things breaking, and his moaning during the day.” He has nightmares and says, “We were sent in tanks to Gaza…. We were instructed to shoot to kill and we shot almost every moving thing. We shot the water tanks, a couple of stray dogs, a cow, a dozen people, and there was that woman with her kid…. I wish I could know what happened to the kid. The kid cried the whole night. I kept hearing the commander’s order in the background, but it was the little kid’s voice that haunted me everywhere…..”
The short story titled “Please Shoot to Kill” portrays family life and fear during nights and days of bombing and Israeli soldiers kicking down the door to their house with M16 rifles ready to fire. It describes what it’s like to see the soldiers ransacking the house then hitting the father. What it’s like to see one’s little sibling hit by shrapnel so badly the leg would be amputated. What it’s like to have Apache helicopters overhead and Meerkhava tanks on the street. The father needs a kidney operation in Egypt but is unable to go there. Instead, a baby that needs surgery is allowed to go. “Laila did not hate the little baby who was sent instead of her father. She only hated Israel for making it so that the doctor had to choose. She only wished this baby would survive, grow up, and become a freedom fighter.”
The story titled “From Beneath” describes the thoughts of a young woman under the rubble, unable to move and sensing what parts of her body have been crushed and how her life was coming to end.
The story “Lost at Once” is a love story giving insights into Gazan social class differences.
These are just a few of the twenty-three short stories in this fine book.
The editor, Professor Refaat Alareer, was also a moving poet and an influential voice with 83 thousand followers on Twitter/X. His twitter handle was @ThisIsGaZa. In his last interview before being killed, Refaat said “I am an academic. Probably the toughest thing I have at home is an Expo marker. But if the Israelis invade, if they barge at us, charge at us, open the door to massacre us, I am going to use that marker to throw it at the Israeli soldiers, even if that that is the last thing I do. And this is the feeling of everybody. We are helpless. We have nothing to lose.”
Refaat Alareer and his brother, sister and four of their children were killed in a targeted airstrike on 6 December 2023. His last poem is a testament to his courage and dedication. It has been widely remembered at demonstrations against Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
If I Must Die
If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself—
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale
Some of Refaat Alareer’s outstanding academic lectures are available online. A tribute to him by his publisher Just World Books is online here. The heading of Refaat Alareer’s twitter account says, “I teach; therefore, I am. Have you read Gaza Writes Back?”
This book exemplifies courage and dignity in the face of hardship and repeated attacks. Each story is different but collectively they give a sense of continued dignity and hope despite suffering and pain. Ultimately, the stories are uplifting. It is a measure of Israel’s lawlessness that they had to murder the editor of Gaza Writes Back.
The post Voices from Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The core ethos of Humanity is Kindness and Truth but this is grossly violated by genocidally racist and pathologically mendacious Apartheid Israel. Huge Zionist perversion and subversion of the West has enabled massive and false Jewish Israeli propaganda to become the dominant narrative in the West. Google Searches reveal the shocking extent of the adoption of 10 major Zionist lies about the Gaza Genocide in the Zionist-perverted US and US Alliance countries.
(1). “Israeli” is falsely used when “Jewish Israeli” would be correct. 99% of the Israeli perpetrators of the killing in this latest Gaza Massacre are actually “Jewish Israelis” because 99% of the Israel Defence Force (IDF) is Jewish and 21% of Israelis are Palestinians.
(2). Re the current Gaza Massacre “terrorist” is vastly more applicable to Jewish Israeli and US killers than to Hamas. Terrorism is as terrorism does and the killers of about 40,000 Palestinians including about 15,000 children to date in the Gaza Genocide are vastly more deserving of the descriptive “terrorist” than Hamas that allegedly killed 1,200 Israelis on 7 October (with possibly most actually killed by overwhelming IDF shelling and missile fire-power).
(3). Google Searches reveal massive English-speaking World lying by omission in ignoring Palestinian exclusion from human rights. The fundamental problem in Apartheid Israel-ruled Palestine has been egregious exclusion of Indigenous Palestinian from human rights. 7 million Exiled Palestinians are excluded from the basic right to live in their own country. 5.6 million Occupied Palestinians are excluded from all the human rights set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 2.1 million Palestinian Israelis can vote for the government ruling them, albeit as Third Class citizens under 65 Nazi-style, race-based discriminatory laws. 7.1 million Indigenous Palestinians are 50% of the Subjects of Apartheid Israel.
(4). The Gaza Massacre has increased anti-Jewish sentiment globally but has also led to massive false Zionist claims of “antisemitism” in response to condemnation of the Gaza Genocide and other Apartheid Israeli crimes. The all-European and fervently pro-Apartheid Israel International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) has a definition of anti-Semitism that has been used to falsely defame critics of Jewish Israeli crimes. The IHRA is anti-Jewish anti-Semitic and anti-Arab anti-Semitic (by falsely defaming anti-racist Jewish, Palestinian, Arab and Muslim critics of Apartheid Israel as anti-Semites) and holocaust-denying (by ignoring all WW2 holocausts other than the WW2 Jewish Holocaust).
(5). Massive Western concern over 250 Israeli hostages while ignoring 5.6 million Occupied Palestinian hostages under highly abusive military rule with 10,000 in military prisons (egregious Zionist lying by omission). A glaring example of current Western anti-Arab anti-Semitism is massive Western coverage of the 250 Israeli hostages that routinely “balances” or indeed displaces reportage of the destruction and mass murder in Gaza (about 40,000 killed so far).
(6). The West falsely accuses Hamas of “hostage taking” war crimes and also “human shield” war crimes because it operates in one of the world’s most densely populated urban areas. Hamas’ 250 Israeli hostages are numerically negligible in relation to 5.6 million Occupied Palestinian hostages under violent and deadly military rule (now for 56 years), 10,000 of whom are highly abusively imprisoned in Israeli military prisons. As for “human shields”, if Hamas would gather above or below ground in uninhabited areas they would be immediately totally destroyed by Israeli bombing.
(7). The West overwhelmingly ignores the Occupied/Occupier Reprisals Death Ratio – yet in the Gaza Genocide it is 65 versus the 10 ordered by Hitler. Conservatively assuming that the IDF caused 50% of the 1,200 Israeli deaths on 7 October, the Occupied/Occupier Reprisals Death Ratio is presently 39,178/ 600 = 65.3, 6.5 times greater than the 10 ordered by Nazi mass murderer Hitler and subsequently effected in the 1944 Ardeatine Massacre. Nazi is as Nazi does.
(8). Mainstream Western journalists are too cowardly to report that Jewish Israelis in the Gaza Massacre lead the world in annual per capita killing of journalists. In May 2022 the “average number of journalists killed per 10 million of population per year” was Occupied Palestine, 2.77; Mexico, 0.75; Colombia, 0.37; the World, 0.084. Since 7 October Israelis have killed 132 journalists over 5 months in Gaza, a territory with a population of 2.3 million. The “average number of journalists killed per 10 million of population per year” in Gaza over the last 5 months has been 1,377, or 3,722 times more than for cartel-dominated Colombia and 16,393 times more than for the World.
(9). The Zionists and pro-Zionists falsely assert that “Israel has the right to defend itself in Gaza” and that brutally subjugated Occupied Palestinians do not. Eminent International law expert and UN Rapporteur for Palestinians, Francesca Albanese: “Israel cannot claim the right of self-defence against a threat that emanates from the territory it occupies, from a territory that is kept under belligerent occupation.” Conversely, the Occupied Palestinians have the right, like any other Occupied and subjugated people, to take up arms against tyranny as set out in the Preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and by Article 51 of the UN Charter.
(10). Jewish Israelis in Gaza lead the World by far for annual per capita killing of children – 17 times greater than for Jewish children in Nazi-occupied Europe. 14,622 Gaza children killed by Jewish Israelis in the 151-day period of 7 October 2023- 5 March 2024 converts to (14,622 children killed /151 days) x (365.25 days/ year)/ (2.3 million people in Gaza) = 15,378 children killed per year per million of total territory population, this being 203 times bigger than the previous World’s worst, Honduras (75.7). 1,500,000 Jewish children killed /6 years) / (280 million people in Nazi-occupied Europe) = 893 children killed per year per million of total territory population, 17 times less than for children in Gaza.
This ongoing Jewish Israeli atrocity in Gaza and the attendant tsunami of Western-propagated Zionist falsehood is a horrible violation not just of Kindness, Truth and Humanity but also of the wonderful humanitarian Jewish tradition from the Ten Commandments and Jesus’ “love thy neighbour”, through Baruch Spinoza and the Enlightenment to the great Jewish humanitarian scholars of the present era from Hannah Arendt to Howard Zinn.
Decent people around the world must (a) inform everyone they can, and (b) urge and apply Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against genocidally racist Apartheid Israel and all people, politicians, parties, collectives, corporations and countries supporting this genocidal neo-Nazi state and its horrendous and unforgivable atrocities. The World must forcibly demand immediate cessation of the killing, and an immediate end to the Occupation so that the now starving and horribly deprived Gazans can be immediately given water, food, shelter, sanitation, medicine, medical care, commencement of gigantic reconstruction – and then forensically-informed international war crimes trials of genocidal Jewish Israelis for one of the world’s worst atrocities.
The post Exposing the 10 Biggest Zionist Lies re Jewish Israeli-imposed Gaza Genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Heba Zagout (1984–2023), Gaza Peace, 2021.
On 4 March, Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA) Philippe Lazzarini presented his startling report on the situation in Gaza (Palestine) to the UN General Assembly. In just 150 days, Lazzarini said, Israeli forces have killed more than 30,000 Palestinians, nearly half of them children. Those who survive continue to face Israel’s attacks and are afflicted with the traumas of war. The four horsemen of the apocalypse described in the Bible’s Book of Revelation – Conquest, War, Famine, and Death – are now galloping from one end of Gaza to the other.
‘Hunger is everywhere’, Lazzarini said. ‘A man-made famine is looming’. A few days after Lazzarini made his blunt assessment, Gaza’s Ministry of Health reported that child malnutrition levels in the northern part of the strip are ‘particularly extreme’. The UN’s Humanitarian Coordinator for Palestine Jamie McGoldrick said that ‘hunger has reached catastrophic levels’ and ‘children are dying from hunger’. By the end of the first week of March, at least twenty children had died due to starvation. Among them was ten-year-old Yazan al-Kafarna of Beit Hanoun (northern Gaza), who died in Rafah (southern Gaza) on the same day that Lazzarini spoke at the UN. The image of Yazan’s emaciated body tore into the already battered conscience of our world. Story upon ugly story pile up alongside the rubble produced by Israeli bombing. Dr Mohammed Salha of Al-Awda hospital, where Yazan died, says that many pregnant women suffering from malnutrition have birthed stillborn foetuses or have required caesarean operations to remove them – without anaesthetics.
Mohammed Sami Qariqa (1999–2023), from the exhibition ‘Gaza International Airport’, 2022.
A ceasefire is nowhere on the horizon. Nor is any real commitment to get aid into Gaza, particularly in the north where hunger has taken the greatest toll (on 28 February, UN World Food Programme Deputy Executive Director Carl Skau told the Security Council that there is a ‘real prospect of famine [in northern Gaza] by May, with over 500,000 people at risk if the threat is allowed to materialise’). A round 155 trucks of aid are entering Gaza per day – well below the 500-truck daily capacity at the crossing – with only a few of them going to northern Gaza. Israeli soldiers have been ruthless. On 29 February, when aid trucks arrived at the Al-Nabulsi roundabout (on the southwestern edge of Gaza City, in northern Gaza) and desperate people rushed to them, Israeli troops opened fire and killed at least 118 unarmed civilians. This is now known as the Flour Massacre. Airdrops of food are not only inadequate in volume, but they have resulted in their own heartbreaks, with some parcels landing in the Mediterranean Sea and others crushing at least five people to death.
As if from nowhere, US President Joe Biden announced in his State of the Union address on 7 March that his country would build a ‘temporary pier’ in southern Gaza to facilitate the entry of aid through the sea. The context for this decision, which Biden omitted, is clear: Israel is not permitting the bare minimum of humanitarian aid to pass through land crossings, Israel destroyed the Gaza harbour on 10 October, and Israel pulverised the Gaza airport at Dahaniya in 2006. This decision is certainly not from nowhere. It also comes in the midst of the campaign for democrats in the US to vote ‘uncommitted’ in the ongoing primaries to make it clear that the US’s complicity in the genocide will negatively impact Biden’s re-election effort. Although one loaf of bread is better than none, these loaves of bread will come to Gaza stained in blood.
There is a hollowness to Biden’s pronouncement. Once aid arrives at this ‘temporary pier’, how will it be distributed? The main institutions in Gaza capable of any mass-scale distribution are UNRWA – now defunded by most Western countries – and the Hamas-led Palestinian government – which Western countries have set out to destroy. Since neither will be able to distribute humanitarian aid on the ground (and, as Biden said, ‘no US boots will be on the ground’), what will become of the aid?
Fathi Ghaben (1947–2024), Ray of Glory, n.d.
UNRWA has been at work since shortly after UN resolution 302 (IV) was passed in 1949, since which time it has been the main organisation to provide relief to Palestinian refugees (of which there were 750,000 when UNRWA began its operations and of which there are 5.9 million today). UNRWA’s mandate is precise: it must ensure the well-being of Palestinians but cannot operate to permanently settle them outside their homes. That is because UN resolution 194 affords Palestinians the ‘right to return’ to their homes from which they were ejected by the Israeli state. Although UNRWA’s main work has been in the field of education (two thirds of its 30,000 staff work for UNRWA schools), it is also the organisation most equipped to handle aid distribution.
The West allowed for the creation of UNRWA not because of any particular concern for Palestinians, but because – as the US Department of State noted in 1949 – the ‘conditions of unrest and despair would provide a most fertile hotbed for the implantation of Communism’. That is why the West provided funds for UNRWA (although, since 1966, this has come with severe restrictions). In early 2024, most Western countries cut their funding to UNRWA based on an unsubstantiated accusation tying UNRWA employees to the 7 October attack. Though it has recently come to light that the Israeli army tortured UNRWA employees, such as through waterboarding and beatings, and forced them to make these confessions, most of the countries that cut their funding based on these grounds have failed to reinstate it (with the exception of Canada and Sweden, which have recently resumed their funding). Meanwhile, several Global South countries – led by Brazil – have increased their contributions.
Filippo Grandi, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees who ran UNRWA from 2010 to 2014, recently said that if ‘UNRWA is not permitted to work, or is defunded, I can hardly see who can substitute [it]’. No humanitarian relief programme for Palestinians in Gaza is possible in the short run without UNRWA’s full partnership. Anything else is a public relations sham.
Majd Arandas (1994–2023), My Grandmother, 2022.
Reading about the famine in Gaza, I remembered a poem written by Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012) about the Szebnie concentration camp in Jasło (southern Poland), which held Polish Jews, Romani people, and Soviet prisoners of war from 1941 until the camp was liberated by the Red Army in September 1944. Brutal, horrible violence was inflicted by the Nazis at Szebnie, particularly against the thousands of Jews who were killed there in mass executions. Szymborska’s poem, ‘Starvation Camp Near Jasło’ (1962), does not flinch from the wretchedness surrounding her, nor from the possibility of humanity for which she yearned.
Write it down. Write it. With ordinary ink
on ordinary paper: they weren’t given food,
they all died of hunger. All. How many?
It’s a large meadow. How much grass
per head? Write down: I don’t know.
History rounds off skeletons to zero.
A thousand and one is still only a thousand.
That one seems never to have existed:
a fictitious foetus, an empty cradle,
a primer opened for no one,
air that laughs, cries, and grows,
stairs for a void bounding out to the garden,
no one’s spot in the ranks.It became flesh right here, on this meadow.
But the meadow’s silent, like a witness who’s been bought.
Sunny. Green. A forest close at hand,
with wood to chew on, drops beneath the bark to drink –
a view served round the clock,
until you go blind. Above, a bird
whose shadow flicked its nourishing wings
across their lips. Jaws dropped,
teeth clattered.At night a sickle glistened in the sky
and reaped the dark for dreamed-of loaves.
Hands came flying from blackened icons,
each holding an empty chalice.
A man swayed
on a grill of barbed wire.
Some sang, with dirt in their mouths. That lovely song
about war hitting you straight in the heart.
Write how quiet it is.
Yes.
The paintings and photograph in this newsletter were created by Palestinian artists killed in Gaza during Israel’s genocide. They have died, but we must live to tell their stories.
The post Conquest, War, Famine, and Death Hit You Straight in the Heart first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Corporate journalists are indeed ‘masters of self-adulation’, as Noam Chomsky has observed. In fact, they have to be; or at least they have to appear to be.
Consider BBC World Affairs Editor John Simpson CBE, a long-term sparring partner and rare example of a BBC journalist who has bothered to reply to our challenges, often graciously. There have been times over the last two decades when Simpson genuinely seemed to get some of what we were saying. It’s no surprise, though, to read Simpson’s recent comment on X:
My colleagues at @itvnews, @SkyNews and @BBCNews jump through hoops to be balanced and impartial, and @Ofcom rightly holds us to the highest standard. Switch on @GBNews, and you watch unashamedly opinionated allegations being passed off as fact. What’s going on, Ofcom? (John Simpson, X, 25 February 2024)
Journalist Glenn Greenwald put this heroic claim in perspective:
The public despises the corporate media. There is almost nobody held in lower esteem or who is more distrusted and abhorred than the liberal employees of large media corporations. Nobody wants to hear from them, so in-group arrogance is all they have left.
But British media are the best of a bad bunch, right? Greenwald again, accurately:
The worst media in the democratic world is the British media, and it’s not even close.
I know it’s hard for people in other countries who hate their own media to believe, but whatever you hate about your country’s media, the UK media has in abundance and worse.
Indicatively, in November 2002, as Bush and Blair were trying to scare their way to war on Iraq, Simpson produced a BBC documentary called: ‘Saddam – A Warning From History’ (BBC1, 3 November 2002). The title was an unsubtle and ‘unashamedly opinionated’ reference to an earlier BBC series, ‘The Nazis – A Warning From History’. This, of course, was a comparison that dovetailed with the sleaziest themes of US-UK state propaganda.
In 2013, Simpson opined:
The US is still the world’s biggest economic and military power, but it seems to have lost the sense of moral mission that caused it to intervene everywhere from Vietnam to Iraq…
Alas, the US continues to struggle to regain its ‘sense of moral mission,’ as it supplies the missiles, bombs and diplomatic immunity fuelling the genocide in Gaza.
Far from jumping through hoops ‘to be balanced and impartial,’ the BBC seems embarrassed even to associate Israel with its own crimes. A typical BBC headline read:
World Food Programme says northern Gaza aid convoy blocked
Was there a landslide? Was Hamas playing politics with food aid? The headline should have read:
Israel blocks northern Gaza aid convoy
Or consider the damning words of the Director-General of The World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who reported this month:
Grim findings during @WHO visits to Al-Awda and Kamal Adwan hospitals in northern #Gaza: severe levels of malnutrition, children dying of starvation, serious shortages of fuel, food and medical supplies, hospital buildings destroyed…
The situation at Al-Awda Hospital is particularly appalling, as one of the buildings is destroyed.
Kamal Adwan Hospital is the only paediatrics hospital in the north of Gaza, and is overwhelmed with patients. The lack of food resulted in the deaths of 10 children.
The BBC headline reporting this story read:
Children starving to death in northern Gaza – WHO
Did the crops fail? If Russia had caused child starvation in Ukraine, we can be confident the words ‘Putin’ and ‘Russia’ would have appeared front and centre in BBC reporting.
Over a picture of an emaciated, skeletal child victim of Israeli starvation in Gaza, Peter Oborne made a related point:
If Gaza was Ukraine this terrible picture would be on every front page tomorrow morning.
Needless to say, that was not to be.
On 29 February, a New York Times comment piece was titled:
Starvation Is Stalking Gaza’s Children
Former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook commented:
Israel is choosing to starve Gaza’s children by blocking aid.
On 5 March, a Reuters headline read:
As Gaza’s hunger crisis worsens, emaciated children seen at hospitals
Author Assal Rad responded:
Gaza’s “hunger crisis” is not a natural phenomenon. Israel is deliberately starving Palestinians in Gaza as a weapon of war, which is an act of collective punishment and a war crime.
The Al-Rashid Humanitarian Aid ‘Tragedy’
What has been termed the ‘Al-Rashid humanitarian aid incident’ – also described as ‘the Flour Massacre’ because the food convoy involved was carrying sacks of flour – occurred in Gaza on 29 February. At least 118 Palestinian civilians were killed and at least 760 were injured after Israeli tanks opened fire on civilians seeking food from aid trucks on al-Rashid street to the west of Gaza City. The BBC’s immediate headline reactions were full of mystery:
Israel-Gaza war latest: More than 100 reported killed as crowd waits for Gaza aid
And:
Biden says Gaza food aid-related deaths complicate ceasefire talks
USA Today’s headline was surreal:
112 killed in Gaza food line carnage: Israel blames Palestinian aid drivers
On 1 March, a Guardian front-page headline read:
More than 100 Palestinians die in chaos surrounding Gaza aid convoy
The standfirst (sub-heading):
Israeli military rejects claims it fired on crowd and blames deadly crush
Imagine that second, high-profile comment in response to claims of a Russian atrocity in Ukraine, especially if Russia had inflicted comparable levels of near-total destruction on Ukraine.
It wasn’t that the truth was unavailable. One day before the Guardian headline appeared, the UK’s sole left-wing national newspaper, the Morning Star, published this online headline, which appeared in the print edition the following day:
ISRAELI ARMY FIRES INTO CROWD WAITING FOR FOOD, KILLING 104
Compare also its standfirst:
ATROCITY: Gaza death toll tops 30,000 after soldiers gunned down starving civilians as they unloaded aid lorries
On 1 March, Associated Press reported:
The head of a Gaza City hospital that treated some of the Palestinians wounded in the bloodshed surrounding an aid convoy said Friday that more than 80% had been struck by gunfire, suggesting there was heavy shooting by Israeli troops. (Our emphasis)
The following day, a BBC headline read:
Fergal Keane: Aid convoy tragedy shows fear of starvation haunts Gaza
A massacre is first and foremost a crime, not a tragedy. The BBC continued to muddle the picture:
After the events at al-Rashid Street in Gaza, in which more than 100 people were reported killed after a rush on an aid convoy, the international community is under pressure to tackle the growing crisis of hunger in the territory, as Fergal Keane reports from Jerusalem. (Our emphasis)
The focus on people reported killed in a ‘tragedy’ ‘after a rush on an aid convoy’ suggested death by trampling, or perhaps troops shooting in panic at a rampaging mob. It led away from the truth that Israeli main battle tanks fired on starving civilians with heavy machine guns. While the word ‘tragedy’ was used four times in the report, the words ‘massacre’, ‘crime’ and ‘atrocity’ were not mentioned. These were Keane’s opening sentences after the introduction specifically mentioning the mass death in al-Rashid Street:
They die in all kinds of places and ways. Broken under the rubble of their homes, blasted by explosives, punctured by high velocity bullets, cut open by flying shards of metal.
And now – as the war enters its fifth month – death from hunger has come to haunt Gaza.
It is essential to know the when, what and how of the tragedy at al-Rashid Street.
Again, this obscured the fact that ‘now’ – in the incident actually under discussion – death also came from high velocity bullets, not hunger.
On 1 March, the much-vaunted BBC Verify – ostensibly tasked to sift truth from allegation – described the massacre as ‘a tragic incident’. The words ‘massacre’, ‘atrocity’ and ‘crime’ were not used. 9/11 was also ‘a tragic incident’, but that’s not how it would ever be described. Paul Brown of BBC Verify reported:
The tragic incident has given rise to differing claims about what happened and who was responsible for the carnage.
Brown commented on video footage:
Volleys of gunfire can be heard and people are seen scrambling over lorries and ducking behind the vehicles. Red tracer rounds can be seen in the sky.
Mahmoud Awadeyah [a journalist at the scene] said the Israeli vehicles had started firing at people when the aid arrived.
“Israelis purposefully fired at the men… they were trying to get near the trucks that had the flour,” he said. “They were fired at directly and prevented people to come near those killed.”
Brown added:
Dr Mohamed Salha, interim hospital manager at al-Awda hospital, where many of the dead and injured were taken, told the BBC: “Al-Awda hospital received around 176 injured people… 142 of these cases are bullet injuries and the rest are from the stampede and broken limbs in the upper and lower body parts.”
Clearly, then, it was a massacre; so why the lack of clarity? Why was the word ‘massacre’ not used to describe a textbook example of a massacre in a report supposed to verify and clarify the truth?
As we noted recently, the Glasgow Media Group examined four weeks (7 October – 4 November, 2023) of BBC One daytime coverage of Gaza to identify which terms were used by journalists themselves – i.e. not in direct or reported statements – to describe Israeli and Palestinian deaths. They found that ‘murder’, ‘murderous’, ‘mass murder’, ‘brutal murder’ and ‘merciless murder’ were used a total of 52 times by journalists to refer to Israelis’ deaths but never in relation to Palestinian deaths. The group noted that:
The same pattern could be seen in relation to “massacre”, “brutal massacre” and “horrific massacre” (35 times for Israeli deaths, not once for Palestinian deaths); “atrocity”, “horrific atrocity” and “appalling atrocity” (22 times for Israeli deaths, once for Palestinian deaths); and “slaughter” (five times for Israeli deaths, not once for Palestinian deaths).
The Muslim Council of Britain’s Centre for Media Monitoring analysed 176,627 television clips from over 13 broadcasters including the BBC, ITV, Sky and Channel 4 from 7 October – 7 November 2023. The report found that Israeli perspectives were referenced almost three times more (4,311) than Palestinian ones (1,598).
This is an exact reversal of performance on the Russia-Ukraine war by our supposedly independent and impartial ‘free press’.
A BBC report on 5 March stated:
Last Thursday, more than 100 Palestinians were killed as crowds rushed to reach an aid convoy operated by private contractors that was being escorted by Israeli forces west of Gaza City.
Palestinian health officials said dozens were killed when Israeli forces opened fire. Israel’s military said most died from either being trampled on or run over by the aid lorries. It said soldiers near the aid convoy had fired towards people who approached them and who they considered a threat.
Those are indeed the two competing versions of events. Was the BBC unable to find meaningful testimony from the hundreds of eyewitnesses to what happened, as they invariably manage to do in reporting alleged Russian crimes in Ukraine?
According to Al Jazeera’s Ismail al-Ghoul, an eyewitness at the scene, Israeli firing occurred in two bursts: the first as people seized food from the convoy, the second when the crowd returned to the trucks:
After opening fire, Israeli tanks advanced and ran over many of the dead and injured bodies,’ he said.
Accounts from the thousands of Palestinians who were there are clearer: Israeli forces fired indiscriminately into the crowd which killed dozens of people and led to a stampede in which more people died.
Hossam Abu Shaar, a 29-year-old resident of Gaza City, who was injured in the attack, said of the gunfire:
“It was so huge that nearly everyone was either killed, shot, injured. I was among the very few lucky ones,” he said, recalling how he had felt the wind of the bullets pass him by.
”I was hit in the leg by shrapnel from an artillery shell that landed nearby.
”I saw bodies being scattered all across the road. It was horrific. We’ve faced similar situations before, when Israeli tanks fired at us, killing and injuring many. But this time the world paid attention, maybe because we were killed on camera.”
CBS reported eyewitness Anwar Helewa:
We ran towards the food aid. The soldiers then started firing at us, and so we left the food and ran.
On 5 March, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights commented:
UN experts condemned the violence unleashed by Israeli forces, which killed at least 112 people gathered to collect flour in Gaza last week, as a “massacre” amid conditions of inevitable starvation and destruction of the local food production system in the besieged Palestinian enclave.
“Israel has been intentionally starving the Palestinian people in Gaza since 8 October. Now it is targeting civilians seeking humanitarian aid and humanitarian convoys,” the UN experts said. “Israel must end its campaign of starvation and targeting of civilians.”
The UN added of its experts:
They noted that the 29 February massacre followed a pattern of Israeli attacks against Palestinian civilians seeking aid, with over 14 recorded incidents of shooting, shelling and targeting groups gathered to receive urgently needed supplies from trucks or airdrops between mid-January and the end of February 2024.
“Israel has also opened fire on humanitarian aid convoys on several occasions, despite the fact that the convoys shared their coordinates with Israel,” the experts said.
None of this has been of much interest to the Western press. Media Matters reported that from February 29 to March 3, Fox News dedicated just 12 minutes of coverage to the massacre, noting:
During that period, Fox News aired only 1 interview about the carnage: a conversation with spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in which she blamed Hamas for Israeli military violence without evidence.
Conclusion
It is instructive to compare this latest apologetic performance with media responses to the Houla massacre in Syria in 2012 where words like ‘murder’, ‘massacre’ and ‘atrocity’ – all instantly pinned on Syrian government forces – were the norm. This BBC headline was standard:
Syria massacre in Houla condemned as outrage grows
Note the very different, damning tone of the opening lines below:
Western nations are pressing for a response to the massacre in the Syrian town of Houla, with the US calling for an end to President Bashar al-Assad’s “rule by murder”.
UK Foreign Secretary William Hague has called for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council this week.
The UN has confirmed the deaths of at least 90 people in Houla, including 32 children under the age of 10.
On the BBC’s News at Ten, the BBC’s Diplomatic Correspondent James Robbins claimed:
The UN now says most victims, including many children, were murdered inside their homes by President Assad’s militias. (Robbins, BBC News at Ten, 29 May 2012)
See our 2-part media alert, ‘Massacres That Matter’, for detail and discussion on this long-term trend in reporting. See, also, our alert, ‘A Tale of Two “Massacres” – Jenin and Racak.’
Even more striking, of course, is the fact that in 2011 all major Western media propagandised heavily for the US-UK overthrow of the Gaddafi government in Libya, not for committing a massacre, but on the basis of fake claims that Gaddafi was planning a massacre in Benghazi.
We began with John Simpson’s lauding of the BBC, so let’s end with a couple of comments from the great and the good of BBC journalism. The BBC’s then Chief Political Correspondent, Norman Smith, declared that Cameron ‘must surely feel vindicated’ by the fall of Gaddafi. (Smith, BBC News online, 21 October 2011)
With Libya in ruins, the BBC’s John Humphrys asked sagely:
What, apart from a sort of moral glow… have we got out of it? (Humphrys, BBC Radio 4, Today programme, 21 October 2011)
The answer, of course, was oil.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
We will destroy everything not Jewish.
— Theodore Herzl [1]We have no solution, you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave, and we will see where this process leads . . . . You Palestinians, as a nation, don’t want us today, but we’ll change your attitude by forcing our presence on you.
— Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan [2]The common denominator amongst all the American peace efforts is their abysmal failure.
— Cheryl A. Rubenberg [3]
USrael’s disgraceful conduct in Gaza goes on, and on and on. Leveling hospitals, shooting children in the head; gunning down a surgeon at the operating table, using an emergency call from a little girl trapped in a car with the corpses of family members to lure two rescue workers to her, then killing all three; systematically killing Palestinian journalists reporting on the slaughter; promising to save three premature babies at a hospital under forced evacuation, then leaving them to slowly die and be devoured by dogs; singing in chorus of the joy of exterminating Arabs; cheering the blocking of food aid to starving Gazans; killing entire families, inducing a Palestinian boy to lay down in the road hoping someone would run over him and end his misery; this is but a small sampling of the consequences of trapping over a million Gazans in the southern half of a 125-square-mile concentration camp without food, shelter, or sanitation, then methodically shooting and bombing them while thousands of their relatives decompose under expanding mountains of rubble.
Depravity on this scale will not magically disappear by establishing a cease fire and holding peace talks, as urgently necessary as both those preliminaries are. Only relentless popular pressure on the U.S. government to force it to deny Israel the means to subjugate and murder Palestinians can even hope to lead to de-nazification of the Jewish state, without which real peace can never be achieved. Keep in mind that in the midst of the current wholesale slaughter a large majority of Israelis think Netanyahu isn’t using enough violence.
Cease fires we have had before, and peace agreements, too, but they didn’t solve the underlying conflict because addressing the absence of Palestinian national rights – the heart of the Palestine conflict – is taboo.
Because of this taboo, massacres of Palestinians are a feature, not a bug, of Zionist ideology, and have stained Israel’s history from before the state was even formed.
Only the scale of the current Gaza slaughter sets it apart.
In June of 1982, for example, Israel invaded Lebanon on a surge of Pentagon arms shipments, seeking to disperse the Palestine Liberation Organization (the Hamas of its day) and poison its relations with the local population while destroying its political and military structures. Tens of thousands of civilians died as the IDF carved up the country in alliance with Christian fascist militias.
While claiming to stand tall for human rights, Washington kept arms and money flowing in support of Israel’s occupation of not just Palestine, but Syria and Lebanon as well.
Lebanon was savagely pounded, leaving people roaming the wreckage of Beirut in clouds of flies, terror in their eyes, their clothes reduced to rags. Mothers howled, orphans sobbed, and the stench of rotting corpses filled the air.
Cluster bombs leveled whole blocks. White phosphorous burned people alive. Palestinian refugee camps were blasted to rubble, left pockmarked with blackened craters that filled with dead bodies and other debris. An officer in the U.N. peace-keeping force swept aside by the Israeli attack on Rashidiyeh said, “It was like shooting sparrows with a cannon.” Asked why houses containing women and children were being bombarded and bulldozed, an Israeli army officer explained that, “they are all terrorists.”
Surrounded by tanks, gunshots, and hysteria, one hundred thousand people were left without shelter or food, roaming through piles of wreckage. Blindfolded men, handcuffed with plastic bonds, were marched away to concentration camps where they were tortured, humiliated, and murdered. Their families were turned over to Phalangist patrols and Haddad forces (Israeli allies), who torched homes and beat people indiscriminately.
At the United Nations, the United States gave its customary blessing to Israeli savagery, vetoing a Security Council resolution condemning Israel.
Much impressed by Israel’s “purity of arms, The New York Times saluted the “liberation” of Lebanon.
But it was a macabre “liberation.” After three months of relentless attack, the southern half of the country lay in ruins. Even President Reagan, as ardent a fan of Israel as any of his predecessors in the Oval Office, couldn’t stomach more killing, and called Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to stop the “holocaust.” Offended at the president’s use of this word, Begin nevertheless halted the bombardment immediately.
An agreement between Israel, the U.S. and the PLO was signed with security guarantees for the Palestinians. Yasser Arafat and his PLO fighters left for Tunis. On September 16, in defiance of the cease fire, Ariel Sharon’s army circled the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. Israeli soldiers set up checkpoints and allowed truckloads of their Phalange and Haddad allies into the Palestinian camps. The Phalangists came with old scores to settle and a long list of atrocities against Palestinians already to their credit. The Haddad forces acted as part of the Israeli Army and operated under its command.
Perched on rooftops, Israeli soldiers watched through binoculars during the day and lit up the sky with flares at night, guiding the soldiers as they moved from shelter to shelter in the camps slaughtering the defenseless refugees. In mid-massacre, Israeli Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan congratulated the Phalangist command for having “carried out good work,” offered a bulldozer for scooping up corpses, and authorized the killers to remain in the camp twelve more hours. [4]
On September 18 war correspondent Robert Fisk entered the camps and described what he found there:
Down every alleyway there were corpses – women, young men, babies and grandparents – lying together in lazy and terrible profusion where they had been killed or machine-gunned to death. . . In the panic and hatred of battle, tens of thousands had been killed in this country. But these people, hundreds of them, had been shot down unarmed . . . these were women lying in houses with their skirts torn up to their waists and their legs wide apart, children with their throats cut, rows of young men shot in the back after being lined up at an execution wall. There were babies – blackened babies because they had been slaughtered more than 24 hours earlier and their small bodies were already in a state of decomposition – tossed into rubbish heaps alongside discarded U.S. Army ration tins, Israeli army medical equipment, and empty bottles of whiskey.
. . . Down a laneway to our right, no more than 50 yards from the entrance, there lay a pile of corpses. There were more than a dozen of them, young men whose arms and legs had been wrapped around each other in the agony of death. All had been shot at point-blank range . . . One had been castrated . . . The youngest was only 12 or 13 years old.” [5]
Such were the results of Israel exercising its “right to self-defense,” just as the wholesale slaughter and starvation of Gazans forty-two years later is rationalized on the same grounds.
The moral of the story is that no matter how blindingly obvious its crimes are Israel is never guilty of anything because . . . the Holocaust.
Forty-seven years ago the London Sunday Times reported that Israel routinely tortures Palestinians, a devastating revelation at the time. The scope of the torture, said the Times, was so broad that it implicated “all of Israel’s security forces,” and was so “systematic that it [could not] be dismissed as a handful of ‘rogue cops’ exceeding orders.”
Among the prisoner experiences detailed by the Times’ Insight team were being beaten and kicked, being set upon by dogs, having one’s testicles squeezed, having a ball-point pen refill shoved into one’s penis, or being raped with a stick and left bleeding from the mouth and face and anus.
Israel categorically denied the charges, but refused to rebut, diverting to side issues and attacking Israeli lawyers who stooped so low as to defend Arabs. Seth Kaplan in the staunchly liberal The New Republic rose in defense of Israeli torture, arguing that how a government treats its people “is not susceptible to simple absolutism, such as the outright condemnation of torture. One may have to use extreme measures – call them ‘torture’ – to deal with a terrorist movement whose steady tactic is the taking of human life.” [6] Of course, every state in the world practicing administrative torture routinely claimed it was fighting “terrorists,” an infinitely elastic designation in the hands of national security officials.
So what supposedly made Palestinians “terrorists”? Mainly, that they resisted Israel’s steady tactic of robbing, swindling, torturing, and murdering all those who had been living in Palestine long before Zionism even appeared on the scene. But Israel simply couldn’t publicly admit that Palestine was not what it told the world it was – a land without a people for a people without a land. It had to keep torturing and killing Palestinians to induce them to vacate the land, but it could never admit this. At the end of 1996, when the Israeli Supreme Court authorized the torture of Palestinian prisoners, the justices called it “moderate physical pressure,” which sounds more like massage than torture. [7]
Two major Middle East peace agreements have been negotiated entirely under the prejudiced assumption that Palestinians are terrorists to be neutralized, not an oppressed people entitled to its rights. In neither Camp David nor Oslo was there any indication that Palestinian grievances were to be seriously considered, much less honestly dealt with. Had the obvious issues been faced with courage then, Gazans wouldn’t be getting slaughtered now. But they weren’t, an outcome that could have been foreseen just by looking at the people who produced the agreements.
The Camp David Treaty was negotiated by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and U.S. President Jimmy Carter.
Sadat was a former Nazi collaborator whose idol was the Shah of Iran, a U.S. client then moving at break-neck speed to Westernize the country, in the process laying down a human rights record so appalling that Amnesty International characterized it as “beyond belief.” He was shortly overthrown by the Iranian Revolution of 1979.
The year before Camp David Sadat had made his “sacred mission” to Jerusalem to speak to the Knesset, opening the way for peace. But he complied with Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan’s instructions to delete references to the PLO, and he never got off his knees after that. At Camp David he threw himself on the goodwill of the United States, striving for an agreement so good for Israel that Begin would invite condemnation should he dare to reject it. Dismissed as a traitor and a fool throughout the Arab world, he was assassinated three years later.
Former head of the underground terrorist group Irgun, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin was proud of his role in blowing up 95 British and Arabs in the King David Hotel in 1946, as well as the slaughter of over two-hundred Arab women, children and old men at Deir Yassin in 1948. In WWII, the Irgun had offered to support the Nazis against the British. One of Begin’s first acts when he became Israeli Prime Minister was to issue a postage stamp honoring Abraham Stern, whose group made the proposal. [8]
The last thing one could reasonably expect out of Prime Minister Begin’s cabinet was peace. His military junta included five generals who maintained cozy relations with apartheid South Africa and the blood-soaked dictators Augusto Pinochet and Anastasio Somoza.
As for Begin’s territorial ambitions, they were expansive, to say the least. The former Irgun commander had been elected on a platform calling for the annexation of the West Bank and the East Bank of the Jordan River, a goal that the Likud Party has never renounced. He regarded the West Bank and Gaza not as occupied but as liberated – from the indigenous Arabs to whom he felt they didn’t rightfully belong, and he called the land “Judea and Samaria,” Biblical names for God’s gift to the Jews. He openly regarded the Palestinians as Israel’s coolies, corralling them into Bantustans even as he promised them full autonomy, which he defined mystically as self-rule for people, but not for the land on which they lived. [9]
The key figure at Camp David, of course, was U.S. President Jimmy Carter, a fundamentalist Baptist and supposedly a neutral mediator between Begin and Sadat. He confessed to having an “affinity for Israel” based on its custodianship of the Holy Land, and regarded it as “compatible with the teachings of the Bible, hence ordained by God.” Ordained by God! He had “no strong feelings about the Arab countries,” but condemned the “terrorist PLO.” Begin he described implausibly as a man of integrity and honor.
Carter instructed Sadat that unless his proposals were patently fair to Israel, which regarded Arabs as subhuman, Begin would justifiably reject them. When Egypt’s opening proposals requested compensation for Israeli use of land and oil wells in the occupied Sinai, free immigration to the West Bank, Israeli withdrawal from the illegally occupied territories (including East Jerusalem), and a Palestinian state, Carter was despondent at the “extremely harsh” recommendations. [10] Any treatment of Palestinians other than as anonymous refugees to be absorbed and pacified in colonial structures was apparently unimaginable extremism.
At the time, the PLO was the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and its inclusion in negotiations was the only possible basis for establishing Palestinian national rights and reaching real peace. Nevertheless, Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski summed up the U.S. stance at Camp David as “bye-bye PLO.” The Palestinians’ nationalist aspirations were summarily dismissed, and a solution for the Occupied Territories was postponed until future “autonomy talks,” to which the PLO would not be invited. This doomed any prospect of peace.
Unsurprisingly, Camp David’s imagined Palestinian “autonomy” was a substitute for national liberation in the Accords, and was fundamentally colonial. Israel was allowed to retain economic and political power over the West Bank and Gaza, and the Israeli Defense Forces were permitted to indefinitely remain. The Palestinians were essentially granted municipal authority (to pick up the garbage?) provided it didn’t threaten Israeli “security.” Prime Minister Begin openly declared that he would never allow a Palestinian state on the West Bank.
It’s hard to improve upon the summation of Camp David provided by Fayez Sayegh, founder of the Palestine Research Center:
A fraction of the Palestinian people (under one-third of the whole) is promised a fraction of its rights (not including the national right to self-determination and statehood) in a fraction of its homeland (less than one-fifth of the area of the whole); and this promise is to be fulfilled several years from now, through a step-by-step process in which Israel is to exercise a decisive veto power over any agreement. Beyond that, the vast majority of Palestinians is condemned to permanent loss of its Palestinian national identity, to permanent exile and statelessness, to permanent separation from one another and from Palestine – to a life without national hope or meaning. [11]
Nevertheless, the United States applauded what it somehow construed as the birth of peace in the Middle East, while Israel proceeded to “annex” Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, tattoo the Occupied Territories with Jewish settlements, carve up southern Lebanon, attack Iraq, and bomb Palestinian refugee camps. [12]
None of this was a surprise. According to Israeli strategic analyst Avner Yaniv, the effect of Camp David’s removing of Egypt from the Arab military alliance was that “Israel would be free to sustain military operations against the PLO in Lebanon as well as settlement activity on the West Bank.” [13]
Five years after Israel had reduced southern Lebanon to rubble Gaza rose in rebellion (the first intifada), and six years after that came the Oslo Accords, with the White House announcing triumphantly for the second time that lasting Middle East peace was at hand. But once again there was no peace. In accordance with long-standing U.S.-Israeli rejectionism the Oslo Accords called for the incorporation of Palestinian lands in a permanent colonial structure administered by Israel.
In other words, after more than seventy years of sacrifice and popular struggle for their national rights, the Palestinians were triumphantly handed a micro-state with no power. A toothless “Palestinian Authority” was set up in the West Bank.
Once again, Israel remained in possession of everything that counted: East Jerusalem, the settlements, the economy, the land, water, sovereignty, and “security.” The Oslo settlement was based on UN Resolution 242, which only recognized Palestinians as stateless refugees, not as a people possessed of national rights.
Israel made no commitment to giving up its violence or compensating the Palestinians for 45 years of conquest and dispossession. Yasir Arafat renounced all nationalist aspirations and discarded Palestinian rights, including the right to resist oppression. He accepted responsibility for guaranteeing Israeli security, turning his people into police for their occupiers.
The Palestinians were granted nothing more than “limited autonomy,” with no guarantee of Palestinian security, no Palestinian sovereignty, and no autonomous economy. Israeli companies were to set up sweatshops in the Occupied Territories and Palestinians were to continue supplying the $6-a-day labor. After years of granting concessions to Israel, they were asked to wait three to five more years until “final status” talks could determine what Israel’s vague references to “improvements” actually meant.
For the majority of Palestinians living in the Diaspora, this represented the final act of robbery, nullifying years of promises from the UN, Arab governments, and the PLO itself.
At the celebration of the Oslo Accords on the White House lawn, Arafat, the conquered, thanked everyone for the agreement suspending most of his people’s rights, and delivered an emotionally sterile speech as though he were reading out of a phone book. He barely mentioned the Palestinians.
Yitzak Rabin, the conqueror, gave a long speech detailing Israeli anguish, loss, and suffering involved in the conquest. He promised that Israel would concede nothing on sovereignty and would keep the River Jordan, the boundaries with Egypt and Jordan, the sea, the land between Gaza and Jericho, Jerusalem, the roads, and the settlements. He did not concede that Israel was, or ever had been, an occupying power. He made no commitment to dismantling the maze of racist laws and repressive fixtures of the Occupation. He said nothing about the thousands of Palestinians rotting in Israeli jails. He expressed not a twinge of remorse for four-and-a-half decades of ethnic cleansing and lies. [14]
So the occupation of Palestine continued for years more, severely restricting Palestinian movement, increasing Jewish colonization of Arab land, and intensifying bureaucratic harassment. On September 28, 2000, Ariel Sharon and a thousand Israeli soldiers touched off the second intifada by invading the Al Aqsa mosque site in Arab Jerusalem. The next day Prime Minister Ehud Barak ordered riot police to storm the compound where 20,000 Palestinians were praying. Rocks were thrown and the police opened fire, killing seven and wounding 220. Within days President Clinton dispatched the largest shipment of attack helicopters to Israel in a decade.
Though portrayed by Israel apologists as extraordinarily generous towards the Palestinians, Prime Minister Ehud Barak never dismantled a settlement or freed a Palestinian prisoner during his entire 18 months in office. Like his predecessors, he refused to compromise on settlements, borders, refugee rights, and Jerusalem. According to Robert Malley, special assistant for Arab-Israeli affairs in the Clinton administration, it is a myth that Israel had offered to meet “most if not all of the Palestinians’ legitimate aspirations,” and equally a myth that the “Palestinians made no concession of their own.” In fact, Palestinians expressed willingness to accommodate Jewish settlements on the West Bank, Israeli sovereignty over Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, and a limit on repatriation of Palestinian exiles, though all of them were entitled to return. Malley stated that “no other Arab party that has negotiated with Israel . . . ever came close to even considering such compromises.”
Meanwhile, Israel offered nothing and demanded surrender, just as it always had.
According to Israeli military analyst Ze’ev Schiff, the Palestinians were left with three options: (1) agree to the expanding Occupation, (2) set up Bantustans, or (3) launch an uprising.
Palestinians chose to fight, and Israel pounded the nearly defenseless civilian population with helicopter gunships, F-16s, tanks, missiles, and machine guns. While systematically assassinating Palestinian leaders, Israel cried “immoral” when its victims turned their bodies into weapons in horrific suicide bombings at supermarkets, restaurants, pool halls, and discotheques. Israeli propaganda blamed “hate teaching” by the PLO, but the real hate teacher was the racist ideology that defined Palestinians as “beasts walking on two legs” and “cockroaches in a bottle,” among other terms of endearment popular with Israeli leaders. [15] This swelled the ranks of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade with volunteers who had lost close relatives to the Israeli military.
Amidst the firestorm of moral indignation occasioned by the suicide attacks, Israel never considered negotiating in good faith to resolve the longstanding conflict, and the United States applied no pressure to make them do so. Following in the footsteps of a long line of predecessors, President George W. Bush heaped arms and aid on Israel, vetoed UN resolutions calling for observers in the Occupied Territories, and continued funding the ever-expanding Jewish settlements. With the entire world recoiling in shocked outrage at Israel’s pulverizing of the West Bank, he declared Ariel Sharon “a man of peace.” [16]
Post-Oslo the stealing of land and dynamiting of Palestinian homes continued with the same justification as before: Jewish land was redeemed, Arab land was unredeemed. By the end of the twentieth-century, over 80% of Palestine no longer belonged to Palestinian Arabs. Under Clinton-Barak settlement construction had accelerated dramatically and Jews received nearly seven times as much water as Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza. Meanwhile, three hundred miles of Jews-only highways and bypass roads integrated the settlements into Israel proper while dividing Palestinian areas into enclaves of misery completely cut-off from the wider world.
Increasing numbers of Israeli Arabs joined with the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories to protest Jewish supremacy rooted in nationality rights granting Jews exclusive use of land, better access to jobs, special treatment in getting loans, and preferences for college admission, among other unearned advantages. Military service brought even more benefits, from which Palestinians were excluded. [17]
Founded as a haven for Jews, Israel had become the most dangerous place in the world for them to live. The constant war on Palestinians that made this so was still described as self-defense, and the crushing of their national culture was still the goal of “peace.” Orwell would have felt like an amateur.
Whatever differences President Biden and Prime Minister Netanyahu may be having regarding tactics and media sound bites, the commitment they share is to preserving the festering boil of apartheid Israel, rooted in the conviction that Jews are a master race of chosen people destined to scrub the Holy Land of unsightly Arabs and rule over Greater Israel forever.
The stench of death is its constant gift to the world.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Joel Kovel, Overcoming Zionism, (Pluto, 2007) p. 224
[2] Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects, (Haymarket, 2010), p. 160
[3] “American Efforts For Peace In The Middle East, 1919-1986“, quoted in Anti-Zionism: Analytical Reflections, Tekiner, Abed-Rabbo, Mezvinsky, eds. (Amana Books, 1988) p. 19509
[4] Noam Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle, (South End, 1983) pps. 155, 359-71, Rosemary Sayigh, Too Many Enemies, (Zed, 1994) pps. 117-121
[5] Robert Fisk is quoted from his book Pity The Nation in Susan Abulhawa, Mornings In Jenin, (Bloomsbury, 2010) pps. 224-6. Abulhawa is a novelist, but quotes verbatim passages from Pity The Nation.
[6] Noam Chomsky, Towards A New Cold War, (Pantheon, 1973-1982) p. 454n., Alfred Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection, (Dodd Mead, 1978) pps. 178-84.
[7] Eduardo Galeano, Upside Down – A Primer For The Looking Glass World, (Henry Holt, 1998), p. 88.
[8] Alfred Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection, (Dodd Mead, 1978) p. 153.
[9] Edward Said, The Question of Palestine, (Vintage, 1979) pps. 14-15, 44, 57, 138, 195, 204, 206-7; Alfred Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection, (Dodd Mead, 1978) pps. 144, 191, 279, 351, 398, 683. Noam Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle, (South End, 1983), p. 95n.; Jimmy Carter, Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President, (Bantam, 1982) pps. 334, 347)
[10] Jimmy Carter, Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President, (Bantam, 1982) pps. 274-5, 338-40; Alfred Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection, (Dodd Mead, 1978) p. 651.
[11] Edward Said, The Question of Palestine, (Vintage, 1979), p. 212
[12] Edward Said, The Politics of Dispossession, (Chatto and Windus, 1994), p. 244; Larry Shoup, The Carter Presidency and Beyond, (Ramparts, 1980) pps. 120-3)
[13] Noam Chomsky, World Orders Old and New, (Columbia, 1994) p. 213.
[14] Edward Said, The Pen and the Sword, (Common Courage, 1994) p. 110; Edward Said, The Politics of Dispossession, (Chatto and Windus, 1994) p. xxxiv, xxxv-xxxvii; Christopher Hitchens in Edward Said, Peace and Its Discontents, (Random House, 1993) p. 3.
[15] John Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, (Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 2007, p. 89)
[16] Stephen Shalom, “The Israel-Palestine Crisis,” Z Magazine, May 2002; Edward Said, “The Desertion of Arafat,” New Left Review, September-October 2001; Rezeq Faraj, “Israel and Hamas,” Covert Action Information Bulletin, Winter 2001; Rania Masri, “The Al Aqsa Intifada – The consequence of Israel’s 34-year occupation”; Noam Chomsky, International Socialist Review, November-December 2001.
[17] Max Elbaum, interview with Phyllis Bennis, “For Jews Only: Racism Inside Israel,” ColorLines, December 15, 2000; Edward Herman, “Israel’s Approved Ethnic Cleansing,” Z Magazine, April 2001; Rene Backmann, A Wall In Palestine, (Picador, 2010), p. 170.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
New Zealand news media came under fire at today’s Palestine solidarity rally in Auckland calling for an immediate ceasefire in the war in Gaza with speakers condemning what they said was pro-Israeli “bias” and “propaganda”.
About 500 protesters waved Palestinian flags and many placards declaring “If you’re not heartbroken and furious, you’re not paying attention – stop the genocide”, “Killing kids is not self-defence” and “Western ‘civility, democracy, humanity, morality’ – bitch, where?”.
They gave Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s government a grilling for the “weak” response to Israel atrocities.
- READ MORE: Israel’s war on Gaza live: UN, medics say many wounded in the Gaza food aid ‘massacre’ were shot
- Standoff during haka at Christchurch Gaza protest
- When the imperial media report on an Israeli massacre – Caitlin Johnstone
Many speakers were angry over the massacre of starving Palestinians when Israeli military forces opened fire on a crowd seeking aid in the central Gaza City area on Thursday with latest Gaza Health Ministry reports indicating that at least 115 Gazans had been killed with 760 wounded.
The overall death toll is now 30,228 Palestinians killed and 71,377 wounded in Gaza since the war began on October 7.
The UN Human Rights office called for a swift and independent probe into the food aid shootings, saying “at least 14 “similar attacks had occurred since mid-January.
The Biden administration has announced a plan with Jordan to airdrop aid into Gaza but former USAID director Dave Harden has criticised the move as “ineffectual” for the huge humanitarian need of Gaza.
Airdrops ‘symbol of failure’
“Airdrops are a symbol of massive failure,” he told Al Jazeera.
The bodies of three more Palestinians killed in the food aid slaughter were recovered.
The New Zealand media were condemned for relying on “flawed” media coverage and journalists embedded with the Israeli military.
“The New Zealand media ‘scalps’ information to create public perceptions rather than informing the public of the facts so that we can come to the conclusion that what Israel is doing in Gaza is genocide,” Neil Scott, secretary of the Palestine Solidarity Network (PSNA), told the crowd.
PSNA’s Neil Scott addressing the Palestine solidarity crowd today. Video: APR
“What Israel is doing in Palestine is apartheid, what Israel is doing in Palestine is occupation – each of those three, plus way more, are crimes against humanity.
“And what is the New Zealand media doing and saying about this?”
“Nothing,” shouted many in the crowd.
“Nada,” continued Scott.
‘Puppies are cute’
“Puppies? Puppies are cute. We’ll get those on TV.
“Genocide. Apartheid. Occupation. Crimes against humanity. Don’t give us news.”
Scott led a deputation of protesters to the headquarters of Television New Zealand yesterday, citing many examples of misinformation of lack of fair and “truthful” coverage.
But management declined to speak to the protesters and the 1News team failed to cover the protest over TVNZ’s coverage of the war on Gaza.
Criticisms have been mounting worldwide against Western news media coverage, especially in the United Kingdom and the United States, the staunchest supporters of Israel and the source of most of NZ’s global news services, including the Middle East.
CNN ‘climate of hostility’
Yesterday, the investigative website Intercept reported how CNN media staff, including the celebrated international news anchor Christiane Amanpour, had confronted network executives over what they claimed as stories about the war on Gaza being changed and a “climate of hostility” towards Arab journalists.
According to a leaked internal recording, Amanpour told management that the CNN policy was causing “real distress” over “changing copy” and ”double standards”.
Meanwhile, one of some 50 protests across New Zealand today – in Christchurch – was disrupted by a group of counter-demonstrators supporting Israel who performed a haka at the Bridge of Remembrance.
The group from the Freedoms and Rights Coalition – linked to the Destiny Church – waved Israeli flags and chanted “go back to Israel”. The pro-Palestinian supporters yelled “shame on them” and carried on with their regular weekly march to Cathedral Square.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
Warning: This story contains details that may be distressing to some readers.
By Lydia Lewis, RNZ Pacific journalist, and Scott Waide, RNZ Pacific PNG correspondent
As women and children seek hope of a future without tribal fighting, the cycle of killing continues in Papua New Guinea’s remote Highlands.
Tribal warfare dating back generations is being said to show no signs of easing and considered a complicated issue due to PNG’s complex colonial history.
Following the recent massacre of more than 70 people, community leaders in Wabag held mediation talks in an effort to draw up a permanent solution on Tuesday, with formal peace negotiations set down for yesterday between the warring factions.
A woman, who walked 20 hours on foot with seven children to flee the violence in the remote highlands, was at the meeting and told RNZ Pacific she wants the fighting to stop so she can return home.
In 2019, the then police minister said killings of more than two dozen women and children “changed everything”.
But a tribesman, who has asked to remain anonymous, told RNZ Pacific the only thing that had changed was it was easier to get guns.
Multiple sources have told RNZ Pacific the government appears to be powerless in such remote areas, saying police and security forces are sent in by the government when conflict breaks out, there is a temporary pause to the fighting, then the forces leave, and the fighting starts again.
There are also concerns about a lack of political will at the national level to enforce the law using police and military due to tribal and political allegiances of local MPs, as recommendations made decades ago by former PNG Defence Force commander Major-General Jerry Singirok are yet to be fully implemented.
While the government, police and community groups look at peaceful solutions, mercenaries are collecting munitions for the next retaliatory fight, multiple sources on the ground, including a mercenary, told us.
Killing pays
After “Bloody Sunday”, which left dozens dead in revenge killings, the men with guns were out of bullets.
Tribal fighting in Papua New Gunea’s Enga Province reached boiling point on February 18, fuelled by a long-standing feud between different clans, which resulted in a mass massacre.
The tribesman who spoke to RNZ Pacific said they did not want to fight anymore but believed there was no other option when someone from the “enemy” turned up on their land wanting to burn down their village.
“Prime Minister [James Marape] — we want development in our villages,” he said, speaking from a remote area in the Highlands after his village was burnt to the ground.
There is no employment, no infrastructure, no support, he said, adding that those were the things that would keep people busy and away from engaging in tribal conflict.
At the moment killing people paid, he said.
‘Hundreds of lives lost’
“Businessmen, leaders and educated elites are supplying guns, bullets and financing the engagement of gunmen,” Wapenamanda Open MP Miki Kaeok said.
The MP is worried about the influence of money and guns, saying they have taken over people’s lives especially with the increase in engagement of local mercenaries and availability of military issued firearms.
“Hundreds of lives have been lost. Properties worth millions of kina have been ransacked and destroyed. I don’t want this to continue. It must stop now,” Kaeok pleaded.
Meanwhile, men in the Highlands are paid anything between K3000 (NZ$1300) to K10,000 (NZ$4,400) to kill, the tribesman claimed during the interview.
Then, he called over one of the men involved in that fight, an alleged killer, to join the video interview.
“Um this is the hire man,” he introduced him. “If they put K2000 (NZ$880) for him and say go burn down this village — he goes in groups — they clear the village, they give him money and he goes to his village . . . ”
The “hire man”, standing slouched over holding a machete, looked at the camera and claimed 64 people were killed on one side and eight on another pushing the total death toll to more than 70.
Wabag police told RNZ Pacific on Tuesday that 63 bodies had been recovered so far.
“A lot of people died,” an inspector from Wabag told RNZ Pacific.
The killings have not stopped there; a video has been circulating on social media platforms of what appears to be a young boy pleading for his life before he was killed.
The video, seen by RNZ Pacific, shows the child being hit by a machete until he falls to the ground.
The man who allegedly carried out the brutality was introduced to RNZ Pacific by the tribesman via video chat.
“They recognise that this person was an enemy,” the tribesman — translating for the killer, who was standing in a line with other men holding machetes — told RNZ Pacific.
“This small guy (referring to the dead child) came out of the bush to save his life. But he ended up in the hands of enemies.
“And then they chopped him with a bush knife and he was dead.”
“In revenge, he killed that small boy” because the killer’s three family members were killed about five months ago.
Asked whether they were saddened that children have died in the violence, the killer said: “No one can spare their lives because he was included in the fight and he’s coming as a warrior in order to kill people,” our source translated.
Killing people — “that’s the only way”, they said.
Exporting guns
The source explained military guns are a fairly recent addition to tribal fighting.
He said that while fighting had been going on most of his life, military style weapons had only been in the mix for the last decade or so.
He said getting a gun was relatively easy and all they had to do was wait in the bush for five days near the border with Indonesia.
“We are using high-powered rifle guns that we are getting exported from West Papuans.”
He added the change from tribe-on-tribe to clan-to-clan fighting has exacerbated the issue, with a larger number of people involved in any one incident.
Mediation underway
A Wapenamanda community leader in Enga Province Aquila Kunza said mediation was underway between the warring factions in the remote Highlands to prevent further violence.
“The policemen are facilitating and meditating the peace mediation and they are listening,” Kunza said.
Revenge killings had been ongoing for years and there was no sign of gunmen stopping anytime soon, Kunza said.
“This fight has lasted about four years now and I know it will continue. It occurs intermittently, it comes and goes,” he said.
“When there’s somebody around (such as the military), they go into hiding, when the army is gone because the government cannot support them anymore, the fighting erupts again.”
Kunza has been housing women and children who fled the violence and after years of violence and watching police come and go, he is calling for a community-led approach.
At a large community gathering in Wabag the main town of Enga on Tuesday people voiced their concerns.
“The government must be prepared to give money to every family [impacted] and assist them to resettle back to their villages to make new gardens to build new houses,” Kunza said.
He said formal peace negotiations are taking place today as residents from across the Enga Province are travelling to Wabag today for peace talks between the warring factions.
‘Value life’
Many Engans have lamented that the traditional rules of war have been ignored as children have not been spared in the conflict and societal norms that governed their society have been broken.
A woman who was kidnapped last year in Hela in the Bosavi region — a different area to where the recent massacre took place — and held for ransom said PNG was on the verge of being a failed state.
“I’ve gone through this,” Cathy Alex told RNZ Pacific.
“People told us who gave them their guns in Hela, people told us who supplied them munitions. People told us the solutions. People told us why tribal fights started, why violence is happening,” Alex shared.
She said they managed to find out that killers got paid K2000 (NZ$880) for killing one person, that was in 2017.
“For a property that’s worth K200/300,000 [up to NZ$130,000] that’s destroyed, the full amount goes to the person who caused the tribal fight,” she said.
“How can you not value the life of a person?”
Government help
With retaliations continuing the “hire man” who claims to have killed more than 20 people from warring tribes, said he is staring down death.
“He would have to die on his land because…when they come they will fight…we have to shoot in order to protect my village,” the tribesman explained.
“He said he’s not scared about it. He is not afraid of dying. He got a gun in order to shoot, they shoot him, and that’s finished.”
“He’s really worried about his village not to burn down.”
The tribesman said that without government committing financial support for infrastructure, jobs and community initiatives the fighting will continue.
He also wants to see a drastic change in police numbers and a more permanent military presence on the ground.
“We don’t have a proper government to protect us from enemies in order to protect ourselves, our houses . . . and to protect assets we have to buy guns in order to protect them.”
Parliament urged to act
Last week, the PNG Parliament discussed the issue of gun violence.
East Sepik Governor Allan Bird, who is on the opposition benches, has called on the government “to respond”.
He said the “terrorists in the upper Highlands” needed their guns to be stripped from them.
“We are a government for goodness sake — let’s act like one,” Bird said.
Deputy Prime Minister John Rosso agreed with Bird’s sentiments and acknowledged that the situation was serious.
He called on the whole of Parliament to unite to fix the issue together.
RNZ Pacific has contacted the PM Marape’s office for comment with no response yet.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
EDITORIAL: The PNG Post-Courier
Some people are literally making a killing in Enga.
Yes, they really are.
Hired gunmen are getting rich by the day and picking up women and girls as payments as well, leaving deaths and destruction in their wake in what is apparently becoming a booming industry.
- READ MORE: Wapenamanda massacre: PNG leaders angry over tribal war ‘barbarity’
- Wapenamanda massacre: ‘Pregnant mothers fled for their lives’
- Wapenamanda massacre — 50 killed in PNG’s worst tribal fighting
- Other PNG tribal warfare reports
The news is disturbing, to say the least, for a province that has got so much going at the moment.
As the illegal industry takes root by the day, we do not see this deadly business which is already stretching the limits of tolerance and the resources of the law and justice sector, ending soon.
Police Commissioner David Manning promised more manpower will be deployed into the province to assist those on the ground to curb the tribal fighting.
At the same time, he is asking for help from the provincial leaders to get down to their communities to stop the fighting and killing.
Grabbed world attention
The recent massacre in Wapenamanda has grabbed world attention again and this time the Australian government, with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese describing the event as “very disturbing”, promising more technical aid to PNG to address this madness.
Tribal fighting has always been a curse in Enga for years. What started as bow and arrow affairs in the past have now gone high-tech with the deployment of drones, Google maps and high-powered guns, resulting in the high number of deaths
Genocide is the word to describe what is happening.
Powerful tribes are eliminating the weak, and leaving the disciplinary forces helplessly watching by the roadsides as the massacre continues to go.
There is no concern for the lives killed, the injuries or the plight of the hundreds of mothers and children caught up in this mayhem.
In the words of Provincial Police Commander, Superintendent George Kakas, businessmen, educated elites and well-to-do people fund these activities, hire gunmen and purchase firearms and ammunitions.
We would like to add politicians to the list because we suspect that they procured the weapons and left them with their supporters during the elections and these guns are now coming out.
How could they sleep peacefully?
How could these people find the peace to sleep peacefully in the night when their money, the technology, the guns and bullets they supplied are killing in big numbers and the murderers are uploading images of the dead bodies online for the world to see?
Prime Minister James Marape recently promised new legislation to curb domestic terrorism and we wait to see whether this law will ever get passed by Parliament.
This law is needed now to make the facilitators and the killers account for their actions.
In the interim, the government must declare a State of Emergency in Enga to deploy the full force of the law into the fighting zones to deal with the perpetrators.
They are known to the police, the leaders and even the Prime Minister.
What is stopping the police from arresting these culprits? Are they above the law? Are they protected species, vested with the power to end lives of other people in this manner?
Entire tribes wiped out
What are we waiting for?
To see entire tribes wiped out from the face of Enga before we move in to collect the bodies, take the women and children to care centres and keep watching from the roadsides.
Enough is enough. Declare the SOE in Enga. Enact the domestic terrorism legislation. Arrest those that facilitate and kill.
So much is going for Enga today and if nothing is done to end this ugly disease, Enga is doomed.
This PNG Post-Courier editorial was originally published under the title “Genocide in Enga” on 21 February 2014. Republished with permission.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
By David Robie, editor of Asia Pacific Report
A Palestinian advocate has appealed to the New Zealand government to call for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and to back the South African genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
“A sovereign state like New Zealand that has historically stood for what is morally correct must not bend to foreign pressure, and must reject policies aligned with the United Kingdom of Israel and the United States of Israel which blindly endorse and support the apartheid regime,” said Billy Hania of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA).
He was speaking at the pro-Palestinian rally and march in Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau yesterday as the Gaza death toll rose above 25,000 dead, mostly women and children.
- READ MORE: ‘Criminal complaints’ filed against Israeli President Herzog in Switzerland
- War on Gaza: The US plan to revamp Palestinian Authority is doomed
- ‘Bombing all around us’ — Israeli assault hospital in Khan Younis
Belgium is among the latest of 61 countries — and the first European nation — to support the genocide case and a growing number of other lawsuits are also being brought against Israel.
Chile and Mexico have asked the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate crimes against civilians in the war and Indonesia has filed a new lawsuit in the ICJ against Israel for its illegal occupation of Palestinian territories.
Swiss prosecutors have also confirmed that a “crimes against humanity” case has been filed against Israeli President Isaac Herzog during his visit to the World Economic Forum in Davos last week. No further details were given.
“The Zionist project is failing in Palestine — the apartheid entity with 75 years of colonial terror has achieved nothing for the Jewish people, oppressing and killing Palestinians through a violent settler colonial approach,” Hania said.
“Mass killing of Palestinians will achieve nothing for the Jewish people. Without respect for Palestinian rights and respect for life in Palestine, there will be no peace period.”
‘One holocaust not enough?’
Constrasting the shrinking support for Israel with massive citizen protests “in their millions” taking place around the world, Hania criticised Germany’s intervention in the genocide case supporting Tel Aviv while also planning to provide 10,000 tank munitions to “the apartheid regime with which to massacre Palestinians — as if one holocaust was not enough”.
“We are calling on the New Zealand government to support the South African ICJ case in addition to supporting the recent Chile-Mexico ICC war crimes initiative. This initiative is technically important with Israel being a signatory to the ICC,” Hania said.
He also thanked Indonesia for its legal initiative.
“More than 100 days of targeting Palestinian civilians and civilian infrastructure to exterminate Palestinian life is committing genocide, the crime of all crimes and with total impunity,” Hania said.
“More than 60,000 tons of explosives dropped over Gaza in 100 days equals three nuclear bombs, more than the infamous nuclear tragedy on Japan that led to its immediate surrender. It’s fundamentally different for Gaza as surrendering does not exist in Palestine vocabulary.”
He said the more than 100 Israel hostages would remain in Gaza until the “thousands of Palestinian hostages are freed”.
“The Gaza siege must end, West Bank Israeli settler extremist violence must end, there must be respect for worshippers and Muslim religious sites attacks by Israeli extremists is well documented and must end.”
24 massacres cited
Hania stressed that the current war did not start on October 7 with the deadly Hamas resistance movement attack on southern Israel as claimed by the Israeli government.
He cited a list of 24 massacres of Palestinians by Zionist militia that began at Haifa in 1937 and Jerusalem the same year, including the Nakba – “the Catastrophe” — in 1948 when 750,000 Palestinians were forced out of their homes and lands with the destruction of towns and villages.
Hania also referred to a recent New York Times article that warned Israel was in a strategic bind over its failed military policies, saying Israel’s objectives were “mutually incompatible”.
“Israel’s limited progress in dismantling Hamas has raised doubts within the military’s high command about the near-term feasibility of achieving the country’s principal wartime objectives: eradicating Hamas and also liberating the Israeli hostages still in Gaza,” wrote the authors Ronen Bergman and Patrick Kingsley.
Israel had established control over a smaller part of Gaza at this stage of the war than originally envisaged in battle plans from the start of the invasion, which were reviewed by The Times.
Citing Dr Andreas Krieg, a war analyst at King’s College London, from the article, Hania quoted:
“It’s not an environment where you can free hostages.
“It is an unwinnable war.
“Most of the time when you are in an unwinnable war, you realise that at some point — and you withdraw.
“And they didn’t.”
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
An exaggerated sense of self-importance and entitlement, hubris, chutzpah, racism while claiming victimhood and massively flawed thinking are the descriptors that come to mind when considering the 555 doctors at the U of T who signed an Open Statement to the University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine (TFOM) from Jewish Physician Faculty.
The statement is an endorsement of Israel’s genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza, which has been “catastrophic”, according to the WHO, for its healthcare system and killed 200 medical workers.
The opening declaration is: “We affirm the right of TFOM faculty to be openly Zionist and to support the right of Israel to exist and defend itself as a Jewish state and for those faculty to be free of public ostracism, recrimination, exclusion, and discrimination in the TFOM.”
In plain language, the doctors want to promote Israel’s slaughter in Gaza and not be challenged by (disproportionately) racialized and younger students and colleagues.
The statement effectively brands all criticism of Israel as antisemitic. It declares “that accusations against Israel as ‘apartheid’, ‘colonialist’, or ‘white supremacist’ or committing genocide are mendacious and aim to promote the argument that Israel should be dismantled as a Jewish state, making such accusations themselves antisemitic.” Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Al Haq, B’tselem and the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestinians have all labeled Israel an apartheid state. Many Zionist pioneers described their aims as “colonial” and hundreds of experts in the field believe Israel is currently committing genocide in Gaza.
While framing themselves as victims, the letter threatens colleagues. “We believe that academic freedom is not absolute. In particular, leaders in academic medicine with power over learners and faculty, who in some cases are the sole leader responsible for thousands of learners and faculty, should not be issuing statements which collide with equity, diversity and inclusion for Jews or which make Jews feel unsafe and unwelcome in the TFOM and which are unrelated or unessential to their core academic role, research, and publishing of results.”
But it’s the many openly racist signatories who have authority over students, as Ghada Sasa’s followers showed on X. The new medical collective Combat Online Harassment concluded, “1 in 5 signatories to the University of Toronto medical school’s proud Zionist letter with active Twitter accounts have posted racist, hateful, or harmful materials!”
This includes Sandy Buchman justifying massacres against Palestinians since Gaza is a “sociopathic society full of murderers”. Another Zionist letter signatory Gideon Hirschfield liked a tweet threatening all Palestinians in Gaza with “immediate and complete destruction” and Dr. Leslie Shulman called for deporting darker skinned teenagers who protested against genocide in Toronto. “Expel. Them. Now. Reason…failure to show evidence of being human.”
Combat Online Harassment, a group of North American healthcare workers, says it was formed in response to “increasing amounts of racist anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and Islamophobic behavior from our colleagues. Simultaneously, we’ve observed an unsettling trend where physicians expressing pro-Palestinian views find themselves unjustly targeted with baseless accusations of antisemitism, resulting in detrimental consequences for their careers. Our work aims to highlight the double standard in the policing of voices; clearly racist and hateful views (ones we post), if coming from Zionists, face little to no repercussions.”
Jewish Zionist doctors have succeeded in punishing anti-genocide voices for making them “feel” uncomfortable. The most high-profile and egregious case is University of Ottawa doctor Yoni Freedhoff who targeted resident Yipeng Ge, leading to his suspension. Over 95,000 people have signed a petition calling for Ge to be reinstated. Toronto Star columnist Shree Paradkar noted, “Several Ontario doctors tell me they are being hauled up for supporting Palestinian rights including for signing a ‘don’t bomb hospitals’ petition. Higher-ups have told them there were complaints and accused them of making Jewish colleagues feel unsafe.”
The Zionist letter highlights the power dynamic in medicine and TFOM. A year ago I wrote about a big Israel lobby and media brouhaha over a ‘report’ on purported antisemitism at TFOM. It concluded: “As Black and Indigenous — and to a lesser extent Latin American, South Asian and Arab — communities struggle for positions within the elite institution, many Jewish and politically Zionist faculty members complain that expressing solidarity with Palestinians discriminates against them. Their pressure led to the appointment of a Special Adviser on Anti-Semitism who published a spurious ‘report’, which outside groups amplified and the dominant media covered widely. This reflects power, not oppression.”
When 555 Jewish doctors openly support Israel’s killing of 17,000 Palestinians this confirms that analysis.
And it makes one wonder what sort of education the ‘caring professions’ at U of T are receiving.
The post What Sort of “Caring” Do Zionist Medical Faculty at U of T Teach? first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.