I was channel surfing the other evening and watched the Supreme Court’s new case concerning homeless encampments, etc. What got me was how the government’s lawyer kept explaining how the homeless situation was being handled. HIs retort was that Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) have been unsuccessful in giving the necessary helping hand to this burgeoning crisis throughout our nation, especially in most cities. Is it me or isn’t it the responsibility of Uncle Sam to use our tax dollars to help address the needs of our homeless? The justices all acknowledged that many of our nation’s homeless are mentally ill individuals, discounting to some extent the millions of others who just cannot afford to pay for shelter. Well, think about this: How many of us who do not own a home can actually afford the outrageous rents the “land lord” charges? I say “land lord” because the term comes from feudalism when the “lord of the manor” owned the rental property for his serfs. Go and get the fine Claude Berri 1993 French film Germinal and see how this feudal arrangement played out. Disgusting!
The case at issue for this Supreme Court is The City of Grants Pass vs. Johnson. Via the internet this is a thumbnail of the case:
The legal issue is whether they can fine or arrest people for sleeping outside if there’s no shelter available. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has deemed this cruel and unusual punishment, and this case is a pivotal challenge to that ruling.
The high court declined to take up a similar case in 2019. But since then, homelessness rates have climbed relentlessly. Street encampments have grown larger and have expanded to new places, igniting intense backlash from residents and businesses. Homelessness and the lack of affordable housing that’s helping to drive it have become key issues for many voters.
So, even the monopoly media is realizing how terrible the homeless situation is. Who gets hurt, in addition to someone who becomes homeless, but the local community? No one wishes to see so many poor souls out in the open, or hidden within the brush, to fend for themselves. Funny how the court does all it can to dance around the solution.
For all those good religious folks who attend their places of worship and echo that we are all our brother’s keeper: do something about it! Start telling your wonderful (yeah, right) elected officials to start increasing the taxing of the Super Rich, AKA Mega Millionaires and Billionaires. When JFK took office the top federal income tax rate was 90%. Over the years it dropped down to 78%, 71%, 50% all the way down to 39% and now at 37%. Do you think perhaps that our Super Rich fellow Americans have it damn good now? You bet your $1,000,000 and up home or shall I call it estate? My plan, the Farruggio Millionaire Flat Surtax Plan, would generate many of the funds needed to not only build affordable housing, but help treat the millions of mentally ill fellow citizens who cannot get the care needed to exist properly. My plan is to have a flat surtax of 50% on any income over 1 million dollars, with NO deductions… period! The first $one million would be taxed at the present rate, with any and all deductions allowed now. The other money would go directly to Uncle Sam to subsidize the homeless and mentally ill… or both. Do you think it is unreasonable for someone now earning $5 or $10 million (or a few $billion) a year to keep HALF that money TAX FREE?
On top of that teepee we need to stop the 50% of our discretionary spending that goes for our War Industries. How about spending 25% and use the remainder of the hundreds of billions of dollars saved to be directed for other social net needs? President Eisenhower, in his farewell address, called it what it was then and still is, a Military Industrial Complex. And the way it has always worked is simple, just follow the money. The House of Representatives just passed another bill for $95 billion in aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. Some estimates are that about half of that money is going into the pockets of US weapons manufacturers and other assorted War related businesses. During the Vietnam debacle whenever a Huey helicopter was destroyed the manufacturer.
Bell Helicopter, sold another one to Uncle Sam for $1 million. In the kill zone of Iraq in 2003, a US Apache Helicopter cost Uncle Sam around $30 million. Today, these vehicles can run from $60 million to over $130 million… of your tax dollars for more of our phony wars and aggressions. How many homeless and or mentally ill Americans can an Apache subsidize?
I could not have been a pacifist, if by that one means waiver of the use of physical force in disputes. The reason is simple. In my childhood I had to actually hit someone who threatened me or positioned himself as if he would in order to end at least two years of harassment, including destruction and theft of my personal property while travelling to and from school. The actual punch that like a miracle sent some invisible wave throughout the scholastic environment was a panic reaction, a thrust to the face of the boy who once had been a playmate and for some only years later explicable reason had converted to lead tormenter.
Although I grew up in a semi-military household, everyone on my father’s side had served in the armed forces, while no one on my mother’s side had, the military as regular and pernicious institutional violence was not present in my youth. We did not play “cowboys and Indians” in the fifth grade. Instead we imagined World War 2 battlefields. As I recall our sandpits resembled most the campaign waged in Italy after Anzio. My classmates had plastic rifles or machine guns with the advantage that they could make noise. I was armed with a wooden training rifle in the shape of the bolt action Springfield issued to US soldiers in the Great War. On one hand I was sorry that the only noise it made was a click when the bolt was drawn or the trigger pulled. Yet, it had been used to drill ordinary soldiers, and hence it was more realistic than all the other guns in our war games. In retrospect, I find minor consolation that I did not wholly absorb the domestic enemy images in Western films. Nor did I ever acquire the fondness for violence which makes armed service so natural for many. These were games and not real life.
Throughout my life, I have known soldiers and others engaged in warfare, mainly those serving either in the Forces of the United States or Her Britannic Majesty. Yet, I have been spared the personal participation in war. Unlike many of my classmates whose military interest was technological—they liked guns—my interest the military as an organization. I began very early to read military history and the classics of military science. Strategy, tactics, and logistics are above all organizational matters. Even if there were not a single rifle or warship employed, the military organisation remains distinctive, a particular way of getting work done.
On 9 May the Russian Federation, as the successor to the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic, the largest and core constituent entity in the defunct Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, celebrated the defeat of the Western fascist invasion spearheaded by the German Wehrmacht under the codename Unternehmen (Operation) Barbarossa. The Second World War is called in the former Soviet Union the Great Patriotic War (Velikya Otechestvennaya voyna). I can recall the years when condescending aspersions were cast on occasion of the military parades in Moscow on 1 and 9 May. These parades were always presented as evidence of Soviet aggressive intent.
Trooping of the Colour and the armaments and martial display in Paris on Bastille Day (14 July) were never subjected to such derision, despite the continued foreign wars in which both Britain and France were (and are engaged). National holidays in countries that fought for their independence or safety might be forgiven for celebrating the forces with which those goals were attained. However, 4 July commemorates the UDI and not the battles to be fought. Trooping the Colour is celebration of the British monarch’s birthday by means of a loyal display of close order massed formation of the regiments responsible for defending the monarchy, not Britain, from invasion. The Guards uniforms and massed bands add to the pageantry at Horse Guards Parade, Whitehall. However the archaic drill formations are not decorative. They are a living example of 18th and early 19th century infantry tactics for producing massed firepower from single shot muskets and rifles. Anyone with some knowledge of French history would find the parade down the Champs Elysées on 14 July incongruent with the storming of the prison by which the start of the French Revolution is remembered. After ignominy in the Great War and the surrender to fascism in June 1940, the ruling class, represented by a banker of 172 cm (while the emperor of the French was only 157 cm tall), can lay no serious claims to heroism in defence of the nation. Presidential celebration of the Jour de Bastille is essentially a commercial display for the French armaments industry, in tough competition with its Western allies.
Pacifism is a personal choice, like so many ethical decisions made by individuals, to be respected. Perhaps there is a potential message for millions that conflict resolution or interest imposition must not necessarily require force of arms. However, like vegetarianism and veganism, pacifism relies on simplifications of the world that are just as problematic as those simplifications that dictate force of arms as the pure means of resolving conflicts. If the purpose of conflict resolution is to prove one side to be right and the other wrong, then war is inevitable. There is no way to prove the ideas of someone else absolutely wrong unless one is prepared to exterminate all those who hold those ideas. Conflict resolution cannot be based on proving who is right and who is wrong—even if in our hearts we believe we know this. Instead of proof of right or wrong—although wartime slogans are usually stated in platitudes and absolutes—conflict, even armed conflict aims to produce terms which both combatants can agree are sufficient to end hostilities.
The primitive propaganda of the NATO members, jointly and severally, has consistently argued that there is an absolute solution to end the war and that is to comply with the dictates of the West in NATO assembled. Pursuant to this unilateralism the Russian Federation, portrayed as the aggressor and hence in the wrong, is alleged to have the same absolute aims that the West in NATO assembled proclaims. Merely asserting this does not make it so—except in the minds of the other enemy NATO has pursued since 2001. This war in Ukraine, designated a special military operation by the Russian Federation and as a war for Ukrainian liberation from Russia in the West, is simultaneously a war against the ordinary inhabitants of the West, with a focus on the frontline sacrifice along the point of contact, stretches of the former NATO-Warsaw Pact border.
Watching the military parades in Russia and China it is tempting to see them as large scale militarist exhibitions. The serried ranks parading past the review stand in Moscow or Beijing cannot help but impress in terms of drilled precision. The strong presence of women, wearing skirts not trousers, conveys the image of an entire population under arms—if only because of the numbers in China. Casual Western observers and insincere critics alike are inclined to see such massive marching formations as incompatible with peace. I can even hear the sceptical remarks that such enormous displays prove that the Russians and Chinese are at least as belligerent as the armed forces in NATO. It is easy to wish that Russia or China, if they really wanted peace, would not so flagrantly display their military resources. Regular presence of US Armed Forces in all manner of sporting events with mass audience appeal is treated as routine with no ideological significance for countries beyond its borders.
Parades and all forms of pageantry are political events—even if promoted as entertainment. It is childish, ignorant or mendacious to attribute political motives to the parades of another country, one’s enemy, while pretending that one’s own country has no political motives for marching on holidays. It is necessary to ask what the motives of an event are and to consider them in historical context. Simply asserting that the bigger the military parade the more militaristic the parading is insufficient.
Long ago the so-called Western allies, Britain and the United States (for most of the war France was occupied by Germany or governed by an explicitly fascist regime in Vichy), were barely engaged in war against the Hitler regime in Germany. Despite claims to the contrary, the facts show that the Anglo-American alliance (essentially a Rhodes-Round Table compact made without the populations of either country) were on the side of anyone who would wage war against the Soviet Union. US ambassador to Moscow, Joseph Davies, was convinced that France and Britain were on the side of Hitler in preparing war against the USSR. So this conclusion as it applied until 1944 was no historical revision. It was in plain sight. The US was neutral until 1941 and Britain had nothing to say in the matter except to make money and avoid outright losses in its imperial corridors.
Although Vladimir Putin essentially repudiated the Soviet Union he was very clear in his speech this year that the military assembled were the descendants of the heroic men and women who defeated Nazism and the West’s second major invasion of the Russian heartland. Their parents and grandparents sacrificed more than their lives to stop German militarism and its allies from destroying what the citizens of the Soviet Union had produced. They can claim the legacy of great armies of liberation in the hell poured over them since the October Revolution.
The People’s Liberation Army, the descendants of the Eight Route Army and other Chinese revolutionary formations, not only defeated the Japanese and united a country torn by foreign invasion, exploitation and civil war. The PLA formed the basis for China’s mobilisation to become the modern industrialised country it is now. When huge divisions parade before the reviewing stand in Beijing, they are celebrating the accomplishments of the fastest and largest poverty reduction in human history for which the PLA’s organisational skills, bureaucratic structures and accumulated industrial know-how was essential.
Unlike the parades in Paris or London, trade shows for the parasitic weapons industry of revanchist France and monarchist Britain, the uniformed and armed or unarmed servants of the Russian and Chinese states can justly claim to honor the peoples their recent forefathers and mothers fought and died to defend and develop. One need only look at the percentages of the war budgets of Russia and China and compare them to what prevails in NATO to see that military is not automatically militarism.
However, Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) allege that Cameron’s comments were at best misleading, and at worst, downright lies.
David Cameron: lie after lie
New figures from CAAT estimate that the real value of arms exports to Israel is twice as high as the government claims it is – at least £1bn since 2015.
Cameron claimed that UK arms sales are not comparable with the US because “we do not have a UK government supply of weapons to Israel, we have a number of licences”.
While UK exports are much smaller than the US, whether they are transferred directly through the government, or whether the government issues licences is irrelevant to the UK’s obligations under International Humanitarian Law. The F-35 jets dropping bombs on Gaza for the last seven months would not be in the sky without the components made all across the UK.
He also said that UK licensing procedures are “some of the toughest in the world”.
The UK’s weak export rules for Israel
However, recent revelations in the legal case against the UK government over arms sales showed that there has been a “hiatus” in the legal assessments needed to assess whether Israel is breaching international humanitarian law (IHL), and that “decisions of some importance have been delayed for some time”.
The last assessment took place on 8 April. However, according to information given in court, this review only covered IHL violations committed in the period up to 28 January. Under UK export rules, arms sales must be halted when there is a clear risk they could be used to break international law.
Finally, Cameron claimed that “our defence exports to Israel are responsible for significantly less than 1% of their total”.
The value of arms sales: not what the government says
CAAT estimates that the real value of arms exports to Israel is twice as high as the government claims it is – at least £1bn since 2015. The UK has exported £489m in single issue licences since 2015. However, 62 open licences have also been issued since 2015. Under open licences, a company can export unlimited amounts of specified military equipment without further reporting requirements.
One open licence is for components for the F35 fighter jets Israel is using to bombard Gaza – 15% of the value of every F-35 is produced in the UK. CAAT estimates this licence has been worth at least £368m to UK industry since 2016.
However, this figure is just for the initial building of the planes. It doesn’t cover the spare parts that Israel will have needed in order to continue its bombardment. CAAT does not know the full value of the other licences. It also does not know if there has been an increase in arms exports following 7 October due to a lag in the data.
Our government and opposition leadership were given advance notice by Israel that they would commit these crimes against humanity, and their failure to call for a ceasefire, failure to stop arming this genocide, and failure to hold Israel to account is what has brought this horror to Gaza.
For months, UK Ministers have acted under the pretense that an unfathomable escalation from Israel in Rafah was needed for them to take meaningful action.
This response from our so-called leaders is morally bankrupt and unforgivable. It has allowed Israel to commit genocide with impunity, and created a hell on earth for the people of Gaza. Now that the invasion of Rafah is underway we see that this ‘red line’ is nothing more than rhetoric.
Cameron: ‘complicit in genocide’ and a ‘liar’
CAAT’s media coordinator Emily Apple said:
Not only is David Cameron complicit in genocide, he is lying to the country about UK arms exports. The UK’s licensing system is not robust. It is murky and unaccountable. Israel is using UK military equipment to commit utterly horrific war crimes in Gaza and this government is still refusing to act.
This government pretended Rafah was a red line. This was a sickening lie.
The atrocities Palestinian people are facing in Rafah are beyond words. But Cameron’s comments show that he intends to continue prioritising the profits of arms dealers, shamefully disregarding international law and treating Palestinian lives with unforgivable contempt. This has to stop and he must face the consequences for his utterly immoral actions.
On April 30, when Columbia University student protesters took over Hamilton Hall, they renamed it “Hind’s Hall,” dropping a large banner out the windows above the building’s entrance. This was a hall famously occupied by students in the 1968 protests against the Vietnam War and against Jim Crow racism in the United States. The students are risking suspension and expulsion, and a very real blacklist has already been generated against them, with Congress joining in to define criticism of genocide as a form of antisemitism that state universities and state-linked employers will not be allowed to tolerate.
I believe their love for Hind Rajab guides the movement so desperately needed to resist militarism. Hind was six years old when Israel used U.S.-supplied weapons to kill her.
If our civilization survives a looming ecological collapse that is helping to drive catastrophic nuclear brinkmanship, I hope future generations of students will study the “Hind’s Hall” occupation in the way that students of the civil rights movement have studied the Edmund Pettus Bridge and the story of Emmett Till. Hind’s story is tragically emblematic. Her cruel murder has befallen many thousands of children throughout the decades of Israel’s fight to maintain apartheid. Just in our young century, from September 2000 to September 2023, Israel’s B’tselem organization reports that 2,309 Palestinian minors were killed by Israelis and some 145 Israeli minors were killed by Palestinians, with these numbers excluding Palestinian children dead from deliberate immiseration via blockade or traumatized as hostages in prisons. We hear reports that thirty-eight Israeli children and some 14,000 Palestinian children have been murdered since October 7, deaths which can all be laid on the doorstep of the ethnostate project so lethally determined to keep one ethnicity in undemocratic governance.
No six-year-old poses any threat to anyone. Like the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children starved to death during the U.S. imposition of economic sanctions against Iraq, none of these children could be held accountable for the actions of their government or military.
Hind Rajab committed no crime, but she was made to watch her family die and wait for death surrounded by their corpses. When the ambulance crew asked safe passage to come rescue her, she was used as bait to kill them as well. Her story must be remembered and told over and over.
As Jeffrey St. Clair writes, Hind was a little girl who liked to dress up as a princess. She lived in the neighborhood of Tel al-Hawa, an area south of Gaza City.
“Hind Rajab was in her own city when the invaders in tanks came,” St. Clair notes. “What was left of it . . . Hind’s own kindergarten, from which she’d recently graduated, had been blown up, as had so many other schools, places of learning, places of shelter and places of safety in Gaza City.”
On January 29, when the Israelis ordered people to evacuate, her mother, Wissam Hamada, and an older sibling set off on foot. Hind joined her uncle, aunt, and three cousins who traveled in a black Kia automobile.
The uncle placed a call to a relative in Germany which initiated the family’s contact with the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS). After the initial connection with the PRCS switchboard, the car was targeted and hit, killing Hind’s uncle, her aunt, and two of her cousins.
Hind and her fifteen-year-old cousin, Layan, were the only survivors.
Switchboard operators handling the phone contact with Layan had immediately notified ambulance workers that the little girls needed to be rescued.
But it would have been suicidal for a rescue crew to enter the area without first working out coordinates with the Israeli military.
Similar to the World Central Kitchen workers killed on Monday, April 1, they waited hours for the coordinated rescue plan.
On the audio tape shared by the PRCS workers, Layan’s petrified voice can be heard. The tank is coming closer. She is so scared. A blast is heard and Layan no longer speaks. PRCS workers call back and Hind answers.
She pleads, “Please come and get me. I’m so scared.”
St. Clair writes, “The [PRCS] dispatched an ambulance crewed by two paramedics: Ahmed al-Madhoon and Youssef Zeino. As Ahmed and Youssef approached the Tel al-Hawa area, they reported to the Red Crescent dispatchers that the IDF was targeting them, and that snipers had pointed lasers at the ambulance. Then there was the sound of gunfire and an explosion. The line went silent.”
The tank-fired M830A1 missile remnant found nearby had been manufactured in the United States by a subsidiary of the Day and Zimmermann Corporation. Day and Zimmermann prides itself on having once received the U.S. National “Family Business of the Year” award—an Internet search for the award chiefly produces references to this company. The company states that it believes in civic and community service, with core values of safety and integrity; emphasizing their success as a team that hits its targets. But since last October, their business has been killing families like Hind’s.
Although Israel predictably insists that Layan and Hind, and the additional slain paramedics, were all lying with their final breaths and that no IDF tanks were present to attack them, Al Jazeera’s analysis of satellite images taken at midday on January 29 corroborates the victims’ accounts and puts at least three Israeli tanks just 270 meters (886 feet) from the family’s car, with their guns pointed at it.
When rescuers were finally allowed to approach the remains of Hind and her family on February 10, the car was riddled with bullet holes likely coming from more than one direction.
Hind’s mother couldn’t go to the site until February 12.
On May 5, Israel raided the offices of Al Jazeera at the Ambassador Hotel in Jerusalem and moved to shut down the television network’s operations in Israel.
To remember Hind’s story is an act of resistance. Commemorating her short life builds resolve to confront profiteers who benefit from developing, manufacturing, storing, and selling the weapons that prolong wars—robbing children of their precious right to live.
Universities should, in theory, be places to learn things of importance, and we can learn from the students of Hind Hall to throw comfort and ambition out the window while keeping hold of love, as the students clung to that banner and to the name of Hind Rajab. We can learn to keep hold of our humanity. We learn by doing, as these students are learning to do, drawing wisdom from people like Phil Berrigan who famously said, “Don’t get tired!”
The list of Gaza solidarity encampments grows each day. Conscious of increasing famine in Gaza, students at Princeton University launched a water-only fast on May 4 as they continue to call for their University to divest from corporations selling weapons to Israel. The United Nations warns of a potential collapse of aid delivery to Palestinians with Israel’s May 7 closure of the two main crossings into Gaza. These crossings are critical entry points for food, medicine, and other supplies for Gaza’s 2.3 million people. The disruptions come at a time when officials say northern Gaza is experiencing a “full-blown famine.”
With thousands of innocent lives in the balance, promoters of peace should take advantage of this crucial opportunity to follow the young people, learning alongside the students whose hunger for humanity reveals stunning courage.
Hind Rajab (Image provided, family photo)
Palestinian Red Crescent Society ambulance crew (Photo Credit: PCRS)
• This article first appeared in The Progressive Magazine
The long-simmering crisis over Israel’s genocide of Palestinians has reached a breaking point. Campus protests in solidarity with Gaza have erupted across North America, spanning at least 45 U.S. states, Canada and Mexico. Similar demonstrations have surged across Europe, including in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and the United…
Seven months of Israel’s genocidal attack — with massive U.S. support — has left more than 35,000 Gazans dead with thousands more missing and tens of thousands injured. Israel has obliterated more than 70 percent of all homes in Gaza. Hospitals and ambulances have been destroyed, with medical staff imprisoned, tortured and killed. The annihilation of Palestinian life and culture includes…
House of Representatives legislation that includes “$60 billion for Kyiv, $26 billion for Israel and humanitarian aid for civilians in conflict zones, including Gaza, and $8 billion for the Indo-Pacific region,” informs the world of the stupidity of it all — from Kyiv to Taiwan, dumbness governs fate. Examine each appropriation, one at a time.
Kyiv
Forced into a political decision that makes it appear that America does not desert its allies, the appropriation accomplishes nothing except to assure that more Russians are killed. It does not save Ukrainian lives or enable Ukraine to gain a leading edge in the war.
In the short run, Ukraine is better protected, which means the war is extended. The kill and destruction rate will be lessened and the time for killing and destruction will be lengthened. The appropriation serves to slightly lessen Ukrainian misery each day and extend the misery for a longer time. The total misery will be the same and feel worse.
Ukraine cannot win the war; it can barely contain the war. Russian troops occupy 1/3 of the country and not one Ukraine soldier is on Russian soil. This is a war of attrition, and, by numbers, Russia wins that war. The deaths and sorrows solicit a solution and not a continuation. The U.S. House of Representatives proudly announces its contribution to the continuation of death and sorrow and does not realize the stupidity of it all.
Some day, at least before all Ukrainian life has been extinguished, the war will end and not satisfactorily for Ukraine. Why wait? Russia has most of what it wants — Crimea and Donbass — both of which were part of the Russian Empire since the late 18th century. If Putin wants Odessa and territory that reaches Transnistria, this may mean extensive negotiations, which is still preferred to extensive slaughter.
Israel
Tied to $17 billion in assistance to Israel’s war effort is $2 billion in humanitarian aid to Gaza. This gives Israel ample funds for acquiring supposed defensive weapons, which it would not need if it stopped offending others, and enables the Zionist kingdom to use its funds for offensive weapons and continue the genocide of the Palestinians. After contributing to infliction of more deaths and sorrows upon the Palestinians, appropriations will be available to relieve their suffering from the $17 billion worth of weapons given to Israel. I have an idea — stop Israel’s attacks on others and its genocide of the Palestinians and then no appropriations will be necessary for anyone.
Not recognizing the use of the October 7 attack as an excuse for the genocide of the Palestinian people is inexcusable. Assisting the genocide by enriching the aggressor is criminal. The United Nations(UN) Office of Expert Scholars, several nations, Craig Mokhiber, former director of the New York office of the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, Francesca Albanese at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, and a large mass of humanity consider Israel’s destruction of the Palestinians as genocide. Amnesty International’s Secretary General, Agnès Callamard says, “Palestinians in Gaza are at risk of genocide, more than 32,000 people have been killed, children have been starved to death amid an imminent Israeli-engineered famine and vast swathes of the Strip have been rendered uninhabitable.” Over a hundred organizations and human rights defenders are calling for arrest warrants for Israeli officials to prevent genocide of the Palestinians.
Despite the authoritative, credible, and legal knowledge, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and the US State Department said, “We don’t have any evidence of genocide being [committed]” by Israel in Gaza.” They have no evidence because the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and AIPAC, two of their “reliable” sources, have told them there is no evidence and the Biden administration does not want evidence that involves Americans in committing genocide. The public accepts the ugly attachment and willingly donates funds to enhance the slaughter. This is strange. The Holocaust occurred in Europe and the US has tens of Holocaust memorial museums, which have been built to give Americans a “guilt trip“and educate them on the prevention of genocide. These museums have been counterproductive, as are most US policies; instead of preventing genocides, the museums have encouraged genocide. Let’s close these wasteful museums, pay less attention to the word Holocaust, which crowds out GENOCIDE IN GAZA, and hold 24/7 education sessions for all Americans on the Gaza genocide. Include the moribund US government officials who aren’t ashamed to be in the stupidity of it all.
Indo-Pacific Region
This donation to increase tension is mostly about Taiwan. If the People’s Republic of China (PRC) attacks, military assistance to Taiwan may lessen casualties to the Taiwanese but it will lengthen the conflict and cause more casualties to the Peoples Liberation Army. No amount of military assistance to Taiwan can prevent the PRC of 1.3 billion people, an army of 2,035,000 active personnel and 510,000 reserve personnel from overcoming Taiwan’s 23.7 million population and its army of 180,000 active personnel and 1,657,000 reserve personnel. No amount of provocation will push the PRC to attack its fellow Chinese. The appropriation is a waste of taxpayer money and another stupidity of it all.
Immediately after the United States recognized the PRC and terminated diplomatic relations with Taiwan on January 1, 1979, the PRC could have walked into Taiwan and the US would have done nothing. China has had 75 years to invade and reincorporate Taiwan into the PRC and has not set the Taiwan Straits straight. Hasn’t China been patient and sensible? The Hong Kong protests, contradictory to US press assertions of China’s brutality, demonstrated China’s care and restraint — no protester died due to police action in an incident related to the demonstrations. In a protest demonstration in Iraq, which occurred at a similar time, the Associated Press reported, “at least 320 protesters have been killed in the demonstrations.”
By law, de jure, Taiwan is a province in China. Beijing designates the island as “Taiwan province.” The PRC does not recognize the Taiwanese passport and issues temporary IDs for Taiwanese who travel to China. The holders of the temporary IDs are treated as Chinese citizens in China. International agencies also give China de jure recognition of Taiwan. The World Bank sometimes calls it “Taiwan District.” The International Monetary Fund prefers the declarative “Taiwan Province of China.” The International Olympic Committee calls it “Chinese Taipei.”
China also wins Taiwan by default. The island is not recognized as a country. To be a country requires diplomatic recognition by the member states of the United Nations. Because Taiwan was removed as a member of the UN, it is classified as a territory. Only 11 countries and the Vatican, all small, recognize Taiwan — Belize, Eswatini, Guatemala, Haiti, Marshall Islands, Palau, Paraguay, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Tuvalu, and Vatican City. If Taiwan is not a country then to whom does it belong?
Everyone has a fantasy — Taiwan may say it is not part of China but it is a separate part of China, slightly in rebellion. China may say it is a province but it is an uncontrolled province, and the US may constantly accuse China of provocations and prepared to invade Taiwan but it is the US who is provocative and behaving most aggressively. The US actions, which have no purpose and do not change Taiwan’s status are the most fantastic and another stupidity of it all.
Jewish people
Dumbest are the Jewish people for maintaining faith in the Zionist mission and the Israeli government who are preparing their demise. Let us recite the facts, and there is no possible refutation to them – a state that calls itself Jewish and a preponderance of world Jewry are committing genocide of the Palestinian people and don’t expect retribution.
To offset attention to the genocide, Israel’s supporters use media control and continue to flood the ether with Holocaust stories. A latest exposé, on the CBS program Sixty Minutes, charges the British government with covering up the killing of Jewish concentration camp inmates (??? may have only been laborers who died) and others on German captured and controlled Guernsey Island during World War II. Seems the Jewish victims, who have not been well identified by cause of death and name, are added to the total of Holocaust victims. Nothing more pleasing to these Holocaust worshippers than to have more Jews killed; nothing makes them happier.
An advertisement that charges anti-Semitism and asks all to reject hate, mentions that 385 synagogues have received false alarm calls of bombs within the buildings. No bombs, no casualties, and the calls may all be from one person. Different in Gazan mosques; no calls, real bombs, thousands of casualties, and from an entire army of hate.
Do the guardians of hate in America, who don’t run ads on the magnitude more serious attacks on Muslims, Orientals, Hispanics, Blacks, and LGBT citizens, expect the world not to despise those guilty of committing genocide? Do they believe they can turn truth into anti-Semitism? Due to the carelessness of university presidents, they may be succeeding. The huge campus protests against the killing fields of genocide are given sinister motives and featured are protests by a few persons who voice complaints about bad words and slaps at a half dozen persons on the campuses who happen to be Jews. The complaints don’t merit much attention.
Only a few Jewish students have been touched and none severely injured in the campus protests. If a student does not want to be bothered, then why not stay away from the demonstrations? And beware of Zionist provocateurs, infiltrators who cause trouble and then yell trouble. In every catastrophic situation, emotions, anger, tension, and tempers are volatile and exaggerated. Taking a few instances of anger in this highly volatile situation, when people want to scream out against the most serious injustice to millions, and deceitfully making it into a contrived torrent of anti-Semitism that gains attention is… you got it… another stupidity of it all. Why isn’t this hyperbole exposed? Why is it allowed?
The following article is an editorial piece by Palestine Action
Lib Dem-led Somerset Council has already backtracked on its motion to evict Israel weapons supplier and manufacturer Elbit Systems from its premises – thanks to the company lying about its involvement in Israel’s killing of Palestinians in Gaza.
Palestine Action campaign to remove Elbit
On Tuesday 23 April, councillors at Lib Dem-led Somerset Council voted to explore options for the removal of Elbit Systems from the property leased to them by the council. Somerset Council is the owner of the ‘Aztec West 600’ building which serves as Elbit’s headquarters in Bristol, from which they oversee their British operations.
The motion followed Palestine Action’s campaign of direct action, which saw meetings disrupted, offices sprayed in blood-red paint, and blockaded, all to highlight the bloodshed with which Elbit’s profits – and their rent for the Aztec West building – are paid for with Palestinian blood.
Somerset residents turned out en masse in support of the campaign, raising their voices against the Council’s relationship with Israel’s war machine, and highlighting the Council’s duty – under both domestic and international law – to evict Elbit, under the provisions of the Genocide Convention, European Convention on Human Rights and International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid.
Lib Dems backtrack
Despite this legal duty and the democratic mandate for eviction, the Council’s Chief Executive reversed course only days later after legal action was threatened by Elbit itself. Elbit’s lawyers claimed that it is false to suggest that they are suppliers of weaponry to the Israeli government or military, prompting an apology from Somerset Council.
These denials by Elbit must be challenged in the strongest possible terms. Palestine Action know well, and have seen it time and again in Courtrooms, that Elbit are careful to distance themselves from their ownership, their products, and the murderous results of their business, but the facts speak for themselves.
Elbit Systems UK is wholly owned by its Israeli parent company, Elbit Systems Ltd.
Just what does Elbit do?
The latter, Israel’s largest weapons company, supplies an incredible amount of weaponry to the Israeli occupation forces. According to Israeli media, Elbit provides up to 80% of the Israeli military’s land based military equipment and 85% of its military drones.
It supplies vast numbers of munitions and missiles – including the ‘Iron Sting’ recently developed and deployed for the first time in the 2023-2024 Genocide in Gaza, along with wide categories of surveillance technologies, targeting systems, and innumerate other armaments.
This heinous company and its British operations are one-and-the-same. Despite the great lengths that Elbit UK has always taken to distance itself from its parent company, we know that Elbit UK is wholly owned by its Israeli counterpart.
Elbit: clearly supplying Israel
Elbit Ltd CEO Bezhalal Machlis, who is on the board of Elbit UK, said in the company’s latest investor conference that
Of course they are all Elbit’s people it doesn’t matter if the company in England is called Elbit UK and the British CEO is in England… it’s 100% owned by Elbit… It’s not a different company, it’s a part of Elbit and when you report on manpower we have 20k employees, 13k in Israel and 7k overseas.
He also noted:
we are a major supplier of armaments to many countries in the world, first and foremost to the IDF, and we are making great efforts to supply the needs of the IDF.
The face that Elbit UK puts out, versus that of Elbit Israel, are therefore markedly different – Elbit Israel is proud of this relationship to Israel’s military, but Elbit UK must attempt to deny it, because it knows that Israel’s genocide in Gaza is far less popular in Britain than in Israel.
And yet, when Israeli Ambassador to Britain Tzipi Hotzelvy made an appearance in July 2023 to Elbit’s new facility in Bristol, she directly praised Elbit UK as an ‘Israeli company’, and showed off a number of Elbit products known to be used by the Israeli armed forces, including Torch-X command and control technologies, radio systems, and night vision goggles.
Regardless of the parent company’s operations, we can also say that, domestically, Elbit Systems UK has long promoted falsehoods about its supplies to Israel.
Lie after lie – and the Lib Dems believe them
They deny that their company provides weapons to Israel, but we know that Elbit UK subsidiaries have a non-disclosure agreement in place to bar discussion of their exports made “for military end use by the State of Israel”.
And these exports are significant: according to the CAAT database, Elbit UK and its subsidiaries have applied for and been granted at least 95 weapons-export licenses to Israel since 2008, for parts including targeting systems and drone components, the latter being made most recently in 2023.
Freedom of Information requests identify a further 75 licenses not listed on the CAAT database, including 11 Direct Licenses in an ‘Extant’ state as-of March 2024. Whether they are supplied directly to the Israeli military, or to the parent company and then to the Israeli military, makes no difference – but Elbit UK appear to rely on the indirect supply chain, and the non-disclosure agreements in place, to make their denials.
These licenses include ML5b surveillance/target acquisition systems – namely the XACT th64 sights, which Instro have sold in quantities of thousands to Israel, likely outfitting their sniper regiments manning the Gaza border – along with components for military ground vehicles (ML6a), and other military electronic equipment (ML11).
Elbit Systems has numerous such subsidiaries in Britain – Instro Precision, UAV Engines, and UAV Tactical Systems – and the Bristol site is a logistical centre which serves to co-ordinate these businesses’ operations and business and export activity.
On top of this, the ownership structure makes clear that all Elbit UK profits are returned to Elbit Israel. Abhorrently, too, Elbit UK’s procurement relationship with the British Ministry of Defence (MOD) is, itself, party to this genocide. Take Elbit’s subsidiary UAV Tactical Systems, Leicester.
Not only does this factory make significant exports of drone parts to Israel, but the drone it manufactures for the MOD is based entirely upon the Israeli’s Hermes drone – meaning that it repackages its genocidal devices for the British market.
Lib Dems: you have a legal and moral duty to evict Elbit
All of this speaks directly to the legal duty that Somerset Council has, its obligation to prevent genocide and its duties not to be complicit in the commission or facilitation of war crimes in Gaza. Elbit’s track record of lying about its exports, its attempts to distance itself from the Israeli occupation, and its threats of legal action, do not change the fact that it is, at its core, a criminal, genocidal enterprise.
Somerset Council must obey international and domestic law, and follow the mandate set forth by the eviction motion, and force the company out of Aztec West.
Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) held an emergency protest on Tuesday 23 April outside the Royal Courts of Justice. The protest is in support of GLAN and Al-Haq who were in court to argue that a Judicial Review over the UK government’s continuing arms sales to Israel should go ahead:
— GLAN | Global Legal Action Network (@GLAN_LAW) April 23, 2024
The High Court agreed with GLAN and Al-Haq – and, as Middle East Eyereported, granted an “expedited judicial review hearing of the government’s export licence process, scheduled for October”.
High Court Israel arms sales: protest and Tory protestations
Despite overwhelming evidence of Israel breaching International Humanitarian Law, (IHL), the case was originally dismissed on 18 February. However, permission was granted for an oral hearing to challenge this decision.
CAAT called an emergency protest due to the government trying to derail the case:
The government argued that it wants a secret hearing based on evidence that it hasn’t yet provided to the court and wants to delay the hearing until December.
The protest demanded justice for Palestinian people, that the government complies with international law and imposes an arms embargo, and that the case is heard urgently and in public:
Under the UK’s export guidelines, arms sales must be suspended when there is a clear risk they could be used to violate IHL.
During its onslaught on Gaza, Israel has killed over 34,000 Palestinian people and its continued and deliberate denial of sufficient aid into the region is causing a catastrophic situation with over one million people facing a man-made famine. Other war crimes Israel has committed include the deliberate targeting of hospitals, refugee camps, journalists, and aid workers.
Pressure has been increasing on this government to suspend arms sales. This has included evidence it is suppressing legal advice confirming that Israel is breaking international law, a letter signed by over 600 legal experts calling for an arms embargo, and dozens of UN experts saying that arms sales must be halted.
Tories derailing tried but failed
Since 2015, the UK has exported £488m of military equipment to Israel in single issue licenses. However, this figure is just scratching the surface as it does not include open licenses. Under open licenses, a company can export unlimited amounts of specified equipment without further reporting requirements. There have been 62 such open licenses since 2015.
One open license is for components for the F35 combat aircraft Israel is using to bombard Gaza. UK industry makes 15% of each F35 in business that’s been worth at least £368 to UK industry since 2016. We do not know anything about how much has been exported to Israel using the other 61 licenses.
CAAT’s media coordinator Emily Apple said:
This government is trying to derail this case because it is complicit in genocide, and it knows it. This is a broken system with government lawyers attempting to defend the indefensible. It is vitally important that not only does this case proceed, but it proceeds quickly and in public, given the atrocities Israel is committing in Gaza with the aid of UK arms exports.
Our government is treating Palestinian lives with contempt. It is making a mockery of both international law and domestic law. It is outrageous that arms sales haven’t been suspended and that legal action is needed. Instead, this government is deliberately ignoring the horrific war crimes Israel is committing to safeguard the profits of arms dealers.
On Tuesday 23 April at around 12pm, students of Bristol University and members of Extinction Rebellion Youth Bristol (XRYB) staged a ‘die-in’. It was over the university’s links to the arms trade – therefore, its complicity in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Bristol University: people ‘die in’ for Palestine
Dozens of students lied down blocking the entrance to Bristol University’s Wills Memorial Building, to appear as if ‘dead’:
The group was joined by many other activist groups ‘on campus’ such as Student Action, the Socialist Society, and the International Feminist Society, all demanding that Bristol University cut its financial ties which run deep in the arms trade:
The action, highly performative, symbolises a staged death and the heavy silence of Bristol University’s ongoing complicity in war crimes:
After around 30 minutes of laying in silence, the group hosted another half an hour of collaborative learning discussion circles and made origami peace doves:
When asked for a statement XRYB said that:
As a youth group we don’t stand with this horrific public display of ‘holding of hands’ with blood-fuelled companies such as BAE Systems, Elbit and Rolls Royce. Companies, which have direct links to the thousands of deaths of innocent Palestinian people and are responsible for an estimated 5-6% of C02 emissions.
A spokesperson from XRYB added and urged the university to “respond to our peaceful demonstration, recognizing that they should start listening to the voice of the student body”.
Stop supporting Israel’s genocide
Additionally, calling to the wider university audience, they said:
Students, staff and public we need to start holding our institutions to account. I don’t want the money, which is supposed to be spent on my education, being wasted on outdated and bloody partnerships, this is the opposite of building a better future.
Information surrounding the direct action group’s campaign can be found on XRYB website – where they demand that Bristol University:
Immediately end all promotion of arms related careers.
Commit to no new research partnerships with companies that produce arms.
On Friday 19 April, during the weekly student and staff Palestine rally, the group hosted a stall outside Senate house, promoting the groups campaign. XRYB was leafleting and engaging in conversations about Bristol University’s ties within Israel’s arms trade and giving out block print patches, stickers, etc.
More students seem to be turning their attention to the matter as seen with the turnout on 23 April.
A student present at the ‘die-in’ added that
The university’s, particularly VC Evelyn Welch’s discussions with the recent Occupiers for Palestine in Tyndall Avenue proved that the institution is not undertaking the severity of the situation and how rapidly they need to end these ties and commit to a net-zero future before it is too late.
New research published Monday shows that global military spending increased in 2023 for the ninth consecutive year, surging to $2.4 trillion as Russia’s assault on Ukraine and Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip helped push war-related outlays to an all-time high. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) recorded military spending increases in every geographical region it examined…
On Sunday 21 April massive anti-imperialist events took place all over Greece. They were protesting against Greece’s involvement in US-NATO-EU militarism and the ongoing bloodshed of the Palestinian people.
Greece: people standing up to NATO and the EU’s imperialism
In Athens a 42km peace march took place along the route of the original Marathon:
The march ended in front of the Ministry of Defense in Athens:
Thanasis Paphilis, secretary general of the World Peace Council, spoke at the event and noted:
We are here today, outside the Ministry of National Defence, at the end of the 41st Marathon March to condemn Greece’s involvement in the murderous US-NATO plans.
To demand the closure and removal of the US-NATO-EU bases and barracks that have turned our country into a military base and our people into a target for retaliation. To return here and now the frigate ‘HYDRA’ and the Armed Forces personnel from the Red Sea.
For the withdrawal of Greece from the EU’s “SHIELD” mission and the return of the “PATRIOT” artillery from Saudi Arabia.
To express our solidarity with the heroic people of Palestine, who for the past six months have been dying from genocide, from the murderous attacks of the terrorist state of Israel, with the blessing of the USA – NATO – EU, but also with the support of the Greek government.
‘What side of history are you standing on?’
Vaios Tsaproounis is an army lieutenant in active service and president of the Officers’ Union of the Region of Xanthi. They said:
It is a great joy and emotion, and even greater is the honour I feel to be among you today, with people who, steadfast, with patience and perseverance, are fighting for the supreme good of peoples, peace, while exposing all those who usurp it.
My decision to join with you, to lead my steps alongside yours, to join my voice and my agony with yours, was for me a conscious one-way street. A choice, identified with my love for our people, but also with my status as a serving military man committed to serving the interests of the people from whom I come.
Feeling the debt to my conscience, to my roots, which are inextricably linked to our people, I declare and at the same time I commit myself to stand by you, to be inspired by the messages of your struggle, to fight with you for a better tomorrow, a tomorrow that I, my colleagues, our people, the peoples of the world deserve.
This is my choice of which side of history to stand on.
Yes, I choose to be on the side of the people and their interests, because they are the only ones who can stop war plans wherever they are hatched.
Yes, I choose with you to demand the return now of the Hydra frigate from the Red Sea, the Patriot artillery from Saudi Arabia, the anti-tank platoon from Bulgaria, and every Greek colleague of mine from missions outside the borders.
Remembering Yugoslavia
Protesters also descended on two military bases in Greece that are either run by NATO or the EU:
NATO's Forward Military Base in Aktio, Greece under protest from the local unions during Antiimperialist Day of Action pic.twitter.com/RPmlcHvOuC
— PAME Greece International (@PAME_Greece) April 22, 2024
EU-OHQ Military Base in #Larissa under siege by Regional Union and local associations
— PAME Greece International (@PAME_Greece) April 22, 2024
‘Greece out of war!’
Meanwhile in Athens, staff sergeant Orion Papadakis summed up:
I am proud to be here and join with you to make the slogans for:
Disengagement of Greece from the imperialist wars.
No participation in the NATO – USA – EU plans.
Close the bases of death in Greece.
Over six months now, you get a knot in your stomach with the images coming out of Palestine. Nearly 20,000 children alone have been killed by the State of Israel. It makes you despair that the Greek state is openly supporting the murderers. And not only in words, but also in deeds. The flame of war burns not only in Gaza, but throughout the Middle East, in Ukraine and elsewhere. And it is only getting hotter.
And you wonder. What business does Greece have getting involved in two wars? Why become a perpetrator and a potential victim? What business do Armed Forces personnel, permanent and enlisted, have participating in war missions? To load white phosphorus missiles, banned by international conventions, to go to Ukraine?
What does the oath you took when you presented yourself to the Army, to serve “with faith and devotion, to the last drop of your blood, the flags” have to do with defending the flags of murderers?
Worried about all of the above, scared a lot of times. That’s why you have to say one more time, even louder:
Greece out of the war. The Greek army has no business outside the borders!
Featured image and additional images via PAME International
With regular maintenance stuff lasts longer, but eventually, in spite of every effort, things break down: the washing machine stops washing, the car won’t start, the mobile phone refuses to connect to the internet.
Socio-economic-political systems also collapse; shaped by an ideology of some kind, they are, like all ‘isms’, limited, and divisive. Looking at The State of the World it is clear that the systems that govern our lives and the modes of living they support are breaking down, fragmenting. The signs are many and varied.
Autocratic regimes are on the rise and many democratic governments, influenced by right wing extremism, are adopting policies and attitudes more usually associated with autocracies.
The values and moral codes that have been in place for generations, some unspoken, culturally shared and absorbed, others formally enshrined in international law, are being ignored, discarded or distorted. The ‘Rules Based International Order’, so-called, is made up of a range of laws or conventions, which underpin geo-political engagement: The UN Charter, the UN Declaration of Human Rights, Geneva Conventions and UN General Assembly Resolutions among other texts.
Self righteous hypocritical western politicians routinely refer to the Rule of Law or International Humanitarian Law, particularly when criticising their enemies (Russia, Iran, China etc), not so much when they or their allies act illegally. The double standards of western governments knows no limits and is a major cause of global destabilisation.
As systems, structures and animating principles disintegrate, extremism and intolerance grow, polarities intensify, the threat of armed conflict and fragmentation expands; fear and uncertainty increases.
And while the underlying causes remain unchecked, the everyday consequences of disintegration deepen and become more pronounced: the environmental emergency, armed conflict/war, poverty/hunger, displacement of people, social alienation and economic inequality, are some of the major effects. Interconnected complex issues resulting from behaviour and attitudes flowing from The Ideology of Greed, which underpins the socio-political systems and the institutions of control; creaking outdated models that are incapable of creating solutions to the crises, no matter how much they are manipulated.
Take climate change for example, clearly the greatest challenge facing humanity. Climate change is the consequence of the fossil fuel economy and endless consumerism; overwhelmingly rich western nations consumerism. Along with the wider environmental emergency, climate change is caused by behavior flowing from a reductive view of life that prizes individual happiness above all else; happiness, which is, in fact, nothing more than pleasure, that can be achieved, the advocates preach, through the accumulation of things or experiences.
This deeply materialistic approach to life, which, far from bringing happiness, actually guarantees discontent, is integral to the socio-economic system. Constant consumption is demanded, and it is consumption, with its insatiable sucking in of energy (and people) and churning out of waste, that is fuelling climate change, has polluted the air, water and soil, and contributed to the creation of societies rife with unhealthy unhappy people.
Curbing climate change, reducing waste and curtailing pollution requires an economy of sufficiency not excess as we have now. An economy, rooted in social justice and environmental responsibility. A dramatic reduction in consumption is essential – in rich nations at least – and a shift to ethical business practices. All of which is incompatible within the suffocating web of Neo-Liberalism.
If reducing climate change and saving the planet is not reason enough to change the socio-economic-political order, how about ending war?
In order for peace to be realised, social justice and freedom must prevail; this means ending all forms of exploitation and discrimination, inequality and injustice. Such sane measures are impossible within a system wedded to money, to competition and greed, and unthinkable while short-term self-interest is the driving factor behind the actions of governments, corporations and many individuals.
Peace also requires that the Military Industrial Complex and all military alliances, including Nato, be dismantled, again unimaginable within the confines of the current economic order.
As everything breaks down and frays, including the nervous systems and mental health of many people, the inadequacies of the present structures become increasingly apparent. This includes the existing forms of parliamentary democracy, which is non-representative, particularly within societies that are increasingly diverse.
If the slide into further chaos, including the possibility of a major war and complete environmental collapse is to be avoided, fundamental change is desperately needed. Both structural change and a change in values and attitudes, which will lead to changes in behaviour. Systemic changes designed with the aim of achieving universally championed principles: peace, social justice, real democracy and freedom.
People throughout the world are desperate for such changes, the men and women in power, less so. Their resistance comes from the recognition that such a shift would inevitably result in the privilege and power they currently enjoy being swept aside.
The choice before us is clear: maintain the status quo, continue along the existing path, which is narrowing to a point of greater extremism, intolerance and conflict and suffer, or unite, reject all forms of division and re-imagine society.
Humanity has faced such choices many times over long ages, has routinely made the wrong decisions and we are living with the disastrous effects. But now, at this moment in time, the consequences of our collective decisions are far reaching in a way that was not the case in the recent or distant past.
These are extremely uncertain dangerous times. Transitional times for sure, but transitioning to what, to a more extreme, dystopian version of the present, or transitional towards a more just peaceful world?
UK-based arms manufacturer Elbit Systems has been repeatedly targeted by pro-Palestine activists for years. It’s over its supplying of weapons to Israel – which end up killing Palestinian people. However, amid Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza activists have stepped up their campaign. Now, one group has turned to ‘subvertising’ to raise awareness of just what Elbit do.
Subvertising to stop Israel’s genocide
This week, activists from Extinction Rebellion Youth Bristol (XRYB) opened bus stop advert frames and replaced the adverts with anti-Elbit designs that they made. The designs tell you how many bus stops from the Elbit Systems in Bristol you are:
In addition XRYB fly posted around the city with two other poster designs:
A QR code on the posters allow people to further find out about Elbit Systems, XRYB, and how to get involved in protests for Palestine.
This kind of direct action is called subvertising:
Subvertising (a portmanteau of subvert and advertising) is the practice of making spoofs or parodies of corporate and political advertisements. The cultural critic Mark Dery coined the term in 1991. Subvertisements are anti-ads that deflect advertising’s attempts to turn the people’s attention in a given direction. According to author Naomi Klein, subvertising offers a way of speaking back to advertising, ‘forcing a dialogue where before there was only a declaration.’ They may take the form of a new image or an alteration to an existing image or icon, often in a satirical manner.
Subvertising against Elbit is a crucial part of the fight against it – for good reason, too.
Elbit: a national and international disgrace
Elbit is Israel’s largest privately owned weapons manufacturer. They manufacture bullets, drones, combat vehicles, electronic warfare systems and missiles. They produce 85% of the land based equipment and drones used by the Israeli military. Less than three weeks ago, one of its Hermes 450 drone was used to target cars taking food to Gaza, killing seven World Central Kitchen aid workers.
Despite Elbit Systems UK being wholly owned by its parent company in Israel, the company often attempt to disassociate themselves from their parent company and global brand.
However, during Elbit’s annual investor conference 2024 in Israel, CEO Bezhalel Machlis stated that all Elbit companies in the UK are a significant part of the Israeli weapons firm who frequently work with their counterparts in Israel and share technology.
In the same conference, a video was displayed of workers saying they feel like ‘civil soldiers’ and regularly engage in ongoing debriefs with the Israeli military during the use of their weapons in Gaza.
A spokesperson for XRYB said:
These weapons are being used for genocide in Palestine and being made so close to us. We need to remind people of this and sit in the discomfort of that because that is the first step to changing things.
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.
Palestine Action started the week as it probably means to go on: by blocking a weapons’ factory, taking direct action against arms trade financing and landlordism – and getting nicked in the process. All in a day’s work, though, for the campaign that is actually disrupting the supply of weapons via Elbit Systems to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza – while MPs do fuck all.
Palestine Action: shut it down – again, and again, and again
On Monday 15 April, activists from Palestine Action attached themselves to vehicles, blockading the four entry routes to Discovery Park, the base of Instro Precision in, Sandwich, Kent. Preventing all entry, Direct action has once again halted production at Instro, a subsidiary of Israel’s largest weapons company, Elbit Systems:
BREAKING: Palestine Action blockade four entry points into Kent’s Discovery Park, making access to the business estate impossible.
Discovery Park is the base of Elbit’s Instro Precision weapons factory, who make sniper rifle sights for the Israeli army to commit genocide.
Prior to the Kent blockade, Palestine Action struck overnight at financial corporations invested in Israel’s war machine, with all of today’s actions marking the A15 Global Day of Action, for a “Coordinated Economic Blockade to Free Palestine”:
BREAKING: Palestine Action target BNY Mellon’s Manchester office, to coincide with the ‘global economic blockade for a Free Palestine’
The Instro site, on Artillery Way in the Discovery Park estate, is normally used for the manufacture of target acquisition, surveillance and reconnaissance equipment for the Israeli military.
Since 2008, Instro Precision has applied for and been granted over 50 weapons export licenses to Israel, mostly for goods falling under category ‘ML5b’ (target acquisition and related systems), for products including imaging systems for Israel’s Hermes drones.
Instro’s reports note that:
the Directors are of the opinion that the company is ultimately controlled by Elbit Systems Limited, [ultimately] a company incorporated in Israel.
Elbit Systems itself is the largest private contractor to the Israeli Military, providing 85% of the occupying forces drones and land-based military equipment.
Targetting Elbit’s ‘systems’ – wherever they may be
Additionally, activists have struck again at the premises of BNY Mellon in Manchester, the financial services corporation which invests over £10m in Elbit Systems. The bank’s windows were shattered, covered in red paint, and spray painted with messages including ‘Drop Elbit’, ‘Child Killers’ and ‘Free Palestine’:
BREAKING: Palestine Action target BNY Mellon’s London office during the global economic blockade for a Free Palestine.
Predictably, cops swooped in to protect the corporate war machine – not those trying to protect millions of innocent civilians. Police arrested five members of Palestine Action:
Elsewhere, as part of the coordinated day of action., Sisters Uncut and other groups took action towards Elbit’s landlords;
Join us at LONDONMETRIC (W1J 5HB) as we take action in response to the call for a global economic blockade to disrupt the flow of capital arming genocide in Gaza. This is London’s resistance as part of @a15action#jointhefeministblockadepic.twitter.com/xn9xvQ1Vo7
It has been clear that there is no route through government to ending the supply of British weapons to Israel’s war machine. 40,000 Palestinians have been massacred in Israel’s genocide, yet more now starving, wounded and displaced. Our government is complicit in all of that – coordinated direct action to immobilise sites of Israeli weapons production is the only possible response.
Featured image and additional images via Palestine Action
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) on Saturday warned the U.S. about “any support for Israel or involvement in harming Iran’s interests,” according to a statement. U.S. President Joe Biden said he met with his national security team for an update on Iran’s attacks on Israel and the U.S. commitment to Israel’s security against threats from Iran and its proxies is ironclad.
Every year at tax time, the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies releases a tax receipt to show where your federal income tax dollars go. Every year, militarism in all its forms is one of the biggest expenses on the receipt. From war and weapons, to deportations and detentions, to prisons and policing, budgeting choices made in Congress mean that every U.S.
An operation has been carried out against Israeli targets in the Occupied Palestinian territories, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said in a statement on Monday night. The drone and missile strike was a response to “numerous crimes” supposedly committed by West Jerusalem, the statement said, among which was an attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, it added.
“In response to the Zionist regime’s numerous crimes … and the martyrdom of a number of our country’s commanders and military advisors in Syria, the IRGC’s Aerospace Division launched tens of missiles and drones against certain targets inside the occupied territories,” the statement said.
The exact targets of the strike remain unknown. It is also unclear if the IRGC was referring to the Occupied Palestinian territories in the West Bank or Israeli territory when announcing the strike. Several media outlets earlier reported that multiple drones were targeting Israeli territory. Tehran said it would provide further details about the operation “soon.”
The development came two weeks after an alleged Israeli airstrike on the Iranian consulate in the Syrian capital of Damascus. The attack, which took place on April 1, killed seven officers of the IRGC’s Quds Force, including two generals.
Following the incident, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei vowed to deal Israel a “slap in the face.” US officials also warned West Jerusalem on Friday that Tehran could be preparing a massive strike against Israel over the weekend.
Keir Starmer has announced that Labour aims to increase military spending if elected. The Labour Party leader echoed the policy of the Conservative Party in calling for 2.5% of GDP military spending – an increase from the present 2.2%.
The right way to talk about public spending – but only for the military
Starmer said the issue of the military was resource-based, stating he would raise spending:
as soon as resources allow
But with government spending that’s always the case, given the UK has a fiat currency which is partly dependent on the nation’s resources, manpower, and expertise. There is no gold-standard.
What macroeconomist John Maynard Keynes said in a 1942 BBC address holds true today:
Anything we can actually do, we can afford… We are immeasurably richer than our predecessors. Is it not evident that some sophistry, some fallacy, governs our collective action if we are forced to be so much meaner than they in the embellishments of life?
Opponents of Keynes’ views on public investing argue that government spending doesn’t increase demand because it simply negates private investment.
But both wellbeing and work-based redistributive policies can bring about more demand through increasing the spending power of more rather than less people.
A billionaire won’t purchase anywhere near the amount of diverse products and services as thousands of people would with additional income.
Starmer could take on the resource-based logic he uses for military spending, but for house building or a green new deal.
But instead, it’s always only a question of cost – rather than ability – when the policies involve public investment.
Starmer dropped his pledge for £28bn a year in green investment, with Labour suggesting we cannot afford it.
At the same time, Starmer and the Tories’ aim to raise defence spending to 2.5% of GDP would reportedly cost around £9bn per year.
The US, meanwhile, spends 3.5% of GDP on the military, while China spends 1.6%.
Starmer: taking country “further backwards”
On social media, people reacted to Starmer’s aim to increase military budgets:
4 years of a Labour party trying to appeal to these guys and we now have a political discourse centred not on tackling austerity or reducing inequality, but on how much cash we spend on nukes. Congratulations Labour for creating a context to take the country further backwards pic.twitter.com/MNmRyiBnlq
Some called out that the double standard also depends on a person’s politics:
Uncosted spend of £10 billion a year from Labour.
But don’t worry – it’s not a left wing figure saying we should use cash to improve the productive capacity of the economy. So it’s fine. pic.twitter.com/tIz5MbdHur
Others also criticised Starmer’s ‘no money’ claims:
So when Starmer said there's no money for lifting people out of poverty, or ending austerity, what he really meant was that he intends to siphon the money off to pay for war-toys controlled by the US. pic.twitter.com/pUhbrIOIDm
The UK’s nuclear weapons regularly receive maintenance in the US.
Labour’s Diane Abbott said Starmer has mismatched priorities:
Our public services are in crisis, there is a huge housing shortage, our transport network is shambolic, the planet is under threat and ordinary people are suffering a fall in living standards. Now is not the time to increase military spending.https://t.co/2QoMeNGCis
Starmer has taken a resource rather than only a cost-based approach, but for military spending. He doesn’t commit to that approach when it comes to investing in key issues like a sustainable future or housing security.
Palestine Action took drastic steps to try and stop Elbit System’s weapons manufacturing. Members of the group crashed cars into the factory’s bollards – backed up by local residents coming out to assist. Predictably, arrests followed – but many would see the action as proportionate when viewed next to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Palestine Action: drastic action
On Thursday 11 April, Palestine Action crashed two cars into the bollards in front of Elbit’s Leicester drone factory, UAV Tactical Systems (U-TacS):
BREAKING: Actionists crash two vehicles into the bollards in front of Elbit's drone factory in Leicester
By locking themselves to the steering wheels, they've blockaded the only entrance into the Israeli weapons maker
Activists used D-locks to attach themselves to the steering wheels, to successfully blockade the only entrance into the Israeli weapons maker:
Dozens of locals came out to reinforce the blockade, chanting ‘murderer’ to workers as they were forced to drive home.
Predictably, cops arrived on the scene and arrested the two Palestine Action actionists:
In the aftermath, the factory looked like a crime scene – which it was anyway before Palestine Action arrived, given Elbit is directly responsible for the massacre of tens of thousands of Palestinians:
U-TacS is majority owned by Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest arms manufacturer, and partially owned by French arms company Thales. Elbit supplies 85% of Israel’s drone fleet and land-based military equipment, marketing its weapons to the world as “battle-tested” on Palestinians. Their flagship drone is the Watchkeeper, which is modelled on the Hermes 450, and has operated in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Elbit’s Hermes 450 is regularly used during previous bombardments and the ongoing genocide in Gaza. It was used by the Israeli military to murder seven aid workers, including three British citizens. U-TacS also exports military drone equipment to the apartheid state of Israel.
Since 7 October, the Israeli military has killed over 33,482 Palestinians, injured 76,049, and destroyed approximately 62% of homes in Gaza.
All power to the actionists
A Palestine Action spokesperson said:
The apparatus of the Israeli military has been embedded into our communities without our permission. Despite legal and moral obligations, our political lass continues to make us complicit in the Gaza genocide. So we’re left with no option but to take direct action and shut Elbit down. Day after day, we will disrupt the Israeli war machine in solidarity with the Palestinian people.
Cops released the two Palestine Action actionists:
The aftermath of today’s action in Leicester, where two actionists crashed vehicles into the bollards in front of Elbit’s drone factory and shut the site down! #ShutElbitDownpic.twitter.com/ulerk2CpnZ
Some people might say Palestine Action using vehicles to stop Elbit is a step too far. We say all power to them – because some damage to bollards is nothing compared to the genocide Israel is carrying out in Gaza.
Featured image and additional images via Palestine Action
Palestine Action has targeted two companies complicit in Israel‘s ongoing genocide in Gaza in one night, due to their association with weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems.
Palestine Action: two hits in one night – both linked to Elbit
Overnight on Wednesday 10 April, activists from Palestine Action targeted ADS Group’s London office and Avnet’s and EBV Elektronik’s facility in Waltham Park, Berkshire. Red paint was sprayed across ADS Groups office and a message was spray painting which read ‘Eid Mubarak Gaza’ and ‘ADS Drop Elbit’:
In Berkshire, activists similarly covered the premises in red paint and shattered windows:
ADS Group, Avnet and EBV Elektronik all profit from working with Israel’s largest weapons firm, Elbit Systems. Elbit Systems supply the Israeli military with 85% of their drone fleet and land-based equipment, as well as all of their small calibre ammunitions (bullets).
In addition, Elbit’s production of munitions, bombs, missiles and digital warfare has been described by the CEO as crucial to enabling the Gaza genocide.
Specifically, ADS Group act as representatives and advocates of the world’s largest arms dealers. ADS’ business is the promotion of companies such as Elbit Systems within government and at arms fairs. Acting to facilitate the business of Israel’s largest weapons company – and promoting them with lobbying – ADS Group are deeply complicit in the ongoing Gaza genocide.
Avnet, owners of EBV Elektronik, describe themselves as a ‘leading global technology distributor’ and boast of their involvement in the production of the F-35 lightning programme. The F-35 fighter jet is frequently used by the Israeli military to commit massacres in Gaza. In addition, the company supplies electronics for Elbit Systems weaponry and has been operating in Israel since 2001.
Israel: fomenting the ‘worst Ramadan’ Palestinians have ‘ever lived’
Since 7 October, Israel has killed at least 33,360 Palestinians and injured over 75,993. As Eid Al-Fitr begins, Palestinians will struggle to commemorate this religious holiday considering the ongoing brutality they are facing.
“There is no joy or appetite for celebrating the holy occasion,” Ahmed Ismail, a shopkeeper in Rafah, told Al Jazeera. “Even children have no interest in toys as they did in the past. This is the worst season we have ever lived.”
Featured image and additional images via Palestine Action
South Korea’s general election will be held on April 10, as candidates compete for the 300 seats in the country’s unicameral National Assembly. The latest polls show a neck-and-neck race between President Yoon Suk-yeol’s right-wing ruling People Power Party (PPP) and the main opposition “liberal” Democratic Party which currently holds a majority. This election will serve as a referendum on Yoon’s…
A new documentary film explores a drawn-out court battle involving the UK government and a campaign group which tried to stop it selling arms to human rights-abusing Saudi Arabia, which has terrorised Yemen for years.
Don’t Buy A Bomb: calling out Britain and Saudi Arabia
Demilitarise Education (dED_UCATION) has released a new documentary film directed by Eva McQuade, following the inner workings of a High Court of Justice appeal.
Since the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen began in 2015, at least 154,000Yemeni citizens have been killed as a result of military action, with British-made weaponry playing a central role. If international humanitarian law does not permit assaults on non-combatants, then how can the government justify its complicity in these war crimes?
The film offers the opportunity to engage with the issue from multiple perspectives, ranging from Erin Alcock and Dearbhla Minogues – solicitors on the case – to Amina Atiq, a British-Yemeni poet who uses her art as a means of activism.
The film combines carefully curated archive footage, which acts as visible evidence of the atrocities committed, with expertise from professionals in the field. In doing so, we see that what Liz Truss called ‘isolated incidents’ are, actually, mass scale arms deals deeply embedded within ‘diplomatic’ relationships between the UK and its allies.
Feinstein: Britain has propped up Saudi assault on Yemen
Contributor to the film Andrew Feinstein is executive director of Shadow World Investigations. He said:
BAE, through the British state, provides significant numbers of advisers to the Saudi air force… the planes that are involved in most of the airstrikes over Yemen and a lot of the ordinance that is released from those planes, the bombs, the missiles that rain down on innocent Yemenis.
After the unjust dismissal of CAAT’s case by the High Court of Justice in June 2023, this documentary is more important than ever to ensure that the government’s continuous evasion of the law is held under scrutiny. In alignment with what Fallon eloquently expresses above, the documentary is a necessity to not only inform but inspire action through enforcing transparency.
Katie Fallon, advocacy manager at CAAT, said:
This film is so important as it shows that campaigners and members of the public can take action, speak truth to power, and disrupt the cycles of violence that our government commits us to.
Nine years after the bombardment of Yemen began, in 2024 the UK is not only bombing Yemen directly, but is complicit in Israel’s genocide of Palestinians and selling arms to Israel again in violation of UK law. In the face of so much horror, the global public has spoken out in our thousands, millions, and billions, standing in solidarity with each other to build a peaceful and just future.
Without such a film, the judicial system can escape public accountability in its failure to enforce national and international law.
Yemen will ‘persist in its pursuit of justice’ against Saudi Arabia and UK
Cindy Sasha produced the film. She said:
When I learnt about CAAT’s court case in 2021, I knew this was an important story to be told. Film is a great medium to allow us to document the truth and share it with the world. This film exposes our corrupt justice system and how power is above the law and how the law chooses profit over people.
By making the film, dED_UCATION has solidified the moment in history, encouraging audience engagement and political action. It is a tangible story in which Western imperialism, the military-industrial complex, and neocolonialism interact. However, it offers hope in the way of re-imagining a future in which citizens refuse to sit back and allow their government to commit war crimes.
The documentary serves to pay respect to the people of Yemen, through making their suffering visible, thus providing an opportunity for solidarity.
As poet and activist Amina Atiq summed up:
The film is greater than a political disagreement, it calls for moral and ethical responsibility from our British Government. The arms trade between Britain and Saudi Arabia has only led to the tragic loss of lives in Yemen. We will continue to revisit this historic relationship of arms as unlawful, inhumane and it is a crime. Our Yemen will persist in its pursuit of justice.
You can watch the film on dED_UCATION’s YouTube channel below:
The Israeli Defence Force (IDF) killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers – including three Britons – using a UK-made drone. The news only serves to increase pressure on the Tories to ban arms exports to Israel.
World Central Kitchen aid workers: killed by the IDF
NGO World Central Kitchen aid workers were coordinating their journey with Israel and in clearly marked vehicles when the Israeli military murdered them with repeated drone strikes.
The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) killed seven people working with the NGO after the aid workers dropped off 100 tonnes of food at a warehouse in central Gazan city Deir al Balah. Those killed include people from Britain, Poland, Australia, and Palestine.
Now, we know the UK government and arms industry is complicit in Israel’s killing of these seven aid workers in Gaza, including three British citizens.
The IDF killed the World Central Kitchen workers with a strike from a Hermes 450 drone manufactured by Elbit Systems. The Hermes 450 is powered by a UK-made R902(W) Wankel engine, produced by Elbit subsidiary UAV Engines Limited in the UK.
UK arms exports to Israel
This latest news on World Central Kitchen follows revelations that the Foreign Office is hiding legal advice that Israel is breaching International Humanitarian Law (IHL) according to Foreign Affairs committee chair Alicia Kearns. The news of the suppressed legal advice was revealed in the Observer from a recorded speech Kearns made at a fundraiser.
According to its own arms export licensing criteria, the government must halt arms sales when there is a clear risk they could be used in IHL violations. On 19th February, GLAN and Al-Haq were refused permission to take the government to court over its arms sales.
The refusal was based on the grounds that the government is carrying out a rolling review process. They have now been granted an oral hearing to argue again for the case to be allowed to proceed.
Since 2015, the UK has licensed £487m worth of weapons to Israel. However, this does not include equipment exported via open licences.
In particular, 15% of the value of every US-made F-35 combat aircraft, which Israel uses to bomb Gaza, is made in the UK, exports for which are covered by an open licence with no limit on the quantity or value of exports. The work on the 36 F-35s exported to Israel up to 2023 has been worth at least £368m to the UK arms industry.
This government is complicit in the murder of UK aid workers in Gaza. It has had every opportunity to impose an arms embargo and has refused to do so. While our thoughts are with the families and friends of the aid workers killed, they are also with the families and friends of the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have been killed by Israel.
Not only is our government complicit in genocide, it knows it. Time and again David Cameron and Foreign Office ministers have refused to answer direct questions on the legal advice they’ve received. They have misled parliament and made a mockery of both our democracy and international law.
It is clear this government has nothing but contempt for Palestinian people. Despite Israel deliberately causing a famine, in which over a million people face starvation, and despite killing tens of thousands of people, this government has chosen to prioritise the profits of arms dealers over Palestinian lives.
Every day people are taking action against arms companies profiting from the genocide Israel is committing. This has to continue. Every single company that supplies weapons or military must be held to account. Our government has failed us, and it has failed the Palestinian people, and it has failed its own citizens. It is down to us to take action.
UK government has World Central Kitchen staffs’ blood on its hands
A spokesperson for campaign group Palestine Solidarity Cornwall said of World Central Kitchen:
We are devastated to hear that James Henderson – known as Jimmy to his friends – was one of the aid workers killed by a targeted strike from Israel, and our deepest thoughts and condolences are with his family and friends.
It is scandalous that nearing 200 aid workers have been killed, and the inevitable deterrent this will pose for the already extremely restricted yet essential aid.
This is a deliberate attempt to ensure the war crime of starvation Israel has engineered cannot be stalled by foreign aid. James is one of over 37,000+ people to be murdered since the start of October, each one an individual with a life, a story and a family, and our politicians can no longer look away.
James’s death, like the 37,000 deaths it numbers in, like the 14,000 children who have been murdered, could have been prevented by our government, and others around the world, ceasing arms deals with Israel and refusing to support a genocide. They are guilty, this blood is on their hands.
President Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech failed to discuss a critical matter — the administration’s funding for the upgrading of all three legs of the nuclear weapons triad: Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), submarines and bomber aircraft. The upgrades, new weapons systems and production of new nuclear warheads are estimated to cost taxpayers over $2 trillion dollars over the…
For weeks, as Gaza was battered with bombs and the body count in the tiny enclave rose inexorably, western publics had little choice but to rely on Israel’s word for what happened on 7 October. Some 1,150 Israelis were killed during an unprecedented attack on Israeli communities and military posts next to Gaza.
Beheaded babies, a pregnant woman with her womb cut open and the foetus stabbed, children put in ovens, hundreds of people burned alive, mutilation of corpses, a systematic campaign of indescribably savage rapes and acts of necrophilia.
Western politicians and media lapped it up, repeating the allegations uncritically while ignoring Israel’s genocidal rhetoric and increasingly genocidal military operations these claims supported.
Then, as the mountain of bodies in Gaza grew still higher, the supposed evidence was shared with a few, select western journalists and influencers. They were invited to private screenings of footage carefully curated by Israeli officials to paint the worst possible picture of the Hamas operation.
These new initiates offered few details but implied the footage confirmed many of the horrors. They readily repeated Israeli claims that Hamas was “worse than Isis”, the Islamic State group.
The impression of unparalleled depravity from Hamas was reinforced by the willingness of the western media to allow Israeli spokespeople, Israel’s supporters and western politicians to continue spreading unchallenged the claim that Hamas had committed unspeakable, sadistic atrocities – from beheading and burning babies to carrying out a campaign of rapes.
The only journalist in the British mainstream media to dissent was Owen Jones. Agreeing that Israel’s video showed terrible crimes committed against civilians, he noted that none of the barbarous acts listed above were included.
What was shown instead were the kind of terrible crimes against civilians all too familiar in wars and uprisings.
Whitewashing genocide
Jones faced a barrage of attacks from colleagues accusing him of being an atrocity apologist. His own newspaper, the Guardian, appears to have prevented him from writing about Gaza in its pages as a consequence.
Now, after nearly six months, the exclusive narrative stranglehold on those events by Israel and its media acolytes has finally been broken.
Last week, Al Jazeera aired an hour-long documentary, called simply “October 7”, that lets western publics see for themselves what took place. It seems that Jones’ account was closest to the truth.
Yet, Al Jazeera’s film goes further still, divulging for the first time to a wider audience facts that have been all over the Israeli media for months but have been carefully excluded from western coverage. The reason is clear: those facts would implicate Israel in some of the atrocities it has been ascribing to Hamas for months.
Middle East Eye highlighted these glaring plot holes in the West’s media narrative way back in December. Nothing has been done to correct the record since.
The BBC and other media outlets keep revisiting the crimes Hamas committed on October 7, but have failed to report on growing evidence that Israel killed its own citizens that day, often in grotesque fashion.
The establishment media has proved it is not to be trusted. For months it has credulously recited Israeli propaganda in support of a genocide.
But that is only part of the indictment against it. Its continuing refusal to report on the mounting evidence of Israel’s perpetration of crimes against its own civilians and soldiers on 7 October suggests it has been intentionally whitewashing Israel’s slaughter in Gaza.
Al Jazeera’s investigations unit has gathered many hundreds of hours of film from bodycams worn by Hamas fighters and Israeli soldiers, dashcams and CCTV to compile its myth-busting documentary.
It demonstrates five things that upend the dominant narrative that has been imposed by Israel and the western media.
First, the crimes Hamas committed against civilians in Israel on 7 October – and those it did not – have been used to overshadow the fact that it carried out a spectacularly sophisticated military operation on 7 October in breaking out of a long-besieged Gaza.
The group knocked out Israel’s top-flight surveillance systems that had kept the enclave’s 2.3 million inhabitants imprisoned for decades. It smashed holes in Israel’s highly fortified barrier surrounding Gaza in at least 10 locations. And it caught unawares Israel’s many military camps next to the enclave that had been enforcing the occupation at arms’ length.
More than 350 Israeli soldiers, armed police and guards were killed that day.
A colonial arrogance
Second, the documentary undermines the conspiracy theory that Israeli leaders allowed the Hamas attack to justify the ethnic cleansing of Gaza – a plan Israel has been actively working on since at least 2007, when it appears to have received US approval.
All the signs are in place that, once again, Israel is seriously considering a massive ethnic cleansing operation of Palestinians, conducted at lightning speed and with US assistance.
True, Israeli intelligence officials involved in the surveillance of Gaza had been warning that Hamas was preparing a major operation. But those warnings were discounted not because of a conspiracy. After all, none of the senior echelons in Israel stood to benefit from what unfolded on 7 October.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is finished politically as a result of the Hamas attack, and will likely end up in jail after the current carnage in Gaza ends.
Israel’s genocidal response to 7 October has made Israel’s brand so toxic internationally, and more so with Arab publics in the region, that Saudi Arabia has had to break off plans for a normalisation agreement, which had been Israel and Washington’s ultimate hope.
And the Hamas operation has crushed the worldwide reputation of the Israeli military for invincibility. It has inspired Yemen’s Ansar Allah (the Houthis) to attack vessels in the Red Sea. It is emboldening Israel’s arch-enemy, Hezbollah, in neighbouring Lebanon. It has reinvigorated the idea that resistance is possible across the much-oppressed Middle East.
No, it was not a conspiracy that opened the door to Hamas’ attack. It was colonial arrogance, based on a dehumanising view shared by the vast majority of Israelis that they were the masters and that the Palestinians – their slaves – were far too primitive to strike a meaningful blow.
The attacks of 7 October should have forced Israelis to reassess their dismissive attitude towards the Palestinians and address the question of whether Israel’s decades-long regime of apartheid and brutal subjugation could – and should – continue indefinitely.
Predictably, Israelis ignored the message of Hamas’ attack and dug deeper into their colonial mindset.
The supposed primitivism that, it was assumed, made the Palestinians too feeble an opponent to take on Israel’s sophisticated military machine has now been reframed as proof of a Palestinian barbarousness that makes Gaza’s entire population so dangerous, so threatening, that they have to be wiped out.
The Palestinians who, most Israelis had concluded, could be caged like battery chickens indefinitely, and in ever-shrinking pens, are now viewed as monsters that have to be culled. That impulse was the genesis of Israel’s current genocidal plan for Gaza.
Suicide mission
The third point the documentary clarifies is that Hamas’s wildly successful prison break undid the larger operation.
The group had worked so hard on the fearsome logistics of the breakout – and prepared for a rapid and savage response from Israel’s oppressive military machine – that it had no serious plan for dealing with a situation it could not conceive of: the freedom to scour Israel’s periphery, often undisturbed for many hours or days.
Hamas fighters entering Israel had assumed that most were on a suicide mission. According to the documentary, the fighters’ own assumption was that between 80 and 90 per cent would not make it back.
The aim was not to strike some kind of existential blow against Israel, as Israeli officials have asserted ever since in their determined rationalisation of genocide. It was to strike a blow against Israel’s reputation for invincibility by attacking its military bases and nearby communities, and dragging as many hostages as possible back into Gaza.
They would then be exchanged for the thousands of Palestinian men, women and children held in Israel’s military incarceration system – hostages labelled “prisoners”.
As Hamas spokesman Bassem Naim explained to Al Jazeera, the breakout was meant to thrust Gaza’s desperate plight back into the spotlight after many years in which international interest in ending Israel’s siege had waned.
Of discussions in the group’s political bureau, he says the consensus was: “We have to take action. If we don’t do it, Palestine will be forgotten, totally deleted from the international map.”
For 17 years, Gaza had gradually been strangled to death. Its population had tried peaceful protests at the militarised fence around their enclave and been picked off by Israeli snipers. The world had grown so used to Palestinian suffering, it had switched off.
The 7 October attack was intended to change that, especially by re-inspiring solidarity with Gaza in the Arab world and by bolstering Hamas’ regional political position.
It was intended to make it impossible for Saudi Arabia – the main Arab power broker in Washington – to normalise with Israel, completing the marginalisation of the Palestinian cause in the Arab world.
Judged by these criteria, Hamas’s attack was a success.
Loss of focus
But for many long hours – with Israel caught entirely off-guard, and with its surveillance systems neutralised – Hamas did not face the military counter-strike it expected.
Three factors seem to have led to a rapid erosion of discipline and purpose.
With no meaningful enemy to confront or limit Hamas’ room for manoeuvre, the fighters lost focus. Footage shows them squabbling about what to do next as they freely wander around Israeli communities.
That was compounded by the influx of other armed Palestinians who piggybacked on Hamas’ successful breakout and the lack of an Israeli response. Many suddenly found themselves with the chance to loot or settle scores with Israel – by killing Israelis – for years of suffering in Gaza.
And the third factor was Hamas stumbling into the Nova music festival, which had been relocated by the organisers at short notice close to the fence around Gaza.
It quickly became the scene of some of the worst atrocities, though none resembling the savage excesses described by Israel and the western media.
Footage shows, for example, Palestinian fighters throwing grenades into concrete shelters where many dozens of festivalgoers were sheltering from the Hamas attack. In one clip, a man who runs out is gunned down.
Fourth, Al Jazeera was able to confirm that the most extreme, sadistic and depraved atrocities never took place. They were fabricated by Israeli soldiers, officials and emergency responders.
One figure central to this deception was Yossi Landau, a leader of the Jewish religious emergency response organisation, Zaka. He and his staff concocted outlandish tales that were readily amplified not only by a credulous western press corps but by senior US officials too.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken graphically told of a family of four being butchered at the breakfast table. The father’s eye was gouged out in front of his two children, aged eight and six. The mother’s breast was cut off. The girl’s foot was amputated, and the boy’s fingers cut off, before they were all executed. The executioners then sat down and had a meal next to their victims.
Except the evidence shows none of that actually happened.
Landau has also claimed that Hamas tied up dozens of children and burned them alive at Kibbutz Be’eri. Elsewhere, he has recalled a pregnant woman who was shot dead and her belly cut open and the foetus stabbed.
Officials at the kibbutz deny any evidence for these atrocities. Landau’s accounts do not tally with any of the known facts. Only two babies died on 7 October, both killed unintentionally.
When challenged, Landau offers to show Al Jazeera a photo on his phone of the stabbed foetus, but is filmed admitting he is unable to do so.
Fabricating atrocities
Similarly, Al Jazeera’s research finds no evidence of systematic or mass rape on 7 October. In fact, it is Israel that has been blocking efforts by international bodies to investigate any sexual violence that day.
Respected outlets like the New York Times, the BBC and Guardian have repeatedly breathed credibility into the claims of systematic rape by Hamas, but only by unquestioningly repeating Israeli atrocity propaganda.
From obscuring the West’s role in starving Gaza to sensationalised accounts of mass rape by Hamas, journalists are playing the role of propagandists, not reporters.
My latest piece, on how the western media built the case for Israel to commit genocide:https://t.co/AwbVHryfqB
Madeleine Rees, secretary general of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, told Al Jazeera: “A state has instrumentalised the horrific attacks on women in order, we believe, to justify an attack on Gaza, of which the majority suffering are other women.”
In other cases, Israel has blamed Hamas for mutilating the bodies of Israeli victims, including by driving over them, smashing their pelvises. In several cases, Al Jazeera’s investigation showed that the bodies were of Hamas fighters mutilated or driven over by Israeli soldiers.
The documentary notes that reporting by the Israeli media – followed by the western media – “focuses not on the crimes they [Hamas] committed but on the crimes they did not”.
The question is why, when there were plenty of real atrocities by Hamas to report, did Israel feel the need to fabricate even worse ones? And why, especially after the initial fabrication of beheaded babies was debunked, did the western media carry on credulously recycling improbable stories of Hamas savagery?
The answer to the first question is that Israel needed to manufacture a favourable political climate that would excuse its genocide in Gaza as necessary.
Netanyahu is shown congratulating Zaka’s leaders on their role in influencing world opinion: “We need to buy time, which we gain by turning to world leaders and to public opinion. You have an important role in influencing public opinion, which also influences leaders.”
The answer to the second is that western journalists’ racist preconceptions ensured they would be easily persuaded that brown people were capable of such barbarity.
‘Hannibal directive’
Fifth, Al Jazeera documents months of Israeli media coverage demonstrating that some of the atrocities blamed on Hamas – particularly relating to the burning alive of Israelis – were actually Israel’s responsibility.
Deprived of functioning surveillance, an enraged Israeli military machine lashed out blindly. Video footage from Apache helicopters shows them firing wildly on cars and figures heading towards Gaza, unable to determine whether they are targeting fleeing Hamas fighters or Israelis taken hostage by Hamas.
In at least one case, an Israeli tank fired a shell into a building in Kibbutz Be’eri, killing the 12 Israeli hostages inside. One, 12-year-old Liel Hetsroni, whose charred remains meant she could not be identified for weeks, became the poster child for Israel’s campaign to tar Hamas as barbarians for burning her alive.
The commander in charge of the rescue efforts at Be’eri, Colonel Golan Vach, is shown fabricating to the media a story about the house Israel itself had shelled. He claimed Hamas had executed and burned eight babies in the house. In fact, no babies were killed there – and those who did die in the house were killed by Israel.
The widespread devastation in kibbutz communities – still blamed on Hamas – suggests that Israel’s shelling of this particular house was far from a one-off. It is impossible to determine how many more Israelis were killed by “friendly fire”.
These deaths appear to have been related to the hurried invocation by Israel that day of its so-called “Hannibal directive” – a secretive military protocol to kill Israeli soldiers to prevent them from being taken hostage and becoming bargaining chips for the release of Palestinians held hostage in Israeli jails.
In this case, the directive looks to have been repurposed and used against Israeli civilians too. Extraordinarily, though there has been furious debate inside Israel about the Hannibal directive’s use on 7 October, the western media has remained completely silent on the subject.
Woeful imbalance
The one issue largely overlooked by Al Jazeera is the astonishing failure of the western media across the board to cover 7 October seriously or investigate any of the atrocities independently of Israel’s own self-serving accounts.
The question hanging over Al Jazeera’s documentary is this: how is it possible that no British or US media organisation has undertaken the task that Al Jazeera took on? And further, why is it that none of them appear ready to use Al Jazeera’s coverage as an opportunity to revisit the events of 7 October?
In part, that is because they themselves would be indicted by any reassessment of the past five months. Their coverage has been woefully unbalanced: wide-eyed acceptance of any Israeli claim of Hamas atrocities, and similar wide-eyed acceptance of any Israeli excuse for its slaughter and maiming of tens of thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza.
But the problem runs deeper.
This is not the first time that Al Jazeera has shamed the western press corps on a subject that has dominated headlines for months or years.
Back in 2017, an Al Jazeera investigation called The Lobby showed that Israel was behind a campaign to smear Palestinian solidarity activists as antisemites in Britain, with Jeremy Corbyn the ultimate target.
That smear campaign continued to be wildly successful even after the Al Jazeera series aired, not least because the investigation was uniformly ignored. British media outlets swallowed every piece of disinformation spread by Israeli lobbyists on the issue of antisemitism.
A follow-up on a similar disinformation campaign waged by the pro-Israel lobby in the US was never broadcast, apparently after diplomatic threats from Washington to Qatar. The series was eventually leaked to the Electronic Intifada website.
Then 18 months ago, Al Jazeera broadcast an investigation called The Labour Files, showing how senior officials in Britain’s Labour Party, assisted by the UK media, waged a covert plot to stop Corbyn from ever becoming prime minister. Corbyn, Labour’s democratically elected leader, was an outspoken critic of Israel and supporter of justice for the Palestinian people.
Once again, the British media, which had played such a critical role in helping to destroy Corbyn, ignored the Al Jazeera investigation.
There is a pattern here that can be ignored only through wilful blindness.
Israel and its partisans have unfettered access to western establishments, where they fabricate claims and smears that are readily amplified by a credulous press corps.
And those claims only ever work to Israel’s advantage, and harm the cause of ending decades of brutal subjugation of the Palestinian people by an Israeli apartheid regime now committing genocide.
Al Jazeera has once again shown that, on matters that western establishments consider the most vital to their interests – such as support for a highly militarised client state promoting the West’s control over the oil-rich Middle East – the western press is not a watchdog on power but the establishment’s public relations arm.
Al Jazeera’s investigation has not just revealed the lies Israel spread about 7 October to justify its genocide in Gaza. It reveals the utter complicity of western journalists in that genocide.
The future always surprises us to some degree. But we make plans, anyway, based on our projections, and we adjust them when our predictions are at least partially wrong, which they always are, because they make assumptions based upon things that we take for granted, such as our health and that meteors and tsunamis will not disrupt those plans. Bearing that in mind, I will make some predictions for the immediate future of Gaza and Israel, and their relationships with the rest of the world. I’m sorry if it is not a happy picture.
First, I predict with sadness and disgust that the remaining Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza will be killed or expelled, mostly the former, despite all our efforts. The main reason is that, Joe Biden, as recently described by Aaron David Miller (Washington Post, March 14, 2024), sees no compelling alternative for Israel that doesn’t include doing grievous harm to Palestinian civilians. Properly translated, this means the greatest genocide since WWII. If this is an accurate picture of the thinking of the Biden administration, there can be little doubt that the US will continue to supply Israel with the means to make the population of Gaza disappear. The option of denying those means to Israel is simply unthinkable to Joe and his government. It might mean giving up their comfortable and prestigious retirement, future presidential libraries and all.
Joe Biden is not Dwight D. Eisenhower, nor John Kennedy, nor even Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter. We no longer have a president with the guts or the acumen to defy anyone, least of all the Zionist Lobby, and we have no prospect of ever having such a person in the White House in the foreseeable future. Donald Trump? He needs the Israel Lobby even more than Biden, and if they weren’t comfortable with him, they would have sabotaged his candidacy a long time ago. Both of them have the same morals as Netanyahu. I rest my case.
A ceasefire? I cannot imagine it. The week-long November pause worked because neither side gave up too much strategically and both benefited politically. There is no similar bargain on the horizon. If Hamas gives up all its captives, it has nothing left to trade. That’s why the Hamas proposal is in three stages, with the final stage being an independent Palestinian state with the right to defend itself, and with multilateral guarantees for its security and independence.
That is, of course, totally unacceptable to Israel, and they said so. For them, the “occupied territories” are more accurately called “greater Israel”, which has not yet been sufficiently settled by Zionist Jews to justify extending the official borders to encompass it. Too many non-Jews. They will address that problem in its turn, but for now the priority is to empty Gaza. So much for the two-state solution, which Israel embraced as long as all they had to do was sit at a negotiations table, keep the deal just out of reach and blame the Palestinians for its failure. Now they’re having none of it.
When will Israel’s genocide end, and what will the result look like? First, the Palestinian population in Gaza will have fallen by at least 2 million – as close as possible to zero, the result of both murder and expulsion, as noted earlier. The orphaned children will be far fewer than the dead ones, but those who survive will be shipped to western countries for adoption, so that they will lose their names and their cultural heritage. But I’m sure they will have loving parents and become well-adjusted western citizens.
As for Israel, its world has been changing since October 7th. First, it is losing – and will continue to lose – its liberal population. It began years ago, but Israel’s population has declined by roughly 10 percent since October 7th, 2023, in parallel with the decline in the population of Gaza, but by choice instead of genocide. The fanatics with genocidal intentions are not the ones leaving, mostly the ones who are more in keeping with traditional Jewish values of being a light unto the nations – or at least not a source of darkness. The emigrants are mainly those who are giving up on the Zionist project. They are not the only ones. American and other western Jews are losing their appetite for the Zionist menu, which allows us to maintain our respect for integrity.
This, of course, means that Israel will be far more isolated than previously, both from the Jewish diaspora and from the non-Jewish communities that previously supported Israel. It’s amazing how a little thing like genocide can cause your friends to turn on you. I suspect that Israeli products, institutions, and culture will be shunned by much of the world. No more trips to Israel as prizes on television game shows.
I have no doubt that Gaza will be annexed to Israel, and I imagine that developers will create Zionist dream communities along the coast, on top of the graves and rubble of their victims. But there might be fewer new immigrants than they might have hoped for. Israel’s future, if it has one, will be as a violent fortress for Zionist exclusivism, supported by a slowly shrinking world Zionist network and their allies, using the resources of other countries in much the same way that Israel is using the United States today, and enriching those individuals and interests that cooperate with them.
I leave it to you to decide if this sounds like a strategy for success.
Join us at LONDONMETRIC (W1J 5HB) as we take action in response to the call for a global economic blockade to disrupt the flow of capital arming genocide in Gaza. This is London’s resistance as part of 
