The man has a cheek. Having lectured Iranians and Lebanese about what (and who) is good for them in terms of rulers and rule (we already know what he thinks of the Palestinians), Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been keeping busy on further depriving access and assistance to those in Gaza and the West Bank. This comes in draft legislation that would prevent the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) from pursuing its valuable functions in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
The campaign against UNRWA by the Israeli state has been relentless and pathological. Even before last year’s October 7 attacks by Hamas, much was made of the fact that the body seemed intent on keeping the horrors of the 1948 displacements current. Victimhood, complained the amnesiac enforcers of the Israeli state, was being encouraged by treating the descendants of displaced Palestinians as refugees. Nasty memories were being kept alive.
Since then, Israel has been further libelling and blackening the organisation as a terrorist front best abolished. (Labels are effortlessly swapped – “Hamas supporter”; “activist”; “terrorist”.) Initially came that infamous dossier pointing the finger at 12 individuals said to be Hamas participants in the October 7 attacks. With swiftness, the UN commenced internal investigations. Some individuals were sacked on suspicion of being linked to the attacks. Unfortunately, some US$450 million worth of donor funding from sixteen countries was suspended.
UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini was always at pains to explain that he had “never been informed” nor received evidence substantiating Israel’s accusations. It was also all the more curious given that staff lists for the agency were provided to both Israeli and Palestinian authorities in advance. At no point had he ever “received the slightest concern about the staff that we have been employing.”
In April, Lazzarini told the UN Security Council that “an insidious campaign to end UNRWA’s operations is under way, with serious implications for peace and security”. Repeatedly, requests by the agency to deliver aid to northern Gaza had been refused, staff barred from coordinating meetings between humanitarian actors and Israel, and UNRWA premises and staff targeted.
Israel’s campaign to dissuade donor states from restoring funding proved a mixed one. Even the United Kingdom, long sympathetic to Israel’s accusations, announced in July that funding would be restored. In the view of UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy, UNRWA had taken steps to ensure that it was meeting “the highest standards of neutrality.”
In August, the findings of a review of the allegations by former French foreign minister Catherine Colonna, instigated at the request of the UN Secretary-General António Guterres, were released. It confirmed UNRWA’s role as “irreplaceable and indispensable” in the absence of a political solution between Israel and the Palestinians, a “pivotal” body that provided “life-saving humanitarian aid and essential social services, particularly in health and education, to Palestinian refugees in Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the West Bank.”
In identifying eight areas for immediate improvement on the subject of neutrality (for instance, engaging donors, neutrality of staff, installations, education and staff unions), it was noted that “Israel has yet to provide supporting evidence” that the agency’s employees had been “members of terrorist organizations.”
On October 24, UNRWA confirmed that one of its staffers killed by an Israeli strike in Gaza, Muhammad Abu Attawi, had been in the agency’s employ since July 2022 while serving as a Nukhba commander in Hamas’s Bureij Battalion. Attawi is alleged to have participated in the killing and kidnapping of Israelis from a roadside bomb shelter near Kibbutz Re’im in October last year. His name had featured in a July letter from Israel to the agency listing 100 names allegedly connected with terrorist groups. But no action was taken against Attawi as the Israelis failed to supply UNRWA with evidence. Lazzarini’s letter urging, in the words of Juliette Touma, the agency’s director of communications, “to cooperate … by providing more information so he could take action” did not receive “any response”.
Having been foiled on various fronts in its quest to terminate UNRWA’s viable existence, Israeli lawmakers are now taking the legislative route to entrench the collective punishment of the Palestinian people. Two bills are in train in the Knesset. The first, sponsored by such figures as Yisrael Beytenu MK Yulia Malinovsky and Likud lawmaker Dan Illouz, would bar state authorities from having contact with UNRWA. The second, sponsored by Likud MK Boaz Bismuth, would critically prevent the agency from operating in Israeli territory through revoking a 1967 exchange of notes justifying such activities.
Even proclaimed moderates – the term is relative – such as former defence minister Benny Gantz support the measures, accusing the UN body of making “itself an inseparable component of Hamas’s mechanism – and now is the time to detach ourselves entirely from it”. It did not improve the lot of refugees, but merely perpetuated “their victimisation.” Evidently for Gantz, Israel had no central role in creating Palestinian victims in the first place.
By barring cooperation between any Israeli authorities and UNRWA, work in Gaza and the West Bank would become effectively impossible, largely because Jerusalem would no longer issue entrance permits to the territories or permit any coordination with the Israeli Defense Forces.
UN Secretary-General Guterres was aghast at the two bills. “It would effectively end coordination to protect UN convoys, offices and shelters serving hundreds of thousands of people.” Ambassadors from 123 UN member states have echoed the same views, while the Biden administration has, impotently, warned that the proposed “restrictions would devastate the humanitarian response in Gaza at this critical moment” while also denying educational and social services to Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem.
In their October 23 statement, the Nordic countries also expressed concern that UNRWA’s mandate “to carry out […] direct relief and works programmes” for millions of Palestinian refugees as determined by UN General Assembly Resolution 302 (IV) would be jettisoned. “In the midst of an ongoing catastrophic humanitarian situation in Gaza, a halt to any of the organisation’s activities would have devastating consequences for the hundreds of thousands of civilians served by UNRWA.”
The statement goes on to make a warning. To impair the refugee agency would create a vacuum that “may well destabilise the situation in [Gaza, and the West Bank, including east Jerusalem], in Israel and in the region as a whole, and may fundamentally jeopardize the prospects of a two-state solution.”
These are concerns that hardly matter before the rationale of murderous collective punishment, one used against a people seen more as mute serfs and submissive animals than sovereign beings entitled to rights and protections. Israel’s efforts to malign and cripple UNRWA remains a vital part of that agenda. In that organisation exists a repository of deep and troubling memories the forces of oppression long to erase.
Western colonialism and imperialism are the roots of the Palestinian struggle. A common characteristic of western powers is their shared history of colonization and oppression of indigenous populations. This distinction is important because it is clear that there is heavy bias against Palestinians in both western political policy and western mainstream media. The United States and Israel share similar histories and politics as settler colonialist nations, each established through the violent dispossession of indigenous populations. Both countries utilized dehumanization of the indigenous populations they displaced to obtain the land they have settled upon. Native Americans were called “merciless Indian savages,” while Palestinians are called “animals” and “terrorists.” Examining relevant histories with a broader view will demonstrate how western interpretations of Palestine are biased. The prevailing western standard has been nonobjective and heavily promotes dishonest and biased narratives, omitting relevant histories and current event considerations. This biased narrative reads as a prejudiced tale meticulously designed to promote the interests of the more powerful side, an oppressive colonial regime and its imperial supporters.
Framing as a Tool of Erasure
The Palestinian struggle and foundations of Israel are a matter of modern-day colonialism achieved through atrocities. Israel is widely supported by the west over their imperialist interests and maintained by political and media propaganda. Criticism of a brutal occupying force is often harshly censored. The matter is frequently mischaracterized as a religious matter, labeled as complicated, or described as a conflict. Framing the Palestinian struggle as a “religious matter” generally encourages people to reduce politics to faith-based tensions. Dismissing something as “complicated” deters any type of engagement because the implicit message is that the issue is too difficult for most people to understand. Referring to the matter as a “conflict” implies symmetry, leaving no conceptual room for the disparity of power that defines a colonial struggle. It is none of those things. At its core, this is an ongoing process of colonization, resulting in the displacement of the Palestinian people and the violent military occupation of Palestinian land.
The strategic framing of Palestine has been used to support zionism for over 76 years. During a 1970 interview with renowned Palestinian activist and author Ghassan Kanafani, Australian media correspondent Richard Carleton referred to the matter of Palestine as a conflict. Kanafani countered that it is not a conflict, but a liberation movement fighting for justice, continuing, “This is where the problem starts. Because this is what makes you ask all your questions. This is exactly where the problem starts. This is a people who are discriminated against fighting for their rights. This is the story.” Fifty-four years later, these same issues about the framing language persist.
Foreign Policy and Domestic Repression
There are several elements to consider when examining the western distortion of the Palestinian struggle. First, we must look at United States foreign policy as it pertains to Middle Eastern, North African, and Muslim-majority nations. Interconnected to these foreign policies are United States domestic policies designed to target American citizens of MENA and/or Muslim backgrounds. These policies are rooted in the Palestinian struggle. Secondly, we must take a closer look at zionism, a western colonial project supported by the US in large part due to its imperialist goals and American interests in the MENA region. Interconnected to the matter of zionism is the strategy of intentional false conflation of antisemitism to criticism of zionism or Israel intended to suppress and silence criticism so that zionism can continue without accountability. These propagandist tactics are supported and reinforced by the United States over their imperialist goals in the MENA region. Third, we must look at the state of Israel more closely, the brutality in which it was created and maintains itself, and Israel’s influence on American politics and media. Interconnected to the matter of Israeli influence, we must look at lobby and special interest groups such as AIPAC and the ADL. These powerful groups use large sums of money to influence media organizations and exert influence and control over American elections and US policy both foreign and domestic.
United States foreign policy in the Middle East has always been in the absolute interest of western imperialism. This has continuously come at the cost of the suffering of MENA nations and their civilians for over a century. President Joe Biden, while serving as a United States Senator, gave a speech on the Senate floor on June 5, 1986, speaking to US foreign policy in the Middle East. He stated that the US should “operate and move in the naked self-interest of the United States of America.” Referring to Israel, he said, “It is the best three-billion-dollar investment we make. Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect our interests in the region.” His current position and statements regarding Israel and the Middle East remain unchanged thirty-eight years later. Biden has openly referred to himself as a zionist to the media on numerous occasions for several decades. He has made repeated statements of support for Israel, even as Israel has been accused of the ongoing genocide of Palestinians, and after several decades of its numerous violations of international law. In December of 2023, Biden stated, “I got in trouble many times for saying you don’t have to be a Jew to be a zionist, and I am a zionist. I make no apologies for that. That’s a reality.” The statements then-Senator Biden made on the Senate floor in 1986 speak volumes to the reasons behind the United States’ predisposition to show favorable bias towards Israel and, therefore, against Palestinians.
The matter of Palestine has always been at the core of United States antiterrorism laws. Palestinian liberation efforts continue to be a central target of both foreign policies and domestic laws oppressive to Arab Americans. The idea of the Arab or Muslim terrorist was introduced to the west by Israel’s current Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu in 1979. Netanyahu used the term in Washington, DC, in 1984 at the “Second Conference on International Terrorism” he organized where he pushed this label and agenda into American politics. On December 22, 1987, he achieved his goal as the Palestinian Liberation Organization was formally declared a terrorist organization by the United States. This was the “first and only time” Congress designated a group as a terrorist organization. These series of events are directly related to escalations that led to the first intifada in 1987. It was also during these conditions that Hamas, a resistance organization, had formed. The region endured continuous turmoil, and heightened escalations continued until the Oslo Accords in 1993.
Journalism vs. Propaganda: A Brief History
While the media is a very influential source in shaping views on important matters, the United States mainstream media has long ago lost its journalistic integrity. Yellow journalism is a type of journalism that uses exaggerated and sensationalist reporting often based on false accounts of events to boost sales and attract readers. The peak of early-stage yellow journalism began as a competition between the publications of two major newspaper publishers in the late 1800s, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. To drive public appeal, the two pushed out sensationalist newspapers, which prominently featured political coverage. In 1898, both Pulitzer and Hearst published misleading newspapers pushing a rumor that Cuba had sank a US battleship when, in fact, a coal fire aboard the ship led to an explosion. The US Maine sinking in the Havana Harbor contributed to the outbreak of the Spanish-American War. Propagandist publications have tainted American journalism to this day and continue to incite both conflicts and hate.
The New York Times’ publishing controversies began in the 1800s and include numerous instances pertaining to significant events from the Russian Revolution to the Iraq War. In more recent times, the New York Times has been cited for publishing articles based on misinformation leading to incitement. In 2003, the Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics found that “the New York Times is more favorable toward the Israelis than the Palestinians, and the partiality has become more pronounced with time.” This trend continues today and is an ongoing ethical and moral problem. During the current genocide in Gaza that began in 2023, The New York Times has been cited multiple times for publishing false accounts of events, from false claims of rapes to disproven accounts of beheaded babies. In April of 2024, The Intercept obtained an internal New York Timesmemo that instructed journalists to avoid “use of the terms ‘genocide’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ and to ‘avoid’ using the phrase ‘occupied territory’ when describing Palestinian land.” They were additionally instructed to avoid the use of “Palestine” or terms such as “refugee camps.” Numerous other mainstream media outlets have also been accused of both biased and inaccurate reporting on Palestine. This trend is commonplace and has persisted for over a century.
A Definitive Bias
The issue of Palestine is deeply intertwined with the rise of anti-Arab hate, contributing to the dehumanization and stereotyping of Arabs. The Middle East and North Africa have rich cultural variances and diverse ethnicities, but there is a strong cultural ignorance in the west about the geography and geopolitics of the MENA region. To many, “an Arab is an Arab” without any thought or attention to regional or political distinctions. The mainstream media promotes this cultural ignorance, flattening public understandings of MENA communities and struggles as a result. Media bias is not only harmful to the populations they target but is a catalyst driving discriminatory hate within their audience here in the United States as well. Media bias plays a role in contributing to harmful stereotypes toward people of Arab, Middle Eastern, and North African ethnic backgrounds, regardless of their religion. Media bias has also contributed to the western racialization of Muslim Americans and has played a destructive role by inciting Islamophobia, giving rise to hate crimes against individuals from these ethnic groups in the US. Natalie Khazaal, associate professor of Arabic and Arab Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology, published an article for The Conversation, an independent news organization, highlighting anti-Palestinian bias in US corporate media: “Reporting can prime audiences to see a Palestinian fighter in a mask as either an icon of terrorism or a hero resisting occupation, depending on how the news is presented.” This one sentence encapsulates the issue Palestinians face in the west. Media portrayals are often biased and tend to leave out crucial histories and background information of events they report on, often totally omitting decades of Palestinian suffering at the hands of an oppressive military colonial settler regime. A definitive bias controls the narrative and information available to the public, leading to a widespread impact and sway on public perception. The media bias infects public viewers and drives large-scale public prejudice against Palestinians.
The convenient western amnesia of Palestinians’ history of suffering must end. We cannot only look to condemn Palestinians, who are blamed for their own suffering. We are now over a year into Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians. Media disinformation has played a significant role in justifying Israel’s criminal actions. Media bias has grave consequences. The Palestinian fight for liberation will persist as long as Palestinians continue to be dehumanized by mainstream western media and imperialist political agendas. The ongoing Palestinian struggle for liberation remains in a state of great peril. There is no true peace process without taking a more critical look at histories and current event considerations through a more honest lens.
Justin Trudeau justified the brutal killing of the leader of a Lebanese political party on the grounds Canada lists his organization as “terrorist”.
On Friday Israel leveled six large apartment buildings in the Dahiyeh suburb of Beirut with some 80 bombs weighing 2,000 to 4,000 pounds each. Dropped by US-made F-15 fighter jets, the US-made BLU-109 “bunker-busters” incinerated an unknown number.
In response to this act of state terror Trudeau posted, “Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has been killed. He was the leader of a terrorist organization that attacked and killed innocent civilians, causing immense suffering across the region.”
When Israel’s terror campaign in Lebanon started in earnest ten days ago former ambassador to Norway and Communications Security Establishment Director General, Intelligence Operations Artur Wilczynski justified terrorizing Lebanese on the grounds of targeting “a terror group.” After Israel injured thousands by blowing up 3,000 pagers across Lebanon the University of Ottawa’s Special Advisor on Antisemitism posted that the “targeting of Hezbollah operatives was brilliant. t struck a major blow against a terror group.”
But Hezbollah isn’t classified as a “terrorist” organization by the United Nations or most countries in the world. Nor was an organization that’s long been represented in Lebanon’s parliament defined as a “terrorist” organization by Ottawa for the first half of its existence. In fact, Prime Minister Jean Chretien met Hezbollah Secretary-General Nasrallah in Beirut in October 2002.
In “Selectively Terrified” Mary Foster detailed “how Hezbollah became a terrorist organization in Canada”. Foster wrote that “pressure to list Hezbollah came from the Canadian Alliance Party (a precursor to today’s Conservative Party), senior Liberal politicians Irwin Cotler and Art Eggleton, B’nai Brith (a Jewish human rights organization, staunchly pro-Israel in orientation), and the Canadian Jewish Congress.” The campaign was greatly boosted by fabricated quotes in the National Post claiming Nasrallah encouraged suicide bombing during a speech at a Beirut rally.
If Hezbollah is a terrorist organization what is the Israeli military or government? Maybe the IOF and Netanyahu’s Likud party could be the first entries on a new Canadian genocidaires list!
Israel supporters have long argued that that country has the right to terrorize Palestinians because Ottawa (usually at the lobby’s behest) listed some organization with limited means a “terrorist” group. Before Hamas’ October 7 attack Canada’s apartheid lobby argued Israel could terrorize 2.2 million Palestinians living in the open-air Gaza prison because Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad is listed a terrorist group in Canada.
Over 10 percent of Canada’s terrorist list is made up of organizations headquartered in a long-occupied land representing one-tenth of one percent of the world’s population. Representing much of Palestinian political life, eight of the oppressed nation’s organizations are listed, ranging from the left secular Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine to the elected Hamas ‘government’ in Gaza.
A dozen years after the terror list was established the first ever Canadian-based group was added. In 2014 the International Relief Fund for the Afflicted and Needy (IRFAN) was designated a terrorist organization for engaging in the ghastly act of supporting orphans and a hospital in the Gaza Strip through official (Hamas-controlled) channels.
In recent months the genocide lobby has pushed to add the anti-imperialist group Samidoun to Canada’s terror enabling list. After its international branch “expressed our deepest mourning and our highest salutes” to Nasrallah upon his assassination, Holocaust Housefather opined that “Samidoun needs to be listed as a terrorist organization in Canada and around the world.” Liberal MP and Special Advisor on Jewish Community Relations and Antisemitism, Anthony Housefather added, “it is one of my priorities to get this done and by expressing how much they loved a terrorist leader who caused civilian deaths in Israel and around the world they are proving my point.”
While Palestinian groups are criminalized, Canada has close ties to the main generator of terror and killing of civilians in historic Palestine. Current Israeli government officials openly boast about their terror as necessary to teach Palestinians a lesson. Yet Canada has been selling weapons to the Israeli military and the two countries’ armed forces work together on various fronts. Additionally, Canadian officials turn a blind eye to illegal recruitment for the IOF while the Canada Revenue Agency takes a soft approach to registered charities that defy its rules by financially assisting the Israeli military.
Measured by the number maimed or killed, the Israeli army is responsible for far more violence than any Palestinian or Lebanese group (and they are doing so on behalf of a European colonial project). Yet the Israeli military is not a listed terrorist organization.
Canada’s terrorist list highlights the stark double standard in Ottawa’s treatment of the colonized and colonizer. In fact, events over the past year clearly illustrate how this list enables Israel to terrorize Palestinians and Lebanese. Once again, shame on us.
Serendipity, picking Viet Thanh Nyugen’s memoir, A Man with Two Faces as the main book for the memoir writing class I am teaching. Last time it was Liar’s Club and Wild and other things to haunt the student with other writers’ haunting memoirs.
Mary Karr and Cheryl Strayed, and the students learned about all sorts of ins and outs tied to those two women’s memoirs. There is countless ink on Mary and Cheryl and endless YouTube uploads of them talking, being interviewed and giving memoir writing tips to selected and wide audiences.
Patience: All I have now is my quickly decaying mind and this platform from which to scream bloody murder, so I’ll get into Viet’s book after I splay the digital page with one of my essays, with is in Cirque Journal and other places:
Hell, here’s one long ass published memoir essay:
Wrestling the Blind, Chasing Apache Horses, and Unpacking the Vietnam War
by Paul Haeder / September 4th, 2013
They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried. — Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
“What was the last best memory you have of your father?” There were eight of us, encircling him, when he asked me to recall that moment I knew my father to be at his most vulnerable point for me, his most unadorned human self. For Robert Bly, he was asking me when I first saw myself as strong (or stronger than my old man).
Bly was tired, the wild man in his Iron John wilted by age, still angular, white as snowy full-head of hair, but taxed by the expressway of poet on call to shunt the drums of war, asked to explain the smear of Abu Ghraib, and his call to duty to fight against the ideology of “war is peace” that was just getting whipped up like an unholy dust devil across his America.
To just step back a bit, I have to admit now that it’s always been my “call to duty” to be in the thick of things, to be this guy having these constant little brushes with fame. Since I was 18 . . . well, 16 if you count being an extra in a motorcycle movie with Ann Margaret and Joe Namath. Or riding away from the camera and Charlton Heston in a cowboy flick shot at Old Tucson. Once in my early twenties, I had the chutzpah to drive up to Lee Marvin’s house in Tucson and plop down my own screenplay into his hands and pitch the idea while playing tennis with him in my jeans and Tony Lamas. From Linda Ronstadt kissing me on my forehead when she arrived at one of her aunt’s house (good friend of my mom, and that day I had begged to learn how to grind corn and mold it all into green corn tamales), to Tom Waits drinking beer and smoking a blunt in the back of my VW bug after he finished a concert in Tucson, I’ve had these odd intersections with famous sorts of people.
Willie Nelson and James Crumley hoisting a few Patron’s with me near Hondo, New Mexico, at Andrew Wyeth’s place. Mashed potatoes, Swiss steak and a plate-full of peas in an El Paso cafeteria with Cormac McCarthy. “This is a story . . . a book, not fragments,” Tim O’Brien insisted while smoking a Camel outside Chope’s near Las Cruces. “Just plow through those weird little occurrences, and you’ll see the memories will start sprouting . . . goddamned different every time. Then you’ll have a book.”
I’ve always been what my thesis advisors or mentors and friends called “the handler,” or the “go-to-kid” with the ability to be older than he was, and to somehow be Every Man/Every Woman’s kid brother . . . or son. I was that twice for Kurt Vonnegut. Twice for Denise Levertov. Once for Octavio Paz and Gabriel Marquez.
Fast forward thirty years. This time, my second brush with Bly, stuck in Spokane on a Saturday, after his poetry reading to a few hundred. Robert Bly needed a post-reading tight one. He was tired, but it only took a few prods and two drinks to get him to actually remember me 21 years earlier. That was 1985. Juarez, Chihuahua. A big group of about ten hangers on mentally gyrating that overtly ga-ga-ing thing for the famous bard inside a restaurant. It was my fault, really, since I arranged the place, the crowd, and mescal spirits liberally passed around. I remember four young women – girls, really – from a private college who sang corridas with the 10-piece mariachi band. Bly was completely taken by their voices.
Let’s move back, err, forward in this case, to April, 2006. Bly had just published The Insanity of Empire, and the tannin of Bush’s war was thick on his lips as he entranced the crowd at the community college and then challenged them to remember their own call to duty:
Tell me why it is we don’t lift our voices these days
And cry over what is happening. Have you noticed
The plans are made for Iraq and the ice cap is melting?
I say to myself: “Go on, cry. What’s the sense Of being an adult and having no voice? Cry out! See who will answer! This is Call and Answer!”
Again, Bly and me, this time 1,600 miles further north than the last time I shared rounds with him. He remembered Juarez, the reading in El Paso, and the Juarez band and that brotherhood and sisterhood of people who had arranged his appearance at the university. And Bly remembered me.
He wasn’t going to give up his question: “No, really, this is an important one . . . for men to know when that point occurs in their relationships with a father.” After a couple of bourbons, Robert Bly seemed to be saying to me it was okay if I just carried on a one-on-one with him at this pub called Catacombs. He repeated how he liked my militancy. He had read the piece I just published in the weekly “not just announcing my reading, but taking it to a higher level of consciousness by putting the you into the narrative.” He also wanted to know what it was like to be the son of a military man who not once but twice went to Vietnam as a career officer.
I pulled from his book, Iron John, widely read and widely disempowered by critics:
The older men in the American military establishment and government did betray the younger men in Vietnam, lying about the nature of the war, remaining in safe places themselves, after having asked the young men to be warriors and then in effect sending them out to be ordinary murderers.
“From the sound of it, your father was smart. Well read. College degrees. Yet he was in two wars. Korea. Then Vietnam. How does his military – his war experience — best inform you? Someone who in a mere few minutes has illustrated to everyone around this table that he is more than just a man’s man, more than just a Renaissance man. An adventurer. Going it alone in Central America. Going to Vietnam ten years ago to experience something locked inside his father. It’s important to know that moment when you first realized your dad’s humanity . . . and knew his fear.”
Desert
“I’m just going to eat rice . . . I need to get to one-forty. I’m tired of wrestling up so much, dad.”
We were following the yellow bus, two of my buddies, Schwam (138 lbs.) and Molina (125 lbs.), were crashed in the back of the 1965 bug. I was driving on a learner’s permit.
My old man seemed small next to me, skinny, his blonde hair receding dramatically in the past few months. He had dropped twenty pounds so he might make it easier on his banged up body for his second spin in Vietnam. Age 36. Already shot once. Airlifted out with a Huey co-pilot gravely wounded and the pilot zipped up in a KIA bag.
He was proud of me, even in my youthful militancy. I was really tanned, brown. Angular. Muscular. He liked it that I had college on my mind even as a freshman. Proud I was wrestling varsity at 15 years old.
“How’d you learn all that mechanical stuff?” he’d ask me while watching me retool, tune up and strip down my Bultaco and Husky motorcycles. “Funny how you never took to learning German, with your Tanta Emmy and Grandma Frieda around when you were a kid. Spanish! How’d you pick that up so quickly?”
Then he’d launch in on West Point, on some Republican senator my mom knew who might send in some appointment recommendation for me to be accepted to the Academy. Here we were hitting 65 mph, entering some of my favorite places — Upper Sonoran Life Zone, then into the Transition Life Zone. Those Desert-Grassland and Desert Riparian zones. And I was hating every last image of war and Nixon and Kissinger I ever saw in print and on TV.
He launched into why General Westmoreland was misunderstood, why Dick Nixon was even more misunderstood: “ . . . inherited a messed up war strategy from President Johnson.” One loud fight after another recalled. Strange, really, how my old man, Chief Warrant Officer Four Marvin Haeder, ended up trying to convince me of something righteous about the military, or why the USA bombing, spraying, immolating and raping Vietnam was “the right policy.”
I was obsessed with post-flashflood arroyos packed with javalina, entranced by the evenings of the a thousand tarantulas, completely taken by the dawns of one hundred zombie bufo alvaris – Sonoran Desert toads.
My old man would be in some classroom or on some mountaintop messing around with radio towers, signal relays, his secret codes while I was into the wild, launching myself into a riot of reptiles, arachnids and mammals.
While my old man showed me black and white photos of his signal corps outposts in Vietnam, images of these denuded jungle camps with eerily happy blacks, Latinos and an array of white men, I was already talking desert green toads, talking about monsoon bursts near Sedona when a thousand western narrowmouth toads appeared unbending from their 10-months suspended animation.
Snakes
Wrestling for me was a way to be as good as any warrior, tin soldier. To stay in shape for three- and five-day hikes into vast expanses Indian Country, land anywhere close to a river or drainage. Like the ones we were near — the San Pedro River drainage that passes along the Pinal Creek en route to the Salado River. My old man talked about logistics, cryptographic mumbo-jumbo, Barry Goldwater while I waxed on and on about these ancient routes, in use from 1100 to 1450 AD. The pueblos on Pinal Creek were once cosmopolitan trade centers with exports of ground pigments, turquoise, beads, and ceramic bowls. Shells from the Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico.
“Your grandfather was fleet champion twice. One hundred and ninety pounds. In the Kaiser’s navy, before he became a pilot. Halberstadt CL- IV’s he piloted. Bi-planes. He would have been proud of you, though.”
Here I was, making a run through Sonora Desert , Highway 77 – the back way to Globe-Miami from Tucson, from my high school parking lot. My two buddies out like logs, and my father — three weeks from his second tour in Vietnam — bringing up my grandfather, the Iron Cross man, big WWI ace, émigré to Iowa in 1921. Failed farmer. Bread truck driver. Failed restaurant owner. The big man with mitts like Babe Ruth’s, his namesake, me, his pride and joy as he lumbered still a hard man in his last gasps with emphysema.
I slowed to a stop as I watched a seven foot bull snake move slowly into a caliche-etched gully cut-bank. “Come on Paul,” my old man pleaded as he saw me scramble over prickly pear, over dried-out saguaro ribs, blasting my body and arms into a bunch of rocks. “Rattlers out here,” he said. “Come on, Paul, be careful.”
Of course, he was wrong. There weren’t rattlesnakes moving around midday at the foot of Pinal Mountain. But the bull snake, hell, I just had to grab it, break up the monotony of the trip to our wrestling match, scare the crap out of Schwam and Molina in the back who were still nestled in with the camping gear my old man absconded from Fort Huachuca for our post-wrestling match bonding fishing trip on the west fork of White River in Apache country.
“Jesus, Paul. Stop.” I put the seven foot snake’s face into the car while my Big Red One Infantry regular army dad, with one tour in Korea as a 19 year old, one in Vietnam two years ago, one more about to be unleashed, complained like a whiny kid brother.
“If you’re afraid of this, Chief, what the heck are you going to do with the three-step viper . . . the ground cobras?” I was a smart ass, know it all, to be sure, but I was stealth, quick to know the flora and fauna of Sonora, all of Arizona, and way into Mexico. Quick to speak Spanish with my Mexican friends. Always camping with older guys, some of whom were former Vietnam War draftees who taught me about motorcycles, endless tracks of desert roads to nowhere/everywhere, and about how rotten the war was.
By the time I was 15, my father didn’t really know me. He was always gone, at schools for his cryptographic signal corps crap: Fort Rucker, Alabama; Fort Huachuca, Arizona; Fort Gordon, Georgia. He had pressed uniforms, spit-shine shoes, shiny pips and his array of ribbons all lined up via small wooden ruler.
His son with the shoulder-length mop of hair, on the other hand, had his terrariums loaded with geckos, five species of scorpions, horned toads, red racer snakes, gopher snakes, California Kings, and any injured animal he’d run across.
Bad language
It was a story of crossed DNA. My working mom gave me a long leash since I was an A student in school. Never sweating (overtly) me driving my sister’s 750 Honda at age 13. One spring break, I ended up with Navajo and Mexican friends outside of Chinle and then two weeks hiking Canyon de Chelly. At age 14. Learning what all middle school kids should learn – Arizona is not a white man’s invention.
Canyon de Chelly, a screwed up Spaniard’s mishearing of the Navajo, Tséyi, which means “inside the rock,” not canyon like white boys and girls are told. The very concept of language as a frame of self, the defining binder for culture — that inside the rock was deeper and more in tune with larger existential quandaries than the mere idea of “canyon” – floored me.
Here I was, with my old man, maybe for the last time since he was going to the killing fields of his Vietnam, the war, not the country. He was waxing nostalgic about the Army, about European history, about the Vaterland , and his weird breaking into song, Das Lied der Deutschen, our family tours in France and Germany, while I cranked up Black Sabbath on the eight-track and watched for brown eagle shadows and the first signs of desert spring bloom.
What a Mutt and Jeff routine – my blond and blue-eyed old man with aspirations for a son named after his war hero father going into the military vis-à-vis the Academy. This 5 foot nine 15-year-old brown hair and brown eyed recalcitrant son with the Afro who spoke Spanish, went out with Mexican girls, and preferred tamales and empanadas to Wiener schnitzel and strudel.
I hated the Vietnam War. Hated the war lovers in my high school. It was 1972, I was 15, and way beyond my years politically compared to most of the guys wrestling with me and slogging through high school. Canyon del Oro High School. Gold Canyon. We were the Dorados. Crazy shit. Dorados.
So many weekends diving in the Sea of Cortez. Watching Mexican fishers pulling in dorado, so-called game fish dolphin (not a mammal at all, but in the family of pompano dolphinfish ). Beautiful iridescent muscular big-headed jade fish. Second only in taste for turistas to the Guaymas jumbo shrimp.
These guys didn’t know what the hell the school was named for. Literally, “The Golden.” Golden city Spanish lust. Wacked out Conquistadors lancing the New World with germs, guns and steel. These unicorn stories of a land of extreme wealth, whose king had been covered with gold dust so many times that he was permanently gilded. A living, walking Midas. The Spaniards and Brits shoving forward with their expeditions into the Americas, sent by syphilitic kings and queens in search of El Dorado. In 1540 Francisco Vazquez de Coronado marched as far north as Kansas seeking the Seven Golden Cities of Cibola. Even the esteemed Walter Raleigh launched an expedition for El Dorado in South America, spearheading the search for the miasma city up the Orinoco River in 1595.
The Sonora was flattening out, desiccating, as the green carpeting of palo verdes thinned, the saguaros becoming spindly, and much more spread out than those pincushioning Oro Valley leading north toward Globe.
The proverbial mining town, Globe, floating fetid iron particulates in the air. All American City with red, white and blue pendants on one side of Main Street, and MIA POW black flags on the other. “Support Our Troops . . . Bring them Home Safe” all over the place.
Wrestling to Touch the Universe
This made my old man happy, as I wailed through diatribe after diatribe about the place where white men cut the earth and poisoned the waters. I kept repeating – “Not Globe . . . Bésh Baa Gow?h . . . place of metal. You think this place was discovered in 1875 when the lawless whites came out here? Really, pueblo tribes needed discovering to self-actualize?”
The Clanton Brothers from OK Corral fame ended up here. The Apache Kid and Geronimo had ties to Globe. “Bésh Baa Gow?h, ” I repeated. My two wrestling chums in unison saying, “What the hell are you talking about?”
I tried to tell these guys and my old man about the 700-year-old pueblo of the Salado culture. I wanted to ditch the wrestling match and find the old remains of one of the more advanced cultures in the Southwest. Besh Ba Gowah Pueblo near the confluence of Pinal Creek and Ice House Canyon Wash.
“Man, Haeder, we have some tough dudes to wrestle,” Molina shouted. “You think I want to hear about this Indian stuff now.”
I had heard about pushing hands from one of my older sister’s Vietnam War vet friends. Some guy named Damian who had resisted a second tour, went AWOL, and made it to the China border, somehow. Then three years later in Arizona of all places. He was a native of Vermont who spent three years on the lam in Nepal, Bhutan, India.
It was Drew Pergonaski and I who drew two wrestlers from the Arizona State Schools for the Deaf and Blind. I had heard about that sort of wrestling challenge, and the ASSDB was on our schedule in a month. But that was going to be a two-day practice session orienting the entire team on wrestling the hearing and sight impaired.
Today, in this two-bit town, it was going to be the most important five-minute tutorial of my grappler’s career given by the two wrestlers’ coach and one of the refs. I was wrestling up, too, some 35 pounds over my weight as this guy was in the 171-188 pound category. I can’t remember the fellow’s name, but he was blind, big, and had these eyes that looked like a Chuckwalla lizard’s, but clouded over like opals.
“You’ll be touching all times. During your face-offs, no breaking away . . . always bodies touching. That’s the only difference. Everything else is touch, feel, weight distribution, and a slight twitch here and muscle flex there. These guys are really good at what they do, without seeing or hearing.”
Drew drew a blind AND deaf fellow, and his instructions where the same, but the deaf part of the disability necessitated more touch by refs and it meant that Drew might hear the whistle first but the opponent might just continue through on a move.
“Hey, Paul, just like judo classes, uh?” my old man said. Like all those judo matches on the army bases we were stationed at. No, pop, no. That was using the gi. All tangled up in leg sweeps and constant yanking on the gi. This is way different, old man.
Mogollon Rim
After a draw with the hulk of a blind freestyler, onward we went toward Fort Apache Indian Reservation, leaving Schwam and Molina behind with the high school team for the bus ride back. Drew was pinned in the third round, and I drew a tie, 6-6, with my first blind wrestler. It was like pushing a hundred pound sack of potatoes and three bags of cement, all bungeed together. I never would have pinned him, and he anticipated my moves since I had to stay grappled to him, tethered, hands to hands. I couldn’t even use some of my judo flips, because this big boy felt my every move before I even thought to use them.
Rednecks in the crowd taunted Molina and Zavala, our two dark wrestlers. Calling them spicks, and this white boy — the son of purple heart recipient, bronze star, air medals for all that time in helicopters with the black box handcuffed to his wrist – jumped over the first row of seats and tried to head butt one big F-150 Ford ball cap Copenhagen chewer for the racists taunt.
I felt my old man pulling me back, and he had the guts to tell the crowd to can it: “All these boys worked hard to get here and do not need to hear that crap.” Our Dorados won, 9-5. The racists in the crowd called us “rich faggots.”
I was breathing in the ions from the Mogollon Rim, all that mixed conifer high desert Tonto National Forest flora binding with my corpuscles. Firs and ponderosa and pine rattlers and cougar, black bear, antelope and endless cascades of wildflowers.
We were headed in that weirdly 1960s light green-patina VW Beetle with Peter Gabriel and Genesis blaring on jerry-rigged four-inch speakers. Trusty Bug we had shipped from Germany to New York and then a drive out to our last family post, in Arizona.
Sky Islands
He looked vulnerable next to me — his balding head shiny with sweat, his blond hairs on his arms like current disturbed fan worms, and his big forehead showing all the signs of professorial greatness, not that of a hard-headed grunt packing a forty-five semi-automatic and M-16.
It was our last time together before he shipped out to Vietnam, on a quest to findApache trout — Oncorhynchus apache — along the west fork of the White River. Maybe it would be our last camping foray.
Mogollon Rim is part of this massive floristic and faunal boundary – the species characteristic of the Rocky Mountains are on the top of the plateau, and species endemic to the Mexican Sierra Madre Occidental live on the slopes below and on these incredible Madrean sky islands –high, isolated mountain ranges further south.
I never knew that eight years later I would end up as a newspaper reporter and hiker around one of those sky islands –pine-oak woodlands, a very specific pine-oak forest ecoregion. Chiricahua Mountains, where Geronimo hid out with his two dozen braves.
I hiked all the major Madreans in the USA – these tropical and subtropical coniferous forests biomes: the Baboquivari, Whetstone, Chiricahua, Huachuca, Pinaleño, Santa Catalina, and Santa Rita mountain ranges.
The Things We Carry
We had US Army issue pup tent shells, cookware, mummy bags, ponchos and other puke green stuff like a cot for my old man and parachute for a shade cover. I had my rice and tuna, and I cooked up cabbage and kielbasa for the Chief.
The river was within twenty feet of our A-tent, the air was settling into a nice 40-degree cool, and stellar jays were jockeying for position on alpine branches as the occasional rogue crow bombarded them. Kissing cousins species-wise.
My father collected snags and dry needles for kindling, and I quickly set to making a big fire. The Bug had been packed with gear, a small bundle of ironwood, hastily bagged canned food and meats. I had already dragged into our camp a downed ponderosa that was semi-seasoned and got to making full ax swings at it.
The speed and breathing and weight of the steady arcs felt good. My father was sitting near the river, on a folded poncho, with his pole tilted over an eddy. He was reading the business section of the Arizona Republic, a newspaper about to become part of the fire starter. He also had a public administration textbook with him, for a correspondence class he was taking for work on yet another a master’s degree.
He liked his coffee at all hours of the day and night, and I brought some green tea my older sister had left at the house before one of her jaunts to Alaska on her motorcycle. I made fire camp coffee and some hot water in the US Army issue pots. We drank from canteens.
I never knew then that maybe my father’s reluctance in filling me in on war details was his professional soldier’s version of PTSD, not even named back in 1972. My old man humored me, though, and let me go on and on about my exploits in Mexico, diving in the Sea of Cortez. My exploits hiking backcountry here and there, he listened to intently. I hated the military, Germany, wars, and so I dove into the wonders of ecosystems, the ecology of my own mind.
I was a tough kid, always pushing the training way beyond what my peers would do. I’d go hiking with two gallons of water and nothing else. Miles deep into the Catalina Mountains. I’d come back scratched up, peeling skin, something like Steve McQueen in Papillion.
Maybe that isolation was my way of rebuffing America’s earth eating, water-polluting capitalism. I know it must have congealed in the middle of juniper forest outside Payson at the bottom of Aravaipa Canyon.
First we laughed at the incredible stars and moon keeping us lit up. Then the outlandish frogs and crickets totally Igor Stravinsky crazy. That white water patch on the White River was like a mini Niagara Falls. We laughed at my old man’s flatulence from all that red cabbage I had cooked up.
At two in the morning, finally with a half hour of sleep under our belts, the pounding trees next to us woke us up. I moved like a special forces wannabe sapper, and shone the light on two large elks rutting on the birch trees near camp. Then, an hour later, we were roused by six or seven white-tail deer tromping through our camp.
Those were the days before the tipping points, before the lag time consequences of too many people, too many chain saws, too many second shadow homes and time-shares, too many paved roads, and way too many diseased grocery-store hunters wanting the thrill of blood sport.
We laughed and laughed, joking how we’d have to get back to Tucson and do a day’s crash just to rest up from our supposedly restive fishing trip.
Paints
I slept through the four a.m. rush hour of Indian paints crossing the White River into our camp. My old man wasn’t next to me in his “fart sack.” The dawn was bleeding peach and tangerine into the sky. I shined the US army gooseneck flashlight over at the flat near the cut-bank where we had been fishing.
My old man was in his skivvies, and my flashlight covered his hairy body which was like a gossamer film. l illuminated the thick wet-looking scars on his shoulders where the Chinese carbine outside of Da Nang cut threw him, missing his heart by an inch. Three crisscrossed snail tracks.
He looked strong but old at age 36. There he was, full-blood military man, history buff, someone I had little in common with, talking to two long-haired Whiteriver Apaches. Both had Winchester 30.30’s shoulder-strapped, and their horses – 10 maybe – were just lingering there, by my old man, taking gulps of water.
He was looking up at these young guys, who just nodded their heads when my old man gave them the double thumbs up. Cowboy hats, blue jeans, one had on a white t-shirt with AIM and an eagle printed on it, and the other was wearing USMC sweatshirt. They barely acknowledged me creaking out of the funny Army tent.
My old man was encircled by these incredible horses. The air was just right. A frost left the world crystalline. I had that spotlight pointed at my old man. The glow of his blond hairs oddly simian, like something along the lines of Grendel out of Beowulf.
I could hear him telling these fellows about some tidbit of history of the pinto. These palomino and buckskin Paint-Horses were incredible soaking up a rest next to the Chief, my old man.
I was amazed that this warrior, this technocratic warrior, knew something about Indian Country I did not:
“Amazing, fellows, amazing. These horses go back to Arabia. They called them kanhwa. I think it means blotched. In India, the word is pulwahri, I think, something along the lines of a white horse that flowers with black spots. And, my son, here, well, he’d know something of the Spanish origin of the horse’s name. The word is pintado, painted it means, right?” he asked, smiling at me, saluting me as the sun was lifting pine green into shadows.
These two Apache youth nodded, calmly eyeing my old man – this skivvy-wearing Grendel talking about these magnificent horses that came out of nowhere. Pawing the dirt and lapping up water. There, at the edge of the White River. It was our small last camp. Three weeks away from deployment to Indochina. A soon-to-be lost father, stuck in the Huey wake of a wet sky.
He was a teacher, then. Small-framed, vulnerable, not the hard-edged bravado of Vietnam film lore. Not the ex-wrestler from Iowa. This guy, broken by divorce, and dedicated to some mythology about Country and Commander in Chief.
He knew about those horses. I wonder how. I never asked.
The last of the darkish sky lifted with another Apache dawn. The trout skimmed the surface looking for cadis flies.
I cracked wood and stoked the embers. I was going to break my fast today and make my old man skillet potatoes and some good old Bratwurst and share with him. I had requisitioned a hearty German mustard from my mom’s pantry. A few apples would be sliced with the brats. Onions and tomatoes and chile peppers. Hot coffee.
All that German stuff simmering in those US Army pots and pans in the middle of a strangulated Apache reservation.
Bly was right. The moment the war lifted from my heart, I saw my old man. Just a guy waiting for daylight, waiting for fish. and waiting for the day he’d say goodbye to Arizona and say oh fuck to his war.
Our war.
The war in those Apaches’ blood.
The war trapped in Arabian-Spanish-English Paints.
The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness. ? Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
**the end**
This piece appeared in House Organ.
House Organ, edited by Kenneth Warren, Lakewood, Ohio, is the best print poetry monthly in the U.S. You wouldn’t know it by looking at it, but its retro look (no website) belies its rich crême-de-la-crême contents. Among the contributors: Jack Hirschman, Harrison Fisher, Vincent Ferrini (goodbye, great old man of poesy!) and many, many others.
Look, I can go from today, what’s happening now with Viet’s honorable words and stance on Gaza and Genocide, then move backwards, but truly this says it all about cancel culture, Jews, Jewish power, Israel-First millionaires and billionaires, and the zealotry of zionism in the halls of power, money, politics:
“We are joined by the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen to discuss his new book, A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, a History, a Memorial. Last week the 92NY, a major cultural institution in New York City, canceled an event with Nguyen after he joined 750+ writers in signing an open letter calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. His memoir explores his family’s personal history as refugees from Vietnam dealing with the impacts of U.S. imperialism. Civilian stories are war stories, too, says Nguyen. He says the U.S.’s greatest acts of anti-Asian violence occur internationally and continue today.”
I see total continuity between what the United States has done in the Philippines, in Korea, in Japan, in Laos, in Cambodia, in Vietnam and now with Palestine.
Well, I can’t hold a candle to all these reviewers’ 300-word blurbs, AKA kudos for the book: Grove Atlantic! Check them out for thos pithy, writerly sorts of punchy reactions to his book.
For me, for the students reading the memoir, and for our discussions, we all can see Viet covers that universal story of being a refugee in land that expects assimulation and genuflection.
A country that is still settler colonial in its proxies and its Projects for a New Hegemony America. Proxies here and subjugation there. He is in the land of the homeless — both the houseless and those with no tribe, no nuclear family, friendships and hopes dashed on the hard walls encircling the American mind
He’s not digging being called a boat person, and his young life in San Jose (first landing in Pennsylvania) is one where he is a man without a solid tribe. He says he was sort of a spy in his parents’ home, since he was not Vietnamese, really, through this process of American (California) schooling, that is, he spoke and read English, and was not interested in some traditional route of work work work until you drop drop drop, Vietnamese or Asian style. He also felt like a spy within his American interactions and various settings as he coursed through life determined to find that face, some new American face, but one that is steeped in Viet Nam.
San Jose!
His parents worked hard in their San Jose store, and they neglected Viet in that they sacrificed time with two sons because of the American grind — seven days a week, 14 hour days, running the business to get ahead, to get into middle class life, and to send money home to family who did not leave Vietnam as refugees, who were not considered interlopers, illegals, that is, not perjorative boat people.
Viet’s on a whirlwind tour, in book festivals, on the main stage in books stores, at colleges, on the CBS Morning show, on Democracy Now, and he was on that trajectory before signing onto a pretty benign letter asking for a cease fire in Gaza.
“People might like to think the war is done when a ceasefire is signed, but for most people who live through a war, it goes on for decades.”
The Letter in the London Review of Books
An Open Letter on the Situation in Palestine,
We, the undersigned artists and writers based in the EU, the UK and North America, are speaking out to demand an end to the violence and destruction in Palestine.
The deliberate killing of civilians is always an atrocity. It is a violation of international law and an outrage against the sanctity of human life. Neither Israel, the occupying power, nor the armed groups of the people under occupation, the Palestinians, can ever be justified in targeting defenceless people. We can only express our grief and heartbreak for the victims of these most recent tragedies, and for their families, both Palestinians and Israelis.
Nothing can retrieve what has already been lost. But the unprecedented and indiscriminate violence that is still escalating against the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, with the financial and political support of Western powers, can and must be brought to an end. By cutting off vital electricity, food and water supplies; by attempting to displace by force over one million Palestinians from their homes, with no guarantee of return; and by carrying out continual airstrikes against civilians, including those who are attempting to evacuate, the state of Israel is committing grave crimes against humanity. Its allies, our own governments, are complicit in these crimes.
Human rights groups have long condemned Israel’s occupation of Palestine and the inhumane treatment of – and system of racial domination over – Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli state. But we are now witnessing a new and even more drastic emergency. The UN expert Francesca Albanese has warned that Israel’s current actions in Gaza constitute a form of ethnic cleansing. The Israeli historian Raz Segal has described the situation in Gaza as a ‘textbook case of genocide’.
We call on our governments to demand an immediate ceasefire and the unimpeded admission of humanitarian aid into Gaza. We also demand an end to all arms shipments and military funding, supplies that can only exacerbate the humanitarian catastrophe at hand. Although these measures will not be enough to secure true justice, liberation and equality, they represent an urgent and indispensable first step. We plead for an end to all violence, an end to all oppression and denial of human rights, and a path towards a just and sustainable peace for all.
This memoir is narrated by the American Viet and the other Viet, with the voice addressing himself as you, and this book is memorial (for his mother) and history (for his ancestors and his brief life in Viet Nam and who he is as a man, Vietnamese, yes, Vietnamese American.
Well, I grew up in the United States feeling like I had two faces. On the one hand, I felt, living in my very Vietnamese household with my very Vietnamese parents, that I was an American spying on them. And I felt completely American growing up. But then, when I stepped outside of that household and outside of the Vietnamese refugee community into the rest of the United States, I felt like a Vietnamese spying on these Americans. And so I took that feeling of duality, and I infused that into my fiction, into characters, like The Sympathizer, the title — the character of that novel. And, you know, for a long time, I worked out my own emotional complications, having grown up as a refugee in the United States, feeling myself to be an eyewitness to the trauma that my parents underwent. I survived that experience by becoming emotionally numb, by not feeling things, by shutting down and not dealing with what I had seen and what I had felt.
This book is certainly tied to his mom’s amazing persistence and her own downfall, falling several times with nervous breakdowns and then the more permanent memory failings . . . because of the trauma of so much she experienced in Vietnam and as a refugee in a new land. He was on his way as a successful essayist, novelist, college prof before the shit hit the fan.
Gaza, in real time, on TV, blasted onto Telegram, all over the internet, even with Israel’s demons cutting power and cell phone service!
He is critical of American colonialism, and he has not kept his mouth shut about just what this schizophrenic country is, i.e. calling out the hypocrisy of the country, of the times, of the political nature of a society that is led by the lesser (sic) of two evils. He redacted Donald Trump, his name, from the book, as a way of exploring censorship and self-censorship, erasure, how in reality so much of America’s history and dirty laundry and exceptionally violent past/present have been redacted from Americans books and teachings and minds. As Gore Vidal said, we are the United State of Amnesia. Think of agnotology and entertaining ourselves into blind ignorance, into the death of critical thinking, into mental and physical inflamation.
The contradictions and almost bi-polar nature of being a man between two places, or in his case, a man with two faces, demands an unsettling focus on developing self through “the power of the word.”
The word has meant so much to Viet Thahn, so much so that the cancelling of his book talks’ venues has been a double whammy for him, a contradiction, but in line with the reality of the American Nightmare of not just internment camps for people, but the closing of the mind demanded of a superficial, consumeristic, capitalistic society that for more and more people is transactional and filled with the GAD and SAD of broken indidivuals and communities (General Anxiety Disorder and Social Anxiety Disorder).
[Newsflash — Celebrity disgusting voyerism culture splays opportunities for even second level books deals for third tier writers: Britney Spears is thankful to her fans for the success of her new memoir. The Woman in Me was released on Oct. 24 and has sold 1.1 million copies through its first week on sale, according to Gallery Books, a division of Simon & Schuster. The number includes pre-orders, print books, ebooks and audiobooks formats. ]
An aside . . . .
The death of his mother was the opening he had to begin the journey of this part of his life, this memoir.
And so, eventually, though, it came time to write a memoir, after my mother passed away in 2018. And I certainly wanted to write about my mother and her extraordinary life as a refugee, as a survivor, as a successful businesswoman, as a hero who in the end was destroyed by herself, by whatever was happening in her mind. And so there is a memorial for her in this book, as well. And then, finally, there’s a history, because I think it’s hard for me to separate the memoirs of myself and my family and the memorial I’m writing about my mother from the history of Vietnam and the United States, that led to war and that led to us becoming refugees.
The casualties of war are the people, the villages, the cities, the communities, the families, the cultures, the land, and the collective and individual sanity of the people, the survivors. The first casualty in war is, what, truth, or is it the victors (sic) writing the history, or the lies, or the invented drama, the self-absorbed victimhood, blaming the victims for their own dilemma? And today, bold, in your face, perpetrated by the two grand fake democracies — USA and Israel — is becoming yet another force of collective evil so so in our collective faces that many turn away, two-faced, fearful of how deeply our country — our taxes — is responsible for so much trafficked death and destruction.
[ Not that the world outside the USA isn’t just as disgusting as the current leveling of entire families and neighborhoods in Gaza: “The Boko Haram Islamic extremist group launched an insurgency in northeastern Nigeria in 2009 in an effort to establish their radical interpretation of Islamic law, or Sharia, in the region. At least 35,000 people have been killed and more than 2 million displaced due to the extremist violence concentrated in Borno state, which neighbors Yobe.
Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu, who took office in May, has not succeeded in ending the nation’s security crises both in the northeast and in northwest and central regions where dozens of armed groups have been killing villagers and kidnapping travelers for ransom. ]
I certainly do think that this memoir that I wrote, which is about my life and the lives of my parents, who came to the United States as refugees and who went through 40 years of war and colonization when they were living in Vietnam, those stories I tell in this book, and larger stores about Vietnamese refugees, in general, and about the War in Vietnam, do have a lot of relevance to what’s happening today.
One of the things that I stress in the memoir is that civilian stories are war stories, too. I look at the lives of my parents, who were not soldiers, and how they were deeply affected by war constantly. They were displaced as refugees twice. They had to leave behind an adopted daughter when they fled Vietnam for the first time. My mother had to go to the psychiatric facility in the United States three times in her life, the last time leaving her permanently disabled. And I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how the ramifications of war are oftentimes very visible for soldiers, because when we think about wars, we generally think of wars, soldiers, battles, tanks and so on, but the fact of the matter is that wars usually kill more civilians than soldiers.
And civilians bear enormous burdens, both of violence but also of ongoing trauma in the years afterwards. And that trauma is also then passed on to their families, to their children. I grew up witnessing how the Vietnamese refugee community in the United States was a traumatized community that had a very hard time dealing with its past. It was oriented towards look to the future, becoming American, and then having the unspoken consequences of the war rippling through the family and the community.
And probably the last thing to say here is that when Vietnamese Americans become Americans, it’s certainly part of the narrative of the so-called American dream, of which I’m very critical in the book, but part of the complication for me is that, you know: What does it mean to come as a refugee to the United States and then become a part of a country that is a military-industrial complex and is a settler colonial society? That’s a contradiction that I try to work through in the book.
It’s a rocky row to hoe, for sure, being a professor at UCLA, in a state that is a major Military Industrial Complex purveyor of pain and death; the state with that ugly surveillance location, Silicon Valley, plaguing the earth, man, plaguing it; and then the entire Hollywood Propaganda Industry and LaLaLandia nature of the Disneyfication of humanity.
Everything I think about California (I was born in San Pedro) can be put on that one of a million stories of disenfranchisement and racist theft. Chavez Ravine:
During the early 1950s, the city of Los Angeles forcefully evicted the 300 families of Chávez Ravine to make way for a low-income public housing project. The land was cleared and the homes, schools and the church were razed. But instead of building the promised housing, the city — in a move rife with political controversy — sold the land to Brooklyn Dodgers baseball owner Walter O’Malley, who built Dodger Stadium on the site. The residents of Chávez Ravine, who had been promised first pick of the apartments in the proposed housing project, were given no reimbursement for their destroyed property and forced to scramble for housing elsewhere.
So much about Vietnam, for its entire history BEFORE the French and American wars against the Vietnamese, is a litany of displacement, struggle, triumph, and a repeat of more and more conflict and theft and war (invading armies).
And, now, San Jose, Vietnam Town or Little Saigon, what a flippancy:
Oh, Vietnam! The one I visited, my images:
Review to be continued!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
A few hours before the reading was set to take place, a spokesperson for 92NY said the event was “postponed.”
In a statement sent to NPR, the 92NY spokesperson said the center has always invited diverse viewpoints. “As a Jewish organization we believe the responsible course of action right now is to take some time to determine how best to use our platform and support the entire 92NY community, so we made the difficult decision to postpone the October 20th event.”
Nguyen instead held the event at the McNally Jackson bookstore in Manhattan.
The poetry center’s director Sarah Chihaya and senior program coordinator Sophie Herron confirmed to NPR that they both resigned from their posts following the cancellation of Nguyen’s event, but did not comment further.
The 92nd Street Y, New York’s Unterberg Poetry Center has been a hub for literary events and readings since 1939. It has a long history of hosting canonical writers such as T.S Eliot, Langston Hughes, Marianne Moore, to more contemporary authors such as Sandra Cisneros and Lorrie Moore.
When contacted by NPR, Nguyen said he hasn’t been in touch directly with the board or any spokespersons from 92NY. On Instagram, he wrote:
“I have no regrets about anything I have said or done in regards to Palestine, Israel, or the occupation and war.”
And so the rest of the poetry season is cancelled. Now the rest of the 92NY’s poetry reading season – which was set to feature Emily Wilson, Roxane Gay, Tracy K. Smith, and more – is “currently on pause,” according to a 92NY spokesperson.
Pause … another word for censored, stopped, derailed, cancelled, imploded, sanctioned, forced into submission!
The ongoing Israeli operation against Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia group so dominant in Lebanon, is following a standard pattern. Ignore base causes. Ignore context. Target leaders, and target personnel. See matters in conventional terms of civilisational warrior against barbarian despot. Israel, the valiant and bold, fighting the forces of darkness.
The entire blood woven tapestry of the Middle East offers uncomfortable explanations. The region has seen false political boundaries sketched and pronounced by foreign powers, fictional countries proclaimed, and entities brought into being on the pure interests of powers in Europe. These empires produced shoddy cartography in the name of the nation state and plundering self-interest, leaving aside the complexities of ethnic belonging and tribal dispositions. Tragically, such cartographic fictions tended to keep company with crime, dispossession, displacement, ethnic cleansing and enthusiastic hatreds.
Since October 7, when Hamas flipped the table on Israel’s heralded security apparatus to kill over 1,200 of its citizens and smuggle over 200 hostages into Gaza, historical realities became present with a nasty resonance. While Israel falsely sported its credentials as a peaceful state with dry cleaned democratic credentials ravaged by Islamic barbarians, Hamas had tapped into a vein of history stretching back to 1948. Dispossession, racial segregation, suppression, were all going to be addressed, if only for a moment of vanguardist and cruel violence.
To the north, where Lebanon and Israel share yet another nonsense of a border, October 7 presented a change. Both the Israeli Defence Forces and Hezbollah took to every bloodier jousting. It was a serious affair: 70,000 Israelis displaced to the south; tens of thousands of Lebanese likewise to the north. (The latter are almost never mentioned in the huffed commentaries of the West.)
The Israeli strategy in this latest phase was made all too apparent by the number of military commanders and high-ranking operatives in Hezbollah the IDF has targeted. Added to this the pager-walkie talkie killings as a prelude to a likely ground invasion of Lebanon, it was clear that Hezbollah’s leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, figured as an exemplary target.
Hezbollah confirmed the death of its leader in a September 27 strike on Beirut’s southern suburb of Dahiyeh and promised “to continue its jihad in confronting the enemy, supporting Gaza and Palestine, and defending Lebanon and its steadfast and honourable people.” Others killed included Ali Karki, commander of the organisation’s southern front, and various other commanders who had gathered.
Israeli officials have been prematurely thrilled. Like deluded scientists obsessed with eliminating a symptom, they ignore the disease with habitual obsession. “Most of the senior leaders of Hezbollah have been eliminated,” claimed a triumphant Israeli military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani.
Defence Minister Yoav Gallant called the measure “the most significant strike since the founding of the State of Israel.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated with simplicity that killing Nasrallah was necessary to “changing the balance of power in the region for years to come” and enable displaced Israelis to return to their homes in the north.
Various reports swallowed the Israeli narrative. Reuters, for instance, called the killing “a heavy blow to the Iran-backed group as it reels from an escalating campaign of Israeli attacks.” Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr opined that this “will be a major setback for the organisation.” But the death of a being is never any guarantee for the death of an idea. The body merely offers a period of occupancy. Ideas will be transferred, grow, and proliferate, taking residence in other organisations or entities. The assassinating missile is a poor substitute to addressing the reasons why such an idea came into being.
A dead or mutilated body merely offers assurance that power might have won the day for a moment, a situation offering only brief delight to military strategists and the journalists keeping tabs on the morgue’s latest additions. It is easy, then, to ignore why Hezbollah became a haunting consequence of Israel’s bungling invasion and occupation of Lebanon in 1982. Easy to also ignore the 1985 manifesto, with its reference to the organisation’s determination to combat Israel and those it backed, such as the Christian Phalangist allies in the Lebanese Civil War, and to remove the Israeli occupying force.
Such oblique notions as “degrading” the capacity of an ideological, religious group hardly addresses the broader problem. The subsequent shoots from a savage pruning can prove ever more vigorous. The 1992 killing of Hezbollah’s secretary-general Abbas al-Musawi, along with his wife and son, merely saw the elevation of Nasrallah. Nasrallah turned out to be a more formidable, resourceful and eloquent proposition. He also pushed other figures to the fore, such as the recently assassinated Fuad Shukr, who became an important figure in obtaining the group’s vast array of long-range rockets and precision-guided missiles.
Ibrahim Al-Marashi of California State University, San Marcos, summarises the efforts of Israel’s high-profile killing strategy as shortsighted feats of miscalculation. “History shows every single Israeli assassination of a high-profile political or military operator, even after being initially hailed as a game-changing victory, eventually led to the killed leader being replaced by someone more determined, adept and hawkish.” Another Nasrallah is bound to be in tow, with several others in incubation.
The ongoing Israeli operation against Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia group so dominant in Lebanon, is following a standard pattern. Ignore base causes. Ignore context. Target leaders, and target personnel. See matters in conventional terms of civilisational warrior against barbarian despot. Israel, the valiant and bold, fighting the forces of darkness.
The entire blood woven tapestry of the Middle East offers uncomfortable explanations. The region has seen false political boundaries sketched and pronounced by foreign powers, fictional countries proclaimed, and entities brought into being on the pure interests of powers in Europe. These empires produced shoddy cartography in the name of the nation state and plundering self-interest, leaving aside the complexities of ethnic belonging and tribal dispositions. Tragically, such cartographic fictions tended to keep company with crime, dispossession, displacement, ethnic cleansing and enthusiastic hatreds.
Since October 7, when Hamas flipped the table on Israel’s heralded security apparatus to kill over 1,200 of its citizens and smuggle over 200 hostages into Gaza, historical realities became present with a nasty resonance. While Israel falsely sported its credentials as a peaceful state with dry cleaned democratic credentials ravaged by Islamic barbarians, Hamas had tapped into a vein of history stretching back to 1948. Dispossession, racial segregation, suppression, were all going to be addressed, if only for a moment of vanguardist and cruel violence.
To the north, where Lebanon and Israel share yet another nonsense of a border, October 7 presented a change. Both the Israeli Defence Forces and Hezbollah took to every bloodier jousting. It was a serious affair: 70,000 Israelis displaced to the south; tens of thousands of Lebanese likewise to the north. (The latter are almost never mentioned in the huffed commentaries of the West.)
The Israeli strategy in this latest phase was made all too apparent by the number of military commanders and high-ranking operatives in Hezbollah the IDF has targeted. Added to this the pager-walkie talkie killings as a prelude to a likely ground invasion of Lebanon, it was clear that Hezbollah’s leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, figured as an exemplary target.
Hezbollah confirmed the death of its leader in a September 27 strike on Beirut’s southern suburb of Dahiyeh and promised “to continue its jihad in confronting the enemy, supporting Gaza and Palestine, and defending Lebanon and its steadfast and honourable people.” Others killed included Ali Karki, commander of the organisation’s southern front, and various other commanders who had gathered.
Israeli officials have been prematurely thrilled. Like deluded scientists obsessed with eliminating a symptom, they ignore the disease with habitual obsession. “Most of the senior leaders of Hezbollah have been eliminated,” claimed a triumphant Israeli military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani.
Defence Minister Yoav Gallant called the measure “the most significant strike since the founding of the State of Israel.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated with simplicity that killing Nasrallah was necessary to “changing the balance of power in the region for years to come” and enable displaced Israelis to return to their homes in the north.
Various reports swallowed the Israeli narrative. Reuters, for instance, called the killing “a heavy blow to the Iran-backed group as it reels from an escalating campaign of Israeli attacks.” Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr opined that this “will be a major setback for the organisation.” But the death of a being is never any guarantee for the death of an idea. The body merely offers a period of occupancy. Ideas will be transferred, grow, and proliferate, taking residence in other organisations or entities. The assassinating missile is a poor substitute to addressing the reasons why such an idea came into being.
A dead or mutilated body merely offers assurance that power might have won the day for a moment, a situation offering only brief delight to military strategists and the journalists keeping tabs on the morgue’s latest additions. It is easy, then, to ignore why Hezbollah became a haunting consequence of Israel’s bungling invasion and occupation of Lebanon in 1982. Easy to also ignore the 1985 manifesto, with its reference to the organisation’s determination to combat Israel and those it backed, such as the Christian Phalangist allies in the Lebanese Civil War, and to remove the Israeli occupying force.
Such oblique notions as “degrading” the capacity of an ideological, religious group hardly addresses the broader problem. The subsequent shoots from a savage pruning can prove ever more vigorous. The 1992 killing of Hezbollah’s secretary-general Abbas al-Musawi, along with his wife and son, merely saw the elevation of Nasrallah. Nasrallah turned out to be a more formidable, resourceful and eloquent proposition. He also pushed other figures to the fore, such as the recently assassinated Fuad Shukr, who became an important figure in obtaining the group’s vast array of long-range rockets and precision-guided missiles.
Ibrahim Al-Marashi of California State University, San Marcos, summarises the efforts of Israel’s high-profile killing strategy as shortsighted feats of miscalculation. “History shows every single Israeli assassination of a high-profile political or military operator, even after being initially hailed as a game-changing victory, eventually led to the killed leader being replaced by someone more determined, adept and hawkish.” Another Nasrallah is bound to be in tow, with several others in incubation.
Jeffrey Sachs joins The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté to discuss the investigation into the origins of Covid-19. As chair of the Lancet COVID-19 commission, Sachs alleges that SARS-CoV2 originated from dangerous gain of function experiments sponsored and conducted by US biotech institutions. He alleges a vast cover-up of Covid origins, including by former members of his commission, and details the personal attacks he has incurred for speaking out.
China’s far-western region of Xinjiang — called East Turkestan by Uyghurs — is a essentially a colony that China has occupied for the past 70 years, but before that there has not been any continuous Chinese rule there going back 2,000 years – despite Chinese claims, according to Michael van Walt, an international lawyer who has studied the region extensively.
Van Walt, who has specialized in inner Asia and East Asian relations for the past 15 years and works to resolve conflicts in different parts of the world, presented his findings at 20th anniversary commemoration of the World Uyghur Congress in Munich, Germany, on May 3-6.
In an interview with RFA Uyghur Director Alim Seytoff, van Walt discussed his research. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
RFA: In your presentation, you said that East Turkestan is a colony of the People’s Republic of China and the Chinese government claims that Xinjiang has been an inseparable part of China since ancient times. How do you interpret this latter claim, based on your research?
Michael van Walt: It’s very clear that there has not been any continuous Chinese rule or authority in Eastern Turkestan over the last 2,000 years. Only during the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-220 A.D.) and the Tang Dynasty (618-907) was there some presence. Before the Republic of China was established, Eastern Turkestan was ruled by various khanates, mainly from neighboring parts of Asia, but definitely not Han.
RFA: When we refer to China, it’s understood that China has existed for thousands of years, and that there has been one country called China, dynasty after dynasty. Is this understanding correct?
Michael van Walt: No, it isn’t, and this is what is causing a lot of confusion. What the People’s Republic of China has done, and the Republic of China before it, was to create this idea. There was this national history of China that was projected back into history for thousands of years, as if China had existed as a political entity, as a state, for thousands of years, which it definitely has not.
There have been a number of Han states, empires and dynasties, but the Han people have been ruled not just by Han states, but by many Inner Asian empires as well.
What we call China today was just part of the Manchu empire of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) and the same with numerous others much earlier. So, the present way in which so-called Chinese history is presented — but also, presented sometimes by Western and other scholars — is misleading in that way. It makes it confusing.
And particularly because we use the words “China” and “Chinese,” which can mean many different things.
Today, the PRC [People’s Republic of China] uses the word “China” in Chinese to actually mean all the people that are within what it claims to be the borders of the PRC, whether they are Han Chinese, Tibetan or Uyghur.
But other people use the word “Chinese” essentially to mean Han Chinese and the Chinese language, and the Chinese script to mean the Mandarin script. So, we’re using that word without being precise about what we mean.
If we are being precise, then really the concept of China as a state was imagined in 1911, discussed in 1911, and created in the beginning of 1912 with the Republic of China.
Before that, there were other states with different names, different structures and different principles of governance, which had very little in common with the Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China.
From a legal perspective, those two things are completely different. You cannot talk about the continuity of a state for 2,000 years. It just doesn’t exist. I’m not denying that there was Chinese culture for 2,000 years or 5,000, whatever it may be. I’m not denying there weren’t any Han people. All of this is possible. But not continuous or a continuous stream of Han states.
RFA: Why does the Chinese government make this claim, that Manchuria, southern Mongolia, Tibet and East Turkestan were part of China since ancient times?
Van Walt: I can’t think for them, but it would seem that the idea was first developed by the Republic of China precisely because it wanted to claim those Inner Asian territories as part of the Republic of China. It needed to develop a rationale for that, needed to develop an excuse for that that would be acceptable. So, they invented this history.
Today, I think the PRC insists on that history and that historical narrative precisely because it does not want to be seen as a colonial power in Eastern Turkestan, Tibet and in Inner Mongolia.
RFA: So, was thefirst state called “China” established only in 1912, and before that there were different dynasties and empires under different names that had nothing to do with China as a political entity?
Van Walt: No, and the words zhongguo and zhonghua that are used for the name “China” or for “Chinese” existed before for a long time, but they had a different meaning. They had a meaning of “central state” — the central high culture people radiating wisdom and culture out into civilization.
These were civilizational and spatial concepts, not names of states or of a country. Those words were used, and they were transformed to become a label, as a name. Then they were paired to be equivalent to the word “China” in English or “Chine” in French — the Western concept of China, which Europeans had already for a long time mistakenly imagined to be this continuous China, this imaginary country. By pairing the two, it’s made it very difficult, especially for Westerners and Europeans to conceive of the notion that there was not this continuous China because it already existed in our imagination.
RFA: Are Beijing’s claims akin to, hypothetically speaking, Italy claiming that territories occupied by the Roman Empire were part of the country today? Is China’s rationale similar to this?
Michael van Walt: It is a similar rationale, but there’s a distinction. If they really were to do that, they would claim what the Romans had conquered and what they themselves had conquered in the past. What the PRC claims is what the Mongols and Manchus conquered, not what the Han conquered. So, an illogical thing to do.
It’s quite aside from the fact that today in the modern world you cannot claim territory on the basis of some historical claim from 1,000 years ago, 500 years ago or even 100 years ago, which China does. But you certainly can’t claim it on the basis of what another empire did that happened to conquer you.
But the PRC has been able to convince many that whoever ruled what I call the Han homeland — the Han people and their territory — somehow became Chinese or Han. This notion that the Mongols and Manchus were actually Chinese is absurd.
The fact that today the PRC calls Genghis Khan a great son of China is absurd. Genghis Khan is the one who ordered the conquest of China, not as a son of China, but as a son of the Mongols.
RFA:Is China technically exercising colonial rule in the Uyghur homeland by plundering natural resources and by settling Han Chinese into the territories? Is this part of the reason why China is committing genocide against the Uyghurs?
Van Walt: Yes, it is. It is afraid of losing control over Eastern Turkestan and is trying to suppress Uyghurs and others in Eastern Turkestan. It’s a way of trying to maintain control. Xi Jinping and his government in particular are bent on absolute control. That is the most important policy objective, so everything is driven by that. And if it means putting millions of people in internment camps, eradicating the cultures of the Uyghurs, Tibetans and Mongolians, and to have absolute control over these territories, then so be it. That is their objective.
As for wanting to control all the territories of the former Qing Empire, they have not finished their objective yet. They still need to achieve that. They will want to control Taiwan, the South China Sea, northern India, and probably parts of today’s Russia, including Tuva and Boryatia, because at some point some Mongol or Manchu ruler ruled some of those areas.
And if we were to go into the absurd, let’s remember that the Mongols ruled most of the Eurasian continent all the way to Hungary, the Middle East and India. We wouldn’t really want to see China claim everything that the great son of China, Genghis Khan, achieved.
Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Alim Seytoff for RFA Uyghur.
This week we would like to recommend to you a Chinese song from 1967 called Bravely March On, Arab People!(奋勇前进,阿拉伯人民) in support of the pan-Arab movement.
If you don’t have a lot of time, this is what you should know:
For China, Iran’s attack on Israel was “an act of self-defense”
The West’s new narrative against China: overcapacity
China exceeds its 5% GDP growth target in first quarter
Historic “peace trip” by former Taiwanese leader Ma Ying-jeou
For China, Iran’s attack was “an act of self-defense”
In the context of the genocide that Israel is perpetrating on the Palestinian population, and in retaliation of Israel’s attack on its embassy compound in Damascus (Syria), Iran carried out a missile and drone attack on Israeli territory for the first time in history, repeatedly puncturing the famous “iron dome”.
After the military response, Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, called his Iranian counterpart Hossein Amir-Abdollahian. During their discussion, Wang Yi again condemned Israel’s “unacceptable” attack on the Iranian embassy in Syria, saying it was a serious violation of international law. He also stated that “Iran can handle the situation well and prevent the region from further turmoil while safeguarding its sovereignty and dignity.” The Iranian foreign minister assured Foreign Minister Wang that his country was willing to be moderate and had no intention of escalating the situation further. He further stressed that “the Islamic Republic of Iran advocates an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and supports China’s positive efforts to promote a ceasefire.”
In contrast, Yuval Waks, deputy head of the Israeli mission to China, said Israel was not satisfied with China’s current response to Iran’s attack as, in his words, they had expected “a stronger condemnation and a clear recognition of Israel’s right to defend itself.”
A few days later, the US House Speaker labeled Iran, China, and Russia the new “axis of evil” while supporting the latest bill to send $60 billion to Ukraine.
For years, China has advocated a two-state solution, the creation of an independent Palestinian state, and full Palestinian membership in the UN. In fact, last week, it again supported a UN Security Council motion to that effect, but it was vetoed, once again, by the United States.While everyone is talking about Iran’s actions in recent weeks, a major shift in Iran’s energy trade has been taking place in recent years. Despite Western sanctions, Iran’s oil exports reached a 6-year high, boosting its economy by $35 billion per year.
Iran sold an average of 1.56 million barrels per day, of which the vast majority were sold to China. Approximately one-tenth of China’s oil imports come from Iran.
This makes it more difficult for the new sanctions that the United States and Europe may impose because of the conflict with Israel to really affect the Iranian economy. We could be witnessing a phenomenon similar to that of the Western sanctions against Russia since February 2022: by increasing trade with the economies of the Global South, driven by China, which does not engage with Western sanctions, the economy, which in theory should suffer, ends up strengthening and reducing its dependence on the West. It is too early to say but the indications provided by Iranian oil exports seem to point to this.
The West’s new narrative against China: overcapacity
During her visit to China at the beginning of April, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen expressed her concern about an alleged overcapacity in the Asian giant’s new energy sector. In the last few weeks, this idea has been circulating in the Western media, accusing the Chinese government’s subsidies to energy sector companies as “unfair”. However, the decision to subsidize or not an industrial sector is a national sovereignty decision of the country and a common practice in international trade. The fact is that Europe heavily subsidizes its agricultural sector (and has even been accused of dumping practices) and, historically, the United States has had a protectionist policy to boost its domestic industry. The bottom line is that both the US and Europe are concerned about China’s sweeping advance in the production of electric cars, solar panels, technology, and robotics, products at the core of China’s current industrial development.
A good example is China’s largest automation company Innovance, which has a market capitalization of US$ 25 billion. Known as “little Huawei”, it was founded by former Huawei engineers and today is the main supplier of AC servo systems parts (those that produce motion in industrial machines) and the second largest national producer of industrial robots. Its 2023, revenues increased by 30% to US$ 4 billion; its R&D investment is significant, and it has two factories in Hungary and one in India.
According to figures from the International Federation of Robotics, in 2022 more than half of all industrial robot installations in the world were in China.
This boost in China’s new energy industries is an opportunity for countries in the Global South, Dongsheng member Marco Fernandes told CGTN in an interview. He emphasized that “…it is the first time that we have a major economy, such a strong economy in the Global South, so it is absolutely strategic” and that for developing countries it is “…a matter of trying to have balanced partnerships”.
In this way, China’s alleged overcapacity seems more of a threat to the traditional powers than to the world’s developing countries. Both Europe and the United States insist on decoupling or “de-risking” from China, but the data show that such a thing is far from being achieved. According to a Brookings paper last year, US manufacturers are far more dependent on China than standard calculations that examine the origin of intermediate goods, i.e., imports used to make US products, suggest.
The paper reveals that, in 2018, China was the supplier for more than 90% of US manufacturing sectors, particularly apparel, motor vehicles, and electrical equipment. In 1995, Japan was the main foreign source for about 40% of US manufacturing sectors, followed by Canada with about 30%. This high dependence on Chinese intermediate goods implies, for the authors, that “decoupling from China will be much, much more difficult and much slower than many people think, and may be impossible.”
In the same vein, it was Siemens CFO Ralf Thomas who said a few days ago that it will take “decades” for German manufacturers to reduce their dependence on China. “Global value chains have been built up over the last 50 years – how naive do you have to be to believe that this can change in six or 12 months?” he remarked. This is a small sample of the dependence that European countries also have in their trade with China. Following Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s visit, China announced that it will reduce controls on German agricultural products, including pork, apples, and some beef products. Similar measures were taken earlier this year on products from Spain, Belgium, and Austria, in a clear sign of Beijing’s intentions to improve its ties with Europe.
First quarter economy: China exceeds its 5% GDP growth target
China’s economy exceeded expectations and grew by 5.3% year-on-year in the first quarter, consistent with the annual growth target of “around 5%” set at the Two Sessions earlier this year.
Amid China’s productive reorganization, based on manufacturing, not real estate, as the cornerstone of growth, the investment in fixed assets reached 10 trillion yuan (1.4 trillion USD), up by 4.5%. Amid the restructuring of industry, investment in real estate continues to fall (-9.5%), while manufacturing and infrastructure made up the overall growth in investment, increasing by 9.9 and 6.5%, respectively.
China’s industrial value-added grew 6% in the first quarter, especially in the high-tech sector whose manufacturing growth accelerated. China’s central bank will set up a 500 billion yuan ($70 billion) re-lending program to support the country’s science and technology sectors for small and midsize companies.
On the international front, the use of the RMB in international transactions continued to grow. According to SWIFT, the share of the yuan in global payments rose to a record high in March (4.69%), remaining the world’s fourth most active currency. The US dollar continued to have the largest share in global payments, at around 47% and the euro fell below 22%.
When SWIFT began tracking the use of the yuan in 2010, the currency accounted for less than 0.1 percent of global settlements.
Moreover, the use of the yuan in China’s cross-border transactions for trade in goods was nearly 30% in the first quarter, up from 25% in 2023 and 18% in 2022.
Historic “peace trip” by former Taiwanese leader Ma Ying-jeou
Ma Ying-jeou, the former leader of the island of Taiwan from 2008 to 2016, made a peace trip to mainland China where he met with Xi Jinping. At the meeting, Xi affirmed that “there are no problems that cannot be discussed and no forces that can separate us” and that “external interference cannot contain the historical trend of national reunification”. For his part, Ma said that upholding the 1992 Consensus and opposing “Taiwan independence” are the common political basis for the peaceful development of cross-Strait relations.
Ma belongs to Taiwan’s main opposition Kuomintang party, which is more inclined to maintain a friendly relationship with the mainland. The Democratic Progressive Party, which has ruled since 2016, won the last regional elections. In a few days, the new leader William Lai Ching-te, who will succeed Tsai Ing-wen, will take office. Since Tsai came to power in 2016, talks with the central government have been frozen since the Taiwanese government stopped recognizing the 1992 Consensus that respects the One China principle.
It remains to be seen how these relations will develop with the new government. Ma, after his visit to the mainland, urged the elected leader to respond “pragmatically” to Xi Jinping’s call for peace, and to respect the One China principle.
China launches third round of anti-corruption inspections of the financial sector
China launched another series of disciplinary inspections of key government departments and state-owned financial institutions.
The third round of routine inspections, following the last one in 2021, will target 34 agencies, including central government ministries, the central bank, the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges, the largest state-owned banks and insurers, as well as policy lenders.
The anti-corruption campaign launched by Xi Jinping in 2013 has covered all sectors of governance. From ministries, finance, and state-owned enterprises, to health and sports. More than four million CPC regional cadres and 533 at the vice-ministerial level and above have been investigated since the start of the anti-corruption campaign.
Pork prices plummet in China
Chinese pork prices are in a prolonged slump due to oversupply. After peaking at 26 yuan (US$ 3.6) in October 2022, they have now hit a low of 14 yuan (US$ 1.93). This product accounts for 60% of the country’s meat consumption, so fluctuations in its prices have multiple implications.
For a start, it puts deflationary pressure on the Consumer Price Index, which in March rose by 0.1% year-on-year, below the government’s 3% target.
If China decides to reduce the number of pigs raised, it will most likely have an impact on the global grain market, as a decrease in feed demand will put downward pressure on international prices.
In addition, the downward price trend puts producers at risk of bankruptcy and may put many small producers out of production, as has happened on other similar occasions.
That is why the Chinese government started to take action, announcing plans to reduce its target number of breeding sows by about 5% starting in March, from 41 million to 39 million. In addition, it will consider 92% of that target (about 35.9 million sows) as an acceptable level.
China’s coastal cities will be below sea level within a century
A quarter of China’s coastal land will sink below sea level within a century, according to a new study by Chinese and US researchers published in the journal Science. They found that about one-third of the population of the 82 cities analyzed live in regions that drop more than 3 mm per year, while 7% live in areas that drop more than 10 mm per year. The paper also found that 270 million Chinese currently live on subsiding land.
Changes in groundwater and the weight of construction would be among the reasons, and a possible solution could lie in long-term control of groundwater extraction.
Subsidence causes cracks in the ground, damages buildings, and increases the risk of flooding. In addition, land subsidence-related disasters in China have injured or killed hundreds of people and cost an annual direct economic loss of more than 7.5 billion yuan (US$1 billion) in recent decades.
The team mapped the subsidence of cities between 2015 and 2022 using a technique powered by the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 satellites to measure vertical land movement.
New university graduates choose smaller cities for work
Chinese university graduates are increasingly opting to leave the country’s major cities and seek employment in smaller cities and counties. According to a Mycos survey, in 2018, only 20% of respondents were working in counties and cities six months after graduation, but this figure increased to 25% by 2022.
It’s because graduates want to move closer to family and avoid the pressure that comes with working in big cities. Counties and cities also offer more opportunities to get public sector jobs.
Nearly 60% of respondents working in counties and cities had been in the same place for at least five years and their average monthly income had increased from 4,640 yuan ($641) in 2018 to 5,377 yuan in 2022. Their average job satisfaction rate increased from 67% to 76% during the same period.
Some regions push policies aimed at promoting the return of graduates to their hometowns. For example, Suichang County in Zhejiang Province offers those with master’s degrees a housing allowance of 300,000 yuan and an annual living allowance of 30,000 yuan for five years.
The importance of “peace” in the rhetoric of the West lies not in the sincerity with which it is preached. Rather “peace”, like the DIE dogma emerging from the recent Awakening Crusade (Wokism) is a term of invidious distraction. The intensity and frequency of its use is determined by the underlying concept of domination. As opposed to actual peace, i.e. the absence of hostilities, “peace” is a political and psychological warfare device deployed for what could be called “terminological” or “linguistic” denial.
Just as the US Forces, operating behind the United Nations banner in Korea, wantonly destroyed civilian infrastructure from 1951-1953 in order to deny Koreans access to their own country, the strategic aim of “peace”, in whatever form it is praised or promoted, is to deny enemies not only the control of the story line (the cliché “narrative” applies here) but also of the vocabulary to express their interests. Saturation bombing, the West’s tactic of choice, applies to language as well as to dropping high explosive as a means to silence the foe.
Deprived of the use of the terminology of peace, the defendants opposing Western aggression are forced to use the language of war. As a result, pleas to avoid or prevent war can be translated into belligerent intentions. The West has led the world in the development and proliferation of public deliberative bodies, electoral machinery and mass media. The constant praise and attention given to parliaments, congresses and legislative assemblies is not an expression of vital democratic processes or the active translation of popular will into government action. Instead the purpose of these bodies and the mechanisms for filling them with people is to create and maintain what are best understood as public language machines. Qualifications for membership, beyond certain demographic specifications, demonstrate potential capacity to produce and reproduce the systemic language output the surplus of which is deployed to overwhelm or occlude any other forms of expression.
This overproduction of verbiage and cant is often decried as a malfunction of deliberative assemblies. However that is an error. Just as a jury trial should not be confused with scientific fact-finding and assessment, the written product of deliberative assemblies is not the distillation of popular will.
The difference between philosophy and science, a relatively recent distinction, is that philosophy comprises exercises in how to respond to explanations (hierarchical verbal behaviour) while science comprises the exercises in verbalizing the non-verbal, sometimes known as facts or the real world, i.e. the empirical frontier. Philosophy was once subsumed by theology and science was nothing more than a more detailed articulation of the statements subsumed by philosophy, in turn subsumed by theology. So human experience at the empirical frontier was subsumed by religious categories and thus governed by those especially privileged and empowered to approve or disapprove the order in which those statements were subsumed. These approvals in turn were subsumed by theocratic explanations the termination of which was “god”.
For what has turned out to be a brief period, less than two hundred years, science comprised practices and explanations that largely dispensed with theological termini. Toward the end of the 20th century, that changed. Science was reintegrated into religion. Instead of science being the collective and individual activity of investigating the empirical frontier and producing statements and practices that facilitated the useful manipulation of the environment, Science became the system in which Truth was uttered through rituals and sacraments prescribed by largely inaccessible sacred texts. The trigger for this reversal of humanism and return to a sacerdotal system was the Manhattan Project. The largest single scientific research project in modern history, the Manhattan Project captured virtually every scholarly and technical faculty in the US to produce the greatest weapon of mass destruction ever invented. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the ultimate demonstration of Western nihilism. This gratuitous crucifixion of two entire cities not only raised the United States to the primacy of violence. It also demonstrated the culmination of Western imperialism. As Harvard professor Samuel Huntington concisely remarked in his notorious book Clash of Civilizations (1994):
The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.
The organization that produced these weapons and gave the United States the power of international extortion also destroyed what remained of independent science. At the same time the enormous – billions in today’s money—funds that built the fission bombs and later the thermonuclear (hydrogen) bombs also began the rampant manipulation of living matter known as genetic engineering. Together these two technologies of future terror were wrapped in permanent secrecy. A new priesthood was created. Instead of doctors of divine theology ordained by bishops and ruled by an absolutist pope in Rome, this new sacerdotal class was ordained with security clearances, i.e. access to secrets and sacred oaths to keep them. The possession of superhuman destructive power was initially concealed by myths of wartime necessity. Until the 1970s, the pontiffs on the Potomac preached that such a horrible weapon would be sinful to use. They also did whatever was possible to prevent other nations from sharing this weaponry. Then the rhetoric of “peace” was applied once the Soviet Union had detonated its own atomic bombs, culminating with the Tsar Bomba. Disarmament and arms control were pursued by the US Government as a means of concealing the original intent of the weapons and the subsequent technological advances as well as impeding Soviet weapons development. Conveniently ignoring the acquisition of atomic bomb building capacity by the state that occupied Palestine after 1947, the US also successfully concealed the fact that its atomic bomb was built to destroy the Soviet Union (and eventually the People’s Republic of China). Despite the declassification of the Sandia oral history of US strategic policy—in which these objectives had been very clearly articulated—the “peace” screen has hidden the atomic core of US aggressive policy from most of the public, both in the US and abroad.
This concealment was an intentional product of the restructuring of Science as the cult of national war policy, euphemistically called “defence”. The complement to this restoration of religious control over the pursuit of scientific knowledge was the imposition of the private-public partnership known as the United Nations. Advertised as a “new and improved” version of the League of Nations formed after the Great War, this union of the victors from the Second World War was supposed to guard the world from future ravages of war. It initially comprised five bodies. The administration was vested in the Secretariat. The general powers were awarded to a representative General Assembly comprising all member-states on the principle of one state-one vote. The task of peacekeeping was vested in the Security Council selected by the General Assembly with each of the leading Allied powers (the US, UK, France, the USSR and Republic of China) endowed with a veto over any decision taken by the Security Council (and thus a check on potential majorities that might form in the General Assembly). In addition an Economic and Social Council was charged with social development issues and the Trusteeship Council was erected to deal with what the Charter called “non-self-governing territories”, i.e. countries still subject to League of Nations mandate or colonial rule. Quickly the Economic and Social Council and the Trusteeship Council were relegated to the backwaters of international diplomacy. The General Assembly was reduced to a debating society. In essence the Security Council and the international diplomatic corps employed by the Secretariat became the only functional organs of this great peacekeeping institution.
It did not take long before even the pretence of peacekeeping became a dead letter. The senior intergovernmental organization of the post-war era is itself party to the longest continuing war in modern history—the US invasion of the Republic of Korea in 1945, the civil war it triggered and the United Nations (US in cognito) forces, less the now defunct Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, against the people of Korea, since 1951 constituted as the People’s Democratic Republic (North) and the Republic of Korea (South). There has not been a single armed conflict since 1945 in which the United Nations, acting through the Security Council, has successfully prevented war or restored peace. On the contrary, the domination of the Security Council by the United States has assured that the so-called Blue Helmets have become the Trojan horses for the Western powers in every part of the world they were deployed. Their principal mission has been to prevent local populations from deciding their internal affairs in any way that might conflict with the interests of the United States, Great Britain or France.
How is it that such sacred trust as the world was told it could place in this great peacekeeping institution could be so consistently betrayed no sooner than the ink had dried in San Francisco? Surely the member-states, initially 45 and now 194, would object to such hypocrisy and aggressive exploitation of international organs. Wasn’t everyone agreed that the horrors of war, demonstrated in the carnage from the Oder to the Yalu between 1936 and 1945, were awful enough? After all the Kellogg-Briand Pact adopted in the interwar period as a cornerstone of international law has not been repudiated by any of the permanent members of the Security Council. Why do governments and peoples accept this regime of constant war against peoples and their human rights to peaceful development and self-determination?
There are major obstacles and they were built into the system, not accidentally but by virtue of the absolute command of destructive power held by the United States and its vassals. First of all there was the secret power of the atomic bomb and the US regime’s demonstrated willingness to use it against civilians en masse. Then there was the veto power bestowed upon three of the empires with the least interest in any change of the status quo. Although not formally part of the United Nations organization, the Bretton Woods accords created, under US control, the weapons of mass economic destruction known as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The Second World War had devastated most of the world’s industrial capacity and disrupted international trade. This left the US not only with its tools for financial manipulation. It created a global captive market for the only country whose industrial and agricultural capacity was untouched by the previous thirty years of violent havoc. Finally the destruction of state power in much of the world extended to both political and civil institutions. It gave the United States oligopoly in the market for consumer goods and information, including entertainment.
Although the Soviet Union had armed itself with powerful atomic weapons this was a purely defensive posture. As US experts knew the USSR would need at least 20 years to recover both in terms of population and economy to pre-war levels. When POTUS Harry Truman repudiated the Yalta agreements concluded by his predecessor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, he aggravated the conditions that would isolate the Soviet Union from the rest of the world. By refusing to recognize the People’s Republic of China, the US enforced the de facto blockade of most of Asia. This would be magnified by carpet-bombing Korea and Vietnam, instigating the murder of some one million Indonesians and the continuing slaughter of Congolese and other inhabitants of Central Africa. Cuba, still subject to a blockade the UN cannot end, is the only country that has been able to resist invasion by US/ UN troops or proxies.
So what does the United Nations really do, if it does not keep the peace?
As the pinnacle of international and intergovernmental diplomacy, the United Nations is the highest deliberative body on the planet. And there it is possible to see its true function. The United Nations is an institution created for distraction and denial. Within its chambers, talk of “peace” substitutes for peace. Its specialized agencies are staffed primarily by agents and assets of the US and its vassals, who owe their assignments and extensive diplomatic privileges to the patronage of the US and the corporations for which it stands. Instead of supporting member-states with the putative expertise available, these transnational bureaucrats apply the resources fed to the United Nations to manipulate national and local policies. Even the promise of appointments or the extension of membership privileges to the diplomatic corps of small and medium-sized states provides bribery or extortion at arm’s length for the corporate interests and foreign policies of the Allied permanent members. The absolute veto power prevents any serious initiative from the General Assembly from being carried into action even if adopted by large majorities in that house.
The “talk” of peace and peacekeeping is not only the inalienable prerogative of the paramount member. By virtue of the control US-based corporations hold over the global mass media, even that talk can erupt at will into a tsunami of “peace” and “reconciliation” or “human rights” or “free enterprise”. The subsequent flood drowns any alternative voices along with arguments and proposals that do not accord with the will of the US oligarchy. As recently as March of this year, a popular conservative journalist-commentator, Tucker Carlson, was told point blank by the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, that even his most open, vocal and visible acts of goodwill toward the owners of the US and NATO would not be heard. Just like the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China have no control over global mass media. There may be fans of genuine Russian vodka and millions may dine regularly on some version of Chinese cuisine. Yet none of this competes with Coca Cola and Levis. India may produce more films than Hollywood. Russian composers and authors may enjoy international fame. Everyone has heard of the Great Wall and has thousands of things stamped somewhere “Made in China”. Yet when peace is spoken in Moscow or Beijing it is still translated in the West as “not war”.
For decades the vast majority of UN member-states have demanded an end to the atrocities by which the occupation of Palestine is enforced through a settler-colonial state apparatus. Yet the onus for peace is placed not on those who monopolize not only armed force and the language of “peace”. Instead the language of “peace” is applied together with incarceration, torture, murder and mayhem against those who pray for peace itself. Intergovernmental instruments and diplomacy are used aggressively to suppress any peace not commensurate with abject surrender.
At least twenty million Soviet citizens died as a result of the West’s invasion of the Soviet Union by combined forces of Nazi Germany and occupied Ukraine. However the only deaths counted are the estimated six to seven million from Western Europe. The Western Allies in that massive slaughter regularly commemorate their Normandy invasion, only launched to deny the fruits of its unilateral defeat of the Wehrmacht. Until their viceroy, Boris Yeltsin, was replaced by the current President of the Russian Federation, this contempt and its underlying motives were ceremoniously concealed. Meanwhile the deliberative language machines have turned the invasion of the Soviet Union, known as Operation Barbarossa, into a boxing match between the Western devil and the Eastern devil. The Wehrmacht and the Waffen SS are honored today, e.g. in the Canadian parliament, as early heroes of the continuous battle against Russia. This is not hypocrisy or a mistake. Rather it is the admission of what “peace in our time” was intended to deliver. The some 20 million Chinese that were killed by the Japanese invasion, tolerated by the West in its morbid desire for the extermination of communists, do not count at all. Yet a fraction of the overall war deaths continues to justify the occupation of the Middle East by Euro-Americans. To begin the continuing body count in the Congo—well over ten million since Belgium withdrew (after assassinating its first prime minister)—would be pointless. “Peace” in Africa still means the size of the “piece” of Africa owned or controlled by Western corporations—the same corporations that also profited by the deaths in Eastern Europe from 1939 – 1945.
The United Nations is not useless as many are tempted to claim. On the contrary it has proven to be a very useful and highly profitable enterprise. By dominating international diplomatic language it diverts attention from the substance of diplomacy. As a cutout for covert military action and subversion, the United Nations diverts attention from the real belligerents in a world long dehydrated by war. Moreover, by its appropriation of the sacerdotal Science instituted since the Manhattan Project, the United Nations and its specialized agencies suppress genuine scientific investigation and the knowledge needed to remedy the illnesses caused by empires that refuse to die—or worse, that will only die by applying diversity, inclusion and equity to the graveyard to which their owners send people every day.
There is a place for true diplomacy in the world. Conflicts among peoples are just as natural as they are among individuals. Problems solved also expose or create new ones to investigate and solve. That is what science with a small “s” promises humans. In fact that is the essence of humanism. Every explanation implies an organization. Conversely every organization can be understood as an explanation. The United Nations is an organization based on the explanation whose regress is terminated with the atomic bomb. Nearly seventy years cannot alter the fact that an organization borne with the genetic code of atomic annihilation will reproduce death in every generation. If talk of “peace” is to be replaced by peaceful action then clearly a new explanation for international relations is necessary. The language machines created for perpetual war have to be abandoned and real human beings restored to their dignity which includes restoring their language and their voices.
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.
A United Nations (UN) report recently emerged making damning claims of sexual violence allegedly committed by Hamas. But not all is as it seems. The report has some glaring epistemological problems, all of which seem to serve the Israeli narrative that its genocide in Gaza is somehow justified. Moreover, the report fits within a wider modus operandi on the part of the world’s preeminent international institution. A more comprehensive examination of the history of the UN’s role in the conflict in Palestine reveals its supposed pro-Palestinian bias is not as clearcut as it’s commonly presented. Indeed, there is evidence that the UN has, if anything, been more a tool of Israel than the other way round.
Shocking accusations swiftly weaponized by Israel
The UN released the report on March 4, almost six months after the surprise October 7 attack when members of Hamas’ paramilitary wing breached the Gaza border. Co-authored by its special envoy on sexual violence, Pramila Patten, the document claims there are “reasonable grounds to believe” that Hamas engaged in rape and other forms of sexual violence during the attack. Patten gave a statement in which she said that this took place in “at least three locations” including “the Nova music festival site and its surroundings, Road 232, and Kibbutz Re’im.”
The following day, Israel’s foreign minister, Israel Katz, publicly condemned UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres for supposedly failing to respond in an adequate manner. Specifically, he criticized Guterres for failing to immediately call for a UN Security Council meeting about the report’s findings. However, as multiple media outlets have pointed out, Guterres does not have the authority to convene a General Assembly meeting. A UN spokesperson responded that “in no way, shape, or form did the secretary-general do anything to keep the report ‘quiet.’” She added that Katz’s announcement was made a matter of hours before a press conference about the report’s contents was scheduled to be held.
Recalling UN ambassador and launching ‘hasbara’ propaganda campaign
Israel has also withdrawn its ambassador to the UN, claiming that the organization’s leadership is attempting to “silence” the allegations. Katz said in a statement: “”I [have] ordered our ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, to return to Israel for immediate consultations regarding the attempt to keep quiet the serious UN report on the mass rapes committed by Hamas and its helpers on Oct. 7.”
Nonetheless, there are already signs that the Israeli government is seizing on the report as part of its ongoing propaganda campaign to deflect criticism from its committal of ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza. On March 7, the Jerusalem Postreported that Katz, “has directed all embassies within the State of Israel to begin a large-scale hasbara (public diplomacy) campaign immediately… in light of the findings of the UN report on sexual violence in the Hamas massacre on October 7.”
An inversion of the Israeli narrative about the UN
The development represents an inversion of what Israel and Western media commonly characterize as the usual dynamic between the UN and the various parties to the conflict in Palestine. According to this narrative, the UN has a viciously anti-Israel agenda and consistently singles out Israel for criticism. Indeed, hardline Zionists have long complained that the UN is “biased” or even prejudiced against Israel, which often goes alongside the usual conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism.
One US-based Israel supporter even set up an NGO called “UN Watch,” which according to its executive director “holds the UN to account” for its supposed anti-Israel bias. Indeed, we will presumably soon hear an Israeli narrative that presents the fact that the UN has produced such a report in spite of such a bias as the most definitive proof possible that its findings are correct. But a deeper investigation shows that the report is, in fact, deeply flawed in both its methods and conclusions.
A compendium of unverified anecdotes and repetition of Israeli lies
It has already emerged, for instance, that the team of UN personnel who produced the report did not conduct their own research. Tellingly, press reports have also revealed that they did not even meet with any survivors of sexual violence that allegedly took place on October 7. Rather, they relied to a large extent on anecdotal and unverified reports from institutions in Israel. According to CNN, the UN team met with a total of 33 Israeli institutions. One of these was a “search and rescue” organization that has previously been accused of spreading misinformation about the October 7 Hamas attack. This same organization, for example, had earlier claimed that it found a pregnant woman who had been stabbed in the stomach in an apparent attack on her fetus, which turned out to be unverified.
Foreign Policy magazine pointed out that the report furthermore “did not attribute the sexual violence to any specific armed group.” In other words, even if the allegations are true, they could have been committed by Palestinians (or, indeed, non-Palestinians) who were not affiliated with Hamas or any other Palestinian paramilitary organization. Foreign Policy added that “the U.N. team behind the report had not been tasked with an investigative mission” and that “[s]uch attribution would require a fully-fledged investigative process.”
A similar story plays out at the New York Times
The report was released in the same week that it emerged that significant sections of a New York Times article published in December of last year, which contained similar claims, were in fact false. The story, titled “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.,” claimed that members of the Be’eri kibbutz in southern Israel near the Gaza border had been raped by Hamas assailants during the course of the October 7 attack.
But The Interceptreported on March 7 that at least two of the three women “were not in fact victims of sexual assault,” according to a spokesperson of the kibbutz. The Intercept article adds that some of the initial reports about sexual violence came from an anonymous paramedic who had been connected to the international media by a representative of the Israeli government (which, of course, makes this person’s testimony highly suspect). It also states that the kibbutz spokesperson herself “disputed the graphic and highly detailed claims of the Israeli special forces paramedic who served as the source for the allegation, which was published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and other media outlets.”
Not an isolated incident, but the latest chapter in a long history
Neither the UN report nor the erroneous New York Times article would be the first cases of Western institutions or its corporate-owned media spreading misinformation on Israel’s behalf. Indeed, there is a long history of The New York Times specifically taking orders from the Israeli government and its NGO proxies in the Israel lobby. In 2014, for example, the Timesdeliberately failed to report on the arrest of a Palestinian journalist by Israeli authorities because Israel had ordered it to do so. In 2022, the Timesfired a Palestinian photographer on its staff at the behest of the pro-Israel NGO Honest Reporting.
Even when there is no direct evidence of Israeli intervention, leadership of mainstream corporate media across the West seem to have an almost automatic tendency to sideline, silence and/or fire any of its staff who fail to toe the pro-Israel line. In 2018, CNN fired Marc Lamont Hill for making a pro-Palestinian remark at a UN meeting held on the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. The Washington-based publication The Hillsacked Katie Halper in 2022 after she described Israel as an apartheid state (a charge that has become mainstream even within Israel). And the UK’s Guardian newspaper fired Nathan J. Robinson in 2021 after he posted a satirical comment about the US’s military funding to Israel on social media.
Countless resolutions but never any concrete sanction
As for the UN, though there have been many resolutions condemning Israel’s human rights abuses against Palestinians, the organization has seldom imposed any concrete punitive measures against the country in response. Indeed, as political scientist Norman Finkelstein has pointed out, the reason why the UN keeps issuing so many resolutions condemning Israel is because Israel (with the encouragement of its backers in Washington) simply ignores them and continues to violate Palestinian human rights and international law.
In any case, it is the UN General Assembly, rather than the UN’s leadership or staff, that usually issues these condemnations. The UN General Assembly is made up of representatives of governments around the world and so is more representative of global public opinion than the UN’s internal bureaucracy. In any case, General Assembly resolutions can be vetoed by permanent members of the UN Security Council. Since one of those permanent members is the United States (whose number one ally is Israel), it always vetoes any resolution that condemns Israel anyway.
UN staff slammed by leadership when critical of Israel
Even when UN officials themselves criticize Israel, they sometimes do so only to get silenced or sidelined by the UN’s hierarchy. For instance, international relations scholar at Princeton University Richard Falk served for decades as a UN expert on the conflict in Palestine. Yet his work has often been thwarted by figures within the UN leadership and administration.
In 2017, for example, Falk published a report on Israel’s human rights violations through the UN’s Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (UNESCWA). The head of UNESCWA, Rima Khalaf, said that the report represented the first time that any UN report has “clearly and frankly conclude[d] that Israel is a racist state that has established an apartheid system that persecutes the Palestinian people.”
The fact that Israel is practicing apartheid in the occupied territories is so obvious that former US president Jimmy Carter, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and even Israel’s own human rights organization, B’Tselem, have said so. Even some figures from Israel’s own political, military, intelligence, and legal elite have said so too. Yet in spite of this, Secretary General António Guterres demanded that Khalaf withdraw Falk’s report.
Legitimizing the two-state charade while deplatforming the one-state alternative
Another way that the UN subtly serves the Israeli narrative is its elevation of a two-state solution as the best, and indeed only, means of resolving the conflict. Every resolution passed by the UN General Assembly calling for a resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict is predicated on one Israeli state and one Palestinian state divided by the borders that existed prior to the June 1967 war. This would deliver to Israel 78% of the land that made up historic Palestine while leaving the Palestinians with the remaining 22%. In addition to giving the two sides a completely unfair share of the land (especially considering the rough parity in population numbers), this division would also reward the Zionist landgrab and subsequent ethnic cleansing that took place in the latter half of the 1940s.
The traditional solution that was proffered by all Palestinian nationalist parties before the 1993 Oslo accord, meanwhile, (that is, a single, secular, non-sectarian democratic state with equal rights for all encompassing the whole of historic Palestine) has been systematically suppressed and deplatformed by the UN’s leadership. Former official Craig Mokhiber was essentially forced to resign for reasons of conscience before publicly voicing his support for the rival one-state solution – again highlighting how the UN hierarchy sidelines those who it considers too pro-Palestinian.
In a public letter published just as he resigned, Mokhiber stated that the two-state solution has become an “open joke in the corridors of the UN, both for its utter impossibility in fact, and for its total failure to account for the inalienable human rights of the Palestinian people.” During a media interview shortly after he added: “When people [who work at the UN] are not talking from official talking points, you hear increasingly about a one-state solution.”
The two-state smokescreen
This deliberate deplatforming of the one-state solution and narrow focus on its two-state rival serves an important purpose for Israel. Though Israel opposes even the resolutions in favor of two states (presumably because they insist that such a settlement should be based on internationally recognized borders), it nonetheless benefits from the elevation of the two-state solution. This is because it creates a convenient smokescreen for Israel to deliberately stall on making peace while continuing to displace Palestinians in the West Bank, establish settlements in their place, and build infrastructure for the exclusive use of Israeli settlers – all of which is illegal under international law.
Israel does this as part of a duplicitous sleight of hand in which it publicly proclaims support for a two-state solution while simultaneously itself creating a situation on the ground that makes that solution impossible. It does this for the simple reason that the goal of Zionism from the outset has been the establishment of a Jewish-majority state encompassing all of historic Palestine with the Palestinians ethnically cleansed out of it. As political scientist Rosalind Petchesky puts it in A Land With A People, “the settler colonial project to ‘de-Arabise Palestine’ and bring all of historic Palestine under Zionist sovereignty long pre-dated both the Nakba and worldwide knowledge of the Nazi holocaust.”
Time to rethink the role of the UN
Given the UN’s role in providing cover for the continuation of this process all while posturing as the primary locomotive toward peace, it is high time that Palestinians and their supporters stop looking up to it as a source of truth and meaningful condemnation of Israel’s human rights violations. Clearly, there is growing evidence that the supposed anti-Israel bias of the UN is a myth concocted to benefit Israel. Evidently, if there’s any bias at the world’s preeminent international institution, it is against the Palestinians rather than the other way round.
Europe was burning. Or so I had heard in many media outlets before I boarded a flight to Europe. According to various hysterical outlets in the West, philistines were surging up through Gibraltar and other southbound nodes of ingress to destabilize European culture, that high-flown redoubt of wine and song and literature and art. Lisbon, as I discovered somewhat disappointedly, was serene. No flaming cathedrals. No barricades on the boulevards. Only the prosaic reproduction of daily life, at work in a thousand pastelerias and padarias. Hordes of tourists, like arctic ice floes, coursed through the cobblestone streets with a practiced regularity.
Echoes
These first-world problems felt embarrassingly inconsequential when I turned on the television and saw, with the tiresome predictably of political failure, the latest urgent update on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The airwaves had been crammed with urgent reports from Gaza for some four months now. Hamas had attacked and killed ___. The IDF had attacked and killed ___. All the usual suspects lined up, waiting their cue to go before the cameras. The reporters, always posing as impartial journalists who were deeply concerned for the safety of civilians in the conflict zone, found perches with skyline views where they could point to bombed buildings and streets (hopefully still smoking from the latest attack). Aid workers were summoned to issue urgent appeals for humanitarian assistance and an immediate ceasefire, a demand that felt as feckless as it was rote. Various intellectuals were brought on to gravely explain the roots of the conflict. Several spoke of heartbreak. And lastly the political actors, tiresome in their strident assurances of a just and fierce response. Their singular purpose appeared to be maintaining a posture and position that brooked no dissent, no counterpoint, and yielded to no mitigating circumstances.
The television flickers with images of aftermath. These crises emerged semi-annually for as long as I could remember. Violence was met with violence. Human madness was as strong as ever. The Israeli-Palestine war was the longest running drama in the theater of hate. The principled college freshman I had seen accusing Starbucks of facilitating genocide did not know the weariness of talking truth for years to no effect.
Veteran independent journalist Chris Hedges put it best, bitterly noting: “How can you trap 2.3 million people in Gaza, half of whom are unemployed, in one of the most densely populated spots on the planet for 16 years, reduce the lives of its residents, half of whom are children, to a subsistence level, deprive them of basic medical supplies, food, water and electricity, use attack aircraft, artillery, mechanized units, missiles, naval guns and infantry units to randomly slaughter unarmed civilians and not expect a violent response?”
Assigning blame is the ne plus ultra of Middle East politics. Lately the fault lies with the settler colonial regimes. Here the Israelis take after the Americans, of course, with their unexampled template of having exterminated an entire population in order to claim a continent. They also follow the National Socialists of Hitler’s Germany, which waged a devastating and fatal war on Russia because, according to some accounts, the Nazis too wanted their lebensraum, a backyard, to put it plainly. A resource rich hinterland that all empires surely require (United States and Latin America; the Brits and India; France and North Africa). Everyone needs a backyard. An “inevitable expansion” was the birthright of all imperial powers and superior races, as der fuhrer put it. In this case, Israel says it is reclaiming lost territory.
The historian Samuel Huntington put it like this:
The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.
The numbers suggest as much: 26,000 dead; 63,000 injured; 360,000 housing units destroyed; 1.7M people displaced; 93 percent of the population face a hunger crisis.
Meanwhile, the U.S. vetoes UN Security Council resolutions demanding a ceasefire and the resumption of aid deliveries to defenseless civilians, including food, water, medical supplies, electricity, communications technology, and so on.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivered a fairly damning if disappointingly opaque ruling last month. The ruling on the case nobly introduced by South Africa, which knows about the deprivations of apartheid, established that Israeli actions against Palestinians could reasonably fall within the provisions of the Genocide Convention.
Israel argued self-defense. But as most ambitious nations learn, often too late, as the collapse of their empires bury their ambitions, force does not ensure the security of a people, as the erstwhile French Prime Minister Dominique De Villepin said not long after the October surprise. He went on. Neither force nor vengeance ensures peace and security; what ensures peace and security is justice. Of course this astute if not self-evident statement will be scrupulously ignored as Netanyahu and his radical minions feverishly advance the razing of Gaza. Hamas, elected by Palestinians years ago, will plot their next furious attacks, and scurry through underground tunnels as the bombs rattle the air above them.
A Failed Media Strategy
The coverage of the atrocity weighs in the balance against the essential construct of the occupation, and the dysfunctional relationship between occupier and the occupied. The former is forbidden by international law to attack those it has brutally colonized; the latter conversely has the legal right to resist the occupation, even violently. This fact changes the conversation; it changes the understanding of Palestinian violence; it reduces the condemnatory impulse in sympathizers. Even if to understand is not to forgive and to forgive is not to forget.
Israel and Western media have attempted to elide the wider context from the discussion with a range of tactics. Principally, the “conflict” always seems to begin when Palestinians attack, not when Israel attacks, or oppresses, or suppresses. This conveniently establishes the chronological timeline of the present conflict with Palestinian violence, nicely bookending the story with timestamps that remove the historical backdrop from sight. It is as Theodor Adorno said in another context, “The violence done to them makes us forget the violence they did.” Other tactics include tarring critics with the broad brush of antisemitism; narratives that make Palestinians out to be irrational death cult aggressors and Israel as innocent victims; and a raft of disingenuous vocabulary such as the use of “conflict” for “occupation” and “atrocity” for “resistance.” While both terms may be true the former terms elide the crucial context.
The ICJ ruling will predictably receive scant attention in the mainstream. At best coverage will be diversionary, like that of The Economist. Another story has taken its place. An accusation by Israel that a small group of United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) employees helped plan the October 7th attacks on Israel. This claim, having been made by Israel for months, evidence having been obtained via military interrogations of prisoners, supplied by a country with a vested interest in limiting exposure of the ICJ ruling, commands the headlines. The Biden administration immediately cut funding to the UNRWA, which is the main UN organ of Palestinian aid, an act that violates collective punishment strictures in the Geneva Conventions which model international humanitarian law. But this media misdirection does its job of giving the media something else to talk about aside from the ICJ.
This framing reflects the imperial ambitions of the West. The state of Israel was founded most likely not to establish a homeland for Jews but rather to establish a foothold in the Middle East controllable by Washington. Perhaps this is too cynical, but the amount of intolerable behavior countenanced and enabled by Washington suggests as much.
As such, the mainstream media presents the perspective of its owners, elite capital interests that are the true rulers of society. The ruling ideas of any society are the ideas of the ruling class. It is the corporate media that disseminates the ideas. You can be sure the storylines will flatter the owners and protect their interests, locating them neatly beneath an umbrella of moral piety.
But it is not working. The rise of social media has expanded the world’s understanding of the situation: the original ethnic cleansing of the Nakba, the brutal occupation, a mix of apartheid reservations and furious efforts to drive Palestinians into Egypt, cruelty and deprivation the common feature. The world population knows enough now about the settler colonial ambitions of Israel and the concentration camp conditions it imposes on a group of people that appear, quite rightly, to have a clear grievance. The weight of this emerging social consciousness—driven by non-mainstream reportage—is changing the debate in the West. But it has not yet been enough to stop the carnage.
I saw a quote in Lisbon from Nietzsche scrawled on a white tile in a neighborhood bar that said, “He who has a why can bear any how.” The quote is truncated; the “a why to live for” and “almost any how” are shortened; the meaning is changed. But it made me think of Israel-Palestine. The religious zealotry; the intra-semite enmity; the blood in the soil; the whys make some appalling hows bearable.
As the WEF and WHO drum up fear of “Disease X” there is a new set of narrative gatekeepers assembling a phony Dream Team of ‘covid dissidents.’ The trouble is most of them supported all the mandates! Phony COVID Dissidents: Beware the Dream Team Narrative Police
We are won over by “words that work” from an Israeli training manual.
Hasbara has become a dirty word, thanks to it’s dirt practitioners and the dirty job they are trained to do.
It’s Hebrew for Israel’s sophisticated public relations machinery that’s set up to cynically justify the Jewish entity’s crimes and to create for Israel a “brand image” completely at odds with the ugly truth.
Fiction and distortion are among hasbara’s standard propaganda tools used for spinning fairy tales and propagating disinformation. And it is very effective, up to a point. The reason why it will ultimately fail is that it has very poor material to work with. You cannot behave like psychopaths and disguise it forever. You cannot trample other peoples’ rights and freedoms, and destroy their property, and expect to be loved. You cannot keep your jackboot on your neighbour’s neck for 75 years and expect to call yourself civilised and in tune with Western values. You cannot steal his lands, water and livelihood at gunpoint and claim the moral high ground.
And you certainly cannot create a wholesome brand image from bullshit.
I wrote this 10 years ago, and nothing has changed, only got worse.
Israel’s book of lies
The great mystery is why Western politicians and media outlets, after 75 years of Israel’s existence, are still so ignorant about what’s been happening and the countless crimes committed in pursuit of Zionist ambitions.
Israel’s propagandists have a training manual that teaches the art of hasbara – the sugarcoating techniques and downright lying to persuade the gullible to swallow their poison.
Notice how everything Israelis dislike, and everything that thwarts their lust for domination, is now labelled “Iranian-backed” or “Hamas controlled”. They’d have us all believe we are in mortal danger from Iran and must huddle together in a collective act of aggression orchestrated by Tel Aviv, Washington and London.
The 116-page instruction manual, called the 2009 Global Language Dictionary, was produced by The Israel Project (TIP), which says it is “devoted to educating the press and the public about Israel while promoting security, freedom and peace”. It was written specially for those “on the front lines of fighting the media war for Israel”.
TIP provides journalists, leaders and opinion-formers with “accurate information about Israel”. Its purpose is to help the worldwide Zionist movement win the propaganda war by persuading international audiences to accept the Israeli narrative and agree that the regime’s crimes are necessary for Israel’s security and in line with “shared values” between Israel and the West. And because God gave them the keys to the Holy Land, their abominable behaviour is deserving of our support.
I suspect Messrs Rishi Sunak, James Cleverly, Keir Starmer and the rest of Israel’s stooges in Westminster carry this training manual in their pocket, which accounts for the claptrap they constantly spout and their inexplicable infatuation with the rogue state.
The manual teaches the propaganda tricks that Israel’s scribblers and drivelers use to try to justify the slaughter, the ethnic cleansing, the land-grabbing, the cruelty and its contempt for international law and UN resolutions, and make it all smell sweet.
They tell us, for example, how many rockets are fired from Gaza into Israel but never how many bombs, rockets and shells (including the illegal and prohibited kind) Israel’s US-taxpayer-funded F-16s, tanks, armed drones and navy gunboats pour into the densely-packed humanity that is Gaza.
And they are careful not to mention, for example, that Ben Gurion airport, which serves Tel Aviv, was formerly Lydda airport. Lydda was a major Arab town and communications hub during the British Mandate and designated Palestinian in the 1947 UN Partition Plan. In July 1948 Israeli terrorists seized the town, shot it up and drove out the population. Donald Neff reported how the Israelis massacred 426 men, women and children. Some 176 were slaughtered in the town’s main mosque.
Out of a population of 19,000, only 1,052 were allowed to stay. Others who survived the killing spree were forced to walk into exile in the scalding July heat, leaving a trail of bodies – men, women and children – along the way. Israel has no right to Lydda at all – they stole it in a terror raid, just like Najd/Sderot and hundreds of other Palestinian cities, towns and villages.
“Captain of Spin” returns
I’m horrified to see Mark Regev making a comeback to our screens and being interviewed by British media. Regev (real name Freiberg) is an ace propagandist, master of disinformation, whitewasher extraordinaire and personal adviser and spokesman for the apartheid regime’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu.
While he was ambassador to the UK one of his senior political officers, Shai Masot, plotted with stooges among British MPs and other maggots in the political woodwork to “take down” senior government figures, including Sir Alan Duncan at the Foreign Office. Masot’s hostile scheming was captured and revealed by an Al Jazeera undercover investigation and not, regrettably, by Britain’s own security services and press. “The UK has a strong relationship with Israel and we consider the matter closed,” said the British government afterwards.
It should have resulted in Regev being kicked out, but he wasn’t.
Regev is quoted several times in the Global Language Dictionary in its attempts to justify Israel’s slaughter, ethnic cleansing, land-grabbing, cruelty and blatant disregard for international law and United Nations resolutions, and to make it all smell sweeter with a liberal squirt of persuasive language. It also incites hatred, particularly towards Hamas and Iran, and is designed to hoodwink all us simple-minded Americans and Europeans into believing we actually share values with the racist regime, and therefore ought to support and forgive its abominable behaviour.
Readers are instructed to “clearly differentiate between the Palestinian people and Hamas” and to drive a wedge between them. The manual features “Words that work” – that is to say, carefully constructed language to deflect criticism and reframe all issues and arguments in Israel’s favour. A statement at the very beginning sets the tone: “Remember, it’s not what you say that counts. It’s what people hear.”
Here’s an example:
Israel made painful sacrifices and took a risk to give peace a chance. They voluntarily removed over 9,000 settlers from Gaza and parts of the West Bank, abandoning homes, schools, businesses and places of worship in the hopes of renewing the peace process.
Despite making an overture for peace by withdrawing from Gaza, Israel continues to face terrorist attacks, including rocket attacks and drive-by shootings of innocent Israelis. Israel knows that for a lasting peace, they must be free from terrorism and live with defensible borders.
Actually, Israel made no sacrifices at all – Gaza wasn’t theirs to keep and staying was unsustainable. Although they removed their settlers and troops, they continued to occupy Gaza’s airspace and coastal waters and control all entrances and exits, thus keeping the population bottled up and provoking acts of resistance that give Israel a bogus excuse to turn Gaza into a prison.
International law regards Israel as still the occupier.
The manual also serves as a communications primer for the army of cyber-scribblers that Israel’s Ministry of Dirty Tricks recruited to spread Zionism’s poison across the internet. It uses some of Regev’s words to provide disinformation essential to the hasbara programme. We’re told, for example, that the most effective way to build support for Israel is to talk about “working toward a lasting peace” that “respects the rights of everyone in the region”.
Here are a few more:
We welcome and we support international efforts to help the Palestinians. So, once again, the Palestinian people are not our enemy. On the contrary, we want peace with the Palestinians.
We’re interested in a historical reconciliation. Enough violence. Enough war. And we support international efforts to help the Palestinians both on the humanitarian level and to build a more successful democratic society. That’s in everyone’s interest.
The central lie, of course, is that Israel wants peace. It doesn’t. It never has. Peace simply does not suit Israel’s purpose, which is endless expansion and control. That is why Israel has never declared its borders, maintains its brutal military occupation and continues its programme of illegal squats, or so-called “settlements”, deep inside Palestinian territory, intending to create sufficient “facts on the ground” to ensure permanent occupation and annexation.
Q: Why did Israel use disproportionate force in Gaza?
A: The devastation in Gaza is heartbreaking. So much suffering that was so unnecessary. And none of it had to happen.
Israel left Gaza – uprooting 9,000 Israeli families, and turned it over, peacefully, to the Palestinians. They had every opportunity to succeed: support from the international community, financial aid from across the globe, and the aspirations of the people.
Israel gave up Gaza with every hope that this was the first step towards peace with the Palestinians, and all they got was rockets in return. Not dozens. Not hundreds. Thousands of rockets. Not monthly. Not weekly. Literally daily. Even since the fighting in Gaza stopped, more than 160 rockets been fired from Gaza towards Israel since Israel stopped fighting.
What would you have done – or wanted your government to do – if you and your family were under rocket attack every day? When will the terrorists in Gaza stop shooting rockets at Israeli civilians?
You and I wouldn’t have been so stupid as to live on land we’d stolen from the Palestinians at gunpoint.
It was the former UN secretary-general, Kofi Anan, that put four benchmarks on the table. And he said, speaking for the international community that
If Hamas reforms itself…
If Hamas recognises my country’s right to live in freedom…
If Hamas renounces terrorism against innocent civilians…
If Hamas supports international agreements that are being signed and agreed to concerning the peace process… then the door is open. But unfortunately – tragically – Hamas has failed to meet even one of those four benchmarks. And that’s why today Hamas is isolated internationally. Even the United Nations refuses to speak to Hamas.
Which of those benchmarks has Israel met, Mr Regev?
Iran must be demonised too, so Regev’s twisted wisdom is used again:
Israel is very concerned about the Iranian nuclear programme. And for good reason.
Iran’s president openly talks about wiping Israel off the map. We see them racing ahead on nuclear enrichment so they can have enough fissile material to build a bomb. We see them working on their ballistic missiles…. The Iranian nuclear programme is a threat, not just to my country, but to the entire region. And it’s incumbent upon us all to do what needs to be done to keep from proliferating.
But how safe is the region under the threat of Israel’s nukes? Why is Israel the only state in the region not to have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty? Are we all supposed to believe that Israel’s 200 (or is it 400?) nuclear warheads pose no threat? And why hasn’t Israel signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, and why has it has signed but not ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, similarly the Chemical Weapons Convention?
As for “wiping Israel off the map”, accurate translations of that remark by former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are: “This regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time” (The Guardian), or “This regime that is occupying Qods [Jerusalem] must be eliminated from the pages of history” (Middle East Media Research Institute). Ahmadinejad was actually repeating a statement once made by Ayatollah Khomeini.
And one more:
When asked a direct question, you don’t have to answer it directly. You are in control of what you say and how you say it. Remember, your goal in doing interviews is not only to answer questions—it is to bring persuadable members of the audience to Israel’s side in the conflict. Start by acknowledging their question and agreeing that both sides – Israelis and Palestinians – deserve a better future. Remind your audience that Israel wants peace. Then focus on shared values. Once you have done this you will have built enough support for you to say what Israel really wants: for the Palestinians to end the violence and the culture of hate so that fences and checkpoints are no longer needed and both sides can live in peace. And for Iran for Iran-backed terrorists in Gaza to stop shooting rockets into Israel so that both sides can have a better future.
A simple rule of thumb is that once you get to the point of repeating the same message over and over again so many times that you think you might get sick – that is just about the time the public will wake up and say “Hey—this person just might be saying something interesting to me!
Why is all this elaborate lying and misquoting necessary? It’s the good old Mossad motto “By deception we shall do war”, ingrained in the Israeli mindset.
And I’m even more horrified to have just seen Trevor Phillips giving Tzipi Livni a platform. This vile woman, Israel’s former foreign minister, was largely responsible for the terror that brought death and destruction to Gaza’s civilians during the blitzkrieg known as Operation Cast Lead. Showing no remorse, and with the blood of 1,400 dead Gazans (including 320 children and 109 women) on her hands and thousands more horribly maimed, Livni’s office issued a statement saying she was proud of it. Speaking later at a conference at Tel Aviv’s Institute for Security Studies, she said: “I would today take the same decisions.”
We are won over by “words that work” from an Israeli training manual.
Hasbara has become a dirty word, thanks to it’s dirt practitioners and the dirty job they are trained to do.
It’s Hebrew for Israel’s sophisticated public relations machinery that’s set up to cynically justify the Jewish entity’s crimes and to create for Israel a “brand image” completely at odds with the ugly truth.
Fiction and distortion are among hasbara’s standard propaganda tools used for spinning fairy tales and propagating disinformation. And it is very effective, up to a point. The reason why it will ultimately fail is that it has very poor material to work with. You cannot behave like psychopaths and disguise it forever. You cannot trample other peoples’ rights and freedoms, and destroy their property, and expect to be loved. You cannot keep your jackboot on your neighbour’s neck for 75 years and expect to call yourself civilised and in tune with Western values. You cannot steal his lands, water and livelihood at gunpoint and claim the moral high ground.
And you certainly cannot create a wholesome brand image from bullshit.
I wrote this 10 years ago, and nothing has changed, only got worse.
Israel’s book of lies
The great mystery is why Western politicians and media outlets, after 75 years of Israel’s existence, are still so ignorant about what’s been happening and the countless crimes committed in pursuit of Zionist ambitions.
Israel’s propagandists have a training manual that teaches the art of hasbara – the sugarcoating techniques and downright lying to persuade the gullible to swallow their poison.
Notice how everything Israelis dislike, and everything that thwarts their lust for domination, is now labelled “Iranian-backed” or “Hamas controlled”. They’d have us all believe we are in mortal danger from Iran and must huddle together in a collective act of aggression orchestrated by Tel Aviv, Washington and London.
The 116-page instruction manual, called the 2009 Global Language Dictionary, was produced by The Israel Project (TIP), which says it is “devoted to educating the press and the public about Israel while promoting security, freedom and peace”. It was written specially for those “on the front lines of fighting the media war for Israel”.
TIP provides journalists, leaders and opinion-formers with “accurate information about Israel”. Its purpose is to help the worldwide Zionist movement win the propaganda war by persuading international audiences to accept the Israeli narrative and agree that the regime’s crimes are necessary for Israel’s security and in line with “shared values” between Israel and the West. And because God gave them the keys to the Holy Land, their abominable behaviour is deserving of our support.
I suspect Messrs Rishi Sunak, James Cleverly, Keir Starmer and the rest of Israel’s stooges in Westminster carry this training manual in their pocket, which accounts for the claptrap they constantly spout and their inexplicable infatuation with the rogue state.
The manual teaches the propaganda tricks that Israel’s scribblers and drivelers use to try to justify the slaughter, the ethnic cleansing, the land-grabbing, the cruelty and its contempt for international law and UN resolutions, and make it all smell sweet.
They tell us, for example, how many rockets are fired from Gaza into Israel but never how many bombs, rockets and shells (including the illegal and prohibited kind) Israel’s US-taxpayer-funded F-16s, tanks, armed drones and navy gunboats pour into the densely-packed humanity that is Gaza.
And they are careful not to mention, for example, that Ben Gurion airport, which serves Tel Aviv, was formerly Lydda airport. Lydda was a major Arab town and communications hub during the British Mandate and designated Palestinian in the 1947 UN Partition Plan. In July 1948 Israeli terrorists seized the town, shot it up and drove out the population. Donald Neff reported how the Israelis massacred 426 men, women and children. Some 176 were slaughtered in the town’s main mosque.
Out of a population of 19,000, only 1,052 were allowed to stay. Others who survived the killing spree were forced to walk into exile in the scalding July heat, leaving a trail of bodies – men, women and children – along the way. Israel has no right to Lydda at all – they stole it in a terror raid, just like Najd/Sderot and hundreds of other Palestinian cities, towns and villages.
“Captain of Spin” returns
I’m horrified to see Mark Regev making a comeback to our screens and being interviewed by British media. Regev (real name Freiberg) is an ace propagandist, master of disinformation, whitewasher extraordinaire and personal adviser and spokesman for the apartheid regime’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu.
While he was ambassador to the UK one of his senior political officers, Shai Masot, plotted with stooges among British MPs and other maggots in the political woodwork to “take down” senior government figures, including Sir Alan Duncan at the Foreign Office. Masot’s hostile scheming was captured and revealed by an Al Jazeera undercover investigation and not, regrettably, by Britain’s own security services and press. “The UK has a strong relationship with Israel and we consider the matter closed,” said the British government afterwards.
It should have resulted in Regev being kicked out, but he wasn’t.
Regev is quoted several times in the Global Language Dictionary in its attempts to justify Israel’s slaughter, ethnic cleansing, land-grabbing, cruelty and blatant disregard for international law and United Nations resolutions, and to make it all smell sweeter with a liberal squirt of persuasive language. It also incites hatred, particularly towards Hamas and Iran, and is designed to hoodwink all us simple-minded Americans and Europeans into believing we actually share values with the racist regime, and therefore ought to support and forgive its abominable behaviour.
Readers are instructed to “clearly differentiate between the Palestinian people and Hamas” and to drive a wedge between them. The manual features “Words that work” – that is to say, carefully constructed language to deflect criticism and reframe all issues and arguments in Israel’s favour. A statement at the very beginning sets the tone: “Remember, it’s not what you say that counts. It’s what people hear.”
Here’s an example:
Israel made painful sacrifices and took a risk to give peace a chance. They voluntarily removed over 9,000 settlers from Gaza and parts of the West Bank, abandoning homes, schools, businesses and places of worship in the hopes of renewing the peace process.
Despite making an overture for peace by withdrawing from Gaza, Israel continues to face terrorist attacks, including rocket attacks and drive-by shootings of innocent Israelis. Israel knows that for a lasting peace, they must be free from terrorism and live with defensible borders.
Actually, Israel made no sacrifices at all – Gaza wasn’t theirs to keep and staying was unsustainable. Although they removed their settlers and troops, they continued to occupy Gaza’s airspace and coastal waters and control all entrances and exits, thus keeping the population bottled up and provoking acts of resistance that give Israel a bogus excuse to turn Gaza into a prison.
International law regards Israel as still the occupier.
The manual also serves as a communications primer for the army of cyber-scribblers that Israel’s Ministry of Dirty Tricks recruited to spread Zionism’s poison across the internet. It uses some of Regev’s words to provide disinformation essential to the hasbara programme. We’re told, for example, that the most effective way to build support for Israel is to talk about “working toward a lasting peace” that “respects the rights of everyone in the region”.
Here are a few more:
We welcome and we support international efforts to help the Palestinians. So, once again, the Palestinian people are not our enemy. On the contrary, we want peace with the Palestinians.
We’re interested in a historical reconciliation. Enough violence. Enough war. And we support international efforts to help the Palestinians both on the humanitarian level and to build a more successful democratic society. That’s in everyone’s interest.
The central lie, of course, is that Israel wants peace. It doesn’t. It never has. Peace simply does not suit Israel’s purpose, which is endless expansion and control. That is why Israel has never declared its borders, maintains its brutal military occupation and continues its programme of illegal squats, or so-called “settlements”, deep inside Palestinian territory, intending to create sufficient “facts on the ground” to ensure permanent occupation and annexation.
Q: Why did Israel use disproportionate force in Gaza?
A: The devastation in Gaza is heartbreaking. So much suffering that was so unnecessary. And none of it had to happen.
Israel left Gaza – uprooting 9,000 Israeli families, and turned it over, peacefully, to the Palestinians. They had every opportunity to succeed: support from the international community, financial aid from across the globe, and the aspirations of the people.
Israel gave up Gaza with every hope that this was the first step towards peace with the Palestinians, and all they got was rockets in return. Not dozens. Not hundreds. Thousands of rockets. Not monthly. Not weekly. Literally daily. Even since the fighting in Gaza stopped, more than 160 rockets been fired from Gaza towards Israel since Israel stopped fighting.
What would you have done – or wanted your government to do – if you and your family were under rocket attack every day? When will the terrorists in Gaza stop shooting rockets at Israeli civilians?
You and I wouldn’t have been so stupid as to live on land we’d stolen from the Palestinians at gunpoint.
It was the former UN secretary-general, Kofi Anan, that put four benchmarks on the table. And he said, speaking for the international community that
If Hamas reforms itself…
If Hamas recognises my country’s right to live in freedom…
If Hamas renounces terrorism against innocent civilians…
If Hamas supports international agreements that are being signed and agreed to concerning the peace process… then the door is open. But unfortunately – tragically – Hamas has failed to meet even one of those four benchmarks. And that’s why today Hamas is isolated internationally. Even the United Nations refuses to speak to Hamas.
Which of those benchmarks has Israel met, Mr Regev?
Iran must be demonised too, so Regev’s twisted wisdom is used again:
Israel is very concerned about the Iranian nuclear programme. And for good reason.
Iran’s president openly talks about wiping Israel off the map. We see them racing ahead on nuclear enrichment so they can have enough fissile material to build a bomb. We see them working on their ballistic missiles…. The Iranian nuclear programme is a threat, not just to my country, but to the entire region. And it’s incumbent upon us all to do what needs to be done to keep from proliferating.
But how safe is the region under the threat of Israel’s nukes? Why is Israel the only state in the region not to have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty? Are we all supposed to believe that Israel’s 200 (or is it 400?) nuclear warheads pose no threat? And why hasn’t Israel signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, and why has it has signed but not ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, similarly the Chemical Weapons Convention?
As for “wiping Israel off the map”, accurate translations of that remark by former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are: “This regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time” (The Guardian), or “This regime that is occupying Qods [Jerusalem] must be eliminated from the pages of history” (Middle East Media Research Institute). Ahmadinejad was actually repeating a statement once made by Ayatollah Khomeini.
And one more:
When asked a direct question, you don’t have to answer it directly. You are in control of what you say and how you say it. Remember, your goal in doing interviews is not only to answer questions—it is to bring persuadable members of the audience to Israel’s side in the conflict. Start by acknowledging their question and agreeing that both sides – Israelis and Palestinians – deserve a better future. Remind your audience that Israel wants peace. Then focus on shared values. Once you have done this you will have built enough support for you to say what Israel really wants: for the Palestinians to end the violence and the culture of hate so that fences and checkpoints are no longer needed and both sides can live in peace. And for Iran for Iran-backed terrorists in Gaza to stop shooting rockets into Israel so that both sides can have a better future.
A simple rule of thumb is that once you get to the point of repeating the same message over and over again so many times that you think you might get sick – that is just about the time the public will wake up and say “Hey—this person just might be saying something interesting to me!
Why is all this elaborate lying and misquoting necessary? It’s the good old Mossad motto “By deception we shall do war”, ingrained in the Israeli mindset.
And I’m even more horrified to have just seen Trevor Phillips giving Tzipi Livni a platform. This vile woman, Israel’s former foreign minister, was largely responsible for the terror that brought death and destruction to Gaza’s civilians during the blitzkrieg known as Operation Cast Lead. Showing no remorse, and with the blood of 1,400 dead Gazans (including 320 children and 109 women) on her hands and thousands more horribly maimed, Livni’s office issued a statement saying she was proud of it. Speaking later at a conference at Tel Aviv’s Institute for Security Studies, she said: “I would today take the same decisions.”
I’ve been thinking for quite awhile how the most depraved position of the Israeli government becomes the baseline view here in the United States, particularly in politics and media. It makes sense that the genocidal, racist, colonial project of Israel would find admiration in the ruling class of a nation founded on indigenous genocide and built by black slavery.
Here in the United States of Israel media, Hamas commits “massacres” but the Israeli government never “massacres” anyone – they do “ground operations.” (The latter typically kills 50-100-1,000 times more civilians than do the Hamas “massacres.” See Wikipedia for “Operation Cast Lead” and “Operation Protective Edge.”) Israeli Jews are “killed” (mostly occupation soldiers) but Palestinians “die” from unknown causes and are kept from food, water, medical supplies, building materials, electricity and the internet by mysterious forces of nature – genocide as a weather event. Oh, wow, it’s raining JDAMs and white phosphorus again.
Strangely, even though Israel has killed over 10,000 Palestinians in three weeks in real life, it never actually killed any Palestinians in mainstream media headlines. Nicholas Maduro and Daniel Ortega are often referred to as “Hitlers” but the Israeli government just murdered over 4,000 Palestinian children in three weeks but this was neither a massacre nor Hitler-like to the US Congress or the New York Times. There are worthy and unworthy victims as Chomsky said.
The US is a stinking trash heap of lies. Its media act as lawyers to frantically justify every Israeli atrocity while its politicians compete to see who is the most bloodthirsty toward Arabs and Persians. When the US empire finally implodes there will be Nuremberg-like trials for many commentators and “reporters” who are nothing but pint-sized Julius Streichers and Eichmanns promoting endless wars, justifying atrocities and vilifying innocents to be exterminated. Every article and news report takes for granted that no number of Palestinian lives have as much value as one Jewish Israeli life.
The racist war criminal Joe Biden says the Gaza Health Authority is lying about how many people Israel is killing even though the world sees on Twitter entire city blocks being flattened, mosques, churches, hospitals, bakeries and UN facilities obliterated, individual homes in northern Gaza already being bulldozed by Zionist soldiers for the upcoming land theft and ethnic cleansing, the second Nakba, 35 Palestinian journalists killed and – not the bare-faced lies of Zionists about beheaded Jewish babies – but real video of Palestinian children with their heads blown off from US-supplied bombs dropped by Israelis. Biden kills innocents then he slanders them. Psychopathic empire filth like Biden, Blinken, Nuland and Sullivan won’t be traveling to many countries because there will be arrest warrants for crimes against humanity.
One of these days millions of Americans are going to get tired of living in Israel’s world, the world of censorship where we can’t criticize a foreign country or are penalized for supporting a peaceful, 1st Amendment-covered boycott movement (BDS), where US police forces are trained by Israelis in the latest fascistic techniques, where college professors are drummed out of teaching or denied tenure because they dared to note Israel’s inhumanity and crimes.
Americans are going to get tired of all the Orwellian efforts to protect and promote a goddamned racist genocidal enterprise – charitably called the last apartheid state in the world – normalizing something that’s always been completely abnormal, a state that can’t exist without constant infusions of blood, money, munitions, lies, violence and repression, a tumor implanted in the Levant over 100 years ago by some British imperialists who were themselves antisemites. Americans are going to get tired of politicians who are supposed to be working for us but are much more responsive and animated by slavishly serving a foreign government.
My fellow US serfs, wake the fuck up. What do you think is going to happen in the coming months and years? Do you imagine that the joint US/Israeli genocide of Gaza will result in less “terrorism” and a more peaceful world?
Or you can close your eyes. Go to sleep. Dream on. And when you awake on a bloody street or in a bombed out cafe or a shot up concert, you can say stupid clueless infantile shit like “Why do they hate us?”
In the midst of extensive coverage of the war in Gaza, there are questions that the U.S. mass media should address:
1. How did Hamas, with tiny Gaza surrounded by a 17-year Israeli blockade, subjected to unparalleled electronic surveillance, with spies and informants, and augmented by an overwhelming air, sea and land military presence, manage to get these weapons and associated technology for their October 7 surprise raid?
2. What is the connection between the stunning failure of the Israeli government to protect its people on the border and the policy of P.M. Netanyahu? Recall the New York Times (October 22, 2023) article by prominent journalist, Roger Cohen, to wit: “All means were good to undo the notion of Palestinian statehood. In 2019, Mr. Netanyahu told a meeting of his center-right Likud party: ‘Those who want to thwart the possibility of a Palestinian state should support the strengthening of Hamas and the transfer of money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy.’” (Note: Israel and the U.S. fostered the rise of Islamic Hamas in 1987 to counter the secular Palestine Liberation Organization [PLO]).
3. Why is Congress preparing to appropriate over $14 billion to Israel in military and other aid without any public hearings and without any demonstrated fiscal need by Israel, a prosperous economic, technological and military superpower with a social safety net superior to that of the U.S.? USDA just reported over 44 million Americans struggled with hunger in 2022. This, in the midst of a childcare crisis. Should U.S. taxpayers be expected to pay for Netanyahu’s colossal intelligence/military collapse?
4. Why hasn’t the media reported on President Biden’s statement that the Gaza Health Ministry’s body count (now over 7000 fatalities) is exaggerated? All indications, however, are that it is a large undercount by Hamas to minimize its inability to protect its people. Israel has fired over 8,000 powerful precision munitions and bombs so far. These have struck many thousands of inhabited buildings – homes, apartments buildings, over 120 health facilities, ambulances, crowded markets, fleeing refugees, schools, water and sewage systems, and electric networks – implementing Israeli military orders to cut off all food, water, fuel, medicine and electricity to this already impoverished densely packed area the size of Philadelphia. For those not directly slain, the deadly harm caused by no food, water, medicine, medical facilities and fuel will lead to even more deaths and serious injuries.
Note that over three-quarters of Gaza’s population consists of children and women. Soon there will be thousands of babies born to die in the rubble. Other Palestinians will perish from untreated diseases, injuries, dehydration, and from drinking contaminated water. With crumbled sanitation facilities, physicians are fearing a deadly cholera epidemic.
Israel bombed the Rafah crossing on the Gaza-Egypt border. Only a tiny trickle of trucks are now allowed there by Israel to carry food and water. Fuel for hospital generators still remains blocked.
5. Why can’t Biden even persuade Israel to let 600 desperate Americans out of the Gaza firestorm?
6. Why isn’t the mass media making a bigger issue out of Israel’s long-time practices of blocking journalists from entering Gaza, including European, American and Israeli journalists? The only television crews left are Gazan-residing Al Jazeera reporters. Israeli bombs have already killed 26 journalists in the Gaza Strip since October 7. Is Israel targeting journalists’ families? The Gaza bureau chief of Al Jazeera, Wael Al-Dahdouh’s family was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Wednesday.
7. Why isn’t the mainstream U.S. media giving adequate space and voice to groups advocating a ceasefire and humanitarian aid? The message of Israeli peace groups’ peaceful solutions are drowned out by the media’s addiction to interviews with military tacticians. Much time and space are being given to hawks pushing for a war that could flash outside of Gaza big time. Shouldn’t groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace, the Arab-American Institute, Veterans for Peace and associations of clergy have their views and activities reported?
8. Why is the coverage of the war overlooking the Geneva Conventions, the United Nations Charter and the many provisions of international law that all the parties, including the U.S., have been violating? (See the October 24, 2023 letter to President Biden). Under international law, Biden has made the U.S. an active “co-belligerent,” of the Israeli government’s vocal demolition of the 2.3 million inhabitants in Gaza, who are mostly descendants of Palestinian refugees driven from their homes in 1948. (See, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide).
9. What about the human-interest stories that would be revealing? For example: How do Israeli F-16 pilots feel about their daily bombing of the completely defenseless Gazan civilian population and its life-sustaining infrastructures? What are the courageous Israeli human rights and refuseniks thinking and doing in a climate of serious repression of their views as a result of Netanyahu’s defense collapse on October 7?
10. Where is the media attention on the statements from Israeli military commentators, who, for years have declared high-tech US-backed, nuclear-armed Israel to be more secure than at any time in its history? Israel is reasserting its overwhelming military domination of the entire region, fully backed by U.S. militarism.
Historians remind us that in a grid-locked conflict over time, it is the most powerful party’s responsibility to lead the way to peace.
Establishing a two-state solution has been supported by Palestinians. All the Arab nations, starting with the Arab League peace proposal in 2002, support this solution as well. It is up to Israel and the U.S., assuming annexation of what is left of Palestine is not Israel’s objective. (See, the March 29, 2002 New York Times article: Mideast Turmoil; Text of the Peace Proposals Backed by the Arab League).
More media attention on this subject matter is much needed.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ralph Nader.
“Hamas terrorists”, “hostages”, “anti-Semitism”, Israeli “right of self-defense”, standing with Israel, upholding the “laws of war”, peace thru “negotiations”, “2-state solution”, end game? What are the relevant facts? How should recent events be evaluated?
Double standard
Western imperial states (US, Britain, France, Germany, et cetera) and their mainstream media report the conflict with a pro-Israel anti-Arab bias.
+ Palestinian violence is categorized as “terrorism”, while Israeli violence never is. Statistics: Israeli violence (2008-2023 June) killed 6,407 Palestinians, while Palestinian violence killed 307 Israelis.[1]
+ Israelis taken captive by Palestinian fighters are categorized as “kidnapped” and “hostages”, while the 4,500 Palestinians (including 147 minors as young as 12) in Israeli detention are not so categorized despite the facts that: more than 1,100 are held under administrative detention without charge or access to any court, and many of the remainder were detained on purported “security grounds” (sometimes for nothing other than: denunciation of harsh Israeli policies, relationship with actual militants, expressions of sympathy with the resistance, and/or mere suspicion of support for militant resistance) by military courts (used only against Palestinians) with outcome almost always predetermined with a 99% conviction rate).[2]
+ Ethnic cleansing is recognized in international law as a crime against humanity, but the Zionist state’s ethnic cleansing to create a Lebensraum for their so-called “Jewish state” is simply accepted.
+ Apartheid in South Africa (though the US and its Western allies did not always oppose it) is now considered an injustice, but Israeli apartheid-like persecutions of Palestinians go mostly unmentioned and without condemnation.[3]
+ The territory between the river and the sea is often called “Israel”, never “Palestine”.
+ When Israeli forces kill Palestinians one or a few at a time; it is barely, if at all, mentioned. It is only when Israeli bombings kill Palestinian civilians by the hundreds and thousands that the West sees fit to report on it. Killings of Israelis by Palestinians are reported empathetically as tragic, while Palestinians killed in far greater numbers by Israeli forces are merely unfortunate. With Israel now beginning to mass-murder Palestinians of all ages with indiscriminate bombing and thru starvation (preventing access to food, safe drinking water, and necessary medical supplies with which to treat mass casualties from Israeli bombing); Western state leaders excuse Israeli genocidal war crimes in Gaza, with banal assertions that Israel is only exercising its “right of self-defense” against “terrorists”, assertions which go unchallenged in the mainstream media.
+ Palestinian grievances (home demolitions, road blockages and checkpoints applied only to Palestinians, land and water resources taken from Palestinians and given to neighboring illegal Israeli settlements, grossly inequitable social services, travel restrictions applicable only to Palestinians, the economic siege of Gaza which impoverishes its population, the closing of Gaza’s borders so as to turn it into an “open-air prison”, and so forth) almost invariably go unmentioned.[4]
+ Ever increasing attacks (including murders) upon West Bank Palestinians by neighboring Israeli settlers, sometimes accompanied by participating Israeli soldiers, are perpetrated with impunity and rarely reported in the Western mainstream media.[5]
The most overtly fascist coalition now governing the Zionist state has intensified its oppression of the Palestinians, especially in the occupied West Bank. That has naturally provoked an increase in militant resistance. Hamas and Islamic Jihad, notwithstanding their faults, currently constitute the most organized force in said resistance. The current armed conflict (begun October 07) between Gaza and the Zionist state is the natural outcome of Israeli/Zionist persecution and violence against the Palestinians.
Hamas
There are valid criticisms of Hamas as a governing entity. For example, it has permitted its most Islamist faction to impose a religiously intolerant, theocratic, and patriarchal regime in Gaza (acts which oppress fellow Palestinians); but that is not why Israel and the US condemn it.
Hamas evolved from a Palestinian affiliate of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. Israel originally promoted Hamas as an alternative to the PLO which then represented the Palestinian resistance to Zionist oppression. Indiscriminate Israeli violence against Palestinians during the first intifada (1987—93) affected all Palestinians including Hamas supporters. At that point, Hamas embraced the resistance against the Zionist state. Following the Oslo Accords (1993), Fatah and Israel established the Palestinian Authority which then devolved into a corrupt and subservient client regime for the Zionist state. Hamas has filled much of the vacuum for the militant resistance.
Israel, the US, and their apologists accuse Hamas of being ISIS. That is not a valid comparison; in fact, Hamas denounced ISIS and its crimes. Hamas fighters may have committed some “atrocities” (killing unarmed Israelis of all ages) in the current conflict; but the sensational allegations (beheading babies, immolating captives, raping women) voiced by Netanyahu and Biden are evidently false. Moreover, the charge that Hamas targeted “innocent” civilians ignores context (which is never considered by apologists for Israel, even though it mitigates Palestinian violence). For example, the Kibbutz residents attacked by Hamas are largely armed settlers in possession of land stolen from Palestinians. Furthermore, most non-Arab Israeli adults (women as well as men) serve, or have served, in the Israeli army, which has perpetrated decades of often-murderous persecutions of the Palestinians (including ethnic cleansings); and those Israelis are military reservists until they reach the age of exemption (which varies from 40 to 49 depending upon rank and specialty). Reasoned analysis of Hamas’ actions indicates that they intended to take as many captives (bargaining chips) as possible rather than simply kill Israelis. It appears that it was primarily those Israelis who resisted capture, including by fleeing, who were the ones killed.
Should actual Hamas atrocities be disapproved? Yes. Should every violent Palestinian response to Israeli violence be denounced? No. Should Hamas excesses be equated to, and condemned equally with, those of the Zionist state? To do so (as have, all too eagerly, many left liberal peace advocates posturing as sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians) is to equate the violence of the resistance to that of the oppressor. In effect, it legitimizes the existence of a racist state built upon mass murder, often brutal persecutions, and the violent ethnic cleansing of a country stolen from its indigenous population. Is it appropriate to express uncritical praise for Hamas (October 07) action (as have some radical pro-Palestinian activists)? No. Such response dehumanizes and fails to recognize that the dead and wounded (sometimes avoidably, sometimes unavoidably) included, not only actual enemies, but also innocent children and likely some Israeli Jews of the minority which are actual opponents of the Zionist oppressions of Palestinians. Israeli assertions to the contrary, Hamas does not hate Jews in general; but it is not wrong in recognizing that Israeli “civilians” are not all “innocents”.
Israelis
Many Jews in Israel (and elsewhere: Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now) have sought an end to the Zionist state’s apartheid-like oppressions of the Palestinians[6]; but, in Israel, they are a minority. A much smaller minority of Israeli Jews (along with many Jews in other countries) actually renounce the Zionist project and demand a single state between the river and the sea with equal rights for all, and the right of return and compensation for exiled Palestinians. Certainly, justice-seeking Israelis (some affiliated with organizations such as B’Tselem) do not deserve to suffer and die because of the crimes perpetrated by their government, crimes which provoke the inevitable counter-violent resistance by its victims.
Fantasy: a permanent peace based upon the 2-state solution!
Many liberals (including many of those denouncing Hamas while posturing as sympathetic to the suffering Palestinians) insist that the “Palestinian problem” be resolved thru negotiations toward the vaunted “2-state solution”. They evade the facts. The Zionist state (regardless of ruling party) has never been willing to share Palestine with any actual Palestinian Arab state.
After 30 years of British Mandatory rule with democratic governance denied to the Palestinian populace (in violation of Mandate precepts); the UN (then with white-ruled countries constituting nearly ¾ of its 56 member states), indifferent to the rights of the indigenous Palestinians, divided Palestine so as to give 55% of the territory to the Zionist settlers who then constituted 32% of the total population.
The Zionists, after having “agreed” to the UN plan, then invaded, conquered, and annexed half of the 42% of territory designated by the UN for the Palestinian state (which was never established). The Zionists also permanently expelled a majority of the Palestinians from the 77% of Palestine which then came under their rule.
The Zionist state, in secret alliance with Britain and France, launched a war of conquest to seize the remainder of Palestine plus the Egyptian Sinai. The US, then led by President Eisenhower, issued a firm “no”, and compelled the aggressor: to abort before it had seized the West Bank, and to withdraw from seized territory in Gaza and Egypt.
Israel launched another war of conquest, this time enabled by the US and its allies, and seized all remaining Palestinian territory plus parts of Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon. It then began its ongoing practice of planting illegal Zionist settlements in the newly conquered territories.
1993-95. Israel signed onto the Oslo Accords, which did not include any actual provision for the creation of a real “state” in the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinians are wrongfully blamed for the failure to achieve a 2-state peace agreement. In fact, no Israeli government, then or at any other time, has ever been willing to remove the illegal settlements or to accept a truly sovereign and independent Palestinian state. Moreover, repeated Palestinian attempts to achieve justice by peaceful methods have always been thwarted by the Zionist state and its imperial allies.
Israel, asserting “right of self-defense” as pretext, states its intention to wipe out Hamas and its operatives. Toward that end, Israel, in addition to bombing the territory into rubble, plans a ground invasion of Gaza. If that occurs, it appears reasonable to expect: much more mass killings of Gaza Palestinians (whom the Israeli Defense Minister describes as “human animals”, followed by a very brutal Israeli military rule, and eventual establishment of a quisling regime to rule the populace, plus Israeli detentions of any Palestinians who openly decline to be subservient to that regime, and inevitably a renewed violent Palestinian resistance to the ongoing persecution. Either that or Israel will complete its ethnic cleansing (as advocated by some parties in the ruling coalition) by expelling most remaining Palestinians from all Israeli-ruled territory.
Biden, most members of Congress, and the US foreign policy establishment
Israeli and US leaders responded to outrage over the aerial bombing of the Baptist hospital in Gaza (on Oct 17), with death toll in the hundreds, by blaming it on a misfired Islamic Jihad rocket. Except by their apologists, that assertion is reasonably disbelieved. Militants in Gaza simply do not have rockets with bombs large enough to kill hundreds; whereas Israeli bombs have actually and deliberately destroyed multi-story buildings in Gaza, killing hundreds of their residents. Lies and cover-ups such as this are nothing new for the US; remember previous lies: babies taken from incubators in Kuwait, WMD in Iraq, unprovoked Vietnamese attack in Gulf of Tonkin, no US commanders’ orders to massacre civilians at No Gun Ri and elsewhere during the War in Korea, et cetera.
Biden, who rushed to assert that the US “stands with Israel”, pretends to be pressing Israel to abide by the “laws of war” which prohibit making war on civilians; but he certainly knows that Israel will not comply as long as he refuses to use US leverage to compel compliance; and he clearly will not do so. Likewise pro-Israel politicians in the US Congress will not stop, or even put conditions upon, the $3.8 billion/year of US taxpayer funding (to which Biden intends to add an extra $14 billion) for the Israeli war machine; because (beyond their commitment to Western imperial world domination) they only care that the election-campaign funding, provided by the rich and powerful Zionist lobby and US Zionist billionaires, shall go to themselves rather than to their challengers.
The anti-racist “left” needs to recognize that Biden along with most members of the US Congress and their counterparts in the Western allies, all now rushing to assist Israel, are ultimately no less racist than are Trump’s MAGA Republicans and other right-wing populists.
ENDNOTES
[1] United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs: “Data on casualties,” 2023.
And, so, THAT Anniversary too is on my mind: 22 Years Ago, October 7, 2001, US-NATO Invaded Afghanistan: It Was Presented as “Act of Self Defense.” “America Was Attacked by an ‘Unnamed Foreign Power.’”
From silly to serious, these national and international celebration days give pause for serious writers.