radiofree.asia

Category: United Nations

  • The World Say NO to US Blockade of Cuba

    At the United Nations this week, the world community has overwhelmingly spoken out against the relentless U.S. embargo on Cuba. Yet President Biden remains unmoved, stubbornly clinging to the anachronic policies that are deliberately and systematically causing harm to the well-being of more than 11 million Cubans. Despite the world’s condemnation of the blockade every year since 1992, the U.S. government continues to act in complete isolation from the international community.

    In this solitary corner, the United States was joined only by Israel, a country that relies on the United States for billions of dollars, money that is now set to increase by an additional $14.5 billion to intensify the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.

    But President Biden is not only turning a deaf ear to the international community, he is also ignoring the democratic voice of his own people. Over a hundred resolutions condemning the blockade have been passed across the U.S., representing about 55 million Americans calling for an end to the inhumane unilateral siege on Cuba that has persisted for over 60 years.

    The U.S. embargo has a negative impact on all sectors of Cuba’s economy and has unquestionably worsened the quality of life of Cubans by limiting their access to basic necessities, including medicines, food, and fuel. According to the Cuban government, from March 2022 to February 2023, the blockade caused an estimated $4.8 billion in losses to Cuba, representing more than $555,000 for each hour of the blockade. The inclusion of Cuba in the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism on January 12, 2021 exacerbates the impact of the economic embargo. This has led to an massive increase in the number of Cubans migrating to the United States in search of economic opportunities.

    The embargo is unjust and hinders Cuba’s inalienable right to development. It is also illegal and violates the United Nations charter and the principles of international law. The embargo’s extraterritorial provisions have not only prevented humanitarian aid from reaching Cuba through third-party countries, but have also prevented foreign companies from doing legitimate and lawful business in Cuba.

    While Cuba prioritizes healthcare and solidarity, the U.S. persists in causing harm and inflicting pain on the Cuban people in its failed, 60-year-old effort at regime change. We, at CODEPINK, will not stand idly by. We pledge to continue advocating for justice and tirelessly demanding that our government change its hostile policy towards Cuba by lifting the economic, commercial and financial embargo. We will persist in our call for the immediate removal of Cuba from the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism—a designation that should never have been imposed in the first place.

    U.S. policymakers must abandon their outdated Cold War mentality towards Cuba, and instead listen to the world and start being a good neighbor.

  • Amazon, DoorDash, Walmart Must Address Labor Violation Allegations, UN Says

    A United Nations (UN) poverty expert has called on the CEOs of Amazon, DoorDash and Walmart to address allegations that inadequate pay, hostile union-busting tactics, and the misclassification of workers as “independent contractors” are trapping workers in poverty. “I am extremely disturbed that workers in some of the world’s most profitable companies — in one of the richest countries on earth…

    Source

  • Israel Is Now the Greatest Source of Anti-Semitism

    On October 28, Craig Mokhiber, the Director of the New York Office of the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, wrote to the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) in Geneva (and I here, in boldface, add a few links for documentation of some of his assertions):

    This will be my last official communication to you. …

    The current wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people, rooted in an ethno-nationalist settler colonial ideology, in continuation of decades of their systematic persecution and purging, based entirely upon their status as Arabs, and coupled with explicit statements of intent by leaders in the Israeli government and military, leaves no room for doubt or debate. In Gaza, civilian homes, schools, churches, mosques, and medical institutions, are wantonly attacked as thousands of civilians are massacred. In the West Bank, including occupied Jerusalem, homes are seized and reassigned based entirely on race, and violent settler pogroms [against Arabs] are accompanied by Israeli military units.

    Across the land, Apartheid rules.

    This is a text-book case of genocide. The European, ethno-nationalist, [Jewish] settler colonial project in Palestine has entered its final phase, toward the expedited destruction of the last remnants of indigenous Palestinian life in Palestine. What’s more, the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, and much of Europe, are wholly complicit in the horrific assault. Not only are these governments refusing to meet their treaty obligations “to ensure respect” for the Geneva Conventions, but they are in fact actively arming the assault, providing economic and intelligence support, and giving political and diplomatic cover for Israel’s atrocities. …

    We must begin now or surrender to unspeakable horror. I see ten essential points: 1. Legitimate action: First, we in the UN must abandon the failed (and largely disingenuous) Oslo paradigm, its illusory two-state solution, its impotent and complicit Quartet, and its subjugation of international law to the dictates of presumed political expediency. Our positions must be unapologetically based on international human rights and international law. 2. Clarity of Vision: We must stop the pretense that this is simply a conflict over land or religion between two warring parties and admit the reality of the situation in which a disproportionately powerful state is colonizing, persecuting, and dispossessing an indigenous population on the basis of their ethnicity. 3. One State based on human rights: We must support the establishment of a single, democratic, secular state in all of historic Palestine, with equal rights for Christians, Muslims, and Jews, and, therefore, the dismantling of the deeply racist, settler-colonial project and an end to apartheid across the land. …

    Israelis learned well from Hitler: they elected governments that did (or else condoned doing) to the non-Jewish natives in their land (who before 1948 were 61% Muslim, 30% Jewish, and 8% Christian), what Hitler had done to Jews in Christian Europe — and now they are being supported by the U.S. and its allies to deliver Israel’s final solution to the Palestinian problem: extermination.

    The self-defense by Israel and its apologists, for this reality that drove Mokhiber to quit and to condemn them, is for them to ignore all of that reality, and to focus instead upon the responses to it by the Palestinians. The self-defense, in other words, is to condemn not the side that started this war (themselves) beginning in 1948, but the side that then, and even earlier (in the late 1930s), were trying to prevent or avoid it (the Palestinians). The evil in this deception by the perpetrators — by the Israelis and their apologists — is obvious, and here is how it is driving a surge in anti-Semitism:

    Israel and its apologists say that anti-Israelism is the same thing as anti-Semitism (so that to condemn Israel is to condemn all Jews), but here they lie yet again because outside of Israel are many Jews who loathe what Israel has been doing in their names. The very idea that all Jews are Israelis, or even support the Israelis and oppose the Palestinians in this war between the aggressor (Israelis) and the defender (the Palestinians), is stupid. That idea simply is not the case; but yet many Jews are being targeted by AUTHENTIC anti-Semites as-if it WERE the case.

    Comments by many readers and viewers online are rife with such anti-Semitism, and the global community of that authentic anti-Semitism grows ever-larger, the closer that Israel and the U.S. get to delivering their final solution to the Palestinian problem. A great many of these anti-Semitic comments are coming from individuals who condemn all Jews on the basis of anti-Semitic lines from the New Testament (such as John 8:44, Matthew 23:31-38, and the earliest-written one of them all, 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 — all of which lines I have discussed here). However, many come instead from the Old Testament, which historians consider to be mythical but theologians and preachers believe instead to be “the Word of God”; and, so, scholars cannot agree with one-another on what is history and what in the Old Testament is instead merely myth (religious propaganda, for spreading the Jewish faith).

    According to Wikipedia’s article on the “Kingdom of Judah“:

    Centered in the highlands of Judea, the kingdom’s capital was Jerusalem.[3] Jews are named after Judah and are primarily descended from it.[4][5] The Hebrew Bible depicts the Kingdom of Judah as a successor to the United Kingdom of Israel, a term denoting the united monarchy under biblical kings Saul, David and Solomon and covering the territory of Judah and Israel. However, during the 1980s, some biblical scholars began to argue that the archaeological evidence for an extensive kingdom before the late-8th century BCE is too weak, and that the methodology used to obtain the evidence is flawed.[6][7] In the 10th and early 9th centuries BCE, the territory of Judah appears to have been sparsely populated, limited to small rural settlements, most of them unfortified.[8]

    and Wikipedia’s “Davidic line” says that,

    as for David and his immediate descendants themselves, the position of some scholars, as described by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Silberman, authors of The Bible Unearthed, espouses that David and Solomon may well be based on “certain historical kernels”, and probably did exist in their own right, but their historical counterparts simply could not have ruled over a wealthy lavish empire as described in the Bible, and were more likely chieftains of a comparatively modest Israelite society in Judah and not regents over a kingdom proper.[27]

    If the actual historical nation of Israel was ONLY what is shown on the map as constituting the Kingdom of Judah, then neither Gaza nor the northern two-thirds of the West Bank had ever been in any ancient Israel; and, so, anyone who says that the Jews in 1948 were ‘coming home’ to ‘Israel’ is historically wrong. However, those Jews were ethnically cleansing the land. It’s well-documented, such as here, here, here, and here. And even if ancient Israel had included all of the land that now is Israel, it wasn’t so at all in recent centuries, when virtually all of the residents there were Muslims and Christians — though Jews were demanding to control it while being only a tiny percentage of the population there. Their supremacism was clearly not only fascist but racist; it was Jewish Nazism. Furthermore, during the 1930s, Zionists considered themselves to be fascists; and fascists in both Germany and Italy considered Zionists to be Jewish fascists, ideological brothers of both Italy’s and Germany’s fascists (Christianity’s fascists). And Albert Einstein and other prominent progressive Jews in the U.S. after World War II described as “fascists” Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, both of whom subsequently became elected by Israel’s Jews to lead Israel. And yet the U.S. Government backed them, not only when Begin and Shamir were leading massacres of Arab villages in the 1940s, but when both men became Israel’s leaders in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s — and afterward, under their political follower Benjamin Netanyahu: clearly, a racist-supremacist apartheid regime ever since its founding, a regime which defines the supreme group, “Jew,” not only by religion, but by descent; that is, racially. Under U.S. President Harry S. Truman, the America and the world that his predecessor Franklin Delano Roosevelt (who was against the formation of a Jewish state and even resisted his aides who backed Churchill’s strong support for the creation of Israel, and who also was opposed to Winston Churchill’s and Dwight Eisenhower’s urgings for a war against the Soviet Union) had sought and carefully planned — the world that FDR had been intensively working to build — abruptly ended. And, more than anything else, this is the reason why, on 28 October 2023, the Director of the New York Office of the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, wrote to the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) in Geneva, to resign his post. He resigned his post because now the final solution to the Palestinian problem — the problem that Truman and his successors enabled fascist Jews to create — is about to come to a head. And decent Jews everywhere will be experiencing the backlash from what the indecent ones — who are the majority in Israel — are doing. The decent Jews will be getting the backlash for what the indecent ones are doing, but the blame really should go ONLY to the Israelis, and to the UK and U.S. billionaires (and their politicians and ‘news’-media) who have been constantly propagandizing for them.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Israel Is Now the Greatest Source of Anti-Semitism

    On October 28, Craig Mokhiber, the Director of the New York Office of the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, wrote to the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) in Geneva (and I here, in boldface, add a few links for documentation of some of his assertions):

    This will be my last official communication to you. …

    The current wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people, rooted in an ethno-nationalist settler colonial ideology, in continuation of decades of their systematic persecution and purging, based entirely upon their status as Arabs, and coupled with explicit statements of intent by leaders in the Israeli government and military, leaves no room for doubt or debate. In Gaza, civilian homes, schools, churches, mosques, and medical institutions, are wantonly attacked as thousands of civilians are massacred. In the West Bank, including occupied Jerusalem, homes are seized and reassigned based entirely on race, and violent settler pogroms [against Arabs] are accompanied by Israeli military units.

    Across the land, Apartheid rules.

    This is a text-book case of genocide. The European, ethno-nationalist, [Jewish] settler colonial project in Palestine has entered its final phase, toward the expedited destruction of the last remnants of indigenous Palestinian life in Palestine. What’s more, the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, and much of Europe, are wholly complicit in the horrific assault. Not only are these governments refusing to meet their treaty obligations “to ensure respect” for the Geneva Conventions, but they are in fact actively arming the assault, providing economic and intelligence support, and giving political and diplomatic cover for Israel’s atrocities. …

    We must begin now or surrender to unspeakable horror. I see ten essential points: 1. Legitimate action: First, we in the UN must abandon the failed (and largely disingenuous) Oslo paradigm, its illusory two-state solution, its impotent and complicit Quartet, and its subjugation of international law to the dictates of presumed political expediency. Our positions must be unapologetically based on international human rights and international law. 2. Clarity of Vision: We must stop the pretense that this is simply a conflict over land or religion between two warring parties and admit the reality of the situation in which a disproportionately powerful state is colonizing, persecuting, and dispossessing an indigenous population on the basis of their ethnicity. 3. One State based on human rights: We must support the establishment of a single, democratic, secular state in all of historic Palestine, with equal rights for Christians, Muslims, and Jews, and, therefore, the dismantling of the deeply racist, settler-colonial project and an end to apartheid across the land. …

    Israelis learned well from Hitler: they elected governments that did (or else condoned doing) to the non-Jewish natives in their land (who before 1948 were 61% Muslim, 30% Jewish, and 8% Christian), what Hitler had done to Jews in Christian Europe — and now they are being supported by the U.S. and its allies to deliver Israel’s final solution to the Palestinian problem: extermination.

    The self-defense by Israel and its apologists, for this reality that drove Mokhiber to quit and to condemn them, is for them to ignore all of that reality, and to focus instead upon the responses to it by the Palestinians. The self-defense, in other words, is to condemn not the side that started this war (themselves) beginning in 1948, but the side that then, and even earlier (in the late 1930s), were trying to prevent or avoid it (the Palestinians). The evil in this deception by the perpetrators — by the Israelis and their apologists — is obvious, and here is how it is driving a surge in anti-Semitism:

    Israel and its apologists say that anti-Israelism is the same thing as anti-Semitism (so that to condemn Israel is to condemn all Jews), but here they lie yet again because outside of Israel are many Jews who loathe what Israel has been doing in their names. The very idea that all Jews are Israelis, or even support the Israelis and oppose the Palestinians in this war between the aggressor (Israelis) and the defender (the Palestinians), is stupid. That idea simply is not the case; but yet many Jews are being targeted by AUTHENTIC anti-Semites as-if it WERE the case.

    Comments by many readers and viewers online are rife with such anti-Semitism, and the global community of that authentic anti-Semitism grows ever-larger, the closer that Israel and the U.S. get to delivering their final solution to the Palestinian problem. A great many of these anti-Semitic comments are coming from individuals who condemn all Jews on the basis of anti-Semitic lines from the New Testament (such as John 8:44, Matthew 23:31-38, and the earliest-written one of them all, 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 — all of which lines I have discussed here). However, many come instead from the Old Testament, which historians consider to be mythical but theologians and preachers believe instead to be “the Word of God”; and, so, scholars cannot agree with one-another on what is history and what in the Old Testament is instead merely myth (religious propaganda, for spreading the Jewish faith).

    According to Wikipedia’s article on the “Kingdom of Judah“:

    Centered in the highlands of Judea, the kingdom’s capital was Jerusalem.[3] Jews are named after Judah and are primarily descended from it.[4][5] The Hebrew Bible depicts the Kingdom of Judah as a successor to the United Kingdom of Israel, a term denoting the united monarchy under biblical kings Saul, David and Solomon and covering the territory of Judah and Israel. However, during the 1980s, some biblical scholars began to argue that the archaeological evidence for an extensive kingdom before the late-8th century BCE is too weak, and that the methodology used to obtain the evidence is flawed.[6][7] In the 10th and early 9th centuries BCE, the territory of Judah appears to have been sparsely populated, limited to small rural settlements, most of them unfortified.[8]

    and Wikipedia’s “Davidic line” says that,

    as for David and his immediate descendants themselves, the position of some scholars, as described by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Silberman, authors of The Bible Unearthed, espouses that David and Solomon may well be based on “certain historical kernels”, and probably did exist in their own right, but their historical counterparts simply could not have ruled over a wealthy lavish empire as described in the Bible, and were more likely chieftains of a comparatively modest Israelite society in Judah and not regents over a kingdom proper.[27]

    If the actual historical nation of Israel was ONLY what is shown on the map as constituting the Kingdom of Judah, then neither Gaza nor the northern two-thirds of the West Bank had ever been in any ancient Israel; and, so, anyone who says that the Jews in 1948 were ‘coming home’ to ‘Israel’ is historically wrong. However, those Jews were ethnically cleansing the land. It’s well-documented, such as here, here, here, and here. And even if ancient Israel had included all of the land that now is Israel, it wasn’t so at all in recent centuries, when virtually all of the residents there were Muslims and Christians — though Jews were demanding to control it while being only a tiny percentage of the population there. Their supremacism was clearly not only fascist but racist; it was Jewish Nazism. Furthermore, during the 1930s, Zionists considered themselves to be fascists; and fascists in both Germany and Italy considered Zionists to be Jewish fascists, ideological brothers of both Italy’s and Germany’s fascists (Christianity’s fascists). And Albert Einstein and other prominent progressive Jews in the U.S. after World War II described as “fascists” Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, both of whom subsequently became elected by Israel’s Jews to lead Israel. And yet the U.S. Government backed them, not only when Begin and Shamir were leading massacres of Arab villages in the 1940s, but when both men became Israel’s leaders in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s — and afterward, under their political follower Benjamin Netanyahu: clearly, a racist-supremacist apartheid regime ever since its founding, a regime which defines the supreme group, “Jew,” not only by religion, but by descent; that is, racially. Under U.S. President Harry S. Truman, the America and the world that his predecessor Franklin Delano Roosevelt (who was against the formation of a Jewish state and even resisted his aides who backed Churchill’s strong support for the creation of Israel, and who also was opposed to Winston Churchill’s and Dwight Eisenhower’s urgings for a war against the Soviet Union) had sought and carefully planned — the world that FDR had been intensively working to build — abruptly ended. And, more than anything else, this is the reason why, on 28 October 2023, the Director of the New York Office of the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, wrote to the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) in Geneva, to resign his post. He resigned his post because now the final solution to the Palestinian problem — the problem that Truman and his successors enabled fascist Jews to create — is about to come to a head. And decent Jews everywhere will be experiencing the backlash from what the indecent ones — who are the majority in Israel — are doing. The decent Jews will be getting the backlash for what the indecent ones are doing, but the blame really should go ONLY to the Israelis, and to the UK and U.S. billionaires (and their politicians and ‘news’-media) who have been constantly propagandizing for them.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Australia’s new UN counter-terror chief fears world repeating ‘same mistakes’ of the past in Israel-Gaza conflict

    Prof Ben Saul cautions that exceeding the limits of international law only breeds extremism and discontent, and is no recipe for peace

    As he takes office as the UN’s sole special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism this week, Prof Ben Saul’s purview is dominated by what he views as one serious, though not unprecedented, “mistake”: countering terrorism with military might.

    “Unfortunately, when 9/11 came, the same kind of pressure to take the gloves off became manifest pretty quickly,” says the incoming monitor and Challis chair of international law at the University of Sydney, as he reflects upon Israel’s siege of Gaza in response to Hamas’s attacks on 7 October.

    Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Top UN Official Resigns: “We Are Seeing a Genocide Unfolding Before Our Eyes”

    A former top United Nations official in New York joins us for an in-depth interview about why he has resigned after publicly accusing the U.N. of failing to address what he calls a “text book case of genocide” unfolding in Gaza. Craig Mokhiber is a longtime international human rights lawyer who served as director of the New York Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Top UN official in New York steps down citing ‘genocide’ of Palestinian civilians

    Craig Mokhiber, director of human rights body, accuses the US, UK and much of Europe as ‘wholly complicit in the horrific assault’

    The director of the New York office of the UN high commissioner for human rights has left his post, protesting that the UN is “failing” in its duty to prevent what he categorizes as genocide of Palestinian civilians in Gaza under Israeli bombardment and citing the US, UK and much of Europe as “wholly complicit in the horrific assault”.

    Craig Mokhiber wrote on 28 October to the UN high commissioner in Geneva, Volker Turk, saying: “This will be my last communication to you” in his role in New York.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • US Stands Isolated in Backing Gaza Massacre


    Life in Gaza under Israeli bombardment. Photo credit: canada talks israel palestine

    On Friday, October 27, the nations of the world voted in the UN General Assembly, by a vote of 120 to 14, for an “immediate, durable and sustained humanitarian truce leading to a cessation of hostilities” in Gaza. The resolution was sponsored by the government of sometime U.S. ally King Abdullah of Jordan. 

    Israel’s UN Ambassador responded with utter disdain, accusing those who voted in favor of the “ridiculous resolution” of supporting “the defense of Nazi terrorists” over Israel. In Gaza, Israel’s response to the global call for a truce was to escalate its bombing and expand its ground invasion.

    The U.S. corporate media have not helped Americans understand how isolated our government is in its unconditional support and resupply of weapons for Israel’s genocidal military campaign, which has killed over 8,000 Palestinians, 30% of them women and 40% of them children, while destroying hospitals, apartment buildings, streets and schools, and turning Gaza into nothing short of hell on Earth for the bereaved survivors. According to Save the Children, Israel has killed more children in Gaza in three weeks than have been killed in all global conflicts since 2019.

    The UN vote makes it clear how diplomatically isolated Israel and the United States are. The mere 12 countries that sided with Israel and the U.S. in the General Assembly were 4 from eastern Europe (Austria, Croatia, Czechia and Hungary); 2 from Latin America (Guatemala and Paraguay); and 6 small island nations in the Pacific. 

    Not a single country from western Europe, Africa, the mainland of Asia, the Caribbean or the Middle East voted with the U.S. and Israel. The countries that voted for a truce included many traditional U.S. allies (France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Norway, Ireland, Switzerland, New Zealand), while other U.S. allies like the U.K., Germany, Canada and Japan were among the 45 countries that abstained.

    Israel and the United States are not only diplomatically isolated, but their governments are out of touch with their own people. As Israel prepared to launch its ground invasion of Gaza, a Maariv poll of Israelis found that public support for an immediate large-scale ground offensive of Gaza had fallen from 65% on October 17th to only 29% a week later. 

    Israelis, like the rest of the world, are watching the horrors of the massacre in Gaza, and have realized that their government has no real plan beyond massive, indiscriminate violence for its stated goal of destroying Hamas, which may well be unachievable no matter how many Israeli soldiers, prisoners captured on October 7 and Palestinian civilians it is ready to sacrifice. 

    In the United States, a Data for Progress poll, published on October 20, found that 66% of Americans wanted their government to “call for a ceasefire and a deescalation of violence in Gaza,” and to “leverage its close diplomatic relationship with Israel to prevent further violence and civilian deaths.” 

    Support was across party lines, but, for a Democratic administration and Democratic members of Congress, the 80% of Democrats who agreed with the poll’s statement should have been a wake-up call. Evidently they slept through the alarm, as Congress passed a bill promising unconditional military support for Israel’s campaign in Gaza by 412 votes to 10 on October 24, a green light for the anticipated escalation that followed. 

    By October 30, only 18 members of Congress had signed the resolution introduced by Rep. Cori Bush calling for an “immediate de-escalation and ceasefire.” The new House Speaker Mike Johnson has pledged that the first piece of binding legislation he will put to the floor is one to spend $14 billion to resupply Israel with weapons, a bill that is likely to sail through with overwhelming support from both parties.

    The impotence of the U.S. government to contain the chaos its policies have unleashed can hardly be exaggerated. The U.S. embassy in Beirut has posted a message to all U.S. citizens to leave Lebanon immediately. It says, “You should have a plan of action for crisis situations that does not rely on U.S. government assistance,” and tells them they will have to sign a promissory note to reimburse the U.S. government if it helps to evacuate them. 

    So the results of the U.S. government’s massive investments in the power to kill and destroy have left it unable to protect or help its own citizens around the world. It instead directs them to a State Department web page titled “What the Department of State Can and Can’t Do in a Crisis.”

    The current international isolation of the United States stands in sharp contrast to the way that Biden’s defeat of Trump in 2020 was welcomed around the world. Biden promised a new era of U.S. diplomacy, an end to U.S. wars in the Middle East, and renewed international cooperation on the most serious problems facing the world. 

    Instead, his policies are the worst of all worlds, continuing Trump’s ratcheting up of military spending and his illegal sanctions against Iran, Cuba and a dozen other countries, while shifting Trump’s Cold War with Russia and China into overdrive, and now fueling and escalating catastrophic proxy wars in Ukraine and Palestine.

    But alternatives to American “leadership” are finally emerging. The UN Security Council is immobilized by self-serving U.S. and Russian vetoes, and exclusive rich boys’ clubs like the G7 and the World Economic Forum have only further entrenched neocolonialism and inequality. But now the world is turning to more representative fora like the UN General Assembly, the G20, G77, BRICS and regional groupings like the African Union, ASEAN and CELAC to more honestly debate our common problems and find new ways to solve them.

    As the world comes together to build a post-neocolonial, multipolar world, U.S. propaganda is losing its power to shape the way people look at each new crisis. Israeli and U.S. officials, including Biden, have done their best to cast doubt on the death toll in Gaza, but these numbers are meticulously documented by Palestinian health authorities and accepted by the World Health Organization, UN agencies and NGOs that work there. 

    U.S. officials and media are more inclined to listen to Israeli officials than Palestinian ones, but this only increases U.S. isolation by making it complicit in Israeli propaganda, both in fact and in the eyes of people and governments around the world.

    King Abdullah of Jordan, President Sisi of Egypt and Palestinian leader Abu Mazen canceled a meeting with Biden after Israel apparently killed hundreds of people with what appeared to be an air-burst bomb, as they sheltered at the Anglican Church’s Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City. Biden validated Abdullah, Sisi and Abu Mazen’s decision by doing exactly as they feared and publicly claiming that “the other team” was responsible for the hospital bombing.

    While Palestinian officials have identified over 8,000 people killed in Gaza, Israeli officials have so far only identified 933 of the 1,300 or 1,400 people they say were killed in the Palestinian attack on October 7. 

    The Ha’aretz newspaper in Israel has a web page with photos, names, ages and some personal details of the people killed in Israel who have been identified. At the prompting of the Israeli military, many Western politicians and media have painted the Palestinian attack as a massacre of civilians, so it may come as a surprise to see that at least 361 of the 933 dead so far identified were in fact soldiers, police and security officers. 

    But Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other Palestinian fighters also killed hundreds of civilians on October 7, as surely as Israel’s air strikes have killed thousands of civilians in Gaza. The prisoners they took back to Gaza also included both soldiers and civilians.

    Ha’aretz’s records also raise questions about another story that has been widely repeated by Western media and politicians, including President Biden, which is that Israeli soldiers found 40 dead babies who had been decapitated by Hamas. There are 7 children below the age of 10 among the 572 civilian dead identified in Ha’aretz, but the youngest was 4 years old, not a baby. As with all these questions, we don’t know the answers, but we should be skeptical of unverified atrocity claims, especially since Israel has lied about previous war crimes and resisted independent, international investigations of them.

    Since the fall of the Soviet Union left the United States with no rival to act as a check on its leaders’ unbridled and often unrealistic ambitions for global power, the U.S. has squandered a historic chance to build a peaceful, just and sustainable country, with shared prosperity for us and our neighbors around the world.

    Our leaders’ illusion of military superiority has been a poison pill that has undermined every aspect of post-Cold War U.S. foreign policy. It has led them down a dead end from where they can no longer imagine alternatives to fighting and killing or arming their proxies to fight and kill, even as the consequences of these policies have become so deadly and destabilizing that they undermine the position of the United States in the world and leave it increasingly isolated.

    Apart from the United States, the world is remarkably united behind the goal of ending the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories it occupied in 1967. The United States should stop fueling the occupation with an endless supply of weapons, and stop diplomatically shielding Israel from international efforts to end the occupation. Since the United States has utterly failed in its role as a mediator and honest broker between Israel and Palestine, acting instead as a party to the conflict on Israel’s side, it must now step aside to allow real mediators to take on that role.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Young convicts in the Dry Dock: ongoing violations and delayed justice

    On 17 September 2023, approximately 28 young Bahraini detainees in the Dry Dock Detention Center began a new hunger strike in protest against the continued violations committed against them by the prison administration, and the neglect of the relevant state institutions to carry out their duties, notably the National Institution for Human Rights, and the Ombudsman.

    The rights of children detained in the Dry Dock Detention Center are subject to serious violations, as most of the arrests are based on political backgrounds, and the victims are subjected to unfair trials. In 2011, the state security institutions launched a series of arbitrary arrest campaigns that affected various Bahraini regions and towns and included citizens of different age groups, including children who were not over the legal age at the time of their arrest, for participating in peaceful demonstrations in the movement demanding reform and democracy. Since that date, the scene has been repeated as part of the policies of suppressing freedom and encouraging impunity in Bahrain.

    Due to the lack of transparency in the Ministry of Interior’s data, there are no accurate statistics on the number of detained children. However, investigative reports have previously revealed that Bahrain detains about 150 children, 10 of whom are in Jau Prison – which is designated for adults – while the remaining 140 are divided into two wards. One ward is designated for children aged between 15 and 18 years old, and the other is designated for solitary confinement. Despite these reports, the Bahraini government claims that it has no children in detention, stating instead that those arrested from the age group of 15 to 18 years are serving their sentence in a private reform center.

    Young convicts in the Dry Dock Detention Center are exposed to many human rights violations, including fundamental rights guaranteed by international laws and conventions. Their most prominent demands relate to the following:

    – The right to education;

    – The right to medical treatment;

    – The right to obtain diverse and healthy diets;

    – The right to communicate with the outside world;

    – The right to family visits;

    – The right to have appropriate clothing; and

    – The right to benefit from the Law on Restorative Justice and the Protection of Children from Mistreatment.

    The Law on Restorative Justice for Children and their Protection from Mistreatment was approved on 15 February 2021 and came into effect on 18 August 2021. However, its effects were not reflected on the conditions of young convicts in the Dry Dock Detention Center, nor on those who were arrested after the enactment of this law. These include:

    •       notifying the child’s guardian or person responsible for him – as the case may be – in the legally prescribed ways of every decision or action taken against the child;
    •       ensuring that detained children are treated without discrimination and with an equal degree of decent and humane treatment and ensuring that all necessary rights and needs are met, and that there is no criminal liability on the child who was not more than fifteen full calendar years of age at the time of committing the crime;
    •       that the child victim or witness, in all stages of investigation and trial, must have the right to be heard, his demands must be understood, and he must be treated in a way that preserves his dignity and guarantees his physical, psychological, and moral integrity;
    •       that there be no discrimination between child prisoners on the basis of gender, origin, language, religion, or belief;
    •       The periodic medical examination of all children;
    •       The provision of academic and practical study curricula helping develop their intellectual abilities;
    •       the observation of the child’s right to freedom of practice of religion; and
    •       that, in the event that a child was subjected to physical or sexual mistreatment by the person responsible for him, the specialized prosecution should appoint someone to legally represent the child to carry out all the procedures stipulated in the law, including submitting a complaint, objection, grievance, and appeal against all procedures taken regarding the child.

    Since its passage, this law has been subjected to numerous criticisms, as the government of Bahrain exploits its promulgation to promote the reforms that it has carried out. Unfortunately, its application is still limited to a very small number of young convicts in the Dry Dock Detention Center, despite the fact that many of them meet the conditions of the law and almost all of them demand the right to benefit from it.

    As well, the law fails to guarantee children’s fundamental rights to due process. The law does not prohibit questioning or interrogating children without the presence of a lawyer or their guardians. Article 66 states that “health, social, legal and rehabilitative services must be provided to accused children” at “all stages”, including during “arrest and investigation.” However, Article 67 stipulates that a child has no right to a lawyer until after the child’s case reaches trial. The law also fails to clearly stipulate the child’s right to appeal his deprivation of liberty, while Article 37 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child states that every child in conflict with the law has the right to “immediate access to legal assistance.”

    International human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch, have previously condemned the failure of this law to protect the fundamental rights stipulated in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, as it legitimizes arbitrary detention on charges of exercising the right to peaceful assembly, and allows the interrogation and investigation of children without the presence of their parents or attorney.

    The prison for young convicts fails to uphold the most fundamental rights, and detainees on charges related to the right to expression are subjected to ill-treatment, torture, and reprisal. They are deprived of healthy meals and clothing, are denied family visits, and are denied means of entertainment, which exposes them to psychological and health risks and harms, and which is inconsistent with human and moral principles and values.

    As a result of all of this mistreatment, many of the children have undertaken repeated hunger strikes, despite the dangers that such actions pose to their health. Recently, they announced their hunger strike on 17 September 2023, in protest against the Public Prosecution’s neglect of their right to benefit from the Law on Restorative Justice as a means that may help them get escape these violations. Among them is Hussein Ahmed Habib, who was sentenced to 22 years in prison; he was less than 16 years old at the time his alleged offense was committed. He submitted more than five requests to more than one public prosecutor representative, demanding his retrial before the Children’s Court, but to no avail. Also, Mujtaba Abdul Hussein Abdulla, who was sentenced to 22 years in prison when he was 17 years old, is demanding his retrial before the Children’s Court, but the public prosecution rejects his repeated requests.

    Instead of children being behind their school desks, they are deprived of the right to education. This violation does not stop there – it destroys their future even after the end of their sentence, as they are deprived of job opportunities due to the denial of “good conduct” certificates for political prisoners.

    Among them is Ali Isa Jasim, one of the young convicts who was deprived of his fundamental rights, after he was arrested when he was fifteen years old. He went on two hunger strikes in one month, protesting the denial of his right to education. Despite the promises he has received from the prison administration to provide him with an education, he has yet to be given access to learning resources. His suffering is shared by Khalil Ebrahim Sabah, who resorted to a hunger strike to protest the deprivation of his fundamental rights, including education, for two years. They are therefore waiting to be transferred to Jau Prison to obtain this right.

    In addition to the torture, forced disappearance, solitary confinement, and psychological threats they endure, many child detainees also face deprivation of the necessary treatment and medical care. They are denied medical visits, and the prison administration ignores the conditions of those suffering from illnesses and in need of constant follow-up. On 17 June 2023, six young convicts, including Khalil Sabah and Fares Salman, declared a hunger strike to protest against their deprivation of health care for their scabies disease, which they contracted while in prison due to squalid conditions. Further, Haidar Ebrahim Mulla Hasan, who was arrested at the age of 16 and sentenced to 23 years in prison in three different cases, did not suffer from any health problems before his arrest, but as a result of torture and the dire conditions in prison, including medical neglect, he began to suffer from severe stomach pains to the point of vomiting and defecating blood. He continues to suffer from severe headaches, difficulty breathing, and a dental problem. Despite this, the prison administration refuses to refer him to a doctor for a diagnosis of his condition, and he has not received any treatment yet. In fact, the last time he was presented to a doctor was over a year ago.

    Following the crackdown on popular protests that the country witnessed in 2011, criticism prompted Bahrain to establish three bodies affiliated with the Ministry of Interior: the Prisoners and Detainees Rights Commission (PDRC), the Ombudsman, and the Special Investigation Unit in the Public Prosecution, but the lack of independence of these bodies and their political affiliations has rendered them unfit for purpose. Since their establishment, complaints raised by detainees, especially young convicts, have not been investigated, and the security forces responsible for torturing political prisoners have not been held accountable.

    By exposing young convicts to violations, including forced detention, torture, denial of medical care, and of the right to education, Bahrain is violating the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the Nelson Mandela Rules, which stress the rights of Prisoners, including:

    •       Treat all prisoners with respect because of their inherent dignity and value as human beings.
    •       The prohibition of subjecting any prisoner to torture or to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment, and all prisoners should be protected from this.
    •       The right to obtain legal representation and to investigate all cases of death in custody, disciplinary action, and punishment.
    •       The prison system should strive to minimize the differences between prison life and free life.

    Hence, Americans for Democracy and Human Rights in Bahrain (ADHRB) calls on the Bahraini authorities to:

    •       Stop exposing young convicts to ongoing violations, including forced detention and torture.
    •       Grant young convicts their right to education, medical care, and other fundamental human rights.
    •       Protect minors from ill-treatment, investigate allegations of torture, and stop the policy of impunity that has been practiced until now.
    •       Respond to the demands of young people, and not renounce the promises made to them.
    •       Held them a retrial in accordance with the fair trial procedures that apply to children in order to obtain their immediate and unconditional release, guarantee all their civil rights, and compensate them. 

    The post Young convicts in the Dry Dock: ongoing violations and delayed justice appeared first on Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain.

    This post was originally published on Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain.

  • Muddled Interventions: Haiti, the UN and Resolution 2699

    A country broken by constant foreign interventions, its tyrannical regimes propped up by the back brace of the United States (when it wasn’t intervening to adjust it), marred by appalling natural disasters, tells a sad tale of the crippled Haitian state.  Haiti’s political existence is the stuff and stuffing of pornographic violence, the crutch upon which moralists can always point to as the end, doom and despair that needs change.  Every conundrum needs its intrusive deliverer, even though that deliverer is bound to make things worse.

    Lately, those stale themes have now percolated through the corridors of the United Nations to renewed interest.  The staleness is evident in the menu: servings of failed state canapes; vicious, murderous, raping, pillaging gangs as the main musical score; collapse of civic institutions as the dessert. It’s the sort of menu to rile and aggravate any mission or charity, and yet, military-security interventions continue to capture the feeble imagination.

    Since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in July 2021, the constant theme in reporting from Haiti is that of rampant, freely operating gangs.  Sophie Hills, a staff writer of the Christian Science Monitor, offered this description in October last year: “Armed gangs have immobilized the capital, Port-au-Prince, shutting down the already troubled economy and creating fear among citizens to even walk the streets.”

    This October 23, the UN special envoy to Haiti, María Isabel Salvador, reported to the UN Security Council that the situation had continued “to deteriorate as growing gang violence plunge the lives of the people of Haiti into disarray and major crimes are rising sharply to new record highs.”  These included killings and sexual violence, the latter marked by instances of rape and mutilation.

    To add further complexity to the situation, vigilante groups such as the “Bwa Kale” movement have responded through resorting to lynching (395 alleged gang members are said to have perished in that gruesome way between April 24 and September).

    Moïse’s opportunistic replacement, Ariel Henry, has served as acting prime minister, persistently calling for foreign intervention to right the worn vessel he is steering into a sunset oblivion.  The past presidential elections were last held in 2016, but Henry has not deemed it appropriate to stage elections, preferring the bureaucratic formula of a High Transition Council (HTC) tasked with eventually achieving that goal.  When the announcement establishing the body was made in February, Henry loftily claimed that this was “the beginning of the end of dysfunction in our democratic institutions.”

    These weak assertions have not translated into credible change on the ground.  The contempt with which the HTC has been viewed was indicated by the news from the UN envoy that its Secretary General had been kidnapped by gang members posing as police officers.

    In September, Henry addressed the UN hoping to add some mettle to the Haitian National Police, urging the Security Council to adopt measures under Chapter VII of the UN Charter to “authorize the deployment of a multinational support mission to underpin the security of Haiti”.

    The measure can be read as a stalling measure to keep Henry and his Haitian Tèt Kale Party (PHTK) ensconced.  This is certainly the view of the National Haitian-American Elected Officials Network (NHAEON) and the Family Action Network Movement (FANM).  In their September letter to President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the organisations warned that, “Any military intervention supporting Haiti’s corrupt, repressive, unelected regime will likely exacerbate the current political crisis to a catastrophic one.”  The move would “further entrench the regime, deepening Haiti’s political crisis while generating significant civilian casualties and migration pressure.”

    In its eternal wisdom, the United Nations Security Council felt that an intervention force consisting of Kenyan police, supplemented by assistance from other states, would be required for this mission.  Resolution 2699, establishing a Multinational Security Support Mission led by Kenya, received a vote of 13 in favour, with Russia and China abstaining.  This would entail a co-deployment with Haitian personnel who have melted before the marauding gangs. Thus, history continues to rhyme (the US occupation, 1915-1934 and the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) from 2004-2017).

    Armed gangs feature as a demonic presence in the UN deliberations, regularly paired with such opaque terms as “a multidimensional crisis”.  It is telling that the cliché-governed reasons for that crisis never focus on how the gang phenomenon took root, not least those mouldering state institutions that have failed to protect the populace. Little wonder then, that the Russian representative Vassily Nebenzia felt that sending in armed elements was “an extreme measure” that unnecessarily invoked the provisions of Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations.

    Undeterred by such views, the US representative Jeffrey Delaurentis noted that the mission would require the “inclusion of dedicated expertise in anti-gang operations, community-oriented policing, and children and women’s protection.”  That Washington approved the measure can be put down to endorsing a policy which might discourage – if only in the short term – the arrival of Haitian asylum seekers which have been turned around en masse.

    Despite claiming a different tack from his predecessor in approaching the troubled Caribbean state, President Biden has sought to restrict the influx of Haitian applications using, for instance, Title 42, a Trump policy put in place to deport individuals who pose a pandemic risk, in spite of any asylum credentials they might have.  Within 12 months, the Biden administration was responsible for expelling more than 20,000 Haitians – or as many as the combined totals of three different presidents over two decades.

    Resolution 2699 also suffers from another glaring fault.  Kenya’s dominant contribution to the exercise has raised searching questions back home.  Opposition politician Ekuru Aukot, himself a lawyer who had aided in drafting Kenya’s revised 2010 constitution, saw no legal basis for the government to authorise the Haitian deployment.  In his view, the deployment was unconstitutional, lacking any legal backbone or treaty.

    In granting Aukot an interim injunction, this point was considered by the Nairobi High Court worthy of resolution.  Judge Enock Mwita was “satisfied that the application and petition raise substantial issues of national importance and public interest and require urgent consideration.”  The judge accordingly issued a conservatory order “restraining the respondents from deploying police officers to Haiti or any other country until 24th October 2023.”

    On October 24, Judge Mwita extended the duration of the interim order till November 9, when an open session is scheduled for the petition to be argued.  “This court became seized of this matter earlier than everyone else and it would not make sense for it to set aside or allow the interim orders to lapse.”  The whole operation risks being scuttled even before it sets sail.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Background Facts about Gaza

    Secretary General Antonio Guterres recently said, “the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.” The Israeli Ambassador responded that Guterres’ comments were “shocking”, “unfathomable” and  “disconnected from reality”.  He called for the Secretary General’s resignation. Below are some facts about Gaza to evaluate whether Guterres was accurate or not.

    Gaza is a tiny strip of land on the Mediterranean coast with the 5,000 year old Gaza City in the north. The entire strip is only 5 miles wide by 25 miles in length with 2.3 million Palestinians locked in this territory by Israel.  It is the size of a small US city.

    In 1996 Israeli journalist Amira Haas published the book Drinking the Sea at Gaza. After living and researching in Gaza, she described the history, conditions, religion and politics. The subtitle was “Days and Nights in a Land Under Siege”. Gaza has been under siege for decades.

    About 80% of the people in Gaza are descendants of refugees who were expelled from their villages in what is now southern Israel in the 1948 Nakba (Catastrophe).  Most Gazans have never been able to set foot outside the territory. They are born, live their lives and die in this concentration camp.

    At least 50% of Gaza’s work force is unemployed. Israel restricts nearly all aspects of their economy. For example, Gaza’s fishermen are prevented from going into deeper waters to fish. If they try, they are fired on by Israeli naval boats. Farmers and shepherds are also fired on as they try to eke out a living.

    From December 1998 to February 2001, there was an airport in Gaza until Israel bombed the control tower and destroyed the runways to make it unusable.

    Gaza has a port but foreign boats are prevented from landing. In 2010, six civilian ships including the Turkish Mavi Marmara tried to bring humanitarian relief to Gaza. Israeli paratroopers attacked  the ships,  killing 9 passengers including one American.

    Israel routinely demolishes the homes of Palestinians. In 2003, American peace activist Rachel Corrie was killed by an Israeli bulldozer as she attempted to prevent the destruction of the home of a Palestinian pharmacist in Gaza.

    Israel routinely denies exit permits to outstanding youth who have received scholarships to study abroad.

    In 2014 Israel bombed Gaza’s water reservoir and sanitation treatment facilities, escalating the shortage of drinking water while sewage ran in the streets. Since then, as documented by Oxfam, Israel has prevented the importation of equipment necessary to rebuild sanitation and water treatment.

    In spring 2018 Gazans demonstrated against their imprisonment. They called it the Great March of Return.  The two year report documents that 217 Palestinians were killed and over 19,000 injured  by Israeli soldiers.

    In 2020 the UN issued a report saying that Gaza is not liveable. “The primary cause of this ‘unliveable environment is a highly restrictive Israeli blockade … which has reduced Gaza to the point of ‘systematic collapse.’”

    Conclusion

    Clearly, the Secretary General was accurate in his statement that Palestinians have endured decades of “suffocating occupation”. It is a measure of the Israeli Ambassador’s sense of impunity that he attacks the top UN official who dares to mention this.

    The diplomatic conflict will increase in the coming days and weeks as Israel’s genocidal campaign continues.

    The facts about Gaza and Palestine are clear: Israel is violating international law and Western states that support this are complicit. It is up to the people all over the world to speak out.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Day Guterres Became Relevant

    The relevance given to a UN Secretary-General is often judged by the degree of controversy caused.  In history, the most relevant are usually targeted.  Dag Hammarskjöld, refusing to remain a mere bauble of international office, was almost certainly murdered over his intervention in the Congo civil war in 1961.  The least relevant (who was that sweet little fella, Ban Ki-Moon?) have barely registered a note of dissent.  The big powers like to know they can render such figures impotent, if not insignificant.

    It was, for that reason, refreshing to see the current occupant of that post make the less than startling remark that the atrocious attacks of October 7 staged by Hamas and Islamic Jihad on Israeli soil could not be seen as standalone acts of individual, unprovoked outrage.  António Guterres was careful to also note that there was “nothing” that could “justify the deliberate killing, injuring and kidnapping of civilians, or the launching of rockets against civilian targets”.

    Guterres also noted that it was “important to also recognise the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum.”  The Palestinians had “been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.  They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished.”

    While the attacks by Hamas could not be justified to address such grievances, they also could not be used as a pretext to “justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.”  Even war, he explained to his colleagues, had rules.

    The Secretary-General also reiterated the principle of protecting civilians during armed conflict.  This precluded using them as human shields and ordering “more than one million people to evacuate the south, where there is no shelter, no food, no water, no medicine, and no fuel, and then continuing to bomb the south itself.”

    Such comments did not go down well with the Israeli Foreign Minister.  Bullies of international relations are always easily slighted.  And so it was that Eli Cohen would gasp and wonder which world the secretary-general was living in.  “Definitely, this is not our world.”

    The foreign minister made it fairly clear what sort of world that was.  “I will not meet the UN Secretary-General.  After the October 7th massacre, there is no place for a balanced approach.  Hamas must be erased off the face of the planet.”

    Gilad Erdan, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, spoke in the voice of complacency outraged, going so far as to demand the resignation of Guterres.  “A Secretary-General who does not understand that the murder of innocents can never be understood by any ‘background’ cannot be Secretary-General.”  With a callow splutter, he suggested that the UN chief had “expressed an understanding for terrorism and murder.”

    On army radio, Erdan also announced that Israel would be refusing “to issue visas to UN representatives.  We have already refused a visa for the undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs, Martin Griffiths.  The time has come to teach them a lesson.”

    As ever, Erdan’s reasoning confused explication with justification, but in that world, the nuanced explanation huffs and puffs in tired resignation, leaving the murderous justification to take the front position.

    The comments from Guterres also come in light of the perilous operational state of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA).  The humanitarian agency has been starved of resources and will be forced to cease the provision of hospital care, largely occasioned by Israel’s blockade on fuel.  “Current stocks are almost completely exhausted,” the agency states in its October 26 situation report, “forcing life-saving services to come to a halt.  This includes the supply of piped water as well as fuel for the health sector, bakeries, and generators.”  Staff have also suffered a horrendous: 39 have been killed since October 7.

    As for the attacks on his own integrity, Guterres has been combative.  “I am shocked by the misrepresentations by some of my statement … as if I was justifying acts of terror by Hamas.  This is false. It was the opposite.”

    The brainstorming session in the Netanyahu-IDF meetings must have been straightforward: de-historicise conflict, first and foremost; relegate Hamas to some equivalent monstrous organisation, in this case, ISIS; and then, just to make sure, use Nazism and the Holocaust as recyclable motifs.

    Along the way, massive Palestinian casualties, many children (2,360 deaths over three weeks), can be excused by pointing the finger at Hamas, because it is not Israeli jets and weapons doing the killing but the policy of a terrorist organisation.  And besides, Israel is, as Cohen insists, doing it for “the civilised world”.

    The Israeli strategy here is to excuse the inexcusable: the collective, mass laceration of a people.  In this, they simply perpetuate the tragic crimes that have been visited, not only upon the Jews, but upon any ethnicity or group in history.  The Whig statesman Edmund Burke spoke about not knowing “the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people.”  Unfortunately, in this conflict, that indictment was drawn up some time ago, and is being prosecuted with relentless ruthlessness.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Profile in Persecution: Abdulla Mohamed AlDurazi

    Abdulla Mohamed AlDurazi, an 18-year-old Saudi citizen from the Qatif region in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, was arrested without an arrest warrant while walking alone on 27 August 2014. His detention has been marred by multiple human rights violations, including torture, enforced disappearance, solitary confinement, and an unfair trial. He was sentenced to death for alleged freedom of expression-related crimes committed when he was a minor. He is currently detained in the General Directorate Investigations prison in Al-Dammam, awaiting execution, as the Saudi Supreme Court upheld his death sentence on 8 August 2022, meaning he could be executed at any time without prior notice, in a clear violation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, despite the 2020 Saudi Royal Decree aiming to abolish the death penalty for child defendants. On 16 October 2023, the UN Special Rapporteur on summary, extrajudicial, or arbitrary executions, issued a press release, in which he urged “the Saudi judiciary and other institutions in Saudi Arabia to ensure that Abdullah AlDurazi’s execution is not carried out”.

     

    On 27 August 2014, while Abdulla was walking alone in the street, Saudi security officers seized him, beat him, and arrested him without presenting an arrest warrant. After being taken to the Tarout Police Station and then Qatif Prison, he was moved to the Dammam Investigations Center six months following his arrest. Abdulla forcibly disappeared for three months and endured approximately six months of solitary confinement, during which he was subjected to physical and psychological torture. Prison officers inflicted severe burns around his eye, broke his tooth, and injured his knee while he was restrained for a long time. Because of the cruel torture he endured, he suffered a severe ear injury, and he was hospitalized, where he spent two weeks in a coma. Under this brutal torture, Abdulla was forced into signing a false confession, which he was not allowed to read, claiming his involvement with a terrorist group.

     

    Following three years of arbitrary detention, torture, enforced disappearance, and solitary confinement, Abdulla faced trial before the Saudi Specialized Criminal Court in August 2017. During the trial, he cited the details of the torture he endured during the investigation period, which forced him into signing an already prepared written false confession that he was not allowed to read. He also made many requests for the court for his medical records to be admitted, which shows evidence of his hospitalization from the torture he endured to coerce his confession, but the court ignored them. It also denied Abdulla access to a court-appointed lawyer, which made his father, who works in the fishing sector and has no legal training, represent him at his trial before the Specialized Criminal Court, as his family could not afford to appoint a private lawyer.

     

    Abdulla’s trial relied only on his coerced confession, as the court did not present any other evidence for his alleged involvement in the crimes of which he was accused. Additionally, all of these alleged offenses are not considered among the most serious crimes. Consequently, Abdulla was convicted of 1) participating in the formation of a terrorist cell aimed at destabilizing the internal security in the country and targeting security officers, 2) participating in demonstrations and marches, 3) attacking and destroying public property, carrying out acts of sabotage and chaos, blocking the road and seeking to cause strife and division in the country, 4) assaulting security men by throwing Molotov cocktails at them, 5) blocking the road for pedestrians by burning tires, 6) chanting anti-state slogans, and 7) participating in Ahmed AlMatar’s funeral and distributing water during it, and organizing this funeral. The court even exaggerated and fabricated charges that were not included in the investigation books and the statements extracted under torture, in which Abdulla did not mention the formation of a terrorist cell.  Even though all these crimes allegedly occurred before Abdulla turned 18, except for one crime in relation to peaceful protest-related activities that took place in May 2014, when Abdulla was 18, the Specialized Criminal Court sentenced him to death in February 2018.

     

    Despite the 2020 Royal Decree by Saudi King Salman abolishing the death penalty for child defendants, and Crown Prince Mohamed Bin Salman’s statement in an interview with “The Atlantic” on 3 March 2022 that the death penalty had been abolished except for murder charges, the Court of Appeal upheld his death sentence on 8 August 2022 and rejected Abdulla’s appeal, ignoring the protection provided in the 2020 Royal Decree to minors in Saudi Arabia for discretionary offenses (ta’zir), which involve the charges brought against Abdulla. Notably, the alleged crimes were protest-related and did not involve crimes considered the most serious, such as murder. Abdulla appealed his sentence before the Saudi Supreme Court, and in October 2023, the Supreme Court upheld the death sentence, meaning he could be executed at any time.

     

    On 16 October 2023, the UN Special Rapporteur on summary, extrajudicial, or arbitrary executions, issued a press release, in which he expressed concern at the imminent execution of Abdullah AlDurazi, who was a child when he allegedly committed his crime and urged “the Saudi judiciary and other institutions in Saudi Arabia to ensure that Abdullah AlDurazi’s execution is not carried out”. He added that “the Juvenile Act does not extend to mandatory and retributive death sentences, allowing for the execution of children sentenced under the provisions of the Sharia legal system” – that is, according to the Saudi interpretation of Sharia. Accordingly, he called on Saudi Arabia “to publish the text of the 2020 Royal Decree and enforce it for all defendants below the age of 18, regardless of their crime”. Reprieve, in collaboration with other organizations, had worked on this issue, contributed to its promotion, and shed light on it, warning of the danger of Saudi Arabia carrying out Abdulla’s execution at any time.

     

    Abdulla’s warrantless arrest, torture, enforced disappearance, solitary confinement, and unfair trial go against the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT), to which Saudi Arabia is a party.  Additionally, the violations that he faced despite being a minor violate the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).

     

    As such, Americans for Democracy and Human Rights in Bahrain (ADHRB) urgently highlights the imminent threat to execute Abdulla and at least two other children in Saudi Arabia for crimes they allegedly committed as minors. ADHRB calls on the international community to take immediate action and pressure the Saudi government to revoke the death sentences imposed on all minors in Saudi Arabia. Moreover, it urges Saudi authorities to release Abdulla immediately, given the absence of a fair trial and proper legal procedures. It further demands an investigation into the allegations of torture, enforced disappearance, solitary confinement, and ill-treatment, holding the perpetrators accountable. Compensation for the violations he endured should be provided, or at the very least, a fair retrial must be granted, leading to his release.

    The post Profile in Persecution: Abdulla Mohamed AlDurazi appeared first on Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain.

    This post was originally published on Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain.

  • Gaza Health System Is Hours Away From “Complete Collapse,” Officials Say

    The health system in Gaza is on the verge of “complete collapse,” Palestinian health ministry officials have said, with over a third of hospitals shuttered and the rest rapidly running out of capacity and resources due to Israel’s blockade of electricity, water and humanitarian aid. Al Jazeera reports that a health ministry spokesperson has said that the health system is completely out of service…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Political Education Is as Essential to Organizing as Direct Action

    As the Israeli bombardment of Gaza continues, the death toll in Gaza has topped 6,500, including 2,700 children. In the wake of surprise attacks waged by Hamas, in which 1,400 Israelis were killed on October 7, Israel has carried out genocidal acts of collective punishment against Palestinians in Gaza. Exercising its control over a blockaded Gaza, Israel has shut off access to water, electricity…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Over 300 Former Staffers Call on Sanders to Lead Ceasefire Resolution in Senate

    More than 300 former staffers from Sen. Bernie Sanders‘ 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns released an open letter Tuesday urging the Vermont Independent to sponsor a cease-fire resolution in the U.S. Senate as Israel’s bombing campaign in the besieged Gaza Strip continues unabated. Sanders said last week that “the bombs and missiles from both sides must end” and has accused Israel of violating…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • International Community Faces Acid Test on Gaza

    acid test

    I never thought I’d live to see a British prime minister warmly embracing a war criminal and genocidal thug like Netanyahu, go swanning around a hotel (the King David) which was used as the Jerusalem headquarters of the British Mandate aúthority and blown up by Jewish terrorists in 1946, killing 91 and wounding 45, then tell Netanyahu: “We want you to win.”

    Win what, exactly? And who’s “we”? Certainly not the man-in-the-street in Britain. No, it’ll be that band of brainwashed Ziofreaks in Westminster who have shamed us for over a century.

    And they (the Ziofreaks, not “we”) want Israel to win its dirty 75-year campaign of terror, illegal military occupation, dispossession, annexation, ethnic cleansing and extreme cruelty against the harshly oppressed Palestinians who are trying to defend their homeland.

    I was even more infuriated to see queues of lorries carrying desperately needed aid held up for days at Gaza’s Rafah crossing into Egypt by the Israelis’ refusal to let them enter the mangled hell-hole they’ve created in the packed enclave. I hear they even bombed the crossing to make sure nothing could move.

    Bypass Israel if necessary and deliver aid by sea

    If the UN and the high and mighty powers wanted to, they could bypass Israeli and Egyptian cruelty and bring aid to Gaza by sea. They should have done so as soon as Israel slapped its illegal blockade on Gaza in 2006 following Hamas’s inconvenient election win. As it is, unarmed privateers have been left to try to break the siege.

    In February 2003 British surgeon David Halpin chartered a small Danish cargo vessel, MV Barbara, filled her with important humanitarian items and sailed from Torquay to Ashdod, a port on the Israeli coast close to Gaza where the cargo was transferred by road into Gaza without too much trouble.

    In 2008 two humanitarian vessels actually got through to Gaza. Their success in breaking the siege, and their safe arrival and departure, was due to the intervention of the British Foreign Office. Before the peace activists set sail, they asked the British government “to ensure the freedom boats’ safe and uninterrupted passage to Gaza considering these are international waters and Palestinian territorial waters”. Any attempt to stop the boats would surely infringe the right to freedom of movement to and from Gaza, and seriously breach the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, to which Israel is a party.

    The minister in charge of Middle East affairs Kim Howells later admitted that “FCO officials spoke to Israeli officials in advance of the trip and Israel allowed the boats peacefully into Gaza.”

    Nearly three years later, as Gaza Freedom Flotilla II prepared to sail, Israel was determined not to let the boats reach their destination because safe arrival would drive a coach and horses through Israel’s control-freakery. This prompted the following statement by flotilla organizers to the UN Human Rights Council:

    “We are determined to sail to Gaza. Our cause is just and our means are transparent. To underline the fact that we do not present an imminent threat to Israel nor do we aim to contribute to a war effort against Israel, thus eliminating any claim by Israel to self-defense, we invite the HRC or any other UN or international agency to come on board and inspect our vessels at their point of departure, on the high seas, or on their arrival in the Gaza port. We will – and must – continue to sail until the illegal siege of Gaza is ended and Palestinians have the same human and national rights those of us sailing enjoy.” – Steering Committee of the International Coalition for Gaza Freedom Flotilla II.

    In the end Flotilla II didn’t sail. In all, five shipments were reportedly allowed access prior to the 2008–09 Gaza War, but after that everything was blocked by Israel.

    In May 2010 the Mavi Marmara took part in a flotilla of ships operated by activist groups from 37 countries with the intention of directly confronting the Israeli blockade. While en route and in international waters Israeli Naval Forces communicated to them that a naval blockade around the Gaza area was in force and ordered the ships to follow them to Ashdod port or be boarded. The ships declined and were boarded in international waters.

    Reports from journalists on the Mavi Marmara and from the UN claimed that Israeli gunboats opened fire with live rounds before boarding the ship. Passengers tried to repell the boarding parties of  Israeli commandos, and in the violent clash that followed nine were killed and a tenth died four years later of his wounds. Several dozen more were injured, some seriously. Israel claimed 10 of its troops were injured, one seriously.

    The UN’s official report found Israel’s blockade of Gaza to be legal, but other UN experts, reporting to the Human Rights Council, disagreed and found it was a violation of international law.

    A UN fact-finding mission, investigating the assault on the Mavi Marmara, declared that “no case can be made for the legality of the interception” and they therefore found that the interception was illegal and constituted collective punishment of the people living in the Gaza Strip and thus to be illegal and contrary to Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. It could not even be justified even under Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations [the right of self-defence].

    The Centre for Constitutional Rights also concluded that the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip was illegal under international law and amounted to collective punishment. “The flotilla did not seek to travel to Israel, let alone ‘attack’ Israel. Furthermore, the flotilla did not constitute an act which required an ‘urgent’ response, such that Israel had to launch a middle-of-the-night armed boarding… Israel could also have diplomatically engaged Turkey, arranged for a third party to verify there were no weapons onboard and then peacefully guided the vessel to Gaza.”

    Craig Murray, an internationally recognized authority on these matters, was Head of the Maritime Section of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and responsible for giving political and legal clearance to Royal Navy boarding operations in the Persian Gulf following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. He said that Israel had tried to justify previous fatal attacks on neutral civilian vessels on the High Seas in terms of enforcing an embargo under the legal cover given by the San Remo Manual of International Law Applicable to Armed Conflicts at Sea. “San Remo only applies to blockade in times of armed conflict. Israel is not currently engaged in an armed conflict, and presumably does not wish to be. San Remo does not confer any right to impose a permanent blockade outwith times of armed conflict, and in fact specifically excludes as illegal a general blockade on an entire population.”

    At the same time UN Security Council resolution 1860 (2009) emphasised “the need to ensure sustained and regular flow of goods and people through the Gaza crossings” and called for “the unimpeded provision and distribution throughout Gaza of humanitarian assistance, including of food, fuel and medical treatment”.

    But when MEP Kyriacos Triantaphyllides put a question to the EU Commission this was their reply:

    After the organisation of a flotilla heading to Gaza in May 2010, the Quartet, of which the EU is a member, stated that all those wishing to deliver goods to Gaza should do so through established channels, so that their cargo can be inspected and transferred via land crossings into Gaza. It also stated that there was no need for unnecessary confrontations and that all parties should act responsibly in meeting the needs of the people of Gaza….

    The Commission stands by this line. A flotilla is not the appropriate response to the humanitarian situation in Gaza. At the same time, Israel must abide by international law when dealing with a possible flotilla. The EU continues to request the lifting of the blockade on Gaza, including the naval blockade.

    It might have been scripted in Tel Aviv and not by anyone with Christian principles. The “established channel” for delivering goods to Gaza is of course the time-honoured route by sea, which is protected by maritime and international law and therefore entirely appropriate.

    There’s nothing “provocative” about unarmed vessels with humanitarian cargoes using it. The organizers had offered their cargoes for inspection and verification by a trusted third party to allay Israel’s fears about weapon supplies. They should not have to deal with a belligerent regime that was (and still is) cruelly waging a starvation war on women and children. Anyone suggesting they must do so seeks to legitimize the blockade, which we all know to be illegal and a crime against humanity.

    And where are the UN when a rogue nation – also a UN member – shows contempt for their maritime Convention?

    By 2018 Her Majesty’s Government had abandoned all pretence of upholding the Law of the Seas or even pursuing its 2008 policy of intervening to obtain advance clearance from the Israeli authorities. The Foreign Office appeared to have joined the Zionist conspiracy to legitimise the Gaza blockade and support Israel’s control-freakery.

    Lord Ahmad for the Government, answering a written question in the House of Lords, said: “Embassy officials discussed the travelling flotilla with the Israeli authorities on 6 June….. the Foreign and Commonwealth Office advises against all travel to Gaza including the waters off Gaza.”

    The waters off Gaza are international waters where neutral civilian vessels are entitled to free passage under the UN Conventional on the Law of the Seas. Why shouldn’t unarmed aid boats be able sail there unmolested? Is the Law of the Seas now dead? Is Britain no longer committed to keeping the sea lanes open to innocent shipping? And why is the UN not upholdings its own Convention?

    In particular, what happened to the diplomacy of 2008? Why didn’t our Government arrange advance clearance as before? Or were they, by any chance, colluding to thwart this mercy mission?

    In reply to a question from myself, Alister Burt, minister for the Middle East at that time, said: “Delivery of aid should be co-ordinated with the UN and Israeli and Egyptian Governments. We expect Israel to show restraint and fully respect international law. If wrongdoing has taken place we expect those responsible to be held to account…. We remain deeply concerned about restrictions on movement and access in Gaza, and the impact that this is having on the humanitarian situation. We have frequent discussions with the Israeli Government about the need to ease restrictions on Gaza. We call on Israel, the Palestinian Authority and Egypt to work together to ensure a durable solution for Gaza.”

    As if Israel ever respected international law or had ever been held to account.

    So here we have a horrific humanitarian crisis where the population of Gaza (nearly half of whom are children) are badly injured, starving and bombed out of their homes, with few if any public services still functioning and with aid waiting outside and prevented from entering by Israel.

    This is an acid test for the United Nations and the international community who need to show their real worth and recover the respect they have carelessly lost over the years.

    They are drinking in the Last Chance saloon and this is possibly their final opportunity to prove that the world has, after all, developed moral sensibilities and emerged from the caveman era. All it takes is a mercy flotilla of ships belonging to few UN member states, not privateers, to bring the Middle East issue to a head so the root causes can finally be dealt with in accordance with international law.

    In short, the lives of 2.3 million innocent, incarcerated Gazan cannot be left in the hands of a psychopath like Netanyahu. Nor can the Israelis be allowed to dictate the wider future of the Holy Land they have defiled.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • War on Gaza, 2023

    “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.

    1. 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.
    2. 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.
    3. 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.
    4. 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.

    For a more detailed history, see Charles Pierce: “The essential facts concerning Zionism and Palestine,” (Dissident Voice, 2023 Oct 10).

    End game?

    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.

    [2] Addameer: “The Israeli military court system,” 2017 July.  B’Tselem: “Statistics on Palestinians in Israeli custody,” 2023 Sep 07.

    [3] B’Tselem: “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid,” 2021 Jan 12.

    [4] Amnesty International: “Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians, a look into decades of oppression and domination,” 2022 Feb.

    [5] Leila Fadel: “Palestinians appear to have been killed in reprisal attacks in the West Bank,” NPR, 2023 Oct 18.  Amira Hass: “Israeli Settlers Aren’t Pausing the Expulsion and Dispossession in the West Bank,” Ha’aretz, 2023 Oct 12.

    [6] Ellen Brotsky & Ariel Koren: “We’re anti-Zionist Jews and we see genocide unfolding in Gaza,” Guardian, 2023 Oct 18.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • ‘Very disturbing’: crackdown on oil pipeline protests in Uganda concerns UN rights expert

    Students in Kampala have been beaten and arrested for marching against a 900-mile pipeline co-owned by a French company

    In mid-September, four dozen university students marched through Kampala, the capital city of Uganda, to deliver a petition to parliament calling on the government to end fossil fuel investments and scrap the 900-mile east Africa crude oil pipeline (Eacop).

    The young climate activists were led by 29-year-old Abduh Twaib Magambo, an environmental science student, who carried the two-page typewritten petition that said: “As students and young people of this country, we are the direct and major victims of [the] climate crisis living in a country that is among the most affected by climate change yet one of the least prepared to respond and tackle its effects.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Israel-Gaza conflict: NZ govt providing $5m towards humanitarian aid

    RNZ News

    The New Zealand government is putting $5 million to address urgent humanitarian needs in Gaza, Israel and the occupied West Bank.

    The initial contribution would include $2.5 million to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and a further $2.5 million to the World Food Programme (WFP) under the umbrella of the United Nations appeal.

    The Defence Force also remains on standby to help with evacuations of New Zealanders from the area, if required.

    In a statement, caretaker Prime Minister Chris Hipkins said he was “deeply saddened” by the deaths and conflict in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories.

    “The situation continues to evolve rapidly, and New Zealand is joining other likeminded countries to support those civilians and communities affected by the conflict.

    “The ICRC protects and assists victims of armed conflicts under international humanitarian law, and is working to gain access to people held hostage, distributing cash and other assistance to displaced people, and providing essential medical assistance and supplies.”

    With the Erez and Kerem Shalom crossings shut, the Rafah border was the only way into and out of the Gaza Strip for people and also for humanitarian aid. But that had shut in October too.

    Safe passage
    Western countries are also getting involved to try to secure safe passage through Rafah for both foreign passport holders in Gaza and humanitarian aid, and there have been conflicting reports about whether it would open temporarily or not.

    The WFP aid would help address food insecurity concerns in Gaza and the West Bank, and ensure emergency stock was prepared once access was guaranteed, Hipkins said.

    The Gaza civilian casualties keep climbing . . . 2750 Palestinian adults and 1030 children
    The Gaza civilian casualties keep climbing . . . 2750 Palestinian adults and 1030 children. Al Jazeera screenshot/APR

    “New Zealand calls for rapid and unimpeded humanitarian access to enable the delivery of crucial life-saving assistance.

    “We call on all parties to respect international humanitarian law, and uphold their obligations to protect civilians, and humanitarian workers, including medical personnel.”

    Both the ICRC and WFP act with full independence and neutrality.

    With the Labour-led government being in the caretaker position and trying to transition to the National Party after the general elections, the decision for aid had been made after consultation with National leader Christopher Luxon, Hipkins’ statement read.

    Luxon said he was appreciative of the communication between the outgoing government and the incoming one.

    “It’s important that the government owns those decisions, we are consulted, and when we’re consulted we can give our support.”

    NZDF on standby
    On Monday, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade said most New Zealanders who were registered as being in Israel had already left, but 50 Kiwis were still there, and 20 were registered as being in the occupied Palestinian territories (Gaza and the West Bank).

    But the government has asked for the New Zealand Defence Force to remain on standby in case it is needed to help with evacuations.

    “While not everyone wanting to leave can necessarily get themselves to a departure point, the government has requested NZDF to remain on standby to deploy if necessary,” Hipkins said.

    “Commercial routes remain the best option to depart the region, and MFAT is actively providing consular assistance to New Zealanders who remain in the affected region,” he said.

    “Anyone who wishes to depart should take the earliest commercial opportunity to do so.”

    New Zealand was also working with its partners on evacuation points for people who could not access commercial routes, but Hipkins acknowledged “the security situation on the ground make this difficult”.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • After the Attack, Israeli Rulers Launch Genocidal Destruction

    In the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s horrific counterattack on mostly Israeli civilians and Israel’s hourly genocidal bombing on Gaza’s more than 2 million people – nearly 40% of whom are children – it is unlikely that the Western or U.S. mass media will focus on what should be the U.S. government’s response.

    Last Sunday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken abruptly took down his earlier post which read: “Turkish Foreign Minister @HakanFidan and I spoke further on Hamas’ terrorist attacks on Israel. I encouraged Türkiye’s advocacy for a cease-fire and the release of all hostages held by Hamas immediately.”

    That was the end of any ceasefire talk by Washington – Israel’s historic patron, protector and unlimited weapons provider. Instead, Biden, Blinken and Secretary of Defense Austin have made statements of unconditional support and further weapons shipments for expanding the bombing and destruction of Gaza, targeting homes, mosques, schools, clinics, hospitals, ambulances and critical infrastructure like water mains.

    There was no mention of the far greater destruction of innocent Palestinians using F-16s and U.S.-made missiles that was underway. Are there no lawyers advising these politicians? When Israel ordered a complete siege of tiny, defenseless Gaza (an area much smaller than New York City) Defense Minister Yoav Gallant ordered his Southern Command to cut off essential services to Gaza, declaring “No electricity, no food, no fuel, no water. … We are fighting animals and will act accordingly.”

    Reacting to this omnicidal military order, international law practitioner Bruce Fein noted, “The Genocide Convention defines genocide, among other things, as ‘Deliberately inflicting on [a national, ethnical, racial or religious group] conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part’.”

    No problem, said Biden, assuring Israel unlimited military support to do whatever it wants, thus greenlighting genocide by Israel’s extremist ministers with their long, open record of racist hatred against Palestinians. Having met the legal definition of Co-belligerency, Biden, knowing that the laws of war were being systemically violated, later expressed his hope that Israel would abide by them.

    Biden/Blinken so far have no diplomatic policy, and no strategy counseling restraint to keep the conflict from escalating uncontrollably in that explosive region. They exercise veto power on the UN Security Council blocking anything like a ceasefire truce and negotiations toward a permanent two-state resolution as envisioned by the Oslo Accords and the Arab-Israeli Peace Process signed by all parties on September 13, 1993.

    Our government still hasn’t learned from the history of this region. This is the fifth war on Gaza with the most modern weaponry against Hamas’s fortunately feeble rockets, now intercepted. Over the decades, innocent Palestinian casualties, fatalities, injuries, disease and loss of livelihoods are hundreds of times larger than those suffered by innocent Israelis.

    Yet Washington, knowing that the oppressors, occupiers, and blockaders surrounding and infiltrating Gaza keep saying Israel has a right to defend itself without adding that the crushed Palestinians have a similar right to defend themselves under international law and the norms of equity.

    The Hamas fighters moving into those border Israeli villages saw themselves on a homicide/suicide mission. Many had lost family members, and co-workers, to decades of Israeli bombs. They knew they were going to die inside Israel. Indeed, Israel counted 1,500 Hamas bodies in the area, larger than the number of Israeli civilians slain by these self-perceived martyrs.

    Thus, the cycle of violence expands, and what human rights advocates call “the open-air prison” of Gaza faces total obliteration by Israel. Moral, rational voices for waging peace by Israeli human rights groups, together with their Palestinian counterparts, are lost in the vortex of the killing fields in Gaza – a victim of post-World War II history.

    Driven by the Nazi Holocaust, the founders of the state of Israel were in no mood to tolerate the rights of the indigenous Arab peoples. It was their land and we took it, said the father of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, in an oft-quoted public remark to Nahum Goldmann, the head of the World Zionist Organization.

    After the UN partitioned Palestine in 1948, many expelled Palestinian refugees ended up in the Gaza Strip. Since then, the Israeli military superpower has expanded its original territory several-fold, now holding 78% of the original Palestine plus the Syrian Golan Heights. After its victory over Arab nations in the 1967 war, Israel, in violation of international law, occupied the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, establishing large colonies in the West Bank.

    The U.S. has not been an honest broker, to say the least. It has been meddling in the Middle East, invading countries, toppling regimes, arming dictators and factions, and fueling constant instability. Oil, of course, has also been a key factor driving U.S. foreign policy.

    All along, Congress has become a growing chorus calling for unlimited money and weaponry for Israeli militarism, making that country an unchallengeable military superpower, bristling with nuclear weapons. The existential threat is against the right of the Palestinians to have their state. Before the colossal intelligence failure last week in Gaza, Israeli military leaders had been saying that Israel has never been more secure.

    It is hard not to charge hawkish Congressional Republicans and Democrats with bigoted, legislated cruelties against Palestinian victims of Israeli war crimes. They have tied themselves at the hip to the most historically extreme Israeli politicians who’ve voiced their view of Palestinians as subhuman and use vicious racist language that nearly all members of Congress refuse to disavow.

    The question for Americans of conscience, including American Jews and Arab-Americans – especially Jewish Voice for Peace and the Arab American Institute – is when will the U.S. government assert its influence in the area to say: “Enough.” Stop the slaughter of innocents, demand a ceasefire and commence critical medical and food aid to the suffering survivors.  After years of unconscionable downgrading of the “Palestinian question,” it is time for Washington to launch serious diplomatic negotiations, backing the experienced role of the United Nations (UN) in such conflicts.

    The UN also has a grieving stake there. Israeli “precision” bombing once again struck clearly marked, long-standing UN humanitarian sites in Gaza, so far killing 11 courageous United Nations workers.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Israel-Gaza crisis: NZ must condemn atrocities but keep pushing for a two-state solution

    ANALYSIS: By Alexander Gillespie, University of Waikato

    It was perhaps inevitable that the shock Hamas attack on Israel would become a minor election sideshow in New Zealand. Less than a week from the Aotearoa New Zealand polls, a crisis in the Middle East offered opposition parties a brief chance to criticise the foreign minister’s initial reaction.

    But if it was a fleeting and fairly trivial moment in the heat of a campaign, the crisis itself is far from it — and it will test the foreign policy positions of whichever parties manage to form a government after Saturday.

    It can be tempting to see the latest eruption of violence in Gaza and Israel as somehow “normal”, given the history of the region. But this is far from normal.

    What appear to be intentional war crimes and crimes against humanity, involving the use of terror against citizens and guests of Israel, will provoke what will probably be an unprecedented response.

    Israel’s declaration of war and formation of an emergency war cabinet — backed by threats to “wipe this thing called Hamas off the face of the Earth” — were the start.

    The bombardment and “complete siege” of Gaza, and preparation for a possible ground invasion, have catastrophic potential.

    Hundreds of thousands may be forced towards Egypt or into the Mediterranean, with the fate of the hostages held by Hamas looking dire. Israel has now said there will be no humanitarian aid until the hostages are free.

    There is a risk the war will spread over Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, with Hezbollah (backed by Iran) now involved.

    US President Joe Biden’s warning to Iran to “be careful”, and the deployment of a US carrier fleet to the Eastern Mediterranean, only ups the ante.

    Rules of war
    Given the suspension of some commercial flights to and from Israel, New Zealand’s most meaningful first response has been practical: arranging a special flight from Tel Aviv for citizens and Pacific Islanders, and their families, currently in Israel or the Palestinian territories who wish to leave.

    Beyond these immediate concerns, however, the world is divided. Outrage in the West is matched by support in Arab countries for Palestinian “resistance”. Despite US efforts to get a global consensus condemning the attack, the United Nations Security Council could not agree on a unified statement.

    With no global consensus, New Zealand can do little more than assert and defend the established rules-based international order. This includes stating clearly that international humanitarian law and the rules of war are universal and must be applied impartially.

    That’s akin to New Zealand’s position on the Russian invasion of Ukraine: the rules of war apply to all, both state and non-state forces (irrespective of whether those parties agree to them). War crimes are to be investigated, with accountability and consequences applied through the relevant international bodies.

    This applies to crimes of terror, murder, hostage-taking and indiscriminate rocket attacks carried out by Hamas. But the government needs also to emphasise that war crimes do not justify further retaliatory war crimes.

    Specifically, unless civilians take a direct part in the conflict, the distinction between them and combatants must be observed. Military action should be proportionate, with all feasible precautions taken to minimise incidental loss of civilian life.

    International law prohibits collective punishments, and access for humanitarian relief should be permitted. To hold an entire population captive – as a siege of Gaza involves – for the crimes of a military organisation is not acceptable.

    The two-state solution
    It is also important that New Zealand carefully considers definitions of terrorism and legitimate force. Terrorists do not enjoy the political and legal legitimacy afforded by international law.

    Unlike other members of the Five Eyes security network, New Zealand designates only the military wing of Hamas, not its political wing, as a prohibited “terrorist entity” under the Terrorism Suppression Act.

    Whether this distinction is anything more than a fiction needs to be reviewed. If this were to change, it would mean the financing, participation in or recruitment to any branch of Hamas would be illegal. This might have implications for any future peace process, should Hamas be involved.

    At some point, most people surely hope, the cycle of violence will end. The likeliest route to that will be the so-called “two-state solution”, requiring security guarantees for Israel, negotiated land swaps and careful management of Jerusalem’s holy sites.

    New Zealand has long supported this initiative, despite its apparent diplomatic near-death status. An emergency meeting of the Arab League in Cairo this week urged Israel to resume talks to establish a viable Palestinian state, and China has also reiterated support such a solution.

    New Zealand cannot stay silent when extreme, indiscriminate violence is committed by any group or nation. But joining any movement of like-minded nations to continue pushing for the two-state solution is still its best long-term strategy.The Conversation

    Dr Alexander Gillespie is professor of law, University of Waikato. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Fiji marks 53rd anniversary with a message of ‘unity in diversity’

    By Finau Fonua, RNZ Pacific journalist

    Fiji independence day celebrations — “Fiji Day” — this week was a jovial occasion with thousands of flag waving citizens accompanying the Republic of Fiji Military Forces Band as they marched through the streets Suva towards Albert Park for a flag raising ceremony.

    October 10 marked the republic’s 53rd year since it gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1970.

    Fiji’s chiefs volunteered to cede their sovereignty to the British realm in 1874, gathering in Levuka — Fiji’s old capital — to sign a Deed of Cession. There was a re-enactment of that historic moment with young Fijians dressed in 18th century outfits of British diplomats and Fijian and Tongan chiefs who signed the deed.

    “We must remember with gratitude all of those [who] contributed to the development and modernisation of our beloved Fiji,” Fiji President Ratu Wiliame Katonivere said in a televised state address.

    “Among the many important decisions taken by our forefathers embracing Christianity was and will continue to be our guiding light, we have continued to embrace and respect our multiculturalism and our diverse cultures and religions, our differences make us unique as one people,” he added.

    Ratu Wiliame Katonivere
    Fiji President Ratu Wiliame Katonivere . . . “we have continued to embrace and respect our multiculturalism and our diverse cultures and religions.” Image: Fiji Govt/RNZ

    In Albert park, a military parade took place with formations of decorated officers marching around the park to the tune of the Republic of Fiji Military Forces Band.

    Fiji’s elite were in attendance from the park stands led by Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka. A gun salute from three Howitzers artillery guns topped off the occasions soon after crowds stood attention to the Fijian anthem.

    ‘Uncertain times’
    Ratu Wiliame outlined some of the challenges faced by the country — re-iterating the same concerns raised by Rabuka at the UN General Assembly meeting in New York last month.

    “We are living in uncertain times,” Ratu Wiliame said.

    “Climate change has resulted in frequent tropical cyclones, longer dry spells, floodings and sea level rise for us in the Pacific — it has displaced communities resulting in relocations and loss of culture.

    “Like the rest of the world, we cannot turn a blind eye to the current war of aggression in the Ukraine, our nation like other nations in the world are facing supply change disruptions and threats to food security being heavily reliant on food imports.”

    21 Gun Salute at Albert Park, Suva, 10-October-2023
    The 21 Gun Salute at Suva’s Albert Park. Image: Fiji Govt/RNZ

    The anniversary is the country’s first under the leadership of Prime Minister Rabuka who was elected in the general elections last year, ousting the 16 year long reign of his predecessor Voreqe Bainimarama, regarded by his opposition as a democratically elected dictator, who imposed autocratic policies restricting freedom of the press and for oppressing political opponents from scrutinising his FijiFirst government.

    For many Fijians and pro-democracy advocates in the country, the 2022 general election symbolised a return to democracy, following a peaceful election. Fiji has a history of political turmoil, having experienced four coups in the space of four decades.

    Rabuka himself led the first coup in 1987 — a notorious event which saw racially motivated attacks and rioting against Fijians of Indian heritage. In May this year, he offered a public apology to the victims in a special ceremony.

    ‘Peace a cornerstone’
    “In our multicultural society, peace serves as the cornerstone that nurtures unity and drives progress,” Rabuka said.

    “Together, as one united people, we will continue to build a Fiji that thrives economically and stands as a shining example of unity in diversity.”

    Re-enactment of Fiji's Deed of Cession to the United Kingdom, Levuka, 10-October-2023
    Reenacting the signing of Fiji’s 1874 Deed of Cession. Image: Fiji Govt/RNZ

    President Ratu Katonivere called on Fijians to “focus on the future”.

    “We have had our share of pain and heartaches, we have paid highly for some decisions and actions that were taken in the past,” he said.

    “We must continue to remind ourselves that lessons we have learnt from the past so that we can build a better future for the next generation.

    “We must embrace our strengths and achievements, and be forward looking.

    “As we reflect on our history, I urge all Fijians to celebrate the triumphs we have achieved and focus on the future.”

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • The Essential Facts Concerning Zionism and Palestine

    1. Doctrine. Zionism was devised by some middle-class Jewish Europeans (most prominently Lev Pinsker and Theodore Herzl) as one response to horrendous late 19th century anti-Jewish persecutions in Europe. Like many of their contemporaries among nationalistic privileged-class European intellectuals and like the Nazis who came later, the Zionists conceived of the world’s Jews as a race. Moreover, they viewed the Jews as: (in their own words) a “parasitic” and “alien” presence within the gentile countries; and therefore a “Jewish problem”, which could only be resolved by removing all or most Jews from the gentile countries to a country of their own, which they decided would need to be in Palestine. Consequently, the Zionists opposed assimilation and disparaged those Jews who assimilated. [1]

    2. Colonialism. The Zionists, like other European colonialists, approved of the subjugation of non-white peoples and justified it with the then-commonplace racist rationale that God, or Destiny, had chosen the “superior” Europeans to bring “civilization” to the territories populated by the “primitive” peoples of Africa and Asia. Therefore, no meaningful consideration was given to the rights of the indigenous Palestinian Arabs. [2]

    3. Imperialism. The Zionists coalesced in 1897 with the formation of the Zionist Organization [ZO]. Its leaders then began appealing to various European colonialist powers for sponsorship of their proposal to create a so-called Jewish homeland in Palestine. Ultimately, it was Britain which became the imperial sponsor by issuing the Balfour Declaration (1917) calling for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”. The British motivations were twofold. [3]

    ♦ Firstly, Britain envisioned the creation of a British-allied outpost of European civilization in oil-rich southwest Asia as an instrument for projecting British imperial and commercial power over a part of the world in which British capital and empire were already heavily invested (notably in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company [now BP Inc.], Shell Oil, and the Suez Canal).

    ♦ Secondly, there was the anti-Jewish prejudice of some leading Cabinet members, including former Prime Minister Balfour, who hoped to reduce the Jewish presence in European government, commerce, and the professions.

    4. Anti-Arab racism. Jews (4% of the population) and their Muslim and Christian neighbors (85% and 11% respectively) had coexisted amicably in Palestine for many generations prior to the arrival of the Zionists. Zionist doctrine and practice destroyed this relationship.

    ♦ During the period of British rule over Palestine (1917—48), sympathetic Jewish capitalists in Europe and the United States provided money for Zionist land acquisitions in Palestine. The Zionists then evicted the Arab tenant farmers thereby violating the traditional rights of the latter. Moreover, the Zionist governing body required that Jewish employers hire only Jews and prohibited the sale of any Jewish-owned land to Arabs. Such racial discrimination was standard practice within the Zionist settlements; and it quite predictably provoked Arab resentment against the Zionist settlers. [4]

    ♦ Meanwhile, there were recurring suggestions (in private) by top Zionist leaders (Herzl, Weizmann, Ben-Gurion, and others) that the “Arab problem” could be resolved through “population transfer” to other Arab countries. In fact, from the very beginning, the Zionist leadership intended to eventually expel the indigenous Arab population from Palestine. [5]

    5. Collusion with anti-Jewish persecutors. For several decades, the Zionist organizations refused to fight for equal rights for Jews. In fact, they acted in concert with the persecutors.

    ♦ Whereas many Jews joined other anti-racists (including Communists) in the fight against the chauvinist, xenophobic, and anti-Jewish nationalisms and related persecutions which arose in Europe in the years between the two world wars of the 20th century; the Zionists, largely because of Communist opposition to the racialism at the heart of Zionist ideology, joined the fascists and allied bigots in denouncing the Communists. Meanwhile, the Zionist organizations, claiming to represent the interests of the world’s Jews, refused to fight anti-Jewish bigotry and persecutions. Why? Because they wanted persecuted Jews, not to fight for equal rights within their native countries, but to emigrate to Palestine.  To that end, the Zionist organizations routinely colluded with anti-Jewish states in sponsoring migration, legal and illegal, of European Jews to Palestine. [6]

    ♦ In the 1930s, the New Zionist Organization [NZO] (representing the minority “revisionist” faction) allied itself with fascist Italy until Mussolini broke off the alliance in order to enter the Axis Pact with Hitler. [7]

    ♦ Meanwhile, the German affiliate of the ZO (majority faction) refused to support resistance to Nazi anti-Jewish racial policies in order to maintain cooperation with the Nazi state in promoting and facilitating German Jewish emigration to Palestine. Moreover, the NZO-affiliated German State Zionist Organization (while receiving special favor from the Nazi regime which imposed its leader, Georg Kareski, as director of the Jewish Culture Leagues): praised Nazi policies, opposed the anti-Nazi boycott, and colluded with the Gestapo. [6]

    ♦ After the War largely cut off routes for Jewish emigration, Nazi Germany (in 1941) began its extermination project. In 1944, the ZO’s operative (Rezso Kasztner) in Hungary made a bargain with Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi official in charge of exterminating Europe’s Jews. If Kasztner would reassure the Hungarian Jews that they were to be resettled, not killed; then Eichmann would permit the ZO to take a number of select Jews to safety and Palestine. Kasztner provided the false assurance thereby enabling the Nazi SS to avoid significant resistance as it rounded up 450,000 Jewish Hungarians for deportation to the extermination camps. In return, the Nazi SS permitted the ZO to save 1,700 select Jews. Those, who had assimilated, or were non-Zionist, or were insufficiently young and vigorous were excluded and thereby left to be exterminated by the Nazis. [8]

    ♦! For Zionists, the persecution of Jews within their native countries (certainly prior to the Nazi’s “final solution”) was not something to fight, but a pretext for creating the so-called Jewish State in Palestine. Meanwhile, they dismissed any concern for the human rights of its indigenous population. 

    6. Obstruction of Jewish emigration. During the 1930s, Zionist obstruction of efforts, as at the 1938 Evian conference, to find safe havens for persecuted Jews outside of Palestine, impeded and limited Jewish emigration from Europe. Consequently, a huge number of Jews, who would otherwise have gotten out, were left trapped in Nazi-ruled Europe when the Axis War closed off (to nearly all Jews) avenues for further emigration [9]. Many of these Jews then become victims of the Nazi “final solution”. Moreover, after the War the Zionists opposed any consideration, during the 1946 inquiries of the Anglo-American Committee, to find countries willing to give refuge to the displaced Jews of Europe in Australia, the Americas, et cetera. They wanted these desperate people to have only one option, namely to go, legally or illegally, to Palestine [10]. 

    7. Exploitation of the genocide. Ever since the Axis War, the Zionists and their supporters have manipulated popular sympathy for the Jewish victims of the genocide in order to obtain support for Zionism. They and their supporters insist that the world must atone for the genocide of the six million Jews by granting them Palestine for a “Jewish state”; but they evade the fact that justice would require atonement and compensation for that genocide to be borne by Christian Europe, which perpetrated and/or permitted the genocide, not by the Palestinian Arabs, who had no part in it. [11]

    8. Censorship of critics. Zionists and their supporters routinely attempt to silence opponents of Zionism and critics of Israeli crimes against humanity by smearing said critics as purveyors of “antisemitism”, the word which Zionists and their allies use to mean Judeophobia (hatred of Jews), even though the Arab victims of Zionism are also Semitic in language and ancestral origin. When their critics are Jewish, as many are; Zionists have often disparaged and dismissed them as “self-hating Jews”. As Zionists obsessively smear their anti-racist critics, they generally give much less attention to actual Judeophobes.

    9. Majority rule denied. Throughout most of its (1917—48) rule over Palestine, Britain, in violation of its Article 22 obligations under its League of Nations Mandate, deferred to the Zionists: by turning a deaf ear to repeated Palestinian Arab appeals for redress of grievances, and by refusing to establish any democratically-elected representative governing body. Why? Because such body would undoubtedly have rendered stillborn the scheme to transform Palestine into a Zionist nation-state by acting to stop: further Zionist immigration, land acquisitions, evictions of Arab tenant farmers, and discriminatory employment practices. [12]

    10. Rebellions. Ultimately, the Arabs lost patience and resorted (in 1936) to armed rebellion. The British then used armed Zionist paramilitaries as “police” to assist in suppressing the Arab revolt. However, the persistence and cost of the Arab revolt finally convinced Britain of the folly of continuing to disregard the rights of the Arab majority in Palestine. Consequently, Britain (in 1939) abandoned its totally one-sided support for Zionist goals, and adopted a quasi-neutral policy, which both: offended the Arabs by continuing the refusal of majority rule, and angered the Zionists by restricting Zionist immigration and land acquisitions. The Zionists then revolted. When Britain declared war against Nazi Germany, two of the three Zionist paramilitaries (Haganah and Irgun) suspended the rebellion, while the third (Lehi a.k.a. Stern Gang) attempted (in 1940 and again in 1941) to ally itself to Nazi Germany but was rebuffed. In 1944, Irgun resumed the revolt; and in 1945 the three Zionist paramilitaries jointly resumed their rebellion with sabotage and murders including terrorist bombings. Their violent acts included: IED (improvised explosive device) attacks upon passing trains and motor vehicles; letter bombs; time bombs in hotels and other venues with civilian victims; and so forth; as well as attacks upon police and military targets. They also illegally trafficking large numbers of unauthorized Jewish immigrants into the country. [13]

    11. Partition. In 1947, Britain concluded: that the objectives of the Zionists and of the Palestinian Arabs were irreconcilable, and that it could not maintain peace and order in Palestine with the resources which it was willing to commit. Britain then turned the Palestine problem over to the United Nations. The UN, then consisting of 56 mostly white-ruled (European and western-hemisphere) states, adopted a partition plan (General Assembly Resolution 181) which was grossly discriminatory against the Arabs. Of the 15 Asian and African member states (excluding white-ruled South Africa), only two, having been bribed or coerced, voted for it. [14]

    ♦ Distribution of territory. Although Jews were only 32% of the population, this UN plan allocated 55% of the territory to the “Jewish” state, 42% to the Arab state, and 3% to a UN administered zone in and around Jerusalem.

    ♦ Distribution of population. In the Zionist state, which was to have a population of 995,000, a bare majority of Jews was to rule over 497,000 mostly Arab and Bedouin others. The majority Arab state was to have a population of 735,000, of which a mere 10,000 (1.4%) was to consist of Jews. As had been the policy throughout the Mandate, majority-rule was deemed unacceptable when Jews were a minority but acceptable when and where they were in the majority.

    ♦ Responses. The ZO, intent upon obtaining international acceptance for the proposed Jewish state, professed acceptance of the partition plan. The Palestinian Arabs and neighboring Arab states denounced the plan as a racist and colonialist injustice and refused to be bound by it.

    12. Conquest and ethnic cleansing. Armed conflict began between the Zionists and the Arabs even before Britain withdrew its forces in 1948 May 15. Although the Arabs had greater numbers, they were at a tremendous disadvantage with far fewer individuals trained for military service. Moreover, the intervening military contingents from Arab states were mostly: small in numbers, ill-trained, poorly equipped, and lacking in combat experience. In contrast, the Zionists: had long given priority to immigration by men capable of bearing arms; had tens of thousands of war veterans and other well-trained soldiers; were far better armed; and possessed a much more cohesive civil society with functioning governmental and military organizations. The Zionists proceeded: to conquer as much as possible of the territory allocated for the Arab state, and to expel most of the Arab population from Zionist-held territory. [15]

    13. Nakba. The outcome of the war was a nakba (catastrophe) for the Palestinian Arabs.

    ♦ Territory. By war’s end in 1949, the so-called “Jewish state” had conquered 77% of the territory (including half of the territory allocated by the UN for the Palestinian Arab state); and the remaining 23% was occupied and/or annexed by Jordan and Egypt. [16]

    ♦ Ethnic cleansing. Zionist armed forces had used massacres, death threats broadcast by radio and mobile loudspeakers, and expulsions at gunpoint to dispossess nearly 60% of the indigenous Arab population thereby making refugees of at least 711,000 Palestinian Arabs. [17]

    ♦ Land. Immediately before the war, Jews owned 6.2% of the land in Palestine [15]. During and after the war, the Zionists confiscated the land and homes of the Arabs, who had fled or been expelled [18, 19]. They also confiscated nearly 40% of the landholdings of Arabs, who remained resident within Israeli-held territory [18]. The Zionist state then leased the confiscated land to Zionist Jewish settlers [18, 19]. By 1950, Zionists were in possession of 94% of the land within Israeli-ruled territory (that is 73% of the land within the whole of Palestine) [19].

    ♦ Redress. In 1948 Dec 11, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 194 calling for: (1) a demilitarized permanent international zone for Jerusalem, and (2) respect for the right of return for all refugees willing to live in peace with their neighbors. In 1949 May 11 the UN General Assembly admitted Israel to UN membership based upon its promised acceptance of the UN Charter and General Assembly Resolutions 181 and 194. Compliance with the Charter and with the two Resolutions would have required Israel: (1) to withdraw from occupied territory in the parts of Palestine allocated by the UN for the Palestinian Arab state and for the international zone, (2) to permit repatriation of the Palestinian Arab refugees to their homes in all Israeli-controlled territory, and (3) to accord equal citizenship rights to its Arab minority. Israel refused to comply with its obligations regarding: refugee repatriation, Jerusalem, and occupied Arab territory. Israel dealt with those Arabs remaining within its territory by expelling some and by eventually conferring an inferior class of citizenship upon the remainder. [20]

    ♦ Cover-up. Attempting to conceal evidence of its crimes against humanity, the Zionist state conducts a policy of sequestering, and denying access to, documents consisting of contemporary reports of the massacres, expulsions, and other ethnic cleansing operations which its forces perpetrated during the nakba and subsequently. [21]

    14. Later conquests. The Zionist appetite for Arab territory was not satisfied by their conquests in 1948.

    ♦ Pursuant to a secret duplicitous conspiracy with France and Britain, Israel, in 1956 October, invaded Egypt. France and Britain, hoping to regain possession of the Suez Canal, then also invaded Egypt upon the pretense of intervening in order to safeguard commerce thru the Canal. During the meeting in which the conspiracy was hatched, Israeli leader David Ben Gurion proposed his “grand design”: that Israel should annex the remainder of Palestine plus southern Lebanon plus much of the Sinai. Because a ceasefire was imposed before Israeli forces could re-deploy for their planned invasion of Lebanon and the Jordanian-ruled West Bank, actual Israeli conquests were limited to Gaza and Sinai. Strong pressure by the US (which had not been consulted) ultimately compelled the aggressors to give back the conquered territory. [22]

    ♦ In 1967, the Zionist state launched a massive sneak attack upon Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Therewith, it conquered the remaining 23% of Palestine plus the Egyptian Sinai and the Syrian Golan. Its difficulties during a subsequent war (1973), and the costs of defending its conquests, eventually induced the Zionist state to return the Sinai to Egypt (by 1982); but it has refused to give up any of its remaining 1967 conquests. [23]

    ♦ Israel has repeatedly invaded neighboring Lebanon. It occupied much of Lebanon’s territory for two decades (1982—2000), and finally withdrew only in response to strong armed resistance by the Hezbollah militia. Israel continues to occupy the Sheba’a Farms district of Lebanon. Since 2000, Israeli armed forces have repeatedly (almost daily since 2006) breached Lebanese airspace, territorial waters, and/or land borders. It has also repeatedly bombed targets in the country. Massive Israeli airstrikes in 2006 killed some 1,100 people (mostly Lebanese civilians) and displaced another million. These Israeli actions provoke retaliatory action by the Hezbollah militia and by the Lebanese Army thereby perpetuating tensions and violent conflict. [24]

    ♦ Territories taken from the indigenous Arabs and currently occupied and ruled by the Zionist state consist of seven territories, the last five of which were conquered in the 1967 war. These include all of Palestine consisting of: (1) the partition territory, the 55% of Palestine allocated to the Zionist state by the UN in 1947; (2) the Nakba annexation, the additional 22% conquered by the Zionists in 1948—49; (3) East Jerusalem, 2%; (4) the West Bank, 19½%; and (5) Gaza, 1.4%. The other two, which were taken from neighboring Arab countries, are: (6) Golan, taken from Syria; and (7) Sheba’a Farms, a small piece of Lebanon. [23]

    15. Occupation regime. The Zionist state has persistently committed human rights violations in defiance of both international human rights conventions and UN resolutions.

    ♦ Land grabs. Despite pretending to want peace with the Syrians and Palestinians, the Zionist state has illegally (officially or de facto) annexed their conquered territories. Within all of its occupied territories, it persists: in seizing land from the Arab inhabitants; expelling the Arabs; and settling Jews on those lands (all in violation of the 4th Geneva Convention which pertains, among other matters, to the treatment of the native populations within foreign territories under military occupation). [23, 25]

    ♦ Citizenship and residency rights. The Israeli state encourages Jews with no personal ties to Palestine to take up residence in the country and become citizens, but it denies the right of return to the Palestinian Arabs who fled the war or were forcibly expelled in 1948. [26]

    ♦ Ethnic discrimination. Israel subjects Arabs, including those to whom it has conceded a third-class citizenship, to both overt and institutionalized discrimination. Infrastructure, services, and subsidies, which are routinely provided to Zionist communities, are denied to their Arab neighbors. Required building permits are almost never provided to Arabs, and the state routinely demolishes Arab homes and additions when constructed without such permits. Water resources are confiscated from Arab communities and given to their Zionist neighbors. Within the territories occupied since 1967, Zionist settlers are subject to civil law with liberal civil rights whereas Arabs are subject to arbitrary military law (with no such rights) and rigged judicial proceedings (with due process denied and near-certain conviction predetermined). [25]

    ♦ Repression. The Zionist state subjects the Arab population within occupied territories to murderous repression and collective punishments (in violation of the 4th Geneva Convention and other international human rights laws). Specifics have included: unlawful targeted killings of resistance leaders; detentions and deportations of Palestinian Arab leaders; denial of travel rights to Arab critics of Zionist occupation practices; a profusion of arbitrary detentions and long imprisonments without charge; routine torture of prisoners; home demolitions where a single family member is suspected of an act of violent resistance; use of excessive force in quelling protests; mass bombings of civilian populations (as in Gaza, 2008, 2014 and 2021); a blockade depriving the 2 million Gazans of life-sustaining essentials (export income and vital imports including food, medical supplies, fuel, and sorely needed building materials); checkpoints and road blockages applicable only to Arabs; obstructions of access to education and employment; and so forth. Israel’s systematic and pervasive abuses create such extreme despair that it provokes violent resistance, both collective and individual, against the Israelis; and the Zionist state then uses every incident of violent resistance as a “security” pretext for continuing its injustices against the Palestinian Arabs. [25, 27]

    16. Peace negotiations. The Zionist state, devoted to a racist ideology and existing upon the spoils of its robbery and oppression of the Arabs, has never sought a just peace.

    ♦ Until 1993, Israel refused to negotiate with the Palestinian interlocutors who actually could speak for the Palestinian Arabs. It has also often refused, upon one or another pretext, to even negotiate key issues which have included: the rights of the dispossessed Arabs to return to their native land, Palestinian statehood, the status of Jerusalem, the settlements in the West Bank, and the oppressive policies of the occupation regime. Then, whenever any of these issues have been discussed, Israel has insisted that any concessions on its part be conditional upon their interlocutors bargaining away the fundamental rights of the indigenous Palestinians, rights provided under international law. [28, 29]

    ♦ Israel has unilaterally and persistently created “facts on the ground” and bludgeoned the Palestinians so that their leaders have been compelled to negotiate from a position of such desperation that they are essentially captives negotiating with the Zionist gun to their heads. [30]

    ♦ Finally, the Zionist state, having given a lip-service acceptance of the so-called 2-state solution, pretends to be agreeable in principle to Palestinian statehood so that it can then “justify” continuing to exclude most Palestinian Arabs from citizenship and equal civil rights. Meanwhile, it has planted so many settlements as to make a viable Palestinian state impossible even in the West Bank. Any such “state” would be a collection of disconnected and subjugated cantons similar to the Bantustans of Apartheid South Africa. [31, 29]

    Date: originally researched and written in 2018 June, slightly revised 2021 October.

    Comment on subsequent events.

    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, whatever their faults, currently constitute the most organized force in said resistance. The current armed conflict (begun Oct 07) between Gaza and the Zionist state is the natural outcome of Israeli/Zionist persecution and violence against the Palestinians.

    The US-dominated West (US, NATO, EU, et cetera) and their mainstream media view the conflict essentially from the Zionist perspective. Palestinian violence is categorized as “terrorism”, while Israeli violence against Palestinians never is; the country is always called “Israel”, never “Palestine”; Palestinian grievances usually go unmentioned; and so forth.

    The anti-racist “left” needs to recognize that Biden and his counterparts in the Western allies, now rushing to assist Israel, are no less racist than are Trump’s MAGA Republicans and other right-wing populists.

    ENDNOTES

    [1] Howard M Sachar (Zionist American historian): A History of Israel (Knopf, © 1979) ~ p 10—17, 36—47 ♦ ISBN 0-394-73679-6.

    Lenni Brenner (American social justice writer/activist): Zionism in the Age of the Dictators (Lawrence Hill Books, © 1983) ~ p 1, 4, 15, 18—25, 29—32, 50—51 ♦ ISBN 0-7099-0628-5.

    [2] Benny Morris (Zionist Israeli historian): 1948 – A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (Yale University Press, © 2008) ~ p 4 ♦ ISBN 978-0-300-12696-9.

    [3] Morris: ~ p 5.
    Sachar: ~ p 47—54, 96—110.
    Brenner: ~ p 9.

    [4] Sachar: ~ p 77—78, 142—143, 163—167, 175—176.

    [5] Morris: ~ p 2—3, 18—19.

    [6] Brenner: ~ chapters 3, 5, 6, 7, 12.

    [7] Brenner: ~ chapters 4, 10, 14.

    [8] Brenner: ~ chapter 25.

    [9] Robert Silverberg (American writer): If I Forget Thee O Jerusalem (Pyramid Communication, Inc., © 1970) ~ p 174—175 ♦ ISBN 0-515-02765-0.

    [10] Morris: ~ p 23, 26, 65.

    [11] Morris: ~ p 33.

    [12] United Nations Information System for Palestine [UNISPAL]: The Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem 1917-1988 (1990) ~ Part I (§ III).

    [13] Morris: ~ p 14—20, 29—31, 35—36.

    Wikipedia: 1936-1939 Arab Revolt in Palestine (last edited 2018 May 29); Jewish insurgency in Mandatory Palestine (last edited 2018 May 26) ~ § 1 Origins, § 2 Timeline; Semiramis Hotel bombing (last edited 2018 May 05).

    [14] Morris: ~ p 37—38, 55, 61, 63—65.
    Wikipedia: United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine (last edited 2018 May 14).
    UNISPAL: ~ Part II (§§ III, IV).

    [15] Morris: ~ p 77—93.
    UNISPAL: ~ Part II (§ V).

    [16] UNISPAL: ~ Part II (§ IX).

    [17] Wikipedia: 1948 Palestinian exodus (last edited 2018 Jun 01).

    [18] Sachar: ~ p 386—389.

    [19] Stephen Lendman: “Israel’s Discriminatory Land Policies” (2009 Jul 31) Global Research.
    Wikipedia: Israeli land and property laws (last edited 2018 May 23) ~ § 2 Overview.

    [20] UNISPAL: ~ Part II (§ VI).
    Sachar: ~ p 382—386.

    [21] Hagar Shezaf: “Burying the Nakba” (Haaretz, 2019 Jul 05) Portside.

    [22] Wikipedia: Protocol of Sèvres (last edited 2018 Apr 02); United Nations Emergency Force (last edited 2018 May 27).
    Sachar: ~ p 506.

    [23] Wikipedia: Israeli-occupied territories (last edited 2018 May 23).

    [24] Wikipedia: South Lebanon conflict (1985-2000) (last edited 2018 May 30); Israeli-Lebanese conflict (2018 May 23) ~ § 6 Border clashes, assassinations …, § 7 2006 Lebanon War, § 8 Post-2006 war activity, § 9 Israeli incursions into Lebanon.

    [25] Amnesty International: “Israel and Occupied Palestinian Territories 2016/2017” (accessed 2017 Oct) Amnesty International.
    Human Rights Watch: “Israel – 50 years of occupation abuses” hrw.org.

    [26] UNRWA: “Palestine refugees” (accessed 2017 Oct 01).
    Wikipedia: Israeli nationality law (last edited 2018 May 27); Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law (last edited 2018 Mar 05).

    [27] Ilan Pappe (anti-Zionist Israeli historian): Ten Myths About Israel (Verso, © 2017) ~ chapter 9 ♦ ISBN 978-1-78663-019-3.

    [28] BBC News: “History of Mid-East Peace Talks” (2013 Jul 29).

    [29] Jakob Reimann: “Israel Is an Apartheid State (Even if the UN Report Has Been Withdrawn)” (2017 Mar 31) Foreign Policy Journal.

    [30] Wikipedia: Facts on the ground (last edited 2018 May 18).

    [31] Pappe: ~ chapter 10.
    Seraj Assi: “Is Israel an Apartheid State?” (2017 Apr 07) Foreign Policy Journal.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • War on Gaza: A prime minister with blood on his hands

    COMMENTARY: By John Minto

    Aotearoa New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins is correct to condemn Hamas killing Israeli civilians in its attacks on Israel this week.

    The killing of civilians or taking them hostage is a war crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention and should be universally condemned.

    However, the Labour government has been deathly silent on the war crimes committed by Israel against Palestinians under Labour’s watch these past six years.

    Under his prime ministerial watch this year, Chris Hipkins has looked the other way while Israel has built more illegal Israeli settlement homes on Palestinian land; killed more than 250 Palestinian civilians; supported Israeli settler pogroms against Palestinian towns and villages across the occupied West Bank and encouraged highly-provocative Israeli ministerial and settler incursions into the Al Aqsa compound in occupied East Jerusalem.

    Why does he only wake up when Israelis are killed? Why does he think Israeli lives are more important than Palestinian lives?

    The Prime Minister’s pro-Israel stance is one-sided and blatantly racist.

    New Zealand, along with other Western countries, bears heavy responsibility for the deaths of Palestinians and Israelis in recent days because we have never held Israel to account for its crimes against the Palestinian people.

    We have given Israel a free pass to murder and abuse Palestinians and this led to the inevitable tragedy last weekend.

    It is precisely the attitude of Western leaders such as our Prime Minister which has meant so many lives have been lost.

    The Prime Minister has the blood of Palestinians and Israelis on his hands.

    John Minto is national chair of Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA).

    Gaza Strip . . . about 2.3 million people have been living trapped under an Israeli air, land and sea blockade since 2007
    Gaza Strip . . . about 2.3 million people have been living trapped under an Israeli air, land and sea blockade since 2007. Image: Al Jazeera (CC)

    The besieged Gaza Strip
    The Palestinian enclave — home to about 2.3 million people — has been under an Israeli air, land and sea blockade since 2007, reports Al Jazeera.
    More than 100,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced and thousands have taken shelter in UN schools as Israeli attacks intensify, forcing Palestinians to flee their homes.

    Buildings, mosques and offices have been targeted as Netanyahu promised “mighty vengeance” for the deadly attacks that has sent shockwaves across Israel.

    Harrowing images from inside Gaza have emerged with 19 members of a family killed when an air strike on Sunday hit their residential building. More than 60 percent of Gaza’s population are refugees who were ethnically cleansed from their homes currently in Israel.

    Israel has maintained a land, sea and air blockade on Gaza since 2007, a year after Hamas was democratically elected into power. The voting came nearly two years after Israeli troops and settlers withdrew from the enclave.

    The blockade gives Israel control of Gaza’s borders, and Egypt has stepped in to enforce the western border.

    Israel has stated it has blocked the borders to protect its citizens from Hamas, but the act of collective punishment violates the Geneva Conventions and has long been considered illegal by groups including the International Committee of the Red Cross.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Campaigners aim to lower support for China on UN human rights council

    Parliamentarians from 15 countries urge reduction in vote to signal disapproval of country’s crackdown on Uyghur population

    An effort is under way to drive down the Chinese vote at the UN human rights council this week in an attempt to show continuing worldwide disapproval of its human rights record.

    The elections on to the world’s premier human rights body take place by secret ballot on Tuesday with China guaranteed a seat in one of the uncontested seats from its region, but human rights campaigners are working to lower the level of Chinese support to show pressure on the country is not dissipating.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • UN Security Council Votes to Deploy US-Backed, Kenyan-Led Troops Into Haiti

    The United Nations Security Council has approved an international armed force to address spiraling gang violence in Haiti, where street battles have paralyzed the capital Port-au-Prince since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021. The U.N. mission, which came at the repeated request of Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry, is being led by Kenya, marking the first deployment of…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Chinese ‘miracle water’ grifters infiltrated UN, bribed politicians to build Pacific dream city

    By Aubrey Belford, Kevin G. Hall and Martin Young

    A pair of Chinese scam artists wanted to turn a radiation-soaked Pacific atoll into a future metropolis. They ended up in an American jail instead.

    How they got there is an untold tale of international bribery and graft that stretched to the very heart of the United Nations.

    The stakes could scarcely have been higher for Hilda Heine, the former president of the Marshall Islands.

    A new OCCRP investigation reveals details of how Chinese-born fraudsters Cary Yan and Gina Zhou paid more than US$1 million to UN diplomats to gain access to its headquarters in New York, before embarking on a controversial plan to set up an autonomous zone near an important US military facility in the Pacific Ocean.

    For years, Hilda Heine’s remote archipelago nation of just 40,000 people was best known to the world for Cold War nuclear testing that left scores of its islands poisoned.

    Sitting in the centre of the Pacific Ocean, the country was a strategic but forgotten US ally.

    But the arrival of a couple of mysterious strangers threatened to change all that. With buckets of cash at their disposal, the Chinese pair, Cary Yan and Gina Zhou, had grand plans that could have thrust the Marshall Islands into the growing rivalry between China and the West, and perhaps fracture the country itself.

    Public controversy
    First proposed in 2017, while Heine was still president, Yan and Zhou’s idea raised public controversy.

    With backing from foreign investors, the couple planned to rehabilitate one irradiated atoll, Rongelap, and turn it into a futuristic “digital special administrative region.”

    The Marshall Islands Journal’s front page on 9 September 2022
    The Marshall Islands Journal’s front page on 9 September 2022 reporting Cary Yan and Gina Zhou being extradited from Thailand to the US to face bribery and related criminal charges in New York. Image: MIJ screenshot/APR

    The new city of artificial islands would include an aviation logistics center, wellness resorts, a gaming and entertainment zone, and foreign embassies.

    Thanks in part to the liberal payment of bribes, Yan and Zhou had managed to gain the support of some of the Marshall Islands’ most powerful politicians. They then lobbied for a draft bill that would have given the proposed zone, known as the Rongelap Atoll Special Administrative Region (RASAR), its own separate courts and immigration laws.

    Heine was opposed. The whole thing reeked of a Chinese effort to gain influence over the strategically located Marshall Islands, she told OCCRP.

    A map of Rongelap Atoll in the Marshall Islands.
    A map of Rongelap Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Image: Credit: Edin Pasovic/James O’Brien/OCCRP

    The plan was unconstitutional and would have created a virtually “independent country” within the Marshall Islands’ borders, she said.

    The new Chinese investor-backed zone would also have occupied a geographically sensitive spot just 200 km of open water away from Kwajalein Atoll, where the US Army runs facilities that test intercontinental ballistic missiles and track foreign rocket launches.

    Became a target
    But when President Heine argued against the draft law, she became a target herself. In November 2018, pro-RASAR politicians backed by Yan and Zhou pushed a no-confidence motion to remove her from power.

    She survived by one vote.

    Even then, the president said she had no idea who this influential duo really were. Although they seemed to be Chinese, they carried Marshall Islands passports, which  gave them visa free access to the United States. Nobody seemed to know how they had obtained them.

    Gina Zhou and Cary Yan sat at a table in a restaurant
    World Organisation of Governance and Competitiveness representatives Gina Zhou (left) and Cary Yan (center) at a restaurant in New York. Image: OCCRP

    “We looked and looked and we couldn’t find when and how they got [the passports],” Heine said. “We didn’t know what their connections were or if they had any connections with the Chinese government.

    “But of course we were suspicious.”

    The plan came to an abrupt end in November 2020, when Yan and Zhou were arrested in Thailand on a US warrant. After being extradited to face trial in New York, they pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiracy to bribe Marshallese officials.

    Both were sentenced earlier this year. Zhou was deported to the Marshall Islands shortly after her sentencing, while Yan is due for release this November.

    But although the federal case led to a brief burst of media attention, it left key questions unanswered.

    Who really were Yan and Zhou? Who helped them in their audacious scheme? Were they simply crooks? Or were they also working to advance the interests of the Chinese government?

    OCCRP spent nearly a year trying to find answers, conducting interviews around the world and poring through thousands of pages of documents.

    What reporters uncovered was a story more bizarre — and with far broader implications — than first expected.

    Aubrey Belford, Kevin G. Hall and Martin Young are investigative writers for the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). Republished with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Ukraine as Another Neo-liberal Privatization Exercise

    When considering the recent performances at the General Assembly of the United Nations this year, the echoes of “peace” resound through the plenary hall. Why should anyone want peace in the Ukraine more than any other place the Empire is waging war? My suspicion is that many of these calls are really for Russia to withdraw to its pre-2014 borders. They believe that would make the US regime happy and be a great relief to the minor and little league oligarchs who long for return to business as usual. Calm and intelligent people could be forgiven for doubting the sincerity of many peace petitioners.

    After all, don’t the continuing wars in Africa, the still pending “United Nations” war against the DPRK (where there is only a 70-year-old armistice since 1953), and the innumerable economic wars being waged in places and ways we do not even know, deserve to end too?

    Like the war in the Ukraine, one will hear how complicated these wars are. They cannot be simply ended. Yet they are all simple in one material way: without the US and its NATO cut-outs—often the principal aggressor in violation of the Kellogg-Briand Treaty—many of these wars would never have started or would have long ago been resolved. So why not demand that the US stop waging wars and why not apply sanctions to the US for its belligerence and violations of the law of nations? How can the United Nations end wars when it cannot even end the one it started in 1951? Could it be that too many of the parties among those who convene to call for peace, really need and want just a piece of the action?

    The two military veterans probably best known for criticising US policy in Ukraine, Colonel Douglas MacGregor USA and Major Scott Ritter USMC, have said loud and clear that at least from a military standpoint the Ukrainian armed forces have lost the war against Russia. There have been numerous voices calling for an end to the conflict, not least because the more than USD 46 billion and counting in military aid alone, has yet to produce any of the results announced as aims of what has finally been admitted is a war against Russia.i If Mr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine’s government in Kiev, is to be taken at face value, then the hostilities can only end when Crimea and the Donbas regions are fully under Kiev’s control and Vladimir Putin has been removed from office as president of the Russian Federation. To date no commentator has adequately explained how those war aims are to be attained. This applies especially after the conservatively estimated 400,000 deaths and uncounted casualties in the ranks of Kiev’s forces since the beginning of the Russian special military operation in February 2022.

    Before considering the political and economic issues it is important to reiterate a few military facts, especially for those armchair soldiers who derive their military acumen from TV and Hollywood films. As MacGregor and Ritter, both of whom have intimate practical knowledge of warfare, have said: Armies on the ground need supplies, i.e. food, weapons, ammunition, medical care for wounded, etc. These supplies have to be delivered from somewhere. In ancient times, armies could live off the land. Essentially this was through looting and plunder—stealing their food from the local population as they marched. To prevent the local population from becoming the enemy in the rear and avoid early exhaustion of local supply, generals started paying for what was requisitioned. Defending forces would often withdraw the civilian population and destroy what could not be taken to avoid supplying their enemies. In fact, this kind of rough warfare against civilians still occurs although it has been forbidden under the Law of Land Warfare.ii Naturally the soldier in the field can no longer make weaponry. Even less can they be plundered from the local inhabitants—unless one comes across some tribe the US has armed with Stingers. All the weapons the Ukrainian armed forces deploy have to be imported from countries with manufacturing capacity. As the two retired officers, among others, have said, such capacity is unavailable to the Ukraine. Obviously it would also be unavailable to NATO forces were they to deploy in Ukraine in any numbers. It is illusory to believe that a NATO army can do what the Wehrmacht could not some eighty years ago with three million men under arms and the most modern army of its day. This was so obvious from the beginning that one has to wonder why this war ever started. Is it possible that wars are started without any intention of winning them? If winning the war is not the objective, then what is?

    Forgery and force: Explicit and implicit or latent and expressed foreign policy

    Historical documents are essential elements in any attempt to understand the past and the present. However, this is not because they are necessarily true or accurate. Forgeries and outright lies are also important parts of the historical record. Perhaps the most notorious forgery in Western history is the so-called Donation of Constantine. This document was used to legitimate papal supremacy and the primacy of the Latin over the Greek Church. Although it did not take long for the forgery to be discovered, the objective was accomplished. Even today most people in the West have learned that the part of the Christian Church called Orthodoxy is schismatic when the reverse is true, namely the Latin Church arose from a coup d’état against Constantinople.

    There is now no shortage of evidence that the British Empire forced the German Empire into the Great War and with US help justified the slaughter of some four million men, ostensibly to expel German forces from Belgium. There is systematically suppressed testimony by commanders in the field and others in a position to know that the Japanese attack on the US colonial base at Pearl Harbor was not only no surprise but a carefully crafted event exploited to justify US designs on Japan and China. Yet to this day the myth of surprise attack against a neutral country prevails over the historical facts. Even though there is almost popular acceptance that the US invasion of Iraq was based on entirely fabricated evidence and innuendo, the destruction of the country was not stopped and continues as of this writing.

    What does that tell us about historical record and official statements of policy? Former POTUS and CIA director, George H.W. Bush expressed the principle that government lies did not matter because the lie appears on page one and the retraction or correction on page 28. In short, it is the front page that matters. That is what catches and keeps the public’s attention. Truth and accuracy are immaterial.

    Let us consider for a moment one of the most durable wonders of published state policy—the Balfour Declaration. This brief letter signed by one Arthur Balfour on 2 November 1917 was addressed to the Lord Rothschild, in his capacity as some kind of conduit for the Zionist Federation. Carroll Quigley in his The Anglo-American Establishment strongly suggests that Lord Rothschild, also in his capacity as a sponsor of the Milner Round Table group, presented the letter for Mr Balfour to sign. As Quigley also convincingly argues the academic and media network created by the Round Table has successfully dominated the writing of British imperial history making it as suspicious as the Vatican’s history of the Latin Church.

    This “private” letter to the British representative of the West’s leading banking dynasty is then adopted as the working principle for the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine awarded to the British Empire. From this private letter an international law mandate was created, continued under the UN Charter, to convert a part of the conquered Ottoman Empire into a state entity for people organized in Europe who imagined that some thousand(s) of years ago some ancestors once inhabited the area.iii The incongruence of this act ought to have been obvious—and in fact it was. The explicit policy with which the British Empire had sought to undermine Germany and Austria-Hungary was that of ethnic/linguistic self-determination of peoples. So by right—even if the fiction of a population in diaspora were accepted—this could not pre-empt the right of ethnic/linguistic self-determination in Palestine where Arabic was the dominant language and even those who adhered to the Jewish religion were not Europeans.

    As argued elsewhere there has been a century of propaganda and brute force applied to render the dubious origins and the legitimation for the settler conquest that was declared the State of Israel in 1948 acceptable no matter how implausible. Like the Donation of Constantine, the Balfour Declaration served its purpose. No amount of rebuttal can reverse the events that followed.

    Motors and motives

    However, the question remains what is then the policy driving such acts? What is the motive for such seemingly senseless aggression against ordinary people? Why does an institution supposedly based on national self-determination deny it so effectively to majorities everywhere whose only fault appears to be living on land others covet? By the time the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples was finally adopted in 1960, there was no question of reversing the de facto colonisation practiced by the mandatory powers under the League. Moreover the Declaration was only an act of the UN General Assembly, a body wholly dominated by the three permanent imperial members of the Security Council, each with their veto powers.

    To understand that and perhaps to better illuminate the principal subject—Ukraine—it is helpful to recall that of the five permanent members of the Security Council, the two most powerful are not nation-states at all. The United Kingdom is a colonial confederation as is the United States.

    Russia, France, and China are all states derived from historical ethnic-linguistic determination. Beyond doubt they were formed into such unitary states through wars and revolutions. As de Gaulle famously said, “France was made with the sword”. However, there is no question that these three countries are based explicitly on ethnic-linguistic and cultural congruity within continental boundaries, in the sense articulated by the explicit text of the Covenant and the Charter. On the contrary, Great Britain and the United States are commercial enterprises organised on the basis of piracy and colonial conquest. There is not a square centimetre of the United States that was not seized by the most brutal force of arms from its indigenous inhabitants. “Ethnic-linguistic” among the English-speaking peoples is a commodity characteristic. It is a way to define a market segment.

    Great Britain gave the world “free trade” and liberalism and the US added to that the “open door”. Nothing could be more inimical to the self-determination of peoples than either policy.iv How can a people be independent and self-determined when they are denied the right to say “no”? The Great War and its sequel, the war against the Soviet Union and Communism, aka World War 2, were first and foremost wars to establish markets dominated by the Anglo-American free trade – open door doctrine. One will not find this explicitly stated in any of the history books or the celebratory speeches on Remembrance Day (Memorial Day in the US) or the anniversary of D-Day, to which properly the Soviet Union and Russia ought not to be invited. After all D-Day was the beginning of the official war by Anglo-America against the Soviet Union after Hitler failed. More of Italian, French and German industrial and domestic infrastructure was destroyed by aerial bombardment from the West than by anything the Wehrmacht did—since its job was to destroy Soviet industry. This will not be reported in schoolbooks and very few official papers will verify this open secret. That is because like the Donation much of what counts as history was simply “written to the file”. The facts, however, speak for themselves. When the German High Command signed the terms of unconditional surrender in Berlin-Karlshorst, the domestic industry of the West, except the US, had been virtually destroyed leaving it a practical monopoly not only in finance but manufacturing that would last well into the late 1960s.v Only the excess demand of the war against Korea accelerated German industrial recovery. No one can say for sure how much of German, French, Italian, Belgian, or Netherlands capital was absorbed by Anglo-American holding companies. Hence those that wonder today about the self-destruction of the German economy have to ask who owns Germany in fact. To do that one will have to hunt through the minefield of secrecy jurisdictions behind which beneficial ownership of much of the West is concealed.

    It is necessary to return to the conditions at the beginning of the Great War to understand what is happening now in Ukraine. One has to scratch the paint off the house called “interests” and recall some geography. F. William Engdahl performed this task well in his A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (2011). It would do well to summarise a few of his points before going further.

    Geography and aggrandizement

    Continental nation-states need secure land routes. Pirate states need secure sea-lanes. Britain succeeded in seizing control ruling the waves after defeating the Spanish and Portuguese fleets. It reached a commercial entente with the Netherlands, which helped until the Royal Navy was paramount. The control of the seas meant that Britain could dominate shipping as well as maritime insurance needed to cover the risk of sea transport. So it was no accident that Lloyds of London came to control the financing of maritime traffic. Geography dictated that the alternative for continental nation-states was the railroad. Germany was building a railroad from Berlin to Baghdad which would not only have delivered oil to its industry but allowed it to bypass the Anglo-French Suez Canal and the British controlled Cape route. Centuries before the predecessors to the City of London financed crusades to control the trade routes through the Middle East, propagandistically labelled the Holy Land, whereby this was wholly for commercial reasons. The Anglo-American led NATO captured Kosovo not out of any special loyalty to Albanians but because of geography. Camp Bondsteel lies at the end of the easiest route to build pipelines between Central Asia and the Mediterranean. In short there is not a single war for “self-determination” waged by the Anglo-American special relationship that was not driven by piratical motives, for which ethnic-linguistic commodities are expendable.

    In 1917, the “interests”, for whom Lord Rothschild spoke and no doubt provided financial support, coincided with the pre-emptive control over real estate that had been desired by the banking-commercial cult at least since the establishment of the Latin Church. It is no accident that serious investigations have established that the state created from the British Mandate in Palestine was a commercial venture like all other British undertakings. Moreover it has been able to use its most insidious cover story to veil itself in victimhood and thus immunity for those criminal enterprises, both private and state, that use it as a conduit: money laundering, drug and arms trafficking, training of repressive forces for other countries on contract, etc. all documented and protected by atomic weapons. Moreover this enterprise has been the greatest per capita recipient of US foreign aid for decades. Its citizens are able to use dual citizenship to hold high office in the sovereign state that funds it, too. Any attempt to criticize or oppose this relationship or its moral justification by a public official or personality with anything to lose can lead to the gravest of consequences. Its official lobby in the US, AIPAC, is only one instrument by which any act that could interfere with the smooth flow of cash or influence between Washington and Tel Aviv can be prevented or punished. It draws on an international organisation that does not even have to be organised. The status of ultimate victimhood combined with mass media at all levels committed to protecting “victims” can summon crowds just as Gene Sharp predicted in his works.vi

    A business too innocent to fail

    Now we come to the issues with which this essay began. What is the aim of the war in Ukraine? Will it end when the military operations have failed?

    In April 2022, i.e. just over a month after the Russian intervention, Volodymyr Zelenskyy described “the future for his country”. He used the terms “a big Israel”. In Haaretz it was reported that Zelenskyy wanted Ukraine to become “a big Israel, with its own face”. Writing for the NATO lobby, the Atlantic Council, Daniel Shapiro elaborated what Zelenskyy might mean: the main points are security first, the whole population plays a role, self-defence is the only way, but maintain active defence partnerships, intelligence dominance, technology as key, build an innovation ecosystem, maintain democratic institutions.vii The stories depict this stance for better or worse as the creation of a state under permanent military control, always giving priority to existential threats—presumably from the East.

    But is that really what Zelenskyy meant? Or perhaps that is what he was just supposed to say. What about those who have directed nearly all of NATO armament and so many billions through the hands of the Kiev regime—one notorious even before 2022 as the most corrupt in Europe, if not anywhere? Maybe another construction is to be applied. Perhaps Zelenskyy is talking, like some latter day Balfour, on behalf of his sponsors whose Holocaust piety never prevented them from subjecting nearly entire populations to forced medical experiments starting in 2020. Perhaps he is talking about the extensive participation in all sorts of international trafficking, either as agent or protection for the principals. Perhaps he is talking about the permanent and undebatable foreign aid contributions from the US and the extortion from other countries, e.g. as Norman Finkelstein documented.viii There is no doubt that Ukraine has become a major hub for human trafficking, arms smuggling, and biological-chemical testing. They have atomic reactors and have asked for warheads.ix

    Add to this the potential of a large and potentially self-righteous diaspora spread throughout the West, heavily subsidised and already equipped with influence in high places. A “Ukraine Lobby” was already in preparation in 1947 when the British shipped some eight thousand POWs of the SS Galizia Division (a Ukrainian force) from Italy to Britain without a single war crimes investigation.x From there they were able to spread throughout the Empire as Canada amply indicates.

    Much of the debate about the Ukraine war remains confused because of the successful obfuscation around the term “Nazi”. Essentially a Hollywood story has been substituted for analysis of the historic development of the ideology and government that prevailed in Germany between 1933 and 1945.xi Nazism is treated as sui generis based on criteria that are not unique at all. For example, great attention is given to uniforms and insignia. In fact, after the Great War all the major political factions and parties, e.g. the SPD and DKP, had uniformed paramilitary organisations formed mainly of front veterans. When the NSDAP was able to ban all opponents those uniforms also disappeared. Contemporary fascism also uses current fashion and language. Only the nostalgic retain antiquated uniform and language styles. However repulsive the ideology may be these so-called neo-Nazis are equivalent to the historical re-enactment units found throughout the US for example.

    After WW2 much of Europe was a wasteland, especially the East. Refugees understandably fled as far west as they could because getting to North or South America meant living in territories unscathed by war. The British and US secret services deliberately exploited these refugee waves to cover the removal into safety of the residue of their fascist allies. There they were to prepare for the continuation of war against the Soviet Union by other means. These formations often hid behind ethnic front groups, as the fascists did in occupied West Germany. Hence when an embarrassing discovery was made—usually some low or middle grade Nazi veteran—then he could be disgraced, tried or deported while leaving the bulk of the clandestine organisation in tact. These Nazis were obviously the result of careless immigration oversight but by no means a reflection of state policy.

    Together, historical re-enactment Nazism and “exposed” single Nazi veterans distracted from the large scale programs supporting and expanding anti-communist forces both domestically and for expeditionary deployment. Much more seriously, these two “shows” and the deliberate suppression of meaningful debate about fascist policies and practices—always reduced to anti-Jewish attitudes and actions alone—have successfully prevented any coherent analysis and debate about the relationship between Anglo-American monopoly capital and the cartels that backed the NSDAP regime or the relationship between US/ NATO policy and its consistent support of fascist regimes in Spain, Portugal and throughout the world. It has prevented coherent debate about the long forgotten but documented participation of reconstructed Nazis in the government of the Federal Republic of Germany and their active participation in the Ukrainian war against the Soviet Union after 1945.

    Zelenskyy and his fellow travellers cannot be blamed for their self-confident fascism. It is not an anomaly but a historical product of decades of Anglo-American/ NATO business plans—including the distraction of “Nazi” from the substance of those plans. Given how successful Lord Rothschild’s model for Israel has been, one can scarcely blame a patriot like Volodymyr Zelenskyy for seizing the opportunity to apply it to his own country. The model has been so successful that no one in public dare oppose it. Why not establish another such parasitic machine? Russians just like Arabs provide the permanent enemies with which to sell the permanent victim status at the expense of millions of displaced Ukrainians.

    In other words, there is a very successful business model to be implemented wholly consistent with free trade and the open door and all those other slogans, which have anointed plunder and pillage by the occasionally alpine commercial cult in their campaign to assure that all of us own nothing and they will be happy.

    Endnotes

    i Jonathan Masters and Will Merrow, “How Much as the US Sent to Ukraine Here are Six Charts”, Council on Foreign Relations (10 July 2023). Among those declaring this was Foreign Minister of the German Federal Republic, Annalena Baerbock. Angela Merkel, the former chancellor of the Federal Republic is on record having said that the so-called Minsk Accords were intended to stall the Russian reaction in Donbas until Ukraine could be sufficiently armed to fight against the Russian Federation.

    ii Principally the Hague (1907) Conventions and subsequent Geneva Conventions

    iii More likely the Eastern Europeans in question were descendent from the Khazar kingdom located far closer to what today is Ukraine. The ruling elite was to have converted to Rabbinic Judaism in the 8th century. The Khazar Khaganate was disbursed by the end of the first millennium CE. This would better explain the hostility toward Russia and myth of a national homeland, displaced in 1917 to Palestine based on contemporary political realities.

    iv Historian Gerald Horne ascribes “free trade” to the so-called Glorious Revolution, which also abolished the Royal Africa Company, opening “free trade in slaves”; see The Counter-Revolution of 1776 (2014).

    v Bombing of German factories conspicuously omitted Ford plant in Cologne and GM’s Opel factory in Russelsheim, although both Ford and GM claimed and received reparations for damage done by Allied bombers.

    vi Gene Sharp, From Dictatorship to Democracy (1994)

    vii Daniel B. Shapiro, “Zelenskyy wants Ukraine to be ‘a big Israel’. Here’s a road map”, New Atlanticist (6 April 2022) “By adapting their country’s mind-set to mirror aspects of Israel’s approach to security challenges, Ukrainian officials can tackle national security challenges with confidence and build a similarly resilient state”.

    viii Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry (2000)

    ix This notorious request by Zelenskyy at the Munich Security Conference in 2022 for atomic weapons was another reason President Vladimir Putin gave for a military response to Kiev’s attacks on the Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine that Russia had been forced to recognise as two independent republics and grant protection.

    x A documentary produced by Julian Hendy (The SS in Britain) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjj__aya4BA contains interviews, e.g. with civil servants who were told by US authorities that no pre-immigration investigations were to be conducted. This film about the 14th Waffen SS Division Galizia division has been almost scrubbed from the Web. The film, originally to be broadcast by Yorkshire Television (UK) was never shown. Geoffrey Goodman described details after a private viewing in a Guardian article (12 June 2000).

    xi A useful source for the historical context and actual description of the NSDAP regime can be found in Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933-1944, a detailed study written originally in English by Franz Neumann. This book comprises two parts: the NS state and the economic system. Very little attention is paid to the section on the economic system although the regime cannot be understood without its legacy economic policies and the bureaucracy responsible for implementing them.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Global Leaders Plead for Peace in Ukraine at UN


    President Gustavo Petro Urrego of Colombia addresses the UN General Assembly. Photo credit: UN

    As it did last year, the 2023 United Nations General Assembly has been debating what role the United Nations and its members should play in the crisis in Ukraine. The United States and its allies still insist that the UN Charter requires countries to take Ukraine’s side in the conflict, “for as long as it takes” to restore Ukraine’s pre-2014 internationally recognized borders.

    They claim to be enforcing Article 2:4 of the UN Charter that states “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”

    By their reasoning, Russia violated Article 2:4 by invading Ukraine, and that makes any compromise or negotiated settlement unconscionable, regardless of the consequences of prolonging the war.

    Other countries have called for a peaceful diplomatic resolution of the conflict in Ukraine, based on the preceding article of the UN Charter, Article 2:3: “All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered.”

    They also refer to the purposes of the UN, defined in Article 1:1, which include the “settlement of international disputes” by “peaceful means,” and they point to the dangers of escalation and nuclear war as an imperative for diplomacy to quickly end this war.

    As the Amir of Qatar told the Assembly, “A long-term truce has become the most looked-for aspiration by people in Europe and all over the world. We call on all parties to comply with the UN Charter and international law and resort to a radical peaceful solution based on these principles.”

    This year, the General Assembly has also been focused on other facets of a world in crisis: the failure to tackle the climate catastrophe; the lack of progress on the Sustainable Development Goals that countries agreed to in 2000; a neocolonial economic system that still divides the world into rich and poor; and the desperate need for structural reform of a UN Security Council that has failed in its basic responsibility to keep the peace and prevent war.

    One speaker after another highlighted the persistent problems related to U.S. and Western abuses of power: the occupation of Palestine; cruel, illegal U.S. sanctions against Cuba and many other countries; Western exploitation of Africa that has evolved from slavery to debt servitude and neocolonialism; and a global financial system that exacerbates extreme inequalities of wealth and power across the world.

    Brazil, by tradition, gives the first speech at the General Assembly, and President Lula da Silva spoke eloquently about the crises facing the UN and the world. On Ukraine, he said,

    “The war in Ukraine exposes our collective inability to enforce the purposes and principles of the UN Charter. We do not underestimate the difficulties in achieving peace. But no solution will be lasting if it is not based on dialogue. I have reiterated that work needs to be done to create space for negotiations… The UN was born to be the home of understanding and dialogue. The international community must choose. On one hand, there is the expansion of conflicts, the furthering of inequalities and the erosion of the rule of law. On the other, the renewing of multilateral institutions dedicated to promoting peace.”

    After a bumbling, incoherent speech by President Biden, Latin America again took the stage in the person of President Gustavo Petro of Colombia:

    “While the minutes that define life or death on our planet are ticking on,” Petro declared, “rather than halting this march of time and talking about how to defend life for the future, thanks to deepening knowledge, expand it to the universe, we decided to waste time killing each other. We are not thinking about how to expand life to the stars, but rather how to end life on our own planet. We have devoted ourselves to war. We have been called to war. Latin America has been called upon to produce war machines, men, to go to the killing fields.

    They’re forgetting that our countries have been invaded several times by the very same people who are now talking about combatting invasions. They’re forgetting that they invaded Iraq, Syria and Libya for oil. They’re forgetting that the same reasons they use to defend Zelenskyy are the very reasons that should be used to defend Palestine. They forget that to meet the Sustainable Development Goals, we must end all wars.

    But they’re helping to wage one war in particular, because world powers see this suiting themselves in their game of thrones, in their hunger games.and they’re forgetting to bring an end to the other war because, for these powers, this did not suit them. What is the difference between Ukraine and Palestine, I ask? Is it not time to bring an end to both wars, and other wars too, and make the most of the short time we have to build paths to save life on the planet?

    …I propose that the United Nations, as soon as possible, should hold two peace conferences, one on Ukraine, the other on Palestine, not because there are no other wars in the world – there are in my country – but because this would guide the way to making peace in all regions of the planet, because both of these, by themselves, could bring an end to hypocrisy as a political practice, because we could be sincere, a virtue without which we cannot be warriors for life itself.”

    Petro was not the only leader who upheld the value of sincerity and assailed the hypocrisy of Western diplomacy. Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves of St. Vincent and the Grenadines cut to the chase:

    “Let us clear certain ideational cobwebs from our brains. It is, for example, wholly unhelpful to frame the central contradictions of our troubled times as revolving around a struggle between democracies and autocracies. St. Vincent and the Grenadines, a strong liberal democracy, rejects this wrong-headed thesis. It is evident to all right-thinking persons, devoid of self-serving hypocrisy, that the struggle today between the dominant powers is centered upon the control, ownership, and distribution of the world’s resources.”

    On the war in Ukraine, Gonsalves was equally blunt. “…War and conflict rage senselessly across the globe; in at least one case, Ukraine, the principal adversaries — the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and Russia — may unwittingly open the gates to a nuclear Armageddon… Russia, NATO, and Ukraine should embrace peace, not war and conflict, even if peace has to rest upon a mutually agreed, settled condition of dissatisfaction.”

    The Western position on Ukraine was also on full display. However, at least three NATO members (Bulgaria, Hungary and Spain) coupled their denunciations of Russian aggression with pleas for peace. Katalin Novak, the President of Hungary, said,

    “…We want peace, in our country, in Ukraine, in Europe, in the world. Peace and the security that comes with it. There is no alternative to peace. The killing, the terrible destruction, must stop as soon as possible. War is never the solution. We know that peace is only realistically attainable when at least one side sees the time for negotiations as having come. We cannot decide for Ukrainians about how much they are prepared to sacrifice, but we have a duty to represent our own nation’s desire for peace. And we must do all we can to avoid an escalation of the war.”

    Even with wars, drought, debt and poverty afflicting their own continent, at least 17 African leaders took time during their General Assembly speeches to call  for peace in Ukraine. Some voiced their support for the African Peace Initiative, while others contrasted the West’s commitments and expenditures for the war in Ukraine with its endemic neglect of Africa’s problems. President Joao Lourenço of Angola clearly explained why, as Africa rises up to reject neocolonialism and build its own future, peace in Ukraine remains a vital interest for Africa and people everywhere:

    “In Europe, the war between Russia and Ukraine deserves our full attention to the urgent need to put an immediate end to it, given the levels of human and material destruction there, the risk of an escalation into a major conflict on a global scale and the impact of its harmful effects on energy and food security. All the evidence tells us that it is unlikely that there will be winners and losers on the battlefield, which is why the parties involved should be encouraged to prioritize dialogue and diplomacy as soon as possible, to establish a ceasefire and to negotiate a lasting peace not only for the warring countries, but which will guarantee Europe’s security and contribute to world peace and security.”

    Altogether, leaders from at least 50 countries spoke up for peace in Ukraine at the 2023 UN General Assembly. In his closing statement, Dennis Francis, the Trinidadian president of this year’s UN General Assembly, noted,

    “Of the topics raised during the High-Level Week, few were as frequent, consistent, or as charged as that of the Ukraine War. The international community is clear that political independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity must be respected, and violence must end.”

    You can find all 50 statements at this link on the CODEPINK website: https://www.codepink.org/unurkaine23

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.