US regulators have launched legal action against software giant Adobe for its deceptive cancelation policy that allegedly traps subscribers into continuing to pay for popular software products like Photoshop and Acrobat. The case against the software giant, as well as two of its most senior executives, was initiated by the Federal Trade Commission overnight, and…
U.S. Marines and IDF soldiers in joint maneuver Intrepid Maven, Feb. 28, 2023. Photo: US Marines
On June 13, Hamas responded to persistent needling by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken over the U.S. proposal for a pause in the Israeli massacre in Gaza. The group said it has “dealt positively… with the latest proposal and all proposals to reach a cease-fire agreement.” Hamas added, by contrast, that, “while Blinken continues to talk about ‘Israel’s approval of the latest proposal, we have not heard any Israeli official voicing approval.”
The full details of the U.S. proposal have yet to be made public, but the pause in Israeli attacks and release of hostages in the first phase would reportedly lead to further negotiations for a more lasting cease-fire and the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in the second phase. But there is no guarantee that the second round of negotiations would succeed.
As former Israeli Labor Party prime minister Ehud Barak told Israel Radio on June 3rd, “How do you think [Gaza military commander] Sinwar will react when he is told: but be quick, because we still have to kill you, after you return all the hostages?”
Meanwhile, as Hamas pointed out, Israel has not publicly accepted the terms of the latest U.S. cease-fire proposal, so it has only the word of U.S. officials that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has privately agreed to it. In public, Netanyahu still insists that he is committed to the complete destruction of Hamas and its governing authority in Gaza, and has actually stepped up Israel’s vicious attacks in central and southern Gaza.
The basic disagreement that President Joe Biden and Secretary Blinken’s smoke and mirrors cannot hide is that Hamas, like every Palestinian, wants a real end to the genocide, while the Israeli and U.S. governments do not.
Biden or Netanyahu could end the slaughter very quickly if they wanted to—Netanyahu by agreeing to a permanent cease-fire, or Biden by ending or suspending U.S. weapons deliveries to Israel. Israel could not carry out this war without U.S. military and diplomatic support. But Biden refuses to use his leverage, even though he has admitted in an interview that it was “reasonable” to conclude that Netanyahu is prolonging the war for his own political benefit.
The U.S. is still sending weapons to Israel to continue the massacre in violation of a cease-fire order by the International Court of Justice. Bipartisan U.S. leaders have invited Netanyahu to address a joint session of the U.S. Congress on July 24, even as the International Criminal Court reviews a request by its chief prosecutor for an arrest warrant for Netanyahu for war crimes, crimes against humanity and murder.
The United States seems determined to share Israel’s self-inflicted isolation from voices calling for peace from all over the world, including large majorities of countries in the UN General Assembly and Security Council.
But perhaps this is appropriate, as the United States bears a great deal of responsibility for that isolation. By its decades of unconditional support for Israel, and by using its UN Security Council veto dozens of times to shield Israel from international accountability, the United States has enabled successive Israeli governments to pursue flagrantly criminal policies and to thumb their noses at the growing outrage of people and countries across the world.
This pattern of U.S. support for Israel goes all the way back to its founding, when Zionist leaders in Palestine unleashed a well-planned operation to seize much more territory than the UN allocated to their new state in its partition plan, which the Palestinians and neighboring countries already firmly opposed.
The massacres, the bulldozed villages and the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 to a million people in the Nakba have been meticulously documented, despite an extraordinary propaganda campaign to persuade two generations of Israelis, Americans and Europeans that they never happened.
The U.S. was the first country to grant Israel de facto recognition on May 14, 1948, and played a leading role in the 1949 UN votes to recognize the new state of Israel within its illegally seized borders. President Eisenhower had the wisdom to oppose Britain, France and Israel in their war to capture the Suez Canal in 1956, but Israel’s seizure of the Occupied Palestinian Territories in 1967 persuaded U.S. leaders that it could be a valuable military ally in the Middle East.
Unconditional U.S. support for Israel’s illegal occupation and annexation of more and more territory over the past 57 years has corrupted Israeli politics and encouraged increasingly extreme and racist Israeli governments to keep expanding their genocidal territorial ambitions. Netanyahu’s Likud party and government now fully embrace their Greater Israel plan to annex all of occupied Palestine and parts of other countries, wherever and whenever new opportunities for expansion present themselves.
Israel’s de facto expansion has been facilitated by the United States’ monopoly over mediation between Israel and Palestine, which it has aggressively staked out and defended against the UN and other countries. The irreconcilable contradiction between the U.S.’s conflicting roles as Israel’s most powerful military ally and the principal mediator between Israel and Palestine is obvious to the whole world.
But as we see even in the midst of the genocide in Gaza, the rest of the world and the UN have failed to break this U.S. monopoly and establish legitimate, impartial mediation by the UN or neutral countries that respect the lives of Palestinians and their human and civil rights.
Qatar mediated a temporary cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in November 2023, but it has since been upstaged by U.S. moves to prolong the massacre through deceptive proposals, cynical posturing and Security Council vetoes. The U.S. consistently vetoes all but its own proposals on Israel and Palestine in the UN Security Council, even when its own proposals are deliberately meaningless, ineffective or counterproductive.
The UN General Assembly is united in support of Palestine, voting almost unanimously year after year to demand an end to the Israeli occupation. A hundred and forty-four countries have recognized Palestine as a country, and only the U.S. veto denies it full UN membership. The Israeli genocide in Gaza has even shamed the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) into suspending their ingrained pro-Western bias and pursuing cases against Israel.
One way that the nations of the world could come together to apply greater pressure on Israel to end its assault on Gaza would be a “Uniting for Peace” resolution in the UN General Assembly. This is a measure the General Assembly can take when the Security Council is prevented from acting to restore peace and security by the veto of a permanent member.
Israel has demonstrated that it is prepared to ignore cease-fire resolutions by the General Assembly and the Security Council, and an order by the ICJ, but a Uniting for Peace resolution could impose penalties on Israel for its actions, such as an arms embargo or an economic boycott. If the United States still insists on continuing its complicity in Israel’s international crimes, the General Assembly could take action against the U.S. too.
A General Assembly resolution would change the terms of the international debate and shift the focus back from Biden and Blinken’s diversionary tactics to the urgency of enforcing the lasting cease-fire that the whole world is calling for.
It is time for the United Nations and neutral countries to push Israel’s U.S. partner in genocide to the side, and for legitimate international authorities and mediators to take responsibility for enforcing international law, ending the Israeli occupation of Palestine and bringing peace to the Middle East.
Modi’s narrow re-election this month was greeted in the U.S. media with petulant satisfaction that Indian voters had “woken up”, as an oped piece in the New York Times put it.
The Washington Post’s editorial board rebuked Modi with the headline: “In India, the voters have spoken. They do not want autocracy.”
The Post editors went on to say that Modi “will lack a free hand for further repression of civil society, imprisonment of the opposition, infiltration and takeover of democratic institutions, and persecution of Muslims.”
That is quite a withering rap sheet for a political leader who not so long ago was given the VIP treatment in Washington.
Other U.S. media outlets also sounded smug that India’s legislative elections had returned a diminished majority for Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The “shock setback” for India’s strongman would mean that his Hindu nationalist politics would be restrained and he would have to govern during his third term with more moderation and compromise.
The American media’s contempt for the 73-year-old Indian leader is a dramatic turnaround from how he was lionized by the same media only a year ago.
Back in June 2023, Modi was feted by U.S. President Joe Biden with a privileged state dinner in the White House. The Indian premier was invited to address the Congress and the media were rhapsodic in their praise for his leadership.
Back then, the Washington Post’s editors recommended “toasting” Modi’s India, which Biden duly did at the White House reception. Raising a glass, Biden said: “We believe in the dignity of every citizen, and it is in America’s DNA, and I believe in India’s DNA that the whole world – the whole world has a stake in our success, both of us, and maintaining our democracies.” With trademark stumbling words, Biden added: “[This] makes us appealing partners and enables us to expand democratic institutions across, around the world.”
Modi may well wonder what happened over the past year. The Indian leader has gone from receiving the red carpet treatment to having the rug pulled from under his feet.
The difference is explained by the changing geopolitical calculation for Washington, which is not to its liking.
It is not that the Indian government under Modi has suddenly become a bad strongman who has taken to trashing democratic institutions and repressing minorities. Arguably, those tendencies have been associated with Modi since he first came to power in 2014.
The United States had long been critical of Modi’s Hindu nationalism. For more than a decade, Modi was persona non-grata in Washington. At one stage, he was even banned from entering the country owing to allegations that he was fanning sectarian violence against Muslims and Christians in India.
Washington’s view of Modi, however, began to warm up under the Trump administration because India was seen as a useful partner for the U.S. to counter China’s growing influence in the Asia-Pacific, a region which Washington renamed as the Indo-Pacific in part to inveigle India into its fold. To that end, the U.S. revived the Quad security alliance in 2017 with India, Japan and Australia.
The Biden administration continued the courting of India and Modi who was re-elected in 2019 for his second term.
Biden’s fawning over India culminated in the White House extravaganza for Modi last June when the U.S. media championed the “new heights” of U.S.-India relations. There were at the time residual complaints about India’s deteriorating democratic conditions under Modi, but such concerns were brushed aside by the sweep of media eulogizing, epitomized by Biden’s grandiloquent toasting of the U.S. and India as supposedly world-conquering democratic partners.
It was discernible, though, that all the American charm and indulgence was setting India up for an ulterior purpose.
In between the lines of effusive praise and celebration, the expected pay-off from India was that it would be a “bulwark” for U.S. interests against China and Russia.
As a piece in CNN at the time of Modi’s visit last year in Washington asked: “Will India deliver after lavish U.S. attention?”
The article noted with some prescience: “India and the U.S. may have different ambitions and visions for their ever-tightening relationship, and the possibility that Biden could end up being disappointed in the returns for his attention on Modi.”
The Indian leader certainly did receive some major sweeteners while in the U.S. Several significant military manufacturing deals were signed such as General Electric sharing top-secret technology for fighter jet engines.
Still, despite the zealous courting of New Delhi, over the following months, the Modi government appeared not to change its foreign policy dramatically to suit Washington’s bidding.
India has had long-held strained relations with China over border disputes and regional rivalry. Nevertheless, Modi has been careful not to antagonize Beijing. Notably, India did not participate in recent security drills in the Asia-Pacific along with the U.S. and other partners.
New Delhi has also maintained its strong support for the BRICS group that includes Russia, China, Brazil and other Global South nations advocating for a multipolar world not in hock to Western dominance.
This traditional policy of non-alignment by India is not what Washington wants. It seems that Modi did not heed the memo given during his splendid Washington visit. He rebuffed the American expectation of steering India towards U.S. geopolitical objectives of toeing a tougher line against China and Russia.
What seems to have intensified Washington’s exasperation with Modi is the worsening proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. After two and half years of conflict, President Vladimir Putin’s forces have gained a decisive upper hand over the NATO-backed Kiev regime. Hence, Biden and other NATO leaders have begun to desperately ramp up provocations against Moscow with recent permission for Ukraine to use Western long-range weapons to hit Russian territory.
When Modi visited Washington last June, the West was (unrealistically) confident that the Ukrainian counteroffensive underway at the time would prove to be a damaging blow to Russian forces. Western predictions of overcoming Russian lines have waned from the cruel reality that Russian weapons and superior troops numbers have decimated the Ukrainian side.
During Modi’s state trip last year, Washington’s focus was on getting India to act as a bulwark against China, not so much Russia. Modi has not delivered on either count, but the situation in Ukraine has cratered, from the NATO point of view.
Commenting on U.S. priorities last June, Richard Rossow of the Washington-based think-tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said: “If the invasion went worse for Ukraine, or was destabilizing the region, the Biden administration might have chosen to reduce the intensity of engagement with India. But the United States has found that nominal support to Ukraine, with allies and partners, has been sufficient to blunt the Russian offensive…” (How wrong was that assessment!)
Rossow continued his wrongheaded assessment: “Russia’s ineffective military campaign [in Ukraine] has also underscored the fact that China presents the only real state-led threat to global security, and the United States and India are steadily deepening their partnership bilaterally and through forums like the Quad to improve the likelihood of peace and tranquility in the region. So long as this strategic relationship continues to grow, it is unlikely that a U.S. administration will press India to take a hard line on Russia.”
Washington and its NATO allies have got their expectations about Russia losing the conflict in Ukraine all badly wrong. Russia is winning decisively as the Ukrainian regime stumbles towards collapse.
This is a double whammy for the Biden administration. China and Russia are stronger than ever, and India has given little in return for all the concessions it received from Washington.
From the American viewpoint, India’s Modi has not delivered in the way he was expected to by Washington despite the latter’s fawning and concessions. New Delhi has remained committed to the BRICS multipolar group, it has not antagonized China and it has not succumbed to U.S. pressure to condemn Russia. Far from condemning Moscow, India has increased its imports of Russian oil and gas.
Now with the U.S. and NATO’s reckless bet on Ukraine defeating Russia looking like a beaten docket, Washington’s disappointment with India is taking on an acrimonious tone.
In one year, Modi’s India has gone from a geopolitical darling to a target of U.S. recrimination over alleged human rights violations and democratic backsliding. It is not so much that political conditions in India have degraded any further. It is Washington’s geopolitical calculations that have been upended. Hence the chagrined and increasingly abrasive attitude towards New Delhi from its erstwhile American partner.
Laughing on the bus/Playing Games with the faces/She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy/I said, Be careful his bowtie is really a camera.
— America by Paul Simon, recorded by Simon and Garfunkel in their Bookends album, 1968
Only people who listen to the chorus of reliable alternative media voices warning of the quickly growing threat of nuclear war have any sense of the nightmare that is approaching. Even for them, however, and surely for most others, unreality reigns. Reality has a tough time countering illusions. For we are cataleptically slow-walking to WW III. If it is very hard or impossible to imagine our own deaths, how much harder is it to imagine the deaths of hundreds of millions of others or more.
In 1915, amid the insane slaughter of tens of millions during WW I that was a shocking embarrassment to the meliorist fantasy of the long-standing public consciousness, Freud wrote:
It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death, and whenever we attempt to do so, we can perceive that we are, in fact, still present as spectators. Hence the psychoanalytic school could venture on the assertion that, at bottom, no one believes in his own death, or to put the same thing another way, that, in the unconscious, every one of us is convinced of his own immortality.
The growing lunacy of the Biden administration’s provocations against Russia via Ukraine seem lost on so many. The long-running and deep-seated demonization of Russia and its President Vladimir Putin by U.S. propagandists has sunk so deep into the Western mind that facts can’t descend that deep to counteract it. It is one of the greatest triumphs of U.S. government propaganda.
A friend, a retired history professor at an elite university, recently told me that he can’t think of such matters as the growing threat of nuclear war if he wants to sleep at night, but anyway, he’s more concerned with the consequences of global warming. Readers at publications where my numerous articles about the nuclear war risk have appeared – the worst since the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 – have made many comments such as “nuclear weapons don’t exist,” that it’s all a hoax, that Putin is in cahoots with Biden in a game of fear mongering to promote a secret agenda, etc. How can one respond to such denials of reality?
The other day I met another friend who likes to talk about politics. He is an intelligent and a caring man. He was sporting a tee-shirt with a quote from George Washington and quickly started talking about his obsessive fear of Donald Trump and the possibility that he could be elected again. I told him that I despised Trump but that Biden was a far greater threat right now. He spoke highly of Biden, and when I responded that Biden has been a warmonger throughout his political career and, of course, in Ukraine, was instigating the use of nuclear weapons, and was in full support of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, he looked at me as if I were saying something he had never heard before. When I spoke of the 2014 U.S. engineered coup d’état in Ukraine, he, a man in his sixties at least, said he was unaware of it, but in any case Biden supported our military as he did and that was good. When I said Biden is mentally out of it and physically tottering, he emphatically denied it; said Biden was very sharp and fully engaged. He said Trump was fat and a great danger and George Washington would agree. I was at a loss for words. The conversation ended.
A third friend, just back from living overseas for a year, flew back east from California to visit old friends and relatives. He told me this sad tale:
There were experiences that troubled me very deeply during my visit that had nothing to do with all the death and final goodbyes I was immersed in. My family I would say is pretty typical working class Democrat. Liberal/progressive in social outlook. Most are devout Catholics. All are kind, generous very loving people. What was troubling was that it was pretty much impossible to carry on a rational reasonably sane political conversation with all but a couple of them, as the “Trump Derangement Syndrome” symptoms were absolutely off the charts. It was quite stunning actually. It is almost as if Dementia-Joe isn’t even in office as they had no interest in discussing his many failings, because their entire focus was the orange haired clown. If I had ten bucks for every time someone told me any one of the following NPR/PBS talking points I’d buy a nice meal for myself – (Trump will be a dictator if elected – Trump will prosecute his enemies if elected – Trump will destroy our democracy if he gets in – etc.) Any and all attempts to question these narratives and talking points by bringing the behavior of the current administration into the conversation were met with befuddlement – as if people couldn’t believe that “I” wasn’t as terrified as they were by the “Trump-Monster” lurking in the shadows.
So I guess I’m sharing these thoughts with you, Ed, because it feels like I’m dealing with several different kinds of loss right now. The more obvious “loss” associated with the physical death of loved ones – but I’m also mourning the intellectual and psychological death of living loved ones who have somehow become completely untethered from the “material realities” I observe on planet earth. They can repeat “talking points” but can’t explain the evidence or reason that needs to be attached to those talking points for them to be anything but propaganda. Physical death is a natural thing – something we will all face – but this intellectual and spiritual death I am witness to is perhaps even more painful and disconcerting for me. How do we find our way forward when reason, rational debate, evidence, and real-world events are replaced with fear – and rather irrational fears at that?
This intellectual and spiritual death that he describes is a widespread phenomenon. It is not new, but COVID 19 with its lockdowns, lies, and dangerous “vaccines” dramatically intensified it. It created vast gaps in interpersonal communication that were earlier exploited in the lead-up to the 2016 election and Trump’s surprising victory. Families and friends stopped talking to each other. The longstanding official propaganda apparatus went into overdrive. Then in 2020 the normal human fear of death and chaos was fully digitized during the lockdowns. Putin, Trump, the Chinese, sexual predators, viruses, space aliens, your next door neighbor, etc. – you name it – were all tossed into the mix that created fear and panic to replace the growing realization that the war on terror initiated by George W. Bush in 2001 was losing its power. New terrors were created, censorship was reinforced, and here we are in 2024 in a country supporting Israeli genocide in Gaza and with a population blind to the growing threat of WW III and the use of nuclear weapons.
The communication gap – what my friend aptly describes as “this intellectual and spiritual death” – is two-sided. On one hand there is simple ignorance of what is really going on in the world, greatly aided by vast government/media propaganda. On the other, there is chosen ignorance or the wish to be deceived to maintain illusions.
We are thinking reeds as Pascal called us, vulnerable feeling creatures afraid of death; we, who through the support of wars and violence of all sorts, care just enough to want to be deceived as to what we are doing by supporting wars that make so much blood that is inside other people get to the outside for the earth to drink since it is not our blood and we survive.
I could, of course, quote liberally from truth tellers down through history who have said the same thing about self-deception with all its shades and nuances. Those quotations are endless. Why bother? At some very deep level in the recesses of their hearts, people know it’s true. I could make a pretty essay here, be erudite and eloquent, and weave a web of wisdom from all those the world says were the great thinkers because they are now dead and can no longer detect hypocrisy.
For the desire to be deceived and hypocrisy (Greek hypokrites, stage actor, a pretender) are kissing cousins. Grasping the theatrical nature of social life, the need to pretend, to act, to feel oneself part of a “meaningful” play explains a lot. To stand outside consensus reality, outside the stage door, so to speak, is not very popular. Despite the mass idiocy of the media’s daily barrage of lies and stupidities that pass for news on the front pages and newscasts of the corporate media, people want to believe them to feel they belong.
Yet D. H. Lawrence’s point a century ago still applies: “The essential America soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”
But this killer soul must be hidden behind a wall of deceptions as the U.S. warfare state ceaselessly wages wars all around the world. It must be hidden behind feel good news stories about how Americans really care about others, but only others that they are officially allowed to care about. Not Syrians, Yemenis, Russian speakers of the Donbass, Palestinians, et al. The terrorist nature of decades upon decades of U.S. savagery and the indifference of so many Americans go hand-in-hand but escape notice in the corporate media that are propagandists. The major theme of these media is that the United States government is the great defender of freedom, peace, and democracy. Every once in a while, a scapegoat, one rotten apple in the barrel, is offered up to show that all is not perfect in paradise. Here or there a decent article appears to reinforce the illusion that the corporate media tell the truth. But essentially it is one massive deception that is leading many people to accept a slow walk toward WW III.
There’s a make-believe quality to this vast spectacle of violent power and false innocence that baffles the mind. To see and hear the corporate masked media magicians’ daily reports is to enter a world of pure illusion that deserves only sardonic laughter but sadly captivates so many adult children desperate to believe.
Here’s an anecdote about a very strange encounter, one I couldn’t make up. A communication of some sort that also has a make-believe quality to it. I’m not sure what the message is.
I was recently meeting with a writer and researcher who has interviewed scores of people about the famous 1960s assassinations and other sensitive matters. I only knew this person through internet communication, but he was passing my way and suggested that we meet, which we did at a local out-of-the-way cafe. We were the only customers and we took our drinks out the back to a small table and chairs under a tree in the café’s large garden that bordered open land down to a river. About 10 yards away a woman sat at a table, writing in a notebook that I took to be journaling of some sort. The researcher and I talked very openly for more than two hours about our mutual work and what he had learned from many of his interviewees about the assassinations. Neither of us paid any attention to the woman at the table – naively? – and our conversation naturally revolved around the parts played by intelligence agencies, the CIA, etc. in the assassinations of the Kennedys and MLK, Jr. The woman sat and wrote. Near the end of our two plus hours, my friend went inside the café, which had closed to new customers, to use the men’s room. The woman called to me and said I hope you don’t mind but I overheard some of your conversation and my father worked for U.S. intelligence. She then told us much more about him, where he went to college, etc. or at least what she said she knew because when growing up he didn’t tell her mother, her, or siblings any details about his decades of spying. But when she attended his memorial service in Washington D.C., the place was filled with intelligence operatives and she learned more about her father’s secretive life. Then, out of the blue, it burst out of her how he was obsessed with the high school he attended, one she assured us we probably never heard of (we were in Massachusetts) – Regis High School, a Jesuit scholarship prep school for boys in NYC. To say I was startled is an understatement, since I went to Regis myself, and the anomalous “coincidence” of this encounter in the back garden of an empty café spooked my friend as well. The woman told us more about her father until we had to leave.
I wondered if he wore a bowtie and if what just happened weren’t really so.
Mourners carry the body of Saqr Abed, an Islamic Jihad militant killed in a raid by Israeli forces in the village of Kafr Dan, near the West Bank city of Jenin, Wednesday, June 12, 2024. (Mohammed NasserAPA images)
A warning on 4 June from the UN human rights commissioner that “unprecedented bloodshed” in the occupied West Bank must come to an end has gone unheeded.
The Israeli military, at times in collaboration with Israel’s Border Police and Israel’s domestic secret police Shin Bet, has continued to conduct deadly raids into the occupied West Bank, wreaking havoc to private Palestinian property and civilian infrastructure in the process.
An Israeli military raid into Kafr Dan village west of Jenin in the northern West Bank killed six Palestinians earlier this week.
The invading Israeli forces used Energa anti-tank rifle grenades against a home belonging to the Abed family, killing three, Saqr Aref Abed, Mustafa Allam Mirie and Ahmad Muhammad Abu Obeid.
Others killed during the Israeli attack and confrontations in the village include Ayman Abu Fadalah, Muhammad Hazza Mirie and Ahmad Muhammad Samoudi, 17.
On 11 June, Ahmad was with another child, allegedly carrying homemade explosive devices as they waited for Israeli armored vehicles to pass by on a road in the center of Kafr Dan.
An Israeli sniper shot at the two children from a distance of 100 to 150 meters with six bullets, according to Defense for Children International – Palestine.
One bullet hit Ahmad in his leg, and he collapsed and started pleading for help. The other child was able to flee though he was injured in the thigh.
The Israeli sniper shot towards Ahmad again, striking him in his chest and head.
An Israeli military vehicle then approached Ahmad, and the Israeli driver stepped out and shot the child three more times.
The driver of the military vehicle remained near him for a few minutes as Israeli forces blocked a Palestinian ambulance from reaching Ahmad as he lay wounded on the ground.
“Israeli forces shot Ahmad, waited until he fell to the ground, then shot him several more times, then blocked paramedics from reaching him until they were confident he bled out,” said Ayed Abu Eqtaish, accountability program director at DCIP.
“The United States must stop sending weapons to the Israeli military that are used to kill Palestinian children without restraint, whether in Gaza or the West Bank.”
Ahmad is the older brother of a 12-year-old boy who was shot, and later succumbed to his wounds, during an Israeli raid in Jenin in September 2022.
Mahmoud Muhammad Samoudi had allegedly thrown stones at Israeli vehicles when Israeli forces opened fire at the group of youths he was a part of.
Elsewhere on 10 June, Israeli occupation forces raided the village of Kafr Nimeh, west of Ramallah, and shot and killed four Palestinian men and injured others.
Israeli armored vehicles invaded the Kafr Nimeh village, raided homes and commercial stores, confiscated surveillance cameras and set up a checkpoint at the village’s entrance.
Israeli authorities had been pursuing two Palestinians suspected of setting fire to a vehicle and its trailer in the Sde Ephraim settlement “outpost” in the occupied West Bank overnight on 9 June.
Sde Ephraim was established on a hilltop belonging to the nearby Palestinian village of Ras Karkar.
While all Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank are illegal under international law and building them is a war crime, what Israel refers to as “outposts” are often built without even Israel’s permission and are considered illegal under Israeli law.
The men killed were identified as Muhammad Raslan Abdo, Muhammad Jaber Abdo and Rashdi Samih Ataya, according to the Palestinian Authority civil affairs department, which did not name the fourth Palestinian who was killed.
Local news sources named him as Wasim Bisam Zidan.
Israeli forces had previously detained Muhammad Jaber Abdo for two decades, and he was released in 2022. He was a member of Hamas’ armed wing operating in the occupied West Bank.
Israeli forces claimed to have found a makeshift sub-machine gun and other weapons in the vehicle.
Israeli forces then barred Palestine Red Crescent Society medics from reaching and evacuating the injured for at least two hours.
When one ambulance tried to reach, Israeli forces fired at it with live ammunition, puncturing its tires.
Israeli forces also opened fire on Palestinians gathered in the area, injuring eight with live ammunition, including a child.
Israel is now withholding the bodies of all four Palestinians its forces killed in Kafr Nimeh, UN monitoring group OCHA said. Israel withholds the remains of Palestinians killed during what it claims were attacks, intending to use them as bargaining chips in negotiations.
A governorate-wide strike on Ramallah and al-Bireh was reportedly declared the next day, on 11 June, in mourning.
Wreaking havoc on a refugee camp
Israeli forces invaded the al-Faraa refugee camp in the foothills of the Jordan Valley in the occupied West Bank accompanied with military bulldozers in the late hours of 9 June. Israeli forces briefly withdrew from the camp at dawn the next day but stormed it later with large reinforcements.
Israeli forces also invaded several other neighborhoods in nearby Tubas, before withdrawing completely on the afternoon of 10 June after a 16-hour operation, which saw armed Palestinians defend the camp from the Israeli invaders.
Soldiers raided homes in the refugee camp and used them as sniper and observation points. Bulldozers partially damaged some homes.
A 16-year-old Palestinian child, Mahmoud Ibrahim Nabrisi, was walking out of an alley that led to the refugee camp’s main square when he saw Israeli soldiers stationed in a community center for disabled people in the camp, according to a field investigation by DCIP.
Mahmoud tried to warn people in the area of the presence of the Israeli forces. That’s when an Israeli sniper hiding behind a small hole in the building’s wall that the military created to observe and shoot from, fired at Mahmoud from a distance of 120 to 150 meters. Three bullets hit Mahmoud, one near his eye, one behind his ear and another in his leg.
Palestinian youth transferred Mahmoud to an ambulance, which took him to a nearby hospital where he was pronounced dead.
As has often been the case with Israeli military raids in the occupied West Bank, which include highly destructive attacks on infrastructure, Israeli bulldozers damaged sewage, electricity and water networks during their invasion of al-Faraa refugee camp. Israeli forces also destroyed and bulldozed the refugee camp’s main square and road.
The Israeli military’s widespread destruction of civilian and public infrastructures leads residents to believe that the Israeli army is taking revenge on the camp by destroying it, Wafa news agency reported.
The Israeli military has conducted four major raids into the al-Faraa refugee camp since 7 October, killing 17 Palestinians, the news agency reported.
“Unprecedented bloodshed”
Earlier this month, the UN high commissioner for human rights Volker Türk said Palestinians in the occupied West Bank were “being subjected to day after day of unprecedented bloodshed.”
More than 520 Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank since 7 October, including at least 504 by Israeli forces, according to OCHA.
Israeli settlers have killed at least 10 Palestinians, and another seven were killed by either Israeli army or settler fire.
Of those killed in the occupied West Bank since 7 October, 132 were children.
Israeli forces and settlers have injured over 5,200 Palestinians in the West Bank since 7 October, at least 800 of them children. One third of all injuries were by live ammunition.
Israeli forces and settlers have killed 51 Palestinian children since the beginning of the year, including two US citizens, according to documentation by DCIP.
On June 14, Reuters headlined: “Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic: The U.S. military launched a clandestine program amid the COVID crisis to discredit China’s Sinovac inoculation – payback for Beijing’s efforts to blame Washington for the pandemic. One target: the Filipino public. Health experts say the gambit was indefensible and put innocent lives at risk.”
A June 15 Google-search of the headline “Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic” produced virtually no publication of that Reuters news-report anywhere within the U.S. empire — U.S., Canada, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Philippines, etc. The news-report was not published, for example, in the New York Times, Washington Post,London Times, Guardian, Telegraph, and Daily Mail, nor CNN, NBC, CBS, BBC, NPR, PBS, Deutsche Welle, etc. That headline did briefly run on the websites of USA Today and Fox News, but never the news-report itself on that given site, and the link to the story no longer works at either USA Today or Fox News. There had been a link to that headlined story, but that news-report had not been published on either site. The only mainstream site in the U.S. empire that posted not only the headline but that also at their site the actual news-report, was Australian Broadcasting Corporation, on June 15. A Google-search of that headline four hours later on June 15 showed no better results. So, this extraordinarily important news-report remains as being news even the day after Reuters had published it on their news-feed. Suppression of a major news-story from a U.S. empire news-agency such as Reuters is highly extraordinary.
That suppressed news-report — which should immediately have been splashed everywhere, because it was among the biggest news-stories anywhere on June 14 — opened:
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. military launched a secret campaign to counter what it perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines, a nation hit especially hard by the deadly virus.
The clandestine operation has not been previously reported. It aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China, a Reuters investigation found. Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the military’s propaganda efforts morphed into an anti-vax campaign. Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines – China’s Sinovac inoculation.
Reuters identified at least 300 accounts on X, formerly Twitter, that matched descriptions shared by former U.S. military officials familiar with the Philippines operation. Almost all were created in the summer of 2020 and centered on the slogan #Chinaangvirus – Tagalog for China is the virus.
This post, identified by Reuters, matched the messaging, timeframe and design of the U.S. military’s anti-vax propaganda campaign in the Philippines, former and current military officials say. Social media platform X also identified the account as fake and removed it.
TRANSLATION FROM TAGALOG
#ChinaIsTheVirus
Do you want that? COVID came from China and vaccines came from China
(Beneath the message is a picture of then-Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte saying: “China! Prioritize us first please. I’ll give you more islands, POGO and black sand.” POGO refers to Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators, online gambling companies that boomed during Duterte’s administration. Black sand refers to a type of mining.)
“COVID came from China and the VACCINE also came from China, don’t trust China!” one typical tweet from July 2020 read in Tagalog. The words were next to a photo of a syringe beside a Chinese flag and a soaring chart of infections. Another post read: “From China – PPE, Face Mask, Vaccine: FAKE. But the Coronavirus is real.”
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Podcast: Pentagon’s anti-vax campaign
After Reuters asked X about the accounts, the social media company removed the profiles, determining they were part of a coordinated bot campaign based on activity patterns and internal data.
The U.S. military’s anti-vax effort began in the spring of 2020 and expanded beyond Southeast Asia before it was terminated in mid-2021, Reuters determined. Tailoring the propaganda campaign to local audiences across Central Asia and the Middle East, the Pentagon used a combination of fake social media accounts on multiple platforms to spread fear of China’s vaccines among Muslims at a time when the virus was killing tens of thousands of people each day. A key part of the strategy: amplify the disputed contention that, because vaccines sometimes contain pork gelatin, China’s shots could be considered forbidden under Islamic law.
The military program started under former President Donald Trump and continued months into Joe Biden’s presidency, Reuters found – even after alarmed social media executives warned the new administration that the Pentagon had been trafficking in COVID misinformation. The Biden White House issued an edict in spring 2021 banning the anti-vax effort, which also disparaged vaccines produced by other rivals, and the Pentagon initiated an internal review, Reuters found.
“I don’t think it’s defensible. I’m extremely dismayed, disappointed and disillusioned to hear that the U.S. government would do that.”
Daniel Lucey, infectious disease specialist at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine.
The news-report also said:
Then-Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte pleaded with citizens to get the COVID vaccine. “You choose, vaccine or I will have you jailed,” a masked Duterte said in this televised address in June 2021.
When he addressed the vaccination issue, the Philippines had among the worst inoculation rates in Southeast Asia. Only 2.1 million of its 114 million citizens were fully vaccinated – far short of the government’s target of 70 million. By the time Duterte spoke, COVID cases exceeded 1.3 million, and almost 24,000 Filipinos had died from the virus. The difficulty in vaccinating the population contributed to the worst death rate in the region.
COVID-19 deaths in the Philippines
The pandemic hit the Philippines especially hard, and by November 2021, COVID had claimed the lives of 48,361 people there. …
To implement the anti-vax campaign, the Defense Department overrode strong objections from top U.S. diplomats in Southeast Asia at the time, Reuters found. Sources involved in its planning and execution say the Pentagon, which ran the program through the military’s psychological operations center in Tampa, Florida, disregarded the collateral impact that such propaganda may have on innocent Filipinos.
“We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective,” said a senior military officer involved in the program. “We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.” …
In 2019, before COVID surfaced in full force, then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper signed a secret order that later paved the way for the launch of the U.S. military propaganda campaign. The order elevated the Pentagon’s competition with China and Russia to the priority of active combat, enabling commanders to sidestep the State Department when conducting psyops against those adversaries. The Pentagon spending bill passed by Congress that year also explicitly authorized the military to conduct clandestine influence operations against other countries, even “outside of areas of active hostilities.”
Esper, through a spokesperson, declined to comment. A State Department spokesperson referred questions to the Pentagon.
The statement — “We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective,” said a senior military officer involved in the program. “We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.” — means that the U.S. Government was placing a higher priority upon “dragging China through the mud” than on keeping covid-19 deaths down in the Assia-Pacific region. Especially in the Phillipines, which under Duarte’s Presidency was neutralist in the conflict between the U.S. Government and the Chinese Government, adding to the death-rate there was not a practical concern for the U.S. Government. In other words: the U.S. Government treats neutralist nations as-if they’re instead among its enemy-nations, to such an extent that even civilian deaths there that are caused by the U.S. Government, are of no practical (much less of ethical) concern. This operation by the U.S. Government was expected to increase deaths in that region (because the U.S. Government believed that vaccinations would reduce covid-19 deaths in its own and allied territories), but they were not concerned about that. They were interested only in “how we could drag China through the mud.” The possibily that deaths would increase deaths in and around Asia as a result of what they were doing, was of no concern to them. The extent to which the post-1945 U.S. Government is significantly different than was Hitler’s Government in Germany, is therefore an appropriate matter for public debate, though it’s not being debated anywhere in today’s U.S. empire. The major importance of this news-report from Reuters is that it importantly contributes to that debate; and, now, the further fact of its virtually complete black-out within the U.S. empire, displays the extent to which the U.S. empire will not tolerate the existence of any such public debate. Perhaps this fact is even more important than that extraordinary report from Reuters itself was.
A reasonable conclusion from all of this is that America’s Government treats neutral countries as-if they are enemy countries. An associated aspect of this fact is that starting on June 11th the U.S. Government increased its secondary sanctions against Russia — the sanctions against businesses that trade with Russia — so as to punish them for that and thereby to limit such firms’ choices as to which countries they will be allowed by the U.S. Government to have commerce with. Secondary sanctions present non-U.S. targets (neutral countries and firms) with a choice: do business with the United States or with the sanctioned target, but not both. This is erecting a new “iron curtain,” of a specifically economic type, between the American empire — “The West” — and “The East.”
The U.S. Government is, in effect, betting that to force neutrals to choose between “The West” and “the East,” “The West” will expand, instead of reduce, its empire. Whether, or the extent to which, the reverse might happen, was so much as even considered by “The West,” is not, as-of yet, publicly known.
However, specifically as regards what was the topic in that Reuters news-report: to be concerned not at all about how the death-rates in the east-Asian region would be affected, but ONLY about “how we could drag China through the mud,” was — given the fact that the U.S. Government thought that to increase the vaccination-rates in that region would reduce the death-rates there — for the U.S. Government to intend to increase covid-19 deaths in the East-Asia & Pacific region. It was their intent, regardless of whether, or the extent to which, it was the result of what the U.S. Government did there.
We live in a world of make-believe politics, a world where strings pulled in the interests of the super-rich are ever more visible. And yet we are expected to pretend we cannot see those strings. More astonishing still, many people really do seem blind to the puppet show.
1. The “leader of the free world”, President Joe Biden, can barely maintain his attention for more than a few minutes without straying off topic, or wandering offstage. When he has to walk before the cameras, he does so like he is auditioning for the role of a geriatric robot. His whole body is gripped with the concentration he needs to walk in a straight line.
Anyone who denies this is extremely uncomfortable and embarrassing to watch at this point isn't being honest.
And I don't understand how Democrats and their pundits believe they can convince Americans it's not happening.
And yet we are supposed to believe he is carefully working the levers of the western empire, making critically difficult calculations to keep the West free and prosperous, while keeping in check its enemies – Russia, China, Iran – without provoking a nuclear war. Is he really capable of doing all that when he struggles to put one foot in front of the other?
2. Part of that tricky diplomatic balancing act Biden is supposedly conducting, along with other western leaders, relates to Israel’s military operation in Gaza. The West’s “diplomacy” – backed by weapons transfers – has resulted in the murder of tens of thousands of Palestinians, most of them women and children; the gradual starvation of 2.3 million Palestinians over many months; and the destruction of 70 per cent of the enclave’s housing stock and almost all of its major infrastructure and institutions, including schools, universities and hospitals.
And yet we are supposed to believe that Biden has no leverage over Israel, even though Israel is entirely dependent on the United States for the weapons it is using to destroy Gaza.
We are supposed to believe Israel is acting solely in “self-defence”, even when most of the people being killed are unarmed civilians; and that it is “eliminating” Hamas, even though Hamas doesn’t appear to have been weakened, and even though Israel’s starvation policies will take their toll on the young, elderly and vulnerable long before they kill a single Hamas fighter.
We are supposed to believe that Israel has a plan for the “day after” in Gaza that won’t look anything like the outcome these policies appear designed to achieve: making Gaza uninhabitable so that the Palestinian population is forced to leave.
And on top of all this, we are supposed to believe that, in ruling that a “plausible” case has been made that Israel is committing genocide, the judges of the world’s highest court, the International Court of Justice, have shown they do not understand the legal definition of the crime of genocide. Or possibly that they are driven by antisemitism.
3. Meanwhile, the same western leaders arming Israel’s slaughter of many tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, including more than 15,000 children, have been shipping hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of armaments to Ukraine to assist its armed forces. Ukraine must be helped, we are told, because it is the victim of an aggressive neighbouring power, Russia, determined on expansion and land theft.
And yet we are supposed to ignore the two decades of western military expansion eastwards, via Nato, that has finally coming knocking, in Ukraine, on Russia’s door – and the fact that the West’s best experts on Russia warned throughout that time that we were playing with fire in doing so and that Ukraine would prove a red line for Moscow.
We are supposed to make no comparison between Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and Israel’s aggression against the Palestinians. In the latter case, Israel is supposedly the victim, even though it has been violently occupying its Palestinian neighbours’ territory for three-quarters of a century while, in flagrant violation of international law, building Jewish settlements on the territory meant to form the basis of a Palestinian state.
Antony Blinken: "We can never let the crimes Russia's committing become our new normal… bombing schools and hospitals and apartment buildings to rubble is not normal" pic.twitter.com/W2rBYE8CVk
We are supposed to believe that the Palestinians of Gaza have no right to defend themselves comparable to Ukraine’s right – no right to defend against decades of Israeli belligerence, whether the ethnic cleansing operations of 1948 and 1967, the apartheid system imposed on the remnant Palestinian population afterwards, the 17-year blockade of Gaza that denied its inhabitants the essentials of life, or the “plausible genocide” the West is now arming and providing diplomatic cover for.
In fact, if the Palestinians do try to defend themselves, the West not only refuses to help them, as it has Ukraine, but considers them terrorists – even the children, it seems.
4. Julian Assange, the journalist and publisher who did most to expose the inner workings of western establishments, and their criminal schemes in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, has been behind bars for five years in Belmarsh high-security prison. Before that, he spent seven years arbitrarily detained – according to United Nations legal experts – in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, forced to seek asylum there from political persecution. In an interminable legal process, the US seeks his extradition so he can be locked away in near-isolation for up to 175 years.
And yet we are supposed to believe that his 12 years of effective detention – having been found guilty of no crime – is entirely unrelated to the fact that, in publishing secret cables, Assange revealed that, behind closed doors, the West and its leaders sound and act like gangsters and psychopaths, especially about foreign affairs, not like the stewards of a benign global order they claim to be overseeing.
The leaked documents Assange published show western leaders ready to destroy whole societies to further western resource domination and their own enrichment – and eager to wield the most outrageous lies to achieve their goals. They have no interest in upholding the supposedly cherished value of freedom of the press, except when that freedom is being weaponised against their enemies.
We are supposed to believe that western leaders genuinely want journalists to act as a watchdog, a restraint, on their power even when they are hounding to death the very journalist who created a whistleblowers’ platform, Wikileaks, to do precisely that. (Assange has already suffered a stroke from the more than a decade-long strain of fighting for his freedom.)
We are supposed to believe that the West will give Assange a fair trial, when the very states colluding in his incarceration – and in the CIA’s case, planned assassination – are the ones he exposed for engaging in war crimes and state terrorism. We are supposed to believe that they are pursuing a legal process, not persecution, in redefining as the crime of “espionage” his efforts to bring transparency and accountability to international affairs.
5. The media claim to represent the interests of western publics in all their diversity, and to act as a true window on the world.
We are supposed believe that this same media is free and pluralistic, even when it is owned by the super-rich as well as western states that were long ago hollowed out to serve the super-rich.
We are supposed to believe that a media completely dependent for its survival on revenues from big corporate advertisers can bring us news and analysis without fear or favour. We are supposed to believe that a media whose primary role is selling audiences to corporate advertisers can question whether, in doing so, it is playing a beneficial or harmful role.
We are supposed to believe that a media plugged firmly into the capitalist financial system that brought the global economy to its knees in 2008, and has been hurtling us towards ecological catastrophe, is in a position to evaluate and critique that capitalist model dispassionately, that media outlets could somehow turn on the billionaires who own them, or could forego the income from the billionaire-owned corporations that prop up the media’s finances through advertising.
We are supposed to believe that the media can objectively assess the merits of going to war. That is, wars waged serially by the West – from Afghanistan to Iraq, from Libya to Syria, from Ukraine to Gaza – when media corporations are embedded in corporate conglomerations whose other big interests include arms manufacturing and fossil-fuel extraction.
We are supposed to believe that the media uncritically promotes endless growth for reasons of economic necessity and common sense, even though the contradictions are glaring: that the forever growth model is impossible to sustain on a finite planet where resources are running out.
6. In western political systems, unlike those of its enemies, there is supposedly a meaningful democratic choice between candidates representing opposing worldviews and values.
We are supposed to believe in a western political model of openness, pluralism and accountability even when in the US and UK the public are offered an electoral scrap between two candidates and parties that, to stand a chance of winning, need to win favour with the corporate media representing the interests of its billionaire owners, need to keep happy billionaire donors who fund their campaigns, and need to win over Big Business by demonstrating their unwavering commitment to a model of endless growth that is completely unsustainable.
We are supposed to believe that these leaders serve the voting public – offering a choice between right and left, between capital and labour – when, in truth, the public is only ever presented with a choice between two parties prostrated before Big Money, when the parties’ policy programmes are nothing more than competitions in who can best appease the wealth-elite.
We are supposed to believe that the “democratic” West represents the epitome of political health, even though it repeatedly dredges up the very worst people imaginable to lead it.
In the US, the “choice” imposed on the electorate is between one candidate (Biden) who should be in pottering around his garden, or maybe preparing for his final, difficult years in a care home, and a competitor (Donald Trump) whose relentless search for adoration and self-enrichment should never have been indulged beyond hosting a TV reality show.
In the UK, the “choice” is no better: between a candidate (Rishi Sunak) richer than the British king and equally cosseted and a competitor (Sir Keir Starmer) who is so ideologically hollow that his public record is an exercise in decades of shape-shifting.
Compare Keir Starmer's statements on the siege of Gaza with his arguments at the International Court of Justice in 2014, where he argued that the Serb siege of Vukovar was a case of genocide. A thread on Starmer, international law and Gaza. pic.twitter.com/lu0X6sgXfB
All, let us note, are fully signed up to the continuing genocide in Gaza, all are unmoved by many months of the slaughter and starvation of Palestinian children, all are only too ready to defame as antisemites anyone who shows an ounce of the principle and humanity they all too obviously lack.
The super-rich may be just out of view, but the strings they pull are all too visible. Time to cut ourselves loose.
It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties.
— James Madison, AMemorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments, 1785
James Madison, often referred to as the “Father of the Constitution,” once predicted that the Bill of Rights would become mere “parchment barrier,” words on paper ignored by successive generations of Americans.
How right he was.
Although Madison initially felt that the inclusion of a bill of rights in the originally ratified Constitution was unnecessary to its success, Thomas Jefferson persuaded him that “a bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular, & what no just government should refuse, or rest on inferences.”
The Bill of Rights drafted by Madison—the first ten amendments to the Constitution—was a document so revolutionary at the time that it would come to be viewed as the epitome of American liberty. The rights of the people reflected in those ten amendments encapsulated much of Madison’s views about government, the corrupting influence of power, and the need for safeguards against tyranny.
Madison’s writings speak volumes to the present constitutional crisis in the country.
Read them and weep.
“The accumulation of all powers, Legislative, Executive, and Judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” — James Madison, Federalist No. 47 (30 January 1788) Federalist (Dawson)/46 Full text at Wikisource
“The people are the only legitimate fountain of power, and it is from them that the constitutional charter, under which the several branches of government hold their power, is derived.” — James Madison, Federalist No. 49 (2 February 1788)
“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.” — James Madison, Federalist No. 51 (6 February 1788)
“A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.” — James Madison, Speech, Constitutional Convention (29 June 1787), from Max Farrand’s Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, Vol. I [1] (1911), p. 465
“Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” — James Madison to W.T. Barry, 4 August 1822, Writings 9:103-p-9
“I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.”— James Madison, Speech in the Virginia Ratifying Convention on Control of the Military, June 16, 1788 in: History of the Virginia Federal Convention of 1788, vol. 1, p. 130 (H.B. Grigsby ed. 1890).
In the years since the founders laid their lives on the line to pursue the dream of individual freedom and self-government, big government has grown bigger and the rights of the citizenry have grown smaller.
However, there are certain principles—principles that every American should know—which undergird the American system of government and form the basis of our freedoms.
The following seven principles are a good starting point for understanding what free government is really all about.
First, the maxim that power corrupts is an absolute truth. Realizing this, those who drafted the Constitution and the Bill of Rights held one principle sacrosanct: a distrust of all who hold governmental power. As such, those who drafted our founding documents would see today’s government as an out-of-control, unmanageable beast.
The second principleis that governments primarily exist to secure rights, an idea that is central to constitutionalism. The purpose of constitutionalism is to limit governmental power and ensure that the government performs its basic function: to preserve and protect our rights, especially our unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and our civil liberties. Unfortunately, the government today has discarded this principle and now sees itself as our master, not our servant.
The third principle revolves around the belief that no one is above the law, not even those who make the law. This is termed rule of law. Richard Nixon’s statement, “When the President does it, that means it is not illegal,” would have been an anathema to the Framers of the Constitution.
Fourth, separation of powers ensures that no single authority is entrusted with all the powers of government. The fact that the president today has dictatorial powers would have been considered an offense to every principle for which the Framers took their revolutionary stand.
Fifth, a system of checks and balances, essential if a constitutional government is to succeed, strengthens the separation of powers and prevents legislative despotism. The Framers did not anticipate the emergence of presidential powers or the inordinate influence of corporate powers on governmental decision-making. Indeed, as recent academic studies now indicate, we are ruled by a monied oligarchy that serves itself and not “we the people.”
Sixth, representation allows the people to have a voice in government by sending elected representatives to do their bidding while avoiding the need of each and every citizen to vote on every issue considered by government.
Finally, federalism is yet another constitutional device to limit the power of government by dividing power and, thus, preventing tyranny. In America, the levels of government generally break down into federal, state and local branches (which further divide into counties and towns or cities). Because local and particular interests differ from place to place, such interests are better handled at a more intimate level by local governments, not a bureaucratic national government.
These seven vital principles have been largely forgotten in recent years, obscured by the haze of a centralized government, a citizenry that no longer thinks analytically, and schools that don’t adequately teach our young people about their history and their rights.
Yet here’s the rub: while Americans wander about in their brainwashed states, their “government of the people, by the people and for the people” has largely been taken away from them.
Make your voice and your vote count for more than just political posturing.
Never cease to vociferously protest the erosion of your freedoms at the local and national level.
Most of all, do these things today.
If we wait until the votes have all been counted or hang our hopes on our particular candidate to win and fix what’s wrong with the country, “we the people” will continue to lose.
Israel must be held accountable for the suffering it is inflicting on Gaza (Omar AshtawyAPA images)
Israel does not belong in the modern world. It is the child of European colonialism and Europe’s genocidal anti-Semitism, imposed by force and fire and Western guilt on a land already inhabited by an indigenous people.
Israel is a contemporary trespass of that old world’s colonial ethos that justified genocide, ethnic cleansing, wholesale plunder, endless theft and destruction of indigenous peoples in the name of settlement and divine entitlement of a superior group of humans.
But the modern world has moved on with incremental moral evolution. It long ago repudiated, at least in principle, the racist and violent impulses that powered the genocidal colonial engines of old.
One can hear Israel’s anachronistic nature in the rhetoric of its leaders and citizens. Benjamin Netanyahu points to America’s nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to justify Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Zionists, especially those in settler-colonial nations like the United States and Australia, love to remind us that these countries were founded on the genocide and ethnic cleansing of indigenous peoples.
And from these reminders come their accusations of double standards and hypocrisy. “You’re living on stolen land, why don’t you leave?” so their rhetoric goes.
Implicit in their accusations is an admission of sameness with the violent and racist settler-colonial force that created the United States.
In other words, while humanity has tried and continues to strive to prevent and right the wrongs of the past, Israel points to these base moments in human history, not in the context of “never again,” but as precedents it should be free to emulate.
As we still today uncover mass graves in “Indian schools” where Indigenous children were ripped from their families and tortured to death in boarding schools, Israel demands the right to create more mass graves of Palestinians in the name of “self-defense.”
While we engage in discourse to push for acknowledgement and reparations, much as the world did for European Jews, Israel demands an entitlement to ethnically cleanse indigenous Palestinians, steal their lands, plunder resources and raze their cities and farmlands.
While we imagine and endeavor to create a post-colonial reality of revolutionary universalism, inclusion, equity and understanding, Israel demands the right to Jewish exclusivity and Jewish entitlement at the expense of non-Jews.
Invoking American settler-colonialism to justify its own version of the same is no different than invoking America’s industrialized enslavement as a precedent to emulate.
Rules-based order?
Western governments have long touted their values as beacons of democracy and idealism toward which modernity must aim. How they love to lecture the world about law and rules-based order; about freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of this and that.
But look how quickly they denounce, veto and attack any courts, human rights organizations and UN protocols when the institutions they helped create do not serve their imperial interests. Look how quickly they shut down speech and sic their police on their own citizens trying to exercise those freedoms.
They do this because Israel is antithetical to democratic values. It is antithetical to human rights and the so-called rules-based order.
The West must therefore choose between Israel and the ideals it claims to uphold. And thus far, it is choosing Israel.
And in the process, it is dragging itself and the world into an abyss.
Already, Indian commentators are talking about an “Israel-like” solution in Kashmir. The world is silent as Arab dictatorships like the UAE are arming genocidal militias in Sudan to take control of the country’s vast gold and uranium treasures.
Israel is dragging the world into an infectious darkness that will spread across our planet unless it is stopped and held accountable for the holocaust it is committing in Gaza and now, it seems, in the West Bank as well.
The “solution” is not at all complicated, contrary to pervasive Zionist propaganda.
It is simply an adherence to accepted universal morality that rejects Jewish supremacy as it rejects all other forms of supremacy. This means equality of rights for all those who inhabit the land, a return of Palestinian refugees in a nation of its citizens founded on the principle of one-person-one-vote.
I was arrested again inside of Congress for speaking out against US-backed genocide. Myself and others were brutally tackled and carried out of the room by Capitol Police. I was charged with “crowding, obstructing, or incommoding” for speaking out and holding a sign as the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense testified in Congress for more money for the endless US war machine.
While they are arresting peace activists for exercising first amendment rights they are making plans to host Netanyahu- a war criminal with an actual arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court.
For decades, people following CODEPINK’s lead have been protesting inside the halls of Congress. The year before October 7, there were a handful of us protesting the bloated military budgets and the US warmongering. I was arrested several times on my own, but since October, dozens of us have been arrested in Congress, hundreds in DC, and thousands across the US and the world for Palestine.
The sustained energy and activism are the result of the 40,000+ thousands of Palestinians murdered, millions being starved and displaced, their land, water, and air poisoned, and neighborhoods, hospitals, schools, and refugee camps demolished.
The real criminals are the ones we are protesting against–the ones literally sitting directly in front of us inside the hearing room–and should be the ones arrested, charged, and found guilty for the war criminals they are funding and supporting and the war crimes they are committing.
Any of us speaking and acting out on the side of justice know we are taking risks. We see it as our duty as people in the US in solidarity with and inspired by the Palestinian people facing and resisting this horror.
As I await my court date, I think of the people I spent the night with at the DC detention facility. Just this year, there have been 5 deaths inside the D.C. jail. The dozen or so women in there reminded me that poverty is a policy choice and our carceral, systemically racist state perpetuates harm and cycles of violence.
According to the US Center for Palestinian Rights in Washington DC, for this year alone (before our additional billions of aid weresent), $15,596,311 to Israel’s weapons could instead fund 451,735 households with public housing, 1,322,199 children receiving free or low-cost healthcare, 41,490 elementary school teachers, 10,818,505 households with solar electricity produce, and 100,563 students with their loan debt canceled.
The fight against US militarism is one where the climate, feminist, Indigenous, economic, and racial justice movements are all uniting around right now. And as it deepens and strengthens, we must become more organized as we escalate while we continue to make those in power uncomfortable.
Israel hasn’t just crossed the Biden administration’s pretend “red lines” in Gaza. With its massacre at Nuseirat refugee camp at the weekend, Israel drove a bulldozer through them.
On Saturday, an Israeli military operation to free four Israelis held captive by Hamas since its 7 October attack on Israel resulted in the killing of more than 270 Palestinians, many of them women and children.
The true death toll may never be known. Untold numbers of men, women and children are still under rubble from the bombardment, crushed to death, or trapped and suffocating, or expiring slowly from dehydration if they cannot be dug out in time.
Many hundreds more are suffering agonising injuries – should their wounds not kill them – in a situation where there are almost no medical facilities left after Israel’s destruction of hospitals and its mass kidnap of Palestinian medical personnel. Further, there are no drugs to treat the victims, given Israel’s months-long imposition of an aid blockade.
Israelis and American Jewish organisations – so ready to judge Palestinians for cheering attacks on Israel – celebrated the carnage caused in freeing the Israeli captives, who could have returned home months ago had Israel been ready to agree on a ceasefire.
According to reports, the bloody Israeli operation in central Gaza may have killed three other captives, one of them possibly an American citizen.
In comments to the Haaretz newspaper published on Sunday, Louis Har, a hostage freed back in February, observed of his own captivity: “Our greatest fear was the IDF’s planes and the concern that they would bomb the building we were in.”
He added: “We weren’t worried that they’d [referring to Hamas] do something to us all of a sudden. We didn’t object to anything. So I wasn’t afraid they’d kill me.”
The Israeli media reported Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant describing Saturday’s operation as “one of the most heroic and extraordinary operations I have witnessed over the course of 47 years serving in Israel’s defence establishment”.
The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court is currently seeking an arrest warrant for Gallant, as well as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The charges include efforts to exterminate the people of Gaza through planned starvation.
State terrorism
Israel has been wrecking the established laws of war with abandon for more than eight months.
At least 37,000 Palestinians are known to have been killed so far in Gaza, though Palestinian officials lost the ability to properly count the dead many weeks ago following Israel’s relentless destruction of the enclave’s institutions and infrastructure.
Israel has additionally engineered a famine that, mostly out of view, is gradually starving Gaza’s population to death.
The International Court of Justice put Israel on trial for genocide back in January. Last month, it ordered an immediate halt to Israel’s attack on Gaza’s southern city of Rafah. Israel has responded to both judgments by intensifying its killing spree.
In a further indication of Israel’s sense of impunity, the rescue operation on Saturday involved yet another flagrant war crime.
Israel used a humanitarian aid truck – supposedly bringing relief to Gaza’s desperate population – as cover for its military operation. In international law, that is known as the crime of perfidy.
For months, Israel has been blocking aid to Gaza – part of its efforts to starve the population. It has also targeted aid workers, killing more than 250 of them since October.
But more specifically, Israel is waging a war on Unrwa, claiming without evidence that the UN’s main aid agency in Gaza is implicated in Hamas “terror” operations. It wants the UN, the international community’s last lifeline in Gaza against Israel’s wanton savagery, permanently gone.
By hiding its own soldiers in an aid truck, Israel made a mockery of its supposed “terrorism concerns” by doing exactly what it accuses Hamas of.
But Israel’s military action also dragged the aid effort – the only way to end Gaza’s famine – into the centre of the battlefield. Now Hamas has every reason to fear that aid workers are not what they seem; that they are really instruments of Israeli state terrorism.
Nefarious motive
In the circumstances, one might have assumed the Biden administration would be quick to condemn Israel’s actions and distance itself from the massacre.
Instead, Jake Sullivan, President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, was keen to take credit for the mass carnage – or what he termed a “daring operation”.
He admitted in an interview on Sunday that the US had offered assistance in the rescue operation, though he refused to clarify how. Other reports noted a supporting British role, too.
“The United States has been providing support to Israel for several months in its efforts to help identify the locations of hostages in Gaza and to support efforts to try to secure their rescue or recovery,” Sullivan told CNN.
Sullivan’s comments fuelled existing suspicions that such assistance extends far beyond providing intelligence and a steady supply of the bombs Israel has dropped on the tiny Gaza enclave over the past few months – more than the total that hit London, Dresden and Hamburg combined during the Second World War.
A Biden official disclosed to the Axios website that US soldiers belonging to a so-called American hostages unit had participated in the rescue operation that massacred Palestinian civilians.
Additionally, footage shows Washington’s floating pier as the backdrop for helicopters involved in the attack.
According to Axios, citing a U.S. administration official, the American hostages unit in Israel assisted in the release of the four Israeli captives in Gaza.
Footage published by an Israeli occupation soldier confirms Israel's use of the American temporary pier in central Gaza… pic.twitter.com/GJJp1ZSA7T
The pier was ostensibly built off Gaza’s coast at huge cost – some $320m – and over two months to bypass Israel’s blocking of aid by land.
Observers argued at the time that it was not only an extraordinarily impractical and inefficient way to deliver aid but that there were likely to be hidden, nefarious motives behind its construction.
Its location, at the midpoint of Gaza’s coast, has bolstered Israel’s severing of the enclave into two, creating a land corridor that has effectively become a new border and from which Israel can launch raids into central Gaza like Saturday’s.
Those critics appear to have been proven right. The pier has barely functioned as an aid route since the first deliveries arrived in mid-May.
The pier soon broke apart, and its repair and return to operation was only announced on Friday.
Now the fact that it appears to have been pressed into immediate use as a beachhead for an operation that killed at least 270 Palestinians drags Washington even deeper into complicity with what the World Court has called a “plausible genocide”.
But like the use of the aid truck, it also means the Biden administration is joining Israel once again – after pulling its funding to Unrwa – in directly discrediting the aid operation in Gaza when it is needed most urgently.
That was the context for understanding the World Food Programme’s announcement on Sunday that it was halting the use of the pier for aid deliveries, citing “safety” concerns.
‘Successful’ massacre
As ever, for western media and politicians – who have stood firmly against a ceasefire that could have brought the suffering of the Israeli captives and their families to an end months ago – Palestinian lives are quite literally worthless.
The German Chancellor Olaf Scholz thought it appropriate to describe the killing of 270-plus Palestinians in the freeing of the four Israelis as an “important sign of hope”, while the British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak expressed his “huge relief”. The appalling death toll went unmentioned.
Imagine describing in similarly positive terms an operation by Hamas that killed 270 Israelis to liberate a handful of the many hundreds of medical personnel kidnapped from Gaza by Israel in recent months and known to be held in a torture facility.
The London Times, meanwhile, breezily erased Saturday’s massacre of Palestinians by characterising the operation as a “surgical strike”.
Media outlets uniformly hailed the operation as a “success” and “daring”, as though the killing and maiming of around 1,000 Palestinians – and the serial war crimes Israel committed in the process – need not be factored in.
BBC News’ main report on Saturday night breathlessly focused on the celebrations of the families of the freed captives, treating the massacre of Palestinians as an afterthought. The programme stressed that the death toll was “disputed” – though not mentioning that, as ever, it was Israel doing the disputing.
The reality is that the savage “rescue” operation would have been entirely unnecessary had Netanyahu not been so determined to drag his feet on negotiating the captives’ release, and thereby avoid jail on corruption charges, and the US so fully indulgent of his procrastination.
It will also be very difficult to repeat such an operation, as Haaretz’s military correspondent Amos Harel noted at the weekend. Hamas will learn lessons, guarding the remaining captives even more closely, most likely underground in its tunnels.
The remaining captives’ return will “probably occur only as part of a deal that will require significant concessions”, he concluded.
Leveraging murder
Benny Gantz, the politician-general who helped oversee Israel’s eight-month slaughter in Gaza inside Netanyahu’s war cabinet and is widely described as a “moderate” in the West, resigned from the government on Sunday.
Although ostensibly the dispute is over how Israel will extricate itself from Gaza over the coming months, the more likely explanation is that Gantz wishes both to distance himself from Netanyahu as the Israeli prime minister faces possible arrest for crimes against humanity and to prepare for elections to take his place.
The Pentagon and the Biden administration see Gantz as their man. Having him out of the government may give them additional leverage over Netanyahu in the run-up to a US presidential election in November in which Donald Trump will be actively trying to cosy up to the Israeli prime minister.
The focus on Israeli politicking – rather than US complicity in the Nuseirat massacre – will doubtless provide a welcome distraction, too, as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken tours the region. He will once again wish to be seen rallying support for a ceasefire plan that is supposed to see the Israeli captives released – a plan Netanyahu will be determined, once again, to stymie.
Blinken’s efforts are likely to be even more hopeless in the immediate wake of the Biden administration’s all-too-visible involvement in the killing of hundreds of Palestinians.
Washington’s claim to be an “honest broker” looks to everyone – apart from the reliably obedient western political and media class – as even more derisory than usual.
The real question is whether Blinken’s serial diplomatic failures in ending the slaughter in Gaza are a bug or a feature.
The stark contradiction in Washington’s position towards Gaza was exposed last week during a press conference with State Department spokesman Matthew Miller.
He suggested that the aim of Israel and the US was to persuade Hamas to dissolve itself – presumably by some form of surrender – in return for a ceasefire. The group had an incentive to do so, said Miller, “because they don’t want to see continued conflict, continued Palestinian people dying. They don’t want to see war in Gaza.”
Even the usually compliant western press corps were taken aback by Miller’s implication that a crime against humanity – the mass killing of Palestinians, such as took place at Nuseirat camp on Saturday – was viewed in Washington as leverage to be exercised over Hamas.
But more likely, the seeming contradiction was simply symptomatic of the logical entanglements resulting from Washington’s efforts to deflect from the real goal: buying Israel more time to do what it is so well advanced doing already.
Israel needs to finish pulverising Gaza, making it permanently uninhabitable, so that the population will be faced with a stark dilemma: remain and die, or leave by any means possible.
The same US “humanitarian pier” that was pressed into service for Saturday’s massacre may soon be the “humanitarian pier” that serves as the exit through which Gaza’s Palestinians are ethnically cleansed, shipped out of a death zone engineered by Israel.
Damage in Nuseirat refugee camp following an Israeli attack on 8 June 2024 (Omar AshtawyAPA images)
While Israelis celebrated the release of four captives secured by the military in Gaza on Saturday, Palestinians mourned hundreds of people killed during the daytime operation.
Palestinian officials said that more than 210 Palestinians were killed and 400 injured in central Gaza on Saturday, including in the area where the Israeli military says it rescued the four captives from two separate apartments blocks in a residential area of Nuseirat refugee camp.
The fresh horror in Nuseirat comes two days after Israel bombed a UN school in the refugee camp where thousands of displaced people were sheltering, killing at least 33.
As of 5 June, the Palestinian health ministry in Gaza had recorded more than 36,500 fatalities and 83,000 injuries since 7 October.
The actual fatality count is likely much higher, with thousands of people missing under the rubble. An unknown number of Palestinians in Gaza have died in a secondary wave of mortality as Israel has destroyed water and sanitation facilities in the territory, giving rise to diseases, all while engineering a famine and destroying the healthcare system.
In Nuseirat refugee camp, “Gazan paramedics and residents said the assault killed scores of people and left mangled bodies of men, women and children strewn around a marketplace and a mosque,” Reuters reported on Saturday.
Abu Obeida, the pseudonymous spokesperson for the Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, said that some captives were killed during the operation. Israel has not reported any fatalities among the captives during the raid.
“By committing horrifying massacres the enemy was able to liberate a few of its prisoners but at the same time it killed some of them during the operation,” Abu Obeida said.
“This operation will constitute a major danger to the enemy’s prisoners and will have a negative impact on their conditions and their lives,” he added.
Perfidy
Footage from the raid indicated that Israeli forces infiltrated Nuseirat refugee camp disguised in civilian trucks:
Israeli occupation forces infiltrated the Nuseirat refugee camp today in trucks disguised as humanitarian aid. pic.twitter.com/4jcabCKDHu
— ??? ?????? Anas Al-Sharif (@AnasAlSharif0) June 8, 2024
A wounded eyewitness described walking in the street and seeing what he thought was a truck carrying humanitarian aid before armed forces emerged from the vehicle and shot him in the chest and arm:
"They were in a truck carrying clothes and cooking pans"
A wounded Palestinian eyewitness describes the Israeli forces who snuck into Al-Nuseirat refugee camp today in a humanitarian aid truck coming from the American pier. pic.twitter.com/h3bkEBA2Qx
Israel has repeatedly accused Hamas of hiding among civilians to justify its targeting and destruction of civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, in Gaza, while apparently using trucks disguised as humanitarian aid to carry out an operation that killed scores of civilians. Feigning civilian or non-combatant status, as Israeli forces appear to have done, and hardly for the first time, may constitute the war crime of perfidy under international humanitarian law.
#Israeli hostages held in #Gaza by Palestinian armed groups are held ultra vires and should all be released immediately. Today's rescue operation raises concerns with numerous civilians injured and killed, and – according to unconfirmed media reports – perfidious use of… pic.twitter.com/9q3MZcTOmz
According to Axios, citing a U.S. administration official, the American hostages unit in Israel assisted in the release of the four Israeli captives in Gaza.
Footage published by an Israeli occupation soldier confirms Israel's use of the American temporary pier in central Gaza… pic.twitter.com/GJJp1ZSA7T
The plan for the US pier on the Gaza shoreline was revealed in a surprise announcement by President Joe Biden during his State of the Union address in early March and was framed as an effort to increase humanitarian aid into the besieged territory, despite its limited capacity in comparison to the already established land crossings.
The pier took its first delivery on 17 May and only functioned at partial capacity, on and off, for a few days before a storm damaged the modular pier around a week later.
The controversial pier is part of a corridor that the Israeli military has cut through the center of the Gaza Strip, south of Gaza City, effectively splitting northern and southern Gaza and allowing Israeli forces to more easily carry out raids in the center of the Gaza Strip.
The US Department of Defense said on Friday that repairs to the pier had been completed with the assistance of the Israeli military, raising questions whether the Nuseirat operation was delayed until after the pier was rebuilt.
American role
Barak Ravid, the Axios writer who is frequently fed information by Israel’s military and intelligence apparatus, reported that Nuseirat operation “was supposed to happen a few weeks ago but was canceled for operational reasons,” citing unnamed Israeli officials.
Israeli military spokesperson Daniel Hagari said that hundreds of soldiers were involved in the Nuseirat operation and a police officer was critically wounded during the raid; he was later reported to have died from his injuries.
Axios revealed that “the US hostage cell in Israel supported the effort to rescue the four hostages,” citing an unnamed US official.
Was the US “humanitarian” pier used as a launching point for the Al-Nuseirat massacre (which could not happen without US collaboration)? And what role did US forces play on the ground (besides arming and providing diplomatic cover for the IOF)? #complicityhttps://t.co/KGKij1QoEv
The White House released a statement from national security advisor Jake Sullivan in which he said that Washington “is supporting all efforts to secure the release of hostages still held by Hamas, including American citizens.”
“This includes through ongoing negotiations or other means,” Sullivan added.
Sullivan’s statement on the “successful operation” commends “the work of the Israeli security services that conducted this daring operation” and makes no mention of the scores of Palestinians killed.
The White House statement was only one of many from Western leaders celebrating the rescue of the four Israeli captives without any mention of the Palestinians killed in the process.
Hamas condemned what it called a “horrific massacre against innocent civilians” in Nuseirat camp and other locations in central Gaza and the reported American involvement.
In a statement published on its Telegram channel, Hamas said that it “proves once again the complicity of the US administration” the complicity of the US in war crimes in Gaza.
“Doomsday” in central Gaza
Palestinians residing in the areas of central Gaza attacked on Saturday described “doomsday” scenes like those from a horror film, with quadcopters shooting at civilians in Deir al-Balah while Israel drops bombs from the sky.
Quadcopters get very low in the sky and shoot at civilians around people in Deir al-Balah.
Video recorded in Nuseirat refugee camp shows Israeli-fired missiles striking a residential area.
One graphic video shows around a dozen dead and injured people lying on a street in Nuseirat refugee camp, and other videos show people arriving with severe injuries to overcrowded medical facilities.
Yet another graphic video shows a man holding a young boy with a severe head wound standing among shrouded corpses outside a hospital. When the child suddenly moves, the surprised man runs with the boy in his arms towards the hospital entrance.
Videos and photos show that another boy was killed with his last meal still in his mouth and a man was shot dead while cooking on a stove.
Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, one of the few still functioning in Gaza, was overwhelmed with casualties from Nuseirat and was being run by a sole generator on Saturday while Israeli bombing further threatened its ability to provide urgently needed medical care.
The Palestine Red Crescent Society said that it was transporting injured people from hospitals in central Gaza to a field hospital due to the threat of Israeli bombing:
Palestine Red Crescent ambulance teams are transporting all the injured in the central Gaza Strip to the International Medical Corps field hospital after the area around Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital was threatened with bombing. ?Filmed by PRCS volunteer: Mohammed Suleiman. pic.twitter.com/stThICSilW
The four rescued captives – Noa Argamani, 25, Almog Meir Jan, 21, Andrey Kozlov, 27, and Shlomi Ziv, 40 – were all captured at the Supernova music festival during Hamas’ raid on 7 October last year.
During her captivity, Hamas released two videos showing signs of life from Argamani. The most recent video, published on 31 May, features Argamani’s voice imploring Israelis to put pressure on Netanyahu’s war cabinet, warning that “time is running out.”
The four former captives “were taken to hospital for medical checks and were in good health,” Reuters reported, citing the Israeli military.
This is in stark contrast to Palestinians from Gaza who have been arbitrarily detained by Israel in recent months and released with newly amputated limbs removed without anesthesia and their bodies bearing marks of torture.
Around 250 people were captured in Israel on 7 October and brought to Gaza. More than 100 were released by Hamas as part of a prisoner exchange deal in November.
Two Israeli-Argentinian men were rescued by Israeli forces in Rafah, southern Gaza, in February.
Some 75 Palestinians were killed during that operation as Israel pounded Rafah, where people displaced from other areas of Gaza had sought shelter, in order to create a diversion from the military raid.
A captured Israeli soldier was reportedly rescued by the military in late October.
With the rescue of the four captives on Saturday, a total of seven Israelis and foreign nationals held in Gaza since 7 October have been freed by the Israeli military. Far more regained their freedom through an agreement negotiated with Hamas.
Many families of the captives who remain in Gaza are urgently pressing the Israeli government to secure another exchange deal.
Of the 116 captives who are believed to remain in Gaza, Israeli authorities have declared around a third of them dead, without acknowledging that the most likely cause of death is Israeli bombing.
Analyst Tariq Kenney-Shawa said that the lives of the children killed in Nuseirat on Saturday could have been spared.
“Israel could [have agreed] to a permanent ceasefire and hostage exchange at any time” during the past eight months, Kenney-Shawa stated, “but dead Palestinians are their main objective.”
100+ Palestinians massacred to rescue 4 Israelis who would have been released without bloodshed months ago had Israel’s primary objective been anything other than the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
I shudder to think what the “success” of this morning’s rescue operation will embolden
Some observers said that Saturday’s rescue operation would endanger the captives who remain in Gaza, since Netanyahu’s government has signaled that Israel will not engage in another prisoner exchange and will only secure the captives’ release by force.
“For Hamas, this approach means the captives are becoming a net loss: they have to allocate great resources to keep them but with no potential upside,” according to the Israeli writer Alon Mizrahi.
“They know by now, as [does] everybody else, that the purpose of Israel’s operation is to exterminate and ethnically cleanse the entirety of Gaza’s population” before doing the same to Palestinians in Israel and the West Bank.
Biden’s “Israeli” proposal
The US State Department announced on Friday that Antony Bliken, Washington’s top diplomat, would return to the region in the coming days to push Israel and Hamas to accept a three-phase ceasefire and prisoner exchange proposal put forward by President Joe Biden last week.
The US has also circulated a draft resolution backing Biden’s proposal at the UN Security Council, where it has vetoed multiple resolutions calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
Hamas has not agreed to the plan outlined by Biden, saying that it required clear guarantees that the deal would result in a complete end of the war in Gaza and a full withdrawal of Israeli troops from the territory.
Sami Abu Zuhri, a senior Hamas official, told Reuters that while the group welcomed “Biden’s ideas,” the draft resolution circulated at the Security Council “has no mention of ending the aggression or the withdrawal.”
Reuters paraphrased Abu Zuhri as saying that “Hamas was committed to its 5 May proposal which was based on an end to the fighting and an Israeli withdrawal, a swap deal and a lifting of the blockade of the enclave” – demands consistently maintained by the group throughout the past several months.
Meanwhile, Israeli opposition leader Benny Gantz postponed the anticipated announcement of his resignation from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war cabinet on Saturday.
Gantz had given Netanyahu a deadline of 8 June to deliver a “day-after” strategy for Gaza, where Netanyahu vows to press on until it achieves “total victory” – a goal criticized as “unidentified” (he may have meant to say “undefined”) by Biden during the announcement of his proposal last week.
In an interview published by Time magazine on Tuesday, Biden said there was “every reason for people” to draw the conclusion that Netanyahu was prolonging the war in Gaza for his own aims.
• Jon Elmer contributed background reporting on the US pier.
Western politicians and journalists have hurried to dismiss the murder and maiming of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in the Nuseirat refugee camp on Saturday in a savage joint Israeli-US military operation to free four Israeli captives.
Not just that, they have suggested that the bloodshed was inevitable and justified given that the hostages were being held in a residential neighbourhood of Gaza.
For example, Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor, observed of the massacre that was actively assisted by the US: “The Palestinian people are going through sheer hell in this conflict because Hamas is operating in a way that puts them in the crossfire, that holds hostages right in the heart of crowded civilian areas.”
Apparently, Israel’s decades of belligerent military occupation of the Palestinian territories, its 17-year blockade of Gaza denying its population the essentials of life, its intermittent destruction of the enclave by “mowing the lawn”, and now its carrying out of what the International Court of Justice has called a “plausible genocide” have nothing to do with the “sheer hell” the people of Gaza are suffering.
Those trying to win our consent to mass murder and the planned starvation of the people of Gaza by arguing that Hamas is using Palestinians in Gaza as human shields are engaged in the worst kind of bad-faith argument.
Let’s put back the context they are so keen to obscure:
1. Israel has been besieging the enclave of Gaza for decades. The tiny strip of land’s population comprises mostly Palestinian refugees who were long ago ethnically cleansed from their homes in what is now Israel and confined to Gaza. Their numbers have grown hugely since, to more than 2.3 million, within tightly-delimited “borders” policed – and blockaded – by Israel. Gaza is, in a true sense of the term, a giant concentration camp.
2. Gaza doesn’t have woods, mountains, caves in which Hamas fighters can hide or in which they can conceal their captives. It is not Afghanistan or Russia.
3. Gaza is almost entirely built-up – or it was until Israel destroyed most of its buildings over the past eight months. Small areas are open agricultural land or scrubland Israel will not allow Palestinians to develop – much of that has now been destroyed too. Watching over this tiny space 24/7 are armed Israeli drones. Move outside a building and you are being surveilled. You become a potential target for an assassination by Israel.
4. Hamas has two non-suicidal options for hiding the captives it seized in Israel on October 7. Either in a building, or underground in its tunnels, which were built precisely so parts of Gaza would be out of view of a hostile Israeli military. They are the nearest Hamas has to military bases. (Let us note here another hypocrisy: Israel’s military bases are often embedded in civilian communities inside Israel. Its defence ministry’s headquarters, the Kirya, is in the middle of built-up Tel Aviv.)
5. Hiding the captives above ground is the obviously more humanitarian option, as is clear from the images of those freed at the weekend. Given many months of captivity, they are reported to be in reasonable health.
6. After Israel’s massacre of more than 270 Palestinians at the weekend in Nuseirat camp, Hamas will now take all the hostages underground. That will be far worse for them, and it will make no difference to Israel’s wanton destruction of the buildings above. The overwhelming majority of the 70% of Gaza’s housing stock destroyed by Israel did not contain Israeli captives or Hamas fighters. It was targeted nonetheless because Israel’s military rampage has never been about getting the hostages back, or even about defeating Hamas, an impossible goal. It is about eradicating Gaza.
7. If Israel was really serious about bringing the captives home, it would be negotiating their release, not inducing a famine through an aid blockade that is starving everyone in Gaza: Hamas, Palestinian civilians and Israeli hostages alike. The real human shields are the Israeli captives, pawns being sacrificed by Israel as it pursues its bigger war aims.
8. The truth is that Israel is waging a genocidal war on the Palestinian population to drive them out of Gaza. It needs to manufacture pretexts to avoid reaching a ceasefire deal that would bring the hostages home and bring the bloodshed to an end. The “rescue” of the Israeli captives by killing huge numbers of Palestinians provides ideal conditions for making negotiations impossible. That was the real success.
9. The jubilation – of Israelis, and western politicians and media – at the carnage of Palestinians in place of a ceasefire to end the bloodshed is the real problem. By continuing to treat Palestinians as sub-human, all are enabling the genocide to continue.
This is about the U.S. Government’s lie to the naive Gorbachev, which fooled him to accept the U.S. empire’s proposal that East Germany become a part of West Germany, and that the Soviet Union and its one-Party rule end, and that its Warsaw Pact military alliance end while America’s NATO military alliance wouldn’t. In other words: it’s about how the Cold War on America’s side continued secretly (and now again brings America and Russia to the very brink of WW3), after the Cold War on Russia’s side ended in 1991 — ended on the basis of America’s lie and Russia’s trust in that lie:
On 10 September 2015, I documented this lie because so many U.S.-and-allied ‘historians’ were alleging it not to have happened but to be mere ‘Russian propaganda’ (and, after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, some have even alleged that “European security has in fact benefited significantly from NATO’s enlargement” — a lie on top of the basic one). I also quoted there ‘historians’ who denied this basic lie, so that a reader could see not only the truth but the regime’s agents’ lies denying that it (the West’s Big Lie) had actually happened or that it was important. But then, on 12 December 2017, the U.S. National Security Archives at George Washington University released even fuller documentation of the lie that had occurred by the U.S. Government, and here are highlights from their documentation of it, so that this continuing Big Lie will be recognized by every sane person as being what it is, the Big Lie that might end up producing World War Three:
Memcon from 2/9/90 meeting w/USSR Prem. Gorbachev & FM Shevardnaze, Moscow, USSR
Repeating what Bush said at the Malta summit in December 1989, Baker tells Gorbachev: “The President and I have made clear that we seek no unilateral advantage in this process” of inevitable German unification. Baker goes on to say, “We understand the need for assurances to the countries in the East. If we maintain a presence in a Germany that is a part of NATO, there would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east.” Later in the conversation, Baker poses the same position as a question, “would you prefer a united Germany outside of NATO that is independent and has no US forces or would you prefer a united Germany with ties to NATO and assurances that there would be no extension of NATO’s current jurisdiction eastward?” The declassifiers of this memcon actually redacted Gorbachev’s response that indeed such an expansion would be “unacceptable” – but Baker’s letter to Kohl the next day, published in 1998 by the Germans, gives the quote.
Source: U.S. Department of State, FOIA 199504567 (National Security Archive Flashpoints Collection, Box 38).
Washington D.C., December 12, 2017 – U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991, according to declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University (http://nsarchive.gwu.edu).
The documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and Eastern European membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991, that discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory, and that subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion were founded in written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels. …
The conversations before Kohl’s assurance involved explicit discussion of NATO expansion, the Central and East European countries, and how to convince the Soviets to accept unification. For example, on February 6, 1990, when Genscher met with British Foreign Minister Douglas Hurd, the British record showed Genscher saying, “The Russians must have some assurance that if, for example, the Polish Government left the Warsaw Pact one day, they would not join NATO the next.” (See Document 2)
*****
In addition, there is this: On 11 August 2014, Mary Elise Sarotte headlined at the U.S. empire’s own Foreign Affairs journal, “A Broken Promise?” as-if there still had been any doubt that it was that, and so an honest title for her article would have been “A Broken Promise” or even “A Broken Promise!” Because there’s no question about it. She reported not only that it definitely was a lie, and one by the U.S. Government itself; and that U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush told America’s stooge leaders, starting on 24 February 1990, that it was going to be a broken promise because “‘TO HELL WITH THAT! [promise]’ HE [Bush] SAID. ‘WE PREVAILED, THEY DIDN’T.’” In other words: on the night of 24 February 1990, Bush started secretly ordering his vassals to continue forward with the intention for the U.S. alliance ultimately to swallow-up not only the rest of the USSR but all of the Warsaw Pact and finally Russia itself. And this has been precisely what the U.S. regime and its colonies have been doing, up until 24 February 2022, when Russia finally put its foot down, to stop NATO’s coming within around a mere 300 miles of The Kremlin.
Consequently, even if NATO served a constructive purpose during 1945-1991, it has afterward only endangered the world — including especially Europe, making Europe be again the main battlefield if another World War occurs — and thus its continuance after 1991 can reasonably be considered a massive international crime by the U.S. Government.
NATO is an extension of the will of the U.S. Government, and this is so blatant a fact so that Article 13, which is the only portion of NATO’s charter, the North Atlantic Treaty, that says anything about how a member-nation may either quit NATO or be expelled from NATO, places the U.S. Government in charge of processing a “denunciation” (voluntary withdrawal) — the Charter’s term for resigning from NATO. This term “denunciation” (instead of “withdrawal”) clearly means that if any member does quit, then that will be interpreted by NATO as constituting a hostile act, which will have consequences (the resigning member will be placed onto NATO’s unspoken list of enemies). NATO’s charter has no provision by which a member can be expelled. Moreover, it fails to include any provision by which the charter can be amended or changed in any manner. No charter or constitution that fails to include a provision by which it may be amended can reasonably be acceptable to a democracy: it is so rigid as to be 100% brittle, impossible to adapt to changing challenges. The NATO charter itself is a dictatorial never a democratic document. It takes up, for the U.S. regime after 1945, the function that the Nazi Party had held prior to that in and for Germany: after Hitler died, America took up and has held high his torch for global dictatorship. In fact, “the Government of the United States of America” is also stated in Article 10 as the entity to process applications to join NATO, and, in Article 11, as being the processor of “ratifications” of applications to join.
This Treaty is an imperial document, of the U.S. empire, none other. And, after 1991, its continuation is based only on lies, including the one that now is coming to a head in Ukraine, which is not a NATO member, though Biden said it is — he said recently of Ukraine, that “they are part of NATO.” Tyrants imagine that what they want can simply be willed into existence, and they don’t care about the essential needs of others. Such individuals are driven by their own hatreds. That is what stands at the very top of NATO.
And this is why we are now at the nuclear brink, because of an organization that ought to have ended in 1991.
For some time, President Joe Biden has claimed that there are limits to US support for Israel, that he cares about the loss of Palestinian life and that certain Israeli conduct (e.g., an invasion of Rafah, an Israeli-designated “safe zone”) would result in the loss of US backing. The events of the past weeks have demonstrated that none of these claims are in fact true.
The atrocities of Israel in Gaza continue to mount and to become more egregious by the day. A month ago, on May 6, 2024, Hamas agreed to an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire agreement that looked a lot like the ceasefire agreement now being promoted by the Biden Administration. Israel responded by rejecting this agreement and then immediately doing what Biden warned against doing – attacking Rafah where around 1.7 million Gazan refugees are now living in makeshift tents. As part of this offensive, Israel closed off the Rafah crossing, the border area between Israel and Egypt, cutting off any aid or supplies from coming into famine-ravaged Gaza and preventing any people from leaving. What has transpired is a horrifying series of massacres against civilians which the Biden Administration continues to try to downplay, excuse and explain away.
One of the worst massacres took place on May 27, 2024, when Israeli forces carried out an air assault upon a neighborhood in Rafah in which, as explained by CNN, “[a]t least 45 people were killed and more than 200 others injured . . . most of them women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry and Palestinian medics. No hospital in Rafah had the capacity to take the number of casualties, the ministry said.” Many were horrified by a video which went viral on social media showing a father holding his headless baby who had been decapitated in the assault.
Not even this abominable act elicited a rebuke from the Biden Administration which said that it would leave Israel to investigate itself in regard to this incident, and that it had no plans of changing policy as a result.
And now, Israel has just destroyed a school in Rafah which had been run by UNRWA and which had been sheltering 6,000 Gazan refugees at the time of its destruction. In this assault, at least 40 civilians were killed, including 14 children and 9 women, bringing the total number of civilians killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023, to 36,000, including 15,500 children. As is usually the case given that the US is by far the largest arms supplier to Israel, it was determined that Israel had used US munitions in this attack on the school. After this atrocity, the UN added Israel to its “list of shame” — a distinction reserved for countries that bring extraordinary harm to children. In response to this massacre and this shameful UN designation, the best US spokespeople could muster was to urge Israel to be “transparent” about the assault. No change in US policy toward Israel is forthcoming.
If this were not enough, reports of more grisly crimes are emerging daily. For example, accounts have emerged of the heinous treatment of Palestinian prisoners at the hands of Israeli correctional officers and investigators.
As Mondoweiss explains in a June 7 article, “[b]ehind the bars of Israeli prisons, Israel has been waging war against Palestinian prisoners, creating conditions that make the continuation of human life impossible. The effects of this brutal campaign have reverberated among prisoners’ families outside of jail, who are watching their loved ones being systematically starved, beaten, tortured, and degraded.” Mondoweiss cites a CNN exposé, based upon whistleblower testimony, which detailed “a number of medieval practices to which Palestinian prisoners have been subjected, including being strapped down to beds while blindfolded and made to wear diapers, having unqualified medical trainees conduct procedures on them without anesthesia, having dogs set on them by prison guards, being regularly beaten or put into stress positions for offenses as minor as peeking beneath their blindfolds, having zip-tie wounds fester to the point of requiring amputation, and a host of other horrific measures.”
Mondoweiss also cites a New York Times article “based on interviews with former detainees and Israeli military officers, doctors, and soldiers who worked at the prison, bringing new horrors to light about the treatment of Gazan prisoners. Detainee testimonies repeated many of these same accounts but also included additional disturbing accounts of sexual violence, including testimonies of rape and forcing detainees to sit on metal sticks that caused anal bleeding and ‘unbearable pain.’” And, of course, as Mondoweiss notes, the abominable treatment of Palestinian prisoners – which number in the thousands and includes women and children – has been going on long before October 7.
All of this illustrates how Israel has no limits or restraints upon its treatment of the Palestinian people. And this is so because its great patron, the United States, imposes no such restraints upon it. For all of the crocodile tears shed by Biden, his Cabinet officials and his spokespeople, there truly is no “red line” which Israel could cross which would elicit a cessation of US support, including lethal support, for its war upon the Palestinian people. And for this reason, the war Israel is waging upon Gaza proceeds without pause and continues to descend into greater acts of depravity and horror. In truth, as protest planners organizing to surround the White House to show opposition to the war in Gaza, it is the American people who must therefore be the “red line” to stop this genocide.
Myanmar’s civil war is in a critical phase where the ruling military government is losing significant territory to a broad coalition of insurgent armies. It is estimated that insurgents now control over half the area in the Southeast Asian country after nearly three years of conflict.
Washington views the conflict as an “unmissable opportunity” to topple the military rulers and restore an elected government. The real objective of the United States is not to support democratic politics in Myanmar or peace and stability, but rather to exploit the turmoil in the country as a way to contain China and undermine Beijing’s strategic interests.
In a set-piece interview with Time magazine published this week, President Joe Biden reiterated that Washington is pursuing a Cold War-style containment strategy against Russia and China. As the U.S.-led proxy war in Ukraine against Russia looks increasingly like a dead-end from the West’s perspective, one can expect Washington to up the ante by turning its focus more on hampering China as a geopolitical rival. In his Time interview, Biden provocatively talks about “defending Taiwan against a Chinese invasion”, and mobilization of other Asia-Pacific nations in a U.S.-led alliance to curb Beijing’s influence.
Myanmar is one such locus for the U.S. to exercise involvement and policies to foment problems for China which shares a southern border with this strategically important nation of 57 million people.
In a recent planning document, The Wilson Center, a U.S. government-owned think tank, urged a massive scaling up of Washington’s support for Myanmar’s insurgent paramilitaries under the remit of the newly enacted BURMA Act. The Wilson Center, whose most prominent public member is Secretary of State Antony Blinken, candidly endorses “increased support from the United States and like-minded allies and partners [that] could prove crucial in defeating the junta on a shorter timeline.”
Defeating the military government, according to Washington planners, is essential to “counter undue Chinese influence in Myanmar”. Referring to the regional Association of South East Asian Nations, the U.S. also aims to “ensure a more stable ASEAN and Southeast Asia” and “assist in the establishment of a democratic government in a region facing rising authoritarianism.”
In other words, Washington wants to contain China’s influence in Myanmar and forge the region for its geopolitical interests – albeit using virtue-signaling rhetoric about promoting “stability” and “democracy” over “authoritarianism”.
Myanmar is a linchpin nation in China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative for transcontinental trade and development. Beijing has invested heavily in its southern neighbor to build energy and transport infrastructure linking China with the Indian Ocean and to create an alternative commercial shipping route to the Malacca Strait. Dependence on the Malacca sea route can be seen as a huge risk for China because it is a chokepoint for international trade.
China has centuries of close cultural ties with Myanmar. In more recent times, Beijing was an important supporter of political independence from Britain in 1948 when the country was known as “British Burma”. It seems significant that the American positioning of itself as an ally is belied by invoking an antiquated colonial term for the Southeast Asian nation. The White House and Congress insist on referring to the colonial-era term “Burma” when the country officially changed its name to Myanmar in 1989, which the United Nations and most of the world recognize.
Since independence, Myanmar has seen decades of unrest between myriad ethnic groups and a checkered history of alternating between military and civilian rule. A military coup in 2021 ousted an elected civilian government led by Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. That crisis in turn escalated into a civil war between the military junta, the Tatmadaw, headed by General Min Aung Hlaing, and several insurgent armies.
A determined offensive last October by the three main opposition groups – the Three Brotherhood Alliance (3BA) – has put the military rulers on the back foot from the loss of large swathes of territory beyond the capital, Naypyidaw.
China has striven to maintain balanced links with all ethnic and civilian political parties as well as traditional ties with the country’s military. When Aung San Suu Kyi was in power in 2020 before the coup, China’s President Xi Jinping made a historic state visit during which the two leaders agreed on major trade partnerships.
It is not in Beijing’s strategic interest to take a partisan approach to the conflict in Myanmar. Above all, China’s priority is to see political stability prevailing in its neighbor. That is not just about protecting mega investment and trade projects. Border insecurity has spawned a lot of trouble for China from crime and illegal trafficking. To that end, at the start of the year, Beijing organized peace talks aimed at bringing the various antagonists to a consensus for governance.
However, the ceasefire deal brokered by China does not appear to be holding and there is ongoing violence in several regions.
As the Wilson Center planning document makes clear, it is in the U.S. interest to increase military and political interference in Myanmar to “ensure victory” for the insurgents over the junta. With a budget of several hundred million dollars under the BURMA Act, the Washington planners are aiming to boost military support for the various insurgent groups. At this stage, the equipment is cautiously described as “non-lethal aid”. But as other foreign interventions by the United States demonstrate, such aid is more often merely a wedge opening for eventual lethal supplies.
American covert involvement in Myanmar has a long history going back to the 1950s when the CIA exploited the country as a base for paramilitaries recruited from the Kuomintang, the nationalist faction defeated by the communists in China’s civil war in 1949. In 2007, during a previous episode of civil conflict in Myanmar, the CIA was accused of assassinating an ethnic Karen rebel leader who was negotiating a peace deal with the military government.
In another recent planning study by the more hawkish Jamestown Foundation, which is believed to have close links with the CIA, it was stated: “The struggle to end authoritarian rule in Myanmar is far from resolved and remains rife with challenges, including the risk of escalating regional and international tensions. A sudden breakthrough toward the overthrow of Myanmar’s junta seems exceedingly improbable. The only possibility for this would be a massive and intricate offensive by a larger alliance of militias… in such a way as to directly disrupt Myanmar’s capital, severely destabilizing the governing junta.”
This is a strident call for covert military intervention to escalate Myanmar’s civil war.
Another aspect of U.S. policy is to polarize the conflict in Myanmar and to portray China as being the sponsor of the military rulers in violent opposition to “pro-democracy groups” that the United States is supporting. This is a tried and trusted ploy straight from the U.S. playbook for regime change as seen elsewhere such as in Syria’s civil war or Ukraine leading up to the CIA-backed coup in 2014.
To that end, Western media aligned with Washington’s geopolitical agenda such as Radio Free Asia and the Murdoch-owned newspaper The Australian, are promoting the narrative that China is on the side of Myanmar’s dictators. Other Western media outlets disparage China as cynically “playing both sides”.
The reality is that China is trying to broker a peaceful settlement in a country that has long been beset with internal political problems. Many of those problems stem from the British colonialist legacy of sectarian divisions in Myanmar.
Ominously, the United States is threatening to crudely intervene in Myanmar’s civil war which could make the conflict more bloody and protracted. Because doing so is an “unmissable opportunity” for Washington to sabotage China’s policy of promoting good neighborliness and regional development.
Since day one of their entrance, the Zionists seized opportunities to enhance their strength and further their agenda, extending a single settlement in Ottoman Palestine to complete control of Palestine. Ten pioneers from Russia acquired 835 acres of land southeast of present day Tel Aviv and established Rishon Le-Zion (“First in Zion”). Founded in 1882, the settlement has grown to a city of approximately 260,000.
The “First in Zion” symbolizes the Zionist thrust — pretend innocence, harden hearts, brutalize innocent inhabitants, and turn oppression of others into security needs for yourself. After the Zionists gained overwhelming power, they used power for severe oppression, to steal more lands, manufacture huge bombs to overcome fists and rocks, and to terrorize a population. Those who contended the oppression were called terrorists. The smiles on Zionists’ faces come from convincing a complacent, unknowing, and confused world to accept ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and genocide as daily happenings that only Zionists are permitted to perpetrate.
The questions often asked and never answered are, “How did the Zionist Jews get away with this open air and available for all to see genocide, and why has there been no valid response to stop it? Millions of valiant people struggle each day to change the situation and bring peace and justice to the Middle East, and these efforts have not succeeded in halting the onslaught, not even reducing it by one Band-Aid.
Shocking is the cowardice of prominent and respected persons, such as Barack Obama, who do not speak out forcibly about the genocide in Gaza. Puzzling is that the United States entered World War II to defeat a state claiming ethnic superiority, exhibiting ultra-nationalism, engaging in irredentism, practicing militarism, and perpetrating genocide. For decades the United States has supported another state that claims ethnic superiority, exhibits ultra-nationalism, engages in irredentism, practices militarism, and perpetrates genocide. The US has seen its World War II battle that defeated Nazi Germany give rise to an extremist Zionism, with innocent European Jews and now innocent Palestinians the victims of the battle. Defeat of a despised international opponent has resurrected a lookalike and despised international opponent.
Building an effective strategy against an opponent requires understanding the opponent’s strategy. The Zionist Jews have major strategies — never compromise, continually pursue the agenda, pay no attention to those who cannot or will not militarily intercede (how many armed divisions does the Vatican have?), turn arguments against them into arguments against the accuser (using debts as collateral), and use to advantage the conditioning of minds that the Holocaust and false charges of anti-Semitism have provided. These strategies are apparent in the war on the Gazans and the reactions to the genocide.
PM Netanyahu stated that Israel did not start this war and did not want this war. Although the genocide of the Palestinians started in 1948, when Zionist militias were already cleansing the land and telling the world they were being attacked, Netanyahu made it seem that a past did not exist and a new war had started. PM Netanyahu tells us that a relatively small contingent of lightly armed Hamas militias want to kill all Jews, conquer all Israel, and expel all Jewish inhabitants. This invisible army is prepared to overcome a heavily armed and formidable army that, without much resistance, does to the Palestinians what Netanyahu claims little Hamas wants to do to the Jews — daily massacres, seizing lands, ethnic cleansing, and constant oppression. Israel took advantage of the October 7 attack to hasten the genocide of the Palestinians and disguise the massacre as a legitimate defense.
The Zionist strategy demonstrated its effectiveness when the international Zionist organization persuaded the US Congress to inform the world that the campus protests against US assistance to the genocide of the Palestinians were anti-Semitic conspiracies. Periodic television ads that attempt to validate the anti-Semitic conspiracy and plead not to make Jews victims of the protests followed the diabolical plot. The TV ads indirectly tell us not to give overwhelming importance to the genocide of the Palestinians; more important is that the protests make Jews feel uncomfortable because a few protestors accuse Jews, who support a state that calls itself the “Jewish state,” of complicity in genocide that a “Jewish state” they support is committing. The Zionist strategy works well in a dumbed American republic ─ converts action to stop the genocide into sympathy for those approving the genocide
Focus on the genocide seems a sufficient exercise but lack of success in halting it indicates other severe problems must be addressed. Witnessing the genocide, which is as apparent as the sun rising every 24 hours, having leading and recognized authorities on human rights vigorously exclaim, “This is a genocide,” noting the number of nations voicing their horror and taking action to stop the genocide, regarding the worldwide protests against the genocide, and observing government officials leaving government in protest to the US government’s bizarre assistance in hastening the genocide, and then hearing President Joe Biden say, “What’s happening is not genocide, we reject that,” raises doubts of the sanity of US government officials and operation of a pluralistic democracy where the public’s loud voice is not heard. These genocide deniers can start learning by consulting the Law for Palestine Releases Database, especially the legislative database.
Rhetoric has not clarified that the moral corruption in allowing Zionist Jews to commit genocide has turned religion, democracy, justice, truth, and human rights into meaningless words. Life has lost reality and values have no substance. The mainstream public remains unaware of the seriousness of the damaging relationship the US has with Israel and the genocide and that these affect all aspects of their lives —political, moral, social, cultural, and economic. A strategic objective is to let them know.
Throw it at them.
Huge protests in front of the embassies and media headquarters that support Israel.
Huge protests that align the main roads and city streets and bring the protests into neighborhoods.
Full-page ads in the New York Times and Washington Post calling out the genocide.
Turning anti-Semitism into a vile expression so that its use is uncomfortable. Signs that say “The truth becomes a shit charge of anti-Semitism, and “If truth is anti-Semitism, we are we are all anti-Semites now.”
Assist Jewish organizations that have joined the battle
Jewish organizations, such as Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and If not Now (IFN) have courageously championed Palestinian rights. They deserve praise for their efforts and funding to expand their efforts. These efforts serve a dual purpose — liberate the Palestinians from Israeli oppression and liberate the Jewish people from Zionist oppression.
The biblical “Exodus” story did not free the Jews. Just the opposite, it has been used to keep Jews in perpetual bondage to a spurious history and to promote constant victimhood, while distracting them from roles they may play in the injustices done to others. JVP and IFN are awakening other Jews to the destructive impulses generated from Israel that prevent worldwide Jewry from recognizing the roots of modern Judaism and revert them to atavistic and reactionary relics of an ancient Hebrew and fictitious past.
Israel is not a true democracy, and evidence certifies it is a militarist, nationalist, racist, nation that practices apartheid, engages in severe human rights violations, and spies on its citizens. By blindly accepting Zionist behavior, the Jewish people lost the initiative to change Israel’s policies, misdirected the path to a peaceful solution to the Middle East crisis, exacerbated the crisis, and harmed the security of Jews throughout the world. The exemplary work by JVP and IFN members is the best rescue plan for a subdued Jewish community. The best Hanukah gift is a check to both these organizations.
Lawsuits
Pernicious lawsuits that had no legal value and demonstrated bias of US courts in favor of the Zionists have pulverized the Palestine Authority and organizations supporting Palestinian liberation. Time to have the lawsuits work the other way.
Lawsuits by Jewish groups against those who signify Israel as a Jewish state, a slander to Jewish people that unfairly binds them to the genocide of the Palestinian people..
Lawsuit to finally have AIPAC declared a lobby for a foreign state. New evidence and a new approach will be needed.
Lawsuits to close Holocaust Memorial museums as improper use of the deaths of the Holocaust victims. The US government and people are guilty of genocide of the Native Americans, enslaving Blacks from Africa, and extreme violence against peoples throughout the world — Latin America, the Caribbean, Vietnam, the Philippines, Iraq, Libya, and others. The Holocaust occurred in a foreign nation and neither the US government nor its people had responsibility for the tragedy. The Holocaust Memorial museums indicate otherwise, are unfair to the American people, have not halted other genocides, have been divisive, and have been accused of promoting hatred. These museums distract Americans from their responsibility for the violence they have committed against other cultures. The Native Americans and African Americans did not use the destruction of their peoples to create museums in which they play victim; they took a positive approach and used them to encourage respect for their cultures. Their inviting museums ridicule the lugubrious Holocaust museums and reveal the latter museums as an insult to the European Jews who died in the Holocaust. Included in the lawsuit can be those who suffered during the Holocaust or had close relatives who died during the Holocaust. Having had aunts, uncles, and cousins from Paris, France, and Warsaw, Poland, some who died in the Holocaust and others who struggled for survival during World War II, I identify with the latter. When writing my book on the struggles for survival of my European family during the 2nd World War, Not Until They Were Gone, I made sure it was not written as a Holocaust story and appeared as a book of heroism and survival.
Illegal activities by Israelis residing in the United States
A previous article detailed how Israel sends its citizens to other nations, has them integrate, and steer the country to favor Israel. Exposing, combatting, and bringing law to halt this maneuver and manipulation of American hospitality is a high priority.
Defeating pro-Israel legislators
Highest priority is to do in reverse what AIPAC does. Defeating two or three congress politicos who have had marginal victories is possible. If pro-Israelis suffer more defeats, other politicians will rapidly question their allegiances. An organization for accomplishing this vital task requires the highest skill — demographers who know voting patterns, public relations who understand the constituency and how to approach it, statisticians who can translate voting patterns into probability of victory, fundraisers who can target donors, psychologists who interpret behavior, sociologists who recognize social patterns, political consultants who recognize strengths and faults of candidates, and luck.
Defeat media co-opting
This includes responding to social media. Failure to change media co-opting by the Zionists makes other tasks more difficult. Establishing an alternative media has been tried and never permanently succeeded. Why? One insulting obvious reason is that the American public prefers simplicity, excitement, and trash, regardless of the truth. Insulting, but true. It is difficult for moral, dedicated, and honest people to operate at the low level of the Fox network and use the Zionist duplicity that infiltrates and inserts fallacies into conventional media networks. Even if the Fox News types are defeated, their audience will find another Fox News type. Intense brainstorming by smart people who do smart things and understand the devious mind can devise a strategy that limits Zionist influence. Subtlety, invisible conditioning, and making people feel cheated by subscribing to cheaters are my recommendations to the brainstorming operation.
Getting Things Straight
It’s troublesome to hear those who struggle to prevent the genocide exhibit lapses in knowledge that affect the solution. As an example, I have heard many people refer to UN Proclamation 188, the Partition Plan, as the UN awarding the Jews a state. Two corrections: (1) The UN General Assembly cannot award. It can only recommend; it is not an enforcing agency. The Palestinians had every right to refuse the plan. (2) I have written several times that the partition plan did not create two states; it divided one Palestinian state into two states ─ a Palestinian state composed of almost 100 percent Palestinians, and a Palestinian state called Jewish for differentiation. In the document that recognized the ‘new state,’ President Truman crossed out the words ‘Jewish state’ and inserted the words ‘state of Israel.’ This state was composed of about 67 percent Palestinians who were native to the area (400,000 Palestinians), a smaller contingent of 200,000 foreign Jews that had been born or came as Zionists to live permanently in Palestine, and another larger contingent of 400,000 foreign Jews who arrived for expediency and not with original intentions of remaining in the British Mandate. They should not have been counted in the census. From that perspective, David Ben-Gurion and a small clique of opportunists took advantage of an ill-advised UN, an ill-led and ill-equipped Palestinian community, and a confused world to declare their state, and, with seasoned militia forces — Haganah, Irgun, Lehi, and Palmach — cleanse the area of Palestinians and establish Israel. Disconcerting that significant information is not properly distributed, which leads to the recommendation that an organization be formed to provide accurate material, answer questions, and correct inaccuracies.
Conclusion
Requests for obtaining viable recommendations that will prevent the genocide of the Palestinians have not been forthcoming. Demonstrations have highlighted the massacres and brought those who recognize the genocide to work together, but have not succeeded in changing government policy. Gathering signatures for petitions to congressional representatives has slightly moved some Democratic politicos to change their pro-Israel position but has not prevented committees from assisting Israel and has not prevented legislation that favors Israel.
Masses of dedicated and well-meaning people are involved in the push to prevent genocide; unfortunately, the present efforts do not appear they will achieve the wanted results. Much more is needed and the lack of inquiries, recommendations, discussions, and feedback to suggestions indicate that the urgent message has fallen on deaf ears.
When the hurricane swirled and spread its deluge of dark evil
onto the good green land ‘they’ gloated.
The western skies
reverberated with joyous accounts:
“The Tree has fallen !
The great trunk is smashed! The hurricane leaves no life in the Tree!”
Had the Tree really fallen?
Never! Not with our red streams flowing forever, not while the wine of our thorn limbs fed the thirsty roots,
Arab roots alive, tunneling deep, deep, into the land!
When the Tree rises up, the branches
shall flourish green and fresh in the sun
the laughter of the Tree shall leaf
beneath the sun
and birds shall return
Undoubtedly, the birds shall return.
The birds shall return.
Those who may recall, if only vaguely, the early chapters of their secondary school history books, may recognize- if not remember- that the original name of the “party of Jefferson” was the Democratic-Republicans. In the first years of the American Empire, the government was in the hands of the Federalist Party, led by the Boston Adams dynasty and the New York mercantile-adventurers for whom Alexander Hamilton had become spokesman. The Federalists became extinct in the term of Thomas Jefferson, the Democratic-Republican POTUS from Virginia. The party base was essentially the Southern landowning oligarchy which opposed its creditors in New York and Boston. The westward extermination of the indigenous and expansion of the empire gave rise to the Whig party. Imperial politics and finance was fought until 1860 by the mercantile – colonizers of what was then the Northwest Territories (a region now considered part of the “mid-West”, basically extending from the River Ohio to the Mississippi and the Great Lakes).
The determination of the mercantile oligarchy from Boston to Chicago to extract from the Southern oligarchy the costs of the 1857 economic crash intensified the divisions within the settler republic. Those textbooks to which reference is made above also erroneously simplify the conflicts that led to the only serious war ever fought on US territory– the civil war from 1860 to 1865. School pupils are taught that this fraternal war was fought for the liberation of African slaves or for the preservation of constitutionally enshrined “states’ rights”– depending on which side of the Mason-Dixon line one went to school. I recall terms like “the war of Northern Aggression” and “the war between the States” prevailing in the American South while Northern schools taught the “Civil War” and the fight to abolish slavery. The past decade of attacks on memorials to the Confederate States of America and thus the distractive erasure of a complex period in US history by the congenitally ignorant (aka the awakened “Woke”) has been aggravated by other systemic language perversion. It is beyond the scope of such modest essays as this to remedy the institutionalized dementia which passes for social justice activism in the US. However just like sewage treatment is an ongoing process, responsible users of public language ought to regularly skim at least the upper layers of mendacious slime from the reservoirs that supply potable thought.
In this sense it might be helpful to restore some clarity of definition to the political topography.
What I have called elsewhere the Fourth Awakening (“Awakenings” are the Protestant equivalent of the Latin Crusades– both of which are directed toward the extermination of dissidents and “brown people”) has become the moral equivalent of the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth). The Establishment, constituted in the Democratic Party (with its Republican component- hence Democratic-Republicans), has created, since the early 1980s, a domestic armed propaganda movement, drawing conceptually on elements of the NSDAP Sturmabteilung (SA) and the counter-insurgency organization created by the CIA in what would be called the Phoenix Program. Since ideological consistency is not essential in a society controlled entirely by daily marketing and advertising campaigns, the combination of anti-racist and egalitarian rhetoric with support of the most violently imperialist and anti-humanist government policies should not surprise. An accurate understanding of the German NSDAP would include the fact that “national socialism” absorbed strong anti-capitalist and petty bourgeois democratic tendencies in the service of cartel capitalism (and surreptitiously the Anglo-American Empire). The original fascist party, was created by the faux socialist Benito Mussolini while on the payroll of British secret intelligence services. Just like it was never necessary for everyone in the Manhattan Project or the NASA Space Program to know what the real objectives of their work was, there is no need to impugn the motives of thousands of young people who have been recruited directly or indirectly into today’s “Children’s Crusade”.
While it is helpful to examine and understand the underlying ideology, that is insufficient. All ideologies are inherently incoherent by themselves. It is really impossible to enforce, short of death, uniform responses to ideological instructions even among those who consider themselves true and loyal believers. Hence it is essential, while giving weight to ideological analysis, to examine the organizational mechanisms by which ideology is transformed into action and action is absorbed within ideology. Although the claims by the wokie-dokies to be latent or active social justice warriors cannot be taken at face value, the behavioral consequences of such explanations must be taken seriously. In fact it is possible to believe in racial equality and act in ways that exacerbate inequality. Does one judge the attribute of belief or the results of the act? Hypocrisy is a natural condition of language in part because it is impossible to act in a way which is utterly and absolutely consistent with any verbal explanation of the act in question. There is always a statement which can be uttered that qua statement is consistent with other statements of the same type and yet inconsistent with the nonverbal actions attributed to it. We judge statements to be appropriate or not as statements (verbal acts) and as instructions for how to respond to other statements or non-verbal acts. Philosophy and ethics are largely concerned with the generation of statements that ought to be used as explanations for assessing other statements or nonverbal behavior.
The question can be restated. Based on assumptions and values as to what behavior is appropriate for maintaining social relations governed by “democracy”, “equality”, or even the DIE criteria or “diversity, inclusion and equity”, is it the language or the results that count? The answer to that question requires that one include language as action and results of actions at the empirical frontier as distinct categories. Moreover language in its passive sense, contemplation and scholarship, ought to be considered in relation to the actions generated rather that as some quasi-mathematical equation on the blackboard.
So let us return to the party terminology with which we began. The Democratic Party is the lineal descendant of the Democratic-Republican Party. It was historically the party of the North American slavocracy and landed oligarchy. After the “war of Northern Aggression” it became the party of resistance to the Republican Party (aka GOP or the party of Lincoln) which replaced the Whigs and for strategic reasons absorbed the third awakening (abolitionism) in an alliance with Northern creditor interests. Whatever one may have thought of chattel slavery in the 19th century, the Republican Party was not the anti-slavery party but the party of the slave merchants and usurers whose abolition of the slave system and much of the agricultural asset base of the latifundistas would render the South the poorest part of the United States to this day. African-Americans– Negroes in the 19th century– were admitted to political power during the so-called Reconstruction period as Republicans, not as Democrats. These Reconstruction governments created the first wide-ranging free public primary and secondary education for the poor agricultural workforce, whites as well as freed slaves. In other words Black Reconstruction was an attempt to remedy the class inequalities inherited from the Anglo-American antebellum regime. It was ultimately torpedoed by the reconciliation of creditor and debtor, whereby the Southern elite agreed to industrialize in the textile industry for example in return for power-sharing again. This reconstitution of the Anglo-American elite in 1865 also gave birth to the industrial and financial trusts associated with the so-called Robber Barons (Carnegie, Rockefeller, Morgan, et al.) and the prison-industrial complex, whereby freed slaves and poor whites were sent to prison to perform “involuntary servitude” pursuant to the loophole in the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution. Unlike Britain that used Australia and other colonies for labor discipline, the Americans had space to incarcerate bonded labor at home.
The Fourth Awakening/ Crusade is identified by its opponents as a Democratic Party project. Per corollary the Democratic Party is condemned for its “leftist” or “socialist” policies based on the largely unchallenged assumptions that the ideology and the actions are consistent and that both have some vague root in “socialism” or even “communism”. Absurdly the more reasonable assessment is that they are a product of covert Zionist psychological warfare strategy, one which is only being admitted as police bludgeon students on elite universities for protesting the mass murder perpetrated by the settler-colonial state occupying Palestine. The absurdity is that adherents to a traditional oligarchy identified as “white” and “nativist” attack or defend themselves from crusaders they claim to be foreign in every sense of the word. However the Democratic Party has always been tightly controlled by an anti-communist/ anti-socialist elite. Even its “immigrant” party machines were ultimately “nativist”. However the Democratic Party in the North managed the immigrant labor just like its brethren in the South managed the former slaves and sharecroppers. The paragon of “left” Democratic politics, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, would have been unelectable without the Southern vote. The moral degenerate who dropped the first atomic bombs, Harry S. Truman, and his 1993 Arkansas successor, were products of Southern Democratic machine politics.
The bipolarity produced by American politics leads opponents of the Democratic Party machine, actually the result of a merger between the Bush Republicans and the Clinton Democrats, brokered by the principals of the national security state, to huddle behind the mast and sails of the Goodship Ronald Wilson Reagan, slinging insults like broadsides of grapeshot– whereby the shot is only made of grapes rather than something more deadly. Thus the wholly transitional hordes of Wokism and the Democratic faithful are incited to ever escalating violations of what formal democratic practices and procedures survived the hundred-year corporatist onslaught– marketed as “public-private partnerships”. The most recent travesty are the quasi-autistic orgasms and Vitus dances performed by solipsistic Trump haters after his bureaucratic lynching before a New York Superior Court. (What would Joseph E. Davies have said about that, one can only imagine?) Clearly it is impossible for those engaged in the destruction of the United States of America, as an inhabited nation rather than a special purpose entity of its finance capitalist oligarchy, to articulate themselves in terms both empirically verifiable and linguistically/ ideologically coherent. The party of Lincoln, the party of Kennedy, the party of peace, the party of the New Deal, the anti-slavery party, the party of civil rights (was there ever such a party?), the party of Reagan, the party of Clintons, chose your epigraph. Since 2020 it is even impossible to say that these are the parties of electoral representative democracy. For better or worse, if a woman’s beauty pageant can be won by a man dressed in woman’s clothes, then why not an election decided in favor of someone who is not even alive? Voting dead has a long tradition in US electoral politics.
Were these all merely anecdotes from Tierra del Fuego or Fiji, it would be comic. However these are the conditions prevailing in the most belligerent and homicidal state on the planet. A minority consensus is emerging in the United States and among its vassals that the West is managed by the insane. Intuitively the vast majority of ordinary people throughout the world have known this for decades. That majority of ordinary humans, who have been kept in senseless poverty since the US helped crush the revolution in Haiti with financial warfare in 1803, understand that the only way to escape the US was under its shadow by immigrating there. The American Dream was to escape the Anglo-American nightmare. Yet the armed propaganda units of the Fourth Awakening (the latest corporatist crusade) are simply too ignorant to grasp these details. That is also what makes them unwitting instruments of Democratic Party– in reality Democratic-Republican– terror. After the real socialists and revolutionaries were exiled or killed (by the end of the 1970s) and replaced by academic androids, who produced a similarly chimeric ideology– combining e.g. postmodernism, transgenderism and CRT, there were no alternatives for the justifiably dissatisfied. This has been an established strategy for recruiting terrorists, whether in Vietnam to neutralize the NLF or in Iraq– destroy real opposition and then recruit the unwitting into synthetics run by opportunists.
The language of US American politics is powerful. It has been crafted by the best psychological warfare (propaganda) experts corporate money can buy. Edward Bernays was merely the most self-important of the lot. There are also squadrons of academics like the late Dr Heinz Kissinger and his Democratic counterpart, Zbigniew Brezinski. Then there is the Hollywood regiment of congenital propagandists who expand their operations beyond the silver screen to share the stage of misanthro-capitalism e.g. by promoting covert operations throughout Africa for “humanitarian” reasons. Underlying it all is the religion of Business by which the population is constantly told that some clown in the Executive Mansion makes decisions– while all his bills are paid by his corporate donors, a euphemism for masters. Because Business is the measure of all virtue, anything the State does which benefits Business is good. Moreover Business virtue is enhanced by the degree to which government serves it. Since corporations (and offshore trusts in secrecy jurisdictions) are “persons” in terms of the law and upper class persons too, they deserve the full protection and promotion of the State. Therefore neither a Republican partisan nor a Democrat– especially a bought-and-paid-for wokie dokie— will dispute the right and dignity of oligarchs who buy state, national and intergovernmental legislatures and executives for their “personal” benefit. They will all agree that if the business plan, like they learned to produce at Wharton, Harvard or LSE, is realistic and the income projections are plausible, then killing a billion or two with genetic engineering or atomic weapons, is just an unavoidable expense on the liabilities side of the balance sheet.
While those who are doing their best to find solutions to this insanity and evil try to sort the language and the behavior, there are confronting even greater forces whose conviction is beyond rational argument. These legions are armed not only by the State with its democidal mission. These legions are also irradiated with the toxins of nearly 80 years. They believe that the atomic bomb was created for liberation. They are the crusaders for death as freedom. When in they go marching, with their saints, then the number to which we are to belong is nil. When the Democratic-Republican saints go marching in, oh when those saints go marching in– it will be over the billions of corpses without number– oh when those saints go marching in.
The world’s two highest courts have made an implacable enemy of Israel in trying to uphold international law and end Israeli atrocities in Gaza.
Separate announcements last week by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) should have forced Israel on to the back foot in Gaza.
A panel of judges at the ICJ – sometimes known as the World Court – demanded last Friday that Israel immediately stop its current offensive on Rafah, in southern Gaza.
Instead, Israel responded by intensifying its atrocities.
On Sunday, it bombed a supposedly “safe zone” crowded with refugee families forced to flee from the rest of Gaza, which has been devastated by Israel’s rampage for the past eight months.
The air strike set fire to an area crammed with tents, killing dozens of Palestinians, many of whom burnt alive. A video shows a man holding aloft a baby beheaded by the Israeli blast.
Hundreds more, many of them women and children, suffered serious injuries, including horrifying burns.
Israel has destroyed almost all of the medical facilities that could treat Rafah’s wounded, as well as denying entry to basic medical supplies such as painkillers that could ease their torment.
This was precisely the outcome US President Joe Biden warned of months ago when he suggested that an Israeli attack on Rafah would constitute a “red line”.
But the US red line evaporated the moment Israel crossed it. The best Biden’s officials could manage was a mealy-mouthed statement calling the images from Rafah “heart-breaking”.
Such images were soon to be repeated, however. Israel attacked the same area again on Tuesday, killing at least 21 Palestinians, mostly women and children, as its tanks entered the centre of Rafah.
‘A mechanism with teeth’
The World Court’s demand that Israel halt its attack on Rafah came in the wake of its decision in January to put Israel effectively on trial for genocide, a judicial process that could take years to complete.
In the meantime, the ICJ insisted, Israel had to refrain from any actions that risked a genocide of Palestinians. In last week’s ruling, the court strongly implied that the current attack on Rafah might advance just such an agenda.
Israel presumably dared to defy the court only because it was sure it had the Biden administration’s backing.
UN officials, admitting that they had run out of negatives to describe the ever-worsening catastrophe in Gaza, called it “hell on earth”.
Days before the ICJ’s ruling, the wheels of its sister court, the ICC, finally began to turn.
Karim Khan, its chief prosecutor, announced last week that he would be seeking arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, along with three Hamas leaders.
Both Israeli leaders are accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including attempts to exterminate the population of Gaza through planned starvation.
Israel has been blocking aid deliveries for many months, creating famine, a situation only exacerbated by its recent seizure of a crossing between Egypt and Rafah through which aid was being delivered.
The ICC is a potentially more dangerous judicial mechanism for Israel than the ICJ.
The World Court is likely to take years to reach a judgment on whether Israel has definitively committed a genocide in Gaza – possibly too late to save much of its population.
The ICC, on the other hand, could potentially issue arrest warrants within days or weeks.
And while the World Court has no real enforcement mechanisms, given that the US is certain to veto any UN Security Council resolution seeking to hold Israel to account, an ICC ruling would place an obligation on more than 120 states that have ratified its founding document, the Rome Statute, to arrest Netanyahu and Gallant should either step on their soil.
That would make Europe and much of the world – though not the US – off-limits to both.
And there is no reason for Israeli officials to assume that the ICC’s investigations will finish with Netanyahu and Gallant. Over time, it could issue warrants for many more Israelis.
As one Israeli official has noted: “The ICC is a mechanism with teeth”.
‘Antisemitic’ court
For that reason, Israel responded by going on the warpath, accusing the court of being “antisemitic” and threatening to harm its officials.
Washington appeared ready to add its muscle too.
Asked at a Senate committee hearing whether he would support a Republican proposal to impose sanctions on the ICC, Antony Blinken, Biden’s secretary of state, replied: “We want to work with you on a bipartisan basis to find an appropriate response.”
Administration officials, speaking to the Financial Times, suggested the measures under consideration “would target prosecutor Karim Khan and others involved in the investigation”.
US reprisals, according to the paper, would most likely be modelled on the sanctions imposed in 2020 by Donald Trump, Joe Biden’s predecessor, after the ICC threatened to investigate both Israel and the US over war crimes, in the occupied Palestinian territories and Afghanistan respectively.
Then, the Trump administration accused the ICC of “financial corruption and malfeasance at the highest levels” – allegations it never substantiated.
Fatou Bensouda, the chief prosecutor at the time, was denied entry to the US, and Trump officials threatened to confiscate her and the ICC judges’ assets and put them on trial. The administration also vowed to use force to liberate any Americans or Israelis who were arrested.
Mike Pompeo, the then US secretary of state, averred that Washington was “determined to prevent having Americans and our friends and allies in Israel and elsewhere hauled in by this corrupt ICC”.
Covert war on ICC
In fact, a joint investigation by the Israeli website 972 and the British Guardian newspaper revealed this week that Israel – apparently with US support – has been running a covert war against the ICC for the best part of a decade.
Its offensive began after Palestine became a contracting party to the ICC in 2015, and intensified after Bensouda, Khan’s predecessor, started a preliminary investigation into Israeli war crimes – both Israel’s repeated attacks on Gaza and its building of illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their lands.
Bensouda found herself and her family threatened, and her husband blackmailed. The head of Israel’s Mossad spy agency, Yossi Cohen, became personally involved in the campaign of intimidation. An official briefed on Cohen’s behaviour likened it to “stalking”. The Mossad chief ambushed Bensouda on at least one occasion in an attempt to recruit her to Israel’s side.
Cohen, who is known to be close to Netanyahu, reportedly told her: “You should help us and let us take care of you. You don’t want to be getting into things that could compromise your security or that of your family.”
Israel has also been running a sophisticated spying operation on the court, hacking its database to read emails and documents. It has tried to recruit ICC staff to spy on the court from within. There are suspicions at the ICC that Israel has been successful.
Because Israel oversees access to the occupied territories, it has been able to ban ICC officials from investigating its war crimes directly. That has meant, given its control of the telecommunications systems in the territories, that it has been able to monitor all conversations between the ICC and Palestinians reporting atrocities.
As a result, Israel has sought to close down Palestinian legal and human rights groups by designating them as “terrorist organisations”.
The surveillance of the ICC has continued during Khan’s tenure – and it is the reason Israel knew the arrest warrants were coming. According to sources that spoke to the Guardian and 972 website, the court came under “tremendous pressure from the United States” not to proceed with the warrants.
Khan has pointed out that interference in the court’s activities is a criminal offence. More publicly, a group of senior US Republican senators sent a threatening letter to Khan: “Target Israel and we will target you.”
Khan himself has noted that he has faced a campaign of intimidation and has warned that, if the interference continues, “my office will not hesitate to act”.
The question is how much of this is bravado, and how much is it affecting Khan and the ICC’s judges, making them wary of pursuing their investigation, expediting it or expanding it to more Israeli war crimes suspects.
Legal noose
Despite the intimidation, the legal noose is quickly tightening around Israel’s neck. It has become impossible for the world’s highest judicial authorities to ignore Israel’s eight-month slaughter in Gaza and near-complete destruction of its infrastructure, from schools and hospitals to aid compounds and bakeries.
Many tens of thousands of Palestinian children have been killed, maimed and orphaned in the rampage, and hundreds of thousands more are being gradually starved to death by Israel’s aid blockade.
The role of the World Court and the War Crimes Court are precisely to halt atrocities and genocides before it is too late.
There is an obligation on the world’s most powerful states – especially the world’s superpower-in-chief, the United States, which so often claims the status of “global policeman” – to help enforce such rulings.
Should Israel continue to ignore the ICJ’s demand that it end its attack on Rafah, as seems certain, the UN Security Council would be expected to pass a resolution to enforce the decision.
That could range from, at a minimum, an arms embargo and economic sanctions on Israel to imposing no-fly zones over Gaza or even sending in a UN peacekeeping force.
Washington has shown it can act when it wishes to. Even though the US is one of a minority of states not a party to the Rome Statute, it has vigorously supported the arrest warrant issued by the ICC against Russian leader Vladimir Putin in 2023.
The US and its allies have imposed economic sanctions on Moscow, and supplied Ukraine with endless weapons to fight off the Russian invasion. There is evidence, too, that the US has been waging covert military operations targeting Russia, most likely including blowing up the Nordstream pipelines supplying Russian gas to Europe.
The media’s Nord Stream lies just keep coming.
Why do billionaires and governments scramble to control the media? Because the power over our minds is the greatest power there is.
The Biden administration has orchestrated the seizing of Russian state assets, as well as those of wealthy Russians, and it has encouraged a cultural and sporting boycott.
It is proposing to do none of that in the case of Israel.
Divisions in Europe
It is not just that the US is missing in action as Israel advances its genocidal goals in Gaza. Washington is actively aiding and abetting the genocide, by supplying Israel with bombs, by cutting funding to UN aid agencies that are the main lifeline for Gaza’s population, by sharing intelligence with Israel and by refusing to use its plentiful leverage over Israel to stop the slaughter.
And the widespread assumption is that the US will veto any Security Council resolution against Israel.
According to two former ICC officials who spoke to the Guardian and 972 website, senior Israeli officials have expressly stated that Israel and the US are working together to stymie the court’s work.
Washington’s contempt for the world’s highest judicial authorities is so flagrant that it is even starting to fray relations with Europe.
The EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, has thrown his weight behind the ICC and called for any ruling against Netanyahu and Gallant to be respected.
Meanwhile, on Monday, French President Emmanuel Macron expressed his outrage over Israel’s attacks on Rafah and called for them to stop immediately.
Three European states – Spain, Ireland and Norway – announced last week that they were joining more than 140 other countries, including eight from the 27-member European Union, in recognising Palestine as a state.
The coordination between Spain, Ireland and Norway was presumably designed to attenuate the inevitable backlash provoked by defying Washington’s wishes.
Among the falsehoods promoted by the US and Israel is the claim that the ICC has no jurisdiction over Israel’s military actions in Gaza because neither of them have recognised Palestine as a state.
But Palestine became a state party to the ICC way back in 2015. And, as Spain, Ireland and Norway have highlighted, it is now recognised even by western states usually submissive to the US-imposed “rules-based order”.
Another deception promoted by Israel and the US – a more revealing one – is the claim that the ICC lacks jurisdiction because Israel, like the US, has not ratified the Rome Statute.
Neither believes international law – the legal foundation constructed in the aftermath of the Second World War to stop future Holocausts – applies to them. Which is yet more reason to discount their assurances that there is no genocide in Gaza.
But in any case, the argument is entirely hollow: Palestine is a party to the ICC, and the Rome Statute is there to protect its signatories from attack. It is only violent bullies like the US and Israel who have no need for the ICC.
Might makes right
Both the ICJ and the ICC are fully aware of the dangers of taking on Israel – which is why, despite the dissembling complaints from the US and Israel, each court is treading so slowly and cautiously in dealing with Israeli atrocities.
Pick at the Israeli thread of war crimes in Gaza, and the entire cloth of atrocities around the world committed and promoted by the US and its closest allies starts to unravel.
The unspoken truth is that the “Shock and Awe” bombing campaign and years of brutal occupation of Iraq by US and British troops, and the even lengthier and equally bloody occupation of Afghanistan, eviscerated the legal constraints that would have made it harder for Putin to invade Ukraine and for Israel to put into practice the erasure of the Palestinian people it has dreamed of for so long.
It is Washington that tore up the rulebook of international law and elevated above it a self-serving “rules-based order” in which the only meaningful rule is might makes right.
Faced with that stark axiom, Moscow had good reason both to take advantage of Washington’s acts of vandalism against international law to advance its own strategic regional aims and to suspect that the relentless military expansion of a US-led Nato towards its borders did not have Russia’s best interests at heart.
Now, as Netanyahu and Gallant risk being put in the dock at The Hague, Washington is finally finding its resolve to act. Not to stop genocide. But to offer Israel protection to carry on.
War crimes overlooked
For that reason, Khan did everything he could last week to insulate himself from criticism as he announced that he wants Netanyahu and Gallant arrested.
First, he made sure to weigh the accusations more heavily against Hamas than Israel. He is seeking three Hamas leaders against two Israelis.
In his indictment, he implicated both the Hamas political and military wings in war crimes and crimes against humanity over their one-day attack on Israel on 7 October and their hostage-taking.
By contrast, Khan completely ignored the Israeli military’s role over the past eight months, even though it has been carrying out Netanyahu and Gallant’s wishes to the letter.
Notably too, Khan charged the head of Hamas’ political bureau, Ismail Haniyeh, who is based in Qatar, not Gaza. All the evidence, however, is that he had no foreknowledge of the attack on 7 October and certainly no operational involvement.
Further presenting Hamas in a worse light, Khan levelled more indictments against its leaders than Israel’s.
That included a charge rooted in a prominent western establishment narrative: that Israeli hostages held in Gaza have faced systematic sexual assault and torture. There appears to be little persuasive evidence for this allegation at this stage, unless Khan has access to facts no one else appears to know about.
By contrast, there is plenty of objective evidence of Palestinians being kidnapped off the streets of Gaza and the occupied West Bank and subjected to sexual assault and torture in Israeli prisons.
The message of Israel’s torture chambers is directed at all of us, not just Palestinians. ‘Black sites’ are about reminding those who have been colonised and enslaved of a simple lesson: resistance is futile.
That, however, is not on the charge sheet against Netanyahu or Gallant.
Khan also ignored plenty of other Israeli war crimes that would be easy to prove, such as the destruction of hospitals and United Nations facilities, the targeted killing of large numbers of aid workers and journalists, and the fact that 70 percent of Gaza’s housing stock has been made uninhabitable by Israel’s US-supplied bombs.
Taking on Goliath
In making the case against Israel, Khan clearly knew he was taking on a Goliath, given Israel’s stalwart backing from the US. He had even recruited a panel of legal experts to give its blessing, in the hope that might offer some protection from reprisal.
The panel, which unanimously endorsed the indictments against Israel and Hamas, included legal experts like Amal Clooney, the nearest the human rights community has to a legal superstar. But it also included Theodor Meron, a former legal authority in the Israeli government’s foreign ministry.
In an exclusive interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, explaining his reasoning, Khan seemed keen to preempt the coming attacks. He noted that an unnamed senior US politician had already tried to deter him from indicting Israeli leaders. The prosecutor suggested that other threats were being made behind the scenes.
The ICC, he was told, was “built for Africa and thugs like Putin” – a criticism of the court that echoed complaints long levelled against it by the Global South.
In Washington, the ICC is expected to serve as nothing more than another institutional tool of US imperialism. It is not there to uphold international law dispassionately. It is there to enforce a US “rules-based order” in which the US and its allies can do no wrong, even when they are committing atrocities or a genocide.
The predictably skewed framing of the interview by Amanpour – that Khan needed to explain and justify at length each of the charges he laid against Netanyahu and Gallant but that the charges against the Hamas leaders were self-evident – was one clue as to what the court is up against.
The ICC prosecutor made clear that he understands all too well what is at stake if the ICC and ICJ turn a blind eye to the Gaza genocide, as Israel and the US want. He told Amanpour: “If we don’t apply the law equally, we’re going to disintegrate as a species.”
The uncomfortable truth is that such disintegration, in a nuclear age, may be further advanced than any of us cares to acknowledge.
The US and its favourite client state give no sign of being willing to submit to international law. Like Samson, they would prefer to bring the house down than respect the long-established rules of war.
The initial victims are the people of Gaza. But in a world without laws, where might alone makes right, all of us will ultimately be the losers.
I know we don’t expect good faith commitments from Israel, but believe or not, we have other options. The Biden administration charged CIA Director Bill Burns with negotiating a ceasefire in Gaza between Israel and Hamas. Wonder of wonders, he succeeded. In cooperation with the Qatari and Egyptian mediation teams, and in communication with the Israeli and Hamas negotiating teams he finally concluded a detailed settlement that was submitted to both sides.
Now before I go any further, do you think that Director Burns, representing Israel’s staunchest ally, would create a ceasefire agreement that is unacceptable to the Israeli negotiating team? But it was Hamas that responded first, with complete approval. Take a look at what Burns and the other teams – including the Israeli team – created, and which Hamas approved. Does it look unreasonable to you?
And what was Israel’s response? It invaded Rafah within hours of the Hamas acceptance, seized and closed the only remaining crossing for humanitarian relief supplies, and rejected the agreement that had been negotiated on their behalf. What is the definition of perfidious?
Israel has made its choice. No ceasefire. Level Gaza to the ground. Slaughter the civilian population and deny them food, water, medical care and everything needed to sustain life until they are gone, one way or another.
That’s Israel’s criminal choice, as ruled by the International Court of Justice, with whose injunction to cease and desist Israel has not made the slightest attempt to comply. As long as Israel has the US on its side, enabling, aiding and abetting its genocide with massive arms and economic aid as well as direct participation through military and intelligence advice and expertise, Israel feels no need to comply. It’s a choice that the post-WWII Nuremberg trials were supposed to prevent and deter forever.
But what about the US choice? If we want a ceasefire, do we not have the power to make it happen? Why can’t we just shove it down Israel’s throats by cutting off every penny of every type of aid that we are giving them? It worked for Eisenhower in 1956.
You know as well as I do why not. It’s because Eisenhower was a strong, widely respected leader who made decisions that could be enforced. Biden is a ridiculous figure that is at best a thug, relying on other other thugs like the Israel Lobby, the military-industrial complex (about which Eisenhower warned) and the oil industry to prop him up. These thugs have our politicians (not to say our entire country) by the bowls. They rule for their own pleasure. Biden and the Democrats can’t budge without their permission, and neither can Trump and the Republicans.
Absolute monarch Louis XIV of France is reported to have said, “l’état, c’est moi” (the state, that’s me”). Apparently, today, the state is the Israel Lobby. No one dares to defy it. Ask those who lost their political careers trying to do so. Ask Cynthia McKinney. Ask Earl Hilliard. Ask Paul Findley. Ask Dennis Kucinich.
Is that our destiny? To be under the thumb of fanatics willing to commit genocide against millions of people who have only been trying to have their own sovereign country on their own land for the last hundred years? Are we destined to be governed by a foreign power rather than our own will? If so, perhaps it’s time for the American people to pick up their torches and pitchforks and head for their own Bastille (which may be in Tel Aviv), and get themselves free.
Ana Segovia (Mexico), Huapango Torero (‘Huapango Bullfighter’), 2019.
The skin is the largest organ of the human body. It covers our entire surface, at some points only as thin as a piece of paper and at other points about half as thick as a credit card. The skin, which protects us from all manner of germs and other harmful elements, is fragile and unable to defend humans from the dangerous weapons we have made over time. The ancient blunt axe will break the skin with a heavy blow, while a 2000-pound MK-84 ‘dumb bomb’ made by General Dynamics will not only obliterate the skin, but the entire human body.
Despite a 24 May order from the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the Israeli military continues to bomb the southern part of Gaza, particularly the city of Rafah. In blatant disregard of the ICJ’s order, on 27 May Israel struck a tent city in Rafah and murdered forty-five civilians. US President Joe Biden said on 9 March that an Israeli attack on Rafah would be his ‘red line’, but – even after this tent massacre – the Biden administration has insisted that no such line has been violated.
At a press conference on 28 May, communications advisor to the US National Security Agency John Kirby was asked how the US would respond if a strike by the US armed forces killed forty-five civilians and injured two hundred others. Kirby responded: ‘We have conducted airstrikes in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, where tragically we caused civilian casualties. We did the same thing’. To defend Israel’s latest massacre, Washington has chosen to make a startling admission. Given that the ICJ has ruled that it is ‘plausible’ that Israel is conducting a genocide in Gaza, could it be said that the US is guilty of the same in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Ficre Ghebreyesus (Eritrea), Map/Quilt, 1999.
In 2006, the International Criminal Court (ICC) began to assess the possibility of war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then, in 2014 and 2017, respectively, opened formal investigations into crimes committed in both countries. However, neither Israel nor the United States are signatories to the 2002 Rome Statute, which established the ICC. Rather than sign the statute, the US Congress passed the American Service-Members’ Protection Act – known informally as the ‘Hague Invasion Act’ – which legally authorises the US government to ‘use all means necessary’ to protect its troops from ICC prosecutors. Since Article 98 of the Rome Statute does not require states to turn over wanted personnel to a third party if they have signed an immunity agreement with that party, the US government has encouraged states to sign ‘Article 98 agreements’ to give its troops immunity from prosecution. Still, this did not deter ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda (who held the post from 2012–2021) from studying evidence and issuing a preliminary report in 2016 on war crimes in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan joined the ICC in 2003, giving the ICC and Bensouda jurisdiction to conduct their investigation. Even though it signed an Article 98 agreement with Afghanistan in 2002, the US government fervently attacked the ICC’s investigation and warned Bensouda and her family that they would face personal repercussions if she continued with the investigation. In April 2019, the US revoked Bensouda’s entry visa. Days later, a panel of ICC judges ruled against Bensouda’s request to proceed with a war crimes investigation in Afghanistan, stating that such an investigation would ‘not serve the interests of justice’.
Staff at the ICC were dismayed by the court’s decision and eager to challenge it but could not get support from the justices. In June 2019, Bensouda filed a request to appeal the ICC’s decision not to pursue the investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan. Bensouda’s appeal was joined by various groups from Afghanistan, including the Afghan Victims’ Families Association and the Afghanistan Forensic Science Organisation. In September 2019, the Pre-Trial Chamber of the ICC ruled that the appeal could go forward.
Dawn Okoro (Nigeria), Doing It, 2017.
The US government was enraged. On 11 June 2020, US President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 13928, which authorised his government to freeze ICC officials’ assets and ban them and their families from entering the United States. In September 2020, the US imposed sanctions on Bensouda, a national of Gambia, and senior ICC diplomat Phakiso Mochochoko, a national of Lesotho. The American Bar Association condemned these sanctions, but they were not revoked.
The US government eventually repealed the sanctions in April 2021, after Bensouda left her post and was replaced by the British lawyer Karim Khan in February 2021. In September 2021, ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan said that while his office would continue to investigate war crimes by the Taliban and the Islamic State in Afghanistan, it would ‘deprioritise other aspects of this investigation’. This awkward phrasing simply meant that the ICC would no longer investigate war crimes committed by the United States and its allies from the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. The ICC had been sufficiently brought to heel.
Alexander Nikolaev, also known as Usto Mumin (Soviet Union), Friendship, Love, Eternity, 1928.
Prosecutor Khan again demonstrated his partial application of justice and fealty to the Global North ruling elites when he rushed into the conflict in Ukraine and began an investigation into war crimes by Russia just four days after its invasion in February 2022. Within a year, Khan would apply for warrants for the arrest of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Lvova-Belova, which were issued in March 2023. Specifically, they were charged with colluding to abduct children from Ukrainian orphanages and children’s care homes and take them to Russia, where – it was alleged – these children were ‘given for adoption’. Ukraine, Khan said, ‘is a crime scene’.
Khan would use no such words when it came to Israel’s murderous assault on Palestinians in Gaza. Even after more than 15,000 Palestinian children had been killed (rather than ‘adopted’ from a war zone), Khan failed to pursue warrants for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his military subordinates. When Khan visited Israel in November–December 2023, he warned about ‘excesses’ but suggested that since ‘Israel has trained lawyers who advise commanders’, they could prevent any horrendous violations of international humanitarian law.
Ayoub Emdadian (Iran), The Sapling of Liberty, 1973.
By May 2024, the sheer scale of Israel’s brutality in Gaza finally forced the ICC to take up the issue. The orders from the ICJ, the outrage expressed by numerous governments of the Global South, and the cascading protests in country after country together motivated the ICC to act. On 20 May, Khan held a press conference where he said that he filed applications for the arrest of Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Diab Ibrahim al-Masri, and Ismail Haniyeh and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and his head of military, Yoav Gallant. Israel’s Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara said that the ICC accusations against Netanyahu and Gallant are ‘baseless’ and that Israel will not comply with any ICC warrant. For decades now, Israel – like the United States – has rejected any attempt to apply international humanitarian law to its actions. The ‘rules-based international order’ has always provided immunity for the United States and its close allies, an immunity whose hypocrisy has increasingly been revealed. It is this double-standard that has provoked the collapse of the US-driven world order.
Buried within Khan’s press statement is an interesting fragment: ‘I insist that all attempts to impede, intimidate, or improperly influence the officials of this Court must cease immediately’. Eight days later, on 20 May, The Guardian – in collaboration with other periodicals – published an investigation that revealed Israel’s use of ‘intelligence agencies to surveil, hack, pressure, smear, and allegedly threaten senior ICC staff in an effort to derail the court’s inquiries’. Yossi Cohen, the former head of Israel’s spy agency, Mossad, personally harassed and threatened Bensouda (Khan’s predecessor), warning her, ‘You don’t want to be getting into things that could compromise your security or that of your family’. Furthermore, TheGuardian noted that ‘Between 2019 and 2020, the Mossad had been actively seeking compromising information on the prosecutor and took an interest in her family members’. ‘Took an interest’ is a euphemistic way of saying gathered information on her family – including through a sting operation against her husband Philip Bensouda – to blackmail and frighten her. These are clichéd mafia tactics.
Hamed Abdalla (Egypt), Conscience du sol (‘The Consciousness of the Earth’), 1956.
As I followed these stories of the blood and law, I read the poems of Chechnya-born Jazra Khaleed, writing in Greek in Athens. His poem ‘Black Lips’ stopped me in my tracks, the last stanzas powerful and bleak:
Come let me make you human,
you, Your Honor, who wipe guilt from your beard
you, esteemed journalist, who tout death
you, philanthropic lady, who pat children’s heads without bending down
and you who read this poem, licking your finger—
To all of you I offer my body for genuflection
Believe me
one day you will adore me like Christ
But I’m sorry for you sir—
I do not negotiate with chartered accountants of words
with art critics who eat from my hand
You may, if you desire, wash my feet
Don’t take it personally
Why do I need bullets if there are so many words
prepared to die for me?
Which words are slowly dying? Justice, perhaps, or even humanitarianism? So many words are thrown about to assuage the guilty and to confuse the innocent. But these words cannot muffle other words, words that describe horrors and that demand redress.
Words are important. So are people, such as Gustavo Cortiñas, who was arrested by the Argentinian military dictatorship on 15 April 1977, never to be seen again. He became one of the 30,000 people whom the military killed between 1976 and 1983. On April 30, two weeks after Gustavo was arrested, his mother, Nora Cortiñas (or Norita, as she was lovingly known), joined other mothers of the disappeared to protest in front of the government house Casa Rosada, at the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, the first in what became a regular feature.
Norita was a co-founder of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, which courageously shattered the wall of misleading words that tumbled out of the mouths of the military Junta. Though her son was never found, Norita found her voice looking for him – a voice that was heard at every protest for justice and spoke with great feeling about the pain in the world until the weeks leading up to her death on 31 May. ‘We say no to the annexation of Palestine’, she said in a video message in 2020. ‘We oppose any measure that tends to erase the identity and existence of the Palestinian people’.
Many years from now, I would like to be remembered as a woman who gave her all so that we could have a more dignified life… I would like to be remembered with that cry that I always say and that means everything I feel inside me, that means the hope that someday that other possible world will exist. A world for everyone. So, I would like to be remembered with a smile and for shouting loudly: venceremos, venceremos, venceremos! We will win, we will win, we will win!
If you want a glimpse of the next stage of America’s transformation into a police state, look no further than how Israel—a long-time recipient of hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign aid from the U.S.—uses its high-tech military tactics, surveillance and weaponry to advance its authoritarian agenda.
Military checkpoints. Wall-to-wall mass surveillance. Predictive policing. Aerial surveillance that tracks your movements wherever you go and whatever you do. AI-powered facial recognition and biometric programs carried out with the knowledge or consent of those targeted by it. Cyber-intelligence. Detention centers. Brutal interrogation tactics. Weaponized drones. Combat robots.
A 2018 investigative report concluded that imported military techniques by way of these exchange programs that allow police to study in Israel have changed American policing for the worse. “Upon their return, U.S. law enforcement delegates implement practices learned from Israel’s use of invasive surveillance, blatant racial profiling, and repressive force against dissent,” the report states. “Rather than promoting security for all, these programs facilitate an exchange of methods in state violence and control that endanger us all.”
Petti documents how the NYPD set up a permanent liaison office in Israel in the wake of 9/11, eventually implementing “one of the first post-9/11 counterterrorism programs that explicitly followed the Israeli model. In 2002, the NYPD tasked a secret ‘Demographics Unit’ with spying on Muslim-American communities. Dedicated ‘mosque crawlers’ infiltrated local Muslim congregations and attempted to bait worshippers with talk of violent revolution.”
That was merely the start of American police forces being trained in martial law by foreign nations under the guise of national security theater. It has all been downhill from there.
As Alex Vitale, a sociology professor who has studied the rise of global policing, explains, “The focus of this training is on riot suppression, counterinsurgency, and counterterrorism—all of which are essentially irrelevant or should be irrelevant to the vast majority of police departments. They shouldn’t be suppressing protest, they shouldn’t be engaging in counterinsurgency, and almost none of them face any real threat from terrorism.”
This ongoing transformation of the American homeland into a techno-battlefield tracks unnervingly with the dystopian cinematic visions of Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report and Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium, both of which are set 30 years from now, in the year 2054.
With Israel in the driver’s seat and Minority Report and Elysium on the horizon, it’s not so far-fetched to imagine how the American police state will use these emerging technologies to lock down the populace, root out dissidents, and ostensibly establish an “open-air prison” with disconcerting similarities to Israel’s technological occupation of present-day Palestine.
For those who insist that such things are celluloid fantasies with no connection to the present, we offer the following as a warning of the totalitarian future at our doorsteps.
Facial Recognition
Fiction: One of the most jarring scenes in Elysium occurs towards the beginning of the film, when the protagonist Max Da Costa waits to board a bus on his way to work. While standing in line, Max is approached by two large robotic police officers, who quickly scan Max’s biometrics, cross-check his data against government files, and identify him as a former convict in need of close inspection. They demand to search his bag, a request which Max resists, insisting that there is nothing for them to see. The robotic cops respond by manhandling Max, throwing him to the ground, and breaking his arm with a police baton. After determining that Max poses no threat, they leave him on the ground and continue their patrol. Likewise, in Minority Report, police use holographic data screens, city-wide surveillance cameras, dimensional maps and database feeds to monitor the movements of its citizens and preemptively target suspects for interrogation and containment.
Fiction: In another Elysium scene, Max is hunted by four drones while attempting to elude the authorities. The drones, equipped with x-ray cameras, biometric readers, scanners and weapons, are able to scan whole neighborhoods, identify individuals from a distance—even through buildings, report their findings back to police handlers, pursue a suspect, and target them with tasers and an array of lethal weapons.
Fact: Drones, some deceptively small and yet powerful enough to capture the facial expressions of people hundreds of feet below them, have ushered in a new age of surveillance. Not even those indoors, in the privacy of their homes, will be safe from these aerial spies, which can be equipped with technology capable of peering through walls. In addition to their surveillance capabilities, drones can also be equipped with automatic weapons, grenade launchers, tear gas, and tasers.
Biometric scanners and national IDs
Fiction: Throughout Elysium, citizens are identified, sorted and dealt with by way of various scanning devices that read their biometrics—irises, DNA, etc.—as well as their national ID numbers, imprinted by a laser into their skin. In this way, citizens are tracked, counted, and classified. Likewise, in Minority Report, tiny sensory-guided spider robots converge on a suspected would-be criminal, scan his biometric data and feed it into a central government database. The end result is that there is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide to escape the government’s all-seeing eyes.
Fact: Given the vast troves of data that various world governments, including Israel and the U.S., is collecting on its citizens and non-citizens alike, we are not far from a future where there is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. In fact, between the facial recognition technology being handed out to law enforcement, license plate readers being installed on police cruisers, local police creating DNA databases by extracting DNA from non-criminals, including the victims of crimes, and police collecting more and more biometric data such as iris scans, we are approaching the end of anonymity. It won’t be long before police officers will be able to pull up a full biography on any given person instantaneously, including their family and medical history, bank accounts, and personal peccadilloes. It’s already moving in that direction in more authoritarian regimes.
Predictive Policing
Fiction: In Minority Report, John Anderton, Chief of the Department of Pre-Crime, finds himself identified as the next would-be criminal and targeted for preemptive measures by the very technology that he relies on for his predictive policing. Consequently, Anderton finds himself not only attempting to prove his innocence but forced to take drastic measures in order to avoid capture in a surveillance state that uses biometric data and sophisticated computer networks to track its citizens.
Fact: Precrime, which aims to prevent crimes before they happen, has justified the use of widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, precognitive technology, and snitch programs. As political science professor Anwar Mhajne documents, Israel has used all of these tools in its military engagements with Palestine: deploying AI surveillance and predictive policing systems in Palestinian territories; utilizing facial recognition technology to monitor and regulate the movement of Palestinians; subjecting Palestinians to facial recognition scans at checkpoints, with a color-coded mechanism to dictate who should be allowed to proceed, subjected to further questioning, or detained.
Making the Leap from Fiction to Reality
When Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1931, he was convinced that there was “still plenty of time” before his dystopian vision became a nightmare reality. It wasn’t long, however, before he realized that his prophecies were coming true far sooner than he had imagined.
Israel’s military influence on the United States, its advances in technological weaponry, and its rigid demand for compliance are pushing us towards a world in chains.
Through its oppressive use of surveillance technology, Israel has erected the world’s first open-air prison, and in the process, has made itself a model for the United States.
What we cannot afford to overlook, however, is the extent to which the American Police State is taking its cues from Israel.
If you want a glimpse of the next stage of America’s transformation into a police state, look no further than how Israel—a long-time recipient of hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign aid from the U.S.—uses its high-tech military tactics, surveillance and weaponry to advance its authoritarian agenda.
Military checkpoints. Wall-to-wall mass surveillance. Predictive policing. Aerial surveillance that tracks your movements wherever you go and whatever you do. AI-powered facial recognition and biometric programs carried out with the knowledge or consent of those targeted by it. Cyber-intelligence. Detention centers. Brutal interrogation tactics. Weaponized drones. Combat robots.
A 2018 investigative report concluded that imported military techniques by way of these exchange programs that allow police to study in Israel have changed American policing for the worse. “Upon their return, U.S. law enforcement delegates implement practices learned from Israel’s use of invasive surveillance, blatant racial profiling, and repressive force against dissent,” the report states. “Rather than promoting security for all, these programs facilitate an exchange of methods in state violence and control that endanger us all.”
Petti documents how the NYPD set up a permanent liaison office in Israel in the wake of 9/11, eventually implementing “one of the first post-9/11 counterterrorism programs that explicitly followed the Israeli model. In 2002, the NYPD tasked a secret ‘Demographics Unit’ with spying on Muslim-American communities. Dedicated ‘mosque crawlers’ infiltrated local Muslim congregations and attempted to bait worshippers with talk of violent revolution.”
That was merely the start of American police forces being trained in martial law by foreign nations under the guise of national security theater. It has all been downhill from there.
As Alex Vitale, a sociology professor who has studied the rise of global policing, explains, “The focus of this training is on riot suppression, counterinsurgency, and counterterrorism—all of which are essentially irrelevant or should be irrelevant to the vast majority of police departments. They shouldn’t be suppressing protest, they shouldn’t be engaging in counterinsurgency, and almost none of them face any real threat from terrorism.”
This ongoing transformation of the American homeland into a techno-battlefield tracks unnervingly with the dystopian cinematic visions of Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report and Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium, both of which are set 30 years from now, in the year 2054.
With Israel in the driver’s seat and Minority Report and Elysium on the horizon, it’s not so far-fetched to imagine how the American police state will use these emerging technologies to lock down the populace, root out dissidents, and ostensibly establish an “open-air prison” with disconcerting similarities to Israel’s technological occupation of present-day Palestine.
For those who insist that such things are celluloid fantasies with no connection to the present, we offer the following as a warning of the totalitarian future at our doorsteps.
When Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1931, he was convinced that there was “still plenty of time” before his dystopian vision became a nightmare reality. It wasn’t long, however, before he realized that his prophecies were coming true far sooner than he had imagined.
Israel’s military influence on the United States, its advances in technological weaponry, and its rigid demand for compliance are pushing us towards a world in chains.
Through its oppressive use of surveillance technology, Israel has erected the world’s first open-air prison, and in the process, has made itself a model for the United States.
What we cannot afford to overlook, however, is the extent to which the American Police State is taking its cues from Israel.
For the Chinese, the trauma of the Century of Humiliation continues as a blunt reminder of their past defeat and neo-colonial servitude, as well as a reminder of the West’s self-righteous hypocrisy and arrogance.
In 1500, India and China were the world’s most advanced civilizations. Then came the Europeans. They eventually looted and wreaked havoc on both, just as they were to on the Americas and Africa. For India and China, Britain was the chief culprit, relying on state-sponsored drug-running backed by industrialized military power. The British Empire was the world’s largest producer and exporter of opium—the main product of global trade after the gradual decline of the slave trade from Africa. Their “civilization” brought the Century of Humiliation to China, which only ended with the popular revolution led by Mao Zedong. This historic trauma and the struggle to overcome it and re-establish their country is etched in the minds of the Chinese today.
Before the British brought their “culture,” 25% of the world trade originated in India. By the time they left it was less than 1%. British India’s opium dealing was for the large part of the 19th Century the second-most important source of revenue for colonial India. Their “opium industry was one of the largest enterprises on the subcontinent, producing a few thousand tons of the drug every year – a similar output to Afghanistan’s notorious opium industry [during the US occupation], which supplies the global market for heroin.” Opium accounted for about 17-20% of British India revenues.
In the early 1700s, China produced 35% of the world GDP. Until 1800 half the books in the world were printed in Chinese. The country considered itself self-sufficient, not seeking any products from other countries. Foreign countries bought Chinese tea, silk, and porcelain, having to pay in gold and silver. Consequently, the balance of trade was unfavorable to the British for almost two centuries, like the situation the US and Europe face with China today.
This trade slowly depleted Western reserves. Eventually, 30,865 tons of silver flowed into China, mostly from Britain. Britain turned to state sponsored drug smuggling as a solution, and by 1826 the smuggling from India had reversed the flow of silver. Thus began one of the longest and continuous international crimes of modern times, second to the African slave trade, under the supervision of the British crown.
(The just formed United States was already smuggling opium into China by 1784. The US first multi-millionaire John Jacob Astor grew rich dealing opium to China, as did FDR’s grandfather, Warren Delano, Jr.)
The British East India Company was key to this opium smuggling. Soon after Britain conquered Bengal in 1757, George III granted the East India Company a monopoly on producing and exporting Indian opium. Eventually its Opium Agency employed some 2500 clerks working in 100 offices around India.
Britain taxed away 50% of the value of Indian peasants’ food crops to push them out of agriculture into growing opium. This soon led to the Bengal famine of 1770, when ten million, a third of the Bengali population, starved to death. Britain took no action to aid them, as they did almost a century later with their orchestrated famine in Ireland. Another famine hit India in 1783, and again Britain did nothing as 11 million starved. Between 1760-1943, “As per British sources, more than 85 million Indians died in these famines which were in reality genocides done by the British Raj.”
At its peak in the mid-19th century, the British state-sponsored export of opium accounted for roughly 15% of total colonial revenue in India and 31% of India’s exports. The massive revenues from this drug money solidified India as a substantial financial base for England’s later world conquests.
In 1729, the Chinese emperor declared the import of opium illegal. At the time it amounted to 200 chests a year, each 135 pounds, a total of 14 tons. The emperor in 1799 reissued the prohibition in harsher terms, given imports had leaped to 4,500 chests (320 tons). Yet by 1830 it rose to 1100 tons, and by 1838, just before the British provoked the First Opium War (1839-1842), it climbed to 40,000 chests (2800 tons).
A chest of opium cost only £2 to produce in India but it sold for £10 [over $1,000 in today’s prices] in China, nearly an £8 profit per chest.
About 40,000 chests supplied 2.1 million addicts in a Chinese population of 350 million. China was losing over 4000 tons of silver annually. Addicts were mostly men, twenty to fifty-five years old, which should have been their most productive years. Smoking opium gradually spread to different groups of people: government officials, merchants, intelligentsia, women, servants, soldiers, and monks.
Just before the First Opium War the Chinese “drug czar,” Lin Zexu, wrote to Queen Victoria, “Where is your conscience? I have heard that the smoking of opium is very strictly forbidden by your country; this is because the harm caused by opium is clearly understood. Since it is not permitted to do harm to your own country, then even less should you let it be passed on to the harm of other countries.” In standard imperialist arrogance, Britain ignored the letter and challenged the very legality of China’s sovereign decision to prohibit opium imports.
Britain provoked this First Opium War in retaliation for China seizing and destroying 1300 tons of opium held by British drug dealers off Canton (now Guangzhou). This had a value equal to one-sixth of the British empire’s military budget. British Foreign Secretary Palmerston demanded an apology, compensation for the opium, a treaty to prevent Chinese action against British drug-running, and opening additional ports to “foreign trade,” their euphemism for drug dealing.
The British India Gazette reported on the sack of one Chinese city during the war:
A more complete pillage could not be conceived than took place. Every house was broken open, every drawer and box ransacked, the streets strewn with fragments of furniture, pictures, tables, chairs, grain of all sorts — the whole set off by the dead or the living bodies of those who had been unable to leave the city from the wounds received from our merciless guns… The plunder ceased only when there was nothing to take or destroy.
Once Britain defeated China, the Treaty of Nanking gave Hong Kong to the British, which quickly became the center of opium drug-dealing, soon providing the colony most of its revenue. The treaty also allowed the British to export unlimited amounts of opium.
In 1844, France and the US forced China to sign similar unequal and unjust treaties, with the same unrestricted trading rights.
In the wake of the First Opium War, a devastating famine hit southern China, causing mass starvation among millions of poor Chinese peasants. Soon the Taiping Rebellion against Chinese imperial rule broke out, claiming 20 million Chinese lives between 1850 and 1864. As with many later civil wars, as in Syria a decade ago, the European states financed the rebels to undermine the national government.
Karl Marx detailed how Britain provoked the Second Opium War (1856-1860). France joined in the looting. The Times of London, propagandists for their state-sponsored drug mafia, declared, “England, with France . . . shall teach such a lesson to these perfidious hordes that the name of Europe will hereafter be a passport of fear, if it cannot be of love, throughout their land.”
In October 1860 the British and French military attacked Beijing. Despite French protests, British commander Lord Elgin destroyed Yuanming Yuan, the emperor’s summer palace, in a show of contempt for the Chinese.
The Summer Palace was the quintessential treasure house of China. No such collection of wealth and beauty had ever existed anywhere on earth. Nor would it ever again.…in some 200 fabulously decorated buildings, thirty of them imperial residences, lay riches beyond all dreams of avarice. Jewels, jade, ceremonial robes, the court treasures, bales of silk, and countless priceless artifacts represented the years of accumulated tribute placed before the Chinese emperors. There were splendid galleries of paintings and irreplaceable libraries…For three days British and French troops rampaged through the palace’s marble corridors and glittering apartments, smashing with clubs and rifle butts what they were unable to carry away.
When the robbery and destruction was finished, they burned Yuanming Yuan to the ground. An estimated 1.5 million Chinese relics were taken away, many still filling museums and the homes of the wealthy in the West today.
Britain and France forced China to legalize the import of opium, which reached 5000 tons by 1858, an amount surpassing global opium production in 1995. China had to agree that no Westerner could be tried in Chinese courts for crimes committed in the country, and, ironically, to legalize Christian missionary work.
As a specimen of how both wars were carried on, we quote the following from an English writer on the bombardment of Canton: ‘Field pieces loaded with grape were planted at the end of long, narrow streets crowded with innocent men, women and children, to mow them down like grass till the gutters flowed with their blood.’ In one scene of carnage, the Times correspondent recorded that half an army of 10,000 men were in ten minutes destroyed by the sword, or forced into the broad river. The Morning Herald asserted that ‘a more horrible or revolting crime than this bombardment of Canton has never been committed in the worst ages of barbaric darkness.’
By the mid-1860s, Britain was in control of seven eighths of the vastly expanded opium trade into China. Opium imports from India skyrocketed to 150,000 chests (10,700 tons) in 1880. British opium earnings amounted to $2 billion a year in today’s money and accounted for nearly 15% of the British Exchequer’s tax revenue. The London Times (October 22, 1880) outrageously claimed that “the Chinese government admitted opium as a legal article of import, not under constraint, but of their own free will.” Lord Curzon, later Under Secretary for India, “denied that England had ever forced opium upon China; no historian of any repute, and no diplomatist who knew anything of the matter, would support the proposition that England coerced China in this respect.”
China began domestic production to curtail losing more silver to imported opium. After 1858, large tracts of land were given over to opium production, and provinces turned from growing food and other necessities to opium. Eventually the Chinese were producing 35,000 tons, about 85% of the world’s supply, with 15 million addicts consuming 43,000 tons annually.
China, now greatly weakened by the British narco state, surrendered territory to Russia equal to the combined size of France, Germany, and Spain. In 1885 France seized Chinese Southeast Asia. In 1895, Japan seized Taiwan and Chinese-controlled Korea.
The Eight-Nation Alliance (Japan, Russia, Britain, France, the United States, Germany, Italy, and Austria-Hungary) invaded again in 1900 to crush the nationalist Boxer Rebellion. An indemnity of 20,000 tons of silver was extracted, and China reduced to a neo-colony.
By 1906, besides British India, opium dealing also provided 16% of taxes for French Indochina, 16% for the Netherlands Indies, 20% for Siam, and 53% for British Malaya.
That year, the British, still exporting 3500 tons to China, finally agreed to end the dirty business within ten years. The British crown had the distinction of being the biggest opium smuggler in history – a central factor in their wrecking Chinese and Indian civilizations.
World opium production by 1995 was down to 4,200 metric tons (4,630 tons), mostly from Burma and Afghanistan. The Taliban banned it in 2000, and production fell from 3400 to only 204 tons. The 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan reversed this, and by 2008, US occupied Afghanistan was producing 90% of the world’s opium, reaching 10,000 tons in 2017. After the US was driven out in 2021, the Taliban quickly stopped opium production. The United States Institute of Peace, possibly revealing US support for narco-trafficking, pronounced, “the Taliban’s successful opium ban is bad for Afghans and the world” and “will have negative economic and humanitarian consequences.”
The blight of opium on China was not resolved until the revolutionary victory in 1949 – though it continued in British Hong Kong. Mao proclaimed “China has stood up,” ending its Century of Humiliation during which at least 100 million Chinese were killed in wars and famines, with up to 35 million during the Japanese invasion from 1931-1945.
By 1949, China had been reduced to one of the world’s poorest countries. Just 75 years ago four out of five Chinese could not read or write. But since 1981, China has lifted 853 million of its people out of poverty, has become an upper middle income country according to the World Bank, and regained its stature in the world. The West now views China as a renewed threat, again seeking to economically disable it and chop it into pieces. However, this time, the Chinese people are much better prepared to combat imperialist designs to impose a new era of humiliation on them.
Ireland’s recognition of the state of Palestine has been enthusiastically welcomed at home and (mostly) abroad as a positive contribution to the future of Palestine. Needless to say, this development did not take place in a vacuum though, for the most part, it is being presented as if it did.
The scale and endurance of the pro-Palestinian campaigns in Ireland both historically, and specifically in response to the Israeli/US barbarism in Gaza, is probably not given the recognition it deserves. However, the result was dramatic: the Irish government was forced to take a position – a position that successive Irish governments had resolutely refused to entertain.
That is one side of the story. The problem for pro-Palestinian campaigners and supporters is that Ireland is a perfect example of a term not often used these days – Ireland is a banana republic. So much so, that the Irish government does not get out of bed in the morning without first checking with its major ‘partner’ – the United States of America.
This is where internal political considerations clashed with Ireland’s unswerving allegiance to the US. There now was a problem and it had to be solved. So, for our brave leaders in the Irish government, it then became a matter of how to manage this particular problem.
Enter the US State Department. From then on, Ireland stayed firmly within the boundaries allowed – as it always does. And that is what it came down to: what would Ireland be allowed to say or do. The statement provided by the Irish government, here if read carefully, clearly shows what those boundaries are.
It did not stop there: on 28 May, the day the Palestinian flag flew outside Leinster House (Irish Parliament) the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Simon Harris stated “And Europe could be doing a hell of a lot more, Europe needs to do a lot more in relation to this.” Europe but not the United States of America! Know your boundaries and stick to them – or else.
As reported by Politico:
Dublin was determined to take this step without damaging its typically strong relations with U.S. politicians — particularly Biden’s White House.
Consequently, Irish Department of Foreign Affairs diplomats ensured that their U.S. counterparts in the State Department were speedily briefed on every conversation the Irish had with like-minded European governments — Belgium, Malta, Norway, Slovenia and above all Spain — as they pursued a joint plan to recognize Palestinian statehood, the official said.
This included face-to-face discussions with senior National Security Council officials at the White House in March as part of St. Patrick’s Day-related diplomacy; multiple phone calls between Irish Foreign Minister Micheál Martin, who led the Irish initiative, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken; and final calls to Washington following the Irish Cabinet’s formal signoff on its decision Tuesday night.
“We couldn’t have been clearer in spelling out our intentions weeks, months in advance to make sure there were no surprises or needless suspicions raised in Washington,” said the Irish official, granted anonymity to discuss private conversations.
Apparently, the US side was quite chuffed with the outcome: “They tried to make enough of a group so that it would make a splash, but in our view, it’s more like a ripple.”
In the end, the Irish statement announcing its intentions quite clearly shows that the Irish position soon emerged as an Irish government/US State Department position or, in short, a US State Department position.
Let’s start with the “hostages”:
“It is long past time for a ceasefire, for the unconditional release of hostages and for unhindered access for humanitarian aid.”
and,
“Let me be clear that Ireland condemns the barbaric massacre carried out by Hamas on October 7th last. Civilians attacked and murdered. Hostages taken in the most brutal and terrifying of circumstances, including a young Israeli-Irish child.
We call again for all hostages to be immediately returned to the arms of their loved ones.”
Harris is referring here to more than one hundred Israeli hostages held by Hamas. Nowhere in his statement does he even refer to the 5,200 Palestinians hostages, including at least 170 children held up to October 6, 2023, nor to the 7,350 more hostages taken by Israel since that date.
Move on to “children”:
“Children are innocent. The children of Israel. The children of Palestine. They deserve peace.”
Look at the order. Yet, the killings are in a different order – 10,651 Palestinians were slaughtered by Israel in the 23 years up to 7 October 2023, including 2,270 children and 656 women (Israel’s B’Tselem figures). That’s 460 a year. In that period Israel was exterminating Palestinians at the rate of 8:1 and children at the rate of 16:1.
The figures since 7 October are so horrific that they cannot even be accurately counted – on the Palestinian side. That is before we even start to think about starvation and denial of medical and other essential requirements, the destruction of medical facilities, injuries and the unrelenting terror.
Now we get to the “two state solution”:
“It is a statement of unequivocal support for a two-State solution – the only credible path to peace and security for Israel, for Palestine and for their peoples.” (note the order again)
“A two-state solution is the only way out of the generational cycles of violence, retaliation and resentment, where so many wrongs can never make a right.”
It is not for me to determine what is best for the Palestinian people but when the chief enablers of the barbarism against the Palestinian people tell you that there is only one solution – a two state solution – it is legitimate to constructively analyse that position. However, when the Irish government – in unison with the chief enablers of the barbarism – insists that this is the only solution, it becomes an imperative.
The fact is that large numbers of Palestinians have always, and still, oppose the Oslo Accords and the concept of a two state solution. Indeed, a large part of the reason for the successful election of Hamas in Gaza was its opposition to those concepts. Yet, the Irish government and the US government insist this is the ONLY way forward.
However, Ulster says NO! Ooops, I have strayed into that other unresolved statehood issue – the little matter of the British-occupied six counties in the province of Ulster in the north of Ireland.
Sorry, Israel says NO! NEVER! to a two state solution with Netanyahu boasting that “everyone knows that I am the one who for decades blocked the establishment of a Palestinian state that would endanger our existence.”
Despite the clearly stated and unequivocal refusal of Israel to even consider a two state solution, the Irish and US governments insist that it is the ONLY option. So, Ireland has now recognised the state of Palestine but retains the right to tell them what to do in step with the US government telling them what to do: the-two-state-no-other-option option is the only option.
The real irony is that in fighting so hard for Palestinian statehood and sovereignty, the Irish government – as usual – entirely sacrificed its own statehood and sovereignty as it crawled on its belly to the US State Department begging for some understanding for the little pickle it found itself in. The fact is that the Irish government would not dare step one inch outside the well-established boundaries that have been set for it by the US authorities.
Yet, the Irish government is successfully strutting its stuff – virtually unchallenged – about how brave it is, what a wonderful defender of the oppressed it is, what a promoter of peace it is as it crawls back from its ‘consultations’ with the worst offender of all those concepts the world has ever known.
Now that Palestine is sorted, perhaps we could look to seeking statehood and sovereignty for Ireland? The farcical position of the Irish government leading a charge on Palestinian statehood while simultaneously begging forgiveness and understanding from the despots who rule the US (and who think they rule the world) and with an on-going British occupation of part of our country, has not entirely gone unnoticed. One thing is certain, the Irish government will not lead that charge.
A 5/31/2024 article in CounterPunch returns to the question of the death toll of the genocide in Gaza, and the gross undercount of deaths by almost every agency imaginable, even the ones in Gaza itself. I suggest further elaboration.
200,000 was the number dead that Ralph Nader estimated at the beginning of March. It has to be double that now. How many thousands of pregnant women and their fetuses and newborn have died? How many diabetics or others needing medication or special diets or treatment? But even those without special conditions are dying because they can’t give up food and water.
We have reached the stage where the number of starving or dehydrated persons is so high that they have no defense against common diseases or mild injuries. Why are they not reported? Because there is no one to record them, of course. The hospitals and clinics are largely a memory. Potable water is a luxury. I’m banned from X and FB, but I imagine you’ve seen the living and dying skeletons that I predicted months ago. I see them mainly on Telegram. The international agencies report that nearly all the population is food insecure, and a majority are malnourished. It’s a matter of time.
Israel would like to move faster. I’m not sure why they don’t. Perhaps they’re afraid that world reaction will graduate to more forceful measures, but I see no indication that this is the case. With the exception of Yemen and some non-state actors, no one seems willing to resort to physical force. Members of the US Congress and figures in the Biden administration have even encouraged Israel to “finish the job”. Certainly, they have no moral qualms.
Are they worried that they will run out of Jews? Part of the purpose of killing off the Palestinians was to assure that Jews will be significantly more numerous in “greater Israel” (AKA Palestine). That clearly is not working. It is far more likely that more Jews have fled Israel than Palestinians have been reduced by genocide. In fact, even the effective Jewish inhabited area has been reduced in both the north and the south.
Worse still, Israel grossly underestimated the capability of the Palestinian resistance and its partners, and overestimated its own. Hamas and its allies clearly understood and planned for Israel’s reaction, while Israel had little appreciation for their adversary. So much for the strategy of disproportionate force. Israel is unaccustomed to taking so many casualties, which are in any case unknown. No one believes the official count and resorting to foreign mercenaries.
Israel is also dissolving from within. Who’s buying Israeli anymore, except the dwindling community of true believers? What economy is left consists largely of shoveling American money into Israeli furnaces. Meanwhile, Israelis are fighting among themselves for desperate solutions to their intractable problems. The powerful international network of faithful sayanimwill remain in place (who likes to give up power?) and will continue to manage the controls. But other Jews will object to being associated with such persons, weakening the support for, and the effectiveness of, the Zionist dreamightmare.
Israel is clearly losing, but the rate of its demise will depend on factors that are difficult to predict, and even harder to control. Nevertheless, if Israel survives this miscalculation in the short term, it will only do so as a smaller, more fanatical remnant of its former self.
It was much like witnessing a boy killing flies, with a slight afterthought of apology. The spokesman for the Israeli Defense Forces, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, did little to acquit himself, or the cause, as to why more Palestinian civilians had been indulgently killed in yet another Israeli air strike. “Despite our efforts to minimize civilian casualties during the strike, the fire that broke out was unexpected and unintended … Our investigation seeks to determine what may have caused such a large fire to ignite.”
The release commences with the usual garnish. The strike, despite resulting in deaths in a camp of displaced Palestinians in Tal al-Sultan, was soberly designated and professionally targeted. It was successful. Two Hamas terrorists had been procedurally “eliminated” (in the social media release, the IDF proudly places the word upon the heads of Yassin Rabia and Khaled Nagar). “The strike was based on precise intelligence,” Hagari tells us. Those killed had, in turn, killed Israelis. They were having a meeting. “Their deaths saved lives.”
Away from the glove handling reflections of Hagari, the returns of the May 26 strike showed that Palestinian civilians were also seen as miscellaneous detritus, fundamentally dispensable. The butchery is now a matter of record: 46 dead civilians, including 23 women, children and the elderly. All on a sliver of territory fast becoming the most famous real estate of death on the planet. It’s a particularly bloody ratio for killing two alleged terrorists.
In a statement on May 29 from the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, various rapporteurs, including such figures as Francesca Albanese, responsible for the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, to Ben Saul, charged with the task of promoting human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, expressed their dismay. “Harrowing images of destruction, displacement and death have emerged from Rafah, including infants torn apart and people burnt alive.” Such reports indicated “that the strikes were indiscriminate and disproportionate, with people trapped inside burning plastic tents, leading to a horrific casualty toll.”
The Israelis have been told by a number of international bodies, entities, and sympathisers, with repeated urgency, that its current murderous efforts are simply not worth it. The Rafah front presents further calamitous risks. The toll, notably in striking camps of civilians displaced by prior bombings and military engagements, would be too great. The reputational toll, likewise. The slaughter that pads out and packs morgues; the bodies of women and children that seem to multiply with pestilential cruelty; the incidents of pure callousness dressed in a décor of euphemism: We target, and we target well; the rest is accidental or unavoidable.
The International Court of Justice, in yet another ruling on Israel’s campaign in Gaza, recently concluded that the military offensive in Rafah, along with “any other action in the Rafah governorate, which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part” be “immediately” halted. It also ordered Israel to open the Rafah crossing and permit UN officials to enter Gaza and report back to the court within a month to verify compliance.
The ICJ also noted the concerns of UN officials about the risks arising from any military assault on Rafah, one that would put “hundreds of thousands of people … at imminent risk of death”. Such risks had already “started to materialize and will intensify even further if the operation continues”.
Israel’s politicians and military personnel – at least those lacking candour – always hit upon the same formula in such instances. It is one noted by such unflagging scribes as the late Robert Fisk: the justification of violence with seemingly sound process, decency with the stuffing of crime. A trained pupil in such efforts is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “Despite our utmost efforts not to harm innocent civilians, last night, there was a tragic mistake.” When compared with his previous statements equating all Palestinians to actors behind a terrorist cause, one that would, in turn, give birth to a terrorist state, the element of mistake is less relevant than the desire to conclude the task at hand.
The next instalment of the performance involves the mandatory investigation that yields no culprits, no charges, and no prosecutions. “The details of the incident are still under investigation, which we are committed to conducting to the fullest extent,” gabbled Major-General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi at a news conference, noting that the IDF “regrets any harm to non-combatants during the war.”
Such a method is also approved by Israel’s staunchest ally. “You cannot reach a conclusion about the results of these investigations in the middle of a conflict,” reasoned White House spokesman John Kirby. Why, it should be asked, bother?
The Israeli response to attacks on its citizens on October 7 last year, increasingly enfeebled by reality, long ago moved into the realm of farce. But farce and advertising tend to be part of the same show, and the advertising about the ongoing campaign in Gaza by the Israeli forces continues to rattle the swill bucket.
I suppose my title could have been couched in the singular form, as Hermann Hesse, the Nobel Prize winning German/Swiss author, did with his collection of anti-war essays about World War I (the war to end all wars that didn’t), If The War Goes On . . .
Or more appropriately, I might have eliminated that conditional “If” since it seems Pollyannish.
It’s a long hard road, this anti-war business. During the first Cold War and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis in the early sixties when Kennedy and Krushchev narrowly avoided blowing the world to smithereens, Bob Dylan put it right in his fierce song, Masters of War:
(Verse 1)
Come, you masters of war
You that build the big guns
You that build the death planes
You that build all the bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know I can see through your masks
(Verse 3)
Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain
Indeed there is asystem of war that guarantees that the various wars go on and on ad infinitum, and they are linked. It is why the warfare state has killed our anti-war leaders, first and foremost JFK for turning against war in the last year of his presidency. Then in 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy in quick succession. It is why if you dare to look around the world today, you will see that there is a series of wars happening, not only in the obvious places like Ukraine and Gaza, but in places that you may never have heard of, and if you peek a bit further into their causes, you will discover that a familiar culprit with 750 plus military bases around the world has its hand in most of them – the United States of America.
These wars have their cold and hot phases. There are days when the corporate media let them sleep and other times when the same media wake them a bit, but never enough to wake their readers up to the reality of the deadly game. That is the media’s job as stenographers for the warfare state. Wars being essentially the health of the state, as Randolph Bourne wrote long ago, they provide vast profits for the military-industrial complex/Wall St., whether they are in preparation or in operation, awake or asleep, hot or cold. Ray McGovern, the former CIA analyst with a moral conscience, has aptly named this vast interlocking propaganda apparatus the military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academia-think-tank complex, MICIMATT. It is a complex that blatantly serves the interests of the masters of war who “ain’t worth the blood/that runs in [their] your veins,” in Dylan’s words.
The preparation for war is war. What is prepared must be used up, so other weapons can be prepared to be used up, so other weapons can be prepared to be used up, and on and on until one day no one is left to use anything, for the world will be used up in a nuclear conflagration. These weapons are produced in nice clean factories that pay good wages to people who take their pay and go their way, giving their souls to the killers. For the U.S. economy is built on the waging of wars so continuous that it is nearly impossible to find a break between its hot and cold phases, or what seems like decent employment and the diabolic. They are so intertwined. It is a system of capitalistic finance, a revolutionary system that builds to destroy.
The U.S spends nearly $900 billion dollars annually on “defense” spending; this is more than China, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, the U.K., Germany, France, South Korea, and Japan combined. The U.S.A. is a warfare state; it’s as simple as that. And whether they choose to be aware of it or not, the vast majority of Americans support this killing machine by their insouciance and silence. That their country is spending up to 2 trillion dollars on modernizing its nuclear weapons disturbs them not. It is a death cult. Some – as I myself have done mistakenly – talk about the “deep state” or some other deceptive phrase that conceals the truth that the official state is the “deep state.” It stares us in the face, but many refuse to stare it back down. It is too obvious, standing, as it does, in the way of a life of illusions.
And what is equally apparent today – or should be if one is not asleep – is that because of the war policies of the U.S., the chances of another world war and the use of nuclear weapons is rising by the day. Despite all its denials to the contrary, the US/NATO is pushing for open warfare with Russia that will involve the use of nuclear weapons.
Our masters of war are pushing us toward a nuclear abyss.
In a recent perceptive article, “Russia and China Have Had Enough,” Pepe Escobar writes truths many prefer not to hear. That there is no split between Russia and China but the opposite – a rock solid Russia-China strategic partnership and a determination to oppose and defeat the U.S./UK/NATO hybrid war tactics across Eurasia and the Middle East. That the more these U.S.-led forces attempt to destroy Russia, the more the expanding alliances involved in the Shanghai Cooperative Agreement (SCO) and the expanding BRICS partnerships of emerging economies (originally just Brazil, Russia, India, and then South Africa; now also Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, United Arab Emirates, with many more countries waiting to join) will gain in power. In Escobar’s words, “. . . the Global Majority is on the move: Russia is closely cooperating, increasingly, with scores of nations in West Asia, wider Asia, Africa and Latin America.”
Despite this fact, the United States and its allies blithely continue as if their control of the world order is secure. That they can butcher and badger the world into submission. The insane are usually deluded, but when they control nuclear weapons, the people of the world need to awaken.
Ray McGovern, a Russia expert, (see raymcgovern.com) has echoed Escobar on the absurdity of the Russian China split; has emphasized how Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians has made it an isolated but desperate pariah state; and how the U.S. war against Russia in Ukraine is leading to the increased use of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons that could lead to full-scale nuclear war. He is not alone in this warning.
There are many signs that we are moving toward a nuclear war with calls for U.S./NATO to support more strikes inside Russia, crossing a very dangerous Russian red line. Russia has made it very clear they will respond. As politicians of various stripes – French President Macron, NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, et al. have ecstatically been urging the Biden administration, who needs no urging, to escalate the war in Ukraine by attacking Russia proper (“The time has come for allies to consider whether they should lift some of the restrictions they have put on the use of weapons they have donated to Ukraine,” Stoltenberg told The Economist.), Mike Whitney has written about a recent such attack that should send chills down everyone’s spines – “Washington Attacks Key Elements of Russia’s Nuclear Umbrella Threatening Entire Global Security Architecture.” – but since the corporate media ignore it, most will dream away and get their barbecues ready for Fourth of July celebrations. They and the flag-dressed Dolly Parton can sing all they want about when Johnny comes marching home again, but Dolly and no one will be jolly if there are no homes to march to, no Johnnies marching anywhere but to death, no anything. Just a wasteland.
Michel Chossudovsky, Ray McGovern, Eva Bartlett, Craig Murray, Patrick Lawrence, Vanessa Beeley, Pepe Escobar, Oliver Stone, Andrew Napolitano, Craig Paul Roberts, Chris Hedges, Alastair Crooke, Caitlin Johnstone, Peter Koenig, Finian Cunningham, Diana Johnstone, Lew Rockwell, and so many other sane but marginalized writers whose names I am omitting as I write quickly, are warning us of our closeness to nuclear annihilation. Cassandras all, I fear. Marginalized prophets such as writer and antinuclear activist James W. Douglass (Lightning East to West, JFK and the Unspeakable, etc.) have been issuing such warnings for decades. It is understandable that so many turn away from such warnings, for the thought of a nuclear war induces deep anxiety hard to control. But unless the vast majority can break through such reticence and see through the official propaganda, the world will be destroyed by madmen sooner or later. The signs today all point to sooner, for we are on the edge of the abyss.
Former British diplomat Alistair Crooke, in a recent article – The brink of dissolution: Neurosis in the West as the levee breaks – writes about how the Biden administration’s policy toward Russia-China, not to say Israel-Palestine, being nothing more than more of the same, is stupid, self-defeating, and very dangerous. Rather than accepting that its proxy war against Russia in Ukraine is a disaster, the U.S. is escalating the conflict to a terrifying level. Rather than accepting the obvious deep alliance between China and Russian exemplified in the recent hug between Putin and Xi and their joint 8,000 word joint statement, Biden has said, “Russia is in a very, very difficult spot right now. They are being squeezed by China.”
It doesn’t get any stupider. But when more of the same doesn’t work and you can’t accept the reality of a changing world order, you do more of the same. Crooke writes:
The paradox is that Team Biden – wholly inadvertently – is midwifing the birth of a ‘new world’. It is doing so by dint of its crude opposition to parturition. The more the western élites push against the birthing – through ‘saving Zionism’; ‘saving European Ukraine’ and by crushing dissent – perversely they accelerate the foundering of Leviathan.
President Xi’s double farewell hug for President Putin following their 16-17 May summit nonetheless sealed the birth – even the New York Times, with customary self-absorption, termed the warm embrace by Xi as ‘defiance of the West’.
The root of the coming dissolution stems precisely from the shortcoming that the NY Times headline encapsulates in its disdainful labelling of the seismic shift as base anti-westernism.
More of the same, yes, that is Biden’s approach, inflamed regularly by the anti-Russian hatred spewed by TheNew York Times and its ilk. It is an obsession bordering on full-fledged madness, yet it is integral to the belief that the U.S. is an empire and will remain one while the rest of the world can go to hell. Such a mindset is behind the U.S.’s abrogating all the nuclear weapons treaties that provided a semblance of security that nuclear weapons would not be used.
Crooke ends his piece with these sobering words:
Put plainly, with the U.S. unable to exit or to moderate its determination to preserve its hegemony, Lavrov [Sergey Lavrov, Russian Foreign Minister] sees the prospect for increased western weapons provision for Ukraine. The discourse of military escalation is in fashion in Europe (of that there is no doubt); but both in the Middle East and Ukraine, western policy is in deep trouble. There must be doubts whether the West has either the political will, or the internal unity, to pursue this aggressive course. Dragging wars are not traditionally thought to be ‘voter friendly’ when campaigning reaches its peak.
Let me repeat that last understated sentence: “Dragging wars are not traditionally thought to be ‘voter friendly’ when campaigning reaches its peak.” And so? More of the same?
Israel [is] becoming a dangerous pariah; Ukraine/US/NATO a dangerous loser. As Israel defies the UN, and as the “exceptional” geniuses around Biden ignore Kremlin warnings regarding provocations re Ukraine, the likelihood increases for US use of tactical nukes.
Desperadoes do desperate things. In Biden and Netanyahu we have two blood-thirsty nihilists at the end of their ropes. These masters of war make me think that a better title for this piece would have been:
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant at a press conference in Tel Aviv on October 28, 2023. POOL / VIA REUTER
Senator Lindsay Graham was bursting with contempt for the International Criminal Court (ICC) when he grilled Secretary of State Blinken at a May 21 Congressional hearing. Wagging his finger, he warned that, if the ICC gets away with issuing arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, “we are next.”
The audience at the hearing, stacked with CODEPINK pro-Palestine supporters, burst out in applause at the notion of the US being hauled before the world’s highest court. “You can clap all you want,” an angry Graham retorted, “but they tried to come after our soldiers in Afghanistan.” Graham was thankful that in the Afghan case “reason prevailed” when the case was dropped, adding that the US must level sanctions against the ICC “not only to protect our friends in Israel but to protect ourselves.”
Graham was referring to the 2019 efforts of former ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda to hold both the Taliban and the US accountable for war crimes in Afghanistan. When Graham said that “reason prevailed,” he really meant that US thuggery prevailed because the Trump administration brazenly imposed sanctions against ICC officials, denying them visas to the US and freezing their assets in US banks. President Biden lifted the sanctions but did so with the tacit understanding that the court would not resume the probe of US crimes in Afghanistan. The message from both Democratic and Republican presidents was clear: Do not dare hold the US to the same standards you use for others.
The International Criminal Court was founded in 1998 as the result of a lifetime’s work by an American (and Jewish) international lawyer, Benjamin Ferencz, rooted in his experience as an investigator and chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg tribunals after the Second World War. Ben passed away in 2023 at the age of 103, but the universal jurisdiction that the court is exercising in this case is the fruition of his life’s work to hold war criminals accountable under international law, no matter what country they are from or who their victims are.
Enter Israel. The ICC has been building a case against Israel for nearly a decade. A recent blockbuster investigation by the Guardian and two Israeli-based news outlets revealed a shocking almost decade-long secret campaign against the court by Israeli intelligence agencies, who surveilled, hacked, pressured, smeared and threatened ICC officials in an effort to derail the court’s inquiries.
Despite the pressure, on May 20, ICC prosecutor Karim Khan made his request for Israeli and Hamas arrest warrants. Among the charges against the Israeli officials are extermination, using starvation as a method of warfare, willfully causing great suffering, and intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population.
Prosecutor Karim Khan’s request has now gone to a panel of three judges who will determine in the coming weeks whether the request is granted. But pro-Israel forces in the US are trying their best to throw sand in the wheels of justice with threats of new sanctions.
One ultimatum already came from Senator Tom Cotton and 11 other Republican senators in a toxic April 24 letter. “Target Israel and we will target you,” the senators signaled to the ICC. “If you move forward with the measures indicated in the report, we will move to end all American support for the ICC, sanction your employees and associates, and bar you and your families from the United States.” The letter concluded with a hair-raising: “You have been warned.”
The Biden administration has responded to the ICC by flip flopping like a fish on dry land. On May 20, the White House put out a statement calling the ICC prosecutor’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders “outrageous”, adding “Whatever this prosecutor might imply, there is no equivalence — none — between Israel and Hamas. We will always stand with Israel against threats to its security.” Secretary of State Anthony Blinken called the request “shameful.” At a hearing on May 22, he told Senator Graham that he welcomed working with him on efforts to sanction the ICC.
But on May 28, National Security Council Communications Advisor John Kirby said at a White House press briefing, “We don’t believe that sanctions against the ICC is the right approach here.” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who spoke after Kirby, reiterated that message. She said that legislation against the ICC “is not something the administration is going to support” and that “sanctions on the ICC are not an effective or appropriate tool to address U.S. concerns.”
This new position from the White House will make it easier for more Democrats to say no to the bills that will be introduced as soon as Congress returns from recess on June 3. Already, dueling statements are coming out from Congressional members. While Senate Majority Leader Schumer called the ICC appeal “reprehensible” and Democrat Joe Manchin joined with Republicans to call for visa bans for ICC officials and sanctions on the international body, Senator Bernie Sanders defended the court, saying, “The ICC is doing its job. It’s doing what it is supposed to do. We cannot only apply international law when it is convenient.”
On the House side, progressives voiced support for the ICC. Rep. Cori Bush said, “Seeking arrest warrants for human rights abuses is an important step towards accountability. It’s shameful for U.S. officials to threaten the ICC while continuing to send weapons that enable war crimes.” Rep. Mark Pocan gave a gutsy response, saying, “If Netanyahu comes to address Congress, I would be more than glad to show the ICC the way to the House floor to issue that warrant.”
While most Republicans and pro-Israel hawks in the Democratic Party will likely join hands to hammer the international court, President Biden may ultimately feel pressured to adopt the position best articulated by Senator Van Hollen. “It is fine to express opposition to a possible judicial action, but it is absolutely wrong to interfere in a judicial matter by threatening judicial officers, their family members and their employees with retribution. This thuggery is something befitting the mafia, not U.S. senators.” It is also not befitting the White House, especially one that has been such a willing partner to Israel’s war crimes.
Professor Jeffrey Sachs is the President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. He is the author of many best selling books, including The End of Poverty and The Ages of Globalization. Here he is with probably the smartest and most accurate assessment of the Ukraine war, and American foreign policy more broadly, ever caught on tape.