Monday, March 25, 2024

Jonathan Cook: Are we the baddies?’ Western support for genocide in Gaza means the answer is yes

The desperate smear campaign to defend Israel’s crimes highlights the toxic brew of lies that’s been underpinning the liberal democratic order for decades

First published by Middle East Eye]

In a popular British comedy sketch set during the Second World War, a Nazi officer near the front lines turns to a fellow officer and, in a moment of sudden – and comic – self-doubt, asks: “Are we the baddies?”

For many of us, it has felt like we are living through the same moment, extended for nearly three months – though there has been nothing to laugh about. 

Western leaders have not only backed rhetorically a genocidal war by Israel on Gaza, but they have provided diplomatic cover, weapons and other military assistance. 

The West is fully complicit in the ethnic cleansing of some two million Palestinians from their homes, as well as the killing of more than 20,000 and the injuring of many tens of thousands more, a majority of them women and children. 

Western politicians have insisted on Israel’s “right to defend itself” as it has levelled critical infrastructure in Gaza, including government buildings, and collapsed the health sector. Starvation and disease are starting to pick off the rest of the population.

The Palestinians of Gaza have nowhere to run, nowhere to hide from Israel’s US-supplied bombs. If they are ultimately allowed to escape, it will be into neighbouring Egypt. After decades of displacement, they will be finally exiled permanently from their homeland. 

And as western capitals seek to justify these obscenities by blaming Hamas, Israeli leaders allow their soldiers and settler militias, backed by the state, to rampage across the West Bank, where there is no Hamas, attacking and killing Palestinians.

In defending Gaza’s destruction, Israeli leaders have reached readily for an analogy with the allies’ firebombing of German cities like Dresden – apparently unembarrassed by the fact that these were long ago acknowledged as some of the worst crimes of the Second World War.

Israel is waging an old-style, unabashed colonial war against the native population – of the kind that predates international humanitarian law. And western leaders are cheering them on.

Are we sure we are not the baddies?

Slave revolt

Israel’s attack on Gaza provokes revulsion from so many because it seems impossible to rationalise it. It feels like a reversion. It lays bare something primitive and ugly about the West’s behaviour that has been obscured for more than 70 years by a veneer of “progress”, by talk about the primacy of human rights, by the development of international institutions, by the rules of war, by claims of humanitarianism. 

Yes, these claims were invariably bogus. Vietnam, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Ukraine were all sold based on lies. The true goal of the US, and its Nato sidekicks, was plundering the resources of others, maintaining Washington as the global top dog, and enriching a western elite.

But importantly, the deception was sustained by an overarching narrative that dragged along many westerners in its wake. Wars were to counter the threat of Soviet communism, or Islamic "terror", or a renewed Russian imperialism. And as a positive corollary, these wars claimed to be liberating oppressed women, protecting human rights, and fostering democracy. 

None of that narrative overlay works this time. 

There is nothing humanitarian about bombing trapped civilians in Gaza, turning their tiny prison enclave into rubble, reminiscent of earthquake disaster zones but this time an entirely man-made catastrophe. 

Even Israel does not have the gall to claim to be liberating the women and girls of Gaza from Hamas as it kills and starves them. Nor does it pretend to be interested in democracy promotion. Rather, Gaza is full of “human animals” and must be “flattened”. 

And it has been all but impossible to make Hamas, a group of a few thousand fighters penned into Gaza, appear a credible threat to the West’s way of life. 

Hamas cannot send any kind of warhead into Europe, let alone in 45 minutes. Their prison camp, even before its destruction, was never the plausible heart of some Islamist empire ready to overrun the West and subject it to "sharia law". 

In fact, it has been barely feasible to refer to these past weeks as a war. Gaza is not a state, it has no army. It has been under occupation for decades and under siege for 16 years – a blockade in which Israel has counted the calories allowed in to maintain low-level malnutrition among Palestinians.

As the American Jewish scholar Norman Finkelstein has noted, Hamas’ breakout on 7 October is better understood not as a war but as a slave revolt. And like slave rebellions throughout history – from Spartacus’ against the Romans to Nat Turner’s in Virginia in 1831 – it was inevitably going to turn brutal and bloody.

Are we on the side of the murderous prison guards? Are we arming the plantation owners?

Mass gaslighting

In the absence of a persuasive justification for assisting Israel in its genocidal campaign in Gaza, our leaders are having to wage a parallel war on the western public – or at least on their minds. 

To question Israel’s right to exterminate Palestinians in Gaza, to chant a slogan calling for Palestinians to be free of occupation and siege, to want equal rights for all in the region – these are now all treated as the equivalent of antisemitism.

To demand a ceasefire to stop Palestinians dying under the bombs is to hate Jews.

The extent to which these narrative manipulations are not only abhorrent but themselves constitute antisemitism should be obvious, were we not being so relentlessly and thoroughly gaslit by our ruling class.

Those defending Israel’s genocide suggest that it is not just Israel’s ultra-right government and military but all Jews who will the destruction of Gaza, the ethnic cleansing of its population, and the murder of thousands of Palestinian children.

That is the real Jew hatred. 

But the path to this mass gaslighting operation has been paved for a while. It began long before Israel’s levelling of Gaza. 

When Jeremy Corbyn was elected Labour leader in 2015, he brought for the first time a meaningful anti-imperialist agenda to the heart of British politics. And as a staunch supporter of Palestinian rights, he was viewed by the establishment as a threat to Israel, a critically important US client state and the lynchpin of the West’s projection of military might into the oil-rich Middle East.

Western elites were bound to respond with unprecedented hostility to this challenge to their forever war machine. This appears to have been duly noted by Corbyn's successor, Keir Starmer, who has since made sure to present Labour as Nato’s number one cheerleader.

During Corbyn’s tenure, little time was lost by the establishment in working out the best strategy for putting the Labour leader permanently on the back foot and undermining his well-established anti-racist credentials. He was recast as an antisemite.

The campaign of smears not only damaged Corbyn personally but tore the Labour Party apart, turning it into a rabble of feuding factions, eating up all the party’s energy and making it unelectable. 

Smear campaign

That same playbook has now been rolled out against much of the British and US public. 

This month the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a resolution equating anti-Zionism – in this case, opposition to Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza – with antisemitism.

Protesters who have turned out to demand a ceasefire to end the massacres in Gaza are characterised as “rioters”, while their chant of “from the river to the sea” calling for equal rights between Israeli Jews and Palestinians is denounced as a “rallying cry for the eradication of the state of Israel and the Jewish people”. 

Tellingly again, this is an inadvertent admission by the western ruling class that Israel – constituted as a Jewish chauvinist, settler-colonial state – can never allow Palestinians equality or meaningful freedoms any more than apartheid South Africa could for the native Black population.

In a complete inversion of reality, opposition to genocide has been reframed by US politicians as genocidal.

This mass smear campaign is so unmoored that western elites are even turning on their own to shut down freedoms of speech and thought in the institutions where they are supposed to be heavily protected.

The heads of three top US universities – from which the next members of the ruling class will emerge – were grilled by Congress about the threat of antisemitism to Jewish students from campus protests calling for an end to the killing in Gaza.

The West’s order of priorities was laid bare: protecting the ideological sensitivities of a section of Jewish students who fervently support Israel’s right to kill Palestinians was more important than either protecting Palestinians from genocide or defending basic democratic freedoms in the West to oppose genocide.

The reticence of the three university presidents to cave in to the politicians’ demands for the snuffing out of free speech and thought on campus led to a campaign to defund their colleges as well as calls for their heads.

One, Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, has already been forced out of office.

Crisis on all fronts

These developments are not the outcome of some strange, temporary, collective psychosis overtaking western establishments. They are yet more evidence of a desperate failure to stop the West’s long-term trajectory towards crises on multiple fronts.

They are a sign, first, that the ruling class understands it is again visible to the public as a ruling class, and that its interests are beginning to be seen as completely divorced from those of ordinary people. The scales are falling from our eyes.

The simple fact that one can again use the language of “establishments”, a “ruling class” and “class war” without sounding unhinged or like a throwback to the 1950s is an indication of how perception management – and narrative manipulation – so central to upholding the western political project since the end of the Second World War is failing. 

Claims about the triumph of the liberal democratic order declared so loudly in the late 1980s by intellectuals such as Francis Fukuyama – or “the end of history”, as he grandly termed it – now look patently absurd.

And that is because, second, western elites clearly have no answers for the biggest challenges of our era. They are floundering around trying to deal with the inherent paradoxes in the capitalist order that liberal democracy was there to obscure.

Reality is breaking through the ideological cladding.

The most catastrophic is the climate crisis. Capitalism’s model of mass consumption and competition for the sake of competition is proving suicidal. 

And the promise of progress – of kinder, more nurturing and equal societies – now sounds like a sick joke to most westerners under the age of 45.

Brew of lies

The claim that the West is best is starting to look like it rests on shaky foundations, even to western audiences. 

But that idea crumbled long ago abroad, in the countries either devastated by the West’s war machine or waiting for their turn. The liberal democratic order offers them nothing except threats: it demands fealty or punishment.

Which is the context for the current genocide in Gaza. 

As it claims, Israel is on the front lines – but not of a clash of civilisations. It is an exposed, precarious outpost of the liberal democratic order, where the brew of lies about democracy and liberalism are at their most toxic and unconvincing. 

Israel is an apartheid state masquerading as “the only democracy in the Middle East”. Its brutal occupation forces masquerade as “the most moral army in the world”. And now Israel’s genocide in Gaza masquerades as “the elimination of Hamas”. 

Israel has always had to obscure these lies through intimidation. Anyone daring to call out the deceptions is smeared as an antisemite. 

But that playbook has sounded grossly offensive – inhuman even – when the matter at hand is stopping genocide in Gaza.

Where does this ultimately lead? 

Nearly a decade ago, the Israeli scholar and peace activist Jeff Halper wrote a book, War Against the People, warning: “In an endless war on terror, we are all doomed to become Palestinians.”

Not just the West’s “enemies”, but its populations would come to be seen as a threat to the interests of a capitalist ruling class bent on its permanent privilege and enrichment, whatever the costs to the rest of us.

That argument – which sounded hyperbolic when he first aired it – is beginning to seem prescient. 

Gaza is not just the front line of Israel’s genocidal war on the Palestinian people. It is also a front line in the western elite’s war on our ability to think critically, to develop sustainable ways to live, and to demand that others be treated with the dignity and humanity we expect for ourselves. 

Yes, the battle lines are drawn. And anyone who refuses to side with the baddies is the enemy.

Gaza: UN Security Council Passes "Immediate" Ceasefire Resolution US Abstains

From Reuters:

UNITED NATIONS, March 25 (Reuters) - The United Nations Security Council adopted a resolution on Monday demanding an immediate ceasefire between Israel and Palestinian militants Hamas and the release of all hostages after the United States abstained from the vote.
The remaining 14 council members voted for the resolution, which was proposed by the 10 elected members of the body. There was a round of applause in the council chamber after the vote.
"The Palestinian people has suffered greatly. This bloodbath has continued for far too long. It is our obligation to put an end to this bloodbath before it is too late," Algeria's U.N. Ambassador Amar Bendjama told the council after the vote.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the failure of the U.S. to veto the resolution was a "clear retreat" from its previous position and would hurt Israel's war efforts and bid to release more than 130 hostages still held by Hamas.
"Our vote does not, and I repeat that does not represent a shift in our policy," White House spokesperson John Kirby told reporters. "Nothing has changed about our policy. Nothing."
Following the U.N. vote, Netanyahu canceled a visit to Washington by a high-level delegation that was due to discuss a planned Israeli military operation in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where some 1.5 million people have sought shelter.
Washington had been averse to the word ceasefire earlier in the nearly six-month-old war in the Gaza Strip and had used its veto power shield ally Israel as it retaliated against Hamas for an Oct. 7 attack that Israel says killed 1,200 people.
But as famine looms in Gaza and amid growing global pressure for a truce in the war that Palestinian health authorities say has killed some 32,000 people, the U.S. abstained on Monday to allow the Security Council to demand an immediate ceasefire for the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, which ends in two weeks.
Hamas welcomed the Security Council resolution, saying in a statement that it 'affirms readiness to engage in immediate prisoner swaps on both sides'.

FAMINE IMMINENT

U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield said the U.S. fully supported "some of the critical objectives in this nonbinding resolution," but added that Washington did not agree with everything in the text, which also did not condemn Hamas.
"We believe it was important for the council to speak out and make clear that any ceasefire must come with the release of all hostages," she told the council after the vote. "A ceasefire can begin immediately with the release of the first hostage and so we must put pressure on Hamas to do just that."
The resolution demands the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages. Israel says Hamas took 253 hostages during its Oct. 7 attack.
"It was the Hamas massacre that started this war," Israel's U.N. Ambassador Gilad Erdan said. "The resolution just voted upon makes it seem as if the war started by itself ... Israel did not start this war, nor did Israel want this war."
The resolution also "emphasizes the urgent need to expand the flow of humanitarian assistance to and reinforce the protection of civilians in the entire Gaza Strip and reiterates its demand for the lifting of all barriers to the provision of humanitarian assistance at scale."
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged Israel on Monday to lift all obstacles to aid into Gaza and allow convoys of the U.N. Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA into the north of the coastal enclave.
Famine is imminent and likely to occur by May in northern Gaza and could spread across the enclave by July, according to a U.N.-backed report by a global authority on food security released last week.
The U.S. has vetoed three draft council resolutions on the war in Gaza. It has also previously abstained twice, allowing the council to adopt resolutions that aimed to boost aid to Gaza and called for extended pauses in fighting.
Russia and China have also vetoed two U.S. drafted resolutions on the conflict - in October and on Friday.
"This must be a turning point," an emotional Palestinian U.N. envoy Riyad Mansour told the Security Council after the vote on Monday. "This must lead to saving lives on the ground."

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Reporting by Michelle Nichols, Editing by Franklin Paul

Stellar murder: when stars destroy and eat their own planets


NASA/CXC/M.Weiss
Or Graur, University of Portsmouth

Our Sun is both our best friend and our worst enemy. On the one hand, we owe our very existence to our star. Earth and the other planets in the Solar System formed out of the same cloud of gas and dust as the Sun.

And without its light, there could be no life on this planet. On the other hand, there will come a day when the Sun ends all life on Earth and, eventually, destroys Earth itself.

The risks that stars can pose to their planets are highlighted by a new study published in Nature. The authors looked at stars similar to our Sun and found that at least one in 12 stars exhibits traces of metals in its atmosphere. These are thought to be the scars of planets and asteroids that have been ingested by the stars.

Planets should never feel too comfortable as they orbit their parent star, as there are at least two ways in which their star can betray their trust and bring about their violent demise.

Tidal disruption

The first is through a process called “tidal disruption”. As a planetary system forms, some planets will find themselves orbiting their star along paths that are either not quite circular or are slightly inclined relative to the plane of the star’s rotation. When that happens, the gravitational force exerted by the star on the planet will slowly correct the shape or the alignment of the wayward planet’s orbit.

In extreme cases, the gravitational force applied by the star will destabilise the planet’s orbit, slowly pulling it closer and closer. If the hapless planet strays too close, it will be torn apart by the star’s gravity. This happens because the side of the planet facing the star is slightly closer than the side facing away (the difference is the planet’s diameter).

The strength of the gravitational pull exerted by the star depends on the distance between it and the planet, so that the side of the planet facing the star feels a slightly stronger pull than the side facing away.

On Earth, this difference in the strength of the force of gravity creates the daily ebb and flow of the tides. In essence, the Sun is trying to deform Earth, but is far enough away that it only manages to pull on the waters of its oceans. But a planet dangerously close to its star will find its very crust and core being pulled apart by these tides.

If the planet is not too close to the star, its shape will merely be deformed into that of an egg. Just a little closer to the star, and the difference between the gravitational pull on its different sides will be enough to completely tear it apart, reducing it back to a cloud of gas and dust that spirals into the star and vaporises in its hellish fires.

The process of tidal disruption was first suggested some 50 years ago. For the last couple of decades, astronomers — including my group — have observed dozens of bright tidal disruption flares caused by stars shredded by supermassive black holes in the centres of galaxies.

Planet and binary star.
The new study in Nature looked specifically at stars orbiting each other in binary systems. NASA/JPL-Caltech

Last year, for the first time, a group of astronomers reported observing a similar, dimmer flare that was consistent with a planet being disrupted and consumed by its star.

Tidal disruption of planets may be quite common, as shown by the new finding that at least 1 in 12 stars exhibits signs that they have ingested planetary material.

Other studies have found that between a quarter to half of all white dwarfs – the remnants of stars up to twice as massive as our Sun – sport similar scars. As their name implies, white dwarfs are white hot. With surface temperatures of tens of thousands of degrees, the hottest white dwarfs emit ultraviolet and X-ray light energetic enough to vaporise their orbiting planets.

The end of Earth

Rest assured; Earth won’t be destroyed via tidal disruption. Our planet’s end will come in about five billion years, when the Sun will transition into a red giant.

Stars are powered by the process known as fusion, where two light elements are combined to make a heavier one. All stars start out their lives fusing the element hydrogen in their cores into the element helium. This fusion process both stabilises them against implosion, due to the incessant pull of gravity, and creates the light that makes them shine. Our Sun has been fusing hydrogen into helium for roughly 4.5 billion years.

But 4.5 billion years from now, the hydrogen in the Sun’s core will run out. All fusion in the core will stop, and gravity, unopposed, will force the star to contract. As the core contracts, it will heat up until the temperature is high enough for helium to fuse into carbon.

Fusion will once again stabilise the star. In the meantime, though, the outer envelopes of the star will expand and cool, giving the now giant star a redder hue. As the red giant Sun expands, it will engulf Mercury, Venus and Earth – it may even reach all the way out to the orbit of Mars.

Earth may have another five billion years to go, but we will not be here to witness its extinction. As the Sun burns through its hydrogen stores, it steadily grows brighter: every billion years, its luminosity increases by about 10%.

A billion years from now, the Sun will be bright enough to boil away Earth’s oceans. So, the next time you bask in the warm rays of the Sun, remember: it’s got it in for us.The Conversation

Or Graur, Associate Professor of Astrophysics, University of Portsmouth

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Sunday, March 24, 2024

Norman Finkelstein. LEX FRIDMAN ASKS: DOES ISRAEL TARGET CIVILIANS?

Norman Finkelstein
Mar 23, 2024
 
LEX FRIDMAN ASKS: DOES ISRAEL TARGET CIVILIANS?
 

In the course of a recent debate, moderator Lex Fridman posed the question, “Do you think there is a policy, top down from the IDF to target civilians?” (from the official transcript). Both Mouin Rabbani and I answered in the affirmative. Someone seated next to Professor Morris indignantly retorted that the notion of “a whole apparatus that tries to murder” was a “ridiculous argument.” To settle this matter, leaving not a smidgen of doubt, I recalled Gaza’s Great March of Return that began in March 2018. A distinguished independent international Commission of inquiry afterwards investigated these protests and produced a voluminous report running to fully 250 single-spaced pages (from which I will be quoting). The report states that at its inception the protests “could be characterized as a genuine popular festive event, with tens of thousands of people ... gathering around traditional activities, concerts, barbecues, cultural activities and sports games.” When Israel perpetrated a large scale massacre six weeks later on May 14, “anger over [the] killings and injuries drove groups of youths to engage in more violent actions.” 

Order this book
How did Israel respond to the overwhelmingly peaceful protesters as they gathered on March 30 and for weeks thereafter engaged in nonviolent demonstrations? It assembled along the perimeter of Gaza, according to Israeli officials, “specially trained snipers, in order to ensure accurate and measured use” of live ammunition. The IDF subsequently stated that “nothing was carried out uncontrolled; everything was accurate and measured, and we know where every bullet landed,” while then-Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman stated that “Israeli soldiers did what was necessary. I think all our soldiers deserve a medal.” The Commission of inquiry found that “demonstrators who were hundreds of meters away from the Israeli forces and visibly engaged in civilian activities were intentionally shot. Journalists and health workers who were clearly marked as such were shot, as were children, women, and persons with disabilities;” it also found “reasonable grounds to believe that the Israeli security forces killed and maimed Palestinian demonstrators who did not pose an imminent threat of death or serious injury to others when they were shot.” A large portion of the report documents in detail “emblematic” killings and injuries inflicted by Israel’s precision snipers. Herewith a tiny sample of these typical incidents as described by the Commission:

Mohammad Obeid, a 24-year-old footballer for the Al Salah Sports Club…, took out his telephone and began recording a “selfie” video. An Israeli Security Forces sniper shot him in the right side of his right leg as he filmed himself approximately 150 meters from the separation fence. The bullet passed through his right leg and hit his left leg just above the knee, shattering the base of his femur.… He was standing alone. The area was quiet and calm, there was no shooting from the Israeli side, no tear gas, no stone throwing from the Palestinian side, no one had set fire to tires.… Mohammad was speaking calmly and filming himself when the ISF sniper shot him.

Yousef Kronz was a 19-year-old student journalist when he attended the demonstration.…He wore a blue “PRESS” vest and carried his photography equipment, including a camera and a tripod. He sat cross-legged on top of a sand dune to take photographs of the demonstrators, at least 800 meters from the separation fence. After approximately 40 minutes…, as he stood up, the ISF shot him with two bullets in immediate succession which hit him in the right knee and the left knee.… Yousef’s right leg was later amputated.

Abed Hawajri was a 41-year-old man…. The ISF shot him in the abdomen.… Abed was standing near the back of a crowd when shot, with nothing in his hands…, approximately 150 meters from the fence. He was taken to the hospital and died the same day.

A 16-year-old boy climbed onto high ground … approximately 300 meters from the separation fence. He was distributing sandwiches to demonstrators. The ISF then shot him in the face with a single bullet, which entered his nose and exited his skull. As a result of his injuries, he had a fractured jaw, is deaf in one ear and is unable to taste or smell.

Naji Abu Hojayeer was a 25-year-old mechanic…. An ISF soldier … shot him in the abdomen…. He died the same day.… Naji was standing 300 meters from the separation fence when he was shot. He was wrapped in a Palestinian flag, surrounded by hundreds of people.

Mohammad Ajouri, a 17-year-old … member of the Palestinian Athletics Organization…handed out onions and water to protestors to relieve symptoms of teargas inhalation. When he was approximately 300 meters away from the fence, ISF soldiers shot Mohammad in the back of his right leg. Doctors had to amputate his leg as a result.

Jihad Abu Jamous was a 30-year-old man…. ISF soldiers shot him in the head with live ammunition when he was approximately 250 to 300 meters from the fence. He died immediately.

Alaa Dali is a 21-year-old cyclist for the Palestinian Cycling Team. He had earned a slot to participate in the Asian Games in the summer of 2018.… An ISF sniper shot him in his right leg … as he stood alone watching the demonstration approximately 300 meters from the separation fence … while wearing his cycling gear and holding his bicycle. The nearest demonstrator was approximately 15 meters in front of him.… Doctors amputated Alaa’s leg above the knee in order to save his life.

Ali Khafajah was a university student…. ISF soldiers shot him in the head with live ammunition…. Ali was talking on his phone while standing in a crowd about 150 meters from the separation fence when he was shot.… He died at the hospital.

The ISF shot 14-year-old Mohammad Ayoub … in the head…. Mohammad was at least 200 meters from the separation fence when the ISF shot him.

The ISF shot 14-year-old Haytham Jamal in the abdomen. He was killed with a single shot as he stood in a crowd watching the ISF fire tear gas at another group of demonstrators.

Majdi Al Satari was an 11-year-old child…. He was shot in the head by live ammunition by an ISF sharpshooter while attending the protest…. Majdi died of severe brain lacerations ….Majdi was shot while standing … about 100 meters away from the security fence.

ISF soldiers shot 16-year-old Ahmad Abu Tyoor in the thigh as he danced a traditional Palestinian dance alone with his hands in the air, around 10-15 meters from the separation fence. The bullet severed his femoral artery and he died of his wounds the following day.

The ISF shot 11-year-old Nasser Mosabeh in the back of the head…. Nasser had been helping his two volunteer paramedic sisters treating injured people…. When the victim was shot, he was under a tree, 250 meters from the fence…. The bullet entered the right side of his head behind his ear and parts of his skull and brain were found close to his body.

Musa Abu Hassainen was a 35-year-old Civil Defense paramedic. ISF soldiers killed him with a shot to the chest … while he was wearing a high-visibility Civil Defense vest.… He was approximately 250-300 meters from the fence when ISF soldiers shot him.

Abed Abdullah Al Qotati was a 22-year-old volunteer paramedic…. ISF soldiers shot him in the chest in Rafah … as he was tending to an injured demonstrator near the separation fence. Abdullah was wearing a white paramedic jacket and carrying a red first-aid kit when the ISF soldiers shot him.… He died of bleeding and lacerations to his thoracic organs.

Tarek Loubani is a Canadian-Palestinian physician.… The ISF shot him as he stood among a group of paramedics wearing his hospital uniform. He was shot with one bullet that passed through both legs. Visibility was clear. There were no demonstrators near the group of medics and there was no shooting from the ISF either immediately before or after he was shot.

The ISF shot a 24-year-old freelance photojournalist … in the abdomen with live ammunition. He was standing with his back to the separation fence, around 300 meters away. When he was shot he was taking a break from photographing along with two other photojournalists from international news agencies. He was wearing a blue vest marked “PRESS” and the bullet entered his mid-section just below the vest.

The ISF shot 30-year-old journalist Yasser Murtaja with live ammunition in the lower abdomen as he covered the demonstration site…. Yasser was wearing a dark blue bulletproof vest clearly marked with the word “PRESS,” and a blue helmet.… He was standing approximately 300 meters from the separation fence, behind a large group of demonstrators. Visibility was good, and there were no other shots fired in the vicinity at the time. The gunshot hit him in the abdomen…, and [he] died of his injuries the following morning.

The ISF killed Ahmed Abu Hussein, a 24-year-old journalist…. Publicly available video footage of Ahmed’s shooting ... clearly shows him standing still taking photographs of demonstrators…. At the moment he was shot, Abu Hussein was approximately 250-300 meters from the fence. He was clearly marked as a journalist, wearing a blue helmet and a blue vest marked “PRESS.”

Fadi Abu Salmi was a 29-year-old double amputee…. The ISF shot him in the chest…. He died immediately. The ISF shot him … as he sat in his wheelchair under a tree approximately 250-300 meters from the separation fence with two friends.

Ahmad Abu Aqel was 24 years old…. He walked with crutches…. He sat down alone on a small sand hill … approximately 150 meters from the separation fence … with his back towards the fence. The ISF shot him in the back of the head…. He died the same day.

***

The wonder is that in the here and now it can still be doubted that Israel targets civilians: Haven’t the UN, senior public officials, humanitarian organizations, and human rights groups explicitly and unequivocally denounced Israel for using starvation “as a weapon of war. Israel is provoking famine” (EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell)?

 

Saturday, March 23, 2024

Hypocrisy Exposed: US Proposal Does Not Call For a Cease Fire in Gaza

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

GED/HEO
3-23-24

 

The US rogue regime has failed in its most recent efforts at the UN Security Council to cover for its main proxy in the Middle East that is conducting a genocidal war in Gaza. Referred to by one of the main supporters of the Israeli genocide, U.S. secretary of state, Antony Blinken as, sending, “a strong signal” to the Zionists, the resolution does the opposite.

 

Millions of US citizens pay little attention to the details when it comes to the actions of the US government and military abroad, but the rest of the world’s citizens that suffer the consequences of these actions are less fortunate.

 

The US proposal got 11 votes at the UN Security Council with three opposing, China, Russia and Algeria. Guyana abstained. The no vote by China and Russia count as vetoes as they are permanent members of the security council.

 

The representative for Guyana, Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett (in the video above) explained her country’s abstention pointing out that, “Contrary to media reports, this resolution does not call for an immediate ceasefire.” She also stressed, as did others, that an immediate ceasefire shouldn’t be linked to a release of hostages or a condemnation of Hamas.

 

An argument could be made that the “hostages” are not hostages but prisoners of war, captured forces of the occupying power. It is important when discussing this issue to raise the point that the population of Gaza are displaced persons or the relatives of people who were driven from their homes by the occupying power. As the noted Israeli Historian Ilan Pappé pointed out, the communities attacked by the resistance when it broke through the Gaza fence were once 11 Palestinian villages whose residents were driven out, homes destroyed and settlements built in their place.

 

And if we want to talk about hostages, the Zionist regimes has thousands upon thousands of Palestinian hostages in its prisons, many of them children.

 

In addition, one also has to think deeply about what sort of people would hold a rock concert a couple of miles from a concentration camp or what some have described as the world’s largest outdoor prison under siege by an occupying power that controls all important aspects of life there.

 

Guyana’s representative also stressed that:

“If one were to read this resolution without background knowledge, it would be difficult to ascertain which party in this conflict is committing the atrocities in Gaza – atrocities which necessitated this draft resolution being put forward. In a resolution of 41 paragraphs, 2,036 words, the occupying power is mentioned once in the penultimate paragraph.”

 

The US mass media is attempting to portray US imperialism’s competitors, namely China and Russia, as blocking US attempts to bring peace and an end to the genocide just to make the US look bad, and will no doubt have some success here at home, but the rest of the world is not fooled. This crisis did not arise on October 7th 2023, it is decades old.

 

And this obsession of demanding any criticism of Hamas as a condition for any discussion at all on the subject is simply a distraction. The Zionist regime wants to drive Palestinian life and culture from the region no matter what leadership the Palestinians have. It’s a war against the Palestinian resistance not Hamas. The Quakers could be leading it, it wouldn’t matter.

 

Lastly, there are anti-Semites that are stressing that Israel runs the US, that the tail is wagging the dog. I do not agree with this view and what they really mean is that Jews control America.  While most anti-Zionists are not anti-Semites, genuine anti-Semitic forces will use the brutality of the Zionist regime to equate it with Jewishness. This is given support by some states and the Zionists themselves to link the two. Zionism is a political formation, a racist and extremist ideology; it is not Judaism. Israel’s behaviour must be condemned but that does not mean we are not vigilant in rooting out genuine anti-Semitism when it raises its ugly head.

 

Israel was created as a foothold for European and western capitalism in the Middle East as a result of the vacuum left by the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in WW1 and in addition, it would be one way of dealing with Europe’s “Jewish problem”. A “Loyal little Ulster in the Middle East” as one British official put it. The European Jewish community, survivors after the murder of 6 million of them by the Nazi’s and suffering centuries of violence and discrimination in Christian Europe, were a useful tool in this great game. It has been a disaster.

 

As distasteful as the Zionist regime is, I find it difficult when there are calls to kick Israel out of Fifa or the Olympics and so forth while the US and Britain, two of the main architects of the crisis do not face the same criticism. In the last analysis, this crisis is one of many, a legacy of colonialism and Imperial power.   It is a crisis of the system that created it and cannot be resolved within the framework of capitalism. We are faced today not simply with a choice of Socialism or barbarism, as Rosa Luxemburg once stated, but socialism or annihilation of human civilization.

For a glimpse of the mentality of the Zionist settlers check this out: 


Friday, March 22, 2024

Rafah offensive would be a desperate manoeuvre by a cornered politician

Editorial: Rafah offensive would be a desperate manoeuvre by a cornered politician

Judging by statements he has made to the media, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was determined that the IDF press ahead with a ground operation against Rafah in the southern-most part of the Gaza strip. If had gone ahead – and it is looking unlikely now – it would have led to a steep rise in Palestinian casualties and a severe exacerbation of the humanitarian crisis that Israel has already created there.

Around the city of Rafah, nearly a million and a half civilians are concentrated into an area roughly five miles by five, and they have nowhere else to go. Netanyahu’s sabre-rattling over Gaza represents the desperate manoeuvres of a cornered politician. He has claimed that an assault is ‘necessary’ to free the remaining Israeli hostages held by Hamas and other armed groups in Gaza, but so far the bloody assault of the IDF has been distinctly unsuccessful in freeing hostages.

Since October 7, over 32,000 Palestinians have been killed, the big majority of them non-combatants, women and children. More than twice that number have been injured. Gaza has been bombed back to the stone-age, with every facet of civilian infrastructure blown to bits, irrespective of whether or not it had any military or strategic value to the IDF.

Herding millions of terrified refugees from one corner of the Gaza Strip to another has created a  humanitarian catastrophe of unprecedented proportions and, as many have pointed out, Israel clearly seen to be using mass starvation as a weapon of war – denying food convoys access to Gaza and firing on civilians when they have surrouned those few trucks that are allowed in.

The Israeli population can do the maths

But how many Israeli hostages did all of this mayhem deliver? Three, to be exact. This is the same number as those killed by the IDF by ‘accident’ as they had tried to surrender. It is a tiny fraction of the number recovered through the temporary cease-fire last November.

The population of Israel aren’t stupid; they can do the maths, and there will be a growng awareness of exactly how little the IDF have achieved in their collective punishment of the population of Gaza. Moreover, there is the added fear that dozens more hostages may have been killed in the massive bombardments of Gaza over the past five months and there is at least a possibility that if they are being held in tunnels around Rafah, even more would be killed ‘accidentally’ by the IDF.

Guardian headline, March 22

What we are witnessing at the moment, is a fundamental re-alignment of the politics of the Middle East, a shift of tectonic proportions, not least within Israel, and a corresponding shift in the international perception of Israel. The Gaza war and its political and diplomatic fall-out are taking the decades-old policies of the state of Israel to their logical conclusion. Policies based on the complete denial of rights, economic development or even hope to the Palestinian population have been the cornerstones of Israeli government policies for decades.

Israeli politics has been driven by its right wing, personified by Netanyahu, who has been the most important Israeli politician for two decades. Israel has been shoved up a blind alley, unfortunately taking large part of the Jewish population with it. But the system of apartheid that they have been perfecting for years was never going to work, as a basis for peace or ‘security’ for Israel. In that sense, all of those foreign politicans, who have sat on their hands and said nothing as apartheid was being perfected, share a responsibility for what is happening now.

Israel tries – and fails – to minimise media coverage of Gaza

Today, every Arab leader in the Middle East – each of them looking out for their own position, power and corrupt privileges – is sitting on a volcano of massive public anger over the slaughter in Gaza. Israeli might be trying hard to minimise the coverage of its genocidal attack by targetting journalists, but reports from Al Jazeera will be beamed into homes across the Arab and the Muslim world for five months.

If US diplomats are scuttling around the Middle East by the score, from one Arab capital to another, it is not at all out of sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians – after, all, their government has been, and still is, facilitating the onslaught with its weaponry – but because they are trying to shore up the stability of rotten Arab regimes with the hope that the USA can “restrain” Israel.  

Some commentators in Israel (Haaretz for example) do not think an offensive will take place in Rafah, at least in the near future, not least because it would require a new mobilisation of reservists who have already been sent home. But if it had gone ahead, and especially  if it meant thousands of Palestinians fleeing for their safety into Egyptian territory, it would spell the end of the thirty-year-old Israel-Egypt peace deal. It could threaten another Arab Spring, a mass movement of Egyptian workers in support of Palestine.

It would threaten to engulf the whole region in mass protests. Egypt’s President Sisi knows it. The King of Jordan, whose population is half Palestinian knows it. The various kings, sheikhs and emirs in the Gulf know it. Above all, the Biden administration knows it and this explains the growing rift between the US and Israel.

Netanhayu, on the other hand, is a politician who has based his entire career on the lie of ‘security through strength’ and, besides, he is facing at some stage a trial for corruption. His personal position, therefore, renders him somewhat difficult to persuade. That is why the merciless conduct of the war in Gaza is increasingly being seen by the Israeli public and Western politicians as little more than a political strategy for the benefit of Netanyahu and his right wing coalition partners.

Netanyahu’s main war aim is his own political survival

An analysis this week in the ‘liberal’ Israeli newspaper Haaretz has the headline, Israel’s Lingering, Aimless War Is a One-way Ticket to International Isolation. Netanyahu may be “clueless” the article says, but he is “resolute about subjecting its management to his political survival”.

What is beginning to seriously worry the more sober representatives of Israeli capitalism, including the ‘liberal left’, is the the huge and unprecedented tide of world opinion that has swung against Israel over the Gaza war. “If this trend continues,” the Haaretz article continues, “Israel will cement its status as a pariah on the world stage.” The only thing wrong with this article is that it is out of date. Israel is already a pariah on the world stage.

Last week, the most prominent Jewish politician in the United States, Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Party leader of the Senate, denounced Netanyahu. It is worth quoting in full what he is reported to have said to the Senate: “If Prime Minister Netanyahu’s current coalition remains in power after the war begins to wind down, and continues to pursue dangerous and inflammatory policies that test existing US standards for assistance, then the United States will have no choice but to play a more active role in shaping Israeli policy by using our leverage to change the present course.”

It would be surprising if US politicians were not already having discussions behind the scenes with political rivals to Netanyahu, to replace him at the earliest possible date.

Even David Cameron is more critical of Israel than Starmer

One Western government after another has now called for a ceasefire in Gaza and for the free movement of humanitarian aid to the beleaguered Palestinian population. The latest is Belgium’s prime minister who has said on Thursday that EU leaders had made “extremely clear” demands about the war.

We finally have a unified position that is extremely clear,” he said. “Demanding that the violence stops right now . . . very clear that an invasion of Rafah is something that is not acceptable and a very specific demand that Hamas would release the hostages as soon as possible,”

Even the British Foreign Minister, David (now ‘Lord’) Cameron appeared to criticise Israel on social media for not allowing the free movement of humanitarian assistance, leading to a spat with an Israeli government spokesperson, Eylon Levy. Levy’s reply to Cameron was to repeat the lies being put out by other apologists for Israel.

I hope you are also aware”, Levy replied to Cameron, in a tweet on March 8 (since deleted), “there are NO limits on the entry of food, water, medicine, or shelter equipment into Gaza, and in fact the crossings have EXCESS capacity.” When the British embassy in Tel Aviv contacted Netanyahu’s office for “clarification”, Levy was promptly sacked, exposing the lies for what they were.

To their shame, among those Western politicians who are still clinging desperately to Netanyahu’s policy, there is the leadership of the Labour Party. Even within the lobby group known as the “Labour Friends of Israel”, so long parodied as the “Labour Friends of Netanyahu”, there must be serious foreboding about the dead-end into which the Israeli state has been driven. So far,

Labour’s right wing, echoing Netanyahu, have succeeded throughout the Party in an almost blanket association of any criticism of Israel with ‘antisemitism’. To be against Zionism, according to the LFI, is to be against Jews. This would be contested by the thousands of Jewish people going on marches against the obliteration of Gaza, both here and even in the US.

Tweet by the Labour Friends of Israel – associating an antizionist view with antisemitism.

Labour’s right wing are completely behind the curve of history, because huge shifts in opinon have already taken place across the globe and that momentum will continue for some time. In 1996, llegedly angered by Netanyahu’s arrogance, the then US President Bill Clinton was alleged to have asked, “Who’s the fucking superpower here?”  That little anecdote sets the tone for Israeli-US relations in the coming months and years. Things will never be the same again.

What is important for socialists to understand is that this historic divide will not be limited to diplomats and politicians. The latter, in any case, will soon get over their small quantum of ‘sympathy’ for Palestine, and the US will continue to arm Israel to make it the only military superpower in the Middle East.

But what matters for socialists is the impact on the ground and in the streets. The war in Gaza has created mass movements of tens millions of workers and youth in support of Palestinian rights. It is this political earthquake which has made the ground move under the feet of the world’s politicians, including those in the Arab world the main Western capitalist countries.

But in the same way, the political ground will shift under the feet of Israeli politicians. The Zionist project that saw the establishment of an Israeli state, with economic development and ‘security’ only at the expense of six million Palestinians, was always a hopeless chimera that would lead only to war, economic sacrifice and international approbrium.

Although beginning with a minority, the war in Gaza will eventually lead to millions of Israeli workers in reappraising not only their own interests, but the interests of ordinary Palestinian workers, and where these two can coincide.

 

Seymour Hersh: THE IRON-CLAD PIÑATA

 Putin is an enemy the West cannot topple—so why does Biden keep swinging?

Vladimir Putin at the Scientific and Practical Centre for Diagnostics and Telemedicine Technologies in Moscow on February 14. / Photo by Vyacheslav Prokofyev/POOL/AFP via Getty Images.

President Biden’s foreign policy problems in the Middle East and Ukraine are daunting, especially in an election year, but the war between Russia and Ukraine could be nearing a military endgame, and not via negotiations. Vladimir Putin’s military is more entrenched inside Ukraine than ever, and the undermanned and under-equipped Ukraine military is facing a stalemate at best and the permanent loss of four oblasts. In essence, it is a defeat. 

The Russian president’s unchallenged re-election over the weekend was a farce by democratic standards, especially coming after the death last month of the imprisoned dissident Alexei Navalny. The 77 percent turnout was the largest since the fall of the Soviet Union, and Putin won 87 percent of the vote. “It was the same process” as in earlier Russian elections, a knowledgeable American official caustically told me.  “The Russians voted that way because it was in their interest to do so. The people had to vote.”

Even amid a difficult and costly war that he initiated, Putin remains firmly in control of Russia, despite a series of Western sanctions and wishful thinking in Washington that its military expertise, weapons, and enthusiasm for the war would loosen his grip on power. Blindfolded by ideology, Biden wants the candy of regime change, but Putin has proven to be an iron-clad piñata. 

The American president keeps taking his swings. It was not surprising that Biden chose to turn to Putin and the Ukraine war at the start of his State of the Union speech on March 7. He and his foreign policy staff have put Putin’s diminishment at the top of their to-do list since taking office. He told the Congress that Russia “is on the march” and Putin’s intent is “to sow chaos throughout Europe and beyond. If anybody in this room thinks Putin will stop at Ukraine, I assure you, he will not. . . . History is watching . . . Europe is at risk.”

Yet he made it clear, without a hint of irony, that the immediate Russian threat to NATO and the unity of Western Europe were not enough to put American soldiers at risk in an election year.. “There are no American soldiers at war in Ukraine, and I am determined to keep it that way,” he said.

Or course, we journalists who have spent our lives in Washington quickly learn that political words have no meaning, and it’s what Biden did not say that’s important.

It is understood throughout the American intelligence community that Ukraine has little chance of winning the war. Its major counteroffensive of last year has failed, the army is depleted and short of ammunition, and military experts here have predicted that Putin will move to tighten his control over eastern Ukraine and the four border oblasts he has seized by moving to take Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, about twenty miles from the Russian border. Ukraine weathered Russian attacks on Kharkiv early in the war and finally took control of the city after successful 2022 counteroffensives. It has clung to shaky hold on it in the months since.

Kharkiv, founded in the 17th century, has special standing in Ukraine and Russia as the scene of four brutal back-and-forth battles against one of Germany’s last remaining intact tank divisions in World War II. Germany won the final battle in 1943, but it would be the last significant victory of its exhausted army in the war. The city is now seen as vulnerable to a renewed Russian attack.

In a post-election interview last Friday, Putin restated his conditions for peace talks with the Ukraine government headed by President Volodymyr Zelensky. “For us to hold negotiations now just because they [the Ukraine military] are running out of ammunition would be ridiculous,” he told a friendly Russian television journalist. “Nevertheless, we are open to a serious discussion and we are eager to solve all conflicts, especially this one, by peaceful means.

“Are we ready to negotiate? We sure are,” he said, “but we are definitely not ready for talks that are based on some kind of ‘wishful thinking’ which comes after the use of psychotropic drugs, but we are ready for talks based on the realities that have developed, as they are in such cases, on the ground.”

The American official, who is kept abreast of the ongoing talks between leaders of the two armies at war, said that officials of the Biden administration, working with Zelensky, continue to rebuff any chances of significant progress in peace talks. The reality, he said, is “that the lands in dispute”—four oblasts formerly in Ukraine’s control and Crimea—“from north to south and east to west all are Russia’s. So stop talking about it and make a deal.” Right now, “Putin could drive to Lviv”—near the border with Poland in western Ukraine—“but what would he gain in terms of his current dominance? US vacillation and peace at home? He wants Kharkiv, and he will get it when he forces Zalensky to capitulate. 

“We were on the verge of a reasonable negotiation several months ago before Putin’s re-election and Zelensky’s military degradation. The US leaders got wind of the possibility and gave Zelensky the ultimatum—‘No negotiations or settlement or we won’t support your government with the $45 billion in non-military funds [that Ukraine is now receiving annually]. Biden has staked his presidency on meeting the Russian threat to NATO and outsmarting the monster, and he will not change course now, under any circumstances, and the end is inevitable. There is no road to victory for Ukraine, and it will end with Putin as an historical icon in Russia, having recovered a national jewel [Kharkiv] from the West.” 

Adding to the chaos is the ineffectiveness of US sanctions in deterring Putin from his war plans. Last week the Economist summarized the extent of the failure. “Russia’s economy has been re-engineered. Oil exports bypass sanctions and are shipped to the global south. Western brands from BMW to H&M have been replaced with Chinese and local substitutes. . . . Dissent at home has been strangled.” 

No friend of Russia, the magazine added a warning drawn from Great Britain’s experience of the Cold War: “Russia’s ability to hobble the global institutions established after 1945, not least the UN Security Council, should not be underestimated. It has morphed into a nihilist and unpredictable foe of the liberal world order, bent on disruption and sabotage. It is like North Korea or Iran on steroids, armed with thousands of nuclear warheads.”

This is the world the Biden administration fostered. Its refusal to seek a middle ground in the Ukraine war, along with its inability to check Israel’s continued assault in Gaza, will become a political liability in Biden’s campaign against Donald Trump, who warns of unending violence if he loses the presidential election in November.

The best that Biden has come up with is continued, if so far empty, talk about a ceasefire in Gaza, and a commitment that no American soldiers will be sent to the front in Ukraine. The president also promises that the United States will keep on paying for Ukrainians to fight and die in a proxy war that could be ended.