Humanity doesn’t just need to escape from the mental prison of imperial indoctrination. It needs to escape from the heart prison as well.
I’m always talking here about the need to fight empire propaganda to help the public awaken to the fact that everything we’ve been trained to believe about the world is a lie, because that insight taking root in sufficient numbers would be the first step toward the revolutionary changes our world so desperately needs.
But large numbers of people opening their eyes to the reality of mass-scale psychological manipulation by the powerful would by itself be insufficient, because people need not only to see the truth — they also need to care.
Realizing the depravity and immense human suffering the US-centralized empire is responsible for creates an opportunity to respond to this insight with horror and begin resisting it — but it is only an opportunity. At that juncture it’s still possible for someone to realize that we’re not being told the truth about what’s happening in the world, but decide to play along with the lies anyway, either because the existing world order has made them wealthy, or because they are too indoctrinated with support for western power structures, or because they ideologically support Israel, or because they’re afraid of the changes and upheaval that would come with an overturning of the status quo, or because they are intellectually and morally lazy, or some other selfish reason.
Realizing that you’ve been indoctrinated into accepting a pernicious status quo unlocks an important door within yourself, but just because that door is opened doesn’t mean you have to walk through it. Walking through it requires another kind of awakening — an awakening of the heart.
Really no amount of knowledge or intellectual insight will ever set us free as a species in and of itself. You could upload the sum total of human knowledge into the brain of everyone on earth — including even government secrets that aren’t public knowledge — but unless this is accompanied by a collective opening of the heart, it wouldn’t make any difference. Unless people can find it within themselves to care deeply about the horrific things our rulers have been doing to our fellow human beings, no amount of knowledge about those things will catalyze real change.
And there are plenty of people who know but don’t care. The most powerful government agencies in the world are run by people who know terrible secrets about our ruling power structures that we ordinary members of the public are not allowed to know, but because their loyalty is to the empire and not to humanity, they don’t care about the moral implications of what they know or the human suffering the empire is responsible for.
So the demand of this moment in history is not just to understand, but to care. Not just to know what’s wrong with the world, but to feel it. Not just to awaken on the level of the head, but to awaken on the level of the heart as well. Not just to value our own personal understanding, but to value humanity as a whole.
Knowledge of the truth can lead to a profound compassion for the victims of the globe-spanning power structure which rules over us and a determination to oppose its cruelty — that’s why said power structure pours so much energy into keeping everyone propagandized. But it doesn’t necessarily need to lead to such compassion. The light of truth can stop its expansion at the gates of the heart, unless there’s some willingness from somewhere deep inside us to throw those gates open.
Ultimately humanity just needs to wake up, on every level. We need to liberate ourselves from the shackles of propaganda. We need to liberate ourselves from the shackles on our hearts. We need to liberate ourselves from the shackles of the ego. We need to liberate ourselves from the shackles of the dualistic perspective which obfuscates the oneness of all of reality from our vision.
That’s what’s being asked of us at this juncture. To wake all the way up and become a conscious species. That’s the only way we’ll ever be able to move about on this planet in a healthy and harmonious way.
And we’ll either rise to the occasion or we won’t. We’ll either wake up, or we’ll destroy ourselves. I believe we have the freedom as a species to go either way.
Of the many awful warmonger comments President Biden made in his State of the Union address Thursday night, arguably the worst was when he reiterated the US empire’s position that it is fine and good for the IDF to keep murdering Gazan civilians until Hamas bows to all of Israel’s demands.
Biden did this by lamenting the “heartbreaking” death and starvation of civilians in Gaza while in the same breath stating that Hamas could end all of this violence by laying down arms and surrendering those responsible for the October 7 attack.
“Israel has a right to go after Hamas,” Biden said. “Hamas ended this conflict by releasing the hostages, laying down arms — could end it by — by releasing the hostages, laying down arms, and surrendering those responsible for October 7th.”
“This war has taken a greater toll on innocent civilians than all previous wars in Gaza combined,” Biden went on to say. “More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, most of whom are not Hamas. Thousands and thousands of innocents — women and children. Girls and boys also orphaned. Nearly 2 million more Palestinians under bombardment or displacement. Homes destroyed, neighborhoods in rubble, cities in ruin. Families without food, water, medicine.”
“It’s heartbreaking,” added Biden, referring to the genocide that he himself is actively backing and could choose to end at any time.
(Democrats love babbling about how “heartbreaking” Gaza is. It’s their favorite thing to do. They love nothing more than to weep publicly over the death and starvation and unfathomable human suffering they themselves are directly responsible for, as though it’s some kind of natural disaster and not a US-backed genocide that is only happening because this Democrat-run administration actively facilitates it.)
We don’t talk enough about how horrifyingly evil it is that the actual, stated position of Israel and its immensely powerful allies is that all of the killing and starvation of Palestinian civilians in Gaza is entirely the fault of Hamas, because Hamas has not acquiesced to the military demands made by Israel. In effect, it is saying “We will kill thousands and thousands of children until you give us everything we want.”
I mean, imagine if Russia did that. Imagine if Putin started raining military explosives on parts of Ukraine known to be densely packed with children, and then saying the mass-scale child-killing will continue until Ukraine surrenders and that all of the child deaths are actually the fault of the Ukrainians because they still haven’t given Putin everything he wants.
I think we all know that if such a thing were to happen it would be the subject of worldwide condemnation, and justifiably so. Such a tactic is not meaningfully different from lining up children on their knees on the battlefield and shooting them one by one in the back of the head until the enemy unconditionally surrenders.
They’re not just doing this with airstrikes and bullets — they’re doing it with food as well. Aaron Maté has a new article out titled “The Biden doctrine in Gaza: bomb, starve, deceive” which picks apart statements from White House officials about the temporary pier this administration is planning to build on Gaza’s coast over the next several weeks, ostensibly to allow for the arrival of more aid into the enclave………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Maté explains that Vice President Kamala Harris recently gave a speech in which she said Hamas needs to agree to a hostage deal in order to “get a significant amount of aid in,” which is the same as saying Israel and its allies will help starve Gazan civilians until Hamas capitulates to their demands.
“The very fact that the delivery of ‘a significant amount’ of aid is conditional on Hamas accepting Israeli demands underscores that Israel, with US backing, is using that aid as a tool of coercion,” Maté writes, noting that this directly contradicts Biden’s admonishment to Israeli leaders in his State of the Union address that “Humanitarian assistance cannot be a secondary consideration or a bargaining chip.”
Washington’s role in the mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza makes a lot more sense when you stop looking at it as a reluctant passive witness to Israel’s crimes and begin viewing it as an active participant. US officials will occasionally wag their fingers at the Netanyahu government and act like Israel’s worst atrocities are being carried out against the beneficent humanitarian wishes of the United States, but if you mentally mute all the narrative spin that’s being placed on this thing you just see a giant concentration camp packed full of children being murdered at mass scale by the most powerful empire that has ever existed.https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/saying-hamas-just-needs-to-surrender
the conjectured deployment of NATO troops in Ukraine – would provoke a military response from Moscow. The extreme risks of the ensuing hostilities spiraling out of control to the nuclear threshold are self-evident.
The West has set itself on a path of collective suicide — both moral and economic
Western leaders are experiencing two stunning events: defeat in Ukraine, genocide in Palestine. The first is humiliating, the other shameful. Yet, they feel no humiliation or shame. Their actions show vividly that those sentiments are alien to them – unable to penetrate the entrenched barriers of dogma, arrogance and deep-seated insecurities. The last are personal as well as political. Therein lies a puzzle. For, as a consequence, the West has set itself on a path of collective suicide. Moral suicide in Gaza; diplomatic suicide – the foundations laid in Europe, the Middle East and across Eurasia; economic suicide – the dollar-based global financial system jeopardized, Europe deindustrializing. It is not a pretty picture. Astoundingly, this self-destruction is occurring in the absence of any major trauma – external or internal. Therein lies another, related puzzle.
Some clues for these abnormalities are provided by their most recent responses as deteriorating conditions tighten the vise – on emotions, on prevailing policies, on domestic political worries, on ginger egos. Those responses fall under the category of panic behavior. Deep down, they are scared, fearful and agitated. Biden et al in Washington, Macron, Schulz, Sunak, Stoltenberg, von der Leyen. They lack the courage of their stated convictions or the courage to face reality squarely. The blunt truth is that they have contrived to get themselves, and their countries, in a quandary from which there is no escape conforming to their current self-defined interests and emotional engagement. Hence, we observe an array of reactions that are feckless, grotesque and dangerous.
Feckless
Exhibit 1 is French President Emmanuel Macon’s proposed plan to station military personnel from NATO members within Ukraine to serve as a tripwire. Arrayed as a cordon around Kharkov, Odessa and Kiev they are meant to deter advancing Russian forces from moving on those cities for fear of killing Western soldiers – thereby risking a direct confrontation with the Alliance. It is a highly dubious idea that defies logic and experience while tempting fate. France long has deployed members of its armed forces in Ukraine where they programed and operated sophisticated equipment – in particular, the SCALP cruise missiles. Scores were killed by a Russian retaliatory strike a few months ago that destroyed their residence. Paris cried ‘holy murder’ for Moscow’s unsporting conduct in shooting back at those attacking them. It was retaliation for the French participation in the deadly bombing of the Russian city of Belgorod. Why then should we expect that the Kremlin would abandon a costly campaign involving what they see as vital national interests if uniformed Western troops were deployed in a picket line around cities? Would they be intimated into passivity by spiffy uniforms assembled under outsized banners inscribed with the slogan: “DON’T MESS WITH NATO”?
Moreover, there already are thousands of Westerners bolstering the Ukrainian armed forces. Roughly 4 – 5,000 Americans have been performing critical operational functions from the outset. The presence of a majority predates by several years the onset of hostilities 2 years ago. That contingent was augmented by a supplementary group of 1,700 last summer which was as a corps of logistic experts advertised as mandated to seek out and eradicate corruption in the black-marketing of pilfered supplies. The Pentagon people are sown thought the Ukrainian military from headquarters planning units, to advisers in the field, to technicians and Special Forces.
It is widely understood that Americans have operated the sophisticated HIMARS long-range artillery and the Patriot air defense batteries. This last means that members of the U.S. military have been aiming – perhaps pulling the trigger on – weapons that kill Russians. In addition, the CIA has established a massive, multipurpose system able to conduct a wide range of Intelligence and operational activities- independently as well as in conjunction with the Ukrainian FSB. That includes tactical Intelligence on a day-by-day basis. We don’t know whether they had a role in the campaign of targeted assassinations inside Russia.
A critical role also has been played by Britain. Their specialized personnel have been operating the Storm Shadow missiles (counterpart to the French SCALP) employed against Crimea and elsewhere. Too, MI-6 has taken a lead role in designing multiple attacks on the Kerch Bridge and other critical infrastructure. The principal lesson to be drawn from this overview is that the positioning of European troops at key sites as human hostages in not wholly original. Their presence has not deterred Russia from attacking them in the field or, as in the French case, hunting them down in their residences.
Feckless: Exhibit 2 is the American airdrop of a paltry load of humanitarian aid in the sea off of Gaza. This bizarre action overlaps the silly and the grotesque. The United States has been the major accomplice in the Israeli ravaging of Gaza. Its weapons have killed 30,000 Gazans, wounded 70,000+, and devastated hospitals. Washington has actively blocked any serious attempt at aid by the UNWRO in withholding the funds necessary to finance its operations, while staying silent as Israel blocks entry points from Egypt and massacres residents awaiting the arrival of a food convoy. Furthermore, it has vetoed every attempt to end the carnage through ceasefire resolutions of the UN Security Council. This absurd gesture of kicking pallets out an airplane hatch simply underscores American disregard for Palestinian lives, its contempt for world opinion and its shameless subjugation to dictates from Israel.
Feckless: Exhibit 3 is provided by Rishi (Sage) Sunak, interim Prime Minister of the U.K. An ardent backer of Israel, he consistently has criticized Peace demonstrations protesting the assault on Gazans as obstacles to achieving a long-term ceasefire and political settlement. In this, he continues the long tradition of British fealty to its American overlord. Last week, he escalated the attack in denouncing them as tools of Hamas who have been taken over by terrorists – terrorists who threaten to tear the country apart. He likened it to ‘mob rule’ – as punctuated by the electoral victory of maverick George Galloway who crushed the Tories (and Labour) in a by-election. No evidence, of course, as to how half a million peaceable citizens are a Trojan horse for Muslim jihadis. This fecklessness is recognizable for those familiar with the haughty manner cultivated by the English upper crust – infecting even an arriviste in those exalted circles whose origins were in the Indian Raj. Condescension toward the lower ranks, instruction as to where the boundaries of acceptable behavior lie. That attitude often is laced with cute disparagements of groups or nationalities that don’t conform. The fact that Sunak himself is unabashed at now making snide accusations – however implied – about Muslims demonstrates the durability of cultural prejudices along with the historical openness of England’s upper class to those with money or cachet. These days, even a rishi. I suppose that’s social progress.
The dangerous element in Sunak’s unbecoming demagoguery is not its aggravating effect on the West’s culpability in the Palestine. The regional protagonists, as well as the rest of the world, smile at Britain’s grand rhetorical flourishes knowing that it counts only as America’s Tonto. Rather, it opens a breach in the country’s dedication to free speech and assembly. For it comes close to saying that any public disagreement with HMG’s policy is tantamount to treason.
Grotesque
Insofar as violent ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians is concerned, it is fair to say that the Western governments’ complicity via its arming and unqualified backing for Israel’s gruesome actions constitutes grotesque behavior. To single out individual elements among individual governments is superfluous. The entire episode is grotesque. So it is seen by nearly the entire world outside the countries of the collective West. That represents about 2/3 of humanity. Still, our nations’ political elites appear oblivious and/or disdainful of that judgment. It matters little to them that they are seen by the ‘others’ as inhumane, arch hypocrites and racists. Those strong impressions are reinforced in many places by traumatic memories of how they themselves were subjugated, trodden upon and exploited over the centuries by people who righteously instructed them on the superiority of Western values – just as they do today.
There are actions that manifestly represent a clear and future danger of an expanding war in Europe. Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s belligerent Secretary-General, boldly stated last week that the Western allies should give Ukraine the green light to use the cruise missiles they have acquired to attack targets in Russia proper. Those weapons include the Storm Shadow, the Scalp, the long-range Tauras that Germany may soon dispatch and similar hardware to be provided by the U.S. (perhaps launched from the F-16s already arriving). Such a drastic move has been hinted at by other Western leaders, and pushed by hardline factions in Washington. Putin has warned that such escalation by the West – as with the conjectured deployment of NATO troops in Ukraine – would provoke a military response from Moscow. The extreme risks of the ensuing hostilities spiraling out of control to the nuclear threshold are self-evident.
Taken together, the actions by Western leaders – supported by their nations’ political elites – are indicative of a behavior pattern that has parted ways with reality. They derive deductively from dogmas unsubstantiated by objective fact. They are logically self-contradictory, impervious to events that shift the landscape, and radically unbalanced in weighting benefits/costs/risks and probabilities of success. How do we explain this ‘irrationality’? There are background conditions that are permissive or encouraging of this flight from sound reasoning. They include: the nihilistic socio-cultural trends in our contemporary post-modern societies; their susceptibility to collective hysteria/overwrought emotional reactions to unsettling events – 9/11, Islamic terrorism, the fable about Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election among other political matters, the conjuring of the menacing Chinese dragon, scary predictions of inevitable war with the PRC, outlandish claims that Putin is planning to launch an all-out campaign to conquer Europe up to the English Channel.
The last two are fed by the free-floating anxieties, i.e. dread, engendered by the earlier bouts of mass psychopathology. Those allegations, in fact pure fictions, have gained currency among senior military figures, heads of government, and among strategic ‘thinkers.’
Back to the ingredients of panic. We noted fear – of both the identifiable and the unknown, and sub-conscious feelings of insecurity. Those feelings derive from a matrix of disorienting shifts in the global environment inhabited by Western societies. They, in turn, grow in reciprocation with unsetting domestic developments. The outcome is two-fold: a stultifying of any reasonable debate about dubious policies – leaving premises and purposes untested, and opening opportunities for willful persons or factions who harbor audacious objectives of remaking the world’s geo-political space according to American hegemonic specifications. To that end, our leaders manipulate and exploit conditions of emotional disorientation and political conformity. The outstanding example are the so-called ‘neo-cons’ in Washington (who number Joe Biden as a comrade-in-arms) who have crafted a network of like-minded true believers in London, Paris, Berlin and at both ends of Brussels.
What of the puzzle we noted as to the near complete absence of feelings of guilt or shame – especially over Gaza, of being humiliated in the eyes of the world? In conditions of nihilism, matters of conscience are moot. For the implicit rejection of norms, rules and laws frees the individual self to do whatever impulses or ideas or selfish interests impel it. With the superego dissolved, there is no felt obligation to judge oneself in reference to any external or abstract standard. Narcissistic tendencies flourish. A similar psychology obviates the requirement for experiencing shame. That is something that can only exist if we subjectively are part of a social grouping wherein personal status, and sense of worth, depend on how others view us and whether they grant us respect. In the absence of such a communal identity, with its attendant sensitivity to its opinion, shame can exist only in the perverse form of regret that one has been unable to meet the demanding, all-consuming need for self-gratification. That applies to nations as well as its individual leaders.
“We have a situation where the US is airdropping aid on day one, and Israel is dropping bombs on day two. And the American taxpayer is paying for the aid and the bombs.”
The spectacle, if it did not say it all, said much of it. Planes dropping humanitarian aid to a starving, famine-threatened populace of Gaza (the United Nations warnsthat 576,000 are “one step from famine”), with parachuted packages veering off course, some falling into the sea. Cargo also coming into Israel, with bullets, weaponry and other ordnance to kill those in Gaza on the inflated premise of self-defence. Be it aid or bullets, Washington is the smorgasbord supplier, ensuring that both victims and oppressors are furnished from its vast commissary.
This jarring picture, discordant and hopelessly at odds, is increasingly running down the low stocks of credibility US diplomats have in either the Israel-Hamas conflict, or much else in Middle Eastern politics. Comments such as thesefrom US Vice President Kamala Harris from March 3, made at Selma in Alabama, illustrate the problem: “As I have said many times, too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. And just a few days ago, we saw hungry, desperate people approach aid trucks, simply trying to secure food for their families after weeks of nearly no aid reaching Northern Gaza. And they were met with gunfire and chaos.”
Harris goes on to speak of broken hearts for the victims, for the innocents, for those “suffering from what is clearly a humanitarian catastrophe.” A forced, hammed up moral register is struck. “People in Gaza are starving. The conditions are inhumane. And our common humanity compels us to act.”
It was an occasion for the Vice President to mention that the US Department of Defense had “carried out its first airdrop of humanitarian assistance, and the United States will continue with these airdrops.” Further work would also be expended on getting “a new route by sea to deliver aid.
It is only at this point that Harris introduces the lumbering elephant in the room: “And the Israeli government must do more to significantly increase the flow of aid. No excuses.” They had to “open new border crossings”, “not impose any unnecessary restrictions on the delivery of aid” and “ensure humanitarian personnel, sites, and convoys are not targeted.” Basic services had to be restored, and order promoted in the strip “so more food, water, and fuel can reach those in need.”
In remarks made at Hagerstown Regional Airport in Maryland, President Joe Biden toldreporters that he was “working with them [the Israelis] very hard. We’re going to get more – we must get more aid into Gaza. There’s no excuses. None.”
In a New Yorkerinterview, White House National Security spokesman John Kirby keeps to the same script, claiming that discussions with the Israelis “in private are frank and very forthright. I think they understand our concerns.” Kirby proceeds to fantasise, fudging the almost sneering attitude adopted by Israel towards US demands. “Even though there needs to be more aid, and even though there needs to be fewer civilian casualties, the Israelis have, in many ways, been receptive to our messages.”
The other side of this rusted coin of US policy advocates something less than human. The common humanity there is tethered to aiding the very power that is proving instrumental in creating conditions of catastrophe. The right to self-defence is reiterated as a chant, including the war goals of Israel which have artificially drawn a distinction between Hamas military and political operatives from that of the Palestinian population being eradicated.
Harris isalways careful to couple any reproachful remarks about Israel with an acceptance of their stated policy: that Hamas must be eliminated. Hamas, rather than being a protean force running on the fumes of history, resentment and belief, was merely “a brutal terrorist organization that has vowed to repeat October 7th again and again until Israel is annihilated.” It had inflicted suffering on the people of Gaza and continued to hold Israeli hostages.
Whatever note of rebuke directed against the Netanyahu government, it is clear that Israel knows how far it can go. It can continue to rely on the US veto in the UN Security Council. It can dictate the extent of aid and the conditions of its delivery into Gaza, which is merely seen as succour for an enemy it is trying to crush. While alarm about shooting desperate individuals crowding aid convoys will be noted, little will come of the consternation. The very fact that the US Airforce has been brought into the program of aid delivery suggests an ignominious capitulation, a very public impotence.
Jeremy Konyndyk, former chief of the USAID’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance during the Obama administration gives his unflattering judgment on this point. “When the US government has to use tactics that it otherwise used to circumvent the Soviets and Berlin and circumvent ISIS in Syria and Iraq, that should prompt some really hard questions about the state of US policy.”
In his remarks to The Independent, Konyndyk finds the airdrop method “the most expensive and least effective way to get aid to a population. We almost never did it because it is such an in-extremis tool.” Even more disturbing for him was the fact that this woefully imperfect approach was being taken to alleviate the suffering caused by an ally of the United States, one that had made “a policy choice” in not permitting “consistent humanitarian access” and the opening of border crossings.
Even as this in extremis tool is being used, US made military hardware continues to be used at will by the Israel Defence Forces. The pointwas not missedon Vermont Democratic Senator Peter Welch: “We have a situation where the US is airdropping aid on day one, and Israel is dropping bombs on day two. And the American taxpayer is paying for the aid and the bombs.”
The chroniclers of history can surely only jot down with grim irony instances where desperate, hunger-crazed Palestinians scrounging for US aid are shot by made-in-USA ammunition.
If the US authorities succeed in convicting a journalist for exposing war crimes, this would have another serious consequence. In the future, it would become even more difficult and dangerous to expose the sordid reality of wars,
How US and British authorities are bending the law and undermining press freedom
“Those who tell the truth need a fast horse,” says an Armenian proverb. Or they need a society that protects the truth and its messengers. But this protection, which our democracies claim to offer, is in danger. As a journalist, Julian Assange has published hundreds of thousands of files documenting war crimes committed by the USA and its allies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo and elsewhere. The authenticity of the documents is beyond question. However, none of the perpetrators have been brought to justice or convicted. In contrast, the messenger has been incarcerated in a high-security prison in London for five years with life-threatening health problems, having previously spent seven years locked up in the Ecuadorian embassy. He has been charged with no crime in the UK, in any EU country or in his home country of Australia. The only reason for his grueling deprivation of liberty is that the US government has initiated extradition proceedings accusing the journalist Assange of espionage, invoking a law dating back more than a hundred years to the First World War: the Espionage Act.
Never before has a journalist been charged under this law. The extradition process therefore sets a dangerous precedent. If it is successful, every journalist on Earth who exposes US war crimes would have to fear suffering the same fate as Assange. That would be the end of freedom of the press as we know it. Because it is based on the capacity to bring to light the dark sides of power without fear of punishment. Where this freedom is extinguished, it is not only the freedom of journalists that dies, but the freedom of us all: the freedom from the arbitrariness of power.
For this reason alone, this extradition process should never have been accepted by the courts in a functioning legal system. Julian Assange did not act as a spy in any way, but as a journalist and as such is subject to special protection. Incidentally, the key witness for the espionage charge was the notorious fraudster and convicted paedophile Sigurdur Ingi Thordarson, who admitted in 2021 that he had lied on behalf of the FBI and had been granted immunity from prosecution.
Let us imagine the case with reversed roles: Suppose an Australian journalist had published war crimes committed by the Russian military and intelligence services and sought protection in a Western European country. Would the courts seriously consider extradition proceedings to Moscow for espionage, especially if the key witness is a convicted criminal?
Assange is facing the absurd sentence of 175 years in the USA. It is to be feared that he will not survive the extremely harsh conditions in the notorious US prison system. For this reason, the London Magistrates’ Court initially halted his extradition in 2021. The US government then published a paper stating that Assange would not face solitary confinement. However, according to Amnesty International, this declaration is “not worth the paper it is written on”, as the non-binding diplomatic note reserves the right for the US government to change its position at any time. The Court of Appeal, however, found this paper sufficient to clear the way for extradition – a travesty of justice, as Amnesty noted.
The hearings, which took place on February 20 and 21 at the High Court in London and whose verdict is expected in March, are the last opportunity for Assange to obtain an appeal against this extradition decision. However, there is a high risk that the law will once again be turned on its head. As the investigative platform Declassified UK reports, one of the two judges, Jeremy Johnson, previously worked for the British secret service MI6, which is closely intertwined with the CIA and whose illegal activities came to public attention through the work of Julian Assange.
For Julian Assange, the trial itself has already become a punishment. Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, concluded after detailed investigations that Assange had been subjected to systematic psychological torture for years. The fact that the US was prepared to go even further came to light in September of the same year: according to reports in the Guardian, senior intelligence officials, including the then head of the CIA and later Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, planned to kidnap and murder Assange in 2017.[v]
The background:
Wikileaks had published documents that year that became known as “Vault 7”. They show the CIA’s massive activities in the field of cyber warfare and prove how the secret service systematically and comprehensively intervenes in web browsers, IT systems in cars, smart TVs and smartphones, even when they are switched off. This was one of the most sensational revelations by Wikileaks since the leaks by Edward Snowden, who uncovered the massive illegal surveillance by the NSA. The CIA was not to forgive Assange for this coup and subsequently classified Wikileaks as a “non-state hostile intelligence service” – a momentous neologism that allowed journalists to be declared enemies of the state. After Pompeo became Secretary of State in 2018, the US government initiated the extradition proceedings. This move replaced Pompeo’s original kidnapping and killing plan, with the goal remaining the same: the destruction of an inconvenient journalist.
The revelations of whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning and journalists such as Julian Assange have shown that in the shadow of the so-called war on terror, a vast parallel universe has emerged in recent decades that is obsessed with the illegal spying on its own citizens and the arbitrary imprisonment, torture and killing of political opponents. This world is largely beyond democratic control, indeed it is undermining the democratic order from within.
However, this development is not entirely new. In 1971, leaks revealed a secret FBI program for spying on, infiltrating and disrupting civil rights and anti-war movements, which became known as COINTELPRO. In the same year, the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers leaked by whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, which showed that four successive US administrations had systematically lied to their citizens about the extent and motives of the Vietnam War and the massive war crimes committed by the US military. In 1974, Seymour Hersh revealed the CIA’s secret programs to assassinate foreign heads of state and the covert operation to spy on hundreds of thousands of opponents of the war, which ran under the code name “Operation CHAOS”. Driven by these reports, the US Congress convened in 1975 the Church Committee, which carried out a comprehensive review of the secret operations and led to greater parliamentary control of the services.
Julian Assange is part of this venerable journalistic tradition and has made a decisive contribution to its renewed flourishing. However, there is one important difference to the 1970s: Today, the most important investigative journalist of his generation is openly persecuted, criminalized and deprived of his freedom. When states declare the investigation of crimes to be a crime itself, society enters a dangerous downward spiral, at the end of which new forms of totalitarian rule can emerge. As early as 2012, Assange remarked, at the time with regard to the increasingly comprehensive surveillance technologies: “We have all the ingredients for a turnkey totalitarian state”.
If the US authorities succeed in convicting a journalist for exposing war crimes, this would have another serious consequence. In the future, it would become even more difficult and dangerous to expose the sordid reality of wars, especially those wars that Western governments like to sell as civilizing missions with the help of embedded journalists. If we do not learn the truth about these wars, it becomes much easier to wage them. Truth is the most important instrument of peace.
Julian Assange has not yet been extradited and sentenced. Over the years, a remarkable international movement has formed for his release and the defense of press freedom. Many parliamentarians around the world are also raising their voices. The Australian parliament, for example, supported by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, passed a resolution by a large majority calling for Assange’s release. A group of over 80 members of the German parliament have joined in. However, the German government is still refusing to exert any serious pressure on Joe Biden’s government, which continues to persecute Assange. German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, who as the Green Party’s candidate for chancellor had spoken out in favor of freeing Assange, has persistently avoided questions on the subject since joining the government. Her ministry has left questions from MPs about the case unanswered for months, only to then make elusive rhetorical excuses. The leading politicians of the governing German coalition, who like to loudly present themselves as the guardians of democracy and the rule of law, must finally take action in this case of political justice and unequivocally demand the release of Julian Assange before it is too late. However, this would require overcoming the cowering attitude towards the godfather in Washington and actually standing up for the much-vaunted values of democracy.
Plan Dalet was the blueprint used by the ..Israeli army… to expel Palestinians from their homeland during Israel’s establishment in 1948. As…Israeli historian Benny Morris noted in his landmark book on the events of 1948, Plan Dalet was “a strategic-ideological anchor and basis for expulsions by front, district, brigade and battalion commanders”… Today, this act of mass expulsion would be called ethnic cleansing.
It must be clear that there is no room in the country for both peoples…. If the Arabs leave it, the country will become wide and spacious for us…. The only solution is a Land of Israel…without Arabs. There is no room here for compromises… Yosef Weitz (1890-1972) former director of the Jewish National Fund’s Land Settlement Department.
The IDF’s recent airstrikes on civilian areas in Rafah mark the beginning of the final phase of Israel’s massive ethnic cleansing project. On Monday, Israel bombed a number of locations where Palestinian refugees were huddled in tents after fleeing Israel’s onslaught in the North. Videos of the destruction appeared on a number of Twitter-sites which showed a deeply-cratered wasteland in the middle of makeshift encampments. Not surprisingly, women and children made up the bulk of the casualties with no evidence of Hamas to be found anywhere. According to a witness at the site, body parts and carnage were strewn across the landscape. This is from an article at the World Socialist Web Site:
Israel launched a massive aerial bombardment of Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza, on Sunday night into Monday morning, killing over 100 people. As the sun came up, the world was horrified by images of the mangled bodies of children, in a chilling demonstration of what is to come in the weeks ahead.
Over the weekend, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged to carry out a full-scale military onslaught against the besieged city, declaring, “Our goal … is total victory.” For the Israeli regime, “total victory” means killing as many Palestinians as possible and driving the rest from their homes. With a green light from Biden, Israel commencing Rafah massacre, World Socialist Web Site.
Israeli spokesmen and members of the western media provided the perfunctory justification for Monday’s attacks by reiterating the fiction that Israel is trying to eradicate Hamas. What is obscured by this obvious deception is the fact that the basic plan for expelling the Arab population from their native land dates back to the origins of the Jewish state. Indeed, the founder of the modern Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), wrote the following:
“We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country… expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”
This same line of reasoning has persisted through the decades although today’s Zionists tend to express themselves more brashly and with less restraint. Take, for example, popular conservative pundit Ben Shapiro who presented his views in an article titled “Transfer is Not a Dirty Word”. Here’s what he said:
If you believe that the Jewish state has a right to exist, then you must allow Israel to transfer the Palestinians and the Israeli-Arabs from Judea, Samaria, Gaza and Israel proper. It’s an ugly solution, but it is the only solution. And it is far less ugly than the prospect of bloody conflict ad infinitum….
The Jews don’t realize that expelling a hostile population is a commonly used and generally effective way of preventing violent entanglements. There are no gas chambers here. It’s not genocide; it’s transfer….
It’s time to stop being squeamish. Jews are not Nazis. Transfer is not genocide. And anything else isn’t a solution. Transfer is Not a Dirty Word, Narkive
“Squeamish”? Shapiro thinks that anyone who recognizes the appalling moral horror of driving people off their land and forcing them into refugee camps is squeamish?
This is the essence of political Zionism and it dates back to the very beginning of the Jewish state. So, when critics claim that Netanyahu has assembled the “most right-wing government in Israel’s history”, don’t believe them. Netanyahu is no better or worse than his predecessors. The only Prime Minister who veered even slightly from this ‘iron law’ of Zionism, was Yitzhak Rabin who was (predictably) assassinated by an opponent of Oslo. What does that tell you?
It tells you there was never going to be a “two-state” solution; it was a charade from the get-go. And (as Netanyahu intimated recently) Israeli leaders merely played along with the hoax in order to buy-time to prepare for the solution that is being imposed today.
Have you ever wondered why so many Israelis support Netanyahu’s murderous rampage in Gaza?
Hint) It’s not because Israeli Jews are homicidal maniacs. No. It’s because they know what he is doing. They’re not taken-in by the “Hamas” diversion, that is merely propaganda pablum for the West. They know that Netanyahu is implementing a plan to seize all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. And, in doing so, he is achieving the territorial ambitions of his Zionist ancestors. So, even though the majority of Israelis despise Netanyahu and think he should be prosecuted for corruption, they are willing to look the other way while he does their bidding.
What onlookers need to realize is that the current strategy is not new at all, in fact, it has a 75 year-long pedigree that aligns with the demographic objectives of the Zionist leadership.
None of this of course has anything to do with Hamas which is merely the pretext for the eradication of the indigenous people. What we are seeing is the actualization of the Zionist dream, the modern version of Plan Dalet, the original roadmap for ethnic cleaning that was drawn up in 1948.
So, what is Plan Dalet?
Plan Dalet was the blueprint used by the ..Israeli army… to expel Palestinians from their homeland during Israel’s establishment in 1948. As…Israeli historian Benny Morris noted in his landmark book on the events of 1948, Plan Dalet was “a strategic-ideological anchor and basis for expulsions by front, district, brigade and battalion commanders”… Today, this act of mass expulsion would be called ethnic cleansing.
Officially adopted on March 10, 1948, Plan Dalet specified which Palestinian cities and towns would be targeted and gave instructions for how to drive out their inhabitants and destroy their communities. It called for:
“Destruction of villages… especially those population centers which are difficult to control continuously… the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state.”
Three quarters of all Palestinians, about 750,000 people, were forced from their homes and made refugees during Israel’s establishment. Their homes, land, and other belongings were systematically destroyed or taken over by Israelis, while they were denied the right to return or any sort of compensation. More than 400 Palestinian towns and villages, including vibrant urban centers, were destroyed or repopulated with Jewish Israelis.” Plan Dalet & The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,IMEU
So, what have we seen over the last four months?
We’ve seen the terrorizing of an entire population that has experienced relentless bombing, destruction of vital infrastructure, a full blockade of food, water and medical supplies, and a mass exodus to the southernmost city in Gaza at gunpoint.
Is this not Plan Dalet?
It is. It’s a modern version of the original plan. That is why the IDF is bombing tent cities full of unarmed civilians who pose no threat to Israeli security. It’s not to fight Hamas but to terrorize the population into fleeing the city. That’s the goal. Israel knows that if they bomb the refugees, they will storm the border, breach the wall, and stream into Egypt en masse. That’s the plan in a nutshell.
And the plan appears to be succeeding. In fact, Netanyahu might be just days-away from finishing the work that was begun by Ben-Gurion. He has already started to increase the airstrikes on Rafah while a full-blown ground assault could be launched at any time. As the humanitarian crisis intensifies, the desperation and fear will grow eventually triggering a massive stampede for the Egyptian border. Once the Palestinians leave Gaza, they will fall under the guardianship of representatives of the international community who will transfer them to nations around the world. This is how Netanyahu intends to seize the land he will incorporate into a Greater Israel, by driving unarmed civilians out of their homes and into the desert.
The expulsion of the Palestinians shows that –behind the moral pontificating about human rights and ‘the rule of law’– the United States and Israel are capable of the most barbarous cruelty imaginable. It is truly shocking that the two nations can execute a filthy plan like this in broad daylight while the rest of the world sits on their hands.
There’s a certain particularly toxic personality type which thrives on being hated. They behave in wildly odious and destructive ways, and then when people react to this with hostility they plunge into poor-me victimhood, which they then use to justify more odious and destructive behavior.
You may have been unfortunate enough to have encountered such personalities in your own life. They behave atrociously, and then when people react to it they say “See?? I really AM being persecuted!”
……………………………… A Jewish anti-Zionist Israeli named Alon Mizrahi posted an interesting piece on Twitter a few days ago that’s been rattling around in my head ever since, wherein he argues that Israel is actually intentionally generating hatred towards itself in order to shore up political power.
Claiming that “Israel and American Jewish organizations took it upon themselves to keep Jews afraid and isolated” in a “strategy of intentional paranoia,” Mizrahi opines that when October 7 hit, “the right wing, nationalistic, paranoid section of the Jewish political spectrum, realized it could be translated into political gold.”
“It doesn’t seem like Israel is trying to be hated globally. It is actually what it’s doing,” Mizrahi writes. “It is intentionally airing its cruelty and barbarity so that it will remain closed up to the world, thus guaranteeing the continued rule of the paranoia camp.”
“Palestinians are just crash test dummies in this scenario,” he adds. “Their deaths are used to get people angry and Israel hated, so it becomes even more paranoid.”
Whether you accept or reject Mizrahi’s perspective, you can’t deny that Israel’s apologists have been seizing on the outrage its actions in Gaza have caused as evidence of anti-semitic persecution. The Anti-Defamation League has started categorizing pro-Palestine rallies as anti-semitic incidents, including rallies organized and attended by Jewish groups, leading to the Israel-friendly mass media reporting a massive spike in “anti-semitism” in the wake of October 7. Common pro-Palestine chants like “From the river to the sea Palestine will be free” have been deceitfully labeled calls for the genocide of Jews, and any criticism of Israel’s actions is met with a deluge of accusations of anti-semitism.
Once Israel and its western supporters succeeded in framing any opposition to to the Israeli government as evidence of anti-semitism, it was guaranteed that any time Israel does something evil it will cause a new wave of “anti-semitism” per those standards. This perceived hatred and persecution could then be cited as evidence for why Israel needs to be even more violent, militaristic and tyrannical than it already was, and why its brutal treatment of Palestinians is justified and correct. This in turn could be used by western governments to justify pouring more weapons into Israel and providing military support against its neighbors.
In this dynamic, anything Israel does causes more people to hate Israel both in the middle east and around the world, to which Israel responds by tearfully proclaiming “See?? They hate us! We must defend ourselves against their hostilities!”
This is not the sort of behavior you would accept from someone in your life, and it shouldn’t be the sort of behavior we accept from nuclear-armed ethnostates. As with any other widespread dysfunction, the key to dismantling this one is to spread awareness of what it is that Israel is doing
And what Israel is doing, ultimately, is weaponizing sympathy and victimhood. When somebody is using a weapon to hurt others, you take their weapon away. The world needs to stop giving Israel sympathy and stop buying into its victimhood narratives, because those narratives are only ever used to justify more and more western-backed atrocities.
This won’t happen until enough awareness has spread of what’s really going on here. For there to be a movement toward health, a lot of eyes need to open to the unwholesomeness of this manipulative dynamic — both inside and outside of Israel.
Israel is reportedly preparing to launch a ground assault on Rafah, the southernmost part of the Gaza Strip where Gazans have been pushed to flee to. Israel has instructed the 1.4 million refugees sheltering there to evacuate, along with the hundreds of thousands of people who were already living there before, but there doesn’t seem to be anywhere for them to go. This could wind up being the single deadliest phase of Israel’s onslaught to date.
So to summarize, the IDF has been packing the population of Gaza into the southernmost part of the enclave like toothpaste toward the end of a tube, and now they’re going to attack that southernmost part, but it’s totally not genocide and you’re an evil Nazi if you say it is.
This genocide is not a genocide. Ceci n’est pas une pipe.
Can we all just stop and marvel at how successful Israel and its allies have been at moving the conversation from “The ICJ ruled that Israel needs to immediately cease killing Palestinians” to “Is it right or wrong to starve two million people based on unevidenced claims?”
Australian foreign minister Penny Wong has acknowledged that Canberra joined the US, UK and other allies in cutting off UNRWA funding without having seen proof of Israel’s claims against the organization. Empire managers are now openly admitting they suspended aid to Gaza without having seen evidence of the claims that call was based on; they cut the aid because they were told to, then waited for narratives to be provided to them as to why this was a good and righteous decision.
If you’re going to say that a bad thing happened and we therefore need to cut off aid to the most aid-dependent population on earth, then you’d better at least be able to prove the bad thing actually happened. If evidence exists, then show it. If you insist on starving two million people, you can’t do it on vibes alone.
How is this not obvious to everyone? How was it not immediately obvious the instant it came up? Time and time again we are asked to consent to the empire doing the most heinous things to the most vulnerable populations on secret, invisible evidence. We are expected to trust their secret evidence without getting to look at it, even though they’ve been caught lying about things like this over and over and over again.
In the midst of the ongoing destruction of Gaza and the slaughter of Palestinians, the identity and authenticity of Jewish people calling into question the actions of Israel are being tarnished. A greater discussion of what it means to be Jewish, what it means to have a Jewish state and what Judaism has historically taught people is taking place among Jews around the world.
On this episode of the Scheer Intelligence podcast, Heyday Books publisher and former LA Times book editor Steve Wasserman and host Robert Scheer commit themselves to this conversation as Jews who have experienced these questions firsthand through their families in addition to having explored and reported on this topic throughout their careers.
Whether it was through Scheer’s reporting (with research by a youthful Wassernan) on the “Jews of L.A.” series for the Los Angeles Times and his reporting on the Six Day War in Israel and Gaza or Wasserman’s work with authors exploring Zionism and Israel, the pair have dealt in depth with the issue at hand.
Both stress the importance of Jewish culture in shaping their upbringing and viewing the world from a progressive, inclusive lens. Wasserman explains that for him Judaism encapsulates “The idea of being an honorable, ethical person, about making the world better, performing tikkun, helping to heal the world.”
As it pertains to his own familial history, Wasserman explains his mother’s brothers’ sacrifice: “They were premature anti-fascist. And they were eager to fight Hitler. And, they were killed within a week of each other… My mother has never gotten over their sacrifice. So, yes, we shed blood in the war against fascism.”
While delving into the idea of Israel, the two acknowledge the complexities of the history as it relates to the struggles of the diaspora and the Holocaust, but still, Wasserman acknowledges, “I’ve never thought that Israel or the State of Israel spoke for everyone. I’m a disciple of I.F. Stone, who said that all governments lie, including governments that you might be attached to for emotional and historical reasons.”
Transcript
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… Scheer. I felt at home with the survival of a certain, international Jewish concern for the other, which, of course showed up in the American civil rights movement, with the important participation of American Jews.
Now, you look at Israel, and it’s a totally different picture, where the more fundamentalist religion is critical and indeed a formal part of the government, supported by very prominent right wing Jews like the late Sheldon Adelman and others in the United States, the leader of Israel and Netanyahu actually came to the United States when Obama was president and challenged his peace initiative with Iran in the US Congress, almost unheard of………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
What counts is the emotional attachment that peoples on every side, each of whom are hostage to fanatics and fundamentalists and extremists, but who believe with all their might that they have a near God given right to this bit of desert, and they are going to squander their best, the flower of their youth and the murderous rage to claim a right to live there. So, now we have 25,000 and counting deaths, many of them women and children. A murderous, vengeance, criminally prosecuted by a power-mad guy called Netanyahu. Other extremists on the other side. And as the old slogan in the ‘60s had, war is bad for every living thing. And, I see, at the moment, a pretty, forlorn and, hopeless situation here because, what Israel has done in its acts of vengeance is simply created, they have sowed the seeds for the dragon teeth that will arise.
Every Palestinian will seek revenge down the centuries. And the place is cursed. Reason has taken flight. Sobriety is nowhere in the picture. And we have a fever dream of nationalist yearnings by two peoples who somehow cannot find a way to live together in peace and harmony and the squandering of their national treasure, as I say, the flower of their youth is a heartbreak for everyone. So the question of the endangerment of Jews everywhere. I’ve never thought that Israel or the State of Israel spoke for everyone. I’m a disciple of I.F. Stone, who said that all governments lie, including governments that you might be attached to for emotional and historical reasons.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………And it was also, as I say, a convenient copout for the rulers of England and the United States and the Soviet Union to embrace Zionism. Good, the Jews who are troublemakers, they’re progressive, they’re radical, they write too much, they think too much. There is a wonderful tradition which you summarized before. They’re a threat to our stability wherever they are. Let them have a state of their own. Okay. So there was a cynicism that underwrote this, that Zionism could play on. …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. https://scheerpost.com/2024/02/08/israel-does-not-speak-for-jews-like-us/
Probably none of us would be here today if not for Stanislav Petrov, an officer in the former Soviet Union whose skepticism about a computer system saved the world. When, on Sept. 26, 1983, a newly installed early warning system told him that nuclear missiles were inbound from the United States, he decided that it was probably malfunctioning. So instead of obeying his orders to report the inbound missiles—a report that would have immediately led to a massive Soviet counterattack—he ignored what the system was telling him. He was soon proved correct, as no U.S. missiles ever struck. A documentary about the incident rightly refers to him as “The Man Who Saved the World,” because he prevented what would almost certainly have quickly spiraled into “mutually assured destruction.”
Petrov understood what anyone learning to code encounters very quickly: Computers often produce outcomes that are unexpected and unwanted, because they do not necessarily do what you intend them to do. They do just what you tell them to do. Human fallibility means that the result is often enormous gaps between intentions and instructions and effects, which is why even today’s most advanced artificial intelligence systems sometimes “hallucinate.”
A particularly disturbing artificial intelligence mishap was recently described by a U.S. Air Force colonel in a hypothetical scenario involving an A.I.-equipped drone. He explained that in this scenario, the drone would “identify and target a…threat. And then the operator would say ‘Yes, kill that threat.’ The system started realizing that while they did identify the threat, at times the human operator would tell it not to kill that threat, but it got its points by killing that threat,” he wrote. “So what did it do? It killed the operator. It killed the operator because that person was keeping it from accomplishing its objective.” Logical, but terrible.
Much of the public conversation about A.I. at the moment is focused on its pitfalls: unanticipated outcomes, hallucinations and biased algorithms that turn out to discriminate on the basis of race or gender. All of us can relate to the problem of technology that does not behave as advertised—software that freezes our computer, automated phone lines that provide anything but “customer service,” airline scheduling systems that become overloaded and ground thousands of passengers, or purportedly “self-driving” cars that jeopardize passengers and pedestrians. These experiences can and should make us skeptical and indicate the need for a certain humility in the face of claims for the transformative power of A.I. The great danger of A.I., however, is that it can also perform quite effectively. In fact, it is already transforming modern warfare.
Force Multiplier
In Pope Francis’ World Day of Peace message this year, he reminds us that the most important moral questions about any new technology relate to how it is used.
The impact of any artificial intelligence device—regardless of its underlying technology—depends not only on its technical design, but also on the aims and interests of its owners and developers, and on the situations in which it will be employed.
It is clear that the military use of A.I. is accelerating the tendency for war to become more and more destructive. It is certainly possible that A.I. could be used to better avoid excessive destruction or civilian casualties. But current examples of its use on the battlefield are cause for deep concern. For example, Israel is currently using an A.I. system to identify bombing targets in Gaza. “Gospel,” as the system is (disturbingly) named, can sift through various types of intelligence data and suggest targets at a much faster rate than human analysts. Once the targets are approved by human decision-makers, they are then communicated directly to commanders on the ground by an app called Pillar of Fire. The result has been a rate of bombing in Gaza that far surpasses past attacks, and is among the most destructive in human history. Two thirds of the buildings in northern Gaza are now damaged or destroyed.
A.I. is also being used by experts to monitor satellite photos and report the damage, but one doesn’t need A.I. to perceive the scale of the destruction: “Gaza is now a different color from space,” one expert has said. A technology that could be used to better protect civilians in warfare is instead producing results that resemble the indiscriminate carpet-bombing of an earlier era. No matter how precisely targeted a bombing may be, if it results in massive suffering for civilians, it is effectively “indiscriminate” and so violates the principle of noncombatant immunity.
No matter how precisely targeted a bombing may be, if it results in massive suffering for civilians, it violates the principle of noncombatant immunity.
Questions of Conscience
What about the effects of A.I. on those who are using it to wage war? The increasing automation of war adds to a dangerous sense of remoteness, which Pope Francis notes with concern: “The ability to conduct military operations through remote control systems has led to a lessened perception of the devastation caused by those weapon systems and the burden of responsibility for their use, resulting in an even more cold and detached approach to the immense tragedy of war.” Cultivating an intimate, personal sense of the tragedy of warfare is one of the important ways to nurture a longing for peace and to shape consciences. A.I. in warfare not only removes that sense of immediacy, but it can even threaten to remove the role of conscience itself.
This is a difficult, but critical read. The collective hardship experienced by Gaza’s female prisoners in Israel is unprecedented even within the tragic history of Israel’s treatment of Palestinian prisoners. The Palestine Chronicle reports ..
The names of 51 female prisoners, illegally detained by invading Israeli forces during their ground operation in Gaza, have been revealed.
This number was announced by the Palestinian Prisoners’ Affairs Authority in a statement, without confirming whether there are other female prisoners secretly detained in Israel.
Regardless of the exact number, however, the testimonies that were collected from released prisoners reveal shocking abuse, ill-treatment and torture.
The Palestine Chronicle spoke with Lama Khater, from Al-Khalil (Hebron), who was arrested on October 26 and released under the prisoner exchange deal between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Resistance on November 30.
Khater was detained along with ten female prisoners from Gaza and witnessed the abuse they were subjected to.
Arbitrary Arrest
Khater said the conditions of female prisoners from Gaza were particularly difficult, starting with their kidnapping during their displacement from the northern Gaza Strip.
“They were arrested randomly, mostly from the northern Gaza Strip. Israeli soldiers detained mothers, too, who have been forced to leave their children with passers-by,” she stressed.
Khater recounted that before arriving at Damon Prison, the female detainees were left without covers, subjected to humiliating strip searches and forced to sleep on the bare floor.
When they were brought into the prisons, they were blindfolded, handcuffed, and deprived of their hijab, said Khater.
They were reportedly placed in narrow cells in Damon Prison and not allowed to speak to the rest of the female prisoners from the occupied West Bank and Palestine 48.
“All female prisoners are subjected to great restrictions,” Khater said, “but the prisoners from Gaza were treated even worse.”
“For example, they are only allowed to shower in large groups of at least 50 women, and for not more than 15 minutes a day”.
Khater said that on December 10 and 11, five female prisoners from the Gaza Strip were taken out of Damon prison. Their current location is not yet known.
Among the female Gazan prisoners, some are in a particularly difficult state; an 80-year-old woman who suffers from Alzheimers and a pregnant woman. Both are subjected to medical negligence.
Held in Cages
The Palestine Chronicle also spoke with Palestinian lawyer Hassan al-Abadi, who collected the testimonies of several female prisoners in Damon.
Al-Abadi, who volunteered to visit the female prisoners, submitted his first request to the Israeli Prison Administration on November 30, but was told in response that there were no longer female prisoners in the detention facility.
A few days later, however, media reports revealed that dozens of female prisoners, from Gaza, Jerusalem and Palestine 48, were still held there.
Al-Abadi confirmed to The Palestine Chronicle that there are over 40 female prisoners from Gaza in the facility, but they are prohibited from seeing a lawyer.
“When I would visit any female prisoner from the West Bank or Jerusalem, she would tell me about the harsh conditions of detention of the prisoners from the Gaza Strip,” he said.
Al-Abadi said he was particularly disturbed by the way Israeli forces transported the female detainees from Gaza to the prisons.
According to the lawyer, they were placed in trucks carrying cages similar to those used for animal transport.
“This detail particularly hurt me: these women have been transported in animal trucks. They have been tied, blindfolded and stripped of their head covering, as a way to humiliate them,” al-Abadi said.
Stained with Blood
The lawyer also said that when the female detainees arrived at the prison, their clothes were stained with blood. Most of them were also bleeding from their hands, as the plastic chains had been tightly tied around their wrists for days.
Upon their arrival, they were distributed into three rooms, each containing six iron beds. Most of them were reportedly forced to sleep on the floor without pillows or mattresses.
“The prisoners told me that the food is also very bad and that the Israeli guards deliberately leave it on their cells’ doors for hours, until it turns cold. The water has a rusty taste as well,” al-Abadi said.
“The female detainees from Gaza are even forbidden from talking to the rest of the prisoners and they have to communicate in secret.”
Al-Abadi shared that one of the women had to leave her four children in Gaza. The eldest was only eight years old, the youngest an infant.
According to the testimony from other prisoners, the woman was walking on Salah Al-Din Street, fleeing from the north of the Gaza Strip, when the Israeli soldiers arrested her.
“When she learned that she would be under arrest, she immediately handed her children to a boy who was walking in the street and told him to take care of them,” al-Abadi said.
“I learned from the other prisoners that she asked about her children every day, crying inconsolably, but nobody was updating her on their fate.”
A few days ago, however, al-Abadi was able to deliver a verbal message to this woman, that her children had eventually reached their father. “This time, she cried out of joy,” he said.
Great Concern
According to al-Abadi, these women are not only suffering due to the extremely cruel conditions of their detention but because they are constantly concerned about their families.
They do not know the fate of their children as Israel continues to relentlessly bombard Gaza.
“They are not allowed to hear the news or follow what is happening in any way. They are isolated from the outside world and don’t know anything,” al-Abadi explained.
But there are other forms of violation carried out by Israeli authorities. Al-Abadi told us that the prison administration prevents these women from bringing along sanitary pads
Therefore, during their period, they are forced to wash their clothes daily and wear them when they are still wet, as the prison administration does not provide them with additional clothes. They only have what they were wearing at the time of arrest.
Israel considers men and women detained in the Gaza Strip to be prisoners of war under the so-called “unlawful combatants” law. Therefore, it prevents them from having contact with lawyers and human rights institutions.
(The Palestine Chronicle) – Fayha’ Shalash is a Ramallah-based Palestinian journalist. She graduated from Birzeit University in 2008 and she has been working as a reporter and broadcaster ever since. Her articles appeared in several online publications. She contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
As a secular Jew raised in a fiercely anti-Zionist family, I grew up viewing the State of Israel as an unfortunate fait accompli and accepting that the two-state solution was probably the best that could be hoped for.
Since then, I have come to the conclusion that the creation of a Jewish state was a catastrophic mistake and that Zionist Israel has relinquished its right to exist.
What good could possibly have come from a project that handed a group of Jewish Europeans a land that for countless centuries was inhabited by Arab Palestinians?
Not only did Palestinians have no say in the creation of a Jewish state on their homeland, but just at the time when other developing countries around the world were finally breaking free from the yoke of colonial rule Palestinians, like Native Americans and Australia’s First Nations people before them, became the victims of European settler colonialism — this time endorsed by a U.N. resolution that neither the Palestinians nor any of the Arab states agreed to or voted for.
The driving force behind both the 1917 Balfour Declaration that called for a Jewish homeland in the British Mandate of Palestine and the 1948 U.N. Partition Plan that established a Jewish State, was Zionism, a religious, political and cultural movement that began in the late 19th century to claim Palestine as the God-given homeland of the Jewish people.
Contrary to official mythology, however, the Zionist fervour was not shared by the majority of Jews.
The socialist Jewish Labour Bund in Eastern Europe, for instance, believed that Jewish culture should be preserved right at home in the shtetls (villages) as opposed to running off to Palestine and thought that the notion of Jews colonising Palestine was farcical. They even wrote a mocking Yiddish song for the Zionists – “Oy, Ir Narishe Tsionistn” (“You Foolish Little Zionist”).
Meanwhile Jews, Christians and Muslims had been living aside each other in historic Palestine in relative peace for centuries. It was only after the rapid influx of European Jewish refugees fleeing the pogroms in Eastern Europe following World War I, and in the wake of the Holocaust, that the conflicts in Palestine escalated and the bloodshed on both sides began.
By the time of the U.N. partition plan, Israeli Defence Force brigades had already launched a bloody campaign of burning villages and killing men, women and children to drive Palestinians off their land. In all, 750,000 Palestinians were expelled into refugee camps in neighbouring Arab countries.
This was the beginning of the Nakba (the catastrophe) that continues today – most strikingly in Gaza — as Zionist zealots insist Israel has a rightful claim to all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
In their view, all of Palestine belongs to Jews because in the words of Likud Party Knesset Member Danny Danon, the Bible is “our deed to the land.”
For Zionists like Danon, expelling Palestinians is an existential necessity, a view that echoed in 1956 by Moshe Dayan, military commander of the Jerusalem Front in 1948, who proclaimed:
“We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel helmet and the cannon we cannot plant a tree and build a home… This is the fate of our generation, and the choice of our life – to be prepared and armed, strong and tough – or otherwise, the sword will slip from our fist, and our life will be snuffed out.
What cause have we to complain about their fierce hatred to us? For eight years now, they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we turn into our homestead the land and villages in which they and their forefathers have lived.
Let us not be afraid to see the hatred that accompanies and consumes the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs who sit all around us and wait for the moment when their hands will be able to reach our blood.”
Next Uprising Would Dwarf Oct.7
As Dayan knew then, Israel would never be safe. In Gaza now, Israel is creating the next generation of Palestinian resistance fighters who have witnessed their families slaughtered, guaranteeing that the next uprising will dwarf the Hamas invasion of Oct. 7.
Whatever legitimacy Israel might have claimed as a haven for Jewish refugees who were abandoned in the West after the Holocaust, their right to a state of their own has long since been forfeited.
Both the 1917 Balfour Declaration that promised Jews a homeland in the British Mandate of Palestine and the 1948 U.N. partition plan creating the State of Israel stipulated that the rights of Palestinians had to be safeguarded and, following the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948, U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194 of that year specifically said the refugees’ had the right to return “at the earliest practicable date.”
On all counts, Israel has completely failed to live up to its obligations to protect the most basic rights of the Palestinian people.
Today, Palestinians living inside Israel remain second-class citizens without equal rights to own property or even use their own language. On the West Bank, Palestinians are dispossessed and murdered daily by Jewish settlers with the backing of the IDF.
In Gaza, even before Israel’s invasion following Oct. 7, Palestinians have lived under a brutal state of siege in an open air prison. The millions of Palestinians who were exiled into refugee camps in neighbouring Arab states are still denied the right to return.
Indeed, the Zionists have brought to Palestine the very scourge they fled in Europe — murdering, expelling and ethnically cleansing an entire population, mirroring the behaviour of their Nazi oppressors.
In the documentary film Tantura about the 1948 massacre of almost 300 Palestinians in the Palestinian village of Tantura, former Israeli soldiers, now in their 90s, retell the story of the slaughter unashamedly.
One brigade member laughs as he recalls, “Of course we killed them, without remorse… If you killed, you did a good thing.” An old woman says matter-of-factly, “Let them remember (what we did to them) like we remember what happened in Europe (the Holocaust). If they did it, we can also.”
Yet, despite the evidence of Israeli war crimes, Zionists have continued to deny Israel’s atrocities while claiming their own superiority. Professor emeritus at Haifa University, Ilan Pappe, says of the mindset:
“I think the self-image of Israel as a moral society is something I haven’t seen anywhere else in the world. We are the ‘Chosen People’ (in the Old Testament Jews were chosen by God as his special people). This is part of the Israeli self-identification…(But) basically, the project of Zionism has a problem… You cannot create a safe haven by creating a catastrophe for other people.”
Today, complicit Western leaders and their media proxies wring their hands about the regrettable loss of civilian lives in Gaza while hypocritically calling for a two-state solution they know is virtually impossible since Israel has reduced the amount of Palestinian land from 45 percent at the time of partition to 15 percent today.
Craig Mokhiber, who recently resigned as New York director for the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights over the U.N.’s failure to act on war crimes in Gaza, said in his resignation letter:
“The mantra of the ‘two-state solution’ has become an open joke in the corridors of the U.N., both for its utter impossibility in fact, and for its total failure to account for the inalienable human rights of the Palestinian people.”
Writing On Wall For Two-State Solution
After 75 years of Israel’s colonial oppression of the Palestinian people, it has become glaringly obvious that any notion of a two-state solution has become little more than a fig leaf for Israel’s apartheid regime and the only way forward is one secular democratic state that safeguards the fundamental rights and equality for all of its citizens.
Obviously, it won’t happen overnight or without conflict – Israel will aggressively defend its perceived right to exist as a Jewish state with the massive backing of the Western powers. Palestinians will never abandon their yearning for a homeland as it was before the arrival of European Jewish settlers — but the writing is on the wall.
Almost two decades ago the late Palestinian-American academic Edward Said wrote that:
“The beginning (of one democratic state) is to develop something entirely missing from both Israeli and Palestinian realities today: the idea and practice of citizenship, not of ethnic or racial community, as the main vehicle of coexistence.”
More recently, Palestinian academic and physician Ghada Karmi has cautioned:
“The U.N. that made Israel and must now unmake it, not by expulsion and displacement as in 1948, but by converting its bleak legacy into a future of hope for both peoples in one state.”
But if the U.N. fails to act, Karmi sees a more apocalyptic path to the end of the Zionist state. In her recent book One State: The Only Democratic Future for Palestine, she writes:
“Israel will fiercely reject the shared state, but will be powerless to prevent it from happening. … It will not happen solely as a result of a one-state campaign and solidarity movements. … but rather through people’s natural resistance to relentless oppression leading to the ultimate overthrow of the oppressors.”
If that can happen without cataclysmic global repercussions, possibly bringing the U.S. and Europe to the brink of the next world war, perhaps a new secular democratic state for both Jews and Palestinians will evolve from the struggle.
In any event, it is time to acknowledge that the Zionist project has been a spectacular failure and the status quo can no longer be maintained. Israel has become a pariah state in the eyes of most of the world and the winds of change are now howling across the region.
Stefan Moore is an American-Australian documentary filmmaker. His documentaries have received four Emmys and other awards. In the U.S., he was co-director of TVG Productions in New York, a series producer at WNET and a producer for the prime time CBS News magazine program 48 HOURS. In the U.K. he worked as a series producer at the BBC, and in Australia he was an executive producer for Film Australia and the ABC.
The World Court will hear the case on Jan. 11 and 12 at The Hague.
Notable quotes from Jan. 11 hearing
From South African attorney Tembeka Ngcukaitobi:
“There is an extraordinary feature in this case: that Israel’s political leaders, military commanders, and persons holding official positions have systematically and in explicit terms declared their genocidal intent… And these statements are then repeated by soldiers on the ground in Gaza as they engage in the destruction of Palestinians and the physical infrastructure of Gaza.”
“What state would admit to a genocidal intent? Yet the distinctive feature of this case has not been the silence as such but the reiteration and repetition of genocidal speech throughout every sphere of state in Israel.”
“We remind the court of the identity and authority of the genocidal inciters: the prime minister, the president the minister of defense, the minister of national security, the minister of energy and infrastructure, members of the Knesset, senior army officials, and foot soldiers… The evidence of genocidal intent is not only chilling, it is also overwhelming and incontrovertible.”
“Israel has subjected Gaza to what has been described as one of the heaviest conventional bombing campaigns in the history of modern warfare. Palestinians in Gaza are being killed by Israeli weaponry and bombs from air, land and sea. They are also at immediate risk of death by starvation, dehydration and disease as a result of the ongoing siege by Israel, the destruction of Palestinian towns, the insufficient aid being allowed through to the Palestinian population, and the impossibility of distributing this limited aid while bombs fall. This conduct renders essentials to life unobtainable.“
“…the level of Israel’s killing is so extensive that nowhere is safe in Gaza. … Palestinians in Gaza are subjected to relentless bombing wherever they go. They are killed in their homes, in places where they seek shelter, in hospitals, in schools, in mosques, in churches, and as they try to find food and water for their families. They have been killed if they failed to evacuate. In the places to which they have fled, and even while they attempted to flee along, Israeli declared safe routes.”
“Israel has killed an unparalleled and unprecedented number of civilians with the full knowledge of how many civilian lives each bomb will take.“
Public hearings on South Africa’s request for provisional measures will take place on January 11 and 12 at the ICJ which is located in the Peace Palace in The Hague, Netherlands. The hearings will be livestreamed from 4:00-6:00 a.m. Eastern/1:00-3:00 a.m. Pacific on the Court’s website and on UN Web TV. The court could order provisional measures within a week after the hearings.
Other States Parties to the Genocide Convention Can Join South Africa’s Case
South Africa, a party to the Genocide Convention, charged Israel with genocide in the International Court of Justice.
For nearly three months, Israel has enjoyed virtual impunity for its atrocious crimes against the Palestinian people. That changed on December 29 when South Africa, a state party to the Genocide Convention, filed an 84-page application in the International Court of Justice (ICJ, or World Court) alleging that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
South Africa’s well-documented application alleges that “acts and omissions by Israel … are genocidal in character, as they are committed with the requisite specific intent … to destroy Palestinians in Gaza as a part of the broader Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group” and that “the conduct of Israel — through its State organs, State agents, and other persons and entities acting on its instructions or under its direction, control or influence — in relation to Palestinians in Gaza, is in violation of its obligations under the Genocide Convention.”
Israel is mounting a full-court press to prevent an ICJ finding that it’s committing genocide in Gaza. On January 4, the Israeli Foreign Ministry instructed its embassies to pressure politicians and diplomats in their host countries to make statements opposing South Africa’s case at the ICJ.
In its application, South Africa cited eight allegations to support its contention that Israel is perpetrating genocide in Gaza. They include:
(1) Killing Palestinians in Gaza, including a large proportion of women and children (approximately 70 percent) of the more than 21,110 fatalities and some appear to have been subjected to summary execution;
(2) Causing serious mental and bodily harm to Palestinians in Gaza, including maiming, psychological trauma, and inhuman and degrading treatment;
(3) Causing the forced evacuation and displacement of about 85 percent of Palestinians in Gaza — including children, the elderly and infirm, and the sick and wounded. Israel is also causing the massive destruction of Palestinian homes, villages, towns, refugee camps and entire areas, which precludes the return of a significant proportion of the Palestinian people to their homes;
(4) Causing widespread hunger, starvation and dehydration to the besieged Palestinians in Gaza by impeding sufficient humanitarian assistance, cutting off sufficient food, water, fuel and electricity, and destroying bakeries, mills, agricultural lands and other means of production and sustenance;
(5) Failing to provide and restricting the provision of adequate clothing, shelter, hygiene and sanitation to Palestinians in Gaza, including 1.9 million internally displaced persons. This has compelled them to live in dangerous situations of squalor, in conjunction with routine targeting and destruction of places of shelter and killing and wounding of persons who are sheltering, including women, children, the elderly and the disabled;
(6) Failing to provide for or ensure the provision of medical care to Palestinians in Gaza, including those medical needs created by other genocidal acts that are causing serious bodily harm. This is occurring by direct attacks on Palestinian hospitals, ambulances and other healthcare facilities, the killing of Palestinian doctors, medics and nurses (including the most qualified medics in Gaza) and the destruction and disabling of Gaza’s medical system;
(7) Destroying Palestinian life in Gaza, by destroying its infrastructure, schools, universities, courts, public buildings, public records, libraries, stores, churches, mosques, roads, utilities and other facilities necessary to sustain the lives of Palestinians as a group. Israel is killing whole families, erasing entire oral histories and killing prominent and distinguished members of society;
(8) Imposing measures intended to prevent Palestinian births in Gaza, including through reproductive violence inflicted on Palestinian women, newborns, infants and children.
South Africa cited myriad statements by Israeli officials that constitute direct evidence of an intent to commit genocide:
“Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything,” Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said. “If it doesn’t take one day, it will take a week. It will take weeks or even months, we will reach all places.”
Avi Dichter, Israel’s Minister of Agriculture, declared, “We are now actually rolling out the Gaza Nakba,” a reference to the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to create the state of Israel.
“Now we all have one common goal — erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth,” Nissim Vaturi, the Deputy Speaker of the Knesset and Member of the Foreign Affairs and Security Committee proclaimed.
Israel’s Strategy to Defeat South Africa’s Case at the ICJ
We all know now that Israel can do no wrong, for it is blessed with immunity for being the eternal victim. For Israel, Hitler is the gift that keeps on giving.
We all know that the USA is complicit in the crimes, rushing more and more PMGs to Israel so it will never run short in its precise bombing of important military targets, such as churches, hospitals, schools, mosques, universities, and ordinary homes and residential high-rises.
We all know that no matter how many UN “emergency” meetings are held to rein in Israel’s bloodlust, no matter how many resolutions voted on, the bombs will continue to fall, because Israel can kill as many Palestinians as it wants. There is no one to stop them.
No one seems to know, let alone care, that all the people of Gaza (2.2 million)—not just some—cannot get enough to eat each and every day, and mass starvation is happening right now.
The usual response among most people in the West is—both sides are the same (meaning, Israelis and Palestinians); they both lie and cheat and murder, it’s hard to know where the truth lies. We should worry about our own countries.
If that were true, then why is it that as of now there is only side that has had over 8,000 bombed to pieces? That has had killed nearly 30,000, and left 55,000 people injured? That has had the only place given them to live turned into a wasteland? Why is it that ordinary citizens of one side have been heavily armed with the latest weapons, while those of the other side buy what they can on the black market?
Why is it that one side is well-fed and will not be worrying about food and water, while the other side must starve it out?
How exactly are both sides the same? How is it that both sides lie, cheat and kill?
Then the argument is made that Palestine and Israel are so far away. Let them fight it out. I have other things to worry about.
If that were true, then what about February 2022, when the entire West went into a paroxysm of Russphobia (which still shows little signs of abating), and you couldn’t go to get some milk without being told to to help the poor Ukrainians who were bring “brutally invaded” by the “dictator” Putin, etc.
Why was Ukraine not so far away, then—but Palestine is now so far away? Why was it so easy to care for one side and hate the other in 2022, but now we must be neutral?
Where is the International Criminal Court, which could not issue an arrest warrant for President Putin fast enough, but which now can see no crimes being committed in Gaza by Netanyahu and his ilk?…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
why does Israel slaughter Palestinians with impunity? Because Western powerbrokers and their ruling class have chosen Israel to play the role both of victim and “hero” of civilization. To that end, Palestinians (and Muslims generally) have been assigned the role of “villain,” who can only move from one outrage to the next atrocity. Just imagine the negative press if Zionism were a Muslim invention. In this way, “our values,” the “international rules-based order,” Western “civilization” are stood up against “barbarism.” When Israel kills babies, it kills for our good, for our “civilization,” for “our values.” We, in the West, are the beneficiaries of the “heroic” slaughter by the gallant IDF. Just as all those dead Ukrainians have let us keep our “democracy” and our “freedom.”
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