Israeli Cabinet Approves 19 New Apartheid Colonies in Occupied West Bank.
“The ONLY reason Israel gets away with this naked thievery is US military and political support,” said one observer.
Brett Wilkins, Dec 21, 2025, https://www.commondreams.org/news/israel-19-new-settlements
Israel’s Cabinet on Sunday finalized approval of 19 new Jewish-only settler colonies in the illegally occupied West Bank, a move the apartheid state’s far-right finance minister said was aimed at thwarting Palestinian statehood.
Cabinet ministers approved the legalization of the previously unauthorized settler outposts throughout the occupied Palestinian territory, bringing the total number of new settlements in recent years to 69.
The move will bring the overall total number of exclusively or overwhelmingly Jewish settlements—which are illegal under international law—to more than 200, up from around 140 just three years ago.
Included in the new approval are two former settlements—Kadim and Ganim—that were evacuated in compliance with the now effectively repealed 2005 Disengagement Law, under which Israel dismantled all of its colonies in the Gaza Strip and four in the West Bank.
“This is righting a historic injustice of expulsion from 20 years ago,” Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich—who is a settler—said on Sunday. “We are putting the brakes on the rise of a Palestinian terror state.”
Israel’s Cabinet on Sunday finalized approval of 19 new Jewish-only settler colonies in the illegally occupied West Bank, a move the apartheid state’s far-right finance minister said was aimed at thwarting Palestinian statehood.
Cabinet ministers approved the legalization of the previously unauthorized settler outposts throughout the occupied Palestinian territory, bringing the total number of new settlements in recent years to 69.
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The move will bring the overall total number of exclusively or overwhelmingly Jewish settlements—which are illegal under international law—to more than 200, up from around 140 just three years ago.
Included in the new approval are two former settlements—Kadim and Ganim—that were evacuated in compliance with the now effectively repealed 2005 Disengagement Law, under which Israel dismantled all of its colonies in the Gaza Strip and four in the West Bank.
“This is righting a historic injustice of expulsion from 20 years ago,” Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich—who is a settler—said on Sunday. “We are putting the brakes on the rise of a Palestinian terror state.”
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“We will continue to develop, build, and settle the inherited land of our ancestors, with faith in the righteousness of our path,” Smotrich added.
Following an earlier round of approval for the new settlements last week, Palestinian presidential spokesperson Nabil Abu Rudeineh said, “All Israeli settlement activity is illegal and constitutes a violation of international law and international legitimacy resolutions.”
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres earlier this month denounced Israel’s “relentless” settlement expansion.
Such colonization, said Guterres, “continues to fuel tensions, impede access by Palestinians to their land, and threaten the viability of a fully independent, democratic, contiguous, and sovereign Palestinian state.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials—some of whom, including Smotrich, deny the very existence of the Palestinian people—have vowed that such a state will not be established.
While Netanyahu—who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza—is under pressure from right-wing and far-right government officials, settlers, and others to annex all of the West Bank, US President Donald Trump recently said that “Israel would lose all of its support from the United States if that happened.”
Some doubted Trump’s threat, with Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN) executive director Sarah Leah Whitson reacting to the new settlements’ approval by posting on X that “the ONLY reason Israel gets away with this naked thievery is US military and political support.”
Israel seized and occupied the West Bank including East Jerusalem along with Gaza in 1967, ethnically cleansing around 300,000 Palestinians. Many of these forcibly displaced people were survivors of the Nakba, the Jewish terror and ethnic cleansing campaign that saw more than 750,000 Palestinians flee or be forced from Palestine during the foundation of the modern state of Israel.
Since 1967, Israel has steadily seized more and more Palestinian land in the West Bank while building and expanding colonies there. Settlement population has increased exponentially from around 1,500 colonists in 1970 to roughly 140,000 at the time of the Oslo Accords in 1993—under which Israel agreed to halt new settlement activity—to around 770,000 today.
Settlers often attack Palestinians and their property, including in deadly pogroms, in order to terrorize them into leaving so their land can be stolen. Israeli colonists have also attacked Israel Defense Forces soldiers they view as standing in the way of their expansion.
In July 2024, the International Court of Justice—where Israel is currently facing a genocide case related to the Gaza war—found the occupation of Palestine to be an illegal form of apartheid that must be ended as soon as possible. The ICJ also ruled that Israeli settler colonization of the West Bank amounts to annexation, also a crime under international law. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states that an “occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”
As the world’s attention focused on Gaza during the past two years, Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed at least 1,039 Palestinians—at least 225 of them children—in the West Bank. This year, at least 233 Palestinians, including at least 52 children, have been killed so far, according to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East.
On Saturday, Israeli occupation forces shot and killed two Palestinians in the northern West Bank, including a 16-year-old boy, Rayan Abu Muallah, who the Israel Defense Forces said was shot after he threw an object at its troops.
Report: Netanyahu To Ask Trump To Support Another Attack on Iran
The Israeli PM is expected to make the case during a December 29 meeting at Mar-a-Lago
by Dave DeCamp | December 21, 2025 , https://news.antiwar.com/2025/12/21/report-netanyahu-to-ask-trump-to-support-another-attack-on-iran/
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to ask President Trump to support another US-Israeli war on Iran, according to an NBC News report from Saturday.
The report said that Netanyahu will stress Israel’s concern over Iran’s production of ballistic missiles and will present Trump with options for the US to join or assist Israel with an attack on Iran. Israeli officials are also warning that Iran is reconstituting its nuclear sites that were bombed by the US during the war in June, but that was not their immediate concern.
According to a report from Israel Hayom, Israeli officials are preparing an “intelligence dossier” on Iran to present to Trump. Netanyahu’s office has said the meeting will take place at Mar-a-Lago on December 29, though President Trump suggested last week that it wasn’t finalized, saying, “We haven’t set it up formally, but he’d like to see me.”
Trita Parsi, Executive Vice President of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, has been warning that another war with Iran was likely since Israel didn’t achieve all of its goals during its previous attack on the country, pointing to the fact that Iran’s missile strikes forced Israel to agree to a ceasefire quickly.
“The June war resulted in mutual deterrence, a situation Iran can accept, but one that is intolerable for Netanyahu and his legacy. Ultimately, the conflict was neither a victory for Israel nor for Iran,” Parsi wrote in Responsible Statecraft on Sunday, responding to the NBC report.
“It is precisely this balance of terror that prompts Israel to seek a new round – Israel’s military doctrine does not allow for any of its regional foes to deter it or challenge its military dominance. Iran’s missile program currently does exactly that,” Parsi added. “And this is precisely why Trump must say no to Netanyahu. Because Israel’s objective is not security in the conventional sense, but rather absolute dominance.”
Earlier this month, Trump suggested the US could destroy Iran’s ballistic missiles when a reporter said Iran was “reconstituting” its missile program. “Well, they can try, but it’s going to take them a long time to come back,” Trump said.
“But if they do want to come back and they want to come back without a deal, then we’re going to obliterate that one too. We can knock out their missiles very quickly. We have great power. And we helped Israel a lot. We were shooting down the drones. We were doing a lot of things for Israel. We did a good job for Israel. But Israel did a good job, they fought, they all fought bravely,” the president added.
Ethics matter more than ever – even in Israel
19 December 25, https://theaimn.net/ethics-matter-more-than-ever-even-in-israel/
Who’d have thought, in this time of crisis, lies and propaganda, that it might be the Jerusalem Post that showed us an ethical direction?
And, on another matter of ethics – the Jerusalem Post, again.
I’m pretty used to the pro-Zionist propaganda that spills out from the Israeli media, the American media, and the Australian media.
I don’t know if it’s Hannukah, Christmas, or what, but in the usual cacophony of news and opinion, – that normally unfashionable subject of ethics is now standing out.
The Jerusalem Post spelt out its horror at the new, and murderous symbolism, of the lapel image now worn by ultranationalist Israeli politicians. Closely resembling the previous symbol, which called for the return of the Israeli hostages, their new symbol calls for continued killing of Palestinians, as the lapel image morphs from a ribbon into a noose.
A golden noose around Israel’s soul – says the paper – “The golden noose goes far beyond poor taste. It represents a theology of death, a reverence for vengeance that distorts the face of Judaism and deals a severe blow to Israeli society.”
“Jews around the world would be hard-pressed to defend and embrace the Jewish state.“
And indeed, this noose-wearing thing might backfire – as Jews in Israel and beyond reflect on the ethics of the Netanyahu government’s war on Palestinians.
Almost simultaneously, came the news of the massacre of Jews at Bondi Beach. The mainstream corporate news outlets have, predictably, latched on to this, to engender more vengefulness and hatred, and to blame Australia’s Prime Minister for his support of Palestinian state rights.
There is much coverage and genuine concern for the victims of this cruel outrage and their families. In amongst this, some sentimental coverage of the brave man who tackled an armed killer. As the ABC pointed out, media coverage treated this man as an oddity – as being a Muslim, one would not expect such decency. – a media attitude that is subtly Islamophobic.
” Ahmed al-Ahmed a 43-year-old Sydney fruit shop owner and father of two, moved toward the attacker, wrapped him from behind, wrestled away the long gun, and forced the shooter to retreat. He was shot and hospitalized, but his split-second decision is widely credited with preventing even greater carnage.”
And commented – “There is something profoundly Hanukkah about that moment.”
The Post goes on to reflect on those non-Jews of history, who risked everything to save Jews, – Raoul Wallenberg. Oskar Schindler. Chiune Sugihara and more
“These stories are not only about the Holocaust, but they are also about moral clarity under pressure, the choice to see a fellow human being and refuse to look away.”
This man’s courage and generosity of spirit has impressed people world-wide, and his actions have been praised in the media, cutting through the general tone of anger and hatred
The author, ZVIKA KLEIN, reminds that Hannukah means “a demand that human beings choose decency over cruelty“
Which is pretty much what Christmas is supposed to mean, too.
While the merchants of hate, revenge, and political opportunism hold sway in the corporate media, voices for compassion and decency are being heard too. These are hopes to cling to for the coming year, and bring some positive meaning to Hannukah and Christmas,
Hi-tech holocaust: How Microsoft aids the Gaza genocide
| Alan Macleod, MintPress News, 2025-10-27 |
Israel’s genocide is being powered by Microsoft.
From creating a massive digital dragnet, aiding in the production of A.I.-generated kill lists, hiring hundreds of Israeli spies to run its internal affairs, and suppressing figures opposing the slaughter, the Seattle-based tech corporation has played a key role in the violence.
MintPress has detailed the deep collaboration between the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and Amazon, Google, TikTok, Apple, Palantir, and Oracle, but Microsoft’s relationship with the government and armed forces of Israel is potentially the closest,leading then-CEO Steve Ballmer tostatethat “Microsoft is as much an Israeli company as an American company.” MintPress explores the decades-long partnership between Microsoft and Israel, and the employees trying to break that marriage from the inside.
Turning Code Into Carnage
“Among U.S. tech firms,” the Associated Press wrote, “Microsoft has had an especially close relationship with the Israeli military.” That relationship, it notes, massively expanded after the October 7, 2023, attacks.
In the months following October 7, the IDF’s usage of Microsoft’s Azure cloud service surged more than 200-fold. The amount of data from surveillance cameras, drones, checkpoints, biometric scanners, phone calls, and intercepted Palestinian personal data stored by the IDF on Microsoft servers doubledin the next nine months,reaching13.6 petabytes by July 2024 – equivalent to 23,000 years of audio, or seven trillion pages of text.
The point of all this was to create an enormous digital dragnet, where Palestinians’ every move, word, and keystroke was recorded in monitored in the greatest and most dystopian digital dragnet ever created. In the words of Yossi Sariel, the head of Unit 8200, the IDF’s surveillance division, the plan was to “track everyone, all of the time.”
Sariel argued that big data was the solution to Israel’s problems, envisaging a future where Israel intercepted and stored “a million calls an hour” from Palestine, and used A.I. to search for keywords and identify threats.
There was no way, however, that Israel could do this alone, as it did not possess the expertise or anything like the storage capacity needed for such a project. To this end, Sarieltravelledto Seattle in 2021 to meet with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, to pitch him on the surveillance partnership whereby Microsoft would build Unit 8200 a customized and segregated area within its Azure platform.
The Israeli military uses Microsoft Azure to transcribe, translate, and otherwise process intelligence garnered via mass surveillance, which is then linked to Israel’s A.I.-based weapons systems.
The largest and most controversial organization within the Israeli military, Unit 8200 has long been the centerpiece of Israel’s hi-tech spying operation. The unit is dedicated to surveillance, cyberwarfare, and online manipulation operations. Last year, it carried out the Lebanese Pager Attack, an act that wounded thousands of civilians. Unit 8200 agents were also behind many of the most infamous international spyware and hacking cases, including the Pegasus software, that was used to surveil tens of thousands of the world’s most prominent political leaders, journalists, and human rights campaigners.
Sariel’s policy of mass surveillance changed the internal attitude at Unit 8200. “Suddenly the entire public was our enemy,”said one officer. The gargantuan trove of information compiled in Microsoft Azure amounted to a vast repository on the entire Palestinian population – a giant database of kompromat that is used to extort and blackmail the region’s indigenous people. If a person was secretly gay, or cheating on their spouse, for example, that information was readily available to Unit 8200 agents, who would then use it to turn their targets into informants. One former Unit 8200 member revealed that, as part of their training, they were made to memorize different Arabic slang words for “gay”, so that they could identify them in conversations.
Palestinian man passes through a biometric gate at the Qalandia crossing near JerusalemThe cloud database is also used to provide after-the-fact justification for arrests of innocent peoples. Off-hand, out-of-context comments made years agocan be used to portray anyone as a member of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or another armed resistance force.
…………………………………………………………………………………………….Of course, the vast majority of the deaths have been civilians – around 70% were women and children. But Israeli officials can also go back after the fact and scour their digital dragnet to justify any killing, finding connections or any other incriminating evidence. A senior Israeli military officer described the cloud technology as “a weapon in every sense of the word.” Other officials, however, have gone so far as to raise concerns that Israel’s overreliance on Microsoft as a service is a strategic vulnerability that should be corrected.
Microsoft Sees No Evil, Only Profits
Throughout all this, Microsoft has protested its innocence – and ignorance – of Israeli crimes. A spokesperson for the company stated:
“At no time during this engagement or since that time has Microsoft been aware of the surveillance of civilians or collection of their cell phone conversations using Microsoft’s services, including through the external review it commissioned.
“Any allegations about Microsoft leadership involvement and support of this project … are false.”
But leaked documents suggest Microsoft engineers understood exactly what sort of data was being stored in Azure, and what their clients hoped to achieve……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Corporate Zionism: Roots in Israel’s War Economy
The Azure/IDF partnership is the result of a decades-long relationship between Microsoft and the State of Israel, one which has helped both entities. Microsoft established its first branch in Israel in 1989, and two years later, opened a research and development center in the city of Herzliya near Tel Aviv. The first of its kind outside the United States, the center has continued to expand, and now directly employs an estimated 2,700 workers.
Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Microsoft began signing deals with Israeli firms and government agencies, and, by the 2010s, was an integral part of the Israeli security state. In 2017, it inked a lucrative contract with the Israeli Prison Service, providing cloud services to the entity responsible for jailing tens of thousands of Palestinians without trial. Today, it maintains over 600 active subscriptions with the Israeli military.
The company has also moved to acquire at least 21 Israeli tech firms. Among these include cybersecurity group, Hexadite, purchased for $100 million in 2017, and Oribi, a web analytics business founded by a former Israeli intelligence agent.
sectorEvery CEO in Microsoft’s history has flown to Israel to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, including Bill Gates, who, in 2016, stated that hi-tech Israeli security was “improving the world.”
In short, Microsoft is a cornerstone of Israel’s burgeoning hi-tech sector, which accounts for 20% of the country’s GDP and more than half of its total exports. Netanyahu himself has showered praise on the corporation, describing the Microsoft/Israel partnership as “a marriage made in heaven.”
Others have been less enthused by this union.In June, Iran deliberately targeted a Microsoft center in Be’ersheva, carrying out a missile strike against it. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard justified their actions, citing Microsoft’s “close cooperation with the Israeli army and its being part of the system supporting aggression, and not just a civilian entity.” “The cyber area that was attacked also includes the residences of people from the espionage and artificial intelligence fields, who operate in direct cooperation with the enemy army and its security apparatus,” it concluded.
Cracking Down on Internal Resistance
A greater threat than Iran to Microsoft, however, is its own employees, hundreds of whom have organized to oppose its role in the genocide. Under the banner of No Azure for Apartheid, workers demand that:
Microsoft terminates all Azure contracts with Israel; disclose all ties to the Israeli national security state; publicly call for a ceasefire, and stop persecuting employees who speak out about the genocide.
This fourth demand is particularly salient, as the corporation has shown little to no tolerance for dissent. In October 2024, it fired two workers for organizing a vigil for Palestinian refugees at its corporate headquarters near Seattle………………………………………………………………………
Targeting Enemies
Company employees are far from the only target of Microsoft’s wrath, however. In May, Karim Khan, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court,announcedthat Microsoft had locked him out of his official ICC email account, just as he was formalizing charges against Netanyahu and other top Israeli leaders. For many, the timing was not a coincidence, but rather a message.
The British lawyer joined a vast plethora of Palestinians who have complained that Microsoft has terminated their accounts without warning. A BBC investigationfounddozens of Palestinians who, after attempting to use Microsoft services to contact relatives in Gaza, were banned for life. “I’ve had this Hotmail account for 15 years. They banned me for no reason, saying I violated their terms — what terms? Tell me,” one Palestinian-American user said.
IBM’s brand has forever been tarnished by its collaboration with Nazi Germany, aiding Hitler’s slaughter of millions of people. In much the same way, No Azure for Apartheid believe that Microsoft’s name will forever be linked with the destruction in Gaza. Microsoft has enjoyed a decades-long partnership with Israel, which has seen them slowly integrate themselves into the state, becoming a fundamental part of the system of oppression. From servicing the Israeli war machine, to hiring hundreds of Israeli spies to run its affairs, to cracking down on internal and external dissent against it, Israel’s mass killing of Palestinians is aided by Microsoft, whose technological prowess has helped Israel carry out the world’s first A.I.-powered genocide. https://www.mintpressnews.com/microsoft-israel-surveillance-azure-idf-gaza-genocide/290534/
In 2025, The Israeli Army Was The ‘Worst Enemy Of Journalists’
Kevin Gosztola, The Dissenter, 19 Dec 25
“The Israeli army is the worst enemy of journalists,” according to a year-end analysis of attacks on global press freedom from Reporters Without Borders (RSF).
RSF stated in their 2025 report [PDF], “Over the last 12 months, the Israeli army has been responsible for nearly half (43%) of all journalists killed worldwide.” Military forces specifically targeted 29 media professionals.
To emphasize this staggering statistic, RSF highlighted a double-tap strike on Gaza’s Nasser Hospital that occurred on August 25, 2025. Israeli forces targeted the part of the hospital that was known to “house a workspace for journalists.”
Reuters photojournalist Hossam al-Masri was killed. Mariam Abu Daqqa, a freelance journalist who was contracted by the Associated Press, arrived at the scene to “report on rescue operations.” Eight minutes after the first strike, Abu Daqqa and Al Jazeera photojournalist Mohamed Salama were killed.
The double-tap strike, a war crime, also killed Moaz Abu Taha a journalist contracted by NBC, and Abu Aziz, a freelance journalist who contributed reporting to Middle East Eye.
As of December 19, 2025, at least 260 journalists have been killed by Israeli military forces carrying out an ethnic cleansing campaign against the people of Gaza. Military operations began in October 2023 following an attack by Hamas operatives, which the Israeli government knew about a year before it occurred but did not prevent.
In RSF’s report on 2025, Claudia Sheinbaum’s “failure to protect journalists” in Mexico and Russian drone attacks on reporters in Ukraine were described as the next biggest cause of deaths.
Nine media professionals were killed in Mexico, and three journalists in Ukraine were killed by Russia. Yet compared to Mexico and Russia’s war in Ukraine, the Israeli army killed more than twice as many journalists.
Sixty-seven journalists in 22 countries were specifically targeted due to their work as media professionals……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..https://thedissenter.org/in-2025-the-israeli-army-was-the-worst-enemy-of-journalists/
Netanyahu is exploiting the Bondi Beach massacre to build support for the Gaza genocide and is fueling antisemitism in the process
Benjamin Netanyahu is blaming the attack at Bondi Beach on Australia’s support for Palestinian statehood. He conflates Jewish safety with Zionism to garner support for Israel, but in doing so, he enlists all Jews as agents of Palestinian oppression.
By Jonathan Ofir December 18, 2025, https://mondoweiss.net/2025/12/netanyahu-is-exploiting-the-bondi-beach-massacre-to-build-support-for-the-gaza-genocide-and-is-fueling-antisemitism-in-the-process/
On September 21, Australia officially recognized the State of Palestine. This recognition coincided with that of several other Western countries, including France, Canada, and the United Kingdom. This is, of course, a problem for an Israeli government that “flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan River.”
So what better than a massacre of Jews on Hanukkah to undermine this effort?
At an Israeli government meeting following the Bondi Beach massacre, Netanyahu admonished the Australian government and its Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, for its supposed role. This rhetorical attack aimed not only to delegitimize support for Palestinian statehood but also to garner support for the continuing genocide in Gaza. It does not seem to matter that the shooters, a father and a son of Pakistani Muslim background, are reported to have been inspired by ISIS and not a Palestinian cause as such. Israel never misses an opportunity to incite against Palestinians.
This is what Netanyahu said during the three and half minute long rant, in English. He started like this:
“On August 17th, about four months ago, I sent Prime Minister Albanese of Australia a letter, in which I gave him warning, that the Australian government’s policy was promoting and encouraging antisemitism in Australia. I wrote: ‘Your call for a Palestinian state pours fuel on the antisemitic fire. It rewards Hamas terrorists. It emboldens those who menace Australian Jews, and encourages the Jew hatred now stalking your streets. Antisemitism is a cancer. It spreads when leaders stay silent. It retreats when leaders act. I call upon you to replace weakness with action, appeasement with resolve’.
Instead, Prime Minister, you replaced weakness with weakness, and appeasement with more appeasement. Your government did nothing to stop the spread of antisemitism in Australia, you did nothing to curb the cancer cells that were growing inside your country, you took no action, you let the disease spread, and the result is the horrific attacks on Jews we saw today.”
So, following the Bondi Beach attack, Netanyahu is basically saying, “I told you so.”
The “appeasement” narrative is one that Netanyahu likes a lot, because it alludes to the appeasement policy of Britain towards Nazi Germany under PM Neville Chamberlain, who sought at the time to play soft with Hitler. The analogy turns Palestinians into Nazis, and those who seek to ‘appease’ them, weaklings and antisemites. For Netanyahu, antisemitism is a cancer, and who embodies it? Palestinians.
Netanyahu continued to apply pressure on Albanese, and in turn, any other leaders in the West who are considering supporting the Palestinians:
“We saw an action of a brave man, turns out a Muslim brave man [Netanyahu first claimed he was Jewish], that stopped one of these terrorists from killing innocent Jews. But it requires the action of your government, which you’re not taking, and you have to, because history will not forgive hesitation and weakness – it will honor action and strength. That’s what Israel expects of each of your governments in the West, and elsewhere. Because the disease spreads, and it will consume you as well. But we are worrying right now about our people, our safety, and we do not remain silent”.
And he then expanded his analogy to lump the Bondi Beach attack in with recent news from Syria, Gaza, and Lebanon:
“We fight those who try to annihilate us. They’re not only trying to annihilate us, they attack us because they attack the West. In Syria, we saw yesterday two American soldiers killed, and one American interpreter killed as well, killed because they represent our common culture. Now as a result of this, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said the following. He said ‘let it be known, that if you target Americans anywhere in the world, you will spend the rest of your brief, anxious life, knowing the United States will hunt you, find you, and ruthlessly kill you’. We send our condolences to the people of America, and I want to say that our policy is exactly that policy. That’s why those who target Israelis, target our soldiers, try to kill them, or try to hurt them and wound them, as happened in Gaza yesterday – we take action. They will spend the rest of their brief, anxious lives knowing that Israel will hunt them, find them, and ruthlessly dispose of them. That is American policy, this is Israel’s policy. It’s our policy in Gaza, Lebanon, anywhere around us. We do not sit by and let these killers kill us.”
This is thus also a message to the U.S., we are one in our imperialist alliance. Netanyahu is signaling to Albanese, Australia, and anyone else who is thinking about aligning with the Palestinians in any form or shape, that they will be aligning with those who seek to annihilate Jews.
Netanyahu is playing an all-or-nothing game, and it’s forcing governments that seek to be liberal to choose a side – with Israel, or with the Palestinians, since Israel is so clearly bent on their destruction. Albanese was asked about Netanyahu’s accusations on ABC. Sarah Ferguson asked:
“Let me just talk to you about antisemitism. I want to bring up what Prime Minister Netanyahu said today. He singled you out personally, he said, for ‘pouring fuel on the antisemitism fire by recognising a Palestinian State’. Do you accept any link between that recognition and the massacre in Bondi?”
Albanese: “No, I don’t. And overwhelmingly, most of the world recognises a two-state solution as being the way forward in the Middle East.”
Albanese is clearly trying not to respond with fury to Netanyahu’s demeaning provocations, but Netanyahu is seeking to divide the world, are you with us or against us – and with us is against the Palestinians.
And it is exactly this rhetoric from Israel that arguably fuels antisemitism, or at least anti-Jewish animus.
This is because it seems impossible to protect Palestinians or even offer symbolic support for their national aspirations without being labeled a coward, an appeaser, or an antisemite seeking the destruction of the Jewish people. When these accusations set the terms, many feel that proving their worth against Israel’s claims is pointless. This dynamic also sustains hostility toward the Jewish community.
In 2015, after an attack in France on a Jewish supermarket, Netanyahu said to French Jews: “Israel is your home”. It caused considerable discontent among the Jewish community at the time, which is probably why he didn’t repeat it now. But he’s still posing as the strong leader of all Jews, whom the “weak” leaders should take example from, as it were. When such self-appointed ‘Jewish leaders’ conflate Judaism with Zionism and insist on unquestioning support for Palestinian destruction as proof of solidarity, people will often side with humanity—supporting those facing genocide, not those perpetrating it—and grow resentful of anyone demanding support for such actions.
We are already seeing the Zionist exploitation of the massacre to target Palestine solidarity in Australia, as well as internationally. We will likely also see a further crackdown on Palestinians from the river to the sea.
Following the massacre, mourners descended upon Bondi Beach to remember the victims. Jews waving Israeli flags were permitted, while anti-Zionist Jews wearing a kuffiyeh were distanced by the police. It was a message to all that the lessons drawn from this will likely be the Zionist ones.
Many are now once again listening to Netanyahu’s violent incitement, as if he weren’t wanted by the ICC for crimes against humanity. He has been granted moral authority once again, even if for a fleeting moment, as head of the self-proclaimed Jewish state. He is using it to berate the world about how to be on the right side of history, while actively commanding a genocide.
Gaza is being carved up. Palestinians are being written out.
As governments and billionaires design a “new Gaza,” most corporate media treat it as a technical project, not a colonial mandate that denies Palestinians the right to govern themselves. The basic fact of Palestinian self-determination is pushed to the margins or erased
The first Zionist targeted assassination – 1924
Eli Ku, Aug 25, 2025, https://lenabloch.medium.com/the-first-zionist-targeted-assassination-was-of-the-orthodox-jewish-peace-negotiator-jaacob-israel-de5b0eb7844b
The first Zionist targeted assassination was of the Orthodox Jewish peace negotiator, Jaacob Israel De Haan, in 1924. Jewish terrorists unleashed a brutal terror campaign on Palestinians and the British, with bombings, assassinations, pogroms of Arab businesses and villages, destruction of civilian places of commonality, sabotaging railroads.
“By the time the Balfour Declaration was finalised, thirty-plus years of Zionist settlement had made clear that the Zionists intended to ethnically cleanse the land for a settler state based on racial superiority; and it was the behind-the-scenes demands of the principal Zionist leaders, notably Chaim Weizmann and Baron Rothschild.
First-hand accounts of Zionist settlement in Palestine had already painted a picture of violent racial displacement. I will cite one of the lesser known reports, by Dr. Paul Nathan, a prominent Jewish leader in Berlin, who went to Palestine on behalf of the German Jewish National Relief Association. He was so horrified by what he found that he published a pamphlet in January, 1914, in which he described the Zionist settlers as carrying on
“a campaign of terror modelled almost on Russian pogrom models [against settlers refusing to adopt Hebrew].”
A few years later, the Balfour Declaration’s deliberately ambiguous wording was being finalized. Sceptics—and the British Cabinet—were assured that it did not mean a Zionist state. Yet simultaneously, Weizmann was pushing to create that very state immediately. He demanded that his state extend all the way to the Jordan River within three or four years of the Declaration—that is, by 1921—and then expand beyond it.
In their behind-the-scenes meetings, Weizmann and Rothschild treated the ethnic cleansing of non-Jewish Palestinians as indispensable to their plans, and they repeatedly complained to the British that the settlers were not being treated preferentially enough over the Palestinians. And they insisted that the British must lie about the scheme until it is too late for anyone to do anything about it.
In correspondence with Balfour, Weizmann justified his lies by slandering the Palestinians and Jews—that is, the Middle East’s indigenous Jews, who were overwhelmingly opposed to Zionism and whom Weizmann smeared with classic anti-Semitic stereotypes. The Palestinians he dismissed as, in so many words, a lower type of human, and this was among the reasons he and other Zionist leaders used for refusing democracy in Palestine—if the “Arabs” had the vote, he said, it would lower the Jew down to the level of a “native”.
With the establishment of the British Mandate, four decades of peaceful Palestinian resistance had proved futile, and armed Palestinian resistance—which included terrorism—began. Zionist terror became the domain of formal organizations that attacked anyone in the way of its messianic goals—Palestinian, Jew, or British. These terror organizations operated from within the Zionist settlements and were actively empowered and shielded by the settlements and the Jewish Agency, the recognized semi-autonomous government of the Zionist settlements, what would become the Israeli government.
There was no substantive difference between the acknowledged terror organizations—most famously, the Irgun, and Lehi, the so-called Stern Gang—and the Jewish Agency, and its terror gang, the Hagana. The Agency cooperated, collaborated, and even helped finance the Irgun.
The relationship between the Jewish Agency, and the Irgun and Lehi, was symbiotic. The Irgun in particular would act on behalf of the Hagana so that the Jewish Agency could feign innocence. The Agency would then tell the British that they condemn the terror, while steadfastly refusing any cooperation against it, indeed doing what they could to shield it.
The fascist nature of the Zionist enterprise was apparent both to US and British intelligence. The Jewish Agency tolerated no dissent and sought to dictate the fates of all Jews. Children were radicalised as part of the methodology of all three major organizations, and by extension, the Jewish Agency.”
Thomas Suarez, London House of Lords, December 2016.
Chris Hedges: Rebranding Genocide
The newest form of genocidal celebration in Israel — where social media and news channels routinely chortle over the suffering of Palestinians — is the sprouting of golden nooses on the lapels of members of the far-right political party Otzma Yehudit, Israel’s version of the Ku Klux Klan, including one worn by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
December 16, 2025 By Chris Hedges , https://scheerpost.com/2025/12/16/chris-hedges-rebranding-genocide/
First, it was Israel’s right to defend itself. Then it was a war, even though, by Israel’s own military intelligence database, 83 percent of the casualties were civilians. The 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, living under an Israeli air, land and sea blockade, have no army, air force, no mechanized units, no tanks, no navy, no missiles, no heavy artillery, no fleets of killer drones, no sophisticated tracking systems to map all movements, or an ally like the United States, which has given Israel at least $21.7 billion in military aid since Oct. 7, 2023.
Now, it is a “ceasefire.” Except of course, as usual, Israel only abided by the first of the 20 stipulations. It freed around 2,000 Palestinian captives held in Israeli prisons — 1700 of whom were detained after Oct. 7 — as well as around 300 bodies of Palestinians, in exchange for the return of the 20 remaining Israeli captives.
Israel has violated every other condition. It has tossed the agreement — brokered by the Trump administration without Palestinian participation — into the bonfire with all the other agreements and peace accords concerning Palestinians. Israel’s extensive and blatant flouting of international agreements and international law — Israel and its allies refuse to abide by three sets of legally binding orders by the International Cout of Justice (ICJ) and two ICJ advisory opinions, as well as the Genocide Convention and international humanitarian law — presage a world where the law is whatever the most militarily advanced countries say it is.
The sham peace plan — “President Donald J. Trump’s Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict” — in an act of stunning betrayal of the Palestinian people, was endorsed by most of the U.N. Security Council in November, with China and Russia abstaining. Member states washed their hands of Gaza and turned their backs on the genocide.
The adoption of resolution 2803 (2025), as the Middle East scholar Norman Finkelstein writes, “was simultaneously a revelation of moral insolvency and a declaration of war against Gaza. By proclaiming international law null and void, the Security Council proclaimed itself null and void. Vis-à-vis Gaza, the Council transmuted into a criminal conspiracy.”
The next phase is supposed to see Hamas surrender its weapons and Israel withdraw from Gaza. But these two steps will never happen. Hamas — along with other Palestinian factions — reject the Security Council resolution. They say they will disarm only when the occupation ends and a Palestinian state is created. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed that if Hamas does not disarm, it will be done “the hard way.”
The “Board of Peace,” headed by Trump, will ostensibly govern Gaza along with armed mercenaries from the Israel-allied International Stabilization Force, although no country seems anxious to commit their troops. Trump promises a Gaza Riviera that will function as a “special economic zone” — a territory operating outside of state law governed entirely by private investors, such as the Peter Thiel-backed charter city in Honduras. This will be achieved through the “voluntary” relocation of Palestinians — with those fortunate enough to own land offered digital tokens in exchange. Trump declares that the U.S. “will take over the Gaza Strip” and “own it.” It is a return to the rule of viceroys — though apparently not the odious Tony Blair. Palestinians, in one of the most laughable points in the plan, will be “deradicalized” by their new colonial masters.
But these fantasies will never come to fruition. Israel knows what it wants to do in Gaza and it knows no nation will intercede. Palestinians will struggle to survive in primitive and dehumanizing conditions. They will, as they have so many times in the past, be betrayed.
Israel has committed 738 violations of the ceasefire agreement between Oct. 10 and Dec. 12, including 358 land and air bombardments, the killing of at least 383 Palestinians and the injuring of 1,002 others, according to the Government Media Office in Gaza and the Palestinian Health Ministry. That’s an average of six Palestinians killed daily in Gaza — down from an average of 250 a day before the “ceasefire.” Israel said it killed a senior Hamas commander, Raed Saad, on Saturday, in a missile strike on a car on Gaza’s coastal road. Three others were also apparently killed in the strike.
The genocide is not over. Yes, the pace has slowed. But the intent remains unchanged. It is slow motion killing. The daily numbers of dead and wounded — with increasing numbers falling sick and dying from the cold and rain — are not in the hundreds but the dozens.
December saw an average of 140 aid trucks allowed into Gaza each day — instead of the promised 600 — to keep Palestinians on the edge of famine and ensure widespread malnutrition. In October, some 9,300 children in Gaza under five were diagnosed with severe acute malnutrition, according to UNICEF. Israel has opened the border crossing into Egypt at Rafah, but only for Palestinians leaving Gaza. It is not open for those who want to return to Gaza, as stipulated in the agreement. Israel has seized some 58 percent of Gaza and is steadily moving its demarcation line — known as “the yellow line” — to expand its occupation. Palestinians who cross this arbitrary line — which constantly shifts and is poorly marked when it is marked at all — are shot dead or blown up — even if they are children.
Palestinians are being crammed into a shrinking, fetid, overcrowded concentration camp until they can be deported. Ninety-two percent of Gaza’s residential buildings have been damaged or destroyed and around 81 percent of all structures are damaged, according to UN estimates. The Strip, only 25 miles long and seven-and-a-half miles wide, has been reduced to 61 million tons of rubble, including nine million tons of hazardous waste that includes asbestos, industrial waste, and heavy metals, in addition to unexploded ordnance and an estimated 10,000 decaying corpses. There is almost no clean water, electricity or sewage treatment. Israel blocks shipments of construction supplies, including cement and steel, shelter materials, water infrastructure and fuel, so nothing can be rebuilt.
Eighty-two percent of Israeli Jews support the ethnic cleansing of the entire population of Gaza and 47 percent support killing all civilians in cities captured by the Israeli military. Fifty-nine percent support doing the same to Palestinian citizens of Israel. Seventy-nine percent of Israeli Jews say they are “not so troubled” or “not troubled at all” by reports of famine and suffering among the population in Gaza, according to a survey conducted in July. The words “Erase Gaza” appeared more than 18,000 times in Hebrew-language Facebook posts in 2024 alone, according to a new report on hate speech and incitement against Palestinians.
The newest form of genocidal celebration in Israel — where social media and news channels routinely chortle over the suffering of Palestinians — is the sprouting of golden nooses on the lapels of members of the far-right political party Otzma Yehudit, Israel’s version of the Ku Klux Klan, including one worn by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
They are pushing a bill through the Knesset which seeks to mandate the death penalty for Palestinians who “intentionally or indifferently causes the death of an Israeli citizen,” if they are said to be motivated by “racism or hostility toward a public,” and with the purpose of harming the Israeli state or “the rebirth of the Jewish people in its land,” the Israeli human rights group Adalah explains. More than 100 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli jails since Oct. 7. If the new bill becomes law — it has been cleared through its first reading — it will join the wave of more than 30 anti-Palestinian laws enacted since October 7.
The message the genocide sends to the rest of the world, more than a billion of whom live on less than a dollar a day, is unequivocable: We have everything and if you try and take it away from us, we will kill you.
This is the new world order. It will look like Gaza. Concentration camps. Starvation. Obliteration of infrastructure and civil society. Mass killing. Wholesale surveillance. Executions. Torture, including the beatings, electrocutions, waterboarding, rape, public humiliation, deprivation of food and denial of medical care routinely used on Palestinians in Israeli prisons. Epidemics. Disease. Mass graves where corpses are bulldozed into unmarked pits and where bodies, as in Gaza, are dug up and torn apart by packs of ravenous wild dogs.
We are not destined for the Shangri-La sold to a gullible public by fatuous academics such as Stephen Pinker. We are destined for extinction. Not only individual extinction — which our consumer society furiously attempts to hide by peddling the fantasy of eternal youth — but wholesale extinction as temperatures rise to make the globe uninhabitable. If you think the human species will respond rationally to the ecocide, you are woefully out of touch with human nature. You need to study Gaza. And history.
If you live in the Global North, you will get to peer out at the horror, but slowly this horror, as the climate breaks down, will migrate home, turning most of us into Palestinians. Given our complicity in the genocide, it is what we deserve.
Empires, when they feel threatened, always embrace the instrument of genocide. Ask the victims of the Spanish conquistadors. Ask Native Americans. Ask the Herero and Nama. Ask the Armenians. Ask the survivors of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Ask the Indians who survived the Bengal famine or the Kikuyu who rose against their British colonizers in Kenya. Climate refugees will get their turn.
This is not the end of the nightmare. It is the beginning.
The Lobby Is Milking the Bondi Beach Attack To Silence Critics of Israel’s Genocide
Jonathon Cook. December 16, 2025
It is years of dedicated work by the Israel lobby that has ensured the mass murder of Palestinians is viewed by governments, the media and parts of the Jewish community as entirely legitimate
I, for one, am struggling to stomach the spew of hypocrisy from pro-Israel groups like the Community Security Trust and its policy director, Dave Rich, in the wake of Sunday’s Bondi Beach attack.
Establishment media, on the other hand, appear to have a bottomless appetite for efforts by Israel apologists to exploit the genuine fear and grief of the Jewish community to advance a political agenda – one designed to silence criticism of Israel over its two-year slaughter and maiming of Palestinian children in Gaza.
Predictably, the supposedly liberal Guardian once again gave Rich a prominent slot in its comment pages, this time to spin the attack in Sydney into a demand for silencing opposition to Israel’s genocide.
Here are extracts from Rich’s piece in italics, followed by my observations. His all-too-obvious double standards and his glaring misdirection ploys should have disqualified this piece from publication. But the British media simply can’t get enough of this kind of bilge.
Rich: “The mobile phone footage of two gunmen calmly taking aim at families enjoying a Hanukah party is utterly chilling. It takes a special kind of dehumanisation, an ideology of pure hatred and self-righteous conviction, to do that.”
If Rich is so troubled by issues of dehumanisation, why has he remained so steadfastly mute about the long and utterly chilling dehumanisation of Palestinians by Israel and by its lobby groups, including his own organisation? Remember, Israeli leaders called the Palestinians “human animals”. It is decades of that kind of dehumanisation that laid the ground for Israel’s genocide. It is precisely because of such dehumanisation that the live-streamed horrors of the past two years made barely any impact on the Israeli public or on opinion among Israel’s supporters.
The truth is it is Rich and his fellow pro-Israel lobbyists who are the ones in the grip of an “ideology of pure hatred” – one that chooses to excuse the mass murder of children when they are Palestinian, blown to pieces and starved for months on end by the very state he identifies with.
Rich: “The whole basis of western liberal democracy, the belief in shared values within a diverse society, is endangered by these attacks.”
No, it’s not the Bondi Beach attack that has endangered “western liberal democracy”. That was irreversibly hollowed out when western leaders chose to actively collude in Israel’s genocide and defy the rulings of the world’s most respected legal institutions, the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. Western liberal democracy was hollowed out when these leaders chose to side with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and prioritise his exterminationist agenda over the rule of law………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
The real emergency is a rampant anti-Palestinian racism that has utterly normalised genocide and been given institutional support across the West. It is anti-Palestinian racism, not “antisemitism”, that is the consequence of “two years of turning a blind eye, taking the easy path and ignoring the warnings”. Make no mistake: alongside the grief and the defiance, people with a conscience are angry at the two-year genocide endorsed by our governments. And they have every right to be. https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2025-12-16/bondi-beach-silence-critics-israel-genocide/
The Israeli army is creating a ‘new security reality’ in the northern West Bank to advance colonization
In recent weeks, the Israeli army has launched a renewed military campaign in the northern West Bank. Palestinians say these operations aim to establish a new “security reality” to facilitate the rebuilding of Israeli settlements dismantled in 2005.
Mondoweiss, By Shatha Hanaysha December 16, 2025
On December 3, Israeli forces raided a home in the town of Qabatiya, south of Jenin, tearing down a map of Palestine hanging on the wall and confiscating another. The homeowners, a woman and her 11-year-old daughter, were detained for several hours and subjected to on-site field interrogations as Israeli troops vandalised the rest of the house before eventually withdrawing.
Noura Muhammad, the homeowner, told Mondoweiss that Israeli soldiers broke down the front door when they arrived, immediately asking her whether there was any “gold or money” in the house.
She added that after detaining her and her daughter alongside their neighbors, the soldiers interrogated the child, asking, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“They were attempting to get inside my daughter’s head to understand the future,” Noura told Mondoweiss, explaining that this is a common question that Israeli soldiers ask children to see whether they answer that they want to become resistance fighters. “They’re asking because they’re afraid of that future,” she explains.
In another home, a Palestinian youth with EU citizenship who spoke to Mondoweiss on the condition of anonymity said that Israeli soldiers had detained and interrogated him for hours, while telling him, “Why are you here? Leave the land of Israel.”
These are not isolated incidents. Over the past several weeks, the Israeli army has launched a renewed military campaign in the northern West Bank, first in Tubas and its neighboring villages and then extending to areas such as Jenin, where Israeli soldiers executed two young men in late November. Since then, Israeli forces have repeatedly conducted raids into cities and towns, imposed curfews, invaded homes before converting them into military outposts, forcibly displaced residents, and detained, interrogated, and arrested hundreds of young men.
But what is behind this renewed military campaign, and why is it unfolding only now? While the official Israeli narrative claims that it is “combating terrorism,” locals in Jenin and other parts of the north say it is really about establishing a new reality on the ground of total Israeli dominance. The objective: to create the necessary “security conditions” to allow the unhindered resettlement of areas of Jenin that Israel had evacuated in 2005.
Military escalation as land confiscation
Israel is attempting to create a new status quo in the West Bank as part of its objective of altering the north’s geography. It is doing so by seizing and repurposing Palestinian land to serve colonization and settler infrastructure, and the ongoing military activities in these areas are a part of that effort, locals say…………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Israel moves to reinstate evacuated settlements
The colonization of these lands occurs through both military and semi-legal means, according to Amir Daoud, Director of Publishing and Documentation at the Colonization & Wall Resistance Commission. The first stage of the colonization process starts with the seizure of land following the issuing of a military order related to road construction, Daoud says. He explains that such orders aim to establish an Israeli military foothold over the land before eventually handing it over to settler groups, complete with a permanent infrastructure that the army would have built for ostensibly military purposes. In the second stage of this process, Daoud continues, settlement activity gradually yet systematically returns to the area under the army’s control following the passing of amendments to Israeli laws
regulating settlement construction. In the case of the Jenin area, this was achieved through the amendment (and eventual repeal) of the Disengagement Law of 2005, which led in that year to the unilateral Israeli withdrawal of all settlements from Gaza and four settlements from the northern West Bank……………………………………………………………………………………………………..
‘Functional coordination’ between settlers and the army
Daoud explains that the pattern has become clear: settlers build a road illegally, after which the army intervenes by issuing a military order that declares it a closed military zone, thereby granting the road “legal cover.” Later, it becomes a civilian settlement or is used to expand settlement infrastructure…………………..
For this strategy to be effective, there must be a degree of coordination between settlers and the military. Daoud describes this as “functional coordination,” and the way it works is that settlers first impose their presence on the ground by constructing supposedly “unauthorized” outposts, and then the army converts it into a fixed reality by converting it into a closed military zone, only to later be opened up for civilian use.
Daoud also stresses that the ongoing military operations in the north can only be understood as part of the effort to create a “new security reality” that is more conducive to settlement expansion……….
The resulting picture is one in which military and settler activities are proceeding in an integrated manner, Daoud stresses; it is all part of a single project aimed at “reshaping the geography and demography” of the northern West Bank………………………………………………….. https://mondoweiss.net/2025/12/the-israeli-army-is-creating-a-new-security-reality-in-the-northern-west-bank-to-advance-colonization/
Israel’s biggest con trick: Hiding the true numbers it has killed in Gaza
10 December 2025, https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2025-12-10/israel-con-numbers-killed-gaza/
Israel has penned us all into a ‘debate’, one entirely divorced from reality, that relates only to those killed directly by its bombs and gunfire – not the genocide it is waging by other means
The biggest con trick Israel has managed to pull off over the past two years is imposing entirely phoney parameters on a “debate” in the West about the credibility of the death toll in Gaza, now officially standing at just over 70,000.
It is not just that we have been endlessly bogged down in rows about whether Gaza’s medical authorities can be trusted, or how many of the dead are Hamas fighters. (Despite Israeli disinformation campaigns, the Israeli military itself believes more than 80 per cent of the dead are civilians.)
Or even that these “debates” always ignore the fact that, early on, Israel wrecked Gaza’s capacity to count its dead by destroying the enclave’s governmental offices and its hospitals. The 70,000 figure is likely to be a drastic under-estimate.
No, the biggest con trick is that Israel has successfully penned us all into a “debate”, one entirely divorced from reality, that relates only to those killed directly by its bombs and gunfire.
The truth is that far, far larger numbers of people in Gaza have been actively killed by Israel not through these direct means but through what statisticians refer to as “indirect” methods.
These people were killed by Israel destroying their homes and leaving them with no shelter. By Israel destroying their water and electricity supplies and their sanitation systems. By Israel levelling their hospitals. By Israel starving them. By Israel creating the perfect conditions for disease to spread. The list of ways Israel is killing people in Gaza goes on and on.
Imagine your own societies levelled in the way Gaza has been.
How long would your elderly parents survive in this hellscape?
How well would your diabetic child fare, or your sister with asthma, or your brother with cancer?
How well would you cope with catching pneumonia, or even a common cold, if you hadn’t had more than one small meal a day for months on end?
How would your wife deal with a difficult childbirth if there were no anaesthetics, or no hospital nearby, or a barely functioning hospital overwhelmed with victims from Israel’s latest bombing run.
And what would be the chances of your baby surviving if its mother could produce no milk from her starvation diet? And if you could not give the baby formula feed because Israel was blocking supplies from entry into the enclave? And if, anyway, the contaminated water supply could not be mixed into the formula powder?
None of these kinds of deaths are included in the figure of 70,000. And all precedents show that many, many times more people are killed through these indirect methods than directly through fatal injuries from bombs and bullets.
According to a letter from experts in this field to the Lancet, studies of other wars – most of them far less destructive than Israel’s on the tiny enclave – indicate that between three and 15 times more people are killed by indirect, rather than direct, methods of warfare.
The authors conservatively estimate an indirect death toll four times greater than the direct death toll. That would mean, at a minimum, 350,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza through Israel’s actions.
The reality is likely to be even worse. That is without even mentioning the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have been left with horrific injuries and psychological trauma.
Israel’s war planners know exactly how this direct-to-indirect ratio works. Which is why they chose to destroy nearly every home in Gaza, to bomb the power, sanitation and water facilities, to level the hospitals, and to block aid month after month.
They knew this would be the way Israel could carry out a genocide while offering its allies – western governments and its army of lobbyists – a “get out of jail card” for their active complicity.
Donald Trump’s so-called “ceasefire” is just another layer of deception in this endless game of smoke and mirrors. The UN’s child protection agency, Unicef, reports that less than a quarter of aid trucks are getting into Gaza, past Israel’s continuing starvation blockade, despite Israeli commitments agreed as part of the “ceasefire”. Apparently, this doesn’t register as a gross ceasefire violation. It goes unnoticed.
Unicef reports further that in October alone, at the start of the “ceasefire”, nearly 18,000 new mothers and babies had to be hospitalised in Gaza from acute malnutrition.
The genocide isn’t over. Israel may have slowed the rate of direct killings it is committing by bombing Gaza, but the indirect killings continue unabated. And so does the Israeli-engineered “debate” in the West, one designed to obscure and excuse the mass murder of Gaza’s population.
Iran says bombed nuclear sites present radiation risk
Iran International, Dec 8, 2025,
ran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi says there is a risk of radiation release at nuclear facilities bombed during the 12-day war in June, contradicting earlier assurances from Tehran.
In an interview with Japan’s Kyodo News on Sunday, Araghchi said strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities had created serious dangers, including possible radiation exposure and unexploded ordnance.
“We are now facing security threats and safety concerns,” he said.
Following the joint US-Israeli attacks, Iranian authorities refused to evacuate surrounding towns and repeatedly dismissed public fears.
In late June, deputy health minister Alireza Raeisi said enrichment “does not involve nuclear fission” and therefore cannot generate harmful radiation, adding that measurements around Natanz and Fordow showed the areas were completely safe……………………………………………….
………………………………………… Still, Araghchi told Kyodo News that Iran cannot currently allow the resumption of IAEA inspections halted after the war because no protocol or guideline exists for inspectors entering damaged facilities.
IAEA director general Rafael Grossi has said most of Iran’s enriched-uranium stockpile is being kept at sites in Isfahan, Fordow and Natanz where inspectors lack access, and warned in October that monitors had observed activity around storage locations.
US officials under President Trump have demanded zero enrichment, dismantling of proxy forces and limits on Iran’s missile program – terms Tehran calls unacceptable. https://www.iranintl.com/en/202512081602
U.S. Military Budget Bill Would Ramp Up Israel Aid to Fill In ‘Gaps’ When Other Countries Impose Embargoes Over Genocide.
“this means the US would explicitly use federal law to step in and supply weapons to Israel whenever other countries cut off arms to halt Israel’s ongoing violations across the region.”
The House Armed Services Committee said in September that the measure “combats antisemitism.”
Stephen Prager, Dec 09, 2025, https://www.commondreams.org/news/us-israel-weapons-gap-ndaa
A little-reported provision of the latest military spending bill would direct the US to create a plan to fill the “gaps” for Israel whenever other nations cut off arms shipments in response to its acts of genocide in Gaza.
As Prem Thakker reported Monday for Zeteo, the measure is “buried” more than 1,000 pages into the more than 3,000-page National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which is considered by lawmakers to be “must-pass” legislation and contains a record $901 billion in total spending.
Republicans are shepherding the bill through the US House of Representatives, where—as is the case with most NDAAs—it is expected to pass on Wednesday with Democratic support, even as some conservative budget hardliners refuse to back it, primarily over its $400 million in military assistance to Ukraine.
Since the genocide began following Hamas’ attack on October 7, 2023, the US has provided more than $21.7 billion to Israel, including hundreds of millions that have been supplied through NDAAs.
The new NDAA includes at least another $650 million to Israel, an increase of $45 million from the previous one, even though this is the first such bill to be introduced since the “ceasefire” that went into effect in October. This aid from the Pentagon comes on top of the $3.3 billion already provided through the State Department budget.
But this NDAA also contains an unprecedented measure. It calls for the “continual assessment of [the] impact of international state arms embargoes on Israel and actions to address defense capability gaps.”
The NDAA directs Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard to assess “the scope, nature, and impact on Israel’s defense capabilities of current and emerging arms embargoes, sanctions, restrictions, or limitations imposed by foreign countries or by international organizations,” and “the resulting gaps or vulnerabilities in Israel’s security posture.”
As Drop Site News explains, “this means the US would explicitly use federal law to step in and supply weapons to Israel whenever other countries cut off arms to halt Israel’s ongoing violations across the region.”
“The point of this assistance, to be clear, is to make up for any identified insufficiencies Israel may have due to other countries’ embargoing it as a result of its ongoing genocide in Palestine,” Thakker wrote.
A similar provision appeared in a September version of the NDAA, which the House Armed Services Committee praised because it supposedly “combats antisemitism”—explicitly conflating a bias against Jewish people with weapons embargoes that countries have imposed to stop Israel from continuing its routine, documented human rights violations in Gaza.
Among the nations that have cut off weapons sales to Israel are Japan, Canada, France, Italy, and Spain. Meanwhile, other major backers, such as the United Kingdom and Germany, have imposed partial freezes on certain weaponry.
While official estimates from the Gaza Ministry of Health place the number of dead from Israel’s military campaign at over 70,000, with more than 170,000 wounded, an independent assessment last month from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany and the Center for Demographic Studies in Spain found that the death toll “likely exceeds 100,000.” This finding mirrored several other studies that have projected the true death toll to be much higher than what official estimates show.
Embargoes against Israel have been called for by a group of experts mandated by the United Nations Human Rights Council, including Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories. Meanwhile, numerous human rights organizations, including the leading Israeli group B’Tselem, have said Israel’s campaign in Gaza has amounted to genocide.
‘Genocide is not an Oakland value:’ inside Oakland’s grassroots campaign to end military shipments to Israel
Oakland International Airport has become a key hub for transporting military cargo to Israel during the Gaza genocide. Now, over 30 groups and thousands of Oakland residents have come together in the Oakland People’s Arms Embargo to stop it.
Mondoweiss, By Joseph Mogul December 8, 2025
Talia Rose starts their shift at Oakland International Airport (OAK) at 3:00 a.m., unloading same-day packages from UPS planes. Across the tarmac, they watch FedEx planes come and go. “I never had any idea what the hell is on those planes besides big metal containers that carry packages,” Rose said.
But that would change in August, when Rose attended a local organizing forum where a member of the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) presented a soon-to-be-public report titled “Exposing Oakland’s Military Cargo Shipments to Israel.”
The report—published by PYM, Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC), and U.S. Palestinian Community Network (USPCN)—details FedEx’s routine shipments of F-35 Lockheed Martin fighter jet components to Israel’s Nevatim Airbase. The report describes OAK as a “dependable conduit for critical military technologies,” concluding “beyond a reasonable doubt that military cargo being shipped out of OAK has been used by the Israeli Air Force to carry out airstrikes and commit genocide in Gaza.”
Learning about OAK’s role in facilitating genocide disturbed Rose. “After reading the report, knowing there’s a minimum of three [shipments] a week going through the airport that have F-35 parts, it’s a feeling of overwhelming anxiety,” they said. “I’m right there, you know? I’m across a tarmac from it. It feels like I should be able to do something.”
With the launch of the Oakland People’s Arms Embargo campaign, Rose and thousands of Oaklanders would find what they could do.
The campaign was launched shortly before the People’s Conference for Palestine, a weekend-long event aimed at strengthening the movement, where PYM called for a shift towards local arms embargoes. Their theory was that a strong campaign would need the trifecta of a mass local base, organized workers, and progressive elected officials. Oakland has all three.
A central node of the weapons supply chain
Voulette Mansour, a PYM-Bay Area organizer whose grandparents were displaced during the 1948 Nakba, attended the People’s Conference. Behind the scenes, Mansour and PYM had been preparing for the campaign launch for months, eagerly anticipating this moment. “We had been doing a lot of background work on the research and preparing to launch the report,” Mansour said.
Through research infrastructure developed by PYM’s Mask off Maersk campaign—which targeted the largest maritime carrier of U.S. military cargo (including F-35 components) to Israel—PYM uncovered OAK’s role in the F-35 supply chain. “We were shocked that Oakland popped up on the map, not just as a blip, but as a central node,” said Mansour, “When we found this out, we were disgusted that this was happening in our city, but we also saw it as an opportunity.”
The “Exposing Oakland’s Military Cargo Shipments to Israel” report confirmed multiple shipments every week for over a year, making OAK the second most important logistical hub in the U.S. F-35 supply chain to Israel, behind Fort Worth.
The F-35 fighter jet is considered the crown jewel of the Israeli Air Force; Israel has its own modified version, called the F-35I, which is retrofitted specifically for Israeli weapons systems. Each jet costs around $100 million (subsidized by U.S. taxpayers in the form of federal weapons contracts) and can carry up to 18,000 pounds of munitions. Lockheed Martin is the primary manufacturer of the F-35, but over 1,900 contractors are involved in supplying various components, creating a vast and intricate global supply chain that the U.S. Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) is responsible for coordinating. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
That wave is swelling. On November 22, PYM launched a new global campaign, the People’s Embargo for Palestine, by creating an international arms embargo ecosystem through the coordination of research and strategies across local campaigns.
This is the next phase of our struggle,” said Mansour. “We raise the ceiling of our struggle through pushing for an arms embargo.” https://mondoweiss.net/2025/12/genocide-is-not-an-oakland-value-inside-oaklands-grassroots-campaign-to-end-military-shipments-to-israel/
Manufactured Narratives: A Century of Distortion and Dispossession in Palestine
9 December 2025 Andrew Klein, https://theaimn.net/manufactured-narratives-a-century-of-distortion-and-dispossession-in-palestine/
A recent report criticising Palestinian schoolbooks has revived a persistent narrative: that Palestinian culture inherently teaches hatred. This framing is not merely inaccurate; it is the latest tool in a century-long campaign to obscure a foundational truth – the establishment of Israel was predicated on the deliberate, violent dispossession of the Palestinian people, known as the Nakba (Catastrophe)¹. To understand the present conflict, one must confront the history of broken promises, calculated ethnic cleansing, and the sustained narrative warfare that has enabled ongoing oppression.
The Foundational Act: The Nakba and Systematic Dispossession
The Nakba (1947-1949) was not a tragic byproduct of war but a deliberate political project of demographic engineering. Following the UN partition plan granting 55% of Palestine to a Jewish state despite Jewish land ownership of only ~7%², Zionist militias executed a coordinated plan.
Mass Expulsion: Approximately 750,000 Palestinians – over half the indigenous population – were expelled from their homes or fled massacres³.
Destruction of Society: Over 500 Palestinian villages and urban neighbourhoods were systematically depopulated and often razed to prevent return⁴.
Massacres as Policy: Dozens of massacres terrorised the population into flight. Key examples include:
- Deir Yassin (April 1948): Over 110 Palestinians were killed by Irgun and Lehi militias⁵.
- Lydda (July 1948): Israeli forces killed an estimated 200 people and expelled 60,000-70,000 in a “death march”⁶.
- Tantura (May 1948): Dozens to hundreds of civilians were killed by the Alexandroni Brigade⁷.
Israeli historian Ilan Pappé terms this process “ethnic cleansing”⁸. By 1949, Israel controlled 78% of historic Palestine, creating a refugee population denied their legal right of return – a direct consequence of foundational violence that continues today³.
The Colonial Blueprint: Broken Promises and Zionist Ambition
The Nakba’s roots lie in colonial politics and political Zionism. As noted in the prompt, critical betrayals set the stage:
- The McMahon-Hussein Correspondence (1915-16): Britain promised Arab independence in exchange for revolt against the Ottomans – a promise later broken⁹.
- The Balfour Declaration (1917): In a colonial act, Britain promised “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, dismissing the indigenous Arab majority as “existing non-Jewish communities”¹⁰.
- The British Mandate (1922-1948): Britain facilitated Zionist immigration and land acquisition, suppressing Arab resistance and fostering a “dual society” that marginalised Palestinians¹¹.
This period established the core dynamic: a colonial-backed settler movement facing indigenous resistance, falsely framed as a clash between two equal national movements.
Weaponising Narrative: From Greenhouses to Textbooks
Distorting history shapes perception and shifts blame. A prime example is the Gaza greenhouses narrative after Israel’s 2005 disengagement.
The propagated story was that Palestinians looted and destroyed valuable greenhouses left for them¹². The documented reality is different:
- Israeli settlers destroyed roughly half the greenhouses before departing¹³.
- The remaining greenhouses were purchased for $14 million by international donors for Palestinian use¹³.
- Palestinian entrepreneurs successfully revived the project, exporting produce by late 2005¹³.
- The project was then strangled by Israeli border closures. The critical Karni crossing was shut for months, preventing export and collapsing the enterprise¹³.
This lie – painting Palestinians as inherently self-destructive – serves to absolve Israel of responsibility for its siege’s economic devastation and to dehumanise Palestinians as incapable of peace¹².
This context is essential for the current textbook debate. While groups like IMPACT-se document concerning content, such analysis is often decontextualised¹⁴. It ignores the living curriculum of military occupation, home demolitions, and trauma that Palestinian children endure daily. Framing the teaching of historical resistance as “incitement” deflects from the occupation’s role as the primary teacher of resentment, misleadingly treating a symptom as the root cause¹⁴.
Gaza: The Continuation of the Nakba
The current assault on Gaza is widely seen as a continuation and intensification of the Nakba¹⁵.
- Scale of Destruction: With over 64,000 killed, widespread displacement, and systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure, the assault aligns with acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention¹⁶.
- Evidence of Intent: Statements by Israeli officials dehumanising Palestinians and invoking genocidal biblical rhetoric have been cited by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) as “plausible” evidence of genocidal intent¹⁷.
- Manufactured Consent: Media hesitancy to accurately describe the violence functions to sanitise the reality for international audiences. As Gaza-based journalist Rami Abou Jamous notes, the intent is clear: “They are not hiding it.”¹⁸
The propaganda that once blamed Palestinians for losing their land now blames them for their own societal destruction, all while displacement continues.
Conclusion: Confronting the Core to Break the Cycle
The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a land conflict resolved through demographic engineering and sustained by narrative control. From “a land without a people” to blaming Palestinian curricula, the pattern is the denial of Palestinian sovereignty, identity, and victimhood.
Palestinian resistance to erasure is criminalised, and their history of trauma is reframed as incitement. Until the international community confronts the original and ongoing sin of the Nakba and advances a justice-based solution acknowledging Palestinian rights, this cycle will persist. The debate over textbooks is a distraction from the real-time erasure it seeks to obscure..
References…………………………………………………………………….
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