nuclear-news

The News That Matters about the Nuclear Industry Fukushima Chernobyl Mayak Three Mile Island Atomic Testing Radiation Isotope

Israeli Snipers Routinely, Deliberately Shoot Palestinian Kids In The Head

Caitlin Johnstone, Oct 10, 2024, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/israeli-snipers-routinely-deliberately?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=150036170&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

There’s yet another doctors’ testimony about Israeli forces constantly shooting Palestinian children in the head, this one published in The New York Times.

The report, titled “65 Doctors, Nurses and Paramedics: What We Saw in Gaza,” begins as follows:

“I worked as a trauma surgeon in Gaza from March 25 to April 8. I’ve volunteered in Ukraine and Haiti, and I grew up in Flint, Mich. I’ve seen violence and worked in conflict zones. But of the many things that stood out about working in a hospital in Gaza, one got to me: Nearly every day I was there, I saw a new young child who had been shot in the head or the chest, virtually all of whom went on to die. Thirteen in total.

“At the time, I assumed this had to be the work of a particularly sadistic soldier located nearby. But after returning home, I met an emergency medicine physician who had worked in a different hospital in Gaza two months before me. ‘I couldn’t believe the number of kids I saw shot in the head,’ I told him. To my surprise, he responded: ‘Yeah, me, too. Every single day.’”

Numerous named medical staff who worked in Gaza then testify in the report about routine encounters with children who’d been shot in the head and chest by Israeli forces, as well as children and infants suffering from severe malnutrition and easily preventable infections.

Such reports have been coming out all year. Because Israel has not been allowing foreign press into Gaza, medical staff have in many ways become the de facto western journalists on the ground in the enclave — and they are all saying the same thing.

Back in July a group of 45 doctors and nurses who’d been working in Gaza signed an open letter to President Biden testifying that “every single signatory to this letter treated children in Gaza who suffered violence that must have been deliberately directed at them.”

“Specifically, every one of us on a daily basis treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head and chest,” the letter continues.

Also in July, Politico published an article by two American surgeons named Mark Perlmutter and Feroze Sidhwa titled “‘Nothing Prepared Us for What We Saw’: Two Weeks Inside a Gaza Hospital,” which contains the following passage:

“We started seeing a series of children, preteens mostly, who’d been shot in the head. They’d go on to slowly die, only to be replaced by new victims who’d also been shot in the head, and who would also go on to slowly die. Their families told us one of two stories: the children were playing inside when they were shot by Israeli forces, or they were playing in the street when they were shot by Israeli forces.”

by Israeli snipers in Gaza” was published in The Guardian, citing nine doctors who’d worked in Gaza after October 7 who “reported treating a steady stream of children, elderly people and others who were clearly not combatants with single bullet wounds to the head or chest.”

Forensic pathologists were able to identify bullets used by the Israeli military in these attacks on children:

“The Guardian shared descriptions and images of gunshot wounds suffered by eight children with military experts and forensic pathologists. They said it was difficult to conclusively determine the circumstances of the shootings based on the descriptions and photos alone, although in some of the cases they were able to identify ammunition used by the Israeli military.”

In February the Los Angeles Times published an article titled “I’m an American doctor who went to Gaza. What I saw wasn’t war — it was annihilation”. The author, a reconstructive surgeon named Irfan Galaria, writes as follows:

“On one occasion, a handful of children, all about ages 5 to 8, were carried to the emergency room by their parents. All had single sniper shots to the head. These families were returning to their homes in Khan Yunis, about 2.5 miles away from the hospital, after Israeli tanks had withdrawn. But the snipers apparently stayed behind. None of these children survived.”

So this is happening. The evidence is undeniable, and the sourcing is as solid as it gets. There are mountains upon mountains of rock solid proof that Israeli forces routinely, deliberately shoot Palestinian children in the head in Gaza. 

The only reason this isn’t being treated as an established fact by the western political-media class is because the Israeli military denies it, telling The Guardian in response to the aforementioned report that “The IDF only targets terrorists and military targets. In stark contrast to Hamas’s deliberate attacks on Israeli civilians, including men, women and children, the IDF follows international law and takes feasible precautions to mitigate civilian harm.”

“Doctors say otherwise,” The Guardian wrote.

Indeed, there is no longer any fact-based reason to deny that Israel is deliberately targeting children with sniper fire. The facts are in and the case is closed. The only basis anyone can have for denying this established fact is their own personal loyalty to the state of Israel and its military, and/or their own personal disdain for Palestinian lives.

This fact punches holes in so many of the narratives used to defend Israel over the past year. That Israel is conducting itself in a more ethical way than Hamas. That Israel is waging a war against Hamas and not the Palestinian people. That the IDF are “the most moral army in the world” and are taking extraordinary measures to avoid civilian casualties. That civilians are being killed in Gaza because Hamas uses them as “human shields”. That this is a war fought for Israel’s self-defense, and not a campaign of extermination driven by racism and hate.

There is simply no way to believe any of these things are true when you acknowledge the extensively-documented fact that Israeli forces are routinely shooting children in the head throughout the Gaza Strip.

October 10, 2024 Posted by | Atrocities, Gaza, Israel | Leave a comment

Blinken approved Israeli attacks on Gaza aid convoys: Report

Since the start of Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza, the US-backed army has become the leading cause of death for humanitarian workers worldwide

News Desk, OCT 8, 2024, https://thecradle.co/articles/blinken-approved-israeli-attacks-on-gaza-aid-convoys-report

US State Secretary Anthony Blinken gave the green light for Israel to launch attacks against humanitarian aid convoys inside the Gaza Strip in the early days of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, according to a report by Drop Site News (DSN) citing Israeli journalists and media outlets.

Tel Aviv’s decision was made during a marathon session of the Security Cabinet between 16 and 17 October that Blinken took part in.

“From within the Kirya, the Israeli military’s main headquarters in Tel Aviv, Blinken participated in the frantic discussions of the Israeli War Cabinet … that were occurring in parallel to conversations in the broader Security Cabinet,” DSN reports.

Citing Channel 12 reporter Yaron Avraham, the report states that these sessions saw Israeli officials “[deliberate] for hours over the precise wording of the decision, with each draft being passed between the Cabinet room and Blinken’s room, a distance of a few meters away, inside the Kirya … Eventually, around 3 am, they arrive at an agreed upon text that is read in the Cabinet room in English.”

Channel 13 independently corroborated Avraham’s reporting, detailing: “The discussion with Blinken is conducted as follows: he is sitting in a room in the Kirya with his advisors and security team, while Security Cabinet holds the discussion; [Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron] Dermer goes back and forth and interfaces with him.”

A day later, following additional Cabinet sessions “helmed by both Blinken and [US President Joe] Biden,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office publicly announced its final decision.

“In light of President Biden’s demand, Israel will not thwart humanitarian supplies from Egypt as long as it is only food, water, and medicine for the civilian population located in the southern Gaza Strip or moving there, and as long as these supplies do not reach Hamas. Any supplies that reach Hamas will be thwarted,” the statement, issued in Hebrew, reads. 

However, DSN highlights that “the Hebrew word לסכל, ‘to thwart,’ is frequently used by Israel to describe targeted killings and assassinations. The previous policy of ‘thwarting’ all humanitarian supplies from entering Gaza was conveyed to Egypt as an explicit threat to ‘bomb’ aid trucks.”

“We in the cabinet were promised at the outset that there would be monitoring, and that aid trucks hijacked by Hamas and its organizations [sic] would be bombed from the air, and the aid would be halted,” Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said a few days after the Security Cabinet’s decision was announced.

When pressed for comment by DSN, State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel called the report “absurd.”

Nevertheless, the State Department did not clarify whether Blinken approved attacks on alleged Hamas fighters “who secure aid convoys or seize their contents.”

Over the past year, intentional Israeli attacks have become the leading cause of death for humanitarian workers across the world, as the Israeli army is now responsible for more than 75 percent of aid workers’ deaths recorded since October 2023.

In the last three months of 2023, following the Security Cabinet session that Blinken took part in, Israeli attacks targeting humanitarian workers across the occupied Palestinian territories were responsible for more deaths “than the deadliest full year ever recorded.”

Last month, ProPublica revealed that two US government offices on humanitarian assistance recommended earlier this year that Washington suspend some or all weapons shipments to Israel because its forces were restricting the delivery of aid inside Gaza. However, their recommendations were sidelined by Blinken, who went on to lie to Congress about the findings.

October 10, 2024 Posted by | Israel, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Israel Planning Major Attack on Iran

 The US is coordinating with Israel on its plans.

by Dave DeCamp,  October 2, 2024,  https://news.antiwar.com/2024/10/02/israel-planning-major-attack-on-iran/#gsc.tab=0

Israel is planning to launch a “significant retaliation” attack against Iran over the Iranian missile barrage that targeted Israel on Tuesday, which was a response to several Israeli escalations in the region. Israeli officials acknowledged to Axios that the situation could lead to a full-blown regional war, which would involve the US.

According to the Axios report, Israel could target oil production facilities inside Iran or other strategic sites. Israeli officials say that if Iran hits back, then all options will be on the table, including strikes on Iran’s civilian nuclear facilities.

“We have a big question mark about how the Iranians are going to respond to an attack, but we take into consideration the possibility that they would go all in, which will be a whole different ball game,” an Israeli official told Axios.

Other options being considered are attacks on Iran’s air defenses or targeted assassinations. Israel has a history of killing people inside Iran, including the July 31 assassination of Hamas’s political chief, Ismail Haniyeh.

Israel would likely need US military support to launch significant strikes on Iranian territory, and the Israeli officials speaking to Axios say they are coordinating with the Biden administration. Israel wants more US support if it provokes another Iranian attack.

National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said Tuesday that the US would work with Israel to ensure Iran faces “severe consequences.” President Biden has also said he is working with Israel on a response but said Wednesday that he wouldn’t support strikes on Iran’s nuclear facility.

“All seven of us agree that they have a right to respond, but they have to respond proportionally,” he said, referring to the Group of Seven nations. He said G7 leaders agreed to impose new sanctions on Iran, which will have little impact since Iran is already under so many.

Israel acknowledged on Wednesday that Iranian missiles made an impact on several military bases but claimed there was no significant damage. Israel is also claiming there were no major casualties, with only two Israelis suffering minor injuries. One Palestinian was killed in the Israeli-occupied West Bank when shrapnel from an intercepted missile hit him.

Iran fired about 180 ballistic missiles at Israel in response to the Israeli assassination of Haniyeh in Tehran and the Israeli killing of Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah and Abbas Nilforoushan, an IRGC commander who was killed alongside Nasrallah.

October 9, 2024 Posted by | Israel, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Let’s remember the 365 days of genocide as well as October 7 attack.

Walt Zlotow, West Suburban Peace Coaliton, Glen Ellyn IL, 7 Oct 24

The Chicago Tribune editorial ‘Remember October 7, 2023’ was right to mourn the Israeli dead, injured and those taken hostage from the Hamas attack a year earlier.

But it’s unfortunate there was no mention of the of Israel’s genocidal ethnic cleansing that followed which has inflicted near total destruction on Gaza’s 139 square miles in the following 365 days. The Tribune ignores the over 40,000 officially dead (likely upwards of 100,000), nearly all schools universities, hospitals, homes destroyed and most food, water and medicine kept from reaching the most devastated people on earth.

It’s unfortunate that there is no mention that the year long genocide in Gaza could not be occurring without tens of billions in US weaponry flowing into Israel for their ‘defense.’ Genocide is not defense…it is genocide.

It is unfortunate there was no mention of the people Israeli genocide is designed to remove from Gaza and eventually the West Bank. Say the word Chicago Tribune Editorial Board…they are Palestinians.

For the Tribune to state that the horrors unleased over the past year “can no longer be contained” is an abrogation of the media’s role to provide a solution to the most grotesque destruction of a people in this century. To state “we suspect it (the anniversary) will not be seen as a day to discuss politics or even the ongoing conflict now raging on another front” is being blind to evil that must be confronted relentlessly.  

This is precisely the day for the Chicago Tribune to engage its readership, regardless of ethnicity or religion, over the ongoing conflict. Had the Trib, along with the rest of mainstream media been doing just that for the past 365 days, this genocide might be over and negotiations for a Palestinian state underway.

October 8, 2024 Posted by | Atrocities, Israel | Leave a comment

Carnegie nuclear expert James Acton explains why it would be counterproductive for Israel to attack Iran’s nuclear program

Bulletin, By John Mecklin | October 5, 2024

In the aftermath of Iran’s massive missile attack on Israel this week, it has become clear that Israeli missile defenses are robust. Of the estimated 180 ballistic missiles that Iran launched, only a small percentage evaded Israel’s anti-missile defenses, causing limited damage at or near some Israeli intelligence and military sites and apparently having little impact on Israeli military operations. But the attack marks a major escalation in the Israel-Iran conflict and has led to widespread speculation about when and where Israel will respond. Much of that speculation has centered on the question of whether Israel will attack facilities related to Iran’s nuclear program.

Late this week, I asked James Acton, a physicist and wide-ranging nuclear policy expert who co-directs the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, for his assessment of the Israel-Iran situation, especially as regards the possibility of an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. His answers follow in a lightly edited and condensed Q&A format.

John Mecklin: I gather you think it would be a bad idea for Israel to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. Can you explain why for our readers?

James Acton: Sure. If Israel or the United States tries to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, my belief is that that will harden Iranian resolve to acquire nuclear weapons without eliminating Iran’s capability to do so. Israel would be motivated, in part, to punish Iran for its recent attack on Israel, using that as an opportunity to try and destroy Iran’s nuclear program, so the Israelis didn’t have to worry about it in the future. I think if they decide to attack Iran’s nuclear program, they will find themselves worrying much more about Iran’s nuclear program in the future. We’ll elaborate on this, but an attack would, I believe, simultaneously harden Iranian resolve to acquire nuclear weapons while also not destroying permanently their capability to achieve that goal…………………….

…………..If the Iranian program today comprised a single reactor that had not been turned on, I think you could make a fair argument that it could be in Israel’s interests to attack it. But that’s nothing like what the Iranian program actually looks like…..

……………..But the Iranian program today is based around centrifuges, which are very small and can be manufactured quickly and placed almost anywhere. So even if an Israeli attack destroys Iran’s current centrifuge plants at Fordow and Natanz—and it’s not obvious to me that Iran has the capability to destroy Fordow, which is buried inside a mountain—but even if Israel can destroy Iran’s existing centrifuge plants, Iran is almost certainly going to reconstruct centrifuge facilities………………………………………………………………….

So people tend to say the Israelis can destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Even if that is true in the short term, the question they have to answer is: Then what?

Mecklin: Okay, the second question is: How likely do you think it is that Israel is actually contemplating attacking the nuclear facilities?

Acton: Let me distinguish between two ideas. Are they contemplating doing so? And will they do so?

I think there is an extremely high probability that there is a serious discussion going on right now in the Israeli Security Cabinet about whether to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. Many Israeli leaders have openly called for that at this juncture. And you know, Netanyahu has been publicly mentioning this possibility on and off for many years now. So I would be staggered if there was not a serious discussion within Israel right now about attacking Iranian nuclear facilities.

Would Israel actually go ahead and do that? I think it would be tough without a lot of US support. And Biden has come out and said unequivocally, no. And doing it without US support would do enormous damage to the US Israeli relationship. And I think the Israelis understand that.

I think the Israelis fully understand that if they attack Iran’s nuclear program, Iran then attacks Israel in a much larger way than we’ve seen before. The Israelis are going to want America’s help in defending against those attacks, and there must be at least some uncertainty in their mind, if they just point blank defy an American president, whether that help would be forthcoming. So for all of those reasons, if the US is being as clear in private as it is in public, I do think it’s substantially less than 50/50 that the Israelis are going to attack Iranian nuclear facilities. I think it’s higher than 10 percent, but it’s not, I think, 50/50. Which I find somewhat reassuring.

………………………..one thing that I feel pretty confident in saying is that if Iran has not yet made a decision to build a nuclear weapon, an Israeli strike makes it much, much more likely that It will make that decision to do so—both for reasons of defending the state and for reasons of domestic politics…….. more https://thebulletin.org/2024/10/carnegie-nuclear-expert-james-acton-explains-why-it-would-be-counterproductive-for-israel-to-attack-irans-nuclear-program/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=MondayNewsletter10072024&utm_content=NuclearRisk_NuclearExpert_10062024#post-heading

October 8, 2024 Posted by | Iran, Israel, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Netanyahu’s dangerous gambit to start nuclear war

by Hakkı Öcal, Oct 07, 2024 more https://www.dailysabah.com/opinion/columns/netanyahus-dangerous-gambit-to-start-nuclear-war

He is doing everything to unite all Muslims and to sever the Western civilization’s centuries-old relations with the Islamic world.

My realism-in-international-relations-theory cap on: Unless you make it intentionally, peace cannot occur all by itself. But wars can. You don’t have to do anything special to start a war. But if there is a war you want to start and for some reason, you yourself cannot initiate it, then you find a dog. After all, why keep a dog and bark yourself?

Now, the cap off; back to what is really happening!

Israeli Prime Minister (or the prime suspect of the only genocide of the 21st century that has been going on for the last year) Benjamin Netanyahu started a deluge in his country, and now he is about to let in all those who facilitated his genocide on the prospect of exterminating at least 2 millions of Tehran residents and making about 100 million people injured and sick in Iran and neighboring countries that is on the path of the wind storms of the thermo-nuclear weapons he is going to drop on Iran.

That seems the only way for Netanyahu to keep himself out of Israeli prison: It would gratify the Zionist Armageddon troops in his coalition government who would never allow the Jerusalem District Court to put its claws on him in one count of bribery and three of fraud; he denies them all. His wife and other family members have been involved in all cases.

Netanyahu refused to resign for the trial; he argued that it would not contradict his work. His trial was suspended in October due to Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, raid in the occupied territories; his lawyers asked for another delay claiming he does not have time to prepare, and he will only be able to testify in March of next year. That is, Netanyahu needs to prolong that war to something large and endless like George W. Bush’s “War on Terror.”

As the Hamas Raid provided the favorable circumstances to begin his coalition partners’ plan for the “Final Solution in Palestine,” now he has ample opportunity to respond to the 200 plus rockets the Iranian Mullahs fired on Israel last week as retaliation to Israel’s killing Hezbollah leaders in Lebanon. Now it is Netanyahu’s turn to retaliate against Iran’s counterretaliation. That is his last opening to spread his war on Gaza to the entire Shiite Crescent, starting at the two ends of it, Lebanon and Yemen, and reaching to the center: Iran, itself.

Netanyahu’s Likud has seven coalition partners – United Torah Judaism, Shas, Religious Zionist Party, Otzma Yehudit, New Hope and Noam – and they actually keep him trapped inside the hardline coalition. His partners are spending billions of dollars in the Occupied Territories opening new settlements and religious schools. Hard-line religious parties allowed gun ownership without investigation. If Netanyahu ever objects to any of these government decrees, his National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir the leader of the far-right Jewish Power party, threatened to end the coalition, which might mean Netanyahu goes to prison with his wife.

This political paralysis will not only keep him doing whatever Ben-Gvir wants him to do, but he has to gear up so that he keeps his allies at the U.N. Security Council, the U.S., Britain and France, on a leash. He knows that in America going to a fateful election would not allow him to keep the Israeli armed forces permanently in the Gaza Strip. America wants Israel to withdraw completely, to let the Palestinian Authority take control. Netanyahu cannot accept cooperation with the Palestinians and he can no longer oppose the U.S. demands. The only way out for him seems to raise the level of hostilities in the region.

State built on blood

Israel was created (at the expense of the Ottoman Empire) to provide a safe refuge for Jews. But it has never been what it was intended for. Since its establishment in 1948, over 20,000 Jews have been killed and over 100,000 of them injured and maimed in the wars the Israeli government started. Not all the Israeli prime ministers were warmongers. Yitzhak Rabin, the fifth prime minister of Israel, for instance, wanted to put an end to the violence caused by Israel’s rejection of the U.N.’s partition of Palestine between the Jews and native Muslims and Christians. He signed the Oslo Accords to finally make peace in Palestine. But Yigal Amir, an Israeli law student and ultranationalist who radically opposed Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s peace initiative, particularly the signing of the Oslo Accords, killed him. Guess who benefited from this political murder?

After a brief interval of seven months with Shimon Peres, Netanyahu became the prime minister and again with a coalition of religious hardliners, he rejected the peace accords Rabin signed and began occupying the Palestinian villages and towns.

According to Mouin Rabbani, former senior analyst at the International Crisis Group and co-editor of Jadaliyya Ezine magazine, Netanyahu has three modi vivendi since his first tour of government in 1996. The first is to launch outrageous provocation guaranteed to elicit an armed response. The second is to use overwhelming firepower to kill Arabs and remind them who is boss. The third and the last is to mobilize foreign parties to quickly restore calm on improved conditions.

Forcing their hands

Now Netanyahu is the prime minister for the sixth time, and he has successfully paved the way to elicit any support not only from the U.S. but also from the British, French and German governments.

If, for any reason, he cannot drag the American generals with him into a disastrous war in Iran, there is a way to bring peace to Palestine. American politicians and their trigger-happy generals (who, overruling President Kennedy’s objection, helped Israel go nuclear in the first place) should understand that millions of dead people in Iran and their neighbors, a devastated Tehran and the misery that would follow would make all the Muslim people in the region, Türkiye included, turn their back on the West for good. Those generals should not even think that Iran is a Shiite country and most of the Arabs and Turks are not, so they won’t really bother about the mass killings and devastation in Iran! Even one single, small Jericho rocket with a nuclear bomb would not only demolish the years of efforts to win the hearts and minds of the Middle Eastern nations, but also any future cooperation between the West and the East would be impossible for the foreseeable future.

As professor Stephen Walt, whose realistic cap and basic teachings I borrowed here, says: “If you don’t want someone to do something, you don’t give them the means to do it. One must therefore conclude the U.S. government does not object to what Israel has been doing for the past year.”

We hope the U.S. still has the final control of Netanyahu’s push-button of those bombs which U.S. President Johnson acquiesced to be built in the Negev Desert in Israel after Kennedy was assassinated. (No, I don’t mean that Kennedy was killed by the Israeli Zionists!)

October 7, 2024 Posted by | Israel, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Inside the State Department’s Weapons Pipeline to Israel

Leaked cables and emails show how the agency’s top officers dismissed internal evidence of Israelis misusing American-made bombs and worked around the clock to rush more out while the Gaza death toll mounted.

ProPublica, by Brett Murphy, Oct. 4, 2024

In late January, as the death toll in Gaza climbed to 25,000 and droves of Palestinians fled their razed cities in search of safety, Israel’s military asked for 3,000 more bombs from the American government. U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew, along with other top diplomats in the Jerusalem embassy, sent a cable to Washington urging State Department leaders to approve the sale, saying there was no potential the Israel Defense Forces would misuse the weapons.

The cable did not mention the Biden administration’s public concerns over the growing civilian casualties, nor did it address well-documented reports that Israel had dropped 2,000-pound bombs on crowded areas of Gaza weeks earlier, collapsing apartment buildings and killing hundreds of Palestinians, many of whom were children. Lew was aware of the issues. Officials say his own staff had repeatedly highlighted attacks where large numbers of civilians died. Homes of the embassy’s own Palestinian employees had been targeted by Israeli airstrikes.

Still, Lew and his senior leadership argued that Israel could be trusted with this new shipment of bombs, known as GBU-39s, which are smaller and more precise. Israel’s air force, they asserted, had a “decades-long proven track record” of avoiding killing civilians when using the American-made bomb and had “demonstrated an ability and willingness to employ it in [a] manner that minimizes collateral damage.”

While that request was pending, the Israelis proved those assertions wrong.  In the months that followed, the Israeli military repeatedly dropped GBU-39s it already possessed on shelters and refugee camps that it said were being occupied by Hamas soldiers, killing scores of Palestinians. Then, in early August, the IDF bombed a school and mosque where civilians were sheltering. At least 93 died. Children’s bodies were so mutilated their parents had trouble identifying them.

Weapons analysts identified shrapnel from GBU-39 bombs among the rubble.

In the months before and since, an array of State Department officials urged that Israel be completely or partially cut off from weapons sales under laws that prohibit arming countries with a pattern or clear risk of violations. Top State Department political appointees repeatedly rejected those appeals. 

……………………………….“But it is a question of making judgments,” Blinken said of his agency’s efforts to minimize harm. “We started with the premise on October 7 that Israel had the right to defend itself, and more than the right to defend itself, the right to try to ensure that October 7 would never happen again.”

The embassy’s endorsement and Blinken’s statements reflect what many at the State Department have understood to be their mission for nearly a year. As one former official who served at the embassy put it, the unwritten policy was to “protect Israel from scrutiny” and facilitate the arms flow no matter how many human rights abuses are reported. “We can’t admit that’s a problem,” this former official said.

The embassy has even historically resisted accepting funds from the State Department’s Middle East bureau earmarked for investigating human rights issues throughout Israel because embassy leaders didn’t want to insinuate that Israel might have such problems, according to Mike Casey, a former U.S. diplomat in Jerusalem. “In most places our goal is to address human rights violations,” Casey added. “We don’t have that in Jerusalem.”

Last week, ProPublica detailed how the government’s two foremost authorities on humanitarian assistance — the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department’s refugees bureau — concluded in the spring that Israel had deliberately blocked deliveries of food and medicine into Gaza and that weapons sales should be halted. But Blinken rejected those findings as well and, weeks later, told Congress that the State Department had concluded that Israel was not blocking aid.

The episodes uncovered by ProPublica, which have not been previously detailed, offer an inside look at how and why the highest ranking policymakers in the U.S. government have continued to approve sales of American weapons to Israel in the face of a mounting civilian death toll and evidence of almost daily human rights abuses. This article draws from a trove of internal cables, email threads, memos, meeting minutes and other State Department records, as well as interviews with current and former officials throughout the agency, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The records and interviews also show that the pressure to keep the arms pipeline moving also comes from the U.S. military contractors who make the weapons. Lobbyists for those companies have routinely pressed lawmakers and State Department officials behind the scenes to approve shipments both to Israel and other controversial allies in the region, including Saudi Arabia. When one company executive pushed his former subordinate at the department for a valuable sale, the government official reminded him that strategizing over the deal might violate federal lobbying laws, emails show.

The Biden administration’s repeated willingness to give the IDF a pass has only emboldened the Israelis, experts told ProPublica………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Weapons sales are a pillar of American foreign policy in the Middle East. Historically, the U.S. gives more money to Israel for weapons than it does to any other country. Israel spends most of those American tax dollars to buy weapons and equipment made by U.S. arms manufacturers……………………………………………………………………

There is little sign that either party is prepared to curtail U.S. weapons shipments. ………………………………………………………………………………………

The U.S. gives the Israeli government about $3.8 billion every year and much more during wartime to help maintain its military edge in the region.  Congress and the executive branch have imposed legal guardrails on how Israel and other countries can use the weapons they buy with U.S. money. The State Department must review and approve most of those large foreign military sales and is required to cut off a country if there is a pattern or clear risk of breaking international humanitarian law, …………………

the bulk of that review is conducted by the State Department’s arms transfers section, known as the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, with input from other bureaus. For Israel and NATO allies, if the sale is worth at least $100 million for weapons or $25 million for equipment, Congress also gets final approval. If lawmakers try to block a sale, which is rare, the president can sidestep with a veto.

For years, Josh Paul, a career official in the State Department’s arms transfers bureau, reviewed arms sales to Israel and other countries in the Middle East. Over time, he became one of the agency’s most well-versed experts in arms sales.

Even before Israel’s retaliation for Oct. 7, he had been concerned with Israel’s conduct. On multiple occasions, he said, he believed the law required the government to withhold weapons transfers. In May 2021, he refused to approve a sale of fighter jets to the Israeli Air Force. “At a time the IAF are blowing up civilian apartment blocks in Gaza,” Paul wrote in an email, “I cannot clear on this case.” The following February, he wouldn’t sign off on another sale after Amnesty International published a report accusing Israeli authorities of apartheid.

In both cases, Paul later told ProPublica, his immediate superiors signed off on the sales over his objections……………………………………………………………

 Paul resigned in protest over arms shipments to Israel last October, less than two weeks after the Hamas attack. It was the Biden administration’s first major public departure since the start of the war. By then, local authorities said Israeli military operations had killed at least 3,300 Palestinians in Gaza.

Internally, other experts began to worry the Israelis were violating human rights almost from the onset of the war as well……………………………………………………

. In late December, just before Christmas, staff in the arms transfers bureau walked into their Washington, D.C., office and found something unusual waiting for them: cases of wine from a winery in the Negev Desert, along with personalized letters on each bottle.

The gifts were courtesy of the Israeli embassy………………………………………………

One month later, Lew delivered his endorsement of Israel’s request for the 3,000 precision GBU-39 bombs, which would be paid for with both U.S. and Israeli funds. Lew is a major figure in Democratic circles, having served in various administrations. He was President Barack Obama’s chief of staff and then became his treasury secretary. He has also been a top executive at Citigroup and a major private equity firm.

The U.S. defense attaché to Israel, Rear Adm. Frank Schlereth, signed off on the January cable as well. In addition to its assurances about the IDF, the memo cited the Israeli military’s close ties with the American military: Israeli air crews attend U.S. training schools to learn about collateral damage and use American-made computer systems to plan missions and “predict what effects their munitions will have on intended targets,” the officials wrote.

In the early stages of the war, Israel used American-made unguided “dumb” bombs, some likely weighing as much as 2,000 pounds, which many experts criticized as indiscriminate. But at the time of the embassy’s assessment, Amnesty International had documented evidence that the Israelis had also been dropping the GBU-39s, manufactured by Boeing to have a smaller blast radius, on civilians. Months before Oct. 7, a May 2023 attack left 10 civilians dead. Then, in a strike in early January this year, 18 civilians, including 10 children, were killed. Amnesty International investigators found GBU-39 fragments at both sites. (Boeing declined to comment and referred ProPublica to the government.)

At the time, State Department experts were also cataloging the effect the war has had on American credibility throughout the region. Hala Rharrit, a career diplomat based in the Middle East, was required to send daily reports analyzing Arab media coverage to the agency’s senior leaders. Her emails described the collateral damage from airstrikes in Gaza, often including graphic images of dead and wounded Palestinians alongside U.S. bomb fragments in the rubble.

“Arab media continues to share countless images and videos documenting mass killings and hunger, while affirming that Israel is committing war crimes and genocide and needs to be held accountable,” she reported in one early January email alongside a photograph of a dead toddler. “These images and videos of carnage, particularly of children getting repeatedly injured and killed, are traumatizing and angering the Arab world in unprecedented ways.”

Rharrit, who later resigned in protest, told ProPublica those images alone should have prompted U.S. government investigations and factored into arms requests from the Israelis. She said the State Department has “willfully violated the laws” by failing to act on the information she and others had documented. “They can’t say they didn’t know,” Rharrit added……………………………………………………..

In Israel’s New York consulate, weapons procurement officers occupy two floors, processing hundreds of sales each year. One former Israeli officer who worked there said he tried to purchase as many weapons as possible while his American counterparts tried just as hard to sell them. “It’s a business,” he said.

Behind the scenes, if government officials take too long to process a sale, lobbyists for powerful corporations have stepped in to apply pressure and move the deal along, ProPublica found.

Some of those lobbyists formerly held powerful positions as regulators in the State Department. In recent years, at least six high-ranking officials in the agency’s arms transfers bureau left their posts and joined lobbying firms and military contractors…………………………………………….more https://www.propublica.org/article/israel-gaza-america-biden-administration-weapons-bombs-state-department

October 7, 2024 Posted by | Israel, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

France asserts itself against Netanyahu over Lebanon: Macron calls for Arms Embargo against Israel

Informed Comment Juan Cole10/06/2024

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – In a radio interview with France Inter on Saturday, French president Emmanuel Macron called for an arms embargo against Israel over its ongoing attacks on Gaza and now Lebanon.

BFMTV reported that he said, “I think that today the priority is to return to a political solution, and that we must halt the delivery of arms for pursuing combat against Gaza. France will not deliver them.”

He clarified that France would continue to export defensive materiel, such as parts for the Israeli Iron Dome anti-missile defense system.

The station notes that President Joe Biden has often called for the avoidance of civilian casualties but has steadfastly declined to use his leverage with Israel, given its dependence on US weaponry and ammunition, to pressure it. In Britain, the Labour government of PM Keir Starmer has halted 10 out of 350 weapons licenses on the grounds that those ten weapons would likely be used by Israel against civilians.

Macron is the first leader of a major European country to argue for an embargo of offensive weapons to Israel in response to its total war on Gaza.

The French president has been heavily criticized by former French diplomats and other public figures for not showing the spine toward the Israeli……………………………. more https://www.juancole.com/2024/10/asserts-against-netanyahu.html

October 7, 2024 Posted by | France, Israel, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Urgent Action by S. Korean Civil Society in Solidarity with Palestine.

Urgent Action by S. Korean Civil Society in Solidarity with Palestine, Facebook Page, 6 Oct 24

We Will Stand Together for Palestinian Liberation Until the Very End

One year. One year has passed as the Israeli occupation has escalated the genocide in Gaza. Throughout this past year, we saw children torn to pieces by American weapons. We saw civilians with white flags being executed. We saw the stream of refugees following evacuation orders from the occupation, only to be bombed on the road. We saw refugees burned alive in hospitals, UN-run schools, and tents in the so-called safe-zones. We saw medical staff who tended to patients, journalists who spread the truth, UN workers who provided aid, all massacred. Throughout the past year, we saw in real-time how Israel turned Gaza into an extermination camp, systematically destroying 2 percent of its population.

The survivors of the bombardment are dying of starvation and disease. Since last October 7, Israel escalated the 16-year-long blockade of Gaza, calling its residents “human animals” and cutting off all access to water, food, medicine, electricity and fuel. Children, sole survivors of their families, suffer through amputation without anesthetics, and find that they have no home to go back to. Those who cannot follow Israeli evacuation orders, such as patients, the disabled and the elderly, are taken to concentration camps where they are tortured, raped, or murdered. Israeli politicians are already planning to build illegal settlements over the ruin, and Israeli soldiers are singing and dancing over the murder of Gazans, while fake news endlessly tries to legitimize the genocide. Israel is escalating its ethnic cleansing in its other illegal occupations in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, preparing for forceful annexation of these territories.

The US and the European powers are colluding with the Israeli genocide at an unprecedented level. They exponentially increased their weapons supply to Israel, and blatantly defended Israel’s war crimes. On top of this, they imprisoned and punished their own citizens who condemned the genocide. Throughout this past year, as the genocide unfolded in Gaza, the international community failed to stop the Israeli war crimes, and failed to stop Israel from escalating the war across the Middle East. From September 23, Israel started bombing southern and eastern Lebanon, and on September 29, over the course of 24 hours, Israel bombed Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen and Syria. On September 30, Israel began the ground invasion against Lebanon, and now they are threatening to start a war with Iran as well.

However, the Palestinian struggle is changing the course of history. Palestinians still shout that existence is resistance, and the refugees still vow to return to their homes, even after 76 years of displacement. The new generations are inheriting the resistance struggle, without breaking under the oppression. Palestinians everywhere expose and shatter the hypocrisy and double standards of this world. All over the world, students occupied their campuses demanding their universities to stop their collusion in the genocide and colonial rule, while dockworkers refused to service ships headed to Israel, stopping them from leaving port. Protests of unprecedented scale are filling the streets, shouting from the river to the sea Palestine will be free. This solidarity with the Palestinian struggle led to the ICJ ordering Israel to stop its genocide, and to the ICC seeking arrest warrants for the Israeli war criminals. The UN General Assembly resolution not only demanded Israel to end its illegal occupation of Palestine within a year, but also obligated member states to sanction Israel. Slowly but surely, the Zionist Israeli entity is being isolated.

We stand together with the Palestinian resistance. October 7 changed everything. To end Israeli genocide, military occupation and colonial rule have become our own problem as well. We will bring Palestinian liberation forward with even stronger solidarity. We will pressure the Korean government to issue a comprehensive arms embargo on Israel. We will hold Korean companies accountable, when their machines destroy Palestinian lives. We will reject all attempts at whitewashing that seeks to normalize the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Until Palestinians reclaim their lands, and all refugees return to their homes, we will stand with the Palestinian resistance to the very end.

October 7, 2024 Posted by | Atrocities, Israel, South Korea | Leave a comment

Biden Says US and Israel Are Discussing Strikes on Iranian Oil Facilities

The president previously said he wouldn’t support strikes on nuclear facilities

by Dave DeCamp October 3, 2024,  https://news.antiwar.com/2024/10/03/biden-says-us-and-israel-are-discussing-strikes-on-iranian-oil-facilities/#gsc.tab=0

President Biden said Thursday that the US and Israel were discussing the possibility of striking Iran’s oil facilities in retaliation for the Iranian missile barrage that targeted Israel on Tuesday, which was a response to multiple Israeli escalations.

When asked by a reporter if he would support Israeli strikes on Iranian oil sites, Biden said, “We’re discussing that. I think that would be a little… anyway.” The comments sent oil prices spiking.

Striking Iran’s oil facilities is supported by the ultra-hawkish Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). “These oil refineries need to be hit and hit hard because that is the source of cash for the regime to perpetrate their terror,” Graham said in a statement on Tuesday.

On Wednesday, Biden said he wouldn’t support Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, but the US is vowing to ensure Tehran faces “severe consequences.” Israeli officials have told Axios that they plan to hit Iran hard and believe their attack could lead to a major regional war.

Options being considered besides striking oil facilities are targeting Iran’s air defenses or carrying out a targeted assassination inside Iran. Israeli officials have said that if Iran responds to their next attack, then any option is on the table, including strikes on nuclear facilities.

Israel is coordinating its plans to attack Iran with the US because it wants the US to come to its defense in the event of another significant Iranian attack. If Israel wants to carry out a significant strike inside Iran, it may also need support from the US military.

Iran fired about 180 ballistic missiles at Israel in response to the Israeli assassination of Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and the Israeli killing of Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah and Abbas Nilforoushan, an IRGC commander who was killed alongside Nasrallah.

October 6, 2024 Posted by | Israel, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Israel has given no assurances it won’t target Iran’s nuclear facilities, top State Department official tells CNN

By Kylie Atwood and Jennifer Hansler, CNN, Fri October 4, 2024, Washington 

Israel has not given assurances to the Biden administration that targeting Iran’s nuclear facilities is off the table in retaliation for the Iranian ballistic missile strikes earlier this week, a top US State Department official told CNN on Friday.

The official added that it is “really hard to tell” if Israel will use the anniversary of Hamas’ October 7 attacks to retaliate.

“We hope and expect to see some wisdom as well as strength, but as you guys know, no guarantees,” the official said when asked by CNN if Israel has assured the US that Iran’s nuclear sites are off the table.

US officials have voiced support for Israel responding to Iran’s missile attack earlier this week, with multiple officials publicly saying there must be consequences. At the same time, officials have also voiced concerns about a regional conflagration as they grapple with an increasingly volatile Middle East.

President Joe Biden said earlier this week the US would not support Israel targeting Iran’s nuclear program.

“If I were in their shoes, I’d be thinking about other alternatives than striking oil fields,” Biden said at a press briefing Friday. https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/04/politics/state-department-israel-no-assurances-irans-nuclear-facilities/index.html

October 6, 2024 Posted by | Israel, politics international | Leave a comment

Biden says he would not back Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear sites

Any Israeli response to Iran’s missile barrage should be ‘proportional’, says the US president.

By Al Jazeera Staff, 2 Oct 2024  https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/10/2/biden-says-he-would-not-back-israeli-strike-on-irans-nuclear-sites

United States President Joe Biden has voiced opposition to any strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites in response to Tehran’s missile attack on Israel.

When asked by reporters on Wednesday whether he would back such retaliation, Biden stated “the answer is no”.

Biden’s comments come a day after Iran fired some 180 ballistic missiles at Israel, its second attack on the country since April. Iran’s most recent attacks on Israeli military sites have come in response to the assassination of key Iran-allied figures, including Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed Iran would “pay” for the strike, which reportedly did not cause any serious casualties in Israel but killed one Palestinian in the occupied West Bank.

Analysts warned Israel may seize the chance to launch attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities, a target its leaders have long eyed.

“The risk of an [Israeli] attack on the nuclear programme is particularly high because Iran’s defensive shield Hezbollah is on its knees,” Ali Vaez, the Iran Project director at the International Crisis Group think tank, told Al Jazeera.

“US forces are already in the region shielding Israel, and for Israel, this is potentially a once-in-a-generation opportunity to take care of a major threat that it has perceived from Iran over the past few decades,” he said.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett explicitly called for such an attack in a post on X, saying Israel must “act now to destroy Iran’s nuclear program”.

“We have the justification. We have the tools”, Bennett said.

Biden calls for ‘proportional’ response

In the wake of Iran’s attack, Biden emphasised that the US is “fully supportive of Israel”.

Other US officials warned Iran would face “severe consequences”, with State Department spokesman Matthew Miller telling reporters he was not “ruling anything out”.

On Wednesday, after Biden spoke with allied leaders, he said he would not support an attack on Iran’s nuclear facility. Any Israeli response to Iran, he told reporters, should be “proportional”, a position shared by all nations part of the G7 grouping, including Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom.

The White House also said Biden and G7 leaders spoke about coordinating a new round of sanctions against Iran.

Whole Middle East at risk

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said that the attack was warranted, but that Tehran did not seek war with Israel.

Iran’s armed forces warned that Israel would face “vast destruction” if it retaliated.

The escalation between two of the Middle East’s strongest militaries – while war continues to rage in Gaza and Lebanon – has stoked fears of an even broader conflict in the region.

“The idea of Iran and Israel going after each other under the auspices of the United States will burn everyone in the Middle East and beyond,” said Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst Marwan Bishara.

October 5, 2024 Posted by | Israel, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Israel may launch symbolic attack on Iran nuclear-related facilities, says Ehud Barak

Israeli former prime minister says in interview it is too late to significantly set back Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, and that a ‘massive’ attack on Iran’s oil facilities is likely.

Julian Borger, Fri 4 Oct 2024 , https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/04/israel-may-launch-symbolic-attack-on-iran-nuclear-facilities-says-ehud-barak
Israel is likely to mount a large-scale airstrike against Iran’s oil industry and possibly a symbolic attack on a military target related to its nuclear programme, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak has predicted.

Barak said there was no doubt there would be an Israeli military response to Iran’s assault on Tuesday with over 180 ballistic missiles, most of which were intercepted, but some landed on and around densely populated areas and Israeli military bases.

“Israel has a compelling need, even an imperative, to respond. I think that no sovereign nation on Earth could fail to respond,” Barak said in an interview.

The former prime minister, who also served as defence minister, foreign minister and army chief of staff, said the model for the Israeli response could be seen in Sunday’s reprisal airstrikes against Houthi-controlled oil facilities, power plants and docks in the Yemeni port of Hodeidah, a day after Houthi fired missiles aimed at Israel’s international airport outside Tel Aviv.

“I think we might see something like that. It might be a massive attack, and it could be repeated more than once,” he told the Guardian. Joe Biden said on Thursday there had been discussions in Washington about a possible Israeli attack on Iran’s oil sector, but it not give any details or make clear whether the US would support such an assault.

Barak, now aged 82, said there had also been suggestions in Israel that it should make use of this opportunity, in reprisal for the Iranian attack, to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, but he argued it would not significantly set back the Iranian programme.

When Barak served as defence minister from 2007 to 2013, under both Ehud Olmert and Benjamin Netanyahu, he was among Israel’s most vociferous advocates for bombing the Iranian nuclear facilities, trying and failing to convince presidents George Bush and then Barack Obama, to contribute US military might to the campaign.

On Wednesday, Biden followed Obama in voicing his opposition to any Israeli strikes against Iranian nuclear sites. And Barak himself now accepts the Iran nuclear programme is too far advanced for any bombing campaign to set it back significantly.

“There are some commentators and even some people within the defence establishment who raised the question: Why the hell not hit the nuclear military programme?” Barak said. “A little bit more than a decade ago, I was probably the most hawkish person in Israeli leadership arguing that it was worth considering very seriously, because there was an actual capability to delay them by several years.

“That’s not the case right now, because Iran is a de facto threshold country,” he argued. “They do not have yet a weapon – it may take them a year to have one, and even half a decade to have a small arsenal. Practically speaking, you cannot easily delay them in any significant manner.”

Under a 2015 multilateral nuclear agreement, Tehran accepted tight restrictions on its uranium enrichment and other elements of its programme in exchange for sanctions relief, but that agreement has steadily fallen apart since the US withdrawal under Donald Trump in 2018.

Iran now has a stockpile of enriched uranium that is 30 times higher than the agreed 2015 limit, and it is enriching uranium to up to 60% purity, which in terms of the additional processing required, is very close to 90% weapons grade fissile material. Under the 2015 agreement, Iran’s “breakout time” – the period it would need to produce a nuclear bomb – was at least a year. Now it is a few weeks.

Barak believes there is pressure within the Netanyahu government for at least some symbolic strike against the Iranian programme, even though the former prime minister sees such a gesture as futile.

“You can cause certain damage, but even this might be perceived by some of the planners as worth the risk because the alternative is to sit idly by and do nothing,” Barak said. “So probably there will be even an attempt to hit certain nuclear-related targets.”

While Barak believes that a significant Israeli military response to Tuesday night’s Iranian military attack is now unavoidable and justifiable, he argues the drift to a regional war could have been averted much earlier, if Netanyahu had been open to a US-promoted plan to rally Arab support for a postwar Palestinian government in Gaza to replace Hamas. Instead, Israel’s incumbent prime minister opposed any political “day after” solution that recognised Palestinian sovereignty.

“I think that a strong response is inevitable. That doesn’t mean it was written in heaven a year ago that it’s going to happen,” Barak said. “There were probably several opportunities to limit this conflict before it turned into something like a full-scale Middle East clash. For reasons that cannot be explained under any strategic thought, Netanyahu rejected any kind of discussion of what we call ‘the day after’.

“I do not put the blame for the whole event on Netanyahu. This is basically the fault of Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran behind them,” Barak said. “But having said that, we have a responsibility to take action under a certain innate logic that understands the situation, the opportunity, and the constraints. There is an old Roman saying: ‘If you don’t know which port you want to reach, no wind will take you there.

October 5, 2024 Posted by | Iran, Israel, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Israel’s Ideology of Genocide Must be Confronted and Stopped

Jeffrey D. Sachs • September 30, 2024,  https://www.unz.com/article/israels-ideology-of-genocide-must-be-confronted-and-stopped/

Israel’s violent extremists now in control of its government believe that Israel has the Biblical license, indeed a religious mandate, to destroy the Palestinian people.

When Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took the podium at the U.N. General Assembly last week, dozens of governments walked out of the chamber. The global opprobrium of Netanyahu and his government is due to Israel’s depraved violence against its Arab neighbors. Netanyahu purveys a fundamentalist ideology that has turned Israel into the most violent nation in the world.

Israel’s fundamentalist credo holds that Palestinians have no right whatsoever to their own nation. The Israeli Knesset recently passed a declaration rejecting a Palestinian State in what the Knesset calls The Land of Israel, meaning the land west of the Jordan River.

The Knesset of Israel firmly opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state west of Jordan. The establishment of a Palestinian state in the heart of the Land of Israel will pose an existential danger to the State of Israel and its citizens, perpetuate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and destabilize the region.

To call the land west of the Jordan the “heart of the Land of Israel” is breathtaking. Israel is one part of the land west of the Jordan, not the entire land. The International Court of Justice has recently ruled that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian lands (those outside of Israel’s borders as of June 4, 1967, before the June 1967 war) is plainly illegal. The U.N. General Assembly has recently voted overwhelmingly to back the ICJ ruling and called on Israel to withdraw from Palestinian territories within one year.

There are many sources of this Israeli brazenness, the most important being the backing of Israel by U.S. military power.

It is worth recalling that when the British empire promised a Jewish homeland in Ottoman Palestine in 1917, the Palestinian Arabs constituted around 90% of the population. At the time of the 1947 U.N. partition plan, the Palestinian Arab population was approximately 67% of the population, though the partition plan proposed to give the Arabs only 44% of the land. Now Israel asserts the claim to 100% of the land.

Without the U.S. military backing, Israel could not possibly rule over an Apartheid regime in which Palestinian Arabs constitute nearly one half of the population yet hold none of the political power. Future generations will look back in amazement at the success of the Israel Lobby in manipulating the U.S. military to the severe detriment of U.S. national security and global peace.

Yet in addition to the U.S. military, there is another source of Israel’s profound injustice to the Palestinian people, and that is the religious fundamentalism purveyed fanatics such as the self-proclaimed fascist Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s Minister of Finance, and Minister of National Defense Itamar Ben-Gvir. These fanatics hold fast to the biblical Book of Joshua, according to which God promised the Israelites the land “from the Negev wilderness in the south to the Lebanon mountains in the north, from the Euphrates River in the east to the Mediterranean Sea in the west.” (Joshua 1:4).


At the U.N. last week, Netanyahu once again staked Israel’s claim to the land on Biblical grounds: “When I spoke here last year, I said we face the same timeless choice that Moses put before the people of Israel thousands of years ago, as we were about to enter the Promised Land. Moses told us that our actions would determine whether we bequeath to future generations a blessing or a curse.”

What Netanyahu did not tell his fellow leaders (most of whom had in any event vacated the hall), was that Moses laid out a genocidal path to the Promised Land (Deuteronomy 31):

[The LORD] will destroy these nations before you, and you shall dispossess them. Joshua is the one who will cross ahead of you, just as the LORD has spoken. “The LORD will do to them just as He did to Sihon and Og, the kings of the Amorites, and to their land, when He destroyed them. “The LORD will deliver them up before you, and you shall do to them according to all the commandments which I have commanded you.”

Israel’s violent extremists believe that Israel has the Biblical license, indeed a religious mandate, to destroy the Palestinian people. Their Biblical hero is Joshua, the Israelite commander who succeeded Moses, and who led the Israelites’ genocidal conquests. (Netanyahu has also referred to the Amalekites, another case of a God-ordained genocide of foes of the Israelites, in a clear “dog-whistle” to his fundamentalist followers.) Here is the Biblical account of Joshua’s conquest of Hebron (Joshua 10)

Then Joshua and all Israel with him went up from Eglon to Hebron, and they fought against it. They captured it and struck it and its king and all its cities and all the persons who were in it with the edge of the sword. He left no survivor, according to all that he had done to Eglon. And he utterly destroyed it and every person who was in it.

There is a deep irony to this genocidal account. It almost surely is not historically accurate. There is no evidence that the Jewish kingdoms arose from genocides. Most likely they arose from local Canaanite communities adopting early forms of Judaism. Jewish fundamentalists adhere to a 6th century BCE text that is most likely a mythical reconstruction of purported events several centuries earlier, and a form of political bravado that was common in ancient Near Eastern politics. The problem is 21st century Israeli politicians, illegal settlers, and other fundamentalists who propose to live by—and kill by—6th century BCE political propaganda.

Israel’s violent fundamentalists are some 2,600 years out of step with today’s acceptable forms of statecraft and international law. Israel is duty bound to the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions, not to the Book of Joshua. According to the recent ICJ ruling and UN General Assembly resolution backing it up, Israel must withdraw in the coming twelve months from the occupied Palestinian lands. According to international law, Israel’s borders are those of June 4, 1967, not the Euphrates to the Mediterranean Sea.

The ICJ ruling and U.N. General Assembly vote is not a ruling against the state of Israel per se. It is a ruling only against extremism, indeed against extremism and malevolence on both sides of the divide. There are two peoples, each with roughly half the overall population (and with no shortage of internal social, political, and ideological divisions within the two communities). International law calls for two states, living side by side, in peace.

The best solution, which we should strive for and hope for sooner rather than later, is that the two states, and the two peoples, get along, and actually draw strength from each other. Until then, however, the practical solution will be peacekeepers and fortified borders to protect each side from the animosity of the other, but with each having the chance to prosper. The utterly intolerable and illegal situation is the status quo, in which Israel rules brutally over the Palestinian people.

Hopefully, there will soon be a State of Palestine, sovereign and independent, whether the Knesset wants it or not. This is not Israel’s choice, but the mandate of the world community and of international law. The sooner the State of Palestine is welcomed as member state of the U.N., with the security of both Israel and Palestine backed by U.N. peacekeepers, the sooner will peace come to the region.

October 4, 2024 Posted by | Israel, Religion and ethics | Leave a comment

‘Western Press Obscured the Sheer Terror of What Israel Had Carried Out’: CounterSpin interview with Mohamad Bazzi on Lebanon pager attacks

So this was an entirely indiscriminate attack, and it puts the Western media fascination with Israel’s technological prowess into even sharper focus. We had the Western press marveling at—I’ll just quote a few of the terms—“Israel’s prowess,” “precision,” “James Bond“–type operation. And quite a few other terms that obscured the sheer terror of what Israel had carried out over those two days in Lebanon.

Janine Jackson interviewed NYU’s Mohamad Bazzi about Israel’s terror attacks in Lebanon for the September 27, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson,

Janine Jackson: Speaking of Israel’s remote detonation of thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies of suspected Hezbollah members in Lebanon, former CIA director and defense secretary Leon Panetta told CBS, ”I don’t think there is any question that it’s a form of terrorism.”

Panetta’s remarks were widely reported, mostly straight, but for Fox, where Sean Hannity said Panetta “had the gall to say Israel is engaging in terrorism against the terror group Hezbollah.”

It seems worth noting: Just before Panetta, CBS viewers heard from a former FBI analyst who said of the explosions in stores, cars and homes that killed some 39 people and injured more than 3,000, including children:

Tactically, what Israel has done has been brilliant. They have severely degraded Hezbollah’s capabilities. They’ve severely degraded Hezbollah’s ability to respond to Israeli things. They’re really hoping that, strategically, Hezbollah gets the message: Stop firing rockets into our country.

That “tactic” has led to more death, more destruction and, some say, more chance of a still wider, more devastating war.

Joining us now to talk about unfolding events and US media’s depictions is Mohamad Bazzi. He’s director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and journalism professor at New York University, as well as former Middle East bureau chief at Newsday. He joins us now by phone from here in town. Welcome to CounterSpin, Mohamad Bazzi.

Mohamad Bazzi: Thank you for having me.


JJ: CBS segued from the “brilliant tactic” guy to Leon Panetta by saying that some saw Israel’s action as a “deception one step too far. The United Nations labeled the operation a violation of international law, and it’s raised some eyebrows here at home too.” It’s equally hard to imagine that this wasn’t a violation as that it wouldn’t immediately be condemned as such, had anyone else carried it out, would you say?

MB: That’s an excellent point. It would certainly have been condemned, let’s say, if Russia had carried out a similar operation, or even something a fraction of this kind of attack, in Ukraine.

I think one of the things that struck me, and I suspect it struck you and others who watch the Western media, is the sense of marvel over the ingenuity of Israel’s technological prowess. So what we had is a lot of the coverage framed as, “Oh, this is taking a page out of a spy thriller, or a dystopian movie.”

And in some ways, what unfolded in Lebanon last week was something dystopian, but it wasn’t a movie. It affected real people’s lives. And so many in the Western media were fixating on the novelty of Israel’s attack, and sometimes celebrating it, but they neglected to acknowledge or even consider the sheer terror experienced by tens of thousands of Lebanese civilians. And this is a society that suffered through years and years of trauma, and this was the latest attack that unfolded in this incredibly pernicious way.

A lot of the coverage also didn’t get into the question of whether this constituted a war crime. And, on the face of it, it seems to meet the definition of a war crime: Human Rights Watch, a few other rights organizations, issued statements noting that international humanitarian law forbids the use of booby traps, especially with objects that have such important use for civilians. I think it would fit the definition of a war crime, beyond just being an act of terrorism that’s meant to instill terror in a civilian population.

JJ: Hezbollah, like Hamas, is for many US media consumers almost like a sports team, or like a kaiju, a monster like Godzilla. And I think it might sound strange to some to think that they aren’t solely a military force in Lebanon, but in fact have a much broader role.

MB: Yeah, a lot of media consumers and listeners in the US don’t get the context. They don’t get the background that Hezbollah is not only a militia, it is not only the militia that’s labeled a terrorist group by the US and by many countries in the EU, but it’s also the most dominant military force in Lebanon, and it’s also the most powerful political party and political movement in the country.

So Hezbollah runs an extensive social service network. It operates schools and hospitals and supermarkets and credit unions.

…………………………..It’s the act of terror. It’s the imprecise nature, this deliberate setting off of detonations of thousands of small bombs that went off at the same time on a Tuesday afternoon, as people were going about their daily lives. And so the bombs went off in grocery stores and hospitals and sidewalk cafes and barbershops. The next day, on Wednesday, some of the walkie-talkie explosions went off during the funerals of people who had been killed the day before during the pager explosions.

So this was an entirely indiscriminate attack, and it puts the Western media fascination with Israel’s technological prowess into even sharper focus. We had the Western press marveling at—I’ll just quote a few of the terms—“Israel’s prowess,” “precision,” “James Bond“–type operation. And quite a few other terms that obscured the sheer terror of what Israel had carried out over those two days in Lebanon……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

JJ: There are calls now for Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, to resign after it’s been reported, I believe by ProPublica, that he was in receipt of assessments, from both USAID and the State Department’s Refugees Bureau, that Israel had blocked deliveries of humanitarian aid to Gaza. He had that information, Blinken did, when he went before Congress, and said there was no evidence of that.

Short even of his resignation, though, how many times do US officials need to lie or hide or dissimulate before journalists stop quoting them credulously? Isn’t it just insulting to readers and to the public at some point?

MB: We certainly have many decades of this, going back to Vietnam, of course, US officials lying about war and lying about US support for allies who commit atrocities.

The report from ProPublica has been an exception. It’s an excellent report. It just came out in the last couple of days, based on internal leaks, because there are officials in the State Department, and elsewhere in the Biden administration, that find all of this unconscionable, and don’t want to see this continued support.

And it’s a very important leak, not just because of what it tells us about Blinken and others in the administration, and their ability and willingness to lie to the US public and to lie to the US media, but it also shows us that there’s actually a fairly straightforward path for the Biden administration to stop its weapons transfers to Israel, because those weapons transfers violate US laws. And if they were honest, and they had admitted it, they would’ve had to stop sending weapons, because that’s what US law requires. It’s what the Biden administration’s own guidelines require.

So that was a tremendously important leak by ProPublica. And, unfortunately, I’ve seen some references to it in the past few days, but it’s not getting the widespread attention in the corporate media and in the legacy media that it should be getting.

It’s certainly getting a lot of attention on social media. People are sharing it, and sharing the documents, and it’s creating these calls for Blinken to resign, or for Biden to do something. But it’s certainly troubling to see the legacy media ignore this as well.

And it all raises the question, what more do you want? What more can be presented to the media for it to change its approach to covering this war?

…………………MB: I would certainly like to see more humane coverage. It’s a basic ask, and it’s unfortunate that we have to make this ask, but I would like to see more humane coverage of Palestinians, of Lebanese, of other Arabs and Muslims.

I think one of the things we’ve seen, just in this past week, in the way that the pager explosions and the walkie-talkie explosions were covered—this marveling over Israel’s ingenuity, it ignores the reality on the ground, but it also contributes to the dehumanization of Palestinians and Lebanese and Arabs, this widespread dehumanization that we’ve seen, certainly for decades, but we’ve seen it ramp up to an extreme since Israel launched its war on Gaza. …..more https://fair.org/home/western-press-obscured-the-sheer-terror-of-what-israel-had-carried-out/

October 3, 2024 Posted by | Israel, media | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »