Is the possibility of a World War real?
Ultimately, all the nuclear powers have no intention of firing first, as this would undoubtedly lead to their destruction. The exception is Israel, which seems to have adopted the “Samson doctrine” (“Let me die with the Philistines”). It would thus be the only power to imagine the ultimate sacrifice, the “Twilight of the Gods”, dear to the Nazis.
The military atom was never envisaged as a classic form of deterrence, but as an assurance that Israel would not hesitate to commit suicide to kill its enemies rather than be defeated. This is the Masada complex [3]. This way of thinking is in line with the “Hannibal Directive”, according to which the IDF must kill its own soldiers rather than let them become prisoners of the enemy [4].
Atomic war is possible. World peace hangs on the finger of the United States, blackmailed by Ukrainian “integral nationalists” and Israeli “revisionist Zionists”. If Washington doesn’t deliver weapons to massacre the Russians and Gazans, they won’t hesitate to launch Armageddon.
VOLTAIRE NETWORK | PARIS (FRANCE) | 9 APRIL 2024 by Serge Marchand , Thierry Meyssan, https://www.voltairenet.org/article220708.html
The wars in Ukraine and Gaza have led several leading politicians to compare the current period with the 1930s, and to raise the possibility of a World War. Are these fears justified, or are they just fear-mongering?
To answer this question, we’re going to summarize events that are unknown to everyone, though well known to specialists. We shall do so dispassionately, at the risk of appearing indifferent to these horrors.
First, let’s distinguish between the conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. They have only two things in common:
They represent no significant stakes in themselves, but a defeat for the West, which, after its defeat in Syria, would mark the end of its hegemony over the world.
They are fueled by a fascist ideology, that of Dmytro Dontsov’s Ukrainian “integral nationalists” [1] and that of Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s Israeli “revisionist Zionists” [2]; two groups that have been allies since 1917, but went underground during the Cold War and are unknown to the general public today.
There is, however, one notable difference between them:
The same fury is visible on both battlefields, but the “integral nationalists” sacrifice their own fellow citizens (there are hardly any able-bodied men under thirty left in the Ukraine), while the “revisionist Zionists” sacrifice people who are foreign to them, Arab civilians.
Is there a risk that these wars will become more widespread?
This is the will of both groups. The “integral nationalists” are constantly attacking Russia inside its territory and in Sudan, while the “revisionist Zionists” are bombing Lebanon, Syria and Iran (more precisely, Iranian territory in Syria, since the Damascus consulate is extra-territorialized). But no one responds: not Russia, Egypt or the Emirates in the first case, nor Hezbollah, the Syrian Arab Army or the Revolutionary Guards in the second.
All of them, including Russia, anxious to avoid a brutal retaliation from the “collective West” that would lead to a World War, prefer to take the blows and accept their deaths.
If war were to become widespread, it would no longer be simply conventional, but above all nuclear.
While we all know each other’s conventional capabilities, we are largely unaware of each other’s nuclear capabilities. The most we know is that only the USA used strategic nuclear bombs during the Second World War, and that Russia claims to have hypersonic nuclear launchers with which no other power can compete. However, some Western experts question the reality of these prodigious technical advances. Behind the scenes, what is the strategy of the nuclear powers?
In addition to the five permanent members of the Security Council, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel have strategic atomic bombs. All except Israel see them as a means of deterrence.
The Western media also present Iran as a nuclear power, which Russia and China officially deny.
During the Yemen war, Saudi Arabia bought tactical nuclear bombs from Israel and used them, but it does not seem to have them permanently at its disposal, nor to have mastered the technique.
Only Russia regularly conducts Nuclear War exercises. During last October’s exercises, Russia admitted to losing a third of its population in the space of a few hours, then simulated combat and emerged victorious.
Ultimately, all the nuclear powers have no intention of firing first, as this would undoubtedly lead to their destruction. The exception is Israel, which seems to have adopted the “Samson doctrine” (“Let me die with the Philistines”). It would thus be the only power to imagine the ultimate sacrifice, the “Twilight of the Gods”, dear to the Nazis.
Two critical works have been devoted to the Israeli military atom: The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy by Seymour M. Hersh (Random House, 1991) and Israel and the Bomb by Avner Cohen (Columbia University Press, 1998).
The military atom was never envisaged as a classic form of deterrence, but as an assurance that Israel would not hesitate to commit suicide to kill its enemies rather than be defeated. This is the Masada complex [3]. This way of thinking is in line with the “Hannibal Directive”, according to which the IDF must kill its own soldiers rather than let them become prisoners of the enemy [4].
During the Six-Day War, the Israeli Prime Minister, the Ukrainian Levi Eshkol, ordered one of the two bombs Israel had at its disposal at the time to be prepared and detonated near an Egyptian military base on Mount Sinai. This plan was not carried out, as the IDF quickly won the conventional war. Had it gone ahead, the fallout would have killed not only Egyptians, but Israelis too [5].
During the October 1973 war (known in the West as the “Yom Kippur War”), the Defense Minister, the Ukrainian-born Israeli Moshe Dayan, and the Prime Minister, the Ukrainian Golda Meir, again considered the use of 13 atomic bombs [6].
In 1986, a nuclear technician from the Dimona power plant, the Moroccan Mordechai Vanunu, revealed Israel’s secret military nuclear program to the Sunday Times [7]. He was kidnapped by Mossad in Rome, on the orders of the Israeli Prime Minister and father of the atomic bomb, Shimon Peres of Belarus. He was tried in camera and sentenced to 18 years in prison, 11 of which were spent in total isolation. He was again sentenced to 6 months’ imprisonment for daring to speak to the Voltaire Network.
In 2009, Martin van Creveld, Israel’s chief strategist, declared: “We have several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can reach our targets in all directions, even Rome. Most European capitals are potential targets for our air force (…) The Palestinians must all be expelled. The people fighting for this goal are simply waiting for “the right person at the right time” to come along. Only two years ago, 7 or 8% of Israelis thought this would be the best solution, two months ago it was 33%, and now, according to a Gallup Poll, the figure is 44% in favor
So it’s reasonable to assume that no nuclear power, except Israel, will dare commit the irreparable.
This is precisely what Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu (Otzma Yehudit/Jewish Force) envisaged on Radio Kol Berama on November 5. Referring to atomic weapons against Gaza, he declared: “It’s a solution… it’s an option”. He then compared the residents of the Gaza Strip to “Nazis”, assuring that “there are no non-combatants in Gaza” and that this territory does not deserve humanitarian aid. “There are no uninvolved people in Gaza”.
These remarks provoked indignation in the West. Only Moscow was surprised that the International Atomic Energy Agency did not take up the matter [8].
It is very likely that this is the reason why Washington continues to arm Israel, even though it is calling for an immediate ceasefire: if the United States no longer supplies Tel Aviv with weapons to massacre the Gazans, the latter could use nuclear weapons against all the peoples of the region, including the Israelis.
In Ukraine, the “integral nationalists” planned to blackmail the United States with the same argument: the threat of nuclear or, failing that, biological weapons [9]. In 1994, Ukraine, which had a vast stockpile of Soviet atomic bombs, signed the Budapest Memorandum. The United States, the United Kingdom and Russia guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for the transfer of all its nuclear weapons to Russia and signature of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). However, after the overthrow of elected president Viktor Yanukovych in 2014 (EuroMaidan), the “integral nationalists” worked to re-nuclearize the country, which they saw as essential to eradicating Russia from the face of the earth.
On February 19, 2022, Ukrainian President Voloymyr Zelensky announced at the annual Munich Security Conference that he would challenge the Budapest Memorandum in order to rearm his country with nuclear weapons. Five days later, on February 24, 2022, Russia launched its special operation against the Kiev government to implement Resolution 2202. Its top priority was to seize Ukraine’s secret and illegal reserves of enriched uranium. After eight days of fighting, the civilian nuclear power plant at Zaporijjia was occupied by the Russian army.
According to Argentina’s Rafael Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who spoke three months later on May 25 at the Davos Forum, Ukraine had secretly stored 30 tons of plutonium and 40 tons of uranium at Zaporijjia. At market prices, this stockpile was worth at least $150 billion. Russian President Vladimir Putin declared: “The only thing [Ukraine] lacks is a uranium enrichment system. But that’s a technical question, and for Ukraine it’s not an insoluble problem”. However, his army had already removed a large part of this stock from the plant. Fighting continued for months. If the integral nationalists had still had them, they would have done what the “revisionist Zionists” are doing today: they would have demanded more and more weapons and, if refused, threatened to use them, i.e. to launch Armageddon
Back to today’s battlefields. What are we seeing? In Ukraine and Palestine, the West continues to provide the “integral nationalists” and, to a lesser extent, the “revisionist Zionists” with an impressive arsenal. However, they have no reasonable hope of getting the Russians to back down, or of massacring all the Gazans. At worst, they can lead their allies to empty their arsenals, sacrifice all Ukrainians of fighting age and diplomatically isolate the puppet-state of Israel. As Moshe Dayan once said, “Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to control”.
Let’s imagine that these apparently catastrophic consequences are in fact their goal.
The world would then be divided in two, as it was during the Cold War, except that Israel would have become uninviting. In the West, the Anglo-Saxons would still be the masters, especially as they would be the only ones with weapons, their allies having exhausted theirs in Ukraine. Israel, isolated as it was in the late 70s and early 80s when it was only really recognized by the apartheid regime of South Africa, would still be fulfilling the mission it was originally entrusted with: to mobilize the Jewish diaspora in the service of the Empire, fearing a new wave of anti-Semitism.
References…………………………. https://www.voltairenet.org/article220708.html
The West now wants ‘restraint’- after months of fuelling a genocide in Gaza
A wider war, centred on Iran, would both distract from Gaza’s desperate plight and force Biden to back Israel unconditionally – to make good on his “iron-clad” commitment to Israel’s protection.
The Middle East is on the brink of war precisely because western politicians indulged for decades every military excess by Israel
JONATHAN COOK, APR 16, 2024
Suddenly, western politicians from US President Joe Biden to British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak have become ardent champions of “restraint” – in a very last-minute scramble to avoid regional conflagration.
Iran launched a salvo of drones and missiles at Israel at the weekend in what amounted a largely symbolic show of strength. Many appear to have been shot down, either by Israel’s layers of US-funded interception systems or by US, British and Jordanian fighter jets. No one was killed.
It was the first direct attack by a state on Israel since Iraq fired Scud missiles during the Gulf war of 1991.
The United Nations Security Council was hurriedly pressed into session on Sunday, with Washington and its allies calling for a de-escalation of tensions that could all too easily lead to the outbreak of war across the Middle East and beyond.
“Neither the region nor the world can afford more war,” the UN’s secretary general, Antonio Guterres, told the meeting. “Now is the time to defuse and de-escalate.”
Israel, meanwhile, vowed to “exact the price” against Iran at a time of its choosing.
But the West’s abrupt conversion to “restraint” needs some explaining.
After all, western leaders showed no restraint when Israel bombed Iran’s consulate in Damascus two weeks ago, killing a senior general and more than a dozen other Iranians – the proximate cause of Tehran’s retaliation on Saturday night.
Under the Vienna Convention, the consulate is not only a protected diplomatic mission but is viewed as sovereign Iranian territory. Israel’s attack on it was an unbridled act of aggression – the “supreme international crime”, as the Nuremberg tribunal ruled at the end of the Second World War.
For that reason, Tehran invoked article 51 of the United Nations charter, which allows it to act in self-defence.
Shielding Israel
And yet, rather than condemning Israel’s dangerous belligerence – a flagrant attack on the so-called “rules-based order” so revered by the US – western leaders lined up behind Washington’s favourite client state.
At a Security Council meeting on 4 April, the US, Britain and France intentionally spurned restraint by blocking a resolution that would have condemned Israel’s attack on the Iranian consulate – a vote that, had it not been stymied, might have sufficed to placate Tehran.
At the weekend, British Foreign Secretary David Cameron still gave the thumbs-up to Israel’s flattening of Iran’s diplomatic premises, saying he could “completely understand the frustration Israel feels” – though he added, without any hint of awareness of his own hypocrisy, that the UK “would take very strong action” if a country bombed a British consulate.
By shielding Israel from any diplomatic consequences for its act of war against Iran, the western powers ensured Tehran would have to pursue a military response instead.
But it did not end there. Having stoked Iran’s sense of grievance at the UN, Biden vowed “iron-clad” support for Israel – and grave consequences for Tehran – should it dare to respond to the attack on its consulate.
Iran ignored those threats. On Saturday night, it launched some 300 drones and missiles, at the same time protesting vociferously about the Security Council’s “inaction and silence, coupled with its failure to condemn the Israeli regime’s aggressions”.
Western leaders failed to take note. They again sided with Israel and denounced Tehran. At Sunday’s Security Council meeting, the same three states – the US, UK and France – that had earlier blocked a statement condemning Israel’s attack on Iran’s diplomatic mission, sought a formal condemnation of Tehran for its response.
Russia’s ambassador to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya, ridiculed what he called “a parade of Western hypocrisy and double standards”. He added: “You know very well that an attack on a diplomatic mission is a casus belli under international law. And if Western missions were attacked, you would not hesitate to retaliate and prove your case in this room.”
There was no restraint visible either as the West publicly celebrated its collusion with Israel in foiling Iran’s attack.
Western leaders failed to take note. They again sided with Israel and denounced Tehran. At Sunday’s Security Council meeting, the same three states – the US, UK and France – that had earlier blocked a statement condemning Israel’s attack on Iran’s diplomatic mission, sought a formal condemnation of Tehran for its response.
Russia’s ambassador to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya, ridiculed what he called “a parade of Western hypocrisy and double standards”. He added: “You know very well that an attack on a diplomatic mission is a casus belli under international law. And if Western missions were attacked, you would not hesitate to retaliate and prove your case in this room.”
There was no restraint visible either as the West publicly celebrated its collusion with Israel in foiling Iran’s attack.
Given the West’s new-found recognition of the need for caution, and the obvious dangers of military excess, now may be the time for its leaders to consider demanding restraint more generally – and not just to avoid a further escalation between Iran and Israel. …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Top-dog client state
There is a reason why Israel has been so ostentatious in its savaging of Gaza and its people. And it is the very same reason Israel felt emboldened to violate the diplomatic sanctity of Iran’s consulate in Damascus.
Because for decades Israel has been guaranteed protection and assistance from the West, whatever crimes it commits.
Israel’s founders ethnically cleansed much of Palestine in 1948, far beyond the terms of partition set out by the UN a year earlier. It imposed a military occupation on the remnants of historic Palestine in 1967, driving out yet more of the native population. It then imposed a regime of apartheid on the few areas where Palestinians remained.
In their West Bank reservations, Palestinians have been systematically brutalised, their homes demolished, and illegal Jewish settlements built on their land. The Palestinians’ holy places have been gradually surrounded and taken from them.
Separately, Gaza has been sealed off for 17 years, and its population denied freedom of movement, employment and the basics of life.
Israel’s reign of terror to maintain its absolute control has meant imprisonment and torture are a rite of passage for most Palestinian men. Any protest is ruthlessly crushed.
Now Israel has added mass slaughter in Gaza – genocide – to its long list of crimes.
Israel’s displacements of Palestinians to neighbouring states caused by its ethnic cleansing operations and slaughter have destabilised the wider region. And to secure its militarised settler-colonial project in the Middle East – and its place as Washington’s top-dog client state in the region – Israel has intimidated, bombed and invaded its neighbours on a regular basis.
Its attack on Iran’s consulate in Damascus was just the latest of serial humiliations faced by Arab states.
And through all of this, Washington and its vassal states have directed no more than occasional, lip-service calls for restraint towards Israel. There were never any consequences, but instead rewards from the West in the form of endless billions in aid and special trading status.
‘Something rash’
So why, after decades of debauched violence from Israel, has the West suddenly become so interested in “restraint”? Because on this rare occasion it serves western interests to calm the fires Israel is so determined to stoke.
The Israeli strike on Iran’s consulate came just as the Biden administration was finally running out of excuses for providing the weapons and diplomatic cover that has allowed Israel to slaughter, maim and orphan tens of thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza over six months.
Demands for a ceasefire and arms embargo on Israel have been reaching fever pitch, with Biden haemorrhaging support among parts of his Democratic base as he faces a re-run presidential election later this year against a resurgent rival, Donald Trump.
Small numbers of votes could be the difference between victory and defeat.
Israel had every reason to fear that its patron might soon pull the rug from under its campaign of mass slaughter in Gaza.
But having destroyed the entire infrastructure needed to support life in the enclave, Israel needs time for the consequences to play out: either mass starvation there, or a relocation of the population elsewhere on supposedly “humanitarian” grounds.
A wider war, centred on Iran, would both distract from Gaza’s desperate plight and force Biden to back Israel unconditionally – to make good on his “iron-clad” commitment to Israel’s protection.
And to top it all, with the US drawn directly into a war against Iran, Washington would have little choice but to assist Israel in its long campaign to destroy Iran’s nuclear energy programme.
Israel wants to remove any potential for Iran to develop a bomb, one that would level the military playing field between the two in ways that would make Israel far less certain that it can continue to act as it pleases across the region with impunity.
That is why Biden officials are airing concerns to the US media that Israel is ready to “do something rash” in an attempt to drag the administration into a wider war.
The truth is, however, that Washington long ago cultivated Israel as its military Frankenstein’s monster. Israel’s role was precisely to project US power ruthlessly into the oil-rich Middle East. The price Washington was more than willing to accept was Israel’s eradication of the Palestinian people, replaced by a fortress “Jewish state”.
Calling for Israel to exercise “restraint” now, as its entrenched lobbies flex their muscles meddling in western politics, and self-confessed fascists rule Israel’s government, is beyond parody.
If the West really prized restraint, they should have insisted on it from Israel decades ago. https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/the-west-now-wants-restraint-after?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=476450&post_id=143635791&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=ln98x&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Iran Israel: An audible sigh of relief in the Middle East
By Lyse Doucet,Chief international correspondent, 20 Apr 24, more https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68861607
The latest round in the region’s most dangerous rivalry appears to be over, for now.
Israel still has not officially acknowledged that the attack in Iran in the early hours of Friday morning was its doing.
Meanwhile, Iran’s military and political leaders have downplayed, dismissed and even mocked that anything of consequence happened at all.
The accounts over what kind of weaponry was deployed on Friday and how much damage was caused are still conflicting and incomplete.
American officials speak of a missile strike, but Iranian officials say the attacks, in the central province of Isfahan and in northwest Tabriz, were caused by small exploding drones.
“The downed micro air vehicles caused no damage and no casualties,” Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian insisted to the semi-official Tasnim News Agency.
But these simple quadcopters are Israel’s calling card – it has deployed them time and again in its years of covert operations inside Iran.
This time their main target was the storied central province of Isfahan, which is celebrated for its stunning Islamic heritage.
Of late, however, the province is more famous for the Natanz nuclear facility, the Isfahan Nuclear Technology Centre and a major air base, which was used during Iran’s 14 April attack on Israel.
It is also an industrial heartland housing factories which produce the drones and ballistic missiles that were fired by the hundreds in Israel’s direction last Sunday.
So a limited operation seems to have carried a powerful warning – that Israel has the intelligence and assets to strike at will at Iran’s beating heart.
It is a message so urgent that Israel made sure it was sent before, rather than after, the start of the Jewish Passover, as was widely predicted by Israel watchers.
US officials have also indicated that Israel targeted sites such as Iran’s air defence radar system, which protects Natanz. There is still no confirmed account of its success.
So this attack may also be just an opening salvo. But it was, for the moment, an unintended 85th birthday gift to Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Israel’s official silence gave Iran’s ultimate decision-maker vital political space. Tehran did not have to invoke its new rule that whenever its arch-enemy strikes, Iran will hit back hard, with the risk of sparking a perilous escalatory spiral.
Hardline President Ebrahim Raisi did not even mention these most recent events in his Friday speeches.
For the Islamic Republic, it is all about what it dubs Operation True Promise – its unprecedented onslaught against Israel in the dead of night last Sunday. He hailed what he called his country’s “steely will”.
Iran has prided itself for years on its “strategic patience”, its policy of playing a long game rather than retaliating immediately and directly to any provocations.
Now, it is invoking “strategic deterrence”. This new doctrine was triggered by the 1 April attack on its diplomatic compound in Damascus, which destroyed its consular annex and killed seven Revolutionary Guards, including its most senior commander in the region.
Iran’s supreme leader was under mounting pressure to draw a line as Israel ramped up its targets during the last six months of the grievous Gaza war.
No longer just striking Tehran’s assets, including arms caches, buildings, bases and supply routes on battle grounds like Syria and Lebanon, Israel was also assassinating top-ranking officials.
A decades-long hostility, which had previously played out in shadow wars and covert operations, erupted in open confrontation.
Whatever the specifics of this latest tit for tat, there is a more fundamental priority for both sides: deterrence – a more solid certainty that strikes on its own soil will not happen again. If they do, there is a cost to pay, and it will hurt.
For the moment there is an audible sigh of relief in the region, and in capitals far and wide.
Israel’s latest move, under anxious urging from its allies to limit its retaliation, will have eased this tension, for now. Everyone wants to stop a catastrophic all-out war. But no one will be in any doubt that any lull may not last.
The region is still on fire.
The Gaza war grinds on, causing a staggering number of Palestinian casualties.
Under pressure from its staunchest allies, Israel has facilitated the delivery of greater quantities of desperately needed aid, but the blighted territory still teeters on the brink of famine.
Israeli hostages have still not come home, and ceasefire talks are stalled. Israel still warns of battles to come in Hamas’s last stronghold in Rafah – what aid chiefs and world leaders say would be yet another untold humanitarian disaster.
Iran’s network of proxies across the region, what it calls an “Axis of Resistance” stretching from Hezbollah strongholds in Lebanon through Iran-aligned militias in Iraq and Syria, to the Houthis of Yemen, are at the ready, still attacking daily.
In the last few weeks, simultaneously everything and nothing has changed in the region’s darkest, most dangerous days.
How Long Can Israel Defy the World?
More probably, however, Israel will resist such pressure and threat to resort to the Samson Option, i.e., a nuclear attack on the countries endangering “Israel’s right to exist”. In this worst-case scenario, Israel would be annihilated, but those who put pressure on it would also suffer enormous casualties. Obviously, no country in the world will run the risk of a nuclear attack to free the Palestinians.
By Prof. Yakov M. Rabkin, https://www.juancole.com/2024/01/long-israel-world.htm .
Palestinians in Gaza are being decimated. Over 20,000 have been killed, mostly women and children. Three times more have been wounded. Some experts qualify it as genocide, others as massacre. Two million people have been displaced, many more than during the entire history of displacement of the Palestinians since the start of the Zionist settlement at the turn of the 20th century.
As Israel takes out hospitals and civilian infrastructure, infectious diseases and famine threaten to kill many more people. Several Israeli soldiers have been reported infected during the ground operations, one has died. General Giora Eiland suggests relying on the weapon of imminent epidemics in lieu of endangering the lives of Israeli soldiers in real warfare. Gaza is violently demodernized, bombed into stone age: hospitals, schools, power stations are bombed to rubble. What is happening appears unprecedented.
The number of victims is, indeed, unprecedented. Yet the unfolding tragedy follows the old script of the Zionist project, which is European in more than one sense. It is rooted in ethnic nationalisms of Eastern and Central Europe. Nations must live in their “natural” environment where those not of the titular nationality would be at best tolerated. According to an Iraqi journalist writing in 1945, the Zionists’ goal was “to expel the British and the Arabs from Palestine so that it will be a pure Zionist state. … Terrorism [was] the only means that can bring the Zionist aspirations to fruition.” Significantly, the journalist did not consider the future state Jewish but Zionist. He must have known that Jews from countries other than those of Europe and European colonization constituted a miniscule part of the Zionist movement.
Zionism is also European because it is a settler colonial project, the most recent of all. The Palestine Jewish Colonization Association was among several agencies devoted to turning the multi-ethnic and multi-confessional Palestine into “the Jewish homeland”. The Jewish Colonial Trust, the predecessor of Bank Leumi, today Israel’s largest bank, financed the segregated economic development of the Zionist settlement in Palestine. In the usual colonial manner, the early Zionist settlers were eager to establish a separate colony rather than integrate in the existing Palestinian society.
Zionism is not only the most recent case of settler colonialism. Israel is unique in that, unlike Algeria or Kenya, it is not populated by migrants from the colonial metropolis. But this distinction matters little to the indigenous Palestinians who, just like in many other such situations, are being displaced, dispossessed, and massacred by the settlers. Displacement is enacted not only in Gaza, where it is massive and indiscriminate, but also in the West Bank where it is more focused.
To attain its objectives Zionism has had to rely on major powers, the British Empire, the Soviet Union, France and, nowadays, the United States. The Zionists, committed to the success of their project, have been pragmatic and ideologically promiscuous. They would enjoy the support of the Socialist International during most of of the 20th century and then switch to become the darlings of White supremacists and the extreme-right.
Zionism is a nationalist response to anti-Jewish discrimination and violence in Europe. It deems antisemitism endemic and ineradicable, explicitly rejecting long-term viability of Jewish life anywhere except in “the Jewish state” in Palestine. The Nazi genocide in Europe reinforced this conviction and offered legitimacy to the fledgling colonial project while such projects were crumbling elsewhere in the world. The Zionist project, ignoring the opposition of the Palestinians and other Arabs, simply exported Europe’s “Jewish question” to Palestine.
Palestinians gradually understood that the Zionist project would deprive them of their land and resisted it. This is why the early Zionist settlers, most of them from the Russian Empire, formed militias to fight local population. They perfected their terrorist experience gained during the Russian revolution of 1905 with colonial counterinsurgency measures learned from the vast experience of the British. Established against the will of the entire Arab world, including the local Palestinians, the state of Israel has had to live by the sword. The army and the police have worked hard to keep the Palestinians down (the British used to call it “pacification of the natives”). Their task has been to conquer as much land as possible with as few Palestinians remaining on it as possible.
Many Palestinians now in Gaza had been expelled from the very area in what is now Israel that experienced the Hamas attack in October. They are mostly refugees or descendants of refugees. The high density of the population in an enclosed area (some called it “the largest open-air prison) makes them particularly vulnerable. When Israel did not like the election of Hamas in 2006, it laid siege to Gaza, limiting access to food, medicines, work etc. Israeli officials were openly admitting they were putting the Gazans “on a diet” while having to “mow the lawn” from time to time, subjecting the Gazans to violent “pacification”.
The 16 years of siege intensified anger, frustration and despair leading to the Hamas attack. In response, Israeli used drones, missiles, and aircraft to continue what used to be done with rifles and machine-guns. The death rate has increased, but the goal of terrorizing Palestinians into submission has remained the same. The name of the current onslaught on Gaza is “Iron Swords”, aptly reflects the Zionists’ century-old choice to live by the sword rather than coexist with the Palestinians on equal terms. Ein berera, “we have no choice”, the common Israeli excuse for unleashing violence, is therefore misleading.
Impunity and Impotence
Israel has enjoyed a large degree of impunity, with dozens of UN resolutions simply ignored. Only once, in the wake of the 1956 Suez War, was Israel forced to give up territorial conquest. This happened under a threat coming from both the United States and the Soviet Union. Since then, Israel has relied on firm U.S. diplomatic and military support, which has become more brazen with the advent of America’s unipolar moment after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. This support is now embodied in the supply of American munitions for the war on Gaza, in the presence of U.S. Navy vessels protecting Israel from third parties and in the U.S. vetoes at the Security Council. Israel and the United States are joined at the hip. Europe, while being more critical of Israel rhetorically, closely follows the U.S. line just as it does in the Ukraine conflict. In both conflicts, European chanceries appear to have abdicated independence and, possibly, ability of action.
Israel’s impunity also reflects impotence of the rest of the world. While Muslim and Arab governments decry and protest Israel’s assault on Gaza, none has imposed or even proposed economic, let alone military, sanctions. Fewer than a dozen of countries has suspended diplomatic relations or withdrawn diplomatic personnel from Israel. None has broken relations. Russia and China, along with most of the Global South, express their dismay at civilian casualties in Gaza but they too stop short of going beyond words.
The double standard of the Western reactions is obvious. Drastic economic sanctions imposed on Russia contrast with the generous supply of arms and at best verbal pleas for moderation in response to the Israeli actions in Gaza. In just a few months, the IDF surpassed Russia’s almost two-year record in the Ukraine with respect to the volume of explosives dropped, the number of people killed and wounded, and the civilian/military ratio among the casualties. Western sermons about inclusion and democracy are unlikely to carry much weight in the rest of the world. Palestinian lives do not really matter to Western governments.
This lackadaisical reaction to the massacres in Gaza contrasts with the indignation they provoke in the population in much of the world. Massive demonstrations call on governments to stop the violence. In response, most Western governments have strengthened measures to restrict freedom of speech. Opposition to Zionism has been declared antisemitic, the most recent such measure is the equivalence between anti-Zionism and antisemitism decided by the U.S. Congress in December 2023. Accusations of antisemitism are leveled at students, often Jewish, who organize pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Televised debates as to what constitutes “genocidal antisemitism” on elite university campuses divert attention from what looks like a real genocide in Gaza. Antisemitism serves as Israel’s Wunderwaffe, its ultimate weapon of mass distraction.
Pro-Palestinian demonstrations have been banned in several European capitals where commercial or cultural boycott of Israel has been made illegal. This pressure from the ruling class, including courts, police, corporate media, employers, and university administrations, creates a powerful sense of frustration among the rank-and-file. Shortly after attacking Gaza in 2009, and over sharp criticism of its treatment of the Palestinians, Israel was unanimously accepted into the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), made up of some 30 countries that boast democratic structures of governance. Former Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper, while still in office, placed solidarity with Israel above Canada’s interests to the point of claiming that his government would support Israel “whatever the cost.”
Support for Israel, tending to increase with income, has become a class issue. It serves as another reminder of the growing estrangement between the rulers and the ruled, the proverbial One Per Cent and the rest. It remains to be seen if popular frustration with the hypocrisy of governments in their support for the war on Gaza may one day result in political change that would begin to dent Israel’s impunity.
Israel is a state without borders. Geographically, it has expanded with military conquest or colonization. The Zionist movement and successive Israeli governments have taken great pains never to define the borders they envisage for their state. Israeli secret services and the army pay no heed to borders, striking targets in its neighboring countries at will. This borderless character is also embodied in Israel’s claim that it belongs to the world’s Jews rather than to its citizens. This leads to the overt transformation of Jewish organizations around the world into Israeli agents. This is particularly the case in the United States. Israeli agents, such AIPAC, ensure Israel’s interests in elections on all levels, from school boards to the White House. Israel has even played the legislative against the executive branch in Washington. Yet this unabashed political interference attracts a lot less criticism in mainstream media that the alleged meddling of China or Russia. Israel also intervenes in the political process of other countries.
Conflict Between Jewish and Zionist Values
Zionism has provoked controversy among Jews from its very inception. The first Zionist congress in 1897 had to be moved from Germany to Switzerland because German Jewish organizations objected to holding a Zionist event in their country. The Zionist argument that the homeland of the Jews is not the country, where they have lived for centuries and for which many have spilled their blood in wars, but in a land in Western Asia. For many Jews, this message bears disconcerting resemblance to that of the antisemites who resent their social integration.
Initially irreligious, Zionism transforms spiritual terms into political ones. Thus, ‘am Israel, “the people of Israel”, defined by their relationship to the Torah, becomes ethnicity or nationality in the Zionist vocabulary. This prompted the prominent European rabbi Jechiel Weinberg (1884-1966) to emphasize that “Jewish nationality is different from that of all nations in the sense that it is uniquely spiritual, and that its spirituality is nothing but the Torah. […] In this respect we are different from all other nations, and whoever does not recognize it, denies the fundamental principle of Judaism.”
Another reason for Jewish opposition to Zionism has been moral and religious. While prayers for the return to the Holy Land is part of the daily Judaic ritual, it is not a political, let alone a military objective. Moreover, the Talmud spells out specific prohibitions of a mass move to Palestine before Messianic times, even “with the accord of the nations”. This is why the Zionist project with its addiction to armed violence continues to repel many Jews causing them embarrassment and even revulsion.
True, the Pentateuch and several of the books of the Prophets, such as Joshua and Judges, teem with violent images. But far from glorifying war, Jewish tradition identifies allegiance to God, and not military prowess, as the principal reason for the victories mentioned in the Bible. Jewish tradition abhors violence and reinterprets war episodes, plentiful in the Hebrew Bible, in a pacifist mode. Tradition clearly privileges compromise and accommodation. Albert Einstein was among the Jewish humanists who denounced Beitar, the paramilitary Zionist youth movement, today affiliated with the ruling Likud. He deemed it to be“ as much of a danger to our youth as Hitlerism is to German youth”.
Zionism vigorously rejects this “exilic” tradition, which it deems “consolation of the weak”. Generations of Israelis have been brought up on the values of martial courage, proud of serving in the military. Zionists regularly refer to their state as a continuation of biblical history. The idea of the Greater Israel is rooted in the literal reading of the Pentateuch. Zionism demands total commitment and brooks little opposition or criticism. The passion of the Zionist commitment has led to assassination of opponents, pitched fathers against sons, splitting Jewish families and communities. The historian Eli Barnavi, former Israeli ambassador in Paris, warns that “the dream of a ‘Third Kingdom of Israel’ could only lead to totalitarianism”. Indeed, many Jewish community leaders, undisturbed by the specter of “dual loyalty”, insist that allegiance to the state of Israel must prevail over all others, including allegiance toward their own country.
The Zionists, whether in Israel or elsewhere, have long claimed to be “the vanguard of the Jewish people” with Zionism replacing Judaism for quite a few Jews. Their identity, initially religious, has become political: they are supporters and patriots of Israel, “my country right or wrong” rather than adherents of Judaism.
Generationally, Israel appears an exception among the wealthy countries. With every generation Israelis become more combative and anti-Arab. While in other countries young Jews are usually less conservative than their parents and embrace ideas of social and political justice, young Israeli Jews defy this trend. Israeli education inculcates martial values and the belief that, had the state of Israel existed before World War II, the Nazi genocide would never have taken place. What sustains the fragile unity of the non-Arab majority is fear: a siege mentality that most frequently takes the self-image of a virtuous victim determined to prevent a repetition of the Nazi genocide. The memory of that European tragedy has become a tool of mobilizing Jews to the Zionist cause. Its political utility is still far from exhausted.
Use of the genocide to foster Israeli patriotism has been unflagging since the early 1960s. After an air show in Poland in 2008, three Israeli F-15 fighter jets bearing the Star of David and piloted by descendants of genocide survivors overflew the former Nazi extermination camp while two hundred Israeli soldiers observed the flyover from the Birkenau death camp adjacent to Auschwitz. The remarks of one of the Israeli pilots stressed confidence in the armed forces: “This is triumph for us. Sixty years ago, we had nothing. No country, no army, nothing.”
State schools promote the model of a fighter against “the Arabs” (the word “Palestinian” is usually avoided), glorifies military service turning it into an aspiration and a rite of passage to adulthood. No wonder that Hamas and, by extension, all the Gazans, are often referred to as Nazis. Dozens of Israeli officials and public figures have openly incited genocide of Palestinians: dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza, flattening it into a parking lot, etc. Israeli political scientists have pointed out that civic religion provides no answers to questions of ultimate meaning, while at the same time it obliges its practitioners to accept the ultimate sacrifice. Civic space in Israel has become associated above all with “death for the fatherland.”
Elsewhere in the world, the Hamas attack has galvanized the Zionist commitment under the slogan “We stand with Israel!”. Massive and organized efforts are made to fight the information war. Israeli officials rely on a network of powerful supporters, including executives of high-tech companies, who make sure that the internet amplifies pro-Israel voices and muffles or cancels pro-Palestinian discourse. Censorship leads to self-censorship because pro-Palestinian involvement impedes job prospects and threatens careers.
However, unlike Israelis, diaspora Jews become less and less committed to Jewish nationalism with every generation. Growing numbers of young Jews refuse to be associated with Israel and choose to support the Palestinians. The systematic AI assisted massacre of Palestinians in Gaza has swollen their ranks, particularly in North America. Most spectacular protests against Israel’s ferocity have been organized by Jewish organizations, such as Not in My Name and Jewish Voice for Peace in the United States, Independent Jewish Voices in Canada, and Union juive française pour la paix in France. Prominent Jewish intellectuals denounce Israel and are found among the most consistent opponents of Zionism.
Albeit incongruently, these Jews are accused of antisemitism. Even more incongruently, the same accusation is hurled at ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionists. While Israel’s claim to be the state of all Jews exposes them to disgrace and danger, many Jews who support the Palestinians rehabilitate Judaism in the eyes of the world.
The Samson Option
Since its beginning, critics of Zionism have insisted that the Zionist state would become a death trap for both the colonizers and the colonized. In the wake of the ongoing tragedy triggered by the Hamas attack, these words of an ultra-Orthodox activist spoken decades ago sound prescient:
“Only blind dogmatism could present Israel as something positive for the Jewish people. Established as a so-called refuge, it has, unfailingly been the most dangerous place on the face of the earth for a Jew. It has been the cause of tens of thousands of Jewish deaths … it has left in its wake a trail of mourning widows, orphans and friends…. And let us not forget that to this account of the physical suffering of the Jews, must be added those of the Palestinian people, a nation condemned to indigence, persecution, to life without shelter, to overwhelming despair, and all too often to premature death.”
The fate of the colonized is, of course, incomparably more tragic than that of the colonizer. Palestinian citizens of Israel face systemic discrimination while their kin in the West Bank are subject to repression from both the Israeli military and their subcontractors in the Palestinian Authority. Arbitrary detention without trial, dispossession, checkpoints, segregated roads, house searches without warrant and more and more frequent death at the hands of soldiers and settler vigilantes have become routine on the West Bank. Palestinians in Gaza, even prior to the operation Iron Swords, lived isolated on a small territory, with their access to food and medicine strictly rationed by Israel. Even peaceful protest would be met by lethal fire from Israeli soldiers sitting on the other side of the barrier. There was little work and no prospects for the future. The pressure cooker was ready to explode as it did on October 7.
Since then, thousands of Gazans have been killed and wounded by one of the most sophisticated war machines in the world. This provokes more anger and hatred among the Palestinians both in Gaza and the West Bank. Israelis find themselves in a vicious circle: chronic insecurity inevitable in a settler colony reinforces the Zionist postulate that a Jew must rely on force to survive, which in turn provokes hostility and creates insecurity.
Over two decades ago David Grossman, one of the best-known Israeli authors, addressed the then prime minister Ariel Sharon known for his bellicosity:
“We start to wonder whether, for the sake of your goals, you have made a strategic decision to move the battlefield not into enemy territory, as is normally done, but into a completely different dimension of reality — into the realm of utter absurdity, into the realm of utter self-obliteration, in which we will get nothing, and neither will they. A big fat zero….”
Critical voices within and particularly outside Israel call on the Israelis to recognize that “the Zionist experiment was a tragic error. The sooner it is put to rest, the better it will be for all mankind.” In practice this would mean ensuring equality for all the inhabitants between the Jordan and the Mediterranean and a transformation of the existing ethnocracy into a state of all its citizens. However, Israeli society is conditioned to see in such calls an existential threat and a rejection of “Israel’s right to exist”.
The settler colonial logic radicalizes society in the direction of ethnic cleansing and even genocide. No Israeli government would be capable of evacuating hundreds of thousands of settlers to free space for a separate Palestinian state; the chances of giving up Zionist supremacy in the entire land are even lower. Only strong-armed international pressure may make Israel consider such a reform.
More probably, however, Israel will resist such pressure and threat to resort to the Samson Option, i.e., a nuclear attack on the countries endangering “Israel’s right to exist”. In this worst-case scenario, Israel would be annihilated, but those who put pressure on it would also suffer enormous casualties. Obviously, no country in the world will run the risk of a nuclear attack to free the Palestinians.
Pressure is more likely to come from the public but largely misdirected at local Jewish communities, almost all of them associated in the public mind with Israel. While these Jews, even the most Zionist, have never influenced Israel’s policies towards the Arabs, they have become easy scapegoats for Israel’s misdeeds.
American politicians seem to agree. President Trump referred to Israel as “your state” when addressing a Jewish audience in the United States. President Biden said that “without Israel, no Jew anywhere is safe.” Israeli leaders appreciate such conflations between Judaism and Zionism, between Jews and Israelis. These conflations boost Zionism, feed antisemitism and push Jews to migrate to Israel. This is a welcome prospect for the country, which these new Israelis will strengthen with their intellectual, entrepreneurial, and financial resources as well as supply more soldiers for the IDF.
Despite the opprobrium and public denunciations, Israel appears immune to pressure from the rest of the world. Israeli disdain for international law, the United Nations and, a fortiori, to moral arguments is proverbial. “What matters is what the Jews do, not what the gentiles say”, was Ben-Gurion’s favorite quip. His successors, a lot more radical than Israel’s founding father, will make sure that the tragedy of Gaza does not lead to any compromise with the Palestinians. The Israeli mainstream mocks or simply ignores well-intentioned pleas of liberal Zionists, an endangered species, to “save Israel from itself”. However counterintuitive today, only changes within Israeli society may shake the usual hubris. In the meantime, Israel will continue to defy the world.
About the Author:
Yakov M. Rabkin is Professor Emeritus of History at the Université of Montréal. His publications include over 300 articles and a few books: Science between Superpowers, A Threat from Within: a Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism, What is Modern Israel?, Demodernization: A Future in the Past and Judaïsme, islam et modernité. He did consulting work for, inter alia, OECD, NATO, UNESCO and the World Bank. E-mail: yakov.rabkin@umontreal.ca. Website: www.yakovrabkin.ca
Israel has nuclear weapons. Iran does not
Israel has always refused to confirm its possession of a nuclear arsenal and maintains a policy of strategic ambiguity throughout the region.
The country’s ballistic missile programme, called Jericho, is highly classified. Few details are in the public domain, but the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) estimates Israel has around 24 nuclear-capable missiles.
In general, Israeli leaders do not say much about their country’s atomic capabilities. But in November, far-right cabinet minister Amichai Eliyahu claimed it was an option to launch a nuclear strike on the Gaza strip – comments that were quickly disavowed by Benjamin Netanyahu.
In 2016, a leaked cache of emails from former US secretary of state Colin Powell included one that read: “The boys in Tehran know Israel has 200 [nuclear weapons], all targeted on Tehran, and we have thousands.”
Iran does not have nuclear weapons, but has several nuclear facilities across its territory which experts fear are being used to develop them. Tehran claims they are for civilian use.
In 2016, the country signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action – widely known as the Iran nuclear deal – which lifted sanctions and around $100bn of frozen funds in exchange for an end to atomic weapon research.
………..Tehran has continued to enrich uranium at these sites of rates up to 60 per cent purity – which exceeds needs for commercial use and is just a step away from weapons-grade 90 per cent, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
That means Iran’s so-called “breakout time” – the time it would need to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for a nuclear bomb – is between six months to a year, according to experts.
Iran also vowed to revise its weapons doctrine if its nuclear sites were targeted by Israel before the attack on Friday morning.
What happens next?
So far, it is unclear. Israel maintains its policy of strategic ambiguity and Iran has immediately downplayed the severity of Israel’s attack – saying it would not respond.
A senior official said the country was looking at it more as an “infiltration” rather than an “external attack” – but previously Iran’s president said an attack would be met with a “severe response”. https://au.news.yahoo.com/many-nuclear-weapons-israel-iran-144603850.html
What do we know about Israel’s nuclear weapons?
The New Arab Staff, 23 November, 2023
Israel is believed to possess between 80 and 400 nuclear weapons but has never faced serious international scrutiny over this.
Despite widespread speculation, Israel has neither confirmed nor denied having nuclear weapons, adhering to a policy of deliberate ambiguity.
Israel is believed to have between 80 to 400 nuclear warheads, with the first completed around late 1966 or early 1967.
This estimate would position Israel as the sixth nation globally to develop nuclear weapons. Delivery methods for these weapons are believed to include aircraft, submarine-launched cruise missiles, and the Jericho series ballistic missiles.
Israel consistently reiterates the cryptic refrain that it will “not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East”. The nation has not signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) despite international calls to join.
Recently, the issue gained renewed attention when Israel’s Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu, of the extremist Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party, suggested that using nuclear weapons against Gaza would be an option. He was suspended soon afterwards.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan also recently said that the issue of Israel’s nuclear arsenal should remain a focus on the global agenda.
He accused Western nations of aiding and overlooking alleged crimes against humanity by Israel in Gaza, where over 14,000 people have been killed in indiscriminate bombardment.
History and implications
Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, was committed to acquiring nuclear weapons, justifying this by saying it was to prevent a recurrence of the Nazi Holocaust. …………………………..
By 1952, Israel Atomic Energy Commission chief Ernst David Bergmann sought nuclear collaboration with France, and laid the foundation for future French-Israeli cooperation. This partnership included Israeli scientists’ involvement in France’s nuclear facilities and knowledge sharing, particularly with those with experience on the Manhattan Project.
The relationship culminated in 1957, with France agreeing to build a nuclear reactor and reprocessing plant in Israel, a decision influenced by geopolitical factors and mutual scientific benefits.
This partnership was solidified through secret agreements, ostensibly concentrating on peaceful use of atomic technology but with implications for weapons development………………………………….
The Dimona reactor achieved criticality in 1962, and by 1966 Israel had reportedly developed its first operational nuclear weapon, marking the beginning of its full-scale nuclear weapons production.
The exact costs of Israel’s nuclear program are unknown, but substantial foreign aid and Mossad’s covert operations played crucial roles.
Israeli defector Mordechai Vanunu dramatically revealed the extent of the nuclear programme in 1986, and he was kidnapped by Mossad agents and brought back to Israel, serving long years in prison.
By the mid-2000s, estimates of Israel’s nuclear arsenal varied widely, with speculation about uranium enrichment capabilities adding to these uncertainties.
Despite occasional statements by other countries expressing concern about Israel’s nuclear capabilities, there has been little pressure on Israel to declare its nuclear activities or open up its facilities for inspection, let alone to destroy its weapons.
Double standards
The international community’s approach to nuclear proliferation exhibits notable disparities, especially when comparing the cases of Israel, Iran, and Pakistan.
Israel, despite widespread belief in its possession of nuclear weapons, has never publicly confirmed this and enjoys a unique position of strategic ambiguity. It does not face the same level of scrutiny or sanctions imposed on other nations.
In contrast, Iran, whose nuclear program has raised global concerns about potential weaponisation, has been subject to rigorous inspections, strict sanctions, and intense diplomatic negotiations under frameworks like the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
Pakistan, having openly conducted nuclear tests in 1998, is often viewed through the lens of regional security dynamics, particularly its rivalry with India, and faces a distinct set of international concerns and regulatory measures. https://www.newarab.com/news/what-do-we-know-about-israels-nuclear-weapons
AI-assisted genocide’: Israel reportedly used database for Gaza kill lists
“Israel is currently trying to sell these tools to foreign entities, to governments that are looking to what Israel’s doing in Gaza, not with disgust, but actually with admiration,” said Antony Loewenstein, an Australian journalist and author of The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World.
Aljazeera, 4 April 24
Two Israeli media outlets report the Israeli military’s use of an AI-assisted system called Lavender to identify Gaza targets.
The Israeli military’s reported use of an untested and undisclosed artificial intelligence-powered database to identify targets for its bombing campaign in Gaza has alarmed human rights and technology experts who said it could amount to “war crimes”.
The Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and Hebrew-language media outlet Local Call reported recently that the Israeli army was isolating and identifying thousands of Palestinians as potential bombing targets using an AI-assisted targeting system called Lavender.
“That database is responsible for drawing up kill lists of as many as 37,000 targets,” Al Jazeera’s Rory Challands, reporting from occupied East Jerusalem, said on Thursday.
The unnamed Israeli intelligence officials who spoke to the media outlets said Lavender had an error rate of about 10 percent. “But that didn’t stop the Israelis from using it to fast-track the identification of often low-level Hamas operatives in Gaza and bombing them,” Challands said.
It is becoming clear the Israeli army is “deploying untested AI systems … to help make decisions about the life and death of civilians”, Marc Owen Jones, an assistant professor in Middle East Studies and digital humanities at Hamid Bin Khalifa University, told Al Jazeera.
“Let’s be clear: This is an AI-assisted genocide, and going forward, there needs to be a call for a moratorium on the use of AI in the war,” he added.
The Israeli publications reported that this method led to many of the thousands of civilian deaths in Gaza.
On Thursday, Gaza’s Ministry of Health said at least 33,037 Palestinians have been killed and 75,668 wounded in Israeli attacks since October 7.
AI use ‘violates’ humanitarian law
“The humans that were interacting with the AI database were often just a rubber stamp. They would scrutinise this kill list for perhaps 20 seconds before deciding whether or not to give the go-ahead for an air strike,” Challands reported……………….
……………the fact that there were “five to 10 acceptable civilian deaths” for every single Palestinian fighter who was an intended target shows why there are so many civilian deaths in Gaza, according to Challands.
Professor Toby Walsh, an AI expert at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, said legal scholars will likely argue that the use of AI targeting violates international humanitarian law.
“From a technical perspective, this latest news shows how hard it is to keep a human in the loop, providing meaningful oversight to AI systems that scale warfare terribly and tragically,” he told Al Jazeera.
‘War crimes’
The media outlets cited sources who said the Israeli army made decisions during the first weeks of the current conflict that “for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians”.
“Israel is currently trying to sell these tools to foreign entities, to governments that are looking to what Israel’s doing in Gaza, not with disgust, but actually with admiration,” said Antony Loewenstein, an Australian journalist and author of The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World.
“We’ll find out in the coming months and years who they may be … my sense is it’s gonna be countries that are currently saying they’re opposed to what Israel is doing.” https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/4/4/ai-assisted-genocide-israel-reportedly-used-database-for-gaza-kill-lists?fbclid=IwAR2e7Fms0mKy-8_MLuH_jj6aY6fWgr9FO4dFU2Hf3a0m4GtBFAbJofKhGV0
New Fujitsu security research center in Israel to further develop digital identity tools
Biometric, Nov 30, 2022, Ayang Macdonald
Japanese tech giant Fujitsu has announced plans to set up a research center for data and security in Israel as part of efforts to strengthen its Research and Development (R&D) strategy as well as increase its presence in the country.
The center, which will go operational from April 2023 according to the announcement, highlights Fujitsu’s objectives of meeting the data security and trust requirements of companies and businesses at a time when many people are performing more transactions online.
Fujitsu says the center, to be based in Tel Aviv, will bring together about 10 research experts from Israel, Japan and Europe and their work will be focused on improving security technology for communications networks as part of its global strategy for data and security – a key area in its global R&D strategy.
Research at the center will focus on two main areas, namely developing technology that can ensure and enhance trust for network security, and technologies which can be used for a wide range of real-life situations like autonomous driving, self-checkout, as well as public safety, including anti-attack technologies for object detection AI…………
The company is also planning to develop its IDYX (or “IDentitY eXchange”) technology, which is intended to enable secure distribution of digital identity and attribute information between companies and individuals………………………………. https://www.biometricupdate.com/202211/new-fujitsu-security-research-center-in-israel-to-further-develop-digital-identity-tools?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR0JsxUA-U2OxTaWJA0wn9bVwz6ZrES6Ud3yJbBiyJ7-0pgqbW6TaOodx50_aem_AUNuP6qXKQDr6xEGOrL9tLaha_3Jq5bni6IsXT-5B63IYytKZyPOG_gwYYdcMStOmz7Fcy3mf3NxTz4PKcttQPiC
Bombs and viruses: The shadowy history of Israel’s attacks on Iranian soil
From cyberattacks and assassinations to drone strikes, Israel-linked plots have targeted Iran and its nuclear programme for years.
Israel’s leaders have signalled that they are weighing their options on how to respond to Iran’s attack early Sunday morning, when Tehran targeted its archenemy with more than 300 missiles and drones.
Iran’s attack, which followed an Israeli strike last week on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria, that killed 13 people was historic: It was the first time Tehran had directly targeted Israeli soil, despite decades of hostility. Until Sunday, many of Iran’s allies in the so-called axis of resistance — especially the Palestinian group Hamas, the Lebanese group Hezbollah, Yemen’s Houthis and armed groups in Iraq and Syria — were the ones who launched missiles and drones at Israel.
But if Israel were to hit back militarily inside Iran, it wouldn’t be the first time. Far from it.
For years, Israel has focused on one target within Iran in particular: the country’s nuclear programme. Israel has long accused Iran of clandestinely building a nuclear bomb that could threaten its existence — and has publicly, and frequently, spoken of its diplomatic and intelligence-driven efforts to derail those alleged efforts. Iran denies that it has had a military nuclear programme, while arguing that it has the right to access civil nuclear energy.
As Israel prepares its response, here’s a look at the range of attacks in Iran — from drone strikes and cyberattacks to assassinations of scientists and the theft of secrets — that Israel has either accepted it was behind or is accused of having orchestrated.
Assassinations of Iranian scientists
- January 2010: A physics professor at Tehran University, Masoud Ali-Mohammadi, was killed through a remote-controlled bomb planted in his motorcycle. Iranian state media claimed that the US and Israel were behind the attack. The Iranian government described Ali-Mohammadi as a nuclear scientist.
- November 2010: A professor at the nuclear engineering faculty at Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran, Majid Shahriari, was killed in a car explosion on his way to work. His wife was also wounded. The president of Iran at the time, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, blamed the United States and Israel for the attacks.
- January 2012: Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, a chemical engineering graduate, was killed by a bomb placed on his car by a motorcyclist in Tehran. Iran blamed Israel and the US for the attack and said Ahmadi Roshan was a nuclear scientist who supervised a department at Iran’s primary uranium enrichment facility, in the city of Natanz.
- November 2020:Prominent nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was killed in a roadside attack outside Tehran. Western and Israeli intelligence had long suspected that Fakhrizadeh was the father of an Iranian nuclear weapons programme. He was sanctioned by the United Nations in 2007 and the US in 2008.
- May 2022: Colonel Hassan Sayyad Khodaei of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was shot five times outside of his home in Tehran. Majid Mirahmadi, a member of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, alleged the assassination was “definitely the work of Israel”.
Israel’s cyberattacks on Iran
- June 2010:The Stuxnet virus was found in computers at the nuclear plant in Iran’s Bushehr city, and it spread from there to other facilities. As many as 30,000 computers across at least 14 facilities were impacted by September 2010. At least 1,000 out of 9,000 centrifuges in Iran’s Natanz enrichment facility were destroyed, according to an estimate by the Institute for Science and International Security. Upon investigation, Iran blamed Israel and the US for the virus attack.
- April 2011: A virus called Stars was discovered by the Iranian cyberdefence agency which said the malware was designed to infiltrate and damage Iran’s nuclear facilities. The virus mimicked official government files and inflicted “minor damage” on computer systems, according to Gholamreza Jalali, the head of Iran’s Passive Defense Organization. Iran blamed Israel and the US.
November 2011: Iran said it discovered a new virus called Duqu, based on Stuxnet. Experts said Duqu was intended to gather data for future cyberattacks. The Iranian government announced it was checking computers at main nuclear sites. The Duqu spyware was widely believed by experts to have been linked to Israel.- April 2012: Iran blamed the US and Israel for malware called Wiper, which erased the hard drives of computers owned by the Ministry of Petroleum and the National Iranian Oil Company.
- May 2012: Iran announced that a virus called Flame had tried to steal government data from government computers. The Washington Post reported that Israel and the US had used it to collect intelligence. Then-Israeli Vice Prime Minister Moshe Yaalon did not confirm the nation’s involvement but acknowledged that Israel would use all means to “harm the Iranian nuclear system”.
- October 2018: The Iranian government said that it had blocked an invasion by a new generation of Stuxnet, blaming Israel for the attack.
- October 2021: A cyberattack hit the system that allows Iranians to use government-issued cards to purchase fuel at a subsidised rate, affecting all 4,300 petrol stations in Iran. Consumers had to either pay the regular price, more than double the subsidised one, or wait for stations to reconnect to the central
- distribution system. Iran blamed Israel and the US.
- May 2020: A cyberattack impacted computers that control maritime traffic at Shahid Rajaee port on Iran’s southern coast in the Gulf, creating a hold-up of ships that waited to dock. The Washington Post quoted US officials as saying that Israel was behind the attack, though Israel did not claim responsibility.
Israel’s drone strikes and raids on Iran
- January 2018: Mossad agents raided a secure Tehran facility, stealing classified nuclear archives. In April 2018, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that Israel discovered 100,000 “secret files that prove” Iran lied about never having a nuclear weapons programme.
- February 2022: Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett admitted in an op-ed published in The Wall Street Journal in December 2023, that Israel carried out an attack on an unmanned aerial vehicle, and assassinated a senior IRGC commander in February of the previous year.
- May 2022: Explosives-laden quadcopter suicide drones hit the Parchin military complex southeast of Tehran, killing an engineer and damaging a building where drones had been developed by the Ministry of Defence and Armed Forces. IRGC Commander Hossein Salami pledged retaliation against unspecified “enemies”.
- February 2024: A natural gas pipeline in Iran was attacked. Iran’s Oil Minister Javad Owji alleged that the “explosion of the gas pipeline was an Israeli plot”.
- January 2023: Several suicide drones struck a military facility in central Isfahan, but they were thwarted and caused no damage. While Iran did not immediately place blame for the attacks, Iran’s UN envoy, Amir Saeid Iravani, wrote a letter to the UN chief saying that “primary investigation suggested Israel was responsible”.
Biden Tells Netanyahu US Won’t Support Attack on Iran
White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said that Biden also told Netanyahu “that the United States is going to continue to help Israel defend itself,” signaling the US would intervene again to help Israel if it does choose to escalate the situation and comes under another attack.
The US is portraying the Iranian attack as an Israeli victory
by Dave DeCamp April 14, 2024, https://news.antiwar.com/2024/04/14/biden-tells-netanyahu-us-wont-support-attack-on-iran/
President Biden told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the US wouldn’t join Israel in any offensive action against Iran, multiple media outlets have reported.
US officials are touting Israel’s defense of Iran’s attack as a victory, and that’s the message Biden conveyed to Netanyahu, a sign the US doesn’t want the situation to escalate. Iran fired over 300 missiles and drones at Israel, which was a response to Israel’s bombing of Iran’s consulate in Damascus on April 1.
“Israel really came out far ahead in this exchange. It took out the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp] leadership in the Levant, Iran tried to respond, and Israel clearly demonstrated its military superiority, defeating this attack, particularly in coordination with its partners,” a senior Biden administration official told reporters, according to The Times of Israel.
In a statement on the attack released by the White House, Biden said he would convene with other G7 leaders to “coordinate a united diplomatic response to Iran’s brazen attack.”
Israeli officials claimed 99% of the Iranian missiles and drones were intercepted by Israeli air defense systems and with assistance from the US, Britain, and Jordan. Some missiles got through and damaged the Nevatim Airbase in southern Israel. Only one person was injured in the attack, a seven-year-old Bedouin girl in the Negev, and nobody was killed.
Iran gave Israel plenty of time to respond to the attack by announcing it fired the drones hours before they reached Israeli territory, and Tehran said it gave other regional countries a 72-hour notice. Iranian officials said the attack was “limited” and made clear they do not seek an escalation with Israel.
But Tehran is also warning it will launch an even bigger attack if Israel responds. “If the Zionist regime or its supporters demonstrate reckless behavior, they will receive a decisive and much stronger response,” Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi said in a statement on Sunday.
While the US is signaling it seeks de-escalation and won’t support a potential Israeli attack on Iran, it’s unclear what Israel will do next. The Israeli war cabinet convened to discuss the situation on Sunday, and Israeli media reports said they agreed a response would come but didn’t decide on where or when.
Israeli War Cabinet Minister Benny Gantz vowed Israel would respond but signaled it wouldn’t be imminent. Gantz said the “event is not over” and that Israel should “build a regional coalition and exact a price from Iran, in a way and at a time that suits us.”
White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said that Biden also told Netanyahu “that the United States is going to continue to help Israel defend itself,” signaling the US would intervene again to help Israel if it does choose to escalate the situation and comes under another attack.
Israel’s bombing of the Iranian consulate in Syria killed 13 people, including seven members of the IRGC. Israel has a history of conducting covert attacks inside Iran and killing Iranians in Syria, but the bombing of the diplomatic facility marked a huge escalation.
Israeli Firms Are Working Overtime to Sell Stolen Palestinian Land to US Jews
these land sale events “are illegal under the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and Civil Rights Act of 1965, since registration, entry, and participation are denied on the basis of identity (i.e., race, ethnicity, national origin, and religion).”
The real estate events peddling land in Israeli settlements in the West Bank appear to flout US and international law.
By Eleanor Goldfield , TRUTHOUT. April 13, 2024
our chance to own a piece of the Holy Land!” exclaims the cheerful advertising copy on a real estate website aimed at attracting buyers in the U.S. and Canada to purchase land located in Israel and in a number of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The site describes five land sale events that occurred this spring in the U.S. and Canada.
Another land sale event held in Baltimore invited attendees to “Buy Your Home in Israel Now!” But, as with the other events, attendees couldn’t just be anyone interested in some freshly stolen land. You have to be Jewish, but not just any kind of Jewish.
Greg Kaplan, a local Jewish community member who wanted to learn more about these restrictive events and who tried signing up for the April 1 land sale event in Baltimore, which was hosted by the Jerusalem-based CapitIL Real Estate Agency, told me:
I got a call from Shmuly Eisenmann of CapitIL. He asked me where I daven, who the rabbi is there, and for the rabbi’s number, seeming incredulous that I wouldn’t just have the rabbi’s number stored in my phone. He said he would check on me with the rabbi and asked if the rabbi would know who I was. I said probably not because I don’t go to shul that much. He asked if there was someone at another shul who could vouch for me.
Kaplan was not allowed into the event, which was scheduled to take place at Shomrei Emunah, “a full-service shul and Jewish center” in Baltimore whose list of speakers and scholars in residence includes an IDF lieutenant colonel.
Gillian Stoll, a member of the New Jersey chapter of IfNotNow, who tried to register for the Teaneck, New Jersey, event on March 31, received a series of phone calls. On the first call, Stoll admits to being caught off guard by a slew of questions including the name of her temple and rabbi, his direct number as well as what the reading was at the temple that week. She gave the name of her old rabbi and temple, and the man calling seemed satisfied for the moment, offering that they had to cancel previously “because of protesters.” She then “got a second call from another not so nice guy saying he called the rabbi and he hadn’t heard of me … and asked how old I was … and if I’d been to Israel.” Stoll was also not allowed into the event.
Needless to say, I — as a secular Jew who hasn’t been to temple since about 2007 and whose most recent run-in with a rabbi involved one chanting alongside me at an anti-Zionist action — didn’t even get a phone call. And while these discriminatory practices might be necessary to avoid a bunch of anti-Zionist protesters in your midst, they are, in fact, illegal.
A recent press release from the Palestinian Assembly for Liberation (PAL) Law Commission pointed out that these land sale events “are illegal under the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and Civil Rights Act of 1965, since registration, entry, and participation are denied on the basis of identity (i.e., race, ethnicity, national origin, and religion).”
The commission added that these events violate not only U.S. law but also international law with regard to hosts “exhibiting and offering properties on West Bank settlements recognized as illegal by the U.S. Department of State and by international law” including “Article 49 of the Geneva Convention … Settlements have been found to be grave breaches of international law, and therefore war crimes, by the International Court [ICJ] of Justice in 2004, and are also currently under review by the ICJ in the context of the case of South Africa v. Israel for crimes of genocide, and by the International Criminal Court.”
PAL Law Commission has filed notices and complaints with attorneys general and real estate licensing authorities, and has also served formal cease and desist letters alongside notice and demand letters regarding their findings.
When asked about responses from hosts or organizers, PAL spokesperson Hena Zuberi said:
The response we’ve received is them shifting their events online and/or sponsors pulling out of the events, at least publicly. Although this hasn’t been a direct communication with us it came as an effect directly following our legal action and served as a major legal and grassroots victory for the case and the campaign overall. We’ve shut down several events and moved others online through this action.
One such event was scheduled to take place in Flatbush, Brooklyn, at the Khal Bnei Avrohom Yaakov Simcha Hall and was later moved online after both legal action and local protests. Indeed, it’s impossible to say whether legal action, direct action or a combination of the two has pushed the cancellation or relocation of land sale events. Either way, it’s clear that hosts and organizers are uncomfortable with the attention, as they should be.
On the site listing the event in Flatbush as well as events in Montreal; Toronto; Teaneck, New Jersey; and Lawrence, New York, a banner reads “Our expert speakers will address all your questions about purchasing real estate in Israel and focusing on: Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Ramat Beit Shemesh, Modiin, Givat Shmuel, Raanana, Neve Daniel, Efrat, Motza, Haifa, Ma’ale Adumim, Ashkelon, Netanya.”
………………………………………………….. In short, be it 1948, 1967, 2014 or today, Palestine is occupied land, Israel upholds apartheid, and these land sale events are one of many tactics being used to disappear an Indigenous people and culture, to wipe them off the map literally and figuratively, much as was done here in the so-called United States with mass land sale events of so-called “Indian land” in the West.
……………………………………………. we heard news that the land sale event had been moved last minute to a new location. A small victory, but a victory nonetheless. Zuberi told me, “These victories would not have been possible without the relentless pressure mounted by the PAL legal team and the local PAL chapters’ and allies’ grassroots support and organizing.” This grassroots organizing included the Baltimore chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ office in Maryland, and American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) as well as individuals such as me who, though not affiliated with any one organization, felt the need to show up.
Cassidy Cohen with Jewish Voice for Peace’s Baltimore chapter added: “We come from a Jewish tradition that has for millennia opposed empire, colonization and nationalism, that values every human life, and is rooted in social justice…. As Jews, we oppose all displacement and genocide of Palestinians. We say never again for anyone.”
In other words, to act in solidarity with tireless Palestinian leadership in the struggle for their liberation is the mandate of all who believe in justice, especially us Jews. https://truthout.org/articles/israeli-firms-are-working-overtime-to-sell-stolen-palestinian-land-to-us-jews/
US Declines Israel’s Invitation To Start WW3 (For Now)
CAITLIN JOHNSTONE, APR 14, 2024, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/us-declines-israels-invitation-to?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=143571202&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Iran has carried out its long-promised retaliation for Israel’s attack on its consulate building in Damascus, launching a massive barrage of drones and missiles which it claims hit and destroyed Israeli military targets, while Israel says they dealt only superficial damage with a few injuries. The US and its allies reportedly helped shoot down a number of the Iranian projectiles.
Just as we discussed in the lead-up to the strike, the western political-media class are acting as though this was a completely unprovoked attack launched against the innocent, Bambi-eyed victim Israel. Comments from western officials and pundits and headlines from the mass media are omitting the fact that Israel instigated these hostilities with its extreme act of aggression in Syria as much as possible. Here in Australia the Sydney Morning Herald write-up about the strike didn’t get around to informing its readers about the attack on the Iranian consulate until the tenth paragraph of the article, and said only that Iran had “accused” Israel of launching the attack because Israel has never officially confirmed it.
In any case, Iran says the attack is now over. Given that we’re not seeing any signs of massive damage, Iran’s reported claim that its retaliation would be calibrated to avoid escalation into a full-scale regional war seems to have been accurate, as does Washington’s reported claim that it didn’t expect the strike to be large enough to draw the US into war.
A new report from Axios says Biden has personally told Netanyahu that the US will not be supporting any Israeli military response to the Iranian strike. An anonymous senior White House official told Axios that Biden said to Netanyahu, “You got a win. Take the win,” in reference to the number of Iranian weapons that were taken out of the sky by the international coalition in Israel’s defense. Apparently helping to mitigate the damage from the Iranian attack is all the military commitment the White House is willing to make against Iran at this time.
And thank all that is holy for that. A war between the US alliance and Iran and its allies would be the stuff of nightmares, making the horrors we’ve been seeing in Gaza these last six months look like an episode of Peppa Pig.
But Washington merely declining to get involved is nowhere near enough. As the Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi quipped on Twitter, “Biden needs to PREVENT further escalation, not just declare his desire to stay out of it.”
Indeed, Israel has already made it clear that it is going to be moving forward with an escalation against Iran. Israel’s Channel 12 cites an unnamed senior official saying the Iranian counter strike is going to receive an “unprecedented response”.
“Israel has already informed the Americans and governments in the region that its response is inevitable,” The Economist reports. “Its military options include launching drones at Iran, and long-range airstrikes on Iran, possibly on military bases or nuclear installations.”
It’s unclear at this time how much the latest message from the Biden administration will affect the calculations of this position, but the mass media are reporting that White House officials are worried Israel is getting ready to do something extremely reckless that could draw the US into a war it would rather avoid.
NBC News reports the following:
“Some top U.S. officials are concerned Israel could do something quickly in response to Iran’s attacks without thinking through potential fallout afterward, according to a senior administration official and a senior defense official.
“Those concerns stem in part from the administration’s views of the approach Israel has taken to its war against Hamas, as well as the attack in Damascus.
“President Joe Biden has privately expressed concern that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to drag the U.S. more deeply into a broader conflict, according to three people familiar with his comments.”
People have been raising this concern for some time now. Earlier this month Responsible Statecraft’s Paul Pillar wrote up a solid argument that Netanyahu stands a lot to gain personally from drawing the US into a war with Iran to help him with his legal and political troubles and take the focus off of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Whether that’s the case or not it’s pretty absurd for the Biden administration to just sit around passively hoping this doesn’t happen as though it wouldn’t have a say in the matter, and as though there’s nothing it can do to prevent such an occurrence right now. Biden has had the ability to end this insane cycle of escalation in the middle east since it started six months ago by demanding a ceasefire in Gaza and demanding that Israel rein in its murder machine, just as US presidents have done successfully in the past.
Biden could end all this with one phone call. The fact that he doesn’t means he’s a monster, and no amount of mass media reports about how “concerned” and “frustrated” he is regarding Israel’s actions will ever change that.
Stop Pretending Biden Is Some Passive Witness To Israel’s Warmongering
CAITLIN JOHNSTONE, APR 15, 2024, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/stop-pretending-biden-is-some-passive?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=143599351&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
The more I think about it the more obnoxious I find the Biden administration’s “Gee whiz, I sure hope Israel doesn’t drag us into a giant war in the middle east” posturing and the imperial media’s facilitation of it.
CNN has a new article out titled “As Iran attacks Israel, Biden confronts an escalating Middle East crisis he had hoped to avoid,” which is a genre of story that has been coming out in slightly different iterations again and again for the past six months. Every time Israel does something that makes things more dangerous in the middle east with the assistance of the United States, the American press fall all over themselves to inform the world that the president really doesn’t want this to happen and that his feelings are very upset about it.
“For President Joe Biden, an attack on Israel launched from Iranian soil amounts to a scenario he’d greatly sought to avoid since the start of the current Middle East conflict,” writes CNN, saying the strikes “heighten the risk of a wider regional conflict that could directly draw in the United States, along with other countries.”
“Israel will respond to Iran’s attack, but the scope of that response has yet to be determined,” CNN reports, citing an anonymous Israeli official.
And it’s just such an obscene insult to our intelligence to suggest that the Biden administration is some kind of passive witness to all this, sitting around wringing its hands hoping Israel doesn’t do something so horrible that the United States will have no choice but to leap into World War Three in defense of its dear ally. It’s insulting in that it asks us to believe the US would have no choice but to enter into a war of unimaginable horror if Israel acts belligerently enough, and it’s insulting in that it asks us to ignore the fact that Biden could have ended this insane cycle of escalation with one phone call to Israel at any time over the last six months.
Being asked to accept that the Biden administration is just standing there hoping Israel doesn’t ignite the worst war in middle eastern history is like seeing a dog owner letting their rottweiler run around biting people all over the neighborhood and saying “Yeah he just does what he likes, I just hope he doesn’t kill anybody.”
It’s like, no. Stop that. You’re not just crossing your fingers and hoping Israel doesn’t do something monstrous, you’re letting them do whatever they want because that’s what you’re choosing to do. Israel’s entire existence is as dependent on US support as a scuba diver is on their oxygen tank, and as such the White House has essentially limitless leverage it can use to make Israel do as it pleases — and it has done so in the past. Hell it’s done so during this very Gaza assault, successfully commanding Israel to stop cutting off Gazan telecommunications and to start letting more aid trucks in to the enclave.
If Biden truly didn’t want Israel to be turning the middle east into a hurricane of death and fire, he would stop it. He would put the damn dog on a leash.
The western press have a well-established track record of consistently framing US wars as these traps that Washington just clumsily stumbles its way into, like there’s some giant Macaulay Culkin-like deity sneaking around laying tripwires to force the Pentagon to regime change Libya or whatever. After a certain number of wars you have to figure that a regime is starting a bunch of wars because it’s just a warmongering regime, though — and the US has been involved in a whole, whole lot of wars. Nobody’s that clumsy or that unlucky; it’s like believing your husband when he tells you he keeps slipping and falling with his man parts inside the lady parts of various coworkers.
The most powerful empire that has ever existed is not just passively sitting there praying that big bad Israel doesn’t force it to go to war with Iran. That is not happening. All the violence and chaos that’s happening in the middle east right now is happening because the US empire wants it to happen, and because the people who steer that empire are psychopathic ghouls. And don’t let the crooked manipulators of the western mass media tell you otherwise.
Amid Serious Iran-Israel Tension, The Nuclear Elephant Is In The Room
Tuesday, 04/09/2024, Shahram Kholdi, https://www.iranintl.com/en/202404097226
April 7 marked the sixth month of Hamas-Israel open conflict. Six days before this semi-anniversary, Israel’s April 1 strike on Iran’s embassy in Damascus punctuated an alarming turning point.
Israel’s action did not only corner Hezbollah, Iran’s primary quasi-state proxy on the bloody chessboard of their ongoing conflict but have also eliminated key military leaders. Amid various pundits attempting to predict Iran’s next move, many are acknowledging the significant factor of Iran’s nuclear program lurking in the background.
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s “fatwa” and opinion on the prohibition of producing nuclear weapons “may change tomorrow,” Mahmoud-Reza Aghamiri, the president of Tehran’s Beheshti University and a pro-regime professor of nuclear physics, told Iran’s state TV this week. Aghamiri says Iran currently has the technology and capability to develop a nuclear bomb, and under such circumstances, developing it is easier than not making it.
The punditry and analyses on a possible “direct” clash between Iran and Israel is indeed all over the map. Some, whilst citing “warnings from unnamed Israeli officials behind the scenes” wonder whether or not Iran will strike Israel back from its own territory. Others probe whether it will have its proxies to escalate their asymmetrical strikes against Israel. And last but not least, a handful quibble over whether Israel’s strike would give President Joe Biden the occasion to proclaim support for Israel against Iran but further pressure Israel to heed the US’ demands on the conclusion of the war in Gaza and negotiations with Hamas for the release of the hostages.
On this very outlet, in an article published four days after Hamas attack on October 11, 2023, Benjamin Weinthal covered various sides of a debate on the (unlikely) possibility of a joint US-Israeli attack against Iran as a state sponsor of Hamas.
On the conventional front, The gravity of Israel’s situation cannot be exaggerated. The Hezbollah of Lebanon is armed with thousands of conventional rockets and cruise missiles that can potentially swarm and overwhelm the Israeli Air Defense Shield and Iron Dome and the analyses of Israel’s ability to take all Hezbollah’s arsenal preemptively has been the subject of much debate.
What most observers do not take into account is the possibility that the Israeli attack on the Iranian embassy in Damascus may trigger a rude awakening amongst the IRGC top brass and Khamenei. It might prompt them to hasten the development of their nuclear deterrence capabilities. Despite the regime’s longstanding vow to eliminate Israel, dating back to before 1979, the tensions between Iran and Israel are mutual and deep-rooted.
Israel is presently wary of the Iranian ability to deploy a handful of nuclear warheads and the IDF has been preparing itself for a decisive strike on the Iranian nuclear facilities for quite some time before the Hamas October 7 attack on Israel. Israel, as is discussed below, has been acutely aware of Iran’s ever growing weaponization capacity as early as 2018.
Yet Israel’s collective sense of insecurity is not simply rooted in its fear of its enemies or the deep-seated collective trauma of the Holocaust. Israel’s primary source of insecurity is rooted in its historical roller coaster experience of its alliances. The Soviet de jure recognition of Israel and support for its war of independence against the Arab nations was short-lived and inadequate. France was Israel’s major military supplier for much of the 1950s to the mid-1960s, and upon her aid Israel developed its conventional and unconventional nuclear programs.
But France proved unreliable when President De Gaulle sought a rapprochement with Israel’s Arab enemies and abandoned Israel in the mid-1960s. From the mid-1960s, the United States became Israel’s sole guarantor and ally in all aspects of economy and military from research and development, joint aeronautical and space projects to the development of the sophisticated air-defense systems, namely, “the Iron-Dome”, and the latest sophisticated UAVs.
The United States itself has wavered in its “unequivocal support” for Israel at least on three different occasions. First, President Dwight Eisenhower refused to support Israel in its collusion with the Anglo-French powers during the 1956 Suez Crisis. In fact, Eisenhower turned his back on Israel as he feared escalation with the Soviet Union. Incidentally, there are commentators who believe that President Biden should treat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to a similar set of measures that Eisenhower imposed on Israel in 1956.
There are indeed those in the US who believe Johnson failed to act to prevent Israel’s occupation of the West Bank in 1967 and this is a legacy from which Biden must take harsh lessons and act accordingly. Finally, President Barack Obama’s administration sidelined Israel’s Netanyahu to cajole Tehran’s ruling mullahs into the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) over their nuclear program causing Israel to distance itself ever farther from the Euro-American alliance. Israel has been less than forthcoming about sharing the details of its assassination and sabotage operations with its Euro-American allies ever since. According to some reports, “the CIA does not know” if Israel plans to bomb Iran.”
Today, Israel and Netanyahu are almost identical in their shared sense of insecurities. Even though a majority of Israelis may not vote him to office if elections were held today, they share the same sense of insecurity that has been the compass of his five mandates over the past thirty years. At the core of this sense of insecurity lies Iran’s nuclear program. Since 2018, Israel has taken possession of thousands of documents that lay bear all the militaristic directions of the Iranian nuclear program (Revealed: Emptying of the Iranian “Atomic Warehouse” at Turquz Abad). Over nearly 15 years, Israel is alleged to have succeeded in sabotaging many critical sites of the Iranian nuclear industrial complex. Moreover, Israel is accused of having masterminded the operations that eliminated Iranian nuclear scientists in the same period. Nonetheless, since Donald Trump left the JCPOA, the Iranian regime has progressively accelerated its uranium enrichment and proved Israel’s, read Netanyahu’s, worst fears. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is effectively and totally is in the dark per the latest reports of IAEA and its dire warnings about the exact state of the Iranian nuclear program. In view of the above, it appears that Israel’s assassination and sabotage operations against the Iranian scientists and nuclear sites have effectively failed.
Israeli-American air forces joint drills for long range operations in the summer of 2023 revealed how alarmed both US and Israel were about the Iranian nuclear program. It was speculated at the time that such drills were to prepare both air forces for a joint operation on the Iranian nuclear facilities. Meanwhile, the Americans were in the midst of secret negotiation with the Iranians to reach an “informal nuclear agreement”.
However, joint exercises of such magnitude with any ally are always planned long in advance and are indicative of longstanding concerns. Accordingly, the joint US-Israeli hint at the fact that the Biden administration did neither have any confidence in the success of those secret negotiations with Iran, nor was it assured of the Iranian side’s honoring any such accord. Three weeks before Hamas attack on Israel, a most telling paragraph in the IDF statement on Israeli and Hellenic air forces’ joint drills for long range operations reads as follows: “The exercise is part of a series of exercises and models carried out by the IAF in the past year and their purpose is to improve operational and mental competence for long-range flights, refueling, attacks in the depth [of enemy territory] and achieving air superiority.”
Khamenei, per his religious edict, fatwa, has stated time and again that the manufacturing and usage of nuclear weapons is forbidden. However, Israel’s elimination of two high-ranking IRGC general inside the Iranian embassy’s compound in Damascus has established that there is no red line that it will not cross to maximize its security and minimize all risks. Such an escalating assault may cause the Iranian ruling clerics and the IRGC to wonder if their nuclear facilities will be next on Israel’s target list and they may consider attaining a deterrence greater than a conventional one. Khamenei may indeed invoke the principle of expediency to overrule his own “anti-Nuclear” fatwa. The principle of expediency, as decreed by the regime’s founder Ayatollah Khomeini in January 1988, stipulates that the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic may even violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith in order to preserve “the Islamic Regime” as the preservation of the Islamic Regime supersedes all else.
Thus, if Israel continues to expand its unrelenting attacks on IRGC top brass and Iranian military and diplomatic facilities in the region, and the Iranian regime continues to plunge into the depths of a maelstrom of economic troubles, will Khamenei perceive such an assault as compromising the survival of the regime? And if so what will he do? Will he invoke the principle of expediency and order the rapid manufacturing of nuclear devices and their deployment in the form of a dozen or so warheads? Or will he be resigned to Israel’s overwhelming assault on its proxies and, like his predecessor, will drink from the poisonous chalice of surrender?
‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza
thousands of Palestinians — most of them women and children or people who were not involved in the fighting — were wiped out by Israeli airstrikes, especially during the first weeks of the war, because of the AI program’s decisions.
The Israeli army has marked tens of thousands of Gazans as suspects for assassination, using an AI targeting system with little human oversight and a permissive policy for casualties, +972 and Local Call reveal.
By Yuval Abraham, April 3, 202, + 972 Magazine,
In 2021, a book titled “The Human-Machine Team: How to Create Synergy Between Human and Artificial Intelligence That Will Revolutionize Our World” was released in English under the pen name “Brigadier General Y.S.” In it, the author — a man who we confirmed to be the current commander of the elite Israeli intelligence unit 8200 — makes the case for designing a special machine that could rapidly process massive amounts of data to generate thousands of potential “targets” for military strikes in the heat of a war. Such technology, he writes, would resolve what he described as a “human bottleneck for both locating the new targets and decision-making to approve the targets.”
Such a machine, it turns out, actually exists. A new investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call reveals that the Israeli army has developed an artificial intelligence-based program known as “Lavender,” unveiled here for the first time. According to six Israeli intelligence officers, who have all served in the army during the current war on the Gaza Strip and had first-hand involvement with the use of AI to generate targets for assassination, Lavender has played a central role in the unprecedented bombing of Palestinians, especially during the early stages of the war. In fact, according to the sources, its influence on the military’s operations was such that they essentially treated the outputs of the AI machine “as if it were a human decision.”
Formally, the Lavender system is designed to mark all suspected operatives in the military wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), including low-ranking ones, as potential bombing targets. The sources told +972 and Local Call that, during the first weeks of the war, the army almost completely relied on Lavender, which clocked as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants — and their homes — for possible air strikes.
During the early stages of the war, the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based. One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male. This was despite knowing that the system makes what are regarded as “errors” in approximately 10 percent of cases, and is known to occasionally mark individuals who have merely a loose connection to militant groups, or no connection at all.
Moreover, the Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes — usually at night while their whole families were present — rather than during the course of military activity. According to the sources, this was because, from what they regarded as an intelligence standpoint, it was easier to locate the individuals in their private houses. Additional automated systems, including one called “Where’s Daddy?” also revealed here for the first time, were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences.
The result, as the sources testified, is that thousands of Palestinians — most of them women and children or people who were not involved in the fighting — were wiped out by Israeli airstrikes, especially during the first weeks of the war, because of the AI program’s decisions.
“We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity,” A., an intelligence officer, told +972 and Local Call. “On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”
The Lavender machine joins another AI system, “The Gospel,” about which information was revealed in a previous investigation by +972 and Local Call in November 2023, as well as in the Israeli military’s own publications. A fundamental difference between the two systems is in the definition of the target: whereas The Gospel marks buildings and structures that the army claims militants operate from, Lavender marks people — and puts them on a kill list.
In addition, according to the sources, when it came to targeting alleged junior militants marked by Lavender, the army preferred to only use unguided missiles, commonly known as “dumb” bombs (in contrast to “smart” precision bombs), which can destroy entire buildings on top of their occupants and cause significant casualties. “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people — it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs],” said C., one of the intelligence officers. Another source said that they had personally authorized the bombing of “hundreds” of private homes of alleged junior operatives marked by Lavender, with many of these attacks killing civilians and entire families as “collateral damage.”
The following investigation is organized according to the six chronological stages of the Israeli army’s highly automated target production in the early weeks of the Gaza war. First, we explain the Lavender machine itself, which marked tens of thousands of Palestinians using AI. Second, we reveal the “Where’s Daddy?” system, which tracked these targets and signaled to the army when they entered their family homes. Third, we describe how “dumb” bombs were chosen to strike these homes.
Fourth, we explain how the army loosened the permitted number of civilians who could be killed during the bombing of a target. Fifth, we note how automated software inaccurately calculated the amount of non-combatants in each household. And sixth, we show how on several occasions, when a home was struck, usually at night, the individual target was sometimes not inside at all, because military officers did not verify the information in real time.
STEP 1: GENERATING TARGETS
‘Once you go automatic, target generation goes crazy
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… once the list was expanded to include tens of thousands of lower-ranking operatives, the Israeli army figured it had to rely on automated software and artificial intelligence. The result, the sources testify, was that the role of human personnel in incriminating Palestinians as military operatives was pushed aside, and AI did most of the work instead……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
STEP 2: LINKING TARGETS TO FAMILY HOMES
‘Most of the people you killed were women and children’
…………………………… in the case of systematic assassination strikes, the army routinely made the active choice to bomb suspected militants when inside civilian households from which no military activity took place.
…………………………………………………….. these programs track thousands of individuals simultaneously, identify when they are at home, and send an automatic alert to the targeting officer, who then marks the house for bombing. One of several of these tracking softwares, revealed here for the first time, is called “Where’s Daddy?”
………………………………. Evidence of this policy is also clear from the data: during the first month of the war, more than half of the fatalities — 6,120 people — belonged to 1,340 families, many of which were completely wiped out while inside their homes, according to UN figures.
………………………………….. “In the end it was everyone [marked by Lavender],” one source explained. “Tens of thousands…………………………. Lavender and systems like Where’s Daddy? were thus combined with deadly effect, killing entire families, sources said………………………………………………
STEP 3: CHOOSING A WEAPON
‘We usually carried out the attacks with “dumb bombs”’
……………………………. In December 2023, CNN reported that according to U.S. intelligence estimates, about 45 percent of the munitions used by the Israeli air force in Gaza were “dumb” bombs, which are known to cause more collateral damage than guided bombs.
…………………….. we usually carried out the attacks with dumb bombs, and that meant literally destroying the whole house on top of its occupants. But even if an attack is averted, you don’t care — you immediately move on to the next target. Because of the system, the targets never end. You have another 36,000 waiting.”
STEP 4: AUTHORIZING CIVILIAN CASUALTIES
‘We attacked almost without considering collateral damage’
…………………………………………………………………………….. Sources told +972 and Local Call that now, partly due to American pressure, the Israeli army is no longer mass-generating junior human targets for bombing in civilian homes. The fact that most homes in the Gaza Strip were already destroyed or damaged, and almost the entire population has been displaced, also impaired the army’s ability to rely on intelligence databases and automated house-locating programs.
……………………………………………………………………………… ‘Entire families were killed’
Intelligence sources told +972 and Local Call they took part in even deadlier strikes. In order to assassinate Ayman Nofal, the commander of Hamas’ Central Gaza Brigade, a source said the army authorized the killing of approximately 300 civilians, destroying several buildings in airstrikes on Al-Bureij refugee camp on Oct. 17, based on an imprecise pinpointing of Nofal.
………………………………………………………………………………………………… Such a high rate of “collateral damage” is exceptional not only compared to what the Israeli army previously deemed acceptable, but also compared to the wars waged by the United States in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. ……………………………………………………………………………
STEP 5: CALCULATING COLLATERAL DAMAGE
‘The model was not connected to reality’
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… “the collateral damage calculation was completely automatic and statistical” — even producing figures that were not whole numbers.
STEP 6: BOMBING A FAMILY HOME
‘You killed a family for no reason’
The sources who spoke to +972 and Local Call explained that there was sometimes a substantial gap between the moment that tracking systems like Where’s Daddy? alerted an officer that a target had entered their house, and the bombing itself — leading to the killing of whole families even without hitting the army’s target. “It happened to me many times that we attacked a house, but the person wasn’t even home,” one source said. “The result is that you killed a family for no reason.”……………………………………………………………………. https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
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