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The ‘Greater Israel’ Scheme And Its Global Power Play: A Delusional Recipe For Armageddon

December 5, 2023 AuthorMatthew Ehret, The Last American Vagabond,

In 1996, a nest of American-born imperialists revolving around Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Richard Perle created a new think tank called “The Project for a New American Century.”

While the principled aim of the think tank ultimately hinged on a new “Pearl Harbor moment” that would justify a new era of regime-change wars in the Middle East, a secondary but equally important part of the formula involved the dominance of “Greater Israel” Likud fanatics then taking power over the murdered body of Yitzhak Rabin.

It was toward the start of the new regime of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Richard Perle wrote the report “Clean Break: A Strategy for Securing the Realm,” which outlined a series of goals that would govern the strategic vision of Washington and Tel Aviv for the next two decades. It called for:

Canceling the foundations for the Oslo Accords that threatened to bring about a climate of peace through economic cooperation in the Middle East under a two-state solution
Launching a new doctrine of “right of hot pursuit” justifying armed incursions into Palestinian territories
Inducing the United States to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq
Armed incursions into Lebanon and possible strikes against Syria and Iran

In 2007, General Wesley Clark added even more detail to this neocon program when he revealed the content of a discussion he had with Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld 10 days after 9/11. General Clark stated that he was told of planned invasions of seven countries scheduled to take place within five years… namely: “Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.”

This program was, in short, a recipe for establishing the long-awaited “Greater Israel” promoted by the likes of Theodor Herzl, Vladimir Jabotinsky, and Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook over a century ago.

While the Anglo-Zionist timeline was disrupted over the ensuing years (sometimes involving brave intervention by individuals within America’s intelligence community), the intention embedded in “Clean Break” never disappeared.

With the coming breakdown of the over-inflated Western financial system on one side and the emergence of a viable new multipolar security and economic architecture on the other side, it appears the ghouls that orchestrated 9/11, assassinated Rabin (1995) and Arafat (2004), and revived the Crusades have decided to kick over the chess board.

Conducting a rational analysis of the motives for this type of dynamic poses a major difficulty for any geopolitical commentator used to thinking in academically acceptable terms, which presume that rational self-interest animates the players within a game. In this case, rational self-interest is infected by heavy doses of self-delusional Hegemonism, fanatical imperial zealotry, and end-times eschatology with a Messianic twist (taking both Christian and Jewish forms).

Sifting out Order from Chaos

Netanyahu and his neocon (see: uniparty) supporters in America and Britain appear to be supportive of Israel’s ambition to provoke a vast regional war on one hand, while also believing that perhaps they will be able to use Israel as a wedge to disrupt Russian and Chinese-led development corridors (BRI, short for Belt and Road Initiative, and International North-South Transport Corridor) on the other hand.………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

If Israel wishes to have full control over Gaza’s maritime oil/gas reserves, it can only achieve its goal if the legal owners and beneficiaries living in Gaza disappear.

On October 13, 2023, a policy paper authored by Israel’s Ministry of Intelligence was leaked. It recommended “the forcible and permanent transfer of the Gaza Strip’s 2.2 million Palestinian residents to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula,” as +972 reported.

The paper laid out three possible scenarios for the people of Gaza. The first involves the replacement of Hamas with the Palestinian Authority in Gaza. The second involves the emergence of a new local Gaza authority (not Hamas or PA), and the third includes the expulsion of all civilians into Egypt. The report clearly identifies the third scenario as the most preferable option. The report’s authors write that this third option “will yield positive, long-term strategic outcomes for Israel, and is an executable option. It requires determination from the political echelon in the face of international pressure, with an emphasis on harnessing the support of the United States and additional pro-Israeli countries for the endeavor.”

Of course, US support for moving Gazans into the Sinai Peninsula began literally minutes after October 7. This would create a serious problem for future retaliation by extremely radicalized and traumatized people whose families have been killed by Israel’s crimes for decades. Hamas’ Qatar-based Muslim Brotherhood leadership of multi-billionaires would then easily be able to coordinate with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood to act as agent provocateurs attacking Israel.

The Muslim Brotherhood has served as a major organizing force led by Anglo-Zionist intelligence for decades, was instrumental in orchestrating the Arab Spring, and supported the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad.

Perhaps if this was still 1996, and no powerful coalition of Russia, China, and Iran existed to defend Egypt against the threatened Anglo-Zionist war, then perhaps the PNAC Clean Break Strategy for Securing the Realm might be possible. The decision to ignore reality by rehashing this obsolete program implies the height of incompetence, which threatens to grow far beyond a regional war and into a global thermonuclear conflagration more quickly than many imagine.

This foreshadowing of a prophetic global war to usher in the Messiah (as many Christian rapturists dream of), was outlined in depth by Greater Israel advocate and Jabotinsky collaborator Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook 100 years ago.

Kook was Britain’s selection for the Chief Ashkenaz Rabbi for Jerusalem and Palestine from 1919 to 1935, and his influence in shaping several generations of radical Zionist zealots that took over control of much of Israel’s government after the inside job that was the Six Day War is immense. His prophetic remarks should not be easily dismissed. In his book Orot, Kook said:

“In wars, national characters crystalize. Israel, as the universal reflection of mankind, benefits thereby. The heels of Messiah follow upon World Conflagration… At the hour of the downfall of Western civilization, Israel is called upon to fulfill its divine mission by providing the spiritual basis for a New World Order.” [emphasis added]

The only hope to avoid this calamity and disrupt this flight toward an Armageddon scenario steered by End Times Messianic cultists is to force a ceasefire, as Russia, China, and the vast majority of world citizens (even Americans) demand.

Without this restoration of sanity, the world as a whole will be in for an experience that will make the 14th-century Dark Age appear to be an uncomfortable hiccup in world history. https://www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/greater-israel-power-armageddon/

December 23, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Israel, politics international | Leave a comment

Israel’s military bombs Gaza into unprecedented levels of hunger

December 22, 2023, by: The AIM Network https://theaimn.com/israels-military-bombs-gaza-into-unprecedented-levels-of-hunger/

Oxfam reaction to the IPC food security figures for Gaza

In reaction to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) report published today on Gaza warning of a risk of famine if intense hostilities and restricted humanitarian access persist or worsen, Sally Abi Khalil, Oxfam’s Middle East and North Africa Regional Director, said:

“Gaza’s shocking descent into starvation was so predictable as to be premeditated; an ongoing war crime by the Government of Israel.

“This is irrefutable proof that Israel’s attacks have decimated Gaza’s already fragile food system so catastrophically that most people are no longer able to feed themselves and their families. People are being starved in Gaza. Unless there is an immediate ceasefire and a massive scale-up of humanitarian aid, Gaza risks being pushed into a famine.

“It is abhorrent and barely conceivable in 2023, that women, children and babies, the elderly and sick, the most vulnerable people have had their food weaponised against them. The horror felt by a mother unable to feed her child is the horror of Gaza today.

“While over 90 per cent of people in Gaza cannot find their next meal, some UN Security Council member states are still toying with words rather than voting for a ceasefire.

“Those within the international community who have refused to rein in Israel’s military machine and its collective punishment of Palestinians in Gaza today stand shamed and complicit – this scandal is on your watch. You must no longer patronise this Israeli aggression that is killing so many civilians, even as it fails in its own terms by sowing the seeds of future insecurity for both Palestinians and Israelis alike.”

December 23, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Israel, weapons and war | Leave a comment

At This Point We Have To Always Assume Israel Is Lying Until Proven Otherwise

The belief that Israel is trying to avoid civilian casualties is based on literally nothing. It has no evidentiary basis whatsoever. People believe it because they want to. Because believing it is more emotionally comfortable than facing the obvious reality.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE, DEC 22, 2023

Israel is killing children at a historic rate, is killing an unprecedented number of journalists, and is starving half a million civilians while raining military explosives on a giant concentration camp. No part of this is complicated. No part of this is two-sided.

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On Tuesday Israel killed a Palestinian baby girl who was born during the IDF bombing campaign on Gaza. They’ve been killing children so aggressively for so long now that they’re starting to kill children who were born after the child-killing began.

Seventeen days. Al-Amira Aisha got seventeen days on this planet before being crushed to death by an Israeli airstrike on her home in Rafah, alongside her two year-old brother Ahmed and 25 others who’d been living in the same apartment building. She never knew a day of peace.

A Washington Post investigative report into Israel’s attack on al-Shifa Hospital has found that “the evidence presented by the Israeli government falls short of showing that Hamas had been using the hospital as a command and control center.” The Post reports it came to this conclusion after “analysis of open-source visuals, satellite imagery and all of the publicly released IDF materials.”

At this point the default assumption of any thinking person should be that all claims made by Israel are lies until proven otherwise by mountains of rock-solid evidence.

There are two aspects to the war on journalism over Gaza. The first is a highly concentrated assault in Gaza itself where journalists are actively being assassinated, and the second is a worldwide assault where journalists who don’t follow the official line are being purged.

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It’s so weird watching western rightists babble about how barbaric they think Muslims and their culture are while western culture amasses a mountain of ten thousand child corpses in Gaza…………………………………………………………………………………………….. more https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/at-this-point-we-have-to-always-assume?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=140008251&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&utm_medium=email

December 23, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Israel, secrets,lies and civil liberties | Leave a comment

Chris Hedges: The Death of Israel

Settler colonial states have a terminal shelf life. Israel is no exception. https://scheerpost.com/2023/12/17/chris-hedges-the-death-of-israel/

Israel will appear triumphant after it finishes its genocidal campaign in Gaza and the West Bank. Backed by the United States, it will achieve its demented goal. Its murderous rampages and genocidal violence will exterminate or ethnically cleanse Palestinians. Its dream of a state exclusively for Jews, with any Palestinians who remain stripped of basic rights, will be realized. It will revel in its blood-soaked victory. It will celebrate its war criminals. Its genocide will be erased from public consciousness and tossed into Israel’s huge black hole of historical amnesia. Those with a conscience in Israel will be silenced and persecuted.

But by the time Israel achieves its decimation of Gaza — Israel is talking about months of warfare — it will have signed its own death sentence. Its facade of civility, its supposed vaunted respect for the rule of law and democracy, its mythical story of the courageous Israeli military and miraculous birth of the Jewish nation, will lie in ash heaps. Israel’s social capital will be spent. It will be revealed as an ugly, repressive, hate-filled apartheid regime, alienating younger generations of American Jews. Its patron, the United States, as new generations come into power, will distance itself from Israel the way it is distancing itself from Ukraine. Its popular support, already eroded in the U.S., will come from America’s Christianized fascists who see Israel’s domination of ancient Biblical land as a harbinger of the Second Coming and in its subjugation of Arabs a kindred racism and white supremacy.

Palestinian blood and suffering — 10 times the number of children have been killed in Gaza as in two years of war in Ukraine — will pave the road to Israel’s oblivion. The tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of ghosts will have their revenge. Israel will become synonymous with its victims the way Turks are synonymous with the Armenians, Germans are with the Namibians and later the Jews, and Serbs are with the Bosniaks. Israel’s cultural, artistic, journalistic and intellectual life will be exterminated. Israel will be a stagnant nation where the religious fanatics, bigots and Jewish extremists who have seized power will dominate public discourse. It will find its allies among other despotic regimes. Israel’s repugnant racial and religious supremacy will be its defining attribute, which is why the most retrograde white supremists in the U.S. and Europe, including philo-semites such as John Hagee, Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene, fervently back Israel. The vaunted fight against anti-Semitism is a thinly disguised celebration of White Power.

Despotisms can exist long after their past due date. But they are terminal. You don’t have to be a Biblical scholar to see that Israel’s lust for rivers of blood is antithetical to the core values of Judaism. The cynical weaponization of the Holocaust, including branding Palestinians as Nazis, has little efficacy when you carry out a live streamed genocide against 2.3 million people trapped in a concentration camp.

Nations need more than force to survive. They need a mystique. This mystique provides purpose, civility and even nobility to inspire citizens to sacrifice for the nation. The mystique offers hope for the future. It provides meaning. It provides national identity.

When mystiques implode, when they are exposed as lies, a central foundation of state power collapses. I reported on the death of the communist mystiques in 1989 during the revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania. The police and the military decided there was nothing left to defend. Israel’s decay will engender the same lassitude and apathy. It will not be able to recruit indigenous collaborators, such as Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority — reviled by most Palestinians — to do the bidding of the colonizers. The historian Ronald Robinson cites the inability to recruit indigenous allies by the British Empire as the point at which collaboration inverted into noncooperation, a defining moment for the start of decolonization. Once noncooperation by native elites morphs into active opposition, Robinson explains, the Empire’s “rapid retreat” is assured.

All Israel has left is escalating violence, including torture, which accelerates the decline. This wholesale violence works in the short term, as it did in the war waged by the French in Algeria, the Dirty War waged by Argentina’s military dictatorship and during Britain’s conflict in Northern Ireland. But in the long term it is suicidal.

“You might say that the battle of Algiers was won through the use of torture,” the British historian Alistair Horne observed, “but that the war, the Algerian war, was lost.”

The genocide in Gaza has turned Hamas fighters into heroes in the Muslim world and the Global South. Israel may wipe out the Hamas leadership. But the past — and current — assassinations of scores of Palestinian leaders has done little to blunt resistance. The siege and genocide in Gaza has produced a new generation of deeply traumatized and enraged young men and women whose families have been killed and whose communities have been obliterated. They are prepared to take the place of martyred leaders. Israel has sent the stock of its adversary into the stratosphere.

Israel was at war with itself before Oct. 7. Israelis were protesting to prevent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s abolition of judicial independence. Its religious bigots and fanatics, currently in power, had mounted a determined attack on Israeli secularism. Israel’s unity since the attacks is precarious. It is a negative unity. It is held together by hatred. And even this hatred is not enough to keep protestors from decrying the government’s abandonment of Israeli hostages in Gaza.

Hatred is a dangerous political commodity. Once finished with one enemy, those who stoke hatred go in search of another. The Palestinian “human animals,” when eradicated or subdued, will be replaced by Jewish apostates and traitors. The demonized group can never be redeemed or cured. A politics of hatred creates a permanent instability that is exploited by those seeking the destruction of civil society.

Israel was far down this road on Oct. 7 when it promulgated a series of discriminatory laws against non-Jews that resemble the racist Nuremberg Laws that disenfranchised Jews in Nazi Germany. The Communities Acceptance Law permits exclusively Jewish settlements to bar applicants for residency on the basis of “suitability to the community’s fundamental outlook.”

Many of Israel’s best educated and young have left the country to places like Canada, Australia and the U.K., with as many as one million moving to the United States. Even Germany has seen an influx of around 20,000 Israelis in the first two decades of this century. Around 470,000 Israelis have left the country since Oct. 7. Within Israel, human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists — Israeli and Palestinian — are attacked as traitors in government-sponsored smear campaigns, placed under state surveillance and subjected to arbitrary arrests. The Israeli educational system is an indoctrination machine for the military.

The Israeli scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz warned that if Israel did not separate church and state and end its occupation of the Palestinians, it would give rise to a corrupt Rabbinate that would warp Judaism into a fascistic cult. “Israel,” he said, “would not deserve to exist, and it will not be worthwhile to preserve it.”

The global mystique of the U.S., after two decades of disastrous wars in the Middle East and the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, is as contaminated as its Israeli ally. The Biden administration, in its fervor to unconditionally support Israel and appease the powerful Israel lobby, has bypassed the congressional review process with the Department of State to approve the transfer of 14,000 rounds of tank ammunition to Israel. Secretary of State Antony Blinken argued that “an emergency exists that requires the immediate sale.” At the same time he has cynically called on Israel to minimize civilian casualties.

Israel has no intention of minimizing civilian casualties. It has already killed 18,800 Palestinians, 0.82 percent of the Gazan population — the equivalent of around 2.7 million Americans. Another 51,000 have been wounded. Half of Gaza’s population is starving, according to the U.N. All Palestinian institutions and services that sustain life — hospitals (only 11 out of 36 hospitals in Gaza are still “partially functioning”), water treatment plants, power grids, sewer systems, housing, schools, government buildings, cultural centers, telecommunications systems, mosques, churches, U.N. food distribution points — have been destroyed. Israel has assassinated at least 80 Palestinian journalists alongside dozens of their family members and over 130 U.N. aid workers along with members of their families. Civilian casualties are the point. This is not a war against Hamas. It is a war against the Palestinians. The objective is to kill or remove 2.3 million Palestinians from Gaza.

The shooting dead of three Israeli hostages who apparently escaped their captors and approached Israeli forces with their shirts off, waving a white flag and calling out for help in Hebrew is not only tragic, but a glimpse of Israel’s rules of engagement in Gaza. These rules are — kill anything that moves.

As the retired Israeli Major General Giora Eiland, who formerly headed the Israeli National Security Council, wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth, “[T]he State of Israel has no choice but to turn Gaza into a place that is temporarily or permanently impossible to live in…Creating a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza is a necessary means to achieve the goal.” “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist,” he wrote. Major General Ghassan Alian declared that in Gaza, “there will be no electricity and no water, there will only be destruction. You wanted hell; you will get hell.”

Settler colonial states that endure, including the United States, exterminate through diseases and violence nearly the entirety of their indigenous populations. Old World plagues brought by the colonizers to the Americas, such as smallpox, killed an estimated 56 million indigenous people over about 100 years in South, Central and North America. By 1600 less than a tenth of the original population remained. Israel cannot kill on this scale, with nearly 5.5 million Palestinians living under occupation and another 9 million in the diaspora.

The Biden presidency, which ironically may have signed its own political death certificate, is tethered to Israel’s genocide. It will try to distance itself rhetorically, but at the same time it will funnel the billions of dollars of weapons demanded by Israel — including $14.3 billion in supplemental military aid to augment the $3.8 billion in annual aid — to “finish the job.” It is a full partner in Israel’s genocide project.

December 19, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Israel, weapons and war | 1 Comment

John Mearsheimer: Israel is Choosing ‘Apartheid’ or ‘Ethnic Cleansing’

https://scheerpost.com/2023/12/17/john-mearsheimer-israel-is-choosing-apartheid-or-ethnic-cleansing/

Israel has gone far beyond “going after Hamas” in the first 10 weeks of its war on Gaza, according to one of the United States’ leading political scientists, John Mearsheimer.

He tells host Steve Clemons that murdering hundreds of civilians daily and starving the rest is a “punishment campaign” and “should be unacceptable to decent people all over the world.”

In this episode, Mearsheimer, who teaches international relations at the University of Chicago, looks into Israel’s long-term strategies and explains why the elites in the US, Europe and the Arab world are not taking concrete steps to stop Israel’s bombing campaign.

December 18, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Israel, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Israel Is Wiping Out Gaza’s Journalists: A Tribute

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tejRW7oRniQ

By Mnar Adley / MintPress News, https://scheerpost.com/2023/12/15/israel-is-wiping-out-gazas-journalists-a-tribute/

I recently became the recipient of the Women and Media Award from the Women’s Institute of the Freedom of the Press. While it’s truly an honor to receive this recognition for the journalism that I direct at MintPress News, it’s nearly impossible for me to revel in this accolade when my heart is weighed down heavily by the ongoing turmoil in Gaza.

As a Palestinian-American journalist who has lived under the oppressive shadow of Israeli occupation and witnessed firsthand the relentless brutality of the apartheid regime, I cannot remain silent as my people face relentless oppression and violence.

I want to dedicate this award to the fearless journalists in Gaza who are risking their lives to show us the raw reality of life under Israeli bombs.

Since October 7th, the death toll stands stark and horrific – Israel is systematically taking out journalists, one by one, and killing their families. The Israeli military has already claimed the lives of at least 82 Palestinian journalists in Gaza. These courageous individuals, committed to unveiling the truth, have become direct targets of a regime desperate to cloak its genocidal actions from the world’s scrutiny.

Israel doesn’t want the world to see the reality of its genocidal onslaught in Gaza, so it’s assassinating the messengers.

In most parts of the world, wearing a flack jacket marked “press” gives you protection. But right now in Palestine, it may as well be a target, as Israel has turned Gaza into what the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has called a “cemetery for journalists.”

And you’d think mainstream corporate journalists would talk about the targeting of journalists in Gaza, but they’re not. If legacy media outlets like the New York Times or CNN cover Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza, they don’t have the basic journalistic integrity to say who killed them and fail to point out that Israel is systematically targeting them.

Corporate media are whitewashing Israeli crimes and playing the fool, pretending not to understand where the missiles come from. They pretend not to hear the genocidal rhetoric emanating from Tel Aviv. And even as Israel makes Gaza the most dangerous place in the world to be a journalist, they ignore what is in front of their eyes, manufacturing consent for ethnic cleansing.

Brave women have lost their lives trying to document the Israeli onslaught. Women like Alaa Taher Al-Hassanat, a presenter for the AlMajedat Media Network, whose house was bombarded by Israeli missiles on November 20.

Or Salma Mkhaimer, killed alongside her child in an Israeli air strike on her house in Rafah, Gaza.

And Freelance journalist Ayat Khadoura was also killed in her home by an Israeli air strike. In her “last message to the world” posted on Instagram, she said: “We used to have big dreams, but now our dream is to be killed in one piece so they know who we are.”

This only continues a long history of Israel systematically targeting journalists since its founding in 1948.

Just last year, Israel went so far as to murder our beloved Shireen Abu-Akleh, an American citizen and recipient of the same Women and Media Award that I’m receiving today. And in 2021, it blew up the Associated Press building in Gaza. Yet throughout all this, Israel continues to get a free pass in corporate media.

Despite the hardships, many journalists are risking their lives working around the clock to document the genocide in Gaza. Journalists like Motaz Azaiza, Younis Tirawi, Muhammad Smiry, Motasem Mortaja, Wael Dahdouh, and Hind Khoudary, to name a few, speak truth to power, chronicling the horrors in Gaza.

These people show us in real-time the courage it often takes to be a journalist. And because of that, dozens pay the ultimate price for their bravery.

This award I humbly dedicate to them—the fallen journalists who were mercilessly taken by Israel and those who, against all odds, continue to broadcast to the world the unimaginable horrors of life under incessant bombings.

As for journalists like myself, we vow to carry on their legacy and amplify their voices in the West. We will repeat their message of hope and truth while we challenge and confront the very system perpetuating my people’s destruction, supported directly by our governments and their lapdog media.

If wars can be ignited by deceit, then let us rally for peace through unwavering truth.

December 17, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Israel, media | Leave a comment

Nearly Half of All Israeli Munitions Dropped on Gaza are Imprecise ‘Dumb’ Bombs

Israeli warplanes have used at least 29,000 munitions on the Gaza Strip

By Dave DeCamp / Antiwar.com, https://scheerpost.com/2023/12/15/nearly-half-of-all-israeli-munitions-dropped-on-gaza-are-imprecise-dumb-bombs/

Nearly half of the air-to-ground munitions Israel has dropped on the Gaza Strip are unguided or “dumb” bombs, CNN reported Thursday, citing a US intelligence assessment.

The report said Israel had used 29,000 air-to-ground munitions in its bombardment of Gaza, a total that does not include artillery shells and tank munitions that are also being fired on the Strip. The assessment from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence found 40-45% of the 29,000 munitions have been dumb bombs, and the rest have been precise guided munitions.

Unguided munitions are less precise and are generally considered more of a threat to civilians, but Israel is also slaughtering civilians with precision-guided munitions. A report from +972 Magazine revealed Israel is purposefully targeting civilian areas and launching strikes that might kill one Hamas commander, knowing hundreds of civilians will be killed.

Amnesty International conducted an investigation that found Israel targeted two homes in Gaza full of civilians using Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM), US-provided kits that turn dumb bombs into precision-guided munitions. The strikes killed 40 people, including 19 children, and Amnesty is calling for it to be investigated as a war crime.

The intelligence assessment comes after President Biden called Israel’s Gaza bombing “indiscriminate” but vowed to keep supporting it anyway. Despite the massive civilian death toll in Gaza, the US has no plans to restrict military aid to Israel.

December 17, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Israel, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Biden Intends To Keep Participating In The Incineration Of Gaza

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE, DEC 15, 2023

Biden administration officials are telling the press that they have no plans to place any conditions on military aid to Israel.

CNN reports:

The Biden administration currently has no plans to place conditions on the military aid it is providing to Israel, officials told CNN, despite growing calls by Democratic lawmakers and human rights organizations for the US to stop providing weapons unless Israel does more to protect civilians in Gaza.

Biden administration officials are telling the press that they have no plans to place any conditions on military aid to Israel.

Speaking to Democratic donors in Washington this week, President Joe Biden acknowledged that he has had tough conversations with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about Israel’s military campaign, how Israel is losing international support, and the need for a two-state solution led by the Palestinian Authority. But he said even throughout those discussions, “we’re not going to do a damn thing other than protect Israel in the process. Not a single thing.”

Echoing that sentiment, US officials told CNN that the US has no plans to shift its position and draw any red lines around the transfer of weapons and munitions to Israel.

This is the real story of Washington’s relationship with the incineration of Gaza. Ignore all their feigned concern about civilian casualties and posturing about Israel’s need to wrap this up soon; in reality they intend to keep backing this mass atrocity unconditionally.

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“Israel has a right to defend itself” sounds reasonable until you realize it actually means “Israel has a right to kill as many Palestinian children as it wants in its efforts to eliminate all armed resistance to a murderous and tyrannical occupying regime.”

Israel supporters like to say, “Hamas can end this any time by surrendering.”

Israel can end this any time by ceasing to be a murderous and tyrannical occupying regime held together by endless violence and apartheid. Israel wasn’t attacked because Palestinians are innately evil and want to kill Jews, Israel was attacked because it has treated Palestinians horrifically for generations. If Israel and its allies ended the injustices, paid reparations and righted the wrongs that have been inflicted on Palestinians for the last 75 years, there could be a sustainable peace.

The only way to believe all this intense civilian-slaughtering warfare is necessary to obtain peace is to believe Palestinians are orc-like subhumans who are acting out of an innate hatefulness and thus cannot be reasoned with or negotiated with. It’s not okay for grown adults to believe this.

“Hamas can end this any time by surrendering” really just means “Israel gets to keep murdering Gaza’s children until Gaza’s government gives it what it wants.” Which is about as evil a position as you can possibly imagine. This is not an acceptable position for any person to have

Israel’s unique focus on attacking hospitals makes no sense as a military strategy but makes lots of sense as an ethnic cleansing strategy.

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Western media are constantly babbling about “Iran-backed” forces in Yemen, Syria and Iraq, yet Israeli bombings are never described as “US-backed”, even though they indisputably are, and even though the evidence for this is far stronger than any claims about Iranian backing.

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Both Zionists and people who hate Jews conflate Judaism and Zionism, and both Zionists and people who hate Jews contribute to spreading hatred of Jews by indoctrinating the public with this distortion……………………………………………….

I don’t criticize Israel because I want to, I criticize Israel because I have to. If I could avoid saying stuff that gets weird sociopaths shrieking at me and calling me a Nazi all day long, I would. But if Israel’s going to commit horrific mass atrocities, it must be opposed. https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/biden-intends-to-keep-participating?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=139812608&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&utm_medium=email

December 17, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Israel, politics, USA | Leave a comment

Why can’t the US ever say no to Israel?

The American UN veto on a Gaza ceasefire is a low point of wag-the-dog international politics

Rt.com, Tarik Cyril Amar, 13 Dec 23

December 8, 2023, is a day that will live in infamy. The United States made history of the worst kind by using its permanent seat on the UN Security Council to veto a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. The resolution was advanced by the United Arab Emirates (a US partner) and supported by more than 90 member states. It also had preponderant backing in the global organization’s privileged “upper chamber,” the Security Council, where 13 of its 15 members were in favor (while the UK abstained, abdicating its sovereignty to the US, again).

The American veto directly defied UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Not a natural-born rebel, the UN chief had deployed a rarely used procedure to promote the ceasefire, putting his authority on the line. Referring to Article 99 of Chapter 15 of the UN Charter, he already implied that “international peace and security” were in danger. His spokesperson was explicit that Guterres was making a “dramatic constitutional move.” While maintaining diplomatic balance by also highlighting the Hamas attack on Israel, Guterres’ letter to the Security Council depicted the catastrophic suffering of the Palestinians under the ongoing Israeli attack and concluded that “nowhere” was safe in Gaza.

All to no avail. The US could not be swayed and maintained its de facto unconditional support for Israel, even while the latter is conducting an intensifying genocidal assault on Gaza and its civilian population. This is no longer up for debate, and is no secret either; Israeli leaders have repeatedly made statements that signal the kind of intent that is a crucial element in the crime of genocide, while their actions and those of their forces on the ground speak even louder than their words.

The world has taken note. It took no special bias for the Palestinian leadership – the one derived from the PLO, as well as Hamas – to identify the veto as “disastrous” and “a disgrace and another blank cheque given to the occupying state to massacre, destroy and displace.” China and Russia have denounced American double standards and the “death sentence” Washington has handed down on future Palestinian victims of the Israeli assault.

Amnesty International says Washington has “brazenly wielded and weaponized its veto to strongarm the UN Security Council… undermining its credibility” and displaying a “callous disregard for civilian suffering in the face of a staggering death toll.” Doctors without Borders did not mince its words either, accusing the US of standing “alone in casting its vote against humanity,” with America “complicit in the carnage in Gaza” and undermining not only its own credibility but also that of international humanitarian law.

Craig Mokhiber – an authority on international law and former head of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights office in New York – tweeted that “on the eve of the 75th Anniversary of the Genocide Convention, the US has again vetoed a ceasefire in the UN Security Council… demonstrating its further complicity in the #genocide in #Palestine.”

This list of censure and condemnation could be prolonged almost ad infinitum, especially if we add voices from the Global South. The key point, however, should be clear already: The US stands isolated and disgraced by its very own, easily avoidable – or so it would seem – decision. This was, after all, not a vote asking for justice and restitution for the victims, or – perish that radical thought! – for prosecution of the perpetrators. All this was about was the barest of bare minimums, just a ceasefire, not even a peace deal. Still, that was too much to ask of the US……………………………..

Future historians will ask how this happened. How could the single most powerful nation in the world, which claims to lead not only by force but by “values,” side with the Israeli perpetrators of such an outrageous and open crime, while openly contravening much of the international community? Some will even ask the more cynical question how America, even if its elites are entirely bereft of ethics, could do so much harm to itself.

The simplest, almost technical answer to that question has to do with a historical irony. America owes its veto power – as one of the five permanent members of the Security Council – to what happened in World War II. And while World War II and the German Holocaust against the Jews of (mostly) Europe are not the same, they are part of the same history. Much US pride has been invested in being among the powers that brought down the Holocaust perpetrator state Germany. And yet, here we are: The same US is now using that very veto not only to shield another genocidal state but to help it continue its crime.

There are, of course, broader reasons for this great American failure. Many have been discussed before. Israel serves the function of an enforcer and imperial outpost in the Middle East and sometimes beyond. As current US President Joe Biden – by now often trending on X as #GenocideJoe – stated in 1986, when still an ambitious and pandering senator, if there were no Israel, America would have to invent one. Let’s set aside that even the callous realpolitik behind such thinking is flawed: If it ever was an asset, Israel is turning into a liability. Let’s just note that the American elite claims to believe that Israel is so useful that the commitment to it must be, in Vice President Kamala Harris’ words, “ironclad.”

But so it was for Ukraine only, as it were, yesterday. And yet Kiev is about to be dropped, as so many US clients before. What makes Israel different? Clearly, it is the long-standing top recipient of US financial and military support. Is it sunk cost fallacy then? Is America so over-committed to Israel that it simply won’t walk away?

Yet that hypothesis does not explain the striking one-sidedness of the US-Israel relationship. If there has ever been a case of wag-the-dog, this is it: One thing that the American veto on the Gaza ceasefire resolution shows is that it is Israel that is dominating US foreign policy, not the other way around. Otherwise, Washington would have sought to find a compromise between preserving its own credibility and interests by allowing at least this very modest resolution to pass, while still supporting Israel in multiple other ways.

Clearly, one thing that is determining this American dependence on another, much smaller country is the massive success of lobbying and foreign influence operations on behalf of Israel. Indeed, it is Israel that has run the most invasive and effective such attack on US politics in history. And for the avoidance of any misunderstandings: Noting this obvious fact has nothing to do with “anti-Semitism.” Indeed, trying to smear those who dare bring it up with that accusation is part of how that influence operation works. It’s time to entirely disregard such cheap tricks.

………………………………………………………………. If only we could return, at least, to a world where Americans could forget a little about their Russia obsession when thinking about foreign influence on their country and focus that concern where it matters, namely on Israel. If in addition they could think a little more about Russia as a viable partner – at least occasionally – in helping resolve severe international crises, we would all be much better off. We might even be able to stop a genocide here or there. https://www.rt.com/news/588952-us-israel-un-veto/

December 15, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Israel, politics international, USA | Leave a comment

Bernie Sanders Votes No on Giving Israel Aid to Continue ‘Inhumane War’ on Gaza

“I do not believe that we should give the right-wing extremist Netanyahu government an additional $10.1 billion with no strings attached.”

By Jake Johnson / Common Dreams, more https://scheerpost.com/2023/12/13/bernie-sanders-votes-no-on-giving-israel-aid-to-continue-inhumane-war-on-gaza/

Sen. Bernie Sanders was the lone member of the Senate Democratic caucus to oppose advancing a $110.5 billion supplemental foreign aid measure on Wednesday, expressing opposition to the bill’s unconditional military assistance for the Israeli government.

“I voted NO on the foreign aid supplemental bill today for one reason,” Sanders (I-Vt.) said in a statement. “I do not believe that we should give the right-wing extremist Netanyahu government an additional $10.1 billion with no strings attached to continue their inhumane war against the Palestinian people.”

“Israel has the absolute right to defend itself against the Hamas terrorists who attacked them on October 7,” Sanders added. “They do not have the legal or moral right to kill thousands of innocent Palestinian men, women, and children.”

The aid package, which also includes billions in military assistance for Ukraine, failed to clear a procedural hurdle Wednesday, with every Republican voting no over the absence of immigration policy changes that progressives have condemned as draconian. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) flipped his initial yes vote to no in a maneuver that will allow him to bring the bill forward again at a later date.

According to a summary released by the Senate Appropriations Committee, the supplemental package contains over $10 billion in military aid for Israel, which already receives roughly $4 billion in assistance from the U.S. per year and has gotten tens of thousands of bombs, artillery shells, and other weaponry since the Hamas-led October 7 attack.

The measure is largely in line with a request issued in October by the Biden White House, which has sought to expedite U.S. arms shipments to Israel even as the nation’s military is using American-made weaponry to commit heinous war crimes in the Gaza Strip.

One human rights monitor estimated earlier this week that at least 90% of the people killed by Israeli forces in Gaza since October 7 have been civilians.

Sanders, who has faced progressive criticism and outrage for rejecting calls for a permanent cease-fire in Gaza, said in a Senate floor speech on Monday that Israel “must dramatically change its approach to minimize civilian harm and lay out a wider political process that can secure lasting peace.”

The senator conceded during his remarks that there is no evidence Israel has altered its approach in response to light pressure from top U.S. officials, pointing to recent bombings of United Nations schools and other civilian infrastructure.

“Israel’s indiscriminate approach is, in my view, offensive to most Americans, it is in violation of U.S. and international law, and it undermines the prospects for lasting peace and security,” said Sanders.

December 15, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Israel, politics, USA | Leave a comment

Gaza Is Deliberately Being Made Uninhabitable

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE, DEC 13, 2023 https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/gaza-is-deliberately-being-made-uninhabitable?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=139740561&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&utm_medium=email

Infectious diseases are tearing through Gaza, whose healthcare system has been rendered almost nonexistent, and people are beginning to starve in massive numbers. All of this is due to concrete policy decisions made by Israel in its horrific assault on the Gaza Strip.

In an article titled “Gaza’s health system is ‘on its knees’ as Israel pushes into Khan Younis,” The Washington Post reports that the mass displacement of nearly two million Palestinians in Gaza has led to overcrowding and unsanitary living conditions that are rapidly giving rise to disease.

“Meanwhile, the Gaza Health Ministry and other medical workers said they were recording new cases of acute hepatitis, scabies, measles and upper respiratory infections, mostly among children,” the Post reports. “Infectious diseases are spreading fast, said Imad al-Hams, a physician at the Kuwaiti Hospital in Rafah, as people crowd into tiny slivers of land to escape advancing Israeli forces.”

In a recent interview with CNN, Doctors Without Borders emergency coordinator Marie-Aure Perreaut described conditions in Gaza as “apocalyptic”, saying living conditions at the Al-Aqsa Hospital she’s working from “can barely be described as living conditions anymore.”

“The healthcare system is completely collapsed at the moment,” Perreaut told Al Jazeera.

The UN World Food Programme reports that half of Gaza’s population is now starving due to Israeli siege warfare and the collapse of civilian infrastructure. In northern Gaza that figure goes up to nine in ten.

All of this aligns perfectly with Israeli policies of massive forced evacuations, attacking healthcare facilities, and laying complete siege to the Gaza Strip.

A doctor named Hafez Abukhoussa writes the following in a new article for Time titled “What I’ve Seen Treating Patients in Gaza’s Remaining Hospitals”:

Gaza’s health care system has almost completely collapsed as a result of Israel’s ongoing bombardment. Hospitals and ambulances have been repeatedly attacked. According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, more than 250 medical workers have been killed so far, including two of my colleagues from Doctors Without Borders, who died while performing their duties in Al-Awda hospital in northern Gaza. Of Gaza’s 36 hospitals, only 11 are still functioning in any capacity, according to the World Health Organization. Hospitals in the north like Al-Shifa are barely functioning at all, as basic medicines and fuel have run out. My colleagues have been performing amputations by flashlight and without anesthesia. When Israeli soldiers raided Al-Shifa a few weeks ago — a move the head of the WHO called ‘totally unacceptable’ — doctors and staff were forced to abandon patients too sick or injured to evacuate. Some of those who refused to leave, including the hospital’s director, were arrested, alongside dozens of others. At Al-Nasr Children’s hospital, soldiers ordered staff to leave the patients, including four premature babies who required oxygen, who were later found dead.”

This all also aligns perfectly with the Netanyahu government’s reported agenda to “thin” the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip “to a minimum,” and with all the other calls for ethnic cleansing we keep seeing pushed by Israeli officials and thought leaders over and over again.

It also aligns perfectly with the suggestions made last month by an influential Israeli national security leader named Giora Eiland, a retired major general for the IDF.

“The international community warns us of a humanitarian disaster in Gaza and of severe epidemics,” Eiland wrote. “We must not shy away from this, as difficult as that may be. After all, severe epidemics in the south of the Gaza Strip will bring victory closer and reduce casualties among IDF soldiers.”

Eiland was completely dismissive of the idea that there are innocent people in Gaza, a sentiment we’re seeing pushed harder and harder as Israel draws nearer and nearer to a very, very dark chapter in the history of human civilization.

“They are not only Hamas fighters with weapons, but also all the ‘civilian’ officials, including hospital administrators and school administrators, and also the entire Gaza population that enthusiastically supported Hamas and cheered on its atrocities on October 7th,” Eiland wrote, adding, “Who are the ‘poor’ women of Gaza? They are all the mothers, sisters or wives of Hamas murderers.”

“Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism,” Eiland adds. “Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.”

When people talk about genocide in Gaza, they’re not just talking about the thousands of civilians who’ve been killed in Israeli airstrikes. The policies Israel has been deliberately putting in place have the potential to kill many, many more people than that in the coming months, and if Netanyahu and his goons get their way, that’s exactly what will happen.

December 14, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Israel, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Graphic Videos and Incitement: How the IDF Is Misleading Israelis on Telegram

The IDF unit responsible for psychological warfare operations operates a Telegram channel called ’72 Virgins – Uncensored,’ which targets local audiences with ‘exclusive content from the Gaza Strip’

The IDF Operations Directorate’s Influencing Department, which is responsible for psychological warfare operations against the enemy and foreign audiences, operates a Telegram channel called 72 Virgins – Uncensored, which targets Israeli audiences and shows the bodies of Hamas terrorists with the promise of “shattering the terrorists’ fantasy.”…………………………………………… (subscribers only) more https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/security-aviation/2023-12-12/ty-article/.premium/graphic-videos-and-incitement-how-the-idf-is-misleading-israelis-on-telegram/0000018c-5ab5-df2f-adac-febd01c30000

December 14, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Israel, secrets,lies and civil liberties | Leave a comment

US casts sole vote in UN to continue the annihilation of Gaza

Walt Zlotow, West Suburban Peace Coalition, Glen Ellyn IL ,10 Dec 23

December 8th now makes 2 consecutive calendar Days of Infamy for America. But this one, coming 92 years and a day after the first, is not from an attack on America. It comes from America’s descent into madness, enabling and supporting Israel’s genocidal ethnic cleansing of Gaza after the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel.

The UAE sponsored the UN Security Council resolution demanding an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza. Within 24 hours they garnered nearly a hundred co-sponsors from the UN’s 193 members. UN Secretary-General Antonio Gutierrez invoked rarely used Article 99 of the UN Charter to bring the resolution to the Security Council for immediate consideration over “threats to international peace and “humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza”.

But the US blocked the resolution with a dastardly veto. Thirteen other members voted for it, including some of America’s staunch allies. Even our most lockstep ally Britain abstained. The US now stands alone in supporting Israel’s campaign making Gaza uninhabitable.

Ministers from Egypt, Jordan, the Palestinian Authority, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey came to D.C. to plead with Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to support the ceasefire. But Blinken put them off till after the after the UN vote.

When questioned about the devastation in Gaza, Biden, Blinken just nod and mutter something about imploring Israel to try harder not to annihilate all the Palestinians there. Meanwhile Netanyahu tells his war cabinet “We need 3 things from the US: munitions, munitions, and munitions.” And he gets them PDQ

How bad is that annihilation? Roughly 70% of the 70,000 deaths and injuries are women and children. UN chief Gutierrez cited Article 99 for the first time since 1971 in calling the emergency session to address the “humanitarian nightmare Gaza is facing.” He cited endless bombings that have hit 339 schools, 26 hospitals, 56 health care facilities, 88 mosques and three churches.

Besides Gaza being destroyed, President Biden is ensuring that America’s standing in the world is being destroyed as a beacon of peace and freedom.

Yes, mark December 8th on the calendar as another American Day of Infamy.

Besides Gaza being destroyed, President Biden is ensuring that America’s standing in the world is being destroyed as a beacon of peace and freedom.

Yes, mark December 8th on the calendar as another American Day of Infamy.

December 13, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Israel, politics international, USA | Leave a comment

Civilian deaths in Gaza highest of all world conflicts in 20th Century, including World Wars, Israeli study reveals

https://www.sott.net/article/486726-Civilian-deaths-in-Gaza-highest-of-all-world-conflicts-in-20th-Century-including-World-Wars-Israeli-study-reveals 10 Dec 23

The Guardian newspaper saysThe aerial bombing campaign by Israel in Gaza is the most indiscriminate in terms of civilian casualties in recent years, a study published by an Israeli newspaper has found.

The analysis by Haaretz came as Israeli forces fought to consolidate their control of northern Gaza on Saturday, bombing the Shejaiya district of Gaza City, while also conducting airstrikes on Rafah, a town on the southern border with Egypt where the Israeli army has told people in Gaza to take shelter.

The full death toll from the past 24 hours was unclear but the main hospital in central Gaza, at Deir al-Balah, reported it received 71 bodies, and 62 bodies were taken to Nasser hospital in the main southern city of Khan Younis, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

The Haaretz analysis found that in three earlier campaigns in Gaza, in the period from 2012-22, the ratio of civilian deaths to the total of those killed in airstrikes hovered around 40%. That ratio declined to 33% in a bombing campaign earlier this year, called Operation Shield and Arrow.

In the first three weeks of the current operation, Swords of Iron, the civilian proportion of total deaths rose to 61%, in what Haaretz described as “unprecedented killing”. The ratio is significantly higher than the civilian toll in all the conflicts around the world during the 20th century, in which civilians accounted for about half the dead.

Comment: Andalou Agency, quoting the Palestinian Health Ministry – whose figures have repeatedly been shown by independent agencies to be accurate – report the following:

The Palestinian death toll from the ongoing Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip has mounted to 17,177 since Oct. 7, the Health Ministry in the enclave said Thursday.

“Around 70% of the victims are children and women,” ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qudra told a press conference.

He said 46,000 other people were injured in the Israeli onslaught on the blockaded Palestinian territory.

“At least 290 medics were killed, 102 ambulances destroyed and 160 health care centers targeted in the Israeli attacks, while 20 hospitals and 46 primary care centers were forced out of service,” al-Qudra said.

“The broad conclusion is that extensive killing of civilians not only contributes nothing to Israel’s security, but that it also contains the foundations for further undermining it,” Haaretz concluded. “The Gazans who will emerge from the ruins of their homes and the loss of their families will seek revenge that no security arrangements will be able to withstand.”

Comment: This reaction by even the Israeli press perhaps reveals why Israel, and those facilitating the genocide in the US, and UK, are escalating the slaughter and destruction, because it’s only a matter of time before unrest at home, and a response from those abroad, will hamper their nefarious agenda.

It also serves to distract from the rapidly deteriorating situation in their own economies and societies, whilst at the same time setting the Middle East alight which, they seem to think, will provide justification for their sinister actions.

The figures will make uneasy reading for the Biden administration, which is facing global criticism and isolation for vetoing a UN security council vote for a ceasefire on Friday.

Since the start of the war, triggered by the deadly 7 October attack on Israel by Hamas, the US has been seeking to persuade Israeli forces to be more discriminate in choosing targets, and has repeatedly claimed the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are “receptive” to American advice, despite the consistently high civilian death toll.

Comment: The Guardian has been exposed as being compromised by the UK’s intelligence agencies, and that’s perhaps one reason why it fails to mention that strong evidence, along with logic, has since revealed that not only was the attack known about well in advance; the IDF was forced to stand down; that Israel was responsible for killing a significant number of its own people; as well as destroying evidence.

The US national security spokesperson, John Kirby, repeated that claim while briefing reporters on Air Force One on Friday, but added: “We certainly all recognise more can be done to try to reduce civilian casualties, and we’re going to keep working with our Israeli counterparts to that end.”

Kirby was speaking as the Biden administration faced allegations of abetting war crimes for vetoing the security council resolution.

Human Rights Watch said the US risked “complicity in war crimes” by continuing to provide Israel with weapons and diplomatic support. Paul O’Brien, the executive director of Amnesty International USA, said: “With this veto, the US government is shamefully turning its back on immense civilian suffering, a staggering death toll, and unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.”

Comment: In a vote for a ceasefire at the UN today, the US voted against, the UK abstained, the rest of the UN voted for:

The Saudi foreign minister, Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud, met the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, in Washington on Friday night to maintain pressure for “urgent steps” to establish a ceasefire so humanitarian aid could be delivered.

In the face of the global criticism, US officials stressed the role the US has played in pushing for humanitarian deliveries to Gaza through the Rafah crossing point. Kirby said a US military transport plane had landed in Egypt on Friday carrying nearly 26,000kg (57,000lbs) of food, water, and medicine bound for Gaza.

Comment: Meanwhile the US & UK also provides the weapons, the funds, and the veto powers, without which there would be no need for them to send humanitarian aid.

“We’re certainly mindful of the suffering of the people of Gaza, and we’re doing everything we can to not just get stuff in there but to lead an actual international effort to get stuff in there,” he said.

Kirby said fewer than 100 trucks had crossed through the Rafah gate on Friday, about half the daily volume that entered Gaza during a week-long humanitarian ceasefire at the end of last month.

“Obviously that’s not at the level that we want it to be at,” he said, noting that Israel was preparing to open an additional inspection facility at Kerem Shalom on the Israel-Gaza border, which is expected to ease the most significant bottleneck, inspection capacity.

However, the UN and other aid agencies say that even when trucks enter the Gaza Strip at Rafah, the ground offensive in southern Gaza and the general lack of security is preventing the supplies from being distributed, at a time of a high and rising threat of starvation and disease.

Comment: The UN has also sounded the alarm that 130 of their own staff have been murdered; that their staff are taking their children with them to work in the hopes that, if they can’t be safe at home, they can at least ‘die together’.

They’re also warning that, with the conditions in Gaza being so dire – with 700 people sharing 1 toilet and 25 babies a day being born with little medical supplies – it won’t be long before disease and viral outbreaks ravage those that managed to escape the death from above:

The IDF said it had failed in a hostage rescue attempt on Friday. The chief spokesperson, R Adm Daniel Hagari, said: “The forces raided a Hamas site and eliminated terrorists who had taken part in the abduction and captivity of hostages.”

He said two Israeli soldiers had been seriously wounded in the mission, and no hostages had been rescued. He did not confirm Hamas claims that one hostage, 25-year-old Sahar Baruch, had been killed in the rescue attempt, but his home kibbutz at Be’eri announced Baruch had died.

Comment: See also: Israel’s ground war conundrum

December 13, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Israel, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Ralph Nader on Israeli Government’s War Crimes – Enabled & Defended by Biden & Congress

By Ralph Nader / Nader.org, more https://scheerpost.com/2023/12/10/ralph-nader-on-israeli-governments-war-crimes-enabled-defended-by-biden-congress/

The humiliation of the U.S. government, which is actively complicit in providing the weaponry, funding, and UN vetoes backing the Israeli government’s attack on the civilian Palestinians/Arabs in tiny Gaza, is in plain view daily. All in the name of the unasked American people and taxpayers.

Earlier this week, at a House of Representatives’ hearing, Trump toady Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) repeatedly assailed three University presidents with the question of would they discipline students calling for the genocide of Jews, without any evidence that this hateful speech is prevalent on campus.

Pursuing her fulminations, Stefanik was cruelly oblivious to the real ongoing genocide in Gaza with her support of unconditional shipment of American F-16s, 155mm. missiles and other weapons of mass destruction used to kill children, women and the elderly who had nothing to do with the preventable October 7^th Hamas violence.

Meanwhile, a State Department spokesman continues to say that the Israeli government does not intentionally target civilians. With U.S. drones over Gaza daily, Secretary of State Antony Blinken has visual proof that the overwhelming bombing on civilian structures is killing innocent civilians.

The evidence is in the rubble of hospitals, health clinics, ambulances, schools, libraries, places of worship, marketplaces, water mains, homes, apartment buildings, and piles of unburied corpses being eaten by stray dogs. All this information is in the possession of bomber Biden’s regime.

The Bidenites and their bloodthirsty cohorts in Congress were forewarned when the Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant and other Israeli officials on October 8^th shouted these chilling genocidal orders to their army: “No electricity, no food, no fuel, no water.… We are fighting human animals and will act accordingly.” (See, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide). Add an already illegal 16-year Israeli blockade of 2.3 Palestinians suffering from dire poverty, with 40% of their children down with anemia.

Now, about half of Gaza’s population are children, 85% of the entire population is homeless, wandering helplessly into nowhere, afflicted with pending starvation, sickened by spreading infectious diseases and dirty drinking water. There is little or no medicines for diabetics and cancer patients. No surgery, no anesthesia, no emergency transport, no shelter from cold weather, only American-made bombs and missiles blowing up Palestinians into bits with Israeli snipers everywhere.

The Palestinians cannot flee from their open-air prison. They cannot surrender – the Israeli government wants them gone. Bear in mind, the population that is not yet blown up is sick and dying, denied needed outside humanitarian aid. Defying feeble Biden’s wishes, Netanyahu only allows a trickle of aid trucks to enter Gaza, and those that do enter can scarcely reach their destinations.

All this raises the issue of the gross undercount of casualties. The Hamas Health Authority has restricted its count to the names of the deceased and injured supplied by hospitals and morgues. These locations are now largely rubble or inoperative. Bodies under the rubble, many of them children, can’t be counted. Thousands of missing people cannot be counted. The Ministry’s suspended count is over 17,000 fatalities, plus 45,000 injuries. With the far larger carnage unable to be tabulated, the actual fatality toll may reach 100,000 soon.

Nonetheless, about two weeks ago, the New York Times reported the death undercount of children in Gaza in two months was ten times greater than the deaths of Ukrainian children in nearly two years of Russian bombings. One of its headlines – “Smoldering Gaza Becomes a Graveyard for Children.”

There are about 50,000 pregnant women in Gaza and about 5,500 of them are due to give birth. Where are they going to do that? How can they be cared for and be nurtured? These mothers are sick and starving. Add the babies to the terrorists toll.

Gaza’s area is about the size of Philadelphia. How many dead, injured, and dying people would there be if 20,000 bombs were dropped on civilians and civilian structures in Philadelphia? Philadelphians trapped without food, water, medicine or any escape route. Imagine 85% of 1.5 million residents homeless, wandering in the streets and alleys. And with virtually no humanitarian aid coming from outside the city. There wouldn’t be any fire trucks or water to extinguish spreading fires.

There are courageous Jewish groups (e.g., Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now) and rabbis calling for an end to the slaughter, demanding a ceasefire. There are protestors at all of Biden’s public events/trips reminding him of next November.

Veterans for Peace and other veteran groups are engaged in non-violent civil disobedience in front of the Scranton, Pennsylvania factory producing 155mm missiles for Israel. (Scranton is Biden’s hometown.) Public opinion is turning against the Biden/Israel war without limits on the Palestinians.

Biden wouldn’t want to poll the American people about his $14.3 billion genocide tax, charging American taxpayers to further prosperous Israel’s war of extermination in Gaza. They’ll likely tell Biden that poor children, unaffordable health facilities and other necessities in America need that money first.

There are some 30 Democratic Senators demanding that this Biden bill contain conditions and safeguards so that the money is not used to blow up more Palestinian children and women. But what else are these funds for other than to expand Israel’s military budget? The Israeli extremist ruling coalition under Netanyahu has made no secret of wanting to take over all of remaining Palestine as part of their “Greater Israel” mission to include what they call Judea and Samaria. As Israel’s Founder, David Ben-Gurion, frankly declared referring to the Palestinians, “We have taken their country.” (As quoted in The Jewish Paradox(1978) by Nahum Goldmann.)

It is a cruel irony of history that Israeli state terrorism is producing a Palestinian Holocaust. Netanyahu’s regime has killed over 60 journalists—three of them Israelis—120 United Nations relief workers and instituted total blackouts to keep the grisly events in Gaza out of the news in real time. Netanyahu, to shield his colossal failure to defend Israel on October 7^thand to keep his job, is making sure that his country joins the world community of savage, slaughtering regimes, exemplified by the Bush/Cheney unlawful criminal destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan, followed by Hillary Clinton toppling Libya into permanent violence and chaos since 2011. (Obama later called his conceding to Hillary’s demands as his worst foreign policy decision).

Capitol Hill and the White House don’t wait for any blood-guilt to be recognized. That will surely come later with the judgment of history and the nightmarish visions of innocents being vaporized because of Washington’s unconditional backing of the Israeli blitzkrieg against what the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has repeatedly called the “totally defenseless people” of Gaza.

December 12, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Israel, politics international, Reference, secrets,lies and civil liberties, weapons and war | Leave a comment