The Israeli prime minister has proposed an alliance aimed against Iran
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has proposed the creation of a new military bloc modeled after NATO and called the “Abraham Alliance,” aimed against Iran.
Netanyahu spoke before the joint session of the US Congress on Wednesday. It was his fourth address to American lawmakers, beating Winston Churchill’s record, although about 70 House and Senate members declined to attend for one reason or another.
“America forged a security alliance in Europe to counter the growing Soviet threat,” Netanyahu said at one point. “Likewise, America and Israel today can forge a security alliance in the Middle East to counter the growing Iranian threat.”
He said a “glimpse” of that alliance could be seen on April 14, when Iran launched a missile and drone attack against Israel and the US and the UK helped shoot some of them down.
Netanyahu thanked US President Joe Biden “for bringing that alliance together,” as well as his predecessor Donald Trump for brokering the ‘Abraham Accords’ between Israel and several Arab countries during his term.
“I think we should call it the Abraham Alliance,” he said of the proposed NATO-like bloc.
According to the Israeli prime minister, countries at peace with West Jerusalem or that intend to do so ought to join the bloc, as Iran is a threat to them all.
“When we fight Iran, we are fighting the most radical and murderous enemy of the United States,” Netanyahu said. When Israel fights and works to prevent a nuclear Iran, “we are not only protecting ourselves, we are protecting you,” he argued.
“Our enemies are your enemies, our fight is your fight, our victories will be your victories,” Netanyahu told US lawmakers. “I know that America has our back.”
The US has given military aid to Israel throughout the nine-month war with Hamas that Netanyahu declared following the Palestinian armed group’s raid out of Gaza. Pressed by Palestinian and Arab Americans in Biden’s party, his government has proposed a three-stage ceasefire plan for the enclave, but West Jerusalem has been reluctant to accept it.
Israel will not stop until it has destroyed the military capabilities of Hamas, ended its rule in Gaza, and recovered all the captives taken in the October 7 attack, Netanyahu said, adding, “That’s what total victory means. And we will settle for nothing less.”
U.S. support for Israel’s genocide against Palestine is rooted not only in campaign financing but other factors, including a rigid ideology stuck in the shadow of World War II, writes Joe Lauria.
America as ‘Savior,’ Israel as ‘Victim’
Updated to include quote from Jared Kushner and mention of U.S. defense contractors.
The world-historical crisis in Gaza might in the long-term bring about radical change in both the U.S. and Israel, but in the interim the greatest crimes the two nations have jointly taken part in has stiffened their defenses against unprecedented criticism.
The fear of blasting Israel has been breached. The taboo broken. Tel Aviv and Washington have never faced this before. As both are settler nations, having wiped out natives across the land, they are circling their wagons on a new frontier. They can only respond with the most profound denial and viciousness.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who addressed a joint-session of Congress on Wednesday as the subject of a requested arrest warrant at the International Criminal Court, has demanded the United States shield Israel from criticism while continuing to arm and support its genocide — and the U.S. has answered his call.
When the Biden administration withheld a symbolic shipment of weapons to Israel, Netanyahu counted on Congress to draft a law that would withhold funding for the State Dept. and the Pentagon if President Joe Biden did not give Netanyahu the weapons he needs to “finish the job” in Gaza.
Biden’s withholding of the shipment was designed to fool U.S. voters critical of his Gaza policy. But the assault on Rafah — despite Biden’s supposed red line — continues, and so will unconditional U.S. support for Israel. The question is why.
Why will U.S. politicians risk losing elections to continue supporting the most unimaginable crimes? The answer lies beyond elections and individual politicians.
Continued support for Israel in the midst of genocide threatens the very legitimacy of U.S. post-war rule as the world turns increasingly against the U.S. and Israel.
Despite this, what makes U.S. leaders so enthralled to a foreign nation and leader who has angered several U.S. presidents?
For instance, why did U.S. leaders, essentially on the say-so of that foreign leader, turn against their own university students on U.S. soil peacefully protesting both Israel’s genocide and Washington’s complicity in it?
In a video address to America delivered April 24 in his American-accented English, Netanyahu ordered that anti-genocide protests on U.S. campuses be stopped. And they have been. It is worth quoting his entire remarks. He said:
“What’s happening on American college campuses is horrific. Anti-semitic mobs have taken over leading universities. They call for the annihilation of Israel. They attack Jewish students. They attack Jewish faculty.
This is reminiscent of what happened in German universities in the 1930s. It is unconscionable. It has to be stopped. It has to be condemned and condemned unequivocally.
But that’s not what happened. The response of several university presidents was shameful. Now fortunately, state, local, federal officials, many of them have responded differently but there has to be more. More has to be done.
It has to be done not only because they attack Israel, that’s bad enough. Not only because they want to kill Jews wherever they are. That’s bad enough. It’s also, when you listen to them, it’s also because they say, not only death to Israel, death to the Jews, but death to America.
And this tells us that there is an anti-semitic surge here that has terrible consequences. We see this exponential rise of anti-semitism throughout America and throughout Western societies as Israel tries to defend itself against genocidal terrorists who hide behind civilians.
Yet it is Israel that is falsely accused of genocide. Israel that is falsely accused of starvation and all sundry war crimes. It’s all one big libel. But that’s not new.
We have seen in history that anti-Semitic attacks were always preceded by vilification and slander. Lies that were cast against the Jewish people that are unbelievable, yet people believe them.
And what is important now, is for all of us, all of us who are interested and cherish our values and our civilization to stand up together and to say: enough is enough.
We have to stop anti-Semitism because anti-Semitism is the canary in the coal mine. It always precedes larger conflagrations that engulf the entire world.
So I ask all of you, Jews and non-Jews alike, who concerned with our common future and our common values, to do one thing: Stand up, speak up, be counted. Stop anti-Semitism now.”
Brazen
Netanyahu uttered a dozen lies in that 339-word message, which got 18.4 million views on X. There are five lies in the first five sentences alone:
1). the students are not “anti-semitic mobs” but protestors, many Jews, against genocide; 2.) they are calling for a free and independent Palestine, not the “annihilation” of Israel; 3.) they are not attacking Jewish students, but Israel’s war; 4). they are not attacking Jewish faculty, unless calling out Israel’s crimes is considered an attack on Jews; and 5). Jews were banned from German universities in the 1930s, making such a comparison to the U.S. today a ludicrous lie.
And what exactly does Netanyahu mean by the “annihilation” of Israel, a phrase he repeatedly utters?
If Israel granted full citizenship rights to Palestinians in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, would that mean the “annihilation” of Israel, or the annihilation of apartheid in Israel? The real annihilation going on is that of Gaza by Israel.
More outrageous was Netanyahu’s lie that American student protestors “want to kill Jews wherever they are” and want “death” to Israel and America. He lies about a “surge” of anti-Semitism. In a clinical case of projection, Netanyahu said Israel is “falsely accused of genocide” of “starvation” and of “all sundry war crimes.”
In Lock-Step
Instead of outrage at this litany of obvious falsehoods, U.S. officials and media echoed Netanyahu’s words. The White House, Congress, newspapers, universities and police responded in lock-step, criminalizing students in their own their country for opposing an active genocide.
At the Capitol for Holocaust Remembrance Day on May 7, Biden framed the Oct. 7 attack as purely motivated by hatred of Jews, whitewashing the entire 80-year history of ethnic cleansing and occupation of Palestinians by Israel. ………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………….Obedient Media
The U.S. media has long told the story almost exclusively from Israel’s point of view. That has conditioned the U.S. public, and its political leaders, to give unconditional support for Israel and expect ostracization for criticizing it.
CNN’s chief political correspondent, Dana Bash, for instance, editorialized on a news show a week after Netanyahu spoke about U.S. campus protests that the students had “lost the plot.” …………………………………………………..
as Chicago University professor John Mearsheimer asks, was there an anti-Semitism problem on American campuses before Israel’s attack on Gaza?
Could Have Stopped It
Biden could have stopped the genocide immediately by withholding all weapons, military aid and diplomatic cover — which any decent man with such power would have done. Instead Biden engaged in public relations while the Gazan public was decimated, pretending to oppose Netanyahu and caring for Palestinian civilians.
Likewise Biden’s State Department tried to play it both ways: feinting to the American public that it was ready to criticize Israel for its mistreatment of civilians, while taking no action. The State Department even said it had evidence Israel may have broken international humanitarian law, but not enough to cut off arms shipments.
“The Biden administration believes that Israel has most likely violated international standards in failing to protect civilians in Gaza but has not found specific instances that would justify the withholding of military aid, the State Department told Congress … the report — which seemed at odds with itself in places — said the U.S. had no hard proof of Israeli violations.”
For Netanyahu’s and members of his cabinet who have expressed genocidal intent, this is the chance they have been waiting for, to fulfill Israeli Founding Father David Ben Gurion’s promise of a Greater Israel. The war to wipe out Hamas is a cover for wiping out the Palestinians from Gaza.
Whatever Biden or the State Department says, Israel will continue with its genocidal urban renewal plan in Gaza by bombing buildings with people still living in them with a view to replacing them with Israeli and Western-owned beachfront property (with an Israeli gas pipeline through it). It is evidently a plan Biden and Blinken, and presumably Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, agree with. (Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, whose family are close Netanyahu friends, said, ““Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable … It’s a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but from Israel’s perspective I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up.”)
According to the Jewish News Syndicate:
“Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir declared at the event [on May 14] that the government should encourage voluntary emigration of Palestinians from the Strip.
‘Two things must be done: One, return to Gaza now, return home, return to our holy land. And two: encouraging emigration. To encourage the voluntary departure of the residents of Gaza. It’s moral, it’s rational, it’s right, it’s the truth. This is the Torah and this is the only way—yes, it is also humanitarian,’ the minister told attendees.”
In response to Biden’s “pause” in shipments, Netanyahu said Israel would fight with its “fingernails” if it needed to in Rafah.
Angered US Presidents
Several American presidents have in rare instances stood up to Israel. President Dwight D. Eisenhower threatened sanctions against Israel over the 1956 Suez Crisis to get Tel Aviv, Paris and London to end its military operation against Egypt and for Israel to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula.
Ronald Reagan in 1983 withheld F16s to Israel until it withdrew from Lebanon. “While these forces are in the position of occupying another country that now has asked them to leave, we are forbidden by law to release those planes,’ he said.
And in 1992, George H.W. Bush threatened to withhold a $10 billion loan guarantee if Israel continued building settlements in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, according to The Washington Post. And yet Israel always seems to get its way.
In his review of Netanyahu’s memoir Bibi: My Story, As’ad AbuKhalil wrote last year in Consortium News:
“Netanyahu’s analysis of U.S.-Israeli relations is simple: no matter what Israel does, and no matter how many wars and invasions it launches, the ‘alliance with the U.S. will take care of itself.’ He correctly believes that U.S. presidents will stand by Israel no matter what … ” (p. 84).
Despite this, we learn from the book that a succession of U.S. presidents disliked Netanyahu but would not stand up to him as previous presidents had to earlier prime ministers………………………………………………………….
‘America Can Be Easily Moved’
Ultimate obedience to Netanyahu in the U.S. brings to mind a video of him speaking to an Israeli settler family in Hebrew in 2001 about how easy it is to manipulate the Americans.
He says, “With the U.S., I know how they are. America is a thing you can easily maneuver and move in the right direction. Even if they say something, so what? Eighty percent of Americans support us.”
About the Palestinians, Netanyahu says: “The main thing is, first of all, to strike them, not once but several times, so painfully, that the price they pay will be unbearable. So far the price-tag is not unbearable.”……………………………..
Why?
Why then do American politicians, universities and media slavishly follow whatever Israel demands? There is more than one answer:
1. Money: AIPAC’s campaign financing and defense contracts;
2. Lingering guilt over the holocaust and fear of being labeled an anti-semite;
3. A natural, historical connection between settler, colonial nations founded on ethnic cleansing and genocide;
4. Power-sharing in the Middle East with overlapping regional and international empires;
5. Israeli intelligence possessing kompromat on U.S. politicians.
6. Keeping a World War II ideology alive to justify global and local supremacy.
Money
The answer most often given to the question is campaign contributions for politicians, who want to avoid being “primaried” by Israel Lobby money. The American–Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) raises more than $100 million a year, which it spends on lobbying and campaign contributions to U.S. political candidates.
Universities are also dependent on wealthy donors, many who demand total loyalty to Israel, which goes a long way to explaining why U.S. universities asked police to break up peaceful, anti-genocide protests on their campus.
And of course American defense contractors stand to gain mightily by continued Israeli bombardment of Gaza.
But it isn’t only about money.
Holocaust
Western governments retain inherited guilt for their deplorable behavior during the Second World War regarding the Holocaust. Germany, naturally, is at the top of the list of the still guilty parties, and is the second largest arms supplier to Israel after the United States.
This residual guilt has created a condition in which the descendants of the victims are still immune to criticism 80 years later in an almost inexhaustible supply of sympathy that Israeli leaders clearly exploit. ……………………………………………………………………..
There is deep ignorance in America about the foundation of Israel, exploded by some Israeli historians, especially by Ilan Pappé, whose book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, documented the intent of Israel’s founders to drive more than 700,000 of the indigenous population off their land into neighboring countries, and killing hundreds of thousands more in an unbroken process now playing out in Gaza. ………………………………………..
“As early as 1937, Ben-Gurion wrote that the ‘boundaries of the Zionist aspirations are the concern of the Jewish people and no external factor will be able to limit them.’
Ben-Gurion also hoped for the expansion of ‘Zionist aspirations’ to Israel’s ‘biblical borders’ (which stretch all the way to Iraq). There is no mention of or reference to the Indigenous population in this vision.”………………………………………….
The launch of Israel and the Greater Israel project coincided with the beginning of the post-war U.S. global empire, which overlapped in the Middle East with Israel’s burgeoning regional empire. Israel and its regional ambitions became a natural footprint for U.S. dominance in the region: namely the subjugation of Arab peoples and rulers.
Thus for the continuance of U.S. empire and all the benefits it accrues to U.S. rulers in the face of growing worldwide opposition, it is natural for Washington to continue supporting Israeli expansionism — no matter the horrendous human cost.
Blackmail
One cannot easily dismiss talk of Israeli intelligence gathering blackmail dirt on American politicians to keep them in line beyond campaign bribes. According to Ari Ben-Menashe, a former Israeli military intelligence official, such blackmail is a part of Israeli tactics. For instance, he told Consortium News‘ CN Live! in 2020 that the child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was collecting such kompromat on powerful Americans.
Mired in WWII
Part of the ideology driving the America-Israel dominance regionally and globally is mired in the shadow of the Second World War: the delusion that the U.S. is still the world’s savior and that Jews are still active victims of history. It’s as if 80 years have not passed.
Jews were certainly among the war’s greatest victims, but America was not the sole or even the chief savior, given the outsized role of the Soviet Union in destroying the Nazis.
After the war, the United States was left with troops around the globe, in areas of great natural resources in a devastated world, whose devastation didn’t touch the American mainland.
A worldwide empire was the result. U.S. leaders have been dedicated to expanding and maintaining it ever since by installing and propping up governments that serve U.S. economic and strategic interests and removing those that don’t. This is done through electoral interference, coups and invasions that have killed millions of innocent lives in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and elsewhere.
To maintain a kind of moral veneer to justify America’s global marauding as “spreading democracy” a connection to the moral war against fascism needs to be maintained. So World War II is invoked constantly by American leaders when embarking on new overseas adventures. ……………………………………………
How cynical is it for descendants of survivors of the Second World War genocide to invoke the Holocaust to perpetrate a genocide of their own?
This confusion still clearly pervades Germany today. In their guilt over their genocide of the Jews and their determination never to let it happen again they are stuck in the World War II past and cannot accept that Israel can possibly be the perpetrators of genocide 80 years later.
So protests against Israeli actions in Germany are seen as protests against Jews and have to be stopped, as the police did in May at Humboldt University in Berlin in the very plaza where Josef Goebbels led the Nazi burning of books.
German police shut down an academic conference about Gaza that month in Berlin. In their misguided fervor to stop another genocide the Germans are supporting one, sending more arms to perpetrate the massacres in Gaza than any nation but the United States. …………………………………….. more https://consortiumnews.com/2024/07/24/netanyahu-commands-us-obeys/
The New York Times and the rest of the U.S. mainstream media downplayed, covered up, and even ignored the historic ICJ opinion declaring the Israeli occupation illegal.
The International Court of Justice’s landmark opinion that Israel’s “settlements” in the occupied Palestine West Bank violate international law should have been on the front page of the New York Times. Prominently.
But no. Instead, the Times, along with the rest of the U.S. mainstream media, downplayed, covered up, and even ignored the historic July 19 decision.
Let’s start with the Times. The print edition the day after ran the story at the bottom of page 5. Two days later, the report has already disappeared from the paper’s online home page.
This site has long and regularly explained how the New York Times tried to finesse its reporting about Israel’s illegal settlements. Here’s what we said last year: the paper’s tactic has been to “insinuate that there are ‘two sides’ about whether Israel was legally allowed to move hundreds of thousands of Jewish-only ‘settlers’ into the occupied territory.” The paper’s favorite word was “disputed;” some say yes, some say no, you decide.
No longer. The Times can certainly report that Israel disagrees with the Court’s decision and will not respect it. But “disputed” is over.
Here’s another suggestion. In a triumph of Orwellian language, Israel and its supporters have successfully labeled those 700,000 people as “settlers.” We have long argued that the word “colonists” is more accurate. But the court decision suggests a third possibility: “illegal settlers.” The phrase is not an insult, or an example of bias. After July 19, 2024, it’s just a fact.
Other news outlets
By contrast, the Washington Post was the only outlet that did an acceptable job on the news. Here was its headline: ‘Israel should evacuate settlements, pay reparations, ICJ [International Court of Justice] says.’
National Public Radio is notoriously biased in favor of Israel, and its coverage did not disappoint. Here’s the headline to NPR’s 3-minute on-air report: “Drone attack hits Tel Aviv; ICJ rules West Bank Israeli settlements are unlawful.” That drone attack, apparently carried out by Ansar Allah from Yemen, was certainly news — but in what universe is it more important than the World Court’s finding that Israel has been violating international law for nearly five decades, and that the 700,000 Jewish-only “settlers” are living in Palestine illegally, and should evacuate the territory? (NPR did produce a slightly longer report, but it only appeared on its online website.)
What about CNN? Not much there either — so far, a single online report that apparently did not appear on the air. MSNBC? Its site has a 1:37 report, with no indication of how often it was broadcast.
CBS News was the worst. The network, which once employed genuine journalists like Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather, has so far not aired a single report on the court’s decision.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech before Congress was everything you’d expect: packed full of lies and propaganda spin, yet simultaneously very illuminating and revealing.
The Israeli prime minister received no fewer than 58 standing ovations while speaking before both houses of Congress and spewing the most despicable lies you could possibly imagine in his conspicuously American accent. Depending on how politically aware you are, this spectacle could be perceived as either deeply un-American, or as American as it gets.
He made the completely baseless claim that Iran may be paying the anti-genocide demonstrators outside the Capitol Building during his speech, saying, “When the Tyrants of Tehran, who hang gays from cranes and murder women for not covering their hair, are praising, promoting and funding you, you have officially become Iran’s useful idiots.”
Netanyahu spent minutes ranting and raving about protests in America against his government’s atrocities in Gaza, during which he received a standing ovation from Congress that went on for nearly a minute.
He accused the International Criminal Court of “antisemitism” and “blood libel” for saying that Israel deliberately targets civilians, as though this hasn’t been conclusively established by mountains of evidence like the IDF’s Lavender AI system and statements from doctors describing what can only be deliberate sniper executions of children in Gaza.
He repeated Israel’s evidence-free claim that the only reason people are starving in Gaza is because Hamas is “stealing” all of the aid Israel allows in for itself.
Netanyahu went out of his way to frame Israel’s plight as civilized people against uncivilized barbarians, which only works if you harbor a supremely racist worldview. …………………………………………
This deluge of lies and racist invective received dozens and dozens of standing ovations. The same political class that’s spent the last eight years shrieking about the threat of misinformation, disinformation and foreign propaganda just normalized and applauded a foreign genocidal war criminal as he stood before Congress telling lie after lie after lie.
You couldn’t ask for a better example of everything Washington stands for than this. Both houses of Congress rising to feverishly applaud one of history’s worst genocidal monsters dozens of times as he lies over and over again is a much better representation of what the US government is about than anything you’ll see during the presidential race from now until November.
In July 10, it was announced that social media giant Meta would broaden the scope of its censorship and suppression of content related to the Gaza genocide. Under the new policy, Facebook and Instagram posts containing “derogatory or threatening references to ‘Zionists’ in cases where the term is used to refer to Jews or Israelis” will be proscribed. Unsurprisingly, a welter of Zionist lobby organizations – many of which aggressively lobbied Meta to adopt these changes – cheered the move. Emboldened, the same entities are now calling for all social media platforms to follow suit.
The Times of Israel noted that “nearly 150 advocacy groups and experts provided input that led to Meta’s policy update.” This prominently included Tel Aviv-based CyberWell, mundanely described by the outlet as “a nonprofit that has been documenting the swell of online antisemitism and Holocaust denial since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza.” These malign activities have had a devastating impact on what Western audiences see and hear about the Gaza genocide on their social media feeds.
In January, CyberWell published an extensive report on how it was seeking to censor many prominent X accounts that expressed doubts about the official narrative of October 7, including the widely disseminated, proven-to-be-false libel that Hamas fighters beheaded dozens of infants. Users in the firing line included popular anonymous Zei Squirrel, Al Jazeera, The Grayzone chief Max Blumenthal, and famous rapper Lowkey, of MintPress News. CyberWell claimed such legitimate skepticism was comparable to Holocaust denial.
The impact of these lobbying efforts isn’t clear, although almost simultaneously, Zei Squirrel was abruptly suspended from X without warning or explanation, sparking widespread outrage. It was only due to relentless backlash that the account was reinstated. More recently, CyberWell submitted formal guidance to Meta on censoring the Palestine solidarity phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which Zionists falsely claim is a clarion call for the genocide of Jews.
That intervention is part of a broader effort by the firm to force the social network to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) highly controversial working definition of antisemitism. This definition, which has been condemned by many sources – including academic David Feldman, who helped draft it – for falsely conflating criticism of the Zionist entity and antisemitism, is a major inspiration for CyberWell. So, too, it seems is a sinister Israeli government psychological warfare blitzkrieg, concerned with “mass consciousness activities” in the U.S. and Europe.
On June 24, independent journalists Lee Fang and Jack Poulson reported that CyberWell was one component of this insidious effort to shape and spread pro-Israeli narratives across the Western world, known as Voices of Israel. In response to the exposé, CyberWell repudiated any affiliation with the long-running, Israeli-funded hasbara operation or receiving government funding “from any country.” As we shall see, though, there are unambiguous grounds to doubt these denials.
It is vital to clarify the political, ideological, and financial forces guiding CyberWell’s operations and the malign interests that its censorship activities serve. The non-profit is now a “trusted partner” of Meta, TikTok, and X, ostensibly assisting these major social networks to combat “disinformation.” In reality, this grants a shadowy private firm with open links to Israel’s intelligence apparatus and evident ambitions to take its censorship crusade global, unrestrained power to prevent the reality of Israel’s genocide from emerging publicly.
‘NOTHING WRONG’
In response to the exposures of Fang and Poulson, CyberWell – which had hitherto operated with a reasonable degree of transparency – went scurrying underground. Many sections of its website were pruned of incriminating information or deleted outright. This included a highly illuminating section on the individuals running and advising the outfit. Now, visitors to CyberWell’s website are offered no indication of who or what is behind the initiative, which promises to deliver “more data, less hate” by tackling “antisemitism” online using artificial intelligence…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
‘TIGHTLY KNIT’
CyberWell’s deep and cohering – if well-concealed – ties to Voices of Israel and the Israeli government don’t end there. The non-profit’s 2022 annual report lists its Chief Financial Officer as Sagi Balasha, the very first CEO of Voices of Israel when the operation was still named Concert. He took up the post after leaving the influential Zionist lobby group, the Israeli-American Council (IAC), right around the time IAC donated thousands of dollars to Keshet David under its former name, Israel Cyber Shield…………………………………………………………………………
To make this mephitic web even murkier and more incestuous, CyberWell partnered with the notorious Act.IL, which is closely associated with IAC and the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs. The latter leads Zionist entity anti-BDS efforts globally. CyberWell’s 2022 annual report noted that the non-profit “served as the data provider to Act.IL’s community for their end of year call to action on the state of online antisemitism…………………………………………………………………………………………………………
The ICJ finding also, inevitably, means (whether the judges intend it or not) that not only Israel’s policy in these specific territories, but the Zionist project as such, is based on the irreparable injustice of violently depriving the Palestinians of their inalienable right to national self-determination. Make no mistake, this is not “merely” a blow to the crimes of Israeli occupation and annexation; it calls into question the foundations of Israel as a state, as it is built around the systematic defiance of justice, law, and elementary ethics.
However, while similarly meticulous legal assessments tend to generate complicated outcomes, that is not the case here. As has been widely acknowledged, the findings are devastating for Israel and, at least in legal terms, a clear triumph for the Palestinians and Palestine. In the words of Erika Guevara Rosas, senior director for research, advocacy, policy, and campaigns at Amnesty International, the ICJ’s “conclusion is loud and clear.”
The ICJ has recognized without qualifications that Israel’s holding of territories it seized during the Six Day War – including East Jerusalem (which Israel has officially though unlawfully annexed) and the West Bank (which it pretends to “occupy” but is, in reality, annexing) is illegal and needs to end asap.
In particular, the ICJ made it clear that all settlement must cease and that the settlers already on these territories must leave. That decision alone means that between 700,000 and 750,000 Israeli illegals (here, that term is, for once, exactly correct) should not be where they are. Not only do all of them have to leave the over 100 settlements they never had a right to establish; the Israeli state has an obligation to evacuate them. Moreover, Israel’s expropriations of land are also illegal, that is, simply put, theft. The ICJ has ordered it to return what it has stolen, that is, tens of thousands of acres.
The Israeli state is, of course, deeply implicated in the illegal acts the ICJ has ordered it to stop and even reverse. Israel’s longstanding policies of incentivizing its Jewish citizens – including de facto colonial settlers from anywhere in the world – to move into the illegally held territories and steal Palestinian land and resources is fundamentally criminal, among other reasons, because it is inconsistent with international law, particularly the humanitarian law enshrined in the Geneva Conventions.
Regarding the Gaza Strip, long a de facto concentration camp for its Palestinian inhabitants and since October 2023 the site of Israel’s ongoing genocidal massacre against them, the ICJ has clearly rejected the all-too-frequently heard Israeli argument that its forces retreated from it in 2005.
In reality, as honest legal experts have long maintained and the ICJ has now confirmed explicitly, Israel has always exerted so much stifling control over this area that it has remained an occupying power, with all the attendant obligations, whether its forces were on the ground inside the Gaza Strip or abusing its inhabitants while stationed around it.
The ICJ also clarified the issue of apartheid. As should be well known, apartheid is a recognized crime under international law (it is not merely a name for one specific criminal regime once practiced in South Africa). Under, for instance, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court – not to be confused with the ICJ – the “crime of apartheid” is defined as a “crime against humanity” akin to, for instance, murder, extermination, enslavement, or torture. Also according to the Rome statute, what makes apartheid special is that it is “an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.”
Put simply, apartheid is, literally, one of the worst crimes a regime and the people supporting and working for it can possibly commit. In the case of Israel, unbiased experts and various human rights organizations have long argued that it is committing this crime as well. The ICJ has addressed this issue, noting arguments “that Israel’s policies and practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territory amount to segregation or apartheid, in breach of Article 3 of CERD,” that is, the “Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination” (also known as the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, ICERD).
Israel is, in sum, a state practicing the crime against humanity of apartheid, de facto annexing and settling territories it has no conceivable legal claim on, and systematically denying a whole nation, the Palestinians, their right to self-determination. The court has also finished off any pretense that Israel can justify its continuing, pervasive criminality by alleged “security” needs. Those are only some of the ICJ’s key findings. Others concern Palestinian rights to restitution, return, and reparations, for instance. For anyone even vaguely familiar with how the Israeli state operates, it is obvious that these ICJ findings have declared its core principles illegal, as they are.
Many states, at least those with enough power, break international law, some quite habitually (the US, for instance), some “only” occasionally. Israel, however, is special: By virtue of its own, freely chosen policies informed by a nationalist ideology of supremacy and colonial settlement, it has made breaking international law its reason of state: without it, it is hard to even imagine how it can continue. Note, in this respect, that its minister of defense and its prime minister are on the verge of having warrants issued against them for crimes against humanity and war crimes by the International Criminal Court, while the ICJ has already found that genocide is a plausible possibility in Gaza and, since Israel has brutally disregarded all its injunctions, will most likely confirm that finding in a final judgment in the not-too-distant future.
One thing that the ICJ findings confirm is, of course, that the Palestinians have a right to armed resistance under international law. Another thing that follows is that many things that Israel and its Western backers pretend are up for negotiation are not: Palestinians have a right to get their land back; Israel has no right to use it, in any way, not even as a bargaining chip.
A third thing also follows, but from the Israeli response: The whole Israeli political spectrum, not only Prime Minister Netanyahu and the other extremists in his cabinet, has rejected the ICJ findings. Hence, the illusion that the problem with Israel is just a few radicals in power must be buried once and for all: Unfortunately, its delusions of domination and supremacy are widespread throughout its political sphere and its society. Israel is the worst rogue state in the world, and it is also a dead end. For that, it cannot, as its elites usually do, blame external enemies or “anti-Semitism.” In reality, its own arrogance and outrageous violence against the Palestinians and its neighbors are to blame.
Of course, these ICJ findings, as many cynics will remind us, will not compel Israel to change. Indeed, as UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese has pointed out, Israel’s usual response to being called out is to commit even more crimes, as if to make a point about its defiance of international law. Yet it is shortsighted to believe that the ICJ’s condemnation is irrelevant.
For one thing, the ICJ has been explicit that all other states have a duty to “co-operate with the United Nations” to bring about “an end to Israel’s illegal presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and the full realization of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.” In addition, the judges also reiterated, in great detail, that not only other states, but also “international organizations, specialized agencies, investment corporations and all other institutions” must not “recognize, or cooperate with or assist in any manner in, any measures undertaken by Israel to exploit the resources of the occupied territories or to effect any changes in the demographic composition or geographic character or institutional structure of those territories.”
In essence, the ICJ has put all governments on this planet on notice that they are not free to do as they please about Israel and its crimes, but that they are bound by laws to help stop them and to abstain from being accomplices. That, of course, is an aspect of the findings that should concern the many hypocrites and accomplices in the EU and the US, such as German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, for instance, who cannot see anything but a “comprehensive compliance with international law” when he looks at Israel. But then, that’s the same Olaf Scholz, of course, who can’t figure out who blew up his country’s gas pipelines. Likewise, the leaders of the UK, with “Labour-friend-of-Israel” and, embarrassingly, human rights lawyer Keir Starmer in the lead, and those of the US, in the process of co-perpetrating the genocide in Gaza, should feel at least some discomfort: Standing by Israel will not be cost-free much longer.
Ultimately, the single most important result of these ICJ findings has to do with the enormous role that systematic obfuscation – in plain language: lying – plays for the Israeli regime and its society. All those who have long named Israel’s systemic crimes and called for resistance to them, whether outside or inside Palestine, now have, in effect, the highest court of the world on their side. There is no more room for debate about what Israel is doing, and once that has been settled, there is no argument left for defending it. The ICJ findings won’t suddenly change the world, but when the world does change, they will have played an important role.
Leaked emails published by Jadaliyya on 18 July reveal grievances expressed by BBC staff over the UK broadcaster’s coverage of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza since 7 October.
In a 1 May email, BBC correspondent in Beirut, Rami Ruhayem, wrote to the broadcaster’s Director General Tim Davie and several other departments of its news staff, detailing “evidence of a collapse in the application of basic standards and norms of journalism that seems aligned with Israel’s propaganda strategy.”
He highlights that BBC staff did not respond to “a mass of evidence-based critique of coverage” on 7 October and the days that followed.
“Instead of putting together mechanisms for a thorough examination of output, and for inclusive, respectful, and professional discussions guided by [BBC] standards and values, it appears management has opted to oversee a continuation of the editorial direction the BBC has taken since October,” Ruhayem’s email added. JUL 22, 2024
Jadaliyya has also obtained the content of all of Ruhayem’s email attachments. In the first attachment, the BBC correspondent analyzes interviews with Israeli guests on the British news channel between 10 October and 25 October.
In the second, he analyzes BBC content relating to Hamas’ Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.
“This paper is not about what happened on that day and the days that followed; rather, it is an inquiry into whether – and to what extent – the BBC applied, misapplied or simply cast aside journalistic standards in treating various claims about what happened on that day. I’ve found a sustained collapse in some of the most basic standards and values, one which seems to complement Israel’s propaganda purposes and strategy,” Ruhayem wrote.
“From the start, it was evident that unverified claims of the most atrocious acts by Hamas fighters against Israelis were being circulated and repeated at the highest levels. Even though it was not possible to rule them out, especially at an early stage, a set of basic measures should’ve been initiated; one of them would’ve been to make sure presenters inquire about evidence when such claims are made on air and clarify that the BBC had not verified them,” he added.
He then gives examples of such claims, including the claim that a Hamas fighter cut open the stomach of a pregnant Israeli woman and killed the fetus after pulling it out. Ruhayem highlights that this claim was made at least twice during BBC interviews without interjection from the presenters.
Ruhayem then discusses the claim made in a number of interviews that Hamas fighters “went street to street,” shooting babies, raping girls, beheading, and burning people alive.
“A few basic questions could’ve shed some light on these claims, and helped other teams put together a comprehensive picture of verified atrocities to inform audiences. But in all of the examples above and more, no such questions were asked, and the allegations passed with no comment, clarification, or interjection of any sort.”
Comment: Whereas they were, unsurprisingly, quick and consistent in applying these standards to anti-genocide representatives.
“Once again, the BBC was implying to its audiences that it had verified all these claims, although in these cases, it wasn’t clear what – exactly – it had supposedly verified,” he added.
Since Operation Al-Aqsa Flood and the start of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, claims of atrocities committed by the Palestinian resistance have yet to be verified.
Comment: They haven’t been verified, and investigations into them reveal that this is likely because they did not happen.
Israel’s Haaretz newspaper confirmed earlier this month that the Israeli army ordered troops to kill their own soldiers and civilians on 7 October, turning the Gaza border into an “extermination zone” under the Hannibal Directive.
This had been reported extensively prior to the Haaretz report and has cast significant doubt over claims that Hamas fighters carried out mass killing and mass destruction on 7 October.
Stories of the mass rapes allegedly committed by the Palestinian resistance also remain unproven, including by Israeli police, who were unable to verify accounts of sexual assault committed by Palestinian fighters that day, according to a Haaretz report in January.
Ann Wright on the arms flowing between members of the military alliance and Israel, which despite its small size, ranks as the 15th top weapons importer in the world.
NATO has a long, close and relatively unknown relationship with Israel that in 2016 resulted in the establishment of an Israel office in the Brussels headquarters of the military alliance.
Underscoring the importance to Israel’s association with NATO, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said upon the opening of the office, “This is an important step that helps Israel’s security. It is further proof to the status of Israel and the willingness of many organizations to cooperate with us in the field of security.”
NATO’s invitation to Israel to take up residence in NATO headquarters was a result of pressure by other NATO members on Turkey to drop its veto of the invitation. The invitation arose through a new NATO partnership policy beginning in 2014 but Turkey vetoed the invitation until 2016.
Behind the scenes negotiations between Turkey and Israel in 2015 warmed the chilly relationship that had been essentially severed between the countries in 2010 over Israeli commandos killing 10 Turkish activists and wounding over 50 participants on the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish ship bound for Gaza as a part of the seven-ship Gaza Freedom Flotilla.
According to NATO documents, NATO and Israel have worked together for almost 30 years, cooperating in science and technology, counter terrorism, civil preparedness, countering weapons of mass destruction and women, peace and security.
To strengthen NATO naval interoperability NATO brought on Israel as a partner for its Operation Sea Guardian. Israel’s military medical academy now serves as a “unique asset” for NATO’s Partnership Training and Education Centers community.
Israel is not officially integrated in NATO but is part of the Mediterranean Dialogue, a program sponsored by NATO in cooperation with seven countries of the Mediterranean.
Arms Dealing
NATO’s long-standing working relationship with Israel has translated into NATO countries selling weapons to Israel and other countries buying weapons from Israel’s big weapons industry.
The Action on Armed Violence has a comprehensive worldwide listing of weapons sales and transfers to Israel.
US Main Supplier of Foreign-Sourced Weapons
Israel has been the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign aid since its founding in 1948, having received about $310 billion in economic and military assistance. Since Oct. 7, 2023, the U.S. has passed legislation that has provided at least $12.5 billion in military aid to Israel, which included $3.8 billion from legislation in March 2024 and $8.7 billion from a supplemental appropriation in April 2024.
Since Oct. 7, only two of the more than one hundred military aid transfers to Israel have reportedly met the congressional review threshold of $250 million to be made public, and since the records for the other weapons transfers have not been made public, we can’t be sure .
Additionally, the Israeli military received expedited deliveries of weapons from a strategic stockpile of weapons that is normally used to replenishment weapons for U.S. units in the Middle East. The U.S. has maintained massive warehouses for the stockpile of a huge variety and amount of weapons since the 1980s.
All of the Israeli Air Force’s manned aircraft that are bombing people in Gaza are American-made, with the exception of one helicopter built by France’s Airbus Helicopters. Israel is the first international operator of the U.S. F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the most technologically advanced fighter jet ever made, and had taken delivery of 36 of 75 F-35s by the end of 2023, paying for them with U.S. assistance.
In 2016 the U.S. and Israel signed a third 10-year Memorandum of Understanding covering the 2018-2028 period providing for $38 billion in military aid; $33 billion in grants to buy military equipment; and $5 billion for missile defense systems.
Israel received 69 percent of its military aid from the U.S. in the 2019-2023 period, according to a March fact sheet issued by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
Israel ranks 98th in world population, with a population of 9.4 million, only 0.11 percent of the world’s population, and ranks 154th of all countries in land mass. Despite its small population and land, a study by SIPRI ranks Israel as the world’s 15th top weapons importer, receiving 2.1 percent of all imports, according to globally available data from 2019-2023. Israel is the world’s 9th top weapons exporter, responsible for 2.4 percent of exports.
Germany 2nd Largest Supplier
Germany is the second largest weapons provider to Israel providing around 30 percent of all foreign weapons to Israel. In 2023, Germany approved military equipment and arms exports to Israel worth $353.70 million, a 10-fold increase compared with 2022, This includes four submarines. according to the German Economy Ministry data and data submitted to the International Court of Justice in Nicaragua’s case against Germany for complicity in the genocide of Gaza.
In April, Nicaragua argued that Germany had breached the U.N. Genocide Convention by sending military hardware to Israel, thereby aiding and abetting genocide and violating international humanitarian law in Gaza…………………………………………………………………………………………………..
German Member of Parliament Sevim Dagdelen spoke in Washington, D.C., on July 6 at the NO to NATO; YES to PEACE symposium and on July 7 at the rally for peace at the White House.
In her talks, she said that while from 2019 to 2023, 30 percent of weapons into Israel came from Germany, in 2023, the percentage of weapons sent to Israel dramatically increased to 47 percent from Germany while the U.S. supplied 53 percent.
In 2023, Britain granted export licenses to sell at least $52.5 million of military equipment to Israel — mainly munitions, unmanned air vehicles, small arms ammunition and components for aircraft, helicopters, and assault rifles……………………………….
Penny Wong, the Australian foreign affairs minister, has said her country has not supplied weapons since the start of the Gaza conflict yet data from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) shows that in February 2024 alone Australia directly exported over $1.5 million in “arms and ammunition” to Israel. At an Australian Senate Estimates hearing, the chief economist of DFAT acknowledged that Australia has exported $10 million worth of “arms and ammunition” to Israel over the past five years……………………………..
Washington Summit Statement Silent on Genocide
While NATO members are deeply complicit in the Israeli genocide of Gaza, the final statement of the NATO summit in Washington mentioned nothing about the Israeli genocide of Gaza,………………………………………………
Ann Wright served 29 years in the US Army/Army Reserves and retired as a colonel. She served 16 years as a U.S. diplomat and resigned from the U.S. government in 2003 in opposition to the U.S. war on Iraq. She is a co-author of Dissent: Voices of Conscience.
The original version of this article was published by WorldBeyondWar.
The International Court of Justice ruled today: the State of Israel has the obligation to make reparation for the damage caused to all the natural or legal persons concerned in the Occupied Palestinian Territory;
the State of Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful;
the State of Israel is under an obligation to bring to an end its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory as rapidly as possible;
the State of Israel is under an obligation to cease immediately all new settlement activities, and to evacuate all settlers from the Occupied Palestinian Territory;
all States are under an obligation not to recognize as legal the situation arising from the unlawful presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by the continued presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory;
international organizations, including the United Nations, are under an obligation not to recognize as legal the situation arising from the unlawful presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory; and
the United Nations, and especially the General Assembly, which requested the opinion, and the Security Council, should consider the precise modalities and further action required to bring to an end as rapidly as possible the unlawful presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
This is a major organizing challenge to people around the world; to get as many countries as possible to back as strong action as possible against Israel’s crimes.
Some resources are in my piece, above. Another key is action should be in NYC in front of the UN and various missions to the UN.
Racism in Israel is not a flaw in the system; it is the system.
Unlike the framing commonly put forth by politicians and mainstream media, it is not “complicated.” It is not “an age-old religious feud.” And, it is not “a conflict by extremists on both sides.”
While the Biden administration continues its insincere rhetorical support for the two-state solution, the U.S. has remained Israel’s staunchest supporter, always using its veto power to shield it from accountability and prevent Palestinian statehood despite Israel’s repeated violations of international law and UN Security Council resolutions.
Seventy-Five Percent of All UN Member States Recognize the State of Palestine
In an advisory opinion, the International Court of Justice reaffirmed the Palestinian right to self-determination.
In a landmark opinion issued today, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has said that Israel’s 57-year occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip is in breach of international law.The proceedings came out of a UN resolution passed in December of 2022. In the resolution, the UN General Assembly requested an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice on “Israeli practices affecting the human rights of the Palestinian people in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem.”
The ICJ, also known as the World Court, is the UN’s principal judicial organ that adjudicates disputes between member states and provides advisory opinions on international legal matters.
This case is separate from the one brought forth by South Africa last year, in which the ICJ provisionally ruled that Israeli practices in Gaza are plausibly genocidal. Following that ruling, Israel indicated that it rejects the ICJ’s findings.
In a post on X, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wrote, “Nobody will stop us – not The Hague, not the axis of evil and not anybody else.”
Public hearings on Israel’s occupation of Palestine were held at The Hague on February 19 and lasted for six days, during which 52 countries participated and presented arguments. The panel of 15 judges on the court was asked by the UN General Assembly to consider “the legal consequences arising from the ongoing violation by Israel of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, from its prolonged occupation, settlement and annexation of the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967.”
The hearings commenced with remarks by Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki, in which he asserted the rights of Palestinians to live “in freedom and dignity in their ancestral land.” He asked the ICJ to recognize the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and called on the court to “declare Israel occupation is illegal and must end it completely and unconditionally.”
Israel did not participate in the oral arguments, but the Office of the Prime Minister issued a statement saying, “Israel does not recognize the legitimacy of the discussion at the International Court of Justice in The Hague regarding the ‘legality of the occupation’ — a move designed to harm Israel’s right to defend itself against existential threats.”
Israel’s Occupation Is Sustained by a Combination of State-Sponsored Violence and Apartheid
Israel was born of British colonialism; it was created through a mixture of state violence and vigilante terrorist acts that displaced Palestinians and dispossessed them from their homes and land; it is supported — financially, militarily and diplomatically — by Western, primarily U.S., imperialism-serving war profiteers; and it is sustained by a combination of state-sanctioned violence and a system of apartheid that denies Palestinians — who form half the people in the land under Israeli control from the river to the sea — their equal rights.
After the Nakba of 1948, the State of Israel was established on 78 percent of the land of what had been British Mandate Palestine. During the June 1967 war, Israel took over the West Bank, Gaza and Arab East Jerusalem, the remaining 22 percent of historic Palestine, now known as “the Occupied Territories.” In 1980, Israel unilaterally formalized its annexation of East Jerusalem — a move that was condemned as illegal by the international community.
Over the past 57 years, successive Israeli governments have brutally terrorized Palestinians, demolished homes, confiscated large tracts of Palestinian lands, expanded Israeli settlements in the West Bank — considered illegal under international law — and added many new ones that effectively rendered the “two-state solution” impossible. Now West Bank settlers number more than 700,000; they are heavily armed and are constantly terrorizing Palestinian residents in neighboring villages in an effort to force them to leave, as described in a report by Amnesty International.
According to the Palestinian Health Ministry, since October 7,575 Palestinians — of whom 138 are children — were killed in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem by soldiers and armed settlers.
Israel employs oppression, violence, persecution, checkpoints, house demolitions, displacement, expulsion, imprisonment, land theft, torture of children and collective punishment to ethnically cleanse non-Jewish inhabitants.
Israel has learned that, the more routine its war crimes become, the less coverage they receive – and the less outrage they provoke.
Last week, western doctors who had volunteered in Gaza said Israel was packing its weapons with shrapnel to maximise injuries to those caught in the blast radius. Children, because of their smaller bodies, were being left with much more severe wounds.
In recent days, Israel has struck several United Nations schools serving as shelters, killing dozens more Palestinians. On Tuesday, another strike in the “safe zone” of al-Mawasi killed 17.
According to the UN refugee agency, Unrwa, more than 70 percent of its schools – almost all of them serving as refugee shelters – have been bombed.
Women and children are being targeted intentionally, say Israeli whistleblowers. From ground troops to commanders, the rules of war have been shredded
hey just keep coming. On the weekend, Israel launched another devastating air strike on Gaza, killing at least 90 Palestinians and wounding hundreds more, including women, children and rescue workers.
Once again, Israel targeted refugees displaced by its earlier bombs, turning an area it had formally declared a “safe zone” into a killing field.
And once more, western powers shrugged their shoulders. They were too busy accusing Russia of war crimes to have time to worry about the far worse war crimes being inflicted on Gaza by their Israeli ally – with weapons they supplied.
The atrocity committed at al-Mawasi camp, packed with 80,000 civilians, had the usual Israeli cover story – one rolled out to reassure western publics that their leaders are not the utter hypocrites they appear to be for supporting what the World Court has described as a “plausible genocide”.
Israel said it was trying to hit two Hamas leaders – one of them Mohammed Deif, head of the group’s military wing – although Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seemed uncertain as to whether the strike was successful.
No one in the western media appeared to wonder why the pair preferred to make themselves a target in an overcrowded, makeshift refugee camp, where they were at huge risk of being betrayed by an Israeli informant, rather than sheltering in Hamas’s extensive tunnel network.
Or why Israel deemed it necessary to fire a multitude of massive bombs and missiles to take out two individuals. Is that Israel’s new, expansive redefinition of a “targeted assassination”?
Or why its pilots and drone operators continued the strikes to hit emergency rescue crews dealing with the initial destruction. Was there intelligence that Deif was not just hiding in the camp, but had hung around to dig out survivors, too?
Or how killing and maiming hundreds of civilians in an attempt to hit two Hamas fighters could ever possibly satisfy the most basic principles of international law. “Proportion” and “distinction” require armies to weigh the military advantage of an attack against the expected toll on civilian life.
Biblical vengeance
But Israel has torn up the rulebook on war. According to sources within the Israeli military, it now considers it acceptable to kill more than 100 Palestinian civilians in the pursuit of a single Hamas commander – a commander, let us note, who will simply be replaced the moment he is dead.
Even if the two Hamas leaders were assassinated, Israel could not have been in any doubt that it was perpetrating a war crime. But it has learned that, the more routine its war crimes become, the less coverage they receive – and the less outrage they provoke.
In recent days, Israel has struck several United Nations schools serving as shelters, killing dozens more Palestinians. On Tuesday, another strike in the “safe zone” of al-Mawasi killed 17.
According to the UN refugee agency, Unrwa, more than 70 percent of its schools – almost all of them serving as refugee shelters – have been bombed.
Last week, western doctors who had volunteered in Gaza said Israel was packing its weapons with shrapnel to maximise injuries to those caught in the blast radius. Children, because of their smaller bodies, were being left with much more severe wounds.
Aid agencies cannot properly treat the wounded, because Israel has been blocking the entry of medical supplies into Gaza.
Committing war crimes, if western publics have not worked it out by now, is the very point of the “military operation” Israel launched in Gaza in the wake of Hamas’s one-day attack on 7 October.
That is why there are more than 38,800 known deaths from Israel’s 10-month assault – and likely at least four times that number unrecorded, according to leading researchers writing in the Lancet medical journal this month.
That is why it will take at least 15 years to clear the rubble strewn across Gaza by Israeli bombs, according to the UN, and as much as 80 years – and $50bn – to rebuild homes for the remnants of the enclave’s 2.3 million people still alive at the end.
Israel’s twin goals have been biblical vengeance and the elimination of Gaza – a genocidal rampage to drive the terrified population out, ideally into neighbouring Egypt.
Shoot-everyone policy
If that was not clear enough already, six Israeli soldiers recently stepped forward to speak out about what they had witnessed while serving in Gaza – a story the western media has entirely failed to report.
Their testimonies, published by the Israel-based publication 972 last week, confirm what Palestinians have been saying for months.
Commanders have authorised them to open fire on Palestinians at will. Anyone entering an area the Israeli military is treating as a “no-go zone” is shot on sight, whether man, woman or child.
After months of an Israeli aid blockade that has created a man-made famine, Israel’s military has turned the people of Gaza’s ever-more frantic search for food into a game of Russian roulette.
This perhaps explains, in part, why so many Palestinians are unaccounted for – Save the Children estimates some 21,000 children are missing. The soldiers quoted in 972 say the victims of their shoot-everyone policy are bulldozed out of view along routes where international aid convoys pass.
A reserve soldier, identified only as S, said a Caterpillar bulldozer “clears the area of corpses, buries them under the rubble, and flips [them] aside so that the convoys don’t see it – [so that] images of people in advanced stages of decay don’t come out”. The soldier also noted: “The whole area [of Gaza where the army operates] was full of bodies… There is a horrific smell of death.”
A new Oxfam report reveals how Israel has been systematically weaponizing water against Palestinians in Gaza, showing disregard for human life and international law.
A new Oxfam report reveals how Israel has been systematically weaponizing water against Palestinians in Gaza, showing disregard for human life and international law.
The report, Water War Crimes, finds that Israel’s cutting of external water supply, systematic destruction of water facilities and deliberate aid obstruction have reduced the amount of water available in Gaza by 94% to 4.74 litres a day per person – just under a third of the recommended minimum in emergencies and less than a single toilet flush.
Oxfam analysis also found:
Israeli military attacks have damaged or destroyed five water and sanitation infrastructure sites every three days since the start of the war.
The destruction of water and electricity infrastructure and restrictions on entry of spare parts and fuel (on average a fifth of the required amount is allowed in) saw water production drop by 84% in Gaza. External supply from Israel’s national water company Mekorot fell by 78%.
Israel has destroyed 70% of all sewage pumps and 100% of all wastewater treatment plants, as well as the main water quality testing laboratories in Gaza, and restricted the entry of Oxfam water testing equipment.
Gaza City has lost nearly all its water production capacity, with 88% of its water wells and 100% of its desalination plants damaged or destroyed.
The report also highlighted the dire impact of this extreme lack of clean water and sanitation on Palestinians’ health, with more than a quarter (26%) of Gaza’s population falling severely ill from easily preventable diseases.
In January, the International Court of Justice demanded that Israel immediately improve humanitarian access in light of a plausible genocide in Gaza. Since then, Oxfam has witnessed firsthand Israel’s obstruction of a meaningful humanitarian response, which is killing Palestinian civilians.
Oxfam Water and Sanitation Specialist Lama Abdul Samad said it was clear that Israel had created a devastating humanitarian emergency resulting in Palestinian civilian deaths.
“We’ve already seen Israel’s use of collective punishment and its use of starvation as a weapon of war. Now we are witnessing its weaponizing of water, which is already having deadly consequences.
“But the deliberate restriction of access to water is not a new tactic. The Israeli Government has been depriving Palestinians across the West Bank and Gaza of safe and sufficient water for many years,” she said.
“The widespread destruction and significant restrictions on aid delivery in Gaza impacting access to water and other essentials for survival, underscores the urgent need for the international community to take decisive action to prevent further suffering by upholding justice and human rights, including those enshrined in the Geneva and Genocide Conventions.”
Monther Shoblak, General Manager of the Gaza Strip’s water utility CMWU, said:
“My colleagues and I have been living through a nightmare these past nine months, but we still feel it’s our responsibility and duty to ensure everybody in Gaza is getting their minimum right of clean drinking water. It’s been very difficult, but we are determined to keep trying – even when we witness our colleagues being targeted and killed by Israel while undertaking their work.”
Oxfam is calling for urgent action including an immediate and permanent ceasefire; for Israel to allow a full and unfettered humanitarian response; and for Israel to foot the reconstruction bill for water and sanitation infrastructure.
“We must not lose sight of what is happening in Gaza, where an unprecedented humanitarian crisis continues to get even worse,” said U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Israeli forces have massacred nearly 60 people in the Gaza Strip over just the past 24 hours, and the past week has been one of the deadliest since the war began more than nine months ago.
But you’d hardly know it by looking at the front pages of major newspapers in the United States, despite U.S. President Joe Biden fueling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s assault with diplomatic support and billions of dollars worth of weaponry.
While outlets such as Al Jazeera and Reuters have kept Israel’s onslaught at or near the top of their pages, coverage of the relentless war on the Palestinian enclave has largely been supplanted in the U.S. by presidential politics, particularly in the wake of the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump on Saturday—the same day Israeli forces killed around 100 people in an attack on a southern Gaza town that was previously designated a “safe zone,” as Common Dreamsreported.
Fresh Israeli airstrikes across Gaza on Tuesday killed dozens of people—including children—but the massacres didn’t receive mention on the front pages of the web versions of The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, or USA Today, each of which heavily featured coverage of the high-stakes U.S. presidential contest between two candidates who have backed Israel’s war on Gaza.
As of Tuesday morning, Gaza was entirely absent from the website landing pages of the Journal and USA Today. The Post‘s home page buried a story about the potential for an all-out war between Israel and Hezbollah, while the Times‘ home page contained a piece about surging settler violence in the West Bank amid Israel’s ongoing atrocities in Gaza.
In recent weeks, U.S. corporate media coverage of developments in Gaza has not reflected the extent to which Israel has intensified its aerial and ground attacks, even as recent cease-fire talks have sparked some hope of a pause.
After a 20-year-old gunman attempted to assassinate Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, pictures of the former president’s bloodied ear and raised fist were plastered across the front pages of major newspapers in the U.S. and around the world while the far more numerous images of child victims of Israeli bombs—many of them supplied by the United States—faded from view.
Israel does not allow journalists with major U.S.-based media outlets to enter the Gaza Strip unless they are embedded with Israeli forces and agree to let the military vet their coverage.
Al Jazeera, a Qatari-funded outlet that Israel’s far-right government has repeatedly targeted, reported Monday that “Israeli forces have attacked five separate schools in Gaza in just eight days, killing dozens of people sheltering in them.”
One attack on Sunday, the outlet noted, “struck the United Nations-run Abu Oreiban school in the Nuseirat refugee camp, killing at least 17 people and injuring about 80. Most of the victims were women and children, said Palestinian Civil Defense.”
Reporting from the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, Al Jazeera‘s Hani Mahmoud said he witnessed children “crying out in pain and agony” at the facility, which—like all of Gaza’s remaining hospitals—is under-resourced and only partially functioning.
“This is the result of incinerating bombs,” Mahmoud added.
The death toll from Israel’s war on Gaza is nearing 40,000—likely a dramatic undercount, given how many bodies are missing under the rubble that now dominates the landscape of the enclave and could take 15 years to clear.
Those who have survived Israel’s onslaught are now living amid sewage, decomposing bodies, and the ruins of their homes, shops, schools, and hospitals, with nowhere safe to flee. Famine and disease are spreading rapidly across the territory as the Israeli government continues to restrict the flow of humanitarian aid.
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who has urged the Biden administration to cut off all offensive weapons assistance to Israel, said in a statement late last week that “while much of the media is focused on the drama of the U.S. presidential election, we must not lose sight of what is happening in Gaza, where an unprecedented humanitarian crisis continues to get even worse.”
“We must end our support for Netanyahu’s war,” said Sanders. “Not another nickel to make this horrific situation even worse. I intend to do everything I can to block further arms transfers to Israel, including through joint resolutions of disapproval of any arms sales. The United States must not help a right-wing extremist and war criminal continue this atrocity.”
“I saw before my eyes one missile after another descending next to the tents. Missiles I have never seen in my life in all of Gaza’s wars. Isn’t this internationally forbidden? Shouldn’t the civilian population be protected and not face genocide and mass killing? Isn’t this forbidden?”
The Israeli army committed another massacre against displaced Palestinians in tent encampments, this time in the coastal Mawasi area, which Israel had designated as a “safe zone.”
In a crater in the ground almost larger than a schoolyard, a group of young men dig through the sand and pull out the bodies.
“His head is there! His head is there!” someone yells. A man emerges from the hole, carrying a child.
“Who knows who this child is? Who knows his family? Where are his parents?” he calls out.
Behind him are dead bodies and severed limbs scattered across the ground. Some poke out from beneath the sand, half-buried.
When the Israeli army struck the coastal displacement camp in al-Mawasi, west of Khan Younis, there was no rubble. The Israeli-designated “safe zone” was little more than a sea of tents on the beach, so people were buried in the sand instead.
At 10 a.m. on Saturday, while people were starting their day, the Israeli military targeted the area with successive airstrikes, leading to a massacre that, according to the Ministry of Health in Gaza, has, as of the time of writing, killed 90 people and injured over 300 others. Half of them are women and children, the health ministry says.
Shaima Farwaneh, 16, was near the site of the massacre when it happened. She was preparing to make breakfast for her family when the bombs fell.
People and sand scattered everywhere, limbs that were once attached to bodies flying over their heads.
“A leg hit me, and I saw dismembered bodies a few meters away,” Shaima told Mondoweiss. “I saw a young child screaming. He lost his lower limbs and was crawling on his hands and screaming. The bombs didn’t stop, and suddenly the boy disappeared. I saw how he vanished before me while we ran and lowered our eyes to the ground, unable to do anything but run.”
Shaima describes hearing seven explosions in short succession before it was over. “What a life we live in these tents that we have to see the dismembered bodies of our siblings and families fly over our heads.”
When the ambulance and Civil Defense crews arrived near a well-known crowded market for residents of the area, their vehicles were targeted as well, according to the director of the Civil Defense in Khan Younis, Yamen Abu Suleiman. Two Civil Defense workers were killed in the strike.
Abu Suleiman said that the occupation targeted Al-Mawasi with a large barrage of missiles, which led to many casualties. “The occupation targeted the area more than once to prevent us from any rescue operation,” he tells Mondoweiss, denouncing the silence of the International Committee of the Red Cross over Israel’s prevention of rescue teams from doing their work.
Israel claims that the airstrikes were an attempt to assassinate Muhammad al-Deif, the head of the armed wing of Hamas, the al-Qassam Brigades, as well as the commander of al-Qassam’s Khan Younis District Brigade, Rafi Salama. The Gaza government media office denies the Israeli claims, emphasizing that they are nothing but a way of diverting the world’s attention from the reality of the massacre the Israeli army committed as part of the genocide of Gaza’s people.
According to local sources, over 80,000 displaced people currently reside in tents in that area.
‘No state does this’
Fawzia Sheikh Youssef, 82, was buried in the sand from the bombing but survived. She describes what she experienced during the massacre as something she had never seen in her entire life. She tells Mondoweiss that she was already displaced during the Nakba of 1948 when she was only 6 years old, coming to the Khan Younis area and staying with her family for two years in a tent. 76 years later, she found herself back where she started, but this time witnessing massacres the likes of which she had never seen even during the Nakba.
“There is no country in all the world that does this to children, women, and civilians,” she says. “This isn’t how wars are.”
Fawzia was eating her breakfast when the bomb ripped through her encampment, demolishing her tent and trapping her underneath it. She found herself covered in sand and trapped inside but was not critically injured. She began crawling on the ground and extricated herself from beneath the tent, eventually escaping to a place far away from the shrapnel and missiles, closer to the main road.
“I saw before my eyes one missile after another descending next to the tents. Missiles I have never seen in my life in all of Gaza’s wars. Isn’t this internationally forbidden? Shouldn’t the civilian population be protected and not face genocide and mass killing? Isn’t this forbidden?”
“They killed young people and old women. They do not respect humans. Aren’t we human?” she continues. “There is nothing to protect us from these missiles. The tents fell on our heads, and I was hit with two pieces of shrapnel in my leg. I may get poisoned, and I did not harm anyone.”
“These are not humanitarian actions,” Fawzia says. “A normal state would know that children have value, and women have value. Their lives are respected. Killing them is forbidden. There are wars. Some countries fight in the world, but not like this. Not like what happens with us.”
‘I left my son and fled from the horror of the bombing’
Samah al-Farra, a survivor of the massacre, says she fled from the horror of the missiles, leaving her son behind without knowing what she was doing. She describes what she saw after the incident as witnessing the horrors of the Day of Resurrection. The sound of the explosions, the panic of the people around her, the stampede in the attempt to escape, women leaving their tents without even wearing their clothes — Samah has to live with witnessing all these brutal scenes.
“People were running. There was sand in our eyes and fire over our heads. I left my son behind me and started running. I found the world turned upside down. The bodies of the martyrs were next to us, cut into pieces. It was a massacre. The fragments, sand, and bodies flew over our heads as we ran,” Samah describes.
She says that if this density of missiles had fallen on fortified buildings, it would have destroyed them. “But what about when they fall on tents whose owners are protected only by a piece of cloth?”
She describes the scene as a shower of missiles falling four times in a row, with more than one explosion occurring during each shower. “We saved ourselves. If we had stayed where we were, we would have been cut up and buried under the sand.”
Media reports have said that the bombs used in the al-Mawasi attack were JDAMs made in the U.S., which turn highly destructive unguided bombs into more precise missiles.
‘The entire area was overturned‘
Aziza Abu Tahir sits in front of the devastation after the bombing. Scattered bags of flour, gallons of water, vegetables, pillowcases, and utensils litter the area. She owns an oven and sits beside it every day. The women of the camp send their dough to her to bake for a small fee.
“When they dropped the bombs above our heads, all the people were running and screaming and saying that these were incendiary bombs, and this is the first time we have heard a sound like this,” Aziza tells Mondoweiss. “We ran away, and no one knew where to run. Some people went from one direction and were bombed, and some of them went from another direction and survived. But no one knew where they were going.”
As she speaks, a small child is hugging her, the son of her neighbor. Aziza says his mother takes care of orphans, and explains that when the attack started, his mother was bringing some dough for Aziza to bake in order to then resell to get an income for her family. “She was just here, and I baked what she wanted, and she went to sell it. As soon as she walked away, the bombing started. I don’t know where she is now, and I don’t know if she will return. The entire area she was walking in was overturned, and everything was buried.”
Hassan Suleih conducted interviews and provided photography for this report.
“I got a call from the Saudis — they want to fully recognize Israel,” Biden says in an interview on “360 with Speedy.”
Riyadh has not publicly gone this far, and its officials have reiterated that their country will not normalize relations with Israel unless Jerusalem agrees to establish a pathway to a future Palestinian state — a condition Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has flatly rejected.
Biden doesn’t mention the Palestinian condition, and instead asserts that what Saudi Arabia wants in exchange for normalizing relations with Israel is a guarantee that the US will provide them weapons “if they’re attacked by other Arab nations — one just around the corner.” He appears to be referring to Riyadh’s Mideast rival Iran, which is not an Arab country.
The US president says Washington would also establish a civilian nuclear facility in Saudi Arabia, which the US army would operate “so they can move away from fossil fuels.”
This appears to be the most detail any US official has publicly given regarding the terms of the defense guarantees sought by Saudi Arabia, particularly the nuclear component.
“That’s a big game changer in the whole region,” Biden says.
A Democratic lawmaker and a senior Republican Senate aide told The Times of Israel last week, though, that the window has closed for the Biden administration to broker a normalization deal before the November presidential election, because there is not enough time left for the Senate to hold the hearings necessary to approve the defense guarantees for Saudi Arabia.
nuclear-news 