As a secular Jew raised in a fiercely anti-Zionist family, I grew up viewing the State of Israel as an unfortunate fait accompli and accepting that the two-state solution was probably the best that could be hoped for.
Since then, I have come to the conclusion that the creation of a Jewish state was a catastrophic mistake and that Zionist Israel has relinquished its right to exist.
What good could possibly have come from a project that handed a group of Jewish Europeans a land that for countless centuries was inhabited by Arab Palestinians?
Not only did Palestinians have no say in the creation of a Jewish state on their homeland, but just at the time when other developing countries around the world were finally breaking free from the yoke of colonial rule Palestinians, like Native Americans and Australia’s First Nations people before them, became the victims of European settler colonialism — this time endorsed by a U.N. resolution that neither the Palestinians nor any of the Arab states agreed to or voted for.
The driving force behind both the 1917 Balfour Declaration that called for a Jewish homeland in the British Mandate of Palestine and the 1948 U.N. Partition Plan that established a Jewish State, was Zionism, a religious, political and cultural movement that began in the late 19th century to claim Palestine as the God-given homeland of the Jewish people.
Contrary to official mythology, however, the Zionist fervour was not shared by the majority of Jews.
The socialist Jewish Labour Bund in Eastern Europe, for instance, believed that Jewish culture should be preserved right at home in the shtetls (villages) as opposed to running off to Palestine and thought that the notion of Jews colonising Palestine was farcical. They even wrote a mocking Yiddish song for the Zionists – “Oy, Ir Narishe Tsionistn” (“You Foolish Little Zionist”).
Meanwhile Jews, Christians and Muslims had been living aside each other in historic Palestine in relative peace for centuries. It was only after the rapid influx of European Jewish refugees fleeing the pogroms in Eastern Europe following World War I, and in the wake of the Holocaust, that the conflicts in Palestine escalated and the bloodshed on both sides began.
By the time of the U.N. partition plan, Israeli Defence Force brigades had already launched a bloody campaign of burning villages and killing men, women and children to drive Palestinians off their land. In all, 750,000 Palestinians were expelled into refugee camps in neighbouring Arab countries.
This was the beginning of the Nakba (the catastrophe) that continues today – most strikingly in Gaza — as Zionist zealots insist Israel has a rightful claim to all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
In their view, all of Palestine belongs to Jews because in the words of Likud Party Knesset Member Danny Danon, the Bible is “our deed to the land.”
For Zionists like Danon, expelling Palestinians is an existential necessity, a view that echoed in 1956 by Moshe Dayan, military commander of the Jerusalem Front in 1948, who proclaimed:
“We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel helmet and the cannon we cannot plant a tree and build a home… This is the fate of our generation, and the choice of our life – to be prepared and armed, strong and tough – or otherwise, the sword will slip from our fist, and our life will be snuffed out.
What cause have we to complain about their fierce hatred to us? For eight years now, they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we turn into our homestead the land and villages in which they and their forefathers have lived.
Let us not be afraid to see the hatred that accompanies and consumes the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs who sit all around us and wait for the moment when their hands will be able to reach our blood.”
Next Uprising Would Dwarf Oct.7
As Dayan knew then, Israel would never be safe. In Gaza now, Israel is creating the next generation of Palestinian resistance fighters who have witnessed their families slaughtered, guaranteeing that the next uprising will dwarf the Hamas invasion of Oct. 7.
Whatever legitimacy Israel might have claimed as a haven for Jewish refugees who were abandoned in the West after the Holocaust, their right to a state of their own has long since been forfeited.
Both the 1917 Balfour Declaration that promised Jews a homeland in the British Mandate of Palestine and the 1948 U.N. partition plan creating the State of Israel stipulated that the rights of Palestinians had to be safeguarded and, following the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948, U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194 of that year specifically said the refugees’ had the right to return “at the earliest practicable date.”
On all counts, Israel has completely failed to live up to its obligations to protect the most basic rights of the Palestinian people.
Today, Palestinians living inside Israel remain second-class citizens without equal rights to own property or even use their own language. On the West Bank, Palestinians are dispossessed and murdered daily by Jewish settlers with the backing of the IDF.
In Gaza, even before Israel’s invasion following Oct. 7, Palestinians have lived under a brutal state of siege in an open air prison. The millions of Palestinians who were exiled into refugee camps in neighbouring Arab states are still denied the right to return.
Indeed, the Zionists have brought to Palestine the very scourge they fled in Europe — murdering, expelling and ethnically cleansing an entire population, mirroring the behaviour of their Nazi oppressors.
In the documentary film Tantura about the 1948 massacre of almost 300 Palestinians in the Palestinian village of Tantura, former Israeli soldiers, now in their 90s, retell the story of the slaughter unashamedly.
One brigade member laughs as he recalls, “Of course we killed them, without remorse… If you killed, you did a good thing.” An old woman says matter-of-factly, “Let them remember (what we did to them) like we remember what happened in Europe (the Holocaust). If they did it, we can also.”
Yet, despite the evidence of Israeli war crimes, Zionists have continued to deny Israel’s atrocities while claiming their own superiority. Professor emeritus at Haifa University, Ilan Pappe, says of the mindset:
“I think the self-image of Israel as a moral society is something I haven’t seen anywhere else in the world. We are the ‘Chosen People’ (in the Old Testament Jews were chosen by God as his special people). This is part of the Israeli self-identification…(But) basically, the project of Zionism has a problem… You cannot create a safe haven by creating a catastrophe for other people.”
Today, complicit Western leaders and their media proxies wring their hands about the regrettable loss of civilian lives in Gaza while hypocritically calling for a two-state solution they know is virtually impossible since Israel has reduced the amount of Palestinian land from 45 percent at the time of partition to 15 percent today.
Craig Mokhiber, who recently resigned as New York director for the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights over the U.N.’s failure to act on war crimes in Gaza, said in his resignation letter:
“The mantra of the ‘two-state solution’ has become an open joke in the corridors of the U.N., both for its utter impossibility in fact, and for its total failure to account for the inalienable human rights of the Palestinian people.”
Writing On Wall For Two-State Solution
After 75 years of Israel’s colonial oppression of the Palestinian people, it has become glaringly obvious that any notion of a two-state solution has become little more than a fig leaf for Israel’s apartheid regime and the only way forward is one secular democratic state that safeguards the fundamental rights and equality for all of its citizens.
Obviously, it won’t happen overnight or without conflict – Israel will aggressively defend its perceived right to exist as a Jewish state with the massive backing of the Western powers. Palestinians will never abandon their yearning for a homeland as it was before the arrival of European Jewish settlers — but the writing is on the wall.
Almost two decades ago the late Palestinian-American academic Edward Said wrote that:
“The beginning (of one democratic state) is to develop something entirely missing from both Israeli and Palestinian realities today: the idea and practice of citizenship, not of ethnic or racial community, as the main vehicle of coexistence.”
More recently, Palestinian academic and physician Ghada Karmi has cautioned:
“The U.N. that made Israel and must now unmake it, not by expulsion and displacement as in 1948, but by converting its bleak legacy into a future of hope for both peoples in one state.”
But if the U.N. fails to act, Karmi sees a more apocalyptic path to the end of the Zionist state. In her recent book One State: The Only Democratic Future for Palestine, she writes:
“Israel will fiercely reject the shared state, but will be powerless to prevent it from happening. … It will not happen solely as a result of a one-state campaign and solidarity movements. … but rather through people’s natural resistance to relentless oppression leading to the ultimate overthrow of the oppressors.”
If that can happen without cataclysmic global repercussions, possibly bringing the U.S. and Europe to the brink of the next world war, perhaps a new secular democratic state for both Jews and Palestinians will evolve from the struggle.
In any event, it is time to acknowledge that the Zionist project has been a spectacular failure and the status quo can no longer be maintained. Israel has become a pariah state in the eyes of most of the world and the winds of change are now howling across the region.
Stefan Moore is an American-Australian documentary filmmaker. His documentaries have received four Emmys and other awards. In the U.S., he was co-director of TVG Productions in New York, a series producer at WNET and a producer for the prime time CBS News magazine program 48 HOURS. In the U.K. he worked as a series producer at the BBC, and in Australia he was an executive producer for Film Australia and the ABC.
Federal employees from nearly two dozen US government agencies will walk off their jobs on Tuesday in protest of President Biden’s full-throated support for Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza, Al-Monitor reported on Friday.
Federal employees from nearly two dozen US government agencies will walk off their jobs on Tuesday in protest of President Biden’s full-throated support for Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza, Al-Monitor reported on Friday.
The Biden administration has faced significant internal dissent over the Israeli slaughter in Gaza, which has killed nearly 24,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children. Officials from across government agencies have signed letters protesting the US support for Israel, but a walkout will be the most dramatic step yet, besides the two resignations from administration officials.
Dozens of US officials are organizing the walkout as a group calling itself Feds United for Peace. They expect hundreds of other federal employees to join them on Tuesday.
Al-Monitor obtained a list of some of the agencies where employees are expected to participate in the protest, which includes the Executive Office of the President, the National Security Agency, the Departments of State, Defense, Homeland Security, and Veterans Affairs, and more.
In light of the Al-Monitor Report, House Republicans are calling for any employees who participate in the protest to be fired. “Any government worker who walks off the job to protest US support for our ally Israel is ignoring their responsibility and abusing the trust of taxpayers,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), according to Axios. “They deserve to be fired.”
President Biden is also facing dissent from within his re-election campaign as his backing of Israel’s mass killing of Palestinians is hurting his chances of winning another term. Seventeen Biden campaign staffers said in a letter protesting his support for Israel that they’ve seen “volunteers quit in droves, and people who have voted blue for decades feel uncertain about doing so for the first time ever, because of this conflict.”
Two Canadian nuclear refurbishment projects are in the top five of the largest public sector infrastructure projects currently under development in Canada, according to a newly published annual ranking. The annual Top100 Projects report, published by ReNew Canada magazine, features the 100 largest public sector infrastructure projects currently under development in the country ranked based on their confirmed project cost. Bruce Power’s refurbishment project is in third place with a project cost of CAD13 billion (USD9.7 billion), with Ontario Power Generation’s Darlington nuclear refurbishment in fourth place, at a cost of CAD12.8 billion.
BANNG’s coordinator, Peter Banks, identifies the radioactive residues that lurk beneath the shiny cladding of the former Bradwell nuclear power station in the December 2023 column for Regional Life.
The discoveries of extensive radioactive contamination around the site has triggered the imperative to keep potential intruders at bay, out of all the shiny buildings, including the radioactive waste store, and the contaminated underground labyrinth of tunnels and ducts. How ludicrous would it be to introduce a new power station next door and go through the whole cycle again?
On the Road(map) to Nowhere! Despite the Government’s recent re-announcement of a massive expansion of civil nuclear power, the Blackwater Against New Nuclear Group (BANNG) believes new nuclear at Bradwell remains dead in the water.
In future new nuclear power stations will only be sited in ‘suitable locations’ identified by developers based on a set of criteria. The Government also welcomes ‘responses from any communities that think they may benefit from the social and economic opportunities that new nuclear power can deliver’.
Professor Andy Blowers, the Chair of BANNG, commented, ‘This new approach to siting effectively rules Bradwell out of any further consideration. As we have strenuously demonstrated over the last fifteen years Bradwell is a most unsuitable site and the Blackwater communities are overwhelmingly opposed to nuclear development in such a fragile location, increasingly vulnerable to the impacts of Climate Change’.
Slovakia’s Robert Fico has slammed “stupid liberal demagogues” who still support military aid to Kiev
Funding and arming Ukraine is a “futile waste of human resources and money” that will serve only to fill Ukrainian cemeteries with “thousands of dead soldiers,” Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico wrote in an op-ed on Tuesday. Fico’s article was a rebuttal to his country’s president, who has urged him to send weapons to Kiev.
Following his party’s electoral victory in September, Fico immediately cut off Slovakia’s military aid to Ukraine and vowed to block Kiev’s accession to NATO. Slovak President Zuzana Caputova, however, has called for Ukraine to be given “the means needed to defend itself,” while pro-Western pundits in Slovakia have accused Fico of cozying up to the Kremlin.
…..
Despite pumping Ukraine with tens of billions of dollars’ worth of weapons and sanctioning Moscow’s economy, “Russia completely controls the occupied territories militarily, Ukraine is not capable of any meaningful military counter-offensive, [and] it has become completely dependent on financial aid from the West with unforeseeable consequences for Ukrainians in the years to come,” he explained.
“The position of the Ukrainian president is shaken, while the Russian president increases and strengthens his political support,” Fico continued, pointing out that “neither the Russian economy nor the Russian currency collapsed, [and] anti-Russian sanctions have increased the internal self-sufficiency of this huge country.”
Should the West continue along the path desired by Caputova, “in two or three years we will still be where we are now,” Fico predicted. “The EU alone will be perhaps 50 billion euros lighter, and in Ukraine, cemeteries will be full with thousands more dead soldiers.”
Fico’s Slovak Social Democracy (SMER-SD) faction currently leads a three-party coalition government, while Caputova is the co-founder of the Progressive Slovakia party. Caputova’s role as president is largely ceremonial, and Fico claimed in his op-ed that she is “impatiently waiting” for the end of her term this year so that she can re-enter parliamentary politics…….. https://www.rt.com/news/590409-west-ukraine-wrong-fico/
Construction to start on Sizewell C nuclear power station amid opposition. Construction on the multi-million pound Sizewell C nuclear power station will start despite local opposition to the plans. The government has signed a development consent order, meaning that preparation work on the £700 million site such as building fencing and accommodation can start. Andrew Bowie MP, Minister for Nuclear and Renewables, will visit the site in Suffolk today where he is expected to be met with peaceful protests which have been organised by local campaign groups who are opposed to the project. The final stage of the project, the Final Investment Decision, will be announced later this year.
Sizewell C campaigners hold peaceful demonstration as government minister Andrew Bowie visits. Two campaign groups opposed to the building of a nuclear power plant near the Suffolk coast are to hold a peaceful protest this morning. Stop Sizewell C and Together Against Sizewell C will be demonstrating at the site entrance from 8.45am to 9.30am. Energy minister Andrew Bowie is visiting to prompt a Development Consent Order (DCO) which campaigners say will take the project to the next step.
NEW concerns have been raised about the safety of Britain’s nuclear fleet – with two submarines still in action previously predicted to have been out of commission by this year. Former top government adviser Dominic Cummings (below) sparked interest in the state of Britain’s nuclear fleet at the beginning of this month when he revealed he had attempted to secure assurances the Government would address the “horror show” of the arsenal in return for his help in Rishi Sunak’s election campaign.
Comment. As the UK fumbles its way through its “Civil Nuclear Roadmap” folly, the Rolls Royce lobby paints Hinkley and Sizewell projects as obsolete trash, and touts Rolls Royce’s non existent small reactors as Britain’s energy salvation .
Jeremy Warner: Outsourcing Britain’s nuclear renewal is insanity. Rolls-Royce’s modular reactors are an obvious way to break free of EDF’s grip.
Here we go again. Einstein’s definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing and expecting different outcomes. You would think that the Government had learned its lesson on nuclear renewal after the debacle of Hinkley Point C. Clearly not.
Having already made the same mistake once, by pledging a replica of the ruinously costly Hinkley at Sizewell on the Suffolk coast, ministers are doubling down and promising a third such monstrosity somewhere else.
According to the Government’s “Nuclear Roadmap”, published last week, another of these leviathans in an as yet unspecified location is to be given the go-ahead later this year. On the most recent estimates, Hinkley Point C is expected to cost at least 80pc more than its original budget and is years behind schedule. Some fear that it won’t be until the early 2030s before the reactors are fully operational, such have been the technical and safety complications encountered in the construction phase.
Ministers have also had to agree to punishingly expensive output prices to persuade the main developer, France’s state-controlled EDF, to build in the first place, committing consumers to high electricity costs for decades to come. So much for the promise once made by the ever courteous Vincent de Rivaz, the one-time boss of EDF in Britain, that Hinkley Point would be cooking our Christmas lunches by 2017.
Even allowing for the learning process – theoretically, later projects to the same design should cost less, with past mistakes taken on board – it beggars belief that the Government should attempt to repeat such a tried and demonstrably poor value for money technology.
Given the experience of Hinkley Point C, why are we still pursuing the hugely costly, largely obsolete technology of EDF’s gigawatt stations when there are perfectly viable, but smaller, homegrown alternatives just waiting for the opportunity to fill the gap? If we are to spend £28bn a year of taxpayers’ money on going green, as promised by Labour, we should at least be confident that a large part of the wider economic benefit is reserved for UK supply chains, and is not instead squandered on supporting jobs abroad in France, China, Denmark and the US.
“The defense of nuclear power as a low-carbon energy weakens the European Union’s action against climate change”.
The Renewable Energies for All association denounces, in a column in “Le Monde”, the deleterious effects of the inclusion of nuclear power in the French and European objectives for the deployment of renewable solutions.
Seeking to relaunch nuclear power whatever the cost, France is not only missing a historic opportunity for a rapid and less costly transition to renewable energies and decarbonization.
It weakens the climate ambition of theEuropean Union (EU). The reintegration of current nuclear production in Europe – 6% of its final energy – into the objective of 42.5% renewable energies set by the RED III directive [Renewable Energy Directive III] would create an accounting artifice and lead to vagueness strategic in a field which nevertheless needs a long-term vision.
What US foreign policy shamelessly amounts to is this: ‘We make the rules so we get to break the rules.”
Have you heard the one about the U.S. government wanting a “rules-based international order”?
It’s grimly laughable, but the nation’s media outlets routinely take such claims seriously and credulously. Overall, the default assumption is that top officials in Washington are reluctant to go to war, and do so only as a last resort.
The framing was typical when the New York Times just printed this sentence at the top of the front page: “The United States and a handful of its allies on Thursday carried out military strikes against more than a dozen targets in Yemen controlled by the Iranian-backed Houthi militia, U.S. officials said, in an expansion of the war in the Middle East that the Biden administration had sought to avoid for three months.”
So, from the outset, the coverage portrayed the U.S.-led attack as a reluctant action—taken after exploring all peaceful options had failed—rather than an aggressive act in violation of international law.
On Thursday, President Biden issued a statement that sounded righteous enough, saying “these strikes are in direct response to unprecedented Houthi attacks against international maritime vessels in the Red Sea.” He did not mention that the Houthi attacks have been in response to Israel’s murderous siege of Gaza. In the words of CNN, they “could be intended to inflict economic pain on Israel’s allies in the hope they will pressure it to cease its bombardment of the enclave.”
In fact, as Common Dreams reported, Houthi forces “began launching missiles and drones toward Israel and attacking shipping traffic in the Red Sea in response to Israel’s Gaza onslaught.” And as Trita Parsi at the Quincy Institute pointed out, “the Houthis have declared that they will stop” attacking ships in the Red Sea “if Israel stops” its mass killing in Gaza.
But that would require genuine diplomacy—not the kind of solution that appeals to President Biden or Secretary of State Antony Blinken. The duo has been enmeshed for decades, with lofty rhetoric masking the tacit precept that might makes right. (The approach was implicit midway through 2002, when then-Senator Biden chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s hearings that promoted support for the U.S. to invade Iraq; at the time, Blinken was the committee’s chief of staff.)
Now, in charge of the State Department, Blinken is fond of touting the need for a “rules-based international order.” During a 2022 speech in Washington, he proclaimed the necessity “to manage relations between states, to prevent conflict, to uphold the rights of all people.” Two months ago, he declared that G7 nations were united for “a rules-based international order.”
But for more than three months, Blinken has provided a continuous stream of facile rhetoric to support the ongoing methodical killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Days ago, behind a podium at the U.S. Embassy in Israel, he defended that country despite abundant evidence of genocidal warfare, claiming that “the charge of genocide is meritless.
The Houthis are avowedly in solidarity with Palestinian people, while the U.S. government continues to massively arm the Israeli military that is massacring civilians and systematically destroying Gaza. Blinken is so immersed in Orwellian messaging that—several weeks into the slaughter—he tweeted that the United States and its G7 partners “stand united in our condemnation of Russia’s war in Ukraine, in support of Israel’s right to defend itself in accordance with international law, and in maintaining a rules-based international order.”
There’s nothing unusual about extreme doublethink being foisted on the public by the people running U.S. foreign policy. What they perpetrate is a good fit for the description of doublethink in George Orwell’s novel 1984: “To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it . . .”
After news broke about the attack on Yemen, a number of Democrats and Republicans in the House quickly spoke up against Biden’s end-run around Congress, flagrantly violating the Constitution by going to war on his own say-so. Some of the comments were laudably clear, but perhaps none more so than a statement by candidate Joe Biden on Jan. 6, 2020: “A president should never take this nation to war without the informed consent of the American people.”
Like that disposable platitude, all the Orwellian nonsense coming from the top of the U.S. government about seeking a “rules-based international order” is nothing more than a brazen PR scam.
The vast quantity of official smoke-blowing now underway cannot hide the reality that the United States government is the most powerful and dangerous outlaw nation in the world.
In the UK, the BBC and Sky both ran almost all the Israeli case live, having not run any of the South African case live. I believe something similar was true in the USA, Australia and Germany too.
a hardline and uncompromising start. The judges appeared to be paying very close attention when he opened with the 7 October self-defence argument, but very definitely some of them become started to fidget and become uncomfortable when he started to talk of Hamas operating from ambulances and UN facilities. In short, he went too far and I believe he lost his audience at that point.
Malcolm Shaw speaks for Israel because he actually wants Israel to be able to continue killing Palestinian women and children to improve the security of Israel, in his view.
As with the South African case, according to court procedure the Israeli case was introduced by their “agent”, permanently accredited to the court, Tal Becker of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He opened with the standard formula “it is an honour to appear before you again on behalf of the state of Israel”, managing to imply purely through phrasing and tone of voice that the honour lay in representing Israel, not in appearing before the judges.
Becker opened by going straight to the Holocaust, saying that nobody knew more than Israel why the Genocide Convention existed. 6 million Jewish people had been killed. The Convention was not to be used to cover the normal brutality of war.
The South African case aimed at the delegitimisation of the state of Israel. On 7 October Hamas had committed massacre, mutilation, rape and abduction. 1,200 had been killed and 5,500 maimed. He related several hideous individual atrocity stories and played a recording he stated to be a Hamas fighter boasting on WhatsApp to his parents about committing mass murder, rape and mutilation.
The only genocide in this case was being committed against Israel. Hamas continued to attack Israel, and for the court to take provisional measures would be to deny Israel the right to self-defence. Provisional measures should rather be taken against South Africa and its attempt by legal means to further genocide by its relationship with Hamas. Gaza was not under occupation: Israel had left it with great potential to be a political and economic success. Instead Hamas had chosen to make it a terrorist base.
Hamas was embedded in the civilian population and therefore responsible for the civilian deaths. Hamas had tunnels under schools, hospitals, mosques and UN facilities and tunnel entrances within them. It commandeered medical vehicles for military use.
South Africa had talked of civilian buildings destroyed, but did not tell you they had been destroyed by Hamas booby traps and Hamas missile misfires.
The casualty figures South Africa gave were from Hamas sources and not reliable. They did not say how many were fighters? How many of the children were child soldiers? The application by South Africa was ill-founded and ill-motivated. It was a libel.
This certainly was a hardline and uncompromising start. The judges appeared to be paying very close attention when he opened with the 7 October self-defence argument, but very definitely some of them become started to fidget and become uncomfortable when he started to talk of Hamas operating from ambulances and UN facilities. In short, he went too far and I believe he lost his audience at that point.
Next up was Professor Malcolm Shaw KC. Shaw is regarded as an authority on the procedure of international law and is editor of the standard tome on the subject. This is an interesting facet of the legal profession, where standard reference books on particular topics are regularly updated to include key extracts from recent judges, and passages added or amended to explain the impact of these judgments. Being an editor on this field provides a route to prominence for the plodding and pedantic.
I had come across Shaw in his capacity as a co-founder of the Centre for Human Rights at Essex University. I had given a couple of talks there some twenty years ago on the attacks on human rights of the “War on Terror” and my own whistleblower experience over torture and extraordinary rendition. For an alleged human rights expert, Shaw seemed extraordinarily prone to support the national security interests of the state over individual liberty.
I do not pretend I gave it a great deal of thought. I did not know at that time of Shaw’s commitment as an extreme Zionist and in particular his long term interest in suppressing the rights of the Palestinian people. After 139 states have recognised Palestine as a state, Shaw led for Israel thelegal oppositionto Palestine’s membership of international institutions, including the International Criminal Court. Shaw’s rather uninspired reliance on the Montevideo Convention of 1933 is hardly a legal tour de force, and it didn’t work.
Every criminal deserves a defence, and nobody should hold it against a barrister that they defend a murderer or rapist, as it is important that guilt or innocence is tested by a court. But I think it is fair to state that defence lawyers do not in general defend those accused of murder because they agree with murder and want a murderer to go on murdering. That however is the case here: Malcolm Shaw speaks for Israel because he actually wants Israel to be able to continue killing Palestinian women and children to improve the security of Israel, in his view.
That is the difference between this and other cases, including at the ICJ. Generally the lead lawyers would happily swap sides, if the other side had hired them first. But this is entirely different. Here the lawyers (with the possible exception of ) believe profoundly in the case they are supporting and would never appear for the other side. That is just one more way that this is such an extraordinary case, with so much drama and such vital consequences, not least for the future of international law.
For the reason I have just explained, Shaw’s role here is not that of a simple barrister plying his trade. His attempt to extend the killing should see him viewed as a pariah by decent people everywhere, for the rest of his doubtless highly-paid existence.
Shaw opened up by saying that the South African case continually spoke of context. They talked of the 75 years of the existence of the state of Israel. Why stop there? Why not go back to the Balfour Declaration or the British Mandate over Palestine? No, the context of these events was the massacre of 7 October, and Israel’s subsequent right of self-defence. He produced and read a long quote from mid-October by European Commission President Ursula von Der Leyen, stating that Israel had suffered a terrorist atrocity and had the right of self-defence.
……………………………………………………………. It was South Africa which was guilty of complicity in genocide in cooperation with Hamas. South Africa’s allegations against Israel “verge on the outrageous”.
Israel’s next lawyer was a lady called Galit Raguan from the Israeli Ministry of Justice. She said the reality on the ground was that Israel had done everything possible to minimise civilian deaths and to aid humanitarian relief. Urban warfare always resulted in civilian deaths. It was Hamas who were responsible for destruction of buildings and infrastructure…………………………….
Next up was lawyer Omri Sender. He stated that more food trucks per day now entered Gaza than before October 7. The number had increased from 70 food trucks to 109 food trucks per day. Fuel, gas and electricity were all being supplied and Israel had repaired the sewage systems………………………
Perhaps noting that nobody believed him, Sender stated that the court could not institute provisional measures but rather was obliged to accept the word of Israel on its good intentions because of the Law of the Unilateral Declarations of States……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
It is important to realise this. Israel is hoping to win on their procedural points about existence of dispute, unilateral assurances and jurisdiction. The obvious nonsense they spoke about the damage to homes and infrastructure being caused by Hamas, trucks entering Gaza and casualty figures, was not serious. They did not expect the judges to believe any of this. The procedural points were for the court. The rest was mass propaganda for the media.
In the UK, the BBC and Sky both ran almost all the Israeli case live, having not run any of the South African case live. I believe something similar was true in the USA, Australia and Germany too.
While the court was in session, Germany has announced it will intervene in the substantial case to support Israel. They argue explicitly that, as the world’s greatest perpetrator of genocide, they are uniquely placed to judge. It is in effect a copyright claim. They are protecting Germany’s intellectual property in the art of genocide. Perhaps they might in future license genocide, or allow Israel to continue genocide on a franchise basis.
I am sure the judges want to get out of this and they may go for the procedural points. But there is a real problem with Israel’s “no dispute” argument. If accepted, it would mean that a country committing genocide can simply not reply to a challenge, and then legal action will not be possible because no reply means “no dispute”. I hope that absurdity is obvious to the judges. But they may of course wish not to notice it…
What do I think will happen? Some sort of “compromise”. The judges will issue provisional measures different to South Africa’s request, asking Israel to continue to take measures to protect the civilian population, or some such guff. Doubtless the State Department have drafted something like this for President of the Court [Joan] Donoghue already.
“The President of the Court, Joan Donoghue, is a US State Department, Clinton hack who has never formed an original idea in her life, and I should be astonished if she starts now. I half-expected her strings to actually be visible, emerging from holes in the hall’s magnificent deep relief-panelled wooden ceiling.”
I hope I am wrong. I would hate to give up on international law. One thing I do know for certain. These two days in the Hague were absolutely crucial for deciding if there is any meaning left in notions of international law and human rights. I still believe action by the court could cause the US and UK to back off and provide some measure of relief. For now, let us all pray or wish, each in our way, for the children of Gaza.
Comment: Mr Murray also detailed the immense efforts he went to in order to report on these proceedings:
There was a very good feel at the end of the South African presentation on day one. Everyone felt it had gone extremely well, and left very little room for the court to wriggle away from provisional measures. We left the public gallery, and I went with [Jeremy] Corbyn and [Jean Luc] Mèlenchon to meet the South African delegation. This caused some concern to the security officials, who told us that members of the public had to leave immediately and not meet delegates or speak to the media, who were grouped outside the court but still within the precincts.
The Government has announced that the timetable for investing in the new Sizewell C nuclear power station in Suffolk will be revealed before a general election. However, the campaign group Stop Sizewell C, which is opposed to the project, said there was still much that was unknown about whether the project could go ahead, including how the £20bn would be raised to pay for the station.
A Stop Sizewell C spokesperson said: “From our extensive discussions with officials it is clear that a Sizewell C Final Investment Decision (FID) is still some months away and the time before the next election is running out, for Rishi Sunak hasn’t ruled out a May poll.
A TINY English village could be top of Putin’s nuclear hitlist, locals fear. Brize Norton is only a stone’s throw away from the largest station in the Royal Air Force.
Huge convoys of blacked-out lorries, police riot vans, ambulances and other trucks regularly rumble through, clogging up the village’s narrow main road. Locals claim they’ve had guns pointed at them by cops, and even been forced to pull over to make room for the fleet of “deadly cargo”.
One video shows parents and kids on the school run having to stand aside as a convoy with blue flashing lights thunders through, shaking the walls of surrounding buildings and towering over homes just metres away. The cargo, widely believed to contain “nuclear material”, is a key part of Britain’s Trident weapons programme.
Health workers are at grave risk while trying to provide care to the tens of thousands who are injured due to Israel’s brutal attacks. Both they and aid agencies are also faced with extremely tough choices on how to distribute the scarce medical supplies that are remaining.
Triage is the term that most accurately summarizes what is happening to health services in Gaza. Every hour, health workers have to determine who among the dozens of patients lying on the hospital floors should be treated first. Doctors and nurses also have to decide who gets paracetamol or ibuprofen for procedures that would usually be performed while patients are under anesthesia, and who goes without even that.
There is also a third form of triage going on in the proximity of Gaza these days, and that one falls upon the people trying to get supplies into the Strip. Despite reassurances that they would allow aid to be distributed more easily, Israeli authorities are still obstructing deliveries. Knowing that only a fraction of what is needed will eventually be allowed in, international and humanitarian organizations are choosing—very, very carefully—what they will load on to their trucks.
It’s a difficult choice, explained Michael Ryan, Executive Director of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Health Emergencies Program, during the organization’s beginning-of-the-year press conference. “Do you replace a truck of food with a truck of lab supplies? Which truck has more priority?“
There is no good answer to Ryan’s question. Almost everyone in Gaza is facing food insecurity. All children below the age of 5—335,000 of them—are hungry and facing a lifetime of struggle with the consequences of stunting. Due to the food shortage, more than half of pregnant and breastfeeding women only have access to limited types of food, which impacts theirs and children’s health, according to a testimony by Rohan Talbot from Medical Aid for Palestinians, heard by the International Development Committee of the British Parliament.
On the other hand, the lack of medical supplies, combined with relentless bombardments, has brought about the total collapse of the public health system in Gaza. For decades, the Central Public Health Laboratory in Gaza ensured high-quality public health services. Located north of the Wadi Gaza line, the laboratory is no longer functional. The lack of laboratory capacities means that it is only possible to evaluate the spread of infectious diseases from what is obvious at first glance. There is no way to confirm what are the specific causes leading to e.g. respiratory problems
“We don’t have the means to verify why specific communicable diseases are appearing. We don’t have a way to see what particular pathogen is causing them,” said Teresa Zakaria from WHO’s Health Emergency Program. Because of that, it is impossible to know which measures should be put in place to mitigate the increase in morbidity.
Even if the WHO were able to pinpoint which measures are needed right now, it is extremely unlikely they would be permitted to implement them. Like all other organizations trying to maintain a lifeline to Gaza, the UN’s health agency is not really allowed in. “We have the supplies, the teams, and the plans in place. What we don’t have is access,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
The WHO had planned 7 missions into Gaza since December 26, but was forced to cancel all of them as Israel failed to provide security guarantees. It’s not just the WHO’s experience. Of the 21 missions that various UN bodies had planned in January 2024 alone, 16 were canceled because of the lack of cooperation by the Israeli occupation, reported Richard Peeperkorn, head of the WHO’s office for the occupied Palestinian territories.
Meanwhile, the Israeli army continues to target hospitals and other medical infrastructure in Gaza. Four members of the Palestine Red Crescent Society staff were killed on January 10 when Israeli Occupying Forces (IOF) hit their vehicle. Days before, the 5-year-old daughter of a staff member of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) died from the consequences of an IOF attack on the shelter where MSF workers and their families were seeking refuge.
Those who are still alive share the faith of their patients. Ghada Al Jadba, UNRWA health officer, stressed to the UK International Development Committee that health workers are themselves displaced, having no safe space to sleep or water to drink. Tents, said Al Jadba, are a luxury. She also said that people were increasingly feeling dehumanized and alienated as a result of Israel’s attacks and, presumably, the unwillingness of the international community to act to stop the genocide immediately.
For those on the ground, safeguarding the remnants of the health system in Gaza is looking more and more like “mission impossible,” as Al Jadba put it.
