Biden is a willing scene partner in a barely disguised performance: pretending to be up in arms about Israel’s genocidal conduct while doing everything he can to support it.
While the White House claims to be “frustrated” with Israel’s conduct in Gaza, US support for the carnage continues.
On October 15th, President Biden took umbrage at a suggestion that his administration could not back both the Ukraine proxy war and Israel’s assault on Gaza at the same time.
“We’re the United States of America for God’s sake, the most powerful nation… in the history of the world,” Biden told CBS News. “We can take care of both of these and still maintain our overall international defense.”
Three months and well over 20,000 defenseless Palestinians slain later, the self-declared leader of the most powerful nation in the history of world now claims to be a helpless bystander.
According to four US officials, Biden is “increasingly frustrated” and “losing his patience” with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has rejected “most of the administration’s recent requests related to the war in Gaza,” Axios reports. “The situation sucks and we are stuck,” one official complained. “The president’s patience is running out.” Another official fumes that “there is immense frustration” in the Oval Office. According to Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen: “At every juncture, Netanyahu has given Biden the finger. They are pleading with the Netanyahu coalition, but getting slapped in the face over and over again.”
Van Hollen is correct that the administration is getting slapped in the face by Israel. But he omits that Biden is a willing scene partner in a barely disguised performance: pretending to be up in arms about Israel’s genocidal conduct while doing everything he can to support it.
As Likud parliamentarian Danny Danon explained last month, any US demand of Israel’s military is perfunctory. “They didn’t agree to a ground invasion — we invaded,” Danon said. “They didn’t agree to [attacking] Al-Shifa hospital — we ignored their request. They wanted a pause without hostages — we didn’t accept that. We have no American ultimatum. There is no deadline from the US.”
The US not only imposes no conditions on its support for Israel’s mass murder campaign in Gaza, but has twice bypassed Congress to expedite weapons for it. After all, this administration professes to have “no red lines” when it comes to Israeli aggression, and is fronted by a president who has declared that there is “no possibility” of a ceasefire.
While Biden and his aides now pretend to have their hands tied, their instrumental role is undeniable. “Biden is president of the United States, still the most powerful country in the world by almost every measure and a country without whose support Israel has no future,” former US diplomat Patrick Theros writes. “A firm public demand to cease and desist immediately would have enormous domestic political repercussions in Israel — far less in the United States. Biden would not have to publicly threaten to cut off weapons deliveries; a few words delivered in private to Netanyahu and a few members of his war cabinet would probably suffice.”
“If you want to use your leverage, use your leverage,” former Israeli negotiator Daniel Levy says of Biden’s stance. “You’ve chosen to give Israel a blank check.”
That choice continues. In meetings with Israeli officials on Nov. 30th, Secretary of State Antony Blinken informed his counterparts that they had “weeks, not months” to “wrap up combat operations at the current level of intensity,” US officials later told the New York Times. Upon a return visit to Israel this week, Blinken again touted his push for what he called “the phased transition of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.” That “transition” to a “lower-intensity phase,” White House spokesperson John Kirby said on Sunday, “is coming here very, very soon.”
But away from the news cameras, the posture changes. A senior US official now explains to the Washington Post that it’s in fact “pointless to urge them [the Israelis] to change.” Accordingly, “Washington’s priority has now shifted to tolerating Israel’s high-intensity operation throughout January, while insisting instead that it downgrade the tempo in February.”
In other words, the US has decided to tolerate Israel’s genocidal tempo in Gaza as normal. From Washington’s point of view, saving thousands of Palestinian lives from murder at the hands of US-supplied weaponry would be pointless.
Biden is so committed to continuing the Gaza slaughter that he has even expanded the war zone to Yemen. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
byJov Onsat, Rigzone Staff, Monday, January 15, 2024
The United States Department of Energy (DOE) is offering contracts worth up to $500 million in total for the production of a uranium fuel for smaller nuclear reactors, as it announced a breakthrough in an enrichment project
The request for proposals is for the enrichment of high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU). Currently this fuel is produced only in Russia and the US but only the former makes it at a commercial scale, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The United Kingdom government earlier this month announced funding to enable domestic HALEU production.
“Currently, HALEU is not commercially available from U.S.-based suppliers, and boosting domestic supply could spur the development and deployment of advanced reactors in the United States”, the DOE noted in a press release announcing the funding offer……………………………………………………
Each contractor is assured of a minimum order value of $2 million. They must conduct enrichment and storage activities in the continental US and comply with the National Environmental Policy Act, the DOE said. Proposals are until March 8.
Australian Independent Media, January 16, 2024, by: Dr Binoy Kampmark
There is something distinctly revolting and authoritarian about the royal prerogative. It reeks of clandestine assumption, unwarranted self-confidence and, most of all, a blithe indifference to accountability before elected representatives. That prerogative, in other words, is the last reminder of divine right, the fiction that a ruler can have powers vested by an unsubstantiated deity, the invisible God, and a punishing force beyond the reach of human control. It is anathema to democracy, a stain on republican models of government, a joke on any political system that has some claim on representing what might be called the broader citizenry.
On January 11, the UK government, in league with the United States with support from a number of other countries, attacked Houthi positions in Yemen. The decision had been made without recourse to Parliament and justifiedby Article 51 of the UN Charter as “limited, necessary and proportionate in self-defence.”
In his statementon the attacks, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak pointed to the Houthi’s role in staging “a series of dangerous and destabilising attacks against commercial shipping in the Red Sea, threatening UK and other international ships, causing major disruption to a vital trade route and driving up commodity prices.” He made no mention of the Houthis’ own justification for the attacks as necessary measures to disrupt Israeli shipping and interests in response to their systematic, bloodcurdling razing of Gaza.
Lip service has been paid by the executive within the Westminster system to Parliament’s importance in deciding whether the country commits to military action or not. The stark problem is that the action is always decided upon in advance, and no dissent among parliamentarians will necessarily sway the issue. Motions can be proposed and rejected but remain non-binding on the executive emboldened by the prerogative………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
The Yemen strikes eschew humanitarianism (the humanitarian justifications advanced by the Houthis in protecting Palestinian civilians has been rejected), but shipping interests. The Armed forces minister, James Heappey,was satisfied that an exception to the convention in consulting Parliament had presented itself. “The Prime Minister,” the minister parroted, “needs to make decisions such as these based on the military, strategic and operational requirements – that led to the timing.”
With the horse having bolted merrily out of the stable, Heappey remarked with all due condescension that Parliament would, in time, be able to respond to the decision to strike Yemen. An “opportunity” would be made available “when Parliament returns for these things to be fully discussed and debated.” The sheer redundancy of its role could thereby be affirmed.
Much agitated by this state of affairs, former shadow Chancellor John McDonnell opinedthat no military action should take place without Parliament’s approval. “If we have learnt anything in recent years it’s that military intervention in the Middle East always has dangerous & often unforeseen consequences. There is a risk of setting the region alight.”
Liberal Democrat Foreign Affairs spokesperson Layla Moran was of the view that Parliament should not be bypassed in matters of war, yet optingfor the rather fatuous formula arising out of the 2011 convention. “Rushi Sunak must announce a retrospective vote in the House of Commons on these strikes, and recall Parliament this weekend.”
The use of the royal prerogative in using military force remains one of those British perversions that makes for good common room conversation but offends the sensibilities of the democratically minded elector. A far better practice would be to make the PM of the day accountable to that most essential body of all: Parliament. That same principle would be extended to other constitutional monarchies, which are similarly weighed down by the all too liberal use of the prerogative when shedding blood. If a country’s citizens are to go to war to kill and be killed, surely their elected representatives should have a say in that most vital of decisions? https://theaimn.com/bypassing-parliament-westminster-the-royal-prerogative-and-bombing-yemen/
Walt Zlotow, West Suburban Peace Coalition, Glen Ellyn IL 15 Jan 24
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the US Saturday that his 100 day war of genocidal ethnic cleansing of 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza has got ‘MADE IN USA’ stamped all over it.
“This is not just our war – it is also your war. This is the war of the sons of light against the sons of darkness. This is a war against the axis of evil led by Iran and its three proxies: Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis.”
Apparently, Netanyahu wants Joe to join him in the dock of potential genocidal ethnic cleansing charges currently being litigated at the International court of Justice.
“No one will stop us, not The Hague, not the axis of evil, and not anyone else,”Netanyahu boasted, knowing that the one man who can stop him, Joe Biden, is all in with billions in weapons to bomb virtually the entire Gaza population from their homes. In addition, Joe publicly supports the ongoing genocide, and gives Netanyahu veto proof protection in the UN Security Council.
After a 52 year political career supporting every senseless US war to the hilt, Biden is fading into oblivion a genocide denier, a genocide enabler. His overextended stay on the public stage is ending with the worst single criminal conduct toward humanity in US history. The best war crimes defense lawyers would be hard pressed to save him from conviction at The Hague should he end up there. But no one can save his soul from the harsh verdict of history.
São Tomé and Príncipe has become the first new state party to the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) in 2024. At UN Headquarters in New York on 15 January, the Minister of Justice of São Tomé and Príncipe, H.E. IIza Amado Vaz, deposited the instrument of ratification for this landmark treaty on behalf of the government, bringing the total number of states parties to 70.
The National Assembly of São Tomé and Príncipe unanimously approved ratification of the TPNW on 16 November 2023.
São Tomé and Príncipe’s ratification comes shortly after states parties to the TPNW renewed a “call for all States that have not yet done so to sign and ratify or accede to the Treaty without delay”, and reiterated their commitment to pursue universalisation of the Treaty as a priority, in a declaration issued at the second meeting of states parties of the treaty in New York in December 2023.
ICAN’s Executive Director, Melissa Parke, welcomed the move: “It’s great news that Sao Tome and Principe has ratified the Treaty which means it now has 70 states parties. As more and more countries join the TPNW they strengthen the new international norm it has created that makes nuclear weapons unacceptable. These are the responsible states in the international community, and we look forward to more ratifications and signatures in the year ahead.”
A total of 93 countries have signed the TPNW and 70 have ratified or acceded to it. In Africa, there are now 16 states parties and a further 17 signatories. The TPNW complements and reinforces the 1996 Treaty of Pelindaba, which established Africa as a nuclear-weapon-free zone. The states parties to the Treaty of Pelindaba have called upon all African Union member states “to speedily sign and ratify the [TPNW]”.
In January 2023, São Tomé and Príncipe was among the 37 African states that met in Pretoria, South Africa, for the African Regional Seminar on the Universalisation of the TPNW to promote adherence to the treaty by every African state as soon as possible.
Support for the TPNW
São Tomé and Príncipe was among the first countries to sign the TPNW at a high-level ceremony in New York when it opened for signature on 20 September 2017. Since then, it has promoted universal adherence to the TPNW, including by consistently voting in favour of an annual UN General Assembly resolution since 2018 that calls upon all states to sign and ratify the treaty “at the earliest possible date”.
São Tomé and Príncipe participated in the negotiation of the TPNW at the United Nations in New York in 2017 and was among 122 states that voted in favour of its adoption.
The conflict is “going in the wrong direction,” Mateusz Morawiecki told the UK’s Express newspaper
Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive was “not successful” and Russia has the upper hand strategically, former Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki admitted, in an interview with Britain’s Express newspaper published on Friday.
The conflict in Ukraine is “not going in the right direction,” Morawiecki told the outlet, outlining his “huge concern” with a situation in which Moscow had apparently outflanked its opponents.
Russia has “huge resources,” he explained, noting the country’s military production capabilities significantly outweighed the EU’s own. “They have this strategic depth, and they have patience in international politics,” he added, also dismissing the country’s elections scheduled for March as mere “theater” unlikely to change the balance of power in Moscow.
Morawiecki also argued, however, that Ukraine’s failure had a silver lining for NATO in that it had brought Finland and Sweden into the alliance and was “awakening” countries like Denmark and Romania. The Scandinavian countries, he said, were among the most vocal in calling attention to the threat allegedly posed by Russia.
“Not only the security of the eastern flank of NATO, but also for the security of the United Kingdom, security of Germany, Denmark and the Scandinavians, they do understand it very, very well,” he said.
The former premier (2017-2023) was speaking to the British press for the first time since his successor, current PM Donald Tusk, had two lawmakers from Morawiecki’s Law and Justice Party (PiS) arrested earlier in the week. The ex-leader described the MPs as “political prisoners” and accused Tusk’s admittedly pro-EU government of “representing Brussels and Berlin, not Warsaw.”
While international attention has largely shifted away from the Ukraine conflict to Israel’s war with Gaza as the latter threatens to erupt into a broader conflict, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak traveled to Kiev on Friday to bestow his government’s largest gift yet on the government of Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, announcing £2.5 billion ($3.2 billion) to be paid out over the coming financial year and starting in April, and a bilateral agreement that includes security guarantees for Ukraine “in the event that it is ever attacked by Russia again.”
Zelensky has been vocal about his concern over flagging international support for Kiev’s fight, after unprecedented amounts of foreign aid from the UK, US, and EU failed to appreciably move the needle against Russia. Legislative gridlock has stalled planned aid packages in the US even as the Biden administration insists on an urgency to it, with his political opposition countering that accountability for funds spent must be a requirement for any future aid.
Russia’s absence means the negotiations in Davos could not have produced any concrete results, Dmitry Peskov has said
Top officials from dozens of countries who met in Switzerland to discuss Ukraine’s ‘peace formula’ were engaged in a completely useless endeavor without Russian participation, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday.
On Sunday, national security advisers from 81 nations and international organizations gathered in Davos ahead of the World Economic Forum to talk about a 10-point initiative floated by Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky in October 2022 to end hostilities with Russia.
The plan calls for the withdrawal of Russian troops from the territory Kiev claims as its own and insists on the creation of a tribunal to prosecute Moscow for alleged war crimes. Russia has dismissed the proposal as divorced from reality.
Commenting on the Davos meeting, Peskov called it “talking for the sake of talking,” reiterating that the same applied to previous rounds of talks in such a format. “This process is not aimed and cannot be aimed at achieving a concrete result for an obvious and simple reason – we are not there.”
Russia was also absent from previous discussions last year in Denmark, Saudi Arabia, and Malta. At the same time, Moscow has never categorically refused peace talks with Kiev, despite Zelensky signing a decree banning all negotiations with the current Russian leadership after four regions overwhelmingly voted to join Russia in the autumn of 2022.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg reported on Sunday that the Davos talks had ended “with no clear path forward” despite Ukraine’s hopes that it would be able to secure backing for its plan from members of the Global South, many of whom have proclaimed neutrality in the conflict. That was denied by Ukrainian officials, however, who nevertheless acknowledged differences of opinion among the meeting’s participants.
On Sunday, Swiss Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis echoed Peskov’s remarks, arguing that any Ukraine peace talks should involve Russia in one way or another.
The public now knows that many Israeli noncombatants were killed by their country’s military on October 7. They know this largely thanks to the work of The Grayzone and other independent outlets. We were initially attacked for our work, but now Israeli media is demanding answers as well. Major legacy media organizations like yours continue to ignore serious political scandals like these while pursuing factually-challenged, shamefully unethical journalistic efforts aimed at legitimizing the Israeli government’s public relations objectives.
Haaretz reported on January 4, “The police are having difficulty locating victims of sexual assault from the Hamas attack, or people who witnessed such attacks, and decided to appeal to the public to encourage those who have information on the matter to come forward and give testimony. Even in the few cases in which the organization collected testimony about sexual offenses committed on October 7, it failed to connect the acts with the victims who were harmed by them.”
Were you aware, as The Grayzone documented, that Landau’s previous claims of having seen beheaded babies and a fetus cut from a dead woman’s womb on October 7 have been discredited not only by the Israeli newspaper by Haaretz, but by the Biden White House, which retracted the president’s claim that he had seen photographs of beheaded babies? In fact, only one baby is recorded among those killed on October 7, which means any claim to have seen multiple dead babies must be dismissed out of hand.
After dismantling a New York Times front page feature alleging “a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7” by Hamas, The Grayzone is demanding answers of the paper for its journalistic malpractice.
The following was submitted to New York Times editors and lead author, Jeffrey Gettleman.
The Grayzone has identified serious issues with the credibility of key sources quoted in the New York Times’ December 28 story, “Screams Without Words: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on October 7.” Authored by Jeffrey Gettleman, Anat Schwartz, and Adam Sella, the article purports to prove “a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7” than even Israeli authorities have been willing to allege . However, the Times report is marred by sensationalism, wild leaps of logic, and an absence of concrete evidence to support its sweeping conclusion.
The Times has come under fire from family members of Gal Abdush, the so-called “girl in the black dress” who features as Exhibit A in Gettleman and company’s attempt to demonstrate a pattern of rape by Hamas on October 7. Not only have Abdush’s sister and brother-in-law each denied that she was raped, the former has accused the Times of manipulating her family into participating by misleading them about their editorial angle. Though the family’s comments have sparked a major uproar on social media, the Times has yet to address the serious breach of journalistic integrity that its staff is accused of committing.
The Israeli police have also issued a statement since the publication of the Times’ article asserting that they themselves are unable to locate eyewitnesses of rape on October 7, or to connect the testimonies published by outlets like the Times with anything remotely resembling evidence.
We call on the New York Times to publicly address the comments by the Abdush family accusing Times reporters of misleading them and lying about the circumstances of her death. The Times must also address the statement issued by Israel’s police subsequent to the article’s publication and explain why Gettleman and his co-authors apparently omitted it.
Further, we demand a response to our thoroughly sourced debunking of testimony by key witnesses quoted in the story, as well as the documented record of discredited claims and ethically dubious activity by those same witnesses.
We have provided several questions for your consideration. If you are unable to furnish responses which satisfactorily address the issues we have raised about the credibility of your article, we believe it must be retracted in full.
Family of “the girl in the black dress” accuses NYT of having “invented” rape claim
This is a difficult, but critical read. The collective hardship experienced by Gaza’s female prisoners in Israel is unprecedented even within the tragic history of Israel’s treatment of Palestinian prisoners. The Palestine Chronicle reports ..
The names of 51 female prisoners, illegally detained by invading Israeli forces during their ground operation in Gaza, have been revealed.
This number was announced by the Palestinian Prisoners’ Affairs Authority in a statement, without confirming whether there are other female prisoners secretly detained in Israel.
Regardless of the exact number, however, the testimonies that were collected from released prisoners reveal shocking abuse, ill-treatment and torture.
The Palestine Chronicle spoke with Lama Khater, from Al-Khalil (Hebron), who was arrested on October 26 and released under the prisoner exchange deal between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Resistance on November 30.
Khater was detained along with ten female prisoners from Gaza and witnessed the abuse they were subjected to.
Arbitrary Arrest
Khater said the conditions of female prisoners from Gaza were particularly difficult, starting with their kidnapping during their displacement from the northern Gaza Strip.
“They were arrested randomly, mostly from the northern Gaza Strip. Israeli soldiers detained mothers, too, who have been forced to leave their children with passers-by,” she stressed.
Khater recounted that before arriving at Damon Prison, the female detainees were left without covers, subjected to humiliating strip searches and forced to sleep on the bare floor.
When they were brought into the prisons, they were blindfolded, handcuffed, and deprived of their hijab, said Khater.
They were reportedly placed in narrow cells in Damon Prison and not allowed to speak to the rest of the female prisoners from the occupied West Bank and Palestine 48.
“All female prisoners are subjected to great restrictions,” Khater said, “but the prisoners from Gaza were treated even worse.”
“For example, they are only allowed to shower in large groups of at least 50 women, and for not more than 15 minutes a day”.
Khater said that on December 10 and 11, five female prisoners from the Gaza Strip were taken out of Damon prison. Their current location is not yet known.
Among the female Gazan prisoners, some are in a particularly difficult state; an 80-year-old woman who suffers from Alzheimers and a pregnant woman. Both are subjected to medical negligence.
Held in Cages
The Palestine Chronicle also spoke with Palestinian lawyer Hassan al-Abadi, who collected the testimonies of several female prisoners in Damon.
Al-Abadi, who volunteered to visit the female prisoners, submitted his first request to the Israeli Prison Administration on November 30, but was told in response that there were no longer female prisoners in the detention facility.
A few days later, however, media reports revealed that dozens of female prisoners, from Gaza, Jerusalem and Palestine 48, were still held there.
Al-Abadi confirmed to The Palestine Chronicle that there are over 40 female prisoners from Gaza in the facility, but they are prohibited from seeing a lawyer.
“When I would visit any female prisoner from the West Bank or Jerusalem, she would tell me about the harsh conditions of detention of the prisoners from the Gaza Strip,” he said.
Al-Abadi said he was particularly disturbed by the way Israeli forces transported the female detainees from Gaza to the prisons.
According to the lawyer, they were placed in trucks carrying cages similar to those used for animal transport.
“This detail particularly hurt me: these women have been transported in animal trucks. They have been tied, blindfolded and stripped of their head covering, as a way to humiliate them,” al-Abadi said.
Stained with Blood
The lawyer also said that when the female detainees arrived at the prison, their clothes were stained with blood. Most of them were also bleeding from their hands, as the plastic chains had been tightly tied around their wrists for days.
Upon their arrival, they were distributed into three rooms, each containing six iron beds. Most of them were reportedly forced to sleep on the floor without pillows or mattresses.
“The prisoners told me that the food is also very bad and that the Israeli guards deliberately leave it on their cells’ doors for hours, until it turns cold. The water has a rusty taste as well,” al-Abadi said.
“The female detainees from Gaza are even forbidden from talking to the rest of the prisoners and they have to communicate in secret.”
Al-Abadi shared that one of the women had to leave her four children in Gaza. The eldest was only eight years old, the youngest an infant.
According to the testimony from other prisoners, the woman was walking on Salah Al-Din Street, fleeing from the north of the Gaza Strip, when the Israeli soldiers arrested her.
“When she learned that she would be under arrest, she immediately handed her children to a boy who was walking in the street and told him to take care of them,” al-Abadi said.
“I learned from the other prisoners that she asked about her children every day, crying inconsolably, but nobody was updating her on their fate.”
A few days ago, however, al-Abadi was able to deliver a verbal message to this woman, that her children had eventually reached their father. “This time, she cried out of joy,” he said.
Great Concern
According to al-Abadi, these women are not only suffering due to the extremely cruel conditions of their detention but because they are constantly concerned about their families.
They do not know the fate of their children as Israel continues to relentlessly bombard Gaza.
“They are not allowed to hear the news or follow what is happening in any way. They are isolated from the outside world and don’t know anything,” al-Abadi explained.
But there are other forms of violation carried out by Israeli authorities. Al-Abadi told us that the prison administration prevents these women from bringing along sanitary pads
Therefore, during their period, they are forced to wash their clothes daily and wear them when they are still wet, as the prison administration does not provide them with additional clothes. They only have what they were wearing at the time of arrest.
Israel considers men and women detained in the Gaza Strip to be prisoners of war under the so-called “unlawful combatants” law. Therefore, it prevents them from having contact with lawyers and human rights institutions.
(The Palestine Chronicle) – Fayha’ Shalash is a Ramallah-based Palestinian journalist. She graduated from Birzeit University in 2008 and she has been working as a reporter and broadcaster ever since. Her articles appeared in several online publications. She contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
January 15, 2024, by: Dr Binoy Kampmark, Australian Independent Media
Israel’s relationship with the United Nations, international institutions and international law has at times bristled with suspicion and blatant hostility. In a famous cabinet meeting in 1955, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion famously knocked back the suggestion that the United Nations 1947 plan for partitioning Palestine had been instrumental in creating the State of Israel. “No, no, no!” he roaredin demur. “Only the daring of the Jews created the state, and not any oom-shmoom resolution.”
In the shadow of the Holocaust, justifications for violence against foes mushroom multiply. Given that international law, notably in war, entails restraint and limits on the use of force, doctrines have been selectively pruned and shaped, landscaped to suit the needs of the Jewish state. When the strictures of convention have been ignored, the reasoning is clipped for consistency: defenders of international law and its institutions have been either missing in the discussion or subservient to Israel’s enemies. They were nowhere to be seen, for instance, when Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser was preparing for war in the spring of 1967. Israel’s tenaciously talented statesman, Abba Eban,reflected in his autobiography about the weakness of the UN in withdrawing troops from the Sinai when pressured by Nasser to do so. It “destroyed the most central hopes and expectations on which we had relied on withdrawing from Sinai.”
…………………………… Israeli authorities are resolute in their calls that Islamic terrorism is the enemy, that its destruction is fundamental for civilisation, and that crushing measures are entirely proportionate. Palestinian civilian deaths might be regrettable but all routes of blame lead to Hamas and its resort to human shields.
These arguments have failed to convince a growing number of countries. One of them is South Africa. On December 29, the Republicfiled an applicationin the International Court of Justice alleging “violations by Israel regarding the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide […] in relation to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.” Various “acts and omissions” by the Israeli government were alleged to be “genocidal in character, as they are committed with the requisite specific intent … to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza as part of the broader Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group.” What Pretoria is seeking is both a review of the merits of the case and the imposition of provisional measures that would essentially modify, if not halt, Israel’s Gaza operation.
Prior to its arguments made before the 15-judge panel on January 12, Israel rejected“with contempt the blood libel by South Africa in its application to the International Court of Justice (ICJ).” The Israeli Foreign Ministry went so faras to suggest that the court was being exploited, while South Africa was, in essence, “collaborating with a terror group that calls for the destruction of Israel.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with demagogic rage, claimedthat his country had witnessed “an upside-down world. Israel is accused of genocide while it is fighting against genocide.” The country was battling “murderous terrorists who carried out crimes against humanity.” Government spokesman Eylon Levytried to make it all a matter of Hamas, nothing more, nothing less. “We have been clear in word and in deed that we are targeting the October 7th monsters and are innovating ways to uphold international law.”
In that innovation lies the problem. Whatever is meant by such statements as those of Israel Defence Forces spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, that “Our war is against Hamas, not against the people of Gaza”, the catastrophic civilian death toll, destruction, displacement and starvation would suggest the contrary. Innovation in war often entails carefree slaughter with a clear conscience.
On another level, the Israeli argument is more nuanced, going to the difficulties of proving genocidal intent. Amichai Cohen of Israel’s Ono Academic College and senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute admitsthat comments from right-wing Israeli ministers calling for the “emigration” of Palestinians from Gaza were not helpful. (They were certainly helpful to Pretoria’s case.) But he insists that the South African argument is based on “classic cherry-picking.” Cohen should know better than resort to the damnably obvious: all legal cases are, by definition, exercises of picking the finest cherries in the orchard.
The Israeli defence team’soral submissions to the ICJ maintained a distinct air of unreality. Tal Becker, as legal advisor to the Israeli Foreign Ministry, tried to move judicial opinion inhis address by drawing upon the man who minted genocide as a term of international law, Raphael Lemkin. Invariably, it was Becker’s purpose to again return to the Holocaust as “unspeakable” and uniquely linked to the fate of the Jews, implying that Jews would surely be incapable of committing those same acts. But here was South Africa, raining on the sacred flame, invoking “this term in the context of Israel’s conduct in a war it did not start and did not want. A war in which Israel is defending itself against Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other terrorist organizations whose brutality knows no bounds.” Israel, pure; Israel vulnerable; Israel under attack.
In yet another jurisprudential innovation, Becker insisted that the Genocide Convention was not connected in any way to “address the brutal impact of intensive hostilities on the civilian population, even when the use of force raises ‘very serious issues of international law’ and involves ‘enormous suffering’ and ‘continuing loss of life’.” The Convention, rather, was meant “to address a malevolent crime of the most exceptional severity.”
The view is reiterated by another lawyer representing Israel. “The inevitable fatalities and human suffering of any conflict,” submittedChristopher Staker, “is not of itself a pattern of conduct that plausibly shows genocidal intent.” Butcheries on a massive scale would not, in of themselves, suggest such the requisite mental state to exterminate a race, ethnic or religious group.
As for South Africa’s insistence that provisional measures be granted, Staker was unwavering in repeatingthe familiar talking points. They “would stop Israel defending its citizens, more citizens could be attacked, raped and tortured [by Hamas], and provisional measures would prevent Israel doing anything.”
Legal tricks and casuistry were something of a blooming phenomenon in Israel’s submissions. South Africa had, according to Becker, submitted “a profoundly distorted factual and legal picture……………………………………………..
Malcom Shaw, a figure known for his expertise in the thorny realm of territorial disputes, did his little bit of legal curation. ………………… The only thing that mattered here, argued Shaw, was the attack of October 7 by Hamas, a sole act of barbarity that could be read in terrifying isolation. That, he claimed was “the real genocide in this situation.”………………………. more https://theaimn.com/israels-argument-at-the-hague-we-are-incapable-of-genocide/#
A boom in Chinese solar power construction drove another record-breaking year of renewables growth in 2023, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Carbon Brief analysis of figures in the IEA’s Renewables 2023 report show that the world is now on track to build enough solar, wind and other renewables over the next five years to power the equivalent of the US and Canada. Rapid growth has also pushed the IEA to once again significantly upgrade its renewables forecast, adding an extra 728 gigawatts (GW) of capacity to a five-year estimate it made just a year ago.
This is more than the electricity capacity of Germany and India combined. The agency attributes this growth to plummeting costs of solar power and favourable policy regimes, particularly in China. New solar and onshore wind now provide cheaper electricity than new fossil fuel power plants almost everywhere, it says, as well as being cheaper than most existing fossil fuel assets.
Last year was the warmest since records began in the mid-1800s – and likely for many thousands of years before. It was the first year in which average global temperatures at the surface exceeded 1.5C above pre-industrial levels in at least one global temperature dataset. Here, Carbon Brief examines the latest data across the oceans, atmosphere, cryosphere and surface temperature of the planet.
SO -AMERICA IS NOT POWERFUL.Because quite clearly Biden cannot do anything in the least effective to stop the suffering of the people of Gaza.
However – Biden’s very feeble crocodile tears are a bit hard to believe ! “we will continue working to protect civilians, consistent with obligations under international humanitarian law.”
THE PROBLEM IS: We are expected to believe that Biden’s USA is so powerful - in the face of its obvious weakness to do anything !
Of course, the answer to this conundrum is so simple: Biden is insincereand a hypocrite.
Biden is 100% behind the Israel genocide of Palestinians. Here’s what he says about the Israel hostages held in Gaza “I will never forget the grief and the suffering” And then there’s Biden’s comment on the Gaza death toll (which has now passed 24,000)-“I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed. I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s the price of waging a war. … I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.”
And there’s Joe Biden meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his war cabinet during his visit to Israel, - “I don’t believe you have to be a Jew to be a Zionist, and I am a Zionist.” He made it clear that he stands with Israel and will commit U.S. military aid to protect it from future attacks. Citing “the urgency of Israel’s defensive needs,” the Biden administration on 29/12/23 said it would bypass Congress for the second time this month to approve an immediate arms sale to Israel.
Biden showcased his unflinching support for Israel’s war aims in his address 0n 12 December 23 - He likened Hamas to “animals” and vowed that he would not “walk away from providing Israel what they need to defend themselves and to finish the job against Hamas.”
Don’t expect anything meaningful or truthful to come out of the mouths of Joe Biden and his coterie of mealy-mouthed well-paid sycophants – Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Victoria Nuland, Lloyd Austin Karine Jean-Pierre etc
Australian politicians across the political divide have launched a last-ditch bid to prevent Julian Assange from being extradited to the United States to face espionage charges as the WikiLeaks founder faces a crucial final legal challenge in Britain next month.
The four co-convenors of the cross-party Bring Julian Assange Home Parliamentary Group wrote to British Home Secretary James Cleverly arguing for an urgent review of Assange’s case. This was in light of a judgment in the Supreme Court of the UK in November, striking down Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s controversial plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda.
On February 20 and 21, two British High Court judges will review an earlier ruling that refused Assange permission to appeal his extradition order. This is expected to be his final bid to prevent being sent to the US.
Assange faces decades in prison over his role in the publication of US classified files and diplomatic cables relating to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“If he loses in the UK courts next month he could be extradited to the USA within 24 hours,” Assange’s brother Gabriel Shipton said of the High Court review.
“This is literally a do-or-die scenario for Julian.”
Assange’s lawyer Jennifer Robinson has argued he was at high risk of suicide if the High Court rejects his final appeal, saying Assange was so mentally unwell that he would be unlikely to survive extradition.
Liberal MP Bridget Archer, Labor MP Josh Wilson, independent MP Andrew Wilkie and Greens Senator David Shoebridge wrote in their letter to Cleverly: “We are deeply concerned that the legal proceedings involving Mr Assange will now continue, first in the United Kingdom and then in the United States, if extradition is ordered and consented to by you.
“This would add yet more years to Mr Assange’s detention and further imperil his health.
“To this end, we are requesting that you undertake an urgent, thorough and independent assessment of the risks to Mr Assange’s health and welfare in the event he is extradited to the United States.”
As Home Secretary, Cleverly is one of the government’s most powerful ministers, presiding over law enforcement, national security and immigration and with oversight of the domestic counter-intelligence agency MI5.
The MPs argued in their letter that the judges’ reasoning in the Rwanda Supreme Court case – which found it was illegal for Britain to send asylum seekers to Rwanda – “clearly has direct relevance to the extradition proceedings involving Julian Assange”.
“The decision found that courts in the United Kingdom cannot just rely on third-party assurances by foreign governments but rather are required to make independent assessments of the risk of persecution to individuals before any order is made removing them from the UK,” they wrote.
The MPs said that the justices in Assange’s key extradition hearing had “expressly relied on the ‘assurances’ of the United States as to Mr Assange’s safety and welfare should he be extradited to the United States for imprisonment and trial.
“These assurances were not tested, nor was there any evidence of independent assessment as to the basis on which they could be given and relied upon.”
The MPs wrote that they were deeply worried about Assange being sent to a high-security American prison because he “has significant health issues, exacerbated to a dangerous degree by his prolonged incarceration, that are of very real concern to us as his elected representatives”.
In 2021, District Judge Vanessa Baraitser blocked the attempt to extradite Assange on the basis that the harsh conditions of US solitary confinement would create a substantial suicide risk. Her ruling was overturned on appeal.
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.
