Tag Archives: Benjamin Netanyahu

Israel Is Now the Greatest Source of Anti-Semitism

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: Dissident Voice

On October 28, Craig Mokhiber, the Director of the New York Office of the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, wrote to the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) in Geneva (and I here, in boldface, add a few links for documentation of some of his assertions):

This will be my last official communication to you. …

The current wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people, rooted in an ethno-nationalist settler colonial ideology, in continuation of decades of their systematic persecution and purging, based entirely upon their status as Arabs, and coupled with explicit statements of intent by leaders in the Israeli government and military, leaves no room for doubt or debate. In Gaza, civilian homes, schools, churches, mosques, and medical institutions, are wantonly attacked as thousands of civilians are massacred. In the West Bank, including occupied Jerusalem, homes are seized and reassigned based entirely on race, and violent settler pogroms [against Arabs] are accompanied by Israeli military units.

Across the land, Apartheid rules.

This is a text-book case of genocide. The European, ethno-nationalist, [Jewish] settler colonial project in Palestine has entered its final phase, toward the expedited destruction of the last remnants of indigenous Palestinian life in Palestine. What’s more, the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, and much of Europe, are wholly complicit in the horrific assault. Not only are these governments refusing to meet their treaty obligations “to ensure respect” for the Geneva Conventions, but they are in fact actively arming the assault, providing economic and intelligence support, and giving political and diplomatic cover for Israel’s atrocities. …

We must begin now or surrender to unspeakable horror. I see ten essential points: 1. Legitimate action: First, we in the UN must abandon the failed (and largely disingenuous) Oslo paradigm, its illusory two-state solution, its impotent and complicit Quartet, and its subjugation of international law to the dictates of presumed political expediency. Our positions must be unapologetically based on international human rights and international law. 2. Clarity of Vision: We must stop the pretense that this is simply a conflict over land or religion between two warring parties and admit the reality of the situation in which a disproportionately powerful state is colonizing, persecuting, and dispossessing an indigenous population on the basis of their ethnicity. 3. One State based on human rights: We must support the establishment of a single, democratic, secular state in all of historic Palestine, with equal rights for Christians, Muslims, and Jews, and, therefore, the dismantling of the deeply racist, settler-colonial project and an end to apartheid across the land. …

Israelis learned well from Hitler: they elected governments that did (or else condoned doing) to the non-Jewish natives in their land (who before 1948 were 61% Muslim, 30% Jewish, and 8% Christian), what Hitler had done to Jews in Christian Europe — and now they are being supported by the U.S. and its allies to deliver Israel’s final solution to the Palestinian problem: extermination.

The self-defense by Israel and its apologists, for this reality that drove Mokhiber to quit and to condemn them, is for them to ignore all of that reality, and to focus instead upon the responses to it by the Palestinians. The self-defense, in other words, is to condemn not the side that started this war (themselves) beginning in 1948, but the side that then, and even earlier (in the late 1930s), were trying to prevent or avoid it (the Palestinians). The evil in this deception by the perpetrators — by the Israelis and their apologists — is obvious, and here is how it is driving a surge in anti-Semitism:

Israel and its apologists say that anti-Israelism is the same thing as anti-Semitism (so that to condemn Israel is to condemn all Jews), but here they lie yet again because outside of Israel are many Jews who loathe what Israel has been doing in their names. The very idea that all Jews are Israelis, or even support the Israelis and oppose the Palestinians in this war between the aggressor (Israelis) and the defender (the Palestinians), is stupid. That idea simply is not the case; but yet many Jews are being targeted by AUTHENTIC anti-Semites as-if it WERE the case.

Comments by many readers and viewers online are rife with such anti-Semitism, and the global community of that authentic anti-Semitism grows ever-larger, the closer that Israel and the U.S. get to delivering their final solution to the Palestinian problem. A great many of these anti-Semitic comments are coming from individuals who condemn all Jews on the basis of anti-Semitic lines from the New Testament (such as John 8:44, Matthew 23:31-38, and the earliest-written one of them all, 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 — all of which lines I have discussed here). However, many come instead from the Old Testament, which historians consider to be mythical but theologians and preachers believe instead to be “the Word of God”; and, so, scholars cannot agree with one-another on what is history and what in the Old Testament is instead merely myth (religious propaganda, for spreading the Jewish faith).

According to Wikipedia’s article on the “Kingdom of Judah“:

Centered in the highlands of Judea, the kingdom’s capital was Jerusalem.[3] Jews are named after Judah and are primarily descended from it.[4][5] The Hebrew Bible depicts the Kingdom of Judah as a successor to the United Kingdom of Israel, a term denoting the united monarchy under biblical kings Saul, David and Solomon and covering the territory of Judah and Israel. However, during the 1980s, some biblical scholars began to argue that the archaeological evidence for an extensive kingdom before the late-8th century BCE is too weak, and that the methodology used to obtain the evidence is flawed.[6][7] In the 10th and early 9th centuries BCE, the territory of Judah appears to have been sparsely populated, limited to small rural settlements, most of them unfortified.[8]

and Wikipedia’s “Davidic line” says that,

as for David and his immediate descendants themselves, the position of some scholars, as described by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Silberman, authors of The Bible Unearthed, espouses that David and Solomon may well be based on “certain historical kernels”, and probably did exist in their own right, but their historical counterparts simply could not have ruled over a wealthy lavish empire as described in the Bible, and were more likely chieftains of a comparatively modest Israelite society in Judah and not regents over a kingdom proper.[27]

If the actual historical nation of Israel was ONLY what is shown on the map as constituting the Kingdom of Judah, then neither Gaza nor the northern two-thirds of the West Bank had ever been in any ancient Israel; and, so, anyone who says that the Jews in 1948 were ‘coming home’ to ‘Israel’ is historically wrong. However, those Jews were ethnically cleansing the land. It’s well-documented, such as here, here, here, and here. And even if ancient Israel had included all of the land that now is Israel, it wasn’t so at all in recent centuries, when virtually all of the residents there were Muslims and Christians — though Jews were demanding to control it while being only a tiny percentage of the population there. Their supremacism was clearly not only fascist but racist; it was Jewish Nazism. Furthermore, during the 1930s, Zionists considered themselves to be fascists; and fascists in both Germany and Italy considered Zionists to be Jewish fascists, ideological brothers of both Italy’s and Germany’s fascists (Christianity’s fascists). And Albert Einstein and other prominent progressive Jews in the U.S. after World War II described as “fascists” Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, both of whom subsequently became elected by Israel’s Jews to lead Israel. And yet the U.S. Government backed them, not only when Begin and Shamir were leading massacres of Arab villages in the 1940s, but when both men became Israel’s leaders in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s — and afterward, under their political follower Benjamin Netanyahu: clearly, a racist-supremacist apartheid regime ever since its founding, a regime which defines the supreme group, “Jew,” not only by religion, but by descent; that is, racially. Under U.S. President Harry S. Truman, the America and the world that his predecessor Franklin Delano Roosevelt (who was against the formation of a Jewish state and even resisted his aides who backed Churchill’s strong support for the creation of Israel, and who also was opposed to Winston Churchill’s and Dwight Eisenhower’s urgings for a war against the Soviet Union) had sought and carefully planned — the world that FDR had been intensively working to build — abruptly ended. And, more than anything else, this is the reason why, on 28 October 2023, the Director of the New York Office of the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, wrote to the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) in Geneva, to resign his post. He resigned his post because now the final solution to the Palestinian problem — the problem that Truman and his successors enabled fascist Jews to create — is about to come to a head. And decent Jews everywhere will be experiencing the backlash from what the indecent ones — who are the majority in Israel — are doing. The decent Jews will be getting the backlash for what the indecent ones are doing, but the blame really should go ONLY to the Israelis, and to the UK and U.S. billionaires (and their politicians and ‘news’-media) who have been constantly propagandizing for them.

Israelis May Ask Who the Real Hostage-Takers Are: Hamas or Netanyahu Regime?

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By Finian Cunningham

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his war Cabinet are pushing ahead with a limited ground invasion of Gaza – even though that will mean disaster for thousands of more innocent lives, including over 200 Israeli hostages.

The Biden administration has reportedly been trying to delay the drastic manoeuvre to give more chance for negotiations to secure the release of hostages. But Netanyahu and his cabinet are driven by their ideological fanaticism and need to save face.

Since the attacks on Israel by Hamas Palestinian militants on October 7, the world has been waiting for a much-vaunted ground invasion by the Israeli Defense Forces into the Gaza Strip. Over 1,400 Israelis were killed during the Hamas raids. An estimated 230 hostages were taken by the militants back to Gaza where they are held in secret locations presumably in a network of underground tunnels.

Three weeks of intense aerial bombardment of the Palestinian coastal territory have wrought unprecedented death and destruction in Gaza. Over 8,000 people have been killed with 70 percent of the toll due to women, children and elderly, according to Gaza’s health officials.

The plight of the hostages presents a dilemma for Netanyahu. He is trying to assure Israelis that the “second stage” of the “war on Hamas” – that is the ground invasion – will achieve both objectives of defeating Hamas and rescuing the hostages.

However, the Israeli leader and his war Cabinet are cynically deceiving their people. If the IDF proceed further with its ground operation, the hostages will most likely die.

Already Hamas spokesmen have claimed that 50 hostages have lost their lives during the relentless air strikes over the past three weeks. Hamas released four of the hostages on humanitarian considerations.

The fierce gun battles that are anticipated amid the rubble of Gaza and throughout the maze of tunnels do not bode well for the safe return of the remaining captives.

This is why families of the hostages and many supporters among the Israeli public are calling on Netanyahu to abandon the ground operation and to engage in negotiations for a prisoner exchange.

Hamas officials have offered the release of hostages in exchange for the freedom of all Palestinian political prisoners held by the Israelis. The Israelis detained an estimated 5,000 Palestinians before October 7.  The number has increased dramatically over the past three weeks due to a repressive policy of reprisal by the Israeli state. Hundreds of Palestinians in the other enclave territory of the Occupied West Bank have been taken into custody under emergency powers.

Israeli families are becoming increasingly angry at the way Netanyahu and his ministers are handling the crisis. Protests were held at the weekend outside the Ministry of Defence in Tel Aviv. One parent demanded: “We want all of them [the hostages] back with us today. We want you, the Cabinet, the government, to imagine that these are your children.”

Many Israelis have pointed out how Netanyahu’s sons, Yair and Avner, have inexplicably avoided military call-ups during the so-called state of war declared by the Cabinet. Netanyahu’s eldest son Yair (32) has been on an extended holiday in Miami since April this year.

Others are indignant at the seemingly callous attitude towards the families. “They feel like they’re left behind and no one is really caring about them,” said Miki Haimovitz, a former lawmaker. “No one is explaining what’s going on,” he added, as quoted by Associated Press.

Another lawmaker, Ofer Cassif, told the Strategic Culture Foundation that the Netanyahu government is ramping up repressive powers against any form of opposition to its military and security policies.

Cassif says public meetings throughout Israel are being banned for any groups who are calling for an end to the violence and for negotiations to prevail. He says the persecution is particularly sharp against Palestinians living in Israeli territory. Still, all citizens including Jews who are speaking out against war are liable to be charged as “terrorists”.

In a statement, Cassif, a Member of Parliament (Knesset) for the Hadash party said: “Netanyahu and his thugs use the smokescreen of the war to impose a martial law on Israeli citizens, predominantly Palestinian ones: protests are prohibited and can now be answered with live ammunition, workers and students are suspended and dissidents are persecuted for posts on the social network. I plead to the world – supporting the Israeli government is not supporting Israeli people – it is supporting fascism, death and dictatorship. If you wish to help Israeli people in this dire time – support the peace movement, not the warmongers who waged a war against their own people.”

Despite the repression, a groundswell of public opposition is building against Netanyahu and his coalition administration, which comprises extreme Zionists like Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Interior Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.

Last year, Netanyahu riled mass opposition to what was perceived by the public as a grab for dictatorial powers under the so-called reform of the state’s judiciary. Netanyahu has avoided court prosecution for several corruption cases by extending his time in political office. He has done this by making a pact with extremists who have long wanted to eradicate residual Palestinian territory in Gaza and the West Bank to fulfil a Zionist project of forming “Eretz Israel” (Greater Israel).

When the Hamas killings took place on October 7, many Israelis initially rallied behind Netanyahu and his War Cabinet.

But despite the repressive climate in Israel, many people are now asking questions of Netanyahu and his regime. How was such a security failure possible on October 7? Netanyahu, the wily and slippery character he is, has tried to scapegoat his military team only for them to hit back at him.

In extreme overcompensation for failure, Netanyahu and his fanatical Cabinet are going hard into Gaza to show muscle, regardless of the innocent suffering and mounting war crimes. All too evidently, also of disregard is the fate of Israeli hostages.

The criminal recklessness of Netanyahu and his regime will rebound with a vengeance. Over half of the hostages held by Hamas are foreigners, including American and British citizens.

The death and destruction in Gaza could be stopped immediately if Israel abided by the United Nations’ call for an immediate ceasefire. But, diabolically, the Palestinians, Israelis and indeed the wider region are being held hostage by a psychopathic regime headed by Benjamin Netanyahu.

Slouching Towards the Final Solution

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By Pepe Escobar

Source: The Unz Review

You have stolen the orchards of my ancestors
And the land that I cultivated
And you left nothing for us
Except for these rocks…
If I become hungry
The usurper’s flesh will be my food.

– Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish

It’s by now confirmed that Egyptian intel warned their Israeli counterparts only 3 days before Al-Aqsa Flood that something “big” was coming from Hamas. Tel Aviv, its multi-billion dollar security apparatus and the IDF, “the strongest army in the world”, chose to ignore it.

That configures two key vectors.

1) Tel Aviv get its “Pearl Harbor” pretext to implement a remixed “war on terror” plus a sort of Final Solution to the “Gaza problem” (already in effect).

2) The Hegemon abruptly changes the narrative away from the incoming, inevitable, cosmic joint humiliation of the White House and NATO in the steppes of Novorossiya – a strategic defeat that configures the previous humiliation in Afghanistan as a masked ball in Disneyland.

The total blockade of “human animals” (copyright Israeli Defense Ministry) in Gaza, in fact a civilian population of 2.3 million, has been imposed this past Monday. No food, no water, no fuel, no essential commodities.

That’s a war crime and a crime against humanity, thrashing the four basic principles of the

Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC) – everything duly applauded or at best completely ignored by NATOstan and its assorted oligarch-controlled mainstream media.

Christians, Muslims, Jews and other ethnic groups lived peacefully in Palestine for centuries until the imposition of the racist Zionist Project – complete with all the Divide and Rule attributes of settler colonialism.

The Nakba is an old memory of 75 years ago. We are now way beyond apartheid – and entering total exclusion and expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland.

In January 2023, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu himself stressed, “the Jewish people have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas of the Land of Israel.”

Now, the IDF sent no less than an order to the UN to completely evacuate all residents of northern Gaza – 1.1 million people – to southern Gaza, close to Rafah, the only border crossing with Egypt.

This forced mass deportation of civilians would be the prelude to raze all of northern Gaza to the ground, coupled with expulsion and confiscation of ancestral Palestinian land – edging closer to a Zionist Final Solution.

Welcome to Sociopaths United

Netanyahu, a sociopath with a proven track record, can only get away with serial war crimes because of total support by the White House, the “Biden” combo and the State Department – not to mention inconsequential EU vassals.

We just witnessed a U.S. Secretary of State – a low-IQ functionary out of his depth on every single issue – going to Israel to support collective punishment “as a Jew as well”.

He said his grandfather “fled pogroms in Russia” (that was in 1904). Then came the direct – Nazi – connection to “my stepfather survived Auschwitz, Dachau and Majdanek”. Impressive, that’s three concentration camps in a row. The secretary is obviously oblivious to the fact that the USSR liberated all three.

Then came the connection Russia-Nazis-Hamas. At least it’s all clear.

Internally, Netanyahu is only able to stay as Prime Minister because of especially two rabid ultra-Zionist, racist, supremacist coalition partners. He named Itamar Ben-Gvir as National Security Minister and Bezalel Smotrich as Finance Minister – both de facto in charge of proliferating settlements all across the West Bank in industrial scale.

Smotrich has been on the record saying that “there is no such thing as Palestinians because there is no such thing as a Palestinian people”.

Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, in record time, are on their way to double the settler population in the cantons across the West Bank from 500,000 to one million. Palestinians – de facto non-citizens – number 3.7 million. lllegal settlements – not formally approved by Tel Aviv – are popping up all across the spectrum.

In Gaza – where poverty hovers at 60% and youth unemployment is massive – UN agencies desperately warn of an impending humanitarian catastrophe.

Over 1 million people in Gaza, mostly women and children, depend on UN food assistance. Tens of thousands of kids go to UNRWA schools (UNRWA is the agency for Palestinian refugees).

Tel Aviv is now killing them – softly. At least 11 UNRWA workers have been killed this past week (including teachers, a doctor and an engineer), at least 30 kids, plus 5 members of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent.

To top it all up, there’s the Pipelineistan angle – as in stealing Gaza gas.

At least 60% of the vast gas reserves discovered in 2000 along the Gaza-Israel coastline legally belong to Palestine.

A key consequence of the Final Solution applied to Gaza translates as sovereignty over the gas fields switched to Israel – in yet another massive trampling of international law.

The Global Majority is Palestine

Amid the horrifying prospect of Israel depopulating the entire northern half of Gaza, live on TV and cheered on by hordes of NATOstan zombies, it’s not far-fetched to consider the possibility of Turkiye, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Yemen and the Gulf monarchies joining together, at various levels, to create overwhelming pressure against the implementation of the Zionist Final Solution.

Virtually the whole Global South/Global Majority is with Palestine.

Turkiye, problematically, is not an Arab nation and has been too ideologically close to Hamas in the recent past. Assuming the current Netanyahu gang would engage in diplomacy, the possible best mediation team would be formed by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Egyptian diplomacy.

India has just stabbed itself in the head as a leader of the Global Majority: their leadership does seem to get a hard on when facing Israel.

Then there are the Big Sovereigns: the Russia-China strategic partnership.

Russia-Iran are themselves connected by a strategic partnership – including at all state of the art military levels. The Iran-Saudi rapprochement mediated and clinched by China has led, this week, to Mohammad bin Salman and Ebrahim Raisi on the phone, for the first time ever, coordinating their unwavering support to the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people. Syria’s Bashar al-Assad has just visited China, received with full honors.

China’s trademark diplomatic sophistication – way beyond Al-Aqsa Flood – amounts to supporting legitimate Palestinian rights. The whole Arab world and the lands of Islam clearly feel it – while Israel and NATOstan are impervious to nuance.

With Russia we reach heavy metal territory. Earlier this week, Israel’s ambassador to Russia, Alexander Ben Zvi, was finally received, after several attempts by Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov. It was Israel who practically begged for a meeting.

Bogdanov cut to the chase, bluntly: Ben Zvi was warned that the IDF plan to literally destroy Gaza, expel the indigenous population and practice the ethnic cleansing of those “human animals” was “fraught with the most devastating consequences for the humanitarian situation in the region.”

That advances a quite possible scenario – whose consequences can be equally devastating: Moscow – in collaboration with Ankara – launching a Global South-supported blockade-busting operation against Israel.

It’s no secret – apart from the modus operandi – that Putin and Erdogan have discussed a possible Turkish humanitarian naval convoy to Gaza, which would be protected from an Israeli attack by the Russian Navy out of its Tartous base in Syria and the Russian air Force out of Hmeimim. That would raise the stakes to unforeseen levels.

What’s clear already is that the Hegemon proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and the Israeli “war on terror” remixed in Gaza are just parallel fronts of a single, horrifyingly evolving, global war.

Get this straight, Western media: Palestinians aren’t sub-human

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Dehumanisation of Palestinians is as central to Israel’s war strategy as the deadly missiles it wields

By Andrew Mitrovica

Source: Information Clearing House

A young child sits on his mother’s hip as she and others flee through the streets of the Gaza Strip amid Israeli strikes on October 9, 2023 [Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters]

Israel has waged war on Palestinians for decades.

That fact may come, I suspect, as a surprise to many people whose grasp of the world is shaped by their exclusive consumption of Western media.

The deep and lasting human consequences of Israel’s terrifying, perpetual war on Palestinians – prosecuted with indiscriminate cruelty by an occupying army and its de facto proxies, fanatical settler militias – have been plain for anyone willing or inclined to see, for generations.

Countless lives lost and maimed in body and spirit. Land and homes stolen. Livelihoods and ancient traditions destroyed. The exhausting cycle of having to rebuild, then watching all the promise and possibility turn, in an instant, to dust. The wholesale imprisonment of a people penned like cattle behind walls and barbed wire fences, where water and electricity, food and fuel, are switched on and off on a colonial power’s whim.

But, of course, much of the Western media won’t acknowledge these facts and outrages. That’s because many of the reporters and columnists now gripped by the latest eruption of murderous madness in Palestine and Israel have always interpreted events through a prism chiefly dictated by Israel – whether they are prepared to admit it or not.

In this myopic calculus, Israel is always the victim, never the perpetrator. Israel’s understanding of history matters; Palestinians’ reading not only of the past but of the present and the future too, does not count. And, perhaps most indecent of all, Israeli lives and deaths matter; Palestinian lives and deaths don’t.

Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations, made this point in a quiet, but persuasive address he delivered on Sunday to that apparently powerless body.

“History,” he said, “begins for some media and politicians when Israelis are killed. Our people have endured one deadly year after another”.

Mansour recounted the repeated warnings he and other exasperated Palestinians have issued – time and again – of the potential “consequences of Israeli impunity and international inaction”.

He was not alone.

Human rights groups based in Jerusalem, London and New York have published report after report that establishes, as a matter of international law, that Israel has, for a long time, been guilty of apartheid – a state-sanctioned, systemic policy to impose ethnic supremacy over besieged Palestinians with brutal, grinding efficiency.

Implicit in those dense, meticulously chronicled studies was what amounted to a blazing flare intended to seize finally the flighty attention of complicit Western governments and media. Israel’s deliberate, organised oppression is not only unsustainable, it disfigures both the oppressor and the oppressed.  Ultimately, violence begets violence in round after round of horrific vengeance by both sides.

Predictably, the cautions were not heeded.

Instead, many Western news outlets either dismissed outright or used the familiar vocabulary of denial to obscure the blatant truth.

Others opted for wilful malpractice, preferring to devote time and resources to the death of a celebrity dog over the documented theft, deprivations and indignities endured by Palestinians – young and old.

At the core of this blindness is a shared doctrine that holds that a Palestinian is a disposable non-entity, an expendable by-product of Israel’s right to exist and to defend itself.

In this perverse construct, Palestinian civilians are not considered innocent casualties of war but remain largely responsible for their own deaths and desperate fates.

The result: Western columnists will defend Israel – without so much as a hint of doubt or equivocation – despite its demonstrable record of erasing Palestinians whenever it wants, wherever it wants, for whatever reason it wants.

The sad, human evidence abounds.

Mahmoud al-Saadi, an 18-year-old student, was erased by Israel while walking to school in the Jenin refugee camp last November.

Mohammad al-Tamimi, a two-and-a-half-year-old toddler was erased by Israel while he was sitting in his father’s car parked outside their home in Nabi Saleh, a village northwest of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, as he waited to go to a birthday party in June 2023.

Shireen Abu Akleh, a 51-year-old Palestinian-American journalist was erased by Israel while she was preparing to report on yet another raid in Jenin in May 2022.

Dr Izzeldin Abuelaish, a 67-year-old Palestinian-Canadian physician, scholar and humanitarian, witnessed three of his daughters – Bessan, 21, Mayar, 15, Aya, 13 – and a niece, Noor, 17, being erased when Israeli tank shells shattered the family home in the Gaza Strip in January 2009.

Omar Abdulmajeed Asaad, a 78-year-old Palestinian-American retiree was erased by Israel while en route home to Jiljilya, a town a little northeast of Ramallah in the West Bank, after an evening playing cards with friends in January 2022. Soldiers marched Asaad to a nearby construction site and dumped him onto cold stone pavers. That’s where he died of a “stress-induced heart attack”. Alone.

Twelve-year-old Hassan Abu al-Neil was erased by Israel on August 21, 2021 while standing on what remains of Palestinian soil in Gaza in defiance of the occupation.

The lethal ledger goes on and on and on.

In the awful days, weeks and potentially months ahead, a gallery of writers will, no doubt, stand rhetorically shoulder-to-shoulder with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his appalling calls to impose a total blockade on Gaza and bludgeon it into a “deserted island” in the wake of Hamas’s ruthless onslaught.

Netanyahu’s chilling vow to, in effect, obliterate Gaza and his warning to the 2 million Palestinians who live in that thin strip of land to “get out” is the inevitable expression of apartheid, which is predicated on the dehumanisation of an entire people.

As Palestinian-American writer, Ra’fat Al-Dajani, has explained, the dehumanisation of Palestinians is based on two tenets widely held among Western media: “Palestinians are violent because of who they are –​ because of something intrinsic in their very nature and culture,” Dajani wrote, rather than “because of the oppression and violence of the Israeli occupation”. As a corollary to this, “since Palestinians lack basic standards of morality… the only way to interact with them is through the use of force, whether state-sponsored force by the Israeli security forces or non-state actors such as Israeli settlers. Force is the only language they understand.”

Both of these blasphemies have already been on display on Western cable news channels’ 24/7 loop and in opinion pages featuring the usual parade of Israeli-aligned officials and pundits.

In rebuttal, Mansour was obliged, remarkably, to state the obvious: “We [Palestinians] are not sub-humans. Let me repeat: We are not sub-humans. We will never accept a rhetoric that denigrates our humanity and reneges our rights. A rhetoric that ignores the occupation of our land and oppression of our people.”

Mansour defended the resistance as an understandable response to Israel’s longstanding war on Palestinians, saying: “Israel cannot wage a full-scale war on a nation, its people, its land, its holy sites and expect peace in exchange.”

In the end, the ambassador said, Palestinians, and Palestinians alone, will decide their destiny. “The Palestinian people will be free one day or another, one way or another,” Mansour said.

He is right.

The Powder Keg in the Middle East has Exploded: What Israel’s War on Gaza Means for the Rest of the World

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By Timothy Alexander Guzman,

Source: Silent Crow News

A new war in the Gaza Strip should not be a surprise to anyone who understands what the Palestinians have been going through for the last 75 years.  Many people in the West, in particularly those in the United States and the European Union are shocked and very angry with the attack on Israeli territory by Hamas.  The US mainstream media obviously has a biased view with mostly pro-Israel viewpoints on Israel’s latest conflict in Gaza especially with FOX news who so far, has not invited a Palestinian or Muslim analyst or academic to explain to its audience what led up to this recent attack in the first place.  However, I do believe that Israeli intelligence namely, Mossad knew what was about to take place so that they can move forward to “wipe Gaza off the map” which has been a long-time strategy for Israeli hardliners. Why do I believe Israel allowed it to happen? because the Gaza Strip is one of the most surveilled areas on the planet, therefore Israeli intelligence had to know beforehand that sooner or later, something was going to happen.

Despite what is happening in Gaza, there is one important fact that needs to be told, its not just about Palestine because if Israel gets its way in this war, it will begin targeting other Arab states including Lebanon and Syria which fits into what Oded Yinon, an Israeli journalist wrote in ‘A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties’ suggesting that Israel must “become an imperial regional power” and that it “must effect the division of the whole area into small states by the dissolution of all existing Arab states.” 

The strategy according to Yinon is that “the Zionist hope is that sectarian-based states become Israel’s satellites and, ironically, its source of moral legitimation.”  Although this was written in the 1980’s, all of it is absurd and unrealistic.  Israeli hardliners and Americans especially those in the US bible belt are hoping for a Greater Israel, but that will never happen, the resistance will become stronger throughout the Middle East as more Israeli fighter jets continues to bomb Gaza day after day.  Several Middle Eastern countries and resistance groups have been prepared for the next big war with Israel and the US including Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon, Kataib Hezbollah and other factions in Iraq, Syria, and Iran. 

Government officials, military top brass and intelligence agencies from the US, and NATO know that it will be long and bloody war since Israel is going full force in efforts to take more land in Gaza thus creating more Palestinian refugees in the process. Yinon said create “small states” that will be easier to dominate just like they did in Palestine, they split the territories by turning the Gaza Strip into an open air prison, and at the same-time they created a separate territory in the West Bank, both areas are militarily dominated by Israel Defense Forces (IDF). 

However, for Israel, time is not on their side.  They know that the US is in financial trouble with $33 trillion in debt, so I am sure that many Israeli economists know that without the US and its financial assistance, Israel will not last since they depend on almost every penny that the US government gives them.

In the meantime, Israel is trying to somehow get the US involved in the war. For the Israelis, that’s nothing new.  Remember when Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu claimed to the US congress in 2002 that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons?  “There is no question whatsoever that Saddam is seeking, is working, is advancing towards to the development of nuclear weapons,” he continued “Once Saddam has nuclear weapons, the terror network will have nuclear weapons,” I would say that Netanyahu was successful in getting the US in a war with Iraq.  Or how about the time when Israel attacked the USS Liberty in 1967 in the Mediterranean sea during the Six-Day War which was meant as a false flag operation to bring in the US in its war against Egypt and the rest of the Middle East.

The war on Palestine was the first step in creating an imperial Israel.  On July 9th, 1947, Rabbi Fischmann, a member of the Jewish Agency declared at a U.N. Special Committee of Enquiry that Israel needs to expand “from the River of Egypt up to the Euphrates, it includes parts of Syria and Lebanon.” It is also important to note that Israel has another important reason for expansion which one of them being the obvious and that is to ultimately control the natural resources including oil and gas throughout the Middle East.  When it comes to Big Oil, Washington and the Pentagon share similar goals with Israel when it comes to natural resources in the region. 

Oil Resources & Facilities in Kurdish Regions of Iraq

Since the Gulf war in the early 1990s, Washington and the Pentagon along with Kurdish leadership tried to create a ‘Free Kurdistan‘ that included areas of Iraq, Iran, Syria and even Turkey to dominant the potential energy markets.  In other words, the US establishment and Israel benefit in numerous ways by Balkanizing the Middle East thus making it easier to control the oil and gas fields.

So for the US-Israel partnership, it’s not only ideological, it’s also about the economic benefits of Zionist expansion that not only benefits Big Oil, it benefits the US arms industry since Israel will need a steady supply of weapons for a very long time to maintain control over a Balkanized Middle East and that’s always a plus for the establishment.  So, it is fair to say that Israel needs the US military and its financial aid just as much as the US and its Big oil enterprises need Israel to continue its illegal occupation.

Meanwhile worldwide protests have taken place as the war hawks, neocons, special interest groups (AIPAC) in Washington and their media mouthpieces are already pushing for US military to ultimately attack Iran. 

The US military is already sending its naval ships to the Eastern Mediterranean in show of support to Israel according to Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III:

I have directed the movement of the USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group to the Eastern Mediterranean. This includes the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78), the Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser USS Normandy (CG 60), as well as the Arleigh-Burke-class guided missile destroyers USS Thomas Hudner (DDG 116), USS Ramage (DDG 61), USS Carney (DDG 64), and USS Roosevelt (DDG 80). We have also taken steps to augment U.S. Air Force F-35, F-15, F-16, and A-10 fighter aircraft squadrons in the region. The U.S. maintains ready forces globally to further reinforce this deterrence posture if required

US ships in the Mediterranean sea? seems like déjà vu, but the point here is that the US will most likely get involved despite losing almost every major war they started since the end of World War II. It is assured that they will face a heavy onslaught of firepower from Hezbollah, Syria, Iran, resistance groups from Iraq that can target US bases and assets, even Yemen can get involved in some capacity.  

Russia and China are watching events very closely as their countries are also facing Western aggression on various levels including the US-NATO proxy war in Ukraine and if the US and its close allies in the Asia Pacific are foolish enough, they will to start another proxy war in Taiwan.

This is the big war in the Middle East that many of us have been fearing and it seems unstoppable as tensions have dramatically escalated in such a short period of time. 

Russia and China can sure try to mediate a peace agreement or a ceasefire, but that seems impossible given how Israel sees the necessity and the long-term benefits of seizing more Palestinian territory with close to half of the Gaza strip in its sights and that’s their next step, stripping land away from the Palestinians piece by piece. 

The bottom line is that the US is at $33 trillion in debt with a US dollar reserve currency that is not so popular as before, so how long can the US establishment keep up its military and economic support to Israel?  No one knows for sure, but it is clear that the US and the European establishment is committed to Israel’s security, even if it means bankrupting its own citizens. 

Did Hamas Attack Civilians or Fanatical Zionist Settlers?

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Israel’s fanatical settlers are responsible for countless attacks on Palestinian civilians.

By Kurt Nimmo

Source: Kurt Nimmo on Geopolitics

Now that the USG will help Israeli with its long-anticipated attack on Iran—the Secretary of War, Lloyd Austin, has ordered the USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group to the Eastern Mediterranean—we can expect “Iraq has WMDs” style propaganda in surfeit.

For instance, the “influencer” Hananya Naftali. According to his website, “Hananya has been working for Prime Minister Netanyahu in his digital team for the past 5 years.” He also “served” in the IDF and “fought Hamas during the Gaza War in 2014.”

As an “influencer,” Mr. Naftali needs your attention, thus absurd hyperbole.

“More than 700 Israelis were murdered. So much blood of innocent civilians has been spilled. May God avenge their blood. #IsraelUnderAttack,” he tweeted.

The tweet included a graphic that declares, “More Jews were murdered on October 7th, 2023, than on any other single day since the Holocaust.”

Of course, there is no information beyond Israeli war propaganda to confirm or dispute this claim. It should be a given that a state preparing for war will manufacture outrageous propaganda to make its case, no matter how fallacious and untrue.

The settlements said to be targeted by Hamas include:

Kissufim. This is a kibbutz, part of the so-called Shalom bloc. It was established by a Zionist youth movement in 1951. It is a gateway to the Gush Katif collection of illegal Zionist settlements.

Nahal Oz. Originally a military base, this “settlement” was established by Israeli Nahal soldiers, as part of an effort to establish illegal Zionist settlements.

Re’im. This settlement was established in 1949 by the Israel Boy and Girl Scouts Federation, part of the Palmach (Pelugot Hamahatz), a terrorist organization aligned with the Irgun, the Lehi, and the Haganah, all perpetrators of Zionist violence and terror. Irgun was run by Revisionist Zionism founder Ze’ev Jabotinsky, an admirer of Mussolini and fascism.

Sderot. The Palestinian village of Najd was wiped off the map to make way for this city of Zionist colonialists. More than 30,000 Israelis live there.

In addition, several other kibbutzim and settlements established on ethnically cleansed Palestinian land were overtaken by Hamas.

In the tidal wave of pro-Israel news following the Hamas “invasion,” there is virtually no mention of the fact these settlements violate Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and a long list of United Nations resolutions.

Israel’s fanatical settlers are responsible for countless attacks against Palestinian civilians. The violence is especially acute in the West Bank.

In 2021, Michael Lynk, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, said that settler violence was “ideologically motivated and primarily designed to take over land but also to intimidate and terrorize Palestinians.”

In Jerusalem, under orders of an ultra-nationalistic Israeli government, numerous Palestinian homes have been demolished to make way for settlers. The Netanyahu regime declared illegal West Bank settlements are a “top priority.”

In other words, Hamas was “invading” illegal settlements where armed settlers live and enjoy impunity from prosecution for crimes of violence against Palestinians. This has been Israeli policy, under Labor and Likud regimes, for some time.

But if you watch or read war propaganda news, you are told Hamas are “animals” killing and terrorizing innocent Israeli citizens. The fact of the matter is, right or wrong (and violence against unarmed civilians is always wrong), Hamas was in effect attacking armed vigilantes condoned and supported by the Israeli government.

Israel, the Big Lie

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Smoke rises following Israeli airstrikes on a building in Gaza City, Thursday, May 13, 2021. Weary Palestinians are somberly marking the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, as Hamas and Israel traded more rockets and airstrikes and Jewish-Arab violence raged across Israel. [AP Photo/Hatem Moussa]

Israel is not exercising “the right to defend itself” in the occupied Palestinian territories. It is carrying out mass murder, aided and abetted by the U.S.

By Chris Hedges

Source: ScheerPost

Nearly all the words and phrases used by the Democrats, Republicans and the talking heads on the media to describe the unrest inside Israel and the heaviest Israeli assault against the Palestinians since the 2014 attacks on Gaza, which lasted 51 days and killed more than 2,200 Palestinians, including 551 children, are a lie.  Israel, by employing its military machine against an occupied population that does not have mechanized units, an air force, navy, missiles, heavy artillery and command-and-control, not to mention a U.S. commitment to provide a $38 billion defense aid package for Israel over the next decade, is not exercising “the right to defend itself.” It is carrying out mass murder. It is a war crime. 

Israel has made it clear it is ready to destroy and kill as wantonly now as it was in 2014. Israel’s defense minister Benny Gantz, who was the chief of staff during the murderous assault on Gaza in 2014, has vowed that if Hamas “does not stop the violence, the strike of 2021 will be harder and more painful than that of 2014.” The current attacks have already targeted several residential high rises including buildings that housed over a dozen local and international press agencies, government buildings, roads, public facilities, agricultural lands, two schools and a mosque.

I spent seven years in the Middle East as a correspondent, four of them as The New York Times Middle East Bureau Chief. I am an Arabic speaker. I lived for weeks at a time in Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison where over two million Palestinians exist on the edge of starvation, struggle to find clean water and endure constant Israeli terror. I have been in Gaza when it was pounded with Israeli artillery and air strikes. I have watched mothers and fathers, wailing in grief, cradling the bloodied bodies of their sons and daughters. I know the crimes of the occupation—the food shortages caused by the Israeli blockade, the stifling overcrowding, the contaminated water, the lack of health services, the near constant electrical outages due to the Israeli targeting of power plants, the crippling poverty, the endemic unemployment, the fear and the despair. I have witnessed the carnage. 

I also have listened from Gaza to the lies emanating from Jerusalem and Washington. Israel’s indiscriminate use of modern, industrial weapons to kill thousands of innocents, wound thousands more and make tens of thousands of families homeless is not a war: It is state-sponsored terror.  And, while I oppose the indiscriminate firing of rockets by Palestinians into Israel, as I oppose suicide bombings, seeing them also as war crimes, I am acutely aware of a huge disparity between the industrial violence carried out by Israel against innocent Palestinians and the minimal acts of violence capable of being waged by groups such as Hamas.

The false equivalency between Israeli and Palestinian violence was echoed during the war I covered in Bosnia.  Those of us in the besieged city of Sarajevo were pounded daily with hundreds of heavy shells and rockets from the surrounding Serbs. We were targeted by sniper fire. The city suffered a few dozen dead and wounded each day. The government forces inside the city fired back with light mortars and small arms fire. Supporters of the Serbs seized on any casualties caused by Bosnian government forces to play the same dirty game, although well over 90 percent of the killings in Bosnia were the fault of the Serbs, as is also true regarding Israel.  

The second and perhaps most important parallel is that the Serbs, like the Israelis, were the principal violators of international law. Israel is in breach of more than 30 U.N. Security Council resolutions. It is in breach of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention that defines collective punishment of a civilian population as a war crime. It is in violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention for settling over half a million Jewish Israelis on occupied Palestinian land and for the ethnic cleansing of at least 750,000 Palestinians when the Israeli state was founded and another 300,000 after Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank were occupied following the 1967 war. Its annexation of East Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan Heights violates international law, as does its building of a security barrier in the West Bank that annexes Palestinian land into Israel. It is in violation of U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194 that states that Palestinian “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.” 

This is the truth.  Any other starting point for the discussion of what is taking place between Israel and the Palestinians is a lie.

Israel’s once vibrant peace movement and political left, which condemned and protested against the Israeli occupation when I lived in Jerusalem, is moribund. The right-wing Netanyahu government, despite its rhetoric about fighting terrorism, has built an alliance with the repressive regime in Saudi Arabia, which also views Iran as an enemy.  Saudi Arabia, a country that  produced 15 of the 19 hijackers in the September 11 attacks, is reputed to be the most prolific sponsor of international Islamist terrorism, allegedly supporting Salafist jihadism, the basis of al-Qaeda, and groups such as the Afghanistan Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and the Al-Nusra Front.  

Saudi Arabia and Israel worked closely together to back the 2013 military coup in Egypt, led by General Adbul Fattah el Sisi. Sisi overthrew a democratically elected government. He has imprisoned tens of thousands of government critics, including journalists and human rights defenders, on politically motivated charges.  The Sisi regime collaborates with Israel by keeping its common border with Gaza closed to Palestinians, trapping them in the Gaza strip, one of the most densely populated places on earth. Israel’s cynicism and hypocrisy, especially when it wraps itself in the mantle of protecting democracy and fighting terrorism, is of epic proportions. 

Those who are not Jewish in Israel are either second class citizens or live under brutal military occupation. Israel is not, and never has been, the exclusive homeland of the Jewish people.  From the 7th century until 1948, when Jewish colonial settlers used violence and ethnic cleansing to create the state of Israel, Palestine was overwhelmingly Muslim. It was never empty land.  The Jews in Palestine were traditionally a tiny minority. The United States is not an honest broker for peace but has funded, enabled and defended Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people.  Israel is not defending the rule of law.  Israel is not a democracy.  It is an apartheid state. 

That the lie of Israel continues to be embraced by the ruling elites–there is no daylight between statements in defense of Israeli war crimes by Nancy Pelosi and Ted Cruz–and used as a foundation for any discussion of Israel is a testament to the corrupting power of money, in this case that of the Israel lobby, and the bankruptcy of a political system of legalized bribery that has surrendered its autonomy and its principles to its major donors. It is also a stunning example of how colonial settler projects, and this is true in the United States, always carry out cultural genocide so they can exist in a suspended state of myth and historical amnesia to legitimize themselves. 

The Israel lobby has shamelessly used its immense political clout to demand that Americans take de facto loyalty oaths to Israel. The passage by 35 state legislatures of Israel lobby-backed legislation requiring their workers and contractors, under threat of dismissal, to sign a pro-Israel oath and promise not to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is a mockery of our Constitutional right of free speech. Israel has lobbied the U.S. State Department to redefine anti-Semitism under a three-point test known as the Three Ds: the making of statements that “demonize” Israel; statements that apply “double standards” for Israel; statements that “delegitimize” the state of Israel. This definition of anti-Semitism is being pushed by the Israel lobby in state legislatures and on college campuses. The Israel lobby spies in the United States, often at the direction of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, on those who speak up for the rights of Palestinians. It wages public smear campaigns and blacklists defenders of Palestinian rights–including the Jewish historian Norman Finkelstein; U.N. Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Territories, Richard Falk, also Jewish; and university students, many of them Jewish, in organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine.  

The Israel lobby has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to manipulate U.S. elections, far beyond anything alleged to have been carried out by Russia, China or any other country.  The heavy-handed interference by Israel in the American political system, which includes operatives and donors bundling together hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions in every U.S. congressional district to bankroll compliant candidates, is documented in the Al-Jazeera four-part series “The Lobby.” Israel managed to block “The Lobby” from being broadcast. In the film, a pirated copy that is available on the website Electronic Intifada, the leaders of the Israel lobby are repeatedly captured on a reporter’s hidden camera explaining how they, backed by the intelligence services within Israel, attack and silence American critics and use massive cash donations to buy politicians. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu secured the unconstitutional invitation by then-House Speaker John Boehner to address Congress in 2015 to denounce President Barack Obama’s Iranian nuclear agreement.  Netanyahu’s open defiance of Obama and alliance with the Republican Party, however, did not stop Obama in 2014 from authorizing a 10-year $38 billion military aid package to Israel, a sad commentary on how captive American politics is to Israeli interests.  

The investment by Israel and its backers is worth it, especially when you consider that the U.S. has also spent over $ 6 trillion during the last 20 years fighting futile wars that Israel and its lobby pushed for in the Middle East.  These wars are the greatest strategic debacle in American history, accelerating the decline of the American empire, bankrupting the nation at a time of economic stagnation and mounting poverty, and turning huge parts of the globe against us. They serve Israel’s interests, not ours.   

The longer the mendacious Israeli narrative is embraced, the more empowered become the racists, bigots, conspiracy theorists and far-right hate groups inside and outside Israel.  This steady shift to the far right in Israel has fostered an alliance between Israel and the Christian right, many of whom are anti-Semites. The more Israel and the Israel lobby level the charge of anti-Semitism against those who speak up for Palestinian rights, as they did against British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, the more they embolden the real anti-Semites. 

Racism, including anti-Semitism, is dangerous.  It is not only bad for the Jews.  It is bad for everyone.  It empowers the dark forces of ethnic and religious hatred on the extremes.  Netanyahu’s racist government has built alliances with far-right leaders in Hungary, India, and Brazil, and was closely allied with Donald Trump. Racists and ethnic chauvinists, as I saw in the wars in the former Yugoslavia, feed off of each other.  They divide societies into polarized, antagonistic camps that only speak in the language of violence.  The radical jihadists need Israel to justify their violence, just as Israel needs the radical jihadists to justify its violence.  These extremists are ideological twins.  

This polarization fosters a fearful, militarized society.  It permits the ruling elites in Israel, as in the United States, to dismantle civil liberties in the name of national security.  Israel runs training programs for militarized police, including from the United States.  It is a global player in the multibillion-dollar drone industry, competing against China and the United States.

It oversees hundreds of cybersurveillance startups whose espionage innovations, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, have been utilized abroad “to locate and detain human rights activists, persecute members of the LGBT community, silence citizens critical of their governments, and even fabricate cases of blasphemy against Islam in Muslim countries that don’t maintain formal relations with Israel.” 

Israel, like the United States, has been poisoned by the psychosis of permanent war. One million Israelis, many of them among the most enlightened and educated, have left the country. Its most courageous human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists—Israeli and Palestinian—endure constant government surveillance, arbitrary arrests and vicious government-run smear campaigns. Mobs and vigilantes, including thugs from right-wing youth groups such as Im Tirtzu, physically assault dissidents, Palestinians, Israeli Arabs and African immigrants in the slums of Tel Aviv. These Jewish extremists have targeted Palestinians in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, demanding their expulsion. They are supported by an array of anti-Arab groups including the Otzma Yehudit Party, the ideological descendant of the outlawed Kach party, the Lehava movement, which calls for all Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories to be expelled to surrounding Arab states, and La Familia, far-right soccer hooligans. Lehava in Hebrew means “flame” and is the acronym for “Prevention of Assimilation in the Holy Land.” Mobs of these Jewish fanatics parade through Palestinian neighborhoods, including in occupied East Jerusalem, protected by Israeli police, shouting to the Palestinians who live there “Death to the Arabs,” which is also a popular chant at Israeli soccer matches.

Israel has pushed through a series of discriminatory laws against non-Jews that echo the racist Nuremberg Laws that disenfranchised Jews in Nazi Germany. The Communities Acceptance Law, for example, permits “small, exclusively Jewish towns planted across Israel’s Galilee region to formally reject applicants for residency on the grounds of ‘suitability to the community’s fundamental outlook.” Israel’s educational system, starting in primary school, uses the Holocaust to portray Jews as eternal victims.  This victimhood is an indoctrination machine used to justify racism, Islamophobia, religious chauvinism and the deification of the Israeli military. 

There are many parallels between the deformities that grip Israel and the deformities that grip the United States.  The two countries are moving at warp speed towards a 21rst century fascism, cloaked in religious language, which will revoke what remains of our civil liberties and snuff out our anemic democracies.  The failure of the United States to stand up for the rule of law, to demand that the Palestinians, powerless and friendless, even in the Arab world, be granted basic human rights mirrors the abandonment of the vulnerable within our own society.  We are headed, I fear, down the road Israel is heading down.  It will be devastating for the Palestinians.  It will be devastating for us. And all resistance, as the Palestinians courageously show us, will only come from the street.    

Israel to Invade Gaza — Again?

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By Stephen Lendman

Source: StephenLendman.com

Hostile to peace, stability and the rule of law, militantly racist/fantasy democracy Israel is an apartheid police state.

Waging preemptive war on Palestinians without declaring it — again — state terror is its favorite tactic against defenseless civilians.

What’s been going on since mid-April — especially since terror-bombing of Gaza began days earlier — threatens the lives, well-being and rights of millions of long-suffering Palestinians. 

According to the Times of Israel, the IDF will present a Gaza ground invasion plan for the Netanyahu regime to consider on Thursday.

Israeli forces are mobilized along Gaza’s border for invasion if ordered, no go-ahead given so far.

If initiated, it’ll be the fourth Israeli full-scale ground war of aggression on Gaza since December 2008.

Civilian casualties are already mounting in the Strip in defiance of international law.

The Laws of War: Laws and Customs of War on Land (1907 Hague IV Convention) states:

Article 25: “The attack or bombardment, by whatever means, of towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings which are undefended is prohibited.”

Article 26: “The officer in command of an attacking force must, before commencing a bombardment, except in cases of assault, do all in his power to warn the authorities.”

Article 27: “In sieges and bombardments, all necessary steps must be taken to spare, as far as possible, buildings dedicated to religion, art, science, or charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospitals, and places where the sick and wounded are collected, provided they are not being used at the time for military purposes.” 

Fourth Geneva prohibits violence against civilians in times of war. Collective punishment is banned.

According to Article 33, “(n)o protected person may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed.” 

“Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.”

Pillage is prohibited. Reprisals against protected persons and their property are prohibited.

In 1938, a unanimously adopted League of Nations resolution — the UN’s precursor — prohibited the “bombardment of cities, towns, villages, dwellings or buildings not in the immediate neighborhood of the operations of land forces.”

The 1945 Nuremberg Principles prohibit “crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity.” 

Included are “inhumane acts committed against any civilian populations, before or during the war.”  

Indiscriminate killing and “wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity” are absolutely prohibited.

In 1968, a UN General Assembly Resolution on Human Rights prohibited launching of attacks against civilian populations. 

Terror-bombing Gaza by Israel — now and earlier — resembles Nazi Germany’s aerial terror against Guernica, Spain in April 1937.

Nazi Wehrmacht warplanes destroyed the city, massacred over 1,600 people, injuring hundreds more.

According to air commander Herman Goring at the time, the attack was an “opportunity to test under fire whether (munitions) had been adequately developed.”

An aftermath eyewitness said “(t)he only things left standing were a church and a sacred tree, the symbol of the Basque people.”

“There hadn’t been a single anti-aircraft gun in the town. It (was) mainly a fire raid.”

“A sight that haunted me for weeks was the charred bodies of several women and children huddled together in what had been the cellar of a house.”

Civilian sites were fair game. Guernica had no military significance. 

It was prelude for how both sides operated viciously throughout WW II on a much larger scale.

In his book titled “The Good War: An Oral History of World War II,” the late Studs Terkel explained the “warped…view of how we look at things today (seeing them) in terms of war,” adding:

This “twisted memory…encourages (people) to be willing, almost eager, to use military force” as a way to solve problems — what Terkel called “lunatic” actions.

Examples are endless pre-during-and-post-WW II.

Gazans are again enduring the barbarity of preemptive Israeli terror-bombing, notably against civilians in harm’s way.

Is an end of it near or does the Netanyahu regime have much more mass slaughter and destruction in mind — for political reasons as a way to try holding onto to power?

For time immemorial, long-suffering Palestinians have been victimized by Israeli viciousness because the world community largely looks the other way — while feigning concern for their lives, welfare and rights.