Tag Archives: Ethnic Cleansing

The West’s duplicitous stance and hypocrisy draw condemnation in the world

Posted on by
1

By Viktor Mikhin

Source: New Eastern Outlook

Many politicians around the world strongly condemn not only Israel’s inhumane policy in the Gaza Strip, when peaceful Palestinians are being slaughtered, but also the hypocrisy, duplicity, pharisaism and arrogance of the West. In one case, the current worthless rulers of Europe condemn the defence of their citizens in Donbass by Russia, which is complying with all international rules of engagement. On the other, when Israel started to destroy civilians in the Gaza Strip (which according to international laws is considered a policy of genocide), the West welcomes and applauds, defending its protégé in the Middle East in every possible way.

For example, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan called the West’s position on Gaza, which differs from its position on Ukraine, “the height of hypocrisy.” “What happened in Gaza, has caused the West and the Europeans to lose all their reputation, all their accumulated credits (of trust). They have squandered all their political capital in the eyes of humanity, especially in the eyes of our generations,” Turkish daily Hürriyet quoted Hakan Fidan as saying. According to him, it will not be easy for the West to regain the lost trust. “It will not be easy for them to regain it. Unlike their stance on Ukraine and Russia, their stance on Gaza is the height of hypocrisy. They cannot talk about principles, virtue and morality. They ignore them completely. I see that all this is preparing the ground for a huge geostrategic rupture,” the minister said.

A huge swath of the Global South sees and criticises the double standards that guide the West’s actions in the Gaza Strip and Ukraine, as the New York Times (NYT) reluctantly reported through gritted teeth. The publication notes that for the past 20 months, US authorities have actively criticised Moscow for its special military operation in Ukraine, but now that the IDF has carried out a bloodbath in Gaza, full American support for Israel risks creating new and complex obstacles in Washington’s efforts to win over world public opinion.

The war in the Middle East, the piece says, is driving a wedge between the West and leading nations of the Global South such as Brazil and Indonesia. In addition, the West’s unconscionable double standard in defence of Israelis has been sharply criticised by leaders of the Arab world.   The fact that the West treats Ukraine as a special case because it is in Europe, against the backdrop of Middle East escalation, has only increased discontent in Africa, Asia and Latin America. There, the impression is that the West is more concerned about refugees from Ukraine than about those affected by the conflicts in Arab countries. The publication has to admit that the West has failed to convince countries such as India and Turkey to support sanctions against Russia. Given the bloody events in the Gaza Strip, “Western efforts to widen the front against Russia are unlikely to be successful in the near future“.

Earlier, American businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, who was seeking the nomination as the country’s presidential candidate from the Republican Party (he ended his campaign and supported Donald Trump’s candidacy in the presidential election), said that the United States should seek an early settlement of the conflict in Ukraine, which would provide for the transition of Russian-speaking regions into Russia. And he is not alone in the US, where questions are increasingly being asked as to why it is the Americans who should bear the brunt of the financial burden and supply vast quantities of weapons to the neo-Nazi regime in Kiev.

Irish MEP Mick Wallace has rightly stated that the Ukrainian conflict is still going on because of the unwillingness of the United States to end it. He expressed the same opinion with regard to the situation in the Gaza Strip. The world media also noted that the International Criminal Court, at the behest of the United States, has ignored many years of genocide in Palestine, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, and therefore the ICC is “unfair in its choice of topics to explore” and has turned into “an unscrupulous legal body of the West.”

Russia’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations Vasily Nebenzya has accused the United States of its position preventing the Security Council from adopting resolutions aimed at stopping the violence in the Gaza Strip, RIA Novosti reported. “It is regrettable that under these circumstances the UN Security Council has so far failed to adopt a single resolution demanding a halt to the violence because of the position of one delegation, the United States, which is blocking all efforts and initiatives to stop the bloodshed,” the diplomat said. He noted that this gave Israel carte blanche to further destroy the Palestinians.

The huge difference in the West’s attitude to the Palestinian-Israeli and Ukrainian conflicts points to hypocritical double standards, one of the goals of which is to interpret international law exactly as it suits the US. In this case, the fate of the Palestinian population is much less interesting to the hardened Western officials in terms of “domestic political points.” How many times have Western delegations requested UN Security Council meetings on Ukraine? The answer is at least twice a month, while how many times the said delegations have requested Security Council meetings on the Middle East issue – zero. Apparently, in this case comments are unnecessary, the conclusion is already on the surface. The West’s double standards “in all their glory” were also observed in the situation with the migration crisis in the EU. While Ukrainian refugees have been given all sorts of benefits, refugees from Africa and the Middle East are being “kept in camps in inhumane conditions”.

The State Department has after all decided to explain the difference in its approaches to the situation in Gaza and Ukraine in the way that yesterday’s hegemon considers, rather than in accordance with the generally accepted laws of international law. Thus, the deputy head of the State Department’s press service, Vedant Patel, responded to a journalist’s question about the difference in the approaches of the US authorities to the situation in the Gaza Strip and the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. The official said that Washington sees no grounds to accuse Israel of genocide of Palestinians, and “one should be very careful when making such statements.” At the same time, when Patel was asked why US President Joe Biden “very quickly” called the events in Ukraine “genocide” in 2022, the State Department official could not give more specific explanations. He only noted that “such definitions must be made with a careful consideration of the law and the facts”, without specifying which facts he had in mind. He simply did not have a reasonable answer, and in the current circumstances he did not dare to say that this was Washington’s wish and favourable.

Incidentally, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said earlier that international law must be respected in all conflicts. This is a correct observation, but according to the Secretary General’s personal interpretation, the conflicts in the Gaza Strip and Ukraine have differences. And he personally believes that Israel, which destroys peaceful Palestinians, strictly observes international law, while Russia, which fights against the neo-Nazi regime in Kiev only on the battlefields, violates this law. Apparently, in Stoltenberg’s “enlightened” opinion, Russia will respect international law only when it, like Israel, destroys the peaceful population of our brother nation. A strange opinion worthy of a schizophrenic from a psychiatric hospital. On this occasion, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called the statement by the head of European diplomacy, Josep Borrell, about the “senselessness of humanitarian aid supplies to the Gaza Strip” if hostilities continue there an apologetic of transhumanism. She asked her colleague whether he also considered it pointless to provide medical assistance and love “someone who will die tomorrow”. There was, of course, no reply.

The accusations against the Russian side on the subject of “indiscriminate strikes” against Ukrainian cities can best be assessed by comparing “two realities” – the situation in Ukraine and in the Gaza Strip. In this regard, we can recommend that opponents go to the Internet and familiarise themselves with Ukrainian news or watch local TV channels. On Ukrainian websites one can easily find a large number of reports on club and restaurant life in such cities as Kiev, Kharkov, Odessa, Dnepropetrovsk and others. Ukrainian state institutions and other municipal buildings are functioning normally almost everywhere, transport continues to operate, schools and hospitals are open. This situation can be observed almost two years after Russia launched a special operation aimed at protecting the population of Donbas from the neo-Nazi regime in Kyiv. All of this shows, as has been repeatedly confirmed by independent observers, that the Russian Armed Forces are conducting exclusively precision strikes against military facilities and infrastructure related to military capabilities. This policy is in sharp contrast to the crimes against humanity committed by the neo-Nazi regime in Kyiv, which is deliberately firing Western-made missiles at civilians in Donbas. And there are numerous facts and evidence to this effect, which at the very least would make for a new Nuremberg process.

The current leaders of the West should look at what their lackey Israel is doing in the Gaza Strip, which for three months now has sought to raze the territory and destroy the Palestinians living there. Not only have hospitals and schools been burned to the ground, but entire towns have been destroyed, and the death toll, including a large number of children, is appalling. And all this is happening before the eyes of the world in the 21st century, to the hooting and applause of the Biden administration and the current rulers of Europe, who have finally lost shame, conscience and simple human compassion. “Comparing these two realities, ask yourself a question: how many times have you condemned the methodical annihilation of peaceful Palestinians?” – noted Russia’s UN representative Nebenzya, when asked by Western representatives whether they had ever supported calls for a ceasefire in the Middle East conflict, whether they had condemned Israel’s anti-human crimes. The answer would be only negative. Not only has the West done nothing to stop Israel’s current massacre of Palestinian civilians, it has encouraged them even more by supplying the latest lethal weapons, financially pumping in huge sums of money and defending them on the international stage. Suffice it to say that the US representative at the UN has twice vetoed Security Council resolutions to stop the deadly slaughter in the Gaza Strip, unleashing the Israeli military for even more atrocious crimes, rightly assessed by the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

In the current circumstances, when the former hegemon has lost its power and authority, it has to resort more and more to hypocrisy and double standards to somehow camouflage its bankrupt policy. But no matter how hard the West, led by the U.S., tries, they will no longer be able to fundamentally influence events in the world. And the events in Ukraine, where Russia is successfully conducting a special military operation to protect the Russian population, and the bloody events in the Gaza Strip are the best evidence of this.

Arab regimes collude with Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing of Gaza

Posted on by
Reply

By By Jean Shaoul

Source: Defend Democracy Press

As Israel’s fascist government prepares to launch a massive ground invasion to take over Rafah city, discussions are now under way about setting up 15 campsites—each with around 25,000 tents—across the southwestern part of the Gaza Strip, to house the million-plus Palestinians that have taken refuge in the city.

These tent cities are to be funded by the United States and Arab despots and operated by the butcher of Cairo, Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Egypt and other Arab regimes are in effect providing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with the ability to claim he has assured the “safe passage” he said he would provide so that the planned ground invasion could take place. As Netanyahu again declared as Israel mounted a massive aerial bombardment of the city, his real goal is “total victory”—which means killing as many Palestinians as possible and driving the rest into the desert.

That such proposals could even be discussed with the Arab regimes confirms that their collusion with Israel’s genocidal offensive against Gaza, from day one, has now become direct participation in its ethnic cleansing through a second Nakba.

Israel has already killed at least 29,000 people, mostly women, children and the elderly, buried thousands more under the rubble, and displaced approximately 86 percent of Gaza’s population—1.7 million out of 2.3 million people. The majority are now sheltering in Rafah, close to the border with Egypt where they face famine, lack access to clean water and medical care and the imminent prospect of extermination.

Egypt: Israel’s border guard

Egypt, the most populous Arab state with 104 million people and the key frontline state, has for decades played a criminal role as a direct accomplice in Israel’s suppression of the Palestinians and its de facto border guard.

Since signing a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, Cairo has extended its ties with Tel Aviv, importing natural gas from Israel for refining and re-export, coordinating security over their shared border and the Gaza Strip, maintaining Israel’s blockade on Gaza, and strictly limiting the movement of people and goods across its borders after Hamas took control in 2007. Egypt stood by when Israel launched murderous assaults on the besieged enclave in 2008-9, 2012, 2014, the 2018-29 Great March of Return and 2021.

When the Gaza offensive started in October, Israel’s “wartime proposal” to push Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians into Egypt’s Sinai desert was met with a furious response from Cairo. However, this was not out of any concern for the Palestinians but because of what El-Sisi called “Gaza’s existential threat to Egypt’s national security.” If a million Gazans crossed the border, he warned, this would lead to a resurgence of Islamist “militancy” in Sinai.

When El-Sisi refers to a resurgence of Islamist militancy, he means a renewal of the mass popular opposition known as the 25 January Revolution, which in 2011, at the height of the “Arab Spring”, ended Mubarak’s personal rule. On July 3, 2013, the junta was able to resume power in a military coup thanks to the political bankruptcy of the bourgeois liberal opposition and their pseudo-left appendages in the Revolutionary Socialists, who provided leading personnel for the anti-Islamist Tamarod movement through which the military and its billionaire backers prepared the political ground for the coup. El-Sisi has brutally crushed all dissent ever since and the last thing he wants is millions of displaced and angry Palestinians to act as the focus for broader political opposition to his regime, to US imperialism and all its allies in the region.

The army has already fortified the concrete border wall with Gaza, installing barbed wire to prevent the Palestinians from crossing into the Sinai and deploying troops and 40 tanks along the border.

El-Sisi, speaking at a press conference on October 18 with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Cairo, argued that Israel could move Gaza’s Palestinians to Israel’s Negev desert instead of Sinai “until Israel is capable of defeating Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Afterwards, Palestinians could return to their homeland.”

Reports are circulating, citing the Sinai Foundation for Human Rights, that Egypt is constructing an eight-square-mile walled enclosure in northern Sinai to host Palestinians forcibly expelled from Gaza, though this is described as a “contingency plan” in the event Palestinians succeed in breaching the reinforced border.

But wherever the de facto concentration camps being discussed are eventually established, Egypt and the other Arab regimes involved are giving a greenlight for mass murder in Rafah. On Sunday, with breathtaking cynicism Egyptian officials, responding to these latest proposals for tent cities, told Israel that they would not object to a military operation in Rafah as long as it is conducted without harming Palestinian civilians. Army Radio also said that Egypt had emphatically denied reports it might pullout of its 1979 Camp David treaty if Israel attacked Rafah.

All the oil-rich despots are working openly with Israel to enable it to pursue its genocidal war, even deepening their ties to ensure Israel can continue the war without hindrance. They cover their treachery with crocodile tears over the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza, support for South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice and appeals for an urgent meeting of the toothless UN Security Council that is subject to Washington’s veto “to prevent Israel from causing an imminent humanitarian disaster for which everyone who supports the aggression is responsible.”

Jordan: Repressing Palestinian protests

Jordan has played the most open role in repressing popular opposition to Israel. It shares a long border with Israel and is home to over 2.2 million registered Palestinian refugees driven there by wars between 1947 and 1967, and their descendants. Around half of its 11 million population are of Palestinian descent, of whom around two thirds have been granted citizenship, but they face discrimination while nearly 400,000 still live in 10 refugee camps. Jordan has maintained a “cold peace” with Israel following a US Clinton administration-brokered normalization treaty in 1994.

The Jordanian government has banned protests along its border with the West Bank and clamped down on protests against Israel’s war on Gaza. According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), it has “arrested or harassed” over 1,000 pro-Palestine protesters who have called for the Jordanian government to take action against Israel. Lama Fakih, HRW’s Middle East director, said “Jordanian authorities are trampling the right to free expression and assembly to tamp down Gaza-related activism.”

Last week, the authorities arrested activist, Khaled al-Natour, after he shared posts calling for the lifting of the blockade on Gaza, as part of the government’s heightened crackdown on pro-Palestine activists, under a controversial new cybercrime law. According to Amnesty International, the vaguely worded law, passed in August, gives the government huge latitude to crack down on free speech and has been used to arrest and charge at least six political activists for their “social media posts expressing pro-Palestinian sentiments or criticizing the authorities’ policies towards Israel and advocating for public strikes and protests.”

Arab regimes keeping Israel’s economy running

Jordan, along with several other Arab states, is also playing a central role in keeping Israel’s economy functioning during the war.

According to Israel’s television Channel 13, the United Arab Emirates-based PureTrans FZCO and Israel-based Trucknet, which provides logistics technology for the Arab shipping companies, are transporting vital goods, including food, plastics, chemicals and electronic devices and components, between Dubai’s Jebel Ali Port and Haifa port, via roads passing through Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

The route was established prior to the Gaza offensive. In June, Miri Regev, Israel’s Minister of Transportation and Road Safety, announced plans to develop the route, stating on X/Twitter that “the overland transportation of the goods will shorten the time by 12 days and greatly reduce the existing waiting time due to the wire problem. We will do it and we will succeed.” In September, Trucknet signed a shipping agreement with the UAE and Bahrain.

The plans also include a railway line, yet to be agreed, linking the UAE and Israel with a high-speed train service between Israel’s northern city of Beit She’an and southern port of Eilat on the Red Sea.

The route has assumed greater strategic significance since October and especially because of Houthi attacks on Israeli-linked shipping in the Red Sea, helping Israel circumvent the shipping blockade and cutting the 14-day sea route around the Cape to four days.

Acutely conscious of the mass opposition within its already restive population to Israel’s genocidal war, Jordan denied that goods were being transported to Israel via its territory. But television reports showing trucks from the UAE crossing Jordanian territory to reach Israel exposed this lie, sparking anger and demonstrations against Jordan’s ‘shameful land bridge’ to Israel.

The Dubai-Haifa “land corridor” was in fact first mooted in 2017 by Israel’s transport minister Yisrael Katz and highlighted at the signing in 2020 of the Abraham Accords with the UAE and Bahrain–and later with Sudan and Morrocco–that ended the participants’ long-standing economic boycott of Israel. It made apparent Israel’s economic ties with the Gulf states that had long been kept under wraps.

The Accords not only signified the ditching of their long defunct adherence to securing a “two-state solution,” even as Netanyahu threatened to annex one third of the West Bank, illegally occupied by Israel since the 1967 Arab Israeli war. It crucially paved the way for trade and investment deals with Tel Aviv, particularly in arms, technology and cyberware, and Israel’s broader economic integration into the region begun clandestinely after the 1993 Oslo Accords.

Saudi Arabia and the planned war against Iran

Bahrain could only sign up to the Accords with the tacit consent of its paymaster in Saudi Arabia. Riyadh is now directly involved in the Dubai-Haifa corridor as part of its efforts to extract as many concessions as possible from Washington, including a defence agreement, commitment of “security” support, arms and fighter jets and help with a civilian nuclear program, even as it expanded its economic and political links with China to strengthen its bargaining position.

The land corridor is a key concern for the US and European imperialist powers. It is aimed at positioning the Israeli port of Haifa as a major gateway to Europe, altering the political and economic map of the region by bypassing the Red Sea and furthering Israel’s integration into the Gulf states’ economies.

Haifa would be the linchpin of the India-Middle East Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), a major transport infrastructure project aimed at integrating India, the Gulf and Europe while avoiding Iran, which would bring India closer to US imperialism and counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Oman’s Salalah Port, which has extensive ties with India, could also become part of the new network.

The project, which excludes Turkey, the largest non-oil economy in the Middle East, has aroused Ankara’s wrath, with government officials saying that the most suitable route for east-west trade passes through Turkey not Greece. It also undermines Egypt’s Suez Canal that is already suffering financial losses from the diversion of shipping round the Cape, intensifying its economic and social crisis.

The Arab regimes now account for one quarter of Israel’s $12.5 billion defence exports. Leaders from the UAE have also reiterated their commitment to the Abraham Accords, with UAE presidential foreign affairs adviser Anwar Gargash telling a conference in Dubai last month, “The UAE has taken a strategic decision, and strategic decisions are long-term.”

The bilateral flow of goods has exploded, expanding from $11.2 million in 2019 to $2 billion, excluding software, from January to August 2023, according to Israel’s UAE ambassador. The UAE-Israel partnership deal that came into force last year lowered tariffs with the aim of increasing bilateral trade to $10bn within five years. While far less than Israel’s trade with the European Union and Turkey, this is nevertheless far more than Israel’s trade with Egypt and Jordan.

As Israeli CEOs told the Financial Times, amid the Gaza genocide it has been “business as usual,” with new investment plans going ahead and the UAE’s airline continuing its flights to Tel Aviv even as others cancel theirs.

While Saudi Arabia was never a “frontline state” in the Arab Israeli conflict, in October 1973 it led the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries’ (OPEC) ban on the export of oil to those countries that had supported Israel during the October 1973 Arab Israeli War. The war began after Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to recover the territories lost in the 1967 war. Only Iraq and Libya did not take part in the oil embargo that was lifted in March 1974, by which time the price of oil had risen nearly threefold, massively increasing the oil states’ wealth and reactionary political influence in the region.

50 years later, there has been no mention of a similar embargo in defence of the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, indicating the monarchies’ backing for Israel’s war, paid for and planned by the Biden administration, to assert US hegemony over the resource-rich region and suppress all opposition to Washington and its regional allies and to their own regime.

Israel’s war on Gaza has done nothing to derail Washington’s long-running efforts to broker a normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia. A potential Saudi-Israel deal is a crucial part of its bid to settle the Gaza conflict with Riyadh indicating its willingness to proceed with discussions. For their part, the US and UK have consolidated the reversal of their previous opposition to Riyadh’s war to unseat the Houthis in Yemen, launching hundreds of aerial strikes on the Houthis in response to their attacks on shipping linked to Israel aimed at putting pressure on Israel to end its war and blockade of Gaza.

The Arab regimes, whose populations hold them in contempt, have made a pact with the devil: support for Israel—and by implication US imperialism—in return for Washington’s commitment to back their “security” in the event of a new “Arab Spring” or mass movement to unseat them, and to wage war against Iran, which has backed opposition forces to their rule, as part of its preparations for war on China.

Let Them Eat Dirt

Posted on by
Reply

The final stage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, an orchestrated mass starvation, has begun. The international community does not intend to stop it.

Let Them Eat Dirt – by Mr. Fish

By Chris Hedges

Source: Scheer Post

There was never any possibility that the Israeli government would agree to a pause in the fighting proposed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, much less a ceasefire. Israel is on the verge of delivering the coup de grâce in its war on Palestinians in Gaza – mass starvation. When Israeli leaders use the term “absolute victory,” they mean total decimation, total elimination. The Nazis in 1942 systematically starved the 500,000 men, women and children in the Warsaw Ghetto. This is a number Israel intends to exceed. 

Israel, and its chief patron the United States, by attempting to shut down the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which provides food and aid to Gaza, is not only committing a war crime, but is in flagrant defiance of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The court found the charges of genocide brought by South Africa, which included statements and facts gathered by UNWRA, plausible. It ordered Israel to abide by six provisional measures to prevent genocide and alleviate the humanitarian catastrophe. The fourth provisional measure calls on Israel to secure immediate and effective steps to provide humanitarian assistance and essential services in Gaza. 

UNRWA’s reports on conditions in Gaza, which I covered as a reporter for seven years, and its documentation of indiscriminate Israeli attacks illustrate that, as UNRWA said, “unilaterally declared ‘safe zones’ are not safe at all. Nowhere in Gaza is safe.” 

UNRWA’s role in documenting the genocide, as well as providing food and aid to the Palestinians, infuriates the Israeli government. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused UNRWA after the ruling of providing false information to the ICJ. Already an Israeli target for decades, Israel decided that UNRWA, which supports 5.9 million Palestinian refugees across the Middle East with clinics, schools and food, had to be eliminated. Israel’s destruction of UNRWA serves a political as well as material objective. 

The evidence-free Israeli accusations against UNRWA that a dozen of the 13,000 employees had links to those who carried out the attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, which saw some 1,200 Israelis killed, did the trick. It led 16 major donors, including the United States, the U.K., Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Finland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Estonia and Japan, to suspend financial support for the relief agency on which nearly every Palestinian in Gaza depends for food. Israel has killed 152 UNRWA workers and damaged 147 UNRWA installations since Oct. 7. Israel has also bombed UNRWA relief trucks. 

More than 27,708 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, some 67,000 have been wounded and at least 7,000 are missing, most likely dead and buried under the rubble.

More than half a million Palestinians – one in four – are starving in Gaza, according to the U.N. Starvation will soon be ubiquitous. Palestinians in Gaza, at least 1.9 million of whom have been internally displaced, lack not only sufficient food, but clean water, shelter and medicine. There are few fruits or vegetables. There is little flour to make bread. Pasta, along with meat, cheese and eggs, have disappeared. Black market prices for dry goods such as lentils and beans have increased 25 times from pre-war prices. A bag of flour on the black market has risen from $8.00 to $200 dollars. The healthcare system in Gaza, with only three of Gaza’s 36 hospitals left partially functioning, has largely collapsed. Some 1.3 million displaced Palestinians live on the streets of the southern city of Rafah, which Israel designated a “safe zone,” but has begun to bomb. Families shiver in the winter rains under flimsy tarps amid pools of raw sewage. An estimated 90 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been driven from their homes.

“There is no instance since the Second World War in which an entire population has been reduced to extreme hunger and destitution with such speed,” writes Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University and the author of “Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine,” in the Guardian. “And there’s no case in which the international obligation to stop it has been so clear.”

The United States, formerly UNRWA’s largest contributor, provided $422 million to the agency in 2023. The severance of funds ensures that UNRWA food deliveries, already in very short supply because of blockages by Israel, will largely come to a halt by the end of February or the beginning of March. 

Israel has given the Palestinians in Gaza two choices. Leave or die.

I covered the famine in Sudan in 1988 that took 250,000 lives. There are streaks in my lungs, scars from standing amid hundreds of Sudanese who were dying of tuberculosis. I was strong and healthy and fought off the contagion. They were weak and emaciated and did not. The international community, as in Gaza, did little to intervene. 

The precursor to starvation – undernourishment – already affects most Palestinians in Gaza. Those who starve lack enough calories to sustain themselves. In desperation people begin to eat animal fodder, grass, leaves, insects, rodents, even dirt. They suffer from diarrhea and respiratory infections. They rip up tiny bits of food, often spoiled, and ration it. 

Soon, lacking enough iron to produce hemoglobin, a protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen from the lungs to the body, and myoglobin, a protein that provides oxygen to muscles, coupled with a lack of vitamin B1, they become anemic. The body feeds on itself. Tissue and muscle waste away. It is impossible to regulate body temperature. Kidneys shut down. Immune systems crash. Vital organs – brain, heart, lungs, ovaries and testes — atrophy. Blood circulation slows. The volume of blood decreases. Infectious diseases such as typhoid, tuberculosis and cholera become an epidemic, killing people by the thousands.

It is impossible to concentrate. Emaciated victims succumb to mental and emotional withdrawal and apathy. They do not want to be touched or moved. The heart muscle is weakened. Victims, even at rest, are in a state of virtual heart failure. Wounds do not heal. Vision is impaired with cataracts, even among the young. Finally, wracked by convulsions and hallucinations, the heart stops. This process can last up to 40 days for an adult. Children, the elderly and the sick expire at faster rates.

I saw hundreds of skeletal figures, specters of human beings, moving forlornly at a glacial pace across the barren Sudanese landscape. Hyenas, accustomed to eating human flesh, routinely picked off small children. I stood over clusters of bleached human bones on the outskirts of villages where dozens of people, too weak to walk, had laid down in a group and never gotten up. Many were the remains of entire families. 

In the abandoned town of Mayen Abun bats dangled from the rafters of the gutted Italian mission church. The streets were overgrown with tussocks of grass. The dirt airstrip was flanked by hundreds of human bones, skulls and the remnants of iron bracelets, colored beads, baskets and tattered strips of clothing. The palm trees had been cut in half. People had eaten the leaves and the pulp inside. There had been a rumor that food would be delivered by plane. People had walked for days to the airstrip. They waited and waited and waited. No plane arrived. No one buried the dead. 

Now, from a distance, I watch this happen in another land in another time. I know the indifference that doomed the Sudanese, mostly Dinkas, and today dooms the Palestinians. The poor, especially when they are of color, do not count.  They can be killed like flies. The starvation in Gaza is not a natural disaster. It is Israel’s masterplan. 

There will be scholars and historians who will write of this genocide, falsely believing that we can learn from the past, that we are different, that history can prevent us from being, once again, barbarians. They will hold academic conferences. They will say “Never again!” They will praise themselves for being more humane and civilized. But when it comes time to speak out with each new genocide, fearful of losing their status or academic positions, they will scurry like rats into their holes. Human history is one long atrocity for the world’s poor and vulnerable. Gaza is another chapter.

How Sad It It Is to Watch America’s Abandonment of Morality and Degeneration into Evil.

Posted on by
2

By Paul Craig Roberts

Source: PaulCraigRoberts.org

To be an American today is to collect a basket full of sadness.  We have been at war forever for the profits of the military/security complex, for the hegemonic ideology of the neoconservatives, for Cold War hysteria, and for Israel.  Huge sums of money have been wasted for no benefit to the American people.  Just yesterday I was listening to a deputy sheriff tell me how frustrating it was that he cannot reach the criminal American elite and bring them home to their crimes, but has, instead, to focus on the minor crimes of their lower class victims.  

I asked him why it is the lower class that most waves the flag, and he said that patriotism is all that they have that gives them meaning.  I responded that this means that they cannot escape their victimhood, and he said “that is what is sad about it.”

Parents have not come home from Washington’s wars to their spouses, children, family, and friends.  They died for the military/security complex’s profits, for Israel, or for some dumbshit ideology.  They did not die for America, but for their deaths to have meaning, their families have to insist that they did.  With the American people trapped in this way, Washington can pile up the deaths, thanking the dead not for defending the military/security complex’s profits, but for “defending America.” In this way Washington can continue its endless wars. Dying for America is a way the lower class can find meaning in their lives. 

Now that Russia has shown that there is to be no American victory in Ukraine, Washington has renewed its war adventures in the Middle East, aligning solidly with Israel’s massacre of the Palestinians and against the Arab and Muslim countries that oppose what is an Israeli genocide of the Palestinians. Palestinian women, children, hospitals, schools, social infrastructure are being blown to tiny pieces with the American bombs and missiles that Biden is handing to Israel’s Nazi leader, Netanyahu, who is under indictment both in Israel and now in effect by the International Court of Justice.  But this means nothing to Washington, which sees itself as the exceptional, indispensable country unaccountable to any law, domestic or international.

The alleged “moral democracies,” the US, UK, EU, Japan, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Iceland, thumbed their noses at the International Court of Justice’s verdict against Israel by suspending their funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the major source of aid to the Palestinians in Gaza.  

What does this tell us about the morality of the Western World.  It tells us that it is worse than in Sodom and Gomorrah. 

How can we be Proud Americans when the suspension of funding by Washington will impact life-saving assistance for over two million civilians, over half of whom are children, who rely on UNRWA aid in Gaza? The population faces starvation and an outbreak of disease under Israel’s bombardment and blockade of aid.

This is the way that Zionist Israel, together with its Biden Regime Democrat ally, intends to accomplish its genocidal elimination of the Palestinian people. 

Israel has blockaded all water, food, electricity, and medical supplies to Gaza for the last 120 days. As a result, a half million Palestinians face starvation. 

The massive and ongoing bombing of Gaza, courtesy of the continuous shipment of US munitions to Israel, has killed and wounded at least 90,000 Palestinians, 70% of them women and children. More than 1000 children have had to undergo amputations without anesthesia. There is no medicine, no blood for transfusions, no clean water to wash wounds. And no food. Only more bombs falling from the sky each day, thanks to America.

Chris Hedges reports that the West’s alleged humanitarian and medical institutions refuse to denounce Israel’s decimation of human life in Gaza.  We are faced with the stark fact that even Western medical and humanitarian institutions are in the pocket of Israeli Zionists.  Morality cannot be found on the scene.

How is it that a tiny county, the existence of which depends entirely on American support, can force the world to accept genocide at the risk of the war widening into Nuclear Armageddon?

Israel’s Starvation Strategy

Posted on by
Reply

By Mike Whitney

Source: The Unz Review

It’s not a coincidence that the attacks on UNRWA took place after the ICJ ruling. Israel is trying to discredit the International Court of Justice, and one way of doing that is by rubbishing UNWRA. But UNWRA has fulfilled the heroic role of providing health, education and all other services to the Palestinian refugees since 1948. And it’s really heartbreaking that Israeli propaganda is now demonizing UNWRA and leading some countries to cut off aid. So, my sympathy and support is entirely on the side of UNWRA, and I hope it can long continue to play the vital role it has always played in supporting the Palestinian victims of Israeli aggression. Avi Shlaim, Israeli historian, You Tube

UNRWA provides food and flour distribution for the entire 2.2 million population of Gaza. Defunding UNRWA will lead to mass starvation and death.

Here’s your Zionist quiz for the day: Why did Israel launch a full-blown media blitz on a United Nations relief agency (UNRWA) on the same day that the International Criminal Court of Justice (ICJ) released its historic genocide ruling?

  1. —To divert attention from the fact that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza
  2. —To inform the public that new intelligence had serviced revealing Hamas involvement in the United Nations Relief and Works Agency
  3. —To assure people everywhere that Israel’s main concern is fighting terrorism
  4. —To activate the final phase of their ethnic cleansing operation

If you answered “4” then pat yourself on the back because that is the right answer. Of course, it’s also true that Israel wanted to divert attention from the ICJ’s announcement, but that pales in comparison to the launching of the final phase of its ethnic cleansing operation. This is the real coup de grâce, the final death blow to the two-state solution and a practical remedy to Israel’s nagging demographic problem. This is also the critical puzzle piece that makes sense of the last 100-plus days of relentless bombardment, airstrikes and other forms of state terror. It’s as if Israel is boldly laying down its cards so the entire world can see the strategy it plans to employ to eradicate the native population and fulfill the Zionist dream of a Jewish state from the river to the sea.

And what might that strategy be?

To disperse 2 million Palestinians to the four corners of the earth via mass immigration.

But, how will they do that, after all, haven’t a number of countries already refused to take the Palestinians?

Indeed, they have, but that is before the (soon to-be-published) photos of starving women and children flooded social media sites around the world generating an unprecedented outpouring of sympathy for the beleaguered population. And as public sympathy leads to widespread outrage, more and more people will demand that their governments take action to relieve the suffering through mass immigration. This is how Israel intends to rid itself of its native population and create Zionist Valhalla, a Jewish majority into perpetuity.

This is why Israel has launched its ferocious attack on UNWRA, because UNWRA—more than any other humanitarian organization operating in the Middle East—helps to keep the Palestinians fed and housed which is at-odds with Israeli explicit intentions. The last thing Israel wants is for the Palestinians to establish a massive refugee camp near Rafah that will balloon in size in years to come. That phenom has already taken place in both Jordan and Lebanon where nearly 3 million Palestinians still languish in refugee camps (75 years after the creation of the Israeli state) and are still determined to return home sometime in the future. That is not what Israel wants. Israel wants the Palestinians to ‘vanish into thin air’ which is why they want them dispersed around the world so even the thought of returning home, will never enter their minds.

So, while Israeli leaders do not relish the reputational damage they are experiencing due to their treatment of the Palestinians, they are willing to endure it in order to achieve their broader strategic objectives which are the complete eradication of the Arab population and the strengthening of a permanent Jewish majority.

Israel’s overall strategy was best summarized by Daniella Weiss, a former mayor of a West Bank settlement, who said the following in a short interview on Tik Tok:

“They will move. They will move. The Arabs will move….. So, we don’t give them food, we don’t give the Arabs anything, and they will have to leave. The world will accept them.” (Middle East Eye, Tik Tok)

That’s Israel’s plan in a nutshell.

Destroy a Nation: Israel Is Deliberately Bombing Palestine’s Educational Institutions

Posted on by
1

By Timothy Alexander Guzman

Source: Silent Crow News

It’s not about Hamas, nor the Palestinian resistance hiding its weapons or any other excuse to attack Palestinian schools and universities, it’s a plot to destroy the Palestinian people. The Israeli government is deliberately targeting all educational institutions of Palestine whether they are in the Gaza strip or in the West Bank and beyond.  So why would they do such a thing?    

If the Palestinians don’t have educational institutions to train doctors, engineers, lawyers, historians, mathematicians, religious scholars, lawyers, and every other profession that is essential for a nation to survive and thrive, then what kind of society would they have?  Trained doctors and nurses won’t be able to treat and cure their patients.  Engineers and architects won’t be able to build critical infrastructure such as buildings, roads, water and sewer systems, railways and airports.  An uneducated people won’t be able to maintain or compete with other countries in terms of finance and international trade with skilled accountants, economists, financial planners, and investment bankers.  Professors, teachers, and school administrators won’t be able to teach their students reading and writing, math, history, religion and the sciences such as biology, chemistry and physics.  Newspapers and media won’t have trained journalists, researchers, and radio broadcasters and so on.  In other words, a nation without knowledge is doomed for failure and the Israelis are well aware of it.    

Destroy the education of the Palestinians, you destroy a nation of people.  Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reported that “the Israeli army has killed 94 university professors, along with hundreds of teachers and thousands of students, as part of its genocidal war against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.” Israel has killed many professors along with their family members in the Gaza Strip, “the Israeli army has targeted academic, scientific, and intellectual figures in the Strip in deliberate and specific air raids on their homes without prior notice. Those targeted have been crushed to death beneath the rubble, along with members of their families and other displaced families.”  The number of Palestinian professors, teachers, administrators, and students killed is a sign that those involved in education is a legitimate target for the Israelis:

According to preliminary estimates, the ongoing Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of university students, reported Euro-Med Monitor. The rights group pointed out that destroying universities and killing academics and students will make it more difficult to resume university and academic life when the genocide ends, saying it may take years for studies to be resumed in an environment that has been completely destroyed.

According to the Palestinian Ministry of Education, 4,327 students have been killed and 7,819 others injured, while 231 teachers and administrators have been killed and 756 injured during the ongoing attacks. Meanwhile, 281 state-run schools and 65 UNRWA-run schools in the Gaza Strip have been completely or partially destroyed

Israel is targeting the cultural and historical properties of the Palestinian people to erase their history, but also to destroy any knowledge they have to rebuild their society:

Israel’s widespread and intentional destruction of Palestinian cultural and historical properties, including universities, schools, libraries, and archives, demonstrates its apparent policy of rendering the Gaza Strip uninhabitable, Euro-Med Monitor warned. The attacks are creating an environment devoid of basic services and necessities and may eventually force the Strip’s population to emigrate.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor stressed that the targeting of civilian objects by armed forces, particularly those that are historical or cultural artifacts protected by special laws, is not only a serious breach of international humanitarian law and a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, but falls under the purview of the crime of genocide

There is an indication that there is an agenda behind the mass killings of people involved in education.  The Toronto Star had an interesting article titled, ‘How Israel’s ‘scholasticide’ denies Palestinians their past, present and future’ said that “Academics raising concerns about this particular type of destruction call it “scholasticide,” and point to three related phenomena: the destruction of Gaza’s educational infrastructure, assaults on universities in Gaza and West Bank, as well as serious harassment and attacks on senior faculty and students supporting Palestine within the Israeli university system.” “Scholasticide’ is a term that shows how Israel’s destruction of the education system in Gaza directly impacts the past, present and future of the Palestinian people:

The destruction risks erasing Gaza’s past. For instance, the university that was blasted on Wednesday also housed a national museum containing rare artifacts. Whether those artifacts were destroyed or, as West Bank’s Birzeit University is accusing, stolen by Israel, they are lost to Palestinians. With archives and architecture destroyed, it’s as if Palestinians never lived there.

If the current situation continues, Gaza is also likely to be denied to its people in future. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated his long-standing opposition to Palestinian statehood saying Thursday, “In the future, the state of Israel has to control the entire area from the river to the sea”

According to Abdel Razzaq Takriti, an associate professor of history at Rice University in Texas who is also the chair of the Arab American Educational Foundation said that “as scholars, we cannot fathom how it is possible that we’re supposed to stay silent while our colleagues are being bombed with bombs supplied by our countries” he also said that “this is an attack on the enlightenment in society” he continued“and it’s going to cause ignorance. It’s going to cause lack of opportunity. And it’s designed to do that. Scholasticide is a very dangerous aspect of genocide.”

It’s not just in Gaza, its all of Palestine’s educational institutions that are being targeted by the IDF forces.  The Norwegian Refugee Council conducted a report from January 2018 until June 2020 and found that “Palestinian children in the West Bank contended with a deluge of attacks on education, at a crushing pace of 10 attacks per month, on average.”  The research was based on a 30-month period and it “found that 296 attacks against education by Israeli forces or settlers and settlement private security guards took place during 235 separate incidents.” 

Israel’s actions is nothing less than a diabolical plot to destroy a nation’s people.  It gives the Israelis the excuse it needs to call the Palestinians animals who don’t even know how to read or write and that the Palestinians don’t know how to make a living and that’s why they are dependent on foreign aid.  A report by Amnesty International said that “Palestinians across all areas under Israel’s control have fewer opportunities to earn a living and engage in business than Jewish Israelis” and that “They experience discriminatory limitations on access to and use of farmland, water, gas and oil amongst other natural resources, as well as restrictions on the provision of health, education and basic services.”

With no educational institutions to train and educate its people, the Palestinians will face a collapse of their society.  Zionist warmongers want nothing more but to eradicate any hope for a better future for the Palestinian people by erasing all forms of education that would allow them to advance their society and that is something that the Israelis don’t want to see happen.  

“Not Wanting” A Wider Middle East War, the U.S. Has Started One

Posted on by
Reply

By Edward Curtin

Source: Dissident Voice

You have to hand it to the U.S. and its henchmen for brazenness.  In order to protect their client state Israel and its genocide in Gaza, the U.S., together with the UK, have in one week launched air and sea attacks on the Houthis in Yemen five times, referring to it as “self-defense” in their Orwellian lingo.  The ostensible reason being Yemen’s refusal to allow ships bound for Israel, which is committing genocide in Gaza, to enter the Red Sea, while permitting other ships to pass freely.

To any impartial observer, the Houthis should be lauded.  Yet, while the International Court of Justice considers the South African charge of genocide against Israel that is supported by overwhelming evidence, the U.S. and its allies have instigated a wider war throughout the Middle East while claiming they do not want such a war.  These settler colonial states want genocide and a much wider war because they have been set back on their heels by those they have mocked, provoked, and attacked – notably the Palestinians, Syrians, and Russians, among others.

While the criminalization of international law does not bode well for the ICJ’s upcoming ruling or its ability to stop Israeli’s genocide in Gaza, Michel Chossudovsky, of Global Research, as is his wont, has offered a superb analysis and suggestion for those who oppose such crimes: that Principle IV of the Nuremberg Charter – “The fact that a person [e.g. Israeli, U.S. soldiers, pilots] acted pursuant to order of his [her] Government or of a superior does not relieve him [her] from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.” – should be used to supplement the South African charges and appeal directly to the moral consciences of those asked to carry out acts of genocide. He writes:

Let us call upon Israeli and American soldiers and pilots “to abandon the battlefield”, as an act of refusal to participate in a criminal undertaking against the People of Gaza.  

South Africa’s legal procedure at the ICJ should be endorsed Worldwide. While it cannot be relied upon to put a rapid end to the genocide, it provides support and legitimacy to the “Disobey Unlawful Orders, Abandon the Battlefield”  campaign under Nuremberg Charter Principle IV.

While such an approach will not stop the continuing slaughter, it would remind the world that each person who participates in and supports it bears a heavy burden of guilt for their actions; that they are morally and legally culpable.  This appeal to the human heart and conscience, no matter what its practical effect, will at least add to the condemnation of a genocide happening in real time and full view of the world, even though no one will ever be prosecuted for such crimes since any real just use of international law has long disappeared.  Yet there is a edifying history of such conscientious objection to immoral war making, and though each person makes the decision in solitary witness, individual choices can inspire others and the solitary become solidary, as Albert Camus reminded us at the end of his short story, “The Artist at Work.”

With each passing day, it becomes more and more evident that Israel/U.S.A. and their allies do want a wider war.  Iran is their special focus, with Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen targets on the way.  Anyone who supports the genocide in Gaza, explicitly or through silence, bears responsibility for the conflagration to come.  There are no excuses.

And the facts show that it is axiomatic that waging war has been the modus operandi of the U.S./Israeli alliance for a long time.  Just as in early 2003 when the Bush administration said they were looking for a peaceful solution to their fake charges against Sadam Hussein with his alleged “weapons of mass destruction,” the Biden administration is lying, as the Bush administration lied about September 11, 2001 to launch its ongoing war on terror, starting in Afghanistan.  Without an expanded war, President Biden – aka the Democrats, since he will most probably not be the candidate – and his psychopathic partner Benjamin Netanyahu, will not survive.  It is bi-partisan war-mongering, of course, internationally and intramurally, since both U.S. political parties are controlled by the Israel Lobby and billionaire class that owns Congress and the “defense” industry that thrives on never-ending war to such an extent that even the notable independent candidate for the presidency, Robert Kennedy, Jr., who is running as an anti-war candidate, fully supports Israel which is tantamount to supporting Biden’s expanding war policy.

Biden and Netanyahu, who are always claiming after the fact that they were surprised by events or were fed bad advice by their underlings, are dumb scorpions. They are stupid but deadly.  And many people in the West, while perhaps decent people in their personal lives, are living in a fantasy world of “sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity,” in MLK, Jr.’s words, as the growing threat of a world war increases and insouciance reigns.

Neither the Israeli nor American government can allow themselves to be humiliated, U.S./NATO by the Russians in Ukraine and the Israelis by the Palestinians.  Like cornered criminals with lethal weapons, they will kill as many as they can on their way down, taking their revenge on the weakest first.

Their “mistakes” are always well intentioned.  They stumble into wars through faulty intelligence.  They drop the ball because of bureaucratic mix-ups. They miscalculate the perfidy of the moneyed elites whom allegedly they oppose while pocketing their cash and ushering them into the national coffers out of necessity since they are too big to fail.  They never see the storm coming, even as they create it.  Their incompetence or the perfidy of their enemies is the retort to all those “nut cases” who conjure up conspiracy theories or plain facts to explain their actions or lack thereof.  They are innocent.  Always innocent.  And they can’t understand why those they have long abused reach a point when they will no longer impetrate for mercy but will fight fiercely for their freedom.

All signs point to a major war on the horizon.  Both the U.S.A. and Israel have been shown to be rogue states with no desire to negotiate a peaceful world.  Believing in high-tech weapons and massive firepower, neither has learned the hard lesson that anti-colonial wars have historically been won by those with far less weapons but with a passionate desire to throw off the chains of their oppressors.  Vietnam is the text-book case, and there are many others.  Failure to learn is the name of their game.

The Zionist project for a Greater Israel is doomed to fail, but as it does, desperate men like Biden and Netanyahu are intent on launching desperate acts of war.  Exactly when and how this expanded war will blaze across the headlines is the question.  It has started, but I think it prudent to expect a black swan event sometime this year when all hell will break loose.  The genocide in Gaza is the first step, and the U.S./Israel, “not wanting” a wider war, have already started one.

(For an excellent history lesson on the Zionist oppression of Palestinians and the current genocide, listen to Max Blumenthal’s and Miko Peled’s impassioned talk – “Where is the War in Gaza Going? – delivered from the heart of darkness, Washington D.C.  Two Jewish men who know the difference between Zionism and Judaism and whose consciences are aflame with justice for the oppressed Palestinians.)

Biden, Israel’s accomplice in Gaza, pretends to be a bystander

Posted on by
1

While the White House claims to be “frustrated” with Israel’s conduct in Gaza, US support for the carnage continues.

By Aaron Maté

Source: Aaron Maté Substack

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. In a statement announcing his authorization of US strikes last week, Biden declared that he was acting to protect “freedom of navigation” and the “free flow of international commerce.” Since mid-November, the group that controls most of Yemen, Ansar Allah (misleadingly known in the US as the Houthis), has been targeting commercial ships – primarily those with Israeli links – passing through the Red Sea in a bid to compel the Israeli government to halt its assault on Gaza. By contrast with Israel’s operations, which has an official death toll of 23,000 and counting, Ansar Allah has not killed anyone. It even lost at least ten fighters in a US counterattack on December 31st. As Biden noted, Ansar Allah’s main impact has been to threaten “weeks of delays in product shipping times.” (Others estimate that the delay time can in fact be counted in days).

As in Gaza, the ultimate targets of US aggression in Yemen are civilians. While the Pentagon claims to be targeting Ansar Allah’s military capabilities, the “greater risk from the air attacks is likely borne by ordinary Yemenis,” the New York Times notes. This risk to ordinary Yemenis is consistent with longstanding US policy, specifically the current Biden team’s 2015 decision under President Obama to green-light the Saudi-led war on Yemen that has caused the ensuing humanitarian crisis. Around 21 million Yemenis – two-thirds of the country – rely on aid for survival, while more than four million are internally displaced.

In facing “one of the world’s worst humanitarian calamities,” the Times adds, Yemen faces “a dubious distinction now shared by Gaza.” Given its critical support for Israel’s assault, the US therefore has the dubious distinction of fueling two of the world’s worst humanitarian calamities.

Because of Israel’s blockade and military assault, the risk of famine in Gaza is “growing by the day,” Martin Griffiths, the United Nations’ top humanitarian official now warns. “As ground operations move southwards, aerial bombardments have intensified in areas where civilians were told to relocate for their safety.” For Gaza’s civilians – more than 90% of them displaced — “dignified human life is a near impossibility.”

According to one anonymous official with Israel’s occupation authority for Gaza (COGAT), the lack of dignity for Palestinians in Gaza is a genetic trait. “There is no hunger in Gaza,” the official told Haaretz. “…There were stockpiles of food in Gaza. Don’t forget that this is an Arab, Gazan population whose DNA is to hoard, certainly when it comes to food.”

It is apparently in the White House DNA to share its Israeli client’s avowed bigotry. In a statement Sunday night, President Biden marked “100 days of captivity” for the Israeli hostages in Gaza. Biden’s emotional message failed to even mention the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians killed, wounded, and displaced under US-backed Israeli assault over that same period.

“No one should have to endure even one day of what they have gone through, much less 100,” Biden said of the hostages. By refusing to acknowledge them, Biden is affirming via omission that he believes the exact opposite — and in fact infinitely worse — for Gaza’s two million Palestinian hostages. After 100 days of genocide, the people of Gaza are fated to endure continued atrocities as a direct result of US policy, no matter the Biden team’s ongoing effort to pretend otherwise.