Israel has been unable to achieve any meaningful victories against the Palestinian Fighters Against Occupation
Instead of facing the wrath of the whole world and getting crushed, Hamas has not only survived but is becoming more popular.
While US President Joe Biden’s administration provided excuses for Israel’s invasions and bombings of hospitals in the Gaza Strip, claiming that Hamas has maintained a significant presence in places like the recently-raided al-Shifa Hospital, the world has risen in outrage against the atrocities Israel has committed in the Palestinian territory.
UN relief chief, Martin Griffiths, has called the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza “the worst ever,” and it’s seen as a direct result of the US having drawn “no red lines” for Israel’s behavior in Gaza.
Meanwhile, Hamas scores victory after victory, from a guerilla warfare and political perspective, while its military capabilities appear to have been undiminished so far.
The Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, that launched their attack on Israel on October 7, have managed to shift the world’s attention back on the issue of Palestine, have freed political prisoners held in Israeli detention while inflicting blow after blow against one of the most powerful military forces in the world.
Today, the whole world is talking about the formation of a Palestinian state.
There is also the notion of bringing the Palestinian Authority into power in the Gaza Strip, which would essentially mean the lifting of the 17-year economic blockade that the West has imposed on it.
The issue of protecting the status quo at Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem is also on the regional agenda in a serious way, while the government of Benjamin Netanyahu veers towards collapse.
It had to be an “invisible coup” so that Americans could be persuaded that nothing would change except the president, and that, under new circumstances, Johnson would act as Kennedy would have acted.
There was one thing that Johnson reversed, but Americans did not see it until thirty years later.
It concerned U.S. relations with Israel and with Israel’s enemies.
Johnson was absolutely indispensable, not for the CIA, but for Israel: no other president would have gone as far as Johnson to support Israel’s invasion of Egypt and Syria in 1967.
No other American president, not even Truman, would have let Israel get away with the USS Liberty massacre.
Johnson not only let them get away, he helped them do it (read Phillip Nelson’s Remember the Liberty).
Johnson was committed to Israel, financially (through Abraham Feinberg, see below) and spiritually (“The line of Jewish mothers can be traced back three generations in Lyndon Johnson’s family tree”).
[25] This explains why he filled the Warren Commission with Israeli agents, such as Arlen “Magic Bullet” Specter, later honored by the Israeli government as “an unswerving defender of the Jewish State.”[26]
Most of the different groups that wanted to get rid of [Kennedy] would just have waited and concentrated on political means, and that includes Dulles.
This included using their media contacts to damage him politically.
The only two that desperately needed to get rid of him immediately were LBJ, whom he was about to drop from the ticket and destroy politically, and Israel, because of the immediate efforts to eliminate their nuclear development program at Dimona.
That’s why LBJ and Israel are the overwhelmingly logical suspects.
Research on the JFK assassination must start from the premise that it was a coup d’état.
CIA-theorists tend to minimize the primal fact that the assassination resulted in a change of president.
So let’s repeat the obvious: whoever assassinated Kennedy wanted to put Johnson in power.
That is why defeating Kennedy electorally was not an option: Johnson would have fallen with Kennedy (his epic corruption was to be exposed anyway).
Kennedy’s death was Johnson’s only chance to become president — and, perhaps, to avoid prison.
But Johnson could not do it alone, so let me rephrase: Kennedy’s death was the only way for the conspirators to make Johnson president.
Since Israel decided to pull out from Gaza in 2005, following a 38-year occupation, the strip has been a weapons lab for Israel and subjected to near constant bombardment from the air.
IDF clears itself in Cast Lead air strike that killed 21 family members
Cast Lead proceeded in two phases: a week of intense aerial bombing followed by two weeks of a joint air and land assault and invasion.
The surprise attack began at 11:30 a.m. on December 27, 2008, with Israeli F-16 fighter jets, Apache helicopters, and unmanned drones striking more than 100 locations across the tiny, crowded Gaza Strip within a matter of minutes.
“When the Israelis hit the Islamic University of Gaza, they claimed they targeted a chemical weapons lab,” Khalil said.
“It was hilarious, despite the tragedy. We joked about my father’s office harboring banned chemicals. But in all seriousness, it amazed me how Israel can lie and make up stories and still manage to deceive the world. I want to do something about this.”
In the words of David Halpin, a retired British surgeon and trauma specialist, Gaza was “used as a laboratory for testing what I call weapons from hell”. These included shells containing white phosphorus and dense inert metal explosives (Dime).
These were demons with the latest high-tech weapons, courtesy of the US tax-payer and if the good people of the US knew what was done in their name here, they would be sick to their stomachs. Shame on all of us for allowing this to happen and to go completely unpunished.
Samouni family massacre: In perhaps the most infamous incident of the attack, Israeli soldiers ordered around 100 members of the Samouni family into a single building in the Zaytoun area of Gaza City. Soldiers held the family in the building for 24 hours before shelling the building on January 4, 2009. Twenty-one members of the family, all civilians, were killed.
Al-Daya family massacre: On January 6, an Israeli F-16 jet fired a missile at the home of the Al-Daya family, also in the Zaytoun neighborhood of Gaza City, killing 22 family members, most of them women and children.
White flag killings: The UN mission and human rights groups also documented several cases in which witnesses saw Israeli soldiers kill Palestinians who were fleeing while carrying makeshift white flags to indicate their status as civilians. In one case, a soldier shot and killed two women, Majda and Rayya Hajjaj (aged 37 and 65 respectively) who were fleeing with their families while carrying a white flag in the town of Johr Ad-Dik. In August 2012, in a plea deal with prosecutors, a solider was sentenced to just 45 days in prison for their deaths. To date he’s the only person to face serious charges stemming from Cast Lead.
Use of white phosphorus in populated areas: Rights groups, journalists, and the UN mission in Gaza also documented numerous instances of the use of white phosphorus, an incendiary substance that is illegal when used in populated areas. Israeli forces used white phosphorus in attacks on at least two hospitals (Al-Quds Hospital and Al-Wafa Hospital), as well as the central UN compound in Gaza City. Numerous civilian casualties were caused by white phosphorus in the small, densely populated Strip.
White Flag Deaths
Nada al-Marrdi, age 5, was shot and killed by an Israeli soldier on January 5 in ‘Atatra as her family and
neighbors tried to leave the area holding white t-shir
These casualties comprise a small fraction of the Palestinian civilians killed and wounded during what Israel called Operation Cast Lead, but they stand out because of the circumstances of the attacks.
In each case, the victims were standing, walking, or in a lowly moving vehicle with other unarmed civiians who were trying to convey their non-combatant status by waving a white flag.
All available evidence indicates that Israeli forces had control of the areas in question, no fighting was taking place there at the time, and and Palestinian fighters were not hiding among the civilians who were shot.
Whether waving a white flag or not, these people were civilians not taking an active part in hostilities, and therefore should not have been attacked, according to international humanitarian law (the laws of war).*
For all who visit Palestine, the fragility of the Zionist project is plain to see.
On October 7, the Palestinian people broke the nearly 20-year siege of Gaza — the world’s largest open-air prison.
In response, the Israeli regime threatened them with extermination.
“There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, everything is closed,” Israel’s Defense Minister said.
“We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly.”
Now, the siege has intensified to genocidal proportions.
Hundreds of thousands were internally displaced within Gaza, which has a population of two million people with nowhere to go.
The number of dead, likely underreported, rises by the hour.
Entire housing blocks are being leveled as terrorized families cower in darkness, cut off from the outside world.
From Washington to Brussels, the leaders of the old colonial powers have been quick to cheer on the violence, while slandering the Palestinian resistance with increasingly-hysterical atrocity propaganda.
But to insist, as they do, that the “violence is unprovoked” is to opt for amnesia.
The violence — the original violence of the colonizer — has long been weaved into the very geography of colonized Palestine.
Its serene landscapes are scarred by walls and mazes, checkpoints and guard towers, outposts and turrets.
They sever farmers from farms, traders from trade routes, fishermen from the sea, brothers from sisters. Sometimes, they appear within homes.
A group of settlers moved into the house of the el-Kurd family in Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem, severing their garden, living room, and two bedrooms from the rest.
The occupied parts of the home, like other zones of occupation across Palestine, are an image of neglect.
Everywhere, settlers make the land unlivable to those who seek to return.
The silent war
When we visited Palestine in May as part of an international brigade organized by the Progressive International in collaboration with the International Peoples’ Assembly, we saw that violence unfold across the topography of the occupation.
From the Old City of East Jerusalem, past the Al-Aqsa Mosque, we descended a steep hill.
We passed the so-called City of David — a settler encroachment where, under the guise of archeological excavations for traces of ancient Judaic architecture that largely do not exist, the occupation forces uprooted Palestinian orchards and enclosed their land.
We arrived in Silwan.
The enclave is home to over 65,000 Palestinians.
There, thousands of houses face demolition for not having the right permits — and many have already been turned to rubble.
Families are sometimes given the opportunity to bail their homes out — to pay a ransom for them to remain standing.
But, the bulldozers still come.
Then, the evicted family receives a bill for the soldiers and dogs that forced them from their home — and for the machines that tore it down. Later, the settlers arrive, always flanked by armed guards.
“In Gaza you see the bombs. In the West Bank, the martyrs.
Here, there is a silent war,” Kutaybah Odeh, a local community organizer, told us.
Still, the people of Silwan organize to resist this silent war.
When the bulldozers come, they rally to defend the families whose gruesome turn had come.
The Al-Bustan Community Center that Odeh runs has become a thriving heart of the community.
There, you find simple, defiant joys: trumpets and drums for the marching band; a large tatami mat and, outside, a performance stage and playground — signs of normality and resistance in a site of erasure.
All around, the narrow alleys of the neighborhood are adorned with trees, tiles, and drawings
. “The occupation authorities tell us that they will destroy our homes because they are unfit to live in,” Odeh said. “So we show them that we live in paradise.”
The occupation within the occupation
From the frontline of Odeh’s “silent war”, we traveled to Hebron, or its Indigenous name Al-Khalil, in the West Bank.
We arrived at a bustling market where the aubergines come in five different sizes and the falafels are fried fresh.
Hebron is the “occupation within the occupation.”
Across the city center, heavily-fortified checkpoints — tangles of nets, barbed wire, gates and turnstiles — guard illegal Israeli settlements, where the old city center once stood.
Above a frightful gate separating a desolate settlement from the city is a machine that some call the “smart shooter” — an automated rifle that can kill an approaching human being if the system deems them a risk.
The face of nearly every Palestinian is imprinted in this system, which determines their fate before they can see a human face or hear a human voice.
Soldiers can operate the rifle with a joystick — a macabre game of murder that the occupier mediates through a screen and the occupied feels in their flesh.
What is being guarded?
A near-empty, lifeless street.
A vending machine. A broken-down van.
Signs with fabricated history seeking to recast the colonizer’s oppression as victimhood.
Flags, lots of flags. Here, in a settlement that is home to some 400 settlers, Palestinians are not allowed to set foot.
No trace remains of the bustling life that defiantly continues to exist outside this expanding barricade — life that the settlers grind away with daily volleys of rocks and urine and acid; life that the state actively erases.
The Palestinian markets become cages — enclosed on all sides by gates and wire mesh to defend against the settlers’ attacks.
The occupation within the occupation
From the frontline of Odeh’s “silent war”, we traveled to Hebron, or its Indigenous name Al-Khalil, in the West Bank.
We arrived at a bustling market where the aubergines come in five different sizes and the falafels are fried fresh.
Hebron is the “occupation within the occupation.”
Across the city center, heavily-fortified checkpoints — tangles of nets, barbed wire, gates and turnstiles — guard illegal Israeli settlements, where the old city center once stood.
Above a frightful gate separating a desolate settlement from the city is a machine that some call the “smart shooter” — an automated rifle that can kill an approaching human being if the system deems them a risk.
The face of nearly every Palestinian is imprinted in this system, which determines their fate before they can see a human face or hear a human voice.
Soldiers can operate the rifle with a joystick — a macabre game of murder that the occupier mediates through a screen and the occupied feels in their flesh.
What is being guarded?
A near-empty, lifeless street. A vending machine. A broken-down van.
Signs with fabricated history seeking to recast the colonizer’s oppression as victimhood.
Flags, lots of flags. Here, in a settlement that is home to some 400 settlers, Palestinians are not allowed to set foot.
No trace remains of the bustling life that defiantly continues to exist outside this expanding barricade — life that the settlers grind away with daily volleys of rocks and urine and acid; life that the state actively erases.
The Palestinian markets become cages — enclosed on all sides by gates and wire mesh to defend against the settlers’ attacks.
Shuttered shops in Hebron/Al-Khalil. Photo: Pawel Wargan
In Hebron, 1,350 Palestinian shops have been shut by Israeli occupying forces in 23 years, hollowing out the economic life of the city and sowing misery and desperation among its people.
365 children who attend schools near the settlement have to cross three militarized checkpoints twice each day to get to class and return home.
In all, there are 28 military checkpoints in an area of under five square kilometers — one for every 25 settlers. As the settlements expand, the beating heart of the city gradually dims.
Right to remain
The geography of the Zionist occupation cannot be measured in straight lines.
Jerusalem and Bethlehem are under 10 kilometers apart — a 30-minute drive.
But for Palestinians living in Bethlehem, the distance is unassailable.
A Palestinian in the West Bank, who still has the keys to his house in Jerusalem, is closer to São Paulo, Johannesburg, or Beijing than to his ancestral home.
He cannot travel because the occupation has written the rules that govern his movement.
In Jerusalem, residency is granted to those whose “central life” is in the city — an ill-defined legal concept often interpreted at the whims of the occupying authorities.
Palestinians forced from their homes in East Jerusalem lose their “central life” in the city.
In the process, they lose their right to remain.
Losing residency implies total exclusion from social and economic life: you cannot rent a home, open a bank account, enroll at a university, or find work.
Roughly 95% of Palestinian construction applications are rejected by Israeli authorities and it is exceedingly difficult for Palestinians to find new housing.
And so, they are forced into neighborhoods or camps in the increasingly-populated West Bank, whose land continues to be cut and diced for Zionist settlement.
Since 1950, the Aida Refugee Camp in Bethlehem has been home to thousands of Palestinian families who escaped the Nakba — the campaign of ethnic cleansing that saw Zionist forces evict more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homes in 1948.
They came from more than 27 different towns and villages, and more than 6,000 people continue to live there today — in makeshift brick and concrete high-rises that test the limits of structural integrity.
The United Nations estimated that the camp’s population density is 77,464 inhabitants per square kilometer — one of the highest in the world.
The eight-meter-high separation wall looms over them, casting a permanent shadow on the camp’s perimeter. M. took us up to the roof of a residential building along the wall’s edge.
From the top, he inspected the wall and looked at the land it conceals from view: A taunting field of olive trees that stretches across the horizon.
“That, in theory, is still within the borders they assigned us, but I’ve never been there,” he said.
In the camp’s claustrophobic alleys, the Zionist regime routinely rehearses its cruel technologies of violence.
Every few months, Israeli military trucks spray the neighborhood with excrement, directing their hoses toward open windows.
Sometimes, soldiers burst through the walls of homes with explosives, traumatizing children in the process.
The stench of tear gas is pervasive; Aida Camp is the area most exposed to tear gas in the world.
In the minutes after we arrived, we saw volleys of tear gas canisters erupt from the roof of an armored car — aimed at families who had gathered to pay respects to their deceased relatives at the cemetery.
Since Palestinian children had learned to throw teargas canisters out of harm’s way, the United States developed a new grenade — locally dubbed “the butterfly” — that jumps around while it releases the toxic gas.
We saw these, too. And, when our delegation visited the cemetery later that evening, the occupation forces threatened us at gunpoint.
The impunity that is allowable before international observers speaks to the horrors that take place in their absence.
One night before we arrived at the Aida Camp, Israeli soldiers shot two young men with explosive bullets — munitions that are banned under international law. One lost a leg.
The other’s intestines burst out from his abdomen.
Both survived even though the Israeli troops left them to die at the side of the road.
The Nakba never ended
When the old colonial powers decry Palestine’s “unprovoked” violence, they whitewash the persistent and creeping violence of the colonial occupation that the Palestinian people have endured in every aspect of their lives for over three-quarters of a century.
The Nakba never ended. Since 1948, the people of Palestine have lost over 85% of their land.
The militarization of the Israeli state has confined them to a series of open-air prisons, where they are taunted, humiliated, and killed. The Zionists uproot their olive groves. They pour cement into their water wells.
They evict their families with tear gas, set their crops alight, or poison their land with chemicals unknown.
And that violence has only escalated, with the direct encouragement of Israel’s now openly-fascist government.
In the first nine months of 2023, occupation forces killed more Palestinian people in the West Bank than in any year since the United Nations started to keep track.
One of the myths that was shattered by the Palestinian resistance this week is that of Zionism’s invincibility.
In fact, this myth was already plainly paper-thin.
Despite the routine humiliation and violence, all along the zigs and zags of the occupation we met men, women and children with raised chins, warm smiles, and patient eyes.
They welcomed us into their homes and communities, and they told us their stories.
The contrast with the occupation forces was inescapable.
The further into the West Bank we traveled, the more terrified they appeared.
Guns on their triggers, they seemed at all times prepared to unleash disproportionate violence on those around them.
It is as if they sensed that the colonial regime could not be sustained at no cost to them — a reality that has now come into sharp focus.
That fragility has its roots in a simple truth: The Palestinian people have no choice.
Their lands were invaded.
Their families were dispossessed and massacred.
Their sovereignty was erased and their riches stolen from under their feet.
At every stage, their oppressors had a choice and chose violence.
Zionism is bound by a million threads to imperialism and capitalism.
In its early days, the Zionist movement received significant backing from the British Empire seeking to maintain its grip in the region after the First World War.
Today, it is sustained by the United States and its subordinates as an outpost of empire in West Asia — a forward base designed to advance and cover for the West’s imperialist and ethno-nationalist ambitions in the region.
Israel’s fragility, then, is also imperialism’s. The US’s overwhelming show of support for Israel today makes clear that the act of liberation anywhere is a threat to imperialism everywhere.
Zionism is a partner of imperialism
Imperial backing helps sustain a racially-segregationist capitalist economy within colonized Palestine.
The early Zionist industrialists came with both machinery and labor.
Palestine, in turn, was de-industrialized and its people excluded from employment.
As Ghassan Kanafani has written, the very economic foundations of the Zionist state are found in the systematic dispossession and exclusion of the Palestinian people and the creation of a “whites-only” economy for the settlers:
“[Zionist] immigration was not only designed to ensure a concentration of European Jewish capital in Palestine, that was to dominate the process of industrialization, but also to provide this effort with a Jewish proletariat: The policy that raised the slogan of “Jewish labor only” was to have grave consequences, as it led to the rapid emergence of fascist patterns in the society of Jewish settlers.”
Today, the Israeli state is highly dependent on foreign investment.
In 2022, its high-tech sector accounted for 48.3% of all exports, a system that is underpinned in part by exploited Palestinian labor — and 80% of venture investments in this sector are based on foreign funds.
The Israeli regime is currently implementing a spate of judicial and social “reforms” that have found significant opposition among liberal Israelis, who tolerate the colonial regime insofar as the pretense of liberal democracy, with Jewish primacy, is preserved.
As the pretense of liberal democracy withers away, and the colonial face of the Israeli state comes into sharper view, many believe that Israel risks a wave of capital flight that could challenge the very basis of its settler-colonial economy.
Now, “everything is on the table”. This moment has generated a profound and persistent internal crisis in Israeli society, reflected in lost investments at home, critique from partners abroad, and renewed global interest in disinvestment as an anti-apartheid strategy.
As representatives of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement told us, “in order to remain supported by capitalism, Israel cannot afford to become extremist Orthodox. Even for capitalism, it must show a face of liberal democracy.”
This was one of the factors that burst open the window of opportunity for the Palestinian resistance.
Here, the BDS’s core mission — to sever the arteries of state, institutional, and corporate complicity that power the Zionist project — come into sharp focus.
The struggle to liberate Palestine is fundamentally a struggle against capitalism and imperialism.
It demands that those living in the imperial countries take the fight to the financiers, corporations and institutions that sustain the occupation.
It calls on scientists to refuse to make the gas that poisons Palestinian children, on factory workers to refuse to produce the munitions that crush families in Gaza, and on dockworkers to refuse to load them onto ships.
And it calls on us to take seriously the struggle for socialism, because it is only by arresting imperialism’s cancerous spread that the auxiliary violence of Zionism’s colonial domination can be ended once and for all.
The Palestinian people will not give up their struggle for freedom
We cannot abandon the struggle because the Palestinian people have not.
At Ramallah University, we saw red flags flying high.
An exhibition featuring resistance fighters martyred in Jenin and Nablus saw hundreds of young communists descend on the campus.
Young organizers gave us leaflets, announcing their candidacy in the upcoming student elections.
They face tremendous headwinds. The attack on Palestinian political organizations is relentless.
More than 5,000 Palestinians are held in Israeli jails — and others still are held in jails operated by the Palestinian Authority at Israel’s behest.
But organized political power is on the rise.
Across Palestine, doctors’ and teachers’ unions organized a historic strike aimed both at the Israeli occupation and the Palestinian Authority’s complicity.
Now, as the Palestinian people beat back their occupation, anti-imperialist, socialist, communist, and other popular forces abroad must work to bruise its imperialist backers.
We know that this combined movement will succeed.
As Fayez Sayegh wrote in his seminal text, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, Zionism was anomalous because it “came to bloom precisely when colonialism was beginning to fade away” — a relic of the past that retarded the historical tendency towards liberation.
But in the long arc of history, liberation from colonialism is inevitable.
As the nations of the world proclaimed in the 1961 UN Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, “the process of liberation is irresistible and irreversible”.
The promise of Palestine’s statehood will be realized — from the river to the sea.
But until that moment comes, what terrible cost will the Zionist state impose on the Palestinian people for seeking their freedom?
The Matrix of Control: Rendering the Occupation Invisible
Before we begin our analysis of Taba, I must define what I mean by a Matrix of Control? It is a system of control designed
to allow Israel to control every aspect of Palestinian life in the Occupied Territories, while
lowering Israel’s military profile in order to give the impression to the outside that what Palestinians refer to as “occupation” is merely proper administration, and that Israel has a “duty” to defend itself and the status quo, yet
creating enough space for a dependent Palestinian mini-state that will relieve Israel of the Palestinian population while
deflecting, through the use of “administrative” image and bureaucratic mechanisms, international opposition and thus to maintain control indefinitely and, in the final analysis,
to force the Palestinians’ to despair of ever achieving a viable and truly sovereign state and to accept any settlement offered by Israeli. (“Time is on our side” is, as Sharon has often said, a cornerstone of Israeli policy.)
Because it operates under a Kafkaesque guise of “proper administration,” “upholding the law,” “keeping the public order” and, of course, “security,” the Matrix of Control renders the Occupation virtually invisible. In “normal” times (when active Palestinian resistance can be stifled), its outward appearance is legal and bureaucratic, the most effective means of control over a long period of time. The Israeli military government over the Occupied Territories is called, for example, the “Civil Administration,” even though it is headed by a colonel under the strict authority of the Ministry of Defense, and is bound by the orders of the general commanding the “Central Front.”
The control mechanisms of the Matrix are varied and diverse. There are, first of all, active measures to ensure acquiescence:
Outright military actions, including attacks on civilian population centers and the Palestinian infrastructure;
Extensive use of collaborators and undercover “mustarabi” army units; administrative detention, arrest, trial and torture; and
“Orders” issued by the Military Commanders of the West Bank and Gaza (some 2000 in number since 1967), supplemented by Civil Administration policies, that replace local civil law with policies and procedures that cynically further Israeli political control.
A second set of controls derives from Israel’s policy of “creating facts on the ground”– virtually all of them in violation of international law (including the Fourth Geneva Convention signed by Israel itself). These include:
Massive expropriation of Palestinian land;
Construction of more than 200 settlements and the transfer of 400,000 Israelis across the 1967 boundaries: about 200,000 in the West Bank, 200,000 in East Jerusalem and 6000 in Gaza (the latter occupying a fourth of the land, including most of the coastline);
Carving the Occupied Territories into areas — Areas “A,” “B,” “C,” “D” in the West Bank; “H-1” and “H-2” in Hebron; Yellow, Green, Blue and White Areas in Gaza; nature reserves; closed military areas, security zones, and “open green spaces” of restricted housing over more than half of Palestinian East Jerusalem – which confine the Palestinians to some 190 islands all surrounded by Israeli settlements, roads and checkpoints;
Carving the Occupied Territories into areas — Areas “A,” “B,” “C,” “D” in the West Bank; “H-1” and “H-2” in Hebron; Yellow, Green, Blue and White Areas in Gaza; nature reserves; closed military areas, security zones, and “open green spaces” of restricted housing over more than half of Palestinian East Jerusalem – which confine the Palestinians to some 190 islands all surrounded by Israeli settlements, roads and checkpoints;
A massive system of highways and by-pass roads designed to link settlements, to create barriers between Palestinian areas and to incorporate the West Bank into Israel proper;
Imposing severe controls on Palestinian movement;
Construction of seven industrial parks that give new life to isolated settlements, exploit cheap Palestinian labor while denying it access to Israel, rob Palestinian cities of their economic vitality, control key locations and ensure Israel’s ability to continue dumping its industrial wastes onto the West Bank;
Maintaining control over aquifers and other vital natural resources;
Exploiting holy places (Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem, the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron and others in and around Jerusalem) as pretexts for maintaining a “security presence,” and hence military control.
Yet a third set of control mechanisms, the most subtle of all, are those of a bureaucratic or “legal” nature. They entangle Palestinians in a tight web of restrictions and trigger sanctions whenever Palestinians try to expand their life space. These include:
A permanent “closure” of the West Bank and Gaza;
A discriminatory and often arbitrary system of work, entrance and travel permits system restricting freedom of movement both within the country and abroad;
The use of diverse methods of active displacement: exile and deportation; the revoking of residency rights; induced emigration through impoverishment; land expropriation, house demolitions and other means of making life in the Occupied Territories unbearable. Schemes of “transfer” have also been suggested (in fact, two parties in Sharon’s government — the National Union Party of the assassinated Tourism Minister Ze’evi and Minister of Infrastructure Lieberman’s “Israel Is Our Home” — have “transfer” as their main political program). Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have “departed” since 1967, but a core of three million sumud (“steadfast”) Palestinians still remains.
Zoning policies which, under the guise of planning and the law, serves to freeze the natural development of Palestinian towns and villages. Part of this system involves the restrictive use building permits, enforced by house demolitions, arrests, fines and daily harassment, all designed to confine the population to small enclaves;
Expansive “master plans” being drawn around the settlements which allow for massive building while contending that settlement building has been “frozen.”
Restrictions on the planting of crops and their sale, together with the wholesale uprooting of hundreds of thousands of olive and fruit trees since 1967; and
Employing licensing and inspection of Palestinian businesses as a means of political control.
To all of this must be added, of course, the debilitating psychological costs of life under occupation: loss of life, imprisonment, torture, harassment, humiliation, anger and frustration, as well as traumas suffered by tens of thousands of Palestinians (especially children) who witnessed their homes being demolished, saw their loved ones beaten and humiliated, suffered from inadequate housing, and who lost opportunities to actualize their life potentials. These are wounds that will take generations to heal.
Barak’s “Generous Offer” and the Matrix of Control
This popular view is based on both false information and false assumptions. First of all, there never was an Israeli “offer,” and Israel never proposed to relinquish 95% of the West Bank. At a desperate time when Barak knew he would lose the election, the Israeli delegation came to Taba prepared to talk about conceding 93% of the West Bank – with the Palestinians counter-proposing 97%. But they were not talking about the same land. Because Israel does not consider East Jerusalem and “No Man’s Land” around Latrun as part of the West Bank, but does include the part of the Dead Sea falling within the Palestinian territory, Barak’s 93% was actually more like 88% of the actual Palestinian territory.
The major fallacy in this view is to equate territory with sovereignty. Although gaining control of 95% or 88% of the territory is important – especially if the territory is contiguous — it does not necessarily equate with sovereignty. This is where the crucial issue of control enters the picture. The Palestinians could well receive 95% of the West Bank, Gaza and pieces of East Jerusalem and still not have the prerequisites of national self-determination: coherent territory, economic viability and genuine sovereignty. Since 1967 – and increasingly since the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993 — Israel has laid a “Matrix of Control” over the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. The Matrix, an intricate and an interlocking series of control mechanisms, resembles the Japanese game of “Go.” Instead of defeating your opponent as in chess, in “Go” you win by immobilizing the other side, by gaining control of key points of a matrix, so that every time your opponent moves he or she encounters another obstacle. This strategy was used effectively in Vietnam, where small forces of Viet Cong were able to pin down and virtually paralyze some half-million American soldiers possessing overwhelming fire-power.
In effect Israel has done the same thing to the Palestinians. Laid out strategically, the Matrix of Control paralyzes the Palestinian population even if Israel does not actually occupy large swathes of land. All the settlements and by-pass roads take up less than 5% of the land; “settlement blocs,” “security zones” and other forms of control can be expanded to include 12% of the land as in Barak’s conception or 56% as in Sharon’s. But these 5-12% are what makes the difference between a bantustan and a sovereign, viable state. From the point of view of control, 88% of the West Bank that the Palestinians might receive indeed, sounds “generous,” but it must be evaluated in light of the impact the other 5-12% have on Palestinian viability and sovereignty.
Barak’s “offer” at Taba deserves to be looked at carefully, not because it was truly an “offer” or because it truly represented the Israeli position or a genuine possibility, but because, as Barak never tired of saying, it is by far the best “deal” the Palestinians will ever be offered, the most “generous,” a one-time “take-it-or-leave-it” that would be a “historical mistake” for the Palestinians to reject. If all this is true, would the so-called “95% offer” at Taba have led to a sovereign and viable Palestinian state? Would it have in fact dismantled Israel’s Matrix of Control? The answer to this “best case” scenario is “no.”
It is true that some significant gains were made at Taba. Israel relinquished claim to the Jordan Valley, much territory was conceded (though not 95%), the settlement blocs were reduced in size, and Israel gave up its extra-territorial control over its by-pass road system. The Palestinians gained a greater degree of territorial contiguity and control of their borders, though not of their water resources. But Taba did not break Israel’s hold on the Occupied Territories. On the contrary, it revealed how much Israel could relinquish and still retain control. Taba revealed the essential elements of the Matrix of Control, the minimum “red lines” of any foreseeable Israeli government. Looked at closely, this is what the “generous offer” in fact offered:
Consolidation of Strategic Settlement Blocs. In the mid-1990s Israel began a major strengthening and consolidation of its settlement presence. In order to avoid international opposition to the establishment of new settlements, the government shifted to building new settlements within the expansive master plans around each settlement. In that way it was able to argue that it was simply “thickening” existing settlements to meet natural population growth (an outright falsification), not establishing new ones. It also began to merge discrete settlements into large settlement blocs. Although the fate of some of these blocs remains uncertain (the Jordan Valley settlements, for example, as well as the Kiryat Arba bloc near Hebron and settlements in heavily populated Palestinian areas), Israel is unmoving in this insistance on retaining three large blocs comprising today some 150,000 Israeli settlers:
The city of Ariel and its surrounding “Western Samaria” bloc control a strategic area on the western side of the West Bank, seriously compromising territorial contiguity and the coherent flow of people and goods between the major Palestinian towns of Kalkilya, Nablus and Ramallah. It would also severely restrict the urban development of the Kalkilya area. No less important than its strategic location on the ground is Ariel’s location vis-a-vis Palestinian resources under the ground: the Ariel bloc sits atop the major aquifer of the West Bank and would control the flow and distribution of water.
The central Givat Ze’ev-Pisgat Ze’ev-Ma’alei Adumim(and perhaps Beit El) bloc stretches across much of the central West Bank from the Modi’in area to within 20 kilometers of the Jordan River. It effectively divides the West Bank in two, compelling north-south Palestinian traffic (especially from Ramallah to Bethlehem and Hebron areas) to pass through Israeli territory – the funnel-like Eastern Ring Road. It also keeps the Palestinians of the West Bank far from Jerusalem, isolating the 200,000 Palestinians of East Jerusalem from their wider state and society, and cutting the natural urban link between Jerusalem and Ramallah. In terms of viability, this bloc, a main component of Israeli “Greater Jerusalem,” constitutes the greatest threat to a coherent Palestinian state.
The Efrat-Gush Etzion-Beitar Illit blocto the southwest of Jerusalem (yet connected through Gilo, Har Homa and the Eastern Ring Road/Road #7 complex to the Ma’aleh Adumim bloc) is the other key component of “Greater Jerusalem.” It also impacts seriously on the viability and sovereignty of any Palestinian state. The bloc severs any coherent connection between the major cities of Bethlehem and Hebron, as well as traffic using the “safe passage” from Gaza. It forces Palestinians moving between these areas to use Israeli-controlled “security” roads passing through dense areas of settlement, continually exposed to disruption and closure. It locks in Bethlehem to the extent of preventing its normal urban development. And, like the Ariel bloc, it sits astride and brings into Israeli control a major West Bank aquifer.
The Creation of a “Greater [Israeli] Jerusalem.” The Givat Ze’ev-Adumim and Gush Etzion settlement blocs, 250 square kilometers containing some 80,000 settlers, when annexed to Israeli-controlled “Greater Jerusalem,” will dominate the entire central region of the West Bank and obstruct the territorial contiguity necessary for a viable Palestinian state. They also function as a buffer, to separate Jerusalem from its wider West Bank surroundings, thus keeping the Palestinians at a considerable distance away. Because some 40% of the Palestinian economy revolves around Jerusalem in the form of tourism, commercial life and industry, removing Jerusalem from the Palestinian realm carries such serious economic consequences as to call the very viability of the Palestinian state into question. And in general the “Greater Jerusalem” concept neutralizes Jerusalem as a major Palestinian urban, religious and cultural center.
The Emergence of a “Metropolitan [Israeli] Jerusalem.” The ring roads and major highways being built through and around Jerusalem are intended to create a regional infrastructure of control, turning Jerusalem from a city into a metropolitan region. “Metropolitan” Jerusalem covers a huge area. Its boundaries, incorporating a full 10% of the West Bank (440 square kilometers), stretch from Beit Shemesh in the west up through Kiryat Sefer until and including Ramallah, then southeast through Ma’aleh Adumim almost to the Jordan River, then turning southwest to encompass Beit Sahour, Bethlehem, Efrat abnd the Etzion Bloc, then west again through Beitar Illit and Tsur Hadassah to Beit Shemesh. It also provides a crucial link to the Kiryat Arba and the settlements in and around Hebron. In many ways “Metropolitan” Jerusalem is the Occupation. Within its limits are found 75% of the West Bank settlers and the major centers of Israeli construction.
By employing a regional approach to the planning of highways, industrial parks and urban settlements, an Israeli-controlled metropolis can emerge whose very power as a center of urban activity, employment and transportation will render political boundaries, such as those between Jerusalem and Ramallah or Jerusalem and Bethlehem, absolutely irrelevant. A good example of how this is already happening is the new industrial park, Sha’ar Binyamin, now being built at the “Eastern Gate” to metropolitan Jerusalem, southeast of Ramallah. In terms of Israeli control this industrial park provides an economic anchor to settlements – Kokhav Ya’akov, Tel Zion, Ma’aleh Mikhmas, Almon, Psagot, Adam, all the way to Beit El and Ofra – that otherwise would be isolated from the Israeli and Jerusalem economy. More to the point, it robs Ramallah of its economic dynamism, providing jobs and perhaps even sites for Palestinian industry that would otherwise be located in or around Ramallah. Again, looking at Israel’s strategy from the point of view of control rather than territory, “Metropolitan Jerusalem” virtually empties a Palestinian state of its meaning in terms of viability and sovereignty.
An East Jerusalem Patchwork. Between the negotiations at Camp David and Taba, various options were explored to give the Palestinians more of a presence in East Jerusalem, which they claim as their capital. The peripheral villages and neighborhoods to the north and south of the city might have been ceded, although the Palestinians might receive less than full sovereignty over them – “functional autonomy,” “administrative control” or “limited sovereignty.” In Taba Israel considered ceding some parts of the core areas as well: some of the “Holy Basin” between the Old City and the Mount of Olives, downtown East Jerusalem, the Sheikh Jarrah Quarter, and in the Old City the Muslim and Christian Quarters. The Temple Mount/Haram issue remained unresolved, with Israel prepared to cede “functional sovereignty” (though not official) to the “upper” area of the mosques, while retaining sole sovereignty over the “lower” Western Wall.
Regardless of the size of the territorial compromises, Israel will not cede the entire area of East Jerusalem, where Israelis (about 200,000 in number) outnumber Palestinians. Since the settlements there were situated strategically for maximum control of territory and movement, and since they are today in the process of being connected, any Palestinian patches will only tenuous connections to each other and to the Palestinian capital in Abu Dis. The Palestinian presence in Jerusalem will be fragmented and barely viable as a urban and economic center. Moreover, it would be entirely surrounded by the “outer ring” of Israeli “Greater Jerusalem,” hemming it in and preventing East Jerusalem’s normal urban and economic development. (Indeed, functionally ceding Palestinian areas of East Jerusalem to the Palestinians – relinquishing an “unwanted” population of some 200,000 people without relinquishing control – while incorporating the surrounding settlements into a “Greater Jerusalem” would increase the majority of Jews in the expanded city from the present 70% to 85%.)
Israeli Control over Highways and Movement. Over the past decades (and especially during the Oslo “peace process’), Israel has been constructing a system of major highways and “by-pass roads” designed to link its settlements, to create barriers between Palestinian areas and to incorporate the West Bank into Israel proper. Even if physical control over the highways is relinquished, strategic parts will remain under Israeli control – the Eastern Ring Road, Jerusalem-Etzion Bloc highway, Road 45 from Tel Aviv to Ma’aleh Adumim, a section of Highway 60 from Jerusalem to Beit El and Ofra, and the western portion of the Trans-Samaria highway leading to the Ariel bloc. In terms of the movement of people and goods, this will effectively divide the Palestinian entity into at least four cantons: the northern West Bank, the southern portion, East Jerusalem and Gaza. There are other restrictions as well. The “safe passages” from Gaza to the West Bank, crucial to the viability of a Palestinian state, will only be administered by the Palestinians; they will not receive extra-territorial status. And Israel insists on retaining rights of “emergency deployment” to both the highway system and to the Jordan Valley, severely compromising Palestinian sovereignty. Indeed, the highways would retain the status of Israeli “security roads,” meaning that Palestinian development along them would remain limited.
To fully understand the role of the highway grid in completing the process of incorporation, one must link these West Bank developments to the ambitious Trans-Israel Highway project. Already in 1977, in his Master Plan for the settlement and incorporation of the West Bank, Sharon presented his “Seven Stars” plan calling for contiguous Israeli urban growth straddling both sides of the “Green Line.” The Trans-Israel Highway, which hugs the border of the West Bank, provides a new “central spine” to the country. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis will be resettled in the many towns and cities planned along the length of the highway, especially along the “Green Line” and in areas of the Galilee heavily populated by Arabs. New and expanded Israeli cities, towns and settlements on both sides of the Green Line form a new “metropolitan core-region” in which Metropolitan Tel Aviv (including the Modi’in area settlements, Rosh Ha-ayin and the Ariel bloc) meets Metropolitan Jerusalem (stretching from Modi’in, Kiryat Sefer, Beit Shemesh and the Etzion Bloc across the most of the central West Bank to the settlements east of Ma’aleh Adumim. The Trans-Israel Highway, articulating as it does with the highways and settlement blocs of the West Bank, moves the entire population center of the country eastward, reconfiguring the entire country.
Industrial Parks for Economic Control. The establishment of industrial parks on the “seam” between Israel and the Palestinian state is a key strategy in subduing popular Palestinian opposition to continued Israeli presence and control in the Occupied Territories.
Seven such parks have already been built, with several other in various stages of planning and construction. Yet, while providing employment to the Palestinian workforce, these industrial parks threaten the economic viability of the Palestinian state, maintain a dependency relationship on Israel and present dangers to the environment. They allow Israeli firms continued access to cheap Palestinian labor while denying the workers access to Israel (a key component of the “separation” strategy). Although they pay higher salaries than Palestinians can earn in their own de-developed economy, the wages are still well below Israeli minimum wages and benefits. The proximity of Israeli industrial parks to weaker Palestinian industries nearby creates unfair competition and in the end saps Palestinian cities of their economic vitality. (They also provide crucial economic anchors to the settlements whose residents manage the parks and the factories, as the Sha’ar Binyamin project illustrates.) Just as serious, the lax environmental standards and low costs means that these industrial parks attract Israel’s most polluting industries – chemical, aluminum, plastics, metalworks, batteries. Though established in Palestinian areas (or specially-created Industrial zones), these parks ensure Israel’s ability to continue dumping its industrial wastes into the West Bank.
Meeting Israeli “Security” Concerns. “Security” is defined by Israel in such maximalist terms that it ensures Israeli political, military and economic control. Israel insists that a Palestinian state will be demilitarized and forbidden to enter into military pacts with other states, that Israel controls Palestinian airspace, and that it reserves the right to deploy forces in the Jordan Valley in the indeterminate event that it perceived “a threat” of invasion. Controlling Palestinian labor and commercial movement through the imposition of “security borders,” part of Israel’s declared policy of “separation” from the Palestinians, constitutes additional constraints on Palestinian development, locking the less that 20% of Palestine that is the state from the other more than 80% that is Israel.
Limited Palestinian Sovereignty. A Palestinian state would possess limited sovereignty only. It would be demilitarized and unable to form military alliances not approved by Israel. It would have jurisdiction over its borders, but would have certain restrictions as to who may enter (especially vis-a-vis the refugee issue). And the restrictions regarding military contingencies (defined by Israel) would apply.
Dismantling the Matrix of Control: The Only Way Out
If Israel can force or induce the Palestinians to accept the Camp David formula (or find a post-Arafat quisling to sign the bottom line), it will have succeeded in securing control over the Greater Land of Israel while having relieved itself of the Palestinian population of the Occupied Territories. This is also true of Barak’s “generous offer” at Taba – Israel’s “best deal” (though it never really approached a concrete “offer” or “deal”). Again, it is not hard to understand why the Palestinians rejected it. Taba would have given Israel title to more than 80% of Palestine and control over the rest. The Palestinians would have had to cede the elements essential to their self-determination: economic viability and developmental potential, territorial contiguity, true independence, a normal and sovereign civil society, recognized borders under their own control. Indeed, they were already skating on the thin edge of viability and sovereignty. At Oslo the Palestinians gave up political claim to 78% of their country, and agreed to a mini-state of limited sovereignty: no army, no military alliances not approved by Israel, certain Israeli economic controls and even limitations on who may enter Palestine. Barak’s “take it or leave it” approach also prevented agreement. The Palestinians feared they would be doomed forever to a truncated, dependent, semi-sovereign mini-state, their hopes for a real country and the resolution of the refugee issue frozen within the parameters of Oslo, Camp David and Taba – and ultimately within the Matrix of Control.
Taba did show that peace was possible, but only if Israel truly dismantled its Matrix of Control. Although it represents Israeli’s “best case” scenario, it may not even have been “real.” In articles and interviews Barak has given since leaving office, he has reiterated his old pre-Taba, Camp David positions — 80% of the settlers must remain under Israeli sovereignty; “separation;” Israel retains 15% of the West Bank, etc. Or did he agree knowing full well that any Taba agreement had no chance passing the Knesset? We will never know. What we do have now is a Sharon-Peres government determined to break Palestinian resistance once and for all. Refusing to even consider picking up the negotiations from where they left off at Taba, Sharon has offered the Palestinians 42-56% of the West Bank (the present extent of Areas A and B with some corridors), none of East Jerusalem and a truncated Gaza.
The Matrix of Control represents Israel’s success in establishing a system of control over the Occupied Territories that has lasted decades. Its usefulness does not end there. Because it renders the Occupation invisible, it is capable of deflecting opposition at home and abroad. Although it was Israel who prejudiced the outcome of the Oslo negotiations by measurably strengthening its grip over the Occupied Territories and offering concessions that left its control intact, it is the Palestinians who have been almost universally blamed for the breakdown of the “peace process.” An understanding of the Matrix of Control is essential for comprehending the sources of the present conflict and the obstacles to its resolution. Only dismantling it will lead to a just and lasting peace. This is the only way that Israel’s long-standing and ongoing campaign of “creating facts on the ground” can be effectively neutralized.
In fact, the US is planning to buy new ones — from an Israeli company.
The Trump administration has decided to reverse a policy instituted in 2008 by President George W. Bush (and carried out by President Obama) to end the use of cluster munitions with a failure rate of more than one percent — “duds” — as of Jan. 1, 2019.
Instead, Washington is testing new, more sophisticated cluster munitions to replace those that do not meet the new standards.
“After spending hundreds of millions of dollars researching alternatives to cluster munitions, the US has decided it can’t produce ‘safe’ cluster munitions so it will keep using ‘unsafe’ ones,” wrote Mary Wareham, the arms-division advocacy director at Human Rights Watch, in 2017.
Cluster munitions not only spread bomblets (or “bombies,” as they are called in Southeast Asia) across a wide area, but they can also leave unexploded ordnances that can detonate years if not decades after their release.
The weapon has been banned by more than 100 countries through the Convention on Cluster Munitions, as it does not differentiate between combatants and civilians on the ground.
The weapons were first used in World War II by the Nazis, called the “butterfly bomb.”
New, more efficient munitions
Although more than 100 countries have banned cluster munitions, the US is testing new ones abroad.
US military budget documents reveal that the US is testing the new cluster munition, the M999, in Israel.
IMI Systems, formerly a state-owned company that was recently privatized and that has as a board member Yitzhak Aharonovich, an ex-minister of public security, produces the M999, an antipersonnel cluster weapon.
(IMI also makes the Uzi submachine gun.)
IMI Systems, as well as Israel’s defense ministry, did not follow up on many interview requests with PassBlue, including while this reporter was in Israel.
The testing should be done before the end of 2019, according to military documents.
The US Department of Defense has confirmed it is planning to test the weapon to replace older types.
An unexploded cluster munition bomblet in Laos. The US dropped 14 million tons of the weapon in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. The US is seeking to use new types of the munition that “minimize unintended harm.”
US sending internationally-banned munitions to Israel to be used in Gaza war
Israel’s military and government have a long and well-documented history of making false and misleading statements to cover up and deflect responsibility for war crimes they commit against Palestinians. The following document provides some of the most egregious examples in recent years.
Lying about use of white phosphorus in violation of international law – October 2023
On October 10 in Lebanon and October 11 in Gaza, the Israeli military used white phosphorus shells in violation of international law. Israel denied the claim, stating it was “unequivocally false.” However, Human Rights Watch verified videos of “multiple airbursts of artillery-fired white phosphorus” launched by the Israeli military over the Gaza City port and along the Israel-Lebanon border, labeling it a violation of international humanitarian law. Amnesty International also documented the presence of white phosphorus shells at an Israeli army base in southern Israel near Gaza.
In 2009, during Israel’s attack on Gaza known as Operation Cast Lead, Israel initially “denied outright” that it used white phosphorus. However, Human Rights Watch subsequently documented Israel’s widespread use of white phosphorus shells in Gaza, including in densely populated urban areas, a UN compound, and a UN school. In total, Israel fired more than 200 white phosphorus shells during the assault.
Israel also accused Hamas of firing a white phosphorus shell in 2009, a claim that Human Rights Watch concluded was false.
Unsubstantiated claims about beheading of children – October 2023
Israel’s military and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office claimed that Hamas fighters beheaded up to 40 children during their October 7 attack on the town of Kfar Aza. The incendiary allegations spread quickly and were widely repeated in the media and by President Joe Biden, who falsely claimed during a meeting with Jewish leaders that he personally saw photos of beheaded children, which the White House later walked back, admitting he had not seen any such photos and that the US had not verified the claim. However, Israeli journalists who visited the scene of the alleged beheadings saw no evidence to support the allegation and the Israeli military officials accompanying them made no mention of it. The Israeli army subsequently refused to confirm the claim and more than a week later no evidence has emerged to support it.
Unsubstantiated claims of rape – October 2023
Israeli officials circulated claims that Hamas fighters raped women during their attack on October 7, which were widely repeated in the US media and by US politicians, including President Biden during an address on national television. However, on October 10 an Israeli military spokesperson told a journalist from the Forward, Arno Rosenfeld, that Israel “does not yet have any evidence of rape having occurred during Saturday’s attack or its aftermath” and more than a week later Israel has yet to provide any proof. Journalist Rosenfeld also traced how the story spread based largely on claims made by people who didn’t actually say they witnessed the alleged rapes.
Lying about deadly airstrike on civilian convoy seeking safety in Gaza – October 2023
On October 13, a civilian convoy fleeing Gaza City as ordered by the Israeli military on a road identified as a “safe route” by Israel, was hit by an Israeli airstrike, killing 70 people and wounding at least 200. The Israeli military denied attacking the convoy. However, Amnesty International verified videos of the attack and concluded it was the result of an airstrike.
Lying about the murder of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh – May 2022
On May 11, 2022, renowned Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was shot in the neck and killed by an Israeli sniper while reporting on an Israeli army invasion of the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank, even though she was nowhere near any fighting at the time and was wearing a vest clearly marked “Press.”
Lying about bombing of media offices in Gaza – May 2021
During its May 2021 assault on Gaza, Israel bombed a high-rise tower housing media outlets – including The Associated Press and Al Jazeera – leveling the 14-story building to the ground. Israel claimed the building contained “military assets belonging to the intelligence offices” of Hamas.
However, Human Rights Watch concluded that Israel “provided no evidence to support those allegations” and that the attack “apparently violated the laws of war and may amount to war crimes.”
Lying about the killing of Ahmad Erekat at West Bank military checkpoint – June 2020
On June 23, 2020, 27-year-old Ahmad Erekat was on his way to pick up relatives for his sister’s wedding when he crashed his car at an Israeli military checkpoint in the occupied West Bank and was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers.
Israel claimed it was an attempted attack on soldiers from its occupying army.
However, Forensic Architecture, a research group based at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Palestinian human rights organization Al Haq conducted an in-depth investigation and concluded it was a traffic accident and that Erekat was extrajudicially executed.
Doctoring video to falsely claim medic murdered by Israeli sniper was human shield – June 2018
In June 2018, an Israeli sniper murdered a 21-year-old medic, Razan al-Najjar, during protests by Palestinians imprisoned by Israel’s occupation and siege of Gaza. In an attempt to smear her and justify her killing following an international outcry, Israeli officials circulated a video purporting to show her saying she was acting as a human shield for Hamas.
However, the video was subsequently revealed to have been doctored by the Israeli military to take her comments out of context. As noted by Israeli rights group, B’Tselem, the Israeli military initially claimed “soldiers did not fire at the spot where she had been standing.
Later, the military said al-Najjar might have been killed by a ricochet, before finally accusing her of serving as a human shield… Contrary to the many versions offered by the military, the facts of the case lead to only one conclusion… al-Najjar was fatally shot by a member of the security forces who was aiming directly at her as she was standing about 25 meters (82 feet) away from the fence, despite the fact that she posed no danger to him or anyone else and was wearing a medical uniform.”
According to the UN, in total Israeli soldiers killed 214 Palestinians protesters in Gaza during the Great Return March, including 46 children.Those killed included at least 3 medical workers and 2 journalists, all of whom were clearly identified as such.
Lying about the murder of two Palestinian teenagers during West Bank protest – May 2014
On May 15, 2014, two unarmed Palestinian teens, 17-year-old Nadim Nuwarah and 16-year-old Mohammed Salameh were shot and killed by Israeli soldiers using live ammunition during a protest in the occupied West Bank.
Israel initially claimed its soldiers did not use live ammunition.
Contradicting Israel’s claims, based on videos from the scene and autopsy results, Human Rights Watchconcluded both were killed by live ammunition. An investigation by CNN also came to the same conclusion.
Hundreds of thousands of Israelis have left their homes in the north and the south, moving to the relatively secure center of the country.
Many go to sleep in their safe rooms or public shelters, or wake up in the middle of the night to watch the latest news. Schools are out, employees work part time or not at all, and the economy is limping.
But Israelis have suffered another kind of loss — deep, profound and long-lasting.
This one injured their psyche, their sense of collective self and well-being. You can hear it in their voices, note it in their choice of tentative words and see it on their faces — the feeling of “we have been had.”
Before the Hamas attack, Israelis exuded confidence and bravado.
They believed that a surprise war, like the 1973 Yom Kippur War, could not happen again, and that, if it did, their army would nip it in the bud.
Then came the Hamas attack, almost exactly 50 years later, sending the nation into a deep trauma, the way Japan’s surprise attack on U.S. warships in Pearl Harbor instantly changed the American mindset.
On the other side, Hamas has won the war despite the loss of more than 8,000 Palestinians — some unknown combination of fighters and ordinary Gazans. Hamas — a resistance organization of about 20,000 members — was able to invade a country of more than 9 million occupiers with a powerful US backed army, kill Zionists , create chaos, shatter the Israeli psyche and bring the Palestinian fight for statehood to the global fore.
But the war between Israelis and Palestinians has been going on-and-off ever since Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, when most Palestinians living in what had become Israel fled to the Gaza Strip and to the West Bank.
Since then, new generations have emerged and a national Palestinian identity has evolved.
Palestinians want a state of their own, the way the desire of the Jewish population before 1948 turned into the independent state of Israel.
At a moment when Israel is fighting for its very life (if one is to credit the analysis of Scott Ritter (Scott Ritter, “Why I no longer stand with Israel”) and retired U.S. Army Col. Douglas MacGregor (“Israel has LOST no matter what they do! WW3 is HERE!” ), not to mention Israeli IDF retired Major General Itshak Brik (Israel could cease to exist before 80th anniversary, says ex-premier Barak), and Israel is absolutely dependent on American support (Macgregor: “Israel played right into their hands..
They have LOST BIG TIME!” at minute 9), the Jews have decided to open a second front!
And maybe a far more dangerous one. A front against America.
For the Jews, this is very foolish. Even in the worst case (for the Jews), if Israel is annihilated or its population expelled, the Jews still have the United States as a refuge — a refuge which they have spent 100 years spitting on and one which they disdain, but a refuge nonetheless.
Moreover, it is exactly this refuge that could — if anything can — ensure that the first object of their affections — Israel — continues to exist.
One would think that this would be the time U.S.-based Jews would “cool it” on the “anti-Semitism” war they have been waging on any and all deviating from the “Jewish” line for the past century — even if just for a time, to avoid alienating the great power that is the only thing standing between Israel and its potential destruction.
But no. The Jews since the October 7 Hamas attack have essentially declared war not on Hamas — the IDF is haltingly attempting to do that — but on Americans! And not just on any Americans, but on the most precious commodity that non-Jewish Americans — whether Christian, Muslim Americans possess. Their children.
Beyond this, the Jews have declared war not on “any old” Christian/Muslim/Shinto/Buddhist/Hindu children, but on the very best and brightest of all of them — the ones at Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, Cornell, MIT, and, by implication, the ones at all the other top Universities in the United States.
A timeline is in order:
October 10. Jewish billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman calls for the “unmasking” of all students at Harvard who signed an October 8 pro-Palestinian petition.
As discussed in an earlier article this petition was relatively benign, saying nothing that had not been said 70 years before by Israeli heroes General Moshe Dayan (Moshe Dayan’s Eulogy for Roi Rutenberg — April 19, 1956) and Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion (Ben-Gurion’s Notorious Quotes: Their Polemical Uses & Abuses — Partners For Progressive Israel )— not to mention Israeli founding father Ze’ev Jabotinsky in his writings starting in the 1920’s. “The Iron Wall” (jewishvirtuallibrary.org) .
October 11. Famed Jewish Harvard constitutional law professor Alan Dershowitz (retired but still overly active) calls for the same thing, saying he will “unmask” every student involved in any statement blaming Israel for the violence in the Middle East.
October 11. Professor Dershowitz “unmasks” a Black lesbian law student who had issued a manifesto similar to that issued at Harvard.
As if on cue, a “Big law” law firm Winston & Strawn then withdraws its offer of summer employment to this unfortunate black lesbian law student, stating as its reason her statements on “Holy” Israel.
October 12. Jewish Mega-billionaire Leslie Wexner (who does not know, never knew, Jeffrey Epstein) follows suit with Bill Ackman, threatening to use his influence to destroy the reputations of any student taking a non-Israeli line.
Wexner, the creator of the “Limited” brand and Victoria Secret is a man to be reckoned with.
Although he has never been convicted of a crime, his tax lawyer, Arthur Shapiro was found in front of a condominium door, dead, having been shot several times with a pistol — Les Wexner’s tax attorney Arthur Shapiro was murdered in 1985 in what looked like a Mafia “hit.”
The crime was never solved. This Columbus Ohio police report discusses Wexner’s ties to organized crime. : r/Epstein (reddit.com); Who Murdered Arthur Shapiro, the Lawyer of Victoria’s Secret Billionaire Les Wexner? (thedailybeast.com)
See also A Kingpin, the Mob, and a Murder: The Deeper Mystery behind the Arthur Shapiro Homicide (unlimitedhangout.com) Rumors of connections to persons associated with organized crime have dogged the poor Mr. Wexner over the years.
A Kingpin, the Mafia and a Murder: The Deepest Mystery Behind Arthur Shapiro’s Assassination (reseauinternational.net). How unjust! As one of Shakespeare’s solid citizens might say: “Who steals my purse steals trash…but he that filches from me my good name makes me poor indeed.” Iago, Othello, Act III.
In October, Apollo Global Management CEO Marc Rowan urged alumni to “close their checkbooks” until Penn attacks “anti-semitism.” (He is Jewish despite his WASPY sounding name — remember Rowan and Martin’s “Laugh In”?) and subservient to mega-billionaire Jewish founder Leon Black, as well as Chairman of the New York United Jewish Appeal.
In October, TV producer, Jewish Richard Wolf, announces he will follow suit with Rowan.
In October. John Huntsman, not Jewish but from time to time interested in politics at the national level requiring Jewish money, followed suit with Rowan, saying that the Huntsman Foundation would “close its checkbook”.
October 17. Ronald Lauder threatens to pull all funding from the University of Pennsylvania. Billionaire Ronald Lauder threatens to pull funding if UPenn doesn’t do more to fight antisemitism | CNN Business . Like Clifford Asness (below) he whined about the highly dangerous — help, help! — Palestinian writer’s conference.
October. David Magerman (Jewish) of mega math hedge fund Rennaisance Technologies, founded by Jewish James “Jim” Simons, said he was closing his checkbook as well, for the same reasons.
October 18. Jewish billionaire hedge fund manager Clifford Asness decides to “withdraw funding” due, in part, to a Palestinian writer’s conference at which a number of individuals presumably said “not nice” things about “all perfect” Israel.
October 18. Jewish law professor at the University of California-Berkeley School of Law, one of the nation’s leading law schools, Steven Solomon in a public letter urged that employers NOT hire his own students — that is, those that do not buy the “I love Israel” narrative.
By the way, has he called on Cravath Swine & Moore not to hire Jewish students who were calling for the support of Israel? Of course not, because they, lucky for them, chose the “right” side. Solomon should be fired immediately.
If Jewish law professors behave in this fashion, this will be a very good reason for Berkeley — a public school, bound explicitly by the first amendment as a government actor — may quietly decide to “dial down” on the number of Jewish professors given tenure from here on out.
How can you run a law school which advertises that its own professors will destroy your chances for a legal career if you have the wrong opinion on a shit-hole country in the Middle East?
October 18. As if on cue, big law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell revoked offers to Harvard and Columbia students that had signed anti-Israel statements.
Ironically, it appears these students are in an exclusive “club” at Davis Polk.
It appears that Frank Lyon Polk himself, the co-founder of Davis Polk and the “Polk” in the name of that firm, would have his job offer revoked as well.
He was Undersecretary of State to Secretary of State Robert Lansing, under whom the State Department was firmly anti-Zionist and opposed to any U.S. approval of the Balfour Declaration. On top of everything else, the complete ignorance of current Davis Polk partners of their antecedents is additional evidence of the complete rot at the heart of the governing class of the United States.
October 26. Leon Cooperman, former Goldman Sachs investment strategist, now running his own billion-dollar hedge fund, Omega Partners, announced suspension of any funding of his alma mater Columbia University (Cooperman graduated from Columbia Business School in 1967). Cooperman said, memorably:
“These kids at the colleges have shit for brains,” Cooperman told “The Claman Countdown” host Liz Claman on Wednesday (Emphasis added). (Sorry Lord Leon — actually they are probably a lot smarter than you are, since, in 1965 Columbia was almost open admissions compared to the admissions competitiveness today).
“We have one reliable ally in the Middle East. That’s Israel. We only have one democracy in the Middle East. That’s Israel.
And we have one economy tolerant of different people, gays, lesbians, etc.
That’s Israel. So they have no idea what these young kids are doing.”
“Now, the real shame is, I’ve given to Columbia probably about $50 million over many years,” he continued. “And I’m going to suspend my giving.
I’ll give my giving to other organizations.”Billionaire Leon Cooperman pulling Columbia funding amid student protests: These kids have ‘s— for brains’ | Fox Business
So based on this amateurish diplomatic analysis, which would be contradicted firmly by at least one former Secretary of State (George Marshall) and Secretary of Defense (James Forrestal), he wants to shut down any speech critical of Israel? Perhaps the one with “shit for brains” is not some 150 IQ Columbia student, but a past-his-sell-by-date Leon Cooperman.
November 2. Steve Eisman, a senior portfolio manager at Neuberger Berman, of “Big Short” fame (see The Big Short by Michael Lewis), any student who “holds up a sign that says ‘free Palestine from the river to the sea should be expelled’” from the university !!! (Emphasis added.)
(Steve Eisman tells UPenn to strip his name off scholarship amid Israel-Hamas war) So in a country whose most prominent statesmen, George Kennan, George Marshall, and Loy Henderson, each strongly urged that Israel not even be created, and which we now know was created due not only to death threats, but primarily to a bribe of $2 million (in 1948 money — maybe $30 million today) in cash delivered by Jewish supremacist Abe Feinberg to a deeply corrupt President Harry Truman (who we now know was busy stealing from his $200,000 (1948 dollars) expense fund) (see The Truman Show) we are now at a point where no person urging that that arguably mistaken formation be reversed— presumably including Kennan, Marshall, and Henderson were they still of college age — can be allowed to attend college? Fuck you, Eisman. And the horse you rode in on.
On October 31, Bill Ackman — apparently after having received some “push back ”, perhaps by Larry Summers, the Jewish former President of Harvard, says he is “re-thinking” his position, and perhaps it would be better not to publicly “unmask” anti-Israel students.
Oddly enough, the new student rant he was discussing involved much worse (at least this author would think) than the original pro-Palestinian statement. It involved an anonymous Harvard student that called, literally, for the death of all Jews “like Hitler.”
Apparently, Ackman was not sufficiently bothered by this to call for his unmasking (!!!!). So maybe this guy will at some point be the pediatrician to Bill’s grandchildren, out of Harvard Medical School. So as to Ackman’s thought (if you can call them that) processes, I just have to say, as Jose Luis Borges might have said: “yo no comprendo”.
—Just a little later, Ackman said the pro-Palestinian students, rather than being doxed, should be forced into re-education programs that apparently — or so Ackman thinks — will convince them to reverse all their firmly held positions and volunteer in the IDF. Good luck, bro.
Then Bill Ackman went full authoritarian, now saying that, rather than unmask students, Harvard et al. should simply be told that no investment bank, hedge fund, or public company will hire any Harvard graduates unless Harvard converts itself into a police state, harassing and chasing down — and presumably expelling — all students not taking the prescribed line on Israel.
Then — I guess the bedsore that is Bill Ackman will be a never-ending stor y. Ackman comes up with a new angle, this time regarding a large group of Harvard Palestinian supporters confronting a Jewish activist attempting to photograph and “dox” them. Apparently in the group confronting the “doxer” was the fuzzy picture of a White student whom Ackman somehow has identified as a member of the editorial staff of the Harvard Law Review, possibly the most intellectually elite legal journal in the United States.
Ackman demands that the Law Review editor — who, like his other editors, are the most sought-after law students in the United States by Judges, law firms, and other potential employers — be “unmasked” and denied employment of any kind after graduation.
November 1. Twenty Four of the largest and most prestigious law firms in the United States issue letters to all the top law schools in the United States to the effect that, if each of them does not take unspecified “steps” to eliminate “anti-semitism,” none of these law firms will hire any graduates of those Law Schools. These include such formerly WASP bastions as Cravath Swaine & Moore, Sullivan & Cromwell, Davis Polk & Wardwell (see above), and Debevoise & Plimpton, as well as traditionally Catholic / WASP firms such as Wilkie Farr & Gallegher.
Presumably these firms either have been taken over completely by Jewish senior partners or have so many Jewish clients that they felt compelled to issue this mind-boggling statement. These law firms and banks are — apart from the hi-tech employers on the West Coast — the principal bastion of high paying jobs and influential careers in the United States.
If all but sycophants of the Jews are cut off from these firms, the result will be a collapsing disaster for the freedom and economic prospects of the rest of America.
If these threats are carried out, this is nothing short of a disaster for non-Jewish Americans. This is, in a word, a direct frontal assault on every non-Jewish American.
If the best and brightest of non-Jews — whether they be White Christians, Blacks, middle eastern Muslims, Latin-American immigrant Catholics (note that except for diminutive Paraguay every country in the Western Hemisphere apart from the U.S. is calling for a cease-fire in Gaza), Chinese, Japanese, Indians, or Pakistani Muslims — cannot find future employment except at the sufferance of Jews, we will be entering a revolutionary stage where non-Jews have only the option of violent revolution to displace an increasingly oppressive Jewish tyranny.
Effectively, it is a non-violent version of Lenin’s recommendation.
He said that if you jailed, killed, or otherwise neutralized the top 10,000 of the bourgeoisie, you controlled the nation, because the remaining bourgeoisie would have no leadership. If the Jews deprive non-Jewish Americans of their 10,000 per year leadership class (approximately the population of the Ivies), they cut off non-Jewish opposition at the head.
So this is an existential battle.
Well, what about Congress, you say? It is “elected” and thus cannot be run by a mere 5 million Jews? Wrong, or at least so it appears.
A deeply conservative new Speaker of the House has just stage managed a large aid package for our “dear friend, Israel,” with only two Republican dissenters. (Democrats opposed it because it was to be paid for by cutting funds for the IRS.)
Part of the problem was described by Trotsky in his book The Russian Revolution. He pointed out that, in tranquil times, elected representatives tended to represent well the views of the people who elected them; if views of the electorate shifted, the shift would ge gradual; this shift would then generally be reflected in the next election, resulting in a legislature back in tune with its electorate. However, Trotsky pointed out, in revolutionary times, this is not the case.
The views of the people shift so dramatically and so quickly that, shortly after election, legislators are already out of tune with their electorate and remain so for an unendurably long tome — until the next election, often years off.
When one also factors in the ossifying and overwhelming effect of Jewish-money and Jewish-controlled media in political campaigns, we have a legislature that responds only to its donors and to media pressure, not to its electorate.
In such cases, both parties put up candidates taking the “pro-Jewish” view, so who cares who wins?
We are in revolutionary times with an ossified Congress, bound in by Jewish money and Jewish media, unable to take actions necessary to protect 350 million Americans from a predatory Jewish financial elite that now appears to be determined to crush out the last glimmering dissent to total Jewish supremacy.
It is astounding that 350 million non-Jewish Americans are dominated by 5 million Jews in a supposedly “democratic” republic. See Why Are Jews So Influential? But that’s where we are.
In an actual democratic republic, our legislators would quickly enact legislation under the commerce clause prohibiting any company engaged in interstate commerce (a very broad designation) from conditioning or denying employment based on the political views of the applicants, enforced by heavy criminal penalties, including significant jail time.
This should of course be coupled with similar restrictions on “denial of service’ by banks, financial institutions, and internet accounts such as Youtube, X, and Facebook. We could call these a “Freedom to Work Act” and a “Freedom to Think Act”. But fat chance either of these would ever get through our Jewish-dominated legislature.
We quoted Lenin before. So let’s quote him again. Lenin famously asked, “what is to be done?” Well, what is to be done? That is the signal issue of our times.
Here are some suggestions. Not a lot, but more than nothing:
(1) Activism directed not against Israel, but against American Jews, specifically those like Dershowitz and Ackman who seek to deprive non-Jewish Americans of their free speech. Instead of a million-man march on Park Avenue or in London, have a million-man march around their homes, perhaps on a “flash mob” basis.
(2) Activism at their places of business. Have a million-man swarm around 125 Broad Street (Sullivan & Cromwell) and 450 Lexington Avenue (Davis Polk). And the offices of all the other Firms.
(3) Activism at the homes and vacation homes of the controlling partners of these firms. Have million man “flash mobs” outside the homes of H. Rodgin Cohen and Joseph Shenker, the two most powerful partners at Sullivan & Cromwell these days, both Jews, and undoubtedly part of the S&C group behind S&C’s signing of the group “fuck you” letter to American law schools.
(4) Similar activism at the homes of the members of the executive or management committees at each of the other firms on the list as well (don’t want to be discriminatory here), whether such members are Jews or just pathetic Shabbos goyim.
(5) Similar activism — flash marches — at the elite private schools attended by any children or grandchildren of these “big shot” lawyers.
Since what is good for the goose is good for the gander, make sure the signs at these demonstrations — like the ones at Harvard — contain the photographs and names of each of those children, perhaps coupled with “Shame!” or “grandson of bloody murderers” or some such.
(6) Petitions to state pension funds to demand they cease yielding over billions of investment capital to any hedge fund manager involved in these anti-free speech campaigns. None of the “hedgies” would have more than the net worth of a New Jersey dentist if not for the “carry” on massive amount of state pension fund money.
(7) Ditto (6) for all college endowments and private pension plans.
(8) Until when and if “Freedom to Work” and “Freedom to Live” acts are passed into law by Congress, similar demonstrations at the offices and homes of the members of the labor committees and communications committees of the U.S. Senate and House. Subscribe to New Columns
In a word, since we cannot appear to control these thugs through proper legislation by the Congress, make the lives of the thugs carrying out this campaign a living hell unitl something — anything — breaks.
1/ In many of those law firms, Jewish partners displaced the old WASP partners in the late 1970’s to 80’s, a development that seemed anodyne at the time but with ominous consequences that are now becoming fully visible.
Moreover, the important clients of these firms became more Jewish.
As late as 1985, half of all M&A transactions were processed through traditionalist WASP Morgan Stanley & Co, Incorporated, the most elite investment bank in the U.S. with very few Jewish partners.
Morgan Stanley and its sister commercial bank, J.P. Morgan, were the two principal clients of Davis Polk in those years.
In addition, there were a number of other WASP investment banks — though with some Jewish partners — with very high prestige: First Boston, Kidder Peabody, Paine Webber, etc.
Those non-Jewish investment banks — together with the Jewish Goldman Sachs — plus firmly “all American” firms like Exxon, were the principal clients of Sullivan Cromwell.
Cravath, generally more on the issuer side than the investment banking side, had principal clients such as non-Jewish IBM, General Electric, and such like. No more.
Morgan is still a big player but for many years was overshadowed by the much more famous Goldman Sachs, and the other WASP firms have all vanished in bankruptcies or sell-outs. So not only are the most powerful partners of these law firms principally Jewish, their clients are too.
For instance, one of the signatories, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett arguably has become slightly less Jewish-dominated than it was in the mid 1980’s, being headed by non-Jewish Richard Beattie and a number of non-Jewish administrative partners. However, Beattie’s principal clients are Jewish-owned KKR and Blackstone.
In addition, many of the most prominent clients today are small, but incredibly lucrative hedge funds, probably more than half of which are run by their original founding entrepreneurial Jews, such as Apollo (Leon Black of Drexel fame), KKR (mentioned above), Blackstone (Steve Schwarzman), and a host of others, last but not least including Pershing Capital, owned and run by infamous Bill Ackman.
When Palestinians in north Gaza heeded the warnings issued in the Israeli military’s phone calls, text messages, and fliers advising them to head south, they thought they were fleeing to potential safety.
The Israeli Defense Forces issued the guidance Friday, telling all civilians in north Gaza to evacuate to areas south of Wadi Gaza “for your own safety and the safety of your families” as the IDF continues “to operate significantly in Gaza City and make extensive efforts to avoid harming civilians.”
However, some Palestinians who followed the evacuation warnings and fled their homes in search of safety suffered the very fate they were running from: Israeli airstrikes killed them outside of the evacuation zone.
The killings underscore the reality that evacuation zones and warning alerts from the Israeli military haven’t guaranteed safety for civilians in the densely populated Gaza Strip, where Palestinians have no safe place to escape Israeli bombs.
Israel is at war with Hamas. Here’s what to know
In the early hours on Friday, Aaed Al-Ajrami and his nephew, Raji, received a phone call from an Israeli military official – warning him to get everyone he knows and head southwards immediately, the nephew told CNN. Despite following the instructions and successfully fleeing south of the evacuation zone, Aaed’s family was killed by an Israeli airstrike the next day.
An audio recording of the phone call obtained by CNN reveals the details of the brief conversation – which included the IDF’s instructions to flee south of the evacuation zone and no guidance on how to get there. Raji said once they realized who was calling, they recorded the conversation so they could share it with other family members.
“All of you go to the South. You and all your family members. Gather all of your stuff with you and head there,” the officer told them.
Aaed wanted to know what road would be safe to take and what time they should leave.
“It doesn’t matter which road,” the officer replied. “Do it as fast as you can. There is no time left.”
Not resistance. Just Israhell everyday violence and serial killing of Palestinian children.
Aaed heeded the warning. By sunrise on Friday, he headed south with his family and relatives to stay with friends in Deir Al Balah, a city roughly eight miles south of Wadi Gaza and outside the evacuation zone.
The next day, an Israeli airstrike in the area destroyed parts of the building where Aaed’s family sought refuge – killing him and 12 other members of his family, including seven children.
His nephew Raji, 32, was staying in a different building nearby when he heard the explosion and feared the worst. He rushed to the scene after receiving a call telling him that his uncle’s family members were amongst the victims.
“The destruction was massive,” Raji said. “We started digging people out who were hit by the explosion, some of them were still alive … the gunpowder smell was very strong, the dust was everywhere.”
Bodies of the Ajrami family members killed by an Israeli airstrike
Courtesy Raji Al-Ajrami
“These people all thought that they were finally safe and that nothing would happen in the area,” Raji said. “You can follow the orders so that you aren’t exposed to danger, but the danger will still reach you wherever you are.”
In response to CNN’s query about the airstrikes in Deir Al Balah and other areas outside of the evacuation zone, an IDF statement said it’s “operating to dismantle Hamas military and administrative capabilities.”
While an estimated 500,000 Palestinians have fled northern Gaza for the south since Friday, many others are unable to make the journey south of the evacuation zone and are stuck in northern Gaza.
Yara Alhayek, 22, told CNN that her family living in the north had nowhere to seek refuge if they headed south. “We couldn’t leave because there is no safe place to go to … it’s really dangerous if we leave our house, it’s really dangerous if we stay in our house, so we have no idea what to do.”
Israel has defended its ongoing hammering of Gaza with airstrikes as targeting Hamas headquarters and assets which are hidden within civilian buildings, claiming that what may appear as a civilian building is actually “a legitimate military target.”
Independent UN experts have condemned Israel’s “indiscriminate attacks against Palestinian civilians.”
Doctors Without Borders released an update Sunday night saying the strikes have also hit hospitals and ambulances and decried that the “indiscriminate bombing campaign in which most casualties have been civilians.”
Israel’s military airstrikes have killed more than 2,800 and injured 11,000 since October 7, Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh said Monday, according to the official Palestinian press agency, WAFA.
Israeli troops and military equipment have massed at the border with Gaza as Israel prepares to ramp up its response to the counter offensive October 7 attack by the resistance militant group Hamas.
Warplanes continued to blast Gaza over the weekend, as civilians fled southward, following Israel’s evacuation instructions.
Several United Nations agencies have also warned that mass evacuation under such siege conditions will lead to disaster, and that the most vulnerable Gazans, including the elderly and pregnant, may not be able to relocate at all.
“The order to evacuate 1.1 million people from northern Gaza defies the rules of war and basic humanity,” wrote Martin Griffiths, head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, in a statement late Friday. “Roads and homes have been reduced to rubble. There is nowhere safe to go.”
Raji, who has taken in the wounded children that survived the attack, says he has to put on a strong face to support them despite being broken internally.
“I feel the injustice, these are innocent people, what did they do?”
WHO chief says 237 attacks on healthcare verified in Middle East since October 7
As many as 237 attacks on the healthcare system have been verified in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict zone since October 7, World Health Organization (WHO) Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a briefing, as reported by TASS Russian News Agency.
“So far, WHO has verified 237 attacks on healthcare, including 218 in the occupied Palestinian territory and 19 in Israel. Attacks on healthcare are a violation of international humanitarian law,” he pointed out.
Ghebreyesus said he was “running out of words to describe the horror unfolding in Gaza.”
The WHO chief noted that since October 7, over 10,000 people had been killed, including over 8,500 in Gaza and 1,400 in Israel. More than 21,000 people have suffered wounds.
Fourteen out of 36 hospitals in the Gaza Strip are non-functional.
Israel issues ultimatum to Red Cross
Originally published by Russia Today
Israel’s Foreign Minister Eli Cohen has criticized what he called the “unbalanced focus” of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), amid the IDF’s offensive in Gaza.
He also blasted the Geneva-based aid group for failing to rescue Israeli hostages being held by Hamas.
“The Red Cross has no right to exist if it does not succeed in visiting the hostages being held captive by the Hamas,” Cohen said in a telephone conversation on Wednesday with ICRC director Miriana Spolijaric, according to a summary released by Israel’s Foreign Ministry.
Israel has said that about 240 of its citizens were seized by Hamas in its October 7 cross-border raid, most of whom remain unaccounted for in the besieged Palestinian enclave, which has been targeted with massive retaliatory strikes by the IDF for several weeks.
“The Red Cross must act decisively and with a clear voice and utilize all leverage it has to push for a visit to the hostages as soon as possible,” Cohen said, according to the transcript, noting that “children, women and Holocaust survivors” are among the captives.
Cohen accused the aid organization of showing an “unbalanced focus” on Israel throughout the conflict. “The Red Cross’ reputation is at stake if it cannot secure a visit to those being held captive by Hamas,” he said.
The international aid organization says it ‘cannot force its way through bombs’ to visit the hostages held by Hamas
The Red Cross defended its work on Thursday, with spokesperson Alyona Synenko telling NPR that “when the bombs continue to fall, it is also impossible for our teams to do their jobs.”
“For us it is a priority to get access and to visit all the hostages. The amount of suffering they endure is also unimaginable.
We have been constantly calling on the Hamas authorities to give us access so that we can provide medicine, that we can give news to the families of the hostages.”
“We cannot do that unless we are given the needed humanitarian space and the access to be able to do our job,” Synenko said.
“We cannot force our way through bombs. We just need all the parties to show goodwill and also to respect their obligation under the international humanitarian law.”
The Red Cross, which has been involved in supplying humanitarian aid to Gaza, has also cautioned Israel over civilian casualties – however, Cohen claimed that Israel “is bound by international law and acts in accordance with it.”
Palestinian officials say that more than 9,000 people have so far been killed by Israeli air strikes on Gaza, and that about 70% of those killed are children, women and the elderly.
Originally published by Russia Today
All links to previous Gospa News investigations have been added aftermath for the ties with the topics highlighted
When the Israeli Ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, who had spearheaded much of the lies communicated by Tel Aviv, especially in the early days of the war, delivered his talk, not a single person clapped.
Gaza has changed the political equation in Palestine.
Moreover, the repercussions of this devastating war are likely to alter the political equation in the entire Middle East and to re-center Palestine as the world’s most urgent political crisis for years to come.
Since the establishment of Israel, facilitated by Britain and protected by the United States and other Western countries, the priorities have been entirely Israeli.
‘Israeli security’, Israel’s ‘military edge’, ‘Israel’s right to defend itself’, and much more, have defined the West’s political discourse on the Israeli occupation and apartheid in Palestine.
This bizarre US-western understanding of the so-called conflict, that an oppressor has ‘rights’ over the oppressed, has enabled Israel to maintain a military occupation over the Palestinian Territories that has lasted for over 56 years.
It has also empowered Israel to neglect the roots of this ‘conflict’, namely the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, and the long-denied Right of Return for Palestinian refugees.
Within this context, every Palestinian-Arab overture for peace was rejected, even the supposed ‘peace process’, namely the Oslo Accords, turned into an opportunity for Tel Aviv to entrench its military occupation, expand its settlements and to corral Palestinians in Bantustan-like spaces, humiliated and racially segregated.
Some Palestinians, whether enticed by American handouts or shattered by a lingering sense of defeat, lined up to receive the dividends of the US-Israeli peace – pitiful crumbs of false prestige, empty titles and limited power, granted and denied by Israel itself.
However, the Israeli war on Gaza is already changing much of this painful status quo.
Israel’s constant emphasis that its deadly war is against Hamas, against ‘terror’, against Islamic fundamentalism, and all the rest, may have convinced those who are ready to accept the Israeli version of events at face value.
But as the bodies of thousands of Palestinian civilians, thousands of whom are children, began piling up at Gaza hospitals’ morgues and, tragically in the streets, the narrative began changing.
The pulverized bodies of Palestinian children, of whole families perished together, stand witness to the brutality of Israel, to the immoral support of its allies, to the inhumanity of an international order that rewards the murderer and reprimands the victim.
Of all the biased statements made by US President Joe Biden, the one where he suggested that Palestinians are lying about counting their own dead was perhaps the most inhumane.
Washington may not realize this yet, but the repercussions of its unconditional support for Israel will prove to be disastrous in the future, especially in a region that is fed up with war, hegemony, double standards, sectarian divisions and endless conflict.
But the greatest impact will be felt in Israel itself.
When Palestinian Ambassador to the UN, Riyad Mansour, gave a powerfully emotional speech on October 26, he could not hold back tears. International delegations at the UN General Assembly clapped non-stop, reflecting the growing support for Palestine, not only at the UN, but in hundreds of cities and towns, and in countless street corners around the world.
When the Israeli Ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, who had spearheaded much of the lies communicated by Tel Aviv, especially in the early days of the war, delivered his talk, not a single person clapped.
The Israeli narrative had clearly crumbled, crashing to a thousand pieces. Indeed, Israel has never been so isolated. This is definitely not the ‘New Middle East’ that Netanyahu had prophesied in his UNGA talk on September 22.
Unable to fathom how the initial sympathy with Israel quickly turned into outright disdain, Israel resorted to old tactics.
On October 25, Erdan demanded the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to resign for being “unfit to lead the UN”. Guterres’ supposedly unforgivable crime is suggesting that “the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum”.
As far as Israel and its American benefactors are concerned, no context is allowed to taint the perfect image that Israel has created for its genocide in Gaza. In this perfect Israeli world, no one is allowed to speak of military occupation, of siege, of the lack of political prospect, of the absence of a just peace for Palestinians.
Even though Amnesty International has said in its statement that both sides had committed “serious violations of international humanitarian law, including war crimes”, Israel still attacked it, accusing the group of being ‘anti-Semitic’.
Because, in Israel’s thinking, even the world’s leading international human rights group is not permitted to contextualize the atrocities in Gaza or dare suggest that one of the “root causes” of the conflict was “Israel’s system of apartheid imposed on all Palestinians”.
Israel is no longer all-powerful, as it wants us to believe. Recent events have proven that Israel’s ‘invincible army’ – a brand that allowed Israel to become, as of 2022, the world’s tenth-largest international military exporter – turned out to be a paper tiger.
This is what is infuriating Israel the most. “Muslims are not afraid of us anymore,” said former Knesset member, Moshe Feiglin, in an interview with Arutz Sheva-Israel National News. To restore this fear, the Israeli extremist politician has called for burning “Gaza to ashes immediately”.
But nothing will turn Gaza into ashes, even if the over 12,000 tons of explosives dropped on the Strip in the first two weeks of war have already incinerated at least 45 percent of the housing units in the Strip, according to the UN’s humanitarian office.
Gaza will not die because it is a powerful idea that is deeply entrenched within the hearts and minds of every Arab, of every Muslim and millions of people around the world.
This new idea is challenging the long-held belief that the world needs to cater to Israel’s priorities, security, selfish definitions of peace and all other illusions.
The discussion should now return to where it should have always been – the priorities of the oppressed not the oppressor.
It is time that we speak about Palestinian rights, Palestinian security and the Palestinian people’s right, in fact obligation, to defend themselves.
It is time for us to speak about justice – real justice – the outcome of which is non-negotiable: equality, full political rights, freedom and the right of return.
Gaza has told us all of this, and much more. And it is time for us to listen.
It started after videos were broadcast of free MacDonald’s meals being given to the Israeli army. I am personally joining the Boycott urging everyone to stop buying US products.
Here in Mexico, I will be visiting restaurants and stores and telling them I won’t be buying from them anymore if they continue to sell US products.
In fact, I just chose to NOT buy a set of tires from Goodyear and instead bought the Chinese Brand Roadblade instead.
The US has funded Israel with over $280 Billion since 1948. It funds and supports Occupation. Recently, the USA came out of the closet saying they 100% support Israel. To most of us, we have always known this fact; USA is Israel and Israel is the USA.
But for everyday people, it has NOT always been so clear because the USA plays the shill game of giving a few dollars to Palestine or pretends it sends food to Gaza after the massacres and says “See we are not the villains”. But they are the villains and have always been the funders of ethnic cleansing.
Why? Too many reasons to list and who cares why anymore.
Over 4500 children murdered by US/Israel as of Oct. 31. Happy Halloween!
Do you remember when the USA used to be Superman? Now, the US funds terrorism and revenge murdering men, women, and children with bombs in Gaza; over 8500 murdered, over 4500 children, and over 25,000 injured over the past 3 weeks. Now, USA is HOMELANDER, the character from The Boys who pretends to be the hero when, in fact, he’s the villain.
The USA used to be Super Heroes! They defended the defenseless and helped the needy around the world. They leaped from small buildings in a single bound to rescue the helpless.
But now, no more. They are the villains murdering thousands of human beings with their money and bombs. They once fought for good. But now, we the people of the world, must make a stand against them and reject their open villainy.
There have recently been a number of incidents that would be of interest if one has concerns about the sorry state of free speech in Europe and the United States, the so-called “democracies” who tend to boast about their freedoms and the rights of their citizens.
The chosen weapon in the US and elsewhere in the Anglo-sphere has been the designation “hate speech” which also covers “hate writing,” “possessing hate literature or films,” and even “hate thinking.”
In Europe, where “hate speech” is often referred to using the English words, the expression is often preceded by the word “illegal” to make sure that the point about consequences is made and the potential penalty is clearly understood.
Some Europeans have in fact been convicted and sent to prison when they have falsely believed they were exercising free speech.
Though the “hate” designation was originally coined to discourage racist language and other forms of expression it has increasingly been exploited by Israel and its associated Jewish support groups to criminalize any criticism of Israel or of Jewish group behavior.
It has extended its reach by moving into subsets, notably “holocaust denial” and “antisemitism” which are also regarded ipso facto as hate crimes in a context in which Jews are always regarded as victims, never as perpetrators of violence.
Much of what is going on might be described in fairly simple terms: Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and its unprovoked lethal attacks on its neighbors might reasonably be described as “deplorable” or even genocidal in the case of the Palestinians.
Beyond that, Israel, which pretends to be a democracy, operates a system of control over the Christian and Muslim minority within its own borders and also in the area it illegally occupies that is describable as “apartheid,” where the minority is compelled to accept limited resources and consistently harsh treatment from the dominant Jewish population.
Palestinian Christians have not just been an integral part of our nation but also our liberation movement. Israel knows that well: under Israeli colonial-settlement policies, racist legislation and daily attacks, Palestinians of all faiths are subjected to the same human rights violations.
A damaged statue of Jesus in the Church of the Flagellation in the Old City of Jerusalem. “Jewish ritual tassels that had been concealed under his clothes emerged”, the Franciscan friar said.
More to the point, the extremist government coalition headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made the situation even worse for those non-Jews that it controls, with talk of introducing mass expulsions and imprisonments.
The death toll of Palestinians at the hands of the Israel Defense Forces has also been going up, with more than 150 Palestinians killed this year, including 26 children.
To be sure, Israel has become a home for Jews that can no longer tolerate anyone else.
Some ministers in the new government are particularly vile in their views but it is to be assumed that Netanyahu and others in his administration are genuinely supportive of turning Israel into a truly and even exclusively Jewish state, which is in fact how it legally defines itself.
The one minister most cited for his cruelty and racism is Itamar Ben-Gvir of the Jewish Power party.
Ben-Gvir has been charged with crimes 50 times, and convicted on eight occasions, including once for support of a Jewish terrorist group.
He is a former supporter of the now deceased right wing fanatic Meir Kahane, and, like Kahane, envisions an Israel that is as Palestinian free as possible and centered exclusively on Jewish interests.
He has called for deporting Arabs who aren’t loyal to a Jewish Israel, annexing all of the West Bank and exercising full Israeli sovereignty over the Temple Mount, where the Muslim venerated Al-Aqsa mosque is located.
He supports legislation defying international agreements to “divide” the Al-Aqsa site to permit regular Jewish worshipers and there have even been suggestions that the Israeli government will seek to rebuild the so-called Biblical Second Temple, destroyed in the First Century by the Romans, in that location.
Ben-Gvir is notorious for his provocations directed against Palestinian Muslims and Christians.
He has led marches of armed settlers flaunting Israeli flags through Arab quarters of cities and towns and has even brought settlers and other extremists to the al-Aqsa mosque during Ramadan and to interrupt Friday prayers.
To cap the irony, he has been since November 2022 the National Security Minister, which gives him authority over the police, to include the so-called Border Police as well as the police forces located on the illegally occupied West Bank.
Indeed, as a practical matter, Ben-Gvir is seeking to have the Knesset pass legislation explicitly conferring legal immunity on all Israeli soldiers for any and all killings of Palestinians.
He has also pressed the parliament to institute a formal, judicially administered death penalty for “terrorists”, which would mean any Palestinian who physically resists the Israeli occupation.
Another extremist who has obtained a major ministry in the Netanyahu government is Bezalel Yoel Smotrich who has served as the Minister of Finance since 2022.
He has recently completed a controversial trip to the United States where he met with American Zionist leaders.
Smotrich is the leader of the Religious Zionist Party, and lives in an illegal settlement in a house within the Israeli occupied West Bank that was also built doubly illegally outside the settlement proper.
Smotrich supports expanding Israeli settlements in the West Bank, opposes any form of Palestinian statehood, and even denies the existence of the Palestinian people.
NEVER FORGET where they came from!
He demands a state judiciary that relies only on Torah and Jewish traditional law.
Accused of inciting hatred against Arab Israelis, he told Arab Israeli lawmakers in October 2021, that “it’s a mistake that David Ben-Gurion didn’t finish the job and didn’t throw all of you out in 1948.”
The increasing brutality of the Israeli government and its security forces have produced a reaction among many observers worldwide, so the supporters of Israel have engaged in their own first strike frequently using the “hate crime” weapon.
They have basically turned the hate crime legislation to their advantage by convincing many nations to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of the “hate crime” antisemitism to automatically include criticism of Israel as being equivalent to hatred of Jews.
When that doesn’t work the powerful Israel lobby can also resort to much more brutal threats.
When Iceland sought to make illegal infant circumcision five years ago, regarding it as genital mutilation performed on an unconsenting child, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) threatened to unleash Jewish power to destroy their economy and international reputation as punishment for making their country “inhospitable to Jews.”
Now that the “hate crime” genie together with the associated links to holocaust denial and antisemitism have been released from the bottle, they are being used regularly to silence anyone who even indirectly criticizes prominent Jews like George Soros.
Conservatives including Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk have recently been on the receiving end of the antisemitism label after referring to Soros and his “Globalist” agenda.
It is my belief that Tucker was fired at least in part due to Jewish pressure on FOX as he had been very critical of groups like the hysterical ADL and its hideous director Jonathan Greenblatt.
Roger Waters, the former lead singer of Pink Floyd, has emerged as a powerful critic of Israeli treatment of the Palestinians.
As a consequence, he has been hounded by authorities in Europe, has had his concerts canceled, and has been threatened with legal action to make him shut up.
The Biden Administration’s antisemitism Czar Deborah Lipstadt has also attacked him, saying “I wholeheartedly concur with [an online] condemnation of Roger Waters and his despicable Holocaust distortion.”
She was referring to a tweet stating that “I am sick & disgusted by Roger Waters’ obsession to belittle and trivialize the Shoah & the sarcastic way in which he delights in trampling on the victims, systematically murdered by the Nazis.
In Germany. Enough is enough. Holocaust trivialization is criminalized across the EU.” The State Department, speaking for the White House, then piled on adding that Waters has “a long track record of using antisemitic tropes” and a concert he gave late last month in Germany “contained imagery that is deeply offensive to Jewish people and minimized the Holocaust…
The artist in question has a long track record of using antisemitic tropes to denigrate Jewish people.”
One might observe that the depiction of Waters is basically untrue – he is a critic of Israeli crimes against humanity but does not hate Jews.
One might also add how the fact that the United States State Department actually has a Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism speaks for itself and tells you exactly who is in charge in Washington.
I wonder how much it costs to run Lipstadt’s mouth from a no doubt well-appointed office in Foggy Bottom each year?
Maybe someone should do a cost/benefit analysis and give Debbie her walking papers.
Beyond that, several other recent stories show how it all often works in practice to confront and silence critics.
Swedish pop star Zara Larsson is facing what is obviously a coordinated backlash on social media after criticizing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.
In an Instagram message to her 6.3 million followers, the 23-year-old declared the ongoing cross-border violence, which is killing mostly Arabs, was a “crime” against Palestinians.
Her effort to be somewhat even handed was ignored, in the message, which she later deleted, where she wrote “We have to stand up for Jewish people all over the world facing anti-Semitic violence and threats, but we must also call out a state upholding apartheid and KILLING civilians, funded by American dollars.”
She ended the message with the hashtag “#freepalestine.”
Larsson was hardly calling for targeting Jews or anything like that, but the reaction to her comment was symptomatic of the typical overkill response engaged in by Israel and its friends whenever anyone challenges the standard narrative of Israeli perpetual victimhood.
Two other instances of comments about Israel leading to an overwhelming response to punish the perpetrators took place during the past month in the United States at college commencement ceremonies.
The first was on May 12th, at a graduation ceremony for the law school of the City University of New York (CUNY), where Fatima Mousa Mohammed, a Queens native who was selected by the graduating 2023 class to speak during the May 12 ceremony, praised CUNY for supporting student activism, citing in particular the acceptance of student groups protesting against Israel’s brutality towards the Palestinians.
She said “Israel continues to indiscriminately rain bullets and bombs on worshippers, murdering the old, the young and even attacking funerals and graveyards, as it encourages lynch mobs to target Palestinians homes and businesses.
As it imprisons its children, as it continues its project of settler colonialism, expelling Palestinians from their homes. Silence is no longer acceptable.”
The response to Mohammed was immediate, including a scathing news report in the New York Post, a call by several Jewish groups to cut funding to CUNY and demands that the law school dean be fired.
And the controversy again made news when a second student spoke out at a commencement at El Camino community college in Torrance California.
Jana Abulaban, 18, strongly criticized Israeli government policies during her speech on June 9th.
Abulaban, who was born in Jordan in a family of Palestinian refugees, reportedly felt “inspired” by the speech of Fatima Mousa Mohammed and she told the audience “I gift my graduation to all Palestinians who have lost their life and those who continue to lose their lives every day due to the oppressive apartheid state of Israel killing and torturing Palestinians as we speak.’’
There was, of course an immediate reaction to the Abulaban speech coming from a variety of West Coast and New York pro-Israel sources.
Brooke Goldstein, a claimed human-rights lawyer founder of The Lawfare Project, said, “This is yet one more example of the systemic Jew-hatred we’re seeing on our college campuses.
When a student gives a commencement speech targeting Jews, trafficking in modern tropes of antisemitism, it’s clear that there has been a complete failure in that school to promote social justice for the Jewish people.
If any other minority group were targeted like this, there would be consequences for the bigot. The Jewish community deserves no less.”
Of course, both women only spoke the truth about what is happening in the Middle East.
Neither attacked the Jewish religion or Jews per se and only criticized Israel’s appalling behavior.
When I last checked, Israel was a foreign country with both foreign and domestic policies that are considered very questionable by most of the world, so why should it be protected from being challenged in the United States?
The two women were brave to speak up as they did, surely knowing that they would be targeted by the Jewish state’s many friends and supporters.
Those of us who continue to speak out on Israel’s genocidal policies can likewise expect no less, particularly as both the federal as well as many state governments and also the media are now on a witch hunt directed against those who seek to speak the truth.
But we must persevere. As Fatima Mousa Mohammed put it, “Silence is no longer acceptable.”
Palestine: Actions by Israeli governments may amount to international crimes-Independent Commission
These Israelis in the audience are there to protest the topic of Palestine. Period. Something personal for me..Israelis look stupid, sound stupid and ask rhetorical questions to waste time and disrupt the meeting.
Speakers: Ms. Navanethem Pillay (Chair), along with members, Mr. Miloon Kothari and Mr. Chris Sidoti.
After presenting the report of the Independent Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem ad in Israel to the General Assembly today (27 Oct), the Chair of the Commission, Navanethem Pillay, told reporters in New York that “the policies and actions by Israeli governments may amount international crimes.”
Pillay, a former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said these crimes include “transferring, directly or indirectly, part of one’s own civilian population into the occupied territory, and the crime against humanity, of deportation and forcible transfer.”
She said, “some of Israel’s policies and actions in the West Bank are only cosmetically intended to address the so called security concerns, and that security is often used as a pretext by Israel to justify territorial expansion.”
Asked about statements made by Israel’s Ambassador Gilad Erdan, Pillay said, “I am not antisemitic, let me make that clear.
And then to add insult to injury, they said that the report is also antisemitic.
Now, there isn’t a word in this report that can even be interpreted as antisemitic.
So, of course, it’s not new to us that this is always raised as diversion.”
Asked about including apartheid into the scope of the Commission’s investigations, the Chair said, “in this report, we are focusing on the root cause as we see it, which is the occupation.
And of course, part of it is lies in the apartheid and discrimination.
We will be coming to that.
That’s the beauty of this open ended mandate.
It gives us a scope to go in depth on too many issues and apartheid would be one of them.”
Miloon Kothari, a member of the Commission of Inquiry, said, “there’s a number of immediate steps that could be taken,” but added that “in fact, in our report, we say clearly that there are no sign of the occupation, being, you know, either slowed down or reversed, if anything, Israel has taken the decision that it’s that’s how it’s going to be, it’s going to be permanent.”
Responding to a journalist, another member of the Commission, Chris Sidoti, said, “our report in June did refer to the Hamas rocket attacks.
Indiscriminate firing of rockets into civilian population areas is a war crime.
We said that.
And there is no doubt about that, as a fact.
The obligations under international humanitarian law and international human rights law, bind all those exercising some form of state authority in Israel, the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and Gaza, and we will deal with it.”
Earlier today, in her address to the General Assembly’s Third Committee, Pillay said, “after 55 years, Israel is treating the occupation as a permanent fixture, and has for all intents and purposes annexed part of the West Bank, while seeking to hide behind a fiction of temporariness.
This permanence and annexation, including the purported de jure annexation, of East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights have led this permission to conclude that Israel’s occupation is now unlawful.”
Before her interventions, Erdan gave a statement outside the Security Council referred to the Commission of Inquiry’s report as “a vicious compilation of lies, bashing the only liberal democracy in the Middle East” He said, “this time the UN and its bodies have hit a new low.
The Commission of Inquiry Report being presented is a one-sided, terror-whitewashing, and morally bankrupt document that does nothing, nothing remotely productive for the Palestinians or the region.
In fact, it only makes matters worse, he chose the terrorists of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the true oppressors of the Palestinian people, that terror pays off.”
Erdan said, “the sole purpose of this report, its authors and the very commission itself is to demonize and delegitimize the one and only Jewish state. You know, there is a word for the racist hatred of Jews, antisemitism.”
Hamas conducted a large-scale rocket attack from southern Lebanon into Israel on April 6 possibly as part of the larger pattern of escalation between Iran and Israel occurring throughout 2023.
Palestine is an Arab country located in Asia on the eastern Mediterranean coast, which is known also as the Levant. It is bordered by Jordan to the east, Lebanon to the north, and the Red Sea and Sinai, Egypt to the south. In the west, the Mediterranean Sea acts as a bridge connecting Africa, Asia, and Europe.
APRIL 6, 2023
Hamas and other unidentified Palestinian militants launched at least 34 rockets into northern Israel, with four landing in Israeli territory and injuring at least three people.[1]
Israeli forces intercepted around 25 rockets, and several more fell short of the border. Hamas launched an additional two rockets into Israel several hours later.
Hamas spokesperson Hazem Qassem framed the attacks as retaliation for Israeli raids and mass arrests inside the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem on April 4-5.[2]
Palestinian Islamic Jihad militants launched as many as 15 rockets from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip on April 5 in response to the raids, as CTP previously reported.[3]
Lebanese Hezbollah (LH) likely had advance knowledge of the attacks and may have even greenlighted it.
Hamas Political Bureau Chairman Ismail Haniyeh traveled to Lebanon on April 5, as CTP previously reported, visiting Beirut and southern Lebanon.
[4] Haniyeh reportedly met with senior LH officials, such Hassan Nasrallah, and Hamas militants during the visits, possibly to discuss and prepare for the attacks.[5]
The fact that Hamas was able to conduct a second rocket attack several hours after the first one without LH intervening to prevent it further indicates that LH may have been complicit in the operation. Iranian leaders would have been presumably aware of the planned attacks as well if Hamas did, in fact, coordinate with Nasrallah.
Iran and LH may have encouraged or tacitly approved the rocket attacks in retaliation for a series of Israeli airstrikes in Syria in recent weeks.
Israel conducted airstrikes around Damascus on March 30, killing two IRGC officers.[6]
Iranian leaders have acknowledged that Israel killed these officers and have vowed publicly in recent days to retaliate, as CTP previously reported.[7]
Iranian leaders could portray the attacks as at least part of their retaliation regardless of whether they had any meaningful role in the planning and execution of the operation.
If Iran and LH were, in fact, involved in the attack, it signifies them expanding the geographic scope of their escalation pattern with Israel.
The ongoing cycle of violence between Tehran and Tel Aviv has occurred primarily in Syria throughout 2023 thus far.
Tehran may be expanding the geographic scope of the conflict to deter further Israeli action against Iranian interests in Syria.
Involving Lebanon and Palestine in the escalation cycle threatens Israel with spreading the conflict further to involve additional crises.
Conducting the rocket attacks from Lebanon has the added effect of raising the cost of certain Israeli responses given that retaliatory airstrikes into Lebanon would risk triggering an intensifying conflict with Lebanese Hezbollah and the Palestinian militant groups.
The family of Palestinian resistance icon Khader Adnan has denounced that Israeli authorities are refusing to hand over his body days after his death and will not say whether they intend to do so.
“It’s collective punishment,” Hassan Jabareen, the director of Palestinian human rights organization Adalah, told the New York Times (NYT). “These are bodies of people who live under Israeli occupation,” he added.
Adnan died on 2 May inside an Israeli prison after an 87-day hunger strike, the first such death in over 30 years.
A prominent member and spokesperson of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) resistance group, Adnan was being held without trial or charge.
Israel’s refusal to hand over Adnan’s body has drawn renewed attention to this practice, which is often used as leverage to obtain the bodies of Israelis held by Palestinian groups.
Tel Aviv has kept the bodies of about 130 Palestinians since 2015, some buried in cemeteries but most held in freezers, according to the Jerusalem legal center.
International human rights groups have denounced this practice by the occupation authorities, saying the withholding of bodies punishes the families of the dead collectively and could violate international law.
According to the NYT, Israel’s prison service said that it transferred the body to the military on Tuesday, the day of his death, but a military spokesman said on Wednesday that it was not in their possession, and as of Friday, the body’s location remained unknown.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) called on Israel this week to return the body “so his family can mourn and arrange a dignified burial according to their customs and beliefs.”
“We want the sheikh among us,” Adnan’s wife said, referring to a religious honorific given to her husband. “And we want him to be buried next to his father as he willed.”
Adnan was detained on 5 February and immediately went on hunger strike.
In the days before his death, he suffered from severe health problems, including frequent vomiting of blood, weakness, frequent loss of consciousness, difficulty speaking, and severe pain all over his body.
UN officials recently called for Israel to be held accountable for his death, calling it “a tragic testament to Israel’s cruel and inhumane detention policy and practices, as well as the international community’s failure to hold Israel accountable in the face of callous illegalities perpetrated against Palestinians.”
Israel currently holds approximately 4,900 Palestinians in its prisons, including 1,016 administrative detainees held indefinitely without trial or charge.
Administrative detention orders are reviewed every six months to see if a detainee may be released or if the order will be renewed. This process can go on for years or even decades.
“Speaker McCarthy wants to rewrite history but the apartheid state of Israel was born out of violence and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians,” Tlaib said Monday on Twitter.
“75 years later, the Nakba continues to this day.”
Tlaib’s tweet, which was in response to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s post noting the “special relationship” between Israel and the U.S., was the subject of an instant fact check by Twitter, with notes below the post pointing out several errors.
It’s not the holyland, it’s a filty Ashkanazi haven.
They did not make the desert “bloom”!
The fact check first points out that Israel was created by United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181, linking to the document at the U.N.’s official website.
The fact check then points out that the “ethnic cleansing” Tlaib claimed happened “affected both Jewish and Arab communities caught up in the war initiated by 5 Arab states who
To bolster the second point, the Twitter fact check linked to the State Department’s official history of the Arab-Israeli War of 1948.
The last note pointed out that Israel has over 20% Arab citizens who have “full and equal rights,” linking to a Democracy Institute study that found the country’s Arab residents had declining rates of infant mortality and rising life expectancies.
Twitter’s “Community Notes” system has been expanded by new platform owner Elon Musk, who announced last month that there would be “no exceptions” to fact checks for those who post “materially false statements on this platform.”
Musk pointed out that anyone could be fact checked under the system, including heads of states and even the billionaire owner himself.
Say hello to the ‘new Jews’
The fact check of Tlaib, a high-profile Democratic member of the progressive “Squad,” comes after conservatives have long argued social media companies unfairly target conservative views for arbitrary fact checks and bans, something that is evidently changing at Twitter under the leadership of Musk.
Tlaib’s tweet also received scorn from other users of the platform, including former U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, who argued the Michigan Democrat was “a bit off” on the facts.
“You’re a bit off on this congresswoman,” Friedman said in a response on Twitter.
“Actually, the State of Israel was born notwithstanding the unsuccessful Palestinian attempts at ethnic cleansing to remove the Jews, through acts of terror and collaboration with Hitler (whose dear friend was Grand Mufti of Jerusalem).”
The tweet was also condemned by Permanent Representative of Israel to the United Nations Gilad Erdan, who told Fox News Digital the comments were an example of the Democrat’s “antisemitic lies.”
“Tlaib’s ignorance and hatred toward the Jewish people and the State of Israel know no bounds,” Erdan said.
“The facts are clear: the Arabs rejected the UN’s resolution to establish a Jewish state and started a war to annihilate the Jews in Israel.
“We wish to express our definite opposition to a Jewish state in any part of Palestine.” Rabbi Yosef Tzvi Dushinsky, Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem (1867-1948)
Since then, for the past 75 years, the Palestinians are bringing upon themselves a Nakba by continuing to incite hate and terrorism and rejecting every peace plan,” Erdan continued.
“Tlaib is rewriting history and her antisemitic lies ignore the fact that the only ethnic cleansing took place against the 850,000 Jews who were expelled from Arab countries following Israel’s establishment.”
To coerce the Jews to immigrate to Palestine, Zionist leaders followed Theodor Herzl’s recommendation where he stated: “It is essential that the sufferings of Jews become worse.
This will assist in realization of our plans.
I have an excellent idea … I shall induce anti-Semites to liquidate Jewish wealth … the anti-Semites will assist us thereby in that they will strengthen the persecution and oppression of Jews.
The (invention of) anti-Semites shall be our best friends.”
Zionist leaders launched a covert anti-Jewish and propaganda campaigns claiming that Jews were persecuted and massacred in Eastern Europe.
By the 19th century, those who wanted Jews to “return” to the Holy Land were more likely to be Christian Zionists than Jews.
Lord Shaftesbury, a compassionate Tory who contributed to improving the conditions of lunatics in asylums and children in factories (The Ten Hours Act, 1833), agitated endlessly for promoting a Jewish presence in Palestine.
Sand describes him as an Anglican Theodor Herzl before Herzl; and with reason, since Shaftesbury appears to have even coined the famous line: “A country without a nation for a nation without a country.”
He hoped, of course, the Jews would also convert to Christianity. Lord Palmerston, on the Liberal side, warmed to the idea, not because he cared in the slightest about Jews (or Christians), but because he thought that British Jews colonising a part of the Ottoman Empire would increase British influence.
At the time, few Jews were Zionists.
When persecuted, as they were in the tsarist empire, they much preferred to flee to the new lands of immigration such as Argentina and the United States, than to the Promised Land.
What made the “State of Israel” possible was not God’s promise of a return to a long-lost land, but the Holocaust and the western reluctance to provide a refuge for its survivors.
This is how they made the “desert bloom.”
Holocaust is the Zionist MO. It follows them everywhere.
Much of what Shlomo Sand reveals is known to specialists.
His achievement consists in debunking a nationalist mythology which holds sway in large sections of popular opinion.
It also normalizes Jews, since it challenges the belief in exceptionalism.
The Holocaust was a unique event, but the basic nationalist litany is similar across nations – almost a literary genre in itself – for it is poised between a lachrymose sense of self-pitying victimhood and a vainglorious account of heroic deeds.
“We”, so goes the story, have been around for centuries (1066, famously, in Britain; 966 in Poland; since antiquity in Italy and in Greece).
Eventually, after centuries, we achieved our freedom, our independence, our happiness, and we, who are unlike everyone else, can finally be like everyone else: members and possessors of a country and a nation.
Demystifying what the French call le roman national seems to be today one of the major tasks of historians (once they used to write it).
This can be an uphill struggle, yet it is to the credit of the Israeli book-reading public that Sand’s previous book, The Invention of the Jewish People became a bestseller. Truth-telling may be painful but necessary.
THANKS TO THE ONGOING conflict in Ukraine, we indeed seem to be rushing headlong into a major war—possibly a World War Three, possibly the world’s first (and perhaps last) nuclear war.
Ukraine leadership and their Western backers seem hell-bent on fighting to the last man, and Vladimir Putin, as an old-school Cold Warrior, seems equally determined to press ahead until achieving “victory.”
The cause seems hopeless for Ukraine, who cannot reasonably expect to prevail in an extended conflict with one of the largest militaries on Earth.
At best, they may bleed Russia over a period of months or years, but only at the cost of massive blood-letting themselves.
It seems that Ukraine will be the loser in this struggle, no matter what comes.
In the Western media, we are presented with a remarkably simplified storyline: Putin is an evil warmonger who simply wants to extend Russian territory; to this end, he is exploiting events in Ukraine, deploying his military ostensibly to support the Russian-speaking districts of Luhansk and Donetsk in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine.
But this is just cover, they say, for his mad quest to rebuild the Russian empire.
In pursuit of his goal, he is willing to inflict any amount of material damage and kill any number of civilians.
Fortunately, say our media, Putin has thus far been largely contained; the brave Ukrainian fighters are constantly “reclaiming” land, Russia’s advance has “stalled,” and indeed, Russia seems to be in danger of losing.
Consequently, the US and its allies must do all they can to “aid” and “support” the brave Ukrainians and their beleaguered but heroic leader, Volodymyr Zelensky.
No amount of money, no assortment of deadly weaponry, no military intelligence, is too much.
Like World War Two, this “war” is an unconditional struggle of Good versus Evil; therefore the West, as the moral paragon of the world, must step up, undergo sacrifice, and ensure that Good prevails.
And indeed, the financial support from just the United States is breathtaking: As of early May, Congress has approved $13.6 billion in aid, much of it for direct Ukrainian military support.
And yet this would only cover costs through September.
Thus, president Biden recently called for an additional package of $33 billion, which would include over $20 billion in military and security aid, and, surprisingly, $2.6 billion for “the deployment of American troops to the region,” in order to “safeguard NATO allies.”
Incredibly, Congress responded by approving $40 billion, bringing the total aid thus far to $54 billion.
For perspective, this represents over 80% of Russia’s annual defense budget of $66 billion.
(By contrast, America allocates well over $1 trillion—that is, $1,000 billion—annually in direct and indirect military expenditures.)
Notably, such unconditional support and defense of Ukraine is a virtually unanimous view across the American political spectrum, and throughout Europe.
Right and left, conservative and liberal, working class or wealthy elite, all sectors of society are apparently united in opposition to the evil Putin.
In an era when virtually no issue garners unanimous support, the Ukrainian cause stands out as an extremely rare instance of bipartisan, multi-sector agreement.
The rare dissenters—such as Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and a handful of alt-right renegades—are routinely attacked as “Russian assets” or “tools of Putin.”
There is no room for disagreement, no space for debate, no opposing views allowed.
In fact, though, this is yet another case of what I might call the “unanimity curse”: when all parties in American society are united on a topic, any topic, then we really need to worry.
Here, it seems that the reality is of a potent Jewish Lobby, exerting itself (again) in the direction of war, for reasons of profit and revenge against a hated enemy.
There is, indeed, a Jewish hand at work here, one that may well drive us into another world war, and even a nuclear war—one which, in the worst case, could mean the literal end of much of life on this planet.
The unanimity comes when all parties are subject, in various ways, to the demands of the Lobby, and when the public has been misled and even brainwashed by a coordinated Jewish media into believing the standard narrative.
The best cure for this catastrophic situation is unrestricted free speech.
The Lobby knows this, however, and thus takes all possible measures to inhibit free speech.
Normally, such a struggle ebbs and flows according to the issue and the times; but now, the situation is dire.
Now more than ever, a lack of free speech could be fatal to civilized society.
Context and Run-Up
To fully understand the Jewish hand in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, we need to review some relevant history.
Over the centuries, there have been constant battles over the lands of present-day Ukraine, with Poles, Austro-Hungarians, and Russians alternately dominating.
Russia took control of most of Ukraine in the late 1700s and held it more or less continuously until the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991; this is why Putin claims that the country is “part of Russia.”
For their part, Jews have experienced a particularly tumultuous relationship with Russia, one that ranged from disgust and detestation to a burning hatred.
As it happened, Jews migrated to Russia in the 19th century, eventually numbering around 5 million.
They were a disruptive and agitating force within the nation and thus earned the dislike of Czars Nicholas I (reign 1825 to 1855), Alexander II (1855 to 1881, when he was assassinated by a partly-Jewish anarchist gang), and especially Nicholas II (1894 to 1917)—the latter of whom was famously murdered, along with his family, by a gang of Jewish Bolshevists in 1918.
Already in 1871, Russian activist Mikhail Bakunin could refer to the Russian Jews as “a single exploiting sect, a sort of bloodsucker people, a collective parasite”.[1]
The assassination of Alexander initiated a series of pogroms that lasted decades, and which set the stage for a lingering Jewish hatred of all things Russian.[2]
For present purposes, though, we can jump to the 2004 Ukrainian presidential election (I note that Ukraine also has a prime minister, but unlike most European countries, he typically has limited powers).
In 2004, it came down to “the two Viktors”: the pro-Western V. Yushchenko and the pro-Russian V. Yanukovych.
The first round was nearly tied, and thus they went to a second round in which Yanukovych prevailed by around three percentage points.
But amid claims of vote-rigging, Western Ukrainians initiated an “Orange Revolution”—backed by the Ukrainian Supreme Court—that annulled those results and mandated a repeat runoff election.
The second time, the tables were turned, and the pro-West Yushchenko won by eight points.
The West was elated, and Putin naturally mad as hell.
The following years witnessed financial turmoil and, unsurprisingly, constant harassment from Russia.
By 2010, Ukrainians were ready for a change, and this time Yanukovych won handily, over a Jewish female competitor, Yulia Timoshenko—notably, she had “co-led the Orange Revolution.” Russia, for once, was satisfied with the result.
But of course, in the West, Europe and the US were mightily displeased, and they soon began efforts to reverse things yet again.
Among other strategies, they apparently decided to deploy the latest in high tech and social media.
Thus in June 2011, two of Google’s top executives—Eric Schmidt and a 30-year-old Jewish upstart named Jared Cohen—went to visit Julian Assange in the UK, then living under house arrest.
It is well-known, incidentally, that Google is a Jewish enterprise, with Jewish founders Sergei Brin and Larry Page running the ship.[3]
The nominal purpose of the trip was to conduct research for a book that Schmidt and Cohen were working on, regarding the intersection of political action and technology—in plain words, how to foment revolutions and steer events in a desired direction.
As Assange relates in his 2014 book When Google Met Wikileaks, he was initially unaware of the deeper intentions and motives of his interviewers.
Only later did he come to learn that Schmidt had close ties to the Obama administration, and that Cohen was actively working on political upheaval.
As Assange wrote, “Jared Cohen could be wryly named Google’s ‘director of regime change’.” Their immediate targets were Yanukovych in Ukraine and Assad in Syria.
By early 2013, the American Embassy in Kiev was training right-wing Ukrainian nationalists on how to conduct a targeted revolt against Yanukovych.
It would not be long until they had their chance.
In late 2013, Yanukovych decided to reject an EU-sponsored IMF loan, with all the usual nasty strings attached, in favor of a comparable no-strings loan from Russia.
This apparent shift away from Europe and toward Russia was the nominal trigger for the start of protest actions.
Thus began the “Maidan Uprising,” led in large part by two extreme nationalist groups: Svoboda and Right Sector.[4] Protests went on for nearly three months, gradually accelerating in intensity; in a notable riot near the end, some 100 protestors and 13 police were shot dead.
As the Uprising reached its peak, at least one American Jew was highly interested: Victoria Nuland.
As Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State (first under Hillary Clinton, and then under the half-Jew John Kerry), Nuland had direct oversight of events in eastern Europe.[5]
And for her, it was personal; her father, Sherwin Nuland (born Shepsel Nudelman), was a Ukrainian Jew.
She was anxious to drive the pro-Russian Yanukovych out of power and replace him with a West-friendly, Jew-friendly substitute.
And she had someone specific in mind: Arseniy Yatsenyuk. On 27 January 2014, as the riots were peaking, Nuland called American Ambassador to Ukraine, Jeff Pyatt, to urgently discuss the matter.
Nuland pulled no punches: “Yats” was her man. We know this because the call was apparently tapped and the dialogue later posted on Youtube. Here is a short excerpt:
Nuland: I think Yats is the guy who’s got the economic experience, the governing experience. He’s the… what he needs is Klitsch and Tyahnybok on the outside. He needs to be talking to them four times a week, you know. I just think Klitsch going in… he’s going to be at that level working for Yatseniuk, it’s just not going to work.
Pyatt: Yeah, no, I think that’s right. OK. Good. Do you want us to set up a call with him as the next step? […]
Nuland: OK, good. I’m happy. Why don’t you reach out to him and see if he wants to talk before or after.
Pyatt: OK, will do. Thanks.
It was clear to both of them, though, that the EU leadership had other ideas.
The EU was much more anxious to be a neutral party and to avoid direct intervention in Ukrainian affairs so as to not unduly antagonize Russia.
But in time-tested Jewish fashion, Nuland did not give a damn.
A bit later in the same phone call, she uttered her now-famous phrase: “F___ the EU.” So much for Jewish subtlety.[6]
But there was another angle that nearly all Western media avoided: “Yats” was also Jewish.
In a rare mention, we read in a 2014 Guardian story that “Yatsenyuk has held several high-profile positions including head of the country’s central bank, the National Bank of Ukraine…
He has played down his Jewish-Ukrainian origins, possibly because of the prevalence of antisemitism in his party’s western Ukraine heartland.”
For some reason, such facts are never relevant to Western media.
As the Maidan Uprising gave way to the Maidan Revolution in February 2014, Yanukovych was forced out of office, fleeing to Russia.
Pro-Western forces then succeeded in nominating “Yats” as prime minister, effective immediately, working in conjunction with president Oleksandr Turchynov.
This provisional leadership was formalized in a snap election in May 2014 in which the pro-Western candidate Peter Poroshenko won.
(The second-place finisher was none other than Yulia Timoshenko—the same Jewess who had lost to Yanukovych in 2010.)
It was under such circumstances that Putin invaded and annexed Crimea, in February 2014.
It was also at this time that Russian separatists in Donbass launched their counter-revolution, initiating a virtual civil war in Ukraine; to date, eight years later, around 15,000 people have died in total, many civilians.
With this American-sponsored coup finished, Ukrainian Jews began to reach out to the West to increase their influence.
Thus it happened that just a few months after Maidan, the wayward son of the American vice president got in touch with a leading Ukrainian Jew, Mykola Zlochevsky, who ran a large gas company called Burisma.
In this way, Hunter Biden incredibly found himself on the board of a corporation of which he knew nothing, in an industry of which he knew nothing, and which nonetheless was able to “pay” him upwards of $500,000 per year—obviously, for access to father Joe and thus to President Obama.
Hunter carried on in this prestigious role for around five years, resigning only in 2019, as his father began his fateful run for the presidency.[7]
Despite a rocky tenure, Yatsenyuk managed to hold his PM position for over two years, eventually resigning in April 2016.
His replacement was yet another Jew, Volodymyr Groysman, who served until August 2019. The Jewish hand would not be stayed. All this set the stage for the rise of the ultimate Jewish player, Volodymyr Zelensky.
This situation is particularly remarkable given that Jews are a small minority in Ukraine.
Estimates vary widely, but the Jewish population is claimed to range from a maximum of 400,000 to as low as just 50,000.
With a total population of 41 million, Jews represent, at most, 1% of the nation, and could be as small as 0.12%.
Under normal conditions, a tiny minority like this should be almost invisible; but here, they dominate.
Such is the Jewish hand.
Enter the Jewish Oligarchs
In Ukraine, there is a “second government” that calls many of the shots.
This shadow government is an oligarchy: a system of rule by the richest men.
Of the five richest Ukrainian billionaires, four are Jews: Igor (or Ihor) Kolomoysky, Viktor Pinchuk, Rinat Akhmetov, and Gennadiy Bogolyubov.
Right behind them, in the multi-millionaire class, are Jews like Oleksandr Feldman and Hennadiy Korban.
Collectively, this group is often more effective at imposing their will than any legislator.
And unsurprisingly, this group has been constantly enmeshed in corruption and legal scandals, implicated in such crimes as kidnapping, arson and murder.[8]
Of special interest is the first named above. Kolomoysky has long been active in banking, airlines and media—and in guiding minor celebrities to political stardom.
In 2005 he became the leading shareholder of the 1+1 Media Group, which owns seven TV channels, including the highly popular 1+1 channel.
(The 1+1 Group was founded in 1995 by another Ukrainian Jew, Alexander Rodnyansky.)
Worth up to $6 billion in the past decade, Kolomoysky’s current net wealth is estimated to be around $1 billion.
Not long after acquiring 1+1, Kolomoysky latched on to an up-and-coming Jewish comedian by the name of Volodymyr Zelensky.
Zelensky had been in media his entire adult life, and even co-founded a media group, Kvartal 95, in 2003, at the age of just 25.
Starring in feature films, he switched to television by the early 2010s, eventually coming to star in the 1+1 hit show “Servant of the People,” where he played a teacher pretending to be president of Ukraine.
Then there was the notable 2016 comedy skit in which Zelensky and friends play a piano with their penises—in other words, typical low-brow scatological Jewish humor, compliments of Zelensky and Kolomoysky.
[Zelensky also appeared in a trashy “music” video in which he simulates a grotesque homosexual “come on.” — Ed.]
By early 2018, the pair were ready to move into politics.
Zelensky registered his new political party for the upcoming 2019 election, and declared himself a presidential candidate in December 2018, just four months prior to the election.
In the end, of course, he won, with 30% of the vote in the first round, and then defeating incumbent Poroshenko in the 2nd round by a huge 50-point margin.
Relentless favorable publicity by 1+1 was credited with making a real difference.
Notably, the third-place finisher in that election was, yet again, the Jewess Yulia Timoshenko—like a bad penny, she just keeps coming back.[9]
Zelensky, incidentally, has dramatically profited from his “meteoric rise” to fame and power.
His Kvartal 95 media company earned him some $7 million per year.
He also owns a 25% share of Maltex Multicapital, a shell company based in the British Virgin Islands, as part of a “web of off-shore companies” he helped to establish back in 2012.
A Ukrainian opposition politician, Ilya Kiva, suggested recently that Zelensky is currently tapping into “hundreds of millions” in funding that flows into the country, and that Zelensky himself is personally earning “about $100 million per month.”
A Netherlands party, Forum for Democracy, recently cited estimates of Zelensky’s fortune at an astounding $850 million.
Apparently the “Churchill of Ukraine” is doing quite well for himself, even as his country burns.
In any case, it is clear that Zelensky owes much to his mentor and sponsor, Kolomoysky.
The latter even admitted as much back in late 2019, in an interview for the New York Times.
“If I put on glasses and look back at myself,” he said, “I see myself as a monster, as a puppet master, as the master of Zelensky, someone making apocalyptic plans.
I can start making this real” (Nov 13). Indeed—the Kolomoysky/Zelensky apocalypse is nearly upon us.
Between rule by Jewish oligarchs and manipulations by the global Jewish lobby, modern-day Ukraine is a mess of a nation—and it was so long before the current “war.”
Corruption there is endemic; in 2015, the Guardianheadlined a story on Ukraine, calling it “the most corrupt nation in Europe.”
An international corruption-ranking agency had recently assessed that country at 142nd in the world, worse than Nigeria and equal to Uganda.
As a result, Ukraine’s economy has suffered horribly.
Before the current conflict, their per-capita income level of $8700 put them 112th in the world, below Albania ($12,900), Jamaica ($9100), and Armenia ($9700); this is by far the poorest in Europe, and well below that of Russia ($25,700 per person).
Impoverished, corrupt, manipulated by Jews, now in a hot war—pity the poor Ukrainians.
Hail the American Empire
Enough history and context; let’s cut to the chase.
From a clear-eyed perspective, it is obvious why Zelensky and friends want to prolong a war that they have no hope of winning: They are profiting immensely from it.
As an added benefit, the actor Zelensky gets to perform on the world stage, which he will surely convert into more dollars down the road.
Every month that the conflict continues, billions of dollars are flowing into Ukraine, and Zelensky et al. are assuredly skimming their “fair share” off the top.
Seriously—who, making anywhere near $100 million per month, wouldn’t do everything conceivable to keep the gravy train running?
The fact that thousands of Ukrainian soldiers are dying has no bearing at all in Zelensky’s calculus; in typical Jewish fashion, he cares not one iota for the well-being of the White Europeans.
If his soldiers die even as they kill a few hated Russians, so much the better. For Ukrainian Jews, it is a win-win proposition.
Why does no one question this matter?
Why is Zelensky’s corruption never challenged?
Why are these facts so hard to find?
We know the answer: It is because Zelensky is a Jew, and Jews are virtually never questioned and never challenged by leading Americans or Europeans.
Jews get a pass on everything (unless they are obviously guilty of something heinous—and sometimes even then!).
Jews get a pass from fellow Jews because they cover for each other.
Jews get a pass from media because the media is owned and operated by Jews.
And Jews get a pass from prominent non-Jews who are in the pay of Jewish sponsors and financiers.
Zelensky can be as corrupt as hell, funneling millions into off-shore accounts, but as long as he plays his proper role, no one will say anything.
So the “war” goes on, and Zelensky and friends get rich.
What does Europe get from all this?
Nothing.
Or rather, worse than nothing: They get a hot war in their immediate neighborhood, and they get an indignant Putin threatening to put hypersonic missiles in their capital cities in less than 200 seconds.
They get to deal with the not-so-remote threat of nuclear war.
They get to see their currency decline—by 10% versus the yuan in a year and by 12% versus the dollar.
They get a large chunk of their gas, oil, and electricity supplies diverted or shut off, driving up energy prices.
And they get to see their Covid-fragile economies put on thin ice.
But perhaps they deserve all this.
As is widely known, the European states are American vassals, which means they are Jewish vassals.
European leaders are spineless and pathetic lackeys of the Jewish Lobby.
Judenknecht like Macron, Merkel, and now Scholz, are sorry examples of humanity; they have sold out their own people to placate their overlords.
And the European public is too bamboozled and too timid to make a change; France just had a chance to elect Le Pen, but the people failed to muster the necessary will.
Thus, Europe deserves its fate: hot war, nuclear threat, cultural and economic decline, sub-Saharan and Islamic immigrants—the whole package.
If it gets bad enough, maybe enough Europeans will awaken to the Jewish danger and take action. Or so we can hope.
What about the US? We could scarcely be happier.
Dead Russians, the hated Putin in a tizzy, and the chance to play “world savior” once again.
American military suppliers are ecstatic; they don’t care that most of their weapons bound for Ukraine get lost, stolen or blown up, and that (according to some estimates) only 5% make it to the front.
For them, every item shipped is another profitable sale, whether it is used or not.
And American congressmen get to pontificate about another “good war” even as they approve billions in aid.
And perhaps best of all, we get to press for an expansion to that American Empire known as NATO.
We need to be very clear here: NATO is simply another name for the American Empire.
The two terms are interchangeable.
In no sense is NATO an “alliance among equals.”
Luxembourg, Slovakia, and Albania have absolutely nothing to offer to the US.
Do we care if they will “come to our aid” in case of a conflict?
That is a bad joke, at best.
In reality, what such nations are is more land, more people, and more economic wealth under the American thumb.
They are yet more places to station troops, build military outposts, and run “black sites.”
NATO always was, and always will be, the American Empire.
The push for Ukraine to join NATO by the West-friendly Zelensky was yet another blatant attempt at a power grab by the US, this one on Russia’s doorstep.
Putin, naturally, took action to circumvent that.
But of course, now the push moves to Sweden and Finland, both of whom are unwisely pursuing NATO membership in the illusory quest for security, when in reality they will simply be selling what remains of their national souls to the ruthless Judeo-American masters.
For their sake, I hope they are able to avoid such a future.
And all the while, American Jews and a Jewish-American media play up the “good war” theme, send more weapons, and press ever further into the danger zone.
Ukrainian-American Jews like Chuck Schumer are right out front, calling for aid, for war, for death.[10]
“Ukraine needs all the help it can get and, at the same time, we need all the assets we can put together to give Ukraine the aid it needs,” said Schumer recently, eager to approve the next $40 billion aid package.
As Jews have realized for centuries, wars are wonderful occasions for killing enemies and making a fast buck.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that the present proxy war against Jewish enemies in eastern Europe began not long after the 20-year war against Jewish enemies in Afghanistan ended.
Life without war is just too damn boring, for some.
Public Outrage?
If more than a minuscule fraction of the public knew about such details, they would presumably be outraged.
But as I mentioned, the Jewish-controlled Western media does an excellent job in restricting access to such information, and in diverting attention whenever such ugly facts pop up.
The major exception is Tucker Carlson, who is able to reach some 3 million people each night; this is by far the widest reach for anything like the above analysis.
But Carlson falls woefully short—pathetically short—in defining the Jewish culprit behind all these factors.
Jews are never outed and never named by Carlson, let alone ever targeted for blame.
This crucial aspect is thus left to a literal handful of alt-right and dissident-right websites that collectively reach a few thousand people, at best.
And even if, by some miracle, all 3 million Tucker viewers were enlightened to the Jewish danger here, this still leaves some 200 million American adults ignorant and unaware.
The mass of people believe what they see on the evening news, or in their Facebook feeds, or Google news, or on CNN or MSNBC, or in the New York Times—all Jewish enterprises, incidentally.
This is why, when polled, 70% of the American public say that current aid to Ukraine is either “about right” or even “too little.”
This, despite the fact that around 50% claim to be “very concerned” about nuclear war; clearly they are unable to make the necessary connections.
And for many, it is even worse than this: around 21% would support “direct American military intervention” against Russia, which means an explicit World War Three, with all the catastrophic outcomes that this entails.
Our Jewish media have done another fine job in whipping up public incitement.
In sum, we can say that our media have cleverly constructed a “philo-Semitic trap”: Any mention or criticism of the Jewish hand in the present conflict is, first, highly censored, and then, if necessary, is dismissed as irrational anti-Semitism.
Sympathy toward the (truly) poor, suffering Ukrainians is played up to the hilt, and Putin and the Russians relentlessly demonized.
Leading American Jews, like Tony Blinken and Chuck Schumer, are constantly playing the good guys, pleading for aid, promising to help the beleaguered and outmanned Ukrainian warriors.
Who can resist this storyline?
Thus, we have no opposition, no questioning, no deeper inquiries into root causes.
Jews profit and flourish, Ukrainians and Russians suffer and die, and the world rolls along toward potential Armageddon.
The reality is vastly different.
Global Jews are, indeed, “planetary master criminals,” as Martin Heidegger long ago realized.[11]
They function today as they have for centuries: as advocates for abuse, exploitation, criminality, death and profits.
This is self-evidently true: If the potent Jewish Lobby wanted true peace, or flourishing humanity, they would be actively pushing for such things and likely succeeding.
Instead, we have endless mayhem, war, terrorism, social upheaval and death, even as Jewish pockets get ever-deeper.
And the one possible remedy for all this—true freedom of speech—recedes from our grasp.
On the one hand, I fear greatly for our future.
On the other, I feel that we get what we deserve.
When we allow malicious Jews to dominate our nations, and then they lead us into war and global catastrophe, well, what can we say?
Perhaps there is no other way than to await the inevitable conflagration, exact retribution in the ensuing chaos, and then rebuild society from scratch—older and wiser.
Theodor Herzl is considered the founder of the Modern Zionist movement.
In his 1896 book Der Judenstaat, he envisioned the founding of a future independent Jewish state during the 20th century.
The Zionist movement has maintained a striking continuity in its aims and methods over the past century.
From the start, the movement sought to achieve a Jewish majority in Palestine and to establish a Jewish state on as much of the LAND as possible.
The methods included promoting mass Jewish immigration and acquiring tracts of land that would become the inalienable property of the Jewish people.
This policy inevitably prevented the indigenous Arab residents from attaining their national goals and establishing a Palestinian state.
It also necessitated displacing Palestinians from their lands and jobs when their presence conflicted with Zionist interests.
The Zionist movement—and subsequently the state of ISRAEL—failed to develop a positive approach to the Palestinian presence and aspirations.
Although many Israelis recognized the moral dilemma posed by the Palestinians, the majority either tried to ignore the issue or to resolve it by force majeure.
Thus, the Palestine problem festered and grew, instead of being resolved.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
Zionism false and failed
The Zionist movement arose in late nineteenth-century Europe, influenced by the nationalist ferment sweeping that continent.
Zionism acquired its particular focus from the ancient Jewish longing for the return to Zion and received a strong impetus from the increasingly intolerable conditions facing the large Jewish community in tsarist Russia.
The movement also developed at the time of major European territorial acquisitions in Asia and Africa and benefited from the European powers’ competition for influence in the shrinking Ottoman Empire.
One result of this involvement with European expansionism, however, was that the leaders of the nascent nationalist movements in the Middle East viewed Zionism as an adjunct of European colonialism.
Moreover, Zionist assertions of the contemporary relevance of the Jews’ historical ties to Palestine, coupled with their land purchases and immigration, alarmed the indigenous population of the Ottoman districts that Palestine comprised.
The Jewish community (yishuv) rose from 6 percent of Palestine’s population in 1880 to 10 percent by 1914.
Although the numbers were insignificant, the settlers were outspoken enough to arouse the opposition of Arab leaders and induce them to exert counter pressure on the Ottoman regime to prohibit Jewish immigration and land buying.
As early as 1891, a group of Muslim and Christian notables cabled Istanbul, urging the government to prohibit Jewish immigration and land purchase.
The resulting edicts radically curtailed land purchases in the sanjak (district) of JERUSALEM for the next decade.
When a Zionist Congress resolution in 1905 called for increased colonization, the Ottoman regime suspended all land transfers to Jews in both the sanjak of Jerusalem and the wilayat (province) of Beirut.
After the coup d’etat by the Young Turks in 1908, the Palestinians used their representation in the central parliament and their access to newly opened local newspapers to press their claims and express their concerns.
They were particularly vociferous in opposition to discussions that took place between the financially hard-pressed Ottoman regime and Zionist leaders in 1912-13, which would have let the world Zionist Organization purchase crown land (jiftlik) in the Baysan Valley, along the Jordan River.
The Zionists did not try to quell Palestinian fears, since their concern was to encourage colonization from Europe and to minimize the obstacles in their path.
The only effort to meet to discuss their aspirations occurred in the spring of 1914. Its difficulties illustrated the incompatibility in their aspirations.
The Palestinians wanted the Zionists to present them with a document that would state their precise political ambitions, their willingness to open their schools to Palestinians, and their intentions of learning Arabic and integrating with the local population.
The Zionists rejected this proposal.
THE BRITISH MANDATE
The proclamation of the BALFOUR DECLARATION on November 2, 1917, and the arrival of British troops in Palestine soon after, transformed the political situation.
The declaration gave the Zionist movement its long-sought legal status.
The qualification that: nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine seemed a relatively insignificant obstacle to the Zionists, especially since it referred only to those communities’: civil and religious rights, not to political or national rights.
The subsequent British occupation gave Britain the ability to carry out that pledge and provide the protection necessary for the Zionists to realize their aims.
In fact, the British had contracted three mutually contradictory promises for the future of Palestine.
The Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 with the French and Russian governments proposed that Palestine be placed under international administration.
The HUSAYN-MCMAHON CORRESPONDENCE, 1915-1916, on whose basis the Arab revolt was launched, implied that Palestine would be included in the zone of Arab independence.
In contrast, the Balfour Declaration encouraged the colonization of Palestine by Jews, under British protection.
British officials recognized the irreconcilability of these pledges but hoped that a modus vivendi could be achieved, both between the competing imperial powers, France and Britain, and between the Palestinians and the Jews.
Instead, these contradictions set the stage for the three decades of conflict-ridden British rule in Palestine.
Initially, many British politicians shared the Zionists’ assumption that gradual, regulated Jewish immigration and settlement would lead to a Jewish majority in Palestine, whereupon it would become independent, with legal protection for the Arab minority.
The assumption that this could be accomplished without serious resistance was shattered at the outset of British rule.
Britain thereafter was caught in an increasingly untenable position, unable to persuade either Palestinians or Zionists to alter their demands and forced to station substantial military forces in Palestine to maintain security.
The Palestinians had assumed that they would gain some form of independence when Ottoman rule disintegrated, whether through a separate state or integration with neighboring Arab lands.
These hopes were bolstered by the Arab revolt, the entry of Faysal Ibn Husayn into Damascus in 1918, and the proclamation of Syrian independence in 1920.
Their hopes were dashed, however, when Britain imposed direct colonial rule and elevated the yishuv to a special status.
Moreover, the French ousted Faysal from Damascus in July 1920, and British compensation—in the form of thrones in Transjordan and Iraq for Abdullah and Faysal, respectively—had no positive impact on the Arabs in Palestine.
In fact, the action underlined the different treatment accorded Palestine and its disadvantageous political situation.
These concerns were exacerbated by Jewish immigration: the yishuv comprised 28 percent of the population by 1936 and reached 32 percent by 1947 (click here for Palestine’s population distribution per district in 1946).
The British umbrella was CRITICALLY important to the growth and consolidation of the yishuv, enabling it to root itself firmly despite Palestinian opposition.
Although British support diminished in the late 1930s, the yishuv was strong enough by then to withstand the Palestinians on its own.
After World War II, the Zionist movement also was able to turn to the emerging superpower, the UNITED STATES, for diplomatic support and legitimization.
The Palestinians’ responses to Jewish immigration, land purchases, and political demands were remarkably consistent.
They insisted that Palestine remain an Arab country, with the same right of self-determination and independence as Egypt, Transjordan, and Iraq.
Britain granted those countries independence without a violent struggle since their claims to self-determination were not contested by European settlers.
The Palestinians argued that Palestinian territory COULD NOT AND SHOULD NOT be used to solve the plight of the Jews in Europe, and that Jewish national aspirations should not override their own rights.
Palestinian opposition peaked in the late 1930s: the six-month general strike in 1936 was followed the next year by a widespread rural revolt.
This rebellion welled up from the bottom of Palestinian society—unemployed urban workers, displaced peasants crowded into towns, and debt-ridden villagers.
It was supported by most merchants and professionals in the towns, who feared competition from the yishuv.
Members of the elite families acted as spokesmen before the British administration through the ARAB HIGHER COMMITTEE, which was formed during the 1936 strike.
However, the British banned the committee in October 1937 and arrested its members, on the eve of the revolt.
Only one of the Palestinian political parties was willing to limit its aims and accept the principle of territorial partition: The NATIONAL DEFENSE PARTY, led by RAGHIB AL-NASHASHIBI (mayor of JERUSALEM from 1920 to 1934), was willing to accept partition in 1937 so long as the Palestinians obtained sufficient land and could merge with Transjordan to form a larger political entity.
However, the British PEEL COMMISSION’s plan, announced in July 1937, would have forced the Palestinians to leave the olive- and grain- growing areas of Galilee, the orange groves on the Mediterranean coast, and the urban port cities of HAIFA and ACRE.
That was too great a loss for even the National Defense Party to accept, and so it joined in the general denunciations of partition.
During the PALESTINE MANDATE period the Palestinian community was 70 percent rural, 75 to 80 percent illiterate, and divided internally between town and countryside and between elite families and villagers.
Despite broad support for the national aims, the Palestinians could not achieve the unity and strength necessary to withstand the combined pressure of the British forces and the Zionist movement.
In fact, the political structure was decapitated in the late 1930s when the British banned the Arab Higher Committee and arrested hundreds of local politicians.
When efforts were made in the 1940s to rebuild the political structure, the impetus came largely from outside, from Arab rulers who were disturbed by the deteriorating conditions in Palestine and feared their repercussions on their own newly acquired independence.
The Arab rulers gave priority to their own national considerations and provided limited diplomatic and military support to the Palestinians.
The Palestinian Arabs continued to demand a state that would reflect the Arab majority’s weight—diminished to 68 percent by 1947.
They rejected the UNITED NATIONS (U.N.) partition plan of November 1947, which granted the Jews statehood in 55 percent of Palestine, an area that included as many Arab residents as Jews.
However, the Palestinian Arabs lacked the political strength and military force to back up their claim.
Once Britain withdrew its forces in 1948 and the Jews proclaimed the state of Israel, the Arab rulers used their armed forces to protect those zones that the partition plans had ALLOCATED to the Arab state.
By the time armistice agreements were signed in 1949, the Arab areas had shrunk to only 23 percent of Palestine.
The Egyptian army held the GAZA STRIP, and Transjordanian forces dominated the hills of central Palestine.
At least 726,000 of the 1.3 million Palestinian Arabs fled from the area held by Israel. Emir Abdullah subsequently annexed the zone that his army occupied, renaming it the WEST BANK.
THE ZIONIST MOVEMENT
The dispossession and expulsion of a majority of Palestinians were the result of Zionist policies planned over a thirty-year period. Fundamentally, Zionism focused on two needs:
to attain a Jewish majority in Palestine;
to acquire statehood irrespective of the wishes of the indigenous population. Non-recognition of the political and national rights of the Palestinian people was a KEY Zionist policy.
Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organization, placed maximalist demands before the Paris Peace Conference in February 1919.
He stated that he expected 70,000 to 80,000 Jewish immigrants to arrive each year in Palestine.
When they became the majority, they would form an independent government and Palestine and would become: “as Jewish as England is English”.
Weizmann proposed that the boundaries should be the Mediterranean Sea on the west; Sidon, the Litani River, and Mount Hermon on the north; all of Transjordan west of the Hijaz railway on the east; and a line across Sinai from Aqaba to al-Arish on the south. He argued that: “the boundaries above outlined are what we consider essential for the economic foundation of the country.
Palestine must have its natural outlet to the sea and control of its rivers and their headwaters. The boundaries are sketched with the general economic needs and historic traditions of the country in mind.”
Weizmann offered the Arab countries a free zone in Haifa and a joint port at Aqaba.
Weizmann’s policy was basically in accord with that of the leaders of the yishuv, who held a conference in December 1918 in which they formulated their own demands for the peace conference.
The yishuv plan stressed that they must control appointments to the administrative services and that the British must actively assist their program to transform Palestine into a democratic Jewish state in which the Arabs would have minority rights.
Although the peace conference did not explicitly allocate such extensive territories to the Jewish national home and did not support the goal of transforming all of Palestine into a Jewish state, it opened the door to such a possibility.
More important, Weizmann’s presentation stated clearly and forcefully the long-term aims of the movement. These aims were based on certain fundamental tenets of Zionism:
The movement was seen not only as inherently righteous, but also as meeting an overwhelming need among European Jews.
European culture was superior to indigenous Arab culture; the Zionists could help civilize the East.
External support was needed from a major power; relations with the Arab world were a secondary matter.
Arab nationalism was a legitimate political movement, but Palestinian nationalism was either illegitimate or nonexistent.
Finally, if the Palestinians would not reconcile themselves to Zionism, force majeure, not compromise, was the only feasible response.
FIRST
Adherents of Zionism believed that the Jewish people had an inherent and inalienable right to Palestine.
Religious Zionists stated this in biblical terms, referring to the divine promise of the land to the tribes of Israel.
Secular Zionists relied more on the argument that Palestine alone could solve the problem of Jewish dispersion and virulent anti-Semitism.
Weizmann stated in 1930 that the needs of 16 million Jews had to be balanced against those of 1 million Palestinian Arabs: “The Balfour Declaration and the Mandate have definitely lifted [Palestine] out of the context of the Middle East and linked it up with the world-wide Jewish problem….
The rights which the Jewish people has been adjudged in Palestine do not depend on the consent, and cannot be subjected to the will, of the majority of its present inhabitants.”
This perspective took its most extreme form with the Revisionist movement.
Its founder, Vladimir Jabotinsky, was so self-righteous about the Zionist cause that he justified any actions taken against the Arabs in order to realize Zionist goals.
SECOND
Zionists generally felt that European civilization was superior to Arab culture and values.
Theodor Herzl, the founder of the World Zionist Organization, wrote in the Jewish State (1886) that the Jewish community could serve as: “part of a wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism.”
Weizmann also believed that he was engaged in a fight of civilization against the desert.
The Zionists would bring enlightenment and economic development to the backward Arabs.
Similarly, David Ben-Gurion, the leading labor Zionist, could not understand why Arabs rejected his offer to use Jewish finance, scientific knowledge, and technical expertise to modernize the Middle East.
He attributed this rejection to backwardness rather than to the affront that Zionism posed to the Arabs’ pride and to their aspirations for independence.
THIRD
Zionist leaders recognized that they needed an external patron to legitimize their presence in the international arena and to provide them legal and military protection in Palestine.
Great Britain played that role in the 1920s and 1930s, and the United States became the mentor in the mid-1940s.
Zionist leaders realized that they needed to make tactical accommodations to that patron—such as downplaying their public statements about their political aspirations or accepting a state on a limited territory—while continuing to work toward their long-term goals.
The presence and needs of the Arabs were viewed as secondary.
The Zionist leadership never considered allying with the Arab world against the British and Americans.
Rather, Weizmann, in particular, felt that the yishuv should bolster the British Empire and guard its strategic interests in the region.
Later, the leaders of Israel perceived the Jewish state as a strategic asset to the United States in the Middle East.
FOURTH
Zionist politicians accepted the idea of an Arab nation but rejected the concept of a Palestinian nation.
They considered the Arab residents of Palestine as comprising a minute fraction of the land and people of the Arab world, and as lacking any separate identity and aspirations (click here, to read our response to this myth).
Weizmann and Ben-Gurion were willing to negotiate with Arab rulers in order to gain those rulers’ recognition of Jewish statehood in Palestine in return for the Zionists’ recognition of Arab independence elsewhere, but they would not negotiate with the Arab politicians in Palestine for a political settlement in their common homeland.
As early as 1918, Weizmann wrote to a prominent British politician: “The real Arab movement is developing in Damascus and Mecca…the so-called Arab question in Palestine would therefore assume only a purely local character, and in fact is not considered a serious factor.”
In line with that thinking, Weizmann met with Emir Faysal in the same year, in an attempt to win his agreement to Jewish statehood in Palestine in return for Jewish financial support for Faysal as ruler of Syria and Arabia.
Ben-Gurion, Weizmann, and other Zionist leaders met with prominent Arab officials during the 1939 LONDON CONFERENCE, which was convened by Britain to seek a compromise settlement in Palestine.
The Arab diplomats from Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia criticized the exceptional position that the Balfour Declaration had granted the Jewish community and emphasized the estrangement between the Arab and Jewish residents that large scale Jewish immigration had caused.
In response, Weizmann insisted that Palestine remain open to all Jews who wanted to immigrate, and Ben-Gurion suggested that all of Palestine should become a Jewish state, federated with the surrounding Arab states.
The Arab participants criticized these demands for exacerbating the conflict, rather than contributing to the search for peace.
The Zionists’ premise that Arab statehood could be recognized while ignoring the Palestinians was thus rejected by the Arab rulers themselves.
FIFTH
Finally, Zionist leaders argued that if the Palestinians could not reconcile themselves to Zionism, then force majeure, not a compromise of goals, was the only possible response.
By the early 1920s, after violent Arab protests broke out in Jaffa and Jerusalem, leaders of the yishuv recognized that it might be impossible to bridge the gap between the aims of the two peoples.
Building the national home would lead to an unavoidable clash, since the Arab majority would not agree to become a minority.
In fact, as early as 1919 Ben-Gurion stated bluntly: “Everybody sees a difficulty in the question of relations between Arabs and Jews.
But not everybody sees that there is no solution to this question. No solution!
There is a gulf, and nothing can fill this gulf….I do not know what Arab will agree that Palestine should belong to the Jews….
We, as a nation, want this country to be ours; the Arabs, as a nation, want this country to be theirs.”
As tensions increased in the 1920s and the 1930s Zionist leaders realized that they had to coerce the Arabs to acquiesce to a diminished status. Ben-Gurion stated in 1937, during the Arab revolt:
“This is a national war declared upon us by the Arabs….
This is an active resistance by the Palestinians to what they regard as a usurpation of their homeland by the Jews….
But the fighting is only one aspect of the conflict, which is in its essence a political one. And politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves.”
This sober conclusion did not lead Ben-Gurion to negotiate with the Palestinian Arabs: instead he became more determined to strengthen the Jewish military forces so that they could compel the Arabs to relinquish their claims.
PRACTICAL ZIONISM
In order to realize the aims of Zionism and build the Jewish national home, the Zionist movement undertook the following practical steps in many different realms:
They built political structures that could assume state functions
Created a military force.
Promoted large-scale immigration.
Acquired land as the inalienable property of the Jewish people
Established and monopolistic concessions. The labor federation, Histadrut, tried to force Jewish enterprises to hire only Jewish labor
Setting up an autonomous Hebrew-language educational system.
These measures created a self-contained national entity on Palestinian soil that was ENTIRELY SEPARATE from the Arab community.
The yishuv established an elected community council, executive body, administrative departments, and religious courts soon after the British assumed control over Palestine.
When the PALESTINE MANDATE was ratified by the League of Nations in 1922, the World Zionist Organization gained the responsibility to advise and cooperate with the British administration not only on economic and social matters affecting the Jewish national home but also on issues involving the general development of the country.
Although the British rejected pressure to give the World Zionist Organization an equal share in administration and control over immigration and land transfers, the yishuv did gain a privileged advisory position.
The Zionists were strongly critical of British efforts to establish a LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL in 1923, 1930, and 1936.
They realized that Palestinians’ demands for a legislature with a Palestinian majority ran counter to their own need to delay establishing representative bodies until the Jewish community was much larger.
In 1923, the Jewish residents did participate in the elections for a Legislative Council, but they were relieved that the Palestinians’ boycott compelled the British to cancel the results.
In 1930 and 1936 the World Zionist Organization vigorously opposed British proposals for a legislature, fearing that, if the Palestinians received the majority status that proportional representation would require, then they would try to block Jewish immigration and the purchase of land by Zionist companies.
Zionist opposition was couched indirectly in the assertion that Palestine was not ripe for self-rule, a code for not until there’s a Jewish majority.
To bolster this position, the yishuv formed defense forces (Haganah) in March 1920.
They were preceded by the establishment of guards (hashomer) in Jewish rural settlements in the 1900s and the formation of a Jewish Legion in World War I.
However, the British disbanded the Jewish Legion and allowed only sealed armories in the settlements and mixed Jewish-British area defense committees.
Despite its illegal status, the Haganah expanded to number 10,000 trained and mobilized men, and 40,000 reservists by 1936.
During the 1937-38 Arab revolt, the Haganah engaged in active defense against Arab insurgents and cooperated with the British to guard railway lines, the oil pipeline to Haifa, and border fences.
This cooperation deepened during World War II, when 18,800 Jewish volunteers joined the British forces.
Haganah’s special Palmach units served as scouts and sappers for the British army in Lebanon in 1941-42. This wartime experience helped to transform the Haganah into a regular fighting force.
When Ben-Gurion became the World Zionist Organization’s secretary of defense in June 1947, he accelerated mobilization as well as arms buying in the United States and Europe.
As a result, mobilization leaped to 30,000 by May 1948, when statehood was proclaimed, and then doubled to 60,000 by mid-July—twice the number serving in the Arab forces arrayed against Israel.
A principal means for building up the national home was the promotion of large-scale immigration from Europe.
Estimates of the Palestinian population demonstrate the dramatic impact of immigration.
The first British census (December 31, 1922) counted 757,182 residents, of whom 83,794 were Jewish.
The second census (December 31, 1931) enumerated 1,035,821, including 174,006 Jews.
Thus, the absolute number of Jews had doubled and the relative number had increased from 11 percent to 17 percent.
Two-thirds of this growth could be attributed to net immigration, and one third to natural increase.
Two-thirds of the yishuv was concentrated in Jerusalem and Jaffa and Tel Aviv, with most of the remainder in the north, including the towns of HAIFA, SAFAD, and Tiberias.
The Mandate specified that the rate of immigration should accord with the economic capacity of the country to absorb the immigrants.
In 1931, the British government reinterpreted this to take into account only the Jewish sector of the economy, excluding the Palestinian sector, which was suffering from heavy unemployment.
As a result, the pace of immigration accelerated in 1932 and peaked in 1935-36.
In other words, the absolute number of Jewish residents doubled in the five years from 1931 to 1936 to 370,000, so that they constituted 28 percent of the total population.
Not until 1939 did the British impose a severe quota on Jewish immigrants.
That restriction was resisted by the yishuv with a sense of desperation, since it blocked access to a key haven for the Jews whom Hitler was persecuting and exterminating in Germany and the rest of Nazi-occupied Europe.
Net immigration was limited during the war years in the 1940s, but the government estimated in 1946 that there were about 583,000 Jews of nearly 1,888,000 residents, or 31 percent of the total Seventy percent of them were urban, and they continued to be overwhelmingly concentrated in Jerusalem (100,000) the Haifa area (119,000), and the JAFFA and RAMLA districts (327,000) (click here for a map illustrating Palestine’s population distribution in 1946).
The remaining 43,000 were largely in Galilee, with a scattering in the Negev and almost none in the central highlands.
The World Zionist Organization purchasing agencies launched large-scale land purchases in order to found rural settlements and stake territorial claims.
In 1920 the Zionists held about 650,000 dunums (one dunum equals approximately one-quarter of an acre).
By 1930, the amount had expanded to 1,164,000 dunums and by 1936 to 1,400,000 dunums.
The major purchasing agent (the Palestine Land Development Company) estimated that, by 1936, 89 percent had been bought from large landowners (primarily absentee owners from Beirut) and only 11 percent from peasants
. By 1947, the yishuv held 1.9 million dunums.
Nevertheless, this represented only 7 percent of the total land surface or 10 to 12 percent of the cultivable land (click here for a map illustrating Palestine’s land ownership distribution in 1946)
According to Article 3 of the Constitution of the Jewish Agency, the land was held by the Jewish National Fund as the inalienable property of the Jewish people; ONLY Jewish labor could be employed in the settlements, Palestinians protested bitterly against this inalienability clause.
The moderate National Defense Party, for example, petitioned the British in 1935 to prevent further land sales, arguing that it was a: life and death [matter] to the Arabs, in that it results in the transfer of their country to other hands and the loss of their nationality.
The placement of Jewish settlements was often based on political considerations. The Palestine Land Development Company had four criteria for land purchase:
The economic suitability of the tract
Its contribution to forming a solid block of Jewish territory.
The prevention of isolation of settlements
The impact of the purchase on the political-territorial claims of the Zionists.
The stockade and watchtower settlements constructed in 1937, for example, were designed to secure control over key parts of Galilee for the yishuv in case the British implemented the PEEL PARTITION PLAN.
Similarly, eleven settlements were hastily erected in the Negev in late 1946 in an attempt to stake a political claim in that entirely Palestinian-populated territory.
In addition to making these land purchases, prominent Jewish businessmen won monopolistic concessions from the British government that gave the Zionist movement an important role in the development of Palestine’s natural resources.
In 1921, Pinhas Rutenberg’s Palestine Electric Company acquired the right to electrify all of Palestine except Jerusalem.
Moshe Novomeysky received the concession to develop the minerals in the Dead Sea in 1927.
And the Palestine Land Development Company gained the concession to drain the Hula marshes, north of the Sea of Galilee, in 1934.
In each case, the concession was contested by other serious non-Jewish claimants; Palestinian politicians argued that the government should retain control itself in order to develop the resources for the benefit of the entire country.
The inalienability clause in the Jewish National Fund contracts included provision that ONLY JEWS could work on Jewish agricultural settlements.
The concepts of manual labor and the return to the soil were key to the Zionist enterprise.
This Jewish labor policy was enforced by the General Foundation of Jewish Labor (Histadrut), founded in 1920 and headed by David Ben-Gurion.
Since some Jewish builders and citrus growers hired Arabs, who worked for lower wages than Jews, the Histadrut launched a campaign in 1933 to remove those Arab workers.
Histadrut organizers picketed citrus groves and evicted Arab workers from construction sites and factories in the cities.
The strident propaganda by the Histradut increased the Arabs’ fears for the future. George Mansur, a Palestinian labor leader, wrote angrily in 1937:
“The Histadrut’s fundamental aim is ‘the conquest of labor’…No matter how many Arab workers are unemployed, they have no right to take any job which a possible immigrant might occupy. No Arab has the right to work in Jewish undertakings.”
Finally, the establishment of an all-Jewish, Hebrew-language educational system was an essential component of building the Jewish national home.
It helped to create a cohesive national ethos and a lingua franca among the diverse immigrants.
However, it also entirely separated Jewish children from Palestinian children, who attended the governmental schools.
The policy widened the linguistic and cultural gap between the two peoples.
In addition, there was a stark contrast in their literacy levels (in 1931):
93 percent of Jewish males (above age seven) were literate
71 percent of Christian males
but only 25 percent of Muslim males were literate.
Overall, Palestinian literacy increased from 19 percent in 1931 to 27 percent by 1940, but only 30 percent of Palestinian children could be accommodated in government and private schools.
The practical policies of the Zionist movement created a compact and well-rooted community by the late 1940s.
The yishuv had its own political, educational, economic, and military institutions, parallel to the governmental system. Jews minimized their contact with the Arab community and outnumbered the Arabs in certain key respects.
Jewish urban dwellers, for example, greatly exceeded Arab urbanites, even though Jews constituted but one-third of the population.
Many more Jewish children attended school than did Arab children, and Jewish firms employed seven times as many workers as Arab firms.
Thus the relative weight and autonomy of the yishuv were much greater than sheer numbers would suggest.
The transition to statehood was facilitated by the existence of the proto state institutions and a mobilized, literate public.
But the separation from the Palestinian residents will exacerbated by these autarchic policies.
POLICIES TOWARD THE PALESTINIANS
The main view point within the Zionist movement was that the Arab problem would be solved by first solving the Jewish problem.
In time, the Palestinians would be presented with the fait accompli of a Jewish majority.
Settlements, land purchases, industries, and military forces were developed gradually and systematically so that the yishuv would become too strong to uproot.
In a letter to his son, Weizmann compared the Arabs to the rocks of Judea, obstacles that had to be cleared to make the path smooth.
When the Palestinians mounted violent protests in 1920, 1921, 1929, 1936-39, and the late 1940s, the yishuv sought to curb them by force, rather than seek a political accommodation with the indigenous people.
Any concessions made to the Palestinians by the British government concerning immigration, land sales, or labor were strongly contested by the Zionist leaders.
In fact, in 1936, Ben-Gurion stated that the Palestinians will only acquiesce in a Jewish Eretz Israel after they are in a state of total despair.
Zionists viewed their acceptance of territorial partition as a temporary measure; they did not give up the idea of the Jewish community’s right to all of Palestine.
Weizmann commented in 1937: “In the course of time we shall expand to the whole country…this is only an arrangement for the next 15-30 years.”
Ben-Gurion stated in 1938, “After we become a strong force, as a result of the creation of a state, we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine.”
A FEW EFFORTS were made to reduce Arab opposition. For example in the 1920s, Zionist organizations provided financial support to Palestinian political parties, newspapers, and individuals.
This was most evident in the establishment and support of the National Muslim Societies (1921-23) and Agricultural Parties (1924-26).
These parties were expected to be neutral or positive toward the Zionist movement, in return for which they would receive financial subventions and their members would be helped to obtain jobs and loans.
This policy was backed by Weizmann, who commented that: “extremists and moderates alike were susceptible to the influence of money and honors.”
However, Leonard Stein, a member of the London office of the World Zionist Organization, denounced this practice.
He argued that Zionists must seek a permanent modus vivendi with the Palestinians by hiring them in Jewish firms and admitting them to Jewish universities.
He maintained that political parties in which Arab moderates are merely Arab gramophones playing Zionist records would collapse as soon as the Zionist financial support ended.
In any event, the World Zionist Organization terminated the policy by 1927, as it was in the midst of a financial crisis and as most of the leaders felt that the policy was ineffective.
Some Zionist leaders argued that the Arab community had to be involved in the practical efforts of the Zionist movement.
Chaim Kalvarisky, who initiated the policy of buying support, articulated in 1923 the gap between that ideal and the reality: “Some people say…that only by common work in the field of commerce, industry and agriculture mutual understanding between Jews and Arabs will ultimately be attained….
This is, however, merely a theory. In practice we have not done and we are doing nothing for any work in common.
How many Arab officials have we installed in our banks? Not even one.
How many Arabs have we brought into our schools? Not even one.
What commercial houses have we established in company with Arabs? Not even one.”
Two years later, Kalvarisky lamented: “We all admit the importance of drawing closer to the Arabs, but in fact we are growing more distant like a drawn bow.
We have no contact: two separate worlds, each living its own life and fighting the other.”
Some members of the yishuv emphasized the need for political relations with the Palestinian Arabs, to achieve either a peacefully negotiated territorial partition (as Nahum Goldmann sought) or a binational state (as Brit Shalom and Hashomer Ha-tzair proposed).
But few went as far as Dr. Judah L. Magnes, chancellor of The Hebrew University, who argued that Zionism meant merely the creation of a Jewish cultural center in Palestine rather than an independent state.
In any case, the binationalists had little impact politically and were strongly opposed by the leadership of the Zionist movement.
Zionist leaders felt they did not harm the Palestinians by blocking them from working in Jewish settlements and industries or even by undermining their majority status.
The Palestinians were considered a small part of the large Arab nation; their economic and political needs could be met in that wider context, Zionists felt, rather than in Palestine.
They could move elsewhere if they sought land and could merge with Transjordan if they sought political independence.
This thinking led logically to the concept of population TRANSFER. In 1930 Weizmann suggested that the problems of insufficient land resources within Palestine and of the dispossession of peasants could be solved by moving them to Transjordan and Iraq.
He urged the Jewish Agency to provide a loan of £1 million to help move Palestinian farmers to Transjordan.
The issue was discussed at length in the Jewish Agency debates of 1936-37 on partition.
At first, the majority proposed a voluntary transfer of Palestinians from the Jewish state, but later they realized that the Palestinians would never leave voluntarily.
Therefore, key leaders such as Ben-Gurion insisted that compulsory transfer was essential.
The Jewish Agency then voted that the British government should pay for the removal of the Palestinian Arabs from the territory allotted to the Jewish state.
The fighting from 1947 to 1949 resulted in a far larger transfer than had been envisioned in 1937.
It solved the Arab problem by removing most of the Arabs and was the ultimate expression of the policy of force majeure.
CONCLUSION
The land and people of Palestine were transformed during the thirty years of British rule.
The systematic colonization undertaken by the Zionist movement enabled the Jewish community to establish separate and virtually autonomous political, economic, social, cultural, and military institutions.
A state within a state was in place by the time the movement launched its drive for independence.
The legal underpinnings for the autonomous Jewish community were provided by the British Mandate.
The establishment of a Jewish state was first proposed by the British Royal Commission in July 1937 and then endorsed by the UNITED NATIONS in November 1947.
That drive for statehood IGNORED the presence of a Palestinian majority with its own national aspirations
. The right to create a Jewish state—and the overwhelming need for such a state—were perceived as overriding Palestinian counterclaims.
Few members of the yishuv supported the idea of binationalism.
Rather, territorial partition was seen by most Zionist leaders as the way to gain statehood while according certain national rights to the Palestinians.
TRANSFER of Palestinians to neighboring Arab states was also envisaged as a means to ensure the formation of a homogeneous Jewish territory.
The implementation of those approaches led to the formation of independent Israel, at the cost of dismembering the Palestinian community and fostering long-term hostility with the Arab world.
Several U.S. tech giants including Google, Microsoft and Intel Corporation have filled top positions with former members of Israeli military intelligence and are heavily investing in their Israeli branches while laying off thousands of American employees, all while receiving millions of dollars in U.S. government subsidies funded by American taxpayers.
Start-Up Nation Central, billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Singer’s project to bolster Israel’s tech economy at the expense of American workers, was founded in response to the global Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement that seeks to use nonviolent means to pressure Israel to comply with international law in relation to its treatment of Palestinians:
WITH NEARLY 6 MILLION AMERICANS UNEMPLOYED, and regular bouts of layoffs in the U.S. tech industry, major American tech companies like Google, Microsoft and Intel Corporation are nonetheless moving key operations, billions in investments, and thousands of jobs to Israel—a trend that has largely escaped media attention or concern from even “America first” politicians.
The fact that this massive transfer of investment and jobs has been so overlooked is particularly striking given that it is largely the work of a single leading neoconservative Republican donor who has given millions of dollars to President Donald Trump.
Many of the top tech companies continue to shift investment and jobs to Israel at record rates even as they collect sizable U.S. government subsidies for their operations while they move critical aspects of their business abroad.
The trend is particularly troubling in light of the importance of the tech sector to the overall U.S. economy, as it accounts for 7.1 percent of total GDP and 11.6 percent of total private-sector payroll.
Furthermore, many of these companies are hiring, as top managers and executives, the members of controversial Israeli companies known to have spied on American citizens, U.S. companies, and U.S. federal agencies, as well as numerous members of Israeli military intelligence.
This massive transfer of the American tech industry has largely been the work of one leading Republican donor—billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Singer—who also funds the neoconservative think tank American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Islamophobic and hawkish think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), and also funded the now-defunct Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI).
Singer’s project to bolster Israel’s tech economy at American expense is known as “Start-Up Nation Central,” which he founded in response to the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement that seeks to use nonviolent means to pressure Israel to comply with international law in its treatment of Palestinians.
This project is directly linked to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who in recent years has publicly mentioned that it has been his “deliberate policy” to have former members of Israel’s “military and intelligence units…merge into companies with local partners and foreign partners” in order to make it all but impossible for major corporations and foreign governments to boycott Israel.
Singer’s nonprofit organization has acted as the vehicle through which Netanyahu’s policy has been realized, via the group’s close connections to the Israeli PM and Singer’s long-time support for Netanyahu and the Likud Party. With deep ties to Netanyahu, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and controversial tech companies—like Amdocs—that spied on the American government, this Singer-funded organization has formed a nexus of connections between the public and private sectors of both the American and Israeli economies with the single goal of making Israel the new technology superpower, largely at the expense of the American economy and the U.S. government, which currently gives $3.8 billion in annual aid to Israel.
RESEARCHED AND DEVELOPED IN ISRAEL
In recent years, the top U.S. tech companies have been shifting many of their most critical operations, particularly research and development, to one country: Israel.
A 2016 report in Business Insider noted that Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple had all opened up research and development (R&D) centers in recent years, with some of them having as many as three such centers in Israel, a country roughly the size of New Jersey.
Other major tech companies that have also opened key operation and research centers in Israel include SanDisk, Nvidia, PayPal, Palantir and Dell. Forbes noted last year that the world’s top 10 tech companies were now “doing mission-critical work in Israel that’s core to their businesses back at HQ.”
Yet, some of these tech giants, particularly those based in the United States, are heavily investing in their Israeli branches.
For example, Intel Corporation, which is the world’s second largest manufacturer of semiconductor computer chips and is headquartered in California, has long been a major employer in Israel, with over 10,000 employees in the Zionist state.
However, earlier this year, Intel announced that it would be investing $11 billion in a new factory in Israel and would receive around $1 billion in an Israeli government grant for that investment.
Just a matter of months after Intel announced its major new investment in Israel, it announced a new round of layoffs in the United States.
Yet this is just one recent example of what has become a trend for Intel. In 2018, Intel made public its plan to invest $5 billion in one of its Israeli factories and had invested an additional $15 billion in Israeli-created autonomous driving technology a year prior, creating thousands of Intel jobs in Israel.
Notably, over a similar time frame, Intel has cut nearly 12,000 jobs in the United States.
While this great transfer of investment and jobs was undermining the U.S. economy and hurting American workers, particularly in the tech sector, Intel received over $25 million dollars in subsidies from the U.S. government.
A similar phenomenon has been occurring at another U.S.-based tech giant, Microsoft. Beginning in 2014 and continuing into 2018, Microsoft laid off well over 20,000 employees, most of them Americans, in several different rounds of staff cuts.
Over that same time period, Microsoft has been on a hiring spree in Israel, building new campuses and investing billions of dollars annually in its Israel-based research and development center and in other Israeli start-up companies, creating thousands of jobs abroad.
In addition, Microsoft has been pumping millions of dollars into technology programs at Israeli universities and institutes, such as the Technion Institute.
Over this same time frame, Microsoft has received nearly $197 million in subsidies from the state governments of Washington, Iowa and Virginia.
Israeli politicians and tech company executives have attributed this dramatic shift to Israel’s tech prowess and growing reputation as a technological innovation hub, obscuring Singer’s effort in concert with Netanyahu to counter a global movement aimed at boycotting Israel and to make Israel a global “cyber power.”
START-UP NATION CENTRAL AND THE NEOCONS
In 2009, a book titled Start Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle, written by American neoconservative Dan Senor and Jerusalem Post journalist Saul Singer (unrelated to Paul), quickly rose to the New York Times bestseller list for its depiction of Israel as the tech start-up capital of the world.
The book—published by the Council on Foreign Relations, where Senor was then serving as adjunct senior fellow—asserts that Israel’s success in producing so many start-up companies resulted from the combination of its liberal immigration laws and its “leverage of the business talents of young people with military experience.”
In a post-publication interview with the blog Freakonomics, Senor asserted that service in the Israeli military was crucial to Israel’s tech sector success.
“Certain units have become technology boot camps, where 18- to 22-year-olds get thrown projects and missions that would make the heads spin of their counterparts in universities or the private sector anywhere else in the world,” wrote Senor and Singer.
“The Israelis come out of the military not just with hands-on exposure to next-gen technology, but with training in teamwork, mission orientation, leadership, and a desire to continue serving their country by contributing to its tech sector—a source of pride for just about every Israeli.”
The book, in addition to the many accolades it received from the mainstream press, left a lasting impact on top Republican donor Paul Singer, known for funding the most influential neoconservative think tanks in America, as noted above.
Paul Singer was so inspired by Senor and Singer’s book that he decided to spend $20 million to fund and create an organization with a similar name.
He created Start-Up Nation Central (SUNC) several years after the book’s release in 2009.
To achieve his vision, Singer—who is also a top donor to the Republican Party and Trump—tapped Israeli economist Eugene Kandel, who served as Netanyahu’s national economic adviser and chaired the Israeli National Economic Council from 2009 to 2015.
Senor was likely directly involved in the creation of SUNC, as he was then employed by Paul Singer and, with neoconservatives Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan, co-founded the FPI.
In addition, Dan Senor’s sister, Wendy Singer (unrelated to either Paul or Saul), long-time director of Israel’s AIPAC office, became the organization’s executive director.
SUNC’s management team, in addition to Eugene Kandel and Wendy Singer, includes Guy Hilton as the organization’s general manager.
Hilton is a long-time marketing executive at Israeli telecommunications company Amdocs and is credited with having “transformed” the company’s marketing organization.
Amdocs was once highly controversial in the United States after it was revealed by a 2001 Fox News investigation that numerous federal agencies had investigated the company, which then had contracts with the 25 largest telephone companies in the country, for its alleged role in an aggressive espionage operation that targeted the U.S. government.
Hilton worked at Microsoft prior to joining Amdocs.
Beyond the management team, SUNC’s board of directors includes Paul Singer, Dan Senor and Terry Kassel—who work for Singer at his hedge fund, Elliott Management—and Raphael Ouzan.
An officer in the elite foreign military intelligence unit of Israel, Unit 8200, Ouzan co-founded BillGuard the day after he left that unit, which is often compared to the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).
Within five months of its founding, BillGuard was backed by funding from PayPal founder Peter Thiel and former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt.
Ouzan is also connected to U.S. tech companies that have greatly expanded their Israeli branches since SUNC’s founding—such as Microsoft, Google, PayPal and Intel, all of which support Ouzan’s non-profit Israel Tech Challenge.
According to reports from the time published in Haaretz and Bloomberg, SUNC was explicitly founded to serve as “a foreign ministry for Israel’s tech industry” and “to strength Israel’s economy” while also aiming to counter the BDS movement, as well as the growth of illegal Jewish-only settlements in occupied Palestinian territory.
Since its founding, SUNC has sought to transfer tech jobs from foreign companies to Israel by developing connections and influence with foreign governments and companies so that they “deepen their relationship with Israel’s tech industry.”
Although SUNC has since expanded to include other sectors of the Israeli “start-up” economy, its focus has long remained on Israel’s tech, specifically its cybersecurity industry. Foreign investment in this single Israeli industry has grown from $227 million in 2014 to $815 million in 2017.
In addition to its own activities, SUNC appears to be closely linked to a similar organization, sponsored by Coca-Cola and Daimler Mercedes-Benz, called The Bridge, which also seeks to connect Israeli start-up companies with large international corporations.
Indeed, SUNC, according to its website, was actually responsible for Daimler Mercedes Benz’s decision to join The Bridge, thanks to a delegation from the company that SUNC hosted in Israel and the connections made during that visit.
TEAMING UP WITH ISRAEL’S UNIT 8200
Notably, SUNC has deep ties to Israel’s military intelligence Unit 8200 and, true to Start-Up Nation’s praise of IDF service as key to Israel’s success, has been instrumental in connecting Unit 8200 alumni with key roles in foreign companies, particularly American tech companies.
For instance, Maty Zwaig, a former lieutenant colonel in Unit 8200, is SUNC’s current director of human capital programs, and SUNC’s current manager of strategic programs, Tamar Weiss, is also a former member of the unit.
One particularly glaring connection between SUNC and Unit 8200 is Inbal Arieli, who served as SUNC’s vice president of strategic partnerships from 2014 to 2017 and continues to serve as a senior adviser to the organization.
A former lieutenant in Unit 8200, Arieli is the founder and head of the 8200 Entrepreneurship and Innovation Support Program (EISP), which was the first start-up accelerator in Israel aimed at harnessing “the vast network and entrepreneurial DNA of [Unit] 8200 alumni” and is currently one of the top company accelerators in Israel. Arieli was the top executive at 8200 EISP while working at SUNC.
Another key connection between SUNC and Unit 8200 is SUNC’s promotion of Team8, a company-creation platform whose CEO and co-founder is Nadav Zafrir, former commander of Unit 8200. In addition to prominently featuring Team8 and Zafrir on the cybersecurity section of its website, SUNC also sponsored a talk by Zafrir and an Israeli government economist at the World Economic Forum, often referred to as “Davos,” that was attended personally by Paul Singer.
Team8’s investors include Google’s Eric Schmidt, Microsoft, and Walmart—and it recently hired former head of the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command, retired Admiral Mike Rogers. Team8 described the decision to hire Rogers as being “instrumental in helping strategize” Team8’s expansion in the United States. However, Jake Williams, a veteran of NSA’s Tailored Access Operations hacking unit, told CyberScoop:
“Rogers is not being brought into this role because of his technical experience …It’s purely because of his knowledge of classified operations and his ability to influence many in the U.S. government and private-sector contractors.”
In addition to connections to Unit 8200-linked groups like Team8 and 8200 EISP, SUNC also directly collaborates with the IDF in an initiative aimed at preparing young Israeli women to serve in Unit 8200.
That initiative, called the CyberGirlz Club, is jointly funded by Israel’s Defense Ministry, SUNC and the Rashi Foundation, the philanthropic organization set up by the Leven family of Perrier-brand water, which has close ties to the Israeli government and IDF.
“Our aim is to bring the girls to this process already skilled, with the knowledge needed to pass the exams for Unit 8200 and serve in the military as programmers,” Zwaig told Israel National News.
SEEDING AMERICAN TECH
Yaniv Bar (l) and Udi Cohen, former Israeli intelligence officers and founders of the start-up Aclim8, demonstrate their co-developed “COMBAR” all-in-one hiking tool for “weekend warriors,” at their office in the northern Israeli Kibbutz of Maayan Tzvi, May 21, 2018. Israel’s military is an incubator for future high-tech firms started by former soldiers. (JACK GUEZ/AFP/GETTY IMAGES)
The connections between SUNC and Unit 8200 are troubling for more than a few reasons, one being that Unit 8200, often likened to the NSA, closely coordinates with Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, and is responsible for 90 percent of the intelligence material obtained by the Israeli government, according to its former commander Yair Cohen.
“There isn’t a major operation, from the Mossad or any intelligence security agency, that 8200 is not involved in,” Cohen told Forbes in 2016.
An organization founded by an American billionaire is thus actively promoting the presence of former military intelligence officers in foreign companies, specifically American companies, while also promoting the transfer of jobs and investment to that same country.
Particularly troubling is the fact that since SUNC’s founding, the number of former Unit 8200 members in top positions in American tech companies has skyrocketed.
Based on a non-exhaustive analysis conducted by MintPress of over 200 LinkedIn accounts of former Israeli military intelligence and intelligence officers in three major tech companies, numerous former Unit 8200 alumni were found to currently hold top managerial or executive positions in Microsoft, Google and Facebook.
The influence of Unit 8200 on these companies very likely goes deeper than this non-exhaustive analysis revealed, given that many of these companies acquired several Israeli start-ups staffed by Unit 8200 alumni who subsequently went on to found new companies and start-ups shortly after acquisition.
Furthermore, due to the limitations of LinkedIn’s set-up, MintPress was not able to access the complete list of Unit 8200 alumni at these three tech companies, meaning that the eye-opening numbers found were generated by a relatively small sample.
This jump in Unit 8200 members in top positions at tech companies of global importance is actually a policy long promoted by Netanyahu, whose long-time economic adviser is the chief executive at SUNC.
During an interview with Fox News last year, Netanyahu was asked by Fox News host Mark Levin if the large growth seen in recent years in Israel’s technology sector was part of Netanyahu’s plan.
“That’s very much my plan,” Netanyahu responded. “It’s a very deliberate policy.”
He later added that “Israel had technology because the military, especially military intelligence, produced a lot of capabilities.
These incredibly gifted young men and women who come out of the military or the Mossad, they want to start their start-ups.”
Netanyahu further outlined this policy at the 2019 Cybertech conference in Tel Aviv, where he stated that Israel’s emergence as one of the top five “cyber powers” had “required allowing this combination of military intelligence, academia and industry to converge in one place” and that this further required allowing “our graduates of our military and intelligence units to merge into companies with local partners and foreign partners.”
The direct tie-ins of SUNC to Netanyahu and the fact that Paul Singer has also been a long-time political donor and backer of Netanyahu suggest that SUNC is a key part of Netanyahu’s policy of placing former military intelligence and intelligence operatives in strategic positions in major technology companies.
Notably, just as SUNC was founded to counter the BDS movement, Netanyahu has asserted that this policy of ensuring Israel’s role as a “cyber power” is aimed at increasing its diplomatic power and specifically undermining BDS as well as the United Nations, which has repeatedly condemned Israel’s government for war crimes and violations of international law in relation to the Palestinians.
BUILDING THE BI-NATIONAL SURVEILLANCE STATE
To sum up, a powerful American billionaire has built an influential organization with deep connections to AIPAC, with an Israeli company that has been repeatedly investigated for spying on the U.S. government (Amdocs), and with the elite Israeli military intelligence Unit 8200 that has used its influential connections to the U.S. government and the private sector to dramatically shift the operations and make-up of major companies in a critical sector of the American economy.
Further consider that U.S. government documents leaked by Edward Snowden have flagged Israel as a “leading threat” to the infrastructure of U.S. financial and banking institutions, which use much of the software produced by these top tech companies, and have also flagged Israel as a top espionage threat.
One U.S. government document cited Israel as the third most aggressive intelligence service against the U.S. behind Russia and China.
Thus, Paul Singer’s pet project in Start-Up Nation Central has undermined not only the U.S. economy but arguably national security as well.
This concern is further exacerbated by the deep ties connecting top tech companies like Microsoft and Google to the U.S. military.
Microsoft and Google are both key military contractors. Microsoft is set to win a lucrative contract for the Pentagon’s cloud management and has partnered with the Department of Defense to produce a “secure” election system known as ElectionGuard that is set to be implemented in some U.S. states for the 2020 general election.
Top U.S. tech companies have filled executive positions with former members of Israeli military intelligence and moved strategic and critical operations to Israel, boosting Israel’s economy at the expense of America’s. SUNC’s role in this marked shift merits the deepest scrutiny.
Quotes one Israeli emigrant from Iraq: “In Baghdad we got along fine with the Arabs. But here we have to fight them.”
During Stanford Professor Joel Beinin’s visit to the Urbana campus of the University of Illinois in March of 2000, I was introduced to the seemingly esoteric topic of the plight of Jews in Arab societies subsequent to the establishment of Israel–specifically regarding his research specialty at that time, the Jews of Egypt.
In Beinin’s outstanding book on this subject, The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry, he explores the ultimately unsuccessful attempt of 75,000 Egyptian Jews to “maintain their multiple identities and to resist the monism of increasingly obdurate Zionist and Egyptian national discourses.”
Beinin also spoke presciently—6 months before the beginning of the 2nd intifada–of the dire conditions of the Palestinians in the occupied territories, which he described as “worse than horrible.”
Six months after Sharon’s 2000 visit to the Temple Mount, in March of 2001, a political advertisement sponsored by The American Jewish Committee and Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago appeared in the Chicago Tribune titled “The Other Refugees.” It claimed that:
“The Arab onslaught of 1948 and its aftermath tragically produced two—not one—refugee populations, one Jewish and one Arab.
More than 700,000 Jews across the Arab world were forced to flee for their lives, their property ransacked in deadly riots, and their schools, hospitals, synagogues and cemeteries expropriated or destroyed.”
The ad went on to compare the absorption of many of these Jews by Israel to Palestinians who ”have remained quarantined in squalid camps,” concluding that “Palestinian leadership, backed by many in the Arab world, seeks the destruction of Israel through the ‘return’ of the refugees and their millions of descendants.”
This diatribe concluded by claiming that such a return would mean “Israel’s national suicide.”
This bald propaganda has its origins in, among other things, a tendentious revision of the history of Arab Jews, from one of general cooperation with Muslims (also over-simplified) to deep-seated conflict and persecution.
Beinin mentions prominent examples of this revisionism in his book.
In 1974, a Jewish Israeli woman with the pen name of Bat Ye’or (daughter of the Nile) published Les Juifs en Egypte, to which Beinin credits with originating the “neo-lachrymose” view of Arab Jews, often referred to as Sephardic Jews, or more commonly as Mizrahim (Easterners), as they have come to be called in Israel.
Beinin defines two motivations for the popularity of this “normative Zionist interpretation of the history of the Jews of Egypt” and, by generalization, the Jews of other Middle Eastern and North African countries.
First, it served to counter the grievances of Palestinian refugees, by claiming a “fair exchange” between refugee populations.
Second, it provided the Mizrahim in Israel a means with which to redress their mistreatment in Arab countries, and—just as important—to claim a status in Israel comparable to Ashkenazi survivors of European anti-Semitism.
To distance themselves from Arab cultural attachments, Beinin argues, was “the price of admission to Israeli society.”
Beinin quotes one Israeli emigrant from Iraq: “In Baghdad we got along fine with the Arabs. But here we have to fight them.”
While Joan Peters’ notorious From Time Immemorial (1984) was discredited for its fraudulent demographic argument that the Palestinians essentially did not exist, it is rarely noted that Peters also supported the neo-lachrymose narrative of Arab Jewish history.
This narrative has spawned various examples of tendentious scholarship and outright propaganda, some of which appear in Malka Hillel Shulewitz’s The Forgotten Millions: The Modern Jewish Exodus from Jewish Lands (1999).
More important, as Beinin notes, this view was adopted by Martin Gilbert in The Jews of Arab Lands (1976), and Bernard Lewis in The Jews of Islam (1984). In Semites and Anti-Semites (1984), Lewis emphasized, according to Beinin, the “vulgar characteristics of Arab-Jewish relations.”
This discourse suggests at least three areas of inquiry. The first and largest, of course, concerns the actual causes of the emigration of Arab Jews, to Israel and elsewhere.
The second, already suggested, concerns the status of the Mizrahim in Israeli society as an oppressed population. The final topic is that of the purpose of the propaganda itself, in order to explain its relatively recent popular dissemination.
I will briefly address the last topic first by speculating that, to a certain extent, Zionist propagandists have finally given up the ghost and ceased to claim that the nakba can be traced to “Arab broadcasts.”
But while the expulsion of the Palestinian refugees has been at least tacitly acknowledged—if not its willfulness and the extent of its attendant brutality—this has in turn generated an alternative propaganda strategy based on the claim of “population exchange” that was put forward in the AJC/JFMC ad.
It is argued that this exchange has remained incomplete because other Arabs (the same who expelled Jews) “turned their backs on the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who crossed into Arab lands.”
As Palestinian invocation of the Right of Return has continued throughout this decade, the “population exchange” myth and tactic has become conventional hasbara wisdom, casually and repeatedly invoked, for example, in letters to the New York Times.
Ten years ago, American Jews of Ashkenazi origin generally knew little beyond “Operation Magic Carpet” that brought Jews to Israel from Yemen. Now they “know” more, but their ignorance has been compounded.
It has become “common knowledge” among defenders of Israel that the advent of the Jewish state brought, quid pro quo, the brutal dispossession and expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Arab Jews within a relatively brief period.
There is little knowledge of the details of this expulsion, and for good reason—the claim does not withstand scrutiny.
A discussion of the second topic, that of the status of Arab Jews in Israeli society, may begin with Beinin’s observations quoted above, but centrally refers to the work of Ella Shohat, a Jewish Iraqi emigrant to Israel and then the United States.
In “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Victims,” Shohat begins with the observation that:
“Sephardi Jews were first brought to Israel for specific European-Zionist reasons, and once there they were systematically discriminated against by a Zionism which deployed its energies and material resources differentially, to the consistent advantage of European Jews and to the consistent detriment of Oriental Jews.”
In historical discourse, this has meant that by:
“distinguishing the “evil” East (the Moslem Arab) from the “good” East (the Jewish Arab), Israel has taken upon itself to “cleanse” the Sephardim of their Arab-ness and redeem them from their “primal sin” of belonging to the Orient.
Israeli historiography absorbs the Jews of Asia and Africa into the monolithic official memory of European Jews. Sephardi Jews learn virtually nothing of value about their particular history as Jews in the Orient..”
Shohat claims that it is too simple to assert that the “price of admission” for Mizrahim into Israeli society has been to learn to hate Arabs and to simplify their own complicated histories in Arab cultures.
She points out that Arab-hating has ironically become part of the negative stereotype of Mizrahim as defined by “enlightened” European Israelis, including those in Peace Now:
“The Sephardim, when not ignored by the Israeli left, appear only to be scapegoated for everything that is wrong with Israel; “they” are turning Israel into a right-wing and anti-democratic state; “they” support the occupation; “they” are an obstacle to peace.
These prejudices are then disseminated by Israeli “leftist” in international conferences, lectures, and publications.”
The result of this coerced assimilation and continuing prejudice, Shohat concludes, is that “the identity of Arab Jews has been fractured, their life possibilities diminished, their hopes deferred.”
One response has been the emerging notion of Mizrahi identity as a “departure from previous concepts of Jewishness.”
Vital in forming this identity is a more complex historical analysis of the circumstances that led to the emigration of Arab Jews.
Shohat suggests in “The Invention of the Mizrahim” that such an analysis would consider:
“the secret collaboration between Israel and some Arab regimes, with the background orchestration of the British; the impact of this direct or indirect collaboration on both Arab Jews and Palestinians, now cast into antagonistic roles; Zionist attempts to drive a wedge between Jewish and Muslim communities; the Arab nationalism that failed to make a distinction between Jews and Zionists; and Arab Jewish misconceptions about the secular nation-state project of Zionism, which had almost nothing to do with their own religious community identity. Arab Jews left their countries of origin with mingled excitement and terror but, most importantly, full of Zionist-manipulated confusion, misunderstanding, and projections.”
This brings me to a brief overview of the emigration of Jews from various Arab countries: Algeria (1961-2), Egypt (1948-67), Iraq (1950-51), Morocco (1948-87), Syria (1948-56), Tunisia (after 1956), and Yemen (1948-49). My purpose is to refer to some helpful generalizations employed by reliable scholars, and to provide a selective list of references. Even a brief consideration of these points easily dispels the historical assumptions of the “exchange of populations” tactic.
Beyond those mentioned by Shohat, general factors that must be considered in each case include: the changing economic and cultural status of Jews under British and French colonization, especially French (Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia); the political relationship of Jews—religious or Zionist, bourgeois, nationalist, leftist, or Communist–to Arab nationalist movements (Egypt, Iraq, Algeria, Tunisia); the influence of Zionism among Jews, before and after 1948, and the extent of the messianic desire to emigrate to Israel (Morocco, Yemen); the effects of Zionist pressure and provocation with the specific goal of promoting emigration (Iraq, Morocco); the effects of ongoing conflict between Arab states and Israel from 1948 to 1967 (Egypt, Tunisia, Iraq); the consequences of the end of French colonization (Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria); and finally the general economic and social conditions under which Jews lived (Morocco, Egypt, Syria). To all of this must be added, in most cases, the cumulative effects of emigration as it relates to what Michael M. Laskier (discussing Morocco) calls the “self-liquidation” process.
Israeli historian Tom Segev summarizes emigration immediately after the founding of Israel, especially in relation to North Africa:
“Deciding to emigrate to Israel was often a very personal decision. It was based on the particular circumstances of the individual’s life. They were not all poor, or ‘dwellers in dark caves and smoking pits.’ Nor were they always subject to persecution, repression or discrimination in their native lands. They emigrated for a variety of reasons, depending on the country, the time, the community, and the person.”
Segev summarizes the “messianic fervor” that led to “operation Magic Carpet” in Yemen in 1948-49, but also notes that the Jewish Agency emissary in Aden, “asked permission to prepare the Yemenite authorities to expel the remaining Jews from their country.”
Discussions of the rapid emigration of Jews from Iraq in 1951 often focus on allegations of violent Zionist provocation, which are compelling but have not been completely substantiated.
Just as important, the context of these alleged provocations was acutely described by the late Rabbi Elmer Berger in letters he wrote on the basis of interviews with Jewish leaders during a trip to Baghdad in 1955:
“Zionist agents began to appear in Iraq—among the youth—playing on a general uneasiness and indicating that American Jews were putting up large amounts of money to take them to Israel, where everything would be in apple-pie order.
The emigration of children began to tear at the loyalties of families as the adults in a family reluctantly decided to follow their children, the stress and strain of loyalties spread to brothers and sisters . . . Several caches of arms were ‘discovered’ in synagogues . . . What both Jews and the Government had believed to be only a passing phenomenon—emigration—began to assume the proportions of a public issue.”
Similarly, the fate of the Jews of Egypt is often linked to the infamous Lavon affair of 1954, during which Zionist agents attacked American installations. But in a broader context, Beinin writes of:
“more than occasional instances of socially structured discrimination against Jews in Egypt. In the 20th century, they (the Jews) were inextricably linked to processes of colonization and decolonization, the nationalist struggle to expel the British troops who occupied Egypt from 1882-1956, and the intensification of the Arab-Zionist conflict.”
Jews, especially those whose Europeanized culture and bourgeois interests linked them to secular-liberal nationalism, were excluded from narratives of both colonial privilege and Islamic conceptions of the polity, and clearly had no place in the pan-Arab movement led by Nasser and opposed by Israel. They identified with the national narrative of neither Egypt nor Israel, and many of the wealthier moved to Europe.
Israeli scholar Michael M. Laskier concludes his description of Moroccan emigration, which was prohibited by the Moroccan government from 1956 until 1961, with this comparison to Egypt:
“Whereas in Nasser’s Egypt, Jews and other minorities were expelled or encouraged to leave in 1956-57 and subsequently as part of the national homogeneity campaign, Moroccan politicians frequently spoke of national heterogeneity, even though Moroccan Jewry was often portrayed in the local press as being disloyal and was becoming isolated from Moroccan society on various levels. The Jews were prevented from choosing the emigration alternative until 1961, because Moroccan authorities expected them to participate in nation-building, to invest their capital in Morocco and not in Israel.”
The long-term and disrupted emigration of Moroccan Jews stands in stark contrast to the “flash flood” of Algerian Jews, most of who immigrated to France after Algerian independence in 1962. Algerian Jews were more completely assimilated into French colonial culture, but nevertheless historically attached to Muslim society. Andre Chouraqui writes that “heavy pressure was applied (to Jews) from both sides in the hope of gaining both material and moral support; . . . the vast majority of Jews remained passive in the struggle.” Ultimately, FLN (liberation) attacks not specifically directed at Jews spread panic among both the Jewish and Christian elite, and “Jews saw headlong flight as the only escape from anarchy.” Chouraqui concludes that in North Africa,
“neither the westernized elite nor the masses of Moslems, who were almost entirely ignorant of the implications of Zionism, reacted with great feelings against their countries’ Jews. Had it not been for the conflict with the French…the Jews might well have remained in North Africa for centuries in comparative harmony.”
The disintegration of Jewish cultures in Arab societies was a complicated and by no means inevitable process that has been neither properly understood nor appropriately mourned by its victims, other Jewish Israelis, and Jews of European background around the world. Its use as Zionist propaganda by the Ashkenazi elite in Israel and the U.S. reflects various degrees of racism towards Mizrahim, Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims, and serves to harden the false bipolarity with which Israelis and their American supporters view the world, now through the lenses of “Judeo-Christian” civilization. The specter of the Holocaust has been unfairly transferred to the Arab world, and is used to justify the oppression of the Palestinians and the “war on terrorism.” While Arab Jewish culture has been transformed in the Diaspora, an understanding of their history and demise can begin a process that will allow the Mizrahim to more actively shape a more just Israeli society, and a more peaceful future among Israelis, Palestinians, and other Arabs. In our own country, it can be minimally hoped that debunking mythology about Arab Jews will open some minds to a more fundamental questioning of Zionist conventional wisdom and its relation to American empire.
How can Israelis close their eyes to the violent abuses inflicted by Israel’s military against the Palestinians?
They live in an artificial world of denial — bolstered by a mastery of communications and the dysfunctionality of Palestinian activists — in which abuses against Palestinians such as racism, land theft, physical violence and killings take place every day.
These actions do not even provoke a whimper from the majority of Israel’s Jews.
They have come to accept the fact that their country is one built on the oppression of others, while going to great lengths to separate its viciousness from that which fueled the Holocaust, which brought many of them into the initially welcoming arms of Palestine’s Christians and Muslims.
They may argue that not all Jews in Israel have turned their backs on righteousness. But that was also the response of populations in Germany and in Poland during the Second World War. Not everyone hated Jews, but very few spoke out until it was too late.
That is where Israelis are headed: Toward a fate in which one day they will have to answer for the atrocities that have taken place against Palestinians.
The newly announced investigation by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which was itself founded on principles defined by the postwar trials of the Nazis, is just the beginning.
Every day, Palestinian lands are being confiscated for the sole purpose of expanding the existing and building new Jewish-only settlements.
The best farmlands are taken from Palestinians with impunity.
Reports frequently make it through the Israeli government-throttled mainstream news media about Palestinians who are attacked, brutalized and killed by Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank.
And yet Israeli Jews still manage to go about their business in places like West Jerusalem, where they openly refer to the big houses built using Jerusalem stone as “Arab homes.”
There is absolutely no shame, especially as Israeli Jews lead the campaign to recover land and property stolen from them during the Holocaust.
As they do so, land and property is being stolen from the Palestinians in their name. And their major institutions don’t seem to care.
For Palestinians, March is a special month, during which they commemorate “Land Day.”
This commemoration reflects on when — March 30, 1976 — the Israeli government passed a law allowing the expropriation of lands from non-Jews.
Protests by Palestinian citizens of Israel raged from Nazareth to the Negev.
It was the first time that Israel’s non-Jewish population had stood up to the racism on which Israel is based.
B’Tselem, an organization of Israelis of all backgrounds who embrace human rights, this month released a scathing report on how extensive the theft of land is.
It argues: “The fact that the West Bank has not been formally annexed does not stop Israel from treating it as if it were its own territory, particularly when it comes to the massive resources Israel invests in developing settlements and establishing infrastructure to serve their residents.”
The report adds: “This policy has enabled the establishment of more than 280 settlements and outposts now populated by more than 440,000 Israeli citizens (excluding East Jerusalem).
Thanks to this policy, more than 2 million dunams of Palestinian land have been stolen, by official and unofficial means.
The West Bank is crisscrossed with roads linking the settlements to one another and to Israel’s sovereign territory, west of the Green Line; and the area is dotted with Israeli industrial zones.”
These industrial areas produce stolen products that are then disguised and sold to markets around the world — a process that the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement seeks to expose.
Israel may be able to change the face of the West Bank, just as it has meticulously erased much of the Arab identity from areas throughout Israel, but it cannot erase the truth, which will always stand as a testament to its cruelty.
Israelis are accountable for the horrors from their government.
Historic Palestine has long had an abundance of natural resources, ranging from fresh and ground water, arable land and, more recently, oil and natural gas.
In the seven decades since the establishment of the state of Israel, these resources have been compromised and exploited through a variety of measures.
These include widespread Palestinian dispossession of land in the ongoing Nakba, exploitation of water through failed negotiations, and a finders-keepers approach to gas and oil found in or under occupied land.
(CHICAGO) — Israel wants it all. For decades, it’s been systematically stealing Palestinian land and resources.
Al Haq’s new report provides more evidence.
Titled, “Pillage of the Dead Sea: Israel’s Unlawful Exploitation of Natural Resources in the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” it details grand theft and war crimes.
They benefit Jews by harming Palestinians. More on it below.
Yesh Din defends Palestinian human rights. It exposes Israeli abuses. It champions long denied accountability.
In March 2009, it petitioned Israel’s High Court of Justice (HCJ).
It wants lawless West Bank mining operations stopped. Israel and 11 Israeli corporations steal Palestinian resources rightfully theirs.
It demanded all quarrying and mining activities cease.
It argued that Israeli companies pillage Palestinian resources for profit and Israel’s benefit.
Doing so also violates fundamental international law. As an occupying power, Israel is obligated to protect, not exploit, Palestinian rights.
On Dec. 26, 2011, the HCJ rejected Yesh Din’s petition. It sanctioned lawless pillage. On Jan. 10, 2012, Yesh Din requested another hearing before a broader panel of judges.
Seven distinguished Israeli legal experts stood with Yesh Din.
They took issue with the Court’s ruling.
Their collective opinion matters.
It provides greater impact.
On July 25, 2012, the HCJ spurned Yesh Din again.
In his decision, retired Deputy President Judge Eliezer Rivlin said the December 2011 ruling rejected Yesh Din’s petition mainly because Israel and the Palestinian Authority addressed the issue earlier. They agreed to an interim 1995 deal.
He failed to explain its terms.
It explicitly said “quarries must be transferred to the Palestinian side within 18 months.” Israel still controls them.
The Court’s ruling OK’d its right to steal.
THE COURT’S JUDGEMENT
Seven leading international law experts disagree.
They unequivocally call Israel’s mining operations lawless.
In their judgment, the Court’s ruling was troublesome.
Judge Rivlin addressed their opinion, saying, “I did not ignore the opinion of the experts on international law submitted in support of the petitioner’s argument.
The learned opinion raises important questions and analyzes them most skillfully and eruditely.”
“However, in the concrete circumstances of this case, since no precedent was set in the decision that would justify a further hearing, there is no need to discuss them at this stage.”
In response, Yesh Din attorney Shlomy Zachary said, “This decision by the High Court of Justice recognizes the serious flaws of the court’s decision on the original petition, and mutes its conclusions.”
“The court is also aware that the decision’s determinations must be decided in the future, and therefore the decision on the concrete matter cannot serve as a binding precedent.”
“The opinion of the leading experts from Israel’s universities, submitted as part of this case, added another level that reinforced the need to minimize the determinations about this matter, and we welcome that.”
Israel’s High Court tried having it both ways. In initially rejecting Yesh Din’s petition, HCJ President Dorit Beinisch said, “The belligerent occupation of Israel in the area has some unique characteristics, primarily the duration of the occupation period that requires the adjustment of the law to the reality on the ground, which imposes a duty upon Israel to ensure normal life for a period, which … is certainly long-term.”
At the same time, the Court spurned international law. It also dismissed the opinion of seven distinguished Israeli legal experts.
Their judgment is indisputable. Rule of law principles back it. It carries weight. It concluded saying “the license granted to Israeli corporations to mine exhaustible natural minerals in territory under belligerent occupation is illegal.”
High Court judges know it but ignored them and fundamental international law anyway.
Their ruling was not only dishonest, it was convoluted.
HOW THE DECISION AFFECTS THE PEOPLE
Outrageously, the Court said militarized occupation and Israeli Civil Administration operations benefit Palestinians.
In other words, controlling them at the point of a gun and pillaging their resources helps.
How, the Court didn’t explain. It merely said, “Royalties paid to the Civil Administration by the operators of the quarries are used to finance the operations of the military administration, which promotes various kinds of projects aimed to benefit the interests of the area.”
Stealing what’s theirs doesn’t help. Military occupation spurns their rights. Employment for small numbers of Palestinians at slave wages neither benefits them or the collective population.
Virtually all resources mined help Israel and its settlements. Mining fees, levies and royalties flow straight to Israeli state coffers. Palestinians are denied what’s rightfully theirs.
Al Haq’s report offers more proof. Black’s Law Dictionary calls pillage “the forcible taking of private property by an invading or conquering army from the enemy’s subjects.”
The 1907 Hague Regulations, Fourth Geneva and other international laws prohibit doing so under all circumstances.
The Statute of International Criminal Court calls “pillaging a town or place, even when taken by assault,” a war crime.
Various military manuals prohibit pillage/plunder. The U.N. and other international organizations condemn it.
Looting is absolutely forbidden.
It’s punishable under international, military and general statute laws.
RESOURCES BEING TAKEN
Israel spurns rule of law principles in all forms. Al Haq calls exploiting West Bank resources “the war crime of pillage.” Its report examines Israeli Dead Sea area operations.
It’s “prohibited from exploiting them in a way that undermines their capital and results in economic benefits for Israeli citizens, including settlers or for its national economy.”
The Dead Sea borders Jordan and Israel to the east and the West Bank to the west. It’s in the Jordan Rift Valley. It lies over 400 meters below sea level.
It’s 67 km long, 377 meters deep and 18 km across at its widest point. With 33.7 percent salinity, it’s one of the world’s saltiest water bodies.
In 1967, Israel seized control. Jordan previously controlled the area.
Oslo granted Israel military and administrative control. Vast land areas became closed military zones. Palestinians are denied entry to land rightfully theirs.
Since 1967, pillage accompanied occupation.
Palestinians were dispossessed from their own land and resources.
Israel stole and exploited the Dead Sea and surrounding areas by declaring them “State land.”
No legal basis whatever permits doing so.
Numerous military orders violate international law.
It’s been twisted, inverted, manipulated, distorted, undermined and spurned to justify the unjustifiable.
Israel invents its own version of reality.
Orwellian doublespeak defines it.
Fundamental occupying power obligations are violated. State authorities and settlers reap benefits.
THE DEAD SEA
At the same time, unsustainable water extraction and mining methods let water levels decrease significantly.
Ahava Dead Sea Laboratories was licensed to steal. It mines Dead Sea mud. It’s used for company products. Al Haq’s General Director, Shawan Jabarin, said, “The Israeli authorities are denying Palestinians access to their natural resources all across the OPT, but this practice is particularly evident in the occupied Dead Sea area. This also clearly demonstrates how Israel is benefiting economically from the occupation.”
“Given that the settlers in the area and Ahava Dead Sea Laboratories directly profit from the appropriation of the Dead Sea natural resources and from the trade of the products extracted and processed in this region, they should be considered as primary perpetrators of the war crime of pillage.”
Consumers have a right to know that Ahava operates illegally.
Its products use stolen Palestinian resources. Doing so costs them nearly $150 million annually.
Ahava’s based in Mitzpe Shalem settlement.
It lies on the Dead Sea’s western shore.
It’s Israel’s only company licensed to mine area mud, silt, sand, gravel and other minerals.
It operates subsidiaries in America, Britain and Germany.
Its products have unique cosmetic qualities.
They’re used for various skin disorders.
Exports provide about 60 percent of its revenue.
The remaining 40 percent comes from Israel and tourism.
The Dead Sea has unique geographical, mineral, climatic and archeological features.
Its natural resource riches include ground and surface water, springs and minerals.
It’s a potential world heritage site.
Its landscapes are stunning. Its climate is mild. Its potential for economic development is significant.
Its tourism, industry and agriculture thrive.
Israeli development plans include hotels, water parks, shopping malls and urban facilities.
Enhanced mineral and water extraction are also planned.
Palestinians are entirely deprived of what’s rightfully theirs.
The area is also environmentally vulnerable.
Its ecosystem is endangered.
At issue is over-extraction and other abuses.
The Jordan River Basin’s water system is affected.
Large sinkholes emerged.
As many as 3,000 exist.
Dead Sea shrinkage is worrisome.
It’s divided into two lakes.
Upstream water diversion projects and southern Dead Sea mining caused serious sea level erosion.
Over-exploitation is destroying the area. Domestic, agricultural and industrial wastewater flows directly into the Dead Sea.
Surrounding land areas are affected.
In 2004, Ahava got illegal mining rights.
Authority granting them must cease and desist.
Third-party states must demand it.
Pressuring Israel to stop violating international law is vital.
Aiding and abetting lawlessness can’t be tolerated.
Relations with Ahava and other Israeli companies profiteering from pillage must cease.
Importing their products is illegal.
Everything originating from settlements should be barred. Failure to do so constitutes complicity with grand theft and war crimes.
Water is the only issue in which Israel (still) finds it difficult to defend its discriminatory, oppressive and destructive policy with pretexts of security and God
Israeli spokespeople have three answers ready to pull out when they respond to questions on the water shortage in West Bank Palestinian towns – which stands out starkly compared to the hydrological smugness of the settlements: 1) The Palestinian water system is old, so it suffers from water loss; 2) the Palestinians steal water from each other, and from the Israelis; and 3) in general, Israel has in its great generosity doubled the amount of water it supplies to the Palestinians, compared to what was called for in the Oslo Accords.
“Supplies,” the spokespeople will write in their responses. They will never say Israel sells the Palestinians 64 million cubic meters of water a year instead of the 31 million cubic meters agreed to in the Oslo Accords. Accords that were signed in 1994, and that were supposed to come to an end in 1999.
They will not say that Israel sells the Palestinians water that it first stole from them.
Bravo for the demagogy. Bravo for the one-eighth portion of truth in the answer. Water is the only issue in which Israel (still) finds it difficult to defend its discriminatory, oppressive and destructive policy with pretexts of security and God. That is why it must blur and distort this basic fact: Israel controls the water sources.
And being in control, it imposes a quota on the amount of water the Palestinians are allowed to produce and consume. On average, the Palestinians consume 73 liters per person per day. Below the recommended minimum.
Israelis consume a daily 180 liters on average, and there are those who say even more. And here, unlike there, you will not find thousands who consume 20 liters a day. In the summer.
True, some Palestinians steal water. Desperate farmers, regular chiselers.
If it was not for the water shortage, it would not happen.
A large part of the thefts are in Area C, under full Israeli control. So please, let the IDF and police find all the criminals.
But to justify the crisis with theft – that is deceit.
With the Oslo Accords, Israel imposed an outrageous, racist, arrogant and brutal division of water sources in the West Bank: 80 percent for Israelis (on both sides of the Green Line), and 20 percent for the Palestinians (from wells drilled before 1967, which the Palestinians continued to operate; from the Mekorot water company; from future wells to be drilled in the eastern basin of the mountain aquifer; from agricultural wells and springs.
Many of the springs, by the way, dried out because of Israeli deep wells, or because the settlers took them over. The ways of theft know no bounds.)
Twenty percent is actually good, because now only about 14 percent of the water from the mountain aquifer is accessible to Palestinians in the West Bank.
Technical reasons, irregularities and human error, insufferable Israeli bureaucratic foot-dragging, whose entire goal is to delay the development of the Palestinian water infrastructure and the upgrading of what now exists; unexpected difficulties in producing water from wells in the allowed places, old wells that have dried out or whose production has fallen, and which Israel does not allow to be replaced by newly-drilled wells – all these explain how we have reached 14 percent instead of what was signed in Oslo, and why Israel sells the Palestinians more water that it committed to back then.
After all, it has been left with more water to produce from this natural resource, which, according to international law, an occupying country is forbidden to use for the purposes of its civilian population.
During the summer, the problem becomes worse, of course.
The heat rises and the Palestinians’ demand for water rises, not just the settlers’.
So in the Salfit district and east of Nablus, Mekorot reduces the amount of water it sells to Palestinians.
The spokespeople will not state it that way.
They will say “regulating,” they will say, too. that in the settlements “there are also complaints about a water shortage” (it seems I missed the report on Arutz 7 about it).
But in Farkha, Salfit and Deir al-Hatab people describe, on the verge of tears, how humiliating it is to live for weeks without running water.
And we have not even spoken about the dozens of Palestinian communities on both sides of the Green Line that Israel, a light unto the nations, refuses to allow to connect to the water infrastructure.
