web analytics

How the Zionist War Is Tilting the Global Power Balance

As America’s global empire of influence crumbles, a new alliance is looking to replace it. It consists of Russia, Iran & China. Will this alliance create a new World Order?

DUBAI—The war between Israel and Hamas isn’t just risking a regional conflagration. It is also affecting the global balance of power, stretching American and European resources while relieving pressure on Russia and providing new opportunities to China.

More than a decade ago, Israel started to understand that its occupation of Gaza through siege could be to its advantage.

It began transforming the tiny coastal enclave from an albatross around its neck into a valuable portfolio in the trading game of international power politics.

The first benefit for Israel, and its Western allies, is more discussed than the second.

The tiny strip of land hugging the eastern Mediterranean coast was turned into a mix of testing ground and shop window.

Israel could use Gaza to develop all sorts of new technologies and strategies associated with the homeland security industries burgeoning across the West, as officials there grew increasingly worried about domestic unrest, sometimes referred to as populism.

The siege of Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians, imposed by Israel in 2007 following the election of Hamas to rule the enclave, allowed for all sorts of experiments

How could the population best be contained? What restrictions could be placed on their diet and lifestyle? How were networks of informers and collaborators to be recruited from afar? What effect did the population’s entrapment and repeated bombardment have on social and political relations? 

And ultimately how were Gaza’s inhabitants to be kept subjugated and an uprising prevented?

The answers to those questions were made available to Western allies through Israel’s shopping portal. Items available included interception rocket systems, electronic sensors, surveillance systems, drones, facial recognition, automated gun towers, and much more. All tested in real-life situations in Gaza. 

Israel’s standing took a severe dent from the fact that Palestinians managed to bypass this infrastructure of confinement last weekend – at least for a few days – with a rusty bulldozer, some hang-gliders and a sense of nothing-to-lose. 

Which is part of the reason why Israel now needs to go back into Gaza with ground troops to show it still has the means to keep the Palestinians crushed.

Collective punishment

Which brings us to the second purpose served by Gaza.

As Western states have grown increasingly unnerved by signs of popular unrest at home, they have started to think more carefully about how to sidestep the restrictions placed on them by international law.

The term refers to a body of laws that were formalised in the aftermath of the second world war, when both sides treated civilians on the other side of the battle lines as little more than pawns on a chessboard.

The aim of those drafting international law was to make it unconscionable for there to be a repeat of Nazi atrocities in Europe, as well as other crimes such as Britain’s fire bombing of German cities like Dresden or the United States’ dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

One of the fundamentals of international law – at the heart of the Geneva Conventions – is a prohibition on collective punishment: that is, retaliating against the enemy’s civilian population, making them pay the price for the acts of their leaders and armies.

Very obviously, Gaza is about as flagrant a violation of this prohibition as can be found. Even in “quiet” times, its inhabitants – one million of them children – are denied the most basic freedoms, such as the right to movement; access to proper health care because medicines and equipment cannot be brought in; access to drinkable water; and the use of electricity for much of the day because Israel keeps bombing Gaza’s power station.

Israel has never made any bones of the fact that it is punishing the people of Gaza for being ruled by Hamas, which rejects Israel’s right to have dispossessed the Palestinians of their homeland in 1948 and imprisoned them in overcrowded ghettos like Gaza.

What Israel is doing to Gaza is the very definition of collective punishment. It is a war crime: 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks of every year, for 16 years.

And yet no one in the so-called international community seems to have noticed.

Rules of war rewritten

But the trickiest legal situation – for Israel and the West – is when Israel bombs Gaza, as it is doing now, or sends in soldiers, as it soon will do.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu highlighted the problem when he told the people of Gaza: “Leave now.” But, as he and Western leaders know, Gaza’s inhabitants have nowhere to go, nowhere to escape the bombs. So any Israeli attack is, by definition, on the civilian population too. It is the modern equivalent of the Dresden fire bombings.

Israel has been working on strategies to overcome this difficulty since its first major bombardment of Gaza in late 2008, after the siege was introduced.

A unit in its attorney general’s office was charged with finding ways to rewrite the rules of war in Israel’s favour.

At the time, the unit was concerned that Israel would be criticised for blowing up a police graduation ceremony in Gaza, killing many young cadets. Police are civilians in international law, not soldiers, and therefore not a legitimate target. Israeli lawyers were also worried that Israel had destroyed government offices, the infrastructure of Gaza’s civilian administration.

Israel’s concerns seem quaint now – a sign of how far it has already shifted the dial on international law. For some time, anyone connected with Hamas, however tangentially, is considered a legitimate target, not just by Israel but by every Western government.

Western officials have joined Israel in treating Hamas as simply a terrorist organisation, ignoring that it is also a government with people doing humdrum tasks like making sure bins are collected and schools kept open.

Or as Orna Ben-Naftali, a law faculty dean, told the Haaretz newspaper back in 2009: “A situation is created in which the majority of the adult men in Gaza and the majority of the buildings can be treated as legitimate targets. The law has actually been stood on its head.”

Back at that time, David Reisner, who had previously headed the unit, explained Israel’s philosophy to Haaretz: “What we are seeing now is a revision of international law. If you do something for long enough, the world will accept it.

“The whole of international law is now based on the notion that an act that is forbidden today becomes permissible if executed by enough countries.”

In fact, Israel’s meddling to change international law goes back many decades.

Referring to Israel’s attack on Iraq’s fledgling nuclear reactor in 1981, an act of war condemned by the UN Security Council, Reisner said: “The atmosphere was that Israel had committed a crime. Today everyone says it was preventive self-defence. International law progresses through violations.”

He added that his team had travelled to the US four times in 2001 to persuade US officials of Israel’s ever-more flexible interpretation of international law towards subjugating Palestinians.

“Had it not been for those four planes [journeys to the US], I am not sure we would have been able to develop the thesis of the war against terrorism on the present scale,” he said.

Those redefinitions of the rules of war proved invaluable when the US chose to invade and occupy Afghanistan and Iraq.

‘Human animals’

In recent years, Israel has continued to “evolve” international law. It has introduced the concept of “prior warning” – sometimes giving a few minutes’ notice of a building or neighbourhood’s destruction. Vulnerable civilians still in the area, like the elderly, children and the disabled, are then recast as legitimate targets for failing to leave in time.

And it is using the current assault on Gaza to change the rules still further.

The 2009 Haaretz article includes references by law officials to Yoav Gallant, who was then the military commander in charge of Gaza. He was described as a “wild man”, a “cowboy” with no time for legal niceties.

Gallant is now defence minister and the man responsible for instituting this week a “complete siege” of Gaza: “No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel – everything is closed.” In language that blurred any distinction between Hamas and Gaza’s civilians, he described Palestinians as “human animals”.

That takes collective punishment into a whole different realm. In terms of international law, it skirts into the territory of genocide, both rhetorically and substantively.

But the dial has shifted so completely that even centrist Western politicians are cheering Israel on – often not even calling for “restraint” or “proportionality”, the weasel terms they usually use to obscure their support for law breaking.

Britain has been leading the way in helping Israel to rewrite the rulebook on international law.

Listen to Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour opposition and the man almost certain to be Britain’s next prime minister. This week he supported the “complete siege” of Gaza, a crime against humanity, refashioning it as Israel’s “right to defend itself”.

 

Starmer has not failed to grasp the legal implications of Israel’s actions, even if he seems personally immune to the moral implications. He is trained as a human rights lawyer.

His approach even appears to be taking aback journalists not known for being sympathetic to the Palestinian case. When asked by Kay Burley of Sky News if he had any sympathy for the civilians in Gaza being treated like “human animals”, Starmer could not find a single thing to say in support.

Instead, he deflected to an outright deception: blaming Hamas for sabotaging a “peace process” that Israel both practically and declaratively buried years ago.

Confirming that the Labour party now condones war crimes by Israel, his shadow attorney general, Emily Thornberry, has been sticking to the same script. On BBC’s Newsnight, she evaded questions about whether cutting off power and supplies to Gaza is in line with international law.

 

It is no coincidence that Starmer’s position contrasts so dramatically with that of his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn. The latter was driven out of office by a sustained campaign of antisemitism smears fomented by Israel’s most fervent supporters in the UK.

Starmer does not dare to be seen on the wrong side of this issue. And that is exactly the outcome Israeli officials wanted and expected.

Israeli flag on No 10

Starmer is, of course, far from alone. Grant Shapps, Britain’s defence secretary, has also expressed trenchant support for Israel’s policy of starving two million Palestinians in Gaza.

Rishi Sunak, the UK prime minister, has emblazoned the Israeli flag on the front of his official residence, 10 Downing Street, apparently unconcerned at how he is giving visual form to what would normally be considered an antisemitic trope: that Israel controls the UK’s foreign policy.

 

Starmer, not wishing to be outdone, has called for Wembley stadium’s arch to be adorned with the colours of the Israeli flag. 

However much this schoolboy cheerleading of Israel is sold as an act of solidarity following Hamas’ slaughter of Israeli civilians at the weekend, the subtext is unmistakeable: Britain has Israel’s back as it starts its retributive campaign of war crimes in Gaza.

That is also the purpose of home secretary Suella Braverman’s advice to the police to treat the waving of Palestinian flags and chants for Palestine’s liberation at protests in support of Gaza as criminal acts.

The media is playing its part, dependably as ever. A Channel 4 TV crew pursued Corbyn through London’s streets this week, demanding he “condemn” Hamas. They insinuated through the framing of those demands that anything less fulsome – such as Corbyn’s additional concerns for the welfare of Gaza’s civilians – was confirmation of the former Labour leader’s antisemitism. 

The clear implication from politicians and the establishment media is that any support for Palestinian rights, any demurral from Israel’s “unquestionable right” to commit war crimes, equates to antisemitism.

Europe’s hypocrisy

This double approach, of cheering on genocidal Israeli policies towards Gaza while stifling any dissent, or characterising it as antisemitism, is not confined to the UK.

Across Europe, from the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, to the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the Bulgarian parliament, official buildings have been lit up with the Israeli flag.

Europe’s top official, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, celebrated the Israeli flag smothering the EU parliament this week.

She has repeatedly stated that “Europe stands with Israel”, even as Israeli war crimes start to mount.

The Israeli air force boasted on Thursday it had dropped some 6,000 bombs on Gaza.

At the same time, human rights groups reported Israel was firing the incendiary chemical weapon white phosphorus into Gaza, a war crime when used in urban areas.

And Defence for Children International noted that more than 500 Palestinian children had been killed so far by Israeli bombs.

It was left to Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur on the occupied territories, to point out that Von Der Leyen was applying the principles of international law entirely inconsistently. 

Almost exactly a year ago, the European Commission president denounced Russia’s strikes on civilian infrastructure in Ukraine as war crimes.

“Cutting off men, women, children of water, electricity and heating with winter coming – these are acts of pure terror,” she wrote. “And we have to call it as such.”

Albanese noted Von der Leyen had said nothing equivalent about Israel’s even worse attacks on Palestinian infrastructure.

 

Sending in the heavies

Meanwhile, France has already started breaking up and banning demonstrations against the bombing of Gaza.

Its justice minister has echoed Braverman in suggesting solidarity with Palestinians risks offending Jewish communities and should be treated as “hate speech”.

Naturally, Washington is unwavering in its support for whatever Israel decides to do to Gaza, as secretary of state Anthony Blinken made clear during his visit this week. 

President Joe Biden has promised weapons and funding, and sent in the military equivalent of “the heavies” to make sure no one disturbs Israel as it carries out those war crimes.

An aircraft carrier has been dispatched to the region to ensure quiet from Israel’s neighbours as the ground invasion is launched. 

Even those officials whose chief role is to promote international law, such as Antonio Gutteres, secretary general of the UN, have started to move with the shifting ground.

Like most Western officials, he has emphasised Gaza’s “humanitarian needs” above the rules of war Israel is obliged to honour.

 

This is Israel’s success.

The language of international law that should apply to Gaza – of rules and norms Israel must obey – has given way to, at best, the principles of humanitarianism: acts of international charity to patch up the suffering of those whose rights are being systematically trampled on, and those whose lives are being obliterated.

Western officials are more than happy with the direction of travel.

Not just for Israel’s sake but for their own too. Because one day in the future, their own populations may be as much trouble to them as Palestinians in Gaza are to Israel right now. 

Supporting Israel’s right to defend itself is their downpayment.

Israeli Forces Shot Their Own Civilians, Kibbutz Survivor says


The Zionists don’t care about the Jews. They hate Jews. Hence the holocaust and now the second holocaust against Jews by the Zionists.

An Israeli woman who survived the Hamas assault on settlements near the Gaza boundary on 7 October says Israeli civilians were “undoubtedly” killed by their own security forces.

It happened when Israeli forces engaged in fierce gun battles with Palestinian fighters in Kibbutz Be’eri and fired indiscriminately at both the fighters and their Israeli prisoners.

“They eliminated everyone, including the hostages,” she told Israeli radio. “There was very, very heavy crossfire” and even tank shelling.

The woman, 44-year-old mother of three Yasmin Porat, said that prior to that, she and other civilians had been held by the Palestinians for several hours and treated “humanely.” She had fled the nearby “Nova” rave.

A recording of her interview, from the radio program Haboker Hazeh (“This Morning”) hosted by Aryeh Golan on state broadcaster Kan, has been circulating on social media.

The interview has been translated by The Electronic Intifada. You can listen to it with English subtitles in this video and a transcript is at the end of this article:

Notably, the interview is not included in the online version of Haboker Hazeh for 15 October, the episode in which it apparently aired.
It may well have been censored due to its explosive nature.

Porat, who is from Kabri, a settlement near the Lebanese border, undoubtedly experienced terrible things and saw many noncombatants killed. Her own partner, Tal Katz, is among the dead.

However, her account undermines Israel’s official story of deliberate, wanton murder by the Palestinian fighters.

Although it no longer appears on the Kan website, there can be little doubt about the recording’s authenticity.

At least one Hebrew-language account posted part of the interview on Twitter, now officially called X, and accused Kan of functioning as “media in the service of Hamas.”

Porat also gave her account to the Israeli newspaper Maariv.


This is the translation in English of the headlines(added by Gospa News)

Dramatic testimony from the Nature Party: “The terrorists told me – calm down, we won’t kill you”

Yasmin Porat, 44, a resident of Kibbutz Kabri in the north spent time with her partner Tal Katz, at a Nova party in the south, managed to escape the inferno, recalling: “They told us they wanted to take us to Gaza, and the next day they would return us.”
Alon Hachmon 17:17 09/10/2023 


However, the Maariv story, published on 9 October, makes no specific mention of civilians being killed by Israeli forces.

And in a half-hour interview with Israel’s Channel 12 on Thursday, Porat speaks of intense gunfire after Israeli forces arrived. Porat herself received a bullet in the thigh.

Treated “humanely”

Not only does Porat tell Kan that Israelis were killed in the heavy counterattack by Israeli security forces, but she says she and other captive civilians were well treated by the Palestinian fighters.

Porat had been attending the “Nova” rave when the Hamas assault began with missiles and motorized paragliders. She and her partner Tal Katz escaped by car to nearby Kibbutz Be’eri where many of the events she describes in her media interviews took place.

According to Porat speaking to Maariv, she and Katz initially sought refuge in the house of a couple called Adi and Hadas Dagan. After the Palestinian fighters found them they were all taken to another house, where eight people were already being held captive and one person was dead.

Porat said that the wife of the dead man “told us that when they [the Hamas fighters] tried to enter, the guy tried to prevent them from entering and grabbed the door. They shot at the door and he was killed. They did not execute them.”

“They did not abuse us. They treated us very humanely,” Porat explained to a surprised Golan in the Kan radio interview.

“By that I mean they guard us,” she said. “They give us something to drink here and there. When they see we are nervous they calm us down. It was very frightening but no one treated us violently. Luckily nothing happened to me like what I heard in the media.”

“They were very humane towards us,” Porat said in her Channel 12 interview. She recalled that one Palestinian fighter who spoke Hebrew, “told me, ‘Look at me well, were not going to kill you. We want to take you to Gaza. We are not going to kill you. So be calm, you’re not going to die.’ Thats what he told me, in those words.”

“I was calm because I knew nothing would happen to me,” she added.

“They told us that we would not die, that they wanted to take us to Gaza and that the next day they would return us to the border,” Porat told Maariv.

A Palestinian Holocaust

Successive Zionist Israeli leaders would not dare to commit all this genocidal Holocaust without the American unconditional political, economic, and military support.

Zionist Israel is perpetrating a Palestinian Holocaust under the sight and silence of the so-called humanitarian world, which once screamed “Holocaust … not again.”

Israel is flooding Gaza in a sea of Palestinian blood.

The Israeli air bombers are raining American-provided bombs on Gaza Palestinians.

The Israeli gunboats have joined Israeli bombers shelling Gaza shores. This Holocaust has been going on for the last 75 years with continuous Israeli massacres, one after the other.

Today, Tuesday, October 17, 2023, Israel committed another massacre, the ugliest ever massacre, the mother of all massacres, using American-supplied munitions, that sounded and behaved like the precision-guided smart JDAM (Joint Direct Attack Munition) bomb, Israel bombed and obliterated the Christian Baptist Children Hospital burning at least 500 infants and children, cutting off their heads, ripping their small bodies apart, and burning them beyond any recognition.

This is a well-documented Holocaust by pictures and videos, unlike Netanyahu’s flagrant lies about Israeli children being beheaded, and burned in what he claimed was a second Holocaust, lies that had been parroted by President Biden, many American politicians, some UN Council members, and other European leaders without any shred of evidence, pictures, or videos.

Burning the 500 Palestinian infants in a Christian hospital IS the real Holocaust, the ugliest massacre ever in a long series of Israeli massacres, around 200 ugly massacres, against Palestinians such as Deir Yassin, Al-Tantura, Safsaf, Safad, and Qana massacres just to mention a few.

These massacres express the Zionist genocidal characteristics.

The sad part about this massacre is that all the Western media and politicians describe this bombing as just an explosion.

Worse than that is the silly illogical Israeli accusation of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad faction of targeting the hospital, Palestinians targeting Palestinians, committing suicide!!! How could Israel know who was launching rockets if they had lost all their surveillance equipment in the first few minutes of this war?

Successive Zionist Israeli leaders would not dare to commit this genocidal Holocaust without the American unconditional political, economic, and military support. 

It has become a revealed fact, even to the casual standby, that the successive American Administrations are the real creator, main arms supplier, and protector of the genocidal Israeli Project, the New Middle East project bragged about since the Bush administration.

The US Secretary of State, Jew Antony Blinken’s active direction of these Israeli war crimes is a clear indication of this fact.

Biden’s speeches and coming visit to the Zionist Israeli leaders in unprecedented Presidential support of their genocidal war crimes confirms this fact.

The unconditional unending American flood of all kinds of devastating and even internationally banned weapons, 4 tons bombs, white phosphorous and cluster bombs, and deep earth penetrating bombs, to Israel to perpetrate another Nakba, this time a real Palestinian Holocaust, another ethnic cleansing, and mass population transfer to the Sinai Desert, strongly stress this fact.

The presidential decision to send two major aircraft carrier groups; Gerald Ford and Eisenhower, to the east Mediterranean, with the rumor that lesser carrier groups, the Carl Vinson and the Reagon groups, were being prepared to follow, including the orders of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Sunday to 2,000 troops to gear up for a potential “medical and logistical support …not intended to serve in a combat role” mission in Israel, and the news about sending the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit on the amphibious USS Bataan to perform special operation on the coasts of the Gaza Strip, not to mention all the American military bases and troops in the Gulf, mean that Biden seems to be gambling with the lives of American troops, and with the high possibility of initiating a devastating ever WWIII destroying the whole Middle Eastern region including all the American military bases in the Gulf.

Israelis are not ready to, unable to, and afraid to wage the ground operation they threatened so many times but kept postponing under the justification of bad weather when their “weatherproof” fighter planes kept bombing Gaza.

This huge, deployed American military power, larger than any deployed during WWII, was sent against the highest densely populated small area of 370 square km demonstrating the unconditional unending American flood of all kinds of weapons of mass destruction to Israel to perpetrate another Nakba, another ethnic cleansing, and mass population transfer to the Sinai Desert, a real Palestinian Holocaust.

The Israeli massacre at the Christian Baptist Children’s Hospital provoked hundreds of spontaneous popular pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel, and anti-American mass demonstrations all over the world without any exception.

Demonstrations took place in front of British, French, and American embassies, even in front of the White House. Israeli embassies in Egypt and Jordan were attacked and set on fire in Jordan.

These angry demonstrations continued through the day and late-night hours.

You would think that after the massacre of the children’s hospital, the globally popular decrying demonstration, and even after the mediocre criticism of some Western officials, Israel might lighten up their bombing a little bit, but the Israeli air raids continued even with higher savagery.

The Israeli fighter planes destroyed a bakery to intensify its mass starvation of civilians and bombed a UN school full of civilians taking refuge there.

Biden is on his way to visit Israel to show firm American support to Israel, to attend a quartet meeting in Jordan threatening and pressuring Jordanian king Abdullah, Egyptian Al-Sisi, and PA Abbas, finishing what Blinken failed to do, after which he would, probably, announce the beginning of Israeli (and American) ground. 

Biden’s flight trip was modified to land in Jordan instead of an Israeli airport for safety measures.

The large anti-American demonstrations in the capital Amman scared the three Arab leaders, who decided to cancel the meeting.

Biden’s plane now has to land in Israel. His plane landed in Italy where Biden will be moved to a military plane to carry him safely to Israeli Ben-Gorion airport.

To safeguard the safety of Zionist Biden Israel should take the precautionary measure of lighting its Gaza bombardment to avoid the launching of more retaliatory missiles that may cause Biden to rush to shelters similar to what had happened to Blinken.

Zionist Israel welcomes such an event and even may orchestrate it or commit a false-flag assassination of the old senile Biden, whose use for Israel has expired, in order to broadcast the event accusing Palestinian fighters and inciting an American military revenge that may launch WWIII.

Slouching Towards the Final Solution

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

– Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish

 • OCTOBER 14, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome to Sociopaths United

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Global Majority is Palestine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PSTD Israeli soldier: “I killed more than 40 people for you! I murdered!”

Video: “I killed for you, with these hands,” Israeli soldier tells lawmakers
Ali Abunimah Rights and Accountability 1 December 2015

“I killed for you, with these hands! You say, ‘Terrorists with blood on their hands?’ I killed more than 40 people for you! I murdered!”

This stark admission was made by Ido Gal Razon, a former Israeli soldier, seen in the video above speaking to a committee of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, on 11 November.

Razon wasn’t expressing remorse for the killings, but complaining that he has not been offered treatment for the severe psychiatric impact the butchery he committed in service of Israel has had on him.

“No one gives me therapy, and I complain! I shout,” he says. “I pee at night from post trauma. He comes to me and says: ‘Why did you kill me? Why did you kill me?’”

It’s not clear who is haunting Razon at night, but he could be referring to any of the people he says he killed.

Razon says he was injured while a member of the 51st battalion of the Israeli army’s Golani Brigade when he took part in Operation Clear as Wine – an attack on Palestinians in the central Gaza Strip on 20 December 2007.

Indiscriminate shelling

According to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), Israeli forces carried out a major assault on al-Musaddar village and the adjacent Maghazi refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip on that day.

The attack left eight Palestinian resistance fighters dead and injured 21 Palestinians, mostly civilians, including several children.

Amid indiscriminate shelling of the area, the Israelis destroyed at least 10 homes and razed dozens of acres of agricultural land.

Palestinian relatives mourn over the body of Jihad Jaber, 18, at the al-Aqsa hospital in the central Gaza Strip’s Maghazi refugee camp on 20 December 2007.

Ismael MohamadUPI Photo
The incursion began, according to Al Mezan Center For Human Rights, around noon, when an Israeli “special unit sneaked into middle Gaza area from the eastern border fence and headed to the west.”

The unit, of which Razon was presumably a member, “entered for one-and-a-half kilometers and reached the village of al-Musaddar in central Gaza.

Soldiers stormed six tall buildings and held their inhabitants [in] one room in each building.”

According to PCHR, 23 Palestinians were killed by Israeli attacks in Gaza that week, 10 of them in extrajudicial executions.

It was also the week that Palestinians were celebrating Eid al-Adha, the holiday marking the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca.

Such Israeli assaults, with high tolls of death, injury and destruction, were routine events in Gaza well before the even more massive assaults in December 2008, November 2012 and during the summer of 2014, which together claimed 4,000 lives.

“Kill and kill and kill”
There is no doubt from watching the video that Razon was traumatized by the violence he took part in as a member of an invading, occupying force.

But there’s also no doubt that the victims of Israel’s war crimes have it much worse.

Watching Razon angrily talk about his psychological trauma recalls the words of Arnon Soffer, the Israeli academic and government advisor who helped plan for Gaza’s isolation in the early 2000s.

Soffer infamously said in 2004 that to keep Palestinians subdued and caged in Gaza, and thus preserve Israel as a Zionist “Jewish state,” it would have to “kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.”

“The only thing that concerns me is how to ensure that the boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings,” Soffer added.

Ido Gal Razon is living proof that Zionism not only destroys Palestinians, but also those who are supposed to be its beneficiaries.

Hamas Attack on Israel Deals Blow to Saudi Prince’s Grand Vision

In a country where the government tightly controls social media posts and people have been arrested for being too outspoken about certain issues, many Saudis took to the internet to praise Hamas’s actions and denounce Israel.

Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel — which has left at least 1,500 people dead on both sides — effectively rules out any agreement between Israel and the Palestinian authorities that would help achieve Saudi Arabia’s objectives. That means any normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia is probably on hold for the foreseeable future.

Hamas’s attack “stalls Saudi Arabia’s stabilization and development plans” for the region, said Lina Khatib, director of SOAS University of London’s Middle East Institute.

That might actually be a lesser worry for MBS than how events have been playing out among the Saudi population.

In a country where the government tightly controls social media posts and people have been arrested for being too outspoken about certain issues, many Saudis took to the internet to praise Hamas’s actions and denounce Israel.

Othman Al-Khuwaiter, a Saudi energy sector expert and columnist based in the eastern Saudi city of Dhahran, reveled in what he characterized as the humiliation of Israelis.

“God willing, this will be seared in their memories forever,” Al-Khuwaiter wrote. “They are under siege just when they thought they were masters in full control.”

At the start of the attack over the weekend, Saad Al-Bazei, a professor of English at King Saud University in Riyadh, hailed “the unprecedented and glorious achievements of the Palestinian resistance deep within Israel.”

Social media accounts of individuals that normally post every utterance by MBS and praise his every move were quick to hit back.

‘Grand Project’

“This is an attack on Saudi Arabia’s grand project for the Middle East and we must be in solidarity with the state of Israel,” Badr Al-Saadoun, a Riyadh-based lawyer, wrote on social-media site X.

The Saudi Foreign Ministry called for an “immediate end to escalation by both sides” but added that “the exploding situation” was a result of Israel’s “occupation and deprivation of the Palestinian people of their legitimate rights and the systematic provocations against their sanctities.”

The statement was widely shared by Saudis defending Hamas’s actions.

Mark Dubowitz, chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based think tank that has been involved for years in efforts to forge Saudi-Israeli normalization, said the statement angered many of Israel’s allies in the U.S. and prompted calls to Saudi officials in Riyadh and Reema bint Bandar, the Saudi ambassador in the U.S.

A spokesperson for the embassy said he couldn’t immediately comment.

As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed massive retaliation for Hamas’s actions, it would be unthinkable for MBS to deliver an Israel normalization deal to his people during carnage in Palestinian territories, Dubowitz said.

“This is very much what” Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei “intended,” he said.

Kadyrov Supports Palestine, Offers to Send Forces

October 10, 2023

Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of Chechnya, has extended support to Palestine in a video message released.

In the message, Kadyrov expressed solidarity with Palestine and urged leaders of Muslim nations to form a coalition while appealing to their Western allies to avoid civilian casualties.

Kadyrov also offered to deploy Chechen units as peacekeepers to help “restore order”.

Gaza-based Hamas Palestinian resistance movement launched on Saturday a surprise operation in which its fighters infiltrated and controlled several Israeli settlements in Gaza envelope and fired thousands of rockets at Al-Quds and several Israeli cities.

The current reports show that at least 900 Israelis have died while another 2,400 have been injured in the ongoing Al-Aqsa flood operation.

What Would Happen If Israel and Saudi Arabia Established Official Relations?

First we have to remember that Saudi Arabia was created by the West. They do not lead the Arabs or the Muslims.

The United States is putting pressure on Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel. But the outcome of such a deal may not be as advertised.

1. NORMALIZATION WOULD NOT PROMOTE PEACE OR STABILITY IN THE MIDDLE EAST.

First, normalization would not produce peace.

Proponents of a pattern of Israeli-Gulf normalization argue it will bring regional peace to the “world’s least peaceful region.”

However, none of the recent normalization treaties, including a potential Saudi-Israeli one, would address the “fundamental weaknesses” that cause violence and instability in the region, including in Israel, the Palestinian territories, and Saudi Arabia.

Over the past decade, the majority of Arab countries (including Saudi Arabia) have witnessed protests against oppressive and corrupt governance.

The same has been true in Israel and Palestine.

Many of these protests have been followed by state violence, and in some cases civil wars and foreign interventions, but the deep-seated inequities that have driven the protests have never been addressed, with the relative exception of Tunisia.

Arab regimes need U.S. and Israeli support to contain, instead of end, instability across the region.

2. NORMALIZATION WOULD NOT ALWAYS ADVANCE U.S. INTERESTS IN THE MIDDLE EAST.

Second, a deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia may not work entirely in the United States’ favor, because both countries want Washington to intervene beyond its remit.

Israel and Saudi Arabia’s interests in the region are not identical to those of the United States; in fact, Israeli and Saudi interests overlap in ways that U.S. interests do not.

Both have an interest in keeping the United States an active regional military hegemon, and as a result, they want to avoid, or at least hedge against, a U.S. military drawdown in the Middle East.

Saudi Arabia and Israel want to see the United States use its military might to defeat, not just contain, the threat from Iran.

They both actively push for an all-encompassing and hard-to-get U.S.-Iran deal that conflates the U.S. priorities of halting Iran’s nuclear program and attacks on U.S. interests with countering Iran’s broader geopolitical expansion across the region.

Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United States all want Washington to remain actively invested in the fight against terrorism in the Middle East.

However, Israel’s cyber and intelligence cooperation with Saudi Arabia means that the definition of terrorism is expanded to encompass nonviolent political opponents of the Saudi regime, who often also oppose normalization with Israel.

This expansion of the war on terrorism complicates the U.S. policy of reallocating resources to focus on “inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism,” and other long-neglected foreign policy priorities.

Meanwhile, both Israel and Saudi Arabia are expanding their relations with U.S. strategic competitors like Russia and China.

So far, this cooperation is limited and overwhelmingly economic. However, such collaboration is not always transparent and has the potential to spill over into larger intelligence and military cooperation.

By encouraging regional partners to normalize relations, Washington hopes to redistribute its defense burden among a more integrated defense network of regional allies.

But neither Israel nor Saudi Arabia, even with support from the United Arab Emirates, can lead the kind of regional security framework that the United States has in mind.

In addition to deeply rooted intraregional mistrust and competition, most countries disagree with the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Israel on how to deal with Iran.

3. NORMALIZATION WOULD NOT BOOST MODERATION OR LIBERALIZATION WITHIN SAUDI ARABIA.

Third, there is no credible proof that Saudi citizens are on board.

A new Saudi narrative portrays normalization with Israel as part of a new, moderate Saudi Arabia that is taking shape.

Normalization now would fit into Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s approach of “shock therapy” to signal to his domestic opponents and to the West that he will pursue whatever he sees as modernizing the country.

However, Saudi social actors have not demanded a relationship with Israel in the same way they have demanded other recent reforms, such as the empowerment of women or even the fight against corruption.

What is more, Palestine is not just a subject of distant high politics.

Palestine is also a subject of public discussions, and previously mobilization, in schools, media circles, nongovernmental organizations, public lecture halls, and mosques, including the Two Holy Mosques.

Normalization à la Trump would, in the public view, take the “Saudi Arabia of tomorrow” too far—similar to when Nicki Minaj was invited to perform in the Land of the Two Holy Mosques.

Both events are alien, and even disturbing, to the overwhelming majority’s value system.

Such actions that run against the tide of popular support discredit other promising and much-needed socioeconomic and religious developments in the kingdom.

They feed into the extremist narrative that the crown prince’s reforms are politically motivated against Islam.

Rushing any normalization with Israel politicizes the absolutely indispensable new Saudi discourse on religious tolerance.

What is more, Saudi citizens can spot the media’s backpedaling and official clerics’ efforts to legitimize a public relationship with Israel amid a crackdown on credible pro-Palestinian voices.

Nor is the public blind to contradictions in the Saudi narrative itself. Until recently, Saudi media figures and royal family members were still lambasting Saudi Arabia’s foes, Turkey and Qatar, for their own relationships with Israel.

Similarly, not all voices that denounce Palestinian leaders and put them in the same anti-Saudi camp as Iran, Turkey, and Qatar accept the narrative that Israel is the enemy of my enemy and hence my friend.

Relations with Israel will always remain hostage to the Saudi monarchy’s calculations of the necessities of regime survival.

In the event of normalization, every time the Israeli army uses excessive force or political change takes place in Palestine, public sympathy in Saudi Arabia for the Palestinian cause might force the Saudi regime to react accordingly, even if only symbolically.

4. PEACE WILL NOT BE WARM.

Fourth, normalization will not mean the two nations become friends.

A wave of Saudi writersclerics, and pro-government social media accounts argue that Israel doesn’t threaten Gulf countries.

To the contrary, Palestinians, whom some call “ungrateful Arabs of the North,” have been accused of blackmailing Saudi Arabia and preventing it from putting its national interests first.

This narrative comes amid a state-sponsored campaign on Saudi national identity that puts Saudi identity before Arab or even Islamic identity.

It also argues that young Saudis, or Western-influenced, educated, and open-minded “new Saudis,” want relations with Israel.

However, it is not clear that this identity discourse is popular across Saudi society.

There has been pushback against the entirety of this hypernationalist argument—an argument that has taken over the Saudi social media landscape for the past three years.

It is worth noting that Saudi authorities’ low tolerance for any kind of dissent casts doubts on any assessment of Saudi public opinion, including the views of young people.

This limitation notwithstanding, even recent polls from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and Zogby Research Services confirm that a relationship with Israel now is not popular among Saudi citizens in general.

Saudi authorities will have to repress any mobilization to oppose normalization across societal sectors, generations, and ideological groups.

Further, Israel’s cyber and intelligence cooperation with the Saudi regime gives Saudi citizens a direct political stake in opposing closer relations with Israel beyond sympathy for the Palestinians—because such cooperation is already enhancing Riyadh’s abilities to monitor and police its own citizens.

It is no coincidence that official clerics’ new narrative on normalization is systematically linked to a reminder to Saudi citizens that they have a religious duty to leave politics to the ruler to whom they owe absolute obedience.

Perhaps the Saudi government’s existing control over the free flow of information leads it to monitor people-to-people and people-to-government relations with foreign countries—making organic normalization impossible.

5. NORMALIZATION WILL NOT PAPER OVER ALL OF SAUDI ARABIA’S TROUBLES IN WASHINGTON.

Fifth, there is a belief in Riyadh that good relations with Israel will repair the recent damage to the U.S.-Saudi relationship.

Israel has historically been a major source of the U.S. Congress’s and public’s opposition to deeper relations with Saudi Arabia, despite the kingdom’s significant leverage in policy circles.

However, this belief stems partly from a current misperception that Riyadh’s problems in Washington are the result of the Democrats’ bias against the country.

This belief underestimates the complexity of the U.S.-Saudi relationship, in addition to contentious issues that go beyond matters on the bilateral diplomatic agenda and that cut across U.S. domestic as well as foreign policy debates.

Those include, for example, investing in domestic rather than foreign bases of U.S. power, restoring the United States’ global leadership while reconfiguring the use of the military, and better balancing the United States’ liberal democratic values with its overseas interests.

All those issues will have an impact on the U.S. relationships with both Saudi Arabia and Israel.

6. NORMALIZATION WILL NOT NECESSARILY HELP MATTERS FOR SAUDI DOMESTIC POLITICS.

Sixth, the Saudi leadership may want more than just the traditional “high price”—the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state in exchange for normalization—that the pro-Palestinian camps in Riyadh are discussing. The young Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, could use U.S. support against the many enemies he made on his way to the top, not only in Saudi Arabia but also in the United States.

Such support has a historically proven efficiency in the Gulf. In 1995, Washington’s support of the new and contested Qatari emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, was “crucial” for securing his power against domestic and regional foes. Sheikh Hamad built upon this support by implementing an agenda of liberalization and enhanced relations with Israel.

While not impossible, many conditions would have to be met in order to replicate this scenario. First, Trump, not Democratic nominee Joe Biden, would have to win the upcoming elections.

Second, he would need to keep his promise to support the Saudi leadership against domestic foes despite expert warnings not to meddle in Saudi domestic affairs, his own aversion to the Middle East’s turmoil, and his reductionist perception of the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia as a whole.

Third, the new Saudi leadership would need this support to last, including under any future Democratic administration.

LOOKING AHEAD

It is understandable that the United States and Israel want to formalize Saudis’ recognition of Israelis’ “right to have their own land.”

After all, in the words of Trump, “they’re big.

Because of their religious monuments, you know, they have real power.”

However, the three countries’ current policies risk depriving Saudi Arabia of the exceptional leverage over the Islamic world that comes with such status.

Saudi Arabia’s regional power doesn’t only stem from its economy.

Most importantly, it stems from the transnational acceptance of its influence and its ability to set trends beyond its borders.

The kingdom has spent a lot of money sustaining this transnational base.

When Riyadh’s policies appeal to popular beliefs, its soft power is doubled and its ability to influence other governments goes beyond its physical capacity to coerce them.

It is not in the interests of Washington, Tel Aviv, or Riyadh to push Saudi Arabia toward policies that would further challenge this kind of Islamic and pan-Arab leadership as well as domestic legitimacy.

Not only do such policies risk ceding the kingdom’s exceptional universal outreach to more hostile state and nonstate actors.

They would also waste Saudi Arabia’s ability to lead other Arab- and Muslim-majority states to normalize relations with Israel—when the time for a just, negotiated peace with the Palestinians does come.

Waiving US visas for Israelis would be a mistake

This is the occupation

The US should not give up protecting its own citizens just to present another political gift to the Israeli government.

14 Jun 2023

My American-Palestinian cousins, the Awad family, have a routine for whenever they come to visit us in Jerusalem.

They try to avoid flying into Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv because if the Israelis refuse them entry – as happens to many Americans because of their national origin, religion, or public criticism of Israel – they would have to fly back all the way to the US.

Instead, they usually enter Palestine from Jordan through the King Hussein Bridge Border Crossing.

As an occupying power, Israel still operates the Palestinian side of this crossing.

So when entering the occupied West Bank through that crossing, the Awads still face the Israeli discriminatory practices, but at least if they get denied, it would mean just a return to Jordan.

My cousins also choose to travel via Jordan because they can leave their phones with relatives in Amman and not have to hand them over to the Israelis at the border.

Electronics get searched for – among other things – any criticism of Israel or support for the boycott movement, which immediately results in refusal of entry.

The Awads always bring an extra book or two to read and a spare deck of cards.

Once they arrive at the Israeli passport control and flash their US passport, they are almost always asked to wait a long time.

So they take out the books and the cards and enjoy their time until a random Israeli security officer decides whether they can enter their homeland or not.

Once the Awads cross the border, they know they are still not safe.

Discrimination against American citizens continues inside Palestine, where the Israeli occupation runs a vast network of checkpoints.

They know, for example, that as Americans visiting Palestinian family members or friends, they may not be allowed to drive across a checkpoint together in the same car, as some of them may be ordered to disembark and not allowed to proceed.

They also know they are lucky not to have Palestinian documents.

If Americans who hold Palestinian IDs attempt to go to occupied Jerusalem to visit the Al-Aqsa Mosque or the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, they are stopped at one of the many checkpoints along the way and turned away.

These Americans also do not have the option to fly into Tel Aviv, as Palestinian ID holders are not allowed to use it.

There are myriad ways in which Americans can be denied entry or restricted in their travel while in occupied Palestine.

And they don’t have to be of Palestinian descent to face such mistreatment at the hands of the Israeli authorities.

Because of all these restrictions, when the Awads do make it to Jerusalem to visit us, it is a special joy for us because we know what they have had to go through to reach us.

I and my children, who are American citizens, know all too well Israel’s discriminatory policies.

Meanwhile, illegal Israeli settlers – regardless of whether they are American or not – are allowed to live on occupied land in Palestine, in violation of international law. And, of course, they are free to go wherever they want in occupied Palestine.

Despite Israel’s egregious record in discriminating against Americans, the Biden administration is about to admit it into the US Visa Waiver Program, which would allow Israelis to travel to the US without applying for a visa at a US embassy or consulate.

The visa waiver programme is a privilege reserved only for countries meeting federal statutory requirements including one known as “reciprocity”.

Reciprocity means that a US national should be treated the same way an Israeli national is treated when travelling to the US.

How Israel can possibly meet the reciprocity requirement when the US Department of State has long advised American travellers that they can expect to be discriminated against when travelling to Israel is hard to understand.

However, the current US ambassador to Israel Tom Nides, who is leaving his post in August, seems eager to gift Israel admission into the Visa Waiver Program.

He is set to oversee a one-month “trial period” starting July 1 during which Israeli authorities are supposed to allow Palestinian Americans to enter Israel and allow them to use the Tel Aviv airport.

How compliance during this one month will ensure that Israel will stop its discrimination against all Americans is unclear.

The Israeli government can simply restrain the border authorities for 30 days, pretend that they are changing their ways and once the visa waiver is granted, resume its odious policies.

The Israelis are well aware that the US government would rarely take away a benefit it has given to Israel because of the political costs it may incur.

So, the return of discrimination against American citizens at border crossings controlled by Israel is unlikely to result in its suspension from the Visa Waiver Program.

Israel should not be given special treatment and granted an exception from full compliance with federal law.

The US ambassador to Israel should not have the authority to negotiate the rights of American citizens away with such ease.

It would not only allow Israel to solidify its discriminatory practices but may also encourage others to start mistreating Americans in the same way.

If the US government admits Israel to the Visa Waiver Program without its explicit formal agreement to end all discriminatory practices against all Americans (including Palestinians, Muslims, Arabs and defenders of the Palestinian cause), it would put its stamp of approval on the extension of Israeli apartheid-like policies onto American citizens.

Israel would never accept that its citizens be treated with anything less than equal dignity and neither should the United States.

Israel-Saudi peace can end all hope for Palestinians

Netanyahu is unwilling and unable to give Saudis and Americans what they say they want – “Palestinian statehood” – but in reality, both are willing to settle for much less.

Israel and Saudi Arabia have quietly been making peace for the past several years.

It began with intelligence sharing in response to the Iranian threat and has expanded to commerce and trade.

Neither country appears in a big hurry to accelerate the process despite optimistic talk in Israel. One thing holding things back is what it means for the Palestinians and the Americans.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says normalization would “effectively end the Arab-Israeli conflict.”

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, says not until the Palestinians get their own state with east Jerusalem as the capital.

At least that’s what he says. To which Bibi emphatically says, “No, never.”

Many in Israel and elsewhere are confident that the Saudis aren’t really serious about Palestinian statehood and are unwilling to sacrifice their own interests for it.

Like so many of the other moderate Arab leaders who are making peace with Israel, they’ve grown weary of the Palestinians and their inflexible, maximalist demands.

Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen told a Saudi newspaper, “The Palestinian issue will not be an obstacle to peace with Saudi Arabia,” reported i24News. What would the Palestinians get? His government will offer to “improve the Palestinian economy.”

 PRIME MINISTER Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman in separate photographs: Israeli-Saudi peace is a good thing only when it also includes Israeli-Palestinian peace, says the writer. (credit: Sputnik/Kremlin/Ronen Zvulun/Reuters)
PRIME MINISTER Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman in separate photographs: Israeli-Saudi peace is a good thing only when it also includes Israeli-Palestinian peace, says the writer. (credit: Sputnik/Kremlin/Ronen Zvulun/Reuters)

Israel won’t give the Saudis, US Palestinian statehood, but no one will push

Netanyahu is unwilling and unable to give Saudis and Americans what they say they want – Palestinian statehood – but in reality, both are willing to settle for much less (no one is seriously consulting the Palestinians).

The prime minister can expect to pay a much lower price for normalization, including – probably – a promise not to annex the West Bank (easy, since he already made that deal with the United Arab Emirates), some limitation on settlements, greater economic assistance and mobility for the Palestinians, and some semblance of peace talks.

Both Netanyahu and MBS also have an American problem.

They need the United States to broker the deal – and pay for it – but they don’t want President Joe Biden to get the credit because they feel he has dissed them.

Neither can get a White House invitation, though Biden did say he’d see Netanyahu in the US later this year but avoided saying where.

Biden has made Israeli-Saudi normalization a high foreign-policy priority for both political and policy reasons.

He’d like to have the bragging rights for 2024, especially among friends of Israel who think he’s been too tough (he hasn’t) on Netanyahu, especially his attempts to end the country’s independent judiciary.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and other top officials have been repeatedly meeting with Israeli, Saudi, Palestinian and other regional officials in an effort to broker a deal.

Biden’s top priority is reversing the kingdom’s growing coziness with China, Russia and Iran, all anxious to fill the big power vacuum left by America’s pivot to Asia.

The Saudis know this and are asking a high price, which Bibi will gladly let Uncle Sugar pay.

It’s an old custom. When Netanyahu made peace with the UAE, he reportedly promised to help them get F-35s and other American benefits.

I personally witnessed a top Foreign Ministry official ask the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to help get Washington to deliver on a promise that Israeli diplomats had made to an African dictator.

And US taxpayers have spent billions underwriting Egypt’s peace with Israel.

No price is too high when spending other people’s money, namely American dollars.

THE SAUDIS are demanding a NATO-type security treaty, complete with Article V mutual-defense guarantees.

That’s what it got when Saddam Hussein was at the doorstep in 1990 but now they want it in writing.

Plus, they want access to the same kind of weapons and technology Israel gets.

That kind of deal is important to the Saudis because they know something too many Americans ignore: oil wells are not bottomless.

And they want the US to build a civilian nuclear-energy program. And Biden doesn’t want them turning to Russia or China for that help.

The oil-gorged kingdom also has abundant uranium.

They will want to enrich it themselves, something Washington currently objects to.

Any deal must require close US monitoring to make certain enrichment is kept far below weapons grade.

The Biden administration and many on both sides of the aisle in Congress have a high level of distrust toward MBS and hold him responsible for the savage murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

They also recall Saudi vows that if Iran gets the bomb they’ll want one, too.

Specifically, a defense treaty would require two-thirds Senate approval, which is highly unlikely given widespread views of the homicidal prince and the kingdom for their abysmal human-rights record, for their unreliability and for keeping gas prices high at the pumps.

Netanyahu, with his diminished standing, would not be an effective lobbyist for the Saudi cause.

Both Netanyahu and MBS are said to be concerned that if the next president is a Republican, that person might be averse to delivering on Biden’s commitments.

There’s also a Saudi succession issue. MBS is the de facto ruler because his ailing father, King Salman, 87, reportedly has Alzheimer’s and succession could be tumultuous since the ruthless heir has made many enemies in his brutal climb to the top.

The Palestinians are the big losers. Few believe MBS is sincere about demanding recognition of Palestinian statehood any more than the signers of the Abraham Accords were.

When Bibi was asked by Bloomberg News what was being said about the Palestinians in his discussions with the Saudis and other Arab leaders, he replied, “A lot less than you think.”

The Palestinian Authority is weak, corrupt and ineffective.

Its leader, Mahmoud Abbas is 87, in poor health, in the 18th year of a four-year term and refusing to pick a successor.

His maximalist demands on Israel have led many to believe he is more interested in victimhood than statehood.

There is a price for being left out. Once the Saudis make peace with Israel, Palestinians will have lost their remaining leverage.

Anger and frustration will only grow as they feel ignored and neglected by both Israel and their Arab brethren.

Israelis will be the most convenient targets and the result could be greater violence.

An unintended consequence would be to validate the extremists on both sides of the conflict, Hamas and Iranian proxy terrorists, and hardliners in the Netanyahu government who will press to stiffen their repression and opposition to any concessions to improve quality of life in the West Bank.

Don’t expect to see an Israeli flag flying over an embassy in Riyadh any time soon, but the intelligence and security cooperation will continue to grow and there will be more and more Israeli and Saudi businesspeople traveling between the two countries, and then the ultimate sign of acceptance – tourists.

Peace with Saudi Arabia may end the Arab-Israeli conflict, as Netanyahu has said, and if he has his way it will also end hopes for Palestinian statehood.

Saudi Arabia does not care about Palestine or Jerusalem; it cares about Israel

Saudi Arabia is no friend of the Palestinians, despite recent claims by Riyadh’s foreign minister that an independent state of Palestine is essential for normalization to take place. Riyadh has been against the legitimate Palestinian resistance for more than two decades.

I’m going to add a few more things. #1. A 2 state solution is impossible anyway. Israel is literally in the way. It’s simply a lie. #2. The Palestinians do NOT owe half of their country to the foreign Zionists. They own NOTHING, not one square inch of Palestine. #3. The Arab world does not consider the Saudis their Islamic leader. Wahhabism belongs to the Saudis alone. The former Israelis can stay in Palestine as Palestine citizens. No more Israeli rulers.

September 21, 2023

The normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israeli is in the news again, in what has become a will they-won’t they situation.

Israel is eager to have formal ties with Saudi Arabia as it is the richest Arab country in the Middle East and has the weight and influence that makes it the main player in regional politics.

Saudi Arabia already has relations with Israel, of course, and Israeli companies operate in the Kingdom, including those responsible for security during the Hajj period in Makkah.

However, it is keen to have formal relations with the apartheid state in order to get US arms supplies and have its own uranium enrichment facility.

For the US, having a formal and smooth relationship between its two major allies in the Middle East will be good for its own foreign policy.

Washington’s interests in the region will be protected and it will be able to implement its policies with relative ease.

The losers in all of this are the Palestinians.

Saudi Arabia is no friend of the Palestinians, despite recent claims by Riyadh’s foreign minister that an independent state of Palestine is essential for normalization to take place.

Riyadh has been against the legitimate Palestinian resistance for more than two decades.

Moreover, it has imposed severe restrictions on charities operating in the occupied Palestinian territories and the transfer of donations from Saudi citizens for the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Anyone showing any kind of support for the Palestinian cause can expect to be imprisoned or worse

During the 17-year-old crippling Israeli siege imposed on the Gaza Strip, Saudi Arabia has basically abandoned the Palestinians living there.

Saudi Imams are banned from praying for the Palestinians or mentioning them in their supplications in mosques across the Kingdom, especially in Makkah and Madinah.

Anyone showing any kind of support for the Palestinian cause can expect to be imprisoned or worse.

I have heard Muslim pilgrims complaining of being suppressed by security officers in the Grand Mosque in Makkah when they prayed for the Palestinians, Palestine and Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Appeals to the Almighty to rid Palestine and Al-Aqsa of the Zionists are simply not allowed by the Saudi regime.

With the normalization of ties between Saudi Arabia and Israel, the Palestinians will lose a fair-weather “friend” who used to be shy about dealing with the Israelis.

This shyness pushed Riyadh to throw some crumbs to the Palestinians out of shame and embarrassment.

Now it is all out in the open; Saud Arabia even has someone in Riyadh declaring that he is the “chief rabbi” of the Kingdom.

The PA… exists solely to protect Israel and the Israeli occupation

What about Saudi support for the Palestinian Authority, you may ask?

The PA is not working for the Palestinians; it exists solely to protect Israel and the Israeli occupation.

PA security officers are never there to protect Palestinians when they are attacked and abused by illegal Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank.

Palestinians engaged in legitimate — under international law — resistance against the occupation are tracked down, tortured and imprisoned by the PA.

When the Israeli occupation forces killed five Palestinians the night before last in Jenin, the PA was busy detaining Palestinians in Nablus and other West Bank cities.

OPINION: How the PA contributes to Palestine’s obliteration

Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister Prince Faisal Bin Farhan told US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in June that the regional normalization push with Israel has “limited benefits” without Palestinians being given a state of their own.

“We believe that normalization is in the interest of the region, that it would bring significant benefits to all,” he said.

As long as Saudi Arabia believes that benefits come from the Zionist entity killing your Palestinian brothers, occupying their land, demolishing their homes and desecrating religious sites, then you clearly do not care about them.

“Without finding a pathway to peace for the Palestinian people, without addressing that challenge, any normalization will have limited benefits,” added the minister.

What peace does Saudi Arabia want?

The 2002 Arab Peace Initiative proposed by the Saudi regime called for two states in Palestine, one for Jews in the lands occupied in 1948 and the other for the Palestinians in the land occupied in 1967, in return for normalized relations.

The Saudis were thus willing to abandon more than two-thirds of historic Palestine and essentially condone the ethnic cleansing of the land from pre-1948 to today; the Nakba is ongoing.

Have the Saudis not yet understood that Israel has never, ever, made any concessions on territorial or other issues?

And that Zionism demands the creation of Greater Israel?

The usurper state is expanding constantly, which is why Israel has never declared where its borders are.

They will be wherever Israel can push them to be.

All of this has happened even while the so-called “peace process” was going on; even as “normalization” and the “Abraham Accords” have been signed.

The Saudi foreign minister has repeatedly mentioned Saudi conditions for normalization, including the creation of a Palestinian state in the land occupied by Israel since 1967 alongside a Jewish state.

“There is no way to resolve the conflict other than by ensuring the establishment of an independent Palestinian state,” he said as recently as Monday.

Israeli Channel 12 TV has reported senior Saudi officials as saying that the Kingdom will not sign a “free” normalization deal as the UAE and Bahrain did.

This is all a smokescreen.

I am certain that the Saudis do not care about the Palestinians.

This is evident from the way that the regime keeps praising the Israelis and demonizing the Palestinians, to the extent that speaking about supporting the Palestinian resistance against the Israeli occupation has become a crime, while showing support for the Israeli occupation has become the norm.

Saudi media host Israelis, but not Palestinians who are against the Israeli occupation.

On Wednesday, Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman told Fox News that, “every day we get closer” to normalizing ties with Israel.

“We don’t look at Israel as an enemy, we look to them as a potential ally with many interests that we can pursue together,” the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia told The Atlantic last year.

An announcement about a normalization deal with Israel that disregards legitimate Palestinian rights is just a matter of time.

I expect it to be made very soon, because the Kingdom does not care about Palestine or Jerusalem; it cares about Israel.

MBS Does Not Care About the Palestinians

The Saudi diplomatic gesture toward the Palestinians appears to have been the result of the Biden administration’s insistence. MBS further said that Palestine is not an issue of priority for Saudia Arabia.

Although it remains uncertain whether the Saudi step was coordinated with the Biden administration, the Benjamin Netanyahu government, or the Palestinian Authority, Riyadh has clearly opted to take a risky and quite ambitious diplomatic path considering the potential fallout at home and abroad.

The kingdom was likely hoping that the element of surprise would bring about certain political advantages in its fitful negotiations with the United States—the principal target of its serious conditions and demands to accept the grand bargain of normalization with Israel.

After all, the Saudi diplomatic gesture toward the Palestinians appears to have been, according to well-informed sources in Washington, the result of the Biden administration’s insistence more than any Saudi political factor, whether domestic, regional, or international in nature.

Saudi Arabia cannot simply normalize relations with Israel without offering a fig leaf like elevating its relations with the State of Palestine to the ambassadorial level.****

“In the last several decades the Palestinian leadership has missed one opportunity after the other and rejected all the peace proposals it was given.

It is about time the Palestinians take the proposals and agree to come to the negotiations table or shut up and stop complaining”

Muhammad bin Salman

Saudia crown Prince further said that they had other important issues to deal with.

Especially to curb Iranian influence on the Middle East.

Saudi’s always try to maintain peace in the middle east, during the 1967 Arab-Israel war, Saudia super headed a proposal called The Arab Peace Initiative, which resulted for the end of Arab-Israel conflict.

Fascist Occupiers halts exit of goods from Gaza Palestine

7 September 2023

Israel has halted the transfer of commercial goods from Gaza in what human rights groups and trade unions say is an act of collective punishment after the alleged discovery of explosive material in a shipment destined for the West Bank on Monday.

In a letter sent to Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant on Wednesday, the Israeli human rights group Gisha said that the ban on the exit of goods has “disastrous implications for Gaza’s population.”

The group, which advocates for Palestinian freedom of movement, said that the ban punishes “thousands of civilians, including traders and workers in the agriculture sector and other fields,” over “a single incident that has nothing to do with them.”

Gisha pointed to longstanding abuse of Israel’s control over the movement of goods to and from Gaza, causing “severe, ongoing harm to the Palestinian economy.”

Most of Gaza’s products traded outside of the territory, including those transferred to the West Bank, are exited via the Israeli-controlled Karem Abu Salem checkpoint, known in Hebrew as Kerem Shalom.

As part of its ongoing blockade on Gaza, imposed after Hamas took control over the territory in 2007, Israel banned the exit of goods until 2014. It gradually reinstated the transfer of products to a limited degree since then, but at a fraction of what was allowed before the imposition of the blockade.

The blockade was an intensification of Israeli restrictions in already place since the early 1990s. Its goal – thus far unsuccessful – is to immiserate Gaza’s population so it will disavow the armed resistance against Israeli occupation and colonization.

Livelihoods endangered

Goods transferred from Gaza during July this year were split nearly equally between Israel and the West Bank.

Produce accounted for most of the exited goods, followed by textiles and fish.

Additionally, scrap metal and used batteries are exported to Egypt.

The number of truckloads of outgoing goods via Karem Abu Salem, even before Tuesday’s ban, was more than 70 percent below the monthly pre-blockade average, according to the UN monitoring group OCHA.

The agriculture ministry in Gaza estimates that the new ban on the transfer of goods outside the territory will cost the local agriculture and fishing sectors around $260,000 per day.

Israel’s blockade on Gaza has had profound harm both socially and economically. The unemployment rate was 46 percent in the second quarter of 2023, according to Al Mezan, a human rights group in Gaza.

The new ban endangers the livelihood of 60,000 workers in the agricultural and fishing sectors and 9,000 textile workers, according to Gaza’s agriculture ministry.

The worsened restrictions will cause Gaza’s already fragile economy to deteriorate even further “and lead to the destruction of income-generating businesses,” Al Mezan said.

In 2020, the UN trade organization UNCTAD conservatively estimated that Israel’s blockade and repeated military offensives in Gaza have cost the economy in the territory as much as $17 billion.

The General Federation of Palestinian Industries in Gaza said that the ban on the transfer of goods from Gaza was an act of collective punishment.

Waddah Bseiso, a spokesperson for the federation, called for the reopening of Karem Abu Salem “and the removal of sanctions that worsen the plight of the population and hinder the chances for economic development, peace and stability in the Gaza Strip.”

Israel continues to allow the import of goods into Gaza, albeit with a ban on 61 items that it deems as “dual-use” with both civilian and military applications.

Israel fears Gazafication of West Bank

Israel’s accusation that it found explosive material hidden in a shipment bound for the West Bank follows a resurgence in armed resistance in the territory.

In July, Israel launched a two-day offensive in Jenin, a stronghold of armed resistance in the northern West Bank, in order to weaken the capacity of militant groups in the West Bank. It was the largest Israeli military operation in the West Bank in around two decades.

In June, Palestinian fighters in Jenin incapacitated a 10-ton Panther armored vehicle with an improvised explosive device and hit an Apache attack helicopter that was facilitating the evacuation of ambushed troops during what the military was expecting to be a routine raid.

The tactics employed against Israel during that and other recent raids were reminiscent of those of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, representing an advancement in the sophistication of the armed resistance in the West Bank.

The pro-Israel think tank Middle East Media Research Institute said last month that armed groups in the West Bank are exploiting the weakness of the Palestinian Authority in the north of the territory to develop new military infrastructure.

Palestinian fighters in the West Bank are seeking to make the maintenance of settlements and military deployment in the territory too costly for Israel, just as the armed resistance forced Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Gallant blamed Iran for the shooting deaths of three Israelis in the West Bank last month.

“We are in the midst of a terrorist onslaught that is being encouraged, directed and financed by Iran and its proxies,” Netanyahu said on Monday, implying that Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza were responsible.

Gallant said “we will take several actions that will restore security to the citizens of Israel,” adding that “all options are on the table.”

In late August, Saleh al-Arouri, the deputy head of Hamas’ political wing, warned that Israeli assassinations of its leaders would foment a “regional war.”

In May, Israel killed six Islamic Jihad leaders, along with their relatives and neighbors, during a five-day escalation that began with surprise airstrikes targeting residential buildings.

At least 33 Palestinians were killed during the offensive. Palestinian rocket fire from Gaza killed an 80-year-old Israeli woman and a Palestinian laborer from Gaza working in Israel.

The escalation came after Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s far-right national security minister and kingmaker in Netanyahu’s fragile ruling coalition, demanded a more hardline response to rocket fire from Gaza.

On Thursday, Gallant warned that attacks during the upcoming Jewish high holidays would be met with a “crushing” response.

“We are in a complex security period in all the areas, and especially in [the West Bank] and surrounding Jerusalem,” Gallant said, suggesting that the military doesn’t have great confidence in its ability to maintain security for Israeli settlers.

All Israeli settlements in the West Bank are built violation of international law. The Fourth Geneva Convention forbids an occupying power from transferring its civilian population to occupied territory.

The same convention prohibits the use of collective punishment, such as Israel’s ban on goods exiting Gaza.

The weird US-Israel relationship just got weirder

aljazeera

Long called the most special bilateral relationship, US-Israeli ties are in fact the world’s strangest.

The weirdness, as we have witnessed in the past few weeks, comes in different forms – ranging from the cynical to the surrealistic.

Take for example Friday’s tweet by the US ambassador to Israel, Tom Nides, containing a video of himself and Israeli soldiers at the Israeli-Lebanese border, wishing everyone “Shabbat Shalom”.

This bizarre display of support for the Israeli military, which is de facto still at war with Lebanon, came amid heightened tensions between the two countries.

Earlier in June, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant threatened to bomb Lebanon back into the “Stone Age” if the Lebanese group Hezbollah starts a war.

Likewise, Amir Baram, the head of Israel’s northern command, declared that in the event of a war, the Israeli army would “destroy all the infrastructure … to the last stone” in Southern Lebanon – which would amount to a war crime.

On Monday, three days after the “Shabbat Shalom” clip appeared on Twitter, the Israeli army sent 1,000 troops from its elite forces along with armored vehicles, helicopters and drones into the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank, killing at least eight Palestinians, including children, within the first few hours.

Zombie Night Terror: Review | GameLuster

Nides, a banker-turned-diplomat, engaged in his publicity stunt at a time when Israel is snubbing the US, its closest and most generous ally, with increasing frequency and intensity.

Apart from launching deadly assaults on the Palestinians, Israeli officials have also repeatedly challenged the official US position in support of Palestinian statehood.

Just last week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Knesset’s foreign policy committee that Israel must “crush” the idea of a Palestinian state.

The Israeli leader has also openly disregarded warnings from the US against fostering closer ties with China.

Most recently, he announced he will be travelling to Beijing, giving the cold shoulder to US President Joe Biden’s administration, which has not yet invited him to visit Washington.

Netanyahu and his ministers have not minced their words when expressing dissatisfaction with Biden’s policies.

In March, the prime minister accused the American leader of meddling in Israeli affairs over his comments about the controversial judicial reform his government has been trying to pass and which has sparked months-long protests across Israel.

In February, Israeli Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli reprimanded Nides for “interfering” in Israel’s internal affairs, telling him to “mind [his] own business”.

The US ambassador is not the only US official to engage in bizarre diplomatic stunts amid growing disparagement from the Israeli government.

Last month, US Secretary of State Tony Blinken went out of his way to lobby Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel despite its ever-expanding illegal settlements and mounting violence against Palestinians, which have already embarrassed its new friends in the Gulf along with the Biden administration.

Then the US Congress announced that Israeli President Isaac Herzog will address both of its houses to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Israeli statehood, an honor extended previously to Netanyahu three times.

The last time Netanyahu spoke to a joint session of Congress was in 2015 when he tried to mobilize, if not outright incite, US lawmakers against then-President Barak Obama’s administration over its decision to negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran.

This came after he publicly humiliated Obama at the White House in 2011, lecturing him about Palestine and the Middle East.

This did not deter the Obama administration from committing to send Israel $38bn in military aid over 10 years, subsidizing its purchase of F-35 jet fighters.

And if that wasn’t enough, this “single largest pledge of military assistance in US history”, a pricey gift from the American taxpayer, was met “not with big love, but with mostly meh”, according to The Washington Post.

Last year, the Biden administration reaffirmed and even expanded these military commitments in a new strategic memorandum, the Jerusalem US-Israel Joint Partnership Declaration, in return for, well, nothing. Nada.

It couldn’t even get the previous, presumably more moderate Israeli government to embrace the standard rhetoric on achieving peace in Palestine.

Meanwhile, Biden has decided not to reverse any of his predecessor’s major concessions to Israel concerning its illegal annexation of Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan Heights.

That’s not just strange, it is obscene. Even mad. And it begs the question, is there a method to this madness?

Otherwise, why would the US reward Israel despite its intransigence when such support boosts its militaristic and colonial tendencies and feeds its bellicosity? Several explanations come to mind.

First is the state of US domestic politics.

Biden is desperate not to alienate a single pro-Israel Democrat in the Democrats’ razor-thin majority in the Senate, especially when the Republicans, who control the House of Representatives, are blindly following Netanyahu, come what may.

This is perhaps why Biden, the leader of the world’s foremost superpower, asked for Israeli approval to rejoin UNESCO six years after his predecessor abandoned it to appease Israel.

This was to make sure that the vote in Congress on the issue would pass.

Second is Washington’s political tactics. Biden wants to offset the temporary coolness towards the Israeli government by warming to its military, presidency and secular business elites to illustrate his bona fide “love for Israel”.

Such misplaced sentiment towards a colonial, apartheid regime has become more of an obsession in Washington, totally disconnected from the rest of the country, indeed the world.

In fact, when it comes to Israel-Palestine, Biden and many Democratic senators are not exactly aligned with the Democratic Party’s base, which has become ever more critical of the Zionist state. Dissatisfaction is growing even among the party’s Jewish members.

According to a 2023 Gallup poll, 49 percent of Democrats sympathize more with the Palestinians, 38 percent sympathize more with the Israelis and 13 percent sympathize with neither.

Third is traditional US foreign policy. Conventional wisdom in Washington has long revolved around satisfying Israel’s needs and desires to encourage it to moderate its positions on peace with the Palestinians and make the necessary “compromises”, even “sacrifices”, for peace.

But in reality, unconditional US support has thus far hardened Israel’s stance, radicalized its society and driven its polity towards fascism.

Finally, there is also Washington’s strategic thinking. Historically, the US has maintained strong and consistent strategic cooperation with Israel, seeing it as its most reliable ally in the Middle East despite political and diplomatic ups and downs.

Just last year, Biden repeated this mantra, saying that if there was no Israel “we’d have to invent one.”

But treating it as a strategic asset has long proved of illusionary utility as the Zionist state has shown itself to be an utter liability, at least since the end of the Cold War.

In fact, Israel’s primary objective is to keep America stuck in the Middle East to clean up its messes.

Recently, Netanyahu was quite honest about it, telling Knesset members that China’s growing involvement in the region may not be so bad because it compels America to stay engaged. Well, on Israel’s side, of course.

But much of the Middle East’s hostility towards the US is driven by its decades-long support for what countries in the region see as a colonial warmongering state.

That’s why only by freeing itself from Israel’s paranoid influence could Washington begin to act as a responsible and respectable actor in the region.

Wishful thinking? Perhaps. But the shift in the Democratic Party in favor of justice in Palestine does provide some hope when it is needed most.

Panic in Israeli Media Over Proposed AAA Boycott


Option English subtitles to read

The resolution voted for stated that, “The Israeli state operates an apartheid regime from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, including the internationally recognized state of Israel, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.” It also pointed out that, “The 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid and the 1998 Rome Statute to the International Criminal Court (ICC) define apartheid as a crime against humanity.”

July 24, 2023 — The American Anthropological Association (AAA), representing thousands of anthropologists and scholars, has passed a historic resolution in support of Palestinian rights and freedom, pledging to boycott Israeli academic institutions that are complicit in maintaining Israel’s oppressive apartheid system.

The vote passed with an overwhelming majority following a successful referendum held June 15-July 14, with 71% voting in favor.

Founded in 1902, the 12,000-member AAA is the largest and oldest scholarly body in the United States to endorse a boycott of Israeli academic institutions.

“This resolution is a meaningful demonstration of solidarity by thousands of scholars standing alongside their Palestinian colleagues, whose work and lives are impacted on a daily basis by Israel’s racist, discriminatory policies and brutal military rule,” said Jessica Winegar, an anthropology professor and member of the Anthroboycott collective, which campaigned for the boycott.

“As scholars with a long history of studying colonialism, anthropologists are all too familiar with the devastating harm of Israel’s oppression and theft of Palestinian land.

This vote is an important step in showing that support for Palestinian rights goes hand in hand with the AAA’s values of human rights for all.”

 The resolution precludes the AAA from engaging in any formal relationships with Israeli academic institutions.

The resolution does not prevent individual Israeli scholars from participating in AAA activities or collaborating with AAA members.

“As a US-based association, the AAA has a responsibility to speak up against the nearly $4 billion in military funding the United States provides to Israel each year, enabling Israel’s brutal military rule, illegal theft of Palestinian land, and oppressive apartheid system against Palestinians,” said Winegar.

“Just as scholars throughout the world came together to put pressure on South Africa to end its violent apartheid system, US academic organizations are following in their footsteps and joining the struggle for Palestinian freedom.”

The Palestinian Campaign for the Cultural and Academic Boycott of Israel (PACBI) celebrated this important win for the movement for Palestinian rights: “We thank those who took the time to learn from and listen to Indigenous Palestinian voices.

The AAA membership vote to boycott complicit Israeli universities is wholly consistent with the association’s stated commitment to anti-racism, equality, human rights and social justice and furthers the drive to decolonize anthropology and academia in general.”

The Executive Board of the AAA will now proceed with implementing the resolution, joining the ranks of other scholarly associations that have endorsed a boycott of Israeli academic institutions, including the American Studies Association, the Association for Asian American Studies, the Middle East Studies Association, the National Women’s Studies Association, and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association.

In 2016, a similar boycott resolution narrowly missed adoption by a mere 39 votes – less than 1% of ballots cast.

This breakthrough comes despite attempts to pressure, intimidate, and misinform anthropologists from outside pro-Israel organizations with no apparent link to the discipline.

These efforts included unsolicited and harassing emails sent to all AAA members; lobbying university presidents across the country to intervene in the vote; and frivolous threats of litigation.

 

Anthroboycott extends its deepest congratulations and heartfelt thanks to everyone who voted, as well as the numerous volunteers who dedicated their time and efforts to persuade and mobilize their colleagues.

We also thank the sections of the AAA that formally endorsed the boycott: the Association of Black Anthropologists and the Middle East Section.

We are grateful to the boards of the Association for Feminist Anthropology, Association of Latina/o and Latinx Anthropologists, and Critical Urban Anthropology Association for encouraging their members to support the boycott. 

 

Anthroboycott (Anthropologists for the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions) is a collective of AAA members, including faculty, contingent labor, and graduate students, working in support of Palestinian human rights.

An Israeli civil war?

The genie is out of the bottle, and the fanatics won’t stop until their apocalyptical, messianic redemption is complete, come what may.

23 Jul 2023
Israel’s decades-long colonial and religious war against the Palestinians has culminated in what appears to be Jewish civil strife bordering on civil war.

As hundreds of thousands continue to march in the street against the government, the president has warned of standing at the edge of an abyss, while leading commentators warn that a civil war has already started.

This heating conflict is mainly between two types of Zionism, the pre and post-1967 Zionism; in other words, between the more liberal and secular Zionism and more fanatic and fascistic Zionism.

While these types of Zionism had managed to reconcile their differences throughout the past five decades, Israel’s deepening occupation-cum-apartheid system of Jewish supremacy has provided huge momentum to the extreme elements within the Israeli society.

It has also culminated in the establishment of a new governing coalition of six parties, five of which are “religious” – either ultra-Orthodox, ultra-Zionist or both.

The government is one of the most extreme and racist elements of Israeli society; one that is determined to transform the Jewish communitarian democracy into a fanatical Jewish autocracy, by subjugating Israel’s judiciary to its parliamentary majority, which in turn paves the way to changing its system of government.

A bit of history may help clarify.

Since its inception in 1948 as a settler colonial state, Israel’s leaders have followed in the footsteps of other settler states like the United States, Canada and Australia, by managing the tensions among its different immigrant communities through legal democratic processes.

It was the only way to reconcile the differences between, say Iraqi and Polish, or Moroccan and Russian immigrant communities.

Needless to say, that has not applied to the Palestinian citizens of Israel, who suffered under direct military control through 1966.

Throughout that period, the secular Ashkenazi elites – concentrated in the Labour movement that created and led the earlier settlement of Palestine – had an advantage over the more conservative Sephardic immigrants and religious groups, and became the masters of the land.

But the 1967 war changed that.

The occupation and settlement of East Jerusalem, and the rest of the newly occupied territories, have given vigour and momentum to messianic, fanatical, and hyper-nationalist Israelis ever since.

The weird US-Israel relationship just got weirder

3 Jul 2023

Washington is going out of its way to accommodate Israel and is being publicly chided in return. Why is that?

Long called the most special bilateral relationship, US-Israeli ties are in fact the world’s strangest.

The weirdness, as we have witnessed in the past few weeks, comes in different forms – ranging from the cynical to the surrealistic.

Take for example Friday’s tweet by the US ambassador to Israel, Tom Nides, containing a video of himself and Israeli soldiers at the Israeli-Lebanese border, wishing everyone “Shabbat Shalom”.

This bizarre display of support for the Israeli military, which is de facto still at war with Lebanon, came amid heightened tensions between the two countries.

Earlier in June, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant threatened to bomb Lebanon back into the “Stone Age” if the Lebanese group Hezbollah starts a war.

Likewise, Amir Baram, the head of Israel’s northern command, declared that in the event of a war, the Israeli army would “destroy all the infrastructure … to the last stone” in Southern Lebanon – which would amount to a war crime.

On Monday, three days after the “Shabbat Shalom” clip appeared on Twitter, the Israeli army sent 1,000 troops from its elite forces along with armored vehicles, helicopters and drones into the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank, killing at least eight Palestinians, including children, within the first few hours.

Nides, a banker-turned-diplomat, engaged in his publicity stunt at a time when Israel is snubbing the US, its closest and most generous ally, with increasing frequency and intensity.

Apart from launching deadly assaults on the Palestinians, Israeli officials have also repeatedly challenged the official US position in support of Palestinian statehood.

Just last week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Knesset’s foreign policy committee that Israel must “crush” the idea of a Palestinian state.

The Israeli leader has also openly disregarded warnings from the US against fostering closer ties with China.

Most recently, he announced he will be travelling to Beijing, giving the cold shoulder to US President Joe Biden’s administration, which has not yet invited him to visit Washington.

Netanyahu and his ministers have not minced their words when expressing dissatisfaction with Biden’s policies.

In March, the prime minister accused the American leader of meddling in Israeli affairs over his comments about the controversial judicial reform his government has been trying to pass and which has sparked months-long protests across Israel.

In February, Israeli Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli reprimanded Nides for “interfering” in Israel’s internal affairs, telling him to “mind [his] own business”.

The US ambassador is not the only US official to engage in bizarre diplomatic stunts amid growing disparagement from the Israeli government.

Last month, US Secretary of State Tony Blinken went out of his way to lobby Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel despite its ever-expanding illegal settlements and mounting violence against Palestinians, which have already embarrassed its new friends in the Gulf along with the Biden administration.

Then the US Congress announced that Israeli President Isaac Herzog will address both of its houses to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Israeli statehood, an honor extended previously to Netanyahu three times.

The last time Netanyahu spoke to a joint session of Congress was in 2015 when he tried to mobilize, if not outright incite, US lawmakers against then-President Barak Obama’s administration over its decision to negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran.

This came after he publicly humiliated Obama at the White House in 2011, lecturing him about Palestine and the Middle East.

This did not deter the Obama administration from committing to send Israel $38bn in military aid over 10 years, subsidizing its purchase of F-35 jet fighters. And if that wasn’t enough, this “single largest pledge of military assistance in US history”, a pricey gift from the American taxpayer, was met “not with big love, but with mostly meh”, according to The Washington Post.

Last year, the Biden administration reaffirmed and even expanded these military commitments in a new strategic memorandum, the Jerusalem US-Israel Joint Partnership Declaration, in return for, well, nothing. Nada.

It couldn’t even get the previous, presumably more moderate Israeli government to embrace the standard rhetoric on achieving peace in Palestine.

Meanwhile, Biden has decided not to reverse any of his predecessor’s major concessions to Israel concerning its illegal annexation of Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan Heights.

That’s not just strange, it is obscene. Even mad.

And it begs the question, is there a method to this madness?

Otherwise, why would the US reward Israel despite its intransigence when such support boosts its militaristic and colonial tendencies and feeds its bellicosity?

Several explanations come to mind.

First is the state of US domestic politics. Biden is desperate not to alienate a single pro-Israel Democrat in the Democrats’ razor-thin majority in the Senate, especially when the Republicans, who control the House of Representatives, are blindly following Netanyahu, come what may.

This is perhaps why Biden, the leader of the world’s foremost superpower, asked for Israeli approval to rejoin UNESCO six years after his predecessor abandoned it to appease Israel. This was to make sure that the vote in Congress on the issue would pass.

Second is Washington’s political tactics. Biden wants to offset the temporary coolness towards the Israeli government by warming to its military, presidency and secular business elites to illustrate his bona fide “love for Israel”.

Such misplaced sentiment towards a colonial, apartheid regime has become more of an obsession in Washington, totally disconnected from the rest of the country, indeed the world.

In fact, when it comes to Israel-Palestine, Biden and many Democratic senators are not exactly aligned with the Democratic Party’s base, which has become ever more critical of the Zionist state. Dissatisfaction is growing even among the party’s Jewish members.

According to a 2023 Gallup poll, 49 percent of Democrats sympathize more with the Palestinians, 38 percent sympathize more with the Israelis and 13 percent sympathize with neither.

Third is traditional US foreign policy. Conventional wisdom in Washington has long revolved around satisfying Israel’s needs and desires to encourage it to moderate its positions on peace with the Palestinians and make the necessary “compromises”, even “sacrifices”, for peace.

But in reality, unconditional US support has thus far hardened Israel’s stance, radicalized its society and driven its polity towards fascism.

Finally, there is also Washington’s strategic thinking.

Historically, the US has maintained strong and consistent strategic cooperation with Israel, seeing it as its most reliable ally in the Middle East despite political and diplomatic ups and downs.

Just last year, Biden repeated this mantra, saying that if there was no Israel “we’d have to invent one.”

But treating it as a strategic asset has long proved of illusionary utility as the Zionist state has shown itself to be an utter liability, at least since the end of the Cold War.

In fact, Israel’s primary objective is to keep America stuck in the Middle East to clean up its messes.

Recently, Netanyahu was quite honest about it, telling Knesset members that China’s growing involvement in the region may not be so bad because it compels America to stay engaged. Well, on Israel’s side, of course.

But much of the Middle East’s hostility towards the US is driven by its decades-long support for what countries in the region see as a colonial warmongering state.

That’s why only by freeing itself from Israel’s paranoid influence could Washington begin to act as a responsible and respectable actor in the region.

Wishful thinking? Perhaps. But the shift in the Democratic Party in favour of justice in Palestine does provide some hope when it is needed most.

Resistance ‘most effective strategy’ to end Israeli occupation of Palestine

The secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) has said resistance is the most effective strategy to end more than seven decades of the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

Ali Akbar Ahmadian made the statement in a meeting with the head of the political bureau of the Palestinian Hamas resistance movement, Ismail Haniyeh, and his accompanying delegation in Tehran on Monday as they exchanged views about the latest developments in the region and ways to strengthen unity among Palestinian resistance groups.

Pointing to the ongoing developments in the occupied territories and the internal chaos in the Israeli regime, Ahmadian said, “Resistance is the most efficient strategy to put an end to more than 75 years of the occupation of Palestine.”

The SNSC chief added, “Palestine is the prime issue of the Muslim world, and strengthening unity among Muslims, especially the regional players of resistance [front], will inflict the most severe damage on the Zionist enemy and its supporters.”

Touching upon the enemies’ attempts to sow division among the resistance groups, Ahmadian said, “The unity and support of the resistance groups for the Islamic Jihad movement in the recent war disappointed the Zionist enemy[‘s plans] to [realize] the plot.”

The secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council praised the resistance of Hamas against the Israeli regime and said, “The Palestinian resistance, which once fought to defend itself in Gaza, has achieved a level of preparedness that is now consolidating its presence in the West Bank.”

The Tel Aviv regime launched a deadly bombing campaign on Gaza on May 9, sparking the firing of over 1,000 rockets by the Islamic Jihad toward the occupied territories. The two sides agreed after five days of fighting to an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire that took effect on May 13.

Israeli aerial assaults killed at least 33 Palestinians in Gaza, including six children, and wounded 147, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. Several Islamic Jihad leaders were also among the Palestinian victims of the latest conflict, which marked the worst episode of fighting between Gaza’s resistance factions and Israel since a 10-day war in 2021.

Haniyeh, for his part, expressed his gratitude for the outstanding and effective role of Iran in strengthening unity and cooperation in the Muslim world and the Palestinian resistance groups.

The head of the political bureau of the Palestinian Hamas resistance movement also briefed the Iranian official on political and field developments in Palestine as well as plans by the resistance to maintain and strengthen initiative measures in the face of the occupying regime.

Over the past months, the Israeli regime has intensified attacks against Palestinian towns and cities throughout the occupied territories. As a result of these attacks, dozens of Palestinians have lost their lives and many others have been arrested.

Most of the raids have targeted the cities of Nablus and Jenin in the occupied West Bank, where the regime’s forces have been trying to stifle a growing Palestinian resistance against the occupation.

One of the objectives of Israeli raids on various locations across the occupied West Bank has been to raze the structures that belong to the Palestinians, whom the regime accuses of killing Zionist settlers.

As a result of these attacks, over 160 Palestinians, including 28 children, have lost their lives and many others have been arrested in 2023.

Israel: The Long Con

Since its early days of colonizing Palestine, the Zionist movement has always aimed to establish a Greater Israel.

June 20, 1899

The international rejection of Israel’s plan to formally annex even more Palestinian land is based on two arguments: the annexation is a violation of international law and it defeats the prospects of a two-state solution.

The world view of this international consensus underscores as problematic the lack of a reciprocal dialogue between the sides, their inability to compromise and the unilateral actions that inhibit peace efforts.

At the same time, it foregrounds conventional peace-building processes that emphasize mutual recognition as well as economic and security cooperation.

There is basically a belief in the international community that universal international laws and norms can facilitate a just outcome to the conflict with two independent states living side by side.

Zionism = freedom: Judaism holocausted

This world view is operating in a diplomatic space that has lost all connection to the realities that ordinary Palestinians face.

The Palestinian losses are much more serious than is conventionally suggested in the “save the two-state solution before it is too late” type of thinking.

It is already a very late hour for the prospects of Palestinian freedom and sovereignty.

A different lens must, therefore, be adopted, which first and foremost underscores the logic that underlies the Israeli state – settler-colonialism.

A settler colony

Academics have debated for decades whether Israel constitutes a settler colony, and following the arguments of leading scholars such as Joseph Massad, Rashid Khalidi, Noura Erakat, Ilan Pappe, Hamid Dabashi and Robert Wolfe (among others), the answer is convincing: Israel is the product of a national settler-colonial project.

So, what makes a settler colony a settler colony?

The answer to this question cannot be reduced to specific characteristics but must instead be sought in a general principle.

Simply put: all settler colonies constitute a continuous process of land annexation, whereby native inhabitants are removed and settlers from elsewhere are brought to occupy the land.

To be sure, all modern nation-states have annexed land in certain respects, but the settler-colonial state’s distinguishing feature is that it does not come into being and cannot continue to exist without claiming sovereignty over land that is forcefully taken from its native inhabitants.

In short, the settler colony can only claim its sovereignty through the eradication and erasure of native sovereignty.

The methods of annexation certainly vary, but this variety should not detract us from naming and highlighting their underlying logic: the expulsion of native people from their lands.

This is the core problem of the Palestinian-Israeli struggle. And nowhere is this logic more visible than in the expansion of settlements on occupied Palestinian lands.

Settlements and the Israeli state

Not all, but the majority of arguments that emphasize international law and the peace process are based on the dubious assumption that Israel is interested in seeing a Palestinian state established along the 1967 borders.

But Israeli policies have clearly shown that is not their goal or aspiration.

The list is long but among those policies are the long-held policy of annexing East Jerusalem; the building of the apartheid wall; the siege on Gaza, separating Palestinian land into non-contiguous units; the constant imprisonment of Palestinians under the charge of being political; the occupation and the checkpoints that make life impossible for ordinary Palestinians, hence encouraging their emigration; the de-development of the Palestinian economy; the policy of home demolitions; the discriminatory policies against Palestinian citizens of Israel that deny them the ability to purchase and lease land; and the non-ending stream of Israeli government permits to build more settlements and expand existing ones.  

It is important to take a moment and reflect on the last point.

For decades, settler movements and the settlers have been expelling and replacing native Palestinians from more and more Palestinian lands.

In much of what passes as intellectual diplomatic discourse in North America and Western Europe, these settlers are presented as divorced from the Israeli state and even painted as a burden on the Israeli state.

This occurs even when Israeli policy is directly tied to the expansion of settlements.

In 2016, for example, then-Secretary of State John Kerry claimed, “Let’s be clear.

Settlement expansion has nothing to do with Israel’s security.

Many settlements actually increase the security burden on the Israeli defence forces and leaders of the settler movement are motivated by ideological imperatives that entirely ignore legitimate Palestinian aspirations.”

And when he was not divorcing the ideology of the settlement leaders from the ideology of the state, Kerry made sure to present the settlements as a side issue, and not the core of the problem: “Let me emphasise, this is not to say that the settlements are the whole or even the primary cause of this conflict, of course they are not.

Nor can you say that if the settlements were suddenly removed, you’d have peace without a broader agreement. You would not.”

Versions of this discourse are repeated ad nauseam in the diplomatic arena, all of which misses (purposely or not) the crucial point that these settlers are not ideologically opposed to the state, but are rather a mirror for the foundation of the Israeli state revealed in its naked form.

The main difference is that these settlers act without the sophisticated rhetoric that hides and conceals the violence of the settler colony. They do not hide their intention to remove Palestinians and expand the state that is to come, the state of Greater Israel.

Since the early 20th century, the Zionist movement has longed for the creation of a Greater Israel, but it has been savvy enough to hide and conceal its intentions, especially in the international arena.

As Benny Morris put it in his famous book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, “[Zionist leader David] Ben-Gurion, a pragmatist, from 1937 on, was willing (at least outwardly) to accept partition and the establishment of a Jewish state in only part of the country.

In effect, he remained committed to a vision of Jewish sovereignty over all of Palestine as the ultimate goal of Zionism, to be attained by stages.”

The current relation between the state and the settlers is, thus, not one of opposition or nuisance, but one between a force that expands (the settlers) and a force that makes possible but hides the violence of the expansion (the state).

And at the opportune moment, provided in this case through the Trump administration’s unwavering support for Israel, the state becomes one with the settlers out in the open and officially expands.

The annexation plan is nothing more than the state’s turn to claim sovereignty over what the settlers have already annexed. And they are able to annex precisely because the state makes that possible through its occupation of Palestinian land.

And this cycle will not stop. The settlers will continue to expand and annex with the aid of the state, until such time that the state can officially announce the reality of their fusion with the settlers, taking even more land.

As far as the Israelis are concerned, time is on their side, and they can patiently proceed stage by stage.

Empty words

The latest round of international reactions will predictably change nothing for the Palestinian people.

International law will flag the violation against its rules, words of “condemnation” will fill the air, analysts and commentators will discuss the “strength” of these words in comparison to past statements, and Palestinian land will continue to be stolen.

Palestinian lives will continue to be threatened with death, injury, debilitation, occupation, oppression and expulsion while the world watches and pronounces empty words.

These words do not carry any consequence that can give them meaning, depth, and force.

They are part of the diplomatic routine, which gives the feeling that something is being done, that the world is watching closely and that the world is concerned for Palestine.

This chimera of an act ends up sustaining the status quo and ensures that nothing consequential is ever undertaken.

The very emptiness of these words thus becomes another weapon that enables annexation.

Many ordinary Palestinians have understood this situation for some time: the cavalry is not coming – not from the Arab world, not from the UN and not from international law.

And in their absence, those international institutions and states show themselves as part of the problem, not the solution.

Israeli settler colonialism will not rest until the majority of the Palestinians are removed and expelled, and all of the Palestinian lands are under Israeli sovereignty, just as Ben-Gurion envisioned.

Israel cannot tolerate the idea of Palestinian sovereignty, let alone its implementation because the erasure of Palestinian sovereignty is part and parcel of the underlying logic of the settler colony.

As a result, regardless of how much land Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ally, Defence Minister Benny Gantz actually annex this year, this episode will be neither the first nor will it be the last.

The settler colony, secured in its power after the founding violence, often plays a long game.

But despite the scantest of hopes of ever gaining their freedom and sovereignty, the Palestinians will continue to stand, more or less, alone in their long and historic resistance.

Biggest Jew Murder Operation Since 2002! Bombing the Camps!

Jenin, Jenin (2002) from Palestine Film Institute

[Admin disclaimer: I personally do not refer to Zionists as Jews but only as Zionists. According to Torah Jews they are not Jews but mongrel athiest antisemites]

JULY 4, 2023

The blood drinking Jews have started yet another operation of mass-murdering innocent Arabs for no reason.

Literally: what is the reason???

They don’t appear to have even tried to give an explanation this time.

CNN:

Israeli forces launched what a military source said is its largest military operation in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin in more than 20 years, killing at least nine people and injuring about 100 others, according to Palestinian officials.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said in a statement it launched the ongoing “extensive counterterrorism effort in the area of the city of Jenin and the Jenin Camp,” striking “terrorist infrastructure.”

The IDF carried out around 10 airstrikes using drones, and hundreds of soldiers targeted what it said was a militant “command and control” center as well as weapons and explosive manufacturing sites.

Videos obtained by CNN from Jenin show Israeli bulldozers tearing up streets to disarm potential explosives, as well as Israeli tanks outside the city limits.

Residents told CNN there were explosions and heavy gunfire in the area, while video from the scene showed wounded Palestinians being evacuated by ambulance to Jenin Government Hospital.

Hundreds of Palestinian families fled the area amid the destruction; Jenin deputy mayor Mohammed Jarrar said homes and infrastructure had been destroyed, cutting off electricity and water in the refugee camp.

Duha Turkman, a 16-year-old Jenin resident, said they were given two hours to evacuate.

“We ran out with people from the camp, so many children walked with their parents while terrified and crying, they didn’t understand what was happening to them and why,” she told CNN.

“Many were missing; families were looking for members that they couldn’t get in contact with due to the electricity cut.”

These Jews will bulldoze your homes, drive you into a camp, then bomb the camp.

 

And they want to whine about Hitler?

Hitler never destroyed the Jew houses and never bombed his own Jew camps.

Also: these Arabs used to control Palestine and live in peace. Hitler had a good reason to put Jews in camps.

It’s very obvious that the Jews are doing this during the French riots because white people will connect the two things, like “well, they’re winning in France, but at least the Jews are telling them what for over there in Palestine.”

Look:

 

As an anti-Semite, I have no trouble distinguishing between two situations.

They’re literally opposites, in terms of the Arabs – in one situation the Arabs were invaded, in another situation, the Arabs invaded.

In terms of the Jews – both situations were caused by the Jews. It was the Jews’ idea to make an Arab France.

But 100%, these Jews know that Fatmericans and others will see the situation and France and then think it justifies the Jews killing Palestinians.

The narrative should be: these Arabs fighting in France should go defend Palestinians.

On some level, you could try to say that the Arabs as a race are bringing this on themselves.

But even that I don’t really go along with.

The Arabs in France can say that the French are working with the Jews and therefore deserve this war they’ve brought, and that is more true than “the Arabs brought it on themselves.”

Overall, I view Arabs as a non-threat, and Jews as the source of a virtually infinite number of existential threats.

So obviously, I support whites, and I support whites rising up and fixing the problem in France.

But only if they’re going to be right-wing and Christian and throw off the Jew shackles.

Otherwise, France would be better off under Islamic occupation.

Jews are already pushing the narrative that this is the fault of Iran:

 

Imagine you’re invading and bulldozing a refugee camp, then saying “look at these weapons – can you believe this people were thinking of fighting back???”

The nerve of these Jews is like the stars in the sky.

New collective abuses by Israeli settlers

Does anyone care?

Between 19 and 20 June 2023, Israeli settlers in the West Bank set fire to fields and houses, stoned cars and vandalized Palestinian shops along Route 60.

In retaliation, two Palestinians, members of Hamas, targeted Israeli settlers at a gas station, killing four and injuring four.

One of the assailants was killed by an Israeli, another was shot dead by the Israeli army a few hours later.

400 Israeli settlers responded by invading the Palestinian village of Turmus Aya on 21 June, torching approximately thirty houses and sixty cars.

On 26 February and in the presence of the Israeli army, other settlers destroyed the village of Huwara, also located on Route 60, injuring 400 and killing one.

This Arabophobic pogrom had been incited by the declarations of current Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, both supporters of Jewish supremacy.

A controversy had erupted between Washington and Tel Aviv, at the end of which the Israeli coalition government made a commitment that this would not happen again.

Operation Rothschild

If one were to compare Palestine to the French mandate in Lebanon, the Zionists were the Maronites of British Palestine: a compact minority community that would openly advocate for a British mandate at the Paris Peace Conference and cooperate with the British in governing the territory.

dailysabah

In 1881, the Jews who faced the pogrom in Russia wanted to immigrate to Palestine en masse, and they wanted world-famous people of Jewish origin to finance it, like the Rothschild and Hirsch families. This is called aliyah in Zionist literature.

In response, Sultan Abdülhamid II issued an edict banning Jews from resettling in Palestine in April 1882.

It allowed them to settle anywhere else in the empire, though no more than 150 families.

He then started to buy strategic lands in Palestine through his personal treasury called the Hazine-i Hassa.

From 1882, the Rothschilds began to buy land in Palestine on behalf of others.

The Rothschilds, who had international power as they lent money to all governments, wanted the refugee Russian Jews to be allowed to settle in these lands.

The embassies intervened. The Ottoman government was confused as to what to do.

The first Jewish colony was established in Jaffa that same year, despite not having been granted permission.

By 1918, one-twentieth of Palestine’s fertile lands belonged to the Rothschilds.

The dismissed grand vizier

In 1891, when Russia increased pressure on the Jews, refugees began to settle in Palestine using unofficial and illegal methods, aided by societies in Europe.

Bribing local officials and using fake passports, identity cards and title deeds were the main ways this was done.

For example, Tunisians in Tunis, occupied by France in 1881, were considered citizens by the Ottoman government.

Jews entered the Ottoman country using fake documents and settled in Palestine with the status of Tunisian citizens.

Some 440 Jews who applied for citizenship in an attempt to settle in the Palestinian town of Safed were turned down on the basis that the Ottoman state was not to be resided in by those deported by the Europeans.

Many edicts were issued one after another, drawing the attention of the provinces, and the negligent officials were ordered to be punished.

Ottoman archives are full of correspondence on this subject.

Red Permit

Despite this, Jewish immigration to Palestine could not be prevented.

Believing he could not prevent it, Grand Vizier Cevad Pasha came to an agreement with the Rothschilds and turned a blind eye to the settlements in exchange for a promise to not bring in more refugees.

Subsequently, the sultan dismissed the grand vizier in 1894 and exiled him to Damascus where he remained until his death.

In addition, two governors and some civil servants were dismissed and punished.

 

Jews at the Western Wall, Felix Bonfils, Albumen silver print, 1870s. (Wikimedia Photo)
Jews at the Western Wall, Felix Bonfils, Albumen silver print, 1870s. (Wikimedia Photo)

In 1900, conditions for entry to the holy land were introduced.

Accordingly, every Jewish individual visiting Palestine was required to carry a letter or passport to show their occupation, nationality and reason for visiting.

This “Red Permit” carried by Jews was checked and recorded by the official authorities when they arrived in Palestine.

They were then deported after the 30-day period expired.

The Ottoman government also made an effort to prevent the local Jewish population from being influenced by the Zionists.

Not all Jewish people were Zionists.

It was important not to disturb the Jews who opted to live a more simple life and not engage in political issues.

This required a delicate balance.

 

The portrait of Zionist figure Theodor Herzl taken from old Israeli currency. (Shutterstock Photo)
The portrait of Zionist figure Theodor Herzl taken from old Israeli currency. (Shutterstock Photo)

Herzl and his attractive offer

Meanwhile, Theodor Herzl from Budapest, the leader of the Zionist movement, wanted to meet with Sultan Abdülhamid II.

When his request was declined, he made an offer in May 1901 through his Polish friend Phillip Newlinsky, who was also acquainted with the sultan.

In return for opening Palestine to Jewish immigration and the establishment of an autonomous Jewish homeland, Ottoman foreign debts would be paid and propaganda in the sultan’s favor would be circulated to sway European public opinion.

The sultan refused this offer. Herzl was unable to make the agreement, and he repeated the offer the following year.

Fearing what happened to the autonomous Ottoman province of Egypt due to debt, the sultan welcomes Herzl’s consolidation offer, viewing him as an intermediary in the matter.

However, Herzl’s idea was the acceptance of the colonization proposal. (Britain invaded Egypt in 1882 on the pretext of not paying the debts taken for the construction of the Suez Canal.)

Struggle for virtue

The claim that the government allowed the Rothschilds to borrow money and buy a place in Palestine in return is a complete fabrication.

The unpaid debts to foreign bankers, including the Rothschilds, for the financing of the 1854 Crimean War were restructured during the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II.

There was no need for him to engage in such acts for the sake of borrowing anyway.

By establishing the Duyun-i Umumiye administration, he got the foreign debts under control and increased the credibility of the state.

The small-scale foreign borrowing during his reign was also spent on high-cost zoning activities.

Those who believe the imaginary statement repeated by conservatives that Sultan Hamid lost his throne for not giving away Palestinian land are mistaken. It is possible that the

The portrait of Abdulhamid II, Ottoman Sultan from 1876 to 1909. (Shutterstock Photo)
The portrait of Abdulhamid II, Ottoman Sultan from 1876 to 1909. (Shutterstock Photo)

Ottoman government was unable to prevent the process because it at times acted incorrectly or was incapable.

But it is absurd to claim that the Ottoman government condoned it in return for a loan.

If it were true, he would have agreed with the Rothschilds or Herzl and retained his throne.

Moreover, the sultan prioritized preserving his throne over debt.

But the Ottoman sultans’ mission was a struggle for virtue.

In a letter written in 1913, he wrote to Mahmud Efendi, saying the main reason he lost his throne was for not agreeing to the demands.

Things getting out of control

The Young Turks, who dethroned Sultan Abdülhamid II and seized power, first nationalized the treasury lands belonging to the sultan.

To please the Zionists who supported them, they allowed Jewish immigration to Palestine.

Even though they realized the gravity of the incident immediately after and banned the sale of land to foreigners in Palestine, things were already out of control.

Between 1908 and 1914, the Jews bought 50,000 acres of land and established 10 colonies. In 1913, the Rothschilds bought the treasury lands.

According to the Ottoman censuses, the number of Jewish people living in Palestine was 9,500 in 1881, 12,500 in 1896, 14,200 in 1906 and 31,000 in 1914. In 1917, the Zionists came to an agreement with the British foreign minister, Arthur Balfour. Britain, which was greedy for Jewish capital, promised the Jews a homeland in Palestine with the Balfour Declaration.

When the Syrian front collapsed, Palestine was occupied by British forces.

A grave mistake!

During the British Mandate of Palestine, Jewish immigration increased steadily despite obstacles.

Nazi repression also fueled this migration.

The Jews in Palestine could now own land as they pleased, by restoring unclaimed land but also by purchasing it from the government or individuals.

The Arabs were forced to sell their lands after being put in a difficult situation economically.

For example, ships loaded with wheat that docked at the port at harvest time caused the price of wheat to fall.

When this incident happened again the following year, the peasant, who mortgaged his land the year before, was then forced to sell his land.

During the Ottoman period, the villagers used tactics in order to pay lower taxes, such as registering the land under another person’s name or providing an underestimation of the area.

These lands also passed into the hands of the Jews through purchase.

By 1948, more than half of the Palestinian population was Jewish and more than half of the land belonged to them.

Jewish gangs compelled the British to evacuate the district with their terrorist acts.

Deceived Britain declared in 1939 that the Balfour Declaration had been a grave mistake.

The Hate Crime Purging of “Antisemites” Is Underway!

Saying anything about Israel’s misbehavior can send you to jail

Global Research, June 20, 2023

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.”

“Global Palestine”

The Technology of Occupation Has Become One of Israel’s Main Exports

“So much of what I saw after 9/11 with the US and other countries, UK, Australia, my birth country, was copied from the Israeli playbook, mostly in Lebanon.”

The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World. That’s the title of a new book by the Australian journalist Antony Loewenstein, who examines how Israel’s military-industrial complex has used the Occupied Palestinian Territories for decades, he says, as a testing ground for weaponry and surveillance technology that they then export around the world.

Antony Loewenstein is the author of a number of books, including Disaster Capitalism and My Israel Question. He was based in East Jerusalem between 2016 and 2020. His most recent article for The Sydney Morning Herald is “Being Jewish and critical of Israel can make you an outcast. I should know.” Antony is joining us from Sydney, Australia.

We welcome you to Democracy Now!, Antony. Your book has just come out. What do you mean by the term “the Palestine laboratory”?

Israeli prof: Israel tests weapons on Palestinian kids, tests drugs on prisoners/Israeli occupation authorities have permitted large pharmaceutical firms to experiment on Palestinian prisoners, and have been testing weapons on Palestinian children, a Hebrew University professor disclosed in a recent lecture series.

ANTONY LOEWENSTEIN: Thanks so much for having me on, Amy.

What I mean by that is that the occupation of Palestine by Israel is now the longest occupation in modern times, 56 years and counting.

There’s obviously been an occupation of sorts since 1948, but particularly since 1967.

And during those years, what Israel has done, very successfully, from its perspective, is find various tools and technologies to maintain and control Palestinians.

And what they’ve done during that time, what Israel has done, is increasingly export those tools and technologies, but also those methods, those so-called counterinsurgency methods.

So, what I look at in the book, both being on the ground in Palestine for many years and also through declassified documents and various interviews across the world, is that you find in over 130 countries across the globe in the last decades, Israel has sold forms of anything from spyware, so-called smart walls, facial recognition tools — a range of tools of occupation and repression, that have initially been tested in Palestine on Palestinians.

So, in other words, what I’m saying is that the occupation of Palestine is not staying there.

It’s not a conflict that remains geographically based just in Palestine. It’s become so-called global Palestine.

AMY GOODMAN: How would you describe politicide, a term you use?

ANTONY LOEWENSTEIN: “Politicide,” I think, was a term that was coined by Baruch Kimmerling, who is now the late amazing academic.

And he was talking really about the concept of a desire within many in the Israeli elite to find ways to destroy Palestinians, not necessarily just through killing them, but also through extinguishing their political identity, their political self-determination.

And when looking from the outside, one could argue that in some ways Palestinian resistance lives on.

Your last segment talked about that very strongly. Palestinians mostly have not left Palestine. They remain there.

But certainly, from the current Israeli government, and, I would argue, for decades, there has been a sense that there’s a way to crush Palestinian aspirations, their views, their political reality, their future, their horizon.

And by doing so, Israel has increasingly marketed that to a global audience, including in its whole identity as an ethnonationalist state.

It’s arguably the most successful ethnonationalist state in the world, a Jewish supremacist state. And growing numbers of nations around the world, from India and others, look to Israel with admiration and inspiration.

AMY GOODMAN: We just covered Modi and the lavish reception he got by the president of the United States, Biden, with a state dinner last night, the joint session of Congress. Talk about — a little more about how India looks to Israel.

ANTONY LOEWENSTEIN: Look, what India is doing under Modi, of course, is not solely because of Israel.

But traditionally, Israel and India were not particularly good friends.

But in the last 10 years or so, since Modi took power in 2014, there’s been a real ideological alignment.

But the relationship is really twofold.

One, it’s a defense relationship.

So India buys huge amounts of technology, defense equipment, spyware.

I interview a number of people in my book, individuals in India, lawyers, others, who are spied on by Israeli spyware, particularly Pegasus by NSO Group.

But also, there’s an ideological alignment, a belief that many Indian officials in the Hindu fundamentalist government there are openly talking about admiration for what Israel is doing in the West Bank, and wanting to do something similar in Kashmir.

And what I mean by that is, they say that — two reasons. One, because Israel gets away with it.

No one’s stopping it.

There’s a complete state of impunity that Israel has globally, really.

But secondly, this idea of bringing in, according India’s view, huge numbers of Hindus to Muslim-majority Kashmir to settle that territory, to build so-called settlements akin to what Israel is doing in the West Bank.

And I think there’s a really disturbing ideological alignment.

I would actually make the comparison between Israel and India today to Israel and apartheid South Africa back in the day — nations that were very, very close ideologically and got inspiration from each other, in the belief, in Israel’s case, of course, being a Jewish supremacist state, in India’s case, being increasingly a Hindu fundamentalist state.

And that, to me, is something that should concern people, including the U.S. president.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Antony, you talk about a Jewish supremacist state.

I’m wondering if you could talk about your own background, something that you take on in this last piece you wrote, “Being Jewish and critical of Israel can make you an outcast.

I should know.” And talk about your family, your grandparents, your great-grandparents, those who died in Auschwitz, those who didn’t survive the Holocaust.

ANTONY LOEWENSTEIN: Most of my family, sadly, Amy, like most Jews who lived in Europe, perished in the Holocaust, including Auschwitz.

And the ones who got out and escaped Europe, particularly in 1939, just before the war started, escaped to wherever they were given a visa: Australia, Canada, the U.S., elsewhere.

And the ones who came to Australia, when I was growing up — I was born in the mid-’70s in Melbourne — Israel was not the center of their lives, but Israel was seen as a safe haven.

For those who don’t know, as a Jew, I can go to Israel tomorrow, and within a few months, I can almost certainly be a Jewish citizen, if I can prove that I’m Jewish.

And I think, for many Jews, including my family, there was a real reluctance, and, in fact, a hostility, to any kind of Palestinian reality, Palestinian story, even to meet Palestinians.

I mean, as a young Jew, I never met Palestinians.

And I think there is a change going on, but, certainly, when I started writing about this issue around 20 years ago — I wrote a book in 2006 called My Israel Question, where there were attempts by the Israel lobby in Australia to censor the book.

There was attempts to pulp the book.

There was condemnations of me in Parliament. I mean, it was ridiculous.

The book became a best-seller, thanks to all that ridiculous controversy.

But over that time, my parents, both of whom lost most of their Jewish friends, because it was the sins of the son — I was being critical of Israel. I was trying to humanize Palestinians.

Now, I’m not the only Jew, of course, who was saying this.

And I’m really encouraged in the last years, in Australia, the U.S. and other Western countries, a growing, almost like a Jewish insurgency against particularly an older generation of Jews who doesn’t want to humanize Palestinians and somehow believes that Jewish identity should be tied to Jewish supremacy.

And so, for me, personally, I don’t claim to be a victim.

That story that you referenced at the beginning sort of gives a bit of a pallid history of my life, but also explains that one does pay a price for it.

One does pay a price as a Jewish person. I’m a secular anti-Zionist Jew today. But I feel often that there is a real moral collapse in much of the Jewish diaspora in the last decade. It is changing, but not nearly fast enough.

AMY GOODMAN: Antony, we were talking about the horrific shipwreck last week of migrants, maybe up to 700 dead.

Can you talk about Israeli technology used by the European Union to surveil and target asylum seekers?

ANTONY LOEWENSTEIN: This really shocked me, you know, years ago, when I started doing some work on this issue.

The short version is that the European Union in the last years after 2015, when they were, in their view, overwhelmed by particularly Muslim refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere, didn’t want to ever repeat that.

And they put in place almost a fortress-type Europe, which has occurred in the last years, which is a range of tools and technologies to keep people out — mostly Muslim and Brown and Black bodies, of course.

And part of that arsenal is using Israeli drones.

They’re unarmed, but they are flying over the Mediterranean 24/7, and they’re used mostly by Frontex, which is the EU’s sort of border security arm.

And they’re the eyes in the sky, essentially.

So, they are sending back all these images 24/7 to Warsaw, which is where Frontex is based. And the EU has made a decision — of course, they don’t admit this, but this is the reality — of letting people drown.

This is the new policy.

There are very, very few rescue boats.

The EU barely rescues anyone.

There are some NGOs that are trying to do so, and I deeply admire what they’re doing.

So, the Israeli drone becomes a key arsenal in part of this infrastructure of essentially allowing people to drown.

And to me, it really goes to the heart of why Israeli drones are used by the EU, because they were battle-tested in Palestine over Gaza in a number of years in the last 15 years.

And you see this almost Israeli border-industrial complex exported across the U.S.-Mexico border, for example.

There are massive amounts of Israeli surveillance towers, made by Elbit, which is Israel’s leading defense company, dotted across the border.

It’s a key part of the U.S. arsenal across its border with Mexico. And why was that company chosen by the U.S.? Because, of course, it was tested first in Palestine.

So, to me, the real concern in the 21st century is, as the climate crisis worsens, as resource wars are worsening, as refugee numbers have never been higher since World War II, many Western nations are, sadly, making a choice to not welcome people in — as we saw with the recent awful shipwreck disaster in the Mediterranean — but, in fact, to build higher walls and more surveillance.

And Israeli surveillance and technology and repression is part of that arsenal that many nations are now buying, because it’s been used, in their view, successfully on Palestinians in Palestine.

AMY GOODMAN: And do you have evidence of the United States in particularly controversial situations working with Israel to perhaps have, for example, in Guatemala, Israel work there so that the United States won’t get — won’t be held responsible?

ANTONY LOEWENSTEIN: Absolutely. One of the things I document in the book really clearly is that over the last 50 years a lot of nations that the U.S. was close to, Israel almost became an American wingman, often supporting, arming, training nations the U.S. even couldn’t do officially because of some issue maybe in Congress.

And that did include nations like Guatemala, including at a point where they were committing genocide against their Indigenous populations.

And one of the reasons that many of those nations — Guatemala, Honduras, Chile under Pinochet, a range of other nations in Latin and South America, or, of course, it went far further, including in Africa and Asia — was that these nations were really attracted by the idea of learning the so-called skills that Israel was gaining through its occupation after 1967.

How is it managing the Palestinian population? How is it repressing them, essentially?

And a huge amount of evidence, through declassified documents and interviews, much of which is in the book, virtually goes to the heart of showing that the U.S. and Israel became almost like invaluable partners during that period, to the point where today — look, America remains the world’s biggest arms dealer.

Forty percent of the world’s arms is sold by the U.S. Israel is now 10th.

And just last week, in fact, Israel released its 2022 arms figures: $12.5 billion U.S., the biggest amount ever.

And 25% of that was going to Arab autocracies, after the so-called Abraham Accords, the Trump deal from a few years ago.

So we’re talking about Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and others. So, what are they selling?

They’re selling repressive technology, spyware, intelligence gathering, a range of other tools, to prop up U.S.- and Israeli-backed dictatorships in the Middle East.

So, this is what the Israeli arms industry is about.

Like, this, to me, is not just a moral failing, but a really dark stain on the Jewish legacy 75 years after the Holocaust.

Like, this is what we’ve become — “we” meaning the Jewish population of the world.

The legacy seems to be backing and supporting and arming the worst regimes in the world.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you about something you mentioned earlier, and that’s NSO’s Pegasus.

Explain further how it’s used and how it is used to infect the phones, for example, of journalists, some, for example, who are in jail, like in Morocco, as you talk about the Abraham Accords, Omar Radi, who we interviewed before he was imprisoned, and has been now for several years.

ANTONY LOEWENSTEIN: Pegasus got a lot of attention in the last years, as viewers will know, as probably the most known or infamous Israeli spyware.

Essentially, it’s a tool that allows any government or military intelligence or police department to spy on someone’s phone, iPhone or Android, and get all the information from that phone.

And it’s popped up in dozens and dozens of countries around the world.

And I spend a lot of time in the book interviewing some of the victims of that surveillance, in Togo, for example, in Mexico, in India.

And Mexico, interestingly enough, is the biggest user of Pegasus by far.

There is an absolute addiction in Mexico, both under right-wing governments and the current nominally left-wing government.

Governments don’t want to give this tool up. And it’s not just Pegasus. Of course, there are many other Israeli companies doing the same thing.

But one of the things that I explore in the book is that so much of the media in the last years around Pegasus missed the key point.

It was almost framed as a rogue Israeli company doing terrible things around the world, when, in fact, companies like Pegasus actually are only private in name.

They are basically arms of the state.

Netanyahu and the Mossad, who have been going to various countries in the last 10 years — I document this in the book, and this has also been shown by Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper — often go to nations, like Saudi Arabia, Rwanda and others, and they hold Pegasus and other tools as a diplomatic carrot: “If you support us in the U.N. or elsewhere, we will sell you the most powerful spyware in the world.”

And it works, because it’s been sold in UAE, in Saudi, in Rwanda and many other repressive states.

So, unless there is a complete ban or massive regulation, which currently does not exist at all, these technologies will continue.

And even if NSO Group disappears tomorrow — and it’s currently in financial crisis — many other companies do exactly the same thing, and which is why Israel is now one of the leading spyware exporters in the world.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Antony Loewenstein, I want to thank you so much for being with us, author of the new book, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World. If you want to see our interview with the now-imprisoned Moroccan journalist Omar Radi, as well as our other work talking to the University of Toronto lab and others about Pegasus, you can go to democracynow.org.

Democracy Now! produced with Mike Burke, Renée Feltz, Deena Guzder, Messiah Rhodes, as well, Nermeen Shaikh, María Taracena, Tami Woronoff, Charina Nadura, Sam Alcoff, Tey-Marie Astudillo, John Hamilton, Robby Karran, Hany Massoud, Sonyi Lopez. Our executive director, Julie Crosby. Special thanks to Becca Staley, Jon Randolph, Paul Powell, Mike Di Filippo, Miguel Nogueira, Hugh Gran, Denis Moynihan, David Prude. I’m Amy Goodman. This is Democracy Now!

Israel will be overthrown by Palestinian resistance, Iran tells Hamas

Palestinian resistance is the best way to overthrow Israel, Iran’s Supreme National Security Council Secretary Ali Akbar Ahmadian told Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on Monday, according to Iranian semi-official media outlet Fars.

 JERUSALEM POST JUNE 21, 2023

The two men met in Tehran and discussed how best to “cause the greatest damage to the Zionist enemy and its supporters.”

Media blackout was imposed on the casualties as occupation military ordered tightened censorship on the nature of injuries the soldiers sustained during the operation in Jenin.

“The Palestinian resistance, which once fought to defend itself in Gaza, has reached a stage of preparation where it is now consolidating its presence in the West Bank,” said Ahmadian to Haniyeh.

Haniyeh, in turn, thanked the Islamic Republic for “strengthening unity and cooperation in the Islamic world and the Palestinian resistance groups.”

“The Palestinian resistance, which once fought to defend itself in Gaza, has reached a stage of preparation where it is now consolidating its presence in the West Bank.”

Ali Akbar Ahmadian

A recent poll showed that most Palestinians agree with Ahmadian with more than half of respondents saying that an armed struggle against Israel was the most effective way to end the Israeli “occupation.”

Iran targets Israel through “terrorism”

(defending Palestine)

in West Bank 

In the last few months, Iran has been targeting Israel through Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad with the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) catching an Iranian recruitment program in the West Bank and arresting two people.

Recent internal unrest surrounding the judicial reform has led enemies of Israel like Iran and Hezbollah calling Israel weak and passive while Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei claimed that the 10-day Operation Shield and Arrow between the IDF and the Islamic Jihad was a major success.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on the other hand, called the operation in May a perfect operation hours after it ended. During those 10 days, Israel struck dozens of Islamic Jihad command centers and rocket and missile stores and killed dozens of terrorists.